Doctor had me fired, my company imploded Tech Support |
- Doctor had me fired, my company imploded
- Customer support 24x7 you say?
- Choosing beggar client blows up my phone 3.5 hours after the store is closed!
- sometimes it only takes one question
- That's Not A Docking Station
- Sorry, but that's not allowed. Or how a manager can be a complete jerk.
- Users NEVER forget their passwords.
- What's my voicemail password?
- "We keep putting more tasks on less people, why is our productivity falling?"
- Descriptions Are Everything
- You made it worse!
- Truncate the table in the right place
| Doctor had me fired, my company imploded Posted: 01 Dec 2021 06:19 AM PST Back in the Dark Ages, around 1993, I worked for a medical transcription firm as their SysAdmin. We were doing some cutting edge IT stuff, in getting transcriptions printed at the hospitals remotely, using print queues with the modem number hardcoded in and the system would look for queues with anything in them and dial the number if it found something in that queue. It worked really well, until it didn't. I was the only SysAdmin in this city, so I was on call 24/7/365 and was averaging 3 hours of sleep per night, when I could go home and trying to catch little catnaps here and there when I could. Anytime something would go wrong on the hospital side I would have to go to the hospital and fix it. A few months after I started the two of the VP's from Corp relocated to my city, since we were the most productive city with the highest profits. The first thing they did was come up with an excuse to fire the current director, then they took over operations themselves. Then my job went from taking care of our systems to taking care of the doctor's computers too. I did what I could, but I was also sending out resumes. Then I was told to go to a hospital and see why the printing stopped. I remember this day, I hadn't been home for two days and had been going nonstop for 18 hours. I get there, someone had unplugged the modem. I plug it back in, call comes in and jobs start printing. This doctor walks over and tells me that VP#1 told him that I would go out to his house and work on his home computer. I politely explain to the doctor that I can't do that, and that I'm heading home to get some sleep. Then I head back to the office to pickup a few things before heading home. As soon as I walk through the door I get escorted straight to the VP's Office, both VP#1, VP#2 and the Office Manager are there. They proceed to start chewing me out. I just started laughing at them. I'm the only person in a 1000 miles that knows anything about this system. They lose their temper and tell me I'm fired and am to leave immediately. I really said "Thank You." Then left. This was December 15th, my oldest son's birthday. On the way home I stop a Mom & Pop computer store where I know some of the people to drop off a resume. They tell me that they have no openings right now but will call me when they do. I talk to a couple friends while I'm there then head on home. The only thing I'm worried about is telling my gf that I got fired. I walk through the door, she's at work. I see the answering machine blinking so I hit play. Mom & Pop Computer Store, our primary Novell Engineer just quit are you still available. I call them back and let them know I'll be there tomorrow. That began a much more peaceful career, with better pay, rotating on-call and most every weekend and holiday off. BTW, The medical transcription firm imploded. The VP's were fired. They floundered for about a year and were bought up by a competing firm. [link] [comments] |
| Customer support 24x7 you say? Posted: 01 Dec 2021 01:46 PM PST Back in the late 90's I worked for a freight forwarder setting up a new office in England. I handled their cargo tracking system data, and customer support. The system used an Access Database and dialup modem to retrieve data from a Valued-Added Network provider. It was so badly written that the Database would constantly break while downloading updates and have to be repaired on my local machine. This entailed downloading the entire DB file, repairing it and uploading it again to the customer's cargo tracking PC. I had some fantastic training, including a 10 day trip to the US. Unfortunately, while I was there, a major customer (think global sports apparel brand) had a major data issue, that I 'had' to correct (according to my boss). I could not connect to their database from the freight forwarder's office as they had a new digital telephone network, so I had to do it via the Hotel's analog telephone. It was urgent, and I had to do it over the weekend from Seattle. Downloading, repairing and reuploading the Database took from Friday evening to Sunday evening, allowing them to only lose Friday afternoon in the UK. I thought this was great customer service on my part, despite the challenges. It was painfully slow as at that time I was using the latest 48k baud modem. And I was literally connected for 35-40 hours! My boss chewed me out when I put in my travel expenses and the Hotel telephone bill was £4000……… He was just a Sales Manager so completely clueless on any of my processes and what I had to do to support his customers. I thought I'd saved the day, and he was angry! He was even more angry when I quit some months later to become an IT Manager. Such is life 🙂 [link] [comments] |
