Irony

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Some days you get the stupid, somedays it gets you...

I just spent most of the weekend trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with the home network, only to find that our Number 5 cat... had been chewing on the Cat5 cable!

I know, I know, not a customer story as such... but I'm between jobs and this was funny even if it was at my own expense. And at one point I was seriously thinking of calling for help anyway... kinda glad I didn't! Still, in my defense, it's not exactly a problem you encounter every day. [sharp pointy little teeth, which stripped insulation but didn't sever wires, causing numerous random shorts between pairs and some really f'in weird errors!] Still... *headdesk*

So, freakiest [legitimate] problem you've encountered, or dumbest mistake you've made [if you're brave enough to admit it!] ??

Comments

[ethereal-dusk.livejournal.com]

I once spent over ten hours trouble-shooting why my burner wouldn't burn, including going to buy a new one... before I realized that I had been trying to burn from my DVD player the whole time. I had built a new box and forgotten that I had switched the CD burner with the DVD player for slot position. I'm brave enough to admit to that. Ya,... dumb.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Mannn... that's an expensive mistake. Sympathies there, and thanks for being brave enough.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

So I'm working tech support for a home DSL service, and one of our services, because we are suckers, is to configure people's WiFi for them. So I spend half an hour trying to get this woman's PCMCIA WiFi card up and running, when finally the customer asks me, "Should there be lights on my WiFi card?" I say sure, and ask her what the card looks like. "I don't know," she says. "It's all the way in."

Klaxons start to sound in my head as I ask her to remove it and tell me what it looks like. She pulls it out and reports that it's a lump of molded plastic with "Dell" printed on it.

I didn't spend half an hour troubleshooting a PCMCIA WiFi card. I spent half an hour troubleshooting a goddamn PCMCIA dust plug.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I spent several increasingly frustrating minutes trying to get a keyboard, any keyboard, to work on a PC which had been fine yesterday, eventually diagnosing a busted motherboard port.

Of course, it was two seconds later that the scummy bastard who had seen the old-style PC and turned the keyboard keylock reached over and unlocked it...

Then there was the time I diagnosed a busted CPU, and it took a very expensive trip to a local repair shop to be told, shamefaced, that if I'd just thought to reseat the damn thing I wouldn't have been out $70.

I didn't argue it. I figured it was cheap for a very well-deserved boot in the stupidity.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Just spent an hour trouble shooting my cable modem. Finally figured out that the cable between router and modem was loose (latch had broken off cable end). We'd had a storm last night and I just jumped to conclusions. D'oh!

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Better still: lights not lit, no action at all on the cable modem. It was a Motorola. Any guesses. Yeah, after 90 minutes I discovered the standby switch on the top of the danged thing had been pressed by the 7-yo in the house.

Anybody know why they even put one on the box?

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

sadistic design engineer is my guess! I mean dammit, it couldn't be better positioned to be hit accidentally if they tried!

[mogaribue.livejournal.com]

At least it wasn't PoE!

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Hee, think I would've known about it rather sooner if it had been!

*chew*chew*ZAP*Meow!!

[solradia.livejournal.com]

At the time, hadn't done much with hardware, but decided to muck around in my case. After dusting and putting some stuff in, I try to boot it back up...nada.. not even a beep. I forgot to turn the safety power switch in the back on first. Sat there for about a minute panicking before I remembered.

Alright, I'm more like telling on a coworker

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

I sent a help desk coworker and hardware newbie to install a PCI network card in a lab computer. I reminded her to disable the onboard one from the BIOS.

She comes back and tells me she broke it. We go to the lab, and there's no display on the computer. I think about it for a little while and realize, she's disable the *video* card.

So we're wondering how the hell we fix this (how does one navigate a BIOS in the dark) when she says "Hey, we could use another lab machine as a guide."

So she reboots the machine next to the blank one. She directs me through mine: "Delete; enter the password; right-arrow three times, enter; down arrow a bunch, then back up two, enter; up, enter; F10, enter." (or something like that.

Machine reboots with display.

I laughed so hard afterwards.

Re: Alright, I'm more like telling on a coworker

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

*blink*

Ok, bonehead mistake but that's actually a pretty clever solution... although I half expected it to boot up with the message "You've been eaten by a Grue".

Re: Alright, I'm more like telling on a coworker

[buckaction.livejournal.com]

or, (and this assumes you have physical access to the pc's innards) reset CMOS defaults via jumper.

this is also a very good reason to keep an old PCI VGA card in your toolbox. Failing to locate any other type of display adaper, BIOS POST will usually happily utilize whatever PCI display device it might find installed.

