Repeated failures to fix what should be a very simple issue results in customer demanding a full system replacement... Tech Support |
- Repeated failures to fix what should be a very simple issue results in customer demanding a full system replacement...
- After hours, retirement community residents.
- The Print Drivers "Color" option
- That's a risk we're willing to take
- VPN DOWN!
- When you've finally had enough...
- Bad and naughty children get their toys confiscated to atone for their crimes.
- Best reason to call Tech Support
- Is my monitor ready yet? How bout now?
- Printer oopsie
- Reverse story
| Posted: 30 Apr 2020 04:53 PM PDT Back in the heady days of Windows XP being brand new, I was working for a big computer company in Central Texas, when this gem of a call came to me. From the get go, it's clear this customer is already irate.
When I pull it up, I see a laundry list of back to back to back service calls for a faulty display. He's had enough, and he is demanding a full system exchange. I see that the Monitor has been replaced three times, the video card twice, and the Motherboard once. The issue he's complaining about is a bright spot in the top left corner of his screen. <Insert cursing and complaining and insisting here.>
He proceeds to describe a bright spot in the top left corner of his monitor. It's a few inches from the top bezel and a few inches from the left bezel...and he's seeing it on the login screen. So I have him go to the BIOS, and in the BIOS it's fine. We reset the BIOS anyway, and go back to the login screen. He starts cursing and complaining, because there it is again!
Yup. He'd costed the company thousands of dollars in warranty service because he didn't realize the bright spot in the corner of the Windows XP login screen was an aesthetic element and not a failure in the display... [link] [comments]  |
| After hours, retirement community residents. Posted: 30 Apr 2020 12:52 PM PDT Long ago, at my first job as a consultant, one of our clients was a retirement community. With everything from senior apartments, to end of life care. When a resident requested internet, we would show up to make the room live for internet access. This was basically hooking up a cable in the switch room to make the residents room live, go into the resident's room and make sure the computer is connected. It's a 15-minute job. I get the ticket, and make my way over to the site. I was about 19 at the time. Loved helping the older folks at this site, as I never really had grandparents of my own. I get to the site, make the connection in the switch room, and wander over to the resident's apartment, were I'm greeted by a husband and wife in their late 60's early 70's Me : Me / ResW : Resident Wife / ResH : Resident Husband Me : Hi I have gotten everything setup on the back-end, now I need to come in and make the port you want live inside your apartment, and test that everything is up and running. ResW: Absolutely come on in! (In the room there is a panel I had to take off. To make the Ethernet port live, in the room the computer is in.) I ask ResH where the computer is located. He shows me the room the computer is in; I then make my way over to the panel to make the port live. As I'm doing my thing he asks. ResH: How long have you been doing this? Me: I'm still in school, but was lucky enough to get a job with this consulting company as well. ResH: On the job training, like it should be, he smiles. Me: Yes sir, okay. You are good here, lets go look at your computer. I sit down, and all looks good. We chat for a few moments about my schooling, along with ResW and ResH's quite active lives. They also where bribing me with snacks, (Being the college kid, I happily sit and listen for a bit) As I got ready to head out, they ask me. ResW: Could you help with some odd ended computer things? They wanted Thunderbird setup, and a few other things, that I don't remember anymore. (We are not contracted to provide these types of services, unless asked by the retirement community.) Me: I tell you what, I will stop back after my workday is done. Would that work for you. ResW: Well, don't eat before you get here, you will get a meal out of it for your trouble. After I get done with my day, I drive back over to the retirement community. When I get to the resident's apartment, they both greet me and I sit down and setup everything that they wanted me to get setup, as I munch on home cooked food. I get done, sit and chat for a bit. As I get ready to head out, ResH tries to hand me money. Me: No, no, you payed me in food. That's all I need. ResH: Sternly, no. You're a college kid, I have grand-kids your age, take it, as he stuffs it into my backpack. I thanked him and give him a handshake. Me: Do you want to adopt another grand-kid? ResW: We would love that! So, I got a free meal, $40, and got to meet some awesome people. [link] [comments]  |
| The Print Drivers "Color" option Posted: 01 May 2020 01:28 AM PDT This isn't nessecarily a "nightmare" tale but I think it'd fit. I used to work the support desk for a printer company. We mostly got troubleshooting calls but every now and then we'd get installation support calls (people call us to walk them through setting up their printer. One afternoon I got an installation support call where a patient end user was setting up their black and white printer. At the time there was a semi-common issue of the specific drivers for the printer in question not showing up on a certain Windows 10 versions, so we were instructed to load the generic brand PCL6 drivers as a workaround. So I remote into the users computer and install the generic PCL6 driver. I run some test prints and everything's working properly. The user asks if I could show them how to set the default page size to A4 so they don't have to change it in their software each print. Sure enough I open up the printing preferences and walk them through saving A4 as the default size, but as I'm explaining, an option in the bottom left catches the users Eye. "Automatic/Monochrome/Color" The User asks "This button here on the screen, if I click it will my paper print out in color?" "Now, the generic brand PCL6 drivers work for both mono printers and color printers, so this option is a leftover meant for color models." I explain that to the user, and they seem to understand. However, in search of clarification, the user rephrases, "So if I click this and print, it won't print in color?" I respond "No, it won't because your printer doesn't print color" The user asks "But if it does?" Not really having a solid answer, I blurt the first thing that comes to my mind- "If your black and white printer prints in color, I would advise calling an exoricist. Or burning it." Thankfully the user did not become mad at this response and had a good laugh about it. With that cleared up, the user was set up to go, and finished the call. [link] [comments]  |
