r/TalesFromTechSupport - Next Time READ The Ticket Updates! - #542

hello and welcome back to the kcc channel i'm rob and i hope you're having a wonderful day today we're gonna jump into some tales from tech support our first story today comes to us from joe dawn fan uh poe buddies nerfect let's jump right in i worked for a large local computer company in the early 90s i originally worked in their configuration department then when i had orthopedic surgery i was moved to the tech support phones while i recovered turns out i was pretty good at that so i was put there full time i took a lot of pride in my work a lot of customers liked me and i liked them one day at about 2 30 or 3 on a friday afternoon i was on the phones when i felt my team leader hovering over my shoulder i was just wrapping up the call so he waited for me to finish and as soon as i hung up he told me our boss needed me in his office the look on my face must have been great because he told me i wasn't in trouble but i needed to get their asap when i arrived i found our boss with his boss a vp and the phone was on speaker they introduced me to the voice on the speakerphone it was the regional vp for a big computer manufacturer and mr regional vp said to me boss and vp tell me you're the best at dealing with difficult customers it seems my bosses had gotten good feedback from the people i had been dealing with on the phones so i was picked for this special job which was my company had just sold about 250 computers monitors and nics to another company let's call them x the regional vp of big computer manufacturer had just been called out of a meeting to endure the cio of axe yelling at him saying the computers they had bought were crap the nicks they bought were crap nothing was working everything was going to be sent back to my company and everybody was going to be sued honest this is not hyperbole my company had sold these computers to x but they didn't ask for anything to be done on them no configuration and not only that they were installing the nics and putting the cpus on the desks themselves they were moving offices you see and their moving gift to their employees was new computers for the new office i think everybody except for the cio of x could see 250 computers not working had to be due to something x had done but customers you know also no pressure on me i was authorized for any and all ot needed and regional vp gave me the personal phone numbers for about a dozen of their top tier tech support people who would be able to help me with any issue i might have my bosses gave me their home phone numbers as well as the personal phone numbers for our best netware guys and my friday night drinking plans were put on hold also this site was in another state about an hour drive on a good day and two or more hours during rush hour but at least i was on the clock i headed to the customer's site i arrived at just about the time i would normally be sipping my first beer at the bar and i called the number i had been given for the cio's right-hand man tim who opened the door and greeted me he was a guy who looked like he had just graduated from the local community college which was exactly what he was as i later found out he explained the situation to me and it was that none of the computers were connecting to the network not a one the printers however were as far as they could tell as they could send stuff to them from the servers the knicks all had a heartbeat so i thought cabling and everything was okay my concern was the server configuration itself as i was not a netware guy i was good on dos but if i had to go server side at least i had a ton of phone numbers to call then i realized i didn't have a login prompt back in the dos 5 windows 3.1 days there were two really useful really important files that pretty much set up your computer to work one of them was the config.sys but that wasn't an issue the other was autoexec.bat and that was what i concentrated on for those of you who don't know autoexec.bat is a batch file and all it does is run a batch of commands one after the other and the damn near universal first line in an auto exec was echo off this line meant that you wouldn't see the commands being run in the autoexec.bat until you got to the last line and that last line was a damn near universal login command which we weren't seeing so i read through the autoexec then read it again and i realized the autoexec.bat had a line that referred to a second batch file the auto exact did just what it was told it ran a few commands then ran the second batch file then everything stopped when the second batch file finished what it had to do tim was looking over my shoulder tim i asked who gave you this auto exec the cio he answered yep the person who had called up big computer manufacturer and pulled a karen on them i copied the autoexec.bat to autoexec.old just a good practice and edited the original adding call space in front of the second batch file saved it rebooted and was rewarded with a login prompt i moved over and asked him to log on he logged on successfully and i explained what had happened while he made sure he could access the network and its resources on the second machine i showed tim the edit to make it checked out he tried it on a third and after logging on he leaned back in his chair and said we need to tell the cio we headed toward her office and when we arrived we saw she was in her office with someone else tim stopped short can you wait out here that's the president of our company no problem bro just point me to a phone so i can give my boss a sit rep while tim talked to his bosses i talked to mine who just sighed and told me he'd call everyone else to let them know and i should let him know when i was leaving i stepped back into the hall and tim waved me inside where i gave the president and cio the story he was interested and asked some good questions while the cio looked mortified his final question was is this the only thing needed i answered that from what tim tells me this is it tim knows this network better than i and if he thinks that's it then i think that's it the president looked a silent question at tim who just nodded then asked me how long it would take to edit the remaining workstations i thought for a minute then realized i could make a boot diskette that we could use in the machines pop it in and let the disc do the work how long would this disc take to create he asked honest the longest part was formatting the bootable diskette and making multiple copies back then you could edit any new text file with the command copycon filename.extension on the fly the autoexec.bat on the discard would delete the bad autoexec from the workstation then copy the working autoexec.new onto the diskette to the autoexec.bat on the workstation pop the diskette out reboot and watch your beautiful new login prompt on the workstations delete see colon autoexec.bat copy a colon autoexec.new seacolon autoexec.bat he nodded okay let's do this can you come back tomorrow i nodded do you mind if i call your boss tim get him some discs and we'll test them on a couple workstations if it works we'll come back tomorrow and finish up it's been a long aftern day he called my boss while i made some discounts tim tested them i called my boss before leaving and told him the plan and he told me i could spend all weekend there if i wanted to i was on site the next morning at 9am as agreed in the meantime tim the president and the cio had already fixed about a fourth of the machines with my diskettes they asked me to stick around to help out with some busy work which really consisted of me and tim chatting while breaking down the boxes for all of the stuff they bought this is where i also learned the cio had pretty much been working for three days straight on no sleep so i can't really fault her from missing those five characters finally the busy work was to give the pizza and beer time to arrive in the end i got nice thank you notes from the president and cio of x and the vp of big computer manufacturer placed in my file x signed a nice support contract with my company tim turned into a pretty good friend and i was employee