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vibur posted:That's one thing good I can say about this place. The company is very pushy about ethics. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. So when my boss tried to badger me into violating a Windows license, instead of saying things like 'unlicensed' or 'violation' or even 'illegal', I just said, "That would be highly unethical." That brought an immediate end to it and a born-again willingness to explore other options. It's true, the Bible does support Microsoft licensing: Deuteronomy 17:5 then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has done this evil deed to your gates, that is, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death.
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Jun 17, 2014 15:47
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dogstile posted:
This is easy. Issue resolved by escalation to second line (or sales). Closing ticket and creating related case for escalation. The last time I company I worked for started talking about closing a certain number of tickets a month, I told my manager, 'Sure! How many do you want? Let me open up my ticketing system and I will get them for you right now.' I don't think that got the message across, but folks in foreign office centers kicking our butts in ticket count because they opened a ticket for every phone call or email they got did.
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Jun 22, 2014 14:56
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I have tomorrow off and am doing nothing, hopefully. The rest of my family has the summer off, so they tend to get bored and want to do things when I am off work, like camping. That is fine, but it ends up being a lot of preparation and stress and I come back not exactly rested. The goal for tomorrow is to go to a park and sit in the sun.
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Jul 2, 2014 15:52
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I remember an operations manager laughing at me when I suggested that people on overnight shifts at the NOC should get trained on the programs they used instead of paging out the application admins for any little question. His point was if someone had any brains they weren't going to work nights for 15/hr. My response was  6 months later.
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Jul 6, 2014 15:44
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Ok, fax machines suck. I have a customer that moved from local ISDN lines to centralized SIP trunks. Apparently they just did this one day and tested it by making a few phone calls and calling it good. Now I am in fax hell because most fax machines are not working. 80% were not working due to a specific codec issue that is resolved, but should have been configured correctly before they went SIP. The rest of the problems are random depending on which SIP provider is used, what kind of fax machine it is, and other things like how heavy their trunk utilization is. This has been going on for a month. Twice a week I get an email with new faxes reporting problems and hopefully a trace showing why the call is not completing. Twice a week, even though they can see all of the different issues, I get an email asking why it is taking so long to fix the 'fax issue' as if it was a simple problem and not a major pain in the rear end caused by them dumping things into production without testing or even thought. Sigh, I kinda stopped drinking.
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Jul 9, 2014 15:36
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spidoman posted:You know what really pisses me off? When a large software company decides that all of their contractors will work a maximum of 18 months. And after that must take at least a six month break from the company. This is actually a legal thing. The thinking goes that if they work more than 18 months, then they should be full time employees, and the contractors could sue or involve the labor board or whatever to be made permanent. I quit a job like this in the 90's. Contractors were a max of 18 months. I had worked there for 12 months, was 3 months into the fiscal year, and there was a hiring freeze for the rest of the year. I knew I only had 6 more months and started looking.
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Jul 22, 2014 14:22
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Alereon posted:So how did disabling link speed auto-negotiation become and remain a best practice? In modern times I've only seen or heard of autonegotiation issues or speed fluctuations with bad hardware or cables that would have shown up as packet loss or link flapping with a forced link speed. I mostly wonder because of the number of maintenance windows I see scheduled because GigE really should have more than 100mbit of throughput (or a DS3 more than 10mbit) so I can't see how it makes sense. Because older equipment, and I am talking 10+ years old or more, had problems negotiating duplexity, so if you had a newer device, it wouldn't get a response from the 15 year old 3com hub or whatever, so it would go to half. Special snowflake vendors (example: Avaya) got tired of being blamed for issues when really it was the fact that the customer half-assed their network, so they preached 100/full. Obviously modern networking equipment does auto/auto fine, but there are still folks who don't know any better and still try to lock everything to 100/full. You still run into the occasional problem, though. I remember being on a conference call troubleshooting a flaky network connection. The tech traced the connection from server, to patch panel under the floor, and found it went to a hub under the floor. Someone on the call said, "You mean data switch?" No, it was an old hub that somehow got put in place years ago.
