How do you get an old lady to say f%#k? Tech Support |
- How do you get an old lady to say f%#k?
- Yes, there's an error in the password. No, we won't fix it.
- *sigh* *huff* *grumble* or: Girlfriend fixes her computer
- Have you rebooted the robot correctly?
| How do you get an old lady to say f%#k? Posted: 31 Jul 2020 08:58 PM PDT Get another old lady to say Bingo. Or tell her that she needs to call her internet provider. Long time reader, first time poster. I don't work in IT, but i think it still fits here. I am an HVAC apprentice. Installing and servicing furnaces, ACs, duct work, mini splits, etc. One day a week after my lead (let's call him George Costanza) and I (Jerry Seinfeld) replaced the furnace, coil, and condenser at Elderly Kouple's home (Elaine and Kramer), we get a call from Kramer, who says the system we put in is making an unbearable noise they can hear from the living room. Not good. The condenser was sitting on the outside wall of the living room, and if it's making noise loud enough for them to hear, either we messed up the install or the unit was defective. We show up and Elaine takes us to the living room. Elaine: can you hear it? We can. A rumble. George: go outside and check the condenser. I'll check the furnace. I go outside expecting the worst, but to my surprise, the unit isn't even running. Not in a broken kind of way, it's just not calling to cool now so it's off. There's no way that was causing the noise. I meet back up with George in the living room, he tells me the furnace is also off, no noise there. But we can still hear the rumbling. We look around and triangulate the source of the mysterious rumble. We locate a cable box from that company everybody hates for some strange reason which is vibrating heavily. Having identified the problem Elaine demands that we fix it. I used to work in cell phone sales and service, I'm not a complete tech neophyte so i knew i could turn it off and turn it on and see if that fixed anything. It did not. Elaine: Well what can we do? Jerry: i can't do anything else. It's not a problem with the AC. You're going to have to call [redacted] and have them send one of their techs. Elaine: F$#k. Kramer: thanks boys. shakes our hand [link] [comments]  |
| Yes, there's an error in the password. No, we won't fix it. Posted: 31 Jul 2020 08:54 AM PDT This is an old one from a time long ago when cell phones were used for calling and messages only, and Snake II was the best game available on them, so say… 2006. (Yeah, I know there were better phones available by then, but not in India, not cheaply at least.) The year before, our government-owned telecom service provider had just started broadband services that it was providing over the same physical cables as our landlines. You needed a frequency splitter at the home end, from where one line went to your phone and the other to your ADSL modem to provide internet. Of the two options our TSP provided – rental ADSL modem or self-owned – I went for the second. However, a clerical error at the exchange level made them think it was a rental, and instead of the 2 weeks promised to me, they thought they could put me at the end of a 4-month waiting list. This was corrected after I went to the exchange myself and raised a ruckus, reaching up to the GM of the zone.
Two hours after I met the GM, three engineers including the senior-most at that telephone exchange came home to check what the issue was. He had to reach out to his training officer at the headend, who had to log into the switch to read a few numbers, which when entered in my modem's settings, started the internet connection I've used ever since. But, you ask, where's the tech support? A few weeks later, I was called on by one of my clients – in college, I'd assembled a few PCs for a few friends – who had taken a similar connection but was facing the same issue. Not my problem technically, the PC was working fine and dialup worked perfectly. He too had reached out to the exchange – his mother worked in government and arranged for engineers senior to those who visited me to check it out but even they had given up. Everything worked fine, even other ADSL accounts, but not this one. This piqued my interest – the whole issue was a mirror to mine. Could the resolution be the same? Let's check it out. I asked him to get his phone bill and read out two numbers to me.
I'll give the readers a minute to guess what happened and why. Some more clues:
Got it? So here's what happened. The TSP's engineers were new at this broadband game. They also were unionized and working for a government-owned TSP. Thus, bent on reducing their workload anyhow. To reduce their own long-term workload, they had gone ahead and activated broadband at the headend/switch for every single connection in the whole city, to be connected at the exchange level when needed. That's millions of people who don't know they have broadband connections already ready to run and are surviving on 128k dialup connections. It was one database query that ran for a long time before services were started (but that's fine since it's not even public yet) and somehow a bug crept in affecting a few hundred connections only. What was that bug? The actual interconnection would be via the phone line connected to that number, so the billing wouldn't be affected. But the ADSL security setup asked for a username/password combo. Thus, the phone number as a username and account number as a password. The query was to copy the phone number to the username and the account number to the password fields. But, every time the last 3-4 digits of the account number matched the phone number, what the query did was to transpose the last different digit from the phone number to the password, the starting digits being copied from the account number. Thus, password error of exactly one digit in the middle somewhere. The phone call one of the engineers who visited me at the start made was to the guy who actually ran the original query. He was able to get into the database and run a reverse query for my specific case, and read out that password for us to enter into my modem. He also told us about the bug. Hence, for my friend, I made an educated guess and told him the expected password. The next weekend this circle of friends (which included my client) met up for dinner, I didn't have to pay for a single drink all night.
