techrecovery | Oct. 5th, 2007

I am sure many of you often use remote control software to help users to resolve various issues or make certain configuration changes they need. We have to resort to it every day. Sometimes users are clever enough to ask for it themselves or they notice remote connection, sit back and watch.

But not all of them.

It is always fun when user notices remote activity and tries to interfere with it. Usually we just open Notepad (no chat functionality in the software) and type there what we want to do, ask to save everything and such. But some people are really fast clickers. You know - you open Notepad and they close it instantly. And when they are distant and on slow link they sometimes manage to close it before the program window even draws on the remote screen. Seems like a cheating to me.

Another game you can play with them - chatting via Notepad being on slow links. They never can guess when you finish your sentence and it's their turn to reply. So they start typing right away: "Hello! What kind of problHELLeO!" Poor typing skill is also common:
My c......o....mp...........ute......r fr~~iez~~ee........s ...wh....e...n....
(where every dot stands for 3-4 second pause)

Of course some rules of engagement are common between remote and personal assistance. Like when tech comes to you and is busy with your computer why not leave for a hour or two? He's busy anyway. Of course he may need you to log in again after reboot or ask where that specific document is stored but in that case he can wait a bit. In the remore scenario it gets even better because you rely on user more than ever (recovered printer or bluesreen problems remotely, anyone?) and you can't see if they are still there. You type them something and wait. Then wait more. Then start asking them something dumb like "Are you there?". Then you disconnect and when you connect again you see that someone else logged off pervious session, logged in themselves and is busy with something completely different.

Yesterday I had to reconfigure network drives for our secretary. When I opened Notepad she closed it before I managed to type anything. When I tried again she just minimized it. I opened it again and typed "Hello, it is IT dep..." and it got minimized again. I sent her net popup message "release damn keyboard and mouse!" and tried again. It didn't work. Then I just disabled her controls remotely, typed her a message and proceeded with my task. I was thinking she would call us about strange things going on her PC. She did not. She was definitely more clever than I thought - she tried to shut her PC down.