Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support As the week powers down, The Register brings you another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which readers share memories of tech support messes. This week, meet a reader who has asked to be Regomized* as "Poker Face" and once worked in second-line support for what he described as "a bustling London law firm where time …
I once had to debug a broken button on one of our internal systems, user helpfully sent a screenshot of the page in question so I'd know which button she meant.
I checked, and sure enough someone had broken it a few days earlier with a minor update. Took me maybe 90 seconds to apply the fix and deploy it, asked the user to try it now... still not working.
I asked her to close and restart her browser and try again, still not working. I dragged myself out of my chair and crossed the building to where she was seated to watch the continuing issue in person, she demonstrated clicking the button and noted that nothing was continuing to happen.
I pointed out that she was clicking on the screenshot she'd taken earlier and the actual button was behind it. Ticket resolved.
I pointed out that she was clicking on the screenshot she'd taken earlier and the actual button was behind it. Ticket resolved.
Fair enough -- but I'll be the first to admit that I've caught myself clicking on some application's "close window" X in the upper-right corner ... only to realize belatedly that it was on the screenshot I'd taken and forwarded earlier. Face palm!
Reminds me of an anecdote of a game dev about displaying their game at a con. They had 2 systems set up, one with mouse and keyboard, the other with a game controller (PS4/5 style) and day one noticed barely anyone was using the keyboard and mouse setup because apparently most youngish people were apparently unaccustomed to gaming that way and unsure how to use them. Then day 2 they noticed most kids under roughly ten even moved the controller aside, not understanding what it was and attempted to use the monitors as touchscreens to interact with the game because they were used to tablets and phones for playing games.
"Not a Microsoft Windows Issue"
I think it is. Prior to Microsoft putting Close there it used to be the button on the left hand end of the title bar along with the system menu so it wasn't going to be clicked in error that way. As a consequence a lot - maybe all - software released prior to that didn't have a safety dialog because they didn't need it.
I've come to the conclusion that anyone who wants to change a user interface feature just because they can should first have some interface in their daily life changed, say their car steering set to work the other way round or the brake and accelerator pedals swapped.
And to think that on Windows 3.1, the "close" button is not only on the /other/ end of the window's title bar, it needed to be /double-clicked/ to signal a close.
Windows 3.1 had so many things right. It's like every subsequent version of Windows got more stupid.
Or, OK, sure, it's a design fail of the application not to ask for confirmation... too.
But 89.57% of the occasions the user needs to answer “Hell no, I didn't mean to!” are because of that idiotic placement of those buttons, so yes, the absolute majority of the responsibility rests squarely on the makers of the (various) GUI(s).
"clicking on the screenshot"
Yeah, I've done that too -- I hope only in private, without involving anyone else, but can't say so for absolute certain.
One screen shot is easy enough to keep straight, but when I'm generating a bunch (e.g. to document some procedure) ... well, between the live source window(s), all the screen shots open in gimp, and the final document in Inkscape, at least one moment of confusion is pretty much guaranteed.
Greenscreen equivalent: Once had the pleasure of watching my boss get more and more angry as his compiles refused to acknowledge his updates to code.
Once he had reached the state of asking for another pair of eyes, this been-there-done-that programmer of old asked innocently "you're sure you are not updating the output print file from the compiler rather than the code itself?"
Then, of course I had to make myself scarce for a day.
This happens to me on occasion. I run make, it fails, I see the compiler error and fix it, run make, it fails, check that I saved the file after I edited it, run make, it fails, delete all the binary files in case they somehow got stuck, run make, it takes a lot longer but still fails, close and reopen the editor in case it got stuck, make still fails. Then, I realize that the code I'm building and the code I'm editing are in different directories. Maybe I fixed a problem in one file but a similar error was detected in another one. Maybe these are two different copies of the source, since I often have parallel copies for adding unrelated features. Either way, the editor and the terminal both print the directory I'm in, and if I was just paying attention to those, I'd have noticed that they weren't the same.
"you're sure you are not updating the output print file from the compiler rather than the code itself?"
Or editing a backup copy, or forgetting to save the editor's buffer. Or I didn't forget, but failed to notice that the "save" attempt failed for some reason. Or the Makefile doesn't list the .o file's dependency on the source file I'm editing.
Or I've intentionally restored a source file from a backup, but unintentionally restored its timestamp too, so the build system doesn't realize the object file is out of date.
Or, or, or...
<tangent>
David Tilbrook's old QEF build/portability framework attempted to avoid that last problem by using a different out-of-dateness metric in its build system. Instead of the usual "Is foo.c newer than foo.o?", on each run it recorded all the files' timestamps. I believe the metric was: if foo.c's timestamp is different now than it was the last time I ran -- either increased *or decreased* -- foo.o needs to be rebuilt.
So even restoring an old version of a source file, including its timestamp, would trigger a rebuild of the file's dependants.
