So, how bad does it HAVE to be?

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Today I got a ticket in eMail (no call):
"The printer is jamming up - found some ball bearings in the output tray."

Too me over an hour to find the person that sent it in, and by then I'd gotten a new ticket, also in eMail:
"Printer not working at all now. When can we get a replacement."

The actual conversation consisted of me trying to get the guy to TURN IT OFF. He finally agreed after I got him to admit it wasn't printing at all...


Does it have to start smoking to be shut off, or do you have to see flames?

(no subject)

[buckaction.livejournal.com]

We had a GREAT case come through here a few days ago. It was not my case, but the story went around the office pretty quickly.


An overseas support team (located in India) opened a Severity 1 ticket on a domestic system (located in the US) that was not responding to pings, and they could not get a response from the SP (Service Processor).


We have a rule that we are NOT supposed to send out a Field Engineer until the customer gets an onsite resource that has physical access to the machine. So we had to wait for them to get someone on site.

when they called back in, we were told that when the customer went to the rack location where the supposedly "dead" system was, what he found instead, was a 4U wide hole.

turns out, the machine in question was decommissioned, deracked, and shipped out. But no one bothered to advise the overseas support team that this was going to happen.

The moral of the story? make sure the server you are trying to contact actually (still) exists before you call in a severity 1 ticket for it being down.