A secretary copying a text Tech Support |
- A secretary copying a text
- "WHY DID YOU TELL HIM THAT?!"
- Some coworkers just want to watch the board burn
- Two Types of Ticket Writers
- Basic problems
| Posted: 01 Feb 2021 05:12 AM PST Some years ago I used to work at a small private institute for teaching English (I live in a country where English is not our native language). The secretary there was quite sweet with everyone, and she was the one who suffered the most the pressure from our boss. I couldn't tell who of the two had less knowledge about technology. Anyway, I got to work as usual and I see her typing as fast as she could (she was in her late 50s so she was doing it quite slowly, but trying). I ask her what she is doing because obviously she had a lot of other tasks to do (receive phone calls, talk with parents, fill in forms, etc) and you could tell she was making her biggest effort. She told me our boss had asked her to copy a whole text (more than 10 pages) from a PDF file to doc for her daughter's schoolwork. I approach her and I tell her 'but why don't you do 'this'?' and I copy from the pdf and paste it onto the doc file. She looked at me while all the words from the pdf file appeared immediately and magically in the doc file. I think she is still thanking me to this day. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2021 07:02 AM PST From my days as a cash register repair guy. Drove out to repair a cash register at a mini-mart in a popular beach town. They had a service contract and two cash registers so I didn't expect any drama. One of their registers had "just stopped working" in the middle of a shift. The drive out there takes about an hour but is gorgeous so I'm in a good mood when I get on site. I do the normal troubleshooting and find that the lights are on but nobody's home. Machine has power but isn't accepting any user input.So while I am troubleshooting the two cashiers are trading off on the one working register and the owners (a husband and wife couple) are deflecting Karens.I pop the cover off and immediately see the problem, In fact I may have even uttered the immortal "well THERES yer problem..." I turn to the owner and say "Looks like someone spilled into the keyboard. Looks like Coffee with cream and sugar." Immediately I hear "WHY DID YOU TELL HIM THAT?!" My head snaps to my left and I see cashier number 1 with her hand over her mouth and eyes wide as saucers. She then ran out of the shop and cashier 2 and the owners burst into laughter. "OK...." Turns out that Cashier 2 drinks his coffee black like all truly good people. The owners drink tea, but I'm open to alternative lifestyles. ONLY cashier 1 drinks coffee with cream and sugar. Apparently she had done the deed but rather than fess up she was hoping the problem would either go away on its own or not be traceable to her. My detective skills had convicted her of the crime. Fortunately the coffee never made it to the electronics and I quickly replaced the keyboard matrix and retuned the machine to service. Felt kinda bad about having to charge them because spills were not covered under their contract. As I was leaving I saw the owners escorting the most hangdog looking cashier back into the store. She was still there the next time I serviced the site so I suspect her only punishment was a healthy dose of embarrassment. Edit to thank you for the award! [link] [comments]  |
| Some coworkers just want to watch the board burn Posted: 31 Jan 2021 01:51 PM PST I used to work at a store that sold, bought and repaired arcade machines. They also sold "gameroom furniture" and other related décor for a man-cave. My boss and my coworker come to me with a 60-in-1 arcade game mainboard that has a fairly obvious, shall we say, "thermal failure" of a transistor-looking thing, possibly a voltage regulator, maybe? They want me to try and fix it. This board runs on a low voltage: it uses the JAMMA connector, so it has a 5 volt and a 12 volt input. The two biggest chips on the board do not have heat sinks on them, so they're probably not super-powerful by today's standards, but you don't need much CPU power to run Pac Man or Galaga. For those of you who aren't familiar with component-level electronics (i.e. the actual chips and transistors on a board) it's not that common for a circuit at that voltage and drawing little current to char-broil itself unless you wire it wrong or there's a massive power surge. So I asked him straight up, "Are you sure the machine was wired right" He said "Maybe we could double check the wiring later" I scrutinize the board further to figure out what the damage is. Good news: no other parts or board traces have any visible damage, and the transistor-looking thing looks like it is relatively easy