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blackswordca, I think you have a chance! http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/23/it-pros-trade-your-tech-support-stories-for-a-surface-pro-3/
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Jan 26, 2015 10:51
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Network migration all weekend and of course it all ended with a big workaround that is kind of poo poo. Also one of the few things we could not get back up is my lifeline external dedicated internet line... Well, that and all the phones but who uses those anyway?  This is going to be a lovely week.
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Jan 26, 2015 11:20
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BabyFur Denny posted:One employee cannot wreck the median skill level, that is not how the median works. You probably just worked at a company that can't even get basic mathematics right! We want all our employees to have above average metrics. Make it happen or forfeit your bonus, your job and your firstborn.
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Jan 26, 2015 11:49
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Which Goon wrote this? http://jobview.monster.com/getjob.aspx?JobId=144461403&jvs=cf,can-6342,can,0 quote:Network Administrator with Children’s Specialty Center of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada
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Jan 26, 2015 12:30
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Sometimes, spam tickets are just hilarious. "No, ma'am, that's - that's not necessary. Really. Okay, please stop."
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Jan 26, 2015 13:40
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Exit Strategy posted:Sometimes, spam tickets are just hilarious. Little do you know, SHAKE and HIPS are stupid corporate initiative acronyms.
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Jan 26, 2015 14:29
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SHAKE? Shake Hands And Kill Everyone, right? HIPS? Halt in production services? Better find a desk to hide under before that woman crashes a plane directly into your building.
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Jan 26, 2015 14:44
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Lorrin Coutts is ready to shake hands and kill everyone her halt in production services for support. ... RUN, FORREST, RUN!
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Jan 26, 2015 14:49
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Potato Salad posted:What kind of requests do you see at tier 3 for an ISP? Superficially, I imagine three categories of people: (a) people who let ISP set up stuff and leave well enough alone (b) people who dick around with the router so poo poo doesn't work (c) people who know what they are doing and never call. On the residential side, we dealt with all 3 core services: Cable TV, HSD, Phone. We were *NOT* supposed to be getting strictly cable calls, that was supposed to be Tier 1. OF course we got the drat things anyways. Tier 2 was supposed to walk you through the really stupid poo poo like unplugging the modem, de/reenabling the adapter, checking cables and crap, and resetting email passwords (And they had one hell of a convoluted way to do that). We were supposed to take 99% of phone service calls and any "high level" modem issues. We also did the occasional tracert and things like that, even though Tier 2 did that and 99% of the time it was completely useless crap. The thing is we had a backend we simply called DOCSIS (I can't remember the proper name for it), that polled the modem (Both HSD and telephone), which gave us the ability to do advanced diagnostics on things like "Your modem hasn't actually been reset" "WELL I JUST DID IT", then walking them through removing the stupid rear end battery from their telephone modems. We also did high level password resets, moving email accounts do different user accounts, checking to make sure the telephone was plugged into line 1 not line 2, and other dumb things like that. We just had a bit more access and a bit more brain power than Tier 1 to actually troubleshoot signal issues and whatnot. We would occasionally (rarely) have the advanced issue where there was latency on the network before it got off of our backbone that went to our NOC, and the latency OFF our backbone (Normally 3 or 4 hops away) that people demanded we fix. Anyone play WOW? remember when you had huge latency issues that was caused by the ISP (Bellsouth I think) on the wow servers? They demanded we fix that. Fun stuff. Probably one of the best phone calls I ever got was this guy who was having problems with our internet. Now our policy for our internet troubleshooting is: Connect directly to our modem, check to see if the issue persists, then troubleshoot from there. If it doesn't, blame the customer's equipment, get off the call. This guy calls in, he has intermittent slowdowns on his network. We do the basic stuff, I check his modem, it's all good, see he has a router connected to the modem, tell him to plug a computer directly into the modem and test from there. I know it's an inconvenience, but we really need to check to see if it's your network or our equipment. The guy refused vehemently. Demanded a tech out RIGHT NOW, etc. I kept talking to him, found out he was running a small business on one of our residential lines, and had something like 30 computers, 15 printers and like 15 switches on his network. I told him we can't really send a tech out unless we determine it's our issue. He kept railing me, and somewhere on the line, I found out he had a "failsafe" internet connection on a load balancing router. So I asked him why he can't roll over to his other internet connection for a day just to test so we can verify. He refused, it's our equipment, our failure our problem, etc etc etc. He then threatened to go to dslreports.com (LOLOLOL) and complain. So I told him the tech is going to bypass his equipment, determine the issue is fine, and leave without doing anything, but I'd send one. After the call, I got curious. I logged into dslreports.com and went to the TWC forums. The guy was really drat unoriginal in his name so I spotted it immediately. Got into the thread, he gave the same vague information (While talking poo poo about how unhelpful I was) the guys there asked the same questions I did, and he finally came down to saying the same things he did to me. The people told him the *EXACT* same things I did. He wasn't happy. I felt vindicated.
