Everybody's time is precious, pal: Sometimes it isn't only the terminals that are dumb On the third day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period. We take a jaunt over the …
I would have strangled the bastard with the modem cable, bludgeoned him with the modem itself, and screamed myself into a "hazardous workplace accident" to recouperate at a pub for a few months.
Good thing I'm retired, I'd go broke trying to claim all those cattle prods on my taxes as business related.
Receiving a call on the hotline... trying my best to resolve it with out moving my ass. No dice! Hang up the phone, and trek on down to ground zero, only to walk in the office and see the user with the phone up to their ear and an embarrassed look on their face. " I was just phoning you back to say the issue is resolved now" Without missing a beat I keep walking.
Pedant as his expression is close enough to the users
Ah yes, the days when many types of equipment actually had a "stop working" switch featured prominently enough that a user could flip it accidentally.
I'm not going to put the blame completely on the user for this one. Particularly if the user hadn't been allowed by management to move the modem, and by having IT show up and move it he actually got the problem resolved in a more durable fashion.
Extra points if the off switch is black, unmarked and shaped to form part of the plastic moulding around a corner. Bonus if it's next to a row of USB ports or something else that needs to be poked at.
Double word score if the kit is also used in the dark or somewhere that you can't actually see but need to plug into the ports by feel
"I'm not going to put the blame completely on the user for this one. Particularly if the user hadn't been allowed by management to move the modem, and by having IT show up and move it he actually got the problem resolved in a more durable fashion."
This strikes me as very unlikely. Sure, IT can be annoying about telling people not to do things ("No, you may not come into the server room and move the wires around even if you think you know that it will help", "No, you may not open the network cabinet and force a power cycle by pulling the power cable just because something sort of network-related isn't working and that works at home"), but I don't really think anyone in management would have a regulation about turning a box on your desk around. They might suggest you not do it in case it made things less organized, but it's not hard to do it anyway and claim an IT person did it. Also, I don't think anyone would notice or care.
Meanwhile, the call described in the article is a very stupid way to handle a hypothetical situation as you propose. If you want IT to confirm that the box can be turned around, it would be much more helpful to remember this and ask them when they're already there. Ranting at the IT person who is suggesting how to fix the problem just makes the caller look like a jerk. If I had been called out like that, I certainly would not have turned the box around; I'd have flipped the switch and left. Problem resolved for now. No reason for me to make things easier for someone who won't do what they've been told (correctly) will fix their problem, shown me profound disrespect, and didn't even think about the inconvenience of making someone come in a rainstorm to do something unnecessary.
Yes, ranting always makes you look like a jerk. But keep in mind we're only getting one side of the story here. For all we know, the client had been fighting a running battle with IT for months to get the modem mounted somewhere more secure, and they'd been fighting all the way.
I'm not saying this or anything like it happened. Just that it *could* have happened. And if it had, then even if the narrator was privy to the whole saga, they still wouldn't have mentioned it when telling this story.
Again, seems unlikely. It's possible that this had happened, but there are several good reasons in my mind to think that it did not. First, the modem has to be near the terminal anyway, so there's a limited amount that can be done. Turning it around helped in this case, but if that wasn't helpful, there's not really another good option available. Second, the content of the call does not lead to that kind of solution. The caller complained that the network had failed. Not that it repeatedly failed requiring a long-term solution, that it had failed this particular time. If I have to solve a "this broke" problem, my solution is "fix it now". If I have to solve a "this keeps breaking" problem, my solution is more likely to be what your idealized client would want.
In any story like this, where the user is always stupid and the IT person always figures it out, it's always possible that people are lying. Maybe the user figured out the turn-around procedure and IT is taking credit. Or maybe the call never happened and someone made it up to tell the story. These things don't sound likely to me though, because we've all experienced people who act like these characters. I've seen people who didn't understand seemingly basic things, or who got irrationally angry at someone solving their problem. I've also seen IT people break a system through incompetence and blame the client. Both happen. The general story therefore doesn't sound implausible to me, so I'm likely to consider it genuine. If I assume that the information we have is truthful, I must conclude that the client is entirely at fault and could easily have stated the problem differently and politely if they knew it (which I doubt they did).
"Particularly if the user hadn't been allowed by management to move the modem"
Management may not understand the scope or risk involved with "moving the modem". And as tens of thousands of dollars per minute (We've told that guy a million times: Stop exaggerating) might have been lost should the modem be damaged, I can understand the response.
