You never told us how to exit your software so we hold down the power button. Tech Support |
- You never told us how to exit your software so we hold down the power button.
- My job should NOT involve nudity and lasers! (SFW I promise)
- PC won't stop beeping!
- URGENT *** Cannot print invoices - Cannot log onto another computer!!!!
- Impossible demands from stupid user
- Terrible ideas require even more terrible solutions.
- Users and Goldfish lie
- Throwing the phone , and how I dealt with incessant interruptions
- Different Agent, Same Answer
- Can you please reboot your pc?
- Domain migration = always fun
- Broken “Mouse”
| You never told us how to exit your software so we hold down the power button. Posted: 03 Mar 2021 11:25 AM PST This customer has been using our software for over 25 years. Recently they've been experiencing a lot of data corruption. Their IT company is pretty good and they investigated and were able to determine that they exit our software by turning off the computers running our software (Holding down the power button until it turns off). This includes the server, which is honestly a WTF for us. So a person opens the application on the server (very ill advised) and rather than close the application, they hold down the power button and then power it back on. When the IT company questioned them about this they told them that we have often told them not to do this but since we never told them how to correctly exit the application, they had no other choice. I don't specifically remember telling them not to do this but it's in our online help and if asked during a call we'd certainly tell them not to do it. Admittedly exiting our software is confusing. We only provide them with an X at the top right and then the massively confusing "File -> Exit". Both the IT company and us are shocked at their response considering that the 2 top employees were there when our software was installed and many have been there more than 10 years. It's been more than we week and we're still trying to come to terms with how a customer thinks this is ok and acts shocked when told this is causing data corruption. [link] [comments]  |
| My job should NOT involve nudity and lasers! (SFW I promise) Posted: 03 Mar 2021 09:32 PM PST Please be gentle as this is my first ever post on here, and its a long one maybe even of epic length, but I think it's also a story that needs to be told. About 7 or 8 years back I was working as the entire IT department for a small chain of medical clinics in the Pacific Northwest US. This chain of clinics was a boutique service where they catered to wealthy patients and were trying to add new cosmetic services in addition to the regular care offered. To that end they got themselves a fancy new laser assisted liposuction machine. This machine had a laser attached to the tip that would melt fatty tissue without interacting with surrounding muscle, veins, or connective tissue. It meant they could feed a much smaller tube into the incision and suck the liquefied fat out while doing significantly less damage to the non-fatty tissue resulting in less bruising and a way faster recovery. Very cool. Now this particular machine was made by Palomar, and the surgical tips with the laser emitter were proprietary to Palomar and had an RF ID chip embedded in each one with an ID number. Before the machine would activate you had to scan the RF ID chip and once the machine verified that you had a valid tip, it would activate for a few hours to allow you to perform the surgery then deactivate that serial number so no one could reuse the same tip in two surgeries and to validate the part was a genuine tip from Palomar and not some knock off part. Now just before they were going to do their first live procedure Palomar sent a firmware update for the liposuction machine, and by sent I mean they literally mailed an old school clunky compact flash card with the update on it. It was at this point that I became involved in this circus. The CEO called me and told me I needed to install the firmware update on the new liposuction machine before its inaugural surgery. Now like most IT guys for smaller operations, I am a generalist by necessity, I've done everything from physical infrastructure, to migrating physical servers to virtual machines, to user level support, to running project management on developing their in-house electronic medical records system, building business analytics with SSRS… But laser assisted liposuction machines is WAAAY outside of my wheelhouse. I explained to the CEO that, there is in fact a very specialized breed of nerd you use to service and maintain expensive computerized surgical equipment, and those nerds make significantly more money than my variety does, to reflect the very specialized training they have received.
