A tech support incident at work today

[Riggswolfe]

The IS department I work in is very small, less than a dozen people for 500 users. So, we all talk alot obviously. The helpdesk guy comes into the office of a coworker which I happened to be in. He is laughing so hard tears are running down his cheeks and he can barely talk. Here is the conversation he'd just had:

Female User: "My printer's not working."
Him: *logs on remotely* "I don't see one installed. I'll need to reinstall the drivers. What kind of a printer is it?"
User: "Ummm.." *pause* "It's a Daystar *rattles off a string of numbers.*"
Him: *confused because we typically use HP or Dell printers and he has never heard of a Daystar printer* "Daystar where did you get it?"
User: "Circuit City"
Him: "Hmmm..."
User: *awkward pause* "Ummm...my printers an HP, the Daystar is my mini-refrigerator. Sorry."

[Lt.Dan]

Sure, sure, users are idiots, but tech support guys can be just as bad.  Here's something that happened to my wife recently.

Her: My remote login isn't working with the user ID and password we set up.
Him: Hmmm don't know - maybe the system is down.  Can you call another user and see if they can log in?

[Yegolev]

If I told any of mine, your heads might explode.

[Strazos]

Oh, Do Tell.

[Trippy]

I've had the "this program isn't printing", "have you turned on the printer?", "oops" before.

[Yegolev]

I didn't mean in a good way.  I am currently trying to figure out which one of 11367 tracefiles from circa March 4 is the one I need in order to reconstruct the control files in a database I just restored onto a system it did not originally reside on.  My lack of Oracle knowledge is possibly hampering me, but the real irritant is how someone decided it would be a good idea to compress the files first, then delete them.  This means that about half of the trace files end in .Z and are otherwise the same fucking file as some other trace in the huge, unsortable stack.  My question in the email was more-or-less why are you compressing files that you delete the next day after the incremental backup runs?  Durka?

It's going to be even more funny when someone here posts a "why don't you do X" comment.  However, I do welcome any suggestions, no matter how asinine.

Other ones include a question I got twice this week, paraphrasing "what's that 's' for in the permission string". and my favorite one this week: "You should add a colon to the end of the line in /etc/exports".  Dumbasses.

EDIT: speeling

[Trippy]

If it was Oracle 5 I would've been able to help you in my youth.

[Signe]

I could do all your jobs if I had enough matches.

[Strazos]

Ok, Now you lost me.

[Roac]

I've successfully avoided being first tier tech support for most things, so far.  Good thing about being in the dev side of the house I guess.  What I have had problems with though (at the last job - my current gig has kickass tier 1 support), was the first tier tech guys who would kick tickets up to me.  I honestly think that they filtered out information provided to them.  I would get a phone call at 2am (we were 24/7), and the guy would try to relay to me the person's problem.  Sometimes, the information would be as little as "they can't log in".  Now, the software that the end users were working on was their job, and they go through a reasonably detailed training process.  There were still stupidiots, but not of the "I broke the computer's coaster" variety.  They were, in most cases, more intelligent than our own tech support.

On another occation, I was in a conference room with a vendor who provided one of our key server software packages.  They were running through a live demo (Edit to clarify: new features, new version, existing product), on our system.  Half way through the presentation the server quit responding, and then the remote desktop poofed out.  Odd.  I went back to the computer room to investigate, only to find our techs had decided it was a fine time to pull network cable.  Out of my server.  My production server.  I literally locked the rack shut and kept both keys, to which it remaind that way for months.  

I coined a phrase while there that I frequently pointed out to my boss; The Wife Test.  Now, my wife isn't a techie but is computer literate.  She can install software and fuddle around with simple macros.  Works with both Access (but not T-SQL) and mainframe apps, but is fuzzy on the point of defrag.  If I was asked something stuid by our techs, or they looked at me with blank stares when I explained to them what they needed to do, I would repeat the problem/instructions to my wife and see if she could come up with a probable solution or repeat the instructions back clearly.  If she got it, and they didn't, I would take that as a sign that they were retards unfit for guest access, and send a (written) request to my boss that the lot of them be fired.  She passed the test far more often than they did, and many letters were sent.

They still work there, but I now have a job with a great tech support staff and a boss who doesn't think a turnip garden is suitable for tech support.  Much less stress, and no more 2am calls.

[Yegolev]

I ended up just restoring every file from March 4 (lots), grep sapdata200, got one hit (yay) and proceeded to execute the raw trace inside sqlplus.  Durka, indeed.  I was saved another restore of the DB (about a terabyte) mostly due to the fact that I had changed the DB SID during the restore and the SQL commands failed horribly.  A little viming and viola, recovered database.  Now for pie.

