Watching a human buffer Tech Support |
| Posted: 01 Nov 2021 03:38 PM PDT I work as a student assistant at a University, where I attend the third and last year of Computer Engineering. I work as a helper in the second year Networking class, helping students to follow labs and set up services like simple web/mail servers. The students throughout the semester are to complete a set of labs that prepare them for two projects. One small project to prepare them for their second, and more extensive project, which is their exam. The labs consists of a walk-through part first, making the students set up the given service that the lab entails, followed up by questions. These questions would be anything from "Describe how this works", to change the configuration of what you have just set up to achieve "THIS" result. As the labs gets more advanced one could still follow them to a tee, to complete the initial setup, but the questions would eventually get more to the point of having to google, how to do certain things. As these are second year students one would expect at least a rather basic IT comprehension at this point, and they should be familiar with basic Linux commands and terminal usage. Some students in their year obviously aren't where their progression in their degree suggests. I have been a helper in other/previous classes too; like intro to Linux, and object oriented programming, so I know to a certain degree which are the stronger and weaker students of the bunch. Of the lesser end of the bunch are a few that stand a bit out... like this one. (The lab environment is in CentOS 7, which uses systemd, so the accompanying commands are used) M = me & ST = student ST had a habit of sitting at the lab computer and waiting until I made eye contact, where they would then raise their hand to ask a question. They would only try a command once, and then figure they are either stuck, or progress the lab not caring about the fact that a service isn't running, and then getting more stuck later. Meanwhile sitting and staring at their screen, they would not make any effort to reading the lab instructions again or googling the errors that might be appearing. I would always find this a bit fascinating as the first interaction between us, every single time I got up to ST would be something along the lines of: M: "What seems to be the problem?" As I look at the terminal window to see if I can immediately identify the problem ST: "Well I changed this* in the config file, and tried the restart command, and it won't start" *Points to the lab instructions, where one could input exactly what it says into the config file, and the service would work. M: "Okay, have you looked at the status, which it says right there*?" *Points to the terminal output telling the user what troubleshooting steps they could do on their own. This is where the now famous, among the student assistants, "Buffer" comes along. Any time me or the other helper would get to this stage of the conversation, it would be like watching literal gears grinding in their head as they were trying to kick-start their thought process, to figure out what to do next. The answer would always be "No, I haven't looked at that" - "No, I haven't googled that" - "No, I haven't tried to follow the labs instructions again" But before every single one of these types of responses I would, in awe, watch as this person spent a total of 5 to 10 seconds sit in complete silence, trying to figure out what to do with the words that just came hurtling in their direction. Often times the questions ST had would be of the kind that could be solved by going back into the config file and double checking syntax, or seeing what systemd would output to logs. But time and time again ST would insist on sitting in silence, until making eye contact.. for me to then have to watch as my request for a command or a google search churned away in their head, and them figuring out or being told, their simple mistake. Yet every single time ST got stuck, I would have to walk over to them. Ask them if they googled it, or ran the command that is currently being displayed in their terminal.. only to watch them sit for an eventual alarming amount of time in silence, processing what I had just said. It could be something as simple as: M: "Now, please write 'journalctl -xn' and let's see what the output is" *Proceeds to wait 5 seconds for them to process* ST: "What command to you mean?" M: "The one that is being displayed right there, that we have used before to check what's wrong" Getting a bit frustrated at this point as we are several labs in and has used the same command multiple times before, even a couple today already. ST: Wait for another 5-10 seconds and then proceeds to type in the command. M: "Okay, we can see there is an error in that file.. so could you please cat that for me?" * .... [for about 5-10 seconds]* ST: "What do you mean cat, what file?" M: "The cat command, we have used several times before to check the contents of a specific file.." "I'm talking about the file being marked as having errors in the logs we are currently looking at" *Points to the file being marked with errors* * .... * (You know the drill at this point) ST: Writes the command, sees the content of the file. At which point I would either point out a syntax error, or I would let them figure it out on their own, and come back later when they inevitably haven't done anything to figure out their own mistake. This would be and currently still is with their projects being worked on, be a reoccurring segment of my day. This has of course only gotten worse as the projects doesn't have any instructions only a requirement