Tech Support HELL

As seen on ICHC

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:01:37 GMT

Ah, teachers. Gotta love 'em

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:45:27 GMT

One of our science teachers sent a student to the office today asking for a "male to male USB cable", whilst brandishing a VGA cable. I went "eh???" and followed the student back to the classroom. The teacher (who I have the dubious honour of being a distant relation of) started talking to me about USB ports and said "of course, there's only one on this laptop". So I lifted the laptop up and pointed out the three other USB ports on the opposite side of the laptop...

Clearly she didn't inherit the family's technical genes :)

Foot in mouth error

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:35:22 GMT

"We also have ergonomic keyboards if you prefer the bent ones."

Could anyone BUT me say that to what turned out to be the only openly gay man in the office? It was about ten minutes before work could continue.

"Things that will be deleted w/o warning by netadmin for $100"

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:17:32 GMT

2.5gb of wedding pictures do not belong on a shared network drive at work kthx. (wasn't even her wedding - it was a friend's.)

runner up: 6.5gb copy of an employee's computer from 3 years ago. employee has not been employed here for the last two.

there. solved the space problem. i love me some treesize.

dear stupid people

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:33:20 GMT

what part of,

"thank you for calling Penetrode, my name is taiki, how can I help you?" translates to, "Waste an hour of my time, please, old people preferred?"

double-you tee eff

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:11:15 GMT

So, I'm working today.
On Sundays, I'm the only person manning the helpdesk at the hospital.

I got a call a few minutes ago from a doctor. To quote him, "There are two computers in this room and one of 'em won't even come up! This room is pretty worthless right now!"
I hate it when people say, "The computer won't come up." That can mean SO many things, and it seems like no one ever wants to clarify. And I'm thinking that the PC has lost power? It won't come on??? SOMETHING??

So I forward the phone to the cell and walk up there.

I get up there, and the PC is powered on and is just waitin' for someone to log on.
So I sign on as myself... no problems. At this point, I'm thinking it had to have been a problem with his network password.

Nope.
He signed in just fine.

The problem was that (from what he tells me) the PC somehow lost its network connection yesterday. Or maybe Friday. Who knows. He rebooted it this morning and decided to call me because he figured there'd still be a problem. So he hadn't even tried to sign on.

I need the exercise, and it's nice to get away from this desk sometimes, but... huh?

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:47:10 GMT

(I work for a police force)

E-mail from the web team, informing us of some planned downtime:

System: [List of intranet apps]
Date/time: [blah]
Reason: Webserver-4 died during the night, and all intranet apps need to be migrated to Webserver-5.

At approx. 3 this morning, Webserver-4 bluescreened and we've been unable to restart web services. We need to migrate applications to Webserver-5 so that users can continue to use the applications while we resolve the problem. As for the cause, it has yet to be identified but Webserver-4 is currently helping the police with their enquiries.

Web team makes me laugh.

autoSUCK

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:12:20 GMT

autodesk licensing can DIAF and go to some really unpleasant afterworld to be very very uncomfortable for an extended period of time!!!!!!

I mean fff how is it I pat for stanalone licensed for about 8 different applications from this wonderful conpnay and yet I CANT activate them ????? And for some reason there is no acurate record of the sn so we are essentially functining on guesswork here I mean it's not frickin rocket science?!!??

Oh and the fact that if you make any chanes it breaks everything afkoddfghhjklll

Sorry can't form proper sentanes must drink now

1 phone, 2 phones, 3 phones more phones...

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:31:29 GMT

So, I had to order a HTC Touch Dual 850 for one of our users from Australias largest telecoms company.

It was just a single phone that was ordered. Somehow I have now ended up with 5 phones in total.

Can't wait to see whether this subsequent email advising them of their fubar will result in another phone being sent out.

I like having over $4000 worth of phone sitting in my back room here.

Should I laugh or should I cry?

(and no, I can't appropriate any of them because they're all under different order ID's).

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:54:53 GMT

First call of the day:

I had a gentleman call in about why IE7 was not install on his computer. After 25 minutes (YES THAT LONG) to get him look in the right spot to see what OS he's running it was so obvious why it wouldn't download and install.

He was running Windows 95.

Oiy freaking vey.

And to make it even more fun he insisted that there was nothing wrong with his computer it HAD to be our internet service.

Activate Print Screen

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:34:11 GMT

Please activate the “Print Screen” key on my computer, it currently does not work. If this is something I can do with you over the phone, just let me know.
Thank You,
receptionist

I told my boss that I will have to wait to compose myself before I go over there to see what the receptionist is trying to do.

