I can't send this e-mail... It has worked before! Tech Support |
- I can't send this e-mail... It has worked before!
- Another missing switch (sort of)
- The 6 hour cabling fix
- Tracking down the phantom switch
- Just Scroll Up
- It's a matter of principle!
| I can't send this e-mail... It has worked before! Posted: 25 Jun 2020 09:45 AM PDT This happened a while ago. $tech - Yours truly $user - Elderly user --- Day 1: Ring ring! $tech: Welcome to tech support, how may I help you? $user: Yes, hi. I cannot send an e-mail from this program. It has worked before... $tech: Okay... May I have the name of the computer, please? $user: It is $machine_name $tech: Okay, one moment. May I take a look on your desktop? $user: Yes, please! I find that $user wants to send a .PDF-file as an attachment. After I clicked on settings like "Share > E-mail", in the .PDF-reader, the e-mail program opens up and $user is now familiar with the rest of the process. I guess that the PDF-reader previously had a "one-click" button which opened up the e-mail program directly. Now you need to click on two buttons. $user: Thank you, it was not like it was before. Day 2: Ring ring! $tech: Welcome to tech support, how may I help you? $user: Yes, hi. I cannot send an e-mail from this program. It has worked before... I set up the settings for the user again and close the ticket. Day 3: Ring ring! $tech: Welcome to tech support, how may I help you? $user: Yes, hi. I cannot send an e-mail from this program. It has worked before... At this point I think to myself that it might be the same user as the previous two days with the same issue. When I find that it is, I think to myself that $user might forget this after she gets the help. So, before closing the call, I ask $user if she would like a written guide on her computer. $user: Yes, that sounds like a good idea! On the user's machine, I create a document with both written instructions and images as a "how-to" for this issue. $tech: Okay, now you have a guide in your "My Documents" folder, and you can click on this icon on your desktop whenever you need to send that e-mail attachment again. --- After setting up the guide in $user's computer, I haven't heard from $user again. Edit: Thank you for the award, kind stranger! [link] [comments]  |
| Another missing switch (sort of) Posted: 25 Jun 2020 09:02 PM PDT I read this earlier today and it reminded me of a similar situation. 20 years ago (man time flies) I worked for a gas station chain. We had little gas stations in front of the world's largest retailer from Texas to Miami and as far north as Michigan. We were a 6 man shop supporting about a 1,000 stores at the time. We were jack-of-all-trades. We would go out into the field and install POS systems at new stores, take turns working the help desk for 2 weeks, or go out into the field to go on maintenance runs (we would hit a whole bunch of stores within driving distance of one another to perform minor repairs or replace minor equipment). Most of the maintenance runs were done at night, usually after the store closed. It was not unusual to be at a station at closing, do what needed to be done, drive an hour or more to another station and perform the tasks there, and then hit the next one. Check into a motel sleep all day and start the process over the next night. Part of this chain's gimmick was that they accepted the retailers shopping/gift card and would give a 3 cent discount. To do this, there was a fiber run between the gas station and the retailer. This was a big improvement over the LOS antennas previously used, but that's a different story. Anyway, the fiber connected our POS to the retailers network so that it could communicate with the "authorizer" in the home office in the Ozarks. That's a lot of back story, but bear with me. So during my time on the help desk, I would get calls from a particular store in Florida about the gift cards not authorizing. This went on for a couple of months, the other techs and I tried everything we knew. It was a weird situation. The cards would work during the day and seemed to stop working around 10 pm every night. Thanks to a lawsuit from a competing gas station chain, the 3 cent discount could not be offered at the stores in this area and without that incentive, we didn't have a lot of shopping card volume at that store anyway. So we just threw up our hands and left it on the back burner. A few months later, I was on one of the aforementioned maintenance runs in Florida. We were doing some reprogramming of the pumps and it required us to test credit card and gift card transactions. Programmed the pumps and tested credit cards. Check. Test the shopping card, doesn't work. It was at that point I realized this was THAT store. Time to do some on-site troubleshooting. I tried everything we had done remotely and still didn't have an idea. I checked the Digibox converter at the store (converted the fiber to RJ-45). It showed there was a connection to our 8 port switch, but not to the retailer. Across the parking lot I went. I managed to bluff my way into the switch/server room of a store of the world's largest retailer with no more than a business card. When the night manager walked me into the room, the lights were out. She hit the light switch and I located the Digi box on this side of the connection. The lights on it showed a connection. Weird! But I hadn't noticed any status lights from that area when the overhead lights were off. Playing a hunch, I turned the lights back off and the status lights went off. Millions of dollars spent on store layout and design, and the world's largest retailer had put an outlet in their switch room that was tied to the light switch! Moved the plug, cut the lights to confirm that the converter stayed on, went back across the parking lot and lo and behold, the shopping cards worked. It seems the maintenance people cleaned the floors in that room every night about 10 and turned off the lights on their way out. Someone came in about 6 in the morning and turned the lights back on. Tl;dr: after months of troubleshooting an issue remotely, ended up onsite and discovered the problem was that the world's largest retailer had the outlet we had our equipment plugged into tied to the overhead light switch. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2020 04:42 PM PDT Brief stint with a MSP between jobs. I get sent to a customer's location, internet connection to one of the workstations isn't working. Even though I'm new to the company and have never been to this client's site, it seems easy enough to diagnose and fix. Get there and have a look, sure enough, no link. Swap out patch cable, no luck. Check it on a laptop, no link. It's a back office in an add-on wing, construction company. Generally dirty and abused, so I grab a new keystone, re-punch it, plug it back in with new cable nothing. I call back to the office and ask for a wiring diagram. Nothing of any use, jack isn't labeled, so I go to the network closet and look for a dead port. Well, there's about 10 of them. Cables left over from who-knows-when still plugged into the main switch. I end up re-terminating all of them to see if one magically springs to life. No luck. I have no tracker/toner, so I drive back to the office to grab one. I get back to the client's site and put the toner on the dead port, and hunt for it in the network closet. I get a wisp here and there, but cannot for the life of me find this connection. So now I start arguing that there's no way this port worked. According to the mostly useless diagram, it home runs all the way back to the network closet. They insist they've used this for years, so I keep digging. I chase the wire up into the 6" drop ceiling, where it almost instantly disappears through ducts/pipes/etc. Most of it is inaccessible because of equipment in the way. I pop what tiles I can and piece the run together. Ok, it runs to the net closet, but I'm not getting a tone on that cable, and it's showing link on the main switch, so that can't be the one. I check the cable and the footage marks. They match up. This is the same cable by all accounts, but it has link on one side but not the other, and a tone isn't getting through. Finally, I say I have to trace this inch by inch, and I need them to move all this equipment. Another hour on site with both customer and I getting increasingly frustrated, and I track it down. After some crap is moved out of the way, I see an extension cord fed up into the ceiling and it finally hits me. Trace it out and sure enough, there's a cheapo 4-port hub stashed in the ceiling. I pull the power, reboot it, and boom, it works. Apparently at some point, someone cut that cable in the ceiling, and instead of using a scotch lock, or even a butt connector, decided to terminate both ends into a hub as a patch. This was apparently done by the MSP before us, so it was never documented. 6 hours on site to fix a dead ethernet connection. [link] [comments]  |
| Tracking down the phantom switch Posted: 25 Jun 2020 10:00 AM PDT I've been working with my employer for about 6 months on a brand new site. I'm the only IT on site and the main service desk is in the head office about 200 miles away. I'd spent a good part of the morning moving equipment between offices to help spread people out a bit so we can get people back in working on site rather than at home. During the move I found a whole bunch of spaghetti under the desks, daisy chained power extentions, POE injectors and a little 8 port switch, all in use and dumped under the desks. After sorting through it all and getting stuff moved into the new office space I had a lot of left over equipement, including the switch. I get back to my desk and within 30 minutes I'm getting SolarWind alerts for a switch down. You already know where this is going so I'll save you the effort. I spent an hour checking every cab on the site (I'm not familar with where they all are yet so the name didn't give me a clue). I finally got back to my desk and thought about the 8 port switch sitting in a box in my store room.. surely not, I thought. Well yes, someone thought it would be a good idea to monitor an 8 port desktop switch on SolarWinds and didn't even label the bloody thing. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2020 03:56 PM PDT I received a reply to the comment field on our website that a user could not find a file they were looking for. The comments have the URL from the page it came from listed as part of the metadata, so I could tell she was on the correct page. To make a long story short, I spent the next hour trying to get this person to follow the following instructions in an email chain that included at least 20 replies, 3 screenshots, and at least 3 listings of instructions similar to these: Go to website Scroll down Click the date you want Scroll up All she had to do was scroll back up the page she was on to see the file. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2020 03:19 AM PDT With Covid-19 we've got a lot more people working from home. And as a result we've been giving out more cell phones for company use. Some of these are new, some of these have been used before. Last week I gave out a phone that I wasn't 100% sure about as it had come back in after a user had made some complaints. But after a factory reset I couldn't find anything wrong with it and PEBCAK is pretty rife in our company, so when a secretary needed a new phone I prepped this one with a fresh SIM card and passed it over to the delighted user. Earlier this week I got an email from that user where she claimed that the phone was really slow to charge and that it was probably something with the battery. She'd tried different chargers and cables that she had in her house but every time it needed about a day to fully recharge. That's a bit too long for a phone to normally need in terms of charge rates. So we offered to take a look at it next time she was in the office. Her normal office is about 20 meters away from IT so, I figured it wouldn't be a problem. But it turns out it was. The user replied via mail that she wasn't going to be coming in to the office for the next few weeks because she didn't need to and afterwards she was going on vacation. And we just had to mail her a replacement charger. Now we've had issues in the past when we use the post service to send IT-related gear out to home adresses. Too many things have arrived damaged, or have been stolen from their envelopes/packages. Plus if it's not the charger but something else I don't think sending a new charger via post will help a lot. So I write to her in reply: Sorry, but due to issues with theft and damage when we send things through the post we don't do that anymore. I understand it's a bit of a hassle but you can keep your phone plugged in to the charger to mitigate the problem until you've got the chance to get back in to the office so I can do a proper diagnosis and replacement if that's nessecary. Well that wasn't the answer she was looking for, she replied: I've removed all my accounts from the phone and turned it off. It's not working as it should. And company gear should be working flawlessly. So I will not be using it until I have gotten a replacement. At least she's standing on principle I suppose? [link] [comments]  |
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