Tales From Tech Support - Do your own job!

what's up everybody welcome back to the channel if you're new around here i'm uncle reddit and this is our slash tales from tech support had a lot of people asking me lately uh where are the cats where are the cats well we took that you know week and a half or so and went camping and ever since we've been back their schedule is all out of whack so they're they're here they're uh and they do come back to the room in the evenings but usually when i'm recording lately they just don't they're cats they do what they do all right let's get started there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution network technician for corporate weirdos clients just build out a brand new office space ultra modern everything's sleek decked in the proper corporate gray scale for maximum sole suckage truly a wonder oops slight problem no space for the monster workstations the end users need apparently nobody told the interior designers that desk space was needed for full towers whatever can we do oh say the desktop guys we can put thin clients on the desks and have the end users vpn to their real machines which will even stacks in the idfs client agrees oops slight problem nobody kitted out the idfs to power hundreds of kilowatt monster workstations electrician's eyes twinkle their wallets fatten psus are added and the amperage upped new racks are installed everything gets dumped in the idfs don't worry this will be a temporary solution until we phase out these workstations sure jan oops slight problem desktop guys don't have access to the ids to service the machines client won't let them only network guys are allowed in very important very secure okay now the network guys have the responsibility for maintaining all the workstations since they're in their space oops slight problem desktop guys have a contracted sla of 5 minutes to solve issues network guys have a contracted sla of 24 hours end user can't remote to his machine call again tomorrow but hey the desks look pretty yeah so they've spent thousands upon thousands of dollars i'm sure getting this temporary solution to work after spending all the money to get the place built out and now they're going to end up spending thousands upon thousands more to correct the screwed up temporary solution genius user thanks me for not making them feel stupid webcam not working that and a room number is all i had to work with pop my head in to find the office empty sat down at their laptop logged in opened the camera app and slid the cover off the webcam it was working fixed i told myself as i shook my head as it was another slow day i decided to do a bit more testing five minutes i had confirmed the webcam worked in different browsers and teams went back to my lair and typed up the ticket with the following text note not the actual text but something close enough hello i had a look at your webcam performed some testing and maintenance and it seems to be working during my tests i noticed the protective cover of the webcam was on this is really easy to miss on the laptop model you have just make sure the little slider above your cam is to the right if you want to use it please test and let me know if the webcam is working as intended kind regards turbo jelly later when coming back to lunch said user stopped me to thank me for the email she told me she appreciated how i explained the issue without making her feel stupid it felt good yeah in most cases ninety percent of the cases there's no reason to bash the end user at all make them feel bad guilty stupid whatever the only time that i agree with making somebody feel stupid and small in any way is when they start getting cocky and mouthy i will torture those people until they cry no they can't look that up don't worry they can look that up currently i work a pretty thankless job as a remote service desk tech it's a work from home position where i handle calls and emails from users from a company we're contracted out to to help resolve users issues some backstory to my story we have a policy at work to collect and document as much info as possible in tickets because when we send those tickets to other places they'll need that info to help in a lot of cases in particular i've gotten chewed out a few times by my manager for not documenting user desk location it's apparently very important that i collect this info from the user and record it in a ticket before i send it to on-site support because if they don't get that info from the ticket they won't know where to go now after one case of me just not knowing what i was doing here still pretty new less than two months and a few of me just forgetting i try and get that info where possible today's story i get a call from a frantic user the whole call is less than five minutes they basically screwed with the setup at their desk and now their laptop dock monitors and peripherals are not behaving exactly the way the user needs them to so they called in and asked that i sent someone to their desk to sort it out immediately i tried to collect as much info as possible but they left off very quick to go attend a meeting barely staying on long enough to get their ticket number for the call and my advice for them to call back later if no one fixes their desk setup the user was pretty specific in asking multiple times that on-site people need to go fix their stuff so i have to ask about escalating man equals manager me equals me obviously me i'm pretty sure this is a no but i just got off with a user that made multiple requests for on-site to fix hardware setup at their desk manager yeah that's going to be a no especially with no attempted fixing on our end me alright well they're at least primed to call us back so we can maybe try to fix later when they have more time i didn't even get their desk info they left so quick manager oh that's all right on-site support will be able to look up that info in