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    You bent my cable through the internet. Tech Support

    February 27, 2020

    You bent my cable through the internet. Tech Support

    You bent my cable through the internet.

    Posted: 26 Feb 2020 04:40 PM PST

    This one happened to my coworker. I was sitting along side and got to hear the most interesting one sided conversation I have heard in a while:

    Hello this is <company>, <coworker> speaking. Can I have your name and store number? Ok <client> how can i help?

    So i actually see that your server is online. And i can get into it. Yes, i just moved a window around on your screen, can you see that?

    Ok, let's try turning the screen on and off. No signal? Power saving mode?

    Great! Let's check that signal cable. Oh, it has fallen out? That's no problem, let's just plug it back in.

    Oh? It won't fit? What does it look like? Blue with two screws. Great! Look for a blue port on the monitor. Yep that sounds like it. Just plug it on in. Still wont fit? Is it dirty?

    Ah. Sounds like the pins are bent. That cable has to be replaced. Now I can send you one, but I'll be honest, our shipping fee is more expensive than the cable. If you take it up to a walmart of bestbuy they can hook you up with a new one.

    At this point I hear faded shouting from my co-worker's headset. He sits and just listens, dumbstruck. He reaches over and turns on call recording.

    This client explains that, using the internet, my co worker had sent a signal through the cable that had bent the pins. Thus, he needs to send the reserve signal through and bend them back. A replacement cable is not acceptable. Having the client source one locally is not acceptable. Both are a waste of time and money because he can just send the reverse signal. If that is too hard, he needs to talk to someone smarter who can reverse it for him.

    I would laugh but I can't believe my ears. The manager button is quickly pressed, and our manager calms the client down. He then gets her to run to walmart by saying that she can get a stronger cable that can't be bent by signals. It has a white head and two screws, not blue. It will need some set up when she plugs it in, so she needs to call us once it's in place.

    Two hours later I get the return call from the client. I switch over the screen output and ot works perfectly.

    Now. This is a relatively happy ending, but it gets better.

    Two weeks later, my coworker gets a package delivered to his desk. Inside is the bent cable, some skittles, and a note. The note explains that the cable is for my coworker, to prove that he bent it. The skittles are for me, for setting up the new cable. (And I should share with the manager).

    That cable still hangs in a place of honor by our workstation.

    submitted by /u/Ars-Torok
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    Almost too long in the wasteland...

    Posted: 26 Feb 2020 10:27 PM PST

    This story describes the aftermath of my leaving an untenable position

    I quit my job, flipped my LinkedIn status to 'willing to hear from recruiters' flew home and spent a few days catching up with house/motorcycle/dental/car repairs, cat feeding and sleeping on a sopophoric couch.

    I log back into LinkedIn to nothing I can take- temp to perm jobs three states away, sales positions and ill-formed "do everything like a senior but pay you like an intern" positions.

    I even think about picking up some litigation work, but that smells like failure.

    I drop a line to two technical recruiters I like and ask for some contract work to tide me over.

    One, who we'll call Burt, calls me back that afternoon.

    Burt:"Hey, I saw you were looking for short term work. I have an, er, odd request and you might be interested"

    I hear a buzzing sound in the background, but assume it's just noise on the line.

    me:"Ok, what is it?"

    Burt:"This isn't one of my normal clients. They need to figure out their backups and possibly recover some data. It's urgent, so the faster you can get here, the faster you'll get paid. I'll guarantee that part if you make them happy"

    I get a contact, an address and a phone number. I tell Burt I'll be there this afternoon and make my self presentable, collect some tools, then ride out there on my motorcycle.

    I arrive, find a place to park and busy my self with getting my suit jacket and laptop bag off the bike while securing my motorcycle gear in my saddlebags.

    A middle aged woman has left her beige sedan and is walking towards me with a "I want to talk to your manager" air.

    Beige Camry:"Don't you know you'll never amount to anything riding that death machine?"

    I'm still fumbling with my remove sunglasses, pull regular glasses from their case, place sunglasses in case, remove helmet, put glasses on my face without dropping anything or poking myself in the eye with the glasses, so I don't pay Beige Camry much attention.

    me:"huh?"

    Beige Camry:"You won't go to college and you won't make it past 30 doing stupid things"

    I'm now paying attention. I'm still confused. I look around to make sure she's addressing me. She is. She's planted her nurse shoe wearing feet and wants to give me both barrels.

    me:"I've made it past 30 and graduated college, but I still do stupid things. Thank you for the compliment"

    I go back to the stowing and bungee cording while she glares, then walks off, towards a building next to the parking lot.

