RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

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Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

jre posted:

3 hours later, hosting company still apparently unable to locate on button for server they switched off by mistake.

This is code for "The server isn't in the rack where it should be".

I worked in webhosting, I loved finding a server with an asset tag on the opposite side of a 2000 square foot datacenter from where it should be.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 16:06

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:09

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

GargleBlaster posted:

Oh boy the panic I caused when I pointed out we could remote control people's PCs to help out (Lansweeper Pro being a nice easy way)

Does that mean you can see my screen at any time? What if it's something confidential?

No, we don't just go around watching people's screens, relax, your confidential solitaire session is safe. It ended up easier to just forget we have that feature and go see them, helps with putting some face time in anyway.

When faced with the same situation and question I just laughed maniacally and said "Yeessssssss."

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 15:07

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Partycat posted:

F605.5 deals with lashing up power strips and running them through walls and such.

Well I guess that's one way to avoid hiring an electrician.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2013 15:55

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

MJP posted:

hell yeah mofo.jpg

But the big M? Does this mean your hair must grow pointy and your technical knowledge drops by a level imperceptible in one day, but huge over time?

I'm slowly getting to the point where I never want to touch a printer again, and would rather sit around getting quotes for poo poo we don't need, while throwing unrealistic projects at my team from upon high.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 16:58

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Che Delilas posted:

Frankly I don't see why any company balks at an emergency fund for poo poo like this. You got your hourly techs coming in during the witching hour to fix a problem that, gone unchecked would cost you MILLIONS OF DOLLARS? What the gently caress is a couple thousand dollars paid out to people to make sure they will be willing to bust their rear end to get poo poo back online?

In my experience rich people are miserly shitheads. I can't list the number of times I was called an rear end in a top hat for losing someone MILLIONS of dollars because their stupid loving $12 a month shared web hosting was down.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 22:48

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Pilsner posted:

Eh, next to sysadmins, developers are by far (on average) the most computer competent people you'll find.

Hahahahahahahahaha you are a riot.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2013 14:13

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

HalloKitty posted:

The stupidity of the user apparently knows no bounds. Reaching further than ever previously thought possible.

Honestly, I used to hold the opinion that I'm just an expert at computers and networks, that's why I hold this job so... clearly these other people must be experts at their jobs. 12 years in the workforce and experience has shown me that this is pretty much an illusion. There's an entire class of people to whom actually thinking about their job in any way shape or form is anathema and will literally lock up the minute something outside of the script pops up. These people even exist within IT (The guy that's constantly bugging you on how to do something). When I see a problem I've never encountered before I dig out a shovel and start digging.

I'm now convinced that every shop regardless of what it does is staffed with one or two competent people who literally do everything, and five or six people who's jobs are mainly to escort bits of paper around the office.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 22:19

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

go3 posted:

Secure file sharing services are going to become more prevalent as commonly shared files grow in size(pictures/PDFs) and e-mail attachment size remains static.

Is there some aversion to slapping a shared drive on the company file server that I'm unaware of?

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 20:38

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

GreenNight posted:

File sharing services for sharing files with outside customers or venders instead of using email to send files.

Oh. Well good luck with that poo poo. Every time someone gets a e-mail from a file sharing service around here from a known customer who they know uses that service they automatically forward it to me and ask "Should I open this".

Yay.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 20:41

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

ranbo das posted:

I'm a quasi-intern at a smallish sized company (~50 people) that runs conferences. They basically hired me part-time to put out small fires while the two IT people put out the real fires and try to drag the company kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and now can't afford to get rid of me. One of my jobs involves the way our customers get their content posted online. Without going into too much detail, they are sent a word doc with the conference basic template, make changes to it, and send it back where some program reads it and makes the applicable changes (this program has been a "temporary stopgap" for at least five years while the actual interface for posting stuff gets finished, but the two real IT guys are always putting out fires and have no time to work on it. Right now the estimated rollout date for the new interface is 2016).

