grarrrrrrrrrrrrrg.

[mellay.livejournal.com]

erg.

today, most of my calls went like this:

Me: "Thank you for calling _____ Business Technical Support, may I have your name please?"
Cust: "OH YOU'RE THERE WHY DID YOU HAVE ME ON HOLD I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR NEARLY THREE HOURS -"
Me: "I apologize about the wait -"
Cust: "What did you want? My computer is messing up and I can't get online and I've been waiting for so long. Now what is going on?"
Me: "of course. Could I have your express service code?"
Cust: "BLAHBLAHBLAH now yadda yadda -"
Me: "Ok, while I'm pulling up your information, I'll let you know that the reason why you had to wait so long is a new virus that exploits a windows weakness came out this past weekend -"
Cust: "Yeah yeah I heard it on the phone but I can't possibly have the virus, cause I run NORTON!"
Me: "Ok, now do you download and install the windows critical updates?"
Cust: "The...uh...the what??!"

and this is the point where i happily tell them that a virus is out of HARDWARE'S scope of support, search for the offending file, and give them web addresses to fix it themselves. boy, do i hate whoever made the sasser worm...because i have to deal with these punks.

i actually welcomed calls that involved actual hardware problems...i didn't want to let my one no POST call of the day go! it was the only IT guy i talked to all day, and was almost in tears by the time his phone disconnected, because i knew, just KNEW that when i got my next call, it'd be the sasser. and it was. sad, sad day.

Comments

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

"Housecall has found 20 uncleanable viruses"

Me: "Ma'am, do you have any important data to back up?"
Cust: "...why?"

[said-by-me.livejournal.com]

we lucked out at my company....or we just got smart. We started pushing out the patches last week and if they weren't installed at the *elective* prompt, they were forced. After if somehow they still didn't get installed, the users machine account was frozen and disconnected. I had 1 infected user today and his was so bad we didn't bother trying to fix it, kust sent him in for a rebuild

[agentz.livejournal.com]

I think we've been lucky so far - haven't seen any reports of Sasser appearing in our Helldesk system. Yet.

It's bound to happen though. With about 4000 windows machines on the network its just got to happen.

*sigh*

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

actually, yesterday, while we were all working, all outside internet access went down.

so while we were talking to customers about the virus, it was rumored *we* had been hit with it.

Silly techs, they were really just updating and patching our systems without telling us, and taking us offline to be safe.

[corpslave.livejournal.com]

I'm only part-time, so I haven't been at work since Friday. Training resumes tomorrow at 9am sharp, so I hope the company my team supports doesn't have too many problems. Most of our job deals with internal sales-related software, but I'm sure this would fall in our realm too.

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

We haven't gotten hit at my company (yet hopefully not ever)

After we got hit with Blaster I've been pushing "DO YOUR DAMN UPDATES" every chance I've gotten.

Not to mention every time I have a user on the phone "While you're on check this in Symantec Antivirus" and having them set it to do automatic weekly or daily updates. I also have them set it to automatically do the Windows Critical Updates (as in automatically download the updates and then prompt to reboot the system) depending on the user.

Seems to be working out well though it's really sad that the only way to get people to do this stuff is to automate it . . .