So I shrugged, took the clunky memory card and went to find the flesh melting laser. True to his word, it was not a complicated procedure. Big clunky card slot in the back of the machine, fit the big clunky card. I plug the card in, plug the machine in, and turn it on. On powering up the machine booted from the memory card and loaded the firmware update automatically. I watched the various load messages; no obvious errors pop up it finishes its install and instructs me to pull the card out and restart. I follow direction and low and behold the machine boots up to a fancy full color menu. "Hurray, that went pretty easy." I thought, but this was not my first rodeo, and while I don't know anything about laser assisted liposuction machines, I do know not to trust a patch in a production environment without some testing first. So I go to the doctor who's supposed to be performing surgery with this thing in a few days and I said to her, "Hey doc, I've got that update loaded in the Palomar machine, it looks like it went fine but, I don't really know what fine looks like on there, so you should definitely turn it on, activate a tip and make sure the laser is working, that it's sucking, and doing all the things it's supposed to do before you actually try to use it." She assured me that she would, and I left and went on with my life blissfully unaware that, she'd lied. A few days later I'm having a regular boring day when I get a panicked call from my CEO that I'm needed in the new operating room right now. My heart sank, and I knew I wanted no part of what was about to transpire.
Dutifully, I went. When I arrived there was a naked woman laying on the operating table. She had a sterile drape over her for modesty and hovering over her with the Palomar machine was the doctor and her nurse in full surgical gowns, masks, gloves the works. I on the other hand had no earthly business in that room in my business casual attire and beard. Now the naked woman had already been prepped for surgery. That doesn't just mean she was naked and sterilized, oh no. When you go in for liposuction they prepare you by injecting large amounts of saline mixed with lidocaine into all the tissues they intend to remove. The lidocaine numbs the tissue and saline is injected to bloat things up, loosen the tissue and create room and pressure for the vacuum hose and surgical tip. Even if they do nothing more than prep you, you're going to be numb, bruised, and spend days recovering; so It's not a small thing, once you've prepped the patient, you're pretty committed to doing the surgery.
Looks pretty normal to me, she's deeper into the menus than I'd ever gone when I did the update but there's no warnings, no errors, the fans are humming everything looks like it should be working as near as I can see. I reboot the machine and ask her to try again. (I have no idea how to get to the part where it activates the tips.) She navigates the menu to begin the surgery and waves the tip over the sensor. Nothing.
I shut the machine down, plug in the firmware card again, and re-load the new firmware. Once again it loads smoothly as near as I can tell, and after it boots up again it looks normal, so I ask her to try again with both the tips. No dice. I'm officially at the end of my generic troubleshooting 101 quiver at this point, so I call the 800 number on the machine. I get a Palomar tech support rep on the phone and explain what's going on. He asks me to reboot the machine, to re-load the firmware and report any errors that come up during load, and asks me to try swapping out the tips. I dutifully repeat the trouble shooting steps with him because I understand users lie and you can't trust them even if they tell you they tried it. We get through the obvious stuff while the poor naked lady is still miserably laying bloated and numb on the table next to me and I'm doing my best to pretend she's a potted plant that should not be looked at directly.
So I push the button down give the flat sensor panel a firm tug and sure enough, it pops right out and lifts away from the machine dripping clear fluid out of the bottom of the newly released panel and dribbling it all over the floor and my shoes.
At which point I reply with growing alarm, "By definition machines do not have 'natural by products' please tell me what the human fat melting laser machine is leaking onto my shoes." I was pretty sure it wasn't actually human fat, as no one had, as of yet, ever used this particular machine, but I really wanted a straight answer, so I was being a tad hyperbolic at this point.
I did as instructed and we once again attempted to activate a surgical tip, but still nothing happened.
I motion for the doctor to join me in the hallway and she reluctantly does so. Waiting worriedly in the hall for a status update is the CEO and head of operations.