    A few minutes later, I'm respectably wearing a suit jacket with my laptop bag slung over my shoulder looking for my destination.

    I find my destination and the appropriate office suite. It turns out to be the Law Offices of Amygdala and Euripides, PC . The receptionist tells me to wait in a waiting room with outdated magazines while I hear the buzz of drills.

    A middle aged man introduces himself as Mr Euripides and ushers me back to his cramped office.

    Me:"So, I understand you have some problems with backups"

    Euripides:"We do. We switched providers and now everything is messed up."

    Me:"Ok. By 'service', we're talking a managed service provider- a contractor who handles technical issues, sets up systems and the like'?

    Euripides:"Yes. The old one was too expensive. They were charging us rent on a file server, so we terminated the contract. I had my nephew build a new server and connect it to a cheaper backup service"

    Me:"So, what happened?"

    Euripides:" About two weeks ago, we lost all our files on the server and neither of the backups work. Each blames the other and they start talking technobabble. I threatened them with litigation, but that didn't get my files back."

    Me:"I think I understand. I speak fluent technobabble. Let me take a look and I'll give you an estimate on the costs"

    Euripides:"Burt is taking care of that part"

    I'll have to figure out what that means. I'm here, so I should at least take a look. Lawyer hands me a wrinkled sheet of paper and walks me to a louder room. It seems that their IT closet is in a construction zone. There's sheet rock dust, saw dust and a few broken drop-ceiling tiles' worth of detritus on a single open rack.

    At the bottom of the rack are two flashy gaming PC towers. Translucent Lucite sides with LED light strips show me a stack of hard drives . Clearly the builder was thinking about a different kind of Enterprise than I was.

    I turn to Euripides.

    me:"Ok. Any ideas on what each of these do?"

    Lawyer:"My nephew's number is on that paper. I don't understand all this stuff anyway. Anything else you need from me?"

    me:"Let me take a look and I'll call your nephew if I have any questions"

    He walks off while I grab a spare keyboard and monitor from an unused cubicle. I plug into the PC on the left and use a password on the sheet to login.

    A bit of poking and the OS sees one mountable volume, but four drives. Seems they're some kind of RAID. One drive is showing a hardware failure.

    That's odd, but perhaps that's because Windows isn't my strength. I reboot the first PC from a linux USB drive and move my monitor and keyboard to number 2.

    This one is a bit happier. I see two volumes mounted. One for the OS, one for file storage.

    Even better. The 'storage' volume has one folder, labeled 'Backups'.

    This might be easier than I thought.

    I look through the backups and see one per day, going back about a month or two.

    I pick one from about two weeks ago. It's compressed, so it's going to take a few minutes. I swap back to the first PC, which has booted linux.

    Ok. Four drives. I can mount the OS drive fine. One dead. Remaining two a part of an array. I don't get it. Assuming RAID 5, one drive can fail and we can still read and write data. I need to think on this for a second.

    Back to the other PC to see how the restore's coming. That was fast. I open the folder and see a full backup.

    Of the operating system. Not the file storage. I check the other backups and they're all the same size. Great.

    Then I notice something that makes me sad. The OS volume is 4TB. The Storage volume is 12TB. One drive, three drives.

    There's no parity, the drives aren't mirrored. If any one fails, the whole volume fails.

    I find Lawyer's nephew's number and call it. I get voicemail. I tell him to call me back.

    So my local backups aren't and the one volume that holds the data is borked.

    This is going to be complicated. I call Bart, the recruiter who brought me in.

    Bart:"Hello! How's it going, LT?"

    me:"Uh, not so well. I have a feeling this is going to be expensive."

    Bart:"How expensive?"

    me:"We might have to ship out three drives for recovery. We're talking a few thousand to start"

    Bart:"Is that what you'd charge?"

    me:"I don't have a clean room. I might swap a hard drive controller board, but this is magic by comparison."

    Bart:"Is there anything you can do?"

    me:"I have one last thing to try, but I'm not feeling lucky. Give me an hour"

    Bart:"Let me know"

    me:"Oh. One last question. Are you paying me?"

    Bart:"Yep. I'll pay you for your time and barter with Euripides"

    me:"I won't ask"

    I look at the other number on the paper. It's a local MSP named OnFight. I call the number. After a few minutes in a phone tree inspired by the maze in Zork 1, I exit the twisty passages and get to Joel, a support rep.