Now, our customers are typically terrible at following simple instructions, as all customers are, so when a doc breaks the cobbled-together program, it gets sent to me to post manually (basically just fooling around with some HTML). This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to hours depending on how terrible the customer is at following directions. Usually the mistakes are something simple, like they decide not to use the template we send them, and instead make up their own document, or they decide to say "gently caress your guidelines, I'm going to schedule lunch at 10 am". Last Tuesday, I got such an issue that floored me in it's stupidity.

Instead of just describing what I got, I'm going to do a little bit of roleplaying. I'm a department head at a fairly prestigious college in the USA, and I get a template. Upon this template there are simple instructions, amounting to "make changes on this document and return it to us". Well that's fairly easy, I'll just print out this word document and scrawl on it in sharpie.

Oh wait, how do I return this to them? I should probably scan this into my computer. Great, now I have a PDF with the information on it! Unfortunately, though, the template only had room for me to fill in the titles of the sessions, not the actual content. That's ok, I have this nifty tool that lets me add sticky notes to the PDF. Surely those will be easy to decipher.

Ok, this is great! I have my sharpie'd up pdf with notes all over it. Now I'll just throw this in a folder, zip it up, and send it off!

I responded to him letting him know this was not acceptable, and he would need to follow our format and give us a doc that was something resembling workable and please hurry, because you're a week overdue. I just sat down to an angry email to me, my boss, and the director of the company about how he is being mistreated and we are not respecting him or his position, and why don't we fix this issue. This is going to be so fun.

I'm wondering why he didn't print out the PDF, then fax it to you. He's not following the full idiots chain of logic.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 16:38

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

SEKCobra posted:

All that's going in there is lube. Or so you'd hope.

Yeah, look. You're an IT guy, you know what people will stick into a CD drive given a chance. Now there's a peripheral in the office with an inviting love hole. If you have one of these in the office; someone is going to gently caress it. And they aren't going to clean up.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 17:22

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

TWBalls posted:

Lack of cable management is definitely something that pisses me off. I'm constantly having to tell the other techs here to make sure they install the cable management arms when they're installing the servers. They never do, so all of our stuff looks like a rats nest. When I hear we're having a downtime for any of those systems, I usually find the cable management stuff, then install them. Things are slowly looking better in there, but goddamn, why can't people do poo poo right the first time, then we don't have to worry about fixing it later?

Seems like it boils down to laziness, but, as a bit of a lazy person myself, it seems to me that it makes more sense to do it right the first time, then you're not wasting time/energy trying to 'fix' it for the umpteenth time later down the road. If you're gonna be lazy, be smart about it.

I loving loath cable management arms. But I can work magic with velcro so the rack I have in right now still looks relatively tight and correct.

Relatively because I haven't fixed the server my boss racked n stacked yet.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 00:13

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

KillHour posted:

A call came in today.

A school district was wondering why their AV suddenly stopped working. They were using the free version of Avast! for over 4000 seats.

Man someone is about to get reamed.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 22:22

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Yeah poo poo I could keep that up for months before basic human guilt and restlessness made me press the issue.

Hell I once stretched a one month rotation on night shift indefinitely so I could finish ST:TNG.

If I'm in the building after hours doing some task that involves any sort of "Watching a task bar tick bye" I always bring a stack of DVD's or Blu Rays. Last week I forgot and ended up streaming on my Amazon Prime account.

I watched the Avengers while rebuilding an exchange server.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2013 23:11

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

evol262 posted:

It's almost like you work an in industry where you can walk away from that ticking bar or minimize the RDP window and work on something else.

