You own a... What??? Tech Support |
- You own a... What???
- I thought you knew what you were doing. I take that back.
- Check me out
- Shorted fuses
- From getting an F in your class to assisting your tech issues
- Never offer help for free.
| Posted: 04 Jun 2021 12:04 AM PDT Please forgive formatting and typos, posting from mobile, etc. Kinda front desk... We had a few desks that shared first-contact with customers. Mine was the repair desk, technically, but I could do standard sales, customers refunds, stock checks and back orders too. My desk was also the hub for floor walkers and security's radio charging docks. Elsewhere we had the checkouts and business customer lounge (giant perspex box with sofa, coffee machine and terminal for payments and basic forms). This particular post involves ink cartridge refills and replacement for printers. For those unfamiliar with these things, there are literally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of different ink cartridges and designs. A long time ago, there only used to be perhaps 20 different ink cartridges for a small amount of photo-quality machines for the domestic market and fewer for the expensive office types. It used to be a very controlled purchase because this stuff was very expensive to begin with. Now, you can get a cartridge for perhaps 10c per unit or less. We used to refill cartridges with syringes and needles with selected shades of "cyan, magenta, yellow and black" and different brands had different shades of each. Whenever we offered our services, we asked customers to sign a waiver which told the customer, "your experience of colour and quality of your printing may differ from the original brand's expectations," in other words, your kid's skin tone in a printed photo might look different from reality and you'd need to adjust print settings accordingly. We store these waivers in conjunction with a customer number and copies of receipts for various uses including the unlikely event of an audit from the ink companies we had licenses with and to identify repeat customers who might benefit from a promotion or two. Anyway, an early Karen walked right up to my desk and slapped down a mess of paper and ink cartridge stuffed in a file transparency pocket and a receipt, demanding a refund. Ok, fair enough. I asked what happened and they said, "the machine leaked everywhere and messed up sixteen copies..!" "Wait... 16?" I thought this number was odd, surely you'd stop printing after the first or third mess? "I'm trying to print party invitations for my kid and I can't because you f-d up the refill!" I stared at her for a moment, but was willing to overlook the rudeness on account of the woman's anger... "What the f- are you gonna do about it?" Second strike. "Well, let's see. What printer are you using?" "What's that got to do with it?" "I need to know which brand of ink I need to check." "Oh, it's a BMW." ... What!? To my knowledge, they don't nor ever have made domestic printers. Maybe something in their own offices, but... I highly doubt it??? "A BMW? They do printers now, do they?" I lazily slip on a glove (latex-free rubber-like glove) and pick up the mess, taking out the cartridge. On inspection, I can just about make out the Canon logo and I'm about to access the records with my clean hand, but pause on the next sentence coming out of her mouth. "Duh... Ok, I want to speak to a manager." Third strike. "I'm the manager on shift right now. How can I help?" "... No, I want to speak to your supervisor." "Oh, the owner? They're away on business elsewhere, but I can take a message or give you their email address, if you'd like?" "Ugh!!! Can't I just take my money back!? Now??" "I'm sorry but all refunds need to be assessed and still take five working days to process..." I gingerly place the ink cartridge back down on the messy photo paper. "You know what? I bought the printer from you, too. I'll come back with it and you can refund me for that, too!" She snatched up the mess, stuffed it in her handbag. Three days later, I'd almost forgotten the incident when Karen came back with a big grey Brother printer and slammed it on the desk, breaking a chip off the paper tray in the process. I glanced up at a nearby security camera watching my till and looked back at the customer. "There..!" She also whipped out the transparency pocket and receipt and slapped that on my desk too. I picked up the Canon cartridge and held it next to the Brother printer. Thing is... There is NO way that cartridge would fit into the Brother cartridge holder. They were two completely different shapes, and Canon usually held individual colours in individual slots, while Brother had a cartridge for three colours and one for black. There is no way I knew that the two could ever meet. I opened the Brother printer cover and... peered into it with incredulous horror. It looked like a blood bag had exploded in there, the rubbery ribbon that pulled the printhead back and forth was nearly torn in two and the carrier was practically demolished. I looked closer and saw what looked like deliberate marks from a knife or screwdriver or something. It was all chewed up but from an external direction. The machine did the rest of it to itself from the mechanical action. "Ma'am, did you do this yourself..?" "Well, I had to, it wouldn't fit!! My boyfriend had to use a hammer!" "Your husband..? You didn't do it?" "That's not the point! I made it fit, but it didn't work! My boy's party is in two weeks and..." "I'm sorry madam, but I cannot help you and I have to ask you to leave." I just didn't have the energy to deal with this stupid woman and we're always reminded that we don't have to serve anyone if we don't want to, time-wasters or abusive customers are a big no-no. Oh boy did she rage... threw the printer at me over the desk and prompted a police call while Security went into Bouncer mode... they calmed her down outside and, when the owner got back the following weekend, reviewed the security footage. A magistrate later ruled in our favour for damages and 'distress' to our staff as a whole. Turns out, in the hearing, the Karen was actually on meds for psychological stuff, paranoid schizophrenia I think it was, and had a history of kicking off in other shops all over town but wasn't getting social services (county budgets, etc, but magistrate enforced her rights to it and other help later). Bittersweet story, really, mental health is a big struggle but yeah... don't serve if you don't feel like it. Still... a BMW printer... I still smile trying to imagine one. [link] [comments]  |
