"Please remove me from this mailing list." Tech Support |
- "Please remove me from this mailing list."
- Don't want me to fix the servers? Fine.
- But I take the power out..
- I'll take CPU and Processor for a quarter millon, please.
- The Tale of the Missing DC
- Safety Paper, or How I Learned To Leave Notes
- Where to stick it.
- Expectations too high?
- Let me drink my morning coffee or you won't get to enjoy it either
| "Please remove me from this mailing list." Posted: 14 Jan 2021 11:42 PM PST I work in a laboratory at a veterinary school at a medium-large university. Like many organizations, we have a multitude of mailing lists; personally, I'm subscribed to "Happenings" (which is used to disseminate information about events and alerts), "Research" (which is underutilized), and "CVMBB," the "bulletin board" that is used for anything from "I found this dog" to "I'm selling this stuff" to "I know this is a long shot, but does anyone have an EEPROM reader?" (which I did). This last mailing list is the most widely used one, and it frequently sees a dozen or more messages in a day. I still subscribe to it because I've found some good deals there in the past, and I would rather not risk missing out on something. Also, I can't express how satisfying it was to find someone in need of the USB EEPROM reader that I had carried in my backpack for a couple of years. But I digress. About once a year, I see a flurry of mailing list "Reply All" responses saying, "Please remove me from this list." As you might expect, it only takes one person to make several others do the same thing. At first, I would ignore them. Later, I tried responding to the list explaining how users could log into the web console and manage their subscription preferences. This might help, but it would start up again the following semester. Finally, I wrote an Outlook VBA macro and assigned it to a menu button to automatically post a sender's email address to the web form that unsubscribes them from whatever mailing list they're responding to. It doesn't actually unsubscribe them until they click the link in the confirmation email to log into the list management dashboard, but as far as I can tell, they don't actually know the difference. They just say, "Please remove me from this list," they get a confirmation email with a link to click, and then when they click it, they're unsubscribed. I don't even bother to say anything to them anymore. What makes it even better is that I don't actually work in the IT department. I'm technically just another user on the mailing list, but I pity them and take the necessary steps to accomplish what they apparently can't. [link] [comments]  |
| Don't want me to fix the servers? Fine. Posted: 14 Jan 2021 07:33 AM PST First time posting in this sub. Cross-posting because I was told you might enjoy this. Background - some time around 2000, I worked for a major finance/brokerage company in the IT department. I worked the overnight shift alone and (among other things) my responsibilities included monitoring of the companies most important servers INCLUDING the trading servers as well as performing almost all repairs on these servers since my shift was the least impactful on business. These servers were how every trade from every broker worldwide was processed on behalf of clients. We had 8 servers all behind a load director. For those non-IT people, think traffic at an intersection with a cop letting vehicles know which way they can go. At the time, I reported directly to one of the assistant vice-presidents for IT. Cast is simply me, Dawn(AVP) and Cathy(VP). So at some point doing my job, I begin to notice issues with our trading servers. I determine the cause, come up with the plan to repair the failing parts. On the first night of the week, I will take down 2 servers, repair them, bring them back up, and put them back behind the load director. I will repeat this for the next 3 nights allowing all 8 servers to be repaired with minimal impact and have the last night of the week in case anything goes the way of the toilet. Understand that while I had authority to do this with just about any of the other 1000+ servers the company had, I could NOT touch these without the Dawn's approval. So I send an email to the Dawn detailing the problem, the parts I needed to order, the plan, etc. All I needed from her was a response that said, "Approved" and I would have everything completed within 2 weeks. Also note that I had Read Receipts turned on for all my emails. As you can probably guess, I heard nothing back. 2 weeks later I follow up with another email reminding her of the issue and including all the documentation I had sent with the first one. Nothing. Another 2 weeks go by and I send a 2nd follow-up email noting that this isn't a question of IF these machines will fail but only a matter of WHEN. Crickets. Another 2 weeks go by. It is now about noon on Friday and I am home having just begun my weekend. I get a call that goes something like this: Me: Hello? Cathy: Is this MorpheusJay? Me: Yes. Cathy: This is Cathy. Me: Who? (when I am off the clock, that part of brain turns off, lol) Cathy: It's Cathy. Your boss. Me: OHH! Heya Cathy. What's... oh this cannot be good. (I am now realizing that my boss's boss is calling me at my house and that all the excrement must have followed an upward trajectory towards the device circulating air.) Cathy: All the trading servers have crashed. We need everyone on hand. Me: I'll be there in 20 minutes (It was usually a 35 minute drive) Basically, one server crashed and the load from that server was transferred to the remaining 7 which caused #2 to fail under the increased load. Rinse and repeat for all 8 