Do you ever wonder about fellow IT folk?

[http://users.livejournal.com/shiara_/]

Do you ever wonder about your coworkers in IT and their listening skills?

I'm a SME in my department. The closest equivalent of my job description would be "User Acceptance Tester". Usually that means that in addition to my actual job, I get to deal with most simple computer questions like, "How do I delete a file?" and "Why can't I print this report?". If you have some semblence of 'tech', you're the designate in the department. By no means am I a "tech" person. I just user-test the various apps we have within the specs of my department.

Every time they change the printers at work, I lose the ability to print in DOS. Normally this isn't a biggie - I call up my help desk, tell the person I can't print from DOS, they write up a ticket to send a tech and within a day or two, a tech comes, sets up my DOS lpt1 or lpt2 and I get to print from DOS again.

We usually only print this report from DOS once a month, so it's not like it's the FIRST thing I remember when someone's resetting my printer in Windows. I forgot to ask the tech when he was at my desk 2 weeks ago when they'd flipped us from one server to another.

Today, I was asked by a coworker to print said report. She'd apparently generated it from VB and it was in the folder.

I got to said folder. Nope. Not there. Okay, no problem. I'll run the VB app and get the report in the folder. Go into said folder and print from DOS. Problem solved.

I try to print the document and get an error message about not finding the network connection for lpt1. I slap my head: when the tech was here last week, I forgot about the damn report and he changed my printer but didn't do the DOS prompt part.

So I phone the help desk, tell the IT person my employee number and what my problem is, specifically that I can't print from DOS. That's right: DOS. Not Windows. I can print from Windows just fine. I can't print from DOS. The CMD screen is open on my desktop because, oh, that's what I was doing when I realized I couldn't print from DOS.

She remotes into my computer, sees the CMD.exe screen that shows exactly what I was trying to do.... the screen looked something like this:

dir *. /w
(list of directories ensued)
cd report99
dir *.* /w
(lists of files ensued)
copy Mar06.05 lpt1
(get error message about being unable to find network connection for lpt1)

... and she goes to the Start menu and opens up the Printers folder. Clicks on one of the printers, checks the settings on the printer and then prints a test page.

Um, what part of "I can't print from DOS" did she not hear? Last I checked, DOS /= Windows. If I had a problem printing from Windows, I would say "I can't print from Windows." and, frankly, I'd be more upset because I *need* to print from the Windows-based apps more than the DOS prompt.

I'm sitting on the other end going, "I can print from Windows just fine. I need to have my lpt1 or lpt2 from DOS set up to print."

I'm then put on hold and when she finally comes back, she goes, "I'm going to get a tech to go to your desk. What's your location number?" I give this to her, she sets up a help desk ticket, and I get off the phone.

I got off the phone scratching my head.... if she'd listened to me in the first place, I would not have wasted my time watching her check the printer settings for Windows and would not been on hold for a good 10 minutes while she conferred with someone.

Am I off my rocker for thinking listening skills are lacking here, or did I miss something?

The worst kind of users?

[wyrdrune.livejournal.com]

In my opinion it's the ones who know just enough to give you problem reports that sound feasible. They usually manage this first thing in the morning, before one has coffee/tea/other-beverage. This causes one to spend an hour working on a problem which you can't reproduce, or even work out how it's happened. Then, when you ring them, or connect to their PC via VNC, you discover that they *didn't* mean "autoarchive", they meant "filtering rules"...

ARGH!

Long days

[omg-teh-funnay.livejournal.com]

Hrm, so much to do, so little time to do it in... that's terrible.

The last few days at work have been a blur of routing tickets and special projects, escalations and process review. Now we have to take a few dedicated hours to figure out how to integrate my counterpart in California into a new department with us. Yeah, this'll be great. I'm not worried about her, I'm worried about the rest of us - this new department is coming fast and we don't have all the processes in place yet. We're supposed to create them in a kind of "Make process and get detailed, but be flexible, because we don't know what to expect" way. Thanks, boss. Giving us this much control over process design, but we can't get any of the information that we're starving for.

Are the tickets for said department going to come in conventionally, or do they get their own queue to check? We're not sure yet. So there's a process to handle that

Who are the technicians that we're handing tickets off to? Well, they haven't been hired yet.

We currently print ticket and hand them to the techs. What should we do when 1/3 of the initial team is in another state? Well, paper really isn't efficient. We need something else.

My 'job' at this level is to take incoming tickets from the client system, reality-check them to get appropriate asset and location info, then hand off to a deskside tech. With the new department, I'm going to have to sluice some tickets to a replacement depot and some to other techs for further troubleshooting - meaning that I have to do some troubleshooting myself. This is not a big deal, I've got a decade in IT. However, when we submitted a process doc to management, they came back with absurd recommendations - like designing a question matrix to catch people lying about their equipment. Hell, I have 3 minutes to get the ticket in, contact the EU, verify the asset and location info in the ticket, and check to see if it's an obvious hardware fault (shattered screen, missing keys, and my personal favorite, "water applied to power supply"). Now you want me to determine the actually problem type AND catch the liars? AND THEN push it off to a triage tech for possible resolution? Sorry, man. I live in reality. We just don't have the bandwidth. There are three of us. There are 50,000 supported systems (laptops) in the company.

