MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN BECAUSE I CANNOT READ REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Tech Support |
- MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN BECAUSE I CANNOT READ REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
- This tale is shocking, yet dry.
- Everyone will be fired, literally.
- Submission is subpar
- The elusive error I chased for months.
- "Broken " WiFi
- Great idea. Let's use technology to ignore bad behavior from our dealer network.
- Read what the message/options say before calling for help
- The day I became as dumb as a $user
- Not so technical people of a technical university, Part -1.
- Learn to read
| MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN BECAUSE I CANNOT READ REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Posted: 23 Feb 2021 08:37 AM PST So I have a particularly "technologically-challenged" co-worker who always drives me up the wall. We'll call him Geoff. Today, Geoff hit a new low. We use a custom proprietary software at work, and we all have production and sandbox links on our desktops, but most people never use the sandbox environment. When you open the sandbox, it's very evident, because you get a pop-up warning you that you're not in production. Not an hour ago, I hear Geoff ranting at his desk because "I got a weird pop-up telling me that I'm in sandbox, but I clicked the same link I always do, so something is screwed up here." I walk over, and as I'm approaching his desk, I assure him that he probably just accidentally clicked the wrong shortcut; it happens. He responds with "No, but I clicked the same link in the same place on my computer that I always do!" I look at the open software, and it clearly says he's in the sandbox environment, so I have him close it and show me the shortcut he opened. Again, he insists that "It's in the same place I always click to open [our software]!" I point to the shortcut he indicates, and ask "What does that shortcut say?" "Um...it says 'sandbox.'" "Okay.....so you DID click the wrong shortcut." [Geoff starts getting more panicked] "But then what happened to the old one that was right there?!?" I take two seconds to, ya know, read...and find the shortcut on his desktop. I point it out, and then quickly walk away before he makes another comment to tip me over the edge. SIGH...how do you make people open their eyes and read? [link] [comments]  |
| This tale is shocking, yet dry. Posted: 23 Feb 2021 07:13 PM PST I have a fun, quick tale from this past weekend. My roommate built his computer about a year ago, and has had no trouble with it for all that time. Two weeks ago, it began to randomly reboot. The screens went black, the fans spun up a little, and the PC rebooted. We began debugging by checking for the usual suspects. These weren't blue-screens, as Windows was configured to memory dump after a blue-screen, and no dump files existed. I confirmed that there were no loose power cords, or surge protectors being accidentally bumped. The next time it happened, he comes to my room and says "it shocked me and then restarted when I touched it". Hearing this, I thought that it might be the power supply failing, improperly grounding the case. We buy a new power supply, he installs it, and all is well. For three days. It restarts again, this time while he plugs an external hard drive into the front-panel USB port of the case. We talk it over, and decide that reinstalling windows would only cost us some time, and might resolve the issue if it was driver or windows related. While we're in the middle of installing windows, my roommate leans forward in his chair and lightly touches the metal of the case nearby the front panel ports. The screens went black, the fans spun up a little, and the PC rebooted. We reproduce the issue again a few minutes later. Sometimes, just touching the case near the front panel ports was enough to restart the computer. We pull off the side panel and take a look at the front panel connectors. I notice that the reset switch is across the wrong pins, not in its proper position. We unplug the reset switch header and ensure the others are properly connected. My theory is that the static electricity built up in our hands was pulling a voltage in one of the two switch pins, triggering the reset switch logic to reboot the PC. Why did it take eight months for this issue to appear? It's winter now, and we don't have a humidifier in that room. Static builds up much more easily than it did in the summer and fall. Its been a few days now, and I think my roommate will be forever terrified to touch the case of a running pc lest it decide it is a good time to reboot. [link] [comments]  |
| Everyone will be fired, literally. Posted: 23 Feb 2021 07:50 PM PST I used to work at a store that sold, but also bought and repaired, arcade machines. I was one of the technicians that was supposed to repair them, but other employees shared that duty with me, as I've mentioned before. One of the other employees ask me to help him check all the power supply voltages on this "skee ball clone" machine. (This is NOT the same guy I wrote about before, who tried to physically stop me from testing a power supply before connecting it to the rest of a machine, and I had to remove the main fuse until I came back to prevent him from frying the machine) I have my multimeter ready to go, so I ask him if he has the manual or schematic around. Not surprisingly, he doesn't but it doesn't hurt to ask. I look over the wiring starting from the power inlet, and notice there's something with 2 terminals not connected to anything, but the shorter black wire from the inlet is twisted and taped onto another black wire. A switch that broke, maybe? I look on the other side and notice, there's an empty space that says 250V 3A. Oh, it's a fuse holder. I figure, the guy wants to see if I'll catch it as some