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Your Favorite Support Anecdote
Most of us have had the unfortunate opportunity to have worked tech support at some point, whether it was for a paycheck or for a relative. The Register has offered up a vote for several of their favorite support stories but I'm sure there are many more out there to be had. My favorite horror story was while working a tech support call for a governmental employee, when asked to take her mouse and click on the "start" button all I could hear over the phone is what I later found out was the user banging her mouse against the monitor. What other horror stories have people seen from the trenches?
We had made a fat client app for a company with a metric buttload of regional offices all over Germany. Each office had their own database, and it was replicated daily against the central database. (Short story: each office only needed the data for their region, so it really didn't need the whole central database. And conversely the "mother" corporation didn't need their data immediately either.)
So this woman (afaik, a sorta boss for that particular office too) calls that the application stopped working on her machine. The tech-support guys can't solve it, so they forward the call to us programmers, namely to the guy next to me. Turns out that she had heard about evil hackers and whatnot, and someone recommended that she installs ZoneAlarm and forbid any programs to connect if she doesn't know what they are and what they do. So she installs it on her work computer too. And forbids our application from talking to the database.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was serving at a forward deployed location with the US military. Many things were wrong with our technical position, including the fact that our office was NOT being provided the security updates for MS Exchange, due to a typical military SNAFU.
..
.." and have the because be something you recognized you couldn't argue against?
One of the many known and expected email attacks hit us, and crashed our server.
We couldn't get the server back up. Our "home office" back in the US couldn't figure out how to get our server back up. We got permission to pay for the service, and called the MS Service line. After a short discussion, the MS Techs knew exactly what our problem was, and told me to download a 4.2 Meg update. At this point I had to interrupt, and point out that my connection to the world wasn't that stable, and didn't have enough bandwidth to keep that download under 12 hours, if the connection didn't get lost.
The next thing I knew, I had two MS Engineers on the phone, talking to each other while I listened, trying to figure out how to deal with the problem without using the download. That phone call ran nearly 5 hours. It ended with me typing in hex edits to the MS Exchange software . .
EVERYTHING these men suggested short of that I had to refuse, for technical or mission reasons. The direct hex edit was something like the 7th or 8th solution the engineers came up with.
How would YOU like to hear "Yeah, that would probably work, but, I can't do that because . .
Me: How may I help you?
Customer: Hi, my name is Customer.
Me: Hi, how may I help you today?
C: I just bought a Powerbook G4 and I can't get it connected to the internet. There are no ports at all, no USB, no Ethernet, no modem.
Me: What? Are you sure there are no ports on it?
C: Yes, this is the worst purchase I ever made! Can I bring it to you guys to have a look at it and get ports added?
Me: This is the first time I ever heard of this! You're sure you flipped down the panel in the back?
C: Panel in the back? I don't see a-- I am such an asshole! Thank you so much, I feel so stupid.
Me: It's okay, don't worry. I'm glad I could help.
C: I am sorry for cursing, thank you so much you just saved me so much money.
Me: You're welcome, have a good day.
C: You too!
First Story:
Many moons ago, back in the 80s, I worked for a company that sold and serviced mini and microcomputer systems. We had one company that was complaining and threatening to sue because the "crap" computers we had sold them kept crashing several times per day. So we sent a tech down to check them out. He walked into their brand new, ice cold computer room. Noticing that the room had, like most computer rooms, flourescent lighting, he pointed to a bank of dimmer switches on the wall.
"What are those for?" he asked.
"Oh, they control all the outlets in this room," was the reply.
The tech walked over and spun them all to "max". Problem solved.
Second Story:
Another customer who said our "crap" computers were crashing. I personally flew down to to visit them to see what was going on. As we were discussing the situation, the lights dimmed for a few seconds, came back up, then flashed bright, then went back to normal.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Oh, there's a auto crusher across the street. When the turn on the magnet we get a little brown out, and when they turn it off the lights go up for a moment."
"I here see you opted not to by the uninteruptable power supply, and have not even installed a surge suppressor," I noted. "Do you think that the fact your power is unreliable might have something to do with your problems?"
UPS == End of Story.
Third Story:
Which is not to say our computers weren't crap. Most weren't installed in computer rooms, they were installed in offices, which was kind of a new thing at the time.
We certainly did have a number of strange reset problems, especially in the winter. Then one day we get a technical bulletin entitled, "Static discharge from pantyhose implicated in unexplained system resets." The recommendation: secretaries doing word processing and data entry should stop wearing pantyhose. Now, most of our customers were New England CPAs, and standards for business attire in New England at the time were formal. The secretaries were NOT going to where slacks or skirts without pantyhose.
