Tales from Tech Support - user thinks tech doesn't know his job

hey everyone welcome to r tales from tech support where we get to have a little chuckle at the technologically disadvantaged like me i'm uncle reddit and have i got a story for you malfunctioning mouse context i work the it department of a high school and thus there are many levels of competence among the people we help this older teacher has had problems with an ergonomic mouse multiple times ot equals older teacher op oh so beautiful me it all starts when ot comes into our help desk and slams the mouse onto my desk and starts complaining aop this pos isn't working and always stops working and the replacement mouse just isn't sufficient because it's not ergonomically friendly enough they're specialized might so we have to order them as per need she continues so now i have to ask my boss again to order a new one as this one's broken and always keeps breaking you've tried to fix it like seven times now and it's never good enough this is not okay so i taken the mouse and the wireless usb that comes with it go over to the computer and sure enough it isn't working so i check if it's turned on it is turned on then i take the charging cable and plug it into the mouse and as i do the thing lights up i keep using it for a few hours and it works flawlessly i decide to keep it in storage for the next time her mouse breaks okay so i'm kind of making some inferences here maybe the old person wasn't charging the mouse is that what we're getting at here i mean did they know it was rechargeable i know they knew you know they had a cord and everything but did they actually know like was it run down for them and taught replaced everything but the user a recent tale of the annoyingly absurd and profoundly daft an off-site user with a lockout issue round one user calls about being locked multiple times a day help desk unlocks account wipes save domain credentials round two users still getting locked out multiple times a day plus one irate stat help desk wipes local user profile round three users still getting locked out multiple times a day plus free fury stat help desk sends replacement computer and keyboard round four users still getting locked out multiple times a day plus 5 annoyed plus 10 rage helpdesk is at the location for the day confronts user plus 10 luck user is waking up pc from sleep by repeatedly tapping the enter key as fast as they can until the login screen appears hitting the max bad password attempts in the process oh my god i can just picture that user hitting the keyboard like whack-a-mole it's like my wife at an elevator she really i love my wife but she doesn't understand that pressing the button faster doesn't make the elevator come faster like you know it's not like pedaling a bike you know the more you pedal the faster it goes but there she is just going tap tap tap tap tap oh this is why people drink if calling a company support line at least try what they say i used to work in support for a company that makes mobile device management software while you can use their product in the cloud some organizations choose to host it locally this requires a few things in place one being mysql and setting up a database i had a guy call in trying to get a testing environment set up cool i've done this before a ton of times it won't be an issue we get to the point where you have to launch mysql which is to enter a command and command prompt for it to load the guy on the phone straight out refused to enter the command because it didn't look like something that would launch mysql so we're stuck me trying to explain that yes this would work and him going back and forth with me why it wouldn't after the 10th time asking him to do it my voice getting more and more frustrated at his stupidity he finally ran to command and it launched mysql his words were oh it does work i immediately hung up the phone just give it a shot what was it going to hurt you wasted 20 minutes probably of arguing and you could have just you know even if it didn't work you only wasted 10 seconds of your life okay people are just insane the kids are all right so this just happened to me like an hour ago and while i normally only use this account to promote my content creation stuff this story was just too good to pass up some background while i don't actually work in it my job has become i.t adjacent as of late due to coded circumstances i currently work in a classroom providing child care to elementary aged children while this was normally a before and after school gig it has since become a place kids go in order to log into their remote learning classes if their parents aren't able to stay home with them this means that a big portion of my job now involves troubleshooting issues on their school-provided chromebooks not exactly what i signed up for but i'm a problem solver by nature and pretty comfortable with technology and i actually kind of enjoy when things go south and i have to figure out why anyway today's story involves none of that occasionally i have a walk around the room to make sure everyone's in their classes and not having issues etc it's a way for me to keep track of what's going on and track issues before they happen so i see a fourth grader who i know isn't supposed to be in class yet i ask