| I thought you knew what you were doing. I take that back. Posted: 04 Jun 2021 01:19 AM PDT Happened during the mid 2000s, during my campus days. It's also the only incident from those days worth telling. My school is funded by an extremely wealthy Chinese conglomerate, so we enjoyed lots of benefits that other campuses do not get. One such perk was that students are allowed to work certain jobs within the campus during their free time for a rather high hourly allowance (subject to a cap per week and with the undertaking that it must not affect our studies or grades) and I landed one such job in Tech Support. During a slow day, a fellow student came in to the support office for help. His laptop had Vista and 2GB of memory (remember, 2GB of memory in a laptop during those times was a lot), but he downgraded it to XP and bumped the memory up to 3GB for even greater performance. XP ought to fly on such a machine, but according to the guy, XP has slowed down so much that it was taking more than 15 minutes for the desktop to respond to user input from a cold boot. At the same time, he needs to install some accountancy software for an upcoming tutorial. I set him up on one of the tables and had him turn on the laptop. This fellow wasn't kidding, XP booted to a black screen and white cursor and stayed like that for at least 10 minutes before it finally started drawing the desktop elements one by one, which includes a system tray that has more than two rows of icons and a desktop filled to the brim with all manner of shortcuts, files, installers and whatnots. It was almost 30 minutes by the time the Start menu would respond to a mouse click and even then, the system would randomly freeze for a while doing basic things like accessing Control Panel or the Add/Remove wizard. msconfig showed hundreds of active startup items that I gave up going through the list as soon as I saw it. And forget about software installation, the first software installer took almost five minutes just to start, and it eventually hung when I was specifying a custom installation path at the student's request. Clearly, the performance issues need to be solved before we even talk about software installation. However, we also have a rule that no Support staff is allowed to delete anything on the user's laptop (duh), and since this fellow was able to install XP and upgrade his memory, I assumed we were on similar levels. So I told him to enter Safe Mode, identity everything he does not need, uninstall them, then come back to us for the software installation, or use msconfig to disable enough startup items if uninstallation is not possible. He asked what Safe Mode was, so I demonstrated it to him by rebooting the laptop (which took another eternity), mashing F8 and selecting the Safe Mode option. He was really impressed by how the Safe Mode desktop showed up instantly and how fast everything was in Safe Mode, collected the laptop and said that he will come back once he had removed all the useless stuff. He came back two days later and said that everything is ready for software installation. Guided him to a table and was about to insert the ethernet cable (our software installers are hosted in a separate network accessible only within the Support office) when I noticed that he was booted into Safe Mode. I pointed this out to him, and his answer is forever burnt in my mind. "Yeah, I know. I could not decide what to uninstall, so I decided to just boot into Safe Mode from now on to do my stuff. Don't worry, I selected 'Safe Mode with Networking' for this." Not wishing to argue, I went ahead with the installation. In Safe Mode. Install completed (I was amazed it even worked, because Windows disables the Installer service in Safe Mode!), tested the applications which actually worked, he packed up and left, and I signed off on the install form. I never saw this guy again in the Support office again for the rest of my student life, but I cannot help wondering if this guy did the entirety of his Accountancy course in Safe Mode, and if he is still booting his new Windows 10 laptops and computers into Safe Mode even to this day. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2021 11:01 AM PDT I am Tech Support by vocation, but I was on vacation. I was staying at a hotel on a military base, visiting my daughter who was stationed there. There was a power outage the night before I was leaving, but it was back on before morning. I needed to check out to get to the airport so I went to the front desk.
I go back behind the front desk to take a look at the PCs - dead, no lights, no power. Desk lamps, printers, other equipment, same. I looked under one desk, though, and saw a small ethernet switch that was happily blinking away for one port. I followed its power to a dark corner and found two sets of power outlets: the switch was plugged into one white outlet, the only thing there, while the PCs, printers, etc., were all plugged into power strips connected to the orange ones. I turned off the power strips.
We go to the electrical closet where I see a large UPS sitting on a pallet. I found the breaker, noted it was tripped, and reset it. We then returned to the front desk area where the computers were. I turned the power strips on, one at a time, bringing the computers and everything back up. Just as we finished the manager showed up.
