Tales from Techsupport

[Melcar]

so a voice coil is just like a DC motor then, wire it for negative and it "spins" the other direction.

Pretty good analogy, it's essentially a linear DC motor.

Going to guess on a speaker you want the power to push the cone rather than pull the cone?

I'm not a speaker engineer either - so your guess here is as good as mine; 50-50.
I'd assume you are correct but would have to research that myself... I just hook the leads the way the diagram tells me to.

[Mileron]

Customer: I'm missing data that was entered between January 2012 and today.
Me: Do you have a backup?
Customer: No, but we printed it out, can't you just scan it back into the program?
Me: No, you'll need to re-enter it
Customer: But we already entered it once
Me: Okay, I can examine your dataset then
Customer: Fine (sends the dataset)
Me: Okay it looks like everything you're missing was deleted before 6/4/2012
Customer: Who would have done that?
Me: Someone doing entries at your company...
Customer: Can't you just copy-and-paste it back into where it needs to go?
Me: No, because you've been doing entries for the last four months, and the program record tracking has already been superceded by what you've entered.
Customer: Well we didn't need the info then, but we need it back now
Me: Then re-enter it
Customer: We don't want to, we want you to copy-and-paste it back where it needs to go
Me: With the entries you've made, this has become impossible. It would require a development escalation which could take 3 or more business days, by which time you could probably have re-entered the 6 whole transactions you are missing.
Customer: I really don't see why you can't copy-and-paste it back into where it needs to go.
Me: Well you see, when transactions are entered, they are given a special number that is dated. And since they were deleted before June, the transactional date glue that the program uses for these records is expired. So even though I could copy them out, the glue won't stick them into where it needs to go.
Customer: Well why didn't you just say that?

[Melcar]

the glue won't stick them into where it needs to go.

Don't forget the sunspots...


Sidenote - I actually had a Charter tech try and tell me that the other day...

I changed my service, dropped everything except Internet.


So, I get home last Wed. have no internet. Reset my modem, reset my firewall all that good shit. Call Charter, go through the motions with them, get to the point where they dispatch the tech out... and then he goes on to the other things I could try... "system restore" blah blah this, blah blah that... Oh, & it could be the solar weather - may fix itself...

Right OK... I'll keep that in mind.

Yeah, problem was the wire was disconnected at the pole.

[Mileron]

Yesterday: Company wide email malfunctions
Today: Company wide VOIP phone malfunctions

Me calling help desk: Hi, my office is having intermittent internet problems, preventing email access and phone functionality. We are a call center, is there an outage?
HD: No, there's no problems since yesterday's email
Me: Well the same thing happened this morning until the phone problem just now
HD: How are you talking to me?
Me: I have a cell phone...
HD: Well we have no record of any problems
Me: I am submitting a ticket, so you can record my problems
HD: Well we haven't heard of any problems

In the meantime, I get an email from my manager in the brief moment that Outlook connects that says "We got confirmation there is a company wide phone problem"

It feels like Friday the thirteenth with a full moon.

[FilanFyretracker]

Sunspots will not take a modem offline, They will however result in funny TV issues. But honestly even that has gotten better, Dunno if its better software filtering the noise or just that there are more birds up there now so they point the dish at the one they think will be harmed the least transmission wise.

[Mileron]

Putting a new PC in place for one of the managers who is out of office today.

I'm under the desk disconnecting cables and smell something majorly funky.

Thinking it's food, I bring a flashlight down.

Only to find a pile of toenail clippings on and around and IN the surge protector.

[FilanFyretracker]

now that is rather nasty, I bet if the same manager caught a cubeslave doing that they would get fired.

[Mileron]

Coworker: I was working on a sample dataset that's very hard to replace
Me: (uhoh) Okay
Coworker: I tried recreating it as a test, and the program said "file already exists, do you want to replace?"
Me: (double uhoh) Okay
Coworker: So I said yes. Now I can't find any of the test data the manager spent 3 months inputting. Is that a bad thing?

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

Coworker: I was working on a sample dataset that's very hard to replace
Me: (uhoh) Okay
Coworker: I tried recreating it as a test, and the program said "file already exists, do you want to replace?"
Me: (double uhoh) Okay
Coworker: So I said yes. Now I can't find any of the test data the manager spent 3 months inputting. Is that a bad thing?

[Melcar]

From one of our other network Techs this morning:


her: What would cause a duplicate IP address on the network? -- This was her IP.

Me: That's in range given out for DHCP.

Her: Well, that was the address her computer had when I gave her the new computer.

me: That means you didn't notice she was a DHCP client, so you statically assigned a dynamically assignable address. So, the server doesn't know it's used - and will pass it out a second time.

her: Oh. but that was the address she had when I switch the computer...

Me: Just switch the computer back on DHCP it'll be fine.

[FilanFyretracker]

I do not even have a degree and could have figured that problem out. First rule if a duplicate IP is mentioned in an error is check to see if DHCP is on.

[Mileron]

The following is a paraphrased transcript of an email exchange between me and one of the Sales agents in my office during the height of Hurricane Sandy.