what she's up to her talking to my cousin me how knowing the school provided chromebooks have all chat and social media sites blocked her google docs you guys these kids are opening shared docs with their friends in live editing to chat kids are so darn smart i love it needless to say i didn't stop her she effing earned it yeah i get it and you know what i probably wouldn't have stopped her on that either the google docs thing is no big deal uh as long as you're not sharing inappropriate stuff through the docs eh they're gonna find a workaround and that's probably mild compared to what some of the other kids can do and trust me there are other workarounds even after they've locked down all social media slightly slighted co-worker humorous so i'm second generation in field service and tech support this story is about the only one that overlaps my experiences with my dad's dad equals my dad obviously cw dad's co-worker eventually a lifelong friend of his dk equals dumb kid me in this context when i was young more than a while ago and dumb and still in college dad worked at a nerve center for a particular type of very popular communications vpc he and his colleagues including cw maintained the fiber optic networks and monitored the infrastructure of said vpc provider now dad doesn't particularly go out of his way to meet people but is extremely pleasant and strives for competence in most everything he does which gets him a positive reputation with repeat customers over time some customers would call in and ask for dad when cw or others would answer this got a little annoying to the rest of them as they all had the same experience and were all generally quite competent stage set dk calls into the call center late one night and cw answers thank you for calling vpc official office name this is cw how can i assist you dk can i speak to dad cw dad's on another call at the moment i'm sure i can assist you if you allow it dk cw i'm sure you would do a good job but i kind of need to talk with dad cw it wouldn't be a problem i have access to your files and system monitoring dk realizing what's going on i don't think so in this case i'd like to talk to dad because he's my dad and while you're very nice i think asking someone new for fatherly advice might not be the best idea cw oh you must be dk dad is probably gonna be a bit can i have him call you back some chuckling going on dk that would be great thanks cw and that would be the tale of me and dad discovering cw was feeling a little slighted yeah i get it there's you know part of it's just a personality thing some people even though everybody might have the same credentials the same competence uh and maybe they're all pleasant to deal with there's just certain things about certain people that make people gravitate towards them even if they've only met them on the phone for you know getting tech help they all just assume hey that's the guy to go to i can see where that would be a little frustrating make you question yourself where are my scans gnome support desk reporting in once again customer rang in today with a scanner issue he had been scanning fine earlier in the day from his home setup but was now not receiving scans from the work setup now i explained to him that the work scanner emailed them to him as compared to scanning directly to his pc customer got this concept and said they had not arrived in his emails and he had scanned him several hours ago being a diligent gnome i saw the opportunity to bump this job off to the printer people as i hate the bloody things customer calls back a bit later after the printer peon had checked the settings and they all looked okay log on to the customer's machine and check his emails he had changed his emails from show latest to show oldest scans were at the bottom of the list change the order and the customers back to being a happy chappie well pete good for you for figuring that out side note i'm not sure i'd be calling the printer people peons everybody's got their role to play you know what i mean the last shoot down of lieutenant colonel insect backstory i worked i.t in the army at this point in my career i had progressed from mainframes to tactical computer systems to had no idea css amo combat system support automation officer to desktops to servers email servers domain controllers and into installing and configuring network switches and routers my career in the army was coming to a close i had spent the last three to four months training newly mined computer techs with skills not taught at course hopefully to make them better texts i had signed in my keys and had my replacement sign the keys back out he was bug-eyed to the amount of keys and responsibility he was getting the army's policies on computers and networking were getting ridiculous so i had two computers on my desk one for official military work computer and one personal laptop for pulling miracles out of my butt because the new security guy was a butthole drone i had done his job when it was put on to me as an additional duty the personal laptop never connected to the network because its purpose was for things like drive recovery i personally purchased a couple of expensive drive forensics programs and performing impossible tasks like converting a recorded deposition of sensitive nature