Grah!

[ayelmar.livejournal.com]

A little background: One of the primary systems our lusers access to do 90% of their work has the annoying habit of leaving an orphaned job running on the server if a session is terminated abruptly, such as a loss of connectivity (to clustered servers at several regional data centers); these orphaned jobs continue to count against the total number of allowed signons until they are forcibly killed...one of my tasks is to hunt these down and terminate them with extreme prejudice.
This task has been made considerably easier in recent months by a patch which makes the error message the end-user recieves ("Logon not allowed," yada yada) include the exact server name and job number causing all the trouble, along with the terminal number the job had been called from.

So, on to the call just completed...
luser: "Can you kill a session that's locked?"
me: "Sure, can you give me the error message you're recieving?"
luser: "Logon not allowed."
me: "Okay, and could I get the rest of that message?"
luser: "$terminalnumber"
me: "And at the end, there should be a job number and machine name..."
luser: "Yeah, it's $jobnumber on $machinename."
me: "Thanks, let me clear that for you...that job number and machine name are actually the most important part." *start clearing job*
luser: "Oh, I know; I used to work in IT here at the facility."
me: "..." Then why the hell did you make me fish for that instead of telling me when I asked you for the bloody error message?

(My first actual post to the community, by the way...been lurking for a couple months...)

Comments

[gotica.livejournal.com]

There's one in every group, we have one of them in our IT area here...

*whimper*

[ayelmar.livejournal.com]

Then again, I'm thinking there's a reason she USED to work in IT....

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Beat me to it.

[jecook]

Gods yes. As if I don't have enough work to do, I have to give my cow-orkers assistance with their jobs as well... For training, YES. ABSOLUTELY. But a month afterwards? Hells no. they can look up the procedure...

I've gotten into the habit of making my users go through the mind stretching procedure of minimizing all their windows so they can read their computer name off the wallpaper (Thanks to BGinfo) whilst I troll Active Directory to look the damn thing up myself. I usually have it before they do...

Why fish?

[driftwolf.livejournal.com]

Because:
(a) everyone becomes a luser when they're on the other end of the phone.
Or
(b) because said luser is just cruel and wants to make you suffer like they did.

Take your pick.

cheers,
Marc

--never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by evil intent.

Re: Why fish?

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

Item (a) definitely belongs in the Top x Rules of IT Support.

[commonsensehere.livejournal.com]

yawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!