    Joel:"HithisisJoelatOnFightpleasehold"

    me:"I'm trying..."

    hold music, occasionally interrupted by short, amateur commercials about how awesome OnFight's service is.

    Joel:"HithisisJoelthankyouforwaiting. What'sthecustomernumber?"

    me:"I'm trying to reach whomever manages your backups. I don't have a customer number, but the customer is Law Offices of Amygdala and Euripides, PC."

    Joel:"Uh...(clickity,clickity)they'renotacurrentcustomer..."

    me:"Wait wait wait. Can I talk to a manager for five minutes? I think can solve a problem for you all if I can talk to someone who can make a quick decision"

    Joel:"Pleasehold"

    The wait isn't as long.

    Manager:"Hi there. This is Rebecca. What's this about Amygdala and Euripides?"

    me:"Thanks. You used to rent them a server and do their backups, right?"

    Rebecca:"That's correct. A few months ago we got told to take the server back and to stop the backups"

    me:"Ok, got that. Is there any chance you haven't wiped that server?"

    Rebecca:"We overwrote the drive, reformatted the server and allocated it to a new customer. Backups securely overwritten per A&E's request"

    me:"A&E told you to delete everything?"

    Rebecca:"That's correct. We have emails from Euripides' nephew and a signed letter from Euripides himself"

    me:"Wonderful. Thanks. I'll make sure they understand"

    I call Nephew again.

    Nephew:"Yo"

    me:"Hi. This is Lawtechie. I'm trying to figure out your backups"

    Nephew:"Yeah, this all should work"

    me:"Let me understand. The shiny box on the left is the primary and the one on the right is the backup?"

    Nephew:"Yep. What's wrong with you that you can't get it back?"

    me:"It looks like you're only backing up the C: drive"

    Nephew:"What do you mean?"

    me:"You're backing up the operating system on a nightly basis"

    Nephew:"Right. The important stuff"

    me:"No, that's reinstallable. What about the various documents your uncle's law practice actually runs on?"

    Nephew:"It's not?"

    me:"Unless there's another backup server, no"

    Nephew:"What do you mean?"

    me:"There's a lesson every techie learns. If you don't test your backups, you don't have any"

    Nephew:"We shouldn't need them. Those disks are RAID"

    me:"You sure? It looks like you set them up without mirrors or parity"

    Nephew:"What's parity?"

    me:"I think you should learn some things before building systems that people rely on next time"

    Nephew:"Yeah. I'm going into cybersecurity soon so that stuff won't matter"

    me:"Good for you. That's a business where charlatans and the soulless run rampant. There's also a negative side."

    Nephew:"What?"

    me:"Is there any chance there's a full backup anywhere else somewhere?"

    Nephew:"Yeah. OnFight should have one"

    me:"Tried that. Seems that you told them to burn it all"

    Nephew:"It's more secure that way"

    me:"I wish you luck in your career"

    Nephew:"Don't throw me under the bus"

    I texted Bart to tell him that it wasn't looking good, then I walked to Euripides' office to tell him about hard drive recovery. He thanked me in the way people do when they think you're trying to take advantage of them and said that he'd talk to his nephew before making any important decisions.

    Bart paid me for that day and I went home.

    submitted by /u/lawtechie
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    HELP I can't email my 100,000 row spreadsheet

    Posted: 26 Feb 2020 03:48 PM PST

    Just had someone get pissy at me because they created a spreadsheet with 100,000 rows and tried to email it. It was 34 mb.

    Then I said that we could copy and paste the sheet into another document. It didn't paste exactly so that wasn't good enough. I said she could manually format it the way she wants, but she said that wasn't good enough, it was due at 4:00 pm.

    She messaged me at 4:45 pm about the issue btw. I get off at 5 and was on the phone about another issue.

    I tried deleting the spaces but every time I tried excel would freeze. THEN she tried to tell me that one of the sheets DIDN'T have 100,000 rows on it and proceeded to kick me off the screensharing program. I'm not super great with Excel anyway and it's not really part of my job to do this kind of thing.

    This person got the best employee of the year award btw.

    submitted by /u/AnemoneKunoichi
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    Oh you meant THAT headphone jack

    Posted: 26 Feb 2020 06:27 PM PST

    I work as a Lead Site Technician for a fairly large Audio/Visual company. A decent portion of our company's business is contracting to be the in-house provider for AV equipment and services in various hotel/conference centers across the country.