We NEED something to make this work. We don't need "You can do it" management, we need someone to give us some parameters or something to work with. Otherwise, any process we make is nothing more than a best-guess.

Rahr. We don't even know when this will go live, just that it's "soon"

*groan*

[gotica.livejournal.com]

Howdy.. Thought you guys might like to have a lil snicker at an email I had to handle....

-----
Hi,
I have some confidential DVD's and CD's that I need to dispose of.
Do you know where I can send these to be destroyed???
Thanks
-----

*big sigh*
Had to call and educate on CD disposal.. snap.. cut... shred.... (there is a guy in the office who shreds his CDs).

*headdesk*

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Retardedness. Pure sheer unadulturated retardedness.

Rep: "I have this problem with a file on my laptop. I don't have my laptop with me, but I wanted to see if you could answer this question or if it's something that somebody else deals with."

Don't you just love when people call with a problem that they aren't prepared to work on?

So she goes on to describe her problem to me.

Rep: "Yeah, I'm trying to fill out this form, and it's supposed to have pop up boxes that aren't there, so I got an email that said the fix was to set macros to medium and that would fix it. But I set macros to medium and there's still no pop up boxes."

Wtf? I've heard of enabling macros, and I've heard of setting security to medium, but I've never in my life heard of setting macros to medium.

Me: "It sounds like your form may be corrupted. You'll want to just download a fresh copy of the form and that should fix you up."

Yeah, it's a cop-out, but I don't feel like dealing with her style of idiot today.

Fifteen minutes later...

Phone rings.

Me: "Thanks for calling the <helpdesk> at <company>, this is Kiz, how can I help you?"

Same. Damn. Lady.

Rep: "I was just talking to somebody over there and I don't think they knew what they were talking about, so I need to talk to somebody else who knows about this..."

Oh, I always LOVE to hear that one. Even if they're not referring to me. Our techs, every single one of them, are badass. If you can't be helped by us, you don't WANT to be helped. But anyway.

Rep: "... I have this problem with dropdown boxes that aren't showing up on my form. I did the fix with setting macros to medium but it didn't work."

Sigh. So now it's dropdown boxes and not pop up boxes?

Me: "Okay, can you walk me through exactly what you did?"

Rep: "Okay. I did <navigate through Lotus Notes to a particular remote database and download form> and then opened it in Word, went to Tools, Macro, Security, and chose Medium."

Aha! So it WAS security, not macros, you set to medium. I knew it. Bitch. Anyway, I take all the steps she describes and open up the form.

There is not a dropdown, popup, or any box to be had on this form other than standard text fields.

Me: "Uh... I don't think there's SUPPOSED to be any dropdown boxes. These are all just plain text boxes."

Rep: "Well everyone else is getting dropdown boxes."

I highly doubt that.

Me: "Okay, let me transfer you over to the <department that handles the database this form came from>."

I stay on the line to listen in.

Other department: "There's no dropdowns."

Rep: "But everyone else says they get them."

Other department: "Sorry. There's no dropdowns. You need to just type things in."

I finally dropped off the call five minutes later, and they were still arguing.

(no subject)

[supportbitch.livejournal.com]

And agian, SuB LOVES her coworkers!


Perlman: your monkey theory? oh do tell.
SuB: A monkey shows up at HR wearing a silly hat.
SuB: HR says OMG! A MONKEY! Wearing a SILLY HAT! That's ADORABLE! Let's HIRE IT! Where do we have an opening? Oooo...
SuB: And that is how sysadmins are born.
Perlman: well, there we go. the basis for your doctorate.

---

(PS: SuB loves smart sysadmins, dbas, techies, tinkers, etc. She hates with a passion those who got their jobs because they can dial her number and whine.)

---

(Perlman & SQLguy are two of my coworkers)

SuB: BASTARD SON OF A BITCHWHORE
SuB: this guy just told me "well, that's a good guess, but I need someone smarter now. uh, smarter than me."
(SuB says other unkind things about the user, his parantage, unhealthy love of farm animals)
Perlman: bitchwhore?
Perlman: pimptastic
Perlman: ($BITCHWHORES ~= m/Perlman|SQLguy/) : $BITCHWHORES ~= s/Perlman|SQLguy//g ? print "SuB. Call line #1. SuB, call line #1.";
Perlman: so, SuB you free?
* SQLguy highfives Perlman for use of tertiary operand

---

And you know what? I hate people. I hate $USERs! I had a guy today who COULD NOT for the life of him FTP me a file from Windows! And I had a woman who laughed when I said "that's the pipe SYMBOL, not the word spelled out." Then...I had a man who swore up and down that he'd never heard of a bootable CD and that I must be lying to him about Linux booting off a cd.

And the guy with no support who wanted to install a distro on a UBS harddrive...this is not a distro who is happy living on a usb device.

SuB: So, this guy wants to put this distro on a USB.
$COWORKER: yeeeah, it'll be a miricle if he gets in installed, much less bootable.
SuB: He says "but Lockheed does it!"
$COWORKER: Lockheed also makes jets that fly faster than sound.

Mmm, what a job.

partially xposted to my lj