Peter Principle in Practice!Originally Posted by Bonlainy
(fear my alliteration)
User: My laptop stopped working
Me: Has the power in your house gone out due to the storm? (Tropical Storm Isaias)
User: No, but my laptop is next to a window, and water might have been coming in while I was away from my desk getting my morning tea, do you think that could be it?
Tech support related. I work for a big Canadian IT/outsourcing company and am based in the UK. Currently working from home due to the world going to shit.
We have been getting calls from asian males for the last few weeks saying they work for Sky in London (and never calling from a London dial code) and there is a problem with my router. Normally I just tell them to sod off, but today I decided to humour them.
Caller - (talking me through it like an idiot) open event viewer - ooh look, lots of errors/warnings.
Me - yup
Caller - open (mumbled crap)
Me - sorry I cannot understand you, can you repeat that please?
Supervisor - I am the supervisor, can you open a run box and go to www.teamviewer.com (again, spelled out phonetically)
Me- nope - I am not going to let you access my computer, I work in IT Support.
Supervisor - "motherfucker. you work in IT? fuck off" and hung up
Pissed myself laughing after that.
Hopefully the scamming tossers stop calling me.
Power in my office building is out and has been since 1am.
Everyone in the company gets texts and emails stating this.
I've been getting messages from people saying "we can't access X resource".
My reply is "the power is out in the building with no current ETA on repair".
One lady says back to me, "ok, when is a good time to start bothering you?"
Grebnedlog_2365.jpg
BY the way.
The guy to whom this monitor was originally shipped resigned around the beginning of September, and this past week finally returned his hardware.
Guess which label was visible?
The correct one, with the office address..
Makes no sense whatsoever why it went back to him.
I've had another Fedex kerfuffle.
Needed to ship several laptops and assorted accessories to our office in Sydney, AU.
9/16: Package it up nicely (all in one box) print out the completed customs forms, (five of which - the commercial invoice - I had to hand-sign) and put it in the purple plastic pouch thingy. Drop it at Fedex.
9/18: Voicemail left after 10pm US time stating "we need the commercial invoice"
9/21: Phone call to Fedex to find out where I need to send it, especially since it should have been delivered by now.
9/22: Finally get a message back from Fedex with the email address, so I send it
9/24: Still no update on the tracking page, so I call. They tell me the doc was received, and it was sent to "the correct department" but there's no update
9/25: Phone call, still no update. They tell me "I should expect a call back" from the AU tracing supervisor
9/26: Yes, Saturday. I call. Still no update. They do however state that, due to the fact I've been calling daily, they're going to reassign my case from the AU rep to a US rep (which makes no sense) and promise me a call back.
9/27: Sunday I keep to myself, even though I actually physically went to the office for a non-related issue (new hire broke their desk phone)
9/28: They give me an alternate email address, to which I forward my original email of the copy of the commercial invoice.
9/29: I called Fedex FOUR TIMES. No one can give me an answer as to the status of my package, even though I've told each consecutive rep that I've sent the documentation, and no one has emailed or called me and the tracking page is still not updated. They're also not sure if it's stuck on the Fedex side of things, or if it's stuck in Customs.
I'd call them back today except this power outage has my attention.
I can't remember when it was that I finally talked to someone useful about my Fedex shipping issue. But she basically said "send it to this other other other email address", it got forwarded to Customs within an hour, eight hours later I got confirmation it had passed Customs, and it was finally delivered two and a half weeks late.
Today's:
User has a problem where his laptop screen went 98% dark. Brightness settings aren't fixing it. Connecting an external monitor works fine. We've had a couple similar issues before where the video driver just "gives up" so I figure this is the same problem and coordinate a remote session after his business hours.
Except I cannot connect to it remotely. I try a few times throughout the night in case his home internet dropped. Same issue.
Talking to him this morning, he says: "Oh, I closed the lid so it wouldn't be too bright in my room, did that mess it up?"
hahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha...
