Hi there!!!

[whitewolf3399.livejournal.com]

Newb to the community, have so enjoyed reading others pain I figured I'd share one of my own as well as a funny that happened recently :)



I work at a large ISP providing second tier support for what internally is termed medium to large business. Basically that means if you have a fractional-t1 or higher circuit or one of our VPN products you have to call us for help if it doesn't work. Two years or so back management finally got their head out of their posteriors and realized we were woefully short on both in-house tier1 and tier 2 support so internal only notices got posted.

We hired thirty new Tier 1 analysts!! But wait... This is a unionized org, all Tier 1 support is done by craft employees. Meaning anyone in the same paygrade/slot could/can move over into another slot if positions are available. Does anyone see where this is going yet? 90% of the people we got for our Tier1 had never touched a router, couldn't spell 'IP' and thought 'ethernet' was something Dr's use to administer anesthetic.

Just how woefully under-educated most of them were was revealed to me one morning whilst I was out on our loading dock getting my morning ration of nicotene. One of our new 'analysts' was out there and we were chatting mostly about work and the over-demanding customers we tend to get when a truck with huge letters on the side "Sysco" backed in and began unloading foodstuffs for the cafeteria.

Tier 1 pipes up: Wow, I didn't know they delivered food too!
Me: Pardon?
Tie1: You know, Sysco... isn't that where we also get our routers?
Me: Uhm... no, that company is Cisco.

At that point I decided avoidance was prudent and fled back to my cube....






Tier2: One of my co-workers
TCON: Technical contact for a fairly large company, in theory the network admin or local router jockey

Co-worker and tcon had been working for a few hours on what the customer was calling a 'throughput' problem. Basically his complaint was he wasn't getting the download speeds he thought he should across his dedicated T1 line. After working with the guy for a while co-worker had eliminated our circuit, router and core infrastructure as the problem and from the kindness in his heart trying to help the customer isolate what on his LAN was causing the bottleneck. Co-worker has the guy on speakerphone at this point so we're all listening in to the following:

Tier2: How is your LAN connected to the router? Is it running through a firewall or directly to a hub or switch?
TCON: I don't know... I think it's wired directly to our LAN
Tier2: Do you only have one computer hooked up?
TCON: No, we've got 15 pc's linked up
Tier2: Ok, then you've got to have something else behind our router to distribute the data... what kind of device is it
TCON: I have no idea, this is what we pay you folks for...
Tier2: No sir, you contract with us to provide the connection to the LAN, getting it to the desktop is your responsibility... Do this, see the cable coming out the back of the router?
TCON: Yes...
Tier2: Trace that back to the next box it plugs into, tell me what name is on the front.
TCON: There's three wires here, which one is it?
Tier2: What color are they?
TCON: Black, wait that goes to the power... then there is a light grey one and a blue one.
Tier2: Trace the blue one back, that should go to the wall jack for the T1
TCON: Yep, it goes to a fancy phone plug
Tier2: !?!?!?! Yes, thats called a smartjack...
TCON: Oh... ok, the gray cable runs up and over to this other rack... say...
Tier2: Do you see something that doesn't look right?
TCON: Well, this cable is a little skinny... Do you think it's just to small? All that data is just getting tied up trying to go through this tiny cable and we could get better speeds if we went with a thicker one...

We all had to leave the room for a bit we were laughing so hard.... Oh and customers problem turned out to be the cheap a** wireless router he was using behind our router. It could handle the bit rate just fine but was choking on a high packet rate per second.