So one of the techs comes up with a solution. "Hey, isn't fabric softener supposed to stop static cling?" So, the recommendation goes out: avoid pantyhose, but if you must where them, spray Downy brand fabric softener on them several times a day. Naturally, they all opt to go into the ladies room every couple of hours and spray their legs with Downy.
Another problem solved.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yeah, she scrolled to the right, and couldn't figure out how to go left. 30-year old woman, reporter, uses computers daily. Mmmkay.
One week ago, I send her a /. story that relates to a piece she's producing. She tells me that she can't read it because the text goes off the bottom of the screen and ends in the middle of a sentence.
sigh.
Remember when CD rom speed was a hughe deal and liteon game out with the loud 52x drives.. i had a customer put in his win98 cd.. and when it spun up the cd shattered and (more like an explosion) blew the from of the drive off and mangled the drive.. he was asking us over the phone if this was normal.. brought a whole new meaning to winblows 98
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
"There's something wrong with the network."
"Okay, what's going on?"
"Well, the machine was all like, bam! bam bam! and that surprised me. Then I tried making it go again. That didn't work, 'cos it just sat there going ghh-ghh-ghh-ghh!"
"What?"
"It's a machine gun sound. Now it's just sitting there, all like, what the fuck?"
"Okay, what does that mean?"
"I said, first the machine was all--"
"Never mind. What were you doing when this happened?"
"I was running a test."
"And then what happened?"
"I started getting NFS errors."
"Aha. What kind of NFS errors?"
"You know, like, the file wasn't there."
"Okay. Then what happened?"
"The machine gun sound. Weren't you listening?"
----------------
"I'm heading out of town next week, and I'm going to need the notebook."
"Okay, when do you need it?"
"Oh, some time next week."
"I can do that. What do you need on it?"
"Foobleymatic 2.5, BarfTastic XP, and Crunchometer 2."
"Okay, that sounds good. How's Tuesday sound for you?"
"Today's Friday, right?"
"Yep. Why?"
"Well, I'm actually heading out of town on Monday."
"Aha. When on Monday?"
"Early."
"Early as in, you won't have time to come in here and pick up the laptop, right?"
"Right."
"I see. So really, then, you need it today, don't you?"
"Yeah, I guess I do."
"I see. Well, thanks for telling me."
"Hey, no problem!"
----------------
"Have we thought about wireless access here?"
"I'm agin it. It's too easy to sniff traffic and there are lots of data ports here."
"Well, has anyone ever sniffed traffic?"
"Absolutely. A guy got convicted in the US for sniffing credit card numbers from a Home Depot. They were using encryption. The FBI recently demonstrated how to crack encryption in about four minutes using off-the-shelf software. It's not hard."
"Well, I don't think we have that many secrets."
"...Email? Our source code? Budgets?"
"Well, I'm only thinking of this as a way of getting the printer closer to my office."
"What, you don't print any secrets?"
"No."
"You've just picked up your printing, right? Look at what you have in your hand: email, budget requests. Programmers print out code all the time. Should we open the window and throw it all into the streets?"
"Well..."
"We have shredders for a reason."
"Well, maybe I should just get a printer and put it by my desk."
----------------
Yesterday:
A: Ever since I moved to Linux, I can't print these PDFs any more. I think it's a font problem, just like B had. Have you fixed that yet?
Me: No, but I don't know that you're having a font problem. There are, like, four programs involved in printing that, and each one of them is different now.
A: No, I think it's a font problem. I hate OpenOffice.
B: Fonts are screwed up in Debian. This never happens to me on my Fedora Core machine at home.
Today:
Me: Well, I printed out seventeen pages from two different machines in eight different ways using the printer on the floor above me, and as you can see the crucial difference is the version of Acrobat Reader used to print them. It's not a font problem. Those big black bars? It's a bug in the latest version of Acrobat Reader.
A: Oh.
Me: Yep, the PDFs generated by OpenOffice were fine. Now, I'm reluctant to install an older version of Acrobat because of security pr--
B (sitting right next to A all this time): Oh, you don't have that problem if you use this PDF reader over here.
A: What?
Me: What?
B: Yep, just use the Gnome PDF reader and it prints just fine.
A: Why didn't you tell me yesterday?
B: You said it was a problem with OpenOffice, not PDFs.
A:
Carousel is a lie!