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Jul 25, 2014 18:28
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[quote="dogstile" post="432778697"] Two hours into the day and my manager is telling me that other people have closed six tickets and i've only closed one (I've closed two and raised one, but I digress). What he doesn't seem to understand is that they had "help, i've forgotten my password" or "help, I can't login" tickets which are solved in 2 minutes by anyone who's been here longer than week. I've got Licensing issues, printer installations across entire sites and i've just taught a lovely 60 year old woman how to use the program. Of course i've only closed 2 tickets you knob, different tickets take different amounts of time to complete! In my experience, the only way to win this game is to take the knowledge you gain working actual tickets and get another job. Once people only care about stats, you cannot reason with them, you can only hit the correct numbers. You boss is probably not as much of an idiot as you think. He probably has a boss somewhere up the chain who only cares about numbers, and is hammering him to make sure the numbers are correct. High level managers get bonuses and promotions by telling their bosses that they will 'improve ticket closure rates by 10%' or some such, not by saying, 'we will help people with complicated issues.' It sucks, but this kind of thing is happening everywhere,even places where the goals are even less measurable, like teaching, medicine, and social work.
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Jul 28, 2014 14:14
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You guys and your fancy degrees. I have .0175 radians.
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Aug 5, 2014 04:13
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SamDabbers posted:OCD-like anxiety So speaking of this, does any one else have to stop and look at everything 2-3 times before making service affecting changes? Like if I go to reboot something I have to stop, check to be sure I am in the right system, check to make sure I am within the maintenance window, etc, and then do it again.
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Aug 7, 2014 15:39
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Greg Jackson posted:Being smart and good with computers is definitely an appropriate substitute for a mechanical engineering degree My brother-in-law is a ME that works on computer and network hardware. He does a lot of drawings, but also does stuff like makes sure the power requirements are met, and that the airflow through the case is sufficient for cooling.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:41
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Comcast is outsourcing a lot of their call center work to lowest cost vendors. For a while they were using Canadians, but lately it is whatever West, Convergys, etc will give them.
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Aug 14, 2014 04:50
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Pissing me off: Comcast internet. I work from home. For the first 2 years it was rock solid, but at a certain point they did upgrades to increase speed, and it has sucked. Multiple days in a row with either it down completely for hours or it bouncing all the time. Their internet support is crap and either tell me their is an outage so nothing can be done, or tell me it is my equipment or house wiring, even though when I call there is a cut through announcement stating that there is an outage in my area. I am not concerned for my job yet, but it is really starting to cause issues with productivity. fake edit: It appears that their network has become sentient, because it dropped for 20 minutes just as I was about to post this.
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Aug 20, 2014 19:32
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You are sort of spot on. 2 years ago we lost connection, called into support, and was told that our modem was dead and we needed to buy a new one. So I ran out and got a new one. When I called into support to swap MAC's, I got the "there is an outage in your area" message. So we just got BS'ed by their support. We put the new modem aside and forgot about it. Fast forward 2 years and they do speed upgrades that require a DOCSIS 3 modem and we get emails and phone calls telling us to upgrade. We remember we bought a new modem, and it was DOCSIS 3. So we replaced it. No effect. We did have a tech come out and check the house and local lines and he did a few things, but every time it is down for a while, there is definitely a node outage in the area.
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Aug 20, 2014 19:44
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anthonypants posted:If you have a splitter, but you're not using it, why is it still even plugged in? This was one of the things the tech addressed when he came out. We have internet, but no cable. When the house was built, they put cable connections in 4 rooms and a 6 way splitter in the box in the basement. He capped everything that was not in use. Of course that didn't help that much, given that every time we have a problem lasting more than 3 minutes, we call in and get the "from your address, we see there is an outage in your area" message. Amd my former company tried setting up teams of experts to address problems. Unfortunately they used the GE model of layoff the lowest 10% every year. Even when they made allowances for the fact that were experts, they lost some folks who were concerned that they could be laid off and left.
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Aug 21, 2014 14:20
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:When you make a mistake which forces me to drop everything else I'm working on and put in 3 hours of work resolving an issue you've created, and I inform you of completion of same, do you I think Scott Adams said that you want a job where you piss on the floor, not one where you clean up piss. Sorry if this derails back to bathroom chat. I'll just go back to my mop.
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Aug 28, 2014 22:16
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Thanks Ants posted:gently caress having anything to do with telephony. I support Avaya products and I approve of this message.