    Often, the conference center will have some kind of internal meeting (as opposed to a 3rd party client renting the space) and as part of out agreement we provide our services for essentially free. Apparently "free gear" also means "free from planning" as internal events are consistently the worst organized small meeting we ever do, with time changes, room changes, incomplete requirements, inability to get a straight answer from anyone, etc. Infurriatingly ironic, but on to the specific tale.

    For this particular meeting it was basically a small, simple reception to host a couple dozen important clients to try and cozy up for some extra business. From our side it was dead simple. Just a microphone up front for a small welcome speech, and a hookup to play some background music.

    Despite the obvious simplicity, the sales manager organizing this was going nuts being incredibly micromanaging of every last detail, but not in the good way. Endless back and forth about minutia that didnt matter or weren't applicable to that particular room. She wanted to meet up at a scheduled time to due a full technical walkthrough... of one microphone, and background music.

    We are nothing if not a hospitable partner, however, and agree. We schedule a meeting to go over things the next day and she grills us for a list of what she needs to bring.

    Sales "So do I need to bring a cable to plug into the wall?"

    This is weird because this is far from her first meeting and they have never needed to bring any cable. That literally our job.

    Me "No, we have all that for you, just bring anything you want to play music with that has a headphone jack"

    Sales "A headphone jack?"

    brain skips a gear

    Me "Uh, ya a place to plug in, like, earbuds. Laptop, tablet, mp3 player, most phones. Anything that will play music"

    Sales "Oh so a phone will work?"

    what rock did you just crawl out of? Have you literally never played music on your phone before? You've never seen anyone else do it?

    Me "Ya, most phones, except the newer iPhones and a couple Android ones. Literally just look if it has a place for your earbuds and that's all you need, we will take care of the rest."

    Sales "Ok got it. Headphones. See you!"

    Fast forward to the scheduled run through the next day. I bring down everything that will be a part of the event, set it up in literally under a minute and wait...

    And wait...

    And wait...

    And wait...

    About an hour and a half goes by passed our meeting time, and I have other crap to do. Being just a lowly tech I don't have contact info for the sales team, so I leave our calling card and leave thinking I'll get a call whenever she arrives and I'll pop back in.

    Nope. Never hear a peep for 3 more days.

    On the 3rd day, the phone rings and lo and behold it's the sales lady! She has an event coming up and would like to go over the details! This is not a new event, mind. This is literally the same one that was already discussed to death and she stood up a runthrough she picked the time for.

    Sales "So what do I need to bring"

    Me "Anything that will play music that you can plug headphones or earbuds into"

    Sales "Like a headphone jack?"

    brain gear skip #2... at least she's learning????

    Me "Yes, newer iPhones and some new androids don't have them. We don't have bluetooth connections (don't get me started on that) so it needs to be able to have the audio cable plug in."

    Sales "Got it. Would you mind if we met up today and did a quick run through"

    Me "Why... yes... I... would... love... to..."

    Sales "Thank you so much! Let's meet at -time-"

    No points for guessing which one of us was nowhere to be found and couldn't be reached for the rest of the day.

    So the day of the fated event finally arrives. I spend 2 minutes instead of 1 to make sure it's set up all clean and nice. The catering is putting out the food, the banquets team is finishing the last of the table placements, and here I am standing around like a doofus doing nothing because for a 3rd time now she hasn't come down to the room when she said she would.

    The clock to the clients arriving is counting down fast, and a couple come in early and decided to get an early drink in at the bar. It's really not great of to messing around and adjusting volumes with the folks you're trying to impress with your professionalism in the room. But finally, 10 minutes AFTER the doors officially open, she walks in.

    With a shiney, brand new, god damn iPhone.

    No jack

    Sales"I thought this would work!"

    brain gear skip #3, but it's ok, luckily that was the murder gear

    Me: "Do you have literally anything else, your work laptop, borrow someone else's phone, anything that will fit this cord" holding up the headphone cord

    Sales "Uh, ya, my personal phone I guess, but won't it ring or something if I get a text? I wasn't going to be here all night to leave it behind"

    Me "You can turn on Do Not Disturb to avoid the notifications, and unless you have something else you can grab 10 minutes ago, it will have to do"

    Of course she can't figure out the log in for her Apple Music on the other phone for another 10 minutes, but last I heard the rest of the night went well.

