Ethernet Cable... You Mean A Charger? Tech Support |
- Ethernet Cable... You Mean A Charger?
- Thank you for... precisely nothing.
- My phone is displaying cow skulls!
- Well that was the power cord.
- Tech dejavu: or, another email about email being down
- The one that got away
- Solutions not appreciated, rather waste time and resources
- Check where you pay for your software!
| Ethernet Cable... You Mean A Charger? Posted: 02 Oct 2020 12:32 PM PDT Hello all, I'm back with another fun story. This is a story that happened a few days ago, but is still makes me chuckle and die a little inside at the same time. A new user called into the help desk to assist in a first time login, because the computer she's on was not connect to the companies network so it wouldn't recognize her domain credentials. The fix for this is very simple though. Plug in an ethernet cable in a core office location. That's it, that is all there is to it. It should be pretty simple right? Well if it was I wouldn't be posting the story here. The call goes something like this;
Normally I ask for the error verbatim but in this case there are only two causes for this type of error, either the computer isn't on the domain or, as I said above, not connected to the network. I checked AD and it was indeed on the domain.
Now fellow redditors, I know this might not be a great way to describe an ethernet cord but it's worked for me in the past.
With that she hung up. I never found out if she ever called back in, I can only hope that she isn't as difficult as she was with me. [link] [comments]  |
| Thank you for... precisely nothing. Posted: 02 Oct 2020 09:03 PM PDT Before we begin this wild one there is a disclaimer: Yes, I am a high school student. You can volunteer for the IT department during studyhalls, please don't argue about this, everyone likes to tell me I'm lying about it. It's not commonplace but my school has it. I'm also on mobile, so formatting. Ok, let's go. I'm sitting in the tech support room, and a student brings in a laptop, with a damaged USB port. It's not a small amount either, the plastic insert (it's Type A) is completely bent to the other side, and I can't get it to work. Ordinarily I'd just bend it back, but these devices were still under warranty. (computer company) provides very nice warranties on school devices, so good that you can just send in the device in basically any condition and get it back like new in a few weeks. So, we decide it's best to send it out for warranty repair, and we mark the system clearly "Damaged USB port, repair USB port". These laptops only had 1 USB port so there should be no confusion. Or so we thought. Some time passes, and we get the thing back from repair. I'm just bringing in the devices that we got back (they come in batches) and preparing deliveries for the students who's laptops had just returned, when I hear one of the adult members chuckle a bit. I figure it's nothing much, but he asks me to come look at this. Inside each repaired machine, the company puts a paper inside telling you what was done (sort of like an invoice). On the paper for the system with the broken USB port, it shows that the device was sent to the repair station for repair, and the person who did the repair commented "USB port damaged, needs repair" and sent the computer back to us. They did not fix anything, in fact I don't even think they opened the case. We were both cracking up at this point, because they did the exact thing we did, which was label the problem, and even when sent to the repair desk they did nothing. Thankfully (computer company) is usually pretty good about these things and these sorts of issues rarely happen, but it was still hilarious. TL;DR: Sent laptop for warranty repair, technician states the obvious and fixes nothing [link] [comments]  |
| My phone is displaying cow skulls! Posted: 02 Oct 2020 10:20 AM PDT Hello everyone, This one is short and sweet for you! I had one of my favorite users call me telling me she was having issues with her desk phone. Here is how that call went: Lorixs: Thank you for calling tech support, this is Lorixs. Sophie: Hello Lorixs! I'm having a really strange issue with my phone on my desk Lorixs: Sure, what seems to be the problem? Sophie: Well all of my calls are going straight to voicemail I was pretty sure she must have set her phone to DND Lorixs: On the screen of your desk phone, along the left you should see some icons. Do you see what looks like a phone with a checkmark next to it? or is it a phone with a little circle and a line going through it? Sophie: Ummm....neither? I'm seeing like....a deer? with antlers? but its tilted to the side...oh wait it looks like one of those things in Texas....a cow skull! Lorixs: A cow skull? Sophie: Yeah! or maybe even a reindeer...but its tilted. I walk her through how to turn off DND because I'm still sure that is the problem. As soon as we got to the menu to turn off DND.... Sophie: OH! a phone! i see it now! You have to admit though that it definitely can look like a cow skull! Everything seems to be working now! Thank you I can't un-see the very cartoon-like animal with horns image i have in my brain when seeing the phone icon now [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2020 08:40 PM PDT I work for an insurance agency in their tech support. I mostly do training of our new associates and project work for our department, but when I was still taking our internal 'customers' (Read: Employees of said Insurance company) I had this interaction with someone. Before I get to the interaction; it is important to understand, I give incredibly descriptive but dumbed down and easy to follow instructions. (Which is why I am a trainer now) Interaction Follows: Me: IT Support. This is <Me> can I start with your <credential verification process > Customer: <Gives credentials> Me: How can I help you today? Customer: <Long winded explanation of nothing to do with current issue that is currently murdering my handling time of this call> ... I can't log into my Computer. Me: Okay. Well I can help you with that. Let me take a look at your profile. <Checking Active Directory> Me: I saw that your profile was locked out and