Grr...

[misfit4leaf.livejournal.com]

This isn't about a user, this is about another tech.

For some reason, I've been on the repeat queue where I work, which means that if a customer is calling about a previous issue, it comes to me. It's been that way for the last two weeks, and I've already gotten calls from two different people that I've helped previously. I don't mind that. (what actually bugs me is that when a call comes in, i hear music for 15 seconds before the call actually comes through. wtf?)

Amuways. So I get a customer that I remember from Thursday. I helped him do a reinstall of xp, and I sent him a driver's disk because he didn't have it and told him to call back in and we'd help him install them. Well, he got King Jackass for a tech, and the computer wasn't recognizing the disk and sent him a new one. I verified that the disk wans't actually readable, and told him to put in the new driver disk. The tech sent him the documentation for the computer. What was worse than that? Someone beyond him fucked up and he wound up getting a diagnostic test for some media player.

So I had to send him another driver disk.

A week and a half after I did the original reinstall. And another reason I feel bad? I know he could tell both times he called that I wasn't in the best mood in the world, as he was my last call on Thursday (which is my friday) and today was just a crazy bad day from the word go. Shit. I should have taken down his case number so I could have checked in on the case.

Vodka, anyone?

Easily Confused

[talmun.livejournal.com]

Greetings all.

I work a helpdesk were we support several different clients, both corporate and ISP.  I just got off an ISP call I needed to share with someone.

The user had just signed up for an account and was getting an invalid username/password error.  After some investigation, I discovered that the ISP employee he had signed up with had given him a piece of paper with his password on it and under that she had written 'case-sensitive'.

He was using "case-sensitive" as his password...the mute button saves the day again, I laughed for 5 minutes.

Administrivia... [off topic]

[jecook]

Based on the results of a recent poll, I'l set comments for "registered users". basically, you have to have a LiveJournal account in order to comment here.

I've also gone through and purged the memberlist of deleted and suspended accounts.

Carry on!

She can't brain today, she has the dumb.

[ethereal-dusk.livejournal.com]

It's going to be a really long day when my first call starts with this--

"So, that's "k" as in "kilo"?" I asks.

"No, it's "k" as in "kat". She says.

""K" as in "kat"?" I asks her again.

"Yes, "k" as in "kat"." And she starts getting bent about me questioning her.

This person works for our government. I is worried now. I really are.

You know its a bad day when...

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

1) The caller starts off with "Well... the computer was kind of... struck by lightening."

2) The caller starts off with "Yeah... I ran over my scale... on accident."

3) Someone wants to know how to ship a 50 lb box of "herbs and spices... yeah maaaaaan" to a Middle Eastern Country.

4) A customer's toddler can point out an error to her before she can see it herself.  "Mommy! That's in yellow!"

... and I still have 5 more hours to go.

Yes. Put your home at risk!

[afreak2600.livejournal.com]

A few months ago, I had a subscriber call in and tell me that their cable modem had caught fire.

She said she had a brown-out and then heard a loud pop emanating from her office room. She entered the room to see that the modem was giving off smoke, so she unplugged it. The next morning, she ended up calling us and this is how the conversation went:

Me: So the modem basically starting emitting a lot of smoke?
User: Yes.
Me: Okay. There isn't much that I can do on my end. I'll arrange to have someone come over and pick it up and replace it.
User: Okay. Can I plug it back in? I want to go on the Internet.
Me: Umm. It's probably a very bad idea to consider doing that.

Nice to know that fire doesn't equate to "bad" in some circles.

(no subject)

[ex-deliveryboy.livejournal.com]

wow.


in contrast to my earlier rants about Comcast, I just got off the phone w/ a field tech named Adam that was awesome.


He called me earlier this morning to let me know he had a cancellation, and asked if it'd be ok to arrive early. I double checked with him that they were supposed to let him know to get to the office to be let into the apartment (they hadn't)


He just called me to let me know he was all wrapped up: he installed, tested the tv, phone, activated the modem w/ his laptop and left me extra cable in case I needed to move things around.



