Slashdot Mirror
Tales From the Support Crypt
An anonymous reader writes "Talking viruses, infected physical devices, and lights that go out are some of the 'problems' Panda Security's tech support service has had to face. Many of them were not a result of computer viruses, but of confused users. This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects." For anyone who's been on the receiving end of such questions, now's a good time to tell your cathartic tale.
My all-time favorite true story occured when I tried to help my dad (I bet that for everyone here, our parents are our #1 support customers).
Dad reports following problem: in the last month or so, the mouse started acting strange. Every time he gestures right, the mouse goes left. When he wants to go up, the mouse moves down.
I look it up online, suspecting some virus having fun. Can't find anything.
Dad reports that he got used to the problem, he just has to gesture in the opposite way and then he can use the computer again. Not a great workaround, but it's good enough for him.
At my next visit home, I finally can diagnose the problem live instead of over the phone: Dad was holding the mouse upside down.
True story - lasted for a month before problem was fixed. My fault for not figuring it out sooner.
--
FairSoftware.net: where geeks create side-businesses together
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My grandpa was trying to send a fax. Turns out he was using a waffle iron with a phone attached to it.
I prefer uneducated users.....It does not matter what the problem is you can still charge 20Euros per hour to fix it.....
Six months of AI programming will make you think there is a God. Six months of tech support and you'll know there isn't.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
>"...antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort...
....they taste funny.
As opposed to the 'regular' effort they've gotten comfortable with over the years....? How dare anyone suggest that a product do what it should - I fart in your general dye-rection.
Know why cannibals don't eat clowns?
Breakfast at their house must be a trip.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
> 4) insist the network is up even though we don't see any packets through an *inline* appliance
I had a user email me to ask if (a) the network was down and/or (b) if email was down.
My fondness for people diminished each day I was a sysadmin. I changed careers and am now a mortician. These days I get fewer stupid questions from my clients.
Bark less. Wag more.
Word is a very handy way of assembling a collection of screenshots, what is the problem with that?
Cases like this:
C: I got an error on my screen
S: What message text was displayed?
C: I don't know, I clicked it away
S: --explode--
Maybe I'm just getting old and losing my sense of humor, but it seems like these "ha ha users are dumb" stories get less and less funny. As the audience for personal computing continues to grow, the number of senile, mentally ill or simply ignorant users will also grow. Mocking them leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
/...
But they charged us $600 to chop off dad's hands and reattach them the other way round.
I would say it is best to avoid geek squad.
I took a call from an end user a couple of months ago, informing me she was having trouble changing her password. She was receiving an error message that said "Passwords cannot begin or end with a space."
When she asked me what to do, I focused all of my energy on maintaining calm professionalism and replied "If you're typing a space before the new password - don't; if you're typing a space after the new password - don't."
Her reply?
"Hey that worked! You guys are so smart, I don't know how you can remember all this stuff!"
A client with a recurring virus infection had a recurring pornogrophy habit. I don't mind return customers, but my aim is to teach them enough to not need me that often. I finally pointed out to him where all the viruses were coming from, and recommended safer surfing habits.
For a short while I worked at a school in the same capacity. A coworker brought a box to me saying it just stopped working. It wouldn't turn on. I opened up the case and saw pc133 memory crammed into a pc2700 slot. Only after pointing that out did she 'fess up to trying to upgrade it herself. No, it didn't work after the stick of pc133 was removed, the mobo itself was damaged during insertion.
There was a similar incident with a Frap spilled "near" a keyboard (stuck keys do so many wondrous things!).
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
One of our senior techs (yes, feel free to laugh, I know I do!) came to tell me he had a virus on his laptop. His cursor was runnign wild, an dplenty of windows kept popping open and apps being launched. He could not figure why, so his best guess was "a really bad virus."
From personal experience, 97% of people who guess "It must be a virus!" have no virus whatsoever (the reverse is also true - 97% of viral issues ar edismissed as "something weird is going on and I don't know why") so I assumed it surely wasn't one. I had him unplug his wireless mouse bluetooth dongle, which ended the problem immediately, so it was clear where the problem was coming from. I guessed bad drivers, and suggested he reinstall. Putting them fresh from the driver disk simply returned the issue.
The following day, while looking for a spare power supply, we stumbled on the answer. The wireless keyboard that came with the mouse he was using had been carelessly thrown in there, with another keyboard on top, mashing down a large part of the wireless keyboard's keys. The laptop was just doing as it was told by the keyboard all along.
Be thankful they send you a screenshot. Windows doesn't dump screenshots to file, it puts them in the clipboard. I'd rather they sent me a screenshot pasted into Word than "the computer had an error"
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I changed careers and am now a mortician. These days I get fewer stupid questions from my clients.
Why can't you fix hiiiiiiiiiiiim???
O User with two high end Suns moving RAM while the box is on in an effort to transfer a RAM disk from one box to another.
O Manager demands that A/V software be installed on zSeries boxes, even though if a virus gets on an LPAR on a mainframe, someone royally screwed up. This might be understandable if a contract or some reg required this, but $100,000 for software that just sits there and fires off a glorifed "find / -name \*virus -print" from cron.
8 years ago I had a guy at our company come up to me and tell me he got an email from a girl that said "I love you." He then said, she attached a vbs file to the email and he spent the last 10 minutes trying to get the attachment to work. He said he double clicked on it, ran it from a command prompt and several other ways but couldn't get her "love" program to work for him. The guy was an IT analyst.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
People in category 4 will still be safe, though.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Well, when making a website for a real estate agency, I had to explain to them that in order to get the home pictures up faster (no, I didn't take them), they had to give me jpegs, NOT .docs containing jpegs. And getting them out was harder than it seems, too.
... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
But then you'll have to give support for it.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
Actually... you wouldn't believe the amount of sys admins who sent me screenshots of the app I supported inside a word.doc (a big one too).
One morning i boot up my computer, and i get a really weird boot screen ... i figred it had to be a virus, so i use my friends computer, google it, and come to find out, it was just the windows boot screen :)
Happy holidays
Hey, I've heard of that one before and it's a really insidious one! It's involved in all kinds of botnets and I heard it's even crashed and stopped ships before, not to mention that the people behind it are so violent that they're known to throw chairs. That's pretty f-ing scary man. You really should have reformatted and reinstalled, it's the only way to be sure!
Makes me wonder why they call it Windows anyway. They've got the "brittle and easily broken" part down but the window analogy doesn't work so well without the "transparent" part, which they are definitely missing.
For the more thought-impaired, trigger-happy mods I will add that this was a joke in response to a joke. If this looks like Flamebait or Trolling to you, it's because you're the joke. No, really, being so thoroughly dominated by your personal feelings about software to where you can't even entertain humor about that software without wanting to lash out by abusing the moderation system, well, that's pretty pathetic. It's a shame you don't want something better than that for yourself.
"What if Bill Gates had one nickel for every time Windows crashed? Oh wait, he does!"
Where I work it's common for our users to take a screenshot and save it using a 3rd party program we gave them. They then print the screenshot in black & white.
Then they fax the screenshot into our automated fax server which sends them a TIF image attachment which they then open and copy & paste it inside of word and then send us the word document.
Sigh.
I've had many a student like this.
Does anyone have experience with the Asus K8V. I recall at some point I had a motherboard that actually "spoke" when it could not find memory or a video card instead of the usual beeps. I'm just wondering if this one may have had the same feature. I tried the manual from the Asus site but it doesn't seem to include a troubleshooting guide (I had to use the Chinese site since the global site said "too many users").
LOL!
Word is a very handy way of assembling a collection of screenshots, what is the problem with that?
Or you could just put the screenshots in a .zip file or something...
In my experience, it's never a collection of screenshots. It's one screenshot. Usually of the entire screen, not the actual error window.
This is sent via an e-mail client. Since we're in MS land (os/x at a pinch) as evidenced by the use of "Word", then it's a pretty safe bet that whatever e-mail app the user has will support inline images. Instead, they've made you (1) open a word processor to display the image and (2) muck about with zoom settings so you can actually read the damn thing.
Also, what you generally find is that the problem description is in the e-mail, not in the document, so you're also having to juggle windows to work out what's going on.
This happens so often where I work that it just isn't funny anymore.
That must be great for your new clients, what with all the free BRAAAIIINS you have to give them now.
Yes, it's made up, but it's one of the most funny tech support bits ever made! http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/
Does your email client only allows one attachment per message? Is there something wrong with zip/tar/rar/etc. archives?
Seriously, Word is a terrible way to collect screen shots. Among other things, it often re-sizes the image to fit the page, so I end up with a 1/4-size screen shot that's much, much to small to be of any diagnostic value.
At least the new docx format stores images in a way I can read without Word -- just unzip it and pull the image files out of the media folder.
From the article:
As if in a terror movie, some of our users claim the viruses that reach their computers talk to them in a mysterious way. Many users send us their conversations hoping our technicians can interpret them.
Seriously? I know that people get confused and that some have difficulty correctly attributing problems, but if the support staff is dismissing something like this then they should seriously re-evaluate their current occupations. I've seen several instances of VNC and other remote access programs installed that would match the claim posted by the user that a notepad application started and "it told me that it wasn't a virus, but that it is in my computer". I guess dismissing it as a "stupid user problem" is preferred over admitting that the AV software doesn't prevent things like this or that the support technician would rather burn through their call queue saying "Doesn't sound like a virus. Call Microsoft if you keep having issues. Thank you for calling."
Any chance you could also invent a way to stab people in the face over the telephone while you're at it? And I would add to your list:
6) Complain the network admin/ISP help desk that they can't get to a website [when they can get to other websites, so obviously the network isn't the problem]
7) Don't know the difference between turning off the monitor and restarting the computer
8) Don't know the difference between a modem and a network card
9) Call for tech support from their cell phone when their landline is dead, to complain that their dialup service isn't working
10) Call from their cell phone - in the car, while driving - to get support for a program that runs on a desktop.