servers. I arrived at work to find the entire team is there with 8 brand new servers ready to be built. We get everything built, locked down, restored from latest backups, and online again by 6pm. Then home for the weekend. I get to work Sunday night (my Monday) and the first thing I do is print out emails and those oh-so-precious read receipts. I place them in a nice folder on the corner of my desk. At 7AM Monday morning (end of my shift), Cathy walks into my office and asks me to join her in her office. I say sure and grab the folder and follow her. When we get to her office, present are me, Cathy, Dawn and a lady from HR. Cathy: So, MorpheusJay, I understand from Dawn that it is your job to monitor the trading servers. Can you tell me what happened? Me: Sure. (Opens folder) As you can see from this email dated xx/xx/xxxx, highlighted for your convenience, I notified Dawn of the problem and requested approval to go ahead with the fix. Here... (opens folder again) is the read receipt showing she read it the following morning at xx:xx AM, again, highlighted for your convenience. (Rinse and repeat for the other emails) Cathy: Ok. Thank you, MorpheusJay. Have a good night. We'll see you tomorrow morning. Fallout: The company lost a STUPID amount of money making good on every single trade that didn't happen due to the crash. I came back to work that night to find out from the team that Dawn was gone (I never told them the details). I was assigned to the backup contingency planning team and later to the team that implemented the BCP so that something like this would never happen again. We got a new AVP. Edit: Thanks for the gold! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2021 01:30 AM PST Disclaimer: English is not my main language and such. I work at an IT servicedesk for a quite big company. Today I got a call from a co-worker from the IT department. He is very nice and cooperative. He has got some troubles with his laptop which he can't solve and he can't find the cause. We look trough his laptop and I see his uptime is more then 30 days, thats quite a lot. I look at his power settings and I see Windows quick start is turned on. This is done with all new Windows 10 computers. I explain to him that the PC doesn't really shut down when you push the shut down button, but that it goes to a kind of hybernate so it can quickly start, but it also causes a lot of problems. I explain its not his fault, it Windows, but we can solve it. So we turn off the quick start option and I ask him to restart the laptop to fix it. Now he tells me it shouldn't be an issue because he really shuts down the laptop each night. I tell him he think he does, but quick start prevents it. It took him a few seconds, he politely said goodbye and hung up. [link] [comments]  |
| I'll take CPU and Processor for a quarter millon, please. Posted: 14 Jan 2021 09:18 AM PST I think this can go here. If not, let me know. It's not so much supporting a user as it is dealing with a vendor. In the early 2000's I was a network admin for a local school system. We had a server farm with mainly IBM monsters that ranged from brand new to just a few years old, but each one doing it's job pretty well. This was a time period before Schools were funded like crazy in the IT department and everything lived in a converted closet. We did have UPS's but no generators, so extended power outages were very very unwelcome. One night the inevitable thunderstorm rolled through and lighting lit up sky. It also lit up the transformer that feeds the school. A large amount of the contents in were damaged extensively. When it came time to fire everything back up and see the fallout, we found a smattering of failed hard drives and such. A few hours of letting raid rebuild with spares did the trick. And then there was trusty old frank. Frank was an older Server that was running some very specific admin/accounting programs and had been one of our most stable servers. But, now, he was dead. The time came for each department to talk to insurance and tell them what we had lost. We turned in our list of items and what we needed financially to replace each of them. The hard drives were easy, but Frank wasn't quite as cut and dried. We priced a new server that could do the tasks involved and the price came in around $5,000. As insurance companies are known to do. They decided that that was unacceptable. They decided to treat us like we were ignorant and/or criminals trying to get a free payday out of them. Instead of a brand new server, the obvious answer to them was to get a certified IBM specialist to come in and replace the parts that were bad. So, a few days later the tech shows up. As a funny side note, in rural Kentucky you don't find a lot certified IBM techs. That means if you have been running an IBM based network for anytime, you know all of them. After a short conversation about all the latest events, we show him Frank. He does what diagnostics he can, PSU comes on, that's about it. And concludes we need a new motherboard and processor. The unique thing about Frank is that he was bought during a time that the Pentium Pro processor was a great processor, but it stopped being made in 1998. He had been doing a great job for us for well over 6 years. Now, this was a time before Ebay, and IBM wasn't about to go looking to hard to find us a replacement. So now we get to the point of the title. The insurance company was demanding replacement parts and that is what our good friend the tech was going to give him. He scoured every resource he could find including firing up the production to get us our replacement and then put all of that information into a nice quote and sent it to both us and