| That's a risk we're willing to take Posted: 30 Apr 2020 04:50 PM PDT This story is hard fully anonymize, but I think enough time has passed that I can tell it. I was working as a developer at a software company and we needed a way to authenticate the devices we were building to our web services. Nothing too major, but there were some potentially sensitive endpoints which exposed things that were normally protected by CAPTCHAs and other anti-abuse protections. The original idea was pretty simple, but completely infeasible. Basically, each device would have an x509 SSL certificate baked in at the factory that we could verify on our end. Basically, the exact same kind of certificates that you can purchase from Verisign, but we were the certificate authority and could validate that they we issued them. Any abuse could be mitigated by revoking the certificate. At the last minute however, the manufacturers told us that they didn't have the capability of putting custom unique certificates in the devices, but they could put in unique serial numbers. (Btw, this is something I brought up early in the design process only to be brushed off by management by saying "they already had it handled") So, I ended up with the task of creating a mechanism to load these certificates on to devices during the setup. I researched how others have done this in the past, what worked, and what broke and came up with a fairly robust plan for doing this. After a whole month of discussions with architects and other people, the company had completely torn apart my initial design only to come full circle back to what I initially presented -- with a couple of notable differences. The first had to do with what happens when a device had a bad serial number and couldn't get a certificate. I said, it's a lemon and the customer should exchange it at the store. If the manufacturer couldn't stamp a valid serial number, there's probably plenty of other problems with it as well. I was told that was a "bad customer experience" and insisted on adding a way to manually enter a serial number. There would be a phone number to call and customer service would give the user a new 25 digit hexadecimal number to enter to get past the initial setup process. I mentioned that this would defeat the purpose and open up the system to all kinds of abuse once people figured this out. I was told right then that "that is a risk we're willing to take" Fast forward a few months, and someone in the company discovers a post in an online forum with instructions on how to get these certificates on to unlicensed devices and management freaks out. I got an urgent email asking how to fix it. I simply replied, "That was a risk we were willing to take" and never heard anything from them again. Btw, the other notable design change was how we limited the number of certificates we would issue for a device. I suggested doing a basic rate limit -- If you need to hard-reset your device more than a few times a week, then we should probably stop issuing certificates to it. They changed it to a hard limit of 100 for the lifetime of the device. This seemed pretty stupid, but still fairly reasonable to me so I didn't fight it. Then later discovered that an early batch of the devices were sent to a partner for sales training purposes. They ran through that 100/lifetime cold reset real quick, and we had to rush a fix to our service to make a special case for those training devices. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2020 01:00 PM PDT Last week, I received an email, call, and text message (in that order) from a client based on the East Coast (I'm in Cali) around 6:30AM "reporting" that his VPN wasn't working anymore. I called him back and tested his VPN login creds on my end and confirmed that they were no longer working. I hopped on the Sonicwall and changed his VPN login and he was able to log in again. The next morning, he texts and calls me again reporting the same issue. I tested his new creds from my end and received the same error. I thought it was weird that his account was the only one that was having issues, so I reset his VPN user account password to the same new password and it was working again. I thought there might've been an issue with the Sonicwall, so I scheduled a reboot overnight. I also started researching how to set up LDAP auth via local AD and starting going down that rabbit hole a couple of hours but eventually had to take care of other things before the end of the day. Monday morning, I get yet another call from him with the same issue. He was pretty irate at this point. I tested his credentials on my machine and confirmed they worked all three times I logged in. So then I decide to remote into his machine and watch him enter in his credentials. At first glace, everything looked like there shouldn't be an issue. I copy-pasted the password to make sure it was correct and it still didn't work. I was about to use a different VPN credential to test, but when I went to change the username field, I saw that there was a space entered after his username. As soon as I deleted the space, his login worked again. So I asked him to start over completely and enter in his credentials. I watched him add a space after his username. I pointed it out to him and he denied it, but as he typed out his username slowly, he noticed that he was subconsciously adding a space after his username. I was dumbfounded. I literally face-palmed as he chuckled out loud to himself and apologized for wasting so much of my time. Lesigh [link] [comments]  |
