It makes me wonder...

[elobscuro.livejournal.com]

...How some people get through the day wihtout calling in brain-dead to work. I finally, after a big orgy of "owenrship" (ye cats I'll be glad when they take my outbounds away and I have an excuse to give other techs...) managed to finish with a man who, over two, two-point-five hours on the phone with me, all told, still couldn't understand that WINDOWS XP and OFFICE XP are two different things. No, sir, we don't need to install service pack one before you do your windows updates, your WINDOWS came with service pack 1 installed. That disk that sayas SP1 is an upgrade for OFFICE. After the sixth time in as many minutes he finally declared that he gets it. I hustled him off the phone with a "here's-your-case-#-thank-you-for-calling-The Company Which Must Not Be Named-your-may-be-getting-a-survey" before he can rope me into offering my professional opinion about which disk to install for his third-party crap first.
No uptraining they offer would, at this point, make me happier than some pointers on call control and our exact, explicitly delineated scope of support (preferably inserted into our hold music as subliminal messages).

(no subject)

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

I work as an "ICT Support Specialist" in a secondary school (ages 11-18) in west London. Because we have a finite amount of IT rooms, we operate a room booking system, which previously has just been a sheet in the staff room that some poor bugger has had to type up on a weekly basis. We've recently changed this, and I spent hours setting up a week by week spreadsheet in Excel that all teachers have access to. I've just picked up a note that someone left in our tray in the staffroom that says "Looking at the spreadsheet it only shows rooms available on Mondays. I need tooms on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays!"

I'm torn between making this teacher feel like an idiot and telling her to scroll to the right (common sense dictates you at least try that, surely?) and replying saying "No, you can only have a room on a Monday". I think the former. This time.

Get. Off. The. Phone.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

You know, the longer you argue with me about how soon you need this done and keep asking me who to complain to about us being understaffed because it's year-end close, etc etc, the longer it will take me to be able to create your user account. When I've told you I'll get it done today and will try to get to it as soon as possible but you keep going on and on, you don't endear yourself to me.

Especially when I'm the only one manning the busier-than-usual phones, and keeping me on the phone prevents me from doing what you're requesting.

Application Security

[naggy.livejournal.com]

We have application security based on who is logged on to the application. Nothing special here.

A user calls up, and we tell her that her supervisor will be able to delete a particular record for her.
5 minutes later, supervisor calls back because it's not working. Rather than try it from her own PC, the supervisor walked over to the original user's PC and tried to do it while the original user was logged on.

Apparently we weren't specific enough there...*sigh*

(no subject)

[crankyholly.livejournal.com]

I am in tect support for Insert name of major cable company here.

Last night, a customer (Let's call him... Dickwad X) called in regarding his email timing out. He's using OE and Outlook. He's running a router and firewalls. The email was sending sometimes and sometimes not. Dickwad X had already called in today, and the previous tech told him that since he could telnet in and go through webmail it wasn't anything wrong with our servers. Very very true. The guy called back, I send him an email and he replies to it through our webmail.

"Sir, our servers are up and running. Normally, I'd say there's something corrupt with in outlook and OE, or there's a conflict with your firewalls. The first is very unlikely since it's on both computers."

"No your servers are down."

"Sir, all of our email runs off of the same server, if that were the case, we would have hundreds of calls in queue."

He argued with me for 30 minutes that it was our shit and not his!

Finally, I kept repeating, "Our servers are running and you can send and recieve email from the webmail. There is nothing else I can do for you."

Fuckers.

(no subject)

[funkybenn.livejournal.com]

ok this is getting up my ticker.. I work for an isp.. woot for me :P Ive had people of late who can hardly use a pc. I mean its a strech for these ma & pa kettles to open internet explorer. Thats not the bad thing though. My complaint is that if I ask them to click or do something they want to know the complete ins and outs of each thing. ie todays case. We'll call him Mr. 72yearold customer, after trouble shooting his trashy old windows 98 machine that has NEVER been upgraded, defraged or even scanned, and getting him on he asks what was the issue. I know its a tcpip stack issue because the machine is a heap of shit, but I cant really say that so I explain it in laymans terms. These users arnt taking that for an answer though, they ask more, then asks what tcpip means & stands for!? IT IS NOT MY JOB TO TEACH YOU THE INS AND OUTS OF INTERNET CONNECTIONS! FUCK! I got it working, what more do you want? If i tell you what tcpip stands for and the technology behind the protocol, what are you going to do with that knowledge? Over enquisitive bastards. Then the fucker has the nerve to get annoyed that Im cutting him off? Sorry buddy but 40mins out of my 8hour shift is more than enough to listen to you drivel on about the weather, how your grandchildren are, the cricket, more about the weather. I suggested to you at the beginning of the call to perhaps take a pc course when you couldnt find RUN in the start command, and you said you were having trouble. Dont get pissed at me if you dont know something.. I am TECH SUPPORT, that means technical assistance, not i will hold your hand whilst you fart-arse around. I was patient. I was nice even! goddamn it I hate getting abused for nothing

Oh Help....Before I Vivisect Someone Through the Phone

[the-elfster.livejournal.com]

He called me.

He can't perform an Add/Remove programs, even after following step-by-step directions over the phone.

He can't locate his c:\windows directory on his Windows XP workstation or a c:\winnt directory on his NTv4 workstation.

When putting an Auto-run CD into the drive and the CD doesn't auto-start -- he doesn't understand why you have to double-click on the drive to get started from that point.

The kicker? He's the company's ROOT. May the G-ds keep me from reaching through the phone to kill him.

Attempting to power up... failed.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Meh, lovely. I work nights now. I'm on about 4 hours sleep thanks to a mid-day call from the old job. I still help out there, but they know better than to call me during daylight hours. If they're calling me, it's probably some crisis.

It was.

Apparently the wireless I set up at a place yesterday is totally down. Four machines offline. Ten minutes on the phone with the customer and it's bloody obvious the APs are up. One machine "inexplicably" lost the WEP settings (I'll explain it: STOP SCREWING WITH THE DAMN THING!), one was fine by the time the customer looked at it again, one refused to connect until it was rebooted, and the last one, well, the customer felt confident enough to troubleshoot that one.

I'm expecting a call back, most likely direct to my cellphone (damn caller ID...) any minute now.

What am I, a forensic analyst?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

This guy just left - for better part of an hour, he kept trying to get me to tell him what was wrong with his computer before he reinstalled Windows! And every time I repeated that no, I don't know what was wrong with PC that I've never seen before, and which arrived to me freshly reformatted and reinstalled, he'd try to approach it from another angle. All the while, I have three more machines in the queue, and it's already 7PM... grrr.

(no subject)

[tmercenary.livejournal.com]

I do internal support for a major company we have a system for users to create trouble tickets via an internal website, and have call agents followup/work/route the issues.

This one was priceless:

"Hi, I'm with the laptop repair team, and I have 5 laptops here that need to be fixed"


....My only thought is, do you freakin' job, dude.