5 hours of driving to put paper in a printer. Tech Support |
- 5 hours of driving to put paper in a printer.
- We Didn't Start the Fire, and we just barely stopped it.
- Maybe Not Always Lying
- The phone system just 'does things'.
- The „broken“ computer...
- Roadside Rescue: A Tale of Two Tires
| 5 hours of driving to put paper in a printer. Posted: 27 Apr 2020 08:11 PM PDT I'm the sole IT person for a medium size company. Approximately 120 employees spread across four locations in multiple states. I receive a phone call one Friday afternoon. Me: Hello, this is OP. Employee: One of our report printers won't work. We've been trying to make it work all day. Me: OK. Let me see what I can do about that. Do you have the ID number of the printer (we have asset IDs on all equipment which allows me to look up the information for the printer.) Employee: Yes, it's 123321. Me: ok thanks. Give me just a moment. (After logging in I see the status shows paper tray is empty) Me: looking here at the status, its saying something is wrong with the paper or paper tray. Can you please make sure the paper is in the tray securely and that the tray is closed all the way? Employee: it is. Me: Give me one moment I am going to run some more checks. (This just consisted of remotely rebooting the printer and then sending a test page to see what any new errors in the log would be.) Me: ok, I'm still showing an out of paper error. If you have paper loaded and the tray closed, then its not much more I can do from here. I will get up your way tomorrow and bring a replacement just in case. In the meantime, ill redirect your computer to print to the one across the room so you can continue to work. This location is 2.5 hours away from where I live. That afternoon I load up an older printer from storage to take home with me. I leave out the following morning and arrive at the location about 10. Upon arriving,, before even taking the replacement printer in -- I walk over to the printer. Notice tray is closed. Open it to find.... No paper! Reach under the counter and get a stack of paper. Insert and close tray. Printer starts to print everything in the queue. I do a hard reset to clear the queue so it doesn't keep wasting paper. Me: Can you please try printing something and see what error you get? Employee presses print and it prints successfully. Me (in shock): OK. I think that's got you fixed up. If it happens again, open the tray and make sure to load paper while making sure to not overfill (again trying to not make them feel like the idiot they are) So 2.5 hours there. <5 minutes of work. 2.5 hours back. 5 hours of work time, $120 in mileage reimburse, and company paid lunch (part of the arrangement) $150 salary + $120 + $15 = $285 to put paper in a printer. In my expense report its a section where I write down what needed to be done. I wrote "printer out of paper" hoping someone would see it. Accounting never questioned it. Go figure. [link] [comments]  |
| We Didn't Start the Fire, and we just barely stopped it. Posted: 27 Apr 2020 02:52 PM PDT Hello TFTS. This story is a bit different from the usual, but I firmly believe it falls under "Tech Troubleshooting Under the Direst of Circumstances" This happened only a few short days ago. It started out as any other day during the self-quarantine. I'm sitting in my room on the university campus, chilling out, maxing, relaxing, all cool, when I smell something like burnt plastic. Now this is nothing too unusual. There are a few big stone dumpsters around the campus, and it is almost guaranteed that if you throw away something big and flammable next to the dumpster, like a couch or a bookshelf, that it will be set fire to before midnight. I'd decided to leave my room to check in with my flat mates (we live with 11 on one floor). Usually when something is burning outside, people step on their balconies to watch and chat. But as soon as I leave my room, the burning smell intensifies. This is strange, since my room has a street side window. So if something is burning outside, I should be able to smell it much more clearly in my room than just outside it. Curious about the source of the stench, which now has a distinctive smell of burnt electronics (a combination of burnt plastic and ozone), I start sniffing around outside the door. Directly next the door to my room is a closet, with the door almost permanently cracked open, containing the fuse box for our floor. As I'm sniffing around, I take a peek around the closet door, to find the fuse box on fire! This fire was situated directly underneath the physical mains switch, and has melted a hole in the plastic encasing it was housed in. It was like staring into the furnace of a steam engine, but it could just as well have been a miniature gates to hell given the smell. Immediately I start yelling that there is a fire, and duck back into my room. I have never been happier for the fact that my father inspects fire alarm systems for a living, and gave me a small powder fire extinguisher as a housewarming present. I grab my extinguisher, fumble a second with the safety pin, and start spraying into the fire. Now, my father has told me that with these small powder extinguishers, if the fire is contained, it's almost better to leave it burning then to use