the ticketing system for that user's profile you what oh oh they can just do that huh they're perfectly able to look up user's location info and i've been chewed out multiple times on that why exactly my day just started and i'm already considering calling it quits over this i even had to scroll up in the chat history just to see where this same person had last told me that i needed to collect that info because onsite isn't able to look it up grumbling sailor talk i can understand requesting that you add that into the tickets it's it's nice to have as much information as possible but if you miss it you miss it or if the person jumps off the phone too fast and you can't do anything about it then okay now the other techs have to look it up and go from there i'm not sure in this day and age why it's that critical especially when in this particular instance they can look up the user's profile and get their location just weird on-call person has tried nothing but still it's my fault it isn't working i work at a small energy company and deal with a lot of regulating equipment on a daily basis we have one rotating on-call person that is responsible to fix any problem that arises outside office hours however due to the small size of the company some of the on-call people mainly work in different areas than they are on call for if it's a simple problem they usually solve it but if they can it's accepted to call for help from someone that isn't on call this usually means me since i know the equipment like to help and it's much easier to get a hold of than my boss after hours the story happened about a year ago when one of the non-proficient people were on call it's three o'clock in the morning on monday and i woke up to to the tone of my work phone ringing it's the on-call person and this week it's one of those that specialize in different areas me newly awake hello how can i help you on call i have problem x at location y and can't solve it me okay that's a bit unusual what have you tried on call i can fix it from home but it just returns every hour or so my wife is really mad that she can't get any sleep i've been up for the entire night me that sounds a bit like an electric relay that's starting to fail have you checked electrical equipment on call that's what i thought too me and have you checked it if it's a failing relay it's very easy to fix on call now i haven't been to location y despite it being a five minute drive from his house i thought it would be unsafe to start checking electrical equipment alone in the middle of the night so i hoped it might survive until monday morning but the frequency of alarm is increasing and i can't get any sleep me how long have you been having these troubles on call it started saturday morning and the frequency has been ever increasing since then now it's like 30 minutes between alarms can you come to location why so we can look at this together i don't think it's safe to do alone in the middle of the night me first let me just get this straight you've known about this problem since saturday morning done nothing to try to fix it for the entire weekend and not call it anyone for help during reasonable hours despite increasing frequency and then decide it was better to wake me than the on-call electrician despite suspecting it to be an electrical fault and on top of this it's somehow my fault that you and your wife can't get any sleep because my equipment is failing some sort of an apology about how it isn't my fault but still is my fault that i don't remember me well i'm already awake so there's no need to wake up the electrician too if you think it's unsafe to do this work alone in the middle of the night i'll meet you in location why in 15 minutes and we can do it together when i arrive at location y we identify the problem within 10 minutes it was indeed a faulty relay and since we had spares available it was fixed in minutes on call said thank you complained a bit more about how his wife is mad and that she don't think he should be on call anymore and then we go home to sleep the next day the on-call person complains to my boss about how it's too much work to be on call and that his wife is really mad at him and that's our fault my boss tries to explain to him how it isn't our equipment's fault that his wife is mad at him when he just ignored a recurring problem for a weekend i'm unsure if the on-call person truly accepted that but he didn't make any more fuss about it okay there's two problems here one this guy's lazy i can tell right from the tone of the whole thing if that's really what happened then the on-call guy is just pure lazy the other problem might be that he and his wife made plans over the weekend and even though he was on call maybe they slid out to do other stuff and just kind of ignored it because they were doing whatever else go to the beach the pool birthday party whatever but yeah you took a job that required you to be on call whatever frequency that is and uh yeah either do your job or go to work somewhere else that was pretty easy a weird but easy fix yesterday my assistant director gave me a heads up about a room that was reported to be having problems the department is using that lab for a summer camp and the director claimed none of the computers were booting they had another room in the building as backup but she sent over two people from our level one support to investigate i got an email later on that afternoon that the user was waking monitors not computers so she would press the monitor button see power saving mode and assume the computer wasn't coming on without actually pressing power on the computers they told me one mac had the hard drive logo as if someone was trying to boot to another drive but none were available i went over there myself this morning pressed enter on the screen it was still at and it booted to the desktop restarting would bring it back to that screen though where you