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?

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Late in the old daily poo poo thread, I complained about intermittent network issues causing the whole building to lose Internet access for a few seconds to a few minutes, and that the Help Desk kept closing the ticket without it being resolved. My boss called someone he knows from when he worked at the main campus and bypassed the help desk. While still on the phone, it was quickly determined that the DHCP server ran out of IP addresses for the VLANs on our campus, somehow causing the entire network to poo poo itself. Some people around here are dumber than a sack of doorknobs and worth less in scrap value.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2013 16:47

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 12:27

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

My coworkers are great in almost every way, but one thing in particular drives me crazy. I have my monitors facing away from the door, so they wander in and either walk around my desk or lean over to see what I'm doing. I keep turning the monitor stand/tree a bit further away from the door, and I spent a few hundred dollars extra when I got new furniture to put as much desk space as possible between the other side and me (mostly so three or four of us can spread out 24x48" printouts of blueprints or system diagrams for design/planning and all have space to go over them,) and it makes no difference, they have to see what I'm doing. It's completely harmless, it's not like they're trying to catch me slacking off, but I've mentioned repeatedly that it bugs the poo poo out of me, actually filled out a work order to have a trap door installed in the floor of my office and sent it to my boss "asking" that he sign off on it, and they still do it. One of these days they're going to push me to my breaking point and God help me, I will Goatse someone.

In other news, a server running 6 drives in RAID 5 had a failure on one drive and a drive puncture (Dell's term for an undetected failure causing the controller to calculate parity on an undetected logical bad block.) Fortunately, our local sysadmin is overly competent and was able to boot the previous snapshots of those VMs on another server within 20 minutes (we can't have automatic failover because Network Engineering is literally a room full of wind-up monkeys wearing fezes and clapping cymbals who once manually blacklisted our print server, which is on the server VLAN, without telling anyone about it so our sysadmin had to call the help desk to find out why it couldn't connect to the network.) Dell support was unusually helpful and I'm sure it wasn't the fault of the person on the phone that the two replacement drives failed out-of-box and the replacements for those were lost by FedEx and took three days to arrive with next day shipping.

In other news, it took me four failed cables to realize that at some point in the past year someone put two types of crimp sleeves in the same box. They're visually almost identical but are ~0.3mm different in diameter and using the larger sleeves with the smaller connectors gives a connection that you would expect to withstand a 90lb pull force but comes apart if you look at it funny and probably leaks enough RF that the FAA is going to send me an angry letter if I don't check everything and fix stuff soon.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2013 03:20

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

There's a discussion on out IT listserv about numerous issues with Optiplex 9010s. We only have one at our location and in two weeks it's gone through 4 hard drives and a motherboard. Others are reporting bluescreening out of box, failing to image, and throwing hundreds of nonexistent MAC addresses at switches and the DHCP server. Failure rates not seen since the days of the Optiplex 270. Anyone else have 9010s and have a similar disaster?

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 15:22

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

GreenNight posted:

We had to block Netflix because managers would rather we block sites than manage their god drat employees properly.

Also, we have dumbasses who watch Netflix at work.

After going from everyone having local logons with admin rights to managed workstations on a domain, we had someone outright request that we update flash player so she could play Farmville. Actually, we didn't give everyone admin rights, she was the one user who was restricted and we still had to reimage her computer literally every week because of viruses and malware. Her supervisor doesn't give a flying gently caress about anything, so we just refused the request.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2013 20:49

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Our sysadmin said something about Windows 8.1 and now there's a lot of incoherent shouting coming from his office and he keeps saying "Start Menu."

Lum posted:

My T&Cs for a redundancy (lay off in US terms) are 4 weeks notice and 1 week's pay for every year I've worked there, currently 3 years.

If they want to march me off site there and then, it would be either "gardening leave" when you're technically still employed and aren't allowed to work for someone else, but they don't want you showing up, or "pay in lieu of notice" where I'd get seven weeks pay and stop being an employee.

Not great. If I can last a few more months then it becomes 4 years which would be slightly better.

A lot better than what you US people get though.

My biggest fear right now is that the new buyer is American, so while I'm protected by UK law, the culture may be more closely aligned with US law. Not sure I have it in me right now to go through an employment tribunal.

In case of layoffs we get two months' notice plus another month's notice per year we've worked here with a maximum of 12 months' notice. Unused vacation and comp time are paid out, holidays and personal days can be used or you lose them. If you get laid off and you're eligible for any job with a vacancy, they have to give you that job if you want it, same once they start hiring again.

totalnewbie posted:

See, the problem isn't with the idea, it's with the people executing them.

Since IT outages can potentially cost a lot of money for the company, it should be perfectly reasonable for people to stay reachable as much as possible, in the event that everything catches fire (figuratively).

