Less than three is in the air Tech Support |
- Less than three is in the air
- I'm going deaf and it's your fault
- Sometimes, my users just make... sad
- Out of memory? But I only see 1GB of usage!
- The Agency: Part 4 - An Avalanche of Accountability
- Nvm, let me just make sure my warranty will be voided completely instead of listening to you
- We have people for that
- I’m not “a computer person”…
- The reoccurring dead circuit..
- I thought the computer needed to be reimaged?
- Will do it somehow, if you don't
- A sticky situation
| Posted: 03 Feb 2022 07:36 AM PST This tale takes place more than two decades ago, when the phones were still dumb and the discourse on social media was still smart. Geocities was still under construction and MySpace didn't even exist yet. I had just left my small hometown behind and started college in a big city, where I learned that there is an upper limit to how much ice cream one man should eat in one sitting and that total anonymity is not enough to escape the legacy of being "the computer guy." One night I was hanging out with a few friends, getting my ass kicked at Marvel vs Capcom by a girl whose strategy was essentially "mash ALL the buttons!" Lemme tell ya, it stings just a bit to keep losing to someone like that. Still does, in fact. Anyway, the night went on and we all started discussing our school life. It turned out the girl who'd been kicking my ass for the last hour was having computer troubles and needed to get an assignment delivered to a professor by the end of the week. "I can help with that!" I blurted out. Damn it, my cover as a normal human is blown. "Really?" she said. "That'd be great! Come fix it tomorrow afternoon and I'll send you home with some food." I had been tutoring in exchange for home-cooked meals for some time by this point. It's a great way to meet people and not starve, and most of the people I knew didn't have much cash either so everybody won. So the next day I visited her house, turned on the computer and heard an awful grinding noise from the CD burner. "Has it always been possessed?" "No, this is new." "Ah, well, it looks like you'll need a replacement." Although I don't remember why anymore, I knew she needed that drive operational ASAP so I took her down to the local computer shop. I spoke the language of IT and managed to get her a deal on a 4x burner (slaps top of box "This bad boy can burn so much data!"). Back at her place I installed the drive and saved the day, netting me a big hug and many thanks. As I was putting my screwdriver back in my bag she turned to me. "Hey, do you uh, want to go out for dinner?" To this day, there is exactly one person in this world whose computer I don't mind fixing. TL;DR: Married my client. [link] [comments] |
| I'm going deaf and it's your fault Posted: 03 Feb 2022 10:15 AM PST Not as glamorous as some of you folks, but... Scene: Tech support for cable TV/phone Year: 2010-ish
This is really just customer education. The cable box has it's own volume controls in addition to the TV's volume, so having the box set to a low volume could make it overall too quiet. Most customers aren't even aware of this since it's hidden, but somehow it gets changed every now and then. In addition, there's also the language/SAP/DVS/MTS settings that need checked, since broadcasters do all kinds of shenanigans with their broadcasts on the 2nd and up audio track that make no sense, like lowering the volume, or just muting everything but the laugh tracks, so there's nothing obvious to say that you're on the wrong audio setting either. Plus the labeling of the audio settings don't help either, having it set to Spanish, but still hear English... But in order to tell the customer how to check those, I need to pull up the account and see what equipment they have so I can give proper directions to navigate the menus.
After taking a few guesses at the spelling of the street name...
Out of curiosity, I look at the notes on the account, and see that she called 3 other times about this and hung up on all the other agents too. So I actually call the customer back. I don't even hear it ring at all. I click the dial button and suddenly hear people talking to each other? But not to me. It catches me off guard, but I assume the customer was on their way to call us back and her finger was already on the way down to open the line when it started ringing.
A few hours later she calls back again gets another agent, and says the volume on her TV is too low again, and again hangs up on the agent. A week or so passes uneventfully. She calls in again, gets routed to me again, and the call goes exactly the same, except the volume on her phone is too low this time. Again, it basically amounts to just customer education.