TL;DR: If you face a bug that less than 0.01% of the census is facing, it's in your luck that your tech support already has an answer to it. Edit: I seem to have made it to the TFTS "Quote of the Day." That's a fun achievement to have. Nice. Thanks, all! [link] [comments]  |
| *sigh* *huff* *grumble* or: Girlfriend fixes her computer Posted: 31 Jul 2020 02:18 AM PDT Authors note: I posted this a few years back but it was removed for breaking a "no family tech support" rule, as that rule doesn't exist any more, I'm posting it now. Home tech support 101: Be the one to try and fix things first, you'll probably fix it quickly and efficiently. This is a tale of how these two worlds collide, and collide HARD. The people in this tale are myself ($me) and my Girlfriend ($GF). Its late November of 2013, and $GF's computer (Windows XP still important later on) has been acting up over the last few months, nothing major, but it wont play some of the later games (It used to be my computer, and its a few years old at the point she got it). I've secretly purchased and built a new computer as her Christmas present. One night, she tries so install a game from the DVD drive, and it wont read it. The drive spins, whirs, and does everything that it needs to do, yet Windows says "no disc".
I look over, and ask If she'd like me to take a look at it. I get a resounding "No, I can do it.". I'd like the stress at this point that she knows what she's doing to an extent, she knows her way around a computer, and can diagnose a fair few issues on her own if its software related, hardware escapes her a bit sometimes; and she normally asks me for a second opinion when she's made a determination. I shrug, and carry on playing my game.
At this point, I'm tempted to just go and have a look myself, but I'm aware that it might be conducive to a night on the sofa. I sit back, and half-heartedly keep an eye on her monitor.
My ears prick up. I take over (with a few grumbled protests) and start trying to troubleshoot. sure enough, the mouse doesn't respond, nor does the keyboard. I reboot (with the reset button), and I cant get into the F8 menu, if i hard power off to force it to give me the "your PC turned off suddenly..." options, I cant scroll up or down to get into safe mode, but it WILL work in the bios. I'm a little bewildered, to be honest, so i ask
She went into the registry, and deleted random keys that someone on the internet told her to. I'm confused, and to be frank, fairly annoyed that she didn't think to ask "is this a good idea". But whatever, I've got to fix it. Shes getting a new one, and she will NOT be happy with having no computer for 3 weeks, but I don't want to spend hours on it, because shes getting a new one, I also can't tell her because it's meant to be a surprise. See my dilemma?. Whilst I'm thinking how to get it running, I'm getting occasional remarks like "Just wipe and reload it" or "its a crappy computer anyway" and "It'll be annoying to lose some of that data, but if its broken we'll just have to deal with it". Then a strike of inspiration hits me. I go to my backpack and pull out my dvd case (thankfully I'd decided to bring it home that evening) and flip through and find a wonderful tool called ERD Commander by Winternals, In layman's terms, its a windows XP live CD, if you're familiar with those on linux. I reboot the PC, head into the bios, and set the boot order to CD reader (she has a DVD drive (the one thats been playing up) and a CD reader that i put in because why not, I had it spare doing nothing) and ERD loaded up. The mouse and keyboard WORK! Hallelujah! It's slow as shit, but i load up the registry editor, then stop. I don't know what she deleted. How can i put them back? (remember, she didn't back them up before hand), and my computer is Windows 7, my gut tells me that my registry values might not play nice. Back to thinking... 15 minutes of pondering later I've got it, I'll load up my Windows XP virtual machine on MY tower, and export the entire registry, load it to a thumb drive, put it into hers while loaded into ERD and import it. After a bit of playing around to get the USB drive to read, I successfully manage to import the registry file, I remove the ERD disc, reboot the computer. It works like a charm, mouse works, keyboard works, no data loss. The system seems stable after the registry import. The DVD drive still wont read anything though, But $GF is happy, in fact, you could say she was doing cartwheels. I decide to investigate further into the DVD issue. I turn off the computer, and open the side "Rule 1: Check the basics" Connected? check, Power? check, Master/Slave Jumper? che--wait a second. It was set to slave, as was the cd reader below it. I changed it to Master, and as if by magic, everything worked as expected. I had taken it all apart for a good clean about 4 months before, and must have changed the jumper for some reason (my bad). Total time it took to get it working, about 2 hours. Lessons learned? Do not fuck with the registry, or the registry will fuck with you. Check the cables. Ask a second opinion before you nuke it. TL;DR: Girlfriend managed to somehow render every form of input into the PC impossible. 10/10 would fuck with registry again. [link] [comments]  |
| Have you rebooted the robot correctly? Posted: 31 Jul 2020 11:46 AM PDT This is a story that happened last week. Everyone that reads the title of the post is correct... sort of. The cast: $me: robot programmer $cust: my beloved customer It is Thursday, and I am at another customer far away (450km / whatever in freedom units) when my phone rings. I speak to a person at the time, and let the caller go to mailbox. Before I can get back to him, my colleague calls me and tells me $cust called and needed help, the industrial PC froze. So I call $cust: $cust: greetings $me: greetings, what's up? $cust: nothing to worry about, called your colleague to sort it out. (me thinking to myself... hey easy... I can drop the call right here) $me: I know, he called me. But I am far away, can you tell me what's up? $cust: I don't know, I was not near the robot-cell. $me: that's bad, can you go there and give me more details please? $cust: I don't know if I get to it today... $me: okay it's fine... so it can't be too urgent... call me if you get more info. Skip to the next day... I am on my way home when my phone rings... it's my colleague. $cust called and was not happy that nobody helped him. I told him everything, and we agreed that wewill meet at the customer location and check the problem. we arrived and $cust was gone. We looked at the robot controller and saw the problem right away. We shut down the machine and waited for everything to shut down. We started everything back up, and it worked like charm. The problem was: The robot controller is an PC with a buildin UPS. When you cut power and don't wait for the PC to shut down... and power on again, nothing will work. The customer lost 2 days of production for what could have been another 30sec phone call... TL/DR: The title... [link] [comments]  |
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