f13.net

On the off chance that some of you support users in some way or another, I thought it might be fun to anonymously post some of your better support requests.  I just got this one:


And more come in every freaking day.

I wish I could here people on the phone.

If Roberta is three quarters the age of Terry, Nikki is 97% the age of Roberta, Judi is twice as old as Terry, my age is Judi's age divided by two plus fourteen, and I am 42, what the fuck is wrong with our phones?

That is confusing as fuck.

Oddly enough, I don't work in tech support, but we still get some very odd requests, but they pertain to files and collateral.

I really sucks that the other dept you do the most work with has no idea what they are doing, and refuse to believe anything you say that they don't like.

That is confusing as fuck.

Oh yeah, once I called the office manager because I thought I heard a bird in the ceiling.  We stuffed around for ten minutes before we realised it was someone's screensaver.

Making insane support calls used to be one of my hobbies.  I've matured since last year, though.  I've gone back to glaring at my neighbours for now reason now.  I had forgot how fun it was to watch people run past your house or cross the street before they get to it.  Sometimes I enjoy being a recluse.

Once I thought I heard a squirrel running around on top of our drop ceiling. Turns out I was right when it jumped down on the filing cabinet behind me and freaked me the fuck out.

But it's ok, it's dead now...

Similarly, one time I was at a band practice in my friend's basement when a bird landed on my drum set.

We have three identical computers in our pc lab. Same hardware, same software, security software wipes all changes.

We have a bevy of patrons who will need to switch between them because one 'won't let them' do whatever they are doing. I laugh every time.

There's one guy who will never shut the fuck up, loves to ramble on about technical stuff he kinda sorta knows. He won't talk to me, though. The librarians are nice and just let him ramble, I tell him I don't care and walk away. Seriously, I don't give a shit if there is a setting in the BIOS I can change to get a few milliseconds shaved off seek time for your ZIP disk. I really, really don't. Also, he only has a tooth.

You only need one.  For Corn.  Any more than that and you're just being extravagant.

If I talk to a user, I have failed that day.

(http://talk.softalkltd.com/softalk_weblog/WindowsLiveWriter/40bd7e7c7a76_B1F2/dilbert_tech_support%5B7%5D.gif)

(http://www.keung.biz/dilbert.gif)

Had one today where the DAU (dumb ass user) got an email bounceback that said the address you are sending to does not exist on this server . They called us of course and we told them they would need to contact the guy and get his correct address... The DAU tries to email him asking his correct address using the one that is bad and wondered why he got another bounceback.....<boggle>

I posted this a while back. It was good enough to repost:


Another satisfied customer. As a bonus, this was transcribed (perfectly, as you see) from a customer care voicemail using our visual voicemail feature. That means some poor guy who makes minimum wage gets to type voicemails into text.

Date: Feb 20 2008 10:03:25 AM
From: 1866XXXXXXX
To : Executive Response Team (1862XXXXXXX)

"You asshole, nigger bastards think you can sit here, and route people
to the Philippines, and be left on hold for 2 hours while you refuse to
cancel an account? I will fucking run you over with a truck. You get
some of your fucking niggers on the phone. You answer it, and you
provide the fucking service we paid for, there would be hell to pay."

I did analysis on the tickets our CS department submits to the help desk I supervise: only 35% of them are worth doing.

I'm thinking about making a rule to delete 2 out of every 3 tickets.

Six Sigma project?

To turn this on its head, once at the bank we had an email outage where no one could receive their mail.  Our network admin dutifully sent out a system wide email saying that... nobody could get their mail and he was working on the problem.  He honestly seemed surprised when I showed up at his desk asking if he knew email was down telling me "yeah I sent out an email about that".  I just gave him a blank stare until he realized the problem.

My dept does a lot of work for another dept. Whenever we tell them something they don't want to hear, they just close their ears and go "lalalalala we're right you're wrong!"

And our shitty managers don't back us up.

Nah, but that's one thing I need to work on. Green belt isn't THAT hard to get. Plus it sounds like you can whup someone's ass maybe.

We're a small library. Our network gear is on a shelf. Many years ago we bought an XServe (rack mountable). It sits on my desk. We've had a rack on our Needs List since then.

Couple years ago the maintenance guy decided to build a wall in the room our network gear is in (the future location of the rack). Now we can't fit racks in there.

I just got an email for two free powered full-size racks.

I am fighting the desire to grab a sledge. Maintenance guy is on vacation. Wall is in danger.

