Posts by Hazmoid

On Call: Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Couple of memories here triggered by the mention of fax machines.

Back in the 90s I worked for a Stockbroking firm that still had a Telex machine ! We had one client in India who would send through orders on it and when it burst into life, people would nearly have a heart attack.

We did have someone who was p!ssed at the company do the old looped page through the feeder to use up all the paper in the fax but fortunately it was a plain paper fax, so once the tray ranout, it just held the job in memory. When we came in on Monday, we killed the job and let it print out the next queued jobs.

Recently had to set up a fax machine for a doctor's surgery, when we asked why they wouldn't use an online service they said they preferred to use the device they had so they could confirm that faxes had gone through :) Because it was connected to a 3CX pbx we set it up to deliver received faxes as emailed pdf files .

BOFH: Schrödinger's petty cash puts us in a very awkward superposition

and there will be a sign that says "beware of the Leopard" on the filing cabinet

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

Re: You're Laughing, But It's Coming...

once you have worked out what your secret password is, we will need you to setup mfa using a key we will send to your email. On your new laptop.

https://youtube.com/shorts/SOYl3omFqOw?si=D_2Ip3iR6LnltR_w

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

I have been tempted to "Office Space" many a printer, particularly when they have that annoying random fault error. Have had every one of those delaying tactics tried, but the worst is when there is a 3rd party software involved which requirres consulting another helpdesk when there is a fault.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

"The Marketing department is defined in the "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" as " the first against the wall come the Revolution"

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Re: Different personae

Ford: Drink these 6 pints of beer.

Arthur: At lunch time?

Ford: Time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so.

Arthur: This must be a Thursday, I could never get the hang of Thursdays :)

With apologies to the Late Douglas Adams

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

killed server room trying to exit

Had an incident in a computer room at a stock brokers where there was a power kill button on the wall next to the exit button. After a sparkie managed to kill power to the room while trying to get out, his next tyask was to put a molly guard over the power button :)

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Stockbrokers get up to the kinkiest stuff

I worked for a Stockbrokers before the GFC and we had a couple of incidents with users accessing stuff they shouldn't. We regularly had to tell users to remove their personal "archives" from the network storage area as everyone had a dedicated user area. We also setup up Surf control when our Squid proxy reached it's useful limit and I had the job of checking the quarantined material to see if it was valid or non work related. Never found any kiddy porn but a number of brokers were warned by HR that they would be censured if they were found downloading porn again. Once the word got around that (a.) their porn would be blocked and (b) anything out of the ordinary would be handed straight to HR, it was amazing how little was blocked. We occasionally had to check jpgs because the "skin filter" would block family photos etc, but generally it stopped a lot of the crap on our network.

Then there was the broker in the branch office who had his porn sorted by kink in neat folders on his user area.

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

Re: Been There...

Had the same problem with a batch of HP desktops. We had ~200 of them and started seeing machines that would abruptly reboot and lose users work. After the first half dozen motherboards were replaced by different technicians, we called the service desk, gave them a list of all the serial numbers we had and organised for the machines to be swapped out until we could confirm that all motherboards had been replaced. We had 6 spares, so would swap them into service, hold the 6 machines until the tech could replace them and then swap over the user machines with the repaired ones.

The bonus was that the modular nature of the machines made this relatively painless and swapping a user over was as simple as taking the hdd out of their faulty machine and swapping it into the replacement machine.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Things that didn't happen

used a cage on a forklift many times. You have to trust the operator though, and most of them have a requirement now to wear a harness which becomes a problem when the item you want to access is just out of reach.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: The old line from "Ghostbusters" is never lost on me

When Sigourney Weaver turns into a Hellhound " So, She's a dog?"

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: Oz...

also an excuse to enjoy all those wonderful seasonal foods and drinks that are just too hot for a normal Aussie christmas.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Having grown up in the UNIX world of the '90s ...

I always used "flipping" when talking to (L)users

Outlook takes another sick day

Re: outlook vs hotmail

You know the saying " happy wife, happy life !"

Re: Fix at 07:00 ?

What are you talking about, it seems to be daily that there is an update pushed ;)

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Re: Put the zen face on...

The bonus is when you can charge them for their rant time. 30 minutes going off about IT always failing at the worst time ( hint only when said manager decides to interfere) is 30 minutes you can charge to them for "analysing issue and developing solution" then charging for the time it takes to actually resolve the issue. Sometimes there is also a PITA charge in there as well ;)

Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission

This was a scam

I believe because of the advertising on many mediums, people were lead to believe that this was a legitimate comparison site and nowhere except in the very small type on a buried link did it mention that it only compared products that came from a single company. Because of the proliferation of comparison sites ( Canstar, CompareTheMarket, Finder, etc) it is very easy to be misled that all sites compare all services.

There has to be a commission of some kind for these sites to exist, and indeed for insurance agents to exist, so accepting that they get paid for referring clients that successfully take out a policy is par for the course.

Also now there are a lot of regulations around financial advice and the information that must be provided, although I do not believe this has been pushed out to the wider insurance set.

