Crazy lady demands assistance with a product we don't sell Tech Support |
- Crazy lady demands assistance with a product we don't sell
- The Largest Magnet in the World
- Classic case of PEBKAC
| Crazy lady demands assistance with a product we don't sell Posted: 28 Jul 2021 08:58 AM PDT A woman submitted an email ticket for help accessing her account. Ok, easy stuff. I reply, ask her her username, but can't find it in the database. She insists its correct so I ask her to send a screenshot of the error notification she's receiving. When she does, I notice she's trying to login in to some random website I've never even heard of. I have no idea how she ended up with our contact information. I tell her the site she's trying to access isn't a product of our company and to reach out to their customer support. I then closed the ticket. But alas, that's not the end. She calls in to the support line and I happen to be the one to answer the phone. After I say "Thank you for calling anonymous medical company, this is HoungryHoungryHippo, how can I help you?", she responds with "is this the HoungryHoungryHippo who refused to help me get access to my account?". And I immediately know this is going to be a fun call. She basically insists that its my job to get access to her account. My response is that its not because she's asking about a product we don't even sell. She says she's not hanging up until I help her so I relent and Google the software, find their customer support number, and attempt to give it to her. After I recite the number, she goes silent for a couple seconds, and then says "What do I do with this? I called YOU for a reason! Why are you trying so hard to avoid doing what you get paid to do?". I asked her what hospital she works for and I did notice that they do have an account with some of our products, except the product she was needing help with isn't one of ours. I tell her this and she just isn't grasping it. I finally get pissed off and say "Ma'am, this is not a product we sell. There's nothing I can do aside from pass of their contact number" and she says "Well, we're going to sit here all day because I'm not getting off this line until I'm helped". I chuckle a little to myself and hang up. She immediately calls back. I see it on the caller ID and decide to just let it ring for a bit to see if she gives up. I alert the other techs and after a good laugh at her expense, my manager picks up the phone. He tells her the same thing I did and again, she insists on "being helped". After she whines some more, he tells her there's no assistance we can offer with a product we don't sell and hangs up, again. That's the end of her tirade, right? Nope. She then begins spamming the chat. I closed the first one immediately and she opened a new one. I finally called the hospital she worked for and thankfully someone else picked up the phone. I asked to speak to a manager, told her what happening, and she apologized and insisted it would stop. The lady immediately quit spamming us. I hope she was immensely embarrassed when she finally realized she was an idiot calling the wrong number. Her final send off was giving me a 1/5 rating on the initial email ticket she submitted. Legend has it, she to this day has yet to gain access to her account. [link] [comments]  |
| The Largest Magnet in the World Posted: 28 Jul 2021 01:51 PM PDT I did field work in the early nineties. Back then, some data centers still had VAX machines, dumb terminals, and reel-to-reel backups (Think 1960's era stock footage of computers and big disks spinning around. Those things.) Those devices were old & slow & breaking down & obsolete, so a *lot* of them were replaced in the 1990's. My company sold and installed the replacement tape drives.This customer was porting old backups to the new backup drives. They had been one of the first adopters of computer technology back in the day, and had backups going back, I kid you not, to the late 1960's. The oldest of these backups (early-mid 70's, if memory serves) might or might not port over. Even though it was out of our scope, the customer asked if our company could figure out what was going on. I, as the installing tech, did the preliminary checking, which consisted of learning how their old drives worked. It was data-gathering for the guys who probably knew how this old stuff worked. This was the first and last time I had ever seen one of these old tape drives in use. The upper-level techs did some environmental checks, didn't think their storage was any issue (it was in an old, giant, 100+ year old safe from a defunct bank), tested the drives as best they could, and couldn't find an issue with them. We told them we couldn't figure out what was wrong and the customer thanked us for trying. (Why did they need these old backups some 25-30 years later? This customer was SUPER GIANT CONGLOMERATE that you've heard of, and they probably *still* have legal battles being fought from the 1960's. That is my best guess, and I assure you it is only a guess, but it's the only possible reason I could think of.) Fast forward 5 or 6 years. I no longer work for my previous employer and I was watching some TV. No idea what the show was but it had something to do with magnetism, and I watched as they magnetized a rebar by using the Earth's magnetic field. The rebar was pointed at the ground at about a 45-degree angle, oriented N-S, then struck with a hammer a half-dozen or so times. The now slightly-magnetized rebar picked up some very small paperclips. I flashed back to that customer and their very old, very constructed of iron mag tape storage safe, and I was damn near blinded by the light bulb going off over my head. I had to know. At work the next day, during lunch, I cold-called the local office of SUPER GIANT CONGLOMERATE and asked for the IT Department. I got the local help desk and started by explaining, "I did a service call there about six or seven years ago on some tape drives. I know this is really, really weird, but is there anyone still there who might remember how you guys couldn't port over reel-to-reel backups to the new drives?" "What are you talking about?" the tech on the