I used to work for a large IT firm doing internal support. On the morning of 9/11/2001 I received a phone call from a manager in the manufacturing division. I was based in NY and he was based in MN. He demanded to know why he had not been able to access his e-mail for the last hour and a half. I explained to him that our mail servers were located in building #2 of the World Trade Center, which no longer existed. He demanded to speak to my supervisor because he could not believe our response time to correct the problem and reboot the mail server was so slow. I pointed out that three targets on American soil had just been attacked, two of them civilian and completely destroyed. He still didn't get it. I pointed out that 3000 people died. He again demanded to speak to my supervisor, screaming about our Service Level Agreements and such. I hung up and walked out.
That's a fun one!
I don't know how old you're client was, but I have a pet theory that the reason our grandparents can't handle VCR's or computers is because they're used to farm machinery and exposed gears, where if you screw up because you don't really know what you're doing, somebody gets maimed or killed. They don't like messing with things they don't fully understand.
With computers, screwing around with something that you don't get just means losing a little bit of data or picking up a virus.
So i'm working tech support for a company in Massachusetts, 1st job out of college in 96 - it's a small company, and I'm supporting their product...but, that's getting old, so I tell them I'd rather be in IT and if they want to keep me, they should move me sooner rather than later. They agree to move me to IT, but couldn't do it right away. No problem, eventually is better than never.
(on a side note, I'm glad I was there in the days when a college grad with little real world experience could make a play like that and win)
3 months later I'm still not down there - there's a new mgr there who no one likes, so I'm not complaining. One day, one of the guys there, Muz, gives me a call asking me to come down to his new bosses office.
Apparently she came storming into the IT area, grumps her way into her office and, 3 minutes later, comes flying out saying "My f'n laptop doesn't work AGAIN - you told me last time you fixed it that you FIXED IT, and you clearly didn't. I'm going to talk to HR - if you want to save your job, get in there and FIX the laptop, today the mouse doesn't work." Muz pops his head in to her office after she leaves, and immediately calls me. He tells me the story, and pop down aand peek into her office...and duck my head back out, now laughing.
Boss chooses this point to come back, CIO and HR rep in tow. Now in her defense, she wasn't an IT type person - IT needed a manager, and they threw her under the bus....but there are limits.
So, back to her office, she asks what I'm doing there (all irritated) and I let her know I was helping Muz troubleshoot her problem. I asked her to put her laptop back into her bag as if she had just arrived and show me what she did. So she pulls the power out, slams the lid closed, puts it in her laptop bag, walks out. She comes BACK in 2 minutes later (method actor, I guess). Opens laptop bag. Puts laptop on desk. Opens, turns on. Grabs mouse on her desk and moves it...."See! See! This stupid thing just doesn't work, i want that guy (the actualy IT Person) fired immediately!"
I reach over and grab the dangling end of the mouse and show it to her. That's all, didn't say a word, just twisted it back & forth between my fingers while looking at her.
I don't think I've seen that colour of red in a long time. She was totally embarassed and actually apologized to Muz. CEO, HR head ask Muz and I to walk out. 20 minutes later, the mgr walks out. 2 days later, new mgr in IT - sadly, they just shuffled her to another location within the company...
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
Just a couple of months ago, I had a co-worker come in and complain that one of the machines (windows) he was working on had the file extensions removed from all the files, so he went in and renamed around 100 files so that they would have the proper extensions, but soon found this tiresome. He asked me if there was a reason the file extensions were gone and if I had a quick fix so he wouldn't have to rename the files. I went to the machine, went to folder options, unchecked the "hide extensions for known file types" and voila! a directory full of files with names like "filename.doc.doc" or "something.pdf.pdf". Of course now he had to go through and rename all the files again. To top it off, this guy teaches an "intro to computers" class at the Army base we work on.
1. I asked the user to restart their PC. 5-10 secs passed and she said, "OK". I said "it restarted already?". "Yeah." Turns out she had turned off her monitor and then turned it back on. Oddly, the problem persisted. 2. I was roped into fixing a PC for someone. I'll often tell people just to bring me the "tower". That wasn't enough instruction for this person so I told her to bring me the part of the computer she used to turn on the computer. My mistake: it became clear shortly thereafter that she intended to bring me the powerstrip!
There was a similiar type of incident when British Telecom switched their first telephone exchange from analogue to digital. In order to ensure a complete switchover, the decision was made to physically cut the analogue connections inplace, so there was no going back.
They chose a long weekend (public holiday monday) in order to do this, so it gave them more time to fix any problems. After starting early saturday morning, by sunday evening they had the exchange fully on digital and were congratulating themselves - and then the exchange crashed, entirely.
All sunday evening and night it went through a cycle of 'reboot, work, crash' on an hourly basis. The engineers could not figure it out, tehy did acomplete code dump and laid out the entire codebase on tractorfeed paper in the halls, went over it line by line to find out what was wrong.
