Be specific when you tell people how to work from home Tech Support |
- Be specific when you tell people how to work from home
- Once again, check for dumbest and most obvious reason first.
- Yo dawg, I heard you like surge protectors...
- 'I can't see that, the lights are off'
- My mom, the non-believer
- Beset on all sides, by idiots. Except the client, in an unlikely turn of events.
| Be specific when you tell people how to work from home Posted: 02 Aug 2021 10:51 AM PDT Just a short memory I remembered in a cold sweat but it still baffles me We had a semi large office but for the most part it was always full and the only people who would work from home occasionally was me and a couple of managers. Now one day we tell an employee to work from home for a bit and they were given an explanation of how to remote in from home from their laptop with a secure connection. They just nodded their heads and agreed. That night while im home I go to push updates to every machine in the office when I see that one machine in particular was not updating. I tried to remote into it and nothing, nada. So I lift myself up with a groan and physically go to the office thinking the PSU died or something. No. The entire setup was gone. The next day I call the employee and asked what happened, they told me they took everything home in order to connect to the office. Is quitting still an option? [link] [comments]  |
| Once again, check for dumbest and most obvious reason first. Posted: 03 Aug 2021 01:15 AM PDT My parents had me facepalm so hard yesterday. They are both nearing 70, but they were engineers and are pretty good with computers and with figuring things out when they don't know something. So they mainly call me when they hit language barrier - neither knows English and father's engineering programs set it as default on re-installation, same with software for our old printer. Yesterday's call was about said printer. Old laptop refused to see it no matter what they did, including running installation disk. 15 minutes on phone and several whatsapp photos later I had to admit I can't troubleshoot it from work and will come over in the evening. Whatever they needed wasn't urgent, so they had already left when I came and found the source of problem. Two engineers put USB cable into Ethernet port and didn't question it even when it kept falling out, just put a notepad under it to keep it in place. When I called them, both said that they weren't 100% sure that it was right port, but thought that other would have corrected if it wasn't. [link] [comments]  |
| Yo dawg, I heard you like surge protectors... Posted: 02 Aug 2021 04:49 PM PDT I work as a sysadmin for my county. I started this job not too long ago and haven't been around to every location so I may have new stories under my belt before too long. Today's story is about one of my users' in an admin position. Today this user called me and alerted me to them having issues with their set up. For most of the county, our users' are using a bigname brand laptop hooked up to a fancy little dock station with two display port monitors that are also from bigname brand. It's actually a sweet set up and allows users' to easily work from home because they can just disconnect the laptop and be on their way. The user told me that their laptop would randomly freeze up, the dock would turn off, and their displays would go to sleep. No big deal I thought, maybe there's a firmware update that needs to be pushed through and hopefully fix the problem or we just need to swap a cable out or just restart the machine. Nothing major I assumed. So I go on a nice brisk walk over there from our department and greet user, who shows me the problem. I note that they had actually described said problem in full detail (yay!). I immediately go to restart the machine first. It goes down and comes back up fine and it seems to be working fine. During this period the user and I are talking about our day and what we did over the weekend when it suddenly hits the fritz again and wigs out in front of me. At this point it definitely seems to be behaving like an issue with power going to the dock, or the dock itself. I ask her to let me back into her area and where it's plugged into and she shows me. This is where the horror began. Her dock and monitors were plugged into ye olde beige surge protector. For the sake of this, we'll call it $surge protector 1. The warm orange light indicating its function was not on so I traced the cord to a small compartment area under the right side of her desk, behind the drawer. Inside this compartment, was another surge protector(2). You may already have your hands approaching your face but, there's still more. I noticed there's another multi-pack $surge protector(3) under there too that is ALSO connected to $surge protector 2. $Surge protector 3's main job was to connect the power from the printer... that's right above it. Yes, I too have no idea why this is needed. The power cord was obviously long enough to connect to $surge protector 2. In an effort to undo this mess, I decide to tace $surge protector 2's cord and see where the heck that's going (there's lots of shelving in this office where the cables are routed behind). Well, it turns out $surge protector 2 is connected to an extension cord. Now, I am by no means an electrical engineer but not only am I sure that connecting two surge protectors together is a bad idea, let alone three, I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to use an extension cord for a surge protector either. Alas, as I am wrapping my head around this, I continue my search for where this journey ends. I end up moving a couple of shelves and find a horrific conclusion. $surge protector 2's extension cord is plugged into... ANOTHER FREAKIN' $SURGE PROTECTOR (4)! At this point my feeble brain is trying to peace together this monstrosity of a system and trying to clean it up to the best of my ability. I remove $surge protector 3 from the equation entirely, along with $surge protector 4 as the extension cord could easily make it to the outlet that $surge protector 4 was connected to. However, due to cord lengths, desk orientation, etc... I was only able to configure it so: $surge protector 1 > $surge protector 2 > extension cord to outlet. This still made me uncomfortable and I requested the user to notify facilities IMMEDIATELY to get new outlets installed in her office and to notify me when they do. In the meantime, she said she'd happily work off just her laptop and a charger connected directly to the outlet in the meantime. TL;DR: User had a surge protector jungle because they didn't want to task facilities with installing much needed outlets. Sorry if the formatting is bad, this is my first time posting here. I just had to share this absolutely mind numbing experience. [link] [comments]  |