And then, ideally, if something pops up, the person can just say "Yeah, I can take care of that in the morning" or whathaveyou and everyone is happy. Or, you just don't respond and all that's said is, "Did you get that message last night?" "Yeah, I was in the middle of something so I couldn't answer it." "Okay, cool. Please take care of it when you can."

But what really happens is that people have unrealistic expectations, etc. and can't be an adult about things, so you have to say "Nope, if I'm not working, I'm not doing anything work-related, even if it's answering a message" because if you give an inch they'll take a mile.

I made the mistake of watching a few minutes of Fox News a few weeks ago and they were talking about how ridiculous it was that people would ignore an email from their boss while off the clock and not expect to be fired for it. I'll answer my phone and check my email as a courtesy if I have time, but our contract explicitly states that doing so is voluntary and if your boss wants you on call, you getting an hour of comp time for every 4 you're on call plus 1:1 for travel and doing work.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Oct 17, 2013

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 18:55

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Between one coworker's claims of news bias and conspiracies against Apple and another trying to tell me that the NSA could have a backdoor in AES-256 that nobody noticed or is undetectable, I think someone slipped stupid pills into my department's breakfast.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 20:02

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

We don't have hold music. If we put you on hold you get silence until someone picks up the phone and if nobody answers, you can leave a voicemail that the system promptly discards. Actually, I don't know if it discards it, but it certainly won't flash the new message light on my phone or be retrievable if I call the voicemail system. On the off chance that I get a call and message that are actually important, I leave my office phone forwarded to my cell phone every second that I'm out of my office.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 04:43

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

A stream of upset users came in. Administration has declared that all printers will be removed from faculty offices next week. While I support this completely, I wish that the IT department had been included on the email so it didn't catch us off guard.

Knormal posted:

A ticket came in, but not to us thankfully. Last weekend the phone system in one of our small and older buildings died somehow, I only got the story second-hand from non-technical people but the tales ranged from "it caught on fire" to "it melted'. Either way something blew, and all last week the entire first floor had a chemical smell. But they won't prop open and doors because of security , so they've had big industrial fans giving the smell a nice circular tour of the first floor.

By the end of the week they had people start making (totally justifiable) medical claims and staying home, meanwhile we're trying to swap out their PCs with Windows 7 ones. This is completely out of our area, but I don't know what they expect to happen if they don't open the doors. I guess the regular ventilation system will vent the smell out eventually, but it's going to take weeks.

If only there was a government agency that was responsible for Occupational Safety and Health ...

You can report this kind of thing anonymously and with a building full of sick people there's no way it will come back to you.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 22:11

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I forgot to lock my laptop yesterday while working in a public area with our sysadmin (former Army Sgt.) I came back, unlocked it, and saw his message in notepad "Lock your computer or do pushups."

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 03:16

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

:| Hey GWBBQ, we need more remotes for the combo units on the TV carts

OK, can you get me the model number on that?
:| I don't have one handy

He's generally really good, but I think I'm going to have to talk with him about taking initiative and working independently without explicit instructions.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 15:39

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

larchesdanrew posted:

Does anyone else have supervisors that have intimate knowledge of everything that is going on, but refuse to let you in on the secret so you can do your loving job, then swoop in at the last minute to interfere with every single loving thing you end up working on and take all the credit? Do you first find out about every single project, big or small, three days after it's supposed to have been finished? Are your repeated inquiries related to how things are set up and operate completely ignored, only to have said reaction come back to bite you in the rear end?

Is it just me or is this basically IT in a nutshell, because I think I'm beginning to understand this whole thing.

My boss knows everything that is going on, lets us know about it (even if he has to tell us to keep quiet about it,) steps in to help at the last minute if we need it, and gives us full credit for our work without even mentioning that he was involved. You need to :yotj:

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Mar 21, 2014

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 01:01

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I submitted a request for remote desktop access to a workstation in my office, specifying that I wanted to remote in so I didn't have to stand up. Response: "I can set a GPO or you can enable it yourself." I picked the GPO, waited 15 minutes, and now I'm remoted in.

I am lazy as gently caress.

Naksu posted:

I took these pictures today. One of the Vectras has a note saying "OK 12.2.2004." I would like to know what part of a Pentium 166mhz was "ok" in 2004.

I found one of those old Vectras with a Pentium MX 166MHz a few weeks ago. Between the processor, motherboard, and RAM, it was worth about $15 in scrap. The 486SX chip alone has around $20 worth of gold in it.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2014 19:54

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

pr0digal posted:

I wonder how this monstrosity started out

Location isn't going to improve, but that's an hour with a label maker, a couple hundred bucks on Monoprice, and half an hour of tidying up cables to make it look nice and be easy to troubleshoot. For $1000 more, it could be enclosed and ventilated properly.

larchesdanrew posted:

"End of life is just a scam to drum up sales. There's nothing wrong with using an operating system for many years past end of life."