Possible solution: Move the stack of papers. The fact that the customer's people were aware of the problem and took no steps to formulate a solution within their sphere of authority makes me think that this was a game of chicken. Who moves first?
I'm guessing that you meant "kitchen gloves", rubber or plastic ones to wear washing dishes for instance...
They come in wrist or elbow length...
Looking for "kitchen globes" on Amazon also produces heat insulated gloves and mitts for handling stuff from, and indeed to, the oven. I suppose if you don't have time to wait after powering down a hot modem...
No, they most certainly did NOT. RS232 signals are 10k impedance, and there is no inductance associated with them. In all my years of working with them, I have never seen a spark from an RS232 connector. And I always plugged and unplugged live. If you see sparks when connecting RS232, you have a serious issue.
HOWEVER, and this does appear to be limited to the UK and the continent, we did have frequent issues when different power outlets used different mains circuits. Differing ground references can cause the phenomenon you observed, and the RS232 standard does include a frame ground pin.
Old style, direct magnet, current loop with the 100V DC loop supply might be a candidate, but the ASR33 teletypes used magnet driver cards and could run off a 12V loop supply, so no sparks from that either.
When I lost my life-long employed status, and while re-training to become self-employed, to make a few bob/dollars along the way I did a stint on the tech support line for a very well-known (much-reviled) high street retailer, whose tech support was UK-based at that time.
One story which fits in here was when I took a call from an extremely well-spoke gentleman who had bought a top-of-the-range Sony laptop in his local store that afternoon. I checked his details, and he'd had it less than two hours judging from the sales ticket. The retail price was around £2,500, and it WAS a high-specced machine (I remember telling him I was jealous).
In his very polite voice, he said: 'I wonder if you can help me. I bought a new laptop this afternoon {details verified, as above}. Like a fool, I gave it to my 11 year old son to set up for me {sinking feeling} and at some point he set up a password {feeling underwater now} and now can't remember what it was. And I can't use the computer. Is there anything I can do?'
A bit of Q&A and my worst fears were realised - it was the BIOS password, not the Windows one.
I explained that there might - emphasising 'might' - be a jumper on the main board that would allow a reset, but with warranty issues and so on it would be something best resolved by the manufacturer or possibly, as a first port of call, the store he bought it from. In all honesty, it was something we couldn't/shouldn't be dealing with as it was not covered under extended warranty plans, and in any case he hadn't bought one of those (though I didn't say that). I also realise I'd most probably be able to do it remotely these days, but back then it was a no-no.
After a fairly long conversation he said: 'So there's really nothing for me to do except go back to the store. Is there anything else you can suggest?'
I said: 'Have you considered adoption?'
I got really lucky twice here. He thought it was funny, and QC weren't monitoring me at the time.
I'm about to be downvoted for smugness, despite me upvoting you, but you made two mistakes.
1) You should just have reset the BIOS password, it was quicker than explaining it and there were no tamper proof labels.
2) Infanticide, not adoption. Why would they want another brat?
Also, for the folk who got angry at the irrationally angry moronic clients. Bad move. I'd never/rarely react against their irrational emotional outbursts , I'd just sigh, pat them on the shoulder, fix their problem and walk away. If you get angry at the morons or humiliate them then they'll take it out on their colleagues. Never wrestle a pig.
I haven't downvoted you, but when you say reset the BIOS password, doesn't that involve having a database of codes to access?
I alluded to that when I said I realised I could have done it remotely these days. Back then, there was no code database. And even if there had been, the likelihood of a newly-released top-of-the-range machine being on it was unlikely.
Although it's needlessly digressing, we weren't supposed to get involved with these sorts of issues anyway, because they usually resulted in extended calls and the end result that they might not work anyway was the reason. It wasn't what the tech support line was for - it was for repairs under various warranties.
Fitting a loopback connector on the parallel port of Toshiba laptops & rebooting, would clear the BIOS PW.
Icon - Old Git & pretty sure it was the parallel port (25 pins) loopback connector, most laptop serial ports were 9 pin. I recently found it, then decided to throw it away....or did I decide otherwise keeping it "Just In Case"!
In my last job, one of my users decided to get clever and added a BIOS password, which they then promptly forgot. After trying pulling the CMOS battery etc., my boss came up with a...different...solution.
He grabbed a 9V battery, and dragged the terminals across the motherboard until it was completely dead. Then he got me to ring up Dell and get them to come swap out the mobo under warranty.
"I will just mention those electric fly swatters and some crocodile clips..."