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Sep 3, 2014 01:29
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evol262 posted:This isn't about you personally. Please stop taking it personally and making strawman arguments. I am going to give an example that is in no way directed to any poster, but is exactly what evol is describing. We had a brand new Oracle DBA. Actually it turned out that he did desktop support for Oracle, but used his employment to take a bunch of free Oracle training. He had all book knowledge and very little experience. Upon starting, he logged into the production servers and saw that the application servers for various geographies had the same database SID. One of the first things the books tell you is that all databases should have a unique SID. Did he bring this to anyone's attention? No. Instead he logged into each server and made the SID unique. Of course the application that accessed the database had the SID hard coded, and the whole application server existed as a package of database, scripts and web server, so making this change brought down production everywhere. It is the first time I have ever seen a lessons learned document state "do not allow xxxx access to production." The guy had good intentions, I guess, although this was just the first in a string of things that eventually put him on the layoff list. If he had just asked anyone, he would have gotten information about why things were that way, but instead he came in thinking he knew better.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:41
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So I am having a user moment. I am sitting at my desk watching the hourglass spin. My PC is frozen, and the ticketing system keeps timing out. I have 24 tickets, most for important customers, and I am getting escalated on at least 3. All I want if for it to Just Work. I thought about calling IT, since whenever we bring up performance problems, the first thing our management says is "did you put in a ticket?" But I know that it is the ticketing system having issues, again, and the last time people tried to work with IT on slowness issues, the helpdesk told them it was because they were downloading toolbars and malware from the internet and to run malwarebytes (we got an email shortly after stating the ticketing server was going down for a reboot). Plus most of my time has to be accounted for on tickets, so I don't have time to sit on the phone. I can see why people go running for support at times. The last thing I need right now is to be troubleshooting my own stuff. I have too much else to work on.
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Sep 5, 2014 17:59
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TWBalls posted:Not trying to be a dick but, you do sound like an end user. Oh I agree, like I said, and end user moment. I have so many demands on me that when things don't work, the stress just gets overwhelming. As it was, I waited 5 minutes and things settled down. Yay 5 minute break. Back to the grind.
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Sep 5, 2014 18:38
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My job is telephony and I had to stop drinking so much. I hate it.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:24
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Welp, just had a call that was a case review for open cases for our biggest customer. Myself and a coworker handle most of the cases from them, including all of the big nasty ones, in addition to handling other customers. We found out on the call that there should be 5 full time employees working only on this customer's cases. This explains stress level, missed lunches, unpaid overtime and my general feeling that once I started supporting the customer that the job changed from laid back tech support to stress factory. I'm freaking pissed, but I am not sure what I can do given mortgage, wife's job situation, childcare arrangements, etc. I can't see them hiring 3 more people, considering how hard it has been to hire more, and the fact that they are actively firing folks for non performance.
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Sep 16, 2014 20:40
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Volmarias posted:PM surgically forced users eyelids open and had them watch their password being typed over and over again. Attached punishment electrodes to users naughty bits and forced them to type their password 10 times in a row, correctly. Removed electrodes when user revealed that screams were of pleasure, shuddered. This is even better of you didn't read the posts above and though PM meant Project Manager.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:02
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meanieface posted:We're like PILOTS Eject! Eject! Eject!
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Sep 29, 2014 15:44
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stubblyhead posted:I seem to remember someone with a story of an elderly user requesting that her tower be walled off (and this somehow actually being done), and that over time everyone with any knowledge about it either retired or moved on. Then her computer finally bit the dust, and no one could find it, forcing them to break out blueprints or something to get to the bottom of it. This sounds like the opening of a D&D module. Yes I am a geek.
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Sep 29, 2014 21:44
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stubblyhead posted:Yes, I'm sure telling employees to risk their lives to save replaceable equipment would never result in a costly lawsuit. I used to have an office that was in a data center in the basement of a building. The building had regular fire suppression, but the data center had halon. My cube was in the data center itself. The first thing they told me when I move there was if the fire alarm went off, I had 30 seconds to get out of the area before the halon replaced all the oxygen.
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Oct 3, 2014 19:37
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Oddhair posted:AT&T is the thorn in my side this week. We can reliably get busy signals on any of our ~125 DID numbers, like every other test call we place during business hours is returning busy. Their support has been hot-potatoing this issue back and forth since last Wednesday, and only today have they figured out this affects the whole Houston area. I can't tell where the capacity problem lies, but it is affecting calls from mobile phones to all BVOIP customers. I have been marginally involved with a similar issue, which I will try to describe. When you make a call from any phone, it goes to your carrier. The carrier then has to route it to the destination carrier. The route it takes can go through many other carriers. The reason for this is first just plain connectivity - getting the call from point A to point B - and second different carriers have different agreements and different costs for routing over their network. Generally carriers will try to use the lowest cost route. Over the last two months it appears that a low cost intermediate carrier, one that just exists to route calls between other carriers, was involved in some shenanigans with Verizon where they were trying to send long distance calls over a Verizon route usually used for local calls, since it was cheaper. Verizon figured this out and cut the route for use by other carriers. However, other carriers still had this route in their routing tables. This causes fast busys and delayed call set up. On traces you see multiple SIP INVITES because when the route fails, alternate routes are tried and the call either goes through after a delay or times out and gives a busy. I say all of this because we have a customer that was having this problem, and we have been doing a lot of testing with different carriers. Most of them have identified the hole in their routing and fixed it. We are still having issues with ATT.
