I just wanted a vodka and coke Tech Support |
- I just wanted a vodka and coke
- That time a government agency surprised me with their stupidity (which isn't easy)
- My printer is missing
| I just wanted a vodka and coke Posted: 28 Jul 2020 05:01 PM PDT Another tale of a time I've found myself giving IT support in a very random situation. My last post for those who remember it reminded me of this situation. My last post was why it's bad to mention you work in IT, this is why it can be good. This was a few years ago when I was 18 or 19. I was at a fairly busy local pub having drinks with a friend. It was quite late in the evening and I was fairly tipsy. I go to the bar with my friend, and ask for two double vodka & cokes. I was told by the young woman behind the bar sheepishly, she can't put it through at the moment as the till is frozen and she's waiting for the manager to turn up to fix it for her. I say jokingly "I work in IT, want me to take a look?" Fully expecting her to laugh it off and not allow a drunk stranger access to their point of sale system. Immediately after I speak the manager turns up, he looks at the till screen confused, I see him tap the screen a lot while I patiently wait for my drink. I can see the bartender and manager talking for a moment. The bartender points at me and I overhear "that guy says he can work in IT, maybe he can help". The manager's eyes light up. He approaches me and asks me to come behind the bar, internally I'm laughing because I know I'm getting free drinks out of this. Manager: "the till is frozen, [bartender] says you know computers? Do you think you can help?" Me: "yeah sure I'll take a look" I look at the till, it's android based and there was an app open which looked like she sort of point of sale administration app (as opposed to a till app), it seemed to respond to input so wasn't actually frozen, but apparently it was the wrong app and they didn't know how to get out of it. I noticed the back, home and recent apps was missing from the bottom of the screen. In my mind I think "it's a (Linux) system, I know this". I swipe upwards from the bottom of the screen and the buttons appear. I press the home button, then the bartender opens up the correct app. Bartender: "how did you do that?!" I demonstrate to her and the manager what I did, then go back to my friend on the other side of the bar. Two double vodka and cokes appear in front of us and the manager thanks me. I continue with my evening. Once my drink was empty, the bartender dropped off another free double vodka and coke on my table. I felt it was a very satisfying evening. [link] [comments]  |
| That time a government agency surprised me with their stupidity (which isn't easy) Posted: 28 Jul 2020 05:24 PM PDT First of all, this might not be a tech support story, strictly speaking, since I work as a developer, and it happened during the supporting phase of one of our finished projects. Close enough, I guess. A little backstory: I work as a mid-level developer for a web development company, we develop all kinds of web-based applications, and we do a TON of work for government agencies (as it happened this time as well). So, we were developing a portal plus CMS for a govt. agency, and as part of the system they could manage various country regions, and assign detailed info pages to them with customizable content and title, among other things. The catch is that each region could be assigned to only one info page, because we needed to be able to provide direct links to each region's page (if there is one). By the way, the customizable title is entirely redundant, as they name each info page after the region itself anyway, but hey, what the customer wants, gets. Development completed, project released, we've entered the support period. After a couple months, the project manager informs me that an error report has been received from the live application for this project. Now, receiving error reports from the production environment already make me slightly annoyed, because I, as a mid-level developer, have no full access to the production environment, and if the error is not reproducible on our test environment, then 95% of the time I can't do anything, and have to instruct the PM to bother someone who does have access to the production server. Most of the time the culprit turns out to be some problem with the server configuration, which has nothing to do with me. But not this time, oh no! So we've received this error report from the live CMS, and the usual convo began: (PM - Project Manager, Me - Well.. me.) Yes. They were exactly that stupid. I've opened the edit form for one of the info pages, and although the info page was titled "region B", the selected region was, in fact, region A. Then I checked the rest as well, info page "region C" had region D selected, and info page "region D" had region B selected. These guys failed at writing the correct title for the correct region, and then went and sent us an error report. So what was my fix? I've added a column containing the name of the selected region as well as the custom title to the list view of the info pages, so they can see very well the mess they've created, sent through a merge request for my "fix", and asked the PM to kindly tell the client that they are bloody idiots. Haven't heard of them since. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jul 2020 01:34 AM PDT Hey fellas, this just happened moments ago and it made my day, so I wanted to share this gem with you. The whole story starts a few days ago, when a ticket from User pops up in our system. To have a short description of the setup, the software is installed on one of our servers and the users get a RemoteApp-link on their desktop to login. The users log to their desktop via Citrix from home due to the Covid19-HomeOffice-Policies we have implemented. So HDG gets the ticket and calls User. Maybe the printer has been lost somewhere in the way of the connection from her laptop via Citrix to the RDP-connection. Easy task, reinstall the PDF-software an the Citrix-session and go on. But after the first document, the User drop another note to the ticket 'Printer gone again'. So HDG asks me for help, as I've setup the software in the first place and created the rdp-files. But there is no misconfiguration to be seen. Printers are redirected from the Citrix session to the RemoteApp and even in the software's own settings everything looks fine. I tell HDG my findings and forget about this ticket. Fast forward a week to today. HDG calls me, asking for help again, as this problem still exists. So I call User to have a look myself. She opens ERP, selects her document and opens the print preview. In this view she clicks on the 'Print' button. And I see the issue. User is right, the dialog shows only the WebExPrinter, but what both, User and HDG, missed, was the scrollbar right below. So I asked for control, scrolled the bar to the left and magically all her printers appeared. You could hear the face palm through the phone. We had a short laugh and I called HDG to tell him, what the issue has been. Buddy, you owe me a beer ;) tl/dr: User and admin don't know how scrollbars look like and how they work. [link] [comments]  |
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