All of these are based on real calls that I received while working for AOL tech support.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Screenshots in Word are infuriating because if they have Word then they have Outlook. If you have Outlook you can just paste the freaking screenshot into the message inline and save your admin some time. It drives us crazy at my work as well.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Well if its Windows NT 3.x or NT 4 then yes, you will get a blue screen upon booting up.
I don't know about Panda but many of these antivirus companies are a bit too happy to label everything a threat.
If you buy the complete package, even a cookie from a banner ad are sometimes labelled as a threat when you do a complete scan of the computer.
I can see through that and understand that they just do that to give people a feeling that they are getting something for their money. But it is extremely confusing to the average user and I have talket to serveral people who thought that their computer was infected just because of that.
Stream International
Amateurs.
I can think of several ways to add steps to this process.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I made it a special point to teach my sister how to send me .png screenshots after the first time she sent me a .doc containing a screenshot...
On an unrelated note, Paint is kind of dumb. I typed "ss.png" for the filename, but forgot to change the "file type" dropdown to PNG from JPEG. Took me a rather long time to figure out why my small (300x200) screenshot was 500KB.
I've had two of those happen this month.
First case:
We got an email saying the internet was down and had been for 15 minutes. We monitor this company's connection with a constant ping (every 5 min or so). If it goes down, we'll know. We didn't get one. Plus we were able to VPN in and get on their servers.
Called the customer up. Turns out www.msn.com was busted and wouldn't load. Google, Yahoo, CNN and BBC worked just fine.
It was very likely they heard a badly suppressed laugh right before I hung up.
Second case:
Another company's internet tanks. We can't ping their public ip, they're down. This happened on a Monday, 10AM.
After dragging AT&T there on a leash so they could swap out some hardware (inside a locked box...), the net started working again, Tuesday, 2PM.
We got an email from them shortly after it came back up, dated Monday, 11AM... "Our internet's down."
I need to print both of those out and frame them.
What're you making, an artistic collage? Just paste the freaking things into Outlook along with an explanation of your problem and be done with it. That's like typing something up in Word and then taking a screenshot of it and opening it in paint so that you can print it. You're doing it wrong.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
My cousin came up to me during a holiday party and told me her web browser had become blurry ever since she plugged in a new mouse -- and she wondered if the new mouse (which needed no drivers) had installed some kind of virus.
Meanwhile, one of those great tech support videos (sound absolutely required).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Or you could just put the screenshots in a .zip file or something...
And that would be handier and easier how exactly? How do the screenshots become individual files without pasting them into something first, such as Paint? That method sucks if you have several to collect.
Open Word. Flip to what you need to snap. Hit Alt-PrintScreen. Flip to Word. Paste. Repeat as necessary. Save. You're not going to beat that with Paint, saving each individual shot into a specially prepared folder somewhere, then zipping that up. Work smarter not harder. What I really don't understand is how that classifies someone as an idiot.
This actually happened to me. I was helping out a customer with some software I had written. I told her to download our latest version from our website and to save it to her desktop. At this time she replied. "Goddamnit, I'm not going to tell you this again! I don't have a desktop computer I have a laptop!". I had to place her on hold while I laughed my ass off.
Disgusting isn't it?
Every Christmas it falls on me to fix my grandparents computers. Usually other relatives get there before me and try to fix the problem, usually with little or no success. This past year was my all time favorite for computer problems, the computer would shut down shortly after startup. Other relatives attempted to fix it but no luck. Everyone thought it was a virus. After some looking around, I went into the bios where after digging around a little bit I saw that the temperature for the CPU was really high. Opening up the case showed why, the CPU heatsink and fan was so full of dust that there was no way for any air to move through it. Cleaning that out fixed all of the computer problems.
I've done a bit of support for an electronics company that also made TVs. Back in 2007 one of their newest models was a decent 40" LCD tv, HD ready etc. and fairly cheap. We got a LOT of support calls on that one because of the design of the rear of the TV.
The TV had a physical on/off switch, but the designers had decided to "hide" it between the speaker and display enclosures on the back of it. It was clearly outlined on the diagram on page 5 of the manual, but still we had a ton of calls about this particular model, because people couldn't turn it on. And invariably about half of them would complain that they already hung it on the wall and couldn't reach the bloody switch. Boo fucking hoo - read the manual before assembling your unit.
But - I had one phone call about this TV that still has me smiling ear to ear
Me: "[$Company] support, you're talking to Martin" ... hi?"
Very timid, baby girl voice: "Hiiiiiiii?"
Me: "Ehh
Very timid, baby girl voice: "My name is Pia"
Me: "Hello Pia."
Pia: "I'm four years old!"
Me: "Is your mom or dad around?"
Pia: "My daddy doesn't know how to turn on his TV"
At this point I simply couldn't help but laugh out loud. Then I hear a grown up female voice in the background
Mom: "Just go ahead and laugh, that's what we've been doing all day long"
Me: "Okay, can your dad hear me Pia?"
Pia: "He says he can"
And then I proceded to guide him to where this switch was.
It's one thing to be a stupid user, it's another thing entirely to know that there's something you don't know - at least that's what Socrates believed.
To the people who.... 1) Send me screenshots inside a word document 2) Ask what FTP is when they're supposed to be a server admin 3) Can't run a select statement but are supposed to be the DBA. 4) insist the network is up even though we don't see any packets through an *inline* appliance 5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say. ... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity. In your list, number five really captures it. I can't tell you how common that one is although it sounds like you know from experience.
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.
What do techies get? They get uncooperative users who come to you for help and when you give it, they argue with you and bicker and drag their feet every step of the way, insisting that such-and-such can't possibly work, until it does work, at which time they complain about how long it took or they give you some bullshit about how they just tried that and it didn't work for them. Of course there are exceptions, but this is the norm and I can't understand why this applies so much more to computing. What I am talking about has nothing to do with the user's technical expertise or anything like that. It's the simple principle that if you know more about computing or networking than I do, there is no point in seeking my help. No technical expertise is required to understand this simple principle.
Anyway, for the non-technically inclined who think that we're a bunch of arrogant elitists, this is an example of why we say users are stupid. It's not because we expect them to become experts or even technically knowledgable, it's because we constantly see users complicate simple things, drop all basic standards of common sense and mutual respect, and otherwise engage in behavior that is in no one's interests, particularly theirs.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I used to work in a call center. One day, one of the CSR's came to me with a problem. She was trying to write notes in a customers file but every time she put her coursor into the text field, strange words appeared. The words came as if they were typed in manually and seemed to go everywhere. Address bar, email messages, word documents. The user was convinced that someone had hacked her pc and was sending her cryptic messages like "please visit the bathroom my apple friend".
Long story short, I went to investigate but could not duplicate the problem. That is, until I watched her take a call. As soon as she started speaking into the mic the words returned, and I was able to figure out that microsoft text to speech (came with word) had been installed and enabled somehow. It was doing voice recognition on all her phones headset speech.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
It makes sense. Most of the time you can click through messages and nothing appears to break. It's only after it is obviously broken that people finally give you a call.
9) Call for tech support from their cell phone when their landline is dead, to complain that their dialup service isn't working 10) Call from their cell phone - in the car, while driving - to get support for a program that runs on a desktop.
All of these are based on real calls that I received while working for AOL tech support.
I've had a lot of calls from our sales people similar to these. They work out of their home offices, so they have a lot of really odd things happen to them. For instance, a guy called because he couldn't connect to dialup. After some prodding, it turns out his voice line was down because of a storm, but he figured his data line was still working. The phone company was coming to his house to fix the voice line later that day. He wasn't happy when I told him to have the phone company check his data line when they were there.
I don't get people calling from the car about desktop issues, but I do get A LOT of sales people calling me about laptop issues while they are in the car...driving. They can't understand why I can't help them while they are driving. Forget the fact that the company policy doesn't allow talking on cell phones while driving.
Waddya know? This still exists: http://rinkworks.com/stupid/
We had some screenshots sent in Word too... interestingly they were actual photos taken of the screen because the system wasn't hooked up to a network at the time, and they needed to email from another computer (still no reason to put it in Word... just email me the JPG) and apparently they didn't have a USB thumbdrive. Also interesting is that the problem they were having was with a virus (for real) on a computer that was supposedly not networked, and no thumbdrive... curious.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
...except companies want stupid people to sell stupid products to.
This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects.
Antivirus manufacturers must only make a profit, as markets demand of all companies. They must not do anything else. As such, to remain competitive and justify their existence, large software companies prey on this fear and fan it even further. Yes! Make sure you are protected! Don't want those evil viruses and hackers to get at your precious information, do you? Buy our $200 package which has to be relicensed every year! Nevermind the virus protection is mediocre, look at all the other useless gadgets we provide with it that make just as hard as a bad virus to work with your computer!
Morally, there should be a rather big push by multiple bodies to help educate the public about security, but there is no government body to help to do this, and no nonprofit large enough to make a dent in this. Businesses need customers, and security and antivirus companies have no interest in educating customers if it means reduced sales, which it would.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
One of the things that still amazes me is how clever my grandparents can be in using their computer, and in some other ways how very stubborn and dumb.
They discovered on their own the wonders of internet radio, and found some stations serving up German ooompah music which they absolutely love. Pretty slick for some old folks having their first PC.
However, for months they would harass me about their internet connection/computer being *broken* whenever their radio station wouldn't come in. I tried to explain that sometimes sites (especially media sites) go down for maintenance, or reach their capacity, etc, and won't be available. However, these answers weren't acceptable to them, as the problem must be with the machine. This is, of course, despite the fact that all other sites worked, including other "internet radio" sites.
When I finally thought I had got the concept of the website being at fault through to them, they pointed out that the radio station (same station) worked fine when they pulled it through on their satellite/stereo...
I think it took another few months to explain that the satellite and internet were completely different services, but what I really wonder is why they would be insist on listening through their tinny computer speakers and not on the stereo in the first place.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was a global password for a new system. All passwords were the same across all the locally installed systems. The password was something along with lines of neWs777
After many minutes of talking through with the user...