EDIT: Actually the backup log says the DB is 4436666.231 MB, so yeah.

[schild]

For those of you who know where I work, you know damn well I could slaughter any tech horror story you all could come up with. Fielding 50+ calls a day from people who shouldn't be allowed on the internet and working with just as many that shouldn't be allowed near a computer, well, yea, it can yield some goddamn issues. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

[sinij]

Briefly worked in a small firm, about 10 people and only 2 tech guys that mostly spend their time on development. All testing was don by user complaints...

Internal release of new version, web based database application everything done through browser

Me: New feature A gives incorrect results if B and C is also true
Programmer: It worked for me when I tested it
Me: Well try it yourself, its repeatable
Programmer:  You are not doing something right, it worked for me when I tested it

[Murgos]

Programmer:  You are not doing something right, it worked for me when I tested it

I used to work with that guy.  He would work from home, at night, after taking a bong hit.  He would check code in at 4 am.  Generally, that was the first sign that we would need to undo whatever he just did.

He thought we were deliberately sabotaging his code, "Dude, it worked last night.  I tested it!  You fuckers don't know what you are doing."

The worst part of it?  It was his start-up and he was the boss.  Of course, it (the start-up) failed miserably, lawsuits rage on to this day, 7 years later.

[sinij]

The only reason that guy kept his job is because code was undocumented spaghetti Open Source-based abortion that mostly worked and was too expensive to replace and start over. I hear he eventually left giving company 2 weeks to replace entire system. Speaking about costly... hiring 3 more guys to document everything he did would have been cheaper.

[Ironwood]

This conversations not funny.

I'm sitting here reinstalling my Server 2003 after a bad disk on the Raid seems to have spread to the rest of the drives.  It's our SQL box which contains the last 10 years of Financial Data.

And, for the inevitable chap who asks me where the backup is;  Don't.

:(

[Murgos]

Yeah, RAID.  It's supposed to be redundant.  Sorry to hear it.

[sinij]

Are you going to get blamed when recovery mostly going to fail? I hope its not your job to make sure there are backups.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, RAID.  It's supposed to be redundant.  Sorry to hear it.

To be honest, I've never seen this problem before.  I would never have imagined that any controller would allow a failed or bad disk to overwrite shite onto a good one.

I am kicking myself, because I reactivated the failed drive personally.  I've done this so many times before, it's almost routine.

I've never before seen a Recovery Console or a Fresh Installation FROM CD blue screen.  That's almost worth the price of admission.

Fuck.

[Bunk]

For those of you who know where I work, you know damn well I could slaughter any tech horror story you all could come up with. Fielding 50+ calls a day from people who shouldn't be allowed on the internet and working with just as many that shouldn't be allowed near a computer, well, yea, it can yield some goddamn issues. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Dude, I work for a company that makes software for Realtors... I put two years in to the trenches before I worked my way in to the sales side of things. I've lost count of how many realtors I had to walk through the process of locating the power button on thier PCs. I also always loved the ones that would backup thier databases for thier multi-million dollar business on to one stack of the same floppies, over and over again.

Pre-software days I worked for a scale company and was sent on a repair call at a grain plant for a broken printer. Ninety minute drive to plug a power cable back in.

[Merusk]

My favorites are when the IT guys install software upgrades for a program they don't use, have no idea how to support and really haven't clue one about other than "you draw stuff with it."(AutoCad)

 See what happens is they get a shitload of errors and settings not migrating because of the ultra-lockdown they have the server and user PCs on.  Then when trying to register the software, they can't do it because there's too many old versions on the same machine. They then withold the check to the Vendor because they got errors on the install and figure it's the vendors problem. 

     The punchline is, I was able to fix all the crap myself, and we wouldn't HAVE these problems if they'd simply hire a CAD manager.  However, that's deemed too expensive, because we have 3 programmers already on staff writing commercially available shit like scheduling & timecard software and build management software. 

[Yegolev]

The punchline is, I was able to fix all the crap myself, and we wouldn't HAVE these problems if they'd simply hire a CAD manager.  However, that's deemed too expensive, because we have 3 programmers already on staff writing commercially available shit like scheduling & timecard software and build management software. 

Abstract that a bit and I think you just described every company's IT problems since the beginning of time.

[Morat20]

I'm going to echo that tech-support isn't generally too much better. I once spent 45 minutes on the phone with my DSL provider, begging to be put through to Tier 2 because all I wanted was their freaking DNS IP address.

