Are you spying on me! Tech Support |
- Are you spying on me!
- So the cable guy is going to be late?
- Laptops, lies, and idiots
- When the Sales Manager tries to "Techsplain" to the engineer
- If you give people the option to do things, they’ll do them even if they’re not supposed to
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 03:02 PM PDT So a little background: I work for a higher education IT department and often deal with students, professors, and staff members. This particular incident involved a very pissed off professor and his issued laptop. Cast: me (H), Professor (P) H: Hi thank you for calling IT support my name is H. How may I assist you? P: Yeah an icon has appeared on my desktop and I don't know what it is and it won't let me drag it to the trash bin. H: Oh okay sir, when you say it's not allowing you to drag it, what do you mean by that? P: Well it's asking for administrator credentials in order to delete it and I don't have those. Can you just remote in? H: remotes in Ah okay I see now. It's our systems management software that we use to keep track of our inventory and other information regarding our devices. P: I don't care what it does can you just remove it? H: No I sir I cannot as we need to need it to keep tabs on our devices. P: YOU PPL NEED TO STOP SPYING ON US. IT WAS ONE THING WHEN YOU COULD REMOTE CONTROL OUR COMPUTERS BUT THIS IS A STEP TOO FAR BLAH BLAH BLAH... I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY YOU WOULD EVEN NEED THIS TYPE OF SOFTWARE H: waits for tirade to be over Okay sir: 1) we need this software to keep track of inventory and to check on the diagnostics of OUR devices 2) this is not your laptop it belongs to my department and it is a privilege to have it and 3) we used this software earlier this week to get the serial number off of a stolen laptop so we could fill out a police report. P: gets huffy yeah whatever He then hung up on me. [link] [comments]  |
| So the cable guy is going to be late? Posted: 30 Jul 2020 08:39 PM PDT So this happened a long time ago well before I was a seasoned IT administrator all the way back in the year 1997. I know it was the summer of 1997 since I was working the phones during the week of famous Tyson vs. Holyfield fight; which would later be known as the Bit Fight. I had a summer job working for a company that was a support phone bank for COX cable. The pay was ok, if I remember correctly it was like $9 an hour which at the time was pretty good for a freshmen in high school. The building I worked at was about an hour east of Cleveland on the second floor of a bland building in the warehouse district of a city next to the town I lived in. It was pretty dingy; just rows of cubicles with supervisors at the end of each row to keep the phone plebs in line. The job consisted of taking phone calls from COX cable customers. All the phone calls were from Michigan; specifically many were from Detroit. The support requests ranged from new cable service, cancel service, add features and channels, remove features and channels, or add Pay Per View events. So being that most of my clientele was from Detroit can you guess what the call was about 90% of the time? ... If you guessed it was assisting the customer understand that there cable TV stopped working because they had an overdue balance you are dead right. Needless to say it was not a fun job, lots of I-Rate customers from inner-city Detroit that just wanted there cable TV back on and they did not want to pay the $197 overdue balance. Anyways there was an incident that happened to one of my co-workers one day. And it went something like this: ------------------------------------------------------------------ Cox Cable Support: This is Brian with COX cable customer support how can I help you? Customer: I'm not actually a COX cable customer; I am calling on behalf of my neighbor who is a customer. Brian: Ok, did you want to sign up for COX cable service? Customer: No, I am actually calling just to let you know that there has been an incident. I overheard an argument with one of your cable tech's and my neighbor in the next apartment. Apparently his cable is being disconnected at the pole for non-payment or something like that. After some argument your cable tech was working on the pole in front of the apartment and my neighbor came outside with a revolver and shot the cable tech in the leg. I just wanted to call you guys and let you know that your cable tech is going to be late for this next appointment. ---------------------------------------------------------------- I was told we then advised the concerned citizen to call 911. P.S. Here is something interesting I just remembered. A customer in upstate Michigan a few hours outside of Detroit could be weeks late on there cable bill and not be disconnected; a person in Detroit however, if they are late more then three days there cable would get shut off. You see it all came down to economics; fact of the matter was COX was much more likely to still get paid from someone outside the city. The only way they were likely to see any money from people in the city was for them to call in and be forced to pay because there cable was disconnected. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2020 09:27 AM PDT This takes place at a non-profit with 100M annual budget. The players: Boss: A very patient and technically astute IT manager with an MBA. Knows his way around tech and office politics. OverBoss: Made his fortune with insider trading, thinks his shit doesn't stink, does a lot of "work from home" where the rest of the department isn't allowed. PM: The project manager who magically also gets to work from home. I've yet to see a project he's completed. Me: Your murderous systems engineer anti-hero. SITREP: Company must encrypt all finance laptops by a certain date. As a non-profit we have a LOT of Windows licensing gifted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through Microsoft in a marketing-for-software trade. I'll guarantee you've seen our ads. The PM gets this project in hand in the spring. It's now the fall and Boss has just been informed of the project. All laptops are running Win7 Pro. We