IT Stories

Pwolf · Post by **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...

Mithroch · Post by **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.

Next

Pwolf · Post by **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.

Pwolf

ngsilver · Post by **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.

YouTube · Post by **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.

Corran · Post by **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.

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...

Mithroch · Post by **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

Sukunai · Post by **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.

Kalium · Post by **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.

Fall_Child42 · Post by **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.