Instead, I got a Tier 1 flunky who wouldn't elevate me until he'd gone through their script, and there apparently WAS no script for "User has no plans to use your crappy client when he can just configure his router like a smart monkey".

[Yegolev]

That's pretty dumb.  At the end of any script should be a "Toss the hot potato to This Guy".

[Lantyssa]

Try getting a Teir 3 tech that hasn't a clue what tracert/ping are and how they're telling me one of their routers is glitching every 10 seconds or so.

Sadly, the Teir 1 lady knew exactly what I was talking about, but didn't have the tools or access to do anything about it.

[Samwise]

My tech support organization has only a single tier and we all pretty much have full access to everything.  So although I have a few "stupid customer" stories (they're not as funny to people outside the field since our end users are software developers for the most part and know a disk drive from a coaster), the organization-level nightmares pertaining to systems of tiered incompetency are largely foreign to me.

There's a reason I'm still working in tech support after seven years despite having had numerous opportunities to move to other areas of the org chart.   

[Triforcer]

This thread explains much of the site's barely controlled anger issues to me. 

[Riggswolfe]

My favorites are when the IT guys install software upgrades for a program they don't use, have no idea how to support and really haven't clue one about other than "you draw stuff with it."(AutoCad)

This happens at our work. We're expected to install and configure programs we've never been trained on. It's very frustrating and gets brought up in meetings.

So, long story short: the IT guys are probably just as unhappy about it as you are.

[Yegolev]

Dude, I don't know shit about anything I install except the OS.  Actually, I don't full-install much, I just execute things that require root access.  Knowing what the process is and troubleshooting application errors?  That's what vendor docs, support contracts and SAP consultants are for.  Maybe some Google, too, for when I'm working a pilot and it is apparently up to me to figure out why I can't back up Oracle 10g in online mode.  Being the first to do something ever only sounds cool.

[sinij]

This thread explains much of the site's barely controlled anger issues to me. 

Controlled? I'M GOING TO FUCKING SHOVE YOUR KEYBOARD UP YOUR ASS THEN TURN IT SIDEWAYS. AFTER THAT I WILL SHOVE YOUR MOUSE AND PAD DOWN YOUR THROAT UNTIL IT SITS NEXT TO THE KEYBOARD. AFTER I'M DONE WITH IT YOU WILL HAVE TO ANAL FIST YOURSELF WITH BOTH HANDS AT THE SAME TIME EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO USE YOUR COMPUTER.

[Roac]

Controlled?

Yes, because you haven't done any of that yet.  You just keep saying you will, you tease.

[Bunk]

Try getting a Tier 3 tech that hasn't a clue what tracert/ping are and how they're telling me one of their routers is glitching every 10 seconds or so.

Sadly, the Tier 1 lady knew exactly what I was talking about, but didn't have the tools or access to do anything about it.

That unfortunately is pretty common. You simply just can not be hired in to an upper tier in tech support in most cases. Instead, you get to trudge away reading scripts in tier one and actually getting in trouble for fixing the customer instead of "doing the basics" - all the while waiting for someone in the tier above you to get promoted or fired, to make room for you.

There was a reason I stepped sideways in to sales when the opportunity came up.

[Morfiend]

I had a very aggravating experiance with Netgear a few months back. It went like this.

First make sure you read "Her" comments in a very strong Indian accent.

Her: Welcome to netgear tech support, what is your problem?
Me: Hello, I have one of your routers here at the office, and its really messed up. When I plug it in, its spamming my network with packets, and bringing down my network. Its also not passing packets through. I need to RMA it and get a new one.
Her: Ok, please plug the router in to your network and see what happens.
Me: I just told you what happens. It is bringing down my network and not working at all. I cant plug it in again, because I need my offices network to stay stable during opperating hours.
Her: Ok, got it. Please plug the router in to the network for me and tell me what happens.
*Long pause by me*
Me: Ummm, I just told you. I cant do that, and I told you what would happen and is happening.
Her: Ok, I understand now. Your router is messing up your network. Please plug the router in to the network for me, and tell me what happens.
*Another pause by me*
Me: Ok, I just said I CANT plug it in right now.
Her: Ok, please plug the router in to your network.
Me: Look, I cant do that, this thing is broken. Could I RMA it please and get a new one.
Her: Ok, first can you plug it in to your network please.
Me: Can I have your manager please.

The manager talked to me for 2 minutes and RMA the router.

[Oban]

The suspense is killing me, did you plug the router in to your network?

[Yegolev]

You're a better man than me.  The desire to say "I'll plug my foot into your ass" would have overwhelmed my feeble will.