(no subject)

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

The things you hear when working the night shift - I work for a large company that provides Internet, Telephone and Cable Television. I'm on the graveyard this week, so we're getting some beauties.

Scene: the office. 4am. Quiet. Too quiet.

*Beep*

"Good evening and welcome to [mywork] Cable Net. My name's Gillian, and how can I help you tonight?"

"Yes, I need to pay my bill."

"Ok, but I'm afraid our main accounting system is undergoing maintenance right now. If you have your account number we can go ahead."

"Er... no."

"Hmm - let me try another system. Do you have your username?"

"Huh?"

"Your email address at [mywork]net dot com dot au?"

"Sorry, can't remember that."

"Ok, let me try by home address..."

"XX Cole St, W$#%^&

"Fine, hang on a moment... I don't have any cable internet addresses in Cole St, W$#%^&"

"Oh, no, it's a phone bill."

"Would you excuse me a moment please?"

*hold*

I have no doubt you all heard the scream of anguish from there.

Customer Service (billing) for phones is closed until Monday, but I put her through to faults to see if they could help, and to liven up their dull evening anyway.

(no subject)

[essial.livejournal.com]

A couple of random phrases that make me wanna sqirm when I hear 'em:

customer: "What is a windows XP?"
(enough said..)

customer: "BestBuy said this computer was top of the line! What do you mean its too old to run windows XP?!"
me: "uh.. when did you buy the computer?"
customer: "sometime around 1996"

customer: "*angry* I just got my PC back, and now it wont connect to the internet! AND now none of my phones work!!"
me: "*sigh* try plugging the phone line into the jack with the little phonejack symbol.. call me back if that doesn't fix it"
(never called back)

No.. unfortunatly I'm not joking.. of course I'm sure you guys feel my pain :)

Several Annoyances:
- Customers bringing in "windows cd and license" as a burned CD with a markered serial
- Computers that have a 5.25 floppy drive, 4x CD drive, and a DVD burner all in the same box
- Customers who seem to think you can pull their word documents and pictures off of a drive thats completly and utterly dead (you know.. the ones that go clickatyclack or don't spin).

Heh.. and do any of you techs have the urge to change the passwords to "ImABigGirl" when customers bring in a password-locked XP Pro or NT2000 system and don't tell you the pass is? "Oh by the way, since your system was locked out, I had to change the pass.. its now.. I'm a big girl". Learning is fun!

First error report of the day...

[wyrdlinks.livejournal.com]

From accounts staff: "[myname], this computer's sick."

That's it. That's the sum total of the report. What the f**k am I supposed to diagnose with that? I was *so* tempted to reply with "take it to the loo, rub its back, and give it a drink of water when it's finished throwing up", but that could be a CLM (Career Limiting Move) 'round here. They don't understand sarcasm.

ARGH!

Meh...

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago we had to put an install on hold because the client had ordered a KVM... but no cable sets for the boxen.

They called the other day to let us know the cables had come in...

Yes indeedy. One set of them.

Compaq Tech Support

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Mid last week my sister in law called me to say they were having problems with my brother's computer (a year and a half old Compaq) It kept running slowly and shutting down.

She already figured it was Windows XP getting bogged down with Internet crap so she backed up the important stuff and tried to do a restore. The restore disc was not working.

So she calls Compaq Tech support and they send her out a new set of restore CDs. Starts a restore again, same thing. She managed to get it to a point where Windows would at least come up but it was still running very slowly and shutting down.

From what she said it sounds like Compaq didn't do much troubleshooting and told her that a fan must have gone bad so it's overheating and she'll need to take it to a service center. She wasn't left with a good feeling after dealing with these people. Plus she didn't want to take it to a service center.

So she called me up to see if I could take a look. I got out there yesterday and started it up. Yup very slow and just doesn't seem to want to work well.

I restarted it and went into system setup looking for Diagnostics. I stumbled on a Hard Drive diagnostic utility built into the BIOS. Was actually thinking this might be a memory issue but I figured "Why not" So I run it. "This will take 50 minutes to run" about a minute into it the message said "Hard drive needs replacement"

So we run to Circuit City, buy a Western Digital (those are still good right?) and replace the Maxtor drive with that. Computer restores fine and is back to normal.

I'm just surprised that Compaq tech support didn't have her run any diagnostic utilities on the system to determine the problem. Particularly when it's built into the BIOS. Then again, maybe I'm not surprised. I guess it's not a huge deal because the service center would've determined the cause and fixed it (for a fee) but still. Just seems that they didn't try at all on this one. I could be wrong though!

Oh well.

SimIndiana, without Disasters

[naggy.livejournal.com]

There is an interesting company out of Houston called SimDesk, which offers a set of Office tools similar to MS Office/OpenOffice/StarOffice. The slight difference is that they are not installed on your PC, instead you use a client to access these programs from the web (similar to Citrix nFuse, for those that are familiar). These tools are offered for free to people in certain locations, notably Chicago, Houston, and Indiana. They offer the typical office applications (except databases), filespace, e-mail, instant messaging (not compatable with other instant messagers, as far as I can tell), and contact management.

Now, the reason I point this out, is that when I saw a link for SimIndiana, my first thought was that I'd get to download something where I could drop meteors and send massive earthquakes to destroy the state...start a few fires, instigate some riots, bring in the UFO's to burn down half the city...maybe if it was compatible with SimCity4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack, I could roll a tank through the streets and blast Downtown.

Imagine my disappointment.

Freudian typo du jour

[ororo.livejournal.com]

"clustomer"

Thank you!

[chiyo-no-saru.livejournal.com]

I don't know where to put this, and on the off chance that the guy who helped me sees this:

Thank you so much! I was the one with "The Airport Call", as you put it. And the sarcastic one who cracked jokes about Wisconsin and said that I didn't end up on here as one of the stupid callers - you also said that you wish more people had proxy callers. (I was calling for my mom.) I was also the one who we forgot to plug the Airport into the modem, with the nonexistent IP address - yeah.

You definitely made my day. So, on the off chance that you're gonna read this - thanks so much. You really helped.