Tales From Tech Support - Networks don't need power!

hey everyone welcome to r slash tales from tech support where we get to have a little chuckle at the technologically disadvantaged i'm uncle reddit and have i got a story for you sorry it's been a few days guys been been out of town on the road and decided i just couldn't let you go any longer without an episode i'm sitting in a car in florida right now doing this recording so we'll see how it goes hopefully this sounds okay please forgive any major blunders sitting in a sedan is a little tougher than i thought to do this he sure fixed it all right in the early days of my it career i worked as the only phone support person for a company that provides construction labor and project management we have makeshift office networks set up across the country on our job sites because of the industry the company's in it was much more laid back than your typical corporate environment i get a call my first year there from a construction forum with a very thick southern accent construction forming from here on cf from here on this was almost a decade ago now so i'll remember the dialogue as best i can me companyit support how can i help you construction foreman hey buddy just wanted to let you know that i just can't get my printer to work i've tried everything me okay let me see what i can do can i please have your username so that i can connect to your computer construction format all right it's and he spells out the username construction foreman wait a second i gotta go i'll call back later he abruptly ends the call this is not unheard of as these guys have duties on the site to come first and things can come up that require attention right away i think nothing of it and i go back to my other duties roughly an hour later construction foreman calls back hey buddy just wanted to let you know that i fixed it me oh yeah what was the issue construction forming well what i did was i picked the printer up three inches and then i dropped it at this point i'm trying my best not to laugh in the guy's ear me okay well when the issue happens again please give me a call back i wrap up the call and have a good laugh with some of the other it folks it turns out the guy did call in the next day and did have printer issues to no one's surprise hey sometimes a good little drop fix is all you need evidently he needed more but sometimes it's worth a try no poe doesn't work like that so i work and tech support for a variety of wi-fi and network systems hotels dorms apartment buildings store chains etc and that brings a lot of stories nearly all get a laugh but living through most killed part of my soul and what's left of my faith in humanity this story takes place a day after hurricane michael swept through panama city florida not that far from me so we weren't expecting a call from any store or hotel in the area power was out all over as far as we knew so it was a little shocking to hear from an employee from a higher end men's clothing store call in about network issues stating he needed to store up and running here's what followed me is me ia's employee rg is regional manager e hey yeah look we have clients coming in today for pickup i need the network backup me clients sir are you sure didn't a hurricane just come through e so i have a business to run and these are high paying customers help me get the network up me i'm happy to try if i can does your store have power e scoffs no but the network doesn't need power to work me eyes wide mouth of gape looking at my phone with a wtf expression um excuse me sir could you repeat that e i said the network doesn't get power not from the power company anyway you should know this being tech support me sir i can guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that the network absolutely gets power from the power company e do you think i'm stupid i thankfully held my tongue the network is powered by the internet like home phones are powered by the phone company you know poe power over ethernet so help me get the network back up me shaking my head while my soul dies a little bit more sir any and all phone companies get power from the power company the internet is powered by the power company poe is for devices designed to get power from a main source that's plugged into the wall getting power from the power company e you just don't want to help me what am i supposed to tell the customers who are coming in for their clothes me do you honestly expect people to come out after a major hurricane for close e it was just a storm they'll be here now help me get the network up i have a flashlight in the back what chords do i unplug me sir respectfully but i can't help you there's not power to the store and unplugging anything will be pointless until power is restored e you're refusing to help me me yes god it still feels good i could say that not because i don't want to help you but because i can't e get me your supervisor now me yes sir of course i place genius on hold and turn to my boss her desk is next to my station and she heard the whole thing she not once looked up and just said nope hell no i won't waste my time tell him to call back when there's power needless to say that part of the conversation went smashingly he hung up in a thrash of anger and swear words and i noted my ticket accordingly boss lady just shook her head as i snickered about the level of smart the employee lacked flash forward 20 minutes later and i was the lucky winner of getting the call from the regional manager of e i answered my standard greeting and i could hear the sneer of the rg on the other end rg oh good now i don't have to ask for you would you mind explaining to