Again, I look at the notes and see that she started reporting the volume on her phone was too low about an hour or so ago and already talked to several agents, and big surprise, she hung up on all those agents too. TL;DR, customer going deaf, blames the technology, doesn't let anyone help her. [link] [comments] |
| Sometimes, my users just make... sad Posted: 03 Feb 2022 02:35 AM PST I work in application maintenance. My main tasks are restarting stuck processes, fixing errors in the data, and analysing errors. I work on tickets opened by the application's users. Typical stuff. One type of thing the users can ask me sometimes is to downgrade a certain type of object. Now unlike my other taks, for this one I need a special authorization, that can only be given by a small handful of people. That's because downgrading one of those objects can cut off my client's customers from the service my client provides, so someone with the necessary know-how must check if it's actually okay to do it. So this morning I get a ticket, asking me to downgrade one such object. There is an attachment to the ticket ; normally this would be the authorization I require, so I check it out. The attachment is an excel file, in which they pasted a screenshot of the text "I authorize the downgrade of the object". That's it. No name given, and the object isn't explicitely identified. Just the two sentences. I don't know if they're genuinely this incompetent, or if they thought it would fool me... I don't know which is worse, either. I just... Sometimes I can't help but feel a little sad at what I'm asked, you know? [link] [comments] |
| Out of memory? But I only see 1GB of usage! Posted: 03 Feb 2022 03:47 PM PST Hey guys, First time poster, long time lurker, my time has finally come to join you and contribute to this awesome subreddit. Introduction: I'm a technician for a hosting company, we're not exactly over-staffed so everyone does anything they're capable of, including support. So, fast forward to the story, a wild customer appears on our chat platform.
Indeed, the 10GB folder when expanded had 2 sub-folders with 500MB each, but the interface only showed FOLDERS and not FILES. Think of a folder tree when you install something in your computer.
Guys... imagine 2 folders and 10 files in a tree-like interface (or Details folder view mode for Windows users) Not the first nor the third, middle, or last file, but the second file was 8.99GB.
It was an error log file
Disclaimer 1: I'm allowed to "guide" the customer through self-help procedures without confirming his ownership or identity, as long as I'm not swamped with other important matters. If we're too busy, we can just shrug them off for not being able to authenticate into their accounts or provide the necessary info. Disclaimer 2: The chat can be accessed by non-authenticated users in case they have sales-related questions, but for technical issues we usually ask them to log into their account or submit a ticket depending on the issue. Disclaimer 3: The deletion he did was permanent, he has "Move to thrash" and "Delete" in the context menu, the latter being permanent and non-reversible. [link] [comments] |
| The Agency: Part 4 - An Avalanche of Accountability Posted: 03 Feb 2022 11:31 AM PST Hello everyone! This is the next story in the saga of my time at $Agency, wherein the laziness and incompetence of $BadMike finally catches up with him. All of this is from the best of my memory along with some personal records, but ultimately it is how I remember things. There certainly can be some inaccuracies. Also, I don't give permission for anyone else to use this. TL/DR: Yeah, I don't do that. Enjoy the story :) Again, for context, I am not in IT; rather, I'm a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professional. This particular world is quite small, so I will do what I can to properly anonymize my tale. For reference, during the course of these stories I was employed at a research agency affiliated with a major university. Here is my Dramatis Personae:
When last we left off with the main story of $Agency, we had started to see our team mature substantially as a GIS organization. $AwesomeBoss was now in charge of almost everything on the team and we'd managed to sidestep $MrScott for most of our duties. We had significantly more staff, were putting out more products, and were refining our processes. For most of the year since the fiasco with the network analysis, $BadMike had been sidelined by everyone else, mostly so that we could just get our work done. However, with GIS becoming increasingly more visible at $Agency, the powers-that-be wanted to ensure that $BadMike was justified as a compliment to the team. He was increasingly being held responsible for the quality of his work. The avalanche of accountability started out slow. Among the first events to occur in this drama happened towards the end of the calendar year. We were given a quick-turnaround project to flag a number of records based on information held in other fields. There were only a few thousand, and to a team that regularly dealt with features containing millions of records, this was no big deal. The dataset was split in half between myself and $BadMike, and we were both given half a day to add the necessary flags. I remember specifically that everything was due at 1 PM. Don't ask me how I remember that - I can't remember a single one of my high school English teachers' names. But I remember when this minor, inconsequential flagging project was due. randomshit.png I got started immediately. SQL queries, LIKE functions, sorting, that kind of thing. But as I commenced my work, I got that familiar sickening feeling that I'd wind up doing everything anyways. And I was pretty tired of that. Remember how I told everyone that $BadMike and I shared an office? I decided to do a bit of snooping while I worked. Every 15 minutes or so, I pushed my chair back, ostensibly to stretch. What I was really doing was looking at $BadMike's screen. For the entirety of the morning (when he was supposed to be working), he was doing nothing but surfing news websites. I jotted everything down in my notebook. Just after 12 PM, I noticed that he finally loaded up the actual project itself, which meant that he spent an hour, at most, doing anything on it. Once time was up, $AwesomeBoss and $MrScott came into the office to see where we were on things and reconcile the datasets. $BadMike sent his information off to everybody, including me (since I had to assemble everything together). The bosses asked if we'd had time to create all the necessary flags. $BadMike immediately popped up and said that he'd done so, listing the steps he'd taken in the process. *grinds teeth* Lying little sh\t...