kind of "test" set up by the boss, maybe. So, I nonchalantly point out that I see a problem right there, there's no fuse, someone wired around it. He said he did that because he couldn't find a fuse that would fit. I ask him where we keep fuse holders and he of course has no idea where any fuse holders are. Still keeping my voice flat and calm, I ask if he has seen another machine that has the same kind of fuse that we could use, just for testing. No idea, of course. I tell him, don't plug it in yet, we need a fuse holder and a 3 amp fuse. He walks with the cord over to the power strip, and I pull the other end out the back (it's an IEC connector) and I tell him that bypassing a fuse is a good way to start a fire, and the store burning down would put all of us out of a job. I also explain that if that were done to a customer's game and it caught fire in their building, that the store could get sued. My voice was still a flat calm at this point, yet he snaps at me to "calm down". I tell him if he's going to ever bypass a fuse, that he'd better have a fire extinguisher handy as well as a good pair of running shoes. I tell him I still need to check some other things with the wiring before we plug it in, and I ask him to go get me some duct tape (which I didn't need, but I wanted to keep him busy while I searched for a fuse holder before he plugged it in) but he wouldn't move. I couldn't take the power cord with me because he was holding it, and there was no fuse to pull out to prevent him from powering it. If I were to reach in and try disconnecting the hot wire, I couldn't trust him to know better than to plug it in while I'm touching it, being how incompetent he has just proven himself to be. I set the female end of the cord down and step away, hoping I've made my point clear enough. But no, he goes for the power inlet. I yell STOP and he doesn't even flinch. I figure that instead of having any further conversation with him or trying to play keep away with the cord, I run full sprint to the fire extinguisher as though the game was already on fire, grab it and run back and point the hose into the machine, ready to spray at the first sign of smoke. Of course by now he's plugged it in. Somehow by blind luck it doesn't catch fire. Of course it doesn't work either, probably because he or the other idiot has "fixed" other things. (I know there would have to be an actual fault downstream for a fire to start from a bypassed fuse. But given that the guy was dumb enough to bypass a fuse, the odds of him having caused a short with his "repairs" seemed pretty high at that time) Due to misplaced sympathy I had for job seekers, I hated the idea of reporting anything that could cost another person their job, being that it had been hard enough for me to get a job in an electronics field when I didn't have a bad reputation with a previous employer. On the other hand, I didn't want the boss himself to accidentally start a fire by trying to fix the machine, but then plugging it in without noticing the bypassed fuse. So, I sent my boss a text saying "the previous owner" bypassed the fuse, so it shouldn't be plugged in until that issue is addressed. That "skee ball clone" landed squarely in the "not my problem" category, until and unless the fuse problem was addressed. As far as I know the machine never got fixed. About 4 weeks afterwards I ended up getting dismissed. Not that it mattered, because the store ended up going out of business about 2 months later. I never saw a news story about a customer or his/her family filing a lawsuit against the store, though, about a fire or electrocution caused by a game sold or "fixed" by the store. Believe me, I would totally expose a still-open business that was that dangerously bad at their job. Side note: There was kind of a theme around this place, where no matter how often someone used a tool, supply or part, there was never anyone who knew where it was. Some people would actually get mad at me if I told them where I left a "shared" tool, or asked them beforehand where I should leave it, so they could find it themselves. There were entire arcade machines that the store effectively "lost" in their own warehouse, because the machine was "buried" behind boxes and other machines, out of sight for so long that it was forgotten. There was no paper or electronic record of what we had. TL;DR: Arson around with electrical wiring will get you fired..... or fried [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Feb 2021 06:09 AM PST Greetings. I've read many tales describing various boss situations. Some good, some bad. This is one of my tales. I once worked for a local nerd shop who was trying to crack a government contract. One in particular came up. The contact would have been well above what we were capable of providing, but none the less the CEO wanted to make a submission in the service tender process. I was given the job of writing it. They had never won a govt contract and wanted a fresh set of eyes for this one. My previous life in a different IT world would be useful. Now, writing had never been my forte. Still isn't. (Sorry about that!) Our little nerd shop did standard IT consulting. Our typical clients were businesses with 1-10 terminals. Had some larger, but no significant size. Along came the tender process for whole of government IT services: hardware, virtualisation, data centres, internet security, device security, email, VPN, VoIP helpdesk, etc etc. Many multi million dollar, active-active services to be run. They wanted to be tech supplier/support that rivaled our countries largest telco. I didn't know much about some of the services we were trying to sell - we were literally reselling big-IT products. I arrange for some one on one with the vendors so I could understand. Yup, in previous life I'd done similar things. Never to this scale, but I understood. I quickly came to the conclusion