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Jan 26, 2015 15:44
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I'm really glad the series of call centers I deal with on a daily basis are all generally decent. The centers with First Data are set up so that Tier 1 are the overseas script readers that deal with all the general idiots, and Tier 2 is the actual tech support. When I set up a client, I tell them "If you have a problem, call us first. Here's my card with my office number and cell phone number in case of emergency. If we're not available though, and you wanna know 'how do I enable this', or 'why is it doing that', or 'oh my god it exploded help me', call this 1800 number. Follow these steps when you call that number and it'll get you to level 2 support. Those are the guys I call when I have questions." Generally I find it thrills the client that they have this little shortcut that will give them the tiniest bit of power over their tech support, and generally they only really end up using it if I'm not able to help them over the phone and explicitly tell them to use it. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the other providers that I deal with. Micros, specifically, is like talking to a brick wall. They got bought out by Oracle a couple months back, and went from a lovely "we'll never call you back" voicemail system to an even shittier "we'll never email you back" ticketing system. It used to be that I could call their local office and bug them once every couple weeks and get someone to hum and haw at me about why 3 of our clients that we boarded and sent them all the paperwork for back in September still aren't processing. Now The only thing I can do is submit an email or voicemail ticket and watch it swirl down the drain. Literally all I want to know is why these three clients aren't processing yet. Are they waiting on the merchant to give the go-ahead to make the change? Are they missing something that we can provide to speed the process along? Are they sitting around assfucking themselves all day? I have no clue! Nor does anyone else!
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Jan 26, 2015 16:16
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Renegret posted:I'd like to work for TWC. The bar is set too low to fail. You could do nothing all day and still be a completely average employee. I know we like to rag on these guys but it really seems to be a "Where you are" thing when it comes to how hosed up your cable provider is. I've had no problems at all with TWC, but I've got windstream horror stories galore.
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Jan 26, 2015 16:40
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I love Cablevision to an irrational degree because their support people aren't useless shitpiles and the first people you speak to are empowered enough to resolve the issue for you. Also either TWC or Verizon has some national support center and if you can somehow get them, it's fantastic.
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Jan 26, 2015 16:42
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Good news everyone, Bob the car salesman turned out to be a nice, trustworthy, and ultimately clueless computer janitor. He probably didn't steal their identities, but did manage to reformat my grandparents computer without creating a backup of any kind. He wasn't able to "put in some new chips" because the thing only has 2 RAM slots and they were both full. I guess it's running faster now thanks to the first clean XP install its had in 10 years. My mom went to visit them on Sunday when Bob came back with the computer, and basically put the fear of God into them when she explained what could have potentially happened. Today she is going through and changing the passwords on every account she has access to thanks to the backup I made on Christmas. I'm just not sure what to suggest from here on out. They obviously need a new computer, maybe a laptop. But how do you old-person-proof a computer these days? They need to use something like Keypass/Lastpass but it took significant instruction and a couple years of convincing to even get my formerly-an-IT-administrator mother to even use it, I would need something absolutely dead simple for a couple of 80 year olds. I could probably also put TeamViewer or some other remote assistance application on it to remote it on occasion. Anyone else in this situation and have some suggestions?
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Jan 26, 2015 16:46
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Sirotan posted:But how do you old-person-proof a computer these days? Mac mini/iPad
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Jan 26, 2015 16:48
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ratbert90 posted:Mac mini/iPad I give it 2 hours until they install a slot machine game from the App Store that charges per spin
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Jan 26, 2015 16:50
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ratbert90 posted:Mac mini/iPad Until their flash games don't work.
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Jan 26, 2015 16:50
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evol262 posted:I give it 2 hours until they install a slot machine game from the App Store that charges per spin
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Jan 26, 2015 16:54
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Gothmog1065 posted:Anyone play WOW? remember when you had huge latency issues that was caused by the ISP (Bellsouth I think) on the wow servers? They demanded we fix that. Fun stuff. I don't know the specifics of this incident, but latency on 3rd party networks is something an ISP absolutely can do something about. It just has to go up to your NOC and they might be able to change the routes to go around it, depending if one's available. It's something our Level 3 NOC from time to time. We saw that about a year ago when Level 3 had a big fiber cut on the east coast taking out access to anything west of the Hudson River. It took TWC about six hours to get my service back, meanwhile the company I work for fixed it in about 20 minutes by turning off some routes and letting the magic of Networking sort the rest out. My director got a huge hardon for being better than TWC, but in reality they just set a really low standard. (I'm not trying to hype up my company or anything, I'm just a mindless drone.) Our execs are obsessed with DSL reports though. Our social media guys go through that site every day and escalate complaints to us. Of course, sometimes they escalate nothing but the user's personal e-mail address that's not linked with their account and no other information to find them by. On the off chance we do manage to find the customer, we usually find the same thing you experienced, an uncooperative rear end in a top hat. And to be fair, sometimes it's a legitimate complaint, these are big companies and sometimes people slip through the cracks.