* Anyways, since I knew he'd almost invariably missed something, and since I'd been working on the dataset since that morning (and knew a bunch of the key words and phrases), I immediately opened his work and started some queries. What do you know? There were extensive omissions that I was able to locate immediately. Literally while he was speaking to the others saying he'd "completed" everything, I popped up and said, "Well it looks like you missed this one. And this one. And this one. And this one..." And so on and so forth, ad nauseum. The others clustered around my computer to see what was going on and $BadMike seemed to want to go into argument mode. But having the data right there was completely d*mning - any jacka$$ could just look at my screen and see the records with reserved terms that were not flagged! Both of our bosses looked irritated. They asked me to go ahead and flag everything where $BadMike hadn't. So I did. It took me until the end of the day. :/ A few days later, I was speaking to $AwesomeBoss when she brought up this project. She asked why I had gotten everything completed while $BadMike hadn't, as apparently we'd missed some deliverable because of it. My response was something like "Well, he was checking the news until about an hour before everything was due, so I assumed he probably missed something." $AwesomeBoss's eyes narrowed. She asked me how I knew this - I told her what I'd done, looking at his computer screen every 15 minutes. But more importantly, I also told her that I'd recorded this in the project documentation (which, of course, $BadMike had not even looked at, much less added anything to). Ah, my first encounter with almighty CYA! $AwesomeBoss tersely thanked me and asked me to leave. A bit later, $BadMike wound up going to an impromptu meeting between himself, $DragonLady, $AwesomeBoss, and $MrScott. He didn't come back for a while. When he finally returned, he looked very sullen/pissed off. Sucks to suck, doesn't it, dude? >:D Anyways, despite $BadMike now getting yelled at whenever he screwed up, the rest of us still had work to do. And by design that work didn't involve him in pretty much any way, shape, or form. However, in short order, without any of our knowledge or input management inexplicably decided that $BadMike was going to be involved in the team - one way or another. Our first introduction to this came right out of left field. Over the course of the year, we'd started to have weekly meetings with $DragonLady to report what we were working on (and for her to modify/reassign/f*ck with those assignments as she desired). At one of these meetings, I brought up my duties for that week. The conversation went something like this:
Y'all, understand what was transpiring here. By this point, we had firmly established something called a "spatial data warehouse." This was an authoritative repository of GIS data that we could use in our projects, ready-made and immediately useable. ALL of our projects hinged on the reliability and accuracy of this information. As you've read about in some of my previous posts, I had already been burned by accuracy problems in the past. It had nearly cost me my job. What $DragonLady had just told me was that we were committing the fundamental underpinning of our entire team to the most useless, incompetent, lazy, and least capable employee we had on staff. Dear Christ, the panic that built in my mind. My hands are shaking now just from typing this. I resolved that, no matter what, I would not let this affect the quality of our products. If I couldn't do the data updates, you bet your a$$ that I could check them. And I would point out every minute mistake I found as loudly as I could to anyone that would listen. Predictably, we had problems with $BadMike's updates right from the beginning. To give some perspective, at the time we performed our updates by first editing a particular feature, then placing the updated feature in an output geodatabase for use (adding a date stamp for when it was updated such as "McDonalds_Restaurants_01012021"), and then archiving the older version. $BadMike didn't do any of this except for putting things in the output geodatabase. Nothing had any dates on it, nothing older was ever archived, and the metadata for these features were left untouched. I pointed this out immediately and asked that $BadMike correct these issues via email - cc'ing everyone in our chain of command when doing so. $BadMike never once fixed anything, but at least I had laid out sufficient supplications before the altar of CYA. In short order, we had multiple copies of the same data in our output geodatabases, each one spelled slightly differently, with none of them having a date stamp so we could know which was the most recent version. Most of the archiving I did myself. But wait, there's more! Several of the datasets that $BadMike was updating were mission-critical. It would really dox me to say what they were, but just know that these were incredibly important facilities where altering the location would mean dramatic differences in analysis. In the past, we would simply refer to the older versions, make manual edits where warranted, and otherwise leave positions alone (since we had very accurate locational information to start with). This wouldn't put the brakes on $BadMike, of course! He put together a process to pull down the addresses for these features, ran them through a run-of-the-mill geocoder, then slapped the results into the output geodatabases without ever checking them. Anyone ever dealt with a geocoder before? Ever heard of a little thing called "matching to ZIP Code centroid" instead of to an address point or street centerline? How far away from the on-the-ground location do you expect that would f\cking be?!?