Engineers bring Psyche's thrusters back online

It's not like you can pop over and manually switch the valve.

reminds me of doing remote maintenance on servers, you have to make sure when you reboot that you select restart and not shutdown :)

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Experience a friend had with 4 day week

A friend who worked a 4 day week found that the option was either Monday or Friday. This gave them a 3 day weekend. Regarding the extra hours, I find that I am working those long hours anyway so a day less of them would be a God send. Who in IT does not grab a coffee on the fly and eat at their desk while still taking calls? So technically we are doing those longer hours anyway.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

Was like that when I worked for a Stockbrokers in the late 90s, early noughties. It was expected that we would wear suit, shirt and tie in the office. After wearing the knees out of 2-3 pairs of suit trousers, I asked the boss why we, as IT, had to wear business shirts and ties ( where the shirts would end up with toner on them and the ties ran the risk of being caught in fans) when we were never in the public eye.

He being the awesome boss he was, went to management and explained that IT from now on would be wearing polo shirts with the company logo. From that day on, we were the trendsetters in the office when it came to men's clothing.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Not a magnet but...

When setting up training sessions I would do that with the mice to ensure that they worked on the shiny desks we had. Users got all shirty about the sticky tape residue on their shiny desks :)

Re: Just needed to scroll down a bit

"If you liked our service, please mention us to your friends"

"Not if I want to keep them!"

With apologies to DNA and HHGTTG when talking about devices with "GPP" (Genuine People Personalities)

Re: Ones Aurora

The ability for a user to say " It will only take 5 minutes" is enough to ensure that the job should be delayed until you have a full day to look at it.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Back in the mid 90s I worked for a stockbroking firm and we had recently rolled out Netware servers to a number of our remote sites, along with user personal directories.

We were getting alerts regarding storage on one of the remote sites, ran a scan across the user directories and found that one of the brokers had taken it upon himself to place his complete p*rn library in his user directory, complete with catogory filing under different directories. He was quickly warned that if we could see it, HR could as well. They disappeared a week later, and our server stopped complaining about low storage.

We also implemented surfcontrol at one stage, and my job was to scan the blocked items and send a form email to the recipients that continued reception of prohibited items would result in HR being informed, i.e. tell your buddies to stop sending you p*rn at work otherwise you may not have a job.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: dear god yes

Sounds like the start of "The 4 YorkshireMen" skit

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Try calling Centrelink in Australia (for users in the UK and US, this is our central social security and job search government department), I've heard of people calling and waiting on hold for hours.

Fortunately with mobiles and portable phones you can still get stuff done while waiting.

unfortunately the contract will be written in such a way that they could take a shotgun to their machines, divert their phones to the talking clock and still fulfill their "contract obligations".

With less than a month to go on the contact you are better waiting it out, taking all the schmoozing their sales drones apply and still tell them to "Go F%ck off" at the end of the schmoozing.

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

One of the agents KPIs is probably value of claims denied.

Where as AI will not have any arbitrary KPIs to meet and therefore will treat each claim as genuine until proven otherwise. Human agents will have KPIs and don't tell me that one of them isn't minimising claims paid by any means possible.

I'm reminded of Mr Incredible finding ways to circumvent the arbitrary rules of Insuricorp to make sure people get paid :)

Re: "Thank you for your message. I understand your concern,"

I started following the Post Office debacle from reading about it on el Reg, mainly because I am in Australia and we usually don't get much news from the UK unless it involves the Royal family.

Until some of the instigators of the complete technical and policy stuff up are jailed, both from Fujitsu and the Post Office hierachy, there is never going to be an apology that makes up for the ruined lives created by this farce.

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Plaigiarism is so 20th century. Now it is called a "Creative re-imagining of a classic"

Re: Auditors...

Insert Monty Python Quote

"No-one Expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

During covid shutdowns, I actually came to the office because there were 4 adults in my house trying to work remote. This resulted in internet bottlenecks (thank you Libs FTN NBN :( ) and I usually work in the office by myself, so there was no difference except I was not having to deal with the other adults in the home. Bonus was that when I came home, I could instantly switch off.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: In-car ordering for takeout

Hey google, where is the nearest "takeout of choice" ?

once that displays, pick one and then hey google call this takeout .

If I'm driving the last thing I want to be doing is picking things off a touchscreen menu and being distracted.

There are already enough idiots on their mobiles on the road and I do not see the car manufacturers move to touch screens reducing that.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Scout uniform count?

Had to run the local Joeys section for my Group ( As Group Leader, sections that do not have a qualified leader often fall to the GL to run) so made sure to bring my Scout uniform to work and would change before I left.

Also back in the dim distant past I worked for a stockbrokers in Western Australia and as I lived closest to work, I got the on call job of being first into the office each morning. Because of Daylight savings in Australia, that meant I needed to be at my desk by 5am (8am East Coast time) during summer. I would frequently get calls while riding the bike to work and would go straight into the office in my cycling clothes. So people saw me a few times wandering around in skin tight lycra ;) although in those days I like to think I was reasonably fit.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

have one of these for your HHTTG reference :)

Watchdog deep-sixes job ad that was actually pay-to-play training course

Re: All over cv-library

of course they did nothing about it, they are getting paid to put it on their platform.

