I worked for an MSP that merged with a copier company. Copiers got more and more capable, and so of course people wanted to use their “advanced” features, hence the merger with an IT company.
When they sold a copier, they would sell limited IT engagements. Things like handing information and help to customer IT, or if they lacked IT, limited help like placing it on the network, installing the drivers to use it as a printer, setting up scanning to network. This was done remotely by a level one technician, Joe this time.
Well, install day came, and after Joe helped out the customer claimed that some computers could print, some couldn’t. And some computers couldn’t access anything else on the network. They hired a local IT guy that threw Joe under the bus, and the customer yelled at my boss. As one of the level 2 techs, I was told to “fix what Joe fucked up” right in front of Joe. Shit boss, different story.
I travel out there, look at their problem, but was told I couldn’t touch anything until their IT guy showed up. So I used the time to ask questions, and tour around since I had a hunch.
Local IT guy strides in 15 minutes late, smug as hell. I talk and lead him to the basement, following the signal strength of a weirdly named wifi signal, and get a solid full strength connection in front of a locked closet. I ask them to unlock it, and ask about the router I see on the shelf, and point out that I believe it’s their issue.
Local IT guy installed a router as an access point, and did it so wrong that it was acting as a 2nd DHCP server on their network, handing out different addresses. In layman’s, their computers had 2 bosses with differing orders. Therefore local IT guy broke it, and blamed Joe cause he didn’t understand what he did.
I praised Joe from that day for being the first technician I knew capable of physically installing gear remotely. He was an excellent tech, and a good colleague.
Many years ago I worked for a small company who’d just hired a new CEO - and the guy hated me for some reason. He used every chance to make inappropriate remarks, and at times he’d just get angry and start yelling at me because his MacBook wasn’t doing something the way he wanted it. Keeping in mind, I didn’t do support for endpoints, my specialty was servers and network. I’d just let him go off because he wasn’t local, and would only come to the office for a day about once a month.
One day he called into the office and asked for me (again there are other support people who could easily help him with his macbook issues). He states he’s on a train, and can’t send or receive e-mails. Assuming he’s done basic troubleshooting, and not wanting to piss him off further, I go through normal troubleshooting steps. After several minutes he gets angry again, and starts yelling at me, so did what anyone would do - I put him on speaker phone so everyone else in the office could hear his rant. We all had a good chuckle.
Once he’d gotten it out of his system, I suggested he give me his remote access info (we’d installed remote access software on his macbook for this very reason) so I could remote into his system and see for myself what was going on. He states the software won’t display the one-time access code…so I asked him if he was connected to the WiFi, there was a pause, and then and the phone went dead, he just hung up on me. Magically his email started working after that
“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”
“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Can you print green?”
“Green works fine!”
“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”
Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…
“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”
“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”
I had a user ask us to solve her problems slower because it made her feel stupid when we solved them immediately.
I accidentally wiped a column in a police department’s evidence database 😁😅
Thank you for your service
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
I guess not everybody’s that much into tennis :)
Me: Here’s the URL for the web service I’ve just deployed. I’ve set up users and permissions so just copy it into your browser and you should see a very similar system to what you’ve been trained on with all your data in there.
Customer: All I’m getting is a blank screen.
Much panicking and headscratching later…
Me: Waaaiiiiittt, did you press Return/Go after copying the URL?
Customer: That was not in the instructions.
Anytime you make something foolproof, the universe makes a better fool.
PEBKAC is the only universal truth…
PICNIC is the other universal truth
I know pebcak but not picnic.
Problem in chair not in computer :)
Had an older coworker who was on a long call with a user; his hands got tired so he put it on speaker after a while.
At a certain point my coworker fell asleep… and so did the user on the phone (snoring).
Before I was officially in tech support but I was the unofficial helper in my office. I don’t recall the exact issue this person was having on their desktop but I went over to help and said “have you tried restarting?” This person, a millennial, probably younger or the same age as me, then pressed the power button on the monitor to “restart”. I’m still reeling.
Was working the counter at a repair shop. This really old guy had come in for a data backup and a wipe/restore. We performed said service, and reloaded the data from the backup back on, and his outlook data was encrypted with a password he couldn’t remember.
This infuriated him, he specifically asked me if I wanted HIM to “Shove the desktop tower up his ass, stick his head in after it, and give it a sniff.”
People are wild.
Well but it makes sense you would’ve wanted to him to do that if the guy was being that much of a prick
I worked for a college for a while.
All of the student records were on a mini frame IBM as400 from 1986.
The only connectivity to this device was via a 100 MB ethernet connection. There were no backups. The tape drive that was used for backing up this data I had gone defunct well before my time at the college.
I started noticing errors in the connection logs and I notified the CIO, saying that we needed to replace this box or upgrade it or do something before the connection failed or else we could lose access to data that we are federally required to maintain.
They noted my concerns, and then they let it go.
About 6 months later, the ethernet card failed.
I let them know that our only way to get data into or out of this machine has gone offline and cannot be resuscitated.