the Insurance company. The Motherboard wasn't nearly as convoluted I guess, because they found one of them for a mere $50,000. The processor itself was in a domain all it's own though and the cheapest "IBM certified" processor available was going to be roughly $201,000. Overnight, we became the insurance adjusters best friends. You see, because he had pushed for the replacement part route, it became an option to us and not only to them. And now, we could choose the quarter of a million dollar solution instead of the lesser one. It was nice to watch him squirm and kiss our butts, but in the end it made more sense for us to go with the new solution. He was very keen on getting us what we needed and the relationship with our Insurance agent actually took a great leap forward going forward. Good ole Frank came through again. TLDR: Lightning killed a server and the insurance company didn't want to replace it with a new $5,000 one. Instead they ask IBM to replace original parts and IBM gives a quote of $250,000. The Insurance company happily buys us a new $5,000 server. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2021 01:27 AM PST Around 2006 I got hired on as a Network Engineer for a company. The Senior VP of IT (my boss) decided to have me hit the ground running by upgrading all of the Domain Controllers within the organization. They had already purchased the hardware from a VAR and was having it all shipped to my office. I start building the DCs, and as I finished them I ship them out to our field techs in remote/other locations with specific instructions on what to do, since we spanned multiple states. Aside from my office there was a DC that needed replacing about an hour from my location. I decided to put the DC in my car and haul it down there. I get to the location (name is on the building) swipe my badge at the main doors. Swipe my badge to get into a more secure area of the building, and then swipe my badge to get into the server room. I find the old DC, unrack it. Install the new DC in the exact same location, put a label on it, and finish setting everything up. About 2 weeks later on a Monday I get a call from the Helpdesk. Logins are slow at that location or they are timing out and just some odd things going on. I go to RDP to the server. Nothing. I'm like odd. Go to Ping it. Nothing. We have a Field Tech at the building that day doing some stuff so I give him a call. Me: Hey, it looks like the DC is down there. Can you go physically reboot it for me? FT: Sure, let me walk into the server room. FT: Where is it? Me: Second rack, towards the bottom (there are only 2 racks). It has a label on it and it's a Dell XXX. FT: It's not here. Me. What do you mean? FT: I see the rails and the cables, but no server. Me: WHERE THE F DID IT GO? At this point I am completely dumbfounded. I hang up from the Field Tech and call all of my counter parts to see if they did something with the server. Aside from a good laugh that I lost a Domain Controller nobody knew anything about it. So, I call up my boss to tell him somebody stole our DC. Me: Hey, somebody stole our DC from x location? SVP: What? How did they do that? Me: I dunno. I had the FT physically check and it's literally not there. SVP: When did it go down? Me: Looks like Friday evening. (We were closed on weekends and had no monitoring software, should have been a bigger red flag to me). SVP: Oh, I bet I know what happened. I sub-lease space in the server room to the VAR. They store equipment in there and stuff. Our agreement ended and I decided not to renew. I bet they took it when they were moving their stuff out. Me: You what?!?!? Why did nobody ever tell me this? SVP: Don't worry I'll take care of it. (Then he hangs up on me). I reconfigure everything but don't delete/remove the DC from Active Directory. I figure we will get it back in a couple of hours or a day once the mistake was noticed. I called the Field Tech and told him don't plug the DC in when we get it back. I want to check it out offline before we plug it back into the network. It becomes Friday and still no DC. So I email my boss and he tells me we should have it next week. Next week comes and goes, still no server. Email the boss again, it will be here next week. I call the FT and remind him, don't plug it in until I can look at it. 3.5 months later, I get a call from the FT. FT: Hey, while you were out on vacation we got that DC back. Me: Oh, that's great. I'll be out there tomorrow to take a look at it. FT: I already plugged it back into the network. It's been on for a few days. Me: Did you at least check it out offline? FT: Nope, everything seems to be working. (Hangs up the phone) Fortunately everything was working just fine. My time was short there as a Network Engineer as things like this were not uncommon and I couldn't take it anymore. But they do provide some of my best tech support stories. [link] [comments]  |