ME:
enter your user id... ok, press tab now... ok enter your password.
ME:
... Ok, tell me exactly what you're pressing for password and username
... they were pressing exactly the right things.
Perplexed, I said...
ok... tell me EXACTLY what you're doing at *ALL POINTS* on the keyboard.
User says:
type 'n', 'e', hold SHIFT press 'w', press 's', hold SHIFT press '7', '7', '7'
I say - wait... what? Why are you pressing SHIFT + 7?
User says - well, they're capital 7s!
I then puked all over myself and found a real IT job.
Depends on the policies installed on the Exchange Server- at least in Outlook. I'm amazed at how many Exchange Admins set the policy that you can't send inline images (usually due to spam being a problem).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> 1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
Hey, for a long time windows paint was the only graphic program on a new PC, and it could only save in bmp. If a person had Office, at least word would do RLE to compress it. Way better than a 5MB bmp.
Nowdays paint will save as gif/bmp, but how many people know that they should use that instead of the default bmp format?
I'm not working with support anymore (thank God!) but one case that I still remember was when the guy took a screen shot of an error message using *gasp* his camera. At least it came as .jpg
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
My favorite call from when I used to do tech support involved a bounced email. The caller kept trying to send an email to her minister, but it kept bouncing back as undeliverable.
She thought it had something to do with the church secretary who apparently hated her and might be interfering. She spent about half-an-hour explaining this to me without giving me a chance to get a word in edgewise.
When I was finally given a chance to ask her a question, I asked what email address she was trying to send to. She told me and I said "try it without the 'www.' at the beginning."
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
Agreed. That's my #1 pet peeve as a programmer because of the overhead involved with checking out user-submitted bugs. As I was ranting about that to my wife one day (she used to work at a computer learning center teaching people how to use computers), she nodded and asked how to send a screenshot without using word. I nearly cried.
re: #8 -- What's a modem?
One time in the late 80s I was in the Harvard U. computer sales office (back when people bought computers through their university) just inquiring about prices.
The sales person told me that a very irate professor from Harvard Business School called her up and was yelling about the fact that his new Compaq luggable (suitcase-sized) PC wouldn't turn on.
She asked him if he had plugged it in and he shouted "You're not supposed to plug it in! It's a portable!" She suggested he try it nonetheless and he hung up on her. He did not call back, suggesting that the solution worked.
This probably doesn't make a lot of sense to younger people who are used to all sorts of battery-powered computer appliances, but back then it was very funny indeed!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
When I was in college, I wrote and marketed my first retail software program. I sold about 100 copies before I realized I was in over my head. One day I got a support call from a guy who had ordered the software and had just got his copy in the mail. His problem was that the software would not install. So understanding, that for some reason it didn't autorun the setup file, I tried to walk him through running the setup file himself. But we could never get that far. Finally, I figured his disk drive had gone bad, or maybe the disk he was sent was bad. Cause no files were showing up at all. Yet, he claimed the disk drive was in working order. When he clicked on the A: the little light would come on (yada yada yada). OK, 20 minutes into the phone call... I tell him to mail the disk back and I will send him a new one. Then he was like, "Ok hold on. Let me find it." I was like "find what?" He said, "The disk." I was like, "Isn't in your drive?" He sincerely says, "No, here it is on my desk." *dead silence from me* He then proceeds to ask if he should put the disk in the drive, maybe that's the problem. YEAH, maybe that's the problem!
A typical day in the support team I work in (a large computer manufacturer/software vendor who has been taking a beating lately) includes surreal conversations with outsourced vendor support in (mostly) India trying to deal with hardware problems on servers located in the US.
I swear these poor folks from EDS or CSC are told "no problem that you were a taxi driver last week, just pick up the phone and call [the vendor] and they will help you fix ANYTHING that goes wrong". That's all well and good but if you don't have the console (or the root password) there is little I can do to help you determine if you have a dead interface or if some pinhead in your DC unplugged a cable. I can tell you that cabling or switch settings need to be confirmed but I CAN'T DO THAT FOR YOU.
There was a time when those who were responsible for the basic maintenance of the computer systems of some of the largest companies in the world actually knew something about computers. Now these bit jockeys are like the rent a cops of the corporate data center.
We once had a sales woman rush in and tell us that someone had "stolen her network cable and replaced it with a short one". She was furious and absolutely certain that someone was messing with her stuff. This was confusing because she had a docking station... why is she even messing with her network cable?
Naturally we walked down to her office to find that rather than leaving her docking station plugged-in and stationary at her desk she had been unplugging it and taking it with her. The network cable was just long enough to reach from the desk hole to the back of the docking station and she was trying to plug the thing into the ethernet jack on the side of the laptop itself. We plugged the network cable into the docking station, walked away snickering, and created a new award for stupid users in her honor.
Story 2
I'll never forget the day I came in and saw an e-mail from someone else in IT ranting about how their supply of food stuffs had been raided. He insisted that everyone else should check to make sure nothing else had been stolen by those shifty people that clean the offices at night. Despite joking speculation that it was just one of our co-workers he refused to relent. Of course... a few hours later our boss rolls in and sees the e-mail. He then sends out a reply explaining that he'd pulled an all nighter and that he was the dirty food thief.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Well, safe as long as the network stays down, that is.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
How incredibly stupid must the programmer have been not to use the Trim function that is built into every language I've ever seen that handles strings?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You know, I get the "grumpiness". I try to manage it the best way I can.
/. are the types who always wonder "how does it work"....so I am sure this behavior perplexes others as it does me because it is the exact opposite of my daily SOP and "life philosophy", so to speak. But it's there in huge numbers.
However, it constantly amazes me how LITTLE interest people take in computers, which are all around them. We hear the same tired WinXP questions that have been solved umpteen years ago. But do the users try to help themselves in anyway? Hardly ever, in my experience. How many people do we all know that STILL can't google problems?
And that's what really fries my ass -- the idea that there are computers all around people everyday and -still- they do not take any time to better educate themselves about them. I am not suggesting programming courses, rather, I am suggesting basic, simple, computer training/understanding (ie: user level).
If there is something out there, which you have no knowledge about, and it is glaringly obvious that this "thing" is going to be MORE present going forward, wouldn't you want to learn a little about it? I mean, computers aren't going away or anything. Yet, smart people I know, have almost no understanding of how they work. And no, a car/mechanic analogy doesn't work here. I am talking much more superficially than that....there will always be programmers. I am talking about a user looking at something foreign to him/her and saying "gee, maybe I should learn a little about that thing. I bet it could help me if I knew how to use it"
While I am frustrated, I pose these as very serious questions: why don't more users take an interest in educating themselves about something that is going to be more plentiful vs less plentiful in the future? It'd be like being around in 1910 and writing off electricity as "too hard" and thus ignoring the next 20 years of electricity development. I don't get it -- but it is definitely the norm from what I observe.
Of course, we here at
This article reeks of being written by low-level tech support who think they know more about computers than they actually do.
Obviously antivirus software isn't going to blow an electrical fuse. Obviously the user who thought he'd found a virus in a specific chip on his motherboard was a bit off. A DVD-ROM drive with infected firmware seems unlikely but is certainly within the realm of possibility. The rest are all perfectly plausible.
Someone with a rootkit popping open notepad remotely and typing a message? Viruses that change system sounds? How are those symptoms at all a reason to immediately dismiss the reports?
If there's one thing that grates on my nerves, it's people who work in tech support and therefore think they know everything about computers.
I'd hate to see how the people who wrote this article would respond to a report of the symptoms of a trojan horse/rootkit that I saw firsthand this last weekend. It intercepted all communication with Google (and Yahoo Search) and replaced the first page of results with spam/malware site links. In any browser used on the system, not just IE. MalwareBytes and Avast detected nothing - I had to boot off of a CD and manually move the files somewhere else before Avast detected some (but not all) of them as part of a rootkit.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Picture plz.
There are over 36 million lines of COBOL code in the world, and they are all raping children.
There's also the fact that tech. support is usually free. If they were paying for the services (i.e. taking it to Geek Squad) they'd be much less likely to complain about your fixes.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Every time I tell this story, I get looked at like I am lying through my teeth, but I remind them that this happened back in 1998, when Windows 3.11 was still being used, the 56k modem standard was still being written, and outside of a private T1, an ISDN line was your best bet for a fast connection to the Internet.
I was working Tier 1 Tech Support for a Chicago based ISP and a customer called up saying he was having problems getting onto the Internet. I confirm that he is on Windows 95, and having memorized the steps needed to get his computer configured to connect to us, I start walking him through the process. One of the final steps is to reboot Windows for the settings to take hold.
The computer shuts down without issue and starts the power-up cycle when I hear the CD Drive, a strange liquid sound, and immediately hear the sound of frying electronics and the customer swearing like a sailor on shore leave. Turns out, they had an in-house conference in the office that day and they were serving coffee in those paper cones. Since he could not find a holder for it, he opened up his CD tray and rested the coffee in the center void. When the computer rebooted, it closed said CD tray... ingesting the paper cone and the coffee, frying it into uselessness.
Needless to say, he was quite pissed and I was laughing my arse off for days.
Yeah, I have that problem too, only reverse. I am a Unix admin. I get screenshots pasted directly into Outlook that come to me as "OLE_embedded" in Thunderbird. Just attach a .jpg, don't embed it and just assume that someone else is using your same client to read your email.
OTOH, I can reasonably assume that if they really wanted help they would have sent it in a readable format in the first place.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I.T. Support for local government isn't as bad as doing AOL support, but some days you really couldn't tell the difference. Now, I'm not making fun of these people - a lot of them were born and raised when computers were not mainstream. For the non-geek, it's natural to be afraid to work with something that you have never used. My relatives are always afraid of hitting the wrong button on the computer and "breaking it", and I have to always reassure them that you really cannot break anything. And if they did, so what? They learn something new, and almost anything can be undone or fixed.
