Today's Stupid User Trick

[stonebutterfly.livejournal.com]

So, I work for a videoconferencing company and I sit in the support center. One of the guys near me is fairly loud so regardless of any desire to.. I get to hear his phone calls on a regular basis. Today, I thought he was going to lose it.

Okay... so to set this up.. we sell a little tv-set-top Videoconferencing System which has a swively-headed camera on top, a microphone on the side-ish, and a remote control. You see the other person on the screen, they see you, conversation ensues.

Right... so the swivel-heady camera comes with a little piece of plastic film with a red plastic stripe in it (to let morons know that they forgot to take the safety film off the lense).

J. Random Customer calls in complaining that there's a big red line in the video coming from his camera. Surely the camera is defective!

Patiently, Mr. J. Random and his "tech" on the other end of the phone, are instructed to gently lift the piece of plastic membrane from the lense of the camera, and the picture will be rendered clear.

HALF AN HOUR LATER... Mr. Customer still does not seem to grasp the concept of the fact that there is a bloody piece of protective plastic on the lense to keep it from getting scratched that he needs to take off. So far my fellow technician has found five HUNDRED different ways to descibe "piece of plastic film", "red stripe of plastic"

Then there is the silence... as a look of incredulity comes over the face of the technician who says the dreaded words... "You.. what?"

Yes folks... Mr. J. Random had not only managed to remove the piece of plastic with the red stripe but the ENTIRE GLASS LENSE from the front of his videoconferencing system, rendering it entirely useless.

And no.. apparently they thought nothing was pointedly wrong with the cracking noises and the ripping sounds as they tore it out.

And there you have it... my stupid customer trick of the day. And that was before lunch.

Oh the horrors

[murnkay.livejournal.com]

Thought I'd say hi and drop off ,if nothing else, a quick annoyence.

I'm currently working as the Asst. dir of IT at a local coll. Well that's a bit of a joke, as the Dept has 2 people and one parttimer. Ooooh, I'm the Asst. Director and the othe rguy is the Director... feel like a scam to anyone else? Only one problem with this setup. He does database stuff and really ONLY database stuff. I do everything else. Was trained as a field tech .. hardware/software/wiring/internet so now I have these 120 machines and 6 servers to watch over.

My single worst pet peeve here has to be... all the people who call my line everytime some fucking webpage doesn't load and ask me "Is the server down?" "You mean the Internet Line or the FILE SERVER?" "Uhm that internet thing" "No it's fine." "Well it doesn't work up here." "OK, what are you trying to do, I'll check it here." "I was trying to go to cnn..." "CNN is down, see I'm looking here. The internet is up, CNN is down." "Well can you fix it?" "I'm sorry I don't work for time Warner right now, but I'm sure I can call them and ask them to speed things up..." "Uhm, ok"

And they hang up and go about their lives, probably thinking I called Time/Warner for them, until the next time when the disneyStore website doesn't work. Oh, I can't ask them if they should be useing the net access like that, nono that would be rude. Luckily, they are now mostly used to my sarcasm and no longer fight the unending flow of it. Thank the lord for small favors...

(no subject)

[elyxxx.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd stick my nose in here and introduce to myself. And oh boy do I have plenty to bitch about, but we're being beaten down with calls today because our stupid goddamn database (new database = increased productivity and reliability... HAHAHAHAHAHHAH yeah whatever)..

I think one point will say it all: I support Microsoft desktop products.

Will you please kill me now?

*Cry*

(no subject)

[tk7602.livejournal.com]

well, i'm lucky enough to not directly support anyone anymore, but i do deal second hand with silly user issues.

prior to the company i am at now i worked at BBN/GTE/Genuity whatever they were that year. i was in the first round of techies that new leased line customers talked to, so i got to help people figure out ip addresses and all sorts of other things that they just never understood.

and even better - before that i was at TIAC. boston / new england area people may well have had the (dis)pleasure of using them for internet access in some way shape or form.

scary stuff that. lots of good stories from there. maybe i'll tell the one about the guy picking up his phone and listening to modem tones while expecting to get on "that internet"

FURY FURY FURY!!!