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Oct 7, 2014 14:50
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Nintendo Kid posted:Nah the deal with that is that Charter wanted to buy out Time Warner but lost the bidding war to Comcast. So as part of Charter agreeing not to cause legal hassles, Charter gets to grab up a good deal of Time Warner and Comcast networks across the country. It'll be an "independent" company (run by charter) for a bit and then Charter will either get to straight absorb it or sell it off to another company to cash in. The other deal is that when there is a big cable buy out, the remaining companies go on a trading spree. When cable started there were a lot of cable companies and a lot of competition to be the cable provider in the area. In some places, like the LA metro area, there were many providers, as each small city choose whoever gave the best E: All markets get traded around. I remember looking at a house that had a cable box with the name of a company that no longer existed and went away like 5 mergers ago.
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Oct 8, 2014 03:28
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stevewm posted:Comcast talk.... Because Comcast is engaged in a lot of outsourcing. Most likely it was a contracted outsourcing company that messed it up originally, it was a contracted outsourcing company's agents that could not fix it, and the issue was finally fixed by your tweets getting the attention of an actual Comcast employee. edit: Since we are talking outsourcing, I'll add something pissing me off. Customer that has a maintenance contract with us fires all their telecom support and hires an outsourcing company to take over that function. They are supposed to do day to day MAC support and configuration. The outsourcing company hires a few of the old staff, and the rest is just random folks who can barely speak english and have no idea what a phone switch is. The old staff that was hired don't want to make waves at the new company, and to be honest, are perfectly happy to see them fail, so they are no help. Outsourcing company then considers every telecom related request a maintenance break/fix issue and sends tickets to us. When we push back it is a cycle of escalations and poorly worded emails. SubjectVerbObject fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Oct 9, 2014 15:27
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jammyozzy posted:Today I found our SAP implimentation will allow you to print to any printer in our 50k+ employee, multi-national company. I was almost that excited when my print job came out of the right printer Back in the day I had a job where I supported SAP and UNIX printing in general for a very large company. 50 plus servers printing to who knows how many printers. Report servers running jobs that would print to multiple printers all around the country, and Lord help you if one was missed. We called ourselves Spool Services and would carry around yo-yo's cause they looked like spools. We worked hard, hazed our tier 1's (to get certified to send cases to us they had to beat me at Starcraft), and had fun. I was young and tech boom was in full swing. I miss the money, the fun and my liver.
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Oct 10, 2014 21:40
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Skex posted:
One of the Sociopath's above you is setting your organization up to fail so that they can propose an outsourcing solution. The solution will be worse, but the immediate cost benefit will get the Sociopath promoted and someone else will have to deal with it.
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Oct 20, 2014 02:24
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FISHMANPET posted:He does this with all manners of problems, just just help desk level problems. It's super weird, but it fits with his general idea of any problem being able to be solved by just adding more people to it, regardless of their skill level. It's a cargo cult mentality. My bosses think that if you just status the ticket every two days, a solution will magically appear. I have a speech I give in interviews and the like where I describe how troubleshooting is a skill, above and beyond OS knowledge, certs, degrees, etc. It is amazing how you can take one person and give them a problem, and they are not interested in solving it. That type of person just wants to describe the effect of the issue, get upset, find someone to fix it, or just flat out ignore it. But they you have the fixers - you but something broken in front of them, and it is like an itch they have to scratch. They aren't satisfied until thinks are working, or at least worked around. Sadly, a lot of the things that scripts and metric do encourage the first set of behaviors.
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Oct 21, 2014 02:06
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Crowley posted:Decent office chairs will easily last 10+ years. More people need to realize this. And crappy chairs that appear to be military surplus from the 1950's will last over 50 years. I worked at a place where the chairs we had sucked and people complained. So the company's response was to ask people to tell them if their chair was bad. If it was, they got one of the aforementioned surplus chairs, while their original chair was taken away to be fixed. After about a month they got their chair back, with a few cosmetic changes and maybe tightened up a bit. Still the same old chair, but it was a throne compared to the other one. The next time they asked if there were any issues with the chairs, no one complained.