* >:( I didn't trust these outputs from the very beginning so I did my own checks. Turns out, the geocoder had misplaced tons of facilities. Say it ain't so! In some cases, the new locations were miles away from where they actually existed on the ground. In one instance, the geocoder had misplaced the facility to the opposite side of a county - think "100 West Highway 20" versus "100 East Highway 20." The resulting features were absolute piss-poor quality and we flat out couldn't use them. As soon as I finished my checks, I sent emails to all of the team's management as well as $BadMike showing what the problems were and requested that we rebuild everything. $BadMike then got pissed off and stalked over to me. "Why did you go over my head about this? If you had just spoken to me directly, I could have cleaned all this up!" I gave him a disdainful look (I even remember how far I lowered my eyelids) and just said, "$BadMike, I've been telling you about these problems for weeks. Nothing's changed. We can't use what you produced. We have to have updated, corrected data. Please follow the procedures we built specifically for this and pay attention to what you've created. There's a reason why we set all this up in the first place." $BadMike didn't respond to that and then trundled off. Eventually, it got to the point where we really couldn't use anything $BadMike created at all. Thankfully, $DragonLady and $MrScott rarely followed up with any of their grand proclamations. We thus reverted back to a general schedule among the rest of the team where we updated things whenever we could, and I would check things to make sure they were ok. Just like we'd done before $BadMike ever got involved. *shakes head* Everyone came to understand that if a data element didn't have a date stamp on it, $BadMike created it and we shouldn't use it. Lol. And as time continued on, relations between $BadMike and me/the rest of the team continued to deteriorate. All of us continued to have issues with anything he did and it always made our lives harder. Only $DragonLady's and $MrScott's indulgence seemed to keep him employed at all. I cannot fathom what was going through $BadMike's head during all this. $AwesomeRed was actually able to give us some insights and they were puzzling to say the least. Just to point out, $AwesomeRed was the penultimate diplomat. She and her boyfriend would often have drinks with $BadMike and some of the other GIS team members after work. During those outings, she told us that $BadMike would constantly hate on $DragonLady and $MrScott, telling everyone how incompetent they were, how difficult they were to work with, berating them, and so on. What the actual f*ck?!? These two were literally the only people keeping him off the streets! It's like he was dangling over a cauldron of boiling feces, and not finding the safety rope to his liking, was trying to set it on fire! Things started to get heated between him and the rest of the GIS staff over time, too. He was taking flak for his failures and was no longer able to pin the blame elsewhere. I remember one instance where I was working on some things and $AwesomeBoss and $MrScott came into the office. They beelined for his desk, upset over some analysis he'd screwed up. He'd not used the correct data and messed up the parameters (even though he'd been given clear instructions). After the bosses left, he turned to me with a sulky expression. This was our conversation:
He threw his hands up in the air while I stormed out. God, you have no idea how cathartic it was to say this to that f*cker. I smiled the rest of the day :) Finally, we got to the point where even the pretensions of civility broke down. $BadMike and me were put on separate projects in the early part of the new year, each with a month deadline. I finished mine after a few weeks and moved on to other tasks. $BadMike was still struggling in the last week that he had to work on the project, so $DragonLady asked me if I'd create a series of template maps for him to use. This really wouldn't take much time, so I did so. At the end of the week, just before the deadline, his project was still not completed. We had a meeting between $Me, $BadMike, $DragonLady, $MrScott, and $AwesomeBoss. In that meeting, a very agitated $DragonLady asked why on earth this hadn't been wrapped up. I simply said that I'd produced everything that was asked of me (and I had, there was no question about that at all). $BadMike then proceeded to go into a petulant rage, saying that the templates I'd created weren't suitable and that I was the reason he wasn't able to complete the project. For those of you familiar with GIS, what he complained about was that I had converted the dynamic legends to static graphics - a minor design change that gave us more cartographic control (and was a best practice at the time) and may have caused him to put in an additional 10 minutes of effort. What a f*cking crime. This was literally the only reason he gave for not finishing. I simply crossed my arms, held a disgusted expression on my face, and refused to look at him for the rest of the conversation. After a few minutes, my bosses asked me to leave. I was very angry after this. Like, angrier than I'd ever been before in a professional context. And I felt that I didn't deserve it, either. So I did something I'd never ever done, neither before nor since. I went back to my desk and wrote up a formal complaint against $BadMike. Whenever $DragonLady returned to her office later ($BadMike didn't come back that day), I knocked on her door and asked to speak with her. She let me. I gave her the complaint. I told her that I did not feel like I deserved to have been spoken to like that. I told her that I felt like we were having constant issues out of $BadMike and we needed them to stop. And I asked her to please light a fire under his a$$hole and make him do his job! She told me that she understood. She said that management had noticed a severe deterioration in $BadMike's work quality and that they were taking steps to correct it, up to and including his departure from $Agency if need be. I nodded and thanked her for her time. I didn't really expect anything of it. But I felt like I needed to say something - I wouldn't just let all this slide. At this point, the ball was in $DragonLady's court. Would she actually do what she said and hold $BadMike accountable for his actions? Or would this just another current in the river of bullsh*t we'd all been wading through these past many years? You'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out. See y'all then, everybody! :) Thanks for everything, folks! Here are the other parts to the Agency series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Here are some of my other stories on TFTS if you're interested: A Symphony of Fail Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 [link] [comments] |