Anyway, my former coworker (I have long since left the position), who had been doing support work as an analyst for years, told me of one story that even I couldn't help laugh at. Some lady from admin called him up frantically panicking because her mouse had reached the end of the mouse pad and she hadn't reached the part of the screen where she wanted the pointer to be. Basically, she thought that once the mouse reached the end of the mouse pad, then game over, and you cannot go any further.
He carefully explained to her that she was allowed to lift the mouse up and move it back towards the center of the mouse pad and continue in the direction she wanted to go.
My first action is always to help people and not make them feel stupid, especially since they already feel embarrassed, but every once in a while, I just wish I could let myself mess with them, and be like "YOU DID WHAT!?!? OH NO, IT'S ALL BROKEN. YOU BROKE THE INTERNET!!" if they ask about moving the mouse around, or clicking on an icon on the screen that they know nothing about. I would never do that, but the thoughts are tempting. ;)
Best "String" Ever!
At our place inline images are permitted. Still, very useful information to have (I've not played with Exchange myself yet). Thanks for the pointer.
Nope - he was right on it.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
Agreed, the Web 0.1 method isn't a recommended approach at all. :)
I bet I could send all of those screenshots to /dev/null (digital shredder, kindof), even faster. Doesn't mean it's a useful method.
Whenever you do something FOR someone else (such as sending them screenshots, or any kind of image), you should always try to make it easy for _them_, not for yourself. Especially if it's a support-case and you want help fast.
For me, being the reciever of the image, say I have to upload it to some ticket-system, it takes me a LOT of extra steps extracting them from the Word-document, compared to recieving it in a zip, where many OS:es can even consider it a regular foler and let me upload straight away.
We recently had a sales rep tell us that his laptop DVD drive failed because of a "design flaw". We told him, ok, whatever, mail it in. When we got the machine, we discovered a ribbon cable hanging out of the DVD drive-- which clearly implied that he had disassembled (unscrewed) and reassembled (rescrewed) the drive with the cable hanging out. I guess the "design flaw" he was talking about was that you can't do stupid shit to your computer and expect it to work.
It gets really bizarre when you have people (like, say, your network admin, or someone who allegedly fills this kind of position) berate you that just because the internet doesn't work the mail should be perfectly fine, and you shouldn't BS them into believing mail has anything to do with the internet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I must explain so the mods don't wreck this - Windows NT always had a textual blue screen display right after NTLDR and ntdetect.com that told you how many processors you had, the NT version/build etc. It was blue (like the bsods we know today) because NT used to run on x86, DEC Alpha, MIPS and Arm architectures and since the Alpha only supported blue and white text printing, the NT team (headed by none other than Dave Cutler) decided to just make all of the text mode colors blue and white, including NT's current architecture: x86.
So no, that was not a "Windows always crashes" joke, it was a true albeit ironic statement.
I have to tell you that techies often get the "no I don't" kind of response because of all the wrong diagnoses that have been given in the past. I can count many times when I have instructed a technician on what to do, what I have tried, and then get some half-assed "please reboot", or "check the ethernet cable" or whatever. The thing is, it is impossible to tell the smart, slashdot reading help desk personnel from the just-graduated-from-college-and-trying-to-find-a-real-IT-job person.
Let's see... last week I actually noticed my mouse wandering around on the screen where it wasn't supposed to go. Then the computer opened up a Windows Explorer on its own. No shit. So I opened up Notepad, in between wrestling control over my mouse, and wrote "This is my computer, what the heck are you doing on it?"
The response was "Are you employee #XXXXXXXXXX with the email problem?"
My response: "No, I am working at home and wondering why you took control of my computer."
Him: "Sorry, I am trying to help another user."
Me: "Please give me your name, phone number and department so I can check who you are."
Him: "Sorry, Matt Smith, XXX-XXX-XXXX, Support Desk"
Me: "No worries, don't let it happen again."
I let him drop after that. And here I was freaking out that during my "work" from home, at the exact point I happened to be browsing Slashdot on the company laptop, that they were on to me and I was busted. I am probably busted anyway based on the logs...
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
The place: Purdue University. The year: 1995. (A.D.)
I worked for "PUCC" (Purdue University Computing Center), sitting at the help desk at various computer labs on campus. Our official mandate was to pretty much: keep the labs clean, make sure the hardware worked, keep the printers topped off with paper and toner, and answer simple questions. However, most of us who gravitated towards these jobs were either CS/engineering students or self-made computer/unix tinkerers who loved to dink around on the campus computers, so more often than not, we knew quite a bit more than the average lab user.
At the time, the "LAEB" (Liberal Arts Education Building) basement lab was still shiny and new, with some of the best PC equipment on campus. For those familiar with Purdue, this was the big building that sprouted up next to the "wind tunnel" CS building during that time.
So there I was, in the mid A.M. shift on a day classes were in session. I'm at the big desk in the basement. A rather grumpy looking T.A. approached the end of the desk furthest from me. I look around, hoping I'd miss this one. One of my peers was chatting on the "havens" in a dozen simultaneous sessions under TinyFugue, so he was oblivious. The other was engrossed in the relatively new game of "Marathon" on the single Mac at the desk. So I took the complaint.
"The overhead isn't working." Our labs were all equipped with overhead projectors with color LCD devices that hooked up to the instructor's computer. He was very agitated, obviously pissed that we somehow failed to ensure that *his* lab was in working order before class started. His time was way too important to be dealing with this stuff. You know the type.
Knowing that he was in error, but experienced enough to know better than to dispute the claim, I followed him back to his room.
The routine which followed was pretty much autonomic. I could tell that the projector itself was fine, as I could hear the fan and see the light behind the fan. I checked the cables, and the everything looked good. I stand up, approach the projector, and peer down. I lift my head, grin, wink at the 20-odd bored students, then lift the vanilla envelope from the top of the projector and hand it to the T.A. who just stares at me. The wall at the front of the class is now illuminated with the day's lesson outline. A few chuckles from the class follow as I excuse myself and exit the room.
Good times.
I'm not working with support anymore (thank God!) but one case that I still remember was when the guy took a screen shot of an error message using *gasp* his camera.
I did that within the last month. Ever tried to jot down a FreeBSD kernel panic?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I wish someone had modded parent as Troll. :)
I was working at a computer shop and it was around the same time when building your own rig was better than eMachines and some of the other failures out there. A guy comes in with a box of assorted parts he ordered from a magazine or somewhere. His story is the best I have ever heard. He tells us how he had it all together and except for the drives, he just wanted it to POST cuz he read you never waste your time putting it all together unless it will post with just the RAM, CPU and Vid Card if needed. Apparently the article failed to mention how crucial the CPU fan is. Any ideas where this leads... Fries the CPU, gets AMD to RMA it. Next go... Tries to use a screwdriver to power on the system, again instead of wasting time with the pinouts just in case. Fries the board and CPU somehow. Gets two more RMAs. This is when he finally brought to us and told us the story, personally I wouldn't have told the story but he thought it was hilarious. Granted we still talk about it to this day and laugh about it, always at him though, not with him. The other biggest thing that really gets me is when people buy a computer and do one of two things, it used to be they got broadband and tried to plug the ethernet cable into the modem. Then when most motherboards started carrying NICs onboard they would try to plug their phone line into that...
I once worked IT for a company in Miami. One day I was sitting in the data center checking tape status. The super-high priced consultant admin walked in. She sat down in front of a Sun E6500 serial console, logged in, then started doing some work. After a few minutes, she got up, turned off the console, then started to leave. For non-Sun folks, turning off the main console shuts down the machine. I immediately asked, "What did you just do!?" She looked at me and told me she was pushing some NIS files. "You turned off the machine," I said. She looked at me like I was an idiot. "No, I just turned off the terminal."
The short story is that she normally connected from a terminal at her desk. This time she connected from the main console. It took another couple hours to fix what she'd screwed up.. All the while she was insisting that turning off the console wouldn't shutdown the machine.
There's a flip side to that, most admins I've run into presume you are a stupid user and that merely aiming a few steps at your brain, with no explanation about what the steps do or why they are necessary, is sufficient to send you, the miscreant, away so they can get back to playing with the network or sucking on their thumbs or whatever it is admins do to amuse themselves. Whatever problem we have, it is always an imposition on their precious time which never involves teaching us enough so that we won't be in their office in another 6 months when we cannot recall the magic incantations since the problem was never fully explained to us in the first place...leading the sainted admins to crack wise knowing inside jokes about the stupidity they manage to put up with (read: instill) in their users.
Don't blame the customer. I have a Vizio 42" LCD display, a TV, really. The display has a row of barely labeled buttons along the side of the display. They're all the same form factor, and the top one is on/off. But it's a badly implemented software-polled button. Even though it clicks when pushed, that doesn't necessarily mean the button push was read. The button needs to be held for half a second or so to get a reliable turn-on/off. And the turn-on event occurs about a second after the button is pushed.
There's no real excuse for that. Especially on a device which keeps its "Vizio" logo dimly lit when off, so it clearly doesn't have a hard power off.
The attached Sony DVD player has its own interface problems. The tray open/close button takes several seconds to do anything, and isn't live during the 10-second or so power up sequence. The display is connected to a Sony DVD player via HDMI, and this is all late 2007 equipment, so the Consumer Electronics Control interface ought to be present and make the two devices coordinate on/off and volume controls. Doesn't work.
I once told a woman to hit a button located on the left side of her screen. She then, without pausing confidently asked me; "my left of yours?" Put me down for an internet stabber.
You've clearly never spent much time in any of the professions that you think are treated with inherent respect.
Just because you respect those professions to be more knowledgeable doesn't mean that everyone does. :)
My favorite story is when I first showed my mom how to use a mouse. She wanted the cursor to go up on the screen so she lifted the mouse off the pad. It kind of made sense if you hadn't used a mouse before, but it was still hilarious.