The ticket vending machines they used to have at Dutch train stations took both coins and cards. Apparently, if you tickled them with a piezoelectric lighter they would disgorge all the coins from the bin.
The original "Space Invaders" machine in our local sports club was finally removed after many years when the management discovered that punters had for some time been flicking a piezoelectric lighter in front of the screen, which then gave you free credits....
Sonys, at least the ones I have encountered, are particularly well designed, and I suspect that resetting the BIOS password is intentionally quite a difficult process.
SGI Indigo also is quite well protected. I inherited one, minus the root password. The system is pretty resistant, but not totally. The BIOS password is well protected, and I didn't have a SCSI-1 card to read the HDD. However, the /etc/passwd file is old-skool UNIX, and world readable. The owner had not deleted the demo/demo user, so I got in that way, grabbed the encrypted password string from the /etc/passwd file, and ran it through a password cracker to get root access. Two weeks later, the person I got the system from, found the root password for me :-)
Sony laptops well designed? Are you in a parallel universe? :-) Aesthetically maybe yes.
If it was a Dell laptop they had, then there's a website happily giving out override passwords if you pop in the serial number. This was quite a surprise to me in modern times to find this out. I'm used to BIOS override passwords, such as American Megatrends being 'INTERL' back in the 90s (Its amazing the junk I keep in my brain...). I thought things would be more secure by now.
when i read the phrase "dumb terminal" i think of Wyse 60 and similar... what i'm recalling is fairly thin devices like today's flat screens... i have a hard time picturing how a modem (eg: USR Courier) that's roughly 8" x 5" (203mm x 127mm) and maybe 1" (25mm) thick is sitting on top of a terminal housing that is only a few inches thick... these things i'm remembering from the late '80s were not CRTs but we did have a bunch of those, too...
while trying to be fairly accurate with my measurements, i went looking for pictures and dimensions of these terminal devices my mind keeps picturing... weird that i cannot find any that look like those i remember... thin clients are close but they have too many brains in them... the ones we used required at least a two wire (TX/RX) serial connection and had no brains in them at all... green or amber monochrome and no graphics capabilities at all... we used them with PCMOS, a multiuser multitasking disk operating system, running several database applications on FoxBase (before m$ acquired it)... the "servers" we used at the time were maxed out 286, 386 or early 486 systems generally loaded with several Digiboard serial cards to provide 16+ terminal connections and as much memory as the system could handle... i won't mention all the fun inserting all the memory chips into the EMS/XMS memory boards we used to max the systems' memory out...
ah, the joys of being an old fart...
Dumb terminals existed since the dawn of time and evolved, albeit slowly at some points, along with screen technology. Seems the wyse 60 was a flat-screen CRT (like the sony FST tubes and many imitators) Aesthetics plays a part, and CRTs got shallower over the years as customers would pay to not need a 6ft deep desk just to put a keyboard in front of their giant 17" monitor or whatever at the time, and there was some vale in slimming design choices - like a chunky bezel with a little lump in the back/middle for the rest of the tube. This also meant you can push them into a corner to take less desk area. But look at something like a real vt100 and in that era, they didn't go much further than 'how big does the very boxy box need to be, to fit the tube in.
Wonder if it's the Mr Angry I had the displeasure of dealing with four or five years ago. This customer claimed to be a major investment bank who was "losing millions an hour" thanks to intermittent service on his single copper circuit. That's right they had a single copper circuit which was many years olds and probably should have been replaced with fibre years before. Yes a single circuit, no redundancy no resilience.
Due to the technology in use the full service test could not be run without the cable being unplugged from the wall. Mr Obstructive flatly refused to unplug the cable. "What" he asked "do I pay you for? You can send somebody to unplug the cable."
I politely explained that he did not pay us to unplug cables. If he checked his contract and customer support plan he would have found that the demarcation point was the wall socket. Not the NTE. The circuit was strictly wires only and his employer had purchased the NTE when they had begun the lease on the circuit. Unfortunately we had inherited this customer when we bought another company. It wasn't a good buy, there were lots of customers with similar products.
I explained that we couldn't raise an engineering task with the carrier until a service test had been run. We could send an engineer to unplug the cable, but there was no SLA for this and it would be the next free engineer in the area who would spend. This I explained could take a few hours. If the engineer attended and found no fault then the visit would be chargeable. If the service test did reveal a fault then we would need to raise a task to the carrier, on an eight hour SLA. I checked the contract and found that this was on a 12x5 basis so even if our engineer could get to site within the next couple of hours it could potentially be the next day before his service was fixed.