Ultimately, they had to take the patient to recovery and then send her home un-lipo-sucked. Luckily for the company, she was a volunteer from an employee's family, not a paying customer. They had offered her the procedure for free because nobody wants to pay good money for the privilege of being a doctors first solo liposuction. She eventually did return after the part arrived and got her free liposuction. I was mercifully not involved that time. The Doctor didn't last another year with the company, and as she was the only one they'd paid to have trained for liposuction the machine ended up collecting dust in a closet. I ended up sticking around for another 5 years before finally moving on to Saner pastures. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2021 01:19 AM PST Not my story but told to me by my boss when i first started in tech support in 2007. Background: Our company won the first IT contract for Libraries in our country around 2004. Until then it was just books and sssshhhing librarians. The biggest change was public access terminals for browsing web/library catalogue and MS applications. Near the start of the contract a call was received from an old, very stereotypical, librarian stating her 'PC was beeping', all the usual culprits were checked, something on the keyboard etc. PC fully functional. So a call was logged for an on-site engineer and left at that. The librarian called back 2 hours later to advise the engineer could be cancelled as they had resolved the issue... someone had fallen in the disabled toilets and pulled the emergency chord! I think they were ok. Edit - First ever award. Muchas gracias! [link] [comments]  |
| URGENT *** Cannot print invoices - Cannot log onto another computer!!!! Posted: 04 Mar 2021 12:10 AM PST I work as an IT Support Officer for a mid size international company, around 1500 people~ I came into work this morning and had this ticket: Subject: URGENT *** Cannot print invoices - Cannot log onto another computer!!!! Body: Please sort out ASAP!! She had selected the CRITICAL priority flag when submitting the ticket. - Immediately get on the phone and have already connected to her PC. $Me: Hi, it is <name> from IT, I am calling in regards to your support ticket logged. $Her: OK great thanks for calling. So I cannot open any PDF's on my computer, they are opening with Internet Explorer, so I cannot print them and do my job.. so I tried to log onto someone else's PC but I kept getting error messages... $Me: already changed the default application for .pdf extensions back to Acrobat Pro and testing it. $Her: wait how did you do that? $Me: oh, I'm not sure why it changed, but if you right click on the .pdf and select properties you can change the default application for the file type. $Her: WOW! Awesome :D $Me: so this looks correct? do you want to confirm for me and go through your workflow $Her: *tests it* Yep all good! $Me: As for you logging into another machine, I think the issue you did not log out of your current sessions :) $Her: OK!!! Thanks so much! $Me: BYE BYE! :D - Total time spent was 3 minutes. [link] [comments]  |
| Impossible demands from stupid user Posted: 03 Mar 2021 07:17 AM PST A user last year at my former workplace. $User: I demand a new laptop! I can't use this one, the fans are so loud peolpe can't here me in the Teams meetings. $IT: Your laptop is 3 months old and are the latest model we have, not happening. $User: I can't work on this one, the fans are to loud. $IT: If you stop draning the battery to the last percent, stop having 30+ browser windows open, stop having 10+ powerpoints with 30+ slides open and stop having 15+ worddocuments open at the same time as you Teams call, your fans wouldn't be so loud. Just the heat from having to charge the battery to full from a 5% charge will in use will spinn up the fans. And btw, the fans spinning won't be a problem if you just use a headset instead of the built in microphone. $User: I will have my manager talk to you. $IT: Sure thing... (Gets $IT-manager up to date on the case) $Manager: $User must have a new laptop! $IT-manager: You have two choices. Either we buy $User a specialized built laptop that fills her demands, but since it's a non standardised purchase the cost of about €4000+ (exaggerated estimate) will come out of your department budget, or you can make $User use the standard issued headsets when in Teams calls. Or by all means buy her own headset if the company provided ones don't "fit her style". I'll let you guess who is know using a headset on her calls... I have the same laptop model myself, and the fans are loud when spinning on high speed. But thats what you get when you put high performance components in a slim lightweight chassie together with a high power battery. [link] [comments]  |
| Terrible ideas require even more terrible solutions. Posted: 03 Mar 2021 04:30 PM PST Many moons ago in the mid part of the 2000s I (fresh out of high school) ended up with a team of intelligent misfits, all without any formal IT training either, in an IT department of a large retail store in the deep south. The (slightly crooked) CEO was not tech savvy so his ideas and what was actually feasible with technology and actual reality often had quite a gap between the two. As the IT department it was our job to best match up the fevered dreams of a madman with a realistic best effort. A few previous gems from this man were to 'just download everything on the internet' and having us create a mailing/advertising campaign that bordered on being pure spam. All this paled in comparison when he wanted to build a huge e-store. He had 30K physical items in store and access to another 20K for dropship. He didn't want to put forth the money for a legit operation to obtain pictures and write actual product descriptions. His idea was basically 'just steal from others'. To be fair, it was more of a steal someone's stock manufacturer photos and their descriptions and then have someone rewrite the description in their own words. A gray area all around but we all needed the money. No one on the team knew how to code. None of us had ever heard of web scraping. Collectively we were at a loss on how this task could be accomplished. Luckily one of our more Adderall laden individuals had an idea. After a quick brainstorming session a plan was hatched. It was a sinful brute force abomination of a tech solution. If the universe is indeed a hologram I fear we may have to answer for this sin after we die. The plan was we would scout out a similar site carrying the same items our store did and figure out where they would store their image and description data for an item on the web page. Then we would make sure it was uniform for a few test items. We would create a script with keystroke and mouse position recording software to pull a URL with item code in it from an Excel sheet, alt tab to a browser window, paste the URL, wait for the page to load, save the image, copy the description to the excel sheet and repeat until end of file. They then put this script on every available computer in the store. The team would stay after hours to set all the computers to run the script. The script would run all night and the data harvested in the morning. Many things were learned.