Awesome.

(no subject)

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

I support an email relay that installs on top of sql2000/2005. If a file group gets to 80% full, the server stops accepting new mail.

"Our server stopped!"
"Does the event viewer say 80% full?"
"Yes!"
"Lets add some size to the file group."
- insert 50 minute argument about them having auto grow turned on, and me responding with, if the processing turns off at 80%, and the autogrow occurs at 90% full... -
"Ok, I'll resize the file manually. I don't see how... Oh, mail is flowing again."

I will TELL you when I'm done!

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

A note to the person who brought me his broken Sony:

Calling me every 2 hours and stopping by twice a day to see if the machine is done is NOT helping you get your machine back faster. Every time I have to stop what I'm doing and talk to you it is in fact taking additional time. I TOLD you that I would call you as soon as I was finished. Please let me do my job so I can get your machine done and back to you. Fscker.

Grrrr.

you own a macintosh - the file is fucking gone.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Working as a self-appointed sysadmin in my lab definitely has its disadvantages. Such as it taking 3 months to wring the admin password for the macs out of the old tech who left for greener pastures back in January. Having finally acquired said password, I set out to straighten out the computer lab. This started with deleting all the unused user accounts, some of which belong to employees who haven't been here for over 3 years, and setting up proper general guest accounts.

As I'm doing this, I was seated next to a new hire I'll call D, who was working on another machine. I mention that I'm going through deleting all the unused accounts. "Oh good, could you make accounts for me on those machines? I don't have one yet." Sure, I said, and got him all fixed up. We kept chatting about what a disgrace the computers were, and how I hoped no one had any important data saved on these ancient accounts - if so, I had no sympathy, but I was backing up all the real users just in case (including an admin account named "Bilbo Baggins").

A good hour later, D thinks to mention that by the way - ALL HIS DATA are stored on the desktop of the G4 "guest" account. Which I had summarily deleted beyond retrieval quite some time before. "Is there any way you could get that back?"

:: beats head against desk ::


P.S. I should also mention that this computer has an external backup hard drive and has software installed that should back up all user accounts on a regular basis. Alas, this would not work to retrieve D's data because the external HD? was OFF.

(no subject)

[emsporter.livejournal.com]

I've worked helpdesk nearly four years now. I never quite believed I'd get this call, though.

I managed to talk her through powering the computer off. As it'd crashed, this involved holding down the power button until it shut off. It took about 5 minutes, but we got there, and judging from the fact that it no longer responded to ping, it was actually powered off.

Then we got to turning it back on again. Believe it or not, she swore blind she couldn't find the power button...

After 10 minutes of "it's the one you just turned the damn thing OFF WITH" I punted the call to on-site support. Thank gods for on-site support.

DO NOT hang up on me!

[emsporter.livejournal.com]

Normally I enjoy my job. Today, however, there was a saga that truly tried my patience.

One of the PA's is a regular caller. She handles the problems for most of her unit, which is a practice that we in the Helpdesk encourage. It means there's (nearly) always someone to contact - in our organization, there's often floating staff, who can't guarantee their presence in the office two hours running. So, delegating "the fixing of issues" to the area PA is a pretty good idea.

However, this particular woman is one of those who believe in "IT as a commodity" and "IT staff as peons who should Leap, I say LEAP to my bidding!"

( Read more... )

Viruses are not my problem... nor is spyware

[afreak2600.livejournal.com]

One of the joys of working for an ISP is that I get frequent calls about problems that have no real deal with us. Here are a few situations that I loathe:

User: My computer keeps wanting to shut down. It says something has closed and the computer must turn off.
Me: That indicates that you might be infected with a worm.
User: What is a worm?
Me: Basically, it's a virus that spreads itself around via the Internet.
User: How can that be? I have $ANTIVIRUSPROGRAMME installed.
Me: It may have gotten around the programme.

At this point, I may get this appended to the conversation.