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| Posted: 03 Jun 2021 06:10 PM PDT This doesn't happened to me but happened at my work a few months before i got hired. Disclaimer: you need to know the very very basic in electrical to understand the funny of it. TL;DR at bottom. <Company> got a contract to fix a lot of telecom devices specially power supplies, with a very specific number of devices in a very specific time frame. <Company> need a lot more of people to be able to handle the job so it hired for trial some personnel to be trained for the Master on the team. Master: So... here you have 5 SMPS diagnose them and tell me what you found on them so i can help you to fix them. Apprentice: Sure I'll do. -Some time later. A: Done, they are all shorted. M: Alright (is not rare that they do short, mosfets on the DC power part do actually short badly). A: In all of them the main fuse is shorted! M: Hehehe (thinking it was a joke). A: They say 250v and 16 amps, so it should be around 15 ohms but instead it's a full short (he applied ohm's law to a fuse). M: 0_0 ... it's okay kid... leave them over there and we'll talk later... The poor guy only lasted that shift at the job. TL;DR: The new kid diagnosed as "Shorted" some power supplies because he applied Ohm's law to a fuse. [link] [comments]  |
| From getting an F in your class to assisting your tech issues Posted: 03 Jun 2021 12:52 PM PDT I'll keep this short and sweet, but I do have to give a intro to better understand my position. I was at university and during my 2nd year, I took, and failed, a basic level math class that I ended up retaking with a different professor. Aced the tests, but I never did the homework which was heavily weighted towards my grade. Fast forward to my 4th year, I get a job working in IT for the school, and the college I worked for included the math department. A few months go by, and I get a ticket from a familiar name. The same professor who failed me for not doing my homework just put an issue about her mouse not working. Per her ticket, the mouse was "broken" and she needs a new one. Since her office is not that far from mine, I decided to physically go up to her office to assist! It is kind of our culture in IT where if you put in the ticket, 9/10 we will attempt to make first contact in person since our clients are professors with open office hours, and most issues are solved in 5 minutes of just meeting with them instead of an email chain that takes an entire day. She has an iMac with the magic keyboard and mouse. This was around the time when the magic keyboard and mice were charged up through a lightning cable. Although many of you probably know this, but Apple puts the charging port for the mouse on the bottom of the device! Ridiculous! It makes it unusable while charger! If you haven't guessed it yet, her mouse was simply dead and out of juice. I informed her about the charging port on the bottom, and if you charge a magic mouse overnight, you don't need to worry about it for a few months. She couldn't recall ever being told this, and just assumed they were running on batteries. I go back to my office, fill out the resolution and close the ticket. A few minutes later I hear my boss (who is in the office across from me) let out a chuckle after he read my resolution, walked over to my office and told me that she should've remembered to charge her mouse because he makes it a point when giving magic mice that you need to charge the mouse overnight or during class sessions. Students forget to do their homework, while professors forget to charge their equipment! 3 years later, about to get promoted to a sys admin position, I still look back at this issue fondly, as this is a great example of 1, not everyone will remember what IT tells them, and 2, just because someone has a PhD in mathematics, that does not mean they are a critical thinker or problem solver, they are just specialized in solving math problems. Also, if anyone is wondering, I did inform her I took one of her classes but since it was a lecture hall of 100 students and has been years since, she doesn't remember me. She did ask how well I did in her class. Queue the awkward silence, then telling her I had to retake the class. Surprisingly, she was super nice and easy to work with for the next year! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2021 05:51 AM PDT obligatory don't work in tech support. not 100% sure this fits here, sorry if it doesn't. So stopped by the local corner shop (convenience store for our metrically impaired friends) to pick up some lunch on my way home. shop owner (who I've known all my life) was having a little trouble printing a couple email attachments and asked me for some help. thinking it would be a simple case of walking him through printing attachments from outlook I agreed to help him. (big mistake) in the end it turned out to be 2 or 3 issues that where just annoying to trouble shoot. issue 1) tablet isn't actually connected to wifi so can't download the attachments (he though they where as his tablet had the wifi symbol on (with an exclamation mark). solution: try resetting wifi connection issue 2) tablet now can't find ANY wifi networks solution: turn everything off and bring back on one at a time (thankfully turned out turning bluetooth off was enough to fix it) issue 3) printer was on another network solution: simply change the network the printer is connected to. this took half an hour, 20 minutes of it being finding the instructions on HOW to connect this printer to wifi, the other 10 being restarting the printer every time I tried a password because the wifi connection procedure had to be done from turning it on and he handed me a list of passwords (yes I mentioned how bad it is to just have a list of passwords written down, even if you keep it in the till) but couldn't remember which was for that wifi network. In the end got a free sandwich and bottle of Dr Pepper. TL;DR: agreed to troubleshoot what I thought was a simple issue. ended up doing 40 minutes of tech support for a sandwich and a drink. Edit: lots of typos [link] [comments]  |
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