[liquidmercurial.livejournal.com]

Today has been the day from hell for bitchy, mega-stupid idiots from HELL!!!!

Here are the notes from the last call I took:

- the test mail she was told to send to herself by the last tech, she received just fine
- I said, "Great, then your email is working!"
- she says, "I want some compensation for those days that I wasn't getting email."
- I tried to assess what happened and she kept getting more and more pissed off
- Basically since April 9 she has not received any email
- she also has not received any error messages at all when hitting send/receive
- but today after talking to the last tech who told her to send herself a test message she received "10" messages that were dated April 9 and beyond
- she wants to know how she can get financial compensation for that lost time and email
- I told her she would need to call CS and I gave her the 800 number
- she says that the last time this happened she got a $10 credit to her account because she complained enough (does the word scammer mean anything to anyone?)

And then there was this call right before it:

- she now has a job at home where she answers email that get sent to her
- emails are getting bounced
- these are the emails that she is sending out
- she is using Eudora
- it is sending out but she is getting the mailer daemon thing
- the email says: the following addresses has permanent fatal errors "your envelope sender is in my bad mail from list" while talking to their mail server 5.7.1 550 blank@blank.net unknown
- now this blank@blank.net has received some emails from her before but some don't go through
- trashed the Eudora settings file
- reset Eudora with the basic mail settings
- then I find out that she's using another email address entirely and it has nothing to do with our company (I found this out when she got a password error and she said, "Oh, this is for "this company's" email address?" I said, "What password were you typing in?" Her response was, "The one to the email address I use for my work.")
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH
- luckily we didn't empty the trash
- swapped the Eudora settings out and put the old ones back in
- told her she needs to contact the people who run the email that she is using and tell them her problem because it has NOTHING to do with us

risk of serious injury...

[dfitzpat.livejournal.com]

days like today really ought to be banned. i have spent the entire day working with one customer, on one ticket. it is kind of frustrating to spend my entire day doing this when i have a list of stuff i need to get done both in regards to other tickets as well as the lab that i partly admin.

first, let me explain. they use a product of ours, and since they pay for a support contract, it is in our best interest to work our hardest to resolve issues relating to the software. a few days ago, they were doing maintenance on the system, cleaning up after a few employees left etc... so they removed the old users from the system. however, they didn't bother to check what those users did or were responsible for. one of the users was set to have their home directory in the same path as the database for our product (dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb). so when they removed the user, and ensured that the "remove users' home directory" was also checked, they removed the database, and subsequently, all files within it. and whala! our software no longer works. why? because it can't find the specified database!

well it took me about 1/2 day to come to the above scenario because i didn't think that it was a feasible situation, but turns out, it was. and who am i to comment on their configuration. i'm sure some admin had a good reason someplace along the line... so yesterday i made the recommendation that they restore the database files from a backup prior to user deletion and then to let me know how they make out. because, well honestly, it wasn't our fault, nor is it my job to be a UNIX admin for this guy who was new to HP-UX (though, honestly, it's no fault of his own, he was thrown into it). well they restored the DB but it wasn't the right copy. it turned out to be a newly initialized DB so they must have run the "dbinit" utility we have....

so today we asked them to restore all files associated with our software, an entirely new copy of the DB directory, and the /etc/passwd file to restore the two removed users. this way they'd be back where they were before all this happened. made them stop the server services, then restarted them after the restore was finished. test the connectivity via the client, and woah! it worked... [shaking head]

so here i am. i've now spent more than a day and 1/2 troubleshooting this one ticket which in the end, was a result of their own error. i can't tell you how frustrating this one scenario has been. UNIX admin who is unfamiliar with HP-UX, uninformed end users who don't know the name of the client software they're using, and a cloudy picture of what happened in the first place...

i'm tired now. i'm going to update the ticket, make a note to follow up with them on Monday and go home. i hope to be thoroughly sloshed in a matter of hours as a result of my totally craptastic day today.

(no subject)

[theboss.livejournal.com]

Hello there,
I am a new member to this community. While I may not be a representative, I go through some of the same pains that you all do. :) I work as a supervisor for a national ISP. I get to hear some pretty interesting things throughout the day.
Just wanted to send a quick hello. I will post more as time allows.

TB