| Choosing beggar client blows up my phone 3.5 hours after the store is closed! Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:06 AM PST I run a small repair shop in the middle of nowhere. I had a client wait until 8:30PM last night to text me... 3.5 hours after store hours. It ended up in a stupid argument because she doesn't like the answer I gave her and wants free work or free phone tech support and I said no and finally blocked her number. For even more context this computer came in unable to boot. Hard drive was dead. She donated the PC to me so she wouldn't have to pay the 50 dollar bench fee since she said 150 was too much for a new SSD + Windows 10 install (which was me cutting her a 50 dollar break since I usually charge 200 for that) So I kept it for about a week before she called me 4x asking for free tech support on how to get a new PC before finally wanting the donated one back which I gave back to her when she paid the $150. Then last night she blew up my phone again... at 8:30 PM... This is how the argument went. Her: Why is this email on my login screen? Me: Because windows 10 requires an email. Her: Well what if I wanna sell it? How do I get it off? Me: You don't. You have to reset it. Her: How do I do that? Me: You figure it out or give me $100 and i'll do it for you. Her: Well... my printer doesn't work. It used to work before you had it. (classic line; always the printer doesn't work and you need to fix it for free!) Me: How old is the printer? Her: 2007 (a lie) Me: Send me a picture of the error Her: *error says the printer isn't compatible, it's too old, supported up until Windows 7* Me: Explains the error and gives her some fast solutions out of kindness. Same error message with 3 different approaches. Tell her to buy a new printer. Her: Well it used to work. Me: It would cost more for me to drive to your house to fix it. It's $150 for a house call for that and more if you need more stuff done. Her: Well I don't have a lot of money. Me: The price is the same for everyone. Her: Well how do I get my email off the login thing? Can I call you? Me: It's 930PM... I don't do over the phone tech support. You can have me fix it in shop for 100, on site for 150, those are your options. Thanks. Her: Keeps saying the same shit. Me: I am sorry you are having this difficulty but those are your options. Her: Well you said it would be just like I had it before (gaslighting, a lie) Me: I told you it would be as if you took it out of the package from the manufacturer.. (same thing I tell everyone) Her: *more whining about the same issue at the top of this page expecting a diff answer* Me: *blocks her number* I told this woman the previous day the shop closes at 5PM... we don't do phone support. She's already hassled me more than once trying to get out of paying her previous bills with sob stories and bullshit. [link] [comments] |
| sometimes it only takes one question Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:52 AM PST Another story from my university sysadmin days. Our cast of characters: Me: department level sysadmin with many unhappy professors A: my coworker who had all the same problems I had Dean J: Dean of the College that my department and A's department were in B: Interim CIO for the University G: Director of Networking for the University I worked at a university back in the early 2000s as a sysadmin for a computer intensive research department. Most of the users on campus were supported by a separate IT organization that had fairly severe budget and expertise problems. Some of the folks were great, some were not. These folks were having real issues keeping us connected to the outside world. Bandwidth was low, security was bad, infrastructure was poor, all around not a good situation. "A" was a sysadmin in a similar department who had all the same headaches as me, mainly professors continually complaining about poor connectivity, things like they couldn't reach outside sources reliably from their offices, and could not reach their department research systems from home. These folks tended to work any and all hours so this was very important. Anyway, I spent a fair amount of time opening tickets with the IT guys on network issues, as did A. It was super frustrating since it was clear that the IT guys were caught in an endless loop of fire fighting and basically never got ahead. Finally A got so fed up he asked his Head of Department for permission to ask our Dean to ask for a meeting with IT management. He asked if I wanted to join in and I didn't even ask my boss for permission, I just said, "you bet!". So A and I go to the Dean's main assistant, a lady we had worked with a long time and was a whiz at getting things done. She got Dean J on board, he was getting all the gripes from professors just like we were, and we got the meeting scheduled. The big day arrived and we all sit down in Dean J's conference room. Dean J is at the head of the table, B and G are on one side and A and I are on the other. B and G start off admitting to all the problems, telling us how they inherited things from previous managers (not quite true since both of them are old timers in IT management). And finally they start to lay out all their plans for future. There's a plan to replace outdated network equipment (it was scary, some building were operating on 10M shared environments). They were going to spin up a NOC, implement collecting network metrics (something A and I were already doing for our shops). Implement improved IDS systems, all music to everyone's ears. But there's a problem. A and I having been hearing this for YEARS. And nothing ever happens. Or its tried and makes things worse. A and I are exchanging glances knowing that these guys are just telling us what they know we want to hear. There are no actual milestones quoted, its all pie-in-the-sky BS. I'm worried that Dean J is going to buy this load of manure but no, he's not a Dean for nothing. Dean J has been sitting listening politely, asking very few questions, with a small notepad in front of him, and he's been twirling a pencil around, not actually writing anything down. B and G are really talking up the NOC, its going to solve so many problems once its up and running, Dean J positions his pencil over the notepad and asks, "And when will the NOC be operational?" B and G start squirming in their seats. "Well, you know, hard to say, depends on this or that". And we get a bunch of double talk about how they can't really say when, "security is hard". A and I are about leaping out of our seats watching these guys twist and turn. Dean J is just