    It is an infinite conundrum to me that the more important a event run by the planning team themselves is, the worse it is guaranteed, without exceptions, to be organized. By people whose sole job is to plan meetings. You can't remember who you talked to about what, you skip your own scheduled runthroughs and fail to follow the one singular imperative you were given. But hey, tis our lot to fix their shit, and if it all turns out ok, I guess there was never a problem.

    P.S. to those who are going to ask "why didnt you just provide a laptop/tablet/phone/whatever?" Because we are not really allowed to provide and play copyrighted material we don't have licenses for.

    P.P.S. to those about to suggest "just use -insert service here-" ya, probably could. Trust me, I've literally been whingeing about getting the legalities figured out for ages, and that a company in our industry and our size doesn't already have something in place is mindboggling to me

    submitted by /u/egraiv
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    That Time I Made the Pilot Look Like a Drongo

    Posted: 26 Feb 2020 01:30 PM PST

    Actually, this is just one of many such times I have done so....

    My form of Tech Support is aircraft maintenance, working on fixed-wing aeroplanes and helicopters with a value ranging from mid-five-figures to mid-eight-figures. They usually can be divided into airborne aluminium pit-ponies or their owners' pride-and-joy; even a business jet worth more than ten million dollars can be treated as a workhorse, while a 45-year-old 40-thousand-dollar bugsmasher may be pampered by its owner.

    The events recounted here took place a few years ago.

    [Technical Information: a stall on an aircraft occurs when the angle of the wing relative to the airflow becomes too high. Most aircraft built in the last sixty years have some form of stall warning. On many Cessna bugsmashers, the stall warning device consists of a little kazoo-type device connected to a slot in the wing leading edge; to test it, I place a rag over the slot to stop insects getting in my mouth and I suck air into my mouth, which causes the kazoo to make a noise. But I digress - I just think it's cool that tens of thousands of aircraft were built with a kazoo in the inboard end of the wing.

    The next level of sophistication is a electric system that has a microswitch with a vane actuator on the leading edge of the wing. When the wing approaches the stall, air will start flowing upwards over the wing leading edge; the vane moves upwards, the switch closes and a light comes on in the instrument panel (rare, but sometimes seen on older aircraft) or an electrical horn, usually located behind the instrument panel, starts to make a noise.]

    This story involves an aircraft with an electric stall warning circuit that has a second switch. The function of this switch is to prevent the stall warning from operating when the elevator control (which is used to make the aircraft climb and descend) is all the way forward against the stop in the 'nose-down' position. As this is the complete opposite direction the control would normally be to bring on a stall, I am not sure what its actual purpose is, but there we are.

    One morning my boss came up to me and said, "hey Gert, go over to [operator]'s hangar and have a look at the stall warning on [aircraft registration], the pilot says it's not working." Now this aircraft is an amphibian, and [operator] habitually flew the aircraft with the stall warning system circuit-breaker pulled - rendering it inoperative - because the horn sounds all the time when the aircraft is on the water and this Upsets The Passengers. [Operator] had got into trouble for doing this, so the aircraft was being flown with the circuit-breaker in. I jumped on my mighty steed and galloped towards the enemy ranks hopped on the Company Bicycle and pedalled my way to the other hangar, where [veteran pilot] was at the aircraft, apparently showing a newly-hired pilot what's-what during the course of his training on this to-him-new aircraft.

    Veteran pilot proceeded to tell me that the stall warning didn't work when he tested it. This aeroplane's wing is quite a way from the ground and a pole is Thoughtfully Provided, attached to a conical rubberised-fabric cover, that people may slide said cover over the pitot head, which is also on the wing ("What is a pitot head?" I hear you say? To quote Deane from The Curiosity Show, "I'm glad you asked". But I'm not going to tell you as it isn't relevant to this story). I grabbed the Thoughtfully Provided Pole and used it to push the stall warning switch vane up:

    Me: "Turn on the power" [veteran pilot is in the captain's seat and turns on power as new pilot looks on from the RH seat. Stall warning doesn't make a sound]

    Veteran pilot: "See? It doesn't work."

    Me: "Pull back on the yoke"

    [Veteran pilot, who has flown this type of aircraft for years in several different countries and has thousands of hours' experience 'on type' as we say, pulls back on the elevator control; stall warning cutout switch is no longer doing anything; stall warning horn sounds]

    Veteran pilot: "Huh, that's new"

    Me: "No it isn't"

    With that, I put down the Thoughtfully Provided Pole, walked back to the bicycle and rode away.

    TL, DR: Engineer One, pilot Nil

    submitted by /u/Gertbengert
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