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SEKCobra
Feb 28, 2011

Hi
:saddowns: Don't look at my site :saddowns:

ZeitGeits posted:

He probably isn't forgetting his password due to incompetence, he just doesn't give a crap about using your resources and therefore doesn't bother to remember his password. His usage of IT resources (your time and the time of the helpdesk) is not a technical problem, it is a problem of your management. And if his services to the bottom line of your company justify unlimited use of IT resources, so be it.

First rule of healthcare IT: Never give a flying gently caress about best practices or doing what's right: shut up and do what you are told. Healthcare companies are the most hierarchical organizations there are, outside of the military. So you need to learn to play their game.

Woah man, just because you have given up doesn't mean all of us in this field have to just throw in the towel. I for one am going to keep standing up to retard doctors.

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Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...
Good luck.

I have to agree, it's not that he's forgetting the password, he's just not caring because probably uses that new password exactly once: when it's reset, to do one thing, and then he walks away and doesn't use the system again until next time in a few weeks.

It's not a password for him, it's an identity token that he gets by calling in. If you consider it this way, you might be able to figure out a better way to handle him.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
Dont work for healthcare companies tia

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?

myron cope posted:

We aren't in any kind of trouble over it (especially not me, since I just started in mid-November), it's just a policy change going forward.

Three months from now if it's still happening, I could see it being an issue for us. I'm just going to ticket everything no matter how dumb it is.

Do this, I actually ticket helping my colleagues for five minutes over the phone because if it comes back I can see what's going on with it.

Plus having poo poo written down is good.

Edit: Also so I don't sound like a massive dick, i get asked what i've been up to today, including down periods, it covers my rear end.

dogstile fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jan 25, 2014

ZeitGeits
Jun 20, 2006
Too much time....

go3 posted:

Dont work for healthcare companies tia

Words to live by. Working in IT already sucks enough, no sane man should ever take a job in the healthcare industry.

SEKCobra posted:

Woah man, just because you have given up doesn't mean all of us in this field have to just throw in the towel. I for one am going to keep standing up to retard doctors.

You misunderstand me. I haven't given up. Fortunately I am in a position where I am able to make the cost of their bullshit transparent to their bosses and the bosses of their bosses (I do large scale i.s.h.med rollouts in the german healthcare sector nowadays). When a doctor contacts me with an outlandish demand, I take a note of it and send a cost estimate up his chain of command. You'd be surprised how fast the demands cease after the department head gets involved.

If you don't want to get poo poo on on a constant basis as an IT helpdesk worker in healthcare you have to obey the hierarchy. And you are at the loving bottom of it, together with the typists and the kitchen workers. But you can play the game. You just need a thick skin and you need to log every loving metric you can get your hands on. Escalate it to the decision makers and lean back.

SEKCobra
Feb 28, 2011

Hi
:saddowns: Don't look at my site :saddowns:

ZeitGeits posted:

Words to live by. Working in IT already sucks enough, no sane man should ever take a job in the healthcare industry.


You misunderstand me. I haven't given up. Fortunately I am in a position where I am able to make the cost of their bullshit transparent to their bosses and the bosses of their bosses (I do large scale i.s.h.med rollouts in the german healthcare sector nowadays). When a doctor contacts me with an outlandish demand, I take a note of it and send a cost estimate up his chain of command. You'd be surprised how fast the demands cease after the department head gets involved.

If you don't want to get poo poo on on a constant basis as an IT helpdesk worker in healthcare you have to obey the hierarchy. And you are at the loving bottom of it, together with the typists and the kitchen workers. But you can play the game. You just need a thick skin and you need to log every loving metric you can get your hands on. Escalate it to the decision makers and lean back.

Well I guess Im glad im not part of the office IT here then, because I can safely say most people dont put me on the same level as our low end staff. Doctors are about the only people who have given me trouble anyway, but I'd say only a small amount of all the ones I interacted with. Also our MR staff is loving awesome most of the time regardless of their MD status. There was one woman everyone hated, but she died last year.
So yeah. Doctors are dicks. But not all of them. Probably not even a lot of them. Hell, there are doctors I can jokingly insult and be insubordinate to and have a laugh with. Its just that there are serious dicks who try to really gently caress you over. I will never forget the doc who escallated something for not being worked on, after he offered to let it sit for a day because a coworker wasnt in.