sitting, still holding his pencil, waiting for them to give him some hard dates. B and G are exchanging looks, some mumbled "what do you think?" back and forth, floundering like a fish on a dock. Finally they come up with "Spring Semester". I can't resist and innocently ask, "of what year?". [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 01 Dec 2021 12:43 AM PST I work at an MSP and early on in the pandemic most of our clients were still working to transition to remote work, so there was a lot of calls regarding setting up docking stations, external monitors, etc. One particular call came from a very nice, but notoriously clueless user, "Abby". Abby had been promised a new docking station from the CCO and was calling to get that set up. Abby: "Hi, I got this new dock from the office today but I don't see where my laptop is supposed to plug into it?" Me: "Okay, well there should be either a TB or USB-C cable on the dock that you should he able to plug in, do you see that?" Abby: "No, it just looks like there's a bunch of ports on the back, which one of these am I supposed to plug into?" At this point I know something's definitely not right. Me: "Abby, Can you tell me what the model number on the dock is? I need to look up what exactly you have." Abby: "The thing on the front says Optiplex 3080." ...what the fuck? Me: "Abby, how exactly did you get this 'dock' again?" Abby: "CCO had it on a desk outside his office, he told me to grab it on my way out." At this point I had to start muting myself because I was laughing so much. She'd stolen an entire desktop thinking it was a docking station! We ended up calling the CCO and explaining to him what happened, whose only reaction was to loudly shout "OH MY GOD". He'd left the dock on the same desk as the PC and (incorrectly) assumed she'd be able to tell the difference. Abby has had her fair share of goofs before and after too, but that was definitely the most amusing one. She's always at least pleasant to talk to, but as I said, definitely clueless. [link] [comments] |
| Sorry, but that's not allowed. Or how a manager can be a complete jerk. Posted: 01 Dec 2021 02:36 AM PST Normally I try to post the more funny and outlandish encounters and situations from my job. This one isn't that funny. But a part of me really needs to vent this one. For those who don't yet know. I am an application admin for an elder care facility. I managed the electronic patient dossier system including account management and the like. This morning I got a call from M. M is the manager for some of the supporting staff, mainly housekeeping and the event organizers. Middle management, she is normally not allowed access to the dossiers since she doesn't actually provide care. And the rule of thumb is 'No care no access'. M starts about how there's been an incident at one of our sites, one of our clients has theatened one of the staff. The police are involved and she'd like to have access to the medical dossier of this cliënt. This is what happened afterwards: Me: "I'm not sure I can grant you access since you don't actually provide care for this client. Plus the way our system is built would mean that I'll wind up giving you access to the files of other clients as well. I'll talk to my team lead and ask him what he thinks. Can you log a ticket in the mean time? M: "Sure but it's really urgent. The threat was very serious and there's information in that file that will help with the eviction." We break off the connection and while she logs the ticket (yes she did do that) I open a chat with my team lead and with someone from control to talk about granting acces, wether we should and what alternatives we can offer. Both control and TL are not eager to grant the requested access. TL tells me to keep to the basic principles for access (which tell me not to grant her request) Control suggest that M should talk to the cliënt's caregiver and ask for the individual relevant reports from them. Which is actually a really sensible idea. Armed with this new information and considering the urgency I decide to not react to the ticket, but immediately call M back. me: "Hi M. I've talked about your request with control and my TL. And I don't think I can grant your request. The information in a clients medical file is privileged and should only be accessed by the people who are involved with providing care for the client. Control had a good suggestion to contact the clients primary caregiver and ask for the relevant reports from her." M: "I think that's very strange. My subordinates the event organizers have access to those files. So why can't I have access?" Me: "Your subordinates have access because they're required to report on the clients behaviour during activities that they oversee. But you don't organize or oversee events like that." M: "So I have to call the primary caregiver on her day off to get her to make a printout of those documents?" Me: "No there's other people in her team. You can call one of the head nurses as well if you don't want to bother the primarycaregiver on her day off." M: "I still think I should have access! Now I have to get all this stuff printed out. That's not safe either!" Me: "No, the nurse or caregivers can send you the information through $securesystem that's in place for things like this." M: "This is crazy. I am the manager for these people and they do have access to the files! Why won't you give me access?!" Me: "I'm not allowed to give you access. Even if you're their manager. I'm sorry but I strongly believe it goes against the privacy regulations of our client to give you access. You don't need to see their medical information. It's my job to be the gatekeeper here and I can't give you access." At this point I'm pretty exhasparated. I cut some bits out but we'd been going in circles for a while already. M: "Well fine! I'll go ask someone for access. But that means the police will not be able to do anything!" Upon which she hangs up on me. I'm really frustrated, especially by that last sentence. It feels a lot like she is trying to blackmail and/or blame me for any undesired outcome in the case. I called my TM after she hung up on me and he has my back. After I've calmed down a little more I'm going to follow the CYA protocol and document the shit out of this. I'm also considering mentioning this to HR. [link] [comments] |