phone asked, reasonably. I gave the tech the story above without the TV show, and also asked if they still have the old safe in the data center in the basement. I think it was that bit of info that got me a, "Let me get your phone number and I'll ask around." I thought that was the end of it, but a couple of hours later my phone rang. It was one of the Admins from SUPER GIANT CONGLOMERATE calling me back. He was one of the deskside grunts at the time my old company investigated the issue; he was still with the company but had kept going to school, got his Netware certs, and was now an admin. And he remembered the tape drive issue. "I think I remember you," he said. "Were you the guy who installed the new drives?" I said I was but I no longer work for that company, but I think I know what's wrong. "You've been thinking about this for five years?" he asked, laughing. "No, but something reminded me about it last night, and...you know, I'd just like to have this checked out. It would certainly explain everything. I have a test in mind. It's fast and painless and should only take about as long as it takes to open and close the door to that safe." He asked for details and I told him. "That safe is made of iron, right? I remember how everyone liked it because it was over 100 years old and could probably withstand a nuclear blast, but it's still made of iron, and for 100 years it's been sitting on a big, big, BIG magnet." He was silent for a moment, then said, "I don't follow you." "You know if you leave a paperclip on a magnet the paperclip becomes magnetized? Well, that safe has been sitting around on the Earth for over 100 years, and the Earth is a...." "Magnet," he finished. "Oh, wow. oh, wow." Pause. "What's your test?" I suggested he get a small paperclip, make sure it isn't magnetized, then take it to the safe, open it up, and see if they could hang the paperclip to the top of the safe from the inside. He told me he'd call me back in ten minutes. About 8 minutes later, my phone rang. "That paperclip is still hanging in that safe. I guess we need new storage. Thanks for your help!" and I think I could hear the faint sounds of people frantically removing tapes from a safe behind him. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jul 2021 09:47 AM PDT When I got my first job in IT I worked in a team supporting a government mainframe system. Our government were just getting into the idea of external consultancies doing work because they were "better" than the government employees. The net result of this was we were faced with an annual intake of sparkly faced kids with degrees in geography or business studies arriving as "consultants" working for one of the largest global consultancies at the time. They would arrive, go through an induction for about 6 weeks, disappear to the States for a "COBOL Programming Course" for another 6 weeks at which point they would arrive back and you would find they were your boss. I was saddled with one who kept calling me for somewhat spurious reasons. The one that is indelibly burned into my memory was the "enter key not working" issue. On this day, ${"manager"} was running some user testing on the system and the instructions were pretty clear, you filled in the test data from the script (yes there was a paper script, we are talking the late 80's here) and then you hit the action key to move to the next page. Note, the action key on this particular flavour of mainframe was where you would see the backspace key on a modern PC keyboard. The key just below this had a very different function and could be mapped in the terminal settings applied when a user logged in. On the particular day I had a large number of calls about an issue with one of our line printers. It was apparently spitting out endless sheets of fanfold paper with the same information on it. One of the users had fed the printer with 4 boxes of fanfold and had neatly stacked the 4 boxes of output ready for collection. I logged into the system and checked the print spool, it was full with hundreds of pending print jobs, all the same size and all tagged with ${"manager"} as the owner. I disabled printing, cleared the spool and restarted the scheduler and sure enough jobs started to be added for ${"manager"} again. Time to go and see them. I looked round the office, spotted ${"manager"} and went over. Immediately I was told "the mainframe is broken", a rather odd statement to come from a "manager" for a global IT consultancy. You would expect a little more technical detail at least. On questioning what the issue was I was told no matter how many times the hit the enter key, nothing was happening. Everything suddenly fell in place. My next question was "have you read the user manuals for this application?", I knew full well they had not. In the manuals you were told that the key labelled "action" was the equivalent of "enter" on this mainframe terminal. There was also a very handy keyboard map diagram showing the action key and also telling users that the key below the action key was mapped to print screen. I said "you've been printing the same screen over and over again". This was met with a flat denial and ${"manager"} started to have a go at me in a very loud voice. Now I've never been one to take crap from anyone, especially an inept arrogant fool promoted beyond their level of ability. I turned round, went to the printers, grabbed a barrow, put the 4 boxes of wasted fanfold on the barrow, got all the additional sheets from the printer and added them to the boxes, walked back and said "yes, you have. Here are 4 boxes of fanfold along with a number of additional sheets all screen prints from your terminal." Their response was classic, "how can you prove it's from my terminal". The answer to that was very simple. Every users name was included on the printouts and it appeared on every single sheet. I took great pleasure in going through every single box pointing to their name over and over again. That would not be my last encounter with them, but they were shifted into a role where they had no responsibility for a team. [link] [comments]  |
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