The adventures of King N00b

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

We have a colleague we've started referring to as King N00b. Why? Because, even though he knows nowhere near as much as he thinks he does, he still gets to train all the lesser n00bs, making him King of the N00bs. His manager (not my manager, thank $DEITY) is a useless sack of shit and doesn't even supervise him; not in the least because said manager is not technically minded in any way, shape or form. So when he fucks up he doesn't get in trouble.

Needless to say, working here is becoming more like the Chronicles of George every day. I come in this morning to find a ticket in my queue from a customer requesting a DNS change. King N00b has already told the customer that someone else is authoritative for said domain. Which is fine.

Except the customer asked for PTR record change. Guuuuuuuh. I hope he hasn't left any other booby traps for me today. I need to catch up on some sleep.

In order to make me a little less crazy, I encourage you all to submit your own King N00b stories. Just....real clangers that any tech with half a brain wouldn't drop.

Comments

[fragbert.livejournal.com]

Remember the summer of '05 when we had the two n00bs from hell?

Item the first: most of our apps were web-based. Therefore, when an issue occurred with a remote user, the solution 9 times out of 10 was clear the cache, clear the cookies, reboot. One of the n00bs had a woman on the phone for 90 minutes adjusting her browser settings, including the security settings.

Item the second: this became local legend. Other n00b from hell told a user that the user would have to reboot the internet to fix the problem.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

While I can't say that Andrew was precisely a n00b, he was one of those cocky "shoot from the hip" techs that never bothered with lowly troubleshooting. Mysterious error message? Reformat. MS Word being buggy? Reformat. Bad hair day? Reformat. Worse, he'd do it without telling the users what he was doing, because explaining was beneath him, too. There were several cases where this high-handedness resulted in him unneccessarily reinstalling Windows without letting the user back up their data, resulting in some ANGRY return customers.

[kuang.livejournal.com]

I think I may be able to see your n00b and raise you a muppet...

About a year back we were playing around with Wise packging studio as a precursor to bringing SMS 2003 into our system. One tech was given the job of making the first set of packages for testing - just basic stuff like Firefox and a few small electronics testing packages.

This tech was having a problem when I walked in, so I wandered over to see what was wrong. The package had to deliver a few extra odds and sods into various places along with a script to run a local reghack (don't ask..) and it wasn't playing ball, raising all sorts of completely rabid errors. I was querying our superstar about what she'd done so far and she said 'well, I've made the package, I've done the script and turned it into an executable..'

Stop right there. You've done WHAT?

I looked at the files in question and there was an installerscript.txt and next to it I found installerscript.exe. Apparently the compilation process is pointless as you can turn a script into an executable just by giving it a new extension...

It gets bettter though. I opened the text file and it said things along the lines of 'copy $file to windows folder'.. yup, plain english. After a few minutes of explaining what shell commands were (to be met with 'ooh, can you get me a list of those? how many are there? do they *all* do that when you type /? after them?) I asked what the script was trying to do.

Basically when Firefox installed it seemed to be missing files. I assumed this was based on the local profile data, which isn't a problem as it'll recreate it. I asked how many files it was missing, to be told 'oh, about 250'.

(thinks: there are about that many files in an early Firefox installation FULL STOP!)

She was about to copy EVERY SINGLE FILE to where she thought it should be because Wise said it couldn't find them. Of course most people would have looked for the missing registry key in the local profile that points to the installation location first, but we're clearly not dealing with most people.

As a grand finale - two weeks later she said she 'knew packaging' and asked for a raise....

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Fuck, I hope she didn't get it!

[jon787.livejournal.com]

We had someone interview for a user support job who described their experience with computers as "fighting with the machine". They didn't say it as a joke either.

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

The one that's annoying me most is the guy who keeps sending account *unlocks* to the customer IT group for approval. If it's a password reset for not-the-user-who-called, that's the process. Unlocks don't matter. After I told him the first time... he did it again the next day

[crazdgamer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps he meant that he was Raging Against The Machine. It's an easy mistake to make.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

Heh. Wonder if he ever learned that if he did the troubleshooting, the call would be done faster. :-p

[harry-whodunnit.livejournal.com]

Once I had the 'pleasure' of QAing a noob who told a customer she couldn't connect via dial-up because 'her icon was broken'. He then proceeded to help her delete and recreate a shortcut to the connectoid.

And he argued with me about the low score I gave him. Insisted that he deserved a better score because he addressed the customer appropriately at all times and the connection worked after he was finished. I told him there are no points for getting miracles, only for making them.

(Sadly, in this company, you could get a good QA score by talking to the customer respectfully, even as you made their technical problems worse. We offered the illusion of support rather than the reality.)