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oh rly posted:I have been in a help desk position for a law firm for three years now. Luckily, I have not had to suffer like Dicktrauma, CorvetteFisher, or BlackswordCA. Although, there was one time where a squirrel literally knocked out the power for the entire block. Ancillary to that, you can say "I cannot reveal the information due to an NDA I signed at the outset of employment, but I can tell you I would find <x> number within my desired range for this position." That at least gives them a starting number and heads off an insulting lowball offer. Also, that's one helluva range they've got there, which to me indicates they're looking for an excuse to lowball or they've artificially inflated what they're actually willing to pay to attract more candidates (but would never, ever, ever make an offer at the upper end of that range). I think the biggest range I've ever been quoted was 15k.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:10
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 23:57 |
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So we have a number of tech-enabled conference rooms with laptops that were locked to the tables. A managing partner in the NY office, who I shall charitably call Fuckstick McGee, had a meeting where he wanted to move the laptop around the room, but couldn't because the laptop was locked down. He then throws the epic bitchy baby hissyfit to end all hissyfits and demands that every laptop in every conference room in every office be unlocked. Which we do, because our CIO is an idiot and we have no choice. That was three weeks ago. We are missing 27 conference room laptops and rising. In our most recent meeting, I made a motion for Fuckstick McGee to be the one responsible for locating them, or, failing that, be made fiscally responsible for replacing them. Sadly, my motion was not carried. Fun fact: we still have a great big pile of laptop locks we are not using, despite the clear evidence that our offices are staffed by people whose fingers are so sticky they can only be of gecko descent.
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Aug 16, 2013 17:57
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He's already got one.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:00
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Migishu posted:Bill the CIO for the missing laptops, then when he comes to complain, tell him that if Fuckstick McGee isn't going to be responsible, then the person who authorized unlocking the laptops is. No, the CIO is the dude who authorized Fuckstick McGee's Most Excellent Brain Solution to the problem of I COULDN'T MOVE A LAPTOP TWO FEET TO THE LEEEEFT WHHHHHY. He has now proceeded to make the situation my team's fault, because we're responsible for keeping tabs on hardware, but has explicitly stated we cannot do this by re-deploying the loving locks we were using to successfully do so in the first place. This CIO is also the dude who could not figure out that the sticker on the back of the mifi we gave him that said "Password: abloobloobloo" meant that "abloobloobloo" was the password to access the loving mifi. Dealing with that situation made me strongly suspect that the man is a complete illiterate. To give you some perspective, at this 2000+ employee, multi-office firm, there was ZERO hardware asset tracking until January of this year. But! We rolled out Windows 7 last summer, when a huge number of machines were replaced. If you had the brains god gave a loving peanut, you would think, "Hey, maybe we should do this massive, physically-locate-all-hardware asset project concurrently with this massive, physically-replace-and/or-image-all-hardware, to save a whole bunch of manhours and kill two birds with one stone!" Yeah, we got to do each bit separately, and then be bitched at by the lost hardware between the Win7 rollout and the asset management project, 6 months later. This also led to some fun discoveries, like our Hong Kong office (employees: 13) managing to stockpile 50+ laptops for no earthly goddamn reason, since only 3 users in that office even used laptops. That said, I have had two phone interviews so far and have another one on Wednesday. Also? This is by far and away not the worst job I've ever had. 
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Aug 19, 2013 18:26
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KennyG posted:Lets talk asset tracking. Do not under ANY circumstances use Provance, it's a rampaging piece of garbage. Also, that puppy is yours now, by right of dataroom guardianship.
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Aug 20, 2013 18:46
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Sirotan posted:A ticket came in. What are you unhappy about, this is carte blanche to go buck wild My suggestion is "well, this gives you great leverage for some international terrorism. Demand $50 million from the UN or you will shut down the internet - FOREVER."
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Aug 26, 2013 20:56
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The entire internet shuts down!
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An update on the Saga of Fuckstick McGee: Our missing laptop count hit 29. This winds its way back to the CIO - who approved unlocking the laptops in the first place - who decides that the new solution, instead of replacing the regular locks, will be to keep the laptops locked in the flimsy room cupboards when they are not actively in use. Today we find one of the cupboards shimmied open and two more laptops missing, bringing the grand total to 31. It's a clear case of theft, but I poked around Craigslist and eBay and none of our poo poo is showing up - we have a thief of moderate intelligence, it seems. The thing that kills me is we have a bunch of office services types who have nominal interaction with this tech, and we're paying them like $10 an hour. Of COURSE they have incentive to steal. It's on us to make that not happen, except our upper management has specifically barred us from using the only effective tool we have to make that stop happening. This whole situation is so loving stupid.