At least according to Slashdot Squad of Moderation Trolls.
Don't you know that it is hilariously entertaining to make fun of mentally challenged people?
Rowan Atkinson and Jerry Lewis made careers on the fact that retards are inherently funny.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
True story and it wasn't a gag Client wants to know why he can't read his floppy disk. "Can you open My Computer" "I told you I'm not bringing my computer in" "sir it's an Icon in the Start menu" Hearing Him tap on his CRT "Sir use your mouse to click on it" "Mice? I aint got no mice I got 4 cats" ... much time goes by as we work into My Computer
"Ok, it doesn't seem to see the disk, can you pull it out?"
I hear the mechanical noise of a CD drive.
"sir does the slot you just took your floppy out of open when you push a button?"
"Yes, it's one of those disc/floppy slots"
So for those of you wondering you can in fact put a floppy in a cd drive just right and it will close
Another company's internet tanks. We can't ping their public ip, they're down. This happened on a Monday, 10AM. After dragging AT&T there on a leash so they could swap out some hardware (inside a locked box...), the net started working again, Tuesday, 2PM.
Oh, we had a fun one like that. Ping would work, then stop, then work, then stop. It seems our ISP (starts with an "S", rhymes with "print") forgot that they'd allocated our netblock to us and decided to give it to the loading docks of a shipping company. I was unamused to find that half of our inbound traffic was being redirected to the seediest place in the country, depending on which of two routers was winning the battle at any given moment.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
These start from when I was at university:
Comp Sci 101 (computer use for non CompSci majors - they used Macs). My buddy taught three sections of the lab for the class and he had some stories.
--The woman who moved the mouse to the floor, to use it as a foot pedal, because that's how her sewing machine worked.
--The man who put a penny per lab period into the computer. One week, it finally shorted out.
--The people who put the labels on their floppy disks *over* the metal gate.
--The man who inserted the floppy into the drive backwards / upside down. No, they don't normally fit, but he pushed until it went in.
(The latter two there caused the prof for the class to make new slides explaining how to label and insert a floppy.)
Jump to my first job:
--Co-workers coming back from Christmas break to discover their computers don't work, calling me over to troubleshoot, to discover they'd kicked out the power cord like they did every week for a year before Christmas break. I guess they thought that Santa would make the plug tighter while they were gone.
--Another co-worker complaining his computer wouldn't work (same day). I tell him to plug it in. He says it is. I go over and look; it's plugged in. The power light is on, but the hard drive light isn't. I crack the case to discover that over the break, someone had stolen his processor, memory and hard drive. (Not really a bad user story, but still...)
--Client panicing because their print isn't coming out (which was actually really important). We do 10 man-hours of investigation, and then they call back to say that their printer wasn't turned on.
--Same client, next day, same complaint. We verify that the printer is on, and start the investigation. 4 man-hours later, they call back and say that they had a paper jam.
Current job:
--I have one co-worker whom I have to explain, on the order of once a week, how you map to a shared drive. She writes it down *every time* and still has to have me help her the next week. Each time, she claims she's done what she wrote down, and it doesn't work. I do the exact same thing, and it does work.
--Several coworkers who ask "what should I get as a new computer"; I ask what they're going to do with it, and set them up with a decent baseline for their money. They then think this entitles them to free tech support for the next 6-9 months as they have issues like "Word stopped working" (Yes, that would be the trial version the computer came with. It said it would stop working. Didn't you see that notice?)
I'd go into more details, but I have to go home to change, because nobody every vaccuumed under the raised floor in our computer center after doing all the drilling for the posts.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Luckily I'm somewhat removed from doing support these days but I did have the dubious pleasure of providing computer support for nine years. Most of the stories aren't that good but there's a couple that I remember.
We weren't allowed to set Outlook to delete anything in the Delete folder. The CIO liked using it as a convenient storage place 'since he could put stuff there with just one click'.
A VIP had his secretary print and respond to his e-mail for two months before calling. He was amazed that he had to turn on both parts of his computer for it to work.
A user called to say that her terminal was on fire and asked what to do. "Um, unplug it?"
"My keyboard suddenly stopped working." "What did you spill on it?" "Nothing!" Desk visit later and a full cup of water tipped out of the keyboard. "Oh, maybe some water."
The typical (at the time) running the 5 1/4" floppy through the typewriter to label it, stapling the disk to a report, and the infamous "copy the disk" which ended up with a photocopy in interoffice mail. The last one had the added goodness of the copier scrambling the data on the disk.
"My computer is putting extra letters in my document!" Desk visit since there was nothing in the troubleshooting to find any issues. User was well endowed and didn't like wearing her glasses so she would lean forward to read the screen.
And they wonder why computer support people drink ...
That will be the best part.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
To the people who....
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
I get screenshots inside word documents a lot, and it is because some stupid company-policy-implemented filter decided you can't have images as attachments, but caved in to pressure and allows far more dangerous Word documents...
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Because Word doesn't compress them; they will be huge.
In any case, if you want to capture lots of screen shots you should run /bin/bash and enter:
That will give you a bunch of JPEGs, ready to be zipped. Just click to take each screen shot. That's smarter: program your computer to do your work for you.
I am in complete agreement on this one.
If people exibited as much common sense doing other things as they do when they use their computer (not to mention when they call for help) then there would be many more issues with everyday things.
You would have people putting refrigerators in their house upside down and wonder why the ice maker doesn't work.
Try to cook something in a stove when the power is out at their house.
Drive on the left side of the road (in the US) because their driver seat is on the left and that makes sense.
i'm sure there are 1000+ more examples.
what has amazed me from the beginning of my support career is the fact that so many "smart" people just lose all common sense in front of a computer. I told a user to right-click on the desktop once, after a few minutes of frustrating conversation i figured out he had written "click" on a piece of paper on his desktop and that's why he was so infuriated with me. I've had other users who thought i could see their screen when i'm helping them setup a dial-up connection because i had done it 1000 times and i knew what the screens all looked like.
It's not that you're always fighting with users but they all have a similar lack of common sense when using a computer, i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road.
- My uid ends in 69...
Let me preface this by saying, I agree. People can be dumb. However, I have found a way to look past it and truly love my IT job. Here's a couple tenets I suggest you consider:
1) If it wasn't for people doing stupid things, IT/helpdesk people wouldn't have jobs. Granted, it can be like babysitting sometimes, but I have come to appreciate the ignorance that some people have simply because they know that they can come to me and I can fix it. That makes me a valuable resource.
2) Smart people don't know easy things about computers. I work for a company that does very low level computer science stuff, we have many PhD types who know their niche of computers inside and out, but if you stray them 10 feet from the path they know they're completely lost. Those guys need me because even though I don't know how to design a microchip or synthesize FPGA code, I do know how to fix their terminal when they've hit Control-Q. (Not to say I'm not a technical guy, but this is the type of stuff that you gotta fix for them sometimes.)
3) Everyone says or does stupid things every day of their life. It's unavoidable. By treating customers/users with respect (even if at the moment you don't feel like they deserve it) it endears you to them. You don't know what's going on in their lives that might have them distracted from the technical aspects of their job.
More than once I've felt 'Aww come on, you should know this!' only to find out that the user has some terrible event going on in their life and they couldn't care less about researching the problem or extending their computer knowledge -- they don't want to be in the office but they have to be, they're up against a deadline, they just want it to work now and they send up a signal flare for the IT guys to come and make everything better.
Enjoy those moments, if you're a typical shy nerd like me it's one of the brighter moments you'll get in your professional life to be the hero to someone whos at their wits end.
From TFA:
Interesting. My USB mouse has a built-in card reader, and spent about a month being switched from machine to machine in my KVM with a 32MB card left forgotten inside before I discovered it and realised its potential as a vector of infection... You'd think that if they were security professionals they would have thought of this.
Apropos to this, I remember years ago on the Atari ST someone released a virus that infected the keyboard controller chip, completely outwith the usual CPU-RAM-drive triad.
A user entered password is not generally something that you want to modify - at all.
Do you think I would post that if it wasn't possible to take the SS using the common ways? The customer machine was running windows and the error was simple as an alert. And yes, he had a keyboard with PS button.
Why. Why do non-technical people COMPLETELY LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ AND CONVEY WRITTEN MESSAGES BY VOCAL COMMUNICATION AND/OR JUST MAKE SHIT UP?
"my computer says it has performed an illegal introduction"
"I have a problem. Il think it's because my hard drive can't boot the diskette"
"The program crashed. Something about the memory display"
"No i haven't got his email address. i think he moved to another web site"
Imagine if I, not knowing anything about cars, developed a problem with my car, and took it to the mechanic. When asked what's wrong, what if i said "Oh, i think the rear gasket isn't being lubricated by the spark plugs", i would get laughed out of the shop. So why can't we treat people who say "the monitor wont boot the program off the memory driver" with equal derision.
To the people who.... 2) Ask what FTP is when they're supposed to be a server admin
At least they asked, I was working for a college and the new IT tech asked how we setup virtual personal networks for people on the same day the manager said that we can increase our inter-site communication by buying more dark fiber.
"He is so stupid. And now back to the wall!" Moe Szyslak
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.
To be fair, after the Internet, I now question other experts MUCH more often than I used to.
Ok, so I'll probably respect an electricians'/doctors'/mechanics' opinion a lot more, just because they have a lot more practical experience, but I've found bad diagnoses made by good doctors, mechanics usually want to stuff you with used parts, and electricians might make questionable decisions (usually aesthetic or with cabling).
Of the three, I think doctors might be the more similar because they encounter a wider variety of problems, and just like in IT, I like a second opinion when dealing with doctors.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I disagree with your doctor analogy. You bet doctors have to deal with the same sort of issues we deal with. Yes, even outright denial. Afterall, a doctor is just a technician. He just works with a different type of machine.
The real issue here isnt about IT its that IT is a test. It tests your problem solving skills and your learning skills. It turns out that most people have horrible skills thus all the horror stories.
