techrecovery | WHY? (and Valium and pink custard)

User: My email doesn't work! And neither does my mainframe terminal!
Me: Could you check your network cable, thanks?
User: I plugged it into a different PC!

Just... why? Why do these people not only call me, but when the REALLY SIMPLE AND OBVIOUS source of their problem is revealed, fail to recognise it? And stand there as if their brain had been removed and their skull filled with pink custard and Valium?

I don't expect our callers to be able to read hex code. I don't expect them to know every obscure application fault by heart. That's my job, and I'm proud to be helping people over unexpected potholes in the road of computing. But when they physically cut their computer off the network and then all their network applications start gibbering, shouldn't there be just a glimmer of recognition of cause and effect?

People like this is why I utterly loathe the direction our support team is taking. Our previously tech-savvy team of level-2 techs is becoming a drooling, fumbling pit of despair that the end-users are allowed to phone directly. The previous cadre of onsite level 1 staff has dried up and almost completely blown away.

I need some kind of barrier between me and the endless reminders that we share half our DNA with cabbages. And not just a wall of meat, but an intelligent (or at least half-competent) team of front-line troubleshooters. Because endless repetitions of "reboot and fuck off" is starting to give me just the mildest edge of cynicism, bitterness and a temper.

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the-s-guy.livejournal.com

Aw, thankya

jahbulon.livejournal.com

You? Cynicism, bitterness and a temper? Nooooo! Surely not!

Hell, you've been an inspiration to my own cynicism!

I am a frontline tech and deal with these gibberers on a daily basis. In your ire, perhaps you could spare a thought for us simple folk.

Hell, been there, done that. I figured as an onsite tech I was effectively an instant-response human firewall for the rest of the tech group. If I couldn't fix something at the office, it had damn well better be either outside my authorisation, or actually on fire.

And I'll readily admit that some of our old-school on-site techs are really damn good, and I'd back them to the hilt. But they're not the ones who send us empty-body emails titled "Fwd:Re:Fwd:I can't print, whyyyy?".

dukesnorre.livejournal.com

I can't help myself!

ghostdandp.livejournal.com

Because people are idiots. All of them. With the exception of those of us who aren't, who generally just stare at awe at the rest of the world.

shadowheel.livejournal.com

I don't think awe is the word I'd use. More like... shock. I know I shouldn't by now -- I'd have thought my shock would have turned into a resigned determination for genocide by now.

But when I get calls like this, the shock just comes back:

ME: Please go to your 'Tools' menu.
CALLER: Where would I find that?
ME: At the top of your $email_app window, do you see the 'Tools' menu?
CALLER: No.
ME: Okay, read me out what you do have.
CALLER: File, Edit, Tools, Help. No, I don't see a 'Tools' Menu.
ME: [boggle] Okay, you said you saw 'Help', right?
CALLER: Yeah.
ME: What's immediately to the right of that?
CALLER: Tools.
ME: [pause]
ME: [pause]
CALLER: Oh! Tools!
ME: Okay, go ahead and click on it.
CALLER: Click on what?

This is why I am grateful for two things in my job.

Firstly, the ability to remote-control anyone's workstation from two thousand miles away.

Secondly, my patent-pending Care Factor Zero, which allows me to say "Could you go and get someone else?" without feeling the slightest twinge of remorse.

Recently, I offered to take on the job of being the sole available correspondent for the so-called onsite "tech" who sends us, literally, a dozen or more useless blatherings a day. I would have been very calm, very polite, and given her precisely one calm, polite chance to shut the fuck up. Then I would have permanently autobounced all her dribble back into her manager's mailbox, unread and with attachments saying "We don't read mail from this person as we have generally found it to be incompetent, and we can't spare the time to do her job as well as our own."

For some reason, I wasn't allowed to take on this task. But someone else was assigned to 'deal with her'. I count that as a win.

liquescere.livejournal.com

Here from metaquotes. (Edit: And apparently long-winded. Sorry.)

Eh, our tech guy remote controls our computers too. I'm not a techie, and I'll be the first to admit it. I'm fond of computers, and I can hook up everything I need to make it run, and reformat it when I forget to install my virus scanner and then it dies... but anyway, back to the tech guy. When I was new at my job, I didn't have an Admin account. I was supposed to. So my supervisor called the tech guy, and he was playing around in my computer. He signed in to my account, and was trying to modify my User Priviliges, or whatever they're called. So then he signed in to his account, without logging out of mine, and just kept doing that over and over again, when it didn't work. God it was frustrating to watch.

I have every respect for tech people who know what they're doing. One of my friends got a Mac a while ago, and practically made love to the tech guys. She called them so much they all knew her, and they were really helpful.

I'd trade mine for one of them, even if my work computer isn't a Mac. They'd probably be more helpful.

I salute you for being a helpful tech person.

Thankya :)

And one of the rules of remote control is "If you aren't 100% sure how to do something, your first test bed is NOT the caller's PC."

How else are we going to maintain our reputations as miracle workers?

trixtah.livejournal.com

So true, re the remote desktop experimentation. Not a good look.

And my favourite desktop support trick? You say to the user (especially in the days of Win 3.11 or 95 or 98), "Oh, your application keeps freezing? Have you rebooted?" There's always one that swears they did, and you so KNOW they haven't.

So, visit the user's desktop and bring up the command prompt. Maximise it so the scary looking blackness takes over their screen. Type in dir /s *. Wait for all the filelistings to scroll off the screen. Say "Right, I'll just reboot again to make sure that's all set". Reboot. user logs in and everything works perfectly. User says, "Wow, that's so cool what you did. None of the other desktop guys did ANYTHING." User thinks you're a l33t h@X0r. You go away thinking, "pwnd, tool'.

Both results achieved: you've got rid of the whiny user; one's miracle-working rep is totally enhanced... :-)

Bwahaha.

Reminds me of a flying visit by the bigwigs. Open three DOS windows of vastly different heights and widths. Set the font size in each one to be something different. Set text colors to red, blue and green. Create looping batch file of dir c:\ /s and run it in each window. The triple threads trip each other up continually, making the output pause spastically as if the computer's thinking about something important. Bigwigs walk past and are really impressed; obviously I must be doing SOMETHING brilliant and technical, look at all those text readouts!

lizey.livejournal.com

I'm no techie (am from metaquotes) but I want remote control for my class at school. I get all of the people who haven't bothered to reboot, or are trying to log onto faculty, or don't know where to insert a USB disk...