bigboss and the almost new laptop Tech Support |
| bigboss and the almost new laptop Posted: 18 Sep 2021 11:15 AM PDT I had an earlier post about $bigboss and email. I have a few stories about this person, not all are strictly technical so I'm not sure if the fall within the thread moderator rules. This one is, I'm pretty sure. At this point $bigboss had rotated out of the Dept Chairperson role, but was still on the faculty and recognized as a "high maintenance" user. He would rarely submit tickets, he'd either email me directly, call me, or show up in my office wanting help NOW. This time, he emailed. Basically he said his laptop was running slow and he was worried something was wrong with it. Could I come by and look? We didn't actually care about ticket metrics at this point, a lot of requests were generated in a similar way it was mostly ok. I replied that I'd be happy to look, when would a good time be? He was in his office right now so . . . I popped down the hall to see him. He had his laptop, a Powerbook, sitting on his desk, and starts showing me, at warp speed, what the problem is. He's clicking his mouse every two seconds flipping from window to window, app to app, and saying "see? see? its slow! There is some lag while he indulging in this clicking frenzy, the screen is refreshing so fast I can't follow what he's doing. I take a deep breathe, can I try a few things? He lets go of the mouse and I start slowly clicking through all the things he has open. There's a ton. Several browser windows, Office, text window, pdf viewer, and then I hit something I've never seen before, its a window with a bunch of graphs that seems to be constantly refreshing, like its streaming. What's this? Its a program that shows him real time stock pricing info, he uses it for day trading. I start looking at the resources being used using the regular old system monitor stuff from Apple. The machine has the minimal memory offered and he's using it all. I'm guessing there's some swapping going on as he feverishly clicks around. Plus this streaming is a memory hog according to the monitor. When did this slowness start, last week. By chance is that when he installed the streaming price thing? No, wait, yes, er, maybe? I explain he probably needs to upgrade memory but it may be easier to just get a new laptop. I know for a fact that he has lots of funding from various grants, but he is also VERY cheap. He says the laptop isn't that old, he shouldn't have to replace it. How old is it? A year, maybe two. I'm looking at it and thinking no way. I click on the "About this Mac" tab, its over 4 years old. He doesn't believe it. I'm telling him I could look it up the property database and find out when it was purchased but that's beside the point, doesn't he want a faster machine? We should order one with the memory maxed out. Yes, I'll be happy to get him a quote. I get him a quote and we go back and forth about much it costs. We buy a lot of Apple stuff they should give us a better price. They already do, it called Education pricing, and no, our Department is way too small of a customer to get better pricing. He's kind of sulky but finally agrees to what I've proposed. For context, most users would send me a completed config for a laptop and I would just get it ordered. Anyway, I got his new laptop and install all the stuff he wanted, bunch of stuff from macports, and migrated his various files (yes, most users could do this themselves). And he had to install his magic stock pricing thing since was clearly not related to University business. At the end of day it was kind of frustrating since the original problem was caused by his "incidental use", and all the angst about buying a new laptop when he had plenty of money to buy one and he used it a zillion hours a day. But I realized that if the University wanted to pay me to listen to folks whine about how expensive computers are, that's OK, it was clear my time was considered "free". [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Sep 2021 08:34 AM PDT Hey everyone, you might have read my prior stories about my work in tech support/administration of payment processing systems for the Petrol industry: But this story is from a much older employer, my first real tech job right out of college, and it was.. a shitshow. I was a frontline T1 tech for a major cellphone provider who starts with a V, and my job was.. not as techy as I liked. Half of my calls ended up being about fixing people's bills because their kid downloaded a bunch of ringtones or something, because management decided they wanted to take some pressure off of the backs of the customer service department. My team was made up of people from techy backgrounds, long time call center dwellers, and a couple of stoners that got transferred from the mail room. Our boss was a coke addict who came from the world of AOL Retention and at his last job he had been sent to India to train his replacements, so he alternated between not giving a shit and intensely focusing on your every move, depending on where he was in the day. I had been in training with another tech who we'll call Randal, and Randal was a chronic fuckup with poor impulse control. It had come out that I'm queer shortly in the middle of training (a vastly different story to be told) and he had spent weeks trying to fuck with me while sending me very different signals, so I was pretty pissed when he ended up on my team, but as a year passed we kind of had to work together and put that behind us. Since we were the first team to hit the call floor, we ended up kind of being the de-facto veterans and mentors when new reps joined us and our boss promoted us both into assistant lead roles where we spent half of our days mentoring new team members and the other half killing the call queue in the early evening when it blew up because people got off of work. That's when Randal got too big for his britches. He had always been a lowkey shit stain on the department, and was involved in things like spreading rumors, blatantly hitting on new hires, and general shittery. Our story really starts with the fact that something that I always hated at that job was that we couldn't lock our computers, IT had disallowed it for.. some reason? So it started that when I went for lunch, I'd come back, almost every day, and find my own personal account open on my PC, and Randal sneering or smirking at me. I sent my boss an email, every damn time that it happened, because even opening your own account was a fireable offense, and every few months someone would get walked out for doing it, because our department just wasn't.. the brightest. And then I got sick, some bug caught me unaware and I left