I went ahead and unlocked you. Can you go ahead and try and log in for me with your Windows password? Customer: It still won't let me in and I know I'm typing my password correctly. <Asked customer to try again to confirm the domain/proxy controller wasn't locking her out> Me: Okay usually when you get locked out and attempt to sign in too many times the system essentially 'disables' your network. Could you please shut down your computer for me? Customer: I don't want to do that I have work I didn't save and it takes forever to turn back on, I never restart it. <Pulling up our system monitoring software and seeing that this user has an uptime of 294 hours and internally sighing> Me: That's okay we can cycle the network another way. On the back of the computer there will be a lot of black cables and there is only one blue or green cable. That cable also has an end that is plugged into your computer that is clear and looks like an old phone jack with a pull clip on the top. This cable is also the only cable that goes from the computer to your desk phone. Do you see this cable? Customer: Yes! Me: Go ahead and disconnect that cable for thirty seconds and plug it back in. Customer: My computer just shut off?!?!?!? Me: Which cable did you unplug? Customer: The thick black one. Me: Well, that was your power cable...... Bonus story: A Senior Software Engineer 3 (Of 3 ranks) called in and I asked him to open a browser. His answer verbatim: "What's a browser?" Sigh. [link] [comments]  |
| Tech dejavu: or, another email about email being down Posted: 02 Oct 2020 01:30 PM PDT Recently there was an email issue out of our control. But on the intermittent side, it was really an auth issue to be technical. If you were already signed in you were fine, if you had to sign in or sync MDM you were boned. I'm on call but done for the day, so I asked someone else who was still on to monitor and keep me updated if anything changes and I needed to jump online and let him know email wasn't working on my phone. I get back online a few hours later for something else.... only to discover he kept emailing updates.... Even better, I called him out for emailing me about email issues when he knew I wasn't receiving email, and his response was "but I emailed the whole team, so it doesn't matter if you missed it". I had to remind him that I was the on call tech that week and I was the one who would be jumping back online if need be and that no one else would be getting email on their phones either because of this issue and he was the only one still on his computer working... so no, no one got his message until they got back to a computer. He still didn't get it, but I let it drop at that point because it wasn't worth the energy. If a tech can't understand you don't email about email outages I just have zero faith in humanity anymore. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2020 03:52 PM PDT As a tech, the worst kind of case is the unicorn that's impossible to diagnose. It happened when was working at the front desk of a laptop repair shop, back in the early 2010s. A perfectly normal day, when a perfectly normal guy walks in holding the perfectly normal Toshiba Satellite Core2Duo with 4 GB DDR2 RAM, sporting a Windows 7 clean as a whistle. "I need you to fix this laptop and I need it quick" "Well, what's wrong with it?" "It crashes" "Ok, we'll check it out and let you know" As the front desk it was my job to do a basic diagnosis on every laptop before it was assigned to a tech. Software issues were strictly front desk issues. So I take the guys laptop, remove the harddrive, put in my all knowing test OS and start blasting the laptop with primes, stress tests, ram tests, the real deal. Nothing, that laptop is rock solid. I call the guy: " look, your laptop is fine, it's most likely a software issues, can we take a look at your harddrive?" He replies "anything, just fix it". So I plug the HDD back in, go for a smart check and then for a quick scan. Nothing. I start it up, no windows password, licenced av installed, check event viewer. Nothing. I call the guy: " I am checking your laptop, I did my best, but I just can't make it crash" to which he replies coldly "try Google". So I open the browser with full confidence, i type in Google.com and hit enter, I see the page for about 1 second and BOOM, blue screen. Ok, I got it to crash. Let's try internet explorer, BOOM, crash. Ok, let's try the test drive again, IT MUST BE A SOFTWARE ISSUE. BOOM, Kernel Panic! Ok, this just got weird. I turn to the hammer, HIRENS. Nothing crashes a HIRENS, I boot from USB, turn on network, start the browser, and yeah: BSOD on a HIRENS. Now I'm getting intrigued: IT'S the NIC; eth or WiFi? Doesn't matter, I'll replace the WiFi and check the eth as well. Blue Screen, every single time. I even try other websites, they last one second longer than Google does. I get frustrated, time to replace RAM, Blue Screen. Time to replace the CPU, luckily it was a socketed one, blue screen. I get the techs involved, show them the kernel panic, the HIRENS failing. The WiFi, the CPU, the RAM. Let's change some chips! Out goes the north bridge, out goes the south bridge, full bios reset, every chip with more than 20 pins goes out and a new one goes in place. We are already overtime but nobody wants to leave and miss the end, so we decide to come back first thing in the morning and get to the bottom of it. Turns are taken on the microscope, we map the entire motherboard, every capacitor is measured. Nothing. We put it back together, some 200$ worth of chips went in. And Blue Screen. Just as we give up, the guy walks in. "Is it fixed?" "Yea, we fixed every potential future and passed problem! But it still refuses to run Google". We gave it back to him, free of charge as we couldn't fix the issue. He was mad as hell when he saw the list of operations we had done "all for nothing!? I need this for work" "sorry bud, it's a perfectly good laptop as long as you don't open Google" [link] [comments]  |