me why i'm getting a call from e explaining that you refused to help him me did he tell you why i refused rg yes he said you refused to help him get his network online after he called in informing you it was down me did he also inform you that the store is without power and according to the latest reports power could be down in panama city for the next 48 hours rg excuse me wait what i advise rg of the conversation and my supervisor refusing to speak with thee due to the lack of power at the store i swear you could hear rg slumping shoulders over the phone rg you actually think that's how poe works you've got to be kidding me me sir i wish i was as i told you i tried to explain it to you but he refused to listen he demanded i get the network up due to people coming in to pick up their clothes rg he literally expects people to come in after a hurricane me yes sir but he said it was just a storm rg well i'm over in biloxi right now so i'm not fully aware of the full extent of anything there look let me get off here i'm gonna call e and have a talk with him the call ended and i was kind of sad i couldn't listen in on that conversation a couple days later on my off day he called in and got his network up after the power was restored my co-worker who took the call messaged me about it and said he sounded like a kid who's been grounded for two months utterly defeated one of the few times i wish i could have been in the office to take a call wow entitled and stupid amazing good for you for keeping your cool the op private hospital mess i was tasked with setting up a second separate network in a private hospital i had to replicate a hospital network that consisted of an air conditioned server room and full wi-fi coverage but on a tiny tiny budget and in a broom closet this was all for one single doctor who wanted to subcontract to the hospital and not pay for any of the hospital's excellent infrastructure or support staff the network had to go from the doctor's office down the hall to where there was a fax machine and they needed wi-fi as far as the operating theater there was all kinds of drama over a week or so many basic things they didn't understand about computers but bigger issues too including the company selling them software said an nas was all that was required when they actually needed a server while changing the doctor's windows account on the hospital network to a local one on our yahoo mail wouldn't log in was an outdated browser issue but seriously yahoo mail for important doctor surgeon emails what the hell i fixed everything effortlessly and got them up and running within minutes the unexpected server was up and running the very next day the hospital was constantly ringing work complaining and begging them to sack me my boss was on to me he even sent a co-worker with me to verify i was telling the truth one day i get a call the fax machine wasn't working and the entire network was down as i arrived i noticed my friend from another tech company he was there to replace me we shake hands he apologizes and said if i had known it was you i wouldn't have accepted the job i was fine i never felt so relieved to be free of a problem i walked down the hall unplugged the fax machine from the bleeping network port and left my friend to it it was his mess now after being forced by my boss to write a multi-page explanation of every single thing that happened i didn't get fired and we never spoke of it again i don't understand how the most uneducated people are the loudest ones to complain and think they know everything they want to argue with you i mean it's like that with any specialty you know you don't go in and argue with your mechanic if he tells you your camshaft went bad or some meme bearing or whatever why would you stand there and argue with him if you know better then go home and fix it the satisfaction of supporting unsupportable systems let me just start off by saying i love my job i have a lot of freedom i work from home primarily on a manual ordering process for internal i.t but also on some tech support for our automated ordering portals my company has had a problem with sunk cost fallacy for years instead of throwing out the trash and rebuilding something that works they've been tracking on systems upon systems to patch holes in our requirements that's how we've ended up with four ways of ordering internal i t stuff a manual process involving emails to me nowadays an order portal a newer order portal a newer order portal and emailing service desk understandably the users are incredibly confused and rarely know where to order what luckily at the start of summer last year my boss got the approval to implement a new system from scratch which will replace all these older systems and solutions it will also end the hard system separation between our ordering tickets and our incident tickets allowing all vendors and service desks to work in the same system yay implementation is planned to be finished by quarter two of this year so by the end of the year we might be half done enough backstory as a result of reorganization after reorganization as well as normal career moves every single person who worked with the back end of the oldest order portal is now gone additionally there is no documentation on our specific implementation all we have is a manual for the system itself which while helpful is also an enormous info dump that doesn't tell us anything about our custom workflows because of all this we were in a situation for a while where literally no one supported the tool if there was an issue shrugs were had the team my boss heads up is responsible for it along with all the other tools like it but they were