The solution, clunky and slightly error prone as it was, worked and we would be blocked after a few hours of runtime but would just resume the next evening when the IP ban expired. The pictures were reviewed to verify they were stock looking and the descriptions were edited. The website launched and worked fairly well. Sadly the recession of 2008 ended the company and our sinful abomination was dismantled and forgotten. Knowing a rudimentary bit of Python now I can only look back and laugh as I can accomplish the same things with a few dozen (or less) lines of code. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2021 02:32 PM PST I have a customer that we call "Goldfish" because he has the memory of one. You know the type - you answer their question and 5 seconds later they ask it again... Recently, I was awakened way too early by Goldfish. Nobody could print and the fax machine was down (medical office - they loves their fax machines). Not a problem that I can troubleshoot remotely. So I crawl out of my warm bed, brush my face, shave my teeth, and brew up the go juice. I get onsite, check the fax. They had received 1 fax overnight but they usually get more. I send a fax to my phone and get my ear screeched out. Call the fax back, get the screech. Nothing wrong there. Just a slow fax night. Check in on the printers. Goldfish can't print because he's got a new printer labeled "Front New" and he wants it to be "Front New Laser MF123..." Got it. Everyone else is happily printing away with no issues. In other words, the only problem was that he couldn't find the printer in his list. I'm going back to bed. [link] [comments]  |
| Throwing the phone , and how I dealt with incessant interruptions Posted: 03 Mar 2021 01:21 PM PST 18 some odd years ago I had written an ugly mashup of a MS Access front end / SQL Server back end application that our corporation used for annual physical inventory. Because only idiots use Excel as a relational database and when it breaks ... and I was the dumbass accountant who claimed he could fix it. 500+ people counting inventory in a 2m sq ft factory for three days. 50 people doing data entry every night. I didn't really sleep. And it was time to run the variance reports for recounts and it didn't work. Shit shit shit. 50 managers sitting in an auditorium waiting for that report so they can go double check stuff. You know those bad shows where the one guy is hammering on the keyboard? That was me. And people standing around waiting for me to fix it. And my boss calling me every 10 minutes. Are you done yet ? And I snapped. NO ITS NOT FUCKING DONE STOP CALLING ME GODDAMIT! And threw the phone about 30 feet across the room where the pieces settled into a debris field of plastic and metal. Suddenly the room was empty. And 5 minutes later I had the report fixed. It printed. I took it and handed it out. And went back to my office and had a brief nap. And nobody ever mentioned it ever again. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2021 10:22 AM PST Hello friendos! Another day, and the forehead shaped dent in my desk continues to grow ever larger. Today's story is about a man I'm going to call (for some modicum of privacy) Ken. Ken is about my age (so late 20s-early 30s). And he likes to repeat himself while not listening to others. A lot. Ken called the help desk about a week ago. Laptop is running really slow. Like, open an Excel sheet, go to the bathroom and get a cup of coffee, come back and it just opened slow. He's also getting some disk space errors every time he logs in. Being the helpful little drone I am, I remoted in to look around, ready to run disk clean up since he seems like the type to never empty the recycle bin. Oh, how wrong I was. My dude has less than 600KB of free space left on his C drive. That's kilobyte, with a K. After running disk clean up. To be fair to the guy, he does have a small-ish HDD for his job (It was a 250GB), but still, 600KB!? Apparently, he likes to save EVERYTHING in the documents folder. I tell him there's not a ton I can do, he needs to delete some of the files on his computer, or better yet, move them to his company shared drive (that has 1TB of space with the option to go to 2TB, so its not like he'll fill that up anytime soon). After going in circles for a few minutes while he explains his issues with every single program he uses, it finally sinks in that maybe, just maybe, its all related to having absolutely no free space on his C drive. He agrees to delete some stuff (I make sure to emphasize the importance of also emptying the recycle bin to actually free up space), and move some other things to his drive. Put a nice little bow on everything, close ticket, and forget about it, right? Since I'm making a post about it, that's a very wrong assessment. As of a couple hours ago, this guy has literally called in FOURTEEN times so far, for the same exact issue. He's spoken to every one of us at the help desk multiple times, and he's gotten the same answer every time: delete and/or move stuff. And he just...won't. He hasn't even really tried. Last ticket we have, he was up to a whole 4MB of free space. Best part? Someone eventually took pity on the guy and escalated a ticket to the on site team to see about upgrading his HDD yesterday. And they said no, because he just got his computer a few months ago and his job role does not necessitate anything larger. Guess I'll just have to wait for Ken's next call. Maybe I can get him up to 5MB of free space! Or, you know, keep trying to reason with him until the heat death of the universe. Whichever comes first. [link] [comments]  |