This dude not improve the general mood on the other side of the conversation. Mr Incandescent was he told me going to sue for all their lost business. He was also going to speak to our CEO who was a personal friend and get me fired. It seemed to me like a breach of normal social etiquette to sue a personal friend for millions, but I didn't mention that at the time. However I explained that as long as we remained within SLA his options for financial redress were limited to what was in the contract. And as his employer had signed up to these terms there was nothing I could do about this. I didn't mention that the contractual limit on what redress he could claim was diddly squat. I promised he world get the next available field engineer and he hung up threatening all sorts of terrible consequences.
I tracked down his account manager and gave her a call to find out why this customer was still on a terrible old copper circuit when we could do fibre faster and at around three same price. The account manager explained that once a year she called Mr Apoplectic and explained to him that instead of just renewing the contract for the existing service for another year we could do him a three year contract for a faster more reliable fibre service on a shorter SLA and with a managed NTE thrown in for the same annual fee. She even gave costs for a backup circuit (with a different carrier naturally) and a pair of managed routers. Every year Mr Unreasonable would claim we were con merchants and were just trying to make more money out of him and that he was fine as he was thank you very much.
My next port of call was to look the company up. While they were in investment they were not "a major investment bank" and they certainly weren't turning over millions every hour.
Then an engineer came free so I called up Mr Best-Friend-of-the-CEO to give him an ETA. Naturally he wasn't happy about the ETA. I explained that the engineer had to travel across the city from his previous job and the ETA was pretty much worst case and the engineer would probably be on site before the quoted ETA. This still didn't satisfy Mr Totally-Uneasonable and he expected me to find a closer engineer and pull them off three job they where on. I had, said Mr Patronising, a lot to learn about customer service.
When engineer called in from site well before the quoted ETA I told him I was ready to run the service test as soon as the cable was unplugged. No need, came the reply, the fault was fixed. It turned out that the cable was badly damaged. It appeared that the plug at the wall end had suffered such a heavy impact that the casing was broken. The wall socket was also damaged, but functional. Since he had been shown into the comms room by Mr Suddenly-Contrite and he'd also taken lots of photographs there was no argument. As luck would have it the engineer had a spare cable in his van and service was back up in no time.
Same day engineer, mileage and time plus parts added up to a nice chunk of money. Which was of course not noticable next to the millions of pounds Mr Not-Entirely-Honest was no longer losing every hour.
The following day the account manager called me to let me know that Mr Probably-Looking-For-a-New-Job's boss had been in touch to get a quote for a couple of fibre circuits with managed firewalls.
One place I worked had an employee - we called him Mr Kerr but never to his face as that wasn't his real name - who refused to be constrained by the unreasonable rules enforced by IT and would regularly relocate his desk - and everything on it - to somewhere else in the open-plan office whenever he felt like it. The fact that his Team Manager also told him to sit at that desk didn't matter to Wayne, he would simply unplug "his" computer and move it to another desk - and often that desk would be in another Team's area but Wayne didn't care about that at all either.
One weekend Wayne's team moved from one floor to another and so on the Friday afternoon they put all the stuff off their desk into one box and IT came along and boxed up the IT-owned kit into another - I noticed Wayne had forgotten to pack his mousemat (presumably on the grounds it's IT kit even though it was from another project he had worked on for a short time some years previously) so I put it in the box with his PC.
Everything was moved and reinstalled by Sunday afternoon and we logged on to every PC to make sure it worked and connected to the network etc, then packed up and went home. I made sure Wayne's mousemat was under his mouse when I left because if anyone would be a pain, he would...
Sure enough, Monday morning a call comes in - Wayne's PC is not working, it won't connect to the network (BS - it was working fine when tested). I got the fun task of slogging the half-mile to their new building to see what the problem was and got there to find Wayne beaming happily as I arrived at his desk. His desk with a PC that he has logged on to so he can read his email.
"What? Oh no, the PC is working fine but my mousemat has disappeared" says everybody's favourite user. I shift my gaze about two foot to the right of where his mouse is sitting on the bare desk to where a mousemat that looks suspiciously like his special one is sticking out like a giant zit on the face of a supermodel. On a desk that had been left clear when we left the previous day.
Somehow - and I still don't really know how - I put the mousemat under Wayne's mouse and walked away without relocating him to the ground floor via the nearest window... still it was good training as I have never met another User who was so completely "non-Technically minded"...
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