| Nvm, let me just make sure my warranty will be voided completely instead of listening to you Posted: 03 Feb 2022 01:17 PM PST I occasionally get some users that make me question the most basic stuff. I do customer/tech support for GPS trackers, cameras, etc and I never had the devices in my hand since I work for a US based company, but Im located in Europe. 99,9% of the time it's not an issue, I can read manuals and I can ask any "stupid" question about the devices themselves on slack if needed, but sometimes I feel I shouldn't need to. One tale from yesterday: Customer reply: "I extracted the files, but there is NO WAY to turn the unit off, so I'm stuck!!! I also tried to reset it and I think it worked because all the recordings are gone. Attached is a picture from the device". The picture showed the front side of the device. This irritated me. I checked the manual again, there is clearly a power switch on the backside of the device, not far from the reset hole. I wondered if the unit was completely different from the ones we usually sell since it has audio recording activated, but the front was literally the same. So I sent a screenshot of the "parts description" to my colleague in the US, asking if the power switch turns it on and off. He said yes, that's definitely what it looks like. And in that exact moment, I just felt like a complete idiot. So I replied to the customer: "Have you tried the power switch on the back?" and attached the parts description (which was included in the manual I sent previously) with a big arrow to the power switch. A few hours he replied with: "Nvm, I cut the cable to the microphone, it was easy". I just feel so insecure when the most basic stuff like hitting an ON/OFF button is apparently too complicated. In my mind, no one can be this dense. But I'm also glad some are, otherwise I wouldn't have a job lol. Extra: I also had a customer asking if their 4G Tracker runs on 4G or 3G. The 4G is included in the name and he wrote it out in the request as well. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 03 Feb 2022 08:46 AM PST So this happened a few years back. A smaller location with about 10 employees all in an office setting were being moved out of their office building to a smaller temporary office building so the original building could be repaired due to some damage. They would need to be in the temporary building for about 2 months. I and my 3 person (at the time) IT staff was located in another town about 45 minutes away, but we were responsible for this location as well. The big wigs from corporate stepped in and said they had everything under control regarding the temporary office and the renovation. Being a good manager I started asking questions about how would the LAN be rebuilt, has cable modem been scheduled to be installed, and has someone scheduled IT movers to move their computers and other equipment over. I was told "Yes, everything is being taken care of and we have people for all of that. You will not have to do anything but keep on supporting them." 5 days before the move the Regional Manager calls me and say so what is happening with the network at the new place, we got the keys, but corporate says you're building everything out. (So I guess we are the "people for all of that".) After a few phone calls (including the manager who said they had it under control) it was confirmed that we (the local IT staff) were to handle the scheduling of the cable modem move, assisting corporate with the router reinstallation, LAN rebuild, and moving all of the user's IT equipment. Turns out the Project manager was so focused on the reconstruction of the old site they completely forgot about the needs for the temporary site and did not remember our conversation asking those exact questions. At the last week, they just called the regional manager and said we (local IT) would handle everything. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 03 Feb 2022 09:29 AM PST Another story from my datacenter days while running the Datacenter Applications Team. One of the applications that we built and managed for datacenter use was the ticketing system, which had a built in CMDB. Everything was in the CMDB from user accounts, customer accounts, billing, physical assets, etc. When you create a service ticket, all the fields have to be populated with an CMDB record so it is rather important that the CMDB is correct. Fucking HA! Anyway, my team did not manage the CMDB – it just happened to be the DB our ticketing system used as a resource. All CMDB updates/additions/removals was performed by the Datacenter Inventory team. The specialist that performed this duty for years eventually flattened out the file to a flat CSV file – I didn't give a shit. I learned a long time ago that you cannot always get in everyone's business, especially in a datacenter. He would receive updates throughout the day and upload at COB. Additionally, once a month, they would audit the floor. The Inventory Team had handheld scanners and they would go through each zone, rack by rack, scanning each barcode – again to a CSV. This would then get updated in the CMDB. This guy had been doing this for 10 years or so. And then he quit. His replacement had actually been there for 15 years and worked under him. She was an elderly lady and came off as very sweet. Think of working with Grandma and she always brought cookies. She was also always on a first-name basis with all the fat-heads running the place – again, nobody wants to be mean to Grams (unless you are a curmudgeon like me). A few days after the old Inventory Lead left, I was sitting in the bullpen when I heard "the sound". If you are a team lead or a senior, you know what I am talking about. It is the sound the T1/T2 engineers make when they get a bullshit ticket and start whispering, grunting and rooting around. I had taken the desk closest to the door so that I could head off people trying to "engage" my team directly instead of through proper requests, and I heard the bullshit-ticket noise slowly growing in intensity as it made its way closer to the door. I walked back to where the source was – Ticketing System Team.