/rambling end.

QuiteEasilyDone
Jul 2, 2010

Won't you play with me?
Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


SEKCobra posted:

Woah man, just because you have given up doesn't mean all of us in this field have to just throw in the towel. I for one am going to keep standing up to retard doctors.

Sure, that's fine. Until you stand up against the Dr. that goes to lunch with the CIO every week.

user on probation
Nov 1, 2012

removed

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

This is horrific, and makes me glad me and my boss are the only ones with a key to the machine room.

Inspector_666
Oct 7, 2003

benny with the good hair

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

They are no longer employed by your company now, right?

SyNack Sassimov
May 4, 2006

Let the robot win.
            --Captain James T. Vader


ZeitGeits posted:

First rule of healthcare IT:

go3 posted:

Dont work for healthcare companies tia

There we go.


QuiteEasilyDone posted:

that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

Do you buy this with cash you got using your personal PIN number at an automated ATM machine?

</pedant>

odiv
Jan 12, 2003

Cash money, please.

For content, from yesterday: Why are you sending me an email at quarter to five on a Friday asking for assistance right before turning your computer off? Are you trying to sneak in at the front of the line for Monday, or...?

QuiteEasilyDone
Jul 2, 2010

Won't you play with me?

Inspector_666 posted:

They are no longer employed by your company now, right?

Haha, she's still the office manager for our client and still manages to do hilarious things that make us collectively wince. She's outside of our collective chain of command... and more than 1000 miles separate from any of our teams.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

Potato Alley posted:

Do you buy this with cash you got using your personal PIN number at an automated ATM machine?
</pedant>

The smart thing would be to have Redundant RAID, that way if one RAID breaks you can use a spare.

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



Dr. Arbitrary posted:

The smart thing would be to have Redundant RAID, that way if one RAID breaks you can use a spare.
And it also saves on dusting because you dust one and it gets replicated to the other.

Dylan16807
May 12, 2010

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

The smart thing would be to have Redundant RAID, that way if one RAID breaks you can use a spare.

Turn the replication up to 11.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

This is so stupid and awful, it sounds made up. Which no doubt means it is true.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
So not really knowing the ins and outs of enterprise RAID systems, is that recoverable or is it restore from backup time?

peak debt
Mar 11, 2001
b& :(
Nap Ghost
Should be recoverable. As soon as she removes the second caddy, the drive will disappear from the OS and the server will crash. Then you switch the server off, plug them back in and start it again. It might need to do some consistency checking but with modern controllers you don't even need to exactly remember in which slot the drive was plugged in. That is as long as she didn't mix up the drives between servers, if she did that it's going to be fun.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

peak debt posted:

Should be recoverable. As soon as she removes the second caddy, the drive will disappear from the OS and the server will crash. Then you switch the server off, plug them back in and start it again. It might need to do some consistency checking but with modern controllers you don't even need to exactly remember in which slot the drive was plugged in. That is as long as she didn't mix up the drives between servers, if she did that it's going to be fun.

That's the thing, really. Have you labelled all the drives on your servers? It's not something you imagine happening. Do you think someone who would randomly pull all the drives from a server rack would do them one at a time?

Collateral Damage
Jun 13, 2009

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.
A friend of mine used to work for an electronics development company, and they were having problems with their development boards. They'd work fine after assembly, but a day or two later they'd just stop working, as if the memory chips were going bad. By chance they found the cause when one of the guys worked late one night and spotted the office cleaners making their rounds, going into the testing lab and dusting everything off. Including the boards. With an antistatic duster.

Suffice to say that cleaning company found their contract terminated very quickly.

QuiteEasilyDone
Jul 2, 2010

Won't you play with me?

peak debt posted:

Should be recoverable. As soon as she removes the second caddy, the drive will disappear from the OS and the server will crash. Then you switch the server off, plug them back in and start it again. It might need to do some consistency checking but with modern controllers you don't even need to exactly remember in which slot the drive was plugged in. That is as long as she didn't mix up the drives between servers, if she did that it's going to be fun.