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Jan 26, 2015 16:55
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GreenNight posted:Until their flash games don't work. OSX supports flash. 
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Jan 26, 2015 16:57
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A few years ago people on our network couldn't download the latest Black Ops expansion pack on their Playstation 3's. It affected about 20 people in our service area. Apparently there was this one guy who was super adamant to get it to work that he actually brought his playstation 3 into our call center for us to look at it. I had some downtime and figured, why the gently caress not. Sure enough he was having problems downloading it. I hooked it up to a switch with a mirrored port and set up a capture with wireshark. Turns out the cached copy with Akamai networks was corrupted. Simply changing the DNS records on the PS3 to use google caused it to pull the file from the game servers instead of the cached copy and it worked fine. So in the end it wasn't REALLY a problem with us but trying to explain to a customer what Akamai did it was just easier to set up google DNS to force a bypass.
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Jan 26, 2015 17:04
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orange sky posted:blackswordca, I think you have a chance! Bah, US only. Stupid Microsoft. Edit: Taking bets to see if they forgot my bonus again this month. I did send a reminder email on Friday, that may help
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Jan 26, 2015 17:04
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blackswordca posted:Bah, US only. Stupid Microsoft. Oh, I never noticed that. I'm in the EU so it's pertinent to me, too. Really, Microsoft.
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Jan 26, 2015 17:06
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orange sky posted:Oh, I never noticed that. I'm in the EU so it's pertinent to me, too. Really, Microsoft. If someone wants to use my stories to score themselves a Surface Pro 3, go nuts. A goon should win it.
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Jan 26, 2015 17:07
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blackswordca posted:If someone wants to use my stories to score themselves a Surface Pro 3, go nuts. A goon should win it. I'm trying to decide if I should submit the spec bucket story or not. I probably can't include the picture so I think that might take a bit away from it....
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Jan 26, 2015 17:12
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blackswordca posted:Bah, US only. Stupid Microsoft. If you want a Surface Pro 3 you can reach out to an Azure/Office365 rep for a demo. I mentioned buying hardware for my C-levels and they had the paperwork through that day
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Jan 26, 2015 17:12
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blackswordca posted:Bah, US only. Stupid Microsoft.  forgot Maybe you should just forget not to stuff a giant metaphorical wrench in their network every month. So clumsy! It's ok people FORGET things sometimes 
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Jan 26, 2015 17:18
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Renegret posted:I don't know the specifics of this incident, but latency on 3rd party networks is something an ISP absolutely can do something about. It just has to go up to your NOC and they might be able to change the routes to go around it, depending if one's available. It's something our Level 3 NOC from time to time. We saw that about a year ago when Level 3 had a big fiber cut on the east coast taking out access to anything west of the Hudson River. It took TWC about six hours to get my service back, meanwhile the company I work for fixed it in about 20 minutes by turning off some routes and letting the magic of Networking sort the rest out. My director got a huge hardon for being better than TWC, but in reality they just set a really low standard. (I'm not trying to hype up my company or anything, I'm just a mindless drone.)  NOC just laughed at us. We were "too stupid" to know the situation. They gave 0 fucks about our routing issue. I'm pretty sure that issue though was WOW's direct backbone connection that was causing the latency. You think TWC gives a poo poo about a few gamers? On a larger scale, sure, they can reroute, but not for something dumb like that. E: quote:Our execs are obsessed with DSL reports though. Our social media guys go through that site every day and escalate complaints to us. Of course, sometimes they escalate nothing but the user's personal e-mail address that's not linked with their account and no other information to find them by. On the off chance we do manage to find the customer, we usually find the same thing you experienced, an uncooperative rear end in a top hat. And to be fair, sometimes it's a legitimate complaint, these are big companies and sometimes people slip through the cracks. Pretty sure TWC used to have official guys there, but they pulled a lot of those social media helpdesk guys. There was one leftover that was helping personally, but no official support on dslreports anymore. I think they even pulled from Twitter/Facebook and started pointing people to their useless forums. Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 17:49
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What was that story where an ISP was getting calls every Tuesday about internet not working and then they traced the requests and it was all these dumbasses trying to play WOW during scheduled maintenance?
