ATTN all geeks!

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

Ok I am looking for a sound wave of Boo from Monsters Inc saying, "Mike Wazowski!" Does anyone know of a link or a place I can find it? I have been searching and searching but ... no luck.

Thanks!

IT support person from hell. Or one of them anyway!

[agentz.livejournal.com]

Ok, so at work at the moment we're going through a review process part of which is an online customer survey which was sent out to a random sample of three hundred users the day before yesterday.

Turns out there was a problem with the email that was sent out, or rather that the product that our schools use for their email mis-interprets the URL and breaks the link in the email therefore the survey returns an error. We use MailGear for school email and it turns out that if you send a URL to a MailGear user that contains an & anywhere in the URL, MailGear decides to put a semicolon after the ampersand and ignore anything beyond that in the URL so only text upto the semicolon is underlined and clickable.

When I discovered this yesterday I sent an email round the rest of the tech suppor team explaining what the issue was (given that we were being bombarded with calls about the non-working survey) and explaining in minute detail how to work around the problem with individual users until we can put a larger fix in place.

The workaround is nice and simple really - highlight the whole line of text from the email, copy it to the clipboard, open a new browser window, paste the URL in and then manually edit out the random semicolon. Optional to this was adding a bookmark to the survey so that the user can come back to it at their leisure.

The important thing to remember here is that I described the fix in minute detail, even going as far as to say 'click the mouse to the right of the text of the URL, hold down the mouse button and drag it to the left until the whole line including http:// is highlighed'.

Take it from me, the workaround for this works fine and everyone in our office (10 support analysts, all supposedly intelligent people) should be able to pass this information on to end users.

So today, Lorri, one of the analysts from hell attends a call for the survey problem while in a school looking at a printer. She has my email with her. After an hour of messing around she phones me and says "I can't get it to work" and proceeds to tell me that she's done exactly as my email says. I talk her through it again and it still doesn't work.

I get another phone call from her 90 minutes later saying that she still can't get it to work and is going to head off to another call then come back to the office.

I catch up with her when she comes back in and she's brandishing a handwritten note with the URL of the survey on it, except that it contains the bloody semicolon. Cleverly though she's also forwarded the email from the end user to her own MailGear account and is messing around with it. I watch her open the email, click on the broken link and then turn round and say to me "see, I told you it doesn't work".

I asked her if she had read my email at all and she produces a printout of it from a ring binder. I ask her to follow the instructions again and watch in amazement as she manages to highlight all the text only as far as the semicolon and ignore everything that comes after it. I point out to her that she should be highlighting the whole line so this she does. I ask her to copy that and paste it into a new browser window which she does and then instantly jumps on the Return key and then say "look it still doesn't work".

Lorri dear, try taking the semicolon out of the URL, to which she manages to delete the semicolon and the two characters immediately to the left of it! "It still doesn't work" she whines.

Oh fer fecks sake, I re-pasted the URL into the browser, delete the semicolon and hit Return. And whaddya know?

It works!

Its no wonder my hair is getting thin.