What. The. gently caress.

It's time to start subtly sabotaging equipment.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2014 03:48

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Our new CIO has been making some big changes for the better. On the chopping block today: the help desk hold limit. Under the previous CIO, people had complained about long wait times when calling the help desk and to address this, a six-minute hold time limit was established. After 6 minutes on hold, your call was automatically disconnected to prevent you from waiting any longer.

The new system will prompt you every few minutes to ask if you would like to leave a message or continue to hold.

# ¿ May 9, 2014 18:10

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

SubjectVerbObject posted:

Virtual Hold. Ug. It is a special application that interfaces with your PBX via whatever CTI interface you have. When it works, it works, when it doesn't, good luck. It also requires some infrastructure that you may not have, depending on the size of your company.

To give you an idea of where we are technology-wise, we can't go to VOIP because the Telecom department wants us renting analog phones from them (we were blocked from buying our own by the provost's office.) For another measure of it, a year after asking all schools and departments to get on board with consolidating the university into one Active Directory, the official count of how many ADs and Domain Controllers is still a number plus/minus 10.

# ¿ May 9, 2014 19:58

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I am now officially the person in charge of the department when my boss is not here. This comes with no official change in title or pay, of course.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 20:57

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Dell technicians have finished reviewing the system logs for our Series 7 EqualLogic storage arrays and found a bug in the 7.0.x firmware that causes a kernel panic and restart after 248 days of uptime. They say we should be OK since the next firmware patch will be released sooner than the next time they're expected to crash.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2014 16:50

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

m.hache posted:

Do you have the bug report for this/was it posted publicly? I have a friend who is installing a new Equalogic in his environment and I want to make sure he doesn't get blasted a year down the road when this happens.

All I have is an internal email quoting the Dell tech stating "The issue is one we have seen and should be corrected wtih firmware later this year."

# ¿ Oct 6, 2014 22:55

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

President Ark posted:

See, everything but that could be excusable as wear and tear, although I'm not sure how a laptop could rack up that much unless he was using it to practice his Gallagher routine or something. Screws, though? I speak from experience when I say that it's hard as poo poo to remove laptop screws when you actually are trying and have the correct tools; there's no conceivable way someone could remove the screws by accident unless he hit it with a magnetic sledgehammer or something.

I actually had a screw fall out of my laptop the other day, fortunately on my bed so I could find it easily.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 18:15

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Fenrisulfr posted:

"I was moving my computer and I think I broke a thing 'cause now my computer doesn't work!"

Hmm, I think I may see your problem.

The bits in the top left were stuck in the computer, the rest was sitting on the floor. I guess the DisplayPort cable was a bit short and their solution was to give the computer a big ol' yank. Still don't know where the rest of the plastic bits went. I was honestly kind of surprised that the DisplayPort on the computer still worked when I replaced the cable.

DisplayPort and HDMI are supposed to break like that to avoid destroying the port they're plugged into.

m.hache posted:

I'm starting to realize that faster work sets a precedence that I can't always adhere to.

Set the bar low is what I'm getting at.

I always wait 2-3 minutes before responding to support calls even when I'm doing nothing to avoid building unrealistic expectations.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 23:21

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Trying to move a professor's files (entire life's work) from a pair of external hard drives to OneDrive because it would be kind of nice for it to be backed up somewhere other than the other hard drive in his laptop bag that frequently travels with him internationally, on boats, etc. OneDrive sync failed because most of his 560,000 files are over the 254 character limit due to his Byzantine directory structure and naming convention, and most of it is duplicate files because every year he makes a copy the previous year's folder with everything in it duplicated even though the vast majority remains untouched

We tried moving everything to our university's internal enterprise file storage and setting it up for access from anywhere, and we get emails like "THIS IS NOT THE SOLUTION!" with the body being a rant about how slow access is from off campus demanding to move it all back to the portable drives. We tell him to run a speed test, and when he finally gets around to it he does it from on campus.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 17:09

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 12:27

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I'm chairing the search committee for an IT support position and an applicant listed a lingerie store on their resume, stating that they did IT work for the radiology department. I'm so confused.

cage-free egghead posted:

I work in Desktop Support for a pretty large company. Most days are pretty normal but lately we've been getting a lot of poo poo like this:

These are people who make executive decisions on multimillion dollar projects but can't be hassled to remove paper from a jam.

Our problems are more with printers than shredders, but you don't want anyone in management getting anywhere near a paper jam. I can't even begin to explain how someone trying to clear a paper jam caused $30,000 of damage to a copier, but that's life.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 17:51

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