you sig says otherwise, hot shot

[ebtb.livejournal.com]

Here's a signature you shouldn't use when writing tech support:  "Limits exist only in your mind!"

This following an email that basically said "I'm having trouble updating to the latest version! HELP!" Oh, the irony.  Have you all ever run into equally or more ironic ones?

Comments

[susano-otter.livejournal.com]

"The trouble is only in your mind. Free your mind, your upgrade will follow."

[kalium.livejournal.com]

Zen tech support. I like it already.

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily tech related, but one of my co-workers sent me an email to let me know he'd be late a while back, because he'd fallen and twisted his ankle pretty bad (tripping over his dog, i think).

His sig was a saying from his Marine Corps days: "Pain is just fear leaving the body."

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

One of my customers was a real head-shaker. He was the IT guy for seven facilities but he could barely find his way around a keyboard. Although I was 'just' software support, it quickly got to where his people would call me for help with their PCs because they REALLY didn't want him to touch anything. Said one user after I told her I wasn't allowed to address her PC issue, 'Well, whatever's wrong with it now I can live with compared to whatever he's going to screw up on it if he does anything to fix it!'

Anyhow, this guy had written his very own backup routine, yay him -- but he evidently never did any sort of verifying or testing or he would have noticed that the backup was only picking up files that had been created since the last backup run. Existing files that had merely been updated weren't picked up. Yes, those would be the main data files. When did he find the problem? After a virus got into his network and thrashed everything. We helped him get our runtime software reinstalled and helped him download current versions of all of our programs and such from our WebDAV site. So all that was left was for him to restore the data from his backup -- copy, paste, and have a nice day. Well, that would have been all there was to it if his backups had actually been set up correctly. Instead, he lost about six months of data that the users at these seven facilities had to recreate and rekey.

Long story short (too late!), his sigfile was a mishmash of quotes extolling the virtues of good antivirus protection and backups. I wanted to give him the Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts with a printout of his sigfile.

[jecook]

::facepalm::

Sounds like my boss at the last place I worked at, who wanted to test our backups by nuking the server and doing a full restore.

myself and the rest of the executive team managed to talk him out of it, because doing that to a production server with all your critical data and stuff on it is a really *BAD* idea.

A *test* server, no problem. That's why it's a test server...

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

But if it's a test server, it's not the real, live server so we won't know if it really works on the real, live server! Right? No? Bueller? ;D

(Some days I almost miss working The Desk but then I remember customers like The Doofus and suddenly I don't miss it at all.)