In my career Ive found that people who do well with technology or have patience tend to be good people in other parts of their lives. Those who are impatient and bad with technology tend to be mouth-breathing dolts everywhere else in their lives too. Ignoring novices, its rare to meet someone who is just "bad at computers." They're usually pretty bad at everything.
That's what I used to feel. But interestingly the screen shot in a word documents is smaller. I guess Microsoft severely compressing pictures in a word doc *is* a "feature" ...
Perfect response by email "Unfortunately the email and network is down.", hopefully at that point they realize.
No sig here...
The central computer unit of my university has become populated by less clueful individuals lately. This summer they decided it was a good idea to move mail handling over to Windows computers running Exchange or whatever they call it. One of the consequences was that spam filtering did not work very well anymore, especially for one professor at my division who was suddenly getting unheard-of amounts of spam. So this day, he came into office checked his correspondance and burst out in the corridor, shouting "Gah, 8000 mails!". Poor soul, I doubt he ever found the real ones in that pile.
I think I know where spam comes from now - Microsoft Exchange.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
What if you're not using the MS Virus Distribution Suite 2007, having opted for GroupWise, Notes, or heck even pine?
On night at about 2am, I received a call from one of our field technicians. Quite distraught, he told me his computer was broken and he had a high-profile job in the morning and needed it replaced ASAP. He explained that when he tried to type in his username to login, it was showing garbage on the screen, "all sorts of weird numbers and symbols". He regaled me with the story of how he had taken the laptop apart, checked the contacts on the keyboard ribbon cable, found his keyboard chipset model, and Googled the problem, eventually finding it to be a common issue known as a "K9 Keyboard Chipset error". This guy had done his homework.
Having no way of getting his laptop replaced so quickly by myself, I was forced to call the desktop support manager (who was the epitome of a BOFH). He groggily answered, and the technician told him the issue.
"Do me a favor," said the BOFH.
"OK?" the technician responded.
"Hold down the shift key, and press the Num Lock key. Then login."
"ITS WORKING!"
"Gentlemen, we will discuss this on Monday," growled the BOFH, before slamming the phone down. Those words are to this day etched in my mind. I don't blame him for being angry, but in my defense, the tech *did* sound like he'd already tried everything. From then on, I became known as NumLock PantsDown. I'll tell Slashdot about the "PantsDown" portion another time.
A tech callout that turned out to be a borked mouse, the old fashioned ones with the ball drive wheels. I replaced it with an optic drive one. Gets a very angry call the next day as this mouse was also broken. Second callout, it turns out the the old fart had put a translucent glass tile under the mouse, so as to stop it scratching his desk ..
-------
Or the fella that kept getting a busy signal when he tried to dial in through a modem. Turned out he was trying to phone his own number ..
-----
Caller: I can't get on the Internet
Me: Did you get the Install CD we sent you in the post?
Caller: Yes
Me: And where is it?
Caller: it's upstairs in the bedroom, in a drawer ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
A guy calls up and says, "Yeah, they told me I need your help. I got this card in the mail, and I need to put an e-file in my modem." Turned out the card was a 3.5" floppy, the e-file was a database update, and the modem was his CPU. The rest of the call consisted of me getting the job done by remote control, all the while ignoring him throwing about tech terms and buzzwords he'd heard somewhere and had no inkling of their meanings.
"You know you're narcissistic when you quote yourself in your sigs." -- PRoPAiN!
A long time ago, I had just configured qmail on a server and was monitoring the "alias" mailbox where "postmaster@domain" ends up, and noticed that someone had replied to the unknown user error message, which reads something like:
Hi, this is the qmail-daemon program at domainname. I tried to deliver your message to username, but couldn't find the destination.
Sorry it didn't work out.
The lady responded very politely Dear Mr Qmail Daemon,..., asking if it had any idea where she could reach her friend.
I replied back, thanking her for being so nice to Qmail Daemon, unlike most people who pick on him for being a Daemon and whatnot. She replied that she was a good christian and was trying to be nice to everyone, but that a name like Daemon is quite strange indeed.
Sadly I lost the file, it was quite amusing.
What happens when the user then tries to enter their password and it has a space? It is easier to tell the user not to use a space at the beginning or end of a password when creating it than it is to remember to use a trim everywhere you read a password from. Now, I would use the trim anyhow, but if the user thinks that their password has a space at the beginning of it they're going to use it all of the time and eventually run into some problem.
Starmen.net
When I worked as desktop support, when my company was much smaller I had my fair share of stupid incidents ranging from people pulling me from really important projects because IE popped up to a Java Developer asking why their keyboard and mouse isn't working, when it is clearly evident that they aren't even plugged in.
We used to have a broker (financial company) we dubbed typhoid mary because literally every day our virus scanner would pick up dozens of viruses from this guy. He used to get pissed off at us because we actually had to tend to his machine and clean the bullshit off of his PC each and every day. It eventually gotten better with the Symantec Corporate Edition we installed but after the guy left and we had to do a clean of his PC, we found he had every sort of porn imaginable both in his cache and explicitly downloaded.
The funniest part about all of this, is IF your talking about *WINBLOWS* which you all seem to be then YOU DON'T NEED SCREENSHOTS!!!!
MS was kind enough to include a nice little function into all error dialogs so you can just make the error dialog the active window press [CTRL] + [c] and then PASTE THE TEXT INTO AN E-MAIL or NOTEPAD! no more writing down obscure 0x800000000000000000000 error codes!!! OMG how long have you been using/supporting winblows and you don't know this? (L)users!!!
I was working as a programmer for a university, and I had someone from the helpdesk put in a trouble ticket to me, complaining that the account provisioning software wasn't working for this user, but they had verified that the user's information had checked out, and that they should work.
Of course, I had written the account provisioning. And to slow down people trying to brute force it, I gave the same generic error message for almost every error ... but gave the helpdesk folks a tool which told them the specifics of what was going on.
Unfortunately, the helpdesk person refused to use the diagnostic tool that I wrote, and use her own methods for determining 'if everything was okay', which didn't use the same logic as my programs did. I had to take a few trips down to her cubicle, and finally get her manager involved to explain that I wrote the software and I knew better than her what was going on.
(yes, the user's numeric identifier was in the system, but the person just happened to have two identifiers assigned to them, and so they had flagged one as deprecated, and thus invalid, and my program would refuse to create accounts unless they used the currently active identifier ... the process they were using to look up the ID only showed that it was in the system, not what its current status was ... if they had used my tool, it would have told them what identifier the person should be using.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Perhaps it's because user are more likely to run into incompetent tech support/server admin who just reads off scripted response than, say, incompetent doctor or electrician. This stems from the fact that doctors/electrician/etc are licensed, whereas tech support guys/server admins are not, and thus their competency can vary greatly (i.e. server admin who doesn't know ftp and DBA who can't run select statements).
I am not saying that I'd prefer the IT professions to be licensed... just saying that the reverse is true that user run into incompetent IT than professionals of other specialty, and hence their distrust for techies.
Before my current job (writing software and supporting software developers for the MFP industry), I did "connectivity support" for the same company. I didn't deal with end users, I dealt with technicians. Many of these guys however were NOT IT techs, the vast majority were old curmudgeony copier techs that were a bit hesitant to enter the wonderful world of connected copiers (keeping in mind this was several years back, and I did deal with small dealerships' techs as well as our branch staff). As such, I have quite a few wonderful tales from my time on the other end of the phone/email/escalation system. Some names of people and companies altered to protect the guilty (but yes, my name is Ben, and I do work for Konica Minolta).
Story 1) The magical wireless RJ45 socket.
*Ring ring*, *ring ring*
Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking."
John: "Hi Ben, it's John from Small Rural Copier Company here. I just hooked up a second hand Di251 at a customer and they said they want it connected to their PC to print. So, we sold them the Pi3502 (print controller), but it's not printing, what could be the problem?"
Me: "I'm gonna need a bit more info John. You've installed the controller and the NIC, and plugged everything in right?"
John: "Yep, I even set an 'IP Address' and installed the 'print driver' like the setup instructions said!"
Me: "Okay, good start. Tell me happens when you try to print."
John: "Nothing at all. The customer opens a document, selects to print it, and after a while it just says it failed to print"
Me: "Right, the most likely cause then is just that it can't communicate for some reason. Can you ping the MFP from the PC?"
John asks how to do that, and I talk him through it
John: "Nope, it says no reply."
Me: "Okay, tell me the IP address of the Pi3502 and the computer."
John does so, and I'm actually a little stunned that they're actually valid, on the same subnet, and everything sounded like it should be okay.
Me: "Hmmm... this might be a faulty NIC in the Pi3502, since we've seen a couple of those on this model, and it is second hand. Could you check if the link light is on?"
John: "Sure, where do I find the link light?"
Me: "The NIC has two LEDs - right on top of where the ethernet cable is plugged in, one should flash from time to time and the other should be on permanently - that's the link light."
John: "Ethernet cable? Is that the blue one that was in the box? I didn't know what to do with that, so I haven't done anything with it, it's still in the box."
Me: "... so, just to get this straight... what cables are currently connected to the Di251?"
John: "Just the power cable."
I then explained the 'finer points' of the concept of networking to John, who eventually became enlightened as to the purpose of an ethernet cable, and managed to get everything working about 10 minutes later
Story 2) How to scan.
*Ring ring*, *ring ring*
Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking."
Peter: "Hi Ben, it's Peter from Moderately Sized City Dealership here. I've never set up scanning before, but the customer wants to use the 'Scan to FTP' function. Can you talk me through setting that up?"
Me: [stifling a groan] "Sure Peter. Do you have the details of the customer's FTP server?"
Peter: "Server? They don't have one of those. Do they need that for scanning?"
Me: "If you want to scan to FTP, you need an FTP server. They could install one on a desktop PC if they don't have a dedicated server though. Talk to their admin and ask if they'll install one somewhere for scanning. There's one on the CD that came with the MFP if they don't have a preference, and I can talk you through the setup of that" (The one on the CD was basically a dead simple little "write only" FTP server specifically designed with scanning in min
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
There's a book I ran across, Fear and Loathing in Tech Support, that has lots of stories from Tech Support Hell. Funny, and well worth reading.