A sledgehammer? NO!

Sawzall.

That won't give anything like the satisfaction sledgehammer-carnage will provide.  Explosives would be even better, but they'd probably, um, violate the library's "no noise" policy or something.

Grab a sledge.  It'll give the maintenance guy something to do when he gets back. ;D

Good thing sledgehammers have silencers these days, I remember when they used to make all kinds of racket.

Are *you* going to go tell the crazed looking guy smashin' up the place with a sledge to quiet down?  :grin:

Patron 1: "My God, someone should go tell the library staff about what that maniac's doing!"
Patron 2 : "Um, that *is* the staff...."

At least with explosives you can pretend it wasn't you.

I sure hope that isn't supposed to make sense, because if it is I'm more tired than I thought.

That looks about typical to what our sister company sends us all the time.

Had a lady on the phone yesterday. Has software from us that has a monthly subscription price. She missed one payment, so we sent her a notice. She also forgot to update the login information in an automated part of her software, so it stopped sending out reports to her clients. Each time the report failed, we sent her an email explaining *exactly* what was wrong. We sent 11 of these emails to her over a two and half month period.

She calls us up and demands credit for the product. Her reasoning was that since she had missed a payment on her account (which she caught up a couple weeks later), that we must have shut down the report service on her, so there was nothing she could do. Except ignore our emails, and wait three months to call us, and then demand a refund...

That is striking in its truthiness. :)

Just wanted to share this one:

I am having printing issues it will print on page on 3 pages and two will be bland with maybe a couple black lines on them. I've looked everywhere I know of and I can't see where there are settings that I can change. Do you have any ideas?

Sorry, our e-mail server only has a policy to allow sexual content through.

Had a call come in at a former job from one of our remote sites (12 at the time), and I'm going to make you suffer the same paraphrased work flow I did.

User: Hi *ONE* of our public catalog search computers is down  (note: Wyse 150 dumb terminal, usually 15-40 per site).
Me: Is the terminal plugged in and turned on?
User: Yep its plugged in and turned on.
Me: Are you sure the little adapter on the back is securely screwed tight and the blue cable plugged into the back? (serial -> rj45 adapter).
User: Yep everything is connected.
Me: Ok the terminal port might be locked (flow control on the serial port), press alt something (i cannot remember on Wyse terminals).
User: Nothing happened.
Me: Ok, I'm going to log into your wan serial server and reset the port.

. . . cannot connect via the isdn link . . .

Me: I cannot get in remotely, I'm going to need you to check equipment in the data closet.
User: hang on a second i gotta find a flash light.

. . . ?!?! . . .

Me: Is the light broken or something in the wiring closet?
User: No its just dark.

. . . mmkay . . .

Me: Is the equipment off in the closet?
User: Yep no lights on the equipment
Me: Is the power cable plugged firmly into the wall and to the serial server?
User: Yep, all connections look good everything is hooked up.
Me: Well i'd like you to power off and on the serial server, there's a small button on the front that you have to flip.
User: Second to find it in the dark where the power is off to our building.

. . puts the user on hold and yelled a lot . . .

I VEEDIOED ME SOME MEETINS! MAKE ME CD PLAYER SHOW VEEDYUNS!

I'd have jumped to "is your power out" at about this point, but I have a very low opinion of people.


This is the point where I would have lost my job due to customer abuse... unless it was an internal client.  I'd have let him have it in any case. :oh_i_see:

I'm bringing this back for this:

When I logged on to my computer this morning, my offline e-mail storage was gone and I can not open it back up.  This happened to me a few weeks back and I saved all of the e-mails with instructions to open it back up in my offline e-mail storage.  Please let me know what I need to do in order to recover my offline e-mail storage.

Our Service Desk passed this ticket onto me with a medium priority.

 :uhrr: I can only imagine that was sent to you by Tarzan.

I don't have a lot of interaction with our users due to being more of a backline support kind of guy. I usually support other people in our department, especially the application guys. Who are, without exception, morons. It's bad enough seeing the retarded things regular users send in, but when people who should know better continuously prove that they read a book to get their jobs, you can't help but want to take a six pack, a deer rifle and climb the nearest clock tower.

Here's some gems from our DBA. Note that his first and only language is English:

The higher up they are on the totem pole the worse they are at typing for some odd reason.

In the slot, five by five.

And the lower. Senior management at my place tend to get a PA to do the emailing/talking for them - but the hell desk monkeys continually prove that they have absolutely no command of the English language. By the time a call arrives to me, it has frequently been garbled into unintelligible faceroll.

