The Previous Technician Knew What They Were Doing Tech Support |
| The Previous Technician Knew What They Were Doing Posted: 02 Oct 2021 11:25 AM PDT I was working help desk as a Tier 1 technician, and I was working from home because of the pandemic. I was employed at a managed services provider that had multiple clients across various industries. For some clients, when their users called in, I was a glorified ticket maker, and for others I followed a simple checklist providing basic trouble shooting steps. As for our major clients, I followed an extensive list. That usually involved holding their user's hand through step-by-step instruction document or walking them through hardware checks. Frequently, I would remote in to check/fix various settings, collect logs/screenshots, contact vendors, and running scripts, patches, etc. Slap a bandaid on it to get the system and/or the person working. That was our supreme goal. Otherwise, the issue(s) are escalated to Tier 2 which was the client's corporate/internal IT. Overall, this was not very fulfilling because I always wanted to do more and spend more time on things. However, at least I got a lot of exposure as well as strengthened - and sometimes flexed - my customer service skills. Anyways, the other techs and I would often reminisce on what collective trope a major client's users were spitting at us. Generally, they said these things out of spite. One that we frequently suffered, when informing users the issue had to be escalated, they would exclaim, "The previous technician knew what they were doing." Followed by some flavor of "How come they were able to fix this but not you?" "Can I talk to the previous technician?" "I want to talk to your boss." And so... much.... more... For your context, at the time of the story, I had been at this organization for about a year, and well acquanted with much of everything. Things clicked and I was in my stride. Irate, insulting, and incorrigible callers no longer negatively affected my mood or energy. I was a zen professional. So I was at the tail end of my shift, sometime in the evening, when a user called in about some issue. A polite, elderly genetleman who had troubles with some of the company's proprietary software. After remoting in and investigating, it appeared to be something I had dealt with before, but whatever the case, I had to soldier on. Within the realm of what I was allowed to do, I exhausted all efforts. I let the user know I had to escalate the issue to Tier 2. Unsurprisingly, the user started to berate me, "The previous technician knew what they were doing." Then followed up about how they talked to a technician several hours ago that was an expert and quickly resolved their earlier issues. My eyes widened as I recognized I had talked this user earlier. I checked the call history, and I was the only other person they spoke with that day. I felt a rush of excitement, but I quickly contained myself. I verbally acknowledged and let the user elaborate. It was back and forth scorning me and praising the previous technician. They condemned me further going so far as to accuse me of being new. All the while, unbeknowst to the user praising me, stating the previous technician demonstrated expert skills and was knowledgeable in all things IT and customer service. The user's insolence probably took up a good five minutes. Plenty of rope had been laid out at this point. I think there was a brief moment of silence indicating the user had ran out of gas. I was a rock dropped in water. I can imagine the ripples of emotion develop on his face as I listened with glee the audible stammers and fumbling of words over the phone and his wife's sudden outburst of laughing as I responded, "Sir, that previous technician was me." There was another weak and helpless attempt or two to deflect. I quickly affirmed that I was the previous technician going into further details of our earlier encounter. Then once again informed them I was escalating the issue to Tier 2. The user meekly uttered an okay and hung up the phone. [link] [comments]  |
| Red wire, black wire, white wire…. Oops Posted: 02 Oct 2021 06:49 AM PDT A friend of a friend (long story) had a skee ball game they wanted me to try fixing for them. It was one of the first to have circuit boards, so I didn't really know what to expect. However, there is good news: schematics are available. The bad news is that the wiring to the bottom half is somewhat butchered and some of the connectors are cracked and would need replacement. After replacing the damaged power cord, I plugged it in and it appears that the motherboard at least boots up. The screen animates in what I call a "zeroing around" pattern. I can see missing segments but that may be an easy thing to fix: These older machines actually used incandescent bulbs behind the segments. But first, I need to find the wires for the coin switch, and see if the logic responds to that and starts the game. On the schematic, I find that the coin switches go to the 3 pin connector that has the color code, white, red and black. No problem! I find a handy little wire, and stick it between the red and black wires, and POP! The machine looses power. Watt? Well, darn. I guess I blew the fuse. So I take the fuse out and FSCK! The fuse is intact! Now I'm really getting that sinking feeling that I just made a very expensive and embarrassing mistake. The lights in the room are still on, so I don't think the fuse in the house blew, because most houses have the outlets and lights in a given room on the same circuit. However, where does this extension cord go, exactly? I follow it to a power strip… which is receiving no power even though the switch is on. I follow that to the outlet, and you guessed it, the GFCI has turned off. I press reset and HALLELUJAH! The game comes back on, completely unharmed! In the manufacturer's defense, the 2 connectors are far enough away from each other that the wires for the "wrong" one would be too short to actually plug them in together. So in the end this was really my fault for not reading the entire schematic (or indeed, the entire PAGE of said schematic) before I started crossing wires! There had been times in the past where I had gone down the rabbit hole of tracing out every single line and trying to understand what everything meant, thus tripling the time it took me to repair something because I didn't see the forest through the trees (e.g. missing a broken solder connection or obviously burned out transistor, connector that works if you push on it, or whatever) so that is why I jumped at the opportunity to just say "Okay, I found what I'm looking for, let's try this!" By the way, if the title sounds familiar, it is a paraphrasing of a kid's book my Mom used to read me, where it would say something like "red socks blue socks white socks" and then "oops" with a picture of, for example, someone putting the socks on their hands instead of their feet, putting their shirt on backwards, or whatever. TL;DR: Read the entire schematic first, or trace the wire all the way to the source! Otherwise, you might fry the machine or worse, yourself! [link] [comments]  |
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