Trimming the spaces would not be the right solution. In that case there would be support calls saying that their new password does not work. The error message in this case was very simple and straightforward.
Except if the user has Outlook set to use Word as their email editor; then it's exactly like typing it up in Word.
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity.
Well, it's like people believe that computers run on magic and that the normal rules of physics don't apply to them. Example questions:
I can understand ignorant questions, because a lot of the stuff we do is pretty complex and non-obvious. I just can't understand dumb questions, the ones that show a complete lack of critical thinking.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I had a user once who was a woman in her mid 50s. Most of her job duties were performed on the computer, so she could get around a little bit (a lot perhaps, considering that she got fired for spending upwards of 10-20 hours per week playing solitaire and shopping online).
Anyhow, she calls me up one day and says that something is wrong with her computer: "It says CHECK SIGNAL CABLE in big red letters!"
So I wander on down and sure enough, the monitor reads CHECK SIGNAL CABLE. Recognizing that the message was from the monitor itself, I started poking around at the back of the machine trying to see if anything was disconnected. After about five minutes and a big self-slap on the forehead I asked, "ummm...is your computer on?"
"Well of course it's on, it says CHECK SIGNAL CABLE."
"Yeah, but I mean the computer itself. You know, the "tower", or the "CPU", or the "hard drive", or whatever you happen to call it." (I wasn't really so snippy)
She suddenly realized what I was talking about, and she proceeded to turn her computer on. We had a good laugh about it and I went back to my hole.
About a week later I get another call: "Something is wrong with my computer. It says CHECK SIGNAL CABLE."
I was speechless at first, and almost thought she was joking. After a moment I calmly asked her if she had turned her actual "computer" on, and not just the monitor. She gave an embarrassed laugh and made some apologies and I told her not to worry about it, everybody "has those days."
Maybe a week or two later I get another call from the same lady: "Something is wrong with my computer, it says CHECK.... oh wait, nevermind."
I hung up the phone and took a moment to reflect on how fragile reality can be.
A week or two later I happen to be walking past this lady's desk and one of the guys from our engineering department is looking at the back of her computer and pulling on wires and whatnot. Being a bit dumbfounded I just decided to keep walking on by.
A few hours later I caught up with the guy from engineering and asked him what was up. Sure enough, the lady had forgotten once again to turn her computer on. What really gets me though is that she called this other guy from a completely different department because she *knew* that calling me would somehow lead to embarrassment. And while she could remember this potential for embarrassment, she could not remember that the solution to this particular problem was to simply turn her computer on.
Anyhow, that's my favorite story. Maybe you had to be there. A close second was when a much younger and more savvy woman called me to fix her mouse which was "too slow". Before I was able to get into the mouse properties in Windows and adjust the speed, she insisted on explaining her hypothesis that this particular mouse was slow because it's cord was very long.
Which brings up an interesting reality. I bet that a large number of the support calls I get are solved by having people re-adjust the location of their wireless mouse receiver, which is rarely described as "my mouse isn't working right" but more often "my computer (or 'the internet') is slow, I have to click on things ten times before they open."
Another large number of calls are solved by having people shake the crap out of their keyboards... a stuck ALT or CTRL key can be hard to diagnose the first time. :)
Put me down for ten...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
And then the next call would have been: "My password doesn't work. I keep resetting it and it never works afterwards. Stupid application doesn't work!"
[John]
Shit better not happen!
That's actually not a rare incident. I don't even wonder how many readers nod their head to this statement because it's been an endless source to their own frustration.
One wonders why. Why do people just click away all messages sent to them by the system? I actually remember an incident where I was called to fix "something with the server". Turned out to be a raid6 system that lost three drives and thus didn't work anymore. Now, I hear you say, how can a raid6 system fail? Raid6 can lose two drives and still work. Three drives dying, power surge maybe? No.
One drive failed, but the hotspare took over. The server beeped, so the beeper was cut off. The server reported dutifully that a drive was blown, which was equally dutifully clicked away without reading it.
Another drive failed, but it still somehow managed to keep going. No beep this time since even the best beepers fail to work when they are not connected. And finally the whole system failed to provide data, or they'd probably have continued 'til a rebuilt would have been impossible.
But the real kicker was that I was being yelled at how we dare to sell a Raid6+spare as a system that prevents data loss. It does, when you don't do your best to ignore every information it gives you about an impending catastrophe.
And this is hardly an isolated case of stupidity. People simply close every warning information they get because "I don't understand it anyway". Without reading it, how do you KNOW whether you understand it?
I dare you to ask that question. It usually results in more yelling, but no really enlightening answers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>Whatever problem we have, it is always an imposition on their precious time which never involves teaching us enough so that we won't be in their office in another 6 months
Wow, bitter mcuh?
My time is precious. I cant baby every single user. If I do something I cant spend 30 minutes explaining to you the nitty gritty details of what happened, our network infrastructure, etc.
>leading the sainted admins to crack wise knowing inside jokes about the stupidity they manage to put up with (read: instill) in their users.
So youre saying that if you knew the details youd be able to fix everything yourself. So lets say we are having some problems with one of lines and I need to quickly put in a static route on your desktop. Am I going to sit you down and explain to you what a route is and how the route command works. Heck, if I did that then I could expect a lot of random routes put in by "smart" guys like you.
Hey, at the end of the day its a job. You took the job and you need to learn to live with how the business is run. If you want full admin rights and want to be able to get into the routers you are more than welcome to bring this up with your boss. We'd love to hear how all the "elitist" IT people are keeping you down and how your accounting degree from State U along with your WoW addiction makes you much better qualified to do everything.
Perhaps you should just let us do our fucking jobs so we can go home at 5 just like you do. Thanks.
which never involves teaching us enough...
Please explain why it is our job to teach users? Does the user not share responsibility here? It would be one thing if it was in the job description but it's usually not. Your assertion that this is part of the job reminds me that we have a misunderstanding about what IT admins do and don't do. Hint: teaching isn't usually covered.
I ask because my biggest pet peeve is the helplessness users display with respect to computers. Not only is it dishonest in many cases, but it is lazy. Everyone just throws up their hands and waits for IT. Then what? IT is supposed to hold their hand through the solution and explain, step by step, what went wrong? Nonsense. We IT admins have been trying that for 10 years now. It doesn't work. Hell, we can't even get users to use Google and it's friggin' 2008.
God forbid, sometime over the last 20+ years, users take an hour -maybe even 10hrs- to learn something about the subject. Take a course. Buy a book. Hire someone to teach you. Adult outreach. Libraries! I mean, it's only been 20 years for Windows.....surely anyone could find a moment in their somewhere to "better themselves".
If users spent as much time learning on their own as they do bitching about IT, this problem would have long been solved and over.
When you think about it, the programmer actually did something smart. The program actually checks for leading and ending spaces in the password and then informs the user not to include them. To allow users to have a leading or ending space with a trim function is an expedient but wrong solution to the problem. Later when the user will forget about the space, they will get frustrated that they can't log in. They might be pissed. They'll call support. They'll have to get a new password. The support guy will get an earful. Or the programmer can not allow spaces.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Users really don't 'get' the internet.
Every once in a while get panicked calls from people in other departments saying "really important web-based product is DOWN! FIX IT NOW! We're losing money".
It has taken us quite a bit of time to train the users to first check if another site is reachable (usually Google.com, since it's so reliable). Our internet connection (the actual link, the router, or some other part) goes down at least 6x as often as the system. It's a rare occurrence now. Our system is highly redundant, our office connection isn't (or at least wasn't, it's much better now than it used to be).
I have, in one place, been emailed that the internet was down. Our mail server was external. What happened is the cheap little WiFi access point died, and they couldn't access the 'net on their laptop. It worked fine on the wired desktop, which they sent the email from. And were surfing on.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
most admins I've run into presume you are a stupid user and that merely aiming a few steps at your brain, with no explanation about what the steps do or why they are necessary, is sufficient to send you, the miscreant, away so they can get back to playing with the network or sucking on their thumbs or whatever it is admins do to amuse themselves
...surf slashdot?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
This is virtually impossible when competing factions within the same industry are hellbent on decreasing user knowledge in order to sell product. The pharmaceutical industry is perhaps the poster child of this behavior, using misinformation and misframing to "un-educate" its customers and even its affiliates (university researchers and family doctors), but it's hardly an exception.
Mis-education of consumers, keeping them in the dark, is in fact a primary goal of most corporate advertising campaigns; they do this because it's actually good for business: educated consumers make choices that limit profit margins. Do you honestly think they'll change this behavior because doing so would be good for consumers? The welfare of consumers is the last thing on the minds of corporate execs and mid-level managers. The anti-malware software industry is no exception to this.
I often rant about the very same thing. My conclusion is that we do not get enough respect because "everyone uses computers" and doing things the wrong way does not actualy kill anyone.
I have seen a similar lack of respect towards translators and interpreters, just because speaking a language does not seem so difficult, and everyone speaks at least one.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I had someone email me requesting help getting email back up. To be fair, when he called a few minutes later wondering why I hadn't responded, he immediately realized his error when I said "You EMAILED me that the email server was down?".
There was an older woman who had trouble understanding the mouse. She had to hold it steady with one hand while clicking the buttons on the mouse with her other hand.
So I showed her how to play solitaire on the computer.
A week later she had mastered the mouse.
It's all about finding the right way for that particular person to learn.
Chad Birch isn't trolling, he's bitching. It's possibly offtopic, yeah, but it's not a troll.
I happen to agree with him. Slashdot needs to get an exterminator to remove the "idle" infestation. The damned idles are like cockroaches, if you don't get rid of them they multiply. Soon you have beowolf cluster of idle cockroaches.