of the month for a hundred dollar bonus okay so that last line kind of threw me off a hundred dollar bonus doesn't seem like much but it is a pretty good thank you especially when op got a whole bunch of overtime pay and made a new friend along the way as well that is probably the best bonus you could have do me a quick favor have a look down below the video if that subscribe button still read 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 laser x92 i created a unicorn let's jump right in i have been working as a perma temp at a factory for about four and a half years now four of it driving a forklift loading finished products for the company onto trailers i got good enough at running the computer on it that it runs a single application without breaking it auto boots into this app but it is essentially an aio with a barcode scanner anyway once a month the primary system we use to track the products on route to the other warehouses and their location once they get there goes down and we are supposed to shut down all production for these few hours we don't do that at all and run a parallel system that is only partially connected to the main database i was running with this backup system for about nine months before finding a shortcut that made it possible to run both systems in separate sessions simultaneously while going in and coming out of this backup system this shortcut wasn't documented anywhere and was actually two keys when the way that was documented was 10 keys if you manage to not break the system from sticky keys being forced to run this saves me a couple of hours in my 12 hour shift by running dual sessions instead of scanning into the trailer every time i switch once word started to spread that i found a glitch in the system some of the full-time employees started to come to me with everything to do with these computers i got good at the backup system to the point where they even demanded that i help another third party company run this system they normally run the logistics side of the company here and they keep the whole place rolling forward on about five miracles a day about two years into this highly specialized position with no extra pay but the benefits of not having to deal with the worst parts of my normal job i come across the one woman who is running on a normal backup night and somehow does something i have never seen i am still able to fix it quickly but it puzzles me for another month until she does it again she managed to have a single palette of product show as being present on both of her open trailers at the same time it would be another two months before i would finally be able to test with the system and figure out how this was even possible she scanned the pallet tag realized it was for the wrong trailer and backed out this should have kicked the tag out and simply allowed for it to be scanned into the other trailer it instead held it in limbo likely in cash until the next pallets were scanned and assigned a location she is the only one i know of that could do this twice and still not remember how she did it probably from all the pot she smokes i had been working with this application enough to literally rewrite the manual for running it more efficiently and actually fixing most problems the original material was horrible to start and way outdated to still be useful i had never seen this happen and i was very confused i also haven't seen it since but i added notes on it to my instructions anyway there's only one real thing to say here op make a manual and get yourself a raise our next story today comes to us from sleepmaster91 next time read the ticket updates let's jump right in so i'm working at this company that is responsible for the it support for many companies and we took over the it management and support of this one company that is making electronic equipment motherboards cards etc and they have very specialized software i've never heard of ninety percent of the software that they use and many tickets end up in me having to call the software support because i have no idea how to fix their issues or they're poorly documented so this user calls yesterday and opens a ticket because he's having issues dragging an excel sheet onto a program to clean up the file when he drags and drops the file and hits start to clean up the file the program throws a whole bunch of.net errors and we have no idea who made this software user says it's homemade the help desk tries to fix the issue but unfortunately he has no idea what's wrong and how to fix it so he escalates the ticket and i'm the level 2 tech the only one for now until they hire another one so this issue falls on my queue with a note that this software must work before 3 30 the next day because they need this for their inventory to order stock in advance great i love to get rushed so i start working on the issue first thing the next day i try to fix the problem by reinstalling.net 3.5 and 4.8 from the add remove windows features repair his office installation and i don't know what i did but now it throws a different error but it seems to parse done of the file rather than throw the error right at the beginning so i guess this is making progress then he shows me the software he uses to generate this file to be honest i'm not even sure it's a software from siemens called valor something something excuse my poor memory so i already know that i'm going to have to make a lengthy phone call to some tech support because i have no idea how the software works long story short after one hour on the phone the tech from siemens finds out that the template that the user was using to create the xl file had an issue with commas and that it was seeing the wrong values on some of the cells so we do another template and append new at the end so i update the ticket with a screenshot of the new template to use so that the user knows which template is the right one mind you at this point we're past 3 30. at around 4 ish we get a phone call from his supervisor going apeshit because the issue is still not resolved oh and did i mention that when i tried to contact their support their offices were closed because they're on a different time zone than ours and when i called no one answered and i had to go through the ticket system which was crazy slow for them to answer to get someone remotely connect to the user's computer so my supervisor calls the user and tries to see if he can fix the issue then he shows me that it's not working but then i realize that he's using the wrong template the one that's not working as soon as he uses the template that the siemens tech generated all of a sudden everything works fine the dragon drop to the mysterious software works fine without any issues i told my supervisor that i updated the ticket with the screenshot of the right template to use and he says oh the user didn't read that comment facepalm so next time before losing your crap when an issue is not resolved read the damn ticket updates one person in the comments had an excellent set of steps that op should follow it says a few options to ensure smooth running never solve issues that were not communicated through the defined process clear sla with return times and priorities charge internally to their budget if the problem is not i.t related charge for problems that were known but not communicated sort of like a late fee charge double for on-site visits if not i.t related monthly updates on the ticket queue of open tickets to your boss and the other team's boss clearly showing the amount of tickets that are pending user feedback or clarification also clearly showing the solved cases and the time you invested to show that you probably solved 99 of the issues but they only ever hear of the complicated stuff automated daily reminder for tickets that are pending user feedback after seven days and your boss needs to stick to this as well if it doesn't hurt they will never change thank you to all three 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] you

Channel: Karma Stories

Views: 22,533

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: JiYzbwGeqL8

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021