This one almost cost me my job. Tech Support |
- This one almost cost me my job.
- Extended warranty bonus
- A wasted 15 seconds...
- "Help Desk" doesn't mean we help with everything.
- I need a refill. Yeah, me too after hearing your story.
- Lost in Translation
- It's not the server, it's not the network, it's the printer.
- You knew this the entire time?
- Interesting predecessor
- Branch office printing issues.
- Blueberry muffins story
- Please know the protocol you're programing with
| This one almost cost me my job. Posted: 30 Mar 2021 01:11 PM PDT I was working in a big engineering company. My manager went to a business trip and left me in charge of everything for a day. For some reason one file server crashes. I tried to reboot it, but it crashes again when booting up. I know this server is critical. It serves the home directories and shared storage for about 150 Unix workstations (NFS) and 100 Windows PCs (SAMBA). Managers start calling to know what is happening. I briefly explain what is happening and that I'm working on it. One of the engineering managers, wants to know how long this is going to take. I told him I don't know, but I'am working as fast as I can. He decides to pay me a visit. And keeps nagging about not being able to work. I'm super stressed. At one point he asks: "Do you know how much money we're losing per minute we cannot work?" I snapped and answered: "Yes <insert manager name>, I do, and we have being chatting for like 30 minutes!" He turns around and leaves super pissed. I managed to solve the problem. Next day that manager asked my manager for my head in a stick. My manager answers him: "Well, yes, you were wasting his time, and preventing him to fix the problem." If memory doesn't fail me. The problem was that the server exceeded the max open files limit. Also, I had to disconnect the server from the network to let it boot properly without being choked by all the clients trying to connect at the same time. Edit: some words. Thank you anonymous benefactors for the silver and the award. Thanks for the Gold award. It's my first one. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 02:58 PM PDT I worked for a company that had a walk-up depot repair. Anyone could bring in a computer or peripheral for repair, as long as it was a product we serviced (so no Apple equipment). I heard the service bell ring and went out to greet the customer, a middle-aged gentleman holding a 386sx laptop. "The keyboard has some bad keys," he explained. We were encouraged to fix things, if possible, right there. We fixed several desktop keyboards by shaking out crumbs & paperclips, and one HP LaserJet that was printing a big black streak by removing the "installed on...." label the customer had placed over the laser shutter on the toner cartridge. However, shaking the unit produced neither crumbs nor paperclips, and I could feel the keys had no spring. "It's our only computer, and my daughter has schoolwork on it....Will it be very expensive?" I pulled out the parts manual to get the part number, then the computer to look it up. "We have it in stock, so here are your options," I started. "The part is $110 (IIRC)," and the look on his face said it all. Yeah, stuff was expensive back then. I pointed at the rates chart behind me showing a one-hour minimum would be charged. "This would take an hour of service, and if you want it today, that would be an extra $100." "We don't need it today," he said. "When could we have it?" I excused myself, turned to the door to look inside the repair shop for an idea of how much backlog we had, noticed it was a little late in the afternoon, then turned back to the customer. "Honestly, probably day after tomorrow. But let me show you one more thing." I picked up the unit and pointed out hairline cracks that ran along the sides of the unit, around the keyboard & LCD bezel, and on the bottom of the unit. "See these cracks?" "I'm not worried about those..." I smiled at him. "Let me finish. These cracks are a manufacturing defect, and the manufacturer has an extended warranty for plastics replacement. If you'd like me to take care of this, the kit the manufacturer sends replaces everything EXCEPT the drives, the system board module, and the LCD screen." I paused for a moment, to see if he got it, annnnnd....nope. "This means the keyboard is replaced, too." "Seriously?" he asked. "Yep. The only problem is, is that the manufacturer doesn't let us keep these in stock so I have to order it, and it takes about 5 days for it to come in. So your options are: Today for an arm & a leg, 2 or 3 days for just an arm, or wait a week and it's free." It was a no-brainer for this customer and a little over a week later, he brought his wife & daughter along when he picked it up, with a new working keyboard and no hairline cracks. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 03:52 PM PDT The deployment technicians sometimes call into a higher level help desk to get clarification on deployment build instructions. One day a technician calls in for assistance to ask clarification about setting the time zone on a device. The response that was given was it sets automatically you can just leave it at Eastern. About a month later I was questioned why I told the deployment center to manually set the time zone to Eastern on the devices. I replied and said I said no such thing and to please reread the notes. Management reread the notes and saw my response was that it set automatically. Apparently The deployment was taking place at an office in the Central time zone so when it failed to automatically set to Eastern the technician "corrected" the time. This deployment was for 4,000 devices. Manually adjusting the time took 15 seconds per device in labor. 60,000 seconds, or 1000 minutes or 16.66 hours of additional labor time on this project. This complete waste of labor was automatically undone when the time zone automatically set when the device was delivered to the end user. [link] [comments]  |
