Confession time

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

I'm spending a lot of time reading my way through the archives here. It seems to be therapeutic after stressful days at work. :) And it's affecting my behaviour...

I put in a tech ticket at work this week. I tried all the 'normal' troubleshooting moves with no result, and I was feeling pretty grumpy (see above comment about 'stressful days at work', and modify with thoughts of 'about to be late to a meeting and have three people asking me to do Just One Little Thing right now). So when the tech who got the ticket called me back right then, I was already wanting to tell him "Look, I'm not one of your run-of-the-mill lusers, okay? I do my troubleshooting up front, the Uber Tech Gods of Tech Support HELL say nice things about me, I rock, all right? Stop asking your stupid weed-out-the-luser questions and get over here to fix this genuinely borked machine!"

But I didn't, because he was a nice man trying to fix my problem, and my glorious power-user aura does not shine through the telephone. So I answered his questions while typing as fast as I could and holding a second conversation with the guy breathing down my neck. (I know, that was bad, one must give tech support one's full attention... but breath-boy wouldn't take "can I do this after the meeting?" as a brushoff.)

My side of the conversation:
"Yes I have done [standard troubleshooting step #1]."
"Yes I have done [standard troubleshooting step #2]."
"Yes other users are experiencing this."
"Yes I have powercycled it."
"...But not THAT way. Um. What second button? Okay... I'm not near [borked machine], can you hold a minute while I go try that?"

I get rid of breath-boy without actually having to threaten him with my whacky stick (yes, I have one), and head off to [borked machine], muttering under my breath about how I'm SURE this won't work, it IS dead, this is a waste of my time and I have SO many other things I could be doing with it.

I powercycle, using both the big glowing green obvious button and the extremely non-obvious second button that is cunningly hidden behind an unobtrusive flap the same colour as the rest of the housing, at knee level, with no labels or pointers whatsoever.

The d@mn thing is no longer borked. It pops back to life with all the lights that should be glowing, glowing, all the lights that should be blinking, blinking, and all the lights that should be off, off. It is positively eager to perform its designed function like a good little robot servant should.

THE B@ST@RD. How DARE it be fixable by a full powercycle! How DARE the method for inducing a full powercycle be so non-obvious! Why the HECK did they design it like that! What a STUPID WASTE OF MY TIME! If that damn second switch had been labelled or marked in ANY way I would have had the stupid thing fixed YESTERDAY talk about a TOTAL FAIL of CUSTOMER SERVICE and RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT!!!!!

So I grouched my way back to my desk in high dudgeon, picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and--

--thanked him, sincerely, and wished him a nice day. Because he was a nice man, and he had fixed my problem.

(And I sincerely doubt he had any say in the design of that flippin' switch. Yeah, I figure they built it like that to hide the "don't turn this off until the other button has been off for at least 30 seconds or you'll kill the internal processor" switch from lusers who like to stab random buttons, but that design team is still going to star in my new collection of voodoo dolls.)

Comments

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

At least you were gracious about it.

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

That's the point at which I did NOT open up Tech Support HELL to find a surprisingly familiar-sounding story about the Evil Luser who was rude because finding out about the second on/off button made her feel stupid. :D

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

We've all been there once. *pats*
Or maybe we haven't, but I have. :) Take it as a learning experience!

;)

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

sometimes the buttons are good

I've disabled power buttons before when at clients sites that were too happy to reboot. "The server was slow, so I hit the power button and held it down so it shut off, then turned it back on, not it won't start _application_"

"uh... you don't do that to a windows server box...EVER"

"Oh I've done it hundreds of times"

*puts note in log, cut cable between power button and MB, affix internal button to cable*

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Eeeergh, bad!

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Hm... that was a reply to a reply that doesn't seem to be here any more. *pokes LJ*

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I guess it was too tricky to put a countdown timer on that button. Or something which checks the state of the cache.

