What’s the point of a wired mouse if my laptop already has one of those? - older lady thinks reality is based on what she wants. Tech Support |
- What’s the point of a wired mouse if my laptop already has one of those? - older lady thinks reality is based on what she wants.
- When barcodes attack
- I have no Wi-Fi, and this laptop is REALLY HOT
- Adventures in the void of no product owners
- The mouse won't move..
- Contracts 101 Do not do this at work
- $200 Rat Catchers
- USB Flash Drive Requesr
| Posted: 01 Mar 2021 01:59 PM PST Working a side gig during Covid and came across a gem of a client. This lady sounded to be in her 50s-60s. She had bought a new laptop but didn't like the look of the touchpad. So she bought an external wireless mouse to use instead. Fair enough. Well, I asked her if her mouse came with a little Bluetooth receiver. She confirmed it did. I asked if she had plugged it in. She had not. Okay, good, this'll be easy, I figure. I tell her to plug it in and tell me what prompts she sees. She sighs angrily to herself and after a few seconds she tells me nothing came up. I ask her to move the mouse, she says, again angrily, "yeah.. it moves" Great! Problem solved! Nope. She continues with "Okay but I don't want this Bluetooth thing connected. What's the point of buying it if it has to be plugged in?" Puzzled for a moment I try to explain that it's simply a reality of wireless mice, as well as a lot of wireless devices with laptops. She continues; "Well that's insane. It's needless! The computer already has one connected. I wanted an unconnected one! Now I have to deal with this Bluetooth lead with it getting in the way constantly!" Again, puzzled, I ask her what brand wireless mouse she purchased so I can look it up and may get an idea of what she is talking about. She reads the box. And of course it's a wired mouse. That brand doesn't even sell wireless mice. I ask her if the "Bluetooth lead" connects to the mouse physically. She replies with "Yes! That's the problem!" I try to explain that she has bought a wired mouse and that she needs to return it and get a wireless one if that's what she wants. ... then she starts on with "But why can't you just remove the lead? What's the point of it being wireless if it has the lead?" "It's not a wireless mouse, ma'm" "I'm aware of that and that's what I'm saying is the issue!" "Ma'm. The device you bought is not able to be wireless." "Why not?" "... it wasn't built that way. It was built to have the wire." "That's pointless! The computer already has a connected mouse thing. Why would they sell one that can't be wireless?" "... ... yeah, I don't know. You should return it. Makesure they sell you a wireless one. Tell them you specifically want one that is Bluetooth and wireless." What a fun call. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Mar 2021 06:51 PM PST I discovered some weeks ago that, despite it being supposedly impossible to do, one can enter a barcode into our point of sale system that starts with a tab character. There's no reason to ever do so, of course, since UPCs on consumer products would never actually have a tab in them, and thus, there's no provision for doing so. If one types a barcode it, the cursor just advances to the next field. But if one copies and pastes just so from Excel, it's possible. OK, I have to go through three different functions to fix it, but I can. Today, I discovered that it's also possible to enter UPCs that end with a tab character. This shouldn't have surprised me, but it was a long day. Also easy to clean up. In both those cases, it was less than a dozen anomalous SKUs, easily fixed. But I also discovered today, on the server running a store we just bought, that someone there knows how to either run macros or use the data import functions to mass load UPCs. What they didn't know how to do is validate their data beforehand, or that Excel does stupid things with long numbers. So I found over a thousand UPCs . . . in scientific notation. Sigh. Gonna be a long day tomorrow, too. [link] [comments]  |
| I have no Wi-Fi, and this laptop is REALLY HOT Posted: 01 Mar 2021 07:48 AM PST Long time lurker. Love this subreddit, and stumbled upon something last week that i figure i should share. The players: Bro - My Brother; A natural enemy to all things electronic, however not tech illiterate. Me - Family and friend tech support starting in the early 2000's Bro is not known for treating his computers well. Every single one he has graced with his touch has had SOMETHING go wrong with it. Spilled drinks, broken charge ports, viruses, cracked screens, hard disk fault which he swears was not caused by physical means... I digress.... This problem in particular though, I don't think is his fault... Bro's laptop was running hot; like, "almost give you first-degree burns hot". He decided to ignore this problem and continue using it, until one day he booted it up and he had no Wi-Fi - strange. Well this particular machine is an HP and it shipped with a suite of diagnostic tools, so on his own accord, he ran every troubleshooter and diagnostic tool he could find, but they all came up empty... I even coached him through a windows re-install over the phone after he got sick of HP's UI's, but that did not fix any of his problems either (well the HP bloat went away). The laptop has an ethernet port so he was happy enough continuing to use the