r/TalesFromTechSupport - How a Hollowpoint Solved The IT Problem - #547

hello and welcome back to the kcc channel i'm rob and today we'll be jumping into some tales from tech support our first story today comes to us from jbanelaw the curious case of the zombie warranty let's jump right in as an independent consultant i get all types of clients some are one and done jobs and never hear from that client again others become regulars and some are big jobs that then get passed off to someone inside the company to administer i'm a bit more picky about the work i take these days mostly because i can after developing a good reputation but there was a day and age where when the phone rang and if it was remotely within my wheelhouse and if the billing hours were good i would take the word this is a story that happened recently when an old account came out of the woodwork years later acting like it was just yesterday i was at their location completing the job and as usual no matter what your specialty is no matter how much you try to brand your company no matter the tagline you use when marketing when you do consulting and are in it you will always be the it guy regarding scope of work time stamped 2014. i woke up one monday morning to see an email from a sender who was not a current customer yet the subject line had regarding in it thinking it might be spam i almost deleted it but decided to review it instead to my surprise it was a real email and an actual reply just to an email i had sent back in 2014 it read hey it guy you put this server and some workstations in recently but it appears that one of those workstations is now not booting and the server is giving us problems my internal it turns out that was his college age son said that the hardware is malfunctioning and will need to be replaced i need you to come out and open up a warranty repair or replacement on this equipment and i need that today bolded and underlined if at all possible sincerely guy who did a one-and-done job seven years ago now back when obama was still president i would occasionally partner with another company to sell equipment that carried a limited warranty and my master services agreement does have a short warranty period in it but i had no idea where this guy got the idea that almost seven years later the warranty would still be applicable still i wanted to make certain there wasn't a unique circumstance that i couldn't recall so i went to review the file before writing back one server four workstations cabling and labor i have to admit my record-keeping practices from seven years ago had a lot to be desired but i did have the scope of work and some associated documents archived in some old business records it looked like i did source the equipment from a guy i used to partner with at a pretty good rate too and it did come with a warranty but that expired a year after sale and my msa from that time only warrantied my work for 90 days so i responded with a politely worded email and attached the documents as backup told him i would be happy to swing by today and take a look but it would be a new job and my rates have changed about five minutes later this response shows up in my email hey it guy those documents attached are not from this sale or they don't look like the agreements i have on file my receipt has an unlimited warranty with vip service response within 24 hours i would scan it in but my network is currently down i either need you to come by today to start fixing this or i will bill you for having to call in someone else to make good on your warranty sincerely guy who is starting to sound like a dirk i don't like to assume people are doing business in bad faith or lying but this is starting to smell so i decided there was only one way to go about settling this swing by his office and see what he has in his files maybe i did make a one-time exception to this work that i just can't recall probably not though yeah that is a receipt alright but not for the serial numbers of any of these machines i emailed the guy back saying i would swing by in about an hour and we can talk about it when i get to the office he was waiting for me in the reception area just him as the network is down so he had to send his staff home to try to work using their own internet connections he greets me in a hurried yet respectful manner and then shows me to the conference room there he had out an old file folder stuffed with paper the agreement is in there along with all the receipts it says lifetime warranty good for the entire lifespan of the equipment as long as we are the original owner okay let me review what you have because it doesn't match my records this is from about 7 years ago so i don't really remember this job it is all there in ironclad i'm a shrewd negotiator are you gonna make good on the warranty or try to weasel out of it i don't like the guy's attitude but again want to keep it professional so i comb through the mess of a file folder mr hostage negotiator might be smooth with haggling but maintaining orderly records was not a strength of his apparently the receipt from my work matched up with my records and then i came to another build that wasn't in my file it was just a generic printout with two signatures not mine and did say lifetime warranty on it when i got to the equipment description though i noticed that none of the serial numbers matched my work this was a different bill of sale for a completely different job i'm starting to think this guy is trying to pull one over on me but don't want to throw out unfounded accusations the equipment on this sheet is different from the stuff i installed many years ago did you have someone else in to do work um yeah we had another guy a few years ago run some updates but he said he used the old equipment well only one way to settle this i ask him to show me the malfunctioning boxes so i can check the physical serial numbers against these records the manager shows me to the server room and i compare the tags not even close not even the same manufacturer so here is the serial number here is the information from my sale documents that match yours for the work i did and these are not even by the type but it does match this bill of sale from the guy you had in a few years ago so looks like he put in new stuff that can't be he was supposed to use the old hardware and upgrade a few things well the paperwork all matches with my stuff and yours so my guess is you're mistaken and the person you had do the work had to replace some equipment i show the manager all the numbers and manufacturer types and he is flabbergasted look i'd be happy to help but we're going to need to sign a new agreement and if you want me to prioritize this job it will be at emergency rates but i do have this evening available or you can try to contact this other guy and see if he will make good on his work free advice now i don't want to give the impression this guy was trying to fleece me but it should have also been obvious to him based upon his files that the warranty was not under my work anyhow i did the investigation that was necessary to determine if it was my problem and with that i was prepared to go unless he wanted to pay me for my time and then you get to the awkward part of being a consultant when you have to give a little free advice to get some possible paid work and this guy was about to try to get a lot of this free work out of me okay maybe this isn't the stuff you put in but