from one codec to mp3 a lot of these tasks could not be completed on the army system because of regulations against loading non-dod software on dod systems like i said getting ridiculous hence the non-dod laptop onward i was a day away from terminal leave and the start of my retired military life this happened on a thursday afternoon around 1400 hours i was in my office cleaning stuff out figuring out what were keepsakes and what needed to be tossed then lieutenant colonel insect walks in lieutenant colonel insect sergeant i need you to recover the data off this hard drive for me me why are you bringing me this now tomorrow is pretty much my last day lieutenant colonel insect i brought it to your boss and he said he'd get his best man on the job he couldn't figure it out and gave it back to me me when did you give the drive to boston his best of man lieutenant colonel insect two months ago me and you're just bringing it to me now lieutenant colonel insect there's a bunch of important information on this and i need it recovered and i know you can extract it after playing 20 questions i find out it's his personal external hard drive with his pictures from afghanistan on it he was using his position of rank for something that was personal and hoping to get a freebie out of it by playing it off his official business me sir this will require 12 to 18 hours of scan time to see if there's anything recoverable from the drive along with four to six hours of time to copy recover data to a new external hard drive do you have a fresh external hard drive to dump your data onto lieutenant kernel insect another drive won't you provide one me no this is personal data on a personal external drive you want the data you provided fresh drive actually i don't have time for this tomorrow's my last day it'll be a very short day i'm afraid you'll have to take it to a professional drive recovery company to get your data back i can give you a list of places in town that could facilitate this lieutenant colonel insect what you're not going to do this for me me no sir if you had brought this to me two weeks ago and agreed to buy six pieces for the office i would have had the luxury of time to complete this lieutenant colonel insect six pizzas anytime someone brought personal equipment in for me to work on it was either 100 cash from my retirement party fund or six pizzas for my guys at the office the work was done at home so there was no improper use of government time me that's the going rate for off hours work on personal equipment lieutenant colonel insect i'm giving you a direct order me to work on your personal equipment no sir you have a great day and good luck finding a company that will recover your data cheaper than six pizzas at the time it was seventeen hundred dollars just to look at the drive with no promise of recovering anything lieutenant colonel insect leaves the office empty-handed friday i had prior approval to show up in a suit and tie made my rounds to say goodbye to those i cared about sent out my last official global email of my retiring and thanking those i knew through my career boss crap green twinkies at first thinking i sent out a flame mail until he read it and thought it was great threw a couple boxes of i love me stuff and my laptop in the truck went to lunch with the office and went home yeah i love how everybody wants favors and they want everything last minute and think they can take advantage of you and then there's the guys and this guy happened to be both who think that if they can't get the favor they can just bully you or order you to do it good for you for sticking to your guns and happy retirement do not rely on someone saying they have done something simple disclaimer i'm not technically tech support i just happen to be the least tech illiterate at my office and i build and maintain the excel spreadsheets we use to operate long time luck or first time poster context i work in finance i built the main spreadsheet that we use to interact with the bloomberg terminal and that runs all of our pricing every day we run the closes and save it with any update so that we get the correct change on day the next day senior revenue generator equals srg works in a different country spready equals the main spreadsheet we used to operate srg was angry that his spready wasn't updating each day with the closes he said repeatedly that he's done all the usual debugging stuff multiple times and done so recently within the last week closed and reopened the spready closed and reopened all of excel rebooted his pc run the bloomberg diagnostic tool everything i've been trying to think of other stuff it could be and coming up blank so i've been trying to remote log into his pc for a while but there's never a good time apparently this leads us to today when i finally managed to remote into his pc early a whole bunch of stuff is open including the spready cue investigation open task manager to discover he hasn't rebooted his pc in nearly three weeks so i close out his excel wait about 10 seconds and reopen the spready it's up to date i think i must have gone insane so i run basic stress tests by making changes at my end on my pc and spready version seeing if they update his everything's working perfectly and the changes flow through when i reopen his