| Users NEVER forget their passwords. Posted: 01 Dec 2021 12:38 PM PST This is about a ticket I got at 9am this morning. I work for a healthcare provider, and we use a number of government websites. A manager puts in a ticket saying they're unable to log in to a website and are adamant the firewall is blocking them. I log on to the user's computer, they get to the login, screen and it throws up an incorrect password error. The user tries multiple times until they lock themselves out of the account. I walked them through how to unlock the account through the website, and then hit "forgot password". The website says the user cannot change their password because it was just changed within the last 24 hrs. Me: "Oh, did you change your password within the last 24 hours for this site?" User: "No, I changed it yesterday" Me: ".....Okay, let me clear your saved password for the website and see if we can log in" I go through the browser's settings and clear the saved password, the user then tries to log in, saving the password back to chrome and gets the same "incorrect password" error. Me: "well we can't reset the password until tomorrow, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow to log in" User: "I know I'm typing the password correctly, I just set it yesterday. I called the support line and they said it has to be our firewall or the browser that's blocking it" I then connect the user's computer to a public wifi that's not connected to our firewall, and have them try it again, and same "incorrect password" error. User: "Well they (the site's support) closed the ticket on me because they said it has to be our firewall" Me: "Well I just tried it on a completely different network, and we got the same error, so....." User: "I'M JUST GOING TO LOG IN ON MY PERSONAL COMPUTER FROM HOME" Me: "Okay, please let me know if you're able to log in so I can update the ticket, have a great day" [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:13 AM PST Ticket from a new division head on Monday, he can't remember his VM password. "Your VM password has been reset to the default, "#"" (solved) New ticket: I don't know my VM password. "Your VM password has been reset to the default, "#"" (solved) New ticket: I don't know my VM password. Can't you just tell me the password instead of resetting it again? New Ticket: "Your password cannot have more than two consecutive or repeating numbers as a security measure. I cannot override the security. Please try a different password." (solved) Reply to this: OK, got it, thank you. New Ticket Wednesday: I don't know my VM password. Can't you just tell me the password? HEADDESK. [link] [comments] |
| "We keep putting more tasks on less people, why is our productivity falling?" Posted: 02 Dec 2021 01:52 AM PST I used to work for a big international, lets call it a tech security firm. What we did was mostly reset passwords of users or told them how to plug in a monitor, but the company had very good marketing about how we prevent cyber attacks. Maybe we do, I never met that department if we actually provide that kind of service. I was in first level support so I only really knew about issues with day to day business. Anyways, I was learned in with 3 other people and we were supposed to do support for an international company (mostly just our country's branch, but we occasionally got international calls). We were scheduled to be learned in for 4 weeks, which managers cut down to two, and the second week was basically us doing support with a guy being around to see if we do it right. So yeah good start. So I mentioned this was an international company, so naturally us 4 new employees wouldn't be the only ones doing support for them right? No of course not, they already had a team of about 10 employees taking calls for them during the work hours who got... put to other projects I was told. Anyways, yes, this huge international company was now handled by 4 people who just got the job. I'm sure nothing can go wrong right? Fast forward one month, we got two new team members because two of the previous guys dipped, one of which I've learned got a much higher wage than us (hint: he plays league of legends for about 8 hours a day). We were told by our team leader to start filling out an excel sheet what we do each day, logging each call and bathroom break (btw we have an automated time system too - its just they wanted "more data") So we're filling out these dumb excel sheets each day and then management from higher up gave us a similar, separate sheet, also to fill out. In the mean time a senior employee was assigned to our team to help, which was really good because Mr. League of Legends had been coming to the job stoned for the past 7 days. The senior guy was really cool, he taught me a lot of valueable things, for example what my company does to stop unions and also how to find a better job given my skillset. I left at around the time where we started having daily meeting about productivity. You see, somehow our team was unable to do the caseload that the previous team handled, yet at the same time I was called into trainings to assist other customers our company had. All while filling out dumb sheets what I do all day. I had days with 3-4 hours only spent being essentially told by HR that I don't work hard enough (Read: dont do unpaid overtime). I was able to leave fairly easily (they are apparently used to rotating through staff), but I did pick up that the department supervisor was sent to vacation because he accumulated over 5000 unpaid overtime hours and because law mandated a payout soon, they forced him to take time off because