The problem is, we're located on the eastern seaboard, our client is located in the exact center of the country. Yeah. There was only one server so it wasn't too hard to figure out where everything went and unfortunately the server was unable to handle having its drives pulled and would not boot. We wound up restoring from the day befores backup and calling it a day. This actually happened a while back, but I just got reminded of it recently and had to share.

sfwarlock
Aug 11, 2007

Collateral Damage posted:

A friend of mine used to work for an electronics development company, and they were having problems with their development boards. They'd work fine after assembly, but a day or two later they'd just stop working, as if the memory chips were going bad. By chance they found the cause when one of the guys worked late one night and spotted the office cleaners making their rounds, going into the testing lab and dusting everything off. Including the boards. With an antistatic duster.

Suffice to say that cleaning company found their contract terminated very quickly.

Reminds me of this:

vail@tegra.UUCP (Johnathan Vail) posted:

Subject: Faulty IC's
Date: 6 Feb 89

A friend worked for a company that made IC's. It seemed that
every few months their yields would go down to about zero.
Analysis of the failures showed all sorts of organic material
was introduced into the process somewhere but they couldn't
figure out where. One evening someone was working late and came
into the lab. There he found the maintenance crew cooking
pizza in the chip curing ovens!


found here: http://www.speedygrl.com/funnies/texts/computer.folklore.from.net.rumors.html

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

This is exactly why a lot of places invest in locking cabinets for their stuff - several clients of my company do that, on top of locking down the server room so that nobody gets in that doesn't need to be there. I guess some companies like to cut corners, and if they run things with such little security like that, they deserve whatever catastrophe happens.

guppy
Sep 21, 2004

sting like a byob
A ticket didn't come in, apparently. Except it did.

I was forwarded an email expressing surprise that my team created no tickets during the last two weeks. It came with an attached report that provided no information on my team's ticket creation, so I'm not sure where this idea came from. I personally closed 60+ tickets in that timeframe and I have several other team members.

This isn't the first time reports have been inaccurate. There were similar errors the first week they started running these new reports, and I emailed the guy running him to know that his results were wrong and he should check his reporting algorithm, and cc'd my boss. I got no response whatsoever.

Feels like someone is trying to set us up to take a fall. I think I need to find a new gig. This job has been so good to me for the past several years, and it's just getting so toxic. I hate worrying about this poo poo.

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:

TheFuzzyLumpkin posted:

Tonight is trying to drive me insane.

A user is going internationally and needs int'l voice and data on his phone. I call last week to get him set up with the plan he wants.

He calls back a few days later and says he's decided he DOESN'T want to get e-mails when he's overseas, just voice. I tell him I'm not sure that's possible but I'll call AT&T to find out for sure. AT&T, weirdly, says sure and they'll block his data effective today. Huh, okay. So I give him all the info so he'll know what to expect on cost breakdowns.

Well, he calls today and says he's still getting e-mails. I call AT&T and they say, as I expected, that the tech I talked to was full of poo poo and that if he needs voice he just has to get data too because they can't differentiate. Okay, so I add a the international data and make arrangements for him not to be billed for this because I had relayed AT&T's incorrect info to him.

I get the confirmation e-mail and discover that AT&T had backdated the data so it's going to expire while he's still overseas.

I call them AGAIN and they tell me that whoops, he doesn't have the voice service that was added last week and didn't need to be changed at all! So they readded that. Which I'm assuming at this point means they canceled the line and threw the SIM number into the fires of Mt Doom, and then tried to figure out a way to make razor blades come out of the phone when you use it.

Edit: I can't just block data on the BES because we don't have that as a preconfigured policy, I'm not a BES admin, and see above re: my engineering team being 100% useless.

I worked doing tech support as a customer-facing helldesk monkey for Apple on iPhones right around the time they added Sprint as a carrier. Transfers from Verizon were the only ones that didn't make me want to stab myself in the dick - all actual issues with their service aside, their techs were never incompetent or malicious and generally did their job correctly.

AT&T, meanwhile, was apparently staffed entirely by fuckwits whose brain instantly shut off as soon as the caller mentioned an iPhone and immediately transferred to us, forcing me to spend 20 minutes troubleshooting the issue then wasting a bunch of time transferring back to them while remaining on the line to tell them no, this is something you should be handling. Sprint, meanwhile, wasn't incompetent but were a bunch of lying bastards who would sell people 3-4 copies of Apple's extended warranty because "Hey each one gives you 2 more years of service and support for this phone! :haw:" while also lying about what that warranty covered.