| Safety Paper, or How I Learned To Leave Notes Posted: 14 Jan 2021 12:33 PM PST This one actually is from quite some time ago. I must have been 16 or 17 years old, still in school and doing a summer job at a big local company. It wasn't anything special, just four weeks of tidying up workspaces for test builds, mostly automation machinery for steel plants and stuff like that. My job - keep the floor tidy, lay or draw cables and make sure everything is connected correctly. So, one time we have a high voltage power cord that needs to be removed. I am tasked to do that, so good boy that I am, first thing I do is to check whether there is still power on it. What do you know, there is! So I flipp the fuse and go to the other end of the cable to screw off the head of the cable in order to get it out of the wall. That of course involves the "positive and negative" wire to be removed from the plastic head, too. (No idea what they're called in English, so sorry.) Next thing I know, I hear a loud popping sound, and power is gone in the whole building. I just stand there quite surprised and a bit confused. Then the howling starts - some guy from the test buildup comes running screaming bloody murder. "WHO THE HELL JUST KILLED ALL POWER!" Well, it is me. So I say: "I think I shorted everything. But -" Didn't get any further, because he takes that opportunity to scream to heaven and hell and curse my name (which he didn't know) and thus summoning my boss who rightfully asks what's happening. SBM (screaming bloody murder): "HE KILLED THE POWER!" me: "I switched the fuse off first! It shorted!" boss: "SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!" So, we both tell our side of the story. I say that I flipped the fuse, no power on the cable, so I thought I could take it out with no danger. SBM says that something did not work at his test buildup, so he goes to the power station, flipps in a couple fuses and pronto, stuff works! Until I shorted the whole building, of course. Since boss was the one who told me to get this cable, something is off. We go back to the power station and check it out. Turns out that it was not me who flipped the other fuse. It was someone from the same team as SBM who wanted to test something different, which in turn destroyed whichever test SBM was running. So my boss takes me to one side and says: "New rule: always stick a piece of paper on fuses if you take them out in a live environment. Write some note or something, just so people don't do stupid shit." Then he takes another look at me and asks: "What's that?" Turns out that those anti-static t-shirts they offered at the company for workers (of which I got two!) are worth their weight in gold. Those positive and negative wires? They didn't touch each other. They both touched my t-shirt, about 3-4cm apart from each other. High voltage cruised through that fabric instead of me because it was a way better conductor than the rest of me. It also fused in the process, leaving a nice melted patch which was quite unelastic, a bit like rubber. Boss said that this shirt quite possibly saved my life. Had I worn normal stuff, either the fabric might have caught fire or I would have ended with nice burns somewhere on my chest left by about 1.500 volts, plus a stopped heart. Let's just say I religiously used notes from there on. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Jan 2021 10:44 AM PST File placement can be a tricky subject. Being management I normally do not handle tickets directly, but given the nature of ticket $Tech asked if I could call $Employee with him. I said not a problem and we both called $Employee. $Employee was little upset they could not do the job on their own but all in all everyone is friendly. $Tech, "Hello we are calling about ticket # and I have $Me with me on the call" $Employee, "Oh ok" oddly surprised $Me was joining the call. $Me, "Morning"... I explained why this was a odd case but that we would be happy to help export the video and so forth. First time in 3 years this limitation caused a problem. $Employee is happy and we get down to the details. $Employee, "Where can I find the exported video .... or should I tell you where to stick it?" With out missing a beat I replied, "Well let's not involve HR" with a laugh. $Tech is used to my humor and got the joke right away. $Employee paused not understanding. $Me proceeded to say we would put it at the root of their share so they could move it to whatever sub folder they needed. $Employee is happy and hangs up. 10 minutes later tech line rings. My office is near $Tech's so I can hear him answer. $Employee in a panicked voice, "I need to talk to $Me right away" $Tech, "Sure one second" and transfers the call the proceeds to come in my office. $Me, "Hello" $Employee, "I'm so sorry that's not what I meant when I told you where to stick it". $Me laughing, "I know just some IT humor". $employee thanked us again for the help and hung up. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Jan 2021 07:38 AM PST I do tech support for a school district supporting four different schools. I like my job and my team but there are some end users who are a little frustrating for me when I have to deal with them. Case in point: Teacher says that Vision (classroom computer management program) isn't working anymore and Windows Updates are up to date. I confirmed what he said (rule #1). I tried my normal actions that I take whenever Vision is acting up (we have an older version plus it always acts up). Nothing worked. Pinged a classroom computer just fine. So I installed Vision on my computer and set up the classroom just like his. Mine also would not connect to any of them. After doing this, that and the other thing plus asking some of my team members for other ideas, I decided that I was just going to uninstall Vision altogether on all those computers and start from scratch. I send the Uninstall job to those computers. Lo and behold, the computers start showing up in my Vision! Weird but whatever. Okay fine. So I remoted into his again - after disconnecting my computer - and they STILL aren't showing up. I finally decide that I am just going to reimage his machine as it was giving different issues earlier this school year anyway. The computer also resisted reimaging. Hmmmmm. This is taking way too much time. I'd better head to his classroom and check everything out for myself. First thing I noticed is that there are no NIC lights flashing on the teacher machine. That tickled