ETA* She just wanted to put a screenshot into word. I explained to her the PrtScn key was like the copy part of copy/paste and she got it. Though when I showed her the keyboard shortcut for paste, I blew her mind. *

Also yesterday, the receptionist needed help with sending out a company wide meeting request, and wanted the request response turned off so the email box wouldn't be overloaded with accept/decline. Not an unusual request, went down and showed recp how to do that, and right after the meeting was sent, tons of read receipts filled the box. Recp got a bit upset, saying I was supposed to stop that. I said, well, it could be worse, you could have gotten the accept/decline receipts too (what I had come down to fix in the first place) That's what I get for assuming the recp didn't have request read receipt turned on...

WHY, $DEITY, WHY!?!

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:01:33 GMT

You just spilled an ENTIRE FSCKING CUP OF COFFEE on this poor ThinkPad. The whole keyboard was dripping wet when I looked at this machine, as were the HDD and battery bay. Yet you, in your supremely boneheaded wisdom decided to try to turn the machine on anyway.

I assume you have at least an elementary understanding of how electricty works, so WHY did you think this was a good idea, really? No matter how many times I see behavior like this (and considering how long I've been doing this job, we're well into thousands of instances here), I'm still suprised by it.

You at least had the foresight to buy ThinkPad Protection. So now I can box this machine up and let the IBM/Lenovo depot handle it. Looks like you're going to need a new everything-but-LCD, so maybe they'll issue a replacement.

Had to share this...

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:24:51 GMT

Recap: Helldesk for a Hospital.
Location: Helldesk is in its own separate room, with 5 staff members, including me. This room's rather small, with 4 cubes on each side, 8 cubes total.
People: 4 Helldesk people, including me, and one Senior Helldesk person.

I walked in this morning, closed the door behind me, and heard, from one of the cubes, the voices of one of the Helldesk people and our Senior.

Her: Stick it over there! It's not in all the way!
Him: How much more do you want me to stick it in!?
Her: NO! NO! MORE!
Him: Damnit I can't get it in any more! It's STUCK!

I walked past, dropped my coat and purse, and looked over...

...at the two of them working on a Word document with margin issues.

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:14:29 GMT

Standard background: I work in support for a large university that provides free generalized support for all its students, faculty, staff, and a decent number of alums. There are very few programs in the country even close to it; we take more calls in a week than a lot of places do in a month. And, generally speaking, we support just about everything to some degree, so we get a broad variety of calls.

Anyway, so last night I was on a desk shift at the support desk and this blonde girl comes up, visibly freaking out. I'm prepared for the worst, seeing as how she takes her laptop out of a Vera Bradley bag and is generally kind of twitchy.

I spent like an hour with her - she had a borked wireless driver, expired AV software, and a VPN that wouldn't connect (the expired AV was doing it - grumblepersonalfirewallgrumble). Anyway, she was super nice, the first thing she told me was that she didn't know much at all about computers, and she LISTENED to me. I made sure to explain exactly what we were doing, she asked smart questions, and really, an hour wasn't bad for the amount of work we did. It could've lasted three, with some of the users I've had.

But anyway, my shift ended at midnight and I was on my way out to head over to the gentleman friend's place when this woman stops me. Now, I seriously dislike this particular woman, because she is annoying. I have had her multiple times before both at the desk and on the phone (we track by username, and that voice, oi).

The first thing she says? "I know you're off the clock, but--" NO. STOP THERE. DO NOT PASS GO. WE HAVE A 24-HOUR SUPPORT LINE FOR EXACTLY THIS REASON.

But, of course, since I can't say no to people, I help her. She needed Windows Installer 3.1 so she could install office enterprise. "Go find it on Google."

The thing that pisses me off the most is that she just assumed I have nothing better to do than fix her stupid computer problems. This is not true.

I need an RTFM shirt.

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:39:24 GMT

This ticket made me giggle today:

I seem to type excessively or something, but I have managed to rub quite
a lot of the letters off my keyboard.

Is there any chance you have another downstairs that I can use as I am
missing the letter 'n' now and I appear to have two 'f' keys. Obviously
there is no immediate rush as I can type without them.

<3 users with a sense of humor.

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:35:08 GMT

Before you buy your elderly relative a computer, make sure they can use it.
Do this, or make sure you are on hand at all times to handle all computer-related problems.
Better yet, talk them out of it.

No words chill me quicker than, "My grandson get me this...."

(Side note: if you have a trust fund, hire someone to handle this sort of thing for you. Don't call us and get pissy because you don't know how to use a computer. You have a flipping trust fund. Take a class or hire someone.)