[ximinez]

Heh. I've linked to this post before, but what the hell, it's kind of a classic.

http://cardinalximinez.livejournal.com/3764.html

Summary: DSL went out, we assumed it was a problem with the CO or the phone company. ISP even sent me a new DSL modem, but it didn't work either. Didn't think to check the telephone ground / surge suppressor that I had on the phone line running in to the DSL modem. I don't think I ever did tell them that the old modem was probably fine...

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I did that one... but it was my own box, and I somehow flipped that damn switch while moving it. The kicker? It RAN for a while... it just wasn't very reliable...

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

That must be the American reaction to flipping that switch. In Australia, when *we* flip that switch, it blows things up.

I first discovered this when my brother couldn't work out the difference between the volume control and a little switch on the back of our computer (yay for volume on the back).

And there were a few guys in high school who enjoyed the results, many times.

[snarl817.livejournal.com]

I was configuring SAMBA on my Linux server, and I could mount the share from my windows workstation, but I couldn't write to it. I thought it odd, as I had added the read-write option to the configuration file for the export.

I worked on it for a week, even going so far as to chmod 777 the mountpoint on the server side. Nada. I asked a friend, who suggested that I look at the log file.

Yeah, it took me a week to get around to looking at the log file. And staring me in the face was, "Unknown option: read-write" The option was supposed to be "read write". I felt rather stupid.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

I had a problem where my cable modem wasn't working. So, I crawled under the desk (where the modem was at) and unscrewed the cable and screwed it back in, reseated all the other cables, etc. Eventually called the cable company. Guy came out, pulled the modem out from under the desk...

...and the cable pulled clean out of the connector on the back of the modem. He cut the cable, put a new connector on it, plugged it back in, and it worked perfectly.

[catmmo.livejournal.com]

I've had the same problem with one of my cats liking to chew on cat5 cable. Grr.
Some others -
*Troubleshooting to the point of swapping out a modem before realizing the phone line was dead
*Wondering why my OS wasn't recongnizing the CD drive on a newly built machine and then realizing that I'd connected the power but not the cable
*Spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out why a user's keyboard and mouse were working on his laptop, but not from the port and it turned out he had reversed them when he plugged them into the port...I felt really stupid for not looking at that first.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Well, see that's the thing about my network, it's about 99% wireless, but there's this one 12 inch length of cat5 connecting the wireless router to the adsl modem. [don't blame me, ISP insisted I used their modem, and they didn't do wireless boxes].

I swear I actually forgot about it all weekend.

ahh, cat5.

[azurelunatic]

Not a dumb tale of my own, but I was trying to explain to a friend why it was important to distinguish between phone cord and cat5 when talking to geeks. (She thought she could get away with calling them both phone cord. *shudder*) She was willing to make the distinction when I explained that really, it would seriously confuse the poor geeks, but she said she could never remember what to call it.

I explained that, well, one cat chewing on a phone cord would demolish the phone cord. Since the other cable is a lot thicker and sturdier, it would take *five* cats to demolish it. (Or one very, very determined and destructive cat, but that doesn't make a good mnemonic.)

All was going along well until she looks at the end of the cat5 I'm handing her, and says, "What's with all the pinpricks in this?"

I look at it, crack up, and inform her that this cable has only four cats left; my eris_raven must have been unleashing her destructive urges on the thing.

[snoopyh42.livejournal.com]

One of the dumber ones I'll own up to...

YEARS ago, I was helping to fix my Dad's friend's 386 (possibly 286) PC running DOS. I was probably 9 or 10 at the time, and was typing faster than the computer could keep up with me as I entered commands. One of the commands I entered was "DEL *.*" and since there were no confirmations, I accidentally deleted his root directory.

Fortunately, while there weren't confirmations to keep me from doing stupid things like this, there WAS the undelete command. I just had to know the first letter of every filename in his root...

[jecook]

hmmmm.... freakiest legit problem that I've encountered... Well, there was that one time that Boss did the "hands of healing" gag on a $2 mil+ router and it worked. Otherwise... nothing stands out.

dumbest mistake that I'm willing to publicly admit: Calling the ISP for support without first power cycling the dsl modem...

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

had mice chew through the cable where it went into the floor.... still have to get around to putting ends on that cable

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Oh man... that reminds me of a story about one of the other techs where I used to work. His previous job used to be general fix-it for IT, and they were located in a converted warehouse type place. [them and a couple of dozen other tech start-ups].

Anyway, LAN went down and since all the cabling was up in the ceiling, and he was skinny guy, he got to go up into the crawl space to see what was what.