They asked me to fix it I told them I can’t. The card was down. I had gone through the proper processes of rebooting the machine and opening it up to take a look but couldn’t find anything wrong with it I tried reseating the card, but this system is old as shit and they didn’t make parts for it anymore and even if they did the school would have to buy it and the school is too cheap to buy them.
People are running around scared for losing their jobs because the consequence for this not coming back up could be so severe as to cause the entire college to be shut down.
Okay so now that the stage is set, a few days later the former IT guy happened to stop by the college. This dude was 70 something years old if he was a day, and I saw him out in the corridors.
I walked up to him, I was like hey man just so you know the as400 network connection is down, do you have any tips on how I might bring it back up?
He said hang on a second.
I let him into the server room and he waved his hands in the air over the as 400 and said try it again.
And sure as shit, the fucking network connection came back up.
I lost my shit.
The administrators for the college lost their shit.
Everyone’s fucking mind was blown, and somehow they suddenly magically had the money to purchase a cloud as400 and upload all of our data to it within the next 6 weeks.
I got to retire that box but I’m never ever going to forget how somebody fixed a 40 year old ethernet card by waving their fucking hands in the air
Hahaha, he was having you pretty good! 😅
Magic! Have you ever tried magic yourself? I mean stage magic, not the one with old ladies looking into glass balls and puffing weird smoke.
One of their principles is: “It always happens before it happens”. Means, you have to prepare things and then, when things appear, it looks like magic because nobody has watched you when you prepared it.
My explanation to that magical AS400 is this:
The old IT guy wasn’t there by accident. No way. He was there because somebody had called him. He was the only known person who could ever fix the problem after all. Then he had fixed the AS400 already, while you did not watch. Later when you met him, he decided to play his little show, and well, later he had a good laugh…
That’s a good guess, bits it’s highly unlikely as he showed up in the afternoon and I had been working on it not an hour before.
That and I was the only person other than the CIO who had access to the server room.
My friend recently introduced the concept of the machine spirit to me; the idea that all computers and machines have spirits and that the more complex and complicated the machine and software, the higher the level of technomage required to submit it. Most computers and desktops have low machine spirits so people with basic knowledge can make it work, but machines with purpose or that are complicated require high level technomages to operate. I think about that sometimes when I can fix my friends stuff in minutes but my machine will have issues that take days or weeks to fix.
This makes sense. My level was too low to reactivate the ancient artifact. Hopefully I’ve leveled up since then.
I’ve long bought into the idea of the machine spirit, and I have so many anecdotal stories about it. Most of the time it’s stuff like the mechanics laughing because they finally get to be on the other side of TPS (Technician Proximity Syndrome), but others are more amusing to me. Like the number of times I’ve fixed something by threatening to microwave the machine piece by piece and further turn it into the desktop/server of Theseus.
Sounds like when someone calls me and whatever it is suddenly works when I do it. I always tell them it just got spooked back in line by the IT guy.
This reminds me of the magic / more magic switch.
This was way back but had a basic support call for someone who couldn’t get their mouse to work.
After speaking with them for over ten minutes and just being generally confused I cut to the chase and asked, “Ma’am, what are you doing with your mouse right now?”
The answer? She was moving the mouse around on the monitor.
Half an hour of troubleshooting a user who said they couldn’t reach their file share on their network. They didn’t have access to the internet… They didn’t have access to anything else on the network… Switch under their desk indicated not connecting to the rest of the network. Asked if they would go to the server closet, they said they couldn’t, because an overzealous wrecking ball went through that closet this morning. Not even joking…it was to take down the neighboring building which was being knocked down for being a code violation for being too close to my client’s building.
I got called in to handle a situation where an employee was spying on his boss’s emails. He got caught when a read notification went out from his account.
He got called into a meeting and when they explained what it was about he didn’t say a word, but left the meeting, went back to his office, removed the hard drive from his computer and left with it.
I just had to figure out what he’d done, make sure he didn’t have any further access, and fill in until they hired someone permanent. No idea what happened after that.
Holy shit, that’s some sketch there. When you decide the least incriminating thing is to say nothing and abscond with a drive… damn.
Yeah the company I work at security would’ve 100% got that hdd from him…
Years ago I was working in a sales / support call center. One day in between calls someone posed the question of if you had to sleep with someone of the same sex who would it be. Obvuois answers were things like George Clooney Brad Pitt etc. one of our team was extremely introverted so it was normal for him not to participate.
3 weeks later he pipes up, “I’ve given this a lot of thought and If I had to sleep with a man it would be Jesus Christ” 3 weeks later. Blows my mind he was in deep contemplation for so long. I still am taken a bit back.
The reason? “Jesus seems like he’d be a considerate lover with strong hands.” Beautiful.
He was a carpenter after all
IIRC, a more literal translation of his profession would have been ‘home builder,’ and since most homes in the area at the time would have been stone, he would have been a stonemason. Jesus would have been ripped.