Once some of the job boards get slapped with fines for promoting misleading training course advertisements, then we will see if they start cracking down on it.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

getting stuck with no way out.

I used to work the early shift for a Stockbrokers based in Perth WA, and we worked East Coast hours, so during summer we needed to be in the office 3 hours before normal people, i.e. the market opened at 10am AEDST so we needed to be in the office before 7am WA time. I would usually get there about 5am, have a shower and catch the elevator to our floor before 5.30 to answer calls from the Eastern States offices if there were any issues.

One morning, the lift broke down between floors. Fortunately the security staff were on call, and answered the telephone quickly but could not get anyone from the lift company until 8 am so I was stuck in the lift for a few hours. That was ok, I laid down and tried to get some sleep which would have been fine except security kept checking every 15 minutes that I was still ok :( After the first couple of times I told them that I was going nowhere, so they could just call me when the lift maintenance people got there.

As with any IT person, getting on with building security and maintenance is essential to ensuring that things go well, so we had a running joke about shutting down lifts so that we could have a catnap during the day.

Hardware barn denies that .004 seconds of facial recognition violated privacy

Hammerbarn is go

I'm a bit biased here having had a son working in retail who was abused and told to F off when he asked the customer to pay for the stuff loaded in their trolley.

Based on the video shown on the news last night in relation to this story (various scum attacking staff and customers), I feel that Bunnings Duty of care to their customers and staff overrides any qualms I have about my face being recognised. I think the area they fell down on was not having signs up saying that you agree to be filmed on entering the premises. Having setup up surveilance systems for a number of clients, I'm sure that having FR would be a boon as in most security systems, the video is stored and re-visited after the event.

If this prevents someone with a known proclivity for theft and violence from entering a store, myself as a customer welcome it. It saves me money ( not having to pay more to allow for "leakage") and prevents me being placed in a situation where I may be injured.

https://7news.com.au/news/bunnings-shares-cctv-of-attacks-on-staff-after-facial-recognition-cameras-breached-privacy-c-16802827

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: Am i old in knowing about SSADM?

More likely H&S would ban it due to the chance of users slashing them selves when using the scanner

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Our sons ipad was smashed days after his time at school had come to an end and the insurance policy ran out. We had just opted to pay out the school to keep it too :( instead of returning it.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Used to manage a network for a national stockbrokers, and we had VMs set up so we could vmotion them between sites. An electrical contractor was finishing up some work in our Melbourne computer room and removing his gear. Unfortunately, he leaned his ladder on the wall next to the door, right on top of the electrical isolation switch which did not have a molly guard. We found out that day what equipment was not protected by UPS. Cue screaming from the trading floor that this was "costing millions". A shutdown for power redistribution work and mollyguard installation was programmed shortly after.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: Solution 1

Exactly! I have had enough of these to know that after 2 weeks you can write off the job.

However, I do know some companies are slow to send rejections because they want to make sure that the chosen candidate accepts their offer and actually starts before writing off all the unsuccessful candidates. This way they can avoid re-doing advertising and interviews by going to their 2nd and 3rd choices.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: 6509 was a chassis switch not a router

have an upvote for obligatory "Hitchhikers" reference :)

BOFH: The Boss pulled the plug on our AI, so we pulled the pin on him

Re: Sun (and printers)

My first sysadmin role was managing a Sun system containing a major herbarium database . At the time, all the specimens had labels printed ( from the sun system) with bar codes for ease of cataloguing.

I was constantly tweaking the form for the labels to allow for different fields and lengths of information.

So long ago I have forgotten most of it and the building is no longer standing.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

I suspect that if the provider specifically disables the user connection to the internet through their services, then they would be well within their rights. i.e. by resetting the router they were wrong, but if they reset the user connection password at the provider end, thus preventing connection from the client router, they are covered ( it would be similar to removing access for disabled accounts, a security requirement)

Re: Important word

have an upvote for Obligatory Python reference

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Re: Hardware is not the issue

And another HHGTG reference :) Must be Douglas Adams day

Re: no seriously please reboot

Upvote for the HHGTTTG reference :)

Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Re: "Checking" account?

See that is why Australians lead the world in being ripped off by scam artists ;)

With paypass, tap 'n' go and other world leading tech, I think the last time I opened my wallet was to check the 3 digit code on the back of my card for an online transaction.

As an Australian, checks are a Pain In The A$$ (PITA). You have to physically attend a branch to deposit them and often the funds are not available for 3 days. Nowadays actually finding a bank branch that is open nearby is nigh on impossible.

So we are being forced to use cash or electronic, with our supermarkets being defacto banks.

Google gamed into advertising a malicious version of Authenticator

alternate authenticators

Getting users to download an authenticator is hard enough without bad actors getting into the action. I have seen a number of people caught out with the Microsoft Authenticator being spoofed and then being asked for account details to pay for the software. There is a product in both the play store and the appstore that is very similar in design to the MS authenticator logo.