</tangent>
Back when I was building kernels to try to get some non-standard features working (such as 22 bit addressing, on a Systime modified PDP11/34!) for Bell Labs. UNIX Edition 6 and 7, I would generally get one build every maintenance period I had the system, until I worked out that if I touched all of the .o files other than the one I was changing the code for, I could reduce the build time from 90 minutes to about 5. I knew it was dangerous, but I don't ever remember being caught out by this.
This was before you could specify a time in a touch command, otherwise I would have changed the modification time on the .c file!
tempted to downvote this, only because some numpty did this to a colleague (not IT department). What happened was that the victim called IT and demanded that someone came down and resolve this - similar manner to the lawyer in the story.
As I was the unlucky sod who had my lunch break ruined, yeah going to downvote you.
One of the joys of working with many different 3D modelling packages is the many many many different combinations of mouse/shift/control combinations used for pan/zoom/spin operations.
One of the frustrations is trying all of them and then realising that I've been looking at a screen grab
<Escape> closing windows in Lotus Notes and Sametime kept getting me (vi "hit escape to make sure you're out of insert mode" is in muscle memory for me) when I took a contract in IBM.
Eventually one of my colleagues took pity on me and showed me where in the depths of the settings menu's I could turn off this behaviour in Sametime.
And why minimize anything?
Just make sure to switch to your browser – with Alt-Tab, ferchrissake, no faffing about with mouses and taskbars! – from the actual (and preferably maximized) whatever you're actually working on, so you can switch back to it and continue working on (less than) a moment's notice.
I first ran across this particular problem and fixed it in about 3rd grade. The teacher hadn't plugged in the tape deck that provided the voice-over for the filmstrip. The following month, same teacher, same thing, but this time with a slide show & tape deck. I've run across similar pretty much every year ever since.
Remember, DearOldTelly imitates life, not vice-versa.
If that's obviously English, but not meaningful to you, ask a grandparent.
Aristotle was a great thinker and in some ways the most scientifically minded of the Greek philosophers. (In the sense that he believed the truth should be inferred by observing reality, rather than by making it up in your head like the Platonists.)
Your quarrel is with the medieval scholastics who took him as an authority rather than a foundation. The forerunners of modern Biblical literalists. In other words, people who missed the point so widely, they had to pretend they were aiming for a whole different target.
No, my problem with Aristotle is that he would come up with some hair-brained idea and declare it correct without bothering to check. He thought women had fewer teeth than men, surely that is easily verified. He thought heavy objects fell faster than lighter ones, again he could have done a simple experiment to prove it.
Basically, he would declare a hypothesis as fact and leave it at that.
It does......but.........I had a custard who insisted on a visit to fix his new, powerless, desktop. I switched it on at the mains.
With the same mains switches he insisted be turned off each night. He forgot computers need power.
That's probably my fault for talking about magic smoke and pixies ;)
We actually have power indicators on the socket covers for the twist locks. We had to build them ourselves.
PDUs have indicators but by the time the power cord makes to the mains, you have no idea which one it is. A/B power is useless if you accidentally unplug B when A is tripped.
We also color code the covers, pdu in the cabinet and the conduit going to the colored central pdu/ups.
You have no doubt what circuits you are working on.
Learned that on the hard way.
Not only are they are color coded, they have breaker # and ups ID on the cover and on the pdu in the cabinet.
When you are the design guy and the owner, it gets built in a manner that makes sense, easily repaired and you can sleep at night. Not like some that don’t mind their guys quality of life because they are never affected.
I have an old Cisco router that is going on 10 years uptime. The old guy is still servicing a /24. I am going to see which one of us last longer on the job.
Done that in my garage. Three sockets in a row, one for the tyre fitting machine, one for the wheel balancer, and one (with neon) for the compressor, with the machine name written on the backshell of each plug, after painting with white paint.
The neon is also wired through to another in the lounge, so that the compressor doesn't switch itself on at three AM and make enough noise to wake the dead (and waste electricity - who needs 100PSI at 3AM?). A quick check to see if the neon in the lounge is extinguished saves a late night trudge around to the garage to make sure it's off.
I also rigged up a circuit to show a green LED in the lounge to show that the garage and shed lights were off and both doors locked, for exactly the same reason.
Once watched a colleague spend twenty minutes making a sign reading "This printer is out of ink" and attaching it to a dot matrix printer, knowing full well it would be one of his "peers" who would need to do the necessary.
I estimate if he had lifted the lid it would have taken about half the time to figure out how to change the ribbon cartridge.
We had a nice IT lady who,when she answered a ticket like these, would tell the punter that they had a batch of faulty cables and could they check the serial number on theirs. Most people said something like "Oh, it's fixed itself" and hung up at this point....
... and because these won't-bother-to-look-at-a-plug-socket L-users exist, we happily will come out and put paper in their laser printers, because we don't want those sort of people mucking about anywhere inside a printer or (worse) inside an MFD.
Despite what I said in my post below, yes, that's also true in some cases. One client we lease printers to, the first thing to check on rocking up is that all the paper trays are set correctly. Being multi-size trays, it's not at all unusual to find one or more with the adjustable paper guides moved out of position so the tray sensors are reporting something other than the A4 or A3 that is only ever used in them. US Letter, Legal and other weird sizes are never used at this customers sites, but the printer often think that's what's in the trays and report paper out when the only correctly set tray is empty despite there being one or two thousand sheets in the other trays :-) Of course, the "paper out" is not why we attend site, there's some other fault, but checking the tray is just "what we do" :-)
"(Like refilling paper in printers)."
Ha, yes! At one place a note was laminated and attached to top of the printer reminding users that if the printer reported no paper, to please put some in from the cupboard under the printer. This was met with indignation from many in the office who all claimed they did fill the paper trays. So it was demonstrated to them how many tickets were being raised, asking IT to refill them (all from only a very few people). That was met by the office manager very loudly proclaiming to all and sundry within earshot, ie the entire floor!, that if anyone was incapable of filling a printer paper tray, they could start looking for a new job ASAP. No more "please fill the printer paper tray" tickets and the sign was removed :-)
Couple of students pitch up at the door of our office complaining that one of the computers wasn't working in a lab. Of course, it would be the one furthest from our office... Trudge along, sure enough, pressing the power button doesn't do anything. Wander round the back, notice the plug not quite fully in, so give it a whack to push it all the way in, reach round and press the power button... voila! working PC. Gave the pair of them a look and wandered off without saying anything...
When doing field support (a.k.a."monkey with a screwdriver") I am always careful to refer to the Wide-Area Network port and the Local-Area Network port in so many words when talking with the customer's support desk, to avoid the ambiguity of the similar-sounding acronyms.
And how big is a giga/jiga byte? As a child of the 80s, it's a base 2 value for me (and that's the hill I'm going to die on (*)). Bastardised into a base 10 value by storage media wonks, and then later redefined by the SI as base 10 (after decades of base 2 use).
So now if you see "357 GB" or whatever, you really have no idea WTF that means unless the same program uses "GiB" elsewhere.
* - PS: Pluto is a planet, dammit.
It's round.
It isn't a star.
It goes round a star.
(To me, the important points are the first two. Objects should, in general, be named after intrinsic properties rather than their relationship to something else. The third property is merely a nod to the historical usage of a word "moon". Ideally we wouldn't talk about moons at all, but we would have different words for rocky planets than for gas giants or ice giants.)
Good point. I've also seen it mooted that to qualify as a "planet" it should have "cleared it's orbit" of obvious and noticeable debris. And yet we have theories of "planets" out in the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt and even theories there are interstellar "rogue" planets that have been flung out by the gravitational wars in early forming solar systems.
So yea, round and not star pretty much does it for me too :-)
And that the dwarf planet pluto actually spends some of its orbital time inside the orbit of Neptune. So if it was still considered a planet (which it is not) sometimes it would be #8 with Neptune #9 which means the order in which the planets suite is played would need to change.
Have you ever read what ElReg has to say about itself?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/about_the_register/
The first line reads "The Register is a leading and trusted global online enterprise technology news publication, reaching roughly 40 million readers worldwide."
Whether they like it or not, you can't easily change the physical location of a country. The "British Isles" will remain after the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is gone.
In the same way, the UK remains in Europe even after "they" have got us (temporarily) out of the EU.
We are still here. We still have a lot of empty space - Dartmoor, Salisbury Plain, Scottish Borders, Highlands and Caithness to name a few. With our demographic shift, we need the immigrants that certain bigots are trying to keep out so we can slowly vanish like Japan.
Nope. We are still here but our skin is becoming less pale - a bit like the USA then!
If you're setting up a desk for someone, I'd say yes, power needs to be on and all cables need to be connected; it does seem like some setup was missed.
Not that being absolutely baffled by the idea of a connected power cable is forgivable, high powered lawyer or no.
I don't know. I've seen people immediately set to yanking things about on a new desk, I wouldn't put it past him to be the one to pull the cord loose.
And mainly this is about the guy being a complete and utter twat when asked nicely to complete a very simple task.
"I wouldn't put it past him to be the one to pull the cord loose."
In my much younger days, though when I should still have known better, I called IT support having done (I thought) all the proper checks including the socket. His 5-second investigation found that the two-part power cable dangled under the desk and I'd accidentally kicked the connection loose. Yes, I was suitably apologetic.
Tell that to my hand after a cleaner in a hotel bedroom plugged my soldering iron back in instead of the mini bar (Yes I picked up the wrong end - Fortunately I was still hung over).
User ticket for non working inkjet printer, ask her to check its plugged in yes, walk down in heavily pouring rain, stand there dripping as I point out the 6" gap between printer cable & printer to her Vicky Pollard Yes But No But Yes type protestations in a Indian accent that she had checked the cables.
Move a user into new office 5pm - 5.45pm all is working, get into work 8.45 or so to discover she has been logging tickets & escalating it every five minutes as she can't connect to the internet, walk back down the hill into her office to discover she had somehow moved every heavy item of furniture & plugged into a dead data wallport.
Activating a clearly specified wallport for a very important meeting the next day, test, email client & close ticket, go home. Arrive next day to discover user has re-opened ticket port not working, citing lack of communication & that she had decided to move to a different location for her very important meeting at 7.00, two hours before I started work by which time her important meeting was over. She did not respond well to "Your request was clearly specified & it was carried out, what further communication did she need other than that I had completed the request".
No internet in outlying country school outbuilding, get there at 3.30pm to discover switch unplugged & power plug laying on the floor.
Client screaming about non working printer, its a two part fix, but only have one part, but due to customer screams for five days (Weekend in the middle) please go out & do diagnostic checks as pacification, then return the next day with both parts. Arrive on site, first thing checked is no power at the socket, plug into a different power socket via a extension lead & depart while trying not to laugh.
Having a overseas PhD borrow a departmental printer, then complain it wasn't working was unusual in the fact that we didn't loan printers. But an exception was made for this student who appeared like Mrs Popoff from Rentaghost in anyone's office. Ours, admin support, finance, the Director of Operations, you name it, she would pop in silently. She was wasted as a student, assassin would have been a doddle for her.
The words "Excuse me" in a particular tone caused me and a colleague to develop a twitch whenever she came to our office, so much so that we had a response to stand, grab a random part and try and walk out of the office. Whoever got to the door would win and the loser would have to take the call from her.
When she brought the printer back in, I lost the race (my office mate was a tri-athlete, I was a smoker, drinker so no effort needed by either party).
Placed the printer on the bench, opened one of the covers to find several custard creme biscuits.
I couldn't figure out if it was the student or her children, but I did clean them out and assured the student that the only things required were power, toner cartridge and paper. Anything else may stop the printer from working.
I wish I had my office mates lung capacity, as the student's trek to leave the office meant several strained snorts may have escaped before full laughter.
At least I tried before full volume was reached.
I'm sure I've recounted these before but here goes:
Customer demanding an on-site visit "immediately" after being advised to power down and restart the system. It was pointed out that "immediately" would be at least 40 minutes to get on site. I did have to go out eventually but at least they'd tried the quick fix.
Insurance consultant's secretary who's computer (PS2/50) was completely dead. We went through the usual including specifically asking her to unplug the power lead from the computer and plug it back in firmly as they weren't the greatest power sockets. She claimed she'd done all of that and demanded an engineer, so we warned her that if it was a power lead issue the call would be chargeable; needless to say her boss immediately complained when he got the invoice for the engineer call out for, "Pushed cable into socket!" We pointed out they'd been warned and if he wanted to argue it would have to be with IBM not us (we were contracted first line support only).
After working for Lawyers and their equally insane secretaries there are way too many to count.
I always love the "something weird is happening my computer is broken" - "can you check you have nothing resting on your keyboard" deny anything is on the keyboard.
Repeat the question two more times until "oh I found there is something resting on my keyboard" - click
the always great my computer is not powering on, go up and see they've kicked the lead out of the power brick.
This one is not Lawyers, but the always impressive "my webcam intermittently doesn't work."
"Have you checked the cover over the webcam"
"My webcam has no cover"
*cool voiceover* In fact there was a cover and it was over the webcam
I have had calls in the past that, when they start talking, I interrupt them and ask them to remove whatever is on their KB as the, recognisable, buffer overflow is drowning out what they say.
They do so and announce that I am magic as the noise is what they were calling about...
Slight problem with that being that after nearly 40 years I can't remember the names - in fact I'm not sure I even knew all of them by name.
The names that stick in the mind were the really bright ones such as the one who managed to shuffle the order of his witnesses so as to ensure a key witness was called the next day. He knew the defence leader had to appear in another case and reckoned the junior was one of those who wouldn't be up to asking questions. Possibly the junior in question was the previous owner of the house of one of my colleagues who kept getting debt-chasing letters addressed to him.
"*cool voiceover* In fact there was a cover and it was over the webcam"
Ah yes, but was it obvious and hade a mechanical slider right next to the webcam, or one of the more "clever" ones that have no physical user slider and work entirely under software control by pressing Fn+F9 or whatever?
We had a number of instances of that when we switched laptop suppliers. Luckily our first line support are pretty on the ball, picked it up and posted the fix to the support wiki. The numbers calling in dropped significantly and of those who did, it was a 5-10 second "ticket resolved" exercise which always looks good on the stats :-)
We had a high-profile customer making a transition from their own internal world-wide network to a more commercial T-carrier based system. The company I worked for supplied the necessary gear to interface between $TELCO and their own equipment. This wasn't pre-Internet, but it was before the general use of the Internet for routing internal traffic around the world, so all their WAN links were supplied by one $TELCO or another. Call it mid 1980s.
Our customer service got a phone call from the customer allowing as to how one of their offices in Sydney, Australia refused to see the rest of the world. Customer service called me (the primary TAC Engineer for the customer), and I eyeballed it. Digging into the network, I could see that a loopback switch in the Sydney office was thrown, it would need to be flipped back to connect their LAN to their WAN. I informed customer service, and figured that was the end of it. Until about two hours later when my Boss wandered in and asked what I knew about Sydney being down. I blinked three or four times to reboot (kernel hacking again, probably) and told him I had located the cause and informed our guys as to the fix, and then got on with putting out fires elsewhere.
He replied that apparently the dude in charge of the Sydney office didn't like the answer, had called his Boss, who called his Boss, who called the director of the Australian branch, who called the owner of our company, who was informed by our CS guys that I was responsible, and so now my Boss had been put in charge of fixing it. He wasn't happy. So using my TAC access, I showed him the "fault". He expressed disbelief. And called the owner down to my office. The owner (the engineer who founded the company, and a real tech, not just a suit) also expressed disbelief. I believe his actual words were "What the fuck are those useless fucks doing?" ...
ANYway, he called the director of the Australian branch (just a suit, apparently), who got all shouty and demanded an immediate fix, now, or we'd lose the entire contract if he had anything to say about it. Our owner tried to calm him down, but the dude wasn't having any of it ... so to make a long(er) story short(er), he promised to "put his best man on it" ... and I got sent to Sydney on the next flight. Out of San Francisco. First Class. At very short notice. To flip a switch. With invoice in hand, to be presented personally to the Director in Oz. I honestly thought he was going to take a swing at me when he read it ... it was a tick over $20,000 ... in mid-1980s dollars. Broken down in glorious detail. To flip a switch.
But wait ... it gets better! When I was at the airport heading home (having been in Australia for maybe 2 hours total), I got called to the proverbial White Courtesy Phone[0]. Seems a different branch of the very same company had a similar problem, this time in a satellite office outside Boca Raton, Florida. I called my Boss and asked something like "WTF‽‽‽". He tiredly allowed as to how he personally had checked, and indeed it was the exact same issue. Our owner had asked if I wouldn't mind doing the hono(u)rs ... a completely different Director had called and threatened him in a similar manner to the first. So instead of taking the long east-bound flight home six hours later, I had to take an immediate West-bound flight, changing planes in Jakarta and London, to Florida. Arriving somewhat cranky & disheveled in Boca, I was rather pleased with the similar result (one switch, and out), except I didn't feel physically threatened after the Director read the invoice. This one just went white and slumped in his chair. I excused myself.
Back to the airport, and home to California. Still First Class. Four+ days on the road, literally once around the world, no hotel rooms, not a single proper meal, showering in airports, just to flip two switches. Such was the life of a field engineer. Tell that to kids these days ...
[0] If you don't know a white courtesy phone is, ask yer Gran. This was in the halcyon days before ubiquitous cell phones, and I had left my DynaTAC at home ... it not only wouldn't have worked in Oz, it probably would have been confiscated at the airport.
It reminds me of the first place I worked at (supplier of billing systems and network equipment to telcos)... I worked on the consulting (project implementation) side, but I got to work quite closely with the engineers who managed the actual hardware. They all hated the dreaded call outs for failed equipment, except with one client. This client was based in the Seychelles, so any hardware issue meant an engineer would have to be sent over, and due to flight schedules, they would HAVE to stay at least one or two nights in a 5 star hotel while waiting for their return flights. There used to a be a lot of rumours of engineers bribing managers to be on the preferred list for managing those call outs, never knew if it was true or not.
While I like to think of myself as a technical person, I've definitely been the "user" in a few cases like this story - but NEVER rude to the support engineer. I don't get why people ever think it's OK to be rude to someone like that. I think my funniest mistake has to be kicking the power cable out of the back of the laptop from under the desk.. just as I was about to present something.. with a dodgy battery that held no charge. Previous requests for a new battery had been denied for budget reasons (laptop was "too new" to need a replacement battery apparently). It was funny how quickly I got one after that story got around!
I will admit to being the complainer at one point or another in my life, and when the IT person has either explained what I need to do, or fixed the issue by doing something I could have done myself, I admit my incompetence and promise to do better next time.
Just in case that doesn't work, the IT guy (we're down to one, and corporate has taken all his powers away...he's not happy about that) gets a small token of my thanks every Christmas time. He always says I don't have to do anything for him, and I always say that it never hurts to keep on the good side of IT.
He'd have probably bought me the tickets if he had thought about it, but the hono(u)rs go to my group's corporate secretary. She said later that she would happily swear on a complete stack of S/360 manuals that they were the only tickets available at such short notice.
I relate... I almost did something similar...
A global update was to be performed on Firewalls that managed VPNs, and I was asked bu $CORPORATE to babysit to process ( parse : be on site to press the reset button ) on all the firewalls I was in charge of.
I pointed out that I would need some serious plane travel into remote locations ( like Wallis & Futuna, that's somewhere in French Polynesia in the Southern Pacific ) and that in some case, by the time things were finished I would have to wait there the next week plane, and then asked the stupid question : who was going to pay ? [because I was going to do a full around the world trip, spend a week here and there ( generally a nice tropical island ) for 5 minutes of waiting or at worst a day or two, and all those plane trips being way longer than 4hours I was entitled to at least premium if not business premium on the flights ]
There was a blank for about 30 seconds and I got told that that needed to be sorted [ obviously they hadn't thought of it ]... a few days later, I got an email telling me that finally they were going to take the risk having nobody on site and if an Issue occurs they'll tell me to ask the custmer to press the button.
I can't quite work out whether you were relieved or disappointed at the outcome :-)
Assuming you wanted to do the trip, maybe you should have just got the relevant people to start booking flights and hotels and waited to see what happened when the authorisations for the spend were passed up the chain :-)
A bit of both.
While it would have been nice to visit all those exotic destinations, I'm not fond of tropical climates.
And the way the paperworks needed for travel in $CORPORATE is such that basically It was impossible for me to get anybody relevant to start booking stuff for me.
Self booking is the rule, but for that you need a puny thing called a "Network" which is a number/code in SAP telling beancounters on what to invoice the costs from a trip ( as well as the hour spent working on a given project )... And I didn't have that number/code, It was technically what I asked with the "Who's going to pay" question
Yeah, seen all that as per the article. Also multiple people who swore up and down they'd pressed it to turn the computer on, when they'd been pressing the power button on the screen instead. Various verbal tricks could be used to try and get them to look elsewhere - directly telling them that they'd been pressing the wrong button could get their back up and stop them from looking elsewhere.
A 230 error sounds more like something for the dentist to fix....
Mine's the one with the terrible 80's pun jokebook in the pocket.
Got a call that an all-in-one fruit based computer wasn't booting. Went through usual faultfinding on the phone.
Is the power cable plugged in both ends? Is the plug switched on? Have you tried another socket?
Arrived at the office to find:
2 gang switch. Plug in one. Switch switch to "off" on the plugged in flex. Switched "on" on the other..
Very simple call, felt the heat from the blush as I left. I got some exercise, so not all lost.
New senior lawyer at this place. So far:
Opened a Word document then had to look at email. "How do I get my document back?" Click the Word icon on the task bar.
Double-click an e-mail attachment. "I can't open that file. Is there something wrong with it?" It's open on your other screen.
That there are still people out there like that. It can't be the first time that lawyer encountered a PC. Heck pretty much everyone under 50 has been using computers their entire working life, unless they are a carpenter or something. And would have been taught "computers" in school, though how useful that education would have been is questionable.
oh, no, lawyers, doctors, teachers... I once fielded a call from some D level assistant who can't turn on the computer... I say "I know, there is a power issue in part of that wing. Facilities guys are working on it." Reply, "That can't be... the lights are on!" Me "The lights are on different groups, the wall connections don't all have power." Reply, "But we're in the same room!" I was left scratching my head... so I resisted the urge to school them, and gave them the extension of the facilities manager... never argue with a fool...
We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.
When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.
Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!
When consulting, ALWAYS ask the secretary about the Boss's computer knowledge. You can save a lot of time and trouble for a lot of people over the long haul.
I know of several C*-types of Fortune-500s who make a big show of "checking the computer", even though their network cable was "accidentally" never installed.
I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU, gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing.
After one consulting job, I didn't give a Sr. VP of a Fortune 150 the password to his brand new, triple-headed, US$7,500 desktop PC. This was back in 2007. He never even tried to log into it for the four years that it sat on his credenza, artfully cycling through screensavers. How do I know? Because I'm the only person who ever had the password. He never asked me for it, and his secretary refused when I offered it to her ... Over that four years, about once a quarter he called me up to take a look at it under warranty because "it did something funny". When I checked the logs, the last person to login was myself ... three months earlier. So I closed it down, opened it up, vacuumed it out, buttoned it back up, turned it on, cleared the logs and proclaimed it "fixed", The Boss thanked me every time. The secretary & IT staff also thanked me every time I came out, for keeping him out of their hair. I almost wish that I allowed them to renew the contract after the four years ...
As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...
Hasn't "Poker Face" just described about 2/3 of the tickets handled by break/fix teams? The lawyer adds some comical flair, I suppose. But he's also kind of an archetype, no?
So what if the problem included a feral monkey who was doing the unplugging? And the lawyer worked defence for an adult toy company and the office was filled with samples...
Definitely not. He was a well-regarded defence lawyer with a self-deprecating sense of humour. I certainly regarded him well after he eventually objected to the prosecution leader cross-examining* his own witness, namely me.
* No way was I going to put any great weight on hair comparison as he wanted me to do. I could never understand why the FBI lab seemed to make a big thing about hair comparisons; years after I read an article proving that their evidence was unreliable.
"Ok, let's try this. Shut down you machine. Unplug the power cord. Clean the contacts at both ends with a pencil eraser. Plug the cord into the machine, then into the well, in that order. Power up the machine. Did that fix it?"
Lets the customer pretend that this snake oil did something rather than admitting they didn't plug it in or turn it on.
I used to phone the person who logged the call and ask them to check the cables around the back. "Maybe the cleaners have dislodged something." Usually the office was some hell hole last visited by a cleaner in 1963.
Giving the user a chance to save face by blaming someone else, however imaginary, saved a lot of time wasting visits.
"Clean the contacts at both ends with a pencil eraser."
I wonder what we would use in a modern office? Pen and paper is pretty rare, let alone pencils with a rubber[*] on the end being almost as rare as an actual stand-alone rubber!
AKA an eraser in some versions of English :-)
The PA to the college principal called and stated that her computer was 'doing strange things'. I always considered it politic to keep on the right side of this class of worker, who actually kept the college running and thus ensured that I maintained gainful employment. I asked her to demonstrate the issue as her version of 'strange' and mine may have been wildly different. I watched the screen over her shoulder and after a few minutes we were able to confirm that the computer was indeed doing unexpected things. It took me a couple of minutes to determine the cause and then a couple minutes more to work out how to phrase the explanation without causing major offence.
Because she was short-sighted she had her computer and monitor close to her, which left little room between the keyboard and the edge of the desk, so I suggested that she wear her glasses, so that I could move the computer further back on the desk and the keyboard likewise. To her credit she realised without further explanation, that the reason we needed to do that was because her impressive chest had been intermittently contacting the space bar and adjacent keys..
This actually became fairly common as the typing pool gave way to the departmental secretary with a computer terminal of one kind or another and/or people simply typing up their own reports as the PC became ubiquitous.
I usually just told 'em "It looks like you are leaning on your keyboard".
Occasionally, I would turn on audio key-clicks and tell her "This is only for test purposes, I'll turn them off again in a day or so" ... She always managed to figure it out for herself immediately.[0]
Both options worked well for me, although I had to be careful with the first. Certain women took exception to me even noticing they had a chest, much less what it was doing. On the other hand, the second usually got me a giggly phone call "You're not going to believe what happened ... can you please turn off the clicks now?", thus proving that even the most severe among us can have a sense of humo(u)r if they don't feel threatened.
[0] Now you know why there are no such reports from the days of the typing pool. It still happened, but went unreported. The Selectric tends to announce itself, no observing techie required.
Many years ago, I managed the IT for systems worldwide - which meant phone calls at strange times of the day.
Once, I was laid up with a slipped disk and got a call. This was back in 1984 - mobile phones or DECT not invented. So, I crawled (literally) to the phone in another room to hear someone from Brunei (a country in the Borneo jungle) being very excited - and I use that term loosely- that his printer was broken. Nothing printing. "Are there any lights on?" I asked. "Yes - there's a red one". "And what is the text above the light". "It says .. paper out". It all went very quiet and the phone at the other end was put down.
I got some free beer next time I visited the office.
One time I got a ticket about a computer booting up with a BIOS error about the keyboard and it was constantly beeping. This was in a uni library, and turns out someone had left a book resting on the spacebar. Unlike the person the hero of the story had to deal with, the person I dealt with was quite apologetic for having me come all the way just to move a book and restart the computer. Much easier to let them off with a "no big deal" response that way.
How many times over a stressful 20 year IT Careera have you had to "troublrshoot handhelds, laoptops, and desktoos, only to arrive at a rebooy being the fix, plugging an ethernet cable into the wall or a correct access password, being entrered, assuming that a user had access rights to sftware or WiFi, in Active Directory? What is "fun" is when an Active Directory tool clearly shows when access attempts were made and how many times an incorrect password, wa entered....:-O
a sit down chat with the PFY on user problems.
She found out the other day, when one of the cells was down..... the operator said he'd followed the start up check list and had no idea why it was down and flashing a red alarm.
She got there and the screen said "No hydrualic pressure", she follows the check list.. isolator.... machine start, HP pump start, check interlocks... and its all ready to go
She then explained to the operator to follow the check list in future and not to waste her time if he cant be bothered to press the HP pump start.....
Followed by walking into the office , sitting down and saying to me "why the <bleep> do we bother?" followed by "I know now why you're a grumpy git all the time"
"Welcome to the world of technical support" I said
Beer .. because we all need one after dealing with this shit
Late 1990's. Support contract was $500/yr for 24x7 restaurant point-of-sale support. No support contract was $50 per call, valid credit card number in advance.
There was a certain joy to that middle-of-the night pager alert. Closing manager could not do the nightly books. Absolute panic. They were going to be fired when the owner or general manager found out the next day that the computers were down. Although they had also been given specific instructions 'Don't call me, call the phone number taped to the screen'.
Push the button next to the slot. Now press the space bar. Yes, it will be back up and running in a minute. Thank you very much!
(** For the Millennials among us... "Non-System Disk Error" is what you got when trying to boot to a data disk in the floppy drive.)
Never heard it called NSDE in all my 45+ years in the IT field, at least not here in the UK, so err, thanks for that, even if I no longer need it :-)
ISTR it was None System Disk or Disk Error. Maybe it depended on the version of BIOS or DOS? Also ISTR, that error was produced by the code in the boot sector of the disk too.
