When sleazy salesmen and cloud apps collide Tech Support |
| When sleazy salesmen and cloud apps collide Posted: 30 Nov 2021 04:48 PM PST Cast your eyes back a few (or more) years back to the time that cloud apps were the shiny new hotness. If you didn't have them, your company was a relic of the stone age, and could no longer sit at the cool kids table... Lol, some people actually believed that dribble including our Chief Sales Officer (CSO). He'd seen an advert on the back of an in-flight magazine for this cloud app and instantly knew this was our ticket into the new age of business, exploding sales, stonks memes, and fat bonuses. And so he did what any reasonable person would do... Have a chat with the Head of IT (me) about this awesome new application. Lol, wishful thinking. But he did organise a demo of the software with the C-suite and senior management team. At least that's something, right? Some time later, we trundle into a conference room with our sleazy sales guy, and our cloud app's sleazy sales guy for this demo. Through the demo, the Ops Manager leans over and whispers "This looks like MS Excel".. I nodded, not wishing to miss the good stuff. After the demo, nobody is especially impressed, except for our CSO. We just saw a half-developed online spreadsheet with some fancy graphics. But we're not finished yet, it's the CSO's turn to sell it, and we spend the next half hour being entertained by all the business applications he's got lined up for it. It's going to create a collaborative workforce, it's going to foster information sharing, it's going to enforce single-source-of-truth, it's going to streamline business processes, it's going to be available any-time and any-where, their support team can remotely help, and it's going to replace MS Excel. That's when the mic dropped. See, none of the department heads really cared until it impacted them directly. They all use Excel extensively, and what they heard was we were going to take it away and replace it with something shittier. "Can we import our Excel files?" "Can we link sheets?" "Can we filter xyz", "Can we, can we, can we" and so on.. And the answer was nearly always "No, but that feature is on our roadmap". Until this point, I had been quiet.. I'm a grizzled old IT manager.. I've been through this, and seen how it plays out, and it was my turn to put the final nail in the coffin: "So if this is cloud based, where is it hosted?" "Singapore", the cloud sales guy replied. "CSO, you do realise that a majority of the data you're proposing to host is controlled under license that doesn't allow for 3rd party access, and especially exporting from our country?" It's a rhetorical question of course, the discussion is over, and I'm closing my notebook and getting ready to leave. I've wasted enough time on this. CEO starts to thank everybody for their time, we're not going to buy the software. "We've already bought the software, this is the project kick-off meeting" *Mic drop* To be fair, my stunned goldfish expression is simply because the grizzled IT manager who's seen it all, has in fact, not seen it all. Cutting to the chase, our company of 200 factory workers and 70 engineers / office workers / etc now had a subscription to 500 seats of this spreadsheet software. Why 500? That's the minimum commitment.. Apparently.. The annual cost of this license was about the same as buying Office Pro for every employee, 3 times over. Every year. And because it was a "professional service", not "software", the purchase wasn't flagged for IT review. Where did this money come from though? It was reallocated from a HR software project that we were going to commence in a few months time, a headcount reduction (because "improved efficiency"), with the remaining supposed to come from cancelling various MS software maintenance contracts that we obviously didn't need anymore (hint: Office was a perpetual license without any SA). I'm still goldfishing, Finance manager is having a heart attack, HR manager is having conniptions, and the CEO is looking like an axe murderer. But, as it turns out, we had the software. None of the managers wanted anything to do with it.. They were still very attached to Excel and weren't going to volunteer to give it up. It was the HR manager who was voluntold - after all, her software project was now off the cards. But never fear, our cloud spreadsheet friend has personally guaranteed that his software will do the job.. All we needed to do was engage his recommended 3rd party delivery consultant and they would spec up and quote for the design and implementation work. And that was our 3rd drop of the afternoon. So how did this all pan out?
Reliving that has given me heartburn... Enjoy. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2021 05:18 AM PST
I'm startled away from my morning ritual of coffee and
Ooooook, helpful... So i pop down to the user's office and investigate the issue first-hand.
Feck. I unplug the monitor and cabling, and haul this poor old laptop back to the office to reseat the M.2 drive. I pull it open, clean ou the cat hair, and take the M.2 drive out. I rub the contacts with our fibreglass pen, and wet the contacts with some isopropyl, and insert/remove it a few times from the M.2 socket. It feels a bit loose, weird... I slap the back panel back on it, just to stop unwanted shorts, and power it back on.
Double Feck Oh well, time to file a ticket with Smell customer support! A few hours later... An email arrives from Smell Tech Support. Oh goody, a bunch of troubleshooting steps i've already done.... I start composing the slightly agitated email...
Wait, hang on, i haven't tried that. There's another one waiting for service in the office, i better just try it and see if we can isolate the fault to the SSD or the motherboard... So i crack open the other one, swap over the known good SSD into the faulty machine, pop the back back on and power up
Cool, it's the motherboard. Probably explains why the SSD feels kind of loose. Lets just try the SSD from the faulty machine in the good machine
Huh, must have fried the SSD too. Weird that this one also feels kind of loose though... Lets pop the SSD's back into their respective machines...
Triple feck. Have i just killed another machine? I take the SSD back out of the good machine, wipe it and reseat it. Wait, that's not in the M.2 slot, that's kind of jammed under the mainboard.... No... it can't be... Surely it's not that simple... I crack open the faulty machine and verify my theory. Yup, i'm an idiot. I reseat the M.2 drive into the M.2 slot, instead of jammed higgledy piggledy under the motherboard, pop the back panels back on both the machines, and take them for a test toast. They both boot without issue. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2021 09:00 AM PST Just a couple stories to help my fellow trench workers smile today. Story One: This morning the bosses wife couldn't log into the system. Her password kept locking her out. After resetting the lockout and password several times I was ordered to make the drive and see why she couldn't get in. First things first I tell her not to keep trying until I get there (15 minutes out). She does and locks her account again. Once again I unlock her account then stand behind her telling her to try again. After watching her I reach over turn on NUMLOCK. Works the second time. Story Two: This case was ongoing. It literally has taken me weeks to figure it out. Accountant's computer shuts off then restarts while working. I check and see no reason it is being shut down. Swap out her workstation after running several tests and it is fine for a week. Then it happens to the new workstation. Thinking it must be environment I test the outlet and replace the power strip (outlets for computers are on battery backup). System seems to be fine for a few days then it happens again. This time I ran a cord to another outlet with a battery backup just to see if the outlet was acting up. It wasn't until multiple fails I figured out the problem. During wet cold weather the accountant wore boots to work. Once at her desk she would take off her boots. Occasionally she would run her toes over the power strip pressing the reset button. [link] [comments] |
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