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Oct 24, 2014 14:31
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poo poo pissing me off. I have way too many tickets. I am being told in writing that I need to have updates of substance on most of them by the end of the day. I am being asked about training - what training I would like, what I need to serve my customers etc. The last time I had training I got in trouble and was pulled out of training for failing to update my cases while I was in training. I am sitting here trying to figure out if the training question is some sort of loyalty test and the correct answer is "I would not think of requesting training if it would keep me from satisfactorily updating my tickets."
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Nov 6, 2014 18:41
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Che Delilas posted:Did you call them out on their bullshit (getting in trouble for being in training) when it happened? If not, bring it up now, but do it like a professional and not all passive-aggressive. I did not because in my mind saying anything to a director besides yes ma'am would get me fired on the spot. But I have had a talk with my wife and I am at the point where that is an option. Today has been too many assigned cases for the current caseload I have, customers calling me twice to say, 'hey we just put in a ticket for an outage, can I conference you on a bridge?' forcing me to drop everything and work issues, tier 1's assigning cases to me that say 'customer wants information about patch' which turns into customer want me to install patch tonight after hours, and just a whole host of other things. The sad thing is is that all of this is because folks generally like me and the abilities I have. It makes me kind of proud to be the go to guy, but there is no upside for me. At this point I am doing what I can, and if there are problems I will walk them through the math of the work I have and the hours in the day.
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Nov 6, 2014 22:25
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Che Delilas posted:It's said over and over in these threads, but people will treat you as badly as you let them; if you let someone walk all over you they WILL see you as a doormat and continue to do so until you change their minds. It's more that there is not really leadership, but adherence to metrics. There is no one besides the executives driving this that is accountable. So when you have a load of crap dumped on you, you are still on the hook for updating cases, and everything else. The basic managers are very understanding and apologetic about how the way things are, and will try and work with you, but at the director level and above, who mere mortals like me don't get to interact with, only the data counts, and they have fired people for not meeting metrics. It doesn't matter if you spent all day on an outage for the biggest customer, and that they are thrilled with what you did, you still didn't update all of the cases that you needed to, so, bad employee. Just imagine your average lovely call center put on top of a service center responsible for the phones systems of corporations with 10,000 or more phones.
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Nov 6, 2014 23:37
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stubblyhead posted:Sounds to me like you need to get the gently caress out of Dodge. How long have you been at this company? 3 years. It was great for the first year and a half, but change in regime, metrics, hiring more managers to manage less workers to get more work out of them, etc. The fun part is since they have fewer people, the metrics just document the failure of the remaining folks to deal with the crushing workload. This is exactly how my last job was, any my current was supposed to be an escape from that. The recent fun is OT is restricted, so if you happen to be staying late to update your cases and manager asks you to stay and work a critical issue, OT may not be approved. Fun times. A coworker of mine is leaving early because that happened to him. I am looking, but was trying to do it network wise, rather than shotgunning resumes. I found out last weekend that the place a friend works at doing the same thing just had layoffs, so that is off the table. Looks like plan b is Indeed. Plan C is to stop giving a gently caress and follow the metrics exactly.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:05
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jammyozzy posted:I assume we're doing this: http://www.goleansixsigma.com/how-to-easily-apply-5s-to-your-work-station/ Isn't this basically punishing someone for not being a computer? If someone told me I needed to clean my desk off, I would wonder why they were focusing on that instead of say, how well I could troubleshoot million dollar communication systems.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:56
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jim truds posted:My boss seriously needs to grow a backbone. I sent out the outages for the weekend and we always specify if systems will be down, when, and why. For this weekend we're doing patching on Sunday. For Saturday we made sure to put down there wouldn't be any systems down. Some manager couldn't read and started bitching about how our systems need to be up on Saturday. According to my boss it is our fault this loving idiot can't read and now we're bending over backwards getting his approval on what our notifications should look like. Write the notification in single syllable words. Thing* not work. We fix thing. To fix thing, we stop thing. Then we start thing. When thing back up, thing works! *I can't think of a one syllable word for computer or server, or whatever.
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Nov 14, 2014 19:08
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Lord Dudeguy posted:poo poo not pissing me off: SIP/IP/E Faxing What do you mean the fax software we bought isn't compatible with our SIP provider/SBC/network delay?
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Nov 25, 2014 03:07
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the future 