focusing on implementing the new and replacing the old not on keeping the oil working while implementing the new after almost burning out due to workload in the fall i've ended up with a revised task list my manual ordering department and the best effort support for the old order portals for the newer but not newest portal all i have to do is answer easy questions and redirect harder ones to our external consultant for the oldest one i have to get creative little to no documentation antiquated ui convoluted workflows basically no handover but hey it's best effort support right if i can't figure it out and it's urgent we'll push to implement that feature form in our new portals and handle it manually while waiting for that to be done today it was my day the form stopped working big panic chaos all around the entire country was a war zone i'm definitely not exaggerating and the reality definitely wasn't that one person pinged me on skype asking if i could look into it for them normally i'd ask for a ticket but since i'm only doing best effort support i figured i might as well take a quick look and see if it's something i can fix quick and easy before asking for that i like the guy that messaged me too so he got a free pass there i found the workflow i found the xml response from the system it failed to create the ticket in i found the error it was trying to assign to an outdated group that was removed over christmas i found where that group variable is defined i changed it saved test again failure why oh look there's a deploy button i missed what's the worst that could happen when you press unknown buttons that are named deploy in a system you haven't been trained on that no one understands after changing a variable that hopefully does what i want it to do fortunately nothing exploded the user resubmitted again and it worked problem solved i'm a literal god user informs me that if we end up in a bar together he'll buy me a beer i don't drink and rarely leave my apartment but it's a nice sentiment too long didn't read when you don't know what you're doing poke at things until it works hope it doesn't explode and yes i know that i did kind of know what i'm doing enough to understand with various terms in the ui of the toolment and where to click to probably get it to do what i want but still i've been there not with quite such a technical thing but hey sometimes like you said you just gotta poke around until something works or something fails my baby face okay so this just happened i've been corresponding to a student parent who was given a hot spot since they don't have wi-fi at home hotspot wasn't charging past 30 and had to be kept on the charger all day when i first saw her she looked like a meth head with dreads tied up on her head sunken cheeks face tats and to top it all off was causing the whole lobby to smell of weed the way we give out the hot spots is in a case with a serial number and a charger it's a nice case too like clamshell nintendo ds case nice she brings in the device and hands it to me i ask where the rest of the kit is and she responds why would i need to bring the rest of it it's just an issue with the charging i take it back to my team lead and ask him what to do was told that when she brings the kit back she can get a new device i then proceeded to drag myself back down to her preparing to get yelled at when i finally reached the witch and gave her the news she exploded on me exclaiming that how dare i make her come down here for support in a pandemic now she has to go and sanitize so that her kids don't get sick she only talks to me in the security guard and we were both 10 feet plus from her she storms out and i turn around and shrug it off i sit back down on my desk and see that her ticket has an update oh boy did i not expect the laughs that would cause a little bit of background i just turned 20. six foot three 145 pounds i get mistaken for a high school kid a lot but i do have a full beard at the moment this was her response word for word i really don't appreciate you having me come up here during a pandemic and risk the exposure not to get anything handled and for you to send a child to handle your business i have now been dubbed by my fellow texas baby man told her she's free to come up and get a swap if she can bring back the full kit smiley face yep entitlement knows no bounds no creed no color no socioeconomic status well that's going to do it for today guys thanks for joining me hey do me a favor if you enjoyed this content give us a like click subscribe to the channel and maybe click that little bell icon so you don't miss the fact out with the beard telling you stories and if you're looking for uncle reddit merch and let's be honest who's not looking for uncle reddit merch go on down to the description box and click that little link down there it'll take you to my teespring shop where you can get a nice t-shirt a warm hoodie for the winter or a nice little mug so you can have your favorite beverage while you're listening see [Music] you

Channel: Story Time with Uncle Reddit

Views: 8,927

Rating: 4.9425836 out of 5

Keywords: uncle reddit, reddit, reddit stories, funny reddit stories, r/idontworkherelady, r/prorevenge, r/entitledparents, entitled parents, funny reddit stories 2020, rslash, subreddit, best of reddit, reddit top posts, top posts, top posts of all times, comedy, funny reddit posts, funny reddit, fails, cringe, entitledparents, entitledparents fails, entitled parents fail, malicious compliance reddit, malicious compliance, tech support, tales from tech support reddit, funny reddit posts clean

Id: 45Qz_pq-1LY

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021