We have done this dance before. Do you want me to show you step by step or you want to take my word for it this time? OK Step by step it is. Tech Support |
- We have done this dance before. Do you want me to show you step by step or you want to take my word for it this time? OK Step by step it is.
- The user has learned A Jargon
- IT people makes the worst users
- Tech illiteracy 😭
- Oh well that was easy
- That one time I almost killed an end-user (Anaphylaxis)
- I can't believe this just happened
- Sir, our equipment does not commonly set itself on fire...
- Female mate at work misunderstands me
- This is the busiest accounting day of the month!
- Why does my Tier II insist on making it extremely tedious to add printers?
- “We’re being attacked!”
- "Our network keeps going in and out throughout the day"
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 12:45 AM PDT This tale comes from the private sector. It is an old tale and one that I enjoy retelling. Back in the day when win 7 was the golden child and 8/8.1 was the relative we didnt talk about at thanksgiving, I had a repeat customer. One that... Lets just say he refused to believe a word I said unless I meticulously showed him the truth. Each and every time, it would be a stupid simple issue, and each time he would refuse to pay me until I did these complicated fixes. Each time I would recreate his problem before them, deploy my simple fix, and then try very hard to show him the problem was resolved. In this situation he was having a simple cmos battery issue. Desktop would lose the time when he unplugged it. I told him how to resolve it on his own over the phone, saying he could buy a 5 dollar cr2032 from Absolute evil and simply replace it himself. I trusted in his ability to do that, and that was about it. In true fashion, he did not believe me. He was certain that this computer had a corrupted bios and needed a bios update. Now remember, this was back in the days where bios updates were not quick 2-10 minute ordeals. These were the days were you had to DL the correct bios based off of your mobo number/revision number, mount it onto a bootable flash drive, and configure the bios to boot off of the flash drive. (Dont forget to set it back to C drive when you are done...) Also if your flash drive had a defect in it. More than likely the bios update would fail and you would brick the mobo. So I explained to him to just try my solution first. I told him if he made me walk into absolute evil and have to interect with blue vest wearing demons, I would charge him 50 bucks for the cmos battery replacement. So I have the CMOS battery in my luxurious 97 chevy 4 door sedan, watching as the odometer ticked past 175k. I make sure to stop at 3 places along the way first. I make sure he has to wait longer than 30m for me to arrive. (Less than 10m drive.) I show up, and do the routine test. Turn off PC, unplug, plug back in, and turn it back on. Yup. Time reset to midnight 2009. I turn off, unplug, replace cmos battery, plug back in, and turn back on. I set the timer using the windows time setting thingymajig in the clock whosamawhatsit, and do a full shut down again followed by removal of power cord. (I only use the most detailed technical terms in my job.) On restart, the PC has the correct date and time.
I took a moment to demonstrate how it was working again.
I instantly realized my mistake and quickly added.
I took the windex out of his sails.
So I spent the next 10 minutes showing how the issue was the battery. I removed the good battery, telling him I removed the good one to put the bad one back in, and did the dance 3 times. Each time it failed to hold the time. I informed him I was putting the good battery in and demonstrated how it kept the time after 3 consecutive restarts/unplugs.
I didnt let him finish.