I'm salary and being volunteered to work after hours. I'll be hosed if I'm going to wander the halls catching up on task lists on my time when I can watch the Avengers instead. If some motherfucker wants to call me "Not a team player" for being this way they can bring their stupid rear end in at 3am on saturday to work on poo poo while still doing their regular 8-5 on top of it.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 17:34

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

nitrogen posted:

most of this is hidden from teh customer, its just internal poo poo.

gently caress him. I hate people that give bullshit wild guess answers. It always sends me haring off in a wild direction when the same problem crops up again later.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 20:57

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Caged posted:

There's a slim chance they meant The Cloud, in which case you won't need that cable.

The next person that asks me about cloud backup solutions is getting punched in the dick. Backing up your lovely laptop with it's 256GB drive is a bit different than a 20tb NAS. Can it be done? Yes. But it will also incur a considerable expense.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2013 23:32

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

nitrogen posted:

They want to wire it in a mesh. They just asked me to order 4 port nics.

I've told them to eat poo poo and we're using a switch like we always do, and they are adamant that it wont work. I think it's because they have not historically been smart enough to make sure the vlans are made in such a way that jumbo frames work.

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAH. Not using a switch IS the hard way :psyduck:

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 18:49

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Erwin posted:

No it doesn't?

It does if you host all your shares off C: :smugdog:

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 21:05

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

I always assign the worst piece of poo poo I have in the shop to people who "Spill coffee on things".

# ¿ Nov 25, 2013 16:49

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

What I've done today is give them my mobile number (eep) and asked them to call me, bypassing our helpdesk, so I can log onto their PCs instantly.

Enjoy your promotion to their personal rep for every single loving problem they have. Even on your days off.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 17:09

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

Did it turn out they were VPNing in from home?

____

I'm curious, how does everyone wind down after a really stressful day? I'm losing a lot of sleep at the moment over various calls, having trouble switching off. Apart from drinking!

Dr. Who and video games.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 18:39

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Loose Ifer posted:

This is how it usually goes, but i keep HR's windows 8.1 laptops running, and am the only one here who knows how to use it pretty much, so i guess if they felt like burning bridges....oh who am i kidding i'm gonna get written up.

To be fair I'd write you up for that too.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 23:26

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

I'd have fixed the problem, left, then bitched to HR. If I refused to do work for idiots with superiority complexes I would never be able to engage with a corporate CEO again.

EDIT: And if he unplugged it again, I can't help self sabotage.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 23:36

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Granted I have enough clout in my organization (Read I'm at the manager level) that I'd have just made him look like an idiot on the spot.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 23:38

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Sounds like it's time for a new job.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 23:54

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

Set the desktop background to an image that includes the start button.

Set the background to a webpage that is nothing but the old windows desktop that plays a nope.wav every time you mash start.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2013 17:37

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

And I guess I'm history degree number six.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2013 20:32

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Jadus posted:

Based on install rate and ticket submission it is clear over 50% of our staff do not read email from IT.

This is news?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 17:53

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Cavepimp posted:

Any one of those things on its own is a nightmare. You need to get the hell out of there.

Ever thought about moving to Portland Oregon?

I'm convinced he's a bot that just scans and greps out random IT horror stories and them dumps them into us with a few keywords added so it all looks recognizable.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 19:23

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

ZetsurinPower posted:

I'd say having zero technical aptitude and no ambition while making $50k a year on a helpdesk and having the ability to work from home is hitting the jackpot for certain people here.

There are a couple people who have more potential but there is no path for promotion and the engineering staff doesn't take them seriously because of their peers. They have a strong goon-in-a-well mentality that keeps them on helpdesk for 7 years straight, it doesn't help that they are over-compensated and never pushed to improve (and the low performers are not disciplined in any meaningful way). All around bad environment for success.

Honestly if someone wanted to pay me good money (50k is not good money) to say "No I can't help you" and open tickets I'd probably do it. When I was in my 20's I was in IT because I "Loved it". Now I just want a paycheck good enough to last me to retirement. I'm either getting really pragmatic about all this poo poo, or I've dealt with HP printer drivers one too many loving times.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2014 20:47

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

skipdogg posted:

My company runs several call centers with roughly about 1000 seats in a 24/7/365 operation. I've priced out thin clients every 18 months for the last 4 years and they are more expensive than just putting a Optiplex 3xxx and a basic monitor on a desk every single time. The back end SAN and licensing just kill it when you compare apples to apples on initial cash outlay.