| "Help Desk" doesn't mean we help with everything. Posted: 30 Mar 2021 11:22 AM PDT I am a new-ish employee on the IS Help Desk in a healthcare company, we are a super small team of just six people. How we handle calls goes like this - we have one person on the phone doing inbound tier 1, if it goes over a couple of minutes troubleshooting she creates a ticket and one of us in Tier 2 will call them back. I was covering Tier 1 as part of my training about an hour ago when I get a call asking for the phone number to HR. Pretty simple, not really our purview, but ours is the number plastered on every computer's desktop so understandable. I provide the number, she hangs up, problem solved. Only the next call I get is the same user. She called the number I gave and it went to voicemail three times. Doesn't anyone work in HR? Someone was accidentally stuck with a needle. She is also talking to a co-worker in the background. Caller: "I called the help desk." Co-worker (derisively): "They're not very helpful." I so wish I could've clapped back, instead I'm left raging at the entitlement of some people. [link] [comments]  |
| I need a refill. Yeah, me too after hearing your story. Posted: 30 Mar 2021 03:22 PM PDT This was about a year ago. I was doing an unpaid internship (as is the norm in The Netherlands) in a small, one person computer store. The store buys hand-me-down devices, adds an ssd and sells them for a profit. In walks a lady in her fifties. I would soon learn that this was going to be my first of many encounters with Karens. €me is me, €boss is boss, €user is aforementioned karen €user: "You, boy, I need you to refill my Wi-Fi." €me after pausing for a brief moment: "Refill your Wi-Fi, ma'am?" €user: "Yes you heard me, stop slacking and do it." €me, being very puzzled at this point: "Ma'am, in order to assist you to the best of my ability I am going to have to ask some questions. Does your printer phone or pc experience issues connecting to your Wi-Fi? Do you mean you need printer ink? Is your WiFi slow?" €user: "How am I supposed to know, you should be the expert here! Ugh just let me speak to your boss." €boss: "Ma'am, I know many things in the tech industry but I, nor any other store know what you mean by 'refilling Wi-Fi'." She then left in a huff and never returned. I guess we'll never know what she meant. Edit: for those asking or wondering what she meant, my boss didn't want to take a gamble on what she meant and coming back later being even more angry because we didnt fix the problem. Besides, she never told us what the actual problem was. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 10:28 AM PDT OK a couple of things up front. Firstly, I am not in Tech Support and was going to post elsewhere before a Tech colleague suggested this sub. I think it loosely fit here. Secondly, there is no Karen-esque customer or manger in this story, just a lovely older co-worker who was not at all tech savvy. I hope you enjoy In the late 90's I worked in an office in the UK and it was a time when mobile phones were becoming cheaper and more popular. Anyway, one of my co-workers was a good few years older than the rest of us and had been there for years. He was good at his job but was increasingly confused by the new technology being brought in to the firm so tended to rely on others to help him out. This was not an issue since he was a lovely, generous guy with wonderful sense of humour. One day he approaches me and says that he has bought his wife a mobile phone for her birthday and could I set it up so it would be all good to go when he gave it to her. Of course I was happy to help and the phone was the same make as my own so would be pretty straight forward. So after inserting the sim card, I proceeded through the set up routine until I got to the language setting. Now knowing that his this was a gift for his wife and she was Argentinian, I asked if he would like the language to be set to Spanish. Cue the following conversation (paraphrased as it was a long time ago) Co-worker - "Wow. Really? That's bloody clever. That's fantastic" Me - (a little perplexed at his exuberant reaction) "er! Yeah there getting pretty sophisticated now." Co-worker - "So that means when I call her she will hear...." I cut him off at this point because I could see where this was going. Me - "No Co-Worker, it will not translate your English conversation into Spanish for her at the other end. It refers to the language of the text on the phone. He laughed and said to set the language to English. For the next hour or so, there was periodic giggling from his desk as he reflected on his own silliness. And that's it. Sorry if it was not that exciting but it always brings a smile to my face when I think about it. [link] [comments]  |