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Aug 26, 2013 21:05
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EuphrosyneD posted:This might've been already shot down, but what about getting some sort of indelible labels on them (like the STOPTheft Plate ) or getting Lojack for Laptops for your company? I'm not sure if you've followed the saga since the beginning, but the entire theft problem happened because upper management forced us to remove the laptop locks from machines that sit in the conference rooms, thus making them incredibly easy to steal. Despite 31 missing laptops - and no laptops having gone missing at any point when we were using the cable-locks - we are not allowed to cable-lock the laptops again. Because of one managing partner who threw a hissy fit when he couldn't physically move the laptop a foot to the side during his meeting, and the CIO folding like Superman on laundry day when it came to his babby's hysterical demands. Nobody on upper management is down for fixing a problem they themselves created. Besides, we don't even have to spend money to fix this problem, because we kept all the goddamn laptop locks that actually worked. They're just sitting in my boss's office, waiting to be useful again!
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Aug 27, 2013 00:33
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EuphrosyneD posted:Sorry Fuzzy, that really blows. I'd missed most of your ongoing saga of fail. 'Course you've got ammo to cover your rear end, right? Absolutely. The funny thing is, technically we're not even supposed to be in charge of these laptops - we're the desktop guys, we gave them to the audio-visual team, and the audio-visual team chucklefucks refuse to look for them at all, even though we've tried to tell them it's their problem. But from our boss on down, we have the chain of command telling us to do this mondo stupid thing. It is totally unacceptable for the laptops to be limited in motion in any way, because WHAT IF FUCKSTICK MCGEE WANTS TO MOVE THEM? Also? I'm not working around this stupidity. I am going to sit in the middle of this gibbering, mouthbreathing retardation and let upper management swing in the goddamn breeze. We've been raiding the discard pile for replacements - we're losing Lenovo T520s, and we're replacing them with Dell 6410's. I don't even care at this point. I'd put netbooks in those rooms if we had any. Fun fact: we also have a moratorium on purchasing new hardware, so I'm waiting with bated breath to see what happens when our discard pile also runs out!
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Aug 27, 2013 17:58
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Sirotan posted:I....I still use Winamp. They will take Winamp from my cold, dead hands.
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Sep 5, 2013 20:20
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:The terrible Document Management System that we use has a conference in November! Oh my god, that product used to be Hummingbird DM. . . . . Listen, okay, I will pay you money to punch some people right in the eye at that conference. $50 per punch. $100 bonus if you can knock their eyes clean out of their heads. For any upper management or Opentext programmer you can find. Not Shatner, though. Shatner's alright.
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Sep 16, 2013 21:13
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Yeah, I never say the reason I request PTO, ever. My boss does not need to know why I'm taking time off. So really, the interaction is probably more like "Hey Boss, can I have Thursday off in three weeks?" Boss: "Sure, put it on the calendar." You're reading some pretty crazy interactions into this situation.
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Sep 16, 2013 21:21
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Oh my god, the place I work is staffed entirely by loving clinical retards. So you may remember the Saga of Fuckstick McGee and the Stolen Laptops (which are never getting recovered, though we have successfully fobbed off the blame for them onto another dept at least.) Well, I'm working this evening, and here is what's happened. 1) We are currently in the middle of our open enrollment benefits period. 2) Our IT security manager, without notifying ANYONE, enlisted a third-party service to run a phishing test against us. 3) The phishing test had spoofed headers to appear to come from the benefits department. 4) The content of the test was "the benefits period is about to expire!" 5) This blew up the benefits dept, who had no idea what the e-mail was because nobody told anybody poo poo. 6) The genius security manager INCLUDED PARTNERS on the list of people to use for the testing. (We are a law firm, that is Not Okay.) 7) The benefits dept, having just blown up, e-mails the entire IT dept trying to figure out what's going on. 8) Genius security manager explains what he has done. 9) Benefits dept begs him to send an IT alert indicating what was actually happening. 10) "Oh, we'll get to that tomorrow." VERBATIM. There will be no repercussions for this behavior for the security manager. We're puttin' the rear end in profassionalz here, is what we're doing. Edit: when I stop posting it's because my office was burned down by an enraged mob of benefits employees. TheFuzzyLumpkin fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Oct 3, 2013 |
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Oct 3, 2013 23:08
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Don't you love being on the only team where you work that is actually held accountable for anything? I'm in that boat currently, it's maddening.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:03
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An amazing thing just happened. So I work for a law firm, and we have an attorney who absolutely refuses to interact in any way, shape or form with IT. Her secretary calls on her behalf and handles all things IT related. This is a behavior that is not going away. The secretary will call helpdesk, refuse to troubleshoot and demand that the ticket be immediately escalated, which HD does because the lawyer in question is a rainmaker partner and she gets whatever she wants. So I picked up a couple of those tickets and resolved the issue, so the secretary decides that I'm her new first point of contact. I repeatedly send her our "stop doing this and freaking call helpdesk template" e-mails a few times. She continues to e-mail me, all the while I'm not contacting her back. I then leave for a 2 week vacation with an OoO on saying when I'll be back, confident that the OoO will finally force her to call helpdesk. She loving waits the two weeks I'm out, then replies to the pre-vacation e-mail chain and asks if I now have time to help her NOW. This is not the amazing part. The amazing part is, when I went to my boss to say "OH MY GOD THIS BITCH," he ACTUALLY WROTE HER AN E-MAIL THAT SLAPPED HER DOWN FOR DOING THIS. I taste tin. The world seems purple. Am I having a stroke? Am I dying?