you can take a quick look at it to tell me what the problem is it could be a host of things and if you do have a warranty with another company i don't want to touch anything as it could void that warranty i'm already about two hours into this whole escapade and wanted to clear off some non-urgent work i had scheduled for the days as well but at the same time i want to help this guy out and if that means a few evenings of overtime rate work i'll take the extra money fortunately it didn't take me long to diagnose the problem the equipment that was installed was substandard back in the day it was put in and the box was just dead looks like it needs to be replaced and a backup restored at a minimum probably the same for any workstations that also won't boot the swindle the manager ends up entering into a verbal agreement to pay for five hours of emergency work and i tell him i'll be back later in the day i take a few photos of his records and try to call the company that did the work that is supposedly warranted figure this might be an easy fix if all i have to do is coordinate logistics call the main number as i drive to another client and it is disconnected email the main contact and it bounces look up the website and there is nothing at the domain search for the company on linkedin and find an old profile from a few years ago chased down the ceo of this company and his profile hasn't been touched in years throw the name into an internet search and what pops up are some news articles about how he is in jail for fraud conviction i think you all know where this is going took me a few more hours to piece together what happened looks like this guy came in under the guise of doing an upgrade and what he ended up doing was removing the equipment i installed which was high quality top of the line stuff back then and replaced it with some substandard cheap boxes he had salvaged from god knows where what was surprising is that they functioned as long as they did without failing the manager got billed for new high-end equipment and a lifetime warranty that the company probably never intended on honoring i don't know if the manager thought he was going to pull a fast one on me after he tried to contact the other company to find they were no longer in business assuming i would never check the serial numbers or records but what it did end up doing was costing him a pretty penny for not only my time but all new equipment to get his office back up and running this guy fancied himself to be some sort of hustler but ended up getting hustled although true to form though as we were negotiating my scope of work to get him out of the jam he put himself in he said you're going to give me the repeat customer discount right to which i responded sure i offer a 3 discount for customers who pay in cash a hustler has got to hustle the job was done and again true to form he happily paid in cash making certain to get every penny of that three percent discount closing with thanks it guy it was mentioned in the comments that one would think the company would know that their expensive equipment was being hauled out and replaced with cheap stuff but in my experience when working with ceos and execs they don't know what goes on in the tech room they just need it to work i think that other company realized this and they made bank off of it although it is kind of hard to spend that money if you're sitting in jail just saying do me a quick favor have a look down below the video if that subscribe button still red it means you're not actually subscribed to the kcc channel please hit that subscribe button for more daily reddit stories our second story today comes to us from clairebunny1988 how a hollow point solved the problem when a manager uses cowboy law to get a new server let's jump right in so i work for a company that supplies point-of-sale hardware software networks the works to grocery stores all over the americas have been here for just under a decade and boy do i love my job i am on the support side of the house essentially the warranty this story happened fairly early on we had this one customer a small time independent grocery store chain with maybe three stores and a tight budget they were on a contract that did not include upgrades to their hardware and were still rocking windows xp servers with at most two gigabytes of ram we had been having issues on the regular with one store where their poor little engine that almost could would lock up running batches on their inventory for price management and the manager was proper fed up with the situation his main file server would lock up he would call us we would band-aid it and recommend to the owners of the company that they needed to have a beefier boy installed they would deny every time so after about day umpteen million and three of this repeat issue and the manager begging both us and his bosses for a hardware upgrade i get an automated alert that his server was offline again well he's probably just rebooting it because it's frozen i think boy was i wrong i called the store and the manager answers with an audible grin so wide i can practically get a tan from all that radiating smugness hey manager this is op from company i'm calling because your server is showing offline for us again do you have a few minutes oh buddy i'm glad you called you're gonna have to schedule a tech out here to get this server replaced well you know we need owner approval for that but if you could just emergencies are covered under contract right um yes sir and i can assure you that nothing you or i can do from where we are will get this server back online so this is an emergency correct fair enough sir i'll get someone out there asap so i dispatch a tech and as luck would have it he was already in the area just coming off working on another store i get him to go take a look and he calls me about an hour later tech asking for me specifically hey op can you schedule another dispatch for this store emergency to get their new server authorized yeah i can start the process but you know how these owners have been about buying new hardware yeah that's not gonna be a problem this time what happened can we try to get the server back online that's not gonna happen there bud calling it catastrophic hardware failure over here i'll send you a pic the tech sent my work email a picture and what i saw was a computer case that had a little hole on one side and a substantially larger hole on the other side opened up the case revealed a penetrated hard drive and a shredded motherboard manager got his new computer ah yes this is what we in the it field like to call a rapid unplanned disassembly situation that would be a pretty interesting conversation with the owners though i would love to be a fly on the wall for that one thank you to both ops for posting their stories in the tales from tech support subreddit they are linked in the description down below please go check them out check out one of these other videos and if you haven't yet please hit that subscribe button for more daily reddit stories [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Karma Stories

Views: 23,310

Keywords: karma, comment, chameleon, karma comment chameleon, reddit, funny, funny reddit, reddit funny, r/entitledparents, entitledparents, entitled parents, entitled, parents, top posts, reddit top post, best of reddit, comedy, r/, rslash

Id: VFs1-eE4IBk

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021