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Yeah... the current setup means you really CAN get users truthfully saying "Yes, I powercycled it" followed by "Well it didn't work when I did it!" :P

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

Well, that IS kind of a goofy thing to do with a button that's supposed to be that important. But yeah, they way you handled it said more about you than how much you previously knew about the krunking button.

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Must not point anger at the nice tech who helped me. Must save it up and use it on somebody deserving, later. :P :D

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's easy enough: it's the people who put the button where it is who deserves the royal snarking. Heck, without the tech support guy, would you have A: ever found it or B: figured out that that's what it's for? ^_^

[firon.livejournal.com]

This is why in some cases I will actually pull the plug on printers completely. You can never really be sure they are completely power cycled until you do that.

Honestly though, they should design these things so that if there's a power failure nothing bad happens, right? So why can't they make a power switch that handles the same job?

Then of course there are the laptops that fail to boot due to some random error that can be fixed by unplugging, taking out the battery and pressing the power button. Once you put it all back together it works a charm!

XTS

[ace-brickman.livejournal.com]

We have a little phrase at our shop, "XTS" or "X-treme (with an X!!!11!) Trouble-Shooting," directly related to the reasons you spell out here. Sometimes a regular reboot doesn't work. Shutdown didn't work? OK, shut it down again. Now unplug the damn thing, then hold down the power button for 5 seconds. Yes I'm serious... No, that was just 4.8 seconds, lets do it again.. Ok, now plug it back in. Works? great!

we had some IBM ThinkCenter NICs that would only release an IP address with this process. Don't even ask why, I couldn't tell ya. the IBMs got replaced 3 months after I started, so I didn't get much time to ask why, and wasn't curious enough to find out.

[tanetris.livejournal.com]

Unrelated, I like your icon.

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Heh, thanks - an online friend drew it for me years ago. :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

Gotchas are everywhere; it doesn't matter how long you've been working on computers, they'll still get you. ;)

The term "Power User" just makes me shudder though. I've got a user here who keeps finding new and interesting ways to break her machine and every time I go to fix it she waxes on and on about what a Power User she is. *sigh* I have to say I'm impressed by her ability to break stuff given the locked down nature of the environment here.

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

She's missing a letter, she sounds more like a Power Luser to me :P

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

Indeed she is. :)

[bothunter.livejournal.com]

Wow.. This sounds like a crappy Konica Minolta printer I had to deal with. It had a "Fiery" printer server which ran on Linux and used the non-journaling ext2 filesystem.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I hate Konicas with a fiery passion. They are in our environment against our will. Happily they are also under a NON-IT-CONTRACT between Facility Services and the local Konica business. We get called of course when they break down but we just go, stare at it, and say, "Yup, it's borked. Call X. Have a nice day."

Still, I hate them. Because we then inevitably get yelled at by the users. *sigh*

[ace-brickman.livejournal.com]

ugh! as in Die in a Fiery Hell! That was my first experience with a 10 minute install for a fsking print driver, because of course it's just 1 maybe 2 computers actually printing to the damn thing but they don't have just a simple driver on the CD...

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

When I was a college senior, my school finally implemented a NetReg program for everyone (where you have to register your MAC address to be allowed to play on the internet with the big kids). We were told that because of this, the first time we started up our computers, the internet wouldn't work. We'd have to go through NetReg, then wait half an hour or so for our registration to percolate. And lo, when I booted up my laptop, the internet did not work, as promised. The little NetReg page popped up, I did my thing, and waited. Two days later, it still wasn't working. I cornered some of my friends who worked at the school help desk and wailed that NetReg wasn't working! My internet was borked and it was All Their Fault! One of them came back to my dorm room, took one look at my settings, and said "You forgot to change it from a static to dynamic IP when you moved back to college."

Doh.

[jjjiii]

They like to hide buttons because if it's designed for uptime and they make the off button really obvious, you just know someone's going to screw up their 5 9's by pressing it because they wondered what it did.