laptop via a 50' cat6 tether to the router... So we figured, ok this laptop just runs hot, and you have internet now so problem solved. Problem solved indeed, until the day one of his couch naps was interrupted by a fire in his loins. Said laptop was running SUPER HOT now, definitely worse than before. Well, out of pure spite, that laptop got replaced with a pre-build gaming desktop, and was set aside and forgotten about.... Until somehow I came into ownership of it when I opened a box in my closet and found it. I quickly was reminded of the heating issue, much to the dismay of the first three fingers on my right hand, and diagnosed it as a simple clogged vent/fan, so I emptied about 1/4 can of compressed air into every orifice I could find. Satisfied with the amount of dust and debris expelled onto my kitchen table, I proceeded to try and diagnose the wi-fi problem. There's no option to connect to a wireless network... Strange... Device Manager shows only 1 ethernet adaptor listed... no mention of the wi-fi adapter... also strange... Maybe some drivers are missing due to the windows refresh? This laptop has laid dormant for a few years so I decided to patch into my switch and let windows update do its thing for a few hours... A few hours and reboots later... no wifi.. Hmm maybe HP upped its diagnostic tool game... A few more hours of loading HP's tools and running them.. nothing... Until i was reminded, yet again, much to the dismay of the first 3 fingers on my right hand, yet again, of how hot this thing runs.. So i decide to crack open the bottom of the case. I remove the battery and it's a normal temperature, however the heat issue is coming from a plate just below the battery.. i flip it open and what do i find? A wi-fi card that looks like a forgotten s'more surrounded by brown scorch marks.. Thing got so hot it de-soldered the antenna connectors from the board. It cooked the sticker off the back and it reeks of "I have expelled all my magic smoke, I am no more" Well there's your problem... $12 on amazon and 2 days later i have a working laptop with no overheating issue. I also have Wi-Fi. Thanks for the free laptop bro. [link] [comments]  |
| Adventures in the void of no product owners Posted: 01 Mar 2021 12:41 PM PST As some of you may know at this point, I'm working with systems that are incredibly old and unsupported in our company. Systems that have been replaced at least twice each, yet somehow still remain in use. My project is working to finally, once and for all, replace them and this time actually shut the old ones down. One of the systems I'm responsible for has a form in it that allows users to order access to another system. Let's call it Resource Booking System, or RBS for short. This system is old. Older than my system. So old that it predates most of my coworkers. As part of my job to move these forms to our new system, I have to figure out who owns these forms. Of course, our system is stupid, so it has no information about this. Instead, I rely on looking at other systems (like our support system) when possible. For the RBS system, I find.. nothing. No product owner, anywhere. Even in the systems where they go on and on about data integrity and how nothing is without an owner. No one owns it. So starts the email chain. Person A suggests I talk to person B who suggests person C who suggests person D who suggests person A. Every person along the way claim that the system is no longer in use and we just use outlook to book resources. Every person goes "Huh" when I tell them we've had about thirty orders for access in 2021 so far. Eventually, we give up. No one claims the system, so no one gets to say if it works as intended. We'll move it as is. I do suggest to my boss that the best route to go is to decommission it, but that's a bit outside the scope of our project. He does ask me to find him some data to support the fact that it's actually being used, since no one in the IT leadership believes us. Turns out, the tool only works if you use IE8 or lower in the internal network. Using Citrix or a VPN does not work. I had to RDP to an internal server and use its IE8 to log in, so that the javascript didn't explode. Once in, I find that using the general statistics feature doesn't work, because the request times out no matter what selections I make. 1 hour of statistics for one room in one building? Request timeout. I could however get statistics for each individual building using another feature. It takes about three minutes to get the data in a format that can't be easily exported (can be printed tho!), per room, per building. We have maybe 50-60 buildings, some of which have just as many rooms. I got my boss some stats for a few buildings that prove that the system is most definitely in use, and told him that if he needs complete data then expect not to hear from me for a month or four while I extract it one room at a time. He acknowledged this and promised that if we need complete data, I'm getting a team of people to help me extract it. Just for fun, I asked our host where the scripts and data for the RBS system system was stored. "That system is no longer in use."' Could you please check user traffic? "The system is in use but we don't know where it's hosted." Okay then. I'm taking a nap, my brain is no longer functioning for the rest of the day. Please file a support ticket if you need my brain back up and running. TL;DR: We do not speak of the old magics [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Mar 2021 12:53 PM PST I'm not really in a tech support position but when I was growing up my parents weren't rich. We generally fixed everything we could on our own to save money, so over the years I've picked up many skills. Most are basics but I get called on at my job as a Concrete Mixer driver to fix stuff all the time. Todays story was about a month ago. Simple but funny. Our batching office has a few computers for loading the mixer trucks. When I came back from a job I was called into the office. The manager wouldn't tell me what I'd be doing over the radio. I had to climb up to his office on the 3rd floor. When I made it up there he said he couldn't get his wireless mouse to work. He said he didn't want to be embarrassed for everyone to hear on the radio. I run thru the basics, charged batteries, bluetooth, troubleshooting, cleaned glass underneath, nothing was working. I finally gave up and put a new mouse in the port, and to my surprise it wasn't working either. Now I'm thinking it's the port.. right before I climbed under the desk, the pointer started moving erratically. I stood with the new mouse moving it around for another few minutes until I noticed I hadn't put batteries in.. It was still moving on the monitor... I quickly turned around to see my manager had the correct mouse and was messing with me while I was trying to fix the WRONG computer...Face Palm He got me. I gave him a look.. that look you give when you're amused but wish it wasn't you that fell for it. His reasoning: I had 45 min until the next load and he gave me something to do.. And he needed a laugh. [link] [comments]  |
| Contracts 101 Do not do this at work Posted: 01 Mar 2021 05:51 AM PST Back when intel 3rd gen CPU's were on the store shelves I was working for a small repair shop. Now the owner wasn't tech savvy but he had a good team. The problem was that he always did opposite of what the team advised sometimes to hilarious outcomes. He was pretty good at getting support contracts signed and we would always find ourselves in the position of helping new clients with outlandish request. This time though it was a very straightforward and lucrative job. 70 pc upgrades from ancient first gen 775 to last gen intel CPU's. This meant that power supplies were not our problem, we were supposed to use the existing ones. I got tasked with finding the cheapest i5 CPU/MB/RAM combo that would work without an issue. So I started working and searching and by the end of the day I had a pretty solid config of LGA 1155 MB's factory flashed for 3rd gen i5. I had picked the cheapest i5 with integrated graphics and 2x2GB extremely cheap DDR3 DIMM's. This allowed for a very cheap bulk licence for Windows 7 professional 64 bit. To top it all off the selected config was widely available and the order would've been fast. I send my proposal and go home. Morning the next day. Boss calls me over: "I asked you to make a config yesterday for the large order" "yea, I've sent it to you yesterday" "what, this one?" "Yes, is there a problem?" "Well see for yourself, I can check the website you want to order it from and I can see a cheaper one off the bat" "Yes, what you see is the non GPU model of i5. We need to have integrated GPU so we don't have to order a separate GPU." "Nah, that just won't do, I'll remake the config and order the parts" (The price difference was 3 dollars per unit) And so he did. It took him about a week to source the parts that should've been available in 48 hours tops. He never let anyone see what he had ordered. One week later the orders start arriving. I noticed he ordered the non GPU i5 and asked him: "Boss, did you order dedicated GPU's for this config?" "Of course not, why would I?" "Well there is no GPU integrated in this model of CPU, you need a dedicated one" "Oh, what a dumbass, there are no CPU's with integrated graphics! The motherboard has the graphics card, ask anyone" I sighed, the poor guy forgot he only dealt with broken down laptops of older generations "Ask away, all core models have integrated north bridge so that doesn't exist on motherboards anymore and they can also have integrated graphics. There are no more motherboards with integrated graphics" The guys were witnessing the exchange, he looked at them with a superiority grin and asked "well?" They immediately turned around and left, not a word said. He takes an MB, a CPU, some ram and starts building a test machine. A couple of hours later he comes back and quietly says to my colleague. "Source me the cheapest GPU's. Second hand" Later that day we got 70 professional cards from eons back. They were the first model using pci-e interface and I couldn't make out the manufacturer. Insert Risitas here: " they only had digital output on DVI" Our customer specifically asked for analpg output because the monitors will not be upgraded for a while (a non issue with integrated graphics). So I start laughing the cards costed around 10 dollars each and had no analog output. But did they work? Around 50 of them did. I got sent with a secret mission to the customer to see how many monitors were digital. Great news, around 30 were digital. For the rest he had to order new GPU's, the cheapest ones. By this time he gained 8% from changing my CPU to his model and lost around 25% with the GPU fiasco. It gets better. He ordered cheaper MB's from a shady supplier. A bit less than half of the order. None of them were compatible with the last generation Intel. The socket was proper, but they would not support the CPU even by flashing. To top it off, the supplier refused to receive them back. The losses were piling up. And for the final nail in the coffin he had not ordered Hard Drives. I specifically said in my config that the old PC's had IDE drives and the new MB's were SATA only. The realisation came after he was at the client doing upgrades and they could not plug in a single hard drive. By this time the client got fed up and canceled the contract. As for me, I had the best time of my life being fired. Quick edit: we had IDE to usb interfaces on stock that nobody wanted. We couldn't sell them. I proposed to give them either as a gift or at a discount to this customer for data migration when the upgrade was finished. Around 30 pcs. This specific proposal was even agreed on (with the exception that he would charge full price) yet he didn't order any SATA HDD. Math edit: he got 8% off for the CPU's not the entire order. And then had a 25% increase on the total order because of the GPU's. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Mar 2021 10:10 AM PST Simple story from the Before Times - Before Papa Nurgle visited the world, before I started working for investment banks, back when I was a computer technician for major metropolitan public high schools. The school I was assigned to had its fair share of problems - built in the 60s by a forward-thinking planner that realized schools might need new-fangled things like "computer labs" but wasn't progressive enough to realize every classroom would soon be a computer lab in its own right (leading to daily brownouts and blown fuses), entire floors brought down thanks to a teacher making a loopback on a dumb switch because it looked "untidy," and the ubiquitous "huh, this server cabinet was bricked into the wall during a renovation but the servers are still active on the network" insanity - but this particular story is a little more fundamental than that. See, public schools have very tight budgets, and any excuse not to pay for something is taken as de facto doctrine. This was a great learning experience for me in that I had to maintain everything that plugged into the wall on a parts budget of $0, which meant frankensteining a lot of devices to keep things running long enough for an injection of city and state money that only seemed to come during election years, but it also created unique problems: Things like heat and air conditioning weren't bothered with when school wasn't in session, and I live in a place that experiences seasons with a capital S. So, what happens during winter break? The heat gets shut off. The boilers are run only enough to keep the pipes from freezing, but things get downright frigid indoors. Thing is, power doesn't get turned off, which means most of the workstations are still humming along waiting for the new semester, which makes them little pockets of warmth in a building under deep freeze. So, the first day of spring session brings a slew of complaints about PCs that won't boot, and also there's this odd smell in the classroom? Lo and behold, on something like five PCs on one floor, the fan casing was chewed through and the box was used as a nest, and in three of those, we - well, I, for the teacher had fled the room by this time - found the rat in question, as it had fused with the motherboard when its fur shorted the circuit. Moral of the story: Start a campaign of extermination to rid the building of rather prodigiously proportioned rodents, owing to the health hazard they present to the students? NAH, this is a public school! Memorandum: Please turn off all workstations prior to any extended break, please and thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Mar 2021 09:08 AM PST Sorry about the typo in the title. Mobile is great. Long time reader, first time poster. I wanted to share a conversation I had with a user this morning. I will call her user, and me, me. For some context, our security department rolled out a policy update restricting all USB use for all computers globally. This created some issues with users using USB printers, encrypted drives, etc. Ticket: ENCRYPTED USB DRIVE REQUEST, PLEASE SEND TO MY ADDRESS AT XXXXXX Me: Good morning, this is me with company's IT department. I saw you put in a request for a USB flash drive. We have received a large volume of these requests today due to a security issue affecting all of our systems. Before I send you a drive, I wanted to make sure you didn't already have one. User: I am unsure about having a USB drive. I can't open my file for shipments. Me: Could you please clarify? You do not currently have a USB drive? Or you do, and your current USB drive is not allowing you to open files? NO ANSWER FOR LONG PERIOD Me: Please let me know, when you are able. User: I honestly do not know? I have a laptop computer. Me: You put in a request for a USB flash drive. I am asking if you really need one, or if it is not working. User: it's not working. Me: OK, I will be closing your ticket. This issue is currently being investigated by our security department. I will not be sending you a replacement drive NO RESPONSE [link] [comments]  |
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