A quick look at the request and it was a request from the "new" Inventory Team Lead to perform the nightly CMDB update with the .csv file they would provide. This stuck me as odd for two reasons. 1 – this is the responsibility of the Inventory Team to do. It is literally their job. 2 – we made it easy for them. They had a simple application installed on their laptops where they just had to enter a username, password and name/location of the file to upload and then…click upload. This was not a request to help with an error caused when uploading, which we do work on and support. This was just them wanting us to do it from now on. I picked up my phone and called the Inventory Lead.
Queue the back-and-forth emails between myself, evil Grandma and the DCM. Eventually the DCM got frustrated and we were both ordered to present ourselves in the conference room to explain ourselves and demonstrate the issues. I walked to the back of the bullpen and grabbed Engineer6 (the new guy that had been there a week) and explained to him that he is going to demonstrate to management how to update the CMDB. His face goes white and he asks me "what is a CMDB". I did feel somewhat bad and told him not to worry. It is easy, I will explain it when the time comes. I just wanted him because he was new here and knows fuck-all and that was my only requirement. We got to the conference room and everyone was waiting. The new SDM looking pissed and annoyed, Grandma sitting in her sweater smiling sweetly with, and I am not shitting you, a plate of fucking cookies in front of her. I told fuck-all to sit at the head and plug his laptop into the overhead, open his email and find the email I sent before we left with a copy of the CMDB update attached, save it to his desktop, click THAT application, enter your creds, point to the file you just saved to your desktop and click OK. This took like…a minute. The whole room was quiet as the slidebar crept across the screen and the laptop went "DING!" with the displayed "Upload Completed. Do you wish to integrate into CMDB? YES/NO". He looked at me. I looked at him. I scanned the room and locked eyes with the SDM. Then looked at Grams. I wanted SOOOO bad to grab a cookie and then tell fuck-all to click "YES", but I contained myself. The SDM was still looking pissed. I told fuck-all to click "YES", which he did expertly. "CMDB updated" flashed across the screen. I patiently waited for a response from the SDM. I could tell that she was conflicted. She liked Granny and her cookies. And I know she did not care for me – the name "IT_curmudgeon" was given to me by others, and legitimately earned. But I usually get away with it because I do the damn job well, even if I don't play well with others outside my team. I had proved my point that even brand new fresh-faced fuck-all new to the industry could do this. If he can do it, the Inventory Manager who had been on that datacenter team for 15+ years should be able to do it. Especially since it is her actual job. The result was as I expected. Grandma will be performing the update of the CMDB and I was required to apologize for me calling her out on her bullshit. The SDM left the room, cookie in hand, and I went back to my office pissed. I hate when I have to apologize for being right. [link] [comments] |
| The reoccurring dead circuit.. Posted: 03 Feb 2022 05:46 AM PST After retiring from the army, I got a job working for a logistics company doing IT. It's a small-medium company that has multiple warehouses. One of the warehouses is remote and has it's own DSL connection and VPN back to the main office. It's an old warehouse with an old 100 pair lead-cased cable feeding the building. Each pair is wrapped in paper (that's how old this cable is). When it rained, the DSL would go out. I'd call and put a work order in and it'd get fixed within a day. On work-order #3, I go out to the warehouse to talk with the lineman performing the work. The lineman tells me the cable is shot and that he jumpered the last good pair of wires and that I needed to call in a work order. It's July, I call a work order in and think that it's been replaced. Oh nooo.. It was not. February. We had a warm day and back to -10 F temps. The DSL goes out again. I call in a work order. I ask for the work order number and get it. Suspecting I got the blow off, I call the next day to ask what the status of the work order was. I was told it was canceled. OK, I open another and get the number. I call the next day to get the status. Canceled. telco- Your work order is canceled. me- This will be work order #3. telco- sir, you can put in another work order.. me- naaa. I'm done with that. WHO canceled the order? telco- Mike the foreman. me- OK. I'd like to talk with "mike". (puts me on hold and transfers me) Mike- Mike speaking (sounds like a bully) me- hi Mike.. I'm calling to ask why my work orders are being canceled. Mike- We just don't have time for that. me- Ok Mfer. This just became a one-sided conversation. I put in 3 work orders to get this cable fixed, you fucking blew me off 3 times. I bet if