Tales from Tech Support

Not the dialup chirping.

I, too, have a tale of someone convinced their PC was haunted. My grandmother asked me to take a look at her friend’s computer. She had two problems.

When using new wireless kit, never assume the vendor knows what they are doing, most of the time they do not know what the local laws regarding wireless equipment even are. We have some vendors ignore standards while others follow the standard so closely the kit becomes unusable.

My first job in IT still haunts me for all the stupid shit we did while bragging about how great we were. Most of that coming from the boss who you could easily convince me invented narcissism himself.

Ever have to leave a professional sounding note on a ticket that broadcasts to anyone reading it how rock fuck stupid the user has been?

I’m not going to waste time give you the introduction. If you don’t know who Jimmy is, I suggest you check my post history.

It wasn’t my purpose at first but I think Jimmy’s stories might actually become an ongoing series.

Where i used to work we had a lot of Chinese students in the city, with varying degrees of skill with English. No problem, English is my main but also not my first language. This story is from about 20 years ago.

In our IT store had a few repeat timewaster customers. One in particular though I completely lost patience with. This young man just did not get things. No matter how many times or different ways we explained it. He would keep asking the same question over and over again, I believe some people do this deliberately, it’s a tactic to wear people down until they just give you what you want to get you to go away. Or they don’t like or won’t take no for an answer on principle. This kid did not have that spark, whether the problem was technical or procedural or policy we could explain endlessly why he couldn’t have what he wanted and the only thing he could comprehend was that.. he didn’t have what he wanted. It wasn’t even being offended that he was told “no”, it was simply he had a problem, which was very much his problem, and it still wasn’t solved.

What is?

This happened just now. It’s not serious but, God I wanted to bang my head in a wall.

Years ago we replaced our wireless network. It was.. fine, I guess. As a team we worked with the vendor to rip out the existing installation and install something much more comprehensive. I was asked to take on the BYOD part.

In a company run by absolute villains there was one team that seemed to treat incompetence as a goal. It was such a god awful place they couldn’t keep staff and were constantly hiring, training and losing personnel. Someone told me their attrition rate was >100%. It broke my brain, they tried explaining that for every 10 people they hired 11 or more quit. I still don’t understand how that is possible.

Many years ago as you will soon see, we did a PC build for this customer. Nice guy, early 20s doing a minimum wage job and saving up for his first gaming rig. It wasn’t absolute top of the line but it was more than I would have needed myself, definitely above mid tier.

I get a job for a department I’ve never visited before. I’m mostly access all areas so my card being rejected on the door tells me I’m in a specialist area. I explain I’m IT and get shown through to the right room by one of the staff there and I’m left to get on with it.

One day I’m introduced to the new Networks guy. He seems.. fine? But I get a vibe from him I can’t shake. He’s sort of vague and noncommittal about everything. Which I empathise with, its his first day and I get the impression he’s a recent graduate. I’ve been doing this job for decades and I still don’t have the confidence to talk in absolutes when there’s even a .01% chance of outliers or being caught wrong. Benefit of doubt is given.

I get a job to install some hardware on all the PCs in an office. It should be the easiest bread and butter task I could be asked to perform. I haven’t touched this particular device but its just some USB kit, simple right? We even have our own documentation as well as the manufacturers.

We were preparing for clients to be permanently onsite who required Internet access. We don’t want them on our network and they don’t want to be on ours either for security reasons, so we provide a simple consumer grade broadband line. It’s just the ISP router to a dumb unmanaged switch wired up to each desk, plain and simple. I test each socket myself, every single one is fine.

So we’re having a meeting with a software vendor about a new ERP solution. Representatives of every department and the boss himself present.

These stories are originally posted over the past decade on Reddits TalesfromTechSupport so I am copying over to Lemmy to help bring some life into this /c/

Another tale from the the land downunder. This time for all you RF geeks. I apologise in advance if I use dB, dBm, and dBi incorrectly, I tend to use them interchangeably at work.

This story is a few tears old, but I’ll try to remember all the fun parts.

My incident over 2 9 years ago involves the federal regulator making impossible claims.

These stories are originally posted over the past decade on Reddits TalesfromTechSupport so I am copying over to Lemmy to help bring some life into this /c/

Some background, I work full stack while we also man the support email from users. I’m manning the support email this week, but today I was also tech support for a fellow developer.

This is a more recent story while working for an MSP in Europe compared to my time working for an ISP in Australia

This is a repost of a story I posted on Reddit a few years ago.

User: I need a new ssd to expand the storage on my laptop

Rule T1A - Always have someone else to blame it on.

This doesn’t exactly fit but it’s close enough.

I work in the IT department of a mid-sized company. One of my responsibilities is encoding newly-entered tickets (we use pretty old software for this, so auto-encoding isn’t an option). Because of this, I get to personally greet every new ticket that comes knocking at the front door of our Service Desk, from the frustratingly complex to the yawn-inducingly mundane. This ticket fell in the latter category, and came across as follows.