them. The powder is highly corrosive, especially dangerous to electronics since the fine powder dust can be statically attracted, and an absolute nightmare to clean up. The cleaning costs after using one of these can be higher than the damage of the fire itself. As soon as I start spraying this little stream of dusty fire retardant powder, I remember this little nugget and quickly close the door to my room before continuing spraying. While this small stream of fire powder does seem to diminish the fire, it is still burning away. Within 10 seconds of me starting spraying, a flat mate comes running up with the big fire extinguisher from the hallway and joins in. Instead of a small stream of powder or even a big stream of powder, a cloud seems to have instantly filled up the entire electrical closet and the hallway. Now fires are not the only things that need oxygen, we humans need that too. And while the fire itself had so far barely produced any smoke yet, this cloud of fire powder is now obscuring both of our vision, and the sickly sweet taste indicates it would not be a good idea to breath too much of this stuff ourselves. So while my flat mate is extinguishing the fire, I turn around and open a window in the hallway behind us. Usually that would not be the smartest thing to do, but the fire was still fairly small and we were in more danger from the powder than the fire by that point. Now this is where the under "Tech Troubleshooting under the Direst of Circumstances" comes in. While my flat mate has succeeded in putting out the fire, both of us can clearly hear that distinctive 60 Hertz humming and see arcs in the place where the fire just was. We had just emptied one and a half fire extinguishers into this fuse box, we had no extinguishers left on the floor and this fire can start back up at any second.
I didn't leave my room because I lost power, I could smell something. And indeed, despite the fire and the arcing, all of the 16 Amp circuit breakers are still in the ON position. We quickly flick them all off, only giving a brief though about how suddenly cutting the power could not be good for any of our PC's. I had a machine learning algorithm running for 2 days by that point which would be lost and a flat mate had already lost his PC due to such a sudden power cutoff with a previous landlord. None the less, we manually triggered the breakers, and the arcing diminished significantly, though it did not stop completely. Every few seconds, a few arcs would spark anyway. After a few more tense seconds, someone arrived with the fire extinguisher from our downstairs neighbors. Other people were calling the fire department, campus security, basically everyone except the army. At that point, it basically became a matter of watching over the fuse box, being ready to douse it should it start burning again, and waiting for the fire department to arrive to manage the fire, and security so we could definitively cut the power. Within 5 minutes, the fire department had arrived, and our job was basically done by that point. Aftermath: The fire happened around noon. Within an hour emergency technicians and cleaning crew arrived to inspect and dismantle the fuse box and clean up the powder. That caused an interesting problem since the cleaning crew had a wet vacuum cleaner, which needed power in a building which now had none. We knew someone on campus who owns a portable generator so that was resolved in a few minutes. Tech students own the weirdest things, and this was absolutely a 'my time to shine has come' moment for him. By 7pm, a replacement fuse box had been installed and power was restored to the building. One flat mate had left his door open and likely has fire extinguisher dust in all the wrong places. A specialist cleaning company has been contacted, and will be expensed to insurance. Also, here is a photo of the aftermath for those interested, if the mods will allow it. TL;DR how do you shut off the power to stop an electrical fire if the mains switch is the thing on fire! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Apr 2020 07:03 PM PDT I had a call a number of years ago that really stuck with me - in a positive way, for once. Backdrop: I work for regional ISP with a VoIP product that services both residential and business clients. My forte is the business class, but often times residential calls will come my way if lower-tiered reps get one that's more involved. Other times they're swamped and the more tenured reps, such as myself, jump in to help clear the call queues. I would say a solid 95% of residential support cases are the stereotypical "turn it off and on again" tech calls to power-cycle the ATA so the device can renegotiate the SIP peer with the cloud-based PBX. The installation for the residential VoIP is fairly simple: PBX > internet connection > analog telephone adapter (ATA) > analog phone Business class gets much more complicated, so troubleshooting the residential ones by comparison are nearly always a cakewalk. The Story: One of the lower-tiered reps approaches me with a "weird one". He says the customer claims that every time his wife gets a text nearby while he's on the (VoIP) landline, his call drops. Insert a lot of mental eye-rolls on my part. I'm already wondering why I even