that me writing the submission was a bad idea. Plus, as stated, I'm no word smith. I decide that I'd actually try get the big companies to write their end themselves. They are the subject matter experts and they wanted the government contracts too. So I ask haychpee, etc to write their bits and I'll just marry them together. Slowly they trickle in, and I cut and paste into the rough template I made on how I think the submission should flow. Many weeks and one very larger document later I think i am finished. As I hand the document to my boss/ceo he informs me of the pressure to get a contract as they've never won a govt contact before. Life for me returned back to my hell desk roll. As time passed we find we didn't win and the boss decides to debrief me. Turns out he wasn't happy with the quality of my work. I clearly didn't understand the products as my description of their functions and inner workings were way off and I was poor with my grammar. He spent several days rewriting the submission and he was not impressed. He didn't mince his words either. He blamed me for not winning the contact, and blamed me for not having enough time to rewrite it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the technical aspects were written by the engineers and sales teams of the actual vendors. If he rewrote the work of specialists, it's no wonder they didn't win many contacts. So there you have it, a different twist: trying to win a contract to become tech support. [link] [comments]  |
| The elusive error I chased for months. Posted: 23 Feb 2021 03:51 PM PST Do you ever have a user come to you with an issue that is intermittent and have difficulty pinning the source down? Well the most difficult issue I've ever had to pin down was on my own SO's computer. The laptop was a brand new gaming laptop I helped her pick out for her needs and the laptop worked great! Until suddenly one day it started having issues where the screen would go to sleep intermittently during use and would primarily happen while games were being played. Huh laptop was only a couple months old so I take it off her hands so she doesn't have to worry about fiddling with it and I go about to try to recreate the same scenario where the issue would occur. No matter what I couldn't reproduce the issue and when I would get her to try to reproduce the issue it wouldn't happen since it was so intermittent. I wanted to see if I just used the laptop as my main gaming device for a week or two I could see it happen. Absolutely no issues and the thing worked like a dream. When the issue didn't happen to me at all for an entire week of use I thought the issue may have been related to the game she had been playing (Overwatch) and fixed since there was an update in the time between my use and her use. But then the day she starts using it again the issue pops up. This time I was there to see what was wrong! Or not? I see the issue happen when she started playing her game and the screen is just going to sleep like as soon as she tried to start playing. Then it'd be fine for a minute or two and then bam again the screen goes to sleep. So I take over and as soon as I do the issue goes away. Huh? I hand the laptop back over and immediately the issue comes back up. Then I notice she's wearing a bracelet on her left hand. When her wrist got close to the laptop it kinda moved by itself towards something on the laptop..... That's when I realized the fucking bracelet is magnetic. And every time her left hand moved over to WASD on the keyboard her bracelet was touching the edge of the laptop where I'm guessing the laptop uses a magnet in the lid of the laptop and the base to detect when it's closed which would then put the screen to sleep. The issue was so intermittent because the requirements for this to happen required she wear the bracelet on her left hand and she wouldn't wear it daily. Totally not user error cause she didn't even know the bracelet was magnetic and what user would even think that their bracelet would be the thing causing the error. TL;DR: Intermittently worn magnetic bracelet intermittently put laptop screen to sleep. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Feb 2021 07:02 AM PST Several years ago I did local support for a call center. Management were using HP 8470p laptops. $IM = irate manager $IM stormingintothe desktop support office:, with a friend. this laptop is defective, I want a new one! Me: That's brand new, what is wrong with it? $IM: it doesn't connect to any WiFi. Me: Odd, I tested it and was able to connect. Can I see your laptop please? I immediately noticed that the WiFi button is turned off. I turn it back on and voila, it wants to connect. $IM is mortified and embarrassed. Her friend is cracking up. $IM: you're not going to laugh at me, are you? I pause for a moment. "No, I won't laugh to your face but I may once you leave the office " $IM: thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Great idea. Let's use technology to ignore bad behavior from our dealer network. Posted: 22 Feb 2021 10:24 AM PST Company sold a product that was sold to consumers almost exclusively through our independent dealer network. When a consumer bought one of our products from a dealer, the dealer was contractually obligated to log into our warranty system and register that product by serial number and supply the buyer's information. Makes sense and sounds pretty simple. Apparently not for the paranoid small business owners of the world. I was invited to a meeting with a couple of product safety people. A summary of the conversation between me $Watts and product safety person $PSP. $PSP - We'd like to add a place on our public website where consumers can register their new product themselves. $Watts- How does it get registered today? $PSP - The dealers are supposed to be doing it. But they often use their own address because they don't want us to have their