Orcs and Ostriches
Aug 26, 2010


The Great Twist

odiv posted:

For content, from yesterday: Why are you sending me an email at quarter to five on a Friday asking for assistance right before turning your computer off? Are you trying to sneak in at the front of the line for Monday, or...?

It was probably a problem for at least all of Friday, perhaps longer, but the user was beginning to worry that after a day or two of not doing work, people would notice.

Lightning Jim
Nov 18, 2006

Just a mad weather-ologist :science:

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

Apparently one of the office managers in a client we service decided that the server room needed dusting... and removed these blinking drawers in the front of one of these sliding computer box things so that they could be dusted. Too bad that people are calling her saying the server for which her entire business is based on is down... and that something called a Raid Array was broken. Gosh computers are hard.

I've had a co-worker that had something exactly like this happen as one of his cases.

The customer that called in was a doctor and the doctor even said to him he was specifically told not to touch the equipment ever but felt that it was dusty so he would take care of.

I cannot remember or not if he destroyed the array but I think he did.

Silly Newbie
Jul 25, 2007
How do I?

HalloKitty posted:

That's the thing, really. Have you labelled all the drives on your servers? It's not something you imagine happening. Do you think someone who would randomly pull all the drives from a server rack would do them one at a time?

Things like this are why we number our disks in machines located at client sites. It comes up a few times per year (about 3k machines in the field).

Caconym
Feb 12, 2013

A ticket came in:

"Please extract the position logs regarding the fatal air ambulance crash this 14th as they're wanted for the investigation."

Some clickety clicks later ths is what I found:

log posted:

Timestamp Position update
Timestamp Position update
Timestamp Position update
Timestamp Position update
Timestamp UNIT DELAYED
Timestamp UNIT DISCONNECTED

Never has an innocent log file made me feel so :smith:

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD

Caconym posted:

A ticket came in:

"Please extract the position logs regarding the fatal air ambulance crash this 14th as they're wanted for the investigation."

Some clickety clicks later ths is what I found:


Never has an innocent log file made me feel so :smith:

That reminds me of

quote:

2001-09-11 08:46:46 Arch [1612975] D ALPHA PAGE FROM lifeline: alert 8933585 ETS appl nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com ETS RTCE: - Market data inconsistent...Cantor API problem Trading system offline on nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com, run by etsuser on nbetpsd27, pid = 24277

Caconym
Feb 12, 2013

go3 posted:

2001-09-11 08:46:46 Arch [1612975] D ALPHA PAGE FROM lifeline: alert 8933585 ETS appl nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com ETS RTCE: - Market data inconsistent...Cantor API problem Trading system offline on nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com, run by etsuser on nbetpsd27, pid = 24277

Ouch.

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

So this is pretty loving awesome. We got these new HP EliteDesk 800 G1 computers in to use as Solidworks desktops for the engineers. I get it all setup and bring it down and their current QuatroFX 1500 video card doesn't loving fit - the plug that connects the ports on the front of the case to the motherboard blocks the card from being installed.

Sons of bitches.

skooma512
Feb 8, 2012

You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.
A java update came in:

Broke some poo poo and probably installed Chrome too. The bastards.

Inspector_666
Oct 7, 2003

benny with the good hair

go3 posted:

That reminds me of

I didn't realize until I recently read and article that a full 2/3rds of that company's entire staff was killed on 9/11.

On the anniversary every year since, they donate all of their revenue for the day to 9/11-related charities, though :unsmith:

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




skooma512 posted:

A java update came in:

Broke some poo poo and probably installed Chrome too. The bastards.

Roll back to R45 or adjust the security settings to allow the broken apps to run.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Uninstall Java.

Westie
May 30, 2013



Baboon Simulator

go3 posted:

That reminds me of

the Last Words of fallen aeroplane pilots...

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





God, I dread Java updates because they keep making major changes that break our apps. :(

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Varkk
Apr 17, 2004

pseudomonkey posted:

Yahoo are being classy about it



As if Yahoo have any reason to be smug about email. A major ISP here outsources their email services to Yahoo. For the last 6 months or so there has been a fairly regular issue where they have a pile of accounts compromised due to security flaws at Yahoo. They then disable the accounts until the user contacts them and resets the password. Most users are incapable of doing this themselves and call on IT people to do it for them. Naturally the ISP will only deal with the account holder over the phone.

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