Oh, that's a classic.
For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
Noone should sue or be sued ambiguously.
User: I had an issue with my laptop three days ago
Me: What about now?
User: What about it?
Me: Are you having the issue now?
User: I don't care about now, I care about three days ago! Why did I have that problem?
"Sorry sir you will need to use a T.A.R.D.I.S and contact me on the day the problem happened"
Today we sail
On the Solar Rail
For there's much we just don't know
So farewell with a kiss
Then it's fast for the mist
Till we're sleeping in the cold below
Due to Covid, a few changes have been made with regards to how new hires are processed.
We have generally not had people in the office.
I mean yes, I was onsite 2x a week from March til early June, 3x until mid July, and daily from mid-July through my wife's Covid diagnosis the first week of December.
New hires last started in the office in February, with the others starting remotely until late October, at which point we had 2 groups start onsite, but then due to the City of Philly's change to office occupancy starting the Friday before Thanksgiving, that's it. 3 new hire groups all year, where there would have been a group every 3-5 weeks.
So some of the new hire processing and responsibilities fall in IT's lap, naturally.
Where otherwise we would assume certain "this is how you do X" learning would occur from a team perspective (i.e. the manager teaching their new subordinate how to do it) we had to schedule an hour or more of time with a new hire (based on equipment received and position filled).
This includes acquiring a business-style photograph/headshot to be uploaded to the office network. Especially important (or so upper management feels) with regards to allowing folks to recognize each other via MS Teams meetings.
I have been chasing up an average of 40-60 people on a regular basis to get their damn headshots, because they don't read emails from IT or some shit.
In a fit of pique for how much time I've spent on this one task in the last year (yes even before Covid) I decided to log into Linkedin, which I don't usually, because hey, easy headshots, right?
Well no. Over half of the people for whom I need headshots for either don't have one uploaded, or they're so bad (due to content or composition) that I cannot use them at all even if I were to steal them from the site.
But that's not the point of the post.
At the top of my "messaging" panel, I see an "Urgent" message from one of my coworkers (several countries removed).
"Urgent. I am unable to log in using my new changed password and am locked out of Outlook and MS Teams. Can you help me please?"
Suuuuuure, because that's an approved method to submit a ticket...
User: We have over 100 people who are complaining that certain emails which used to go into their Focused inbox no longer do so. How can we fix this?
Me: Turn off focused inbox, OR, right-click the emails that do not show up in Focused, go down to the option that says "Always deliver to focused"
User: This isn't tenable for 100 people to do
Me: Then my next question would be, are these emails coming from, OR, being delivered to, one single source or distribution list? Because if the answer is "yes" then my only other option is to set a filter on Exchange.
User: No
Me: Then we can't do that
User: That's unacceptable
Had a user spill coffee on her brand new laptop, requiring an upgrade to the warranty to cover Accidental Damage, and getting a full new motherboard etc. However she was given a downgrade and her now-usable-again computer was given to an exec.
Same user, six months later (just a couple weeks ago, I sent Dale the image of her message to me), spills coffee on her replacement laptop. We give her another downgrade, and unequivocally state that if she does it again, she gets a desktop.
The second coffee-drowned computer was unrecoverable (partly due to its age, but also because it would have required a full rebuild and it would be cheaper just to replace the computer. With a refurb.)
I just wanted to post to say that, even though it doesn't get much in the way of replies, I love this thread.
I can definitely empathize with tech support folks. -Did so myself for a good decade or so. Thread seems whiney to me more often than not though, honestly.I just wanted to post to say that, even though it doesn't get much in the way of replies, I love this thread.
Providing support for people who are technically clueless... That's the job. If you didn't realize that when you first got into it; I'm not sure what you were thinking.
I've actually had a couple conversations about this recently.