customers' contact information. If we have a product recall we can get hundreds or even thousands of the mailed notices returned because the person doesn't live at that address. It gets really bad if the dealer has gone out of business. $Watts - So your telling me that our answer to dealers not living up to their contractual obligation of correctly completing warranty registrations is to try and get consumers to do it themselves on our website and then somehow reconcile the information they enter with whatever the dealer might have entered. Why don't we just get the dealers to do their job right and live up to the terms of the contract? $PSP - after a long pause $PSP looks at the other PSP in the meeting - I think I need to have a conversation with the VP of Sales. Watts has a point. Ya think?!? Score one for common sense and holding people accountable for doing their f&*%ing job instead of getting IT to fix it. [link] [comments]  |
| Read what the message/options say before calling for help Posted: 22 Feb 2021 01:59 PM PST I'm not hired as tech support at the company I work with, but I've said I enjoy playing games on my pc which basically means I'm a tech guru according to some of my colleagues (some of which are not much older than me). A colleague ("Sven") calls me (me) Sven: I've just installed that new software but after the installation there is text box telling me to restart the computer! Me: Okay? Can you please read word for word what the actual message is? Sven: "In order to use this software with all its' features you need to restart your computer", But I can't restart now! I'm in the middle of something! Me: Alright, and what are your options? Sven: To "restart now" or..(what felt like 20 seconds of silence)... "restart later" Me: Okay, do you need to "use this software with all its' features" right now? Sven: No? Me: Then click the "restart later" option. Sven: Okay great, thanks! *Hangs up* *Some hours later Sven calls once again* Sven: Okay I've restarted my computer now Me: Okay? Sven: What do I need to do now? Me *realizing that he's now ready to "use this software with all its' features"*: Just launch the software and start using "this software with all its' features" Sven: Okay great, thanks! *Hangs up* It should also be added that Sven also have called when he got a "tip of the day" message upon launch of some software, even though his only option is to click "ok". [link] [comments]  |
| The day I became as dumb as a $user Posted: 22 Feb 2021 01:51 PM PST So this happened today lemme walk you through: A litte backgroud: Im part of a company that is contracted by third parties to fix their software-hardware related issues, and some minor networking problems, there are 4 big companies that we get the most out of the contracts, I did some dumb shit with some user of one of these. Ticket: Computer slow daba dee daba die, go there check it out. So I go there, see all the users from this one company are in a domain, and they log on to their users to access their desktop and stuff, and there was the user that opened the ticket, she was sales, so she had all her spreadsheets and important documents saved IN DESKTOP, no cloud, no onedrive no nothing, but I failed to ask her if she had it on cloud and was too distracted to pay attention. Well her Windows OS was a mess full of corrupted data and what not, so I just did some chkdsk and after that I replace with the standart windows 10 image that we have as backup, lo and behold, I deleted all of her important stuff... Update: Thought my boss was going to rip the skin out of my body, instead he emailed me saying that he was proud that I owned up to it and straight admitted it and tried to find an alternative! [link] [comments]  |
| Not so technical people of a technical university, Part -1. Posted: 23 Feb 2021 09:14 PM PST I work in IT department of a Food Technology University based in India. My Post is Senior Technical Assistant and I was hired for software devlopment related work. So one day I recieve a call from a head of departemnt(Department of Food Science and Technology), she tells me that she has been trying to join a meeting using Google Meet but couldn't and requests me if I can come to her room and see what's wrong. Though software developmet is a desk job but people here call anyone in the IT department for whatever their queries are. I go to her room and the first thing I observe is she hasn't logged in to the Captive Portal, she kept on refreshing the page. She has been in the university for a few years now so she must know that the internet won't work unless she login. I remind her that she needs to login, I turn around and starts walking towards the door, and there it is again. She is still unable to join the meeting. Apparently she didn't set up her Android device with a Gmail ID and was using a Yahoo ID in Gmail App. Due to this whenever she clicked on the link it will redirect her to the Google account login page, which she kept on closing. Eventually I had to setup her device with a Gmail ID and update all the apps. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2021 08:54 AM PST So I have worked for many years on tickets and chats for a huge VPN company, and based on product and service we offered, usually users are not completely tech clueless. So one guy came on chat raging, swearing and saying that 3 agents before me did not help and that we are all incompetent. It was a software issue as he explained, and upon me asking which operating system he uses, he paused and said Oh... I asked for clarification and he replies: "So each of you are asking that question, and tried to help, without progress, could it be because I was saying Windows but when I power on my laptop it says Linux???" So we have easily understood eachother afterwards and the problem was solved😄 [link] [comments]  |
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