| When you've finally had enough... Posted: 30 Apr 2020 05:43 PM PDT (TL;DR at bottom) In the late 90s I was working for a small consulting company on the Jersey shore. One of our clients was a company in Newark whose entire business was designing (of all things) the finials that go on the ends of curtain rods. The company was run by a very demanding, very German man - let's call him "Hanz" to protect the guilty. He had absolutely zero respect for anyone that worked for him, much less any contractors, so naturally everyone HATED going to that site. While I was on the parkway home one afternoon, my boss called and told me his computer was randomly powering off while he was using it. I got off at the next exit to turn around and slog back in to Newark, resigning myself to having to deal with him. I arrived and wound my way into the studio where he worked. His computer was set up with his monitor, etc. on a built-in work table, with the tower below on the floor. Since random power-offs are usually due to either heat or memory problems, I crawled under the table and whipped the cover off the tower. Sure enough, the computer was FULL of dust and cloth fuzz, and it had clogged the CPU fan. I powered off the computer, removed the heat sink and fan, and cleaned everything out as best as I could. I powered it back on, ready to run some benchmarks to put some load on it so I could make sure that had fixed the problem. As soon as it started back up, while I'm still on the floor half under the table, he comes up, leans over the top of me, and begins to use his computer. I'd already had a long day, and I'd had enough of his crap over the last few months, so... ...I snapped. I snaked around him and out from under the table and stood up. "Hanz! Wait a minute... Hanz!" He looked at me and blinked, as if he'd just seen someone with two heads. "Hanz," I continue, "When you take your car to the mechanic, do you sit behind the wheel and rev the engine while he's working on it?" "No" he says. "Then don't do it to me." He backed off, I finished my test, and gave him the work slip to sign. He signed it without saying much at all, and I jumped back in the company car and headed back to the office to turn in my slips for the day. About 15 minutes later, my cell phone rings and it's the owner of my company. "Whelp, here we go!" I thought. Boss: "What did you say to Hanz?" I told him the story exactly as related above. Boss: "Humph. That's weird. He just called me and told me that no one other than you is allowed to work on his computer." I guess he was just waiting for someone to stand up to him. TL;DR: I get angry at a trouble customer and tell him off, he responds by calling the owner of my company to insist I be the only one to ever work on his computer. [link] [comments]  |
| Bad and naughty children get their toys confiscated to atone for their crimes. Posted: 30 Apr 2020 09:05 AM PDT Another story from the world of software tech support. I'll try to keep this as brief as possible, but it requires a bit of context. We technically support two systems. One is a CRM (which we'll call "CRM"), the other is a "sister" program (Sister Program) that acts as a concierge service. Basically, you set up your contacts to automatically flow from CRM to Sister Program, where real humans working out of a queue call said contacts. The system is built to mainly support new contacts that pop into the system on a steady basis. All that said, prior to January, there was a button in CRM that you could press to manually send a contact to Sister Program. There was never a way of sending contacts over in bulk, because it would overload the call queue - so the Button was meant as kind of a little tool if you had the odd contact that you prevented from going in initially, but wanted to send it later. As you might have figured, there were some concerns surrounding this button when the project was first presented to us. Mainly, "Will our clients, being clients, find a way to misuse this button?" The answer? "Oh of course not, no one's going to sit there and repeatedly send contacts over one at a time, that's tedious!" You guys realize people are gonna find a way to do weird shit if they want to, right? Right?? Sister Program was officially rolled out to clients somewhere around late November. Since this product was kind of hastily rushed out the door like a AAA game in 2018-2019, there were bugs, pretty significant feature gaps, ect that we started to get flooded with. Which was fine. The first occurrence of a client misusing The Button began around the same time the product was released. The leadership team over at Sister Program's office was freaking out in Slack at the amount of calls piling up for their workers. We identified the client and told them to stop. Rinse and repeat the scenario above about six more times in the course of a couple of months. We figured some clients were basically hiring some poor sap to sit at a desk and click The Button repeatedly on all the contacts they wanted to send over, whether it was 1 contact or 500 contacts or 8,000 contacts. Maybe it was a punishment for someone's kid. Or they sat there themselves in front of Netflix and did it. Who knows. The seventh and final occurrence was mid-January, where the leadership team for Sister Program was panicking again in Slack. This one was worse than previous instances - there had been thousands going over, over the course of an hour or so. They were understandably losing their shit. Managers on our tech support team were running around the office like headless chickens. Eventually, the client was identified - and it was one of the ones who'd done this shit before. The managers asked one of us to give him a cease and desist call, because they were all hands on deck. I volunteered, because I was curious. We'll call our friend here Timmy. Conversation is roughly paraphrased.