The first was with my wife. She mentioned how I barely talk about work except for extreme problems or severe stupidity. That's because well, the range of stupidity runs the gamut from "headset mic is muted" to "battery in wireless mouse is dead" to "dumped coffee on laptop".
Otherwise, it's a lot of rote daily stuff like "create new account", "add to DL", "I don't know how to clear my Chrome cache for the 40th time in two weeks", and "my computer shut down after two hours when I disconnected it from the power connector. I need it replaced." So most of these don't get shared because they're realistically not memorable.
Another was with one of my coworkers. He asked me why I seemed so jaded.
Now, for clarification, I have been doing tech support in one capacity or another since 1988 or so, when I "helped" our third-grade teacher learn how to enter the password into the brand-new built-in-front-of-us Apple ][e. (She supposedly couldn't figure out how to make a # )
I've supported people of all knowledge levels from my parents who couldn't program a VCR to save their lives, to a brand new iMac owner with a printing issue to a partner at a law firm who didn't understand "right-click" to a tech guy who did everything I instructed because I knew my product better than he did, to my current CEO who decided he wanted to ignore tech's explicit warning not to install Mac OS Big Sur, and after having done so has been having nothing but daily password problems.
This is coupled with a healthy dose of "respect for Murphy and Karma".
There's this guy I've known for the better part of 30 years (most of his life, but he's one of my brother's closest friends) who has this "personality trait" where he likes to over-enthuse about the positive, and it ends up reversing itself.
To wit: "This is going to be a great camping weekend, there's not a cloud in the sky", which inevitably results in it pouring down rain from Friday night until Sunday. (This happened for fifteen years of camping trips.)
Or "just had my car repaired, (this part) is good for another twenty thousand miles" - and it breaks again three days and less than two hundred miles later.
It's to the point where we don't let him say anything along those lines.
Back in 2008 when my sister got her BA, we had a small graduation party for her. It was scheduled on a weekend with greater than 50% chance of rain, and yes it was cloudy up through the morning of - but then it cleared up. He arrives as the sun starts peeking out and starts to wax poetic about how "of course it clears up for such an auspicious weekend" and there were four people trying to get him to shut the hell up.
Similarly, after a maintenance window during which about 200 computers had software drivers pushed out to them to resolve a particularly hinky wifi problem (caused by a Windows update), about a third ended up having bizarre SATA-related driver issues requiring half of those to be reimaged because the hard drive got "lost". At which point I said to the guy who planned the driver update, "this is because you said the driver updates would take care of everything."
Yes, I know it's coincidence. Yes, it's a TV/novel/movie cliche written to subvert expectations or build suspense. (The Martian's Mark Watney blowing up the Hab, for example.) But coincidence and expectation get upended so frequently.
I'm ready for people to be stupid. It's just that, after 22 years of officially getting paid to do support, I'm still shocked at the depths of it.
And yes, some of it can be my own.
Getting tired of products getting sold, but delivery information and preparedness not getting completed.
Got hired on with a bunch of n00bs at my exact same rate of pay. None of them are doing their work to completion. Management doesn't pay attention.
Daily, I am going through my order management and seeing other people's work incomplete, and then having to fix their shit to make sure it doesn't fall back on a cluster fuck.
r/Talesfromtechsupport How The Office Karen MELTED 3 Computers
r/Talesfromtechsupport In today's episode, OP keeps having encounters with an incredibly stupid Karen in the office. Karen has a space heater, and she keeps pointing the thing DIRECTLY at her computer. She manages to melt 3 separate computers this way, and she also gets annoyed at OP when he shows up to fix it. Is she so stupid that she doesn't realize that she's melting the computers, or is she actually devious because she's doing it on purpose as an excuse to avoid work?
space heaters should never be pointed directly at anything, shes lucky she has not caused a legit fire. Folks like that are who burn down their house in winter.
Today we sail
On the Solar Rail
For there's much we just don't know
So farewell with a kiss
Then it's fast for the mist
Till we're sleeping in the cold below
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