It wasn't me Tech Support |
- It wasn't me
- Too many clicks to print...
- Why do I have to enter so many passwords?
- The Enemies Within: But it was a PDF! Episode 127
| Posted: 27 Apr 2021 07:35 PM PDT This happened a few years ago. One of our executives who everyone absolutely despised, put in a ticket that some of her folders disappeared on her desktop. We run folder redirection so everything is stored on our file server, which has file auditing software installed. I go through the logs to see what happened. Low and behold, it was her who deleted the folders. Me: Hi exec, I went through our logs and it show's that you deleted the folders, most likely by accident. I went ahead and restored them for you. Exec: That wasn't me, I didn't delete any folders or files. Me: One second, I'm going to email you something. Here is a screenshot showing your name, the date, and time the folders were deleted. Exec: It wasn't me Me: Ok. I would like to contact our head of security to file a security incident because it looks like someone went in your office, sat in your chair, logged in as you, and deleted these files. Would you like me to contact security for you? Exec: Long pause.....That will not be necessary. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Apr 2021 10:19 AM PDT This was only a couple years ago. I worked at a beer distributor and our POS (point of sale) warehouse guy was very tech challenged. Phone rings... Me: IT, can I help you? POS: Yeah, I'm having trouble printing a spreadsheet. Can you come over and take a look? Me: Sure, I'll be over in a minute. I make my way to POS' desk, he's sitting, acting frustrated and in a huff. POS: 'Big Beer Company' have no idea what we have to go through to do their stupid audits. I don't have time to figure out how to print their GD spreadsheets and do inventory. They're a bunch of idiots! A little background: POS' job is to track all the point of sale items that the beer company would send to us so in turn we could put out new draft handles in bars, mirrors, coasters, stand up displays in stores, etc. He needed to record how many come in and went out and to where. So inventory once a month was mandatory and it could get out of hand quickly if things weren't written down. He always seemed like a powder keg ready to explode, plus he was originally from Boston and used his accent even more when stressed. Me: So what's the issue? POS: Look! He hands me a print out of a spreadsheet, landscape, and the last row is cutoff and prints on a separate page. POS: I can't do inventory like this! Me: Here's a quick and simple way to fix this. I bring up the print settings and choose Fit Sheet on One Page. I print the first page and it's all columns are on one piece of paper. The text was a little smaller, but overall it was readable. POS: What did you do? Me: I chose the setting right here (showing him on the print settings) and then print. POS: That's not going to work. Me: (picking up the printout) Here it is, it works. I know the text is a little smaller... POS: No, that's not how it should work. They send me the spreadsheet and it should fit already. I shouldn't have to do anything but hit PRINT! Me: Then you'll have to contact them. POS: Are you kidding?! Last time I had an issue it took 2weeks for them to respond to me. No, it should just work. Me: Until they get back to you, you can use this as your solution. POS: No. Me: No? It's one extra click. POS: That's one too many. I won't be able to remember to do that each month. Me: (honestly trying to be helpful) Look, I can write it down and even take some screenshots, then you can print it whenever you need to. POS: No, that's okay. I'm just going to print it out how they sent it to me and I'll deal with the extra page. Too bad you couldn't fix it. I walked back to my desk...just another day in desktop support bizarro world. Now I know what it means 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink' comes from. UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments and witty comebacks to Mr POS. I failed to mention the he was also the company President's step-brother...so anything snarky that I wanted to say felt like I was playing with fire. I kept it as professional as possible. [link] [comments]  |
| Why do I have to enter so many passwords? Posted: 27 Apr 2021 04:06 PM PDT In a previous job I supported a software company that provided a high frequency stock trading platform. For being finance related and having users working multi-million dollar accounts their security was extremely lax. Passwords were saved in plain text and visible to employees. There was no way to authentic customers to know if the person on the other end of the phone was authorized to make changes to the account or not. It was security through obscurity, anyone who knew that the account existed was considered to be authorized. This never changed in my time there though I would point out frequently how bad this was. As far as I know they have never suffered any consequences from it. The software required two separate logins, one was for the data subscription that allowed them to see real time pricing for whatever markets they were subscribed to. The second was for the finance portion that allowed them to submit transactions to the markets. Our lax password requirements meant that we were not tracking incorrect password attempts let alone lock out an account for too many attempts. These policies led to the following interaction. Me: Thanks for calling support how may I help you? Customer: Every time I log in to your software I have to enter my password 4 times. Why is that? Me: You should only have to enter your credentials twice. May I have permission to open a remote support session so we can figure out what is happening? The remote session is started and I can see that the customer is ready to log in to their data service. They enter their credentials and it logs them in. The second login box appears which is slightly different in size due to a small difference in labels for the login fields. (This was not a design decision just a result of different programmers being independtly in charge of design the separate login sections.) Me: Now if you will... Customer: See now I have to enter my login credentials again. (Customer proceeds to enter their data credentials in to the transaction login.) Me: Sir if you will just... The login box vanishes, fails to login due to invalid credentials for transaction service, reappears with blank boxes. Customer: Then I have to enter my password a third time. (Customer enters their data credentials in to the transaction login screen. It again fails to login and reappears with a fresh transaction login screen.) Me: Yes I see what is happening if you... Customer: Now I can enter my second login credentials and it will finally let me log all the way in to the software. (Customer enters their transaction credentials and successfully logs in.) Why do I have to enter my first password so many times? Only then would they listen to me and I was able to point out the slight differences between the two authentication screens and convince them that they only need to enter each set of credentials one time as long as they were entered in to the correct screen. TL:DR; Customer continuously uses the wrong login credentials before using the correct credentials and wants to know why they can't just use the correct credentials right away instead. I tell them that they can and it blows their mind! [link] [comments]  |
| The Enemies Within: But it was a PDF! Episode 127 Posted: 27 Apr 2021 07:51 AM PDT By virtue of real projects taking more and more of my time.. I'm getting fewer and fewer tickets actually directed at me. Which.. is good... For me, at least. Not so much for the customers. But that's perhaps a story for another time. Today, we're talking about understanding what a file is. Faxing is still a thing in the medical industry. And while I agree that faxes are more secure than e-mails, for many reasons, most fax services now, have e-mails on the inbound, and outbound sides of things, completely defeating the purpose of using.. a... fax. My turn-up team is attempting to get a customer up and running with their fax. And while my first criticism is them not testing it themselves, stretching a 10 minute troubleshooting session into 4 days of e-mail back and forth... They did manage to figure out that yes, indeed, their configuration of the fax service for this customer worked. Generally, I don't know when this happens. I'm.. not in that department. But I share the first name with the manager of that department. Someone decides to misspell the manager's name, and suddenly I'm on the notification list. Now, this is where things get.. weird. Even after confirming functionality, the customers faxes were coming back as "can't be processed". The first attempts to get the fax, resulted in them sending us blank PDF's with headers on them. *boggles* Cue samesoundingname manager calling me. "Hey Nero... Is an encrypted PDF.. a PDF?" In this case, because the customer is trying to be a good medical company, they're sending encrypted PDF's to the fax server. The fax server doesn't know what an encrypted PDF is beyond being "not-a-pdf-it-can-read" so it's tossing it back. Customer is losing their mind because it's "a pdf". Fax server is going "no it ain't." My support reps.... just figured this out, four days later. Remember folks, once you encapsulate a file, it's no longer the file you started with! At least to everything else that handles it. .................. I should write a few more of these. I've got like a years worth of vendor incompetency to share. [link] [comments]  |
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