Mon 11:03am:
SA: Can you please give me a call? I'm not able to set up a remote connection from my apartment, and the global Help Desk cannot help me.
Me: Everyone is working from home. The office may be experiencing a power outage. If it is not, but it had recently, it's possible your computer is off. If that is the case, you won't be able to connect remotely to your computer. If the computer is on, you need to have the correct computer name/address to remotely connect to the computer.

SA, 11:31am: You don't give me much hope this will get done. What is the address? I know the office is at (street address), but my dad's computer is currently at (his apartment street address)
Me: No, those aren't applicable. You need the computer location on the network. The name of the computer you're sitting at doesn't matter. The house you're in doesn't matter.
SA: Well the Help Desk is also helping me set up VPN. Can you do that?
Me: What do you mean set up VPN?
SA: I just called the Help Desk to set up VPN, can you do that?
Me: No, that's solely a Help Desk thing.
SA: Here's the link I'm using to sign in, it keeps telling me my user name and password is invalid
Me: Well that's because you're using a link for a different business unit, and not for ours. They need to give you a valid connection URL

SA 11:59am: Well what can we do to resolve this?
Me: You need to talk to the Help Desk
SA: So I should follow up with the Global Help Desk to get this resolved? Can't you give me a painless option to walk me through setting it up?

By now I've started CC'ing my lead tech/counterpart, and he's sending me direct IMs like "omg is he for real".

LT 1:41pm: The link you(SA) provided is not a valid link to remotely connect, as Mileron said. You need to contact the Help Desk.

SA 4:28pm: The link didn't work? Can one of you help me get remote access or must I call the Global Help Desk about it? I really need to get this up and running.

At this point, I snapped. Here is my verbatim email to him:

SA, I don't know how many different ways I can tell you this.
THE GLOBAL HELP DESK MUST HELP YOU WITH IT.
That's it. I cannot do anything.

If you can't go to (inserted the VPN URL that I use), select North America for Region, and (Business Unit), and (Authentication Type) for Security, then login with your network information, WE ARE UNABLE TO HELP YOU.

Otherwise, this is out of our hands, I'm sorry.

SA, 10/30 7:00AM: The Help Desk helped me get set up on the VPN. Now I need to know what my phone credentials are (that he uses to log into the phone every single day.) Can one of you help me out with that?





... If he comes to my desk this morning, I'm just going to ignore him.

[FilanFyretracker]

This is going to be an ugly time for customer facing tech support. Going to guess many people will not care that trees are down and that telecom has to wait for a green light from the power company. in NYC a few datacenters went dead.

[Melcar]

UGH...

Most of mine lately seem to be complaining about my coworkers:

So, My vacation begins at 4:30PM today 2 weeks. (deer season, unplug time, no phone, no internet, fresh air, trees, and hopefully some deer.)

Anyways, other network tech this morning:

"Before you leave for your vacation, why can't I remote connect anymore to Computer at remote location".

well, how should I know.

"Can't ping it, can't RDP, can't do remote assist etc... Can't ping anything out there"

hmm, I can't ping it either, but when I ping the whole network these are the 20 address that respond. So there's no block on the whole network, which means if it's a firewall it's the local firewall, not the network one. Check for local firewall, check the AV, if that's not managed properly it defaults to block all inbound etc etc etc...


-- Two hours later "know what the problem was?"

How would I know what the problem was?

"teehee - the computer was turned off".

That would do it.

[Mileron]

Manager: FYI, come 2013 one of our core products will no longer support Excel 2003.
Me: Will we be informing our customers?
Manager: Why?

[FilanFyretracker]

the customers should be informed yes, but on the other hand he may have said that because it will be 2013 and he might be figuring "Who would still use 10yr old software?" (of course the company likely still uses WinXP and IE6.... )

[Alikat Astrae]

-- Two hours later "know what the problem was?"

How would I know what the problem was?

"teehee - the computer was turned off".

That would do it.

I don't know about you guys, but I never turn off my desktop machines unless I'm performing maintenance on them. Except for the Studio computer, which was purpose-built, my desktop units have 24/7 JOBS to do. If I turn them off then they aren't useful.

[FilanFyretracker]

sure it uses power but I leave mine on constantly because it seems really turning a computer on and off is actually worse for it.

I did shut mine down for awhile on monday when the power was getting a bit flickery.

[Dawlin]

I don't know about you guys, but I never turn off my desktop machines unless I'm performing maintenance on them. Except for the Studio computer, which was purpose-built, my desktop units have 24/7 JOBS to do. If I turn them off then they aren't useful.

I need to be able to remote desktop to my work machine at a moment's notice.
That, and it's extremely nice to be able to pick right up where I left the night before.

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

I don't know about you guys, but I never turn off my desktop machines unless I'm performing maintenance on them. Except for the Studio computer, which was purpose-built, my desktop units have 24/7 JOBS to do. If I turn them off then they aren't useful.

I don't think running SETI@HOME qualifies as something that needs to be done 24/7. :P