A recent entry in the Cancellation Reasons field:


The eventual translation I received: "The Agent does not have an MLS license as of yet"

Apparently order of words is irrelevant to call center employees

____________________

We offer a product that synchs our database with a database on a Palm. For data integrity reasons, the system warns you after two weeks of not synchronizing, that you need to synchronize the device. It gives you five warnings before it locks out the DB on the Palm.

We had a guy write in a multi paragraph letter today complaining that it was his right to decide whether and when he would synchronize his device, and that it was none of our business how often he did it. He insisted that we fix our program immediately...


additional funny note - the spell checker just changed my misspelled "parapgraph" to "pa rapgraph"

Rapgraph?

I am seeing the following errors on starting the jboss server without
even deploying any applications. Can you please look into this and
resolve them.



followed by 720k of unreadable gibbrish:

org.jboss.deployers.spi.DeploymentException.rethrowAsDeploymentException(DeploymentException.java:49)
   at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.createMetaData(AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.java:362)
   at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.createMetaData(AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.java:322)
   at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.createMetaData(AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.java:294)
   at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.deploy(AbstractParsingDeployerWithOutput.java:234)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployerWrapper.deploy(DeployerWrapper.java:171)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doDeploy(DeployersImpl.java:1439)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doInstallParentFirst(DeployersImpl.java:1157)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.install(DeployersImpl.java:1098)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.process(DeployersImpl.java:781)
   at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.main.MainDeployerImpl.process(MainDeployerImpl.java:702)
   at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.MainDeployerAdapter.process(MainDeployerAdapter.java:117)
   at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.ProfileDeployAction.install(ProfileDeployAction.java:70)
   at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.AbstractProfileAction.install(AbstractProfileAction.java:53)
   at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.AbstractProfileService.install(AbstractProfileService.java:361)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822)
   at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553)
   at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.AbstractProfileService.activateProfile(AbstractProfileService.java


I don't know java but I guess I'll figure this out... I'm just shocked it spit three quarters of a meg of 'service didn't start' data. I fucking hate Java.

Heh, I work as an app packager deploying with BMC Marimba, which is on a Java platform. Kicks out the same kind of huge ass error logs on both clients and servers every now and then.

Hey, guess who else is dealing with Java problems? Checkbox in an app is broken, works in windows but not OSX.

On the other side of things, don't forget that a single thing that someone in support does and doesn't tell you about can be a source of serious headaches. Last year, I forgot my admin password for my Mac desktop (I think I'd used some kind of alternative capitalization from what I normally use for this particular p-word) and got locked out while trying to remember which capitalization I'd used for it. So I sigh, call up support, and someone comes over to get me back in and reset the password. Without telling me, the support person figured they'd do me a favor and link my network password with my desktop password through the automated password recovery/reset system that we now have. So this week, I'm resetting my network password because I know the automated prompt for a change is coming in a few weeks anyway. A few hours later, I'm installing a new application and I get prompted for my admin password. Doesn't work. I'm like FUCK, I KNOW this password, I had literally just used it earlier that day when booting up the machine. I try again, checking caps lock. No dice. I sigh, and try a slightly different capitalization of the same. No. One more variation, and yes, I'm locked out. It's one of those lockouts that expires eventually to let me try again. So I wait a while, try again. No dice on any of the variations I can think of. Now I'm wondering what the fuck is going on. I call support and I'm sure they're like "That dumbass has forgotten his password again". I say, look, I know I haven't, do you have ideas about what's going on? No, they say, it's just you, do you want us to come rescue you, password-forgetting baby? I say, eh, I have students here to talk to, I'll call you back. I deal with the students, then I think about this a bit. I go back and look at the P-Synch reset and I notice that it recorded a change of password on TWO targets. Then I realize what they did the last time, and that they tied the two passwords together. Again, without telling me about it.

There's a certain amount of user-support stuff like this going on, where the user is actually responding to something that's a non-intuitive change to the way their machine works, is stumbling around trying to figure it out, sounds really dumb, but the problem does come back to something significant that was done by system administrators that no one told the users about.

Seriously?  I would ream the guy that linked my accounts without asking a new one.  If they're not using the same account I have a fucking reason for it.

I actually don't care if the admin password and the network password are linked. I do care if someone links it and doesn't tell me and then haw-haws at me because I can't figure out why the admin password suddenly stopped working.

Bump for one that just came into the Help Desk queue: