Posts by GlenP

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

CRT Monitors...

There was a Microvitec monitor where occasionally a short would develop to the metal case - nothing serious but it would disturb the picture and no amount of degaussing would help.

The proper fix would be to remove the monitor case* and ensure an adequate gap but often a bit of percussive maintenance was sufficient.

One one occasion I had a user complaining about her monitor so I said I might have a quick fix but this needed careful training and should only be carried out by an expert, then Bang - I hit both sides of the monitor which would cause the top to move up slightly. The user jumped about 2 foot into the air but her monitor was fixed!

*Which you did very carefully as there were scary voltages inside those devices.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Many moons ago now

I recall there was a similar problem at one time with MS Office. Everything worked fine in the workplace but when the user went home or travelled it would take ages to open a document.

We eventually tracked it down to network shared printers, Office was trying to interrogate every shared printer set up on the laptop (and some of our users had several spread across three physical sites). In the office with the S2S VPNs was OK but we didn't have an external client VPN running at the time (external access was via Citrix) so it was taking about a minute per printer to time out before it would actually open a document.

MS eventually fixed the problem fortunately.

Just before COVID hit the sales office decided they wanted very expensive rising desks so they could alternate between sitting and standing to work; the sensible view was it was a fad and a few weeks later the things would never move. The desks they'd chosen had little provision for actually cabling anything, it was a nightmare office in that respect anyway and they'd simply have ended up with a lot of dangling wires everywhere. I also pointed out that the proposed fancy chairs would fail any DSE assessment (due to lack of adjustment) and were uncomfortable to sit on.

Fortunately when senior management saw the quote it was quietly filed away in the office shredder!

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

I've got mixed feelings about this, but if it pushes the universities into giving people the core skills they need in the real world it's probably a good thing.

Our degree course was very much based around learning the skills and knowledge of systems, architecture and programming; this was mostly in Pascal with small systems work in Assembler as they felt that if you know how to program you can pick up languages easily enough. It's stood me in good stead over the years and I'm still using techniques I learnt then over 40 years later, in that time I've programmed professionally in Pascal, Fortran, C, Visual Basic (and VBA and VBS), T-SQL, a little bit in Cobol, I've dabbled for myself in Forth and Python and there's probably some I've forgotten.

By chance I met a student on a train who was doing a similar course from a more prestigious University and we got chatting. It turned out that by the end of their second year they were expected to be proficient in about six different languages but only knew the same limited methods in each of those. Much of the more advanced stuff we'd done simply passed them by. Sadly in terms of initial employment he'd win out every time, "I'm from xxxx and I know Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, etc." When it came to actually doing the work he wouldn't have much clue.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Keying...

Keying connectors doesn't always work.

My former boss managed to force a DIMM into the keyed slot the wrong way round. The magic smoke was quickly forthcoming as soon as he turned the computer back on, fortunately it was only the memory that died.

His comment, "I thought it was a bit tight!"

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Not IT but...

A few years ago we had an argument with someone from the canal world who was adamant that 12v electricity was entirely safe and couldn't possibly cause you any harm, obviously based on the fact that it won't normally directly stop you heart. Apart from making sure we stayed well out of the way if he was working on his boat electrics I did explain that not long previously someone had managed to short their battery with careless use of a spanner, jumped back and very nearly landed in the water - with plenty of metal around to hit a head on (and some of it quite sharp) that could have been a fatality; he still required treatment for burns. There were plenty of tales of watches and the like causing problems as a lot of boat electric systems had pretty dodgy wiring*.

*Like instead of using proper ring terminals a previous owner of one of my boats had soldered the wires onto small squares of copper sheet with holes drilled in them as we discovered shortly after buying the boat and fixing the alternator. I won't say the replacement control panel was a thing of beauty but at least it was reasonably safe!

Re: F_ing APC UPS

unless you use the specific APC serial cable

I may have a couple of those lying around somewhere, despite the fact we no longer have the APC UPS's that they were used for, but you never know so just in case!

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Re: Ah yes, 6-Sigma.

But woe betide you if you didn't follow the process even if you were exceeding it!

5750 Auditor: What's your backup retention?

Me: Daily for 7 days, Weekly for 4 Weeks, Monthly for 12 Months, Annual for ever.

5750 Auditor: Oh you cant do that, you must follow a Grandfather - Father - Son rotation.

He didn't know what he was talking about of course and was just reciting from the Quality Manual*. I just gave up and said OK to get the tick in the box and then carried on exactly as I had been.

*Quality Manuals were very rarely custom written, they just picked the sections they thought relevant from their templates like choosing from a Chinese Takeaway menu then renumbered them to hide what they'd done.

He missed out being 5C'd (and yes, I've been through most of those over the years although I only attained a Green Belt in 6-Sigma before that fad thankfully ended again).

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

We were building chemical processing machines so all fixings were 304 (A2) stainless as a minimum. If you were lucky you might manage to pick those up with a decent magnet but for 316 (A4) stainless or hastelloy there was no chance!

A company I worked for had a designer who believe that every single screw in a machine must be the absolute optimum size and length. If an M3x6 screw would work that's what he'd insist on, even if it was the only one on the machine and an M4x10, of which there were several, would be just as good. There might be some validity in large volume manufacture where saving even a fraction on each machine has an impact but we were building custom 5-figure machines and having to keep so many different sizes in stock was actually costing us money.

A relatively minor council official who was deemed critical to dealing with the infrastructure after a nuclear attack was allocated a place in the regional bunker somewhere in the countryside 10+ miles from where he lived. As was usual for town dwellers at the time he didn't have any vehicular transport so enquired how he should get there if the balloon went up.

The answer? They gave him two bob* for the bus fare!

*For youngsters and non-UK people two shillings, 10p in decimal currency.

What happened if said engineer was at another customer's site?

The perennial problem with such contracts, especially away from major urban areas.

Not mine but one from the days when my brother was a manager at an IT Support Provider who had little presence in the north of England and none in Scotland:

Sales - We've just won a major support contract!

Engineering - Oh yes, where is it?

Sales - Aberdeen!

Engineering - What's the response time?

Sales - A guaranteed two hours!

Engineering - You do realise our nearest support engineer is based about 4 hours away, and the next one nearer 6? We could barely promise next working day.

Too often engineering would get ignored and told to just get on with it but I believe in this case the contract was refused.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

Microsoft themselves were caught out in the same way back in around 2014 when SkyDrive (now OneDrive) launched in the UK as BSkyB (originally a merger of satellite broadcasters but also a major ISP. etc.) took them to court over the name and they lost.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

had a staple in it

You've just reminded me of another one, at my current employer. A £1,500 autofeed HP scanner (originally part of a document management system costing several £1,000s that had mysteriously disappeared before I arrived) where the feed mechanism was wrecked by a staple. It simply wasn't worth the cost of repairing or replacing the feeder as MFDs were starting to come in by then.

Users and printing devices...

I say devices as it's not just actual printers!

The usual one with a paper jam in the output was for them to merrily tear off the stub of paper without using the pressure release leaver, leaving me to have to half dismantle the machine to get to the remainder.

Two from a company I worked for many years ago that had a cost saving fanatic of an FD (if you've ever seen the Dilbert cartoon on trying to get a new pencil that's what she was like, you genuinely had to provide your empty biro before she'd issue a new one). The first one was putting part-used label sheets back in the laser printer, on one occasion I did manage to unpeel the label that had wrapped around the drum and clean the residue off. She also insisted on using scrap paper in the fax machine on the grounds that the back was still blank (fair enough until someone didn't check the front and used an invoice copy as packing material to send something to a customer); one user thought that as there was only a little bit of printing on a sheet she could safely Tippex* it out and put the paper straight in the machine - the drum didn't survive the experience, the £100 or so bill wiped out any cost savings that would ever have been made.

*WhiteOut, Snowpake or Liquid Paper for those not familiar with the brand.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

Generally a business or organisation will get away with it once or twice, claiming they don't know who was driving. After that a senior person, e.g. the company secretary or in one case a Deputy Chief Constable, will be prosecuted instead and get the points on their license. The threat is usually enough to improve record keeping!

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Re: Any new

Nightshifts are often a problem.

We installed a guest WiFi and I was instructed to put a sign up in the meeting room with the password. Sure enough, as I expected, not long later I had to change the password and not put a sign up as the night shift were spending too much time on their phones (mobile coverage in the factory is very poor).

Re: "....the candy factory's mechanics started giving him the cold shoulder...."

those who use them for any personal stuff

It wasn't that unusual when not everyone had PCs at home and before smartphones and tablets became common. I've generally adopted a fairly light touch, in lunchtimes was OK but keep it sensible. I also warned them about saving any personal information or credentials as their manager or IT would have access.

Not everyone was sensible, we had one user who was most disgruntled when, during a minor office rearrangement, he found himself on the corner desk right next to the walkway - it stopped him playing solitaire* and trading on eBay in work hours.

*That's how long ago it was.

Kids learn computer theory with wood, cardboard, and hot glue

fit it into 48k of RAM

Some of the coding we used back then probably wouldn't pass muster today, short variable names, no comments, etc. to save a few bytes but sometimes elegance in programming had to give way to practicality.

When I worked as an analyst/programmer at the local college running a VAX 11-785* we had a simple game that one of my predecessors had written. It was useful for the students who'd never actually used a computer before to give them a grounding in keyboard skills, etc., the only problem was that at the start of the academic year it was triggering more page faults on the VAX than all the more serious programs put together and was seriously compromising performance.

The original programmer had followed what he'd been taught at Uni and as he needed an input routine in two places he'd written it as a subroutine; the trouble was that doing so pushed the total code over two memory pages resulting in a page fault every time that routine was called (which was a lot when playing the game). Compacting the code a bit and duplicating it inline in the program brought it all within a single page so no faulting required.

*IIRC it had 8MB memory for a few hundred users.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

We stopped at a farm B&B in Yorkshire, the key fobs were nose rings for bulls! We didn't inquire whether they'd ever been used or not.

Not too large to carry fortunately as we needed the keys when arriving back late.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

I never really go into the Dirk Gently books to the same extent as THHGTG, not sure why.

An old parking meter and a Pi make beautiful music together

replaced by parking apps that require a degree in computer science to operate

My phone now has a separate folder just for parking apps, I'm not sure the Maths & Computing degree is that useful in operating them as most of them seem to defy logical operation.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

Sadly when we visited Magna some years ago it seemed to have been struck by the usual problem of such places, a lot of grant aid to set the place up but insufficient funding to keep it running properly. I hope it's changed but at the time a lot of the displays and experiments weren't working and/or badly needed maintenance.

It was a shame as the place was a great concept.

Re: Define "cleaning"

Given the price of VT keyboards I'm not surprised the bill was high, however from experience they could survive a scrub sometimes.

We had a keyboard that had been Tangoed so with little left to lose we disassembled it and gave everything a good scrub under warm running water. After leaving it all to dry thoroughly (which was possibly the key) and reassembling it we found it worked perfectly.

That DEC kit was fairly bomb proof, I'd left a VT220 in the computer room which then suffered a catastrophic fire due to an electrical fault in the room next door. The terminal case was heavily distorted and melted but just for the crack we did try plugging it in. The screen was a bit dim but duly came up, "VT220 OK"!

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

Re: I thought they were part of Stellantis

Roughly speaking:

GM sold their European operations only (Vauxhall and Opal), not the US, to PSA Group (as was) in 2017.

Stellantis was formed when PSA merged with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in 2021.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Surprising how many people have access that ought not

When I started at the current employer I discovered that the key to the supposedly secure machine cupboard was in an unlocked keybox in one of the offices that anyone could access. I couldn't even secure the cabinet as access was so tight the sides of it had bene removed.

I solved this later when an office move gave me a former strongroom, complete with reinforced walls and ceiling and a Chubb safe door! There were only two keys, I carried one and the other was kept in a lockbox in my office with only a couple of trusted senior people knowing the code.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Been There...

You're absolutely right, in this case Mr 'One Answer' lasted well over a year until I think they realised having no second person was better than a useless one!

Been There...

I've been there many times over the last 40 years, sadly.

Sometimes the support person knows full well they're going through a script but they have to do so to progress the call (the Dell exploding capacitors was a case in point, I raised a call, the support person apologised 'cause we both knew immediately what the problem was but unless he checked every box on his screen he couldn't arrange the engineer).

The worst was the ERP provider at a previous employer. They had two support people, one who'd been there years and knew everything, the other only had one answer to any non-trivial support question, "You'll have to restore from the backup!" That would be bad enough now when I've got hourly database log backups but back then, on an AS/400, we only had overnight tape backups, the consequences of having to repeat most of a day's work with thousands of transactions* didn't bear thinking about. My refusal to do this usually forced an escalation to the person who knew what they were doing, he'd usually have an answer in a few minutes (generally a manual edit of some data).

*Yes, we always instructed people to make sure they could repeat any work but users are users!

Lenovo shows off new laptops that twist and roll

Re: Priorities?

I recall it was the same when the "Intel Inside" labelling first appeared, devices were built to the specs for compliance not for what people needed for their work.

Fortunately I'll hopefully be retired before the next "big thing" comes along!

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

who has ever seen a 12 inch ruler marked off in tenths

I have a 24" engineering ruler that has one edge primarily marked in 16ths and the other in 10ths, although the first few inches go down to 64ths and 100ths respectively.

I also used to have a programmers ruler that had 6ths, 8ths, 10ths and 12ths of an inch marked in different places - useful for form layouts.

It's been threatened!

The only use I can really see for the computer-in-a-keyboard would be in a hot desk environment where individuals need their "own" computer but don't actually travel with it - they could pick a workstation, grab their computer from the storage and plug it in to a single USB-C cable; if it came with a wireless mouse option even better. The trouble is I can't actually conceive of a situation where that would be necessary!

Most laptop keyboards use chicklet keys which are a lot less prone to accumulating debris (and a lot less pleasant to use by and large).

I do have one user who wears out keyboards regularly (long fingernails and multiple finger rings) but she lives with it.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Network Maintenance

Unfortunately it wasn't quite that simple - it was a large* multi-building site with multiple muxes and had connections to other sites as well. As we didn't "own" the cabling (it was installed and managed by another department) we didn't know what could or couldn't be safely unplugged.

*It was only a year or so before I arrived that they'd actually got 4800bps serial across the whole site, until then users at the outer extremities had to dial in over the internal phone system with 300bps modems!

Re: Network Maintenance

Way back in the mid to late 80's I was running an upgrade to VMS on a Vax 11/780. We'd warned the users that the system would be down for several hours and to not try logging in.

The system rebooted 3 or 4 times during the upgrade, coming up with logins reenabled, and every single time before I managed to disable logins again someone had managed to jump on. They must have been sitting their constantly hitting enter on their terminals until they got a login prompt. Ideally we'd have isolated the machine but with multiple serial connections it wasn't that simple.

Later we managed to get DEC to confirm how we could stop this happening, it was in the manuals but given they filled a bookcase we'd never figured it out and they didn't bother to include it in the upgrade procedure.

I've learned that people don't react well to being told outright that they're wrong.

I discovered that early in my career, especially when dealing with people who were experts in their field but idiots with IT.

It's not that difficult, instead of saying, "You did X you *******" it's "Usually when that happens someone did X, I'm not saying you did so but it's possible".

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.

I sometimes feel my career has just been going in circles...

I started on VAX, Unix and AS/400 systems with centralised computing

Everything moved to PCs

Thin clients, Citrix and Parallels came along with the heavy lifting done by servers

Better comms speeds pushed processing back to the PC

The cloud and SAAS arrived so back to centralisation

Now AI is slowly moving to more running locally.

Strangely I still think ERP and the like were easier and faster to use on character terminals if you knew what you were doing, the flow on many web UIs is dreadful - does that make me a crusty old fart? If so I'll accept the accolade!

I'm glad I've only got a few more years to go before it all becomes SEP (Somebody Else's Problem, with thanks to Douglas Adams).

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

I had a support ticket raised by one of our Tech (plastics tech, not IT) guys last week. He deals a lot with customer complaints himself, I thanked him for giving me a comprehensive, but concise, summary of the problem complete with screen dumps of the errors and a description of what he'd been doing.

I wish every user was like that, it's mostly, "XXX isn't working!" You then establish it's not actually XXX anyway and getting the actual errors out of them is like getting blood out of a stone.

Re: Penny ante

User: The computer isn't turning on

Me: Can you check the power lead is firmly in? (IBM PS2/50 had slightly dodgy input sockets)

User: Yes it is!

Me: Can you just unplug it and plug it back in again firmly to be sure?

User: Yes, yes, I've done that!

Me: OK, I'll call an engineer but be aware that if it's a loose power lead it will be chargeable!

A few days later...

User's Boss: Why have I just received a bill for £120 for an engineer visit?

I explained that the engineer had arrived, pushed the power lead back in and left. The boss wasn't very happy with their secretary at that point!

Re: Solicitors...

At the end of the day, they turned off their PC.

Many years ago I has a similar issue where someone had spent the day typing in a large document then closed the word processor without saving (yes, ignoring the prompt). She was a French exchange student so perhaps language hadn't helped and was practically in tears so I needed to do something.

With the aid of trusty old Norton Utilities I was able to find the temporary file in FAT and reset the first pointer to make it visible again (undelete having failed). She still had to redo some formatting but at least she hadn't lost the whole thing.

The other occasion when something similar happened it wasn't the users fault. It was on a VAX at the local college and one of the students had saved her document at the end of the day but inadvertently used the name of one of the printers as her filename - on a VAX that meant the document was printed not filed. Cue another weepy teenager but fortunately we were able to retrieve the printout and one of our department secretaries typed it back in for her so smiles all round.

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

Re: Software for parachute jumps ?

When I flew from Shetland to Aberdeen many years ago they had a set of scales in the terminal for use with the smaller planes to arrange the seating appropriately - it wasn't necessary on the HS-125 though.

I was on a fairly empty internal flight in the US though where the pilot asked if some people could move to the back of the plane to balance things out.

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

“knowledge shared is overtime lost”

In a previous role the IT department used to run period end transactions remotely* for the Finance department on a Sunday morning. For doing so we'd take a half day off in lieu as although the actual work time was barely an hour it was spread over around 3 hours and messed up the day (well that was our excuse). The site manager then decided we weren't allowed the time off so we unilaterally decided that the updates were no longer part of our role and that Finance should be running them. Strangely the "must be run out of hours" diktat was withdrawn!

We lost a good way of getting an extra bit of leave but weren't too sorry to be rid of the hassle as well.

*On one occasion remotely meant sat outside my tent at an event, can of beer in hand and the laptop connected to a Nokia mobile via IrDA - none of this fancy blue tooth stuff! :)

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

I find the worst are financial; institutions' security apps, some of which will simply not run without local admin rights and short of disassembling the code I've not found any way round that. Sadly it's impossible to refuse to allow them to be used.

Vendors...

the developers said that was the required config

We recently had an issue with a 3rd party integration vendor. They were involved in us uploading open receivables data from our SQL based finance system but their default requirement was a user with full access to the entire database - that wasn't going to happen! They then stated as an absolute fact that access had to be to the tables, not views, again not going to happen as there are multiple companies running on the same database and they were only involved with one of those.

Eventually they corrected themselves and said views would be fine but neither they nor the primary vendor could say what data they actually needed so we killed the project. It was frustrating as I could have sorted the whole thing out in a few hours (create views with the correct data subsets, provide a user with restricted access to those views, install the integration software) which would have taken far less time than the back-and-forth discussions.

Salesforce finds new AI monetization knobs to twist

Agentforce...

Salesforce are trying to persuade us to deploy Agentforce. So far we've been unable to see any benefit from doing so and talk of them considerably increasing the costs is hardly likely to help.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: A case in point.

I get a lot of videos coming up that have clearly been ripped off (frequently the image has been reversed, supposedly to try and defeat DR scanning) with clearly AI generated and voiced commentaries that frequently bears little relation to the video content. Unfortunately the algorithms could down-votes as "interaction" which helps promote the content.

Twins who hacked State Dept hired to work for gov again, now charged with deleting databases

Re: Lax Security Practises

I've had similar - the person held in the boardroom away from any systems until I confirmed that all access had been revoked; they were then escorted off the premises.

I've also been, in theory, on the other end of it when I was made redundant - called into a meeting and only allowed back to my desk under supervision before leaving the building; nothing shady, just company policy. It worked out great for me, I was paid for the remainder of the current month, paid in lieu of notice (tax free), there was the redundancy payment and I got an ex-gratia payment of £100 to cover the expenses of job hunting such as stationery that if I'd still been in the office they'd have supplied. I knew it was coming anyway and started a new job three weeks later.

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Re: Subjective

They had a stripped down all-in-one package, Microsoft Works (and if that isn't an oxymoron I don't know what is! :) ). I first encountered it in probably the early 90s when it came free with a new PC and it wasn't too bad for the basics. Having looked I'm slightly surprised it lasted until 2009.

I liked Windows Mobile, and for a while it was the best option for business use, then Microsoft lost interest or dropped the ball and even their own apps weren't getting updated.

Work wise we were heavily Blackberry with a few Nokia dumb phones around, mainly due to the benefits of BES reducing data volumes, once that all changed and iPhones became common I was pressured into changing and couldn't really argue!