| It's not the server, it's not the network, it's the printer. Posted: 30 Mar 2021 09:33 AM PDT Quick and simple. $CB - Client Boss $PT - Printer "Tech" $ME - 51, feeling 90, and tired of this $CB - You did the email thing last week, now our printer isn't scanning to OCR. $PT says you changed everything and broke it. $ME - Well, that's not possible, but I will work with them, Just get me the contact info $CB - He said the drivers are wrong. Fix it! Coffee, Advil, and a short time later $ME - So, $PT, what's going on $PT - You broke the OCR - we need new drivers. $ME - Well, we changed nothing except an email migration. Does the OCR process try to email the doc? $PT - No. The device does a scan, runs it through OCR, then saves it to the server. Get me in and I will show you. $ME - Ok ... Show me. $PT - (connects to the MFC web interface) See - this device has a built-in OCR engine, and it is not working. We need new drivers. $ME - So an internal module, that never sees a request via the driver, needs a new driver installed on a server that just offers up a share? $PT - YES! See - here's where it's set up. See this - it's ... umm ... oh. $ME - You mean see where it states this device is NOT licensed for OCR? Yes, I see that. $PT - I need to get their license code generated - I can update it to restore service. $ME - No new drivers, then? $PT - No - it's just a license issue. $ME - Right, then. I'll update the users. tl;dr - You painted my neighbor's house and now my dishwasher won't work! [link] [comments]  |
| You knew this the entire time? Posted: 30 Mar 2021 05:48 AM PDT So, for context I work at medium sized MSP. We primarily provide network, hardware, servers and limited software support. If someone has a problem with outlook, no prob. Your super specific real estate appraisal software? Don't know a damn thing about it, let me call them. They actually pay these guy for software support, just because it's more efficient for me to call them and get a solution in 20 minutes(supposedly) than spent 3 hours reinventing the wheel. My boss also prefers I don't mess with their software for liabilitiy reason. If something breaks he doesn't want us to get blamed. We've had this ongoing issue where their program runs like dogshit. I'm talking errors/crashing/freezing on every system at least every 15 minutes or so. It varies a little, but has been getting progressively worse as the size of the database increases. So I've been working with the vendor trying to get this fixed. They're restructured the database, reinstalled programs, blamed our network(spoiler:it's not our network). Cue yesterday, I finally get frustrated enough to go digging. Verified firewall rules, dug through event logs, all that fun stuff. Well, yaknow what I discovered? They installed SQLExpress 2008R, and never updated it. I called up the vendor and the conversation was thus- $Me: Hi, so I'm sure you can see this has been an ongoing issue for a while now with no resolution. I did a little investigation myself and it seems a lot of the errors were getting are in relation to SQL; Microsoft has documentation on it but the update package is no longer available through their catalogs.... Yaknow, because the software is over a decade old... $Ven: OH, yeah that may cause the problem. Here's a non-searchable article on our website about upgrading to 2017! $Me: okay wait a minute. You're telling me you guys have spent checks ticket about 16 hours working on this problem and knew the entire time? $Ven: Well, 2008 is what gets installed with our program, and updating to 2017 is out of the scope of our support. At this point I could here the toilet quietly running as our client flushed their money down the toilet to pay these buffoons. $Me: just so we're being extremely clear; you knew outdated software was the issue. You knew that it got installed with your application in the first place. You, and at least half a dozen other support staff(I don't dare call them techs) never even thought to mention this? $Ven: That's just what gets installed with our software. $Me: Alright cool, thanks for your time. Wrote up an email with what I found, sent it off to my boss and the client, waited patiently. Several minutes later the client calls me, the littlest bit heated. $client: so they know the entire fucking time? It's been almost two months. $me: that is correct $client: and they literally have an article on their website about it that they never sent us. $me: yup. $client:... I'll call you back in a few. Several minutes later I receive an email from the client, with my boss and everyone in kingdom come cc'd: Spoke with total They said they would be happy to update their databse. I would prefer that ya'll did that if at all possible. Reply: Yep, no problem. I love contractsヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 10:54 AM PDT Hi all. When I started my job, I didn't know it but I was replacing an IT guy from hell. There were many bizarre aspects to the network which I had to diligently unravel. He also had an interesting relationship with some staff. $me <- me $user <- you get the picture. <Phone rings> $me: Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again. (Ok, maybe not... ) $user: hi, I have to perform this function now, and < previous IT> always said he had to do it himself. Are you able to come up and do it for me. Now I was new to this job, a few weeks or months in. Very large system and I was almost overwhelmed with a step learning curve. All bar about 3 employees were within 50m walk, so didn't do the remote desktop thing. $me: sure, I'll be up in a second. <Walks> (must be a novel concept for some) I don't quite remember what the actual task was, but it doesn't matter. $user: I'm up to this step, are you able to do the next step. $me: (a little confused) suuure. What needs to be done? I'm not familiar with the software. <$user explains> Turns out it was about as important as presenting "complete" on a workflow that occurred every 6/12 months. $me: um, it's a button, why can't you press it. $user:<looking terrified> but $previousIT guy said I could blow up my computer if I did it wrong. $me: umm. How? It is a button, you can press it. $user, < now with tears streaming down her face> but he said the box can catch fire. $me: it's not possible to blow up a computer with pretty fire effects from software. After a some hesitation and much reassurance $user: <presses button>. I guess as there were no pretty fire effects she must have pressed the button correctly. Maybe it was the way she clicked the mouse that did it... [link] [comments]  |
| Branch office printing issues. Posted: 30 Mar 2021 06:18 AM PDT So, my turn after reading several good tales. I have several year of Service Desk experiance for a long list of companies. This happend for a bank in the netherlands. We did support for them and the tussenpersonen? (dutch word: people between normal people and the bank) We have had a week were a printer driver update screwed with every print job. Making 1 single paper job into scrambled letter of several 100 pieces of paper. After a small week 3e line came with a "solution". They updated the printer drivers on the server, and we had the job of cleaning printer drivers of peoples machines. I got a call from this lady in branch office, calling her self not so techical. With the remote desktop i connected to her machine. Cleaned the drivers, Reboot, cleaned driver packages and then send her on her way. Within an hour she call back, still having this issue. So, i reconnected to her machine. Logged of all the users. Remotely deleted the driver folder. Let the user log back in. Wipe drivers again. Restart for good measure. This time i stuck arround and test the print job. Same issue. By this time i got looks from the manager who could see my call time was wayyy above the norm. (slow machine, many reboots, non tech caller) I was in for over an hour. 15 minutes was normal. I had no idea what to do, so i told her i would contact back office support and then give her a call back. "Looks like we might be reinstalling your machine. But ill be back" I hung up and started to contact 2e line but i got a call back from this woman. She found the the issue. Apparently her colleague though is was a waste of paper and put al the paper with the scrambled characters back into the printer. I thanked her for the call back. Hung up and walked away. Had enough for the day. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 07:20 AM PDT A secretary called the help desk, reporting stuck keys on her keyboard. I took the call and walked over with a shiny new keyboard. I checked out the keyboard and sure enough, keys were stuck. I could see it was full of crumbs and other junk, so I replaced the keyboard so she could work. I let her know it was all working and tried to walk away. She asked me what the problem was, so I felt obligated to tell her. I said the keys were stuck because it was full of food crumbs. She immediately responded with a head wobble back and forth, " I don't eat over my keyboard!" I walked back to her desk, turned the keyboard upside down over her desk, and banged on the back of it. Two whole blueberry muffins fell out on her desk and I walked away. Its a fun story to tell, but I usually use it with new employees as an example of being right vs good customer service. Yes I was right, yes she probably deserved it, no it was poor customer service. Also, two whole muffins didn't actually fall out, that's a fun exaggeration, but you get the point. [link] [comments]  |
| Please know the protocol you're programing with Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:21 AM PDT I worked in a bigger company in networking (L2-L4 OSI), well kinda. I was the loadbalancer (LB) guy, so my I extended my working from L2 to L7 (L8, too ofc). When I got an invitation to a meeting it was most likely this: "Can we do this with the LB?" "Sure, we can loadbalance two HTTP-Servers." "Thanks, bye". But this time we got a bigger project! This time we had to loadbalance based on country-information passed in the HTTP-Message. "Well, ofc we can do this. Just add a HTTP-Header and give me the name. Or you add it to your Querry. Any other questions? Message me when you're done, I'll configure then." "Awesome. But could we do this together this afternoon, it's urgent." So we met 2 hours later. They showed me their code, explained how their web-application is working and so on. Then they asked me what are these HTTP-Headers... "Wait what!" So I explained two FullStack-Webdeveloper how their protocol is working, they are working with. After I recoverd from the shock, I still couldn't belive what I just did. They finished everything with the information and I could configure the LB to their wishes. Nice side effect: I heard the best german interpretation of the stentence "I just want to have a solution for that problem". Genius. Still using it after 3 years. [link] [comments]  |
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