this cable connected your home, I guarren-goddamn-tee you that there would be two bucket trucks, a cable truck and 8 guys on site to fix it because it goes to your house. Instead of doing the work in July when it was nice outside, you fuckers are going to be doing it in the snow and blow. Either you do the fucking work or the next trip is going to be using the "open door" policy of your company's CEO to let him know how much a shit job "mike" is doing. Got it, Mike? Mike- We'll be there at 8:45 tomorrow morning. (you can hear he's pissed) 8:30 the next morning I show up. They're already there (surprise surprise). Two bucket trucks, a cable truck, 8 guys and "mike". "Mike" walks over.. Mike- you Mr. Bilco? me- Yes (Mike is sizing me up, I give mike "take your best shot, because I'll lay your ass out" look) Mike- we're not replacing it with 100 pair, we're installing 25 pair. That's the best we can do. me- I don't give a shit. I just want two pairs that work. He walks off to supervise. The lineman that's going to punch the wire onto the DMARC asks where it is, I take him up there.. He tells me that cable should've been replaced long ago. There was a crack in the lead sheathing. Water was seeping in and smoking the circuits. [link] [comments] |
| I thought the computer needed to be reimaged? Posted: 03 Feb 2022 05:32 PM PST Background So this was my first deployment as a 25B (help desk guy that likes the color green) I had been doing the things my MOS is designed for for the first time in 2 years since joining the army. I had been deployed for 4 months and gotten comfortable. Made plenty of mistakes though like getting rid of about 50 users access to their files and folders on a shared drive trying to consolidate permissions. This was the first mistake where I felt like the user wanted to hit me though. I show up to my shift and was told to "fix" a computer for the PAO( photographers that like wearing green) over the last couple of months "fix" a computer means to reimage it. I start working on it going through the process and finish after lunch. Call the user and tell them their computer is ready to be picked up. User is an attractive female about my age and is really nice and not intimidating at all. She picks it up leaves and I go on and finish my shift. I forget how long it was but I think it was the next day or the day after that. I come in on my shift my boss and E6 staff sergeant calls me to her desk. She was super smart and super nice as well and I liked here even after the events below. SSG York: what the fuck Did you do to the PAOs computer she called and was very upset that all her software is gone. PFC dumbass: (confused) I didn't realize she wanted me to install google chrome or some other piece of software after I finished the image on the PAOs computer. SSG York: you did what?! I didn't tell you to reimage her computer I wanted you to "fix" the computer by doing a QC check and make sure there were no issues on it. The software I'm talking about is photoshop. I reimaged her computer and put her licensed copies of photoshop onto it before you reimaged the computer. She's coming here now so you better Explain what you did to her computer and hope she doesn't try to kill you. I knew I fucked up. I haven't worked with photoshop much but I know it's not cheap. So PAO walks in and she's mad and I'm scared she's going to throw the nearest object at me. She's not big at all same height as me but skinny I still thought she could have picked me up and slammed me on the ground in that moment though. We have a waist high divider between me and her so I have a little bit of protection stopping her from charging me. I'm able to explain what happened and that it was my mistake. She still has the original photoshop installs and licenses that the SSG used when she worked on the computer first. I take her computer and start to unfuck my fuckup. I scavenge 2 1tb HDD since the laptop only came with a 500gb one and I find 2 sticks of 16gb ram as well. I install all the software and make sure it works then call her back by the end of the day. I'm saying sorry almost every word and explaining how I upgraded he laptop as well. She's still a little mad but doesn't look like she's looking for something to throw at me. She takes the computer and I don't hear back from her for awhile so I doesn't look like I screwed up anything else. After that any time I saw her walking around the office Id avoid her cause I'm still not certain if she is mad at me or not. After awhile I start making jokes about what happened and she laughs. She ended up forgiving me and didn't hold anything against me after that. [link] [comments] |