I left with the old, dead, cmos battery and a nice 70 bucks in my pocket. Guess who went out and bought the brand new hit game Bioshock Infinite with that money? This guy. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 07:37 AM PDT We see it all the time. Someone, somewhere used a technical word in this guy's hearing and now he inserts it into conversation every chance he gets. Usually they use it so poorly it's easy to tell that this term is out of place and infer what they actually mean. Sometimes though... I just got off an hour-long phone call where this user doggedly hung on to their description of the problem, including a jargon phrase. It made sense in context.... So I spent 50 minutes trying to troubleshoot a problem that didn't exist. When they finally described what was actually happening it was an 8-minute fix. Thanks for reminding me to never use a technical term within earshot of a client I guess. [link] [comments] |
| IT people makes the worst users Posted: 02 Jun 2022 04:51 AM PDT This is my humble pie moment after thinking it was only happening to end users. I'm part of my company's IT departement as a product owner and am usually the guy who makes IT and business talk to each other. We are using an app to "book" our desk when we come into the office during the week that is accessible on phone and via webportal. I was one of the tester for the app and kept in touch with the development team. Since the app is fairly new it is still experiencing some "childhood illnesses" and from time to time I have to log a ticket. Last week, I had a change in schedule and decided to go via the webportal on my laptop to make the change. I click on the shortcut I saved to go on the portal and there's a problem: the portal shows I haven't reserved any days. I open the app on my phone and there it is, my booked days are displayed... Being a good colleague, I send a message to the dev team to tell them that I think there is a problem with the webportal. They reply back that all looks normal. We try the usual troubleshoot: clear your history and cookies, try in incognito mode, restart your machine... nothing works. They look in the backend, it looks like my data is all there. Nobody understand where the problem is... Until someone looks at my laptop and says "Dude, you went to the UAT portal on your laptop...". There it was... a beautilful "problem was between the chair and the screen" bug. I went and modified my shortcut and bought a round on coffee to the dev team as an apology (sorry to the offshore guys, there should be an app to transfer apology coffees offshore). Eat your humble pie, own your mistakes and don't make them twice. Hope you enjoyed, and thank you to all the tech support in the world to make things work for everyone. EDIT: typos [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 07:39 AM PDT Just a little rant! I had a support ticket where someone wasn't getting our emails after a certain date. I checked our communications system and advised them that our emails to their email address had been suppressed on a certain date, thought I couldn't see why, and the only information I had was that the user either marked the email as spam, the email was undeliverable (and therefore became suppressed), or their email server blocked or filtered them. I relayed this information kind of trusting the user would understand the ball was in their court and our company couldn't do anything about it. But I got a follow up request for help with this, so I googled "how to get emails not automatically sent to spam +outlook" and showed her the results. The user could have easily done this themselves. I'm trying to be understanding and patient, but it sometimes annoys me when people don't understand what is something our company's tech support can help with or not. I've had users in previous jobs ask for help troubleshooting their device, or questions about their bank account, or whatever—when the only thing I could do was help them with our own app. I feel like half my job some days is Googling things for users or telling them, "You need to reach out to your bank for help with that" or "Not sure, that's something that your email provider should be able to help with though." Anyone else relate? The majority of the time it doesn't bother me, but I guess I'm in a mood today!😅 [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 02:34 AM PDT This happened for me around Christman and I just recently have been able to put the trauma behind me so I can tell the story. We have a custom made iOs app that our guys in the field use for logging the hours they spend on their jobs. Its an app made about 5 years ago from two different companies. No one has touched it since, no one knows how it works or where to find the source code, nothing is documented. One day, a quiet afternoon a coworker from accounting came to me and said she couldn't use Navision. I tried to open Navision and sign in, but it failed. Hmm what could this be caused by? Remote into the server, and yes........ SSL certificate expired. Bummer, but ok not a huge issue. I got a new certificate, installed it on the server and everything was going smoothly. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Navision, in order to set the certificate for navision, you have to use Navision Administration MMC to set the cert thumbprint for all server instances in order for it to kick in. Our iOs app communicates with our Navision with soap and Odata, so this runs as a Navision instance. Everything started working, except that damn app. No matter what we did, or how many times we rebooted the instance, the app would simply not work. I contacted our now previous Navision developer contractor and asked for help. They had no clue on anything, so I quickly moved on. I got a hold of another Navision senior developer and asked for help. This guy, he reminds me so much of Dr. emmet Brown from back to the future. Just as confusing he can be, just as much of a genius. We started troubleshooting together and could see in event viewer that the server rejected connection attempts from the app, it seemed like it was still using the thumbprint from the old certificate. I spend nights and days trying to find out what was wrong, troubleshooting on a system that nobody knew anything about. The next day, I finally found a article on technet. This was about setting SSL certificates on IP address and ports. The app is using a specific port, and with a quick command In cmd, i could see that the port indeed used the old thumbprint even though we changed it in Navision admin center a million times. One cmd command to delete the old thumbprint, and one cmd command to set the new thumbprint..... Halleluja, the app started working again. I took the rest of day off and tried my best not to become a raging alcoholic [link] [comments] |
| That one time I almost killed an end-user (Anaphylaxis) Posted: 01 Jun 2022 11:53 PM PDT I know I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this post because it is absolutely avoidable and it was directly my negligence that lead to this unfolding but I figured I'd tell it and share it with others as rules and regulations around anaphylaxis are real and for good reason even if you don't keep it at the forefront of your mind. It's often forgotten about in IT when working on end-user devices in particular pre COVID but now I imagine cleanliness and sanitation measures are at the forefront of people's minds in the COVID world. So, the context of this story was at a K-12 School and I was the Helpdesk monkey that would see and triage things where I can and assist the Desktop Engineer where I can where and when he was backlogged. A tale as old as time, reimaging a PC - everyone knows how to do it it's so simple you could probably do it with your eyes closed if your fleet of devices are all similar devices. In some cases, you do it really quickly just to get the process rolling before or after your break just because you know it's going to take a hot minute. Well, in my case it was while I was having a small snack - (and this is where I fucked up) with a fruit/nut bar. You might think well I mean, those things are usually sticky and kind of stay together right - kind of difficult to drop crumbs of it onto a user's device right? Well - depending on the severity of the allergy some kids can get a reaction (minor or otherwise) from coming in contact with their allergy. This is something the school Nurse reamed us about every year - all staff on-site needed to be proficient in administering an EpiPen at least twice a year and prove competency. To make things worse we shared the same building as the Nurse's office so we were also inherently held to a higher standard as we were constantly used as guinea pigs for other staff to practice their skills. Now just in case you're not aware EpiPen's aren't cheap or at least they weren't at the time, I know there's probably a bit more competition now and they might not run a monopoly on it now but they cost a fair bit each - even in a country like Australia where we're known for healthcare - subsidized medication etc. Our student in question needed two of them while the ambulances arrived and he made a full and timely recovery. Words were had between IT and the Nurses but it surmounted to nothing more than a slap on the wrist for me (think working conditions, time away from the desk, solo helpdesk for 1800 students/staff) but you could tell they were peeved about it. The moral of the story is, that anaphylaxis is no joke, and enterprise or not some people may have their allergies into adulthood. Don't snack or eat where you build out or have end user devices for cleanliness and health reasons. [link] [comments] |
| I can't believe this just happened Posted: 01 Jun 2022 12:52 PM PDT Yesterday one of our newish support members got an email from our CEO asking for a report for a list of clients and some API keys. He naturally asked me and some other devs where we kept the keys so he could send off the report. Everyone pretty much said, "wait, let's verify this before doing anything crazy". Anyone could tell this request was off, but not this kid apparently. We logged into work today and had our stand-up where he said he sent off the report yesterday. The call got completely silent. Then our project manager started grilling him. And ended the meeting so she could go track down the CEO and make sure it was actually him, and if it was the CEO that he isn't being phished either. Still waiting on the results, but the rest of us are mentally prepping for the worst now. Wish us luck Edit: Y'all asked for an update. Well it's here! Mostly, they are still keeping us in the dark, but I learned a few things. A bit anticlimactic for y'all, happy day for me. Everything should be okay. The suspicious request surprisingly was from our CEO. He used an alt account and sent the email in a rush and didn't format it like he normally does. Lots of red flags, but fortunately turned out fine. As for the API keys, they still should have never been released, so now there is still a constant security risk. No clue what the seniors decided to do about that, they keep that stuff pretty hush hush. The kid somehow kept his job for now. He got chewed out and probably thought he was getting fired. I'm sure he learned a very valuable lesson. He will be watched closely for a while, hopefully also be required to retake the security training. My boss is probably reevaluating how those keys are stored, but for now it is business as usual. [link] [comments] |