Feedback - is this too harsh

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:19:08 GMT

Background: I am teaching an engineering class at a local college this semester and yesterday I asked a question (this is to senior computer engineers taking an elective "General engineering for CE/EE") that required converting "pounds to kilos." The response was - why would we know that - we have calculators and memorization is silly.

Here is my response - from my own career:

-----------------------------------------------------------

Career Limiting Moves

When I worked for a large engineering and construction firm, the process engineers (of which I was one) had a term for an action an engineer would take which would have an immediate and negative impact on his or her career. The acronym we used to describe these actions was CLMs, which was pronounced clemz. CLMs stood for “career limiting moves.”

Appreciate the power of the clem on your career path.

Use in a sentence: “He said THAT to his BOSS!!! What a clem!”

Provide an example: While working at this engineering and construction firm, I had occasion to visit a senior process engineer because I needed some information from him to size an equipment item. When I walked into his office, I noticed that his eyes were literally bulging outside of their sockets and his face was an uncomfortable shade of bluish red. I said, “Is something wrong?” He said, “I gave a new engineer written instructions on how to access and use the material balance program* and told him to size some equipment. You know what I got back?!” I said, “Sized equipment?” He said, “NOOOOOOOOO!! I got this NOTE: ‘I couldn’t get the program to work. Either write better instructions or do it yourself.’ CAN YOU F—KING BELIEVE THIS?!!!!!!!**” Then in a rather ominous tone he said,” As god is my witness, this kid will not make it through the year.” True to his word, this new engineer left the company in under six months—I believe it was actually four months. Was he fired? No. He was just given work. Lots and lots of work. Lots and lots of work--and no support. He started to miss deadlines—this drew the attention of other engineers who needed his work to do their work. So they started calling him and visiting him--and complaining to him—sometimes really loudly--all while more work was moving in his direction. Time to find a new job.

Quiz: Can you recognize clemz?

Scenario: You, newbie engineer, are in a meeting with your immediate boss (an engineer in her forties) and two members of your client’s project team at the client’s offices. One client representative is a US engineer in his sixties; the other client representative is a European facility manager in his forties. Your boss is going over a plot plan for a central office expansion. She mentions that the concrete pad for one of the equipment items is 40 feet by 50 feet. The European manager asks, ”What is that in square meters?” You see your boss’s head slowly swiveling in your direction, and you suddenly realize your calculator is on your office desk. Your boss turns to you and says, “What is it?” At this point, everyone has turned toward you, and they are waiting expectantly for your answer. You still have said nothing. You note that your boss’s eyes are starting to narrow and the tips of her ears are starting to turn pink—an odd physical characteristic that you have learned means she is really getting PO’d. You have to speak.

When you open your mouth, which of the following is not a clem?

· “I’m special and have always felt units conversions are beneath me.”

· “If it’s squared, that means it’s an area, right?

· “What do I look like—freakin’ Einstein?

· “Hey, I am an (SCHOOL NAME) grad—if you want actual numbers, ask an MIT geek.”

· “Ask the old dude—they used to have to memorize crap like that. YO!—old dude, show us your slide rule”

· “I think it is probably a big number.”

· “I think it is probably a small number.”

· “Bigger than a breadbox. Oh wait—a breadbox would be a volume, right?

· “Yeah, you keep giving me that look, bitch, and I’ll knock you out!”

· “Are there logs involved? I don’t do logs.”

· “It’ll take me a half-hour to drive back to the office and get my calculator. What’s your cell phone number? I’ll call you as soon as I figure it out.”

· “Can I call in a lifeline?”

· “HEY! What’s that that just went by the window?!!!! I think someone jumped!”

· “I have to go the bathroom.”

· “I do not think unannounced quizzes are fair. I feel disappointed.”

· “My religious beliefs prevent me from proselytizing. I have taken a solemn oath never to try to convert a unit.”

· “Do you have an Internet connection? There are lots of unit conversion programs on the web.”

· “So how is the weather In Europe anyway?”

· “Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery—but this moment is a gift, and that’s why they call it the present. Okay, everyone—let’s hold hands and sing kumbayya.”

· “It’s approximately 180 square meters.”

Calculators are great tools—but that’s all they are. They are not a substitute for your ability to do simple math in your head—or on the back of an envelope. Units are the part of the vocabulary of your profession, and they should come to you as easily as words do. Learn the basic unit conversions.

*Yes, there are programs to do these calculations, but you need to know what they are doing.

**Harsh language was a common part of the creative process at this particular firm.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:51:02 GMT

I work in a data center. I get a call from someone who monitors servers from off site.
"Yes, I was working on the server, and disabled the NIC. Somehow I lost connectivity to the server, can you fix it?" he inquired.
..."Do you understand how connectivity was lost when you TS into a machine and disable the network card." I asked.
"If you could investigate and find out how this happened and let us know, that would be great!" He exclaimed.

__________

http://dragcave.net/user/tmercenary

Just wow

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:23:02 GMT

Had a client call in, weve done work for him in the past. I knew he was far from the brightest bulb in the box but today he asked if we could help him remove a tracking device from what he called a "hot" laptop.

...

No.

Really sir, Like I want to risk an entire business with a 15 year reputation to make at best $100 for helping you steal stuff, where do I sign up?

Oooookay..

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:05:37 GMT

A webdesigner in town screwed up one of our client's MX records. (As in, they no longer exist.)
I really have to wonder, however, how this webdesigner got the job. Would you take them seriously with this as their homepage?

(As an edit I thought I should notate that this website is SFW. Nothing pornographic, I promise. Unless he changes it sometime after I post this. Who knows.)

Hmmm

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:44:29 GMT

This window popped up as I was working on a client's workstation this morning. I had to capture it for posterity. I'm just wondering what type of ink exactly I need to purchase now.

This post brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

stabs Monday

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:37:17 GMT

I often find that I start out on a call supporting our own software but then have to wade into teaching someone Windows operations. When it's really basic I can help, but then I start to get out of my depth and have to tell them I can't go any further. Even worse are the ones who are so computer-illiterate and difficult to teach that they need an expert teacher who knows the OS inside and out to fix their problems.

I'm not talking about the stereotypical PEBKAC users here. I just spent half an hour on the phone with a guy who was a programmer back in the '60s, loved Windows 95 and did all kinds of things with it, and is now seventy-five years old and completely buffaloed by Vista. He needed more help than I could give him, and I wish there was a service I could refer him to that could help with Vista in general.

Is there a service like that, that's free or cheap and geared towards helping elderly/young/n00bish computer users with general tasks as long as they're willing to learn?

I do this as much as I can because I think the standard model of each product having its own support line is absolutely useless for these people. Sometimes you just don't know when the problem is with Windows or with the third-party application, and the user ends up being ping-ponged back and forth because MS support blames Dell and Dell support blames us and we blame MS. My calls are not timed and I'm the only support rep for a small-distribution app, so I can spend time with users if I want to, and not cut them off to preserve my performance rating at the cost of not actually resolving their problems.

I just took a course on bicycle maintenance, for cyclists to learn the ins and outs of their own machines and lessen their dependence on service shops. This same outfit also has a walk-in workshop where you can get access to tools plus expert volunteer help and advice for about ten bucks an hour. That's what there needs to be for computers.

I love Fynn

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:41:41 GMT

If you are looking for a good evening activity you should watch Tron with the volume down and Dio's Holy Diver (album) cranking. It was the merger of my two favorite things - Tron and Dio.

*throws horns*

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:20:35 GMT

Another late night "emergency call" from a "client" (we are re-branding and I was told Friday that they aren't customers anymore). In any event, our after hours tier 1 folks just called me up with an urgent ticket - the user accidentally poured a beer on the Cisco ASA that is at their office. Now, I'm not normally one to really ask "how did that happen" since I see shit all day long; BUT, Saturday, 11:55pm EST and you are in the networking closet at your realty firm drinking beer high enough in the air to pour it on the ASA? WTF? Perhaps you are the anti-christ of networking engineers everywhere - because, really, it takes either a) a violation of physics to pour up, b) you were on a ladder and dumped your beer down. Either way I don't know what to say other than I'll call Cisco TAC and have you a new ASA shipped Sunday Red for like $1000 from Bangalore.

I am just waiting for the call that someone accidentally detonated a bomb in their network closet or something. They get worse and worse.

Closing thoughts: "If you idiot-proof something, they will just build a better idiot"

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:23:30 GMT

Ma'am, if I had phone numbers or tools to activate your account, I would have done it by now. Do you think I LIKE listening to you yell and scream at me? Do you think I enjoy listening to you threaten my family? Do you honestly think I want to sit here, listening to you yell and scream about how I'm lying and need to contact someone right away?

Do you understand how stupid you sound yelling at me that our systems are wrong? And did I forget to mention that I am TECHNICAL SUPPORT and not CUSTOMER SERVICE. Our systems may be wrong, but you're still disconnected! And there's nothing I can do about it!

Believe me, lady, I would do anything to get you off my phone. Oh, you're threatening my life? And I've already requested various times you stop yelling! Okay, have a nice day!

Aaaand disconnect.