(no subject)

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

i want to put my fist through a wall right now.

so a little backstory... we have this one upper management person in our department (it's a small 15 or so person IT department) who hasn't got a fucking clue. ever. he'll do shit like IM me saying "we're going to need 7 of these varying model machines by the end of tomorrow" and expect me to shit them out for him. meanwhile, the individual who actually deploys them is laughing because she won't be deploying them right away anyway.

so my normal work day is 9-5. it's not even 9:15 when he messages me to say that one of our users finally brought in his department supported home machine for a motherboard replacement. this was supposed to be done over a month ago and the machine no longer turns on anyway due to a motherboard defect in some of Dell's earlier optiplex gx270s.

i figure, ok fine, i can do it now. so this managerial idiot says he'll tell the guy i'll be down in a few minutes. the original agreement was to bring it to my office because i have to turn it on to let it go through it's manufacturer setup routine and verify that it's ok. the luser won't let it leave his office because of sensitive data. ok, fine he has important data on there but i couldn't give a shit anyway and am not going to go peeking into anything. doesn't matter though. i now have to cart an entire machine setup down to this guy's office just so i can verify that it's working properly.

*headdesk* i really shouldn't be this aggrivated over work this early. normally i don't even get into normal luser problems until after 11. the weekend couldn't come fast enough and next week's partial week can't end fast enough.

**cross posted to my personal journal

Comments

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Too bad you can't tell the luser that he should remove his hard drive himself if he is so concerned about his data, and then he can deliver the computer to you, sans hard drive.

I mean, removal of the hard drive IS considered a customer-level operation by Dell!

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

seriously. i could easily swap in a different drive thanks to the way the cases are designed, but no i get to haul shit around instead. -_-

[tmercenary.livejournal.com]

I used to deal with the "sensitive data" issue by taking out the hd, and use a spare while we wroked on it, the swap 'em back when done

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

yea, that's what would make sense... but in the 6-8 months i've worked here nothing that's done makes much sense unfortunately. hell, we do a "trickle down" thing when upgrading machines. however instead of ya know, deploying the newest machines and working our way down we started with replacing the oldest machines. when i questioned it, the response was that we wanted to get rid of all win 2k machines asap. kinda hard to do when you don't have the equipment to upgrade with.

[akage.livejournal.com]

Ahh yeah, the "blown capacitor" issue. We have a ton of GX270's in our userbase (in fact, the other PC on my desk is a GX270). We've replaced probably 1,000 or so motherboards in the last two months.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

hehe yup. that's the exact problem. for months we were getting a couple calls every few days for this issue. we finally said enough was enough and my supervisor has been ordering as many replacement boards as possible. we went through and replaced the "will probably die soon" ones and are now going through the "eh, looks ok but better safe than sorry" list. =p

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Inform Idiot that testing facilities weigh a quarter-ton (including chair, desk, room, tester etc), PC weighs a couple of pounds, and it's up to the user to carry either one to the other.

Or just don't turn up and when user gets cranky and repeats what idiot said, say "Idiot lied. That's never been the process and he knows it. Look, we have brochures printed up saying that he's a compulsive liar. Would you like to know what he didn't tell you?"

Maybe call a managerial meeting to discuss (with Idiot and Idiot's boss) why Idiot keeps lying? Perhaps hold an intervention? *grin*

It sounds like the Idiot is trying to control you by telling other people you'll do all kinds of things. This has got to be stomped on immediately and hard.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

oh, he's been told numerous times. recently we had a department start trying to install trillian on their new security build machines (which of course is not possible and is unsupported software). the coworker that i work with on deployments said that Idiot was going to have me go to said department and uninstall/remove it from their machines. i told her, nope sorry not my job. it was decided in a meeting with me, my super and the head of the department that my job is in my office or "in shop." anything in the luser offices is "in field" and therefor not my problem unless it's to troubleshoot supported software beyond what the actual support staff can figure out.

when i told my coworker this she agreed and i just said "take that Idiot, nyah" to which we both laughed. very few, if any, other than the dept head actually like this guy. i constantly have coworkers coming in my office grumbling about what Idiot tried to do this time. =p

[jecook]

That explains why Dell swapped those mainboards so quickly for me. And here i thought that a power surge ate both machines.

Yeah, I''ve taken to the practice of just removing non-company software from machines, with no regard to data loss. If they INSIST on using incredimail (a platform which is "easy to install", and a large pain in my right buttock to extract email from), then I will INSIST on removing it with no warning, and without trying to recover their email.

Unfortuantely, I'm not allowed (yet) to remove user privledges, as they are all "legacy" machines. (the term legacy refers to the previous boss, whose deployment policy was non-existant, and mostly random.)

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

yea, there's an easy way to tell if a board on a gx270 is about to go... some of the capacitors start taking a leak. =p

that was an issue with my predicessor's software build. though, before i was hired the users were able to install whatever apparently. for a bunch of the departments quite a few users had to be given admin privs due to special software. i work in a law school so there's random pieces of registrar/admissions/etc software they use. now that the machines are pretty well locked down (with a few exceptions like changing desktop pics and such) we've been discovering quite a few unsupported programs. some of these people like to use their office machines as personal picture dumps too which... thankfully we can start putting a stop to now. sometimes it's just too much fun saying "nope sorry you can't do that now." the other day we ran into that with an enhanced CD someone tried to use.