LucasWaffyWafTech support workers, what are your favorite stories from your time in the industry?
squirrelOne monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
bizarrolandThat's why most companies with fewer than say like a thousand people choose a username that's almost always first letter of first name, last name and then a couple of numbers.
If you can't remember your own name then there are bigger issues than whether you can sign into the computer.
Once upon a time before there were smartphones…
The internet existed already, e-mail as well.
We got a letter on real paper.
The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉
It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…
I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂
no link to pic?
What’s your address they’ll mail it to you ;p
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…
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 :)
Tennis? I thought they were talking about the other sportsball, the one where old dudes hit a ball with sticks into a hole
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
Apocryphal: user reports laptop frequently crashing. Tech is putting it through paces, can’t make it crash. Tech slides it over and asks user to show them what they do differently. User touches the laptop (before they can do anything with it) and it crashes. I was told about this, I didn’t see it happen.
I’ve heard that some laptops with magnetic closures register lid closes when someone with a magnetic wrist watch puts their hands near the keyboard!
Nonono it’s epectromagic energy being emitted…source am in IT
Tru tho …
hada user like this, we joked she was allergic to laptops. we could never replicate the issue until she touched it
Did she name her car “dick turpin”?
I firmly believe some people emit some sort of electromagnetic interference that we don’t have a reliable way to measure yet that makes technology buggy in their hands. My spouse is one such person. I’ve watched them from across the room do exactly the right steps and not have it work. Then hand it to me and it works instantly. There’s no logical reason for this. Their mere presence near by can make some things error it seems. It’s given me a lot more patience when people describe problems that should be impossible.
Bahnd RollardOf all the tech related professions IT people are by far the most supersticious. There is a reason we put bags of ramen on top of server racks and do other weird things when preforming high risk tasks.
A college advisor gave me the nickname of Morris Virus. Computers would go haywire, even crash (at least one death), if I was near them (and sometimes when I was about to arrive). I got kicked out of the Computer Center dozens of times. I got in trouble in other places, like at the local ISP, and got banned from touching some computers.
Streetlights would turn off as I approached and come back on after I passed them. A friend used that to find me.
A great aunt and a brother would meet up from time to time to exchange watches since watches would run faster for one and slower for the other.
RedactedMe: 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 :)
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.
ZorsithHad 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).
Boris NotTooBadinovMany 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
wirelesswireWhen I worked help desk, a coworker of mine took a call where someone called in because one of the thin clients was on fire. The user was advised to call 911.
I was helping a user reset their password and the convo went something like this:
Me: Ok, your temporary password is Password1. Log in with that and you'll be prompted to change it.
User: Is that a capital 1?
Me: No, just a regular 1.
When I worked help desk, a coworker of mine took a call where someone called in because one of the thin clients was on fire. The user was advised to call 911.
Well, did he try to turn it off and NOT back on again?
“We would have been here sooner, but we don’t usually get emails to inform us of fires.”
The IT Crowd: New emergency number: youtu.be/HWc3WY3fuZU?feature=shared
The IT Crowd: Fire! youtu.be/1EBfxjSFAxQ?feature=shared
The IT Crowd - Series 1 - Episode 2: New emergency number
Rule W25 of Rules of Tech Support - Users will try to do things like type in uppercase numbers.
Plot twist, user was running a contest for Capital One credit card and the correct response should have been “what’s in your wallet?”. OP would have won the grand prize and gotten to retire early. But instead lost the game.
The funniest part to me about this is that I’ve definitely thought of ! as capital 1 before
people that use their recycle bin as storage. there have been multiple. once I was at their desk, looked at their trashcan next to their desk and asked if it would be smart to store stuff in there. they got the point after that.
or the new user I setup, went to lunch, came back and needed his password reset because he forgot it already.
Had a colleague who did this regularly, till I put his new pw on a postit, and that in his coat pocket. Worked as long as the weather stayed same… It escalated away, until he let his gf call me for his password, because he did not dare to anymore. We finally gave up and set his pw fixed to “123456”. He was really good at the job, only not with his pw.
Should have given him a USB with write protected password in text file. Tell him to keep it on his person
Ok, I’m at my computer and plugged in my USB. Now what do I do?
The “store things in the recycle bin” people are the victims of a Lotus Notes-ism. The Trash folder in Notes isn’t subject to size limits, so some people started storing anything they wanted to keep there. Those people told other people to do the same without explaining why and it took on a life of its own as a technological fairy tale.
I accidentally wiped a column in a police department’s evidence database 😁😅
Thank you for your service
I was on a call once where some guy initially wanted to like block channels or something. After like 2 minutes it turned into some crazy Trump-esque rant about basically nothing. Some of my favorite quotes:
-
These people out here talking like they no what’s what. They don’t know shit. But big daddy… he knows.
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I see these fools running around here playing games. I don’t play games. I play real life.
FarraigePlaisteaċ (sé/é)I read that in the voice of Dwight Schrute
Once had to explain to an old lady (in full-time employment in a job that requires use of a computer) that the mouse moves around on the desk surface. She was trying to move the cursor by putting the mouse on the screen.
When trying to teach my grandpa how to use a computer, he kept lifting it into the air to make it go up on the screen. We never got past that. Also double clicking was click…1.5second…click. Couldn’t get him going any faster.
jordanlund“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 did support for inexpensive, but commercial grade network equipment. I’d just been promoted to a senior support engineer 2 days earlier. My boss came to me and said “we have a customer who just deployed a over $250k of equipment and it doesn’t work. The customer, sales person and account rep are on the call, we need you to figure it out”. After an hour or so going over their setup we found out our new switch connects to a 3com switch over a fiber line. 3com was out of business at this point, but I managed to find documentation on the product online. It’s fiber ports were FDDI. Our switch only supported Ethernet (No one really supported FDDI at this time.) At which point the sales person said “we’ll just have to replace the rest of the hardware” and the customer agreed.
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 reseeding the cards, 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 sage 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 at tuna 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
The Stoned HackerMy 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.
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.
when someone calls me and whatever it is suddenly works when I do it
Oh, I know that so well.
Usually I caress their screen then, like it was a pet, and say things like “that’s my boy” :)
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.
VindictiveJudgeThis reminds me of the magic / more magic switch.