Thin clients can in the long run save you money if you care about ROI over 3 years or so. Just power alone would save us about 1,000 dollars a month in electricity bills, but I never got call center management to see past the initial larger capex outlay.

They save even more money once management realizes that with a good VPN and phone solution they don't even have to bother with offices anymore. With everything being tracked by metrics I can't for the life of me understand why centralized call centers still exist.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2014 20:49

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

ColdStreamNL posted:

Last Friday two virtual machines went down on a customer location, upon inspection it turned out snapshots created by Veeam backups filled the datastore and VMware couldn't create the vswap files to boot them. This customer has a problematic backup server which takes 3 weeks for a full backup to complete and thus snapshots exist way too long. Exactly the reason why I had disabled all snapshot based backups and 'strongly suggested' the customer to finally replace the backup server (which is about 9 yrs old). Whoever enabled those backup again, thanks!

So after about half an hour of deleting snapshots, booting the virtual machines and disable all backups everything is working correctly. Unfortunately that's not the end of this, of course we had to take "immediate and decisive action". Which resulted in my manager pushing a change done by a jr. tech where one of the virtual machines has been shrunk 20GB so the backups can be enabled again since "there's 125GB available space for snapshots"

Excellent example of addressing the symptom and not the cause, we still need to fix the problem only now we're 6 billable hours further down the road. Not to mention the most logical fix (purchase new storage for the backups and relocate Veeam) requires us to expand the virtual machine that the jr. tech took 6 hours to shrink, good luck explaining that one...

I had an SQL server go down the other day. Reason? My manager setup the drives to shadowcopy because he didn't trust our snapshots. 200GB db. 500 GB of shadowcopies.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2014 20:52

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Syano posted:

We got a strange one last week. One of our offices that does a particularly large amount of paper work sent in a ticket claiming the copier was taking a long time to produce copies. To a man we all laughed and talked about how stupid they were. I have literally never heard of something like that in my 16 years of IT. Til low and behold we look at it and sure enough its taking a long dang time to copy. 4 minutes by our timing for 3 sheets. Friggin weird. Anyone ever seen a copier start to slow down copying as it gets old?

Check the DPI settings. Also yes things get slower as they get older.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 15:44

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

The gently caress? That's the worst anti spam system I've ever seen. My barracuda drives me nuts sometimes but it works a hell of a lot better than that.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 17:13

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

tehloki posted:

Pranks that actually involve loving up somebody else's hardware/software are all idiot high school poo poo and are/probably should be fireable offenses

Just to show my age, I used to steal mouseballs.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 17:17

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

AlternateAccount posted:

90% sure there are optical nice that work on glass now.

Also: clear glass tables/desks are the worst thing.

Yeah god I don't want the accounting chick to see me groping myself during the meeting.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2014 15:17

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Zamboni Apocalypse posted:

Clear the remains from within, clean up the inside only, load with ~~new~~ functional parts, enjoy your new loaner/no-notice-new-employee box.

I'd honestly clean it up and use the case myself. I think it looks pretty rad. Here's my post apocalyptic pc.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2014 15:21

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

See Desk Top.
Work Desk Work!
Please Work Desk.

This reminds me too much of those C:\dos run shirts that were popular amongst nerds in the 90's. poo poo made my knuckles itch.

# ¿ May 6, 2014 17:19

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:09

Rhymenoserous: May 23, 2008

TEAYCHES posted:

48gb Outlook pst file.. corrupt... can't even archive that poo poo. Why....

This user is nice but she isn't going to like that I'm going to spend unbelievable amounts of time fixing this poo poo.

Run pst repair tool. Not fixed? gently caress it.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2014 18:40

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

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