early one day without logging out, because I was super feverish and ended up in bed for six days straight. I had the sick time, and doctors notes, so it wasn't a big deal upon my return except that: And that, my first day back from being sick, was when the company internal fraud/compliance auditors showed up. I watched dozens of people get marched off of the call floor, into the conference room they had set up in, while their manager would box up their belongings, and get walked out. I asked my boss what was going on and he was like "Eh, bunch of people have been paying their own bills with self-given credits, no biggie. Call queues will suck for a bit until we can hire new people though. I just kept working on finding my belongings and getting my PC operational again, I was back up by the time they came for me, but none of my belongings could be found. I ended up, naturally, joining the auditors with my boss. They had a printout of all of the 'fingerprints' of me touching my own account, and apparently I had noted down a "Decided to log in and view my balance -Jackalfeed Lastname" on the day I got sick, like an hour after I had left. They started asking me questions like "Do you know what you were doing?" I turned to my boss and asked him to print out my shift schedule for the last three months, my clock ins and outs, and every email I had sent him, because the only emails I ever sent him were about the exact shit I was in the room for. The auditors were looking at me like I was crazy, but waited. My boss dipped out and then came back about 20 minutes later with all of the printouts, and I handed it to them, and was like "Here, these prove I wasn't in the building for any of the times my account was touched by me. If you want someone, talk to Randal." My boss pipes up, "He's next." I go back to my desk with a tenuous "We'll get back to you" from the auditors and Randal goes into the room, and I can't help but grin savagely as my boss headed to his desk with a cardboard box. In the end, I was saved from termination for fraud, but.. my job was never the same. I was suspended for two weeks without pay while they "investigated" my work, and eventually returned to work, but we were down some eighteen employees and our team was absorbed into another, and our boss dipped to a new position at our office across town. Within four months the department was moved off-shore, and I ended up shuffled into a project that served only a single county and never got any calls coming in, and eventually got fired for attendance because I didn't like going into a job without any.. job to do. I ran into Randal about two years ago and he was a sales clerk at the video game counter at a local used book store, and he immediately greeted me like an old friend and asked me if he could score some ritalin from me. Some fucking people, right? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Sep 2021 04:31 AM PDT I'm going to assume tech support can include help for Broadband/Phone services. So I have far too many of this type of event happen to not have it kept anonymous…sometimes it's a daily event. Anyway, I work for a UK Telecomms company (we come fix your phone and/or broadband services). Generally speaking we're the last resort after you've spent upwards of an hour with an Indian call centre (or the Yorkshire one). This particular lady lives in the South Welsh valleys. I receive the appointment info and ring ahead to inform her I'm on the way. When I ask what's the nature of the problem, hoping for a couple of symptoms to narrow it down to 'Broadband' or 'WiFi' fault, she responds "it doesn't work". No, she can't be anymore specific and she'll show me in 30mins. She's had to go through various checks to get an appt, let alone an engineer through the door, due to covid restrictions on 'total loss of service'. I run a quick SMS based test which reports back that all is OK. 🤷🏻♂️ I'm on site, her "it stopped 4 days ago, it doesn't work". Me "What doesn't work???" Her "Netflix, it doesn't work on the TV" as she tries to hand me the remote. My internal monologue runs somewhere along the lines of "Are you kidding me! We're in a pandemic, I have to wear gloves and a mask and wipe down everything I touch and you can't get Netflix working?! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Sep 2021 12:15 AM PDT This post was written while sitting in a relaxed pose at the desk so apologies for typos, jargon and lack of reference to llamas. We look after several customers and a view of them are on VMWare Horizon and using virtual desktops. One of these lost a staff member and borrowed one from another division for half a day a week to help out. I shall name this borrowed staff member "Pandora". The staff member who left shall not be named as they are irrelevant to the story. So that's the sitch - Friday morning till midday , Pandora goes to the other desk, logs on as the other user (its a generic login anyway) on the physical PC and then logs on to the VM. Cue the phone call to us as , horror of horrors, the "text for the pictures has changed" and Pandora wants to make sure she has not been hacked. To be clear, the text has not changed - the size of the text has changed. Before you reach for the Wireshark and router logs or even check under her keyboard for the post note with faded password to determine the source of the hack, the Friday morning PC has a 19" monitor. Still at 1920x1080 but 19 imperial inches. On Thursday night, she left a 23" monitor. Kudos to her, she can see the difference in icon size between a 19" and 23" screen but cannot see that one is a larger screen. The IT version of cannot see the forest for the trees - cannot see the bezel for the pixels or something. That needs work. Ignore that attempt at metaphor, its silly. We get through the explanation and the call is done. At midday, Pandora goes to lunch and returns to her regular desk on her regular desktop and regular login on her regular VM. Cue the call that the (join with me here intuitive readers) "text for the pictures has changed" , but now they have gone large! Probably 15% larger or there about. Please note, this is not a story bagging the woman for calling up on 2 occasions - this is every Friday. There are other calls that will be recieved form Pandora during the week, but those two on Friday are clockwork. The division where Pandora helps has just hired a new person to sit at that desk so Pandora does not need to go there on Fridays now. Its quite possible that there will be new frustrating calls from the new person but at least I will not have to give geometry lessons every Friday any more. [link] [comments]  |
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