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Oct 31, 2013 20:01
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To this day I am utterly thankful that I got out of an eDocs environment. That poo poo was heinous.
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Nov 27, 2013 10:21
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Ugh, I hate special snowflake users. We're a multisite firm headquartered on the east coast with various satellite offices. We have a bunch of very small offices out in CA (under 100 people.) We had one dude transfer here to HQ from a CA office who has decided that he's too used to having people at his beck and call and I'm his new whipping bitch for initial point of contact, and he whines like an rear end in a top hat at me every time he puts in a ticket. This is because I picked up the first ticket he had when he transferred here. What he doesn't understand is the squeaky wheel here does not get the grease. The squeaky wheel gets progressively more ignored; I now don't respond to any of his e-mails before three days have passed and even then all he gets the form letter telling him to contact User Support as first point of contact. I'm waiting for the loving penny to drop for this douchebag. He keeps trying the whole "this issue is affecting my ability to work," except that's not magical code around here; we're allowed to use our gigantic brains to tell shitstains that being unhappy with the resolution when you plug your laptop in to your monitors at home is not in any way preventing you from doing your goddamn job. I think I'm going to kick his e-mail response delay up to a week.
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Dec 5, 2013 20:36
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English major with poli sci concentration, master's in library science, of course I do IT for a living! Seriously, Lenovos have the best hardware I've worked with. I've seen them eat abuse that no machine should take and come out functional enough to do data recovery. Can't ask for better than that. (I have worked for some places with users who were absolute chimpanzees about loving up their poo poo.)
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Dec 18, 2013 19:20
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When a guy in the UK gave out my personal e-mail address (not related to a real name at all) for his cell phone account, his bill unexpectedly jumped by several hundred pounds a month, and mysteriously keeps jumping back up every time he corrects it. At this point it's turned into a game that's been ongoing since last November, I'm wondering when the penny is going to drop for this dumb son of a bitch. Also, I have had a 100% better success rate at getting Apple IDs out of people when you call it "your app store username and password." They have no idea what an Apple ID is, but they usually know the info they have to put in to download Angry Birds.
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Jan 14, 2014 01:37
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Mother of God. So, I work for a law firm, we have remote access via Citrix (we only provide apps, not full desktops.) A user calls in because he's trying to use a legal program, CPI, over Citrix and he's having problems getting in. So I check and his permissions are set up perfectly to use CPI locally, but when he logs in to Citrix it's opening up a website for the CPI Web Access Module, which I've never even heard of. Curious, I assign myself to the Citrix group for it and I get the same thing - no actual program, just the web service. So I start on down the chain of phone calls to try and figure out what the hell is going on, and discover the following: 1) The CPI application can't be virtualized (this is a straight lie, I've worked at other firms where it has been, but I don't even bother trying to argue with our engineering team anymore because they have zero accountability for their poo poo, as the rest of this story will demonstrate.) 2) The Web Access Module is the correct way to remote access it, but nobody bothered to set it up so it will work directly when outside the firm. 3) The URL for the Web Access Module in Citrix is wrong. 4) The actual procedure is to keep the incorrect icon on the Citrix page, have them open IE and type the correct web access module and log in that way. But he can't be removed from the group that makes the regular icon display. Why?  5) Except in order to get to the WAM they need a separate WAM account - the AD groups that manage regular CPI login won't manage the WAM. 6) Who is the WAM administrator? 7) I call the dev team and lie to them until they make me a WAM administrator so I can set this guy's account up. 8) I get everything set up and test it, and it's working "correctly" - I'm putting that in quotes because nothing about this situation is remotely correct - and 9) I sit there not wanting to call the user back because I am genuinely ashamed at the answer I am going to provide him. Seriously, I need to get promoted to the engineering team because the first thing you can do when you get there is cross "give a gently caress about anything, ever" off your to-do list.