| Can you please reboot your pc? Posted: 03 Mar 2021 12:55 PM PST I had a new coworker start today, and she had issues with her email signature. I emailed her a copy of a guide on how to set it up, and asks if she'd tried it to which she agreed. I told her I would remote in, and suddenly her screen started to go black for a minute, then back again and again. I ask her to reboot and see if that will fix it - she tells me she did, and I try again. It is moving crazily slow but I can see that she has outlook, 2 different browsers, a word document and Skype for Business (which we do not use) open... Meaning she did not reboot. I close it all, reboot, connection is low fine. Follow the three steps of the guide - and the signature is now working fine. Also, I am in sales, bor tech support. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2021 06:25 AM PST As a consultant I've often assisted during domain migrations and split. Sometimes the local IT support requires some assistance. This happened a few weeks ago: DomainA\UserName1 with UPN UserName@company.TLD is going to migrate to DomainB\NameUser1 . UPN will be modified in a later process. The laptop of the user is migrated and the ACLs are transfered to the new username. Beforehand, the user received clear instructions how to log in the first time after migration. (With NameUser1). User logged on to his laptop with his emailaddress (I forgive the user for this, most people think that the UPN is the emailaddress). This translated to his old sAMAccountname. So the local profile could not load and his was given a C:\users\TEMP profile. (but the user was unaware of thiss) User started working with his new profile (or so the user thought..). The next day, the user logged in and all his data was gone and called us in panic. --- I recommended to open CMD and type 'set' and report back the results. Clearly the computer was migrated but the user had a temporary profile. We checked the ACL on the profile folder and that seemed correct. We asked how the user performed the login procedure: "Just with my email address..." We kindly asked the user to try to use the new username 'NameUser1' from the email instructions. I've never seem someone so happy but also so ashamed.. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Mar 2021 09:41 PM PST This is a short and simple story from my front line IT tech support days at a large, prestigious, and public high school in Australia. TL;DR at the end. Our IT office is in the middle of the school and generally central to most staff and students. We have set support hours for students which are before school, during lunch, and after school. Teaching and admin staff can walk-in at any time and request support. We would typically send students away if they requested support during class time. On this occasion, a wild student appears at our door during class time, and advises they were sent down by their teacher Mrs Barrington (name changed) as the teacher needed the support. Okay sure. The student said Mrs Barrington needs a new mouse as her one is broken and doesn't plug into her laptop. The kid hands me the "mouse" and I quickly identify that it is not a mouse, it is a Nokia phone charger (one of the tiny thin pin types from back in the day). We look confused at the kid and say "this is a phone charger not a mouse" and the kid sighs and goes "I know I just didn't want to tell her." Sigh indeed. Knowing Mrs Barrington I can understand why the student just accepted the task as their teacher is toward the end of her teaching career (old), hard of hearing, struggled with the basic concepts of using a computer for teaching, and a little bit pretentious (I don't want to say it's because they're an English teacher butttt, well maybe they're just like that regardless of teaching discipline). We hand the student a new mouse and give them a good-luck shrug. The Nokia charger ended up in the box of random cords, cables, chargers, adapters, and is probably still there to this day. Thankfully Mrs Barrington retired while I was still working there, and we later heard she went on to teaching belly dancing classes. TL;DR - teacher sends student to IT help desk because their "mouse" doesn't work. The mouse is a Nokia phone charger. [link] [comments]  |
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