Eventually sometime monday morning, the night guard from a factory across the road popped across the road and mentioned his phone was going absolutely crazy, every hour he would try to ring his head office to report onsite, and the phone would emite a high pitched buzz and go dead.
Turned out the exchange switchover had put his phoneline in limbo with no phonenumber associated but in a live usable state, and the exchange software couldnt handle that state and so it died with no error state reported.
An easy mistake to make, especially in the days before the cables and connectors were colour-coded.
Someone developed a fix, but the idea was killed before it could catch on...
I worked for a major 3rd party DSL provider a few years ago and I heard this one from a VP in the smoking area (in the parking garage next to peachtree...)
,install, we sent out the kit and he was running at good DSL speeds. No problems.
They have this strange situation with a DSL customer.
It was your basic off the web order
He calls in about 4 weeks later and reports his DSL has stopped working. We have him check the NID and he doesn't have any sync which means he's not even getting a signal from the Central Office. So we roll out a telco truck and they find that his cable was pulled from the DSLAM box and they just pop it back into his copper line.
A week later he calls in the same problem. We have him check his DSL at the NID again and no sync. We call the teclo company again and they send a truck out to the central office box and check the DSLAM, find it was disconnected again, and pop the cable back in again for the DSL.
Then it happens a again... They send out another truck... Fix it... A few days latter... It happens again... And they keep sending the trucks to fix it...
Finally after several weeks of this... The VP gets a call from the teclo... Who has the FBI on the phone asking us to stop fixing the DSL because its disconnecting their wiretap!
So the VP has a CS rep call the guy and politley explain that DSL isn't possible at his location and refunds his money.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
One student punched holes in [5-1/4" disks] so they can be stored in her binder.
That's not that bad of an idea, so long as you knew where it was safe to do that: one hole in the corner would be sufficient to fit it on the center ring of a three-ring binder. Half an inch in from a corner is easily safe.
I take it though that she did it midway down a side.
It's a good think 3.5" disks have a hole built in for this (once you slide the write-protect slider to the open (protected) position). That's another think 5.25" disks got wrong: using a notch taken out to enable writing, which was the opposite of the cassette tapes used previously where breaking off the tab would protect them.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
he had inserted the network cable in the cd-rom drive
I had much the same thing happened to me, except that it was my own wife calling me at work to tell me the digital camera wasn't working. After asking if she had plugged it into the USB hub I sitting on top of my wireless router, she got a little irritated with me, saying she knows how to plug a USB cable in. Long story short, when I got home I found the USB cable shoved into a port on the router. Being a little smarter than I was when first married, I said nothing.
OK, this one comes from Georgia Tech. It's an oldie, but a goodie.
A tech gets a call from Professor Anders in the statistics department. Anders says that the members of his department are only able to send email 500 miles. The tech gets a strange look on his face, then starts asking questions about the situation. After a lengthy phone discussion, he decides that the fellow who has called him is truly not making this up. After all, this is the statistics department, and they're not prone to pulling figures out of the air.
So, the tech goes over to the statistics department and checks out their server. It's a simple old SPARC running Solaris. He sends out some email to a friend in California. Sure enough, it bounces. He sends an email to a friend in Florida, and it goes through fine. The tech scratches his head.
He asks Anders is anything has changed on this SPARC server recently. Turns out that, yes, the server was recently updated to a newer version of Solaris (Version numbers lost to the fog of history). So the tech takes a look at the server and finds that, despite the newer OS, the older version of SendMail is still on the machine. Anders nods and says that, after the update, they downgraded SendMail to an older, more stable version. Ahah! The tech opened the config file, and sure enough, he found the problem.
The new version of SendMail had created a new Config file. This file had some new format for the "Timeout" entry. When the old version was placed onto the system, it tried to read the new config file, but couldn't interpret it correctly. Thus, it set the "Timeout" to "0." How far can electronic information travel away from the server before the CPU can count to 0? 500 miles.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
Received a database backup on 5-1/4" floppy disk for DB repair via overnight delivery.
Stapled to a memo letter right through the disk's data...
Those interesting ways to determine if the end user has a 5-1/4" floppy drive or 3-1/2"
Can you bend it?
'crack'
(Oh, it's a 3.5)
From another support call.:
Please insert the disk and close the door.
"Ok", sounds of disk inserting, followed by several footsteps and a then the thud of
office door being closed...)
No way. I used the same line on my mother for the exact same reasoning...she was convinced it would be a block of scrap if she clicked the wrong icon.
Sure enough she did screw it up with a virus and such eventually, which brought the chance for our first 'let's format and reinstall the OS' session.
Now (3 years later) she installs her own hardware and tinkers in the registry.