| Solutions not appreciated, rather waste time and resources Posted: 02 Oct 2020 12:46 PM PDT I used to work as functional support engineer for 2 closely linked applications (in practice I also acted as application and technical support engineer) at a company that provided business to consumer technical services. To make matters worse I was the only one that oversaw the entire chain of applications. Much more applications like network management systems, CRM and middleware were involved for the services provided to customers. We had outsourced software customization and more importantly systems integration to a third party supplier (1 of the biggest consultancy companies in the world), where our corporate mother had so called specialists (a lot of them insourced from said third party). One of the 2 applications 1 was responsible for was to meat a regulatory requirement and it was a highly specialized application. The official technical and application support at corporate regularly screwed up. And this was nothing different when setting up the test environment. So when we started the acceptance testing for new software releases I was to clear my schedule to execute these tests. In the beginning I complied. This was in a time that I already worked standard 90 hour weeks. Usually it took more than a week of the 2 weeks of testing to get the environment up and running. However I needed be present full time and I was strictly forbidden to work on production issues, because how time critical testing was. But I couldn't anything testing wise, so I started working on production issues. I was reprimanded for this a couple of times. So I started digging into the backend of of the applications in the test environment in order to seem busy and not to do production work. Even the application vendors helped me in understanding the environment, so soon enough I knew what the crucial points were and how to fix them, which I did. I'd say a win win situation... Wrong!!! I even got an official warning when I finally got the end to end process to work, since I couldn't have access to the back end or to the actual servers and that to fix these problems was the application and technical support staff's duty. Next releases I just showed up about half an hour early before the official kick off, did some basic system tests and logged about 5-6 highest priority incidents about the environment not up and running. Then I sat down and started drinking coffee, chitchatting with other colleagues, just as long as I was around the test area. I refused to answer anything about production issues, since that already got me reprimanded before. However being the sole expert on the end to end process, I got a backlog in production issues that needed fixing. Which in term lead to big customer facing problems and complaints, but hey I wasn't allowed to do anything for production. So after a couple of releases in which this happened my manager gave me permission that I would plan my time accordingly, so usually I was done in my 1st week of testing even before the official testing window started, due to the fact that the environment wasn't working. Later on I became involved in the actual integration testing of our third party supplier / integrator, but that is a story for another post. [link] [comments]  |
| Check where you pay for your software! Posted: 03 Oct 2020 04:09 AM PDT I was the senior IT guy in the company for 2 months now. I was still a bit overwhelmed by the job but slowly getting on top of it. I get a call on the company phone, it's someone speaking English. It one of the senior managers, 3rd in the country ranking: "I need you in the head office now!", "Can I know what this is about?" "Yeah, we have a serious IT issue, come over now!" "OK, you do know it's a 6 hour drive" "Of course I know that, who do you take me for, there's a cab waiting for you outside your office and a plane ticket will be mailed shortly, don't miss the flight" Well, this must be serious. 2 and a half hours later I'm in the head office, the accounting department looks like a hostage situation, everyone is nearly crying, top management is shouting. "W-what happened?" One of the senior accountants calls me over, shows me a software interface, and error messages with every attempt to operate it. I whisper "how bad is this?" "Well nobody can do their job, and we have a pending audit" "shit, when did it start?" "There was an update yesterday before days end" I setup in an empty cubicle, as opposed to the main IT office in the same building. I am lost: I had never seen that software, never once been called about it, and it was never mentioned as being my responsibility. I call my manager (as a side note, it management was global, while I was the senior one in the country) "hi, we have a serious problem with X software, I don't really know what to do" "don't do anything, it's not your job" "sigh" I do the only sensible thing and attempt to contact the software provider. "Hello, I am ..., Calling on behalf of ... Company from the {country}, we have a problem since the last software update" "erm, where are you calling from?" "{Country}" "erm, please hold" 5 minutes go by "Sorry sir, but we have no clients in {country}", "dude, what?", "Our last patch removed support for document formats from {country}" "So what can we do, is there a rollback possible?" "No, as I stated, we don't have any clients in {country}, therefore we are unable to offer support" I straighten my back, go into the management office to the guy that brought me here in the first place. I tell him what I found out. His eyes widen, almost become teary. "How could this happen?" "Well, I'd say we need to find out who pays for this software and correct this, can I go home now?" 2 hours later I'm on the plane back. Next day the mistery was solved: the software provider was never aware of us since the parent company paid for our licenses in a different country. The support they removed took 3 weeks to put back in, and the provider had to hire previous contractors to come and help our accounting department get back on track. TL:DR: parent company paid for our software in another country. The software provider removed support for our country since they had no idea about us and had lost its last client in the country. [link] [comments]  |
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