have to explain what I'm about to explain to my own co-worker. I tell the rep that it must be a coincidence, because the systems are not tied together in any way. Even if they're on the same local network, the incoming text really shouldn't be any different than any other traffic the wife's phone is sending to cause a call drop. The other rep said he agreed, but wanted to double-check that there's no way the VoIP and the wife's mobile were 'competing' in some way. I advise that if the customer is adamant, he could point us to an example call where the issue occurred, and we could pull the packet captures and check for anything weird going on. I was fully expecting to never hear about it again. It's amazing when you ask for specific examples how suddenly the issue stops. Customer calls back the next day and just happens to get me right out the gate. He explains his situation and that he has an open ticket for it. I already know who it is as he starts explaining his issue, but I let him re-explain it anyway. He tells me that he knows it sounds crazy, but he can replicate it pretty reliably and that he has examples now. I'm interested, as he sounds like a level headed guy who doesn't believe the words coming out of his own mouth. Definitely not the tin-foil hat type I was anticipating. I do a few spot checks to rule out other more obvious causes and don't find anything off. So, I pull the packet captures and get to analyzing. I tell him Ill give him a call back with my findings. Don't see any issues with the actual packets. As a matter of fact, the call was terminated on the customer's end. I'm already thinking I'm dealing with a poorly placed cheek hitting the 'End' button. But, I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and move forward with additional analysis. So, I switch to listening to the RTP stream just to see if the audio helps give me a better sense of the environment at the time of the call. The phone call plays and everything seems normal. Suddenly I hear a loud DING of a phone notification going off. Call drops immediately. No way. I pull another one of his examples. Same thing. DING. Drop. I pull the final example. Gotta be kidding me. DING. Drop. I show all of my coworkers in business class support. They're just as awestruck as I am. Finally, one of the much more experienced reps off the cuff just says "...wonder if it's negotiating faxes." Hm. That...might make sense. I go back to the actual packet stream. There it is. A couple of t.38 packets that I missed because I was filtering for SIP in Wireshark. The default Apple text 'ding' has tones used in fax signaling. His analog adapter was enabled to listen for t.38 - it heard the tones, thought a fax was coming in and dropped the call to start receiving a fax. I disabled fax negotiations in his adapter and called him back to let him know it should be fixed. He was grateful that I not only fixed the issue, but I actually took him seriously in the first place. The 'other guy' made him feel so silly. This experience stuck with me. The issue was kind of crazy, sure, but it was actually what he said after that made it memorable. I basically was the 'other guy' - the dismissive, jaded, know-it-all that made him feel like an idiot. It wasn't my voice on the phone with him the first time he called, but it might as well have been. This is the support call I use to "check myself" when I feel my outlook on support and users is getting increasingly negative, or I'm just getting a little too big for my britches. Stay sane out there. And remember: nobody likes to feel like an idiot. TL;DR Crazy issue trigger turns out to be true, and I learn to not be so jaded. [link] [comments]  |
| The phone system just 'does things'. Posted: 27 Apr 2020 08:45 PM PDT One of the managers where I work is very difficult to work with. She is stubborn and thinks she and her daughter (also works there) can do no wrong. The manager receives a voice-mail to her email that is simply the company's hold music for a full minute. Being the **** she is, she forwards it to all senior management, the owner of the company, and me stating how bad these VoIP phones are, that things "just happen", it just 'does things', etc. She had been against the change to VoIP that had happened about 6 months prior. Instead of arguing, I pulled the logs. Sure enough. As crazy as it sounds-- one of the counter phones calls her extension (she isn't there). While the phone is ringing, it gets placed on hold. After a minute of recording the hold music, the call automatically disconnects. Knowing I needed more evidence then just responding with the facts, I decided to get ahead of her and pull the CCTV footage that was literally overlooking the counter phone. Instead of sending the footage, I hit reply all and said something to the effect of "someone accidentally called your office and then placed the call on hold." Her reply? Again reply all-- thats stupid! We wouldn't do that. We know how to use a phone. My reply? Again to everyone-- Please see attached video footage of (daughter) attempting to laminate something over the phone. At 0:14 you can see she accidentally pressed the speed dial on the side car. She then also presses the hold button and knocks the phone off the hook. All without realizing. No response from her after that. Just several lol's from others attached to the email. No one likes her. Side note: this manager is my boss's wife. I've never gotten along with her. But then again no one does. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Apr 2020 06:13 AM PDT Hello TFTS! Today i introduce to you: The „broken" windows 7 (shame on us, i know) computer... To start off, it was $Coworkers turn on the user help desk today. Now with him working from home, this proved to be rather difficult at times since he was unable to actually drive to the coworkers who had problems. Thus he mails me what the issue is, and how to resolve it, so it's mostly not a big deal. Today however... I get a mail stating that the pc of a certain coworker just started the self repair. Alright, i put everything for a new setup in my car and drive there, luckily only a 10-15 minute drive. As i arrive there, i don't carry everything inside already and decide to just take a look at the computer first. Well, i wouldn't be here if it was really the case that i needed to build a new setup, right? So the self repair failed (obviously, it's as useful as windows finding the cause why a program stopped responding). I just said to not send the error report and the clicked on restart... and everything is working again. So i drove in total around 30 minutes to click twice. Nice. [link] [comments]  |
| Roadside Rescue: A Tale of Two Tires Posted: 27 Apr 2020 04:37 PM PDT For the record, I'm not a professional, just a hobbyist/enthusiast who knows a thing or two, and who frequently gets asked to help with the cars of friends/family. The other night I get a few frantic text messages and finally a call from a friend--he's blown a tire about 15 minutes from my house, and he's discovered (after a year of owning the car) that it doesn't have a spare tire, jack or tire iron. As luck would have it, I have the same generation Subaru Forester as he does, so I pack up my own spare, a floor jack, a few tools, and hit the road. I arrive to find him in the dark with no lights on, but otherwise it seems like a pretty standard flat. I suspect the tire could even be plugged. I get to work jacking the car up and as I do I explain to him:
He seems to understand, and we continue talking as I put on the spare. A few minutes of unrelated talking later, he starts thinking out loud saying "Okay, I'll bring it to the shop tomorrow so I can get off the spare." So I remind him that it's a full sized spare, and he doesn't have to worry about getting it fixed immediately. He again seems to understand. A few more minutes go by, I'm finishing up and inflating the tire, and I realize he's on the phone with his girlfriend. I hear him asking her to pick him up tonight after he drops the car off at the shop. A little less patiently this time, I remind him that the spare is full-sized, so he can drive normally on it for as long as he needs, and that he could likely just drop the flat tire and wheel off at their shop to get it repaired. Again, he seems to understand. I get things packed up and as we part ways, I once more reassure him he doesn't have to worry about getting the tire back to me right away (the car it goes it is off the road for repairs anyway). He takes off and all seems well. Two days later I get some more frantic text messages and finally a call from him. He wants to drive to drop off some food and drink for his girlfriend at work, but is concerned the spare won't hold up to the trip. I (with significantly less patience) remind him that the spare is f%$#ing full sized and he can drive the f*^@ing car on that tire as long as he f?{ing needs to. He says "thank you, you're a lifesaver, etc etc", and all is again well in the universe. A few days later, I get a message from his girlfriend (also a friend of mine). She informs me that after I helped him with the flat, he took the flat tire and wheel to the dump and threw it away. She had to tell him to go back and get it, and explain to him that it could be repaired (I thought I had explained that to him well enough the night of?!?). She also tells me she recently had to buy him a new oil cap...he had somehow lost the original, and had been driving around without it for a good while. After talking to her for a bit, I decided to sell my spare to them (I had plans to get another to match the offroad wheels and tires on my own car) to make things a bit simpler for them, and to give her more time to get the tire sorted properly for him (without him acting rashly while she's at work). EDIT: I'd like to convey, my friend is a great guy otherwise, and pretty smart at that. He just doesn't seem to be able to wrap his head around car concepts. Smart guy, just not car smart. TL;DR: I help friend with flat tire. Friend does not understand what a full sized spare is. Friend continues to not understand what a full sized spare is. Concept of full sized spare continues to elude friend's understanding. Full sized spare's properties completely non-comprehensible by friend. Girlfriend of friend further communicates that policies and practices surrounding full sized spare and oil cap are not being followed properly by friend. I sell spare tire to friend. [link] [comments]  |
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