Honestly isn't that how most of us learned computers, tinkering around until we screwed up, then learning even more when we fixed it?
I used to do support for a small IT group at a University. In addition to the general sysadmin stuff and the odd bit of web/db foo, I also did basic tech support for our building.
One person in particular kept asking me questions about how to do various things in Excel or Word - nothing that was too obvious, but nothing too difficult either. What I realized after a while was that even though these people spent literally hours a day working in these applications, whereas I used them (at most) an hour or two out of every week, they considered me an expert.
Eventually, I started responding to every question with, "I'm not sure - I need to look that up in the help" before every question. I usually needed to do that anyway, but once they realized that's what I was actually doing, I think it emboldened them to try it themselves.
"check the web logs. Bad password. He is connecting fine but typing in the wrong password. I try to find some way polite way to ask if he knows his own last name. He does. It was Johnson. OK. I keep having him try the user ID and password. I lead him through the numbers one at a time, although I could see from the web logs that he was getting that right. I finally lead him, letter by letter, through the spelling of his own last name (not case-sensitve). That worked."
It *almost* sounds as if YOU were "socially-engineered" into revealing the password to him until he got in.
Agreed that cocky IT people are more dangerous to a company than anything else.
A great example would be when companies operate fleet vehicles. They lay down a few basic policies, and handle ALL maintenance of the vehicles or hire only those they can trust to do the maintenance if the vehicle is in the care of the individual.
The maintenance people don't cop an attitude to the drivers, if they ever even see them, and they certainly don't question the boss for giving the driver the vehicle. They just fix the damn cars/trucks so the company can keep doing business.
Too many IT people think they're more than just glorified copy-machine repairmen. Only those who actually HELP their companies make the situation better and fix the root-cause problems (get the users training, provide only "kiosk" machines for workers too untrained to use a full operating system, make or keep the company's money) are anything more than that.
Complaining about "stupid users" without providing training in the use of the complex equipment sitting in front of them is stupid. It's like pointing someone at an F-16 and saying, "She's all yours. Go do your job. We'll make sure you're shot down quickly so you don't have to do anything other than get it airborne."
+++OK ATH
"... I do CAD work that gets output to a large CNC router, and by setting some values incorrectly, I could at the very least create a situation resulting in the possible loss of a hand, if not more..."
Takes me back to my salad days, when I was studying Mech Eng at a tech college in Oxford. Got myself a summer job at a local engineering concern where I was filling in for various people as they disappered off for their holidays.
It was a decent gig and because of the reason I was there, the work was pretty varied. No way I could fill the shoes of the three or so production engineers, but I could cover tasks that were mainly routine or boring to the full-timers.
One of the jobs I got to do was to produce programs for a horizontal machining center. This was done entirely by reading the drawings and typing in "G" codes at the machine's keypad. Offline programming had yet to rise over the horizon for this particular company. It was pretty easy, as the designers were all ex-apprentices and they knew instinctively how to keep things simple (and quick) to manufacture.
I'd usually run a program through in fresh air to make sure it looked correct and safe but on one occasion I'd either got complacent and hadn't bothered or I'd just missed a bad step. I set the program going with a cube of steel about one foot sized in xyz bolted to the machine bed. All was going well, and a serioes of pockets were cleared and holes drilled until the load meter redlined, the motor noise went from a whine to a loud hum and then a piece of something bounced around the enclosure, spang-spang-spang!
I hit the Big Red Button, killed the power and opened the enclosure to see what was up. Turns out that whatever was bouncing around in there was the actual tool head which was now snapped from it's shank.
Going back over the program and the drawing it appeared that I'd done a rapid traverse without withdrawing from the hole I'd just cleared. Even worse, the tool I'd just broken was a custom diameter end-mill which cost us about GBP200/ea even back in those days. I nearly started crying. I'd have to work for a month practically for free to make up the damage. I walked out of the shop and strolled around the outside of the factory to pull myself together and come up with a plan.
I went back to the shop to find the foreman standing next to the machine, wondering why it was sitting there idle and costing us money. I said I'd broken the tool and offered to meet the company half way and cover 50% of the damage. The foreman looked at me like I was a complete tard for a moment, then burst out laughing. He took me over to the tool store where there was a small pallet with dozens of such tools sitting there in rows like good little soldiers. "Those things go out of spec about four times a day on that machine. Get a new one, take it over to measurement to get it mounted in a toolholder and GET THAT FUCKING MACHINE BUSY AGAIN!"
Long, boring (NPI) and mainly OT, but the lesson of the day is that you can do anything you like short of maiming and killing but don't ever hold up production.
Political language