(no subject)

[red-scully.livejournal.com]

Why do some people insist on telling you that their problem is, "I'm struggling to connect/log in/launch $program"?  "I'm struggling" tells me *absolutely nothing* about the problem.  I initially tried responding to this statement with, "So, when you say you're struggling, what exactly is happening?" - but this generates the response, "I just can't do it."  Ugh.  It seems that following up with, "So can you talk me through each step you took, and tell me when you got stuck?" causes them to respond, "God, I can't remember!  I just can't get it to work."

Clearly, I have a fail here - so what's the correct response to such a wooly 'problem'?  Having only been doing dedicated 1st and 2nd line for 6 months or so, I'm still figuring out the best way to get information out of people when they present with certain 'ailments'.

Whilst I'm here, two other things:

1.  I'm getting extremely tired of not having a good-quality remote control tool at my fingertips.  PCAnywhere is a PIECE OF CRAP.  It's flaky, it doesn't work *at all* if the user has a laptop on a docking station (apparently it gets confused about which screen's output to send back to you?  WTF), and the user has to be talked through launching it and gathering their IP address - things which they 'struggle to do'.  I've started using YuuGuu when the user is remote and there is absolutely no way they can work without me having a look at their machine pronto, but this isn't exactly practical - especially not in a business environment.  Sob.  I miss Remotely Anywhere :-(

2.  The utter dickhead I talked about in this thread,who was incredibly rude to me, hung up on me, bitched about "that's not the way my old IT department in my old job used to do it", complained that "computers aren't my job, they're yours, so why should I waste my time trying to sort out my emails when you can just do it for me?", told me "that's not my concern, it's yours - just sort it out" when I told him policy dictated he needed permission to use someone else's printer, and yelled at my colleague in the middle of the office about the same issue?  Has left.  *PARTY TIMES!*  I can't say how relieved I am about this.  I can now close his outstanding call (the title - all in caps - reads: "I NEED A TOOL TO FIND DUPLICATE FILES ON THE NETWORK") and stop worrying that he's going to murder me in the stairwell.  PHEW.

Depressingly superior

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Don't you just hate it when, by ten minutes into a call, you're better at the caller's entire job than they are?

- particularly when they've been doing it for years and are paid five times your salary?


(Mainly occurs with paper pushers, but I've seen it with various middle managers as well. Bonus points if their entire job is something you could automate with a couple hours' scripting and a few macros.)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T R-P-C-S-S-S

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

just a quick vent for what i went through yesterday. haven't been able to remote into web server for a few months. sometimes a reboot will fix it, sometimes not. but since the web sites were up and functioning, it really wasn't at the top of my to do list. so i'm over in the server room for another piece of business and decide to upgrade mcafee on it, and as soon as i do it catches and deletes rpcsss.exe from c:\windows.

it happened pretty fast and i was doing a couple other things, so i just kind of went "ok" and moved on. then when i rebooted, half my system services didn't start. long story short, rpcsss.exe is a trojan backdoor virus meant to emulate the real rpcss (only two s's) service. it runs as RPC and makes half a dozen other services that may or may not already depend on rpcss.exe now depend on the trojan, rpcsss.exe.

took half an hour to figure out what in the world was going on, then another half hour F3 searching the registry in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services where "rpcsss" was a data value. i compared those services to an existing unaffected server and either fixed the dependency or removed it. reboot, voila, web sites up again.

sigh. viruses are such a waste of time. no idea how it got on there. anyway, maybe this'll help someone one day.

oh, and i still can't remote to that server. it errors like it's not even turned on, which of course it is. not a firewall issue, either. ughghhkdjfhkjdfsgz.