had to hit enter to go past it i tried googling it and then realized some keys were broken then a light bulb came on on my head i unplugged the keyboard and it restarted fine without interruption for those who don't know holding down option on a mac keyboard will give you the option to boot to another drive that's plugged in if no other drives are available it'll still show you macintosh hd as bootable drive plugging it back in brought the issue back which told me one of the option keys was stuck so i replaced the keyboard and the problem went away i let the camp director know what the problem was and that it's working now if any of you have been hanging around here with me for any length of time you know that i've had some keyboard issues lately you know the first problem was i had a gaming keyboard it was okay it was it was a little too clicky to do videos with you know it was cool and all but too clicky too noisy a little awkward the spacing of the keys was a little different than what i'm used to so i gave that to one of my kids went with another keyboard logitech logitech's been standard for me for years it's it's always been like old faithful you know it's their equipment's always worked for me i plugged this one in and it wasn't working wasn't working you know it worked for a while but then it would start acting sketchy come to find out it was the usb hub or so i thought it's a powered usb hub works great most of the time for just about anything i'm doing the problem actually ended up being the usb on the back of the tower that particular port is dead i don't know why well it's not dead it's it's just like glitchy in and out and i've looked at the cables so it's not the cables it must be something in the usb port itself so i have others but it's kind of annoying when you know you're trying to figure out why your stuff's going for fluid it wasn't a signal issue you know my mouse and keyboard my keyboard's wired my mouse is wireless and they don't conflict or anything so that's good but yeah keyboards are the bane of my existence this year the overheating radar transmitter my first job after college was at a defense contractor and i wrote software for radar systems that track domestic air traffic for collision avoidance with drones we kept one of our radar units on the roof of the building and would hire pilots to fly around overhead so we could test the system so test day comes around and it's usually a pretty big deal because it's a pain to coordinate with the pilots if things don't work out you have to wait a whole week to try again so we power up the radar about an hour before the pilot is scheduled to fly to do a dry run over our test plan except that the radar won't turn on when we put on our new code the radar said there was a temperature error we put back a stable software build and still the radar reports that it's too hot for operation so my boss tells me to go to the roof to check it out which is definitely not part of my job description but okay i climb up the ladder onto the roof and open the access panel to the radar transmitter one of the electronics boards in the chassis was particularly notorious for coming loose and when the connection was faulty we got all sorts of strange errors so of course that was my first suspicion lo and behold as soon as i opened the hatch i noticed something strange bees hundreds of them they had built a nest directly over the air intake vent and the inside of the radar chassis was a sauna i think a lot of them overheated and died but there was still plenty of them moving around and they started flying out the access panel so i nuked the heck out of there i told my boss that the problem was a bug after all i see what you did there bug it never ceases to amaze me how wildlife can really get in and muck up your equipment it also will give you a concussion if you're not careful we were building an air terminal in georgetown delaware and we had to pull some communication cables for the airport the runway lights and taxi lights and things like that so we went over to a pool box in the ground which looks like you know double metal doors like you see in the city for basements in front of buildings we opened the doors looked down everything seemed okay so we jumped down in the hole to look in the the end of the conduits where the wires were coming out darn if all those pipes weren't full of corn snakes now they're harmless corn snakes aren't going to hurt you but at first glance in a semi-dark hole in the ground a corn snake sort of reminds me a little bit of a copperhead and i'm not real fond of any snakes i won't kill him but i really don't want him you know being in my lap i i came up out of that hole so fast i slammed my head on one of the doors and uh yeah i didn't go back to the hole well hey guys i hope you enjoyed these stories and if you did would you consider doing me a favor would you click like on this video and subscribe to the channel that would really help us out we're trying to get to 10 000 and i think you guys are well on your way and then to top it all off click that little bell icon so you don't miss the fact out with the beard telling you stories oh yeah and the next episode that i do should be from the state of florida i think we're going the wrong direction for july but we'll see how it goes see

Channel: Story Time with Uncle Reddit

Views: 6,243

Keywords: helpdesk, help desk day in the life, tales from tech support, uncle reddit, top tech support posts of all times, tales from tech support reddit, forgetful tech, funny tech support, funny tech support calls, funny tech support stories, funny help desk calls, tech support mess, computer programming, when a job quote goes wrong, hardware swap, pc repair, networking, sys admin, office karen, tech support horror stories, tech bloopers, self replicating ai, dont be a dick

Id: 6VXe7PdPQqw

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022