People are very, very, stupid, and I want to scream. Tech Support |
- People are very, very, stupid, and I want to scream.
- We thought we had an idiot proof system, it worked for years. Then we encountered the better idiot
- blocking email? please don't
| People are very, very, stupid, and I want to scream. Posted: 01 Aug 2021 12:51 PM PDT On the bottom floor of my building, there is a storeroom with a number pad lock on its door.It has large oval shaped buttons, with a line between the two numbers, so the buttons look like this: 1|2____ 3|4___5|6 7|8 __ Enter__ 9|0 It has only been installed fairly recently- In the past year, to be exact. The amount of times I have been called down, from my office three floors up, just to open it for someone, despite them having been given the PIN- is too damn high. Here are some highlights of the conversations I have had with people who have called me because "The lock's broken."
Lady: "They installed the pad wrong." Me: "...What?" L: "The text I got said the code is thirty-two thirty-two, but there's no thirty-two. There's only twelve and thirty-four." Me: "...It. It's not thirty-two thirty-two. It's three two three two. L: "Well there's none of that either!" I proceeded to have to go down and physically show her how it worked. Twice. L: "Well that's stupid. It's unnecessarily confusing. I'm going to submit a complaint." Me: "You do that." 2. Man: "Hey the pad's broken or something. The code doesn't work." Me: Here we fucking go. "Did you input all four numbers and then press the enter key afterwards?" Man: "Yes! I'm not stupid you know." Me: I really, really doubt that. "Try it one more time while on the phone with me. I'd rather not go down if I don't have to." The pad lets out a very loud beep whenever a button is pressed. As a result, I could hear his next attempt, if you could call it that, quite clearly. \Beep. Beep.\** Man: "It still won't open! I'm telling you, the damn thing's broken!" Me: *sighs* "I'll come down." I hate people. Edit: After many, many comments all agreeing on the same thing, I've made a decision.The next time that management comes to complain about people leaving the door unlocked, I'm going to tell them that it's a terribly designed lock, and they should get a better one if they don't want people finding their own solutions to the problem. Edit 2: I have completed my final shift for this week. As of this evening, it is officially broken; Courtesy of a pissed off user while I was off-site dealing with other problems. Apparently there was a wiring issue in it to begin with, which was why people could press the middle of the button and it would read it as being the 'correct' number despite them not actually pressing the correct half of the button. Management has mixed feelings about this, because on one hand it is therefore under warranty, on the other, they now have a lot of pissed off employees saying "I told you so." They have ignored my requests to please, for the love of god, not replace it with an identical lock of the same make and model. They have also denied my requests to: A: Make a sign, B: Tell users that the password is four two digit numbers instead of the 'actual' four digit pin, (which, after the wiring revelation, was the only denial that made sense to me.) C: Change the PIN to something that didn't use both halves of a button, D: Wire up the new lock to the automated door system so I can just unlock it from my office. I am so glad that this next week is Not My Problem. Not as glad as I am to be leaving this building and all of its dumb-ass management in a couple months, but still pretty happy none the less. I think management might just be getting a kick out of watching me suffer at this point, honestly. [link] [comments]  |
| We thought we had an idiot proof system, it worked for years. Then we encountered the better idiot Posted: 01 Aug 2021 03:13 PM PDT I work in a computer shop, building and prepping new systems. Not too difficult, and I get to do basic support stuff too, I really like the job. We also occasionally sell iMacs, and we set them up with a local account if the user doesn't provide an apple ID. After some time we decided to always put in a simple 'lool' password. It's the same keys on the common local keyboard layouts, and they are close together. We print it on a sticker and put it in the middle of the screen on the protective foil. We tried no password too for a bit, but more than once people would call, asking for the password, because Mac OS sometimes would prompt for it, and they didn't think to just hit enter. It worked very well (unless we forgot the sticker), for years. Until last weekend... We get a call from an older gentleman, he had just picked up his new iMac, and the password wasn't working. I knew it worked, and my colleague who did the finishing touches also confirmed the standard password. We spell it out incase he is misreading it, nope, not working. Thinking maybe the keyboard got disconnected somehow, we send someone to his house since it was only a few minutes away. My colleague arrives, enters the password, and it logs in right away. "What did you do?!", the customer exclaims. Colleague logs back out, slowly types the password, and hits enter. "Oh, you are using that 'L', I was pressing that one" Points to the I key This was not his first computer. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2021 01:41 PM PDT One of my jobs back in the early 2000s, was running an email server for an academic department at a university. The Department had been the first to have email and an internet connection, something that had been done way before my time, but some senior researchers thought it was important to keep our own "identity" rather than migrate to the campus wide system. Our campus network group was struggling with security and was implementing various fixes, including complex ACLs at the network boundary. At some point they asked all the systems people on campus to provide IP addresses for all outward facing servers and what ports needed to be open so they could block traffic they didn't like. I actually ran a firewall between my group and them so I used my rules to make a quick list and sent it to them. Nothing happened for a while but then I started getting reports of mail traffic seeming to be throttled. I started checking our mail logs and actually caught an instance where inbound traffic stopped EXCEPT for mail servers that were on campus. I checked with the network guys and finally got someone who explained they were trying to implement an ACL for port 25, but our mail server should be allowed. I explained what I was seeing, they agreed to check into it, but they were "just testing". For the next week or so the interruptions would randomly happen, I would call them to complain, they would apologize. I requested numerous times that they notify me any time they were testing so I could give them instant feedback that their ACL was broken, and help keep my users off my back. I couldn't get them to agree to this, but hey, I tried. The incidents tapered off after a while so I figured they had figured it out, or maybe given up. Then one Saturday one of my more vocal users called me at home. He was not receiving external email. I SSH in start poking around, I can see we are not getting traffic from outside, and it looks like we haven't since the previous night. I call the "emergency" number for network problems. Tech calls me back but he has nothing to do with the ACLs, he's there in case there's a major outage or something similar. I discuss with him, he takes my home number and says he'll escalate. I say fine. I get a call, pretty quickly, from the main networking guy (MNG). I tell him what I'm seeing: MNG: "I want to be clear that this issue has nothing to do with our ACL" me: "I'm not saying it is, I'm saying it *looks like* the ACL, but maybe its something else" MNG: "Okay as long as we're clear on that" me: "maybe you could disable the ACL for a second to see if anything changes" MNG: "Its not the ACL, I'm not going to do that" I'm tailing my mail logs in one terminal window while I poke around, I can hear him typing in the background. Every once in a while he asks if anything changes, I tell him no. After about five minutes he stops asking me if I've seen any change, its all quiet on the phone. Suddenly I see my mail logs show traffic from outside. me: "Hey, it looks like its OK, let me check". I send myself email from an outside account and it gets delivered to my Dept account! me: "Hey, thanks MNG, looks like its fixed! That's great! What did you do?" <pause> MNG: "I disabled the ACL" me: "can we leave it disabled until Monday? When was it turned on anyway?" MNG: "ACL guy turned it on Friday night, he didn't want to disturb folks during business hours" me: "maybe testing should be done *during* business hours? Just in case?" MNG: "Yeah. I'll talk to him" MNG sounded kind of depressed but I was just happy to have the problem solved. MNG was one of the most responsive and capable people on campus so there was not point in doing a "superior dance", he felt bad enough about the incident. It took me a while to get the whole story, the ACL in question was apparently huge and they were entering it all on a command line. Very easy to make a mistake, at least that was the reason they gave me. It was clear they needed a better tool than a switch ACL. I think they were able to get funding for a real high bandwidth firewall after this. [link] [comments]  |
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