IT Stories

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IT Stories

Postby Pwolf » Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:38 pm

I was thinking about this at work today after we had a little issue...

Anyone who works in the IT field have any good stories to tell?

I work for the State of California as a help desk tech. We had ordered 45 Nvidia Quadro workstation cards ($600-$700 a piece... ~$30,000). I'm asked to test them on the model we are going to deploy them on...

Turns out that the PCI-E 16x slot on the motherboard isn't a real PCI-E 16x slot... it's a fucking Intel proprietary POS. So we get to return them, lol. Unfortunately this probably means we are going to have to spend more money on new workstations.


Pwolf

PS: i have more but i'll save them for late if this thread takes off...
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Postby Mithroch » Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:13 pm

Sure... I'm always ready to make fun of my (L)users. A few jobs ago I was working help desk for a local ISP. An elderly gentle man that was having some connection issues phoned in for support. Obviously as he is on the phone... I have to walk him through checking his settings. At some point I ask him to "right click on the (ISP name) icon and click on properties... a window that says dial-up connection properties should pop up"

At this point I hear the modem engage and start dialing. Yes... this is back in the days when dial-up was the majority of the market.

"No. No. Sir you need to right click on the icon... not left click."

"I did that" he claimed.

"Ok... make sure you cursor... or arrow is on top of the icon and right click. Do you get a small menu..."

The modem engages

"Sir... you have to right click"

"I did... I'll try again"

At this point I notice that he is typing something...

"Sir, what are you typing?"

"You said to write 'click' on the icon"

Yes... this is true. Had it not happened to me... would call it an internet/urban legend... but it did happen to me.


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Postby Pwolf » Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:31 pm

holy crap that is a good one... I'll have to try and remember something similar. I know i've had a similar experience but i can't quiet remember the details.


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Postby ngsilver » Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:32 am

I used to work Help Desk for the Post Office.

Just a sum of some of the odder problems I've gotten:

'That nice cup holder on my computer broke!' <- it's true, I've gotten this call about 10 times.

'I can't fit this disk into the slot' (talking about a 3.25 floppy slot) 'What is the size of the disk you are putting into it?' 'One of those flimsy black things' [head desk] 'Sir, that disk isn't the proper size or kind to fit into that slot' some rustling noised can be heard now 'that's ok, it fits fine now' click. The same guy calls in later and another agent got him, apparently he folded the 5.5 floppy to the size of the 3.25 and put that in. He called in complaining that the computer couldn't read the disk.

I had another caller who couldn't get her 3.25 disk into the drive. After digging further I found out that she had put a slice of American cheese in the slot earlier that day, thinking it would heat it up for her.

I had another caller who was complaining his computer wouldn't turn on. So I went through everything I could think of, including checking if it is plugged in. I finally after and hour on the phone remembered something about a major thunderstorm hitting the area the guy was calling from around that time. I asked the guy if there were lights on in the office he was at. He told me no, the storm had knocked power out. I then spent the next 30 mins assuring him that the computer was not turning on because there was no power. Seriously, I had to explain that concept to him.
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Postby Ileia » Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:55 am

I had a lady who called when her cable/internet weren't working.....during a power outage in her area.
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Postby Corran » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:38 am

As a network engineer/support tech I've had my fair share of problems with both the users and our own customer support desk. Eventually I learned to ask the same questions help desk should have already asked before heading to the customer's location...

One time I drove to the other side of the military base only to find that the user had two NICs and the connection was restored by plugging the lan patch to the other NIC. Help desk should have caught that...

Another time near the end of the day I was assigned a two jobs, one where an entire building lost connectivity and another where a single user had lost connectivity. Of course the building took precedence and by the time I was done with it I went home for the day. When I came in the next day the workgroup manager (the guy that does the troubleshooting on the customer's computer before calling in issues to the help desk) was being a jerk and he was acting like his user was giving him hell or something because I didn't show up the previous day... Turns out the workgroup manager tried pluging a crossover cable to the user's workstation. :evil: The workgroup manager was humble after I showed him the problem...

At my last base I wasn't doing network support and actually ended up being a workgroup manager myself. I went down to the base network control center to get a copy of the Windows image burned to disk so I could load a few workstations in my building... Well, the help desk guy that was assisting me decides to burn the image straight from the network share and I warned him he would coaster the disk if he lost network connectivity. About 70% through the burn, another help desk tech enters the office and discreetly unplugs this guy's NIC as a practical joke.... -_- Seriously wtf. I probably wouldn't have cared so much if they didn't make me bring my own disk in. For some reason they didn't have any DVD-Rs...
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Postby Mithroch » Fri Jul 18, 2008 8:02 am

For those that haven't seen this yet...
The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
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Postby Sukunai » Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:09 am

Do you guys ever get to fix lonely computers?

A "lonely" computer is usually owned by a nice old lady that probably genuinely needs real computer service, but, the service is rarely worth the fee. The thing is, the lady has just come to like the technician.

I have a friend that does house call based service repairs. And he says he gets to visit this one lady on a fairly regular enough basis. And she won't let him do it for free. And no, there's no funny business.
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Postby Kalium » Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:40 am

When I worked systems administration, all sorts of odd stuff happened. Like there was the time when half the battery sets in a UPS went ban and I got tapped to wire up the new batts. I nearly electrocuted myself when two electrodes touched by accident.

When I started working there, it was a Solaris shop. All the faculty were on Sun Blade 100s and 150s. One user in particular I remember. He didn't like Netscape Navigator, the browser of choice (*gag*) on Solaris. Why? He wanted his text-based browser back.

