Sometimes, sneakernet is the answer

[megpie71.livejournal.com]

Just had three calls in rapid succession from one of our staff here at ReallyBigFirm. Now, I've just started the job here about two weeks ago (helldesk phone monkey, mostly L1 support, occasional L2 if they're easy enough) and I'm still learning my way around the systems.

Anyway, this person is trying to send an email to an external client, however Bloated Notes apparently won't allow her to do this, and it's telling her to use some tool she doesn't have in Office to do things. So, I take remote control of her computer, and discover that the message she's getting rattled by is a warning, rather than an error (one of those lovely "do you *really* want to do that?" messages beloved by the developers) and that the email has been sent. Three times. Caller is happy, another one for my resolved count.

Five minutes later - same person, same problem. She's called the client and he hasn't received the email. Oh-kay, thinks I, and checks the size of the attachment, discovering that the attachment and the email are a total of 27KB. Caller will try again, and see whether there's another way to get this through to her client. I (jokingly) suggest as a last resort that she try a courier and a floppy disk. Another one for the resolved queue.

Third time - about two minutes later - and the client *still* hasn't received the email. However, this time she mentions something else - she had a colleague try to send an email to the same client, and they got a bounce message back. I check - she's been getting the bounce messages too. I explain that there's really nothing we can do about this, which she accepts, and ends the call. A third one for the resolved queue, and my stats are looking a lot better now.

But I suppose it just goes to show, you can never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon with a trayful of floppy disks...

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I get a pretty low proportion of "No, see this means you have to spell the email address correctly" problems.

Invariably they start "I can REPLY to the email, I just can't seem to SEND them one!"

Of course, they also seem to believe that tool-tips (start typing the address and have it complete) is their address book and want it transferred to their new computers...

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Apparently, the ability to read and comprehend are not required by ReallyBigFirm (reminds me of Big Tina, from my college days...). Too bad. I would love to have a high paying job where I didn't have to, like, use my brain.

[valkyrwench.livejournal.com]

Wait until the Admin from the other side insists it's somehow your fault that they're bouncing back your email and tells you to fix it. I don't think I ever did get the Admin to understand that they had our domain blocked for some unknown reason and there was nothing I could do about it.