Top Ten Techie Tips for (l)users!

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Here are some gentle tips for staying out of your friendly neighborhood IT geek goddess's doghouse. Following them will keep you from being on the bottom of the list for service calls, repairs, etc. (Or made the subject of some late-night sigil making or worse, snarky blog entries.) Kindly peruse this list, and adhere to its strong suggestions:

1. When you call your tech on a problem that requires an in-person visit, please be there when the tech arrives. An empty chair, and no clue as to what the problem is will not bode well for its resolution.

2. When you call your tech on a problem that requires an in-person visit, please let your tech sit down and fix the problem. Making them do 'keyboard yoga' to get to your PC is a sure fire way to irritate them, especially if you have one of those privacy thingies on your screen.

3. Bringing your kid to work and letting them play on our system and downloading 'malware'-laden entertainment software will definitely put you in our doghouse. It takes us hours to get rid of some of that crap. We mean it when we say that we'll reimage your system if it happens again.

4. We do not have an exclusive 'you-only' network. If the network goes down, everybody suffers. Don't call us and holler about your Very Important Stuff- everybody is important to us. The network is a great equalizer.

5. In regards to #4, don't call each one of us serially in hopes that one of us is lying to you about the network being down and will let you back on it. We're on to that, so, don't go there.

6. If you're dumb enough to have porn on your system, we're smart enough to delete it. And block your access to it.

7. Yes, the screensavers and photos and cute little cursors are nice, but they're so full of malware that we had to block the site. Sorry!

8. So, you called me at home. On the weekend. Tsk. If I had access to the network from home, I would fix your problem, but I don't. You can wait a few hours.

9. Yes, I'm your techie. Yes, I fix computers. But like a physician, I find it rather irritating that you want to share your computer ailment me here at this party/gathering/grocery store. Can it wait?

10. What a neat Christmas/birthday/law school graduation/whatever present! I want one! But if you want me to actually make it work with your system, you're going to have to bring me the software and the manuals, and make sure that you call the activation number and all that. I might be brilliant, but I will never admit to being a telepath, even if I really am.

Thanks giga!

Sunfell
Your Friendly Neighborhood Geek Goddess

(x-posted from my personal blog)

Comments

[unixwiz.livejournal.com]

AMEN!!!!!!!!!

[jecook]

6. If you're dumb enough to have porn on your system, we're smart enough to delete it. And block your access to it.


... After recording the exact date and time of access, to be used in "corrective action" with HR later...

to be used in "corrective action" with HR later...

[dpaul007.livejournal.com]

...or used in blackmail with the (l)user, as the case may be.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

And we did do just that once, after a very upset (and very conservative) manager called us, because someone kept printing out porn on his printer.

Went to one of the network folks with an approximate time, we looked at the log, took screen shots... busted.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

I've actually worked with campus police on multiple occasions when I found kiddie porn on both staff and student users' machines. Do no not pass Go, no not collect $200 - go directly to jail. We also had a big federal case where we worked with the FBI to catch a guy who manipulated the stock market from one of our labs, but catching those kiddie porn bastards always feels so much better.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

*twitch*

Yes, that would definitely feel better. That's really really creepy, especially considering it's on a campus.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

A couple of months ago a casual employee even had the audacity to set up a porn server using kazaa in the cashiers' office - at a cashiers' window - while he was working there all day! It slipped by us for hours because we were busy running around trying to contain a massive virus attack, but when we caught him, we rained fire down upon him like you wouldn't believe. It took about an hour to get him off campus never to return.

If that had been a kiddie porn server, I would have beat the guy to a bloody pulp just on gp right then and there, but he was lucky. There was some pretty nasty stuff, though, mostly of the "come-see-the-rape-of-barely-legal-asian-girls" variety. Sickos. Sometimes it's good to be a tech geek. I love to catch those guys.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I really feel for campus sysadmins- it's a constant battle between you and the idiot kids students.

And it is fun to 'rain fire' upon them.

Love your icon, btw.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Stranger is working for the government. We monitor everything on the network. EVERYTHING. And yet every couple of months there's a newspaper story saying how 150 paper pushers, phone monkeys or cops have been fired for downloading gigs of porn.

Do these people really not realise that using freaking' government computers for these kind of activities will get them busted in double-quick time? Do they not even read their newspapers or watch the evening news, and think "Wow, all those other guys got busted on government equipment, maybe I should only be a porn weasel at home" ?

Bah. Consider it an IQ test.