User: Don't you guys filter for this sort of thing?
Me: We provide minimal filtering for this sort of thing. Blocking the worms outright is not possible or legal.
User: You guys should fix my problem!
Me: We're not responsible for the software on your computer.

Usually somewhere in the conversation I learn that the subscriber has not updated their anti-virus software since Mountain Dew Code Red was still on the shelves. Sometimes you can explain to them that anti-virus software need frequent updates, but you still cannot get through to all of them.

Or even better, when they get spyware!

User: Somehow I keep getting asked to buy $SHITTYPROGRAMME every time I start up my computer and in Internet Explorer, it takes me to $RANDOMSEARCHPAGE that attempts to sell me stuff when I browse.
Me: Sounds like you got spyware.
User: I keep my $USELESSANTIVIRUSPROGRAMME up to date.
Me: You need anti-spyware software.

It's even better when they get all upset over the fact that I will not dispatch to have their problem fixed.

(no subject)

[kyidyl.livejournal.com]

Dear First levels-

It would be just frikkin' lovely if you could remember our support boundaries. That would be greeeeeat. Also, it'd be nice if you could close a ticket every once in awhile. I think that 100+ tickets coming into the queue in one day is a leeeeeettle excessive, don't you? I'm fairly sure it's unnecessary to dispatch tickets for thing like, oh, being unable to access resources from one side of the company when you stated *in the ticket's subject line* that they're using the VPN into the network for the _OTHER_ side of the company.

So if you could just be less retarded, that'd be awsome.

Signed,

~A frustrated second level tech

I know compyooterz r h@rd...

[bynkii.livejournal.com]

But when dealing with them, could you please attempt to rise above the level of "LOOKIE MAW, THE MAGIC BOX DONE ANSWERED MAH EEELEKTRONIC CIPHERIN!!!"

The fact that you are the VP of IS, and cannot correctly use a wireless keyboard makes the baby Jesus eat glass.

xposted in ts_sucks

Something's wrong with me

[omg-teh-funnay.livejournal.com]

So, last time I posted anything fun, I was a team lead/department supervisor for $international_outsourcing_company, assigned to a hardware depot for $hugeass_bank.

I got a new job, started Monday June 4.

I'm back to level one support. I'm actually looking forward to it. $new_employer is an awesome outfit, young and lean and they're doing cool things with technology. Exciting stuff. The last two days have flown by as I immerse myself in command line interfaces and hardware revisions and version notes.

Today, whilst we were running installs on the test cluster, the trainer related the saga of one of his customers

It seems this server admin started a job on one of our boxen and sent it to the background. The job developed personality disorders and she needed to kill it - checked the running process list, found her job and issued a "kill 1" command

1 was the JOB number, not the process ID, which kill uses

Process 1 is init

The variant of BSD we use allows you to kill init, because it trusts you. Unlike Linux, which thinks that killing init is a bad idea.

Our servers use Smart Connect to reconnect to the cluster if something goes wrong

Her screen flickers a bit, and whaddaya know, the jobby job is still running

Kill 1 again

Job still running...

And so on and so forth until she killed EVERY node in her cluster....


Heh. This is what I have to look forward to...

Inadvertent revenge

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

It was a few years ago, but...

We had one of those customers. He wouldn't or couldn't read printed english. He would actually put in tickets for us to read sections of the manual to him over the phone.

I'm a pretty big guy. I compete in martial arts tournaments. One saturday I fought at a renn faire, in california summer heat, and collected more than my share of bruises.

Monday morning I come into the call center. I'm oblivious, wearing the usual short sleeve black tshirt. I had forgotten it was the quarterly customer training day.

I look up to see Mr non-reading rounding the corner. There is a moment, where he just stops, looking at me speechless. Then we have a very pleasant little chat before he flees.

My coworkers fell off their chairs laughing. It took them a while to regain breath and point out the image... a 6' 3" muscular guy with a dozen visible bruises is the anonymous person on the other end of the support line.

The customer was very polite for the next 6 months of phone calls.