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Jan 26, 2015 18:05
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Gothmog1065 posted:
That's...not surprising at all. A few years back there was a whole fiasco with latency connecting to twitch.tv. Even streaming the lowest quality video, it would constantly hang and stutter. Time Warner didn't give a flying gently caress about it until Twitch got involved and started bitching them out. To my knowledge, TWC still hasn't acknowledged to it's customers that there was a problem in the first place. I only found out when it was fixed when twitch made a blog post announcing it. I wanted my video games, dammit 
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Jan 26, 2015 18:07
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Manslaughter posted:What was that story where an ISP was getting calls every Tuesday about internet not working and then they traced the requests and it was all these dumbasses trying to play WOW during scheduled maintenance? I'm not familiar with that one, but we did get flooded with calls during the finale of the Sopranos. When the show abruptly went dark, our customers thought their service went out at the worst possible time and started calling in droves. I wasn't working here at the time, but I've heard the stories. Of course the customer service reps didn't know anything about it, since they were at work working when it went on. It was bad enough that the company had to put out a memo essentially spoiling the end of the show for the reps so they could explain to the customers that no, it wasn't our fault, that's just the way the show ended.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:09
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Renegret posted:latency on 3rd party networks is something an ISP absolutely can do something about This very much depends on where the 3rd party is in the connection. If the 3rd party is an immediate upstream, then the ISP can do something about it. If 3rd party is a few ASN hops down the road, there's a good chance your ISP can't do anything.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:18
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Sirotan posted:Good news everyone, Bob the car salesman turned out to be a nice, trustworthy, and ultimately clueless computer janitor. He probably didn't steal their identities, but did manage to reformat my grandparents computer without creating a backup of any kind. He wasn't able to "put in some new chips" because the thing only has 2 RAM slots and they were both full. I guess it's running faster now thanks to the first clean XP install its had in 10 years. My mom went to visit them on Sunday when Bob came back with the computer, and basically put the fear of God into them when she explained what could have potentially happened. Today she is going through and changing the passwords on every account she has access to thanks to the backup I made on Christmas. ~chromebook~
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Jan 26, 2015 18:36
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Renegret posted:That's...not surprising at all. You wouldn't happen to know the details? I still get this with Twitch even on Low.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:37
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Manslaughter posted:You wouldn't happen to know the details? I still get this with Twitch even on Low. Its the same on FIOS during peak times. This is part of the ongoing issue of the major broadband providers wanting to extort more money out of companies like twitch and netflix as part of the "internet toll road" scheme. Sickening fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 18:46
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:~chromebook~ Didn't even think about this. Might be perfect for them. Thanks!
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Jan 26, 2015 18:48
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Sirotan posted:Didn't even think about this. Might be perfect for them. Thanks! As a side benefit, they're like $200 so you can get them one each!
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Jan 26, 2015 18:51
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Manslaughter posted:You wouldn't happen to know the details? I still get this with Twitch even on Low. Twitch is just laggy in general. Even when I was over at a friend's place with Google Fiber once, Twitch still had lag at peak times.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:53
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:~chromebook~ seconding this. My only snag I ran in to when my in-laws bought my grandfather-in-law a chromebook was my inability to find a good pop mail solution. Obviously this old man's computing existence is based mostly on the ability to use outlook express to RE:FWD:FW:RE:RE:FW keep his friends and family up to date with the latest developments in the government's obstructions to our freedoms and super funny 2001-era jpgs. I set up a gmail account for him that retrieves his mails (from his ISP account) which kind of works ok... but he's probably too nice and doesn't want to bother with the amount of complaining that he'd likely do.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:56
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So a salesguy came in: One of the clients I support bought a trailer and had it wired to the building for power and internet. Now all the sales guys have been shoved out there. The wiring was just finished Friday and I'm at the client site to tie it in today.  hey blackswordca, so were getting internet in the trailer today? Yep, I just need to do some setup but it should be up soon. fantastic. oh, make sure you turn on wireless turn on wireless? you have a new WAP for me to put in? No, I mean turn on the wireless so it works in the trailer as well wireless doesn't work like that. Besides, we just ran a bunch of data cables here to plug your laptops in no, that's too much of a pain. The guy at Best Buy said all you need to do is change the setting in the router and wireless will work, so get it done.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:58
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blackswordca posted:
Then you're gonna need to get the Best Buy guys out here to change that setting, because that's not how commercial networking works. But what do I know, I'm just the guy you're paying for his expertise in setting these things up.
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Jan 26, 2015 19:02
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