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Jan 24, 2014 22:31
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CatsOnTheInternet posted:I work in Citrix primarily, and just about every story I hear of it from other companies makes me cringe. I would have a lot more sympathy for them if there were significant turnover on the engineering team, but I think the shortest period of time any of them have worked here is at least five years, and nobody has quit in at least that long. How can you lose institutional memory when you haven't freaking lost anybody in the institution? I seriously think they began contracting poo poo out without telling anybody, which is why none of them seem to know how to do anything.
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Jan 25, 2014 00:00
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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.
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Jan 25, 2014 01:40
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A ticket came in . . . . Our BESes have a decommission date. HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH We're moving to MDM on a limited list of BYOD. No more Blackberries, no more managing international services.
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Feb 20, 2014 22:40
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I like that they put "company" in quotes. Makes it really obvious that these are "professionals."
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May 12, 2014 20:20
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Did my first malicious hardware replacement today! We got a bunch of Lenovo T430's in (a tiny, incremental upgrade from our 420s). We weren't upgrading anybody, just using them as replacement stock for broken laptops. We had one user flip out, saying she was constantly getting BSoDs on a Win7 PC and she couldn't work like it anymore, and so forth and so on until she got a 430. We just got in some newer models, and she throws the same tantrum: all of a sudden her PC is constantly BSoDing, she can't work, yada yada. So she's getting a 420 replacement.
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May 15, 2014 22:29
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I wouldn't define giving somebody a bong instead of a computer "malicious" in any sense of the word.
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May 15, 2014 23:07
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Okay, so, in lieu of like $20 gift card or whatever for employee appreciation day, this year the firm decided to give us all a logo-branded portable charger. Which, since I'm the kind of person who does this, I looked up the exact model and discovered it ran about $13 a pop. Well, the batteries of the chargers have basically all started to swell precipitously. Like, breaking the back off the device swelling. I work for a law firm. The majority of our staff? Lawyers. JAZZ HANDS (IT was not involved in this purchase at all, thank god.)
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Jun 5, 2014 20:35
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♩♪♫♬ one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong ♩♪♫♬
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Jul 1, 2014 16:19
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The funniest thing was, the user actually had limited connectivity! He couldn't get on the intranet, but he had incredibly slow access to guest. I almost felt bad pulling the loving thing, it was trying SO HARD.
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Jul 1, 2014 16:29
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This hard drive really, really, really didn't want to be a hard drive. I'm too lazy to look it up but since it's a 160gb drive, I'm pretty sure that's every sector on the entire disk. 
TheFuzzyLumpkin fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 23:12
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The problem with helpdesks is anyone remotely competent gets themselves a new job/promotion within a year or so of starting, which means that about 90% of the people on a helpdesk are the ones who are too stupid/drunk/unmotivated to actually learn anything or exert themselves in any way. My last position, the helpdesk was outsourced to Chicago, and those mouthbreathers hosed up the whole "send the ticket to the office in which the user is physically located" on a basis so regularly that I surreptitiously checked whether or not we were operating a halfway house charity.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:52
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Sirotan posted:hot dog stand 4 lyf yo Ahahahahaha oh my god, I have a babby tech right now and I'm trying to teach him to lock his workstation when he gets up from his desk. Every time I catch him forgetting, I've been loving with his display, but this . . . this is gonna be on another level. I've already stored it on his C drive, he won't even see it coming.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:47
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 23:57 |
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Jesus Christ, I have just seen the worst helpdesk ticket I have ever seen. It came in without a user name on it - classed as a "New Employee," which is traditionally used only for new hires, where the ticket will contain all the necessary details. This ticket reads, verbatim: “No information on who this is from. Or what needs to be done exactly. Referring up to make sure if there is a way to locate whoever sent this in gets the assistance they need. I do not even know which office to really send this to.” There is a single line from a spam filter message, which is not our spam filter, containing an e-mail address that is in no way, shape or form associated with the firm. There is no other information. In a gigantic fit of pique that's going to bite me in the rear end tomorrow, I escalated it back to the useless loving idiots on the Helpdesk with a single note: GATHER MORE INFORMATION. Like, a loving user name.
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Dec 9, 2014 00:48
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