how about a positive story to break the monotony? Tech Support |
| how about a positive story to break the monotony? Posted: 24 May 2022 11:50 PM PDT So, as you guys might recall, I'm a typewriter service technician. In this day and age, the number one typewriter in business and professional use is the IBM Selectric, a beast of a machine that's essentially a 6 bit mechanical computer. Wild stuff. So of course I service it. I had an elderly lady bring in her selectric II a while back. It hadn't been serviced in 15 years and was having some trouble printing. It was the usual job, nothing out of the ordinary. Just needed a good clean and relube, along with a couple adjustments and replacement parts. The crown on the story is the phone call I got a week later. Ordinarily phone calls are bad news. Something broke again, someone isn't happy, or perhaps it exploded catastrophically. Not this time. She was calling me to thank me for my work, and that her machine had never worked better. It was honestly really touching that she took the extra time to call me up. There aren't a lot of techs around anymore, and therefore not much of a benchmark for service success. So it was a huge boost in confidence and moral to get that call. Her next service was mysteriously paid for. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 25 May 2022 06:27 AM PDT This is not a IT support tale, or rather it was not supposed to be. People: Me AreaLeader - person responsible for an area (/group of departments) ReportPerson - person responsible for the generation of the reports I started in a office position, and still have a few jobs from that time. From: Me BCC: 30+ people There a unapproved reports for your area. From: AreaLeader To: Me How am I supposed to approve an empty report :( Well, that happens every time an area gets renamed or restructured. And there were a restructure planned so large that I was informed about it in advance. Let me just check the report, and then inform ReportPerson. From: Me To: AreaLeader Did you look through the whole report? Because the first 22 lines are zero. From: AreaLeader To: Me That worked. Thanks. I can't help but wonder: What worked? Looking? Scrolling? Bonus: I talked to ReportPerson, and mentioned it in passing. Apparently not only did she know, but she and at least one more person had been trying to find out what and why that had been renamed about Area. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 25 May 2022 01:53 AM PDT Dates and names slightly changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. So in late 2008 I took a job at a call center doing IT work. The job was with one company who was doing IT consulting informally, which is what I was interested in and since have done. But in 2008, the job was primarily responsible for managing a call center collocated and run by 3 different companies who were all owned by the same set of friends. One of them, Roger was my direct boss. Roger had setup his own company called MSPcorp. Roger wanted to break off and do other things. And I was brought on board to make that happen. Then there was, Call-U a phone sales company. And also We-Call another dialup marketer. Anyways, when I was hired, I first did a survey of the IT systems for all three companies. And it was a legit mess. Backups woefully inadequate, servers unpatched. Servers haphazardly constructed and cables. It was really bad. Guys were routinely repunching and reworking drops, so much so that the ceiling outside the server room collapsed because of the sheer weight of wiring above the drop ceiling. And every month or so, the whole thing would crash at odd hours. So I said so. And made specific recommendations. But Call-Us and We-Call would not invest anything. So I told Roger that I would begin disentangling MSPcorps stuff from this system and infrastructure. By 2010, we had our own server and cloud email system. The server virtualized a number of our functions. And it worked well. All the while, the systems for the others just sat there ticking like a bomb. These guys were so cheap that they did not want to pay for cleaning tapes to maintain their backup. Well in late 2009, the backup system had run out of space. And I talked with the partner who was a developer. And he said that the priority was his databases. And there was no money for testing, or anything. I sent an email to the partners telling them the risks and laying it all out. I told them that in the event of a disaster, I did not think that they would recover anything. The response I got was this "if it is working today, then we are fine." That was a literal quote. Well 2011 comes around. And We-Call is getting ready to move to a new building. The partners have a falling out. We-Call hires a guy, Johnny to build them a new system. He proceeds to build a rack in his office and just run power cables for his 6 new servers directly into the rack. I had warned him that would place the system in An over voltage situation and we needed to get the Electrician to look at it. Johnny just waits until I am out of the office and does it anyways. He doesn't immediately pop a breaker, so he tells his boss Clive, that I just don't know what I am talking about. Well at 2am that night, the tape drive comes on and the breaker pops. I rush to the office, remove Johnny's jury-rigged power cables and get the stack mostly up. All except for the file server. That thing will not boot at all. I check it and the 12 year old compaq proliant has blown the Power supply. I pull a spare from our boneyard of servers, only to find out the drive is toast. It seems this server was setup in raid 0. Backup drive is also dead, and because there was no rotation, the tape was the only one they have. Anyways Mike the CEO of Call-us calls me in after hour 12 of dealing with this and fires me. Roger tells him he can't do that. So Mike tells me he doesn't want me working on his stuff. Ok, so I didn't. A year later Call-us goes out of business. Roger sends me there to reinstall all the servers, which we store until we recycle them in 2016. All that is backstory to this: all this time i have been building MSP in to a successful consultant business. last month, Mike calls me and asks for the backup of Call-Us's servers. Apparently there is some tax thing he needs. Nope I say, everything is gone, no backup, no archive, nothing exists. So Mike stands there and tells me "you are just getting your revenge". To which I replied, I don't have 15 year revenge plans. So yesterday I got served a lawsuit where Mike is suing me personally for $7 million. So June is going to be fun. [link] [comments] |
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