So, he's up there, in the dark with nothing but a rather dim head-lamp, when he notices what looks like a router with little red LED's blinking at him... which puzzles him mightily since there shouldn't be any boxes up there. But what the heck, obviously something is badly wrong when the little red lights are blinking on and off, so he decides to reset it, figuring it might be the problem.

So, he reaches out to the device, aiming for where he figured the power switch would be.... and his fingers encounter fur!
Yup, he just tried to power cycle a rat!

Needless to say, he came down a helluva lot faster than he went up, and not by the same hole!

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Yup, he just tried to power cycle a rat!

Priceless.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

He's lucky he didn't get bit, rat bites can be nasty.

[ateji.livejournal.com]

I have an idiot cat who just loves cords. Phone cords going from modem to wall (my father is stuck in the stone age) on up. I keep waiting to hear a frizzle and an annoyed banshee call.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

I installed Vista.
Ultimate.
64-bit.

It makes me cry..but I needed it for work. :(

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

*hands you tissues*

Man, I feel for you.

Rule #1 - Get caffeine, THEN get to work

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

I was trying to dial into a customer's Unix box about ten years ago but couldn't get connected. Got the customer back on the phone, went through the usual checks, resets, etc. to cure a non-answering modem, no luck. Couldn't even hear my incoming call ringing through the customer's modem in the background, even though when I called the modem number on the handset, it was definitely ringing. (Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for customers' accts payable offices to terminate 'extra' phone lines without telling anyone, not knowing what they were for.) I even had the customer go find a phone she could plug the modem line into and make sure the line itself was good - yep, line was fine, she was able to call me back on it no problem.

I'd also double-checked myself a dozen dozen times to make sure I was dialing the number listed in the customer's notes. It was about the dozen dozenth-plus-one check that I realized that the customer info I had on the screen was for a slightly different customer name than the one I was actually trying to dial into. I asked the customer to hold on a minute while I tried something 'really last resort on the modem here' (she didn't know the modem bank was in a completely different building - shut up), swore profusely at the mute button, then dialed the correct number.

Whaddya know. Connected the first time.

[forever-damned.livejournal.com]

I've spent AGES trying to get my wireless network to work, I just couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to get a signal from one of the wireless cards on the network.

Turned out I'd taken the antenna off a few days ago to troubleshoot on another card and had forgotten to put it back on. :X

[davetheinverted]

My Great Moment Of Stupidity happened about 10 years ago, when I was just starting out as a TS rep. The local ISP I worked for had some interesting setups. First thing to know is that, for reasons beyond my ken, every tech had root access to the actual admin server. NOC was Not Happy about this, but unfortunately, the way things were set up, it would have been nearly impossible for us to do our jobs without this. (Don't ask...just don't ask.) Second thing to know was that because LocalPhoneCompany, despite assuring us every week for four months that yes, they would have those 2400 dry pairs ready to go at our new location, not actually even begun work on them when the due date hit. As a result, our NOC was a 20-mile drive from our headquarters. It was, of course, staffed 24/7...except when there was the very occasional NOC/admin-all-hands meeting.

Some of you can see where this is going.

One of the more common things we had to do was...heck, I don't remember, but it involved poking at people's mail files and some sort of process that could go runaway. After I'd been there a few weeks, one of the other techs showed me how to get out of the process going runaway: CTRL-Z to background the process, then kill -9 %1, which would kill that freshly backgrounded process. It was near the end of the day when he told me this, so I didn't get it 100%. The next morning, I had to do the operation on someone's mail file...and typed kill -9 -1. As root. On the admin server.

Suddenly, nothing worked. Not for us, not for our customers. I'd taken down the server that ran the entire ISP...and in such a way that it couldn't be remotely restarted. And yes, this *was* during one of the aforementioned meetings.

So yeah...I killed the entire ISP until somebody could drive back up to the NOC and physically turn the admin server back on. Amazingly, they let me keep my job. And yes, over time, I *did* get better.


Dav2.718

[turningallblue.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/techsupport/1324994.html
Yup.

[dreamatdrew]

Ahh, the personal stupid-wayback machine:
Item: I just got my new-to-me laptop, and went through and moved all the schtuff from the old lappy to the new one. That night, I went to hang out with some friends of mine at $restaurant and $friend wanted to raid my music collection.. so I set up an ad-hoc and told him to go for it.... he couldn't see my lappy...
after 15 minutes, I gave up, and walked away (mostly because I had to piss like a russian race horse at a german beer party), and $friend2 started looking for what was wrong.
I'd never enabled Samba on the new lappie...