So I introduced him to lynx, and he was happy as a clam.
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Postby Fall_Child42 » Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:04 am

not really a user issue, but when our company decided to up and ditch leasing from Dell, we had to mail everything that was leased back to the company.

Well, being co-op students at the time we were the ones assigned the awesome job of wrapping everything up in whatever box we could find taping it up, and slapping a mailing address on it.

Some of the boxes were a tight fit.

After we were about halfway done we noticed some rather faint Boop...boop....boop coming from inside the room.

we realized that due to the tight fit we must have accidently turned the switch of the UPS on when loading it into the box.

Now nothing really happened from this point on, but we found it rather amusing that we were sending a small yet very heavy, beeping, nondescript package through the mail to Dell Canada.
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Postby inthesto » Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:15 pm

My dad is an IT manager.

He ate his dog once.
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Postby Facem@n » Fri Jul 18, 2008 4:37 pm

I've been working IT support for a few years.

One time I was working for a district Board of Education's MIS dept. One computer in a classroom said "Broken. Please fix" on a sheet of paper on it. Without even thinking about it, I looked behind it and plugged it in and it was working fine.

I was at a relative's home and took care of his borked desktop. I noticed his laptop was on the floor of a very messy room, and told him to not leave it there, unless he wanted an expensive piece of trash after someone steps on it. A few months later he tells me his brother stepped on it (cause it was on the floor) and had the audacity to ask me to fix it.

I've had to explain to attorneys who make 6-figure-a-year salaries how to turn on the computer and what the power button looks like. People turn off the monitor and think they've shut off the machine. I've heard stories from friends of people who cut cables with scissors to move computers, and then tried to tape them back together again.
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Postby Savia » Fri Jul 18, 2008 4:47 pm

Mithroch wrote:For those that haven't seen this yet...
The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude


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Postby Corran » Fri Jul 18, 2008 5:01 pm

Another time back back when I was in Florida some contractors were tasked with relocating a comm closet to the second floor of the jet engine shop... which is fine, except for the part where they neglected to inform us. They started powering down and disconnecting our equipment... near the end of the day, on a Friday, without even labeling the cables, or having all the additional cabling they needed to complete the job. No one in the Network Control Center was even aware such a project was going in that building until they did this... Another tech and I worked 5 hours past the end of our shift to clean up their mess.
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Postby godix » Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:03 pm

I used to be a hardware jockey with a company that sold all the computers to a fortune 500 company. After their onsite tech support people determined the HD, motherboard, or whatever was bad I'd drive out and switch it out under warranty. There was one tech support person where I'd always take out whatever was needed for the problem she claimed and a hard drive with a fresh image of the OS on it. That must have been a magical hard drive or something because just slapping it in was able to fix problems with NIC cards, mice, cd roms, motherboards, you name it. The magic only seemed to work when it was that one particular help desk person though.

Usually I just shrugged my shoulders and figured I was getting paid either way so who cares but one time she really ticked me off. Some bigshots CD rom was broken and even though my typical response time was to be on site within 2 hours of getting the call that wasn't good enough, she insisted I drop what I was doing that instant to go fix this thing and she was being a royal cunt about it all. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad if it wasn't for the fact I was building a server that was to be delivered and installed the next day. So I drop everything and drive the 30 miles out to the site. Pop in a cd to test the problem and it works fine. So I track down the user and ask what the problem is. When the guy was playing his audio CD it would just play 10 seconds of a song then switch to a totally random song. The end user, alright. He wasn't paid to know about computers. So doesn't know what random and intro play are, no big deal. But the woman who is paid to know computers claiming this was a hardware problem? I came close to committing murder that day.

Not a tech story but a general 'WTF?' thing: The company I referred to is a huge company that had several top secret projects. There was one facility where I had to be met at the door and the person escorting me was not allowed to be more than 5 feet from me at any time while I was there. One day I was sick so they send my co-worker to that facility instead of me. Next day I hear the co-worker was detained and questioned by their security for two hours before he was released and we were told that he could never perform a service call at that building and I should always be the one to do it. The cause of this fuss? He wasn't born in America while I was. That was it. The client even admitted that there was nothing more to it than that. Which is rather odd because AFAIK there wasn't a background check performed on either of us. Although I guess if you got a white guy on one hand and a hispanic with an accent on the other then people are gonna assume.

As a contrast to that, at their world headquarters one time they had a problem with a server. It turned out to be a major enough issue I couldn't fix it on site and had to take the thing back into shop. Now keep in mind, this is the world headquarters. The president of the company is in this building as are all 7 of the vice-presidents. And their headquarters for their worldwide legal dept, which is what department this server was for. And of course lots of documents and shit related to their business, including the top secret place I mentioned above. So you'd think walking out of that building with a $20,000 server who's HD was full of legal documents on their operations worldwide would be kinda a problem right? I wheeled it on a cart to the security checkpoint, who was a new guy. I asked him to watch it while I pulled my car around then I loaded into my backseat and drove off. The security guy didn't even ask my name much less what I was doing. Nice of him to keep an eye on the server for me though.

On a 'damn technology is kickass' note: At a location that did military work (but not the top secret place) I sat and watched as they flew a plane over Brazil, dropped a tractor via parachute, then had the tractor bulldoze a landing strip so the plane that airdropped it could land. Both the plane and tractor were controlled remotely from a tiny ass building in middle of Illinois. I'd find that cool even today but this was actually about 10 years ago when people were still impressed by the blazing speed of a 54k modem which just made it all the more impressive.
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