To spare you some of the conversation/research/Slack convos, Steve was one of the cancellation department members working with Timmy. Timmy wanted to cancel his contract early, without penalty, because of some feature he wanted that we obviously couldn't implement at the snap of a finger because that's not how development works. Steve said no because.....it's a fucking contract and there's gonna be penalties. They'd been going back and forth on this for some weeks, and Timmy came to the conclusion that he'd basically try and force us to do what he wanted by doing the thing he knew from experience would fuck us over a bit.
Put him on hold, went to explain to managers that Timmy hears us, and Timmy don't care. The WTF expressions on their faces were priceless. However, this was in the middle of a conversation that had been in progress since before I called Timmy. Main manager checked her Slack, and then returned to me in about five minutes. Let me know that it was fine - just tell him that he only has to stop sending contacts over for an hour. Why? Because The Button's was going to be erased from existence, for everyone, in about an hour. I went back to Timmy, told him I'd checked with managers, and let him know he only had to stop for an hour. He found this agreeable contingent upon a call soon from Steve to discuss (read: bitch about) his contract some more. And as promised, our clients refreshed their pages an hour later to find that The Button had been removed entirely. Want your button back? Sign a form agreeing to not send over a certain amount per week. Signed the form, but start misusing The Button later on? No more button for you. Timmy called back fifteen minutes after the update was rolled out and spoke to a manager. According to said manager, little Timmy threw one hell of a tantrum over having his toy taken away and was threatening all kinds of legal comeuppance he planned to throw our way for this. In the end, Timmy was forced to accept defeat, and decided the best course of action would be to just stop paying his bill. Because we all know that if you stop paying a bill for a service you signed up for, you're free and clear of any consequences. TL;DR: Timmy learned a valuable lesson about life in the real world without his Fairy Godparents. [link] [comments]  |
| Best reason to call Tech Support Posted: 30 Apr 2020 09:17 AM PDT Fist time posting, and on mobile. So apologies for any issues. Cast: Me - not explaining who this is. User - network user calling for help. Me: Thank you for calling "redacted" how may I assist you today. User: Yes. When getting set up today my cat walked on my keyboard and hit the ESC key. Now my laptop is asking for a recovery key. Me: Ok. That's a new one. Me and the user laugh as I generate and read off the recovery password. Me: You are able to log in now, was that everything you needed help with today. User: Yes. Thank you for helping me with my 'cat'astrophe. [link] [comments]  |
| Is my monitor ready yet? How bout now? Posted: 30 Apr 2020 12:09 PM PDT Short one for you Me: me STML: user with Short Term Memory Loss Monday: I go into office to address a couple of WFH monitor requests. Asset tag the monitors and bundle them with appropriate cabling for the laptops that the user has and place at front desk. Send an e-mail to all users. "Your monitor is ready for pickup". Closure notes for each ticket show: Monitor and appropriate cabling left at front desk for user to retrieve at their convenience. Tuesday: E-mail response to my notification: STML: Does mine have a VGA cable with it? Me: yes STML: (additional e-mail) Where do I pickup? Me: Front lobby desk Wednesday: STML submits a ticket: What's the status of my monitor request that was closed? Other tech: doesn't look at ticket notes, just original person ticket was assigned to and routes to their queue. Me: sees the ticket. WTF? "Dear STML, Your ticket was closed advising you that your monitor is ready for pickup at the front lobby desk with all the requested cables. Additionally, you received an e-mail from me notifying you of this and you responded to it twice asking where to pick it up and if it had the requested cables. Both of which I responded to and told you. Is there something else you need clarification on?" -Me TLDR: Here's your monitor. What monitor? This Monitor! That Monitor? YES THIS MONITOR!!!! Where should I pick it up? JUST TAKE IT OUT OF MY HANDS HOW HAVE YOU SURVIVED THIS LONG! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2020 03:45 PM PDT I got a call as a helpdesk tech from a client having issues with his printer. He wasn't the greatest at answering questions, so it took a while to get some clear information. Basically, he couldn't get the device to print single-sided. After checking his driver settings, the printer's configuration, and doing a few test prints, I eventually figured out what the issue was. Me: Can you check the paper in the paper tray? noise of tray opening Him: ...Oh. He had filled the paper tray with paper that already had text printed on one side. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 May 2020 12:48 AM PDT At that time I was software engineering student. I didn't know much about hardware. I had a ASUS laptop with nvidia optimus. The thing was when I plug the charger GPU would run slower and FPS would decrease and when I unplug the charger FPS would increase. Since there aren't any branch of ASUS in my country I went to see some laptop repair guy since there aren't better option in my country. Also some of them have degree in computer hardware. I explained the problem. He had a grin and showed me how to adjust screen brightness. I was dumbfounded, didn't know how to respond and took my laptop home. Since then after some thought, it was probably because how the components were powered when charger is plugged in. [link] [comments]  |
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