have a month to do acceptance testing, plan, deploy, and complete thirty-eight or so laptops. What gets handed off to me is how we do it. Bitlocker? Overboss says it doesn't meet the required encryption specification. Veracrypt/truecrypt? No, Overboss wants centralized control and "truecrypt hasn't been tested". Third party? Sure, look into that. Which I do asking our CDW rep for pricing for 40 endpoints for two different packages. And CDW rep tells me the waste of a PM has already requested such - and never bothered to tell our mutual boss this. Upgrade to Win7 Enterprise? I rejected that because bitlocker was out. Upgrade to Win10? If bitlocker's out it buys us nothing. And Finance has had a laptop to test Win10 with their application stack for two months on a separate project and hasn't reported anything back. Two weeks to go. Word come down from on high: We're going to upgrade these laptops to Win 7 ENTERPRISE and use bitlocker. Wait, what? I thought bitlocker was unacceptable! "I never said that," the Overboss says. I email him where he fucking well did, and update my resume. No testing, we're out of time. We start deploying one at a time because why the fuck not? It's slow - and while 'slow is not a metric' there's no way to make it through the entire breadth of the project in time. We're talking the first laptop we brought in took six hours. We don't have enough loaners to cover more than four at a time anyway. The end users whose laptops are being upgraded are popping their heads in every thirty minutes. Behold, this conversation on encrypting laptops that was decided to be done over my objections by way of an unsupported upgrade path from Win7 Pro to Win10 enterprise... Me: We have thirty-eight laptops to upgrade, each of which will take three hours if the upgrade works and eight if it fails back. OverBoss: That's too long. I told the CFO it takes two hours per laptop. Me: I don't know where you got that number. I've never said it would take two hours. I told you three hours if everything goes right and we can expect a five-to-ten percent failure rate based on my experience of upgrades in place on Windows machines. And this presumes we're not backing up the laptops before the upgrades, which we're not because there's no time. OverBoss: What are the chances we'll get it done by the deadline? Me: Zero. There is no way this will get done in two weeks. OverBoss: What can we do? Me: Move the deadline. OverBoss: That's unacceptable. Me: (after a three second pause or avoid flinging obscenities) I don't know what you want to hear. There is no chance this will get done in two weeks. Thank fuck I was previously scheduled for vacation on that final implementation week. I made myself unavailable. Epilogue: The deadline was bullshit. it took a month. Two laptops bricked hard, three others failed their upgrades and were reimaged cleanly. [link] [comments]  |
| When the Sales Manager tries to "Techsplain" to the engineer Posted: 30 Jul 2020 12:30 PM PDT This one happened to me this morning. I was given a job to configure a customer's well known brand name PBX for SIP which was being provided by a 3rd party vendor. The customer currently had PRI. This also included adding new licenses for said SIP(This will be important in a bit). Nothing too complicated you'd think. Then the engineer from 3rd party SIP provider arrives and I ask him to provide the information I require to configure the SIP profile on the PBX. It was only then that I found out that the 3rd party was in fact installing a gateway device that would convert the SIP to PRI so essentially I had nothing to do. Now I'm thinking why have we included so many SIP trunk licenses, which aren't exactly cheap, when they won't even be used? Queue the following conversation between me (OP) and our Sales Manager (SM): OP: Hey SM you know that SIP config job I'm on? It turns out they're using a gateway which will convert the SIP to PRI so there is no SIP config to be done on the PBX. What should I tell the customer when he asks about the licenses you sold him that are completely redundant? SM: Nothing. Those licenses will be required in future when ISDN goes off. OP: ????? Thinking to myself, " You do realise that the customer's ISDN is being replaced now and the PBX won't know any different?" OP: No problem SM! 🤦♂️ So of course I ended up having to tell some bullsh*t to the customer when he inevitably asked about those licenses. And I basically wasted a whole morning sitting in the customer's office twiddling my thumbs. I've got so many more storys about our Sales team I could write for days. Edit The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating real-time sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications. The Primary Rate Interface (PRI) is a telecommunications interface standard used on an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) for carrying multiple DS0 voice and data transmissions between the network and a user. PRI is the standard for providing telecommunication services to enterprises and offices. [link] [comments]  |
| If you give people the option to do things, they’ll do them even if they’re not supposed to Posted: 30 Jul 2020 02:47 PM PDT Obligatory not tech support, I'm just the client facing monkey. The company has been trying to incorporate e-commerce for a while and is apparently finally almost ready to launch. On the other hand, our clients use a certain tool in our international website for reasons. So can anyone spot the problem when international IT set the page to redirect to our spanking new local site where everyone can see products for sale? Boss couldn't. She sent a message today wondering if I had "given anyone the link to our web store" because we were not ready and got a couple orders. Had to explain that if a costumer is redirected to the page and sees that it's a possibility to buy online, they're gonna try their luck. It's the nature of the beast. The only workaround is to manually give out the information the web tool does instead of handing out the link to cut down on redirects. Guess whose job that is. Joy. [link] [comments]  |
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