for what needs to be set up, but it is completely based on everything the students should have learned in their labs already. Technically one could follow the walk-through of each lab, replacing the contents of config files with the requirements of the projects.. and be all set up... but this is not something that is easily understood by ST At times I have theorized that ST is actually a Humanoid Android, that is built to learn about technology like a human.. only the processing unit the creators used is vastly under-performing for the use case. Whenever I help ST still to this day I can't help but being a bit fascinated, and also get my tinfoil hat out. TLDR; Student attending a Computer Engineering degree, has a literal process loading timer. And may or may not be an android. Edit: Spelling [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Nov 2021 07:15 PM PDT Waaaaay back in the late 90's I was the manager of a support and Help-Desk group. I'd come up through the ranks, so I was (and am) sensitive to the misery of supporting difficult people. Even as far back as the time of this story, I hated fax machines. Every single tiny little organization in the company seemed able to demand that my group buy and maintain these stupid, fiddly things. As my hatred of them grew, I'd walk around and see them everywhere. It was a nightmare for me. So, I worked with my boss and got approval for a skunk-works project to use fax capture cards and turn the incoming faxes into TIFF images and forward them as email attachments to the recipient. The project worked, and we scaled up the hardware until we had a box that had sixteen cards in it. We were able to eliminate all the fax machines in the company with this approach, and best of all each person in the company could have their own personal fax number. We could do this because we had a huge block of unused inbound DID numbers that terminated on our Centrex. After approximately nine hundred million emails to the entire company and several training sessions (that mostly consisted of 'open your email from INBOUND-FAX-xxxx' and you will see your inbound fax' repeated over and over again), we cut over to the new system. People got new business cards hand delivered to their desks, and all was well. Except for terribly-minor-executive-X in legal (TMEX). This person was apparently having a really, really difficult issue with the new system. He called into the help desk and informed them that he was unable to receive faxes, and that since he was an incredibly important person, he would simply continue to use the old mechanical machine. This was fine, and this situation lasted about a year. After a year or so, the maintenance contract on the old fax machine expired and my boss told me not to renew it. So, we sent an email to TMEX informing him that the old machine would be retired, and that since *hundreds\* of people had been successfully using the new system, we expected that whatever issue he had would no longer be an issue. And so, we disconnected the machine and rolled it away. Everywhere I looked, no fax machines. It was good! Immediately on Monday we get a call from TMEX. TMEX "I have missed hundreds of pages of faxes!" Help Desk Person "They're on the log. Let me check something. " HDP: "Yes, they were delivered to your inbox" TMEX "No, they weren't" HDP: "Oh, let me escalate" TMEX: "This entire system is sh*t, you are sh*t, and your team is sh*t! Nothing works!" So the poor person on help desk escalated the situation to me, and I looked into it. Yes indeed, all the faxes had been delivered to his email and were sitting there unread. So I went over to see this super friendly and kind person. Me: "Hello TMEX, it's me from the help desk team, what's the problem?" He immediately begins cursing at me and blaming me for everything. HE THEN POINTS TO HIS PHYSICAL MAIL ORGANIZER WITH A SLOT ON IT LABELED "INBOX" and he yells at me. "See???? There's nothing in my inbox!!! I've missed hundreds of super, insanely, ridiculously important faxes upon which the entire fate of civilization as we know it depend, you massive idiot!!!" (only a slight exaggeration) So, I ask him to open his email. This insanely brilliant person has created a spam filter and put our fax system in it. TMEX: "I was getting too many emails! You cannot possibly expect me to look at so many emails!" So I make him a fax folder on his email client. TMEX: "But it's NOT in my inbox!" .... The solution was to have one of the poor, hapless admins get his faxes, print them out, and then physically place them in his 'inbox'. If only I could have legally resorted to violence.... [link] [comments]  |
| My monitor turned off, can you help? Posted: 01 Nov 2021 10:36 PM PDT I don't work in a tech support role, but I'm known in the office as being good with computers. My colleagues always come to me first to ask for help with tech issues, rather than logging a ticket. S comes to me and says her screen turned off, can I come have look? This has happened to a few colleagues who move their monitor and tilt them any way they can. I tell her I'm busy, but she can just unplug the power cable, and reseat it firmly. She goes away and I hear her fighting with the monitor. Another colleague goes to help but they just can't get the damn thing to work. I then stand up and walk over to them, and immediately see that her PC is off. I press the ON button and everything comes to life. She turned red from embarrassment and slunk down in her chair, but we had a good laugh about it. Her PC just switched off by itself, so I told her to log a ticket. [link] [comments]  |
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