| Will do it somehow, if you don't Posted: 03 Feb 2022 10:33 AM PST 2nd/3rd level support for Exchange here. Was doing support for a very big company for emails (only english language as communication). Got a ticket from one branch in Brasile, where user wanted us to change the email folder, where emails are received to his local (Outlook) folder. I was like, hmm, probably he thinks, we will not be able to access his emails or something similar. So with short talk with my manager, we provided a nice reply to the ticket with reasons why we refuse it and closed the ticket. Month later, we got a ticket with only simple messsage "User is not receiving any emails". As the ticket was created on behalf of person having the issue, we had to call back. So we called the requestor ... Me: Hello, I am from xxx and we received a ticket from you. Her: Hello, yes, wait ... [hearing a run and a lot of whispers] Me: OK [waiting...] Her: Yes [someone else] Me: We received a ticket with number xxx with this issue Her: Yes Me: Could you please tell us more about it and also who is affected? Her: Yes, wait Me: OK [hearing clicking] Her: We update the ticket later Me: OK, will wait ... After few days, we finally got update on the ticket. And yes, it was the person that wanted to change the Inbox in mailbox. So we did backup of it and run check-mailbox tool. Check-tool found some problems related to Inbox and created a new Inbox folder, but new emails were still missing. Asked my manager, if I can have a look on it. So interested, I found with mapi editor some hidden emails from few days ago. So I told about it to my manager and he told me to be quiet. That user caused it himself, we have backup and that we will tell him, it is corrupted and lost. Mailbox was remove-created ... and they refused restore from month back as for that we charge 100€. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2022 10:40 PM PST Just remembered an unfortunate tale that could have easily been avoided, but as you shall see..... Cast: Preface: I used to work for a small company (step above a startup, but still considered a small/medium business) that had massive growth since their start. A lot of the first employees were still there and made sure that was known. This place at times felt like a typical day of high school. Very clique-ish, cut-throat and childish behavior. I worked here as part time IT (with borderline full time hours) and when I was hired, it was a tightly run ship. IT director was pretty much there part time while the Senior SysAdmin and Senior Support Engineer covered 95% of the gaps. The rollout: During this bit of chaos, IT got the approval to perform a laptop refresh. The equipment that we were using was easily 6 years old and had taken a lot of abuse. Laptops were often dropped, scuffed, mishandled, executed (1 VP managed to execute his laptop every Christmas) and it was difficult to keep up with the mess that we had. Every full timer was going to get a new laptop, keyboard, mouse, docking station and monitors. It was a major undertaking but after a few bumps we were able to get things going and finished the rollout. During one team meeting, I heard that while the rollout was a success, some corners had to be cut. Now being the sole part timer, I was not allowed to know why (this was an issue since day 1 working there, I was typically excluded from meetings, info, etc). I didnt dig into it and just figured with new equipment, people would be happy and we didnt have to deal with crappy equipment again. The event: $PoorSoul - Hey Icebear, can you come over here for a few? There was some evidence of syrup on the laptop, but it was still functional. I take the laptop back, open a ticket in our system and give $SupportEng a heads up for Monday. He gives a laugh and confirms we will deal with it Monday The Monday: $Me - Hey $SysAdmin, so unfortunately $PoorSoul may have broken his laptop In comes $SupportEng $SupportEng - Hey guys, where's the laptop? $SupportEng - So when did the keyboard stop working? By this time, the machine will not turn on, it has met its fate $ITDirector - Ok, here what we will do. Open a case with the vendor, tell them the machine will not power on. Theres no physical evidence of syrup, so maybe they will just fix it and send it back I left the office disgusted. No sane person would have made that deal without the warranty, especially given past behavior. Way too much of a gamble to take, but yet here we are. I put in the claim, sent the laptop out and a few weeks later the vendor came back with their findings. Of course they found the syrup, so there goes any chance of free repair. I believe the repair bill totaled $532 to replace the motherboard and battery. It was still under the cost of the laptop, but management decided not to proceed with the repair. Epilogue: After that event, I lasted another 3 months before giving my 4 days notice. I had received an offer for my current job and filled out the paperwork and had a start date. After I left, things just kept getting worse. Both $SysAdmin and $SupportEng left the team, so $ITDirector had to quicky hire some part timers to fill in the gap. A lot more people left the company and eventually the money basically ran dry and massive layoffs came. As of today, the company is closed for good and NGL, im happy it is. That place was a mess and this story was just one of the terrible IT moments. [link] [comments] |
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