| Sir, our equipment does not commonly set itself on fire... Posted: 01 Jun 2022 07:03 AM PDT I had this call a while ago. I work for a telecommunications company. I then educated our customer on proper placement for the router, suitable surfaces to place the router, and that we should use the power supply that is included with the router. Lovely customer, just needed a little extra education with the router. [link] [comments] |
| Female mate at work misunderstands me Posted: 01 Jun 2022 02:38 PM PDT Quite a short story but was reminded of it for some reason today. I had a female friend at work who I got on with really well and we would just basically flirt with each other for some fun. This friend kept complaining that her scroll wheel on her mouse would stop working halfway through the day. Day in day out. For the life of me I couldn't work out what the problem was. Anyway one day I'm with her team just mucking about and having a laugh with them as you do. We were doing the usual flirting and joking about between us all. Whilst I was down there I noticed that she put lip balm on with her finger and then go back to using her mouse. As I said we had all been flirting and the talk had become, how can I say, quite suggestive. Without thinking after I saw her use the lip balm, I innocently said, "Friend, what finger do you use to do it" "OP I don't think that's any of your business!!" "Eh? Friend what finger do you use to put that stuff on your lips" "OP ,really you need to stop, it's not something I want to say" Me now laughing my ass off along with everyone else in her room, "Friend, I don't think you understand me, do you use the same finger to put your lip balm on that you use to scroll the mouse wheel with" Friend now beetroot red, "Yes, I do" And that was how I worked out what caused her scroll wheel to stop working halfway through the day.. It was getting clogged with lip balm. Still makes me laugh thinking about it.. [link] [comments] |
| This is the busiest accounting day of the month! Posted: 01 Jun 2022 09:05 AM PDT Our old NAS croaked a couple of weeks ago and we've been on our backup while I setup a new one. I swapped it over last night after hours. I had a few calls this morning about some permissions, but all one touch tickets. 2-3 min each. The head of accounting came by at around 10 this morning. "So you changed servers last night? It's the first of the month. This is the busiest accounting day of the month!" "And?" "And you could have put us behind schedule!" "Are you currently behind schedule?" "Well, no not exactly. But this is the busiest accounting day of the month. Why would you move servers around?" "Because we were on the backup server and the new primary was ready to use. Are you here to report some problem?" "Yes! That you moved servers around on the busiest accounting day of the month and it could have impacted our monthly reports!" "Did it?" "No. But it could have!" "OK, well just call me if you figure out that it did and I'll fix it" Walks away grumbling.... [link] [comments] |
| Why does my Tier II insist on making it extremely tedious to add printers? Posted: 01 Jun 2022 09:23 AM PDT The steps we have to take to add a printer on a user's machine: Have the end user call the help desk. Then we have the end user save all of their work. Close their apps. Then we log em out. Sign into the admin account. Set the end user's account as a local admin. Log back into the end users account. Access the print server from the file explorer and add the printer. Tedious process right? BUT WAIT, THERES MORE. Of course it wouldn't be very secure to leave them as the local admin. So we have to sign them out AGAIN. Go back into the admin account. Remove the admin privileges. Then have them sign back in. I figure the easiest way would be to set ip a print server and allow users to go in and add the printers they need. No. Tier II insists that their way is the fastest and the MOST secure way. But what do I know? Im just the help desk guy actually doing the process. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 31 May 2022 07:20 PM PDT WAY back in the 80s - when LANs were just starting to become a thing, but RS-232 still ruled the roost - I did remote support for a number of small rural hospitals and clinics. Most had no luck finding competent technical support locally, so the proficiency of most of their "site managers" pretty much started and ended with being able to change the nightly backup tapes without injuring themselves badly enough to claim workers' comp. I could provide about 90% of their support needs over the WAN, so that worked OK for me; I just needed a functional set of eyes and hands on-site to cover the other 10% (printer setups and such). Their servers had network capacity so we could patch them into my office's WAN for remote support, but most of the local operations were adapted serial (think green screens). Also worth noting is the vast majority