to replace, despite being surface-mounted. Bad news: The part number on the "transistor looking thing" is charred beyond recognition, so I can't look up a datasheet to find out whether it was a voltage regulator or a transistor. Oh well, nothing a little circuit tracing can't fix. Wrong. This is one of those multi-layered boards. To be fair, there are actual advantages when it comes to noise suppression, impedance matching, heat sinking and interference immunity. However, it made tracing the circuit impossible, as the traces going to the "transistor looking thing" go to plated holes (aka "vias) that do not come out the other side, meaning they lead to a trace on an inner layer of the board. I tried holding the board up to a light to see if the board was translucent enough to allow me to see the traces, but no such luck. Clearly a schematic would be essential to even replace the obviously blown part, much less troubleshoot one that physically looks fine. I scour the internet for nearly an hour, trying to find a schematic, or at least some insight of what the actual function of the blown part was. Sadly, it was not to be. I couldn't even find user-to-user discussion saying that "Part X is a voltage regulator, I just measured it on my working one" or any user groups trying to troubleshoot these things. Of course we didn't have a working machine with that kind of board in it to measure the output of the part. We didn't even have a non-working machine with that board in it where the board itself is okay. (no, they weren't all fried by the same guy). So, I explain that my only real way of knowing what that part did was to measure a board that was at least able to boot up. Didn't matter if it was in a machine with a working monitor as long as it booted up. I mention that once we have an at least partially working specimen, I may be able to fix the board if you're willing to keep it for now. They hang on to it. Fast forward about a week, and I'm working on a pinball machine. It had a problem with the display's power supply, which in this machine there was a separate board just for that. The power supply for everything else was "spread out" between the transformer itself on the bottom of the chassis, and the solenoid driver board / power supply board in the backbox. I thought I had the display power supply fixed, but I hadn't measured the voltages yet. I realize I don't have my multimeter with me, so I ask my coworker who's just playing with his phone to go fetch it. He did put down his phone but instead, he comes up to the machine and then picks up the cable to try and attach it to the display. I say "well I haven't checked that the voltages are right yet" and he said "well, if they're right, the display comes on, and if they're wrong, it doesn't". I tell him "No, if they're too high, it could burn up the display. Like that other board?" He says "We didn't wire up this machine, the wires are in the right place already." I walk away to go get my multimeter, but the guy is proceeding to plug in the display. I try to explain "I fixed this board, but I'm trying to check my own work. I know you didn't touch the wiring, that's not the problem. I'm trying to make sure I did this power supply correctly. Don't risk the display to save a minute" I had kept my voice flat and calm, but he didn't seem to notice at all. He was like "Dude why are you freaking out" despite me not raising my voice. Funny, I didn't feel angry until after he said that. While he wasn't looking, I pulled the main fuse out of the machine so he literally can't turn it on. It didn't have a user-removable IEC power cord or I would have just taken it with me instead when I went to grab my multimeter. My boss was not there that day nor was there anyone else of authority on site that I could go grab. Otherwise I wouldn't have taken over by pulling the fuse, I would have gone to get my boss, ASAP and explained that he wouldn't let me test the power supply first before connecting the very expensive display to it. I definitely reported this to my boss via text. I would have used email, but the boss's computer was the store's only computer, and it was perpetually logged into the boss's email with no password protection. Therefore, my coworker could have easily seen it to delete it or confront me about it. One voltage was just missing because I had missed something during repair, but that wouldn't have damaged anything, of course. Checking the voltage doesn't harm anything or take long enough to be worth risking expensive parts by not checking it first. There were other times that he basically tried to take over the entire project if I so much as asked him where a tool was that I saw him using 5 minutes ago. I had to make it less obvious which machine I was working on by either opening up a random one, approaching him where he can't see which one I have open, or closing up the machine I'm fixing before trying to talk to him. This pattern continued even after the boss had been back to the store, so I guess my coworker just didn't listen to him or something. TL;DR: Coworker doesn't bother to check the power supply or the wiring before connecting a board and fries it. Then later on he gets mad at me for checking my own work, to the point of trying to physically block me from doing so. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2021 08:10 AM PST Me: Alright, Beth, give it about an hour and SCCM will give you an install through the software center. It might take longer since you live in no-where Kentucky, but just be patient. Just send me an email if you don't see it. -5 minutes later the ticket queue chimes.- Ticket from: Beth Subject: I don't see that install yet. -i take the ticket- Cancel the ticket and respond through the active ticket telling the user that it's been 5 minutes not an hour or longer. -5 minutes later.- Ticket from: Beth Subject: I don't see that install yet. -i take the ticket and cancel it.- -45 minutes later- Ticket from: Beth Subject: I don't see that install yet. -i call Beth. Sometimes the install comes early and I wanna check to see that she's not just missing it. The install isn't there. I push the install again and ask her to wait at least 30 minutes.- -25 minutes later- Ticket from: Beth Subject: I don't see that install yet. -Ticket cancelled with the message: Beth, stop creating tickets to ask for updates.- -5 minutes later- Ticket from: Beth Subject: Sorry 2.Voicemail message: "Hey uh, I can't like. Log into this system. Help?" -ticket created, call should be sub 5 minutes as the system in question is rather easy to fix login issues. The login issue is fixed and the ticket is closed in that 5 minute timeframe.- Me: anything else I can help you with? User: well yeah, I'm also having issues with my windows background. Me: that's just teamviewer blanking it out, so I wouldn't know if I fixed it or not. User: can you take a look? Me: sure? -fiddle with the settings that change nothing because teamviewer is actively blocking the background.- Me: it's probably fixed. Anything else I can help with? User: well yeah, my printer stopped working about 6 months ago. Been meaning to call in for it. Me: 6 months? How have you been getting stuff printed? User: Sending emails to my subcontractor. Me: you've been sending medical information to an unencrypted email? Subcontractors are hired by the user and not the company. They're supposed to be little more than a secretary but everyone commits HIPAA violations with their subcontractors User:.... No... -new ticket to security- -fix the printer inside 5 minutes.- Me: is there anything else I can help you with? User: well, yeah. I haven't been able to do {insurance thing he gets paid to do} in like 4 weeks? Can you look at that? Me: sure -much trickier fix, takes almost half an hour.- Me: is there anything else? User: well yeah, actually... Me: what is it? User: well the internet is broken. Me: we're ... I'm... We're connected through teamviewer. That requires the internet. User: but it says secured not connected. Me: the VPN always does that. You're connected. I'm on your computer. I just did a Google search for your printer drivers. You're connected. User: okay Me: have a nice day. User: wait, there's more! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2021 06:12 AM PST I was working a lvl 1 help desk... well 1.5, had a few extra responsibilities due to low staff. Just came on to the night shift and started doing the daily maintenance when I recieved a call. Me: good afternoon, this is lankyspanky217 how can I help. Customer: oh yeah hey, I don't know what happened. But I was turning my computer off, and now I have a black screen. Me:........... umm can you repeat that for me. Customer: yeah I just turned the computer off and now the screens black. Me: oh well uhh... I'm a little confused as to what the problem is. What do you usually get? Customer: usually the screen doesn't go black. Me: (having a couple ideas, like user not usually turning off computer or some such) oh okay. Well i think you just turned it off fully. If you press the button on the big box it should come on again. Customer: I'll try that thanks. I met him a couple days later and I realised he was perhaps the oldest person I have ever met and it all clicked as to how he got so confused. He was such a nice bloke tho so I struck up a conversation and tried teaching him a few things. Definitely one of the weirdest calls I've ever received. [link] [comments]  |
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