they can't afford paying out that many hours. The larger company still exists, but the hiring firm and all the people I had contact with there have basically vanished from earth when I tried getting some documents from them a couple years later. Moral of the story, unions are good, business managers suck at IT and I'm now in a better place [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 01 Dec 2021 07:51 AM PST I work for a Service Desk at a very large auto insurance company (my first official role working in IT). We work with thousands of internal employees everyday and like everyone else our workload increase has been exponential during the pandemic. I enjoy the work for the most part but have had my share of headaches working in the role taking phone calls. Recently I got promoted to work in our help portal website queue where employees can provide their own help tickets for assistance with the understanding that the issues aren't urgent and will be answered in about 24-48 hours. I like not being on the phone all day anymore but I've received some of the most absurd ticket descriptions while working in this role. The web form is a small text box to provide a brief summary of the problem encountered. Yesterday we had an outage with one of our internal systems that was reported to all employees in the company. We still got a few tickets requesting help which is expected, but one ticket in particular I could not help but laugh about. Someone submitted a description where they decided to open the source code for the website that was down and decided to copy and paste all 400 lines of error code into the description. In the next ticket, someone wrote 1 single word about their problem: "website". Needless to say, these 2 employees were the last on my list of priorities since they don't follow basic instructions. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 01 Dec 2021 03:52 AM PST Many years ago, one of my first jobs in this company was to find a technical solution to a situation where technology was used wrong. A customer had a business, that had a production control and billing software run locally and as a part of wanting to exist on the internet they bought a booking service from an outside vendor. At first things were good, the orders made throught the portal came in as e-mails and they'd have someone enter them into their locally run system. But then more and more people moved onto ordering from the internet and all the sudden entering all that data turned into a never ending chore. The company owner approached us for a solution. We talked to both software vendors and I create a simple system, that fetched a comma separated text file with info on the new orders and used the production control software's API to push it in there. Magic happened: people ordered, the orders went directly into the system. Everyone was happy, the end! Wait! There's more! The system worked without a single hickup all these years, until not long ago the customer sold his business and in comes the new owner and his friend slash IT genius. Just talking 5 minutes to this IT guy made me fear for the worst and boy, did we get it. The IT guy starts drilling into what the customer has. He likes nothing of it. One thing he specially dislikes is the order portal, which he fires and makes a contract with their, worse IMO, direct competitor. He also asks for the technical details on how the system used to work and hears it uses CSV files. He makes a tirade about it being an outdated format and that something more modern needs to be used. Me and my boss both tell him no one ever sees those CSV files, they're processed automatically. No change. So the IT guy goes behind our backs and requests the new portal to send the orders daily as .xlsx files. He also dumps the middleware we made and requests a software that saves the incoming Excel files onto a network share. Since we're talking to a wall, what's requested is made. Now the employees get an Excel sheet with a lot of eye candy and the IT guy sells this to the new owner as a huge modernization. Then comes the day when it's actually switched to use over the old one and guess what! All the employees hate it, they have to type in the data manually into the production control software and a lot of the less tech-savvy employees struggle with finding the files from the network share. The friction this causes in the work force finally reaches the new owner, who contacts my employer and tells we made their systems worse, fix it! [link] [comments] |
| Truncate the table in the right place Posted: 01 Dec 2021 03:06 AM PST All developers were on the rota to work on the support desk for the software house I worked at many years ago. This one story springs to mind. A developer had a problem he couldn't reproduce on our system, and we needed to get a copy of a couple of their tables back on to our system to see if it was something environmental with the system or their data. So, the procedure was basically, truncate table locally, log on to client machine via VPN and a puTTY-esque client to both our local server and the client's machine and run a utility to pull the table contents. Except this one time, the developer forgot to truncate the table 1st so ended up with the union of our test data and the client's data. So they truncated the table and pulled the data - except they'd switched sessions to the client window so truncated this table on their live server. Daft thing was, he mis-typed the command in 2 times before he got it "right". Thankfully because he'd pulled the data locally, we were able to delete our test data from it and pull the data back in the reverse direction to recover it on the clients server. Soon after this, they put a policy in place where any support work should be done on a COPY of the live data whilst investigating any issues. Simpler times then, no firewalls, GDPR, data encryption, anonymisation. [link] [comments] |
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