It was all a long time ago and I can't remember when I last used a floppy disk on a PC :-)
But they are scace.
Worked at an amusement park (not in IT at the time)- the photocopier in the admin building was locked up and you could only get the key from security if you were on the list.
To get on the list, you had to take a 1 hour training session from the office manager- where you were instructed on how to load paper so it wouldn't jam (there is a right and wrong way!), how to change the toner, and several other common maintenance tasks.
Whenever you checked out the key, it was recorded who had it last.
In 3 years, I NEVER saw that copier out of order, nor did I see a maintenance tech except for the normal preventative service checks.
*sigh* if only we could do that with computers.
"you had to take a 1 hour training session from the office manager"
Somehow that reminded me of the time when you had to pass the chief technician's test to drive the departmental mini. He was a bit deaf and had obviously been used to driving cars with bigger, slower revving engines. He didn't know the engine was really labouring when he drive it and he complained about people changing up too late.
"*sigh* if only we could do that with computers."
In the CP/M and DOS days of monochrome, text-only desktops, that's how it work in most places. Nowadays it's just assumed that "everyone knows how to work a computer/printer/copier". Except we are still in (the end of?) the transition period where not all adults used computers at school or even in their jobs until they got promoted into office/management roles. And even then, we may be at the beginning of the transition period where keyboards and mice may become superfluous anachronisms only "old people" use.
While employed as CST at a glade/glen/vale based PC manufacturer, I got a call requiring assistance to improve a CRT monitor's display. They were able to press the physical buttons on the bezel to open the embedded menus, but could not select anything. Of course, because they were taking up the mouse again and trying to select with that. I was fairly sure my instructions had been to use the up/down, < > buttons on the bezel, but they probably thought they knew better. I'm ashamed to say how long that call lasted.
I had something in the region of that.
I had a new DVD player. I plugged it into the TV, and tried a couple of Hong Kong DVDs. "Wrong Region" it complained. I asked the advice line:
* Oh yes, you can change the region. Just click on the menu on the DVD drive
$ err... how?
* Point at the DVD drive and click on it to open it.
$ How do I do that with a DVD player? It's got six buttons across the front, Stop, Play, Skip, Back, Eject, Power. None of them say Menu.
Depending on the time period, it's possible they meant the on screen menu controlled by the IR remote and were trying to lead you into a settings menu. I'm assuming you aren't that daft though and maybe they were talking about a different, more high end model with a similar model number, hence the communications error.
And of course, while Richer Sounds specialised in supplying DVD players which were "region free" for a couple of quid more than the price of the region locked version, other players had official or unofficial methods of swapping regions manually using some arcane combination of buttons and power cycles. Problem was that many of these players had a limited number of swaps which could be carried out before locking themselves to the last region. Often it was as few as 5 or 6 swaps.
I do find it interesting that if you buy a DVD these days (well, the cheaper ones rather than just-released), more than you might expect are "region zero" - that is, will play in any player, and while DVD had six regions in addition to zero, BluRay reduced that to three plus its equivalent of zero.
M.
My favorite: "I can't type anything! Whenever I hit a key, the menu that normally pops up when you click the right mouse button appears."
Me: "Is this in just one application, or everywhere?"
Them: "Everywhere!"
Me: "That is a new one, I'd better wander over and check it out in person."
I get there and sit down. The user is correct about the symptoms of the issue, right-click menu appeared on any key press. I look closer at the user's setup and the cause becomes clear. He was using his laptop while plugged into his docking station, with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The laptop itself was on a stand that let him use the internal screen alongside the external monitor to give him a dual screen setup, and the external keyboard had one corner resting on the right-click button just below the trackpad on the laptop.
The user was rightly embarrassed and apologetic about my having to trek across campus just to pull his keyboard back 2 inches.
Similar at one of our clients. Everyone has a laptop and in the office they use it plugged into the desk screen which in turn has mouse and keyboard. Some people prefer the full desktop keyboard, others are so used to the laptop they prefer that one and most will have the laptop open for the extra screen space. So keyboard/trackpad/mouse issues of the unused kit being accidentality pressed by $something used to be a common issue until everyone had suffered it at least once and learned the lesson :-)
Had a user mode her chair arm was broken blah blah. I pointed out that's not an IT issue and closed it. CCTV isn't to be abused so I didn't comment but I checked the CCTV knowing the one for reception happens to pick their desks up. I watch her staff member move her own (and broken chair) to this desk and take the chair of the one that raised the ticket, this happened the day before. Shame I couldn't comment.
I once took a call from an angry client who's computer wouldn't power up. He assured me it was completely dead and that, yes, it was plugged in. Next morning I was promptly dispatched with a box of spares and spent 4 hours driving up to Manchester. Upon arrival I could see that yes it was plugged in and no it wasn't working. Puzzled I asked if anything had changed with the power cable, no was the response. Dropping to my knees and crawling under the desk i unplugged the cable to find the fuse compartment open and empty. "Ah", says the redfaced client, "sorry". Worked out ok for me though as Fridays were job and finish so there's that.
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