of these facilities were housed in old buildings - many built before computers were even a consideration. In any case - one of these facilities decided to acquire a new Unix server. It was to be networked to terminal servers in the building's electrical closets, and a contractor had wired the CRTs on the floor to the terminal servers with serial cable runs - some of them 50'-100'; (yeah I know, not ideal, but ya works with what ya gots). I set up the new server at my home office, drove it out to the site (some 300-odd miles away), swapped it for the old server, and stayed a couple of days to have them stress-test WORK the new server. Everything was running peachy, so we did our closeout and I headed back home. 4 or 5 days later I get a panicky call from the SM saying "We're being attacked! A whole bunch of people are trying to hack into our system all at once!" I hook in over the WAN and see multiple logins of what appears to be random garbage - but isn't, not quite. The text strings going into the login prompts LOOK like 30+ characters of gibberish; they keep repeating the same 30-plus character sequence, though, and the repeating sequence is unique on each affected port. Hardly a coordinated "attack", but enough to minorly impact server performance as it tries to handle multiple constant streams of gibberish logins. My curiosity is definitely aroused, so back in the car I go. Once I got back on-site it took me about an hour and a half to figure out what was happening (1/3 of which was arguing with Building Maintenance to borrow a stepladder so I could get in the drop ceiling). What I found was: - Their contractor had installed cable with next to no shielding. - When running the cabling through the drop ceiling, the contractor had frequently run cables right next to - and directly over, in some cases - fluorescent light fixtures. - Many of the power outlets in the building had never been properly grounded, and some were not grounded at all. When stress-testing the system we'd had every CRT powered up and running, and everything had gone fine; come about a week later, though - after the "new" had worn off - folks started powering down their CRTs at the end of their workday, though, and that's when the fun started. Ungrounded outlets meant ungrounded serial ports, though, so when the CRTs were turned off (and not putting active juice through the serial cabling) every one of those copper strands became a 50'-100' antenna - picking up any bit of ambient electric radiation around them and sending it to the terminal servers - which then passed it on to the server as if it were input. Oh, and those not-quite-random strings of repeating characters? Those were the "signatures" of the individual fluorescent light fixtures - the electronic noise coming off each was like a fingerprint. The problem was immediately addressed by the simple expedient of leaving the CRTs on 24/7. Eventually the facility actually addressed the problem by replacing all that crappy cabling with UTP. That took forever, though - and after a month or two I'd gotten familiar enough with the signatures of the individual fluorescents that when a garbage login started reoccurring, I could call the SM and tell him which department to go to and turn their CRT back on. :D [link] [comments] |
| "Our network keeps going in and out throughout the day" Posted: 31 May 2022 11:33 AM PDT Way way back in 6 years ago, I worked for a small MSP. Just my boss and I handling small to medium size offices with a bunch of mom and pop shops interspersed. We had a few contracts, but most clients were the call as needed type. We had a few "legacy" clients that did their own thing and only called us when they messed something up. This is one of those calls. $Me: TechCo, this is Elk $Client: Hey Elk, I installed a new router last week and we're having some intermittent network outages. Happening at random times throughout the day, though more frequent in the morning and around lunch. $Me: Oh, I had no idea. That's usually something you should alert us to so we can update your company file and better support you. Passive Aggressive Professionalism is a skill. I'll head over to check things out and grab the new credentials from you. They were a block away from us and the remote connection was failing due to him conveniently leaving that configuration out of the new router. Though he did get the business necessities running for their server application. Good for him. I get over there and start walking towards the network closet which just houses a wall mounted Switch, Router, and Modem with a 2012 Essentials Tower on the floor. $Client: Oh no, it's not over there anymore. I hired my nephew to come move the networking equipment to the break room. $Me: Also something you should let us know. Now I'm thinking the cause of the network outages is nepotism, but I decide to do my due diligence before getting angry. I bottle it up and move to the break room. He opens a small cupboard above the kitchen counter and I immediately see the problem. Directly 2 feet below the cupboard sits an 1100 Watt Microwave which was causing interference everytime someone needed to heat something up. Reheat coffee: Network Outage. Heat up some Oatmeal: Network Outage. I had to start the microwave a few times to prove it to him. Told him to move it and all would be well, then set up our remote access again. Edit: Y'all are cracking me up. Thank you =) [link] [comments] |
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