sheet so either he never did the debugging stuff we asked him to or i'm actually a wizard and my powers can stretch at least across an ocean given that he hadn't rebooted in 3 weeks unfortunately the latter is the most likely option however i am hopeful that i do in fact have magical powers oh good luck with that op i'm still waiting for my magical powers to develop printing issues i'm an architect but i have a story let me back up the principal at my farm was a gross old guy who loved beautiful blonde women not surprisingly he hired a beautiful blonde x-model as his personal assistant while the rest of us including the other two senior partners all worked in a room with an open floor plan on the first floor she had her own office upstairs she was sweet and a nice person i actually liked her very much however it was clear she was hired by our gross boss solely because of her looks sometimes she would call me in a panic asking for tech help one of those times she said she needed to print an email for our boss but was having trouble as an architect printing on the large-scale plotter is always an issue so i felt a printing issue pain well i ran upstairs and printed the email for her i didn't have to do anything special but sometimes computers act up no big deal happy to help a fellow female co-worker anyways a couple hours later i come back upstairs to retrieve a floor plan i had printed from the plotter and wouldn't you know it a 36 by 48 inch enlarged version of the email with only one sentence was hanging in the plotter after a quiet chuckle of myself i disposed of it so she wouldn't get in trouble but it could have passed his modern art listen i'm not saying pretty people can't be smart but sometimes i wonder the power user i had been working three weeks as an on-site help desk engineer it was a good gig 10 minutes from home and the company gave me a car the usual mixed bag of user problems until i came across pete the power user not his real name hi help desk i have a problem with my spreadsheet okay pete i'll come over in a few minutes and take a look so i turned up expecting the usual it's not printing but it's pete the power user my macro isn't working anymore says pete the power user what's a macro i replied well pete goes into what a macro is in details of how it was working and eventually it stopped working as a self-taught i.t guy i had no idea what a macro was until now off i go back to my room and it's time to break out the manual chapter 11 how to create a macro etc i didn't really hold out much hope but i gave pete the power user a call and went and visited him again pete here's my macro and the code behind it with key mapping i don't create macros using that method but let's give it a try he copied his code into my macro and boom it worked even power users need a helping hand sometimes it just needs someone to approach the problem from a different angle rtfm kids phone operated electric shock collar so my grandpa used to work at a phone company and he told me this story in great detail the other day it was just another day when my grandpa got a strange call from a customer it went a little something like this customer i have an issue with my phone grandpa okay what's the problem customer well you see whenever i get a call my dog goes nuts barking and howling grandpa so what's the problem with the phone customer that is the problem i need you to fix it grandpa's size okay i'll put down a request for a service call and i'll get back to you as soon as i can customer great thanks fast forward a couple of days when my grandpa arrives at this woman's house my grandpa goes in and determines that the phone isn't ringing extraordinarily loud and then asks to see the phone box the customer takes him out to the backyard and proceeds to show him the phone box my grandpa noticed that the dog was chained to the phone box for those who aren't familiar with old phone systems this contained the wiring and phone cable and was above ground for easy maintenance he goes ahead and opens it up and sees very clearly that there's a short in the wire the wire also happened to be touching the metal foam box which was connected to the metal chain keeping the dog in the backyard so in essence whenever this woman placed or received a call the dog was getting electrocuted my grandpa fixed the short and the dog never barked when the phone rang again i didn't think there was enough amperage or voltage or whatever in those phone lines to do that kind of damage i mean it may have bugged him and scared him but i don't think it was actually electrocuting the dog tell me what you think down in the comments below hey guys thanks for hanging out with me today if you've enjoyed this content would you consider giving this video a like subscribing to the channel and maybe clicking that little bell icon so you don't miss the fact out with the beard telling your stories see ya you

Channel: Story Time with Uncle Reddit

Views: 8,015

Rating: 4.9556785 out of 5

Keywords: uncle reddit, reddit, reddit stories, funny reddit stories, r/idontworkherelady, r/prorevenge, r/entitledparents, funny reddit stories 2020, rslash, 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, tales from tech support

Id: 0uKadQvP1Xo

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021