something in my memory but I just got to work. Turning on all the computers, making sure Vision was still on them etc. Then it hit me. That teacher had complained a few weeks prior about their computer not connecting to our network anymore. Before I got to his ticket, he emailed and said that he moved the ethernet to a different port and it is working now. Okay, great. Closed ticket and forgot about it. Now I am looking at his screen and seeing that it is connected to wireless. When the teacher said that he moved it to a different port, I figured he meant a different wall port. Nope, he unplugged it and put it in different spot on the back of his computer. He thought he fixed it when the computer just connected to our wireless network (which I had never considered because the previous desktops did not have wireless capabilities). Vision is very finicky and doesn't like it if the "Master" computer isn't on the same network as the "Client" computers. That's why they wouldn't show up. The bank of network ports by the teacher's machine were all dead. But besides all the time I spent on this problem that could have been solved if the teacher would have only known that a working NIC has lights on, what frustrates me the most is what this teacher does for instruction. He is a Gateway to Technology teacher. Gateway to TECHNOLOGY. Rule 1a: Even if a user is NOT deliberately lying, they might still be stupid enough to not be telling the truth! [link] [comments]  |
| Let me drink my morning coffee or you won't get to enjoy it either Posted: 13 Jan 2021 11:27 PM PST I am support for a testing department. If the testers need a new testing environment for their devices, or special test functions for said testing environment, or anything related to any kind of "code" I am your guy. First post, bear with me. This story happened a few months back. I am usually the early bird, first or second one to get in the office every morning. My competitor for the first spot would usually be one of the smaller bosses of the testing dept. I will call him $B. Not my direct boss, but the direct boss of the main antagonist of this story. The antagonist, who I will be referring to as $A, is the kind of guy who always finds an excuse to avoid working. Obviously, $B is not happy about it and keeps complaining. This particular Wednesday morning, as I enter the office at about 6:50 AM (most people arrive between 8 and 10 AM, and nobody even thinks about working before coffee break), I find both $A and $B at their desks (they are next to each other, so that $B can keep a close track of $A's routine). Shortly after I get my cup of coffee and sit at my desk, $A shows up right next to me (Note: I have not even had the chance to take a sip of the coffee). I should mention, $B created a ticket Tuesday afternoon, due next Monday, for updating their testing environment. $A (almost shouting, making sure $B can hear from his desk): Are you finished with updating the test environment ? I need to create the tests and I cannot do that without the test environment finished. $Me: No, I haven't had the chance to look over . . . $A (even louder): Well you better start. There are 3 people waiting on you to finish. We are running out of time. $Me: Deadline is for next Monday, it will take me a few hours at most to finish it. I have another . . . $A (outright shouting at this point): NO, I NEED THIS RIGHT NOW. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. WE NEED TO CHECK IF THE SYSTEM WORKS SO WE CAN CREATE OUR TESTS. GET IT DONE! *turns and goes back to his desk, muttering nonsense. Note: I provided him and his other colleagues with instructions on how to create the the tests, explaining how the test environment will work and all that. They could create about 80% of the tests using the variable names I provided without any issue. And since they lack both the hardware and the software, they cannot even test the environment to see if everything clicks. Anyway, since my sleepiness wore off from all the shouting, guess I no longer need the coffee, I start working on his issue. A few minutes later I notice him getting up, grabbing his mug of coffee and going to get his coffee. By the time he comes back with his coffee about 10 minutes later, I managed to edit my environment generator template (I automated this task, and now I can just use a template to generate most of the environment, with me requiring to add the last few details manually) and I generate the brunt of his environment. I quickly upload the environment and the directions I previously gave, to the ticket ($B gets a notification about it since he reported the ticket) and raise my voice: $Me: $A, I finished the testing environment. You can start working on those tests. Feel free to ask questions, as we have the whole day ahead of us. $A: Already ? I haven't even had my cup of coffee. I'll start on them afterwards. $B: You wanted it as soon as possible. Get it started. You can sip on your coffee as you work. Afterwards i get Skype messages: $A: I was just trying to look cool in front of $B, you didn't have to hurry . Come on, man. Why'd you do say it out loud. $B: Now he really has no excuse. Nice. $B is a really cool guy, who might seem intimidating, but will crack jokes with you on every chance he's got. One thing he will not tolerate, not doing your job. And since $A is skipping on work or doing it badly whenever he's got the chance, $B is as cold as possible when dealing with him. TLDR: Coworker does not let me enjoy my coffee in peace, I fix his issue and boss makes sure the coworker starts working on it instead of drinking his coffee. [link] [comments]  |
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