| 'I can't see that, the lights are off' Posted: 03 Aug 2021 02:27 AM PDT I currently work for a small software company developing our own product. Our users tend to be middle aged onwards so we do have some difficult users at times. As most of our clients don't have a clue about computers, they tend to ring us even though we just support the software, we help them as much as possible though. One day though I received a call from a very clever user who should really have known better. We also supplied this guys PC a few years ago. He rang up to question why his PC had all of a sudden turned off. My first thought as it was an older PC would be a possible PSU issue but no, it was worse... As the call went on we tried as much as possible to try and boot it up but in the end it was not having it. The guy mumbled something about his laptop still working but I didn't register that at the time.... (Fatal error) I then asked the guy to have a look under the desk and make sure that all of the cables were plugged in correctly. He then replied 'I'll try but I can't see a lot as all of the lights are off, we had a power cut 15 minutes ago. I'll go get a torch'. At this point I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I explained to the guy what had happened and he took it fairly well, he got the power back on and amazingly, the PC worked again. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 07:09 PM PDT Literally just got off the phone with my mom helping her out with this one. My semi-retired mom is working on a Word document that has two Excel spreadsheets embedded into it. She needs to email this document to her supervisor, but she's afraid that the Excel sheets didn't embed properly when she sent it, and she's panicking because the document is already late as it is. Because she's semi-retired and mainly uses her smartphone for everything these days instead of her laptop, she's a bit rusty when it comes to Microsoft Office (and Windows for that matter). So, she asked me for help on how to embed Excel sheets into Word (she's already spent quite a bit of time on YouTube looking up how to do this). Although my Office knowledge is a bit rusty myself (I use Google Docs/Slides/Sheets for everything these days), I ask her to send me the files, and she sends me the Word file and two Excel files separately. When I open the Word document, I see that there are several charts which are already embedded, as well as two hyperlinks at the bottom of the document that link directly to the Excel sheets. I tried to explain to her that the two separate Excel files aren't needed, as there is already Excel data embedded in the Word document. She insists that the Excel sheets are still needed, as her supervisors need the ability to edit the data, and that the data won't copy over if she emails just the word document. I come back by saying that the embedded data is editable by right clicking the embedded sheet and clicking "Edit data", which opens the data up in Excel as a "Chart in Microsoft Word", and they can then save the sheets separately, if desired. My mom still doesn't believe me, and is getting more and more stressed out. I finally explain to her that I deleted the separate Excel sheets and re-named the Word document, and the Word document still functioned perfectly (aside from the now-broken hyperlinks at the bottom of the document, which aren't needed anyway). After a few more back-and forths, with me even offering to email her the now-renamed Word document, she finally says, "I believe you" No wonder I have such a high tolerance of users that have both high anxiety and low PC knowledge. My mom has prepared me quite well for my field in that regard, which is one of the many reasons I still love her to death. TL,DR: Mom needs help embedding two Excel sheets in a single Word document; I find that the sheets are embedded just fine; Mom doesn't believe me until I delete the Excel files and explain that the Word doc still works fine. [link] [comments]  |
| Beset on all sides, by idiots. Except the client, in an unlikely turn of events. Posted: 02 Aug 2021 11:54 AM PDT Happened today. The events that unfolded made me feel quite literally like my heart would burst and my head started aching with a sort of cold rage. So, I shall be working for company A, and the other shall be company B. Client contacts me, saying that they lost their *document* and just applied for a replacement(at the site of company B). The two issues are that the tracker says it happened 90+ days ago and so cant be tracked, and that the fee was 28 arbitrary units of money for some reason. Alright, first things first the tracker is just wrong, mostly because this site was made by company B, which is just about the worst IT company ever, in the history of the universe.(So bad that I, at company A, have to inform them as to what their services do and how they work, when I ask for help with fixing them...) The bigger issue is the fee. 28 is a familiar number, so I check. Yep, it used to be 28, but the law changed it at the start of this year, to 8.5. I even checked with the head of the department who are in charge of knowing this specific thing, and she agreed as well. Alright, two possibilities is a single glitch, or worse but entirely possible considering that company B is involved, they did not notice the change in the laws that their services must observe, they did not update it, and they have been more than triple charging people for half a year now, and this is the first time someone brought it up... Alright, I can handle this.... reassure the client, ask them to send in the data so we can have this investimagated and fixed. Great. Not half an hour passes and I am contacted by a (very reliable and knowledgeable) colleague, who asks me to check out an email. I assumed I messed something up, so I check. Nope. Its the email from the client. Some guy who I never even heard of, sent out an answer saying that the guy in the chat was wrong, and it is 28... The client even replied, thanking him, and noting how I was wrong in the chat then. Just in case, I ask, and colleague confirms that no, I was correct. The colleague who made the mistake is apparently a hire so new, I have never even seen his name before. I have no idea what the hell he was even doing, handling that email, as it was not even part of his skillset... I am... rather miffed, to say the least. Fine, the client sent a duplicate. I am busy right now, but transfer that over to my main skillset, I'll get to it ASAP. Just in case, add a note explaining that 8.5 is the correct value, and it has to be forwarded to Company B. Not 5 minutes pass when I check, just in case... The contact has been answered, with a nonsense answer(that I already correctly answered in the chat, btw...) by the same guy. At this point, I was more than a bit miffed... Not only is some complete noob, who probably only plans to stick around as a summer job, questioning my competence, he is also not even bothering to read the available email templates that show he is wrong. Or the information database we have that would also show it. Or even the contact history, to see what was discussed in the chat, or even to notice that he has already answered this exact email... Or just... you know... ask someone to make sure... No shame in that... So yeah... Not taking responsibility or saving asses for that tragi-comedy of errors by trying to fix it, called the superior who was stupefied by the sheer degree of incompetence on display from both company B and the colleague. Another experienced one happened to pass by at the time as well, who was also just staring with a sort of morbid curiosity at this trainwreck. About the only silver lining in the whole matter, was that unbelievably, the client was the best bit of this whole ordeal. Also, the slice of pizza I stuffed into my facehole afterwards to calm down... [link] [comments]  |
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