It's odd that I haven't seen one non-anonymous comment that had anything whatever positive to say about idleising slashdot. Don't any of you guys LIKE unuseable and ugly?`
Maybe it's a virus. Or somebody replaced their RAM with a goat.
Free Martian Whores!
As long as you modify it in the same way as a part of the encryption routine, it won't matter.
ALL user-entered data should be trimed, as a minimum.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And I thought a sysadmin with a zombie problem was having a bad day.
Oh man, I want to mod you troll so bad now.
6: Yes and When the site won't display cause AOL's proxy is borked for that site? Or Aol's DNS is the issue?
7 and 8:? Why is this such a problem? Can You tell the difference between an airless sprayer and popcorn machine at first glance? Maybe maybe not. Yeah, the two parts of the machine with an RJ-XX jack are Soo distinct.
I use Outlook in "plain text only" mode, so this won't work for me, but:
Create new e-mail. Flip to what you need to snap. Hit Alt-PrintScreen. Flip to Outlook. Paste. Repeat as necessary. Send.
This is exactly the same amount of work, but results in an e-mail with attached BMP files.
Along those lines in the realm of web development, I had a colleague insist that I *HAD* to develop this web app and it was mission critical. I happened to be loaded up with work and said I could get it done in a month. That wasn't good enough for her so she went to my boss. He told her it'd be done at the end of 2 months! Two months later it is done and sent to her to review before going live. She reviewed it alright.... *EIGHT MONTHS LATER*!!!! Yeah, it was so mission critical that I had to drop everything *I* was doing to get the job completed, but it wasn't important enough for her to review right away. (She just had to look it over quickly and say "go live with this." I'd even have accepted "here are changes that need to be done" as that would at least have shown some attention paid to it.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I can't tell you how common that one is although it sounds like you know from experience.
Sir, to be able to help you, I need your cooperation. Now, tell me, how often do you experience this particular problem?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
What happens when the user then tries to enter their password and it has a space?
Assuming you're following the basic rule that "all user input of strings should be TRIMed", then your user enters their password with the space as normal, it gets trimed, encrypted, and compared to the stored encryption.
It is easier to tell the user not to use a space at the beginning or end of a password when creating it than it is to remember to use a trim everywhere you read a password from.
Well, you COULD make it part of the encryption routine- you are encrypting your user passwords, right?
Now, I would use the trim anyhow, but if the user thinks that their password has a space at the beginning of it they're going to use it all of the time and eventually run into some problem.
Not your problem if you're following the standard for user input of strings.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Sure, I'll get right on forcing the company I contract for to switch the OS on 1000 machines. Meanwhile, in non-bizarro-world, I will work with what I've actually GOT, is that ok with you?
Called at around 8am a couple of weeks after we'd installed a wireless router into his office saying he was having problems connecting to the wireless.
Ran through checking he had the wireless key correct, etc and then finally thought to ask him where he was.
Moscow he says immediately letting me know what the problem was, signal strength, the signal from his wireless point in Edinburgh couldn't quite reach the distance to where his laptop was in a hotel lobby in Moscow......
Ok true story this was told to me from a couple of techs that I work with from time to time.. A very large corp bank type of place... Employee ends up going on vacation for a week or whatever.. They come back in and have problems.. in the ticket system for support they find that the employee has a monitor leaking some type or fluid... of course you need to bring extra people with you when you go out on a ticket like this to find out why the hell a monitor is leaking something... to find out they had a plant on top of there monitor I think on a something not sure if it was directly on the monitor or not.. it seems the plant got watered by other employees trying to be the nice people they are.. problem was there were wholes in the bottom on the flower planter thing eheheheh... Have to love dumb people...
That's not surprising. It happens with regularity in my company. QA often reports errors by taking snapshots of the error screen/kernel panic with a reasonably high megapixel camera, since the errors are often screen corruption and kernel panics. IMHO it's a perfectly legit thing to do, taking camera shots, they just need to have enough details so that us devs don't go blind trying to spot the details.
Doesn't sound very plausible to me.
No sig today...
Trimming the spaces would not be the right solution. In that case there would be support calls saying that their new password does not work.
Why would it not work, if you were trimming all user input strings, in every instance, like any good user interface design SHOULD? First time it's entered with the space, gets TRIMed, encrypted, and stored in the database. Next time it is entered on the login screen, it gets Trimed, encrypted, and compared to the password stored in the database. They're equal, so the user gets in.
NEVER blame the users for bad UI design.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me. I am still boggled about how anyone could do this and NOT stop to think for a second they could've just emailed me the screenshot to begin with.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
I do humongous form-driven web applications used mainly by scientists. I also support the forms. I remember a few:
Case 1:
scientist: "How do I validate my application?"
me: "There's a button right next to the application reference. What does it say?"
scientist: "it says 'validate application'"
me: "Well. There you have it."
scientist: "What do you mean? What should I do? I must validate this before 17 pm. It's now 16:55! HOW DO I VALIDATE MY APPLICATION?"
me: "*sigh*"
Case 2:
scientist: "Your service is terrible. I cannot login with the username and password you sent me"
me: "What username are you using, Sir?"
scientist: "The one you sent me. 'is:L00232'"
me:"*sigh*"
Case 3:
scientist: "I assure you I sent you the email with the error."
me: "Sir, I searched my inbox and I can't find any mail from you. What email address did you use?"
scientist: "For crying out loud! I used the one you have on your signature: +35121837402. And I've got here the receipt that came out of the machine! Give me your name. I'm going to take your incompetency right to the minister!!! He's an old friend of mine, you know?"
me: "*sigh*"
Case 4:
scientist: "(...) then I clicked 'submit' and nothing happened. I lost 5 hours work and the deadline is in 15 minutes! I demand to have one more day to submit my application. Give me your name. I'm going to take your incompetency right to the minister!!! He's an old friend of mine, you know?"
me: "Sir. Everything the users do in these forms is logged. I'm looking at the logs right now. Your username was used once on July 13 at 19:25 when you created the application and today just 10 minutes ago. My name is [my real name]. Do you still want to take this to the mnister? I will gladly supply the logs."
scientist: "uhhh I mean... errr..."
me:"I thought so"
I've got thousands of cases... I'm going to cry for a couple of minutes...
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
Well there is another side. I've repeatedly run into situations where the user, sometimes me, often not me, knows exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, but doesn't have the privileges or sometimes simply the authority to solve the problem (directive that such things must be done by IT). It has occasionally devolved into a situation where it's been necessary to explain, convince, and cajole a clueless sysadmin or other IT minion into doing what the user knows will work, has approval to do, and is in fact the certified procedure for doing it. And then the IT guy is slack-jawed and says he's going to have to research it and/or get an official approval when it actually works. Then he comes back later with some smarmy explanation of why it has to be done this way (his explanation is generally untrue - it's especially funny when the "user" designed the system), and then he demands that a special procedural request be made every time this procedure is necessary. Okay, that last part can sometimes be good for documentation, but just as often documenting that part of the procedure is unnecessary. And when the request is met with long delays for a procedure which requires fast action for very legitimate business reasons, it's just not cool.
Yeah, I've actually seen that happen quite a lot at several different employers.
Thats 'couldn't care less' in your second to last paragraph, oh wait... :)
Jonathanjk.com
The auto-negotiate feature on NIC's and switches / hubs.
I set them all to auto-negotiate and if they don't use the highest possible setting then I start replacing things until they do.
Other people lock them down to the highest setting.
The worst case I saw was when the tech had locked them down to the highest setting (100Mb / full duplex) and then used crappy CAT 3 cable. And had not cleaned it up so their power strips were sitting on top of loops of cable.
All because he believed that auto-negotiation meant that every single packet had to be negotiated and that meant that the network would be slower. A theory that he should have been able to verify with a very simple test.
Not to mention the old HP printers with the old HP print server cards that would NOT do full duplex.
Do you think I would post that if it wasn't possible to take the SS using the common ways?
Yes. No offense to you, but I don't know you personally so I can't automatically give you the benefit of the doubt. In my experience, there's one set of people more technically challenged than tech support callers: tech support staffers who make fun of people who ask questions the tech's don't understand.
So I'll assume that you're one of the good guys and know better. I can still hear some tech somewhere laughing: "that idiot took a picture of a DOS prompt! Hyuk hyuk!"
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Tale #1: Years ago, I owned a tape backup drive with a few extra tapes that I used to make periodic system backups. A friend of mine had a virus infection on his system. He was going to send it to a repair house that was famous for formatting and reinstalling Windows at the slightest hint of a problem. I offered to lend him my drive and a spare tape to backup his data. My father tried to stop me from doing that because, in his opinion, the virus would infect the tape drive hardware and then infect our system. No matter how many times I argued with him about how that was impossible, he insisted that it would happen and he knew better than me. (This from the guy who asked me how to copy files from one disk to another one. "Drag the files to a folder on your desktop. Now put in the second disk. Now drag the files to that disk." "You're a genius!!!")
Tale #2: We had launched a system allowing users to book appointments online. About 10 months after launch, everything was running smoothly when I got a call from a user claiming that our page wouldn't accept her e-mail address. I checked the obvious things (AOL user? Yes. Putting in "@aol.com"? Yes.) and was just firing up the code to check for some weird edge case triggered by her request when she asked: "Do I need to put my e-mail address in the box that says e-mail address?" No you don't. I employ Psychic Programming. Just look at your screen and think about your appointment and it'll book it for you. If it doesn't book, it's because you're not staring hard enough. *rolling eyes*
Tale #3: I got an e-mail from someone reporting a problem. I asked them to send me a screenshot. They replied that they would if I could just send them my e-mail address. Um... If you don't have my e-mail address... how did you JUST E-MAIL ME?!!!!!!! (She explained that she didn't know how to attach a file to a reply but knew how to attach one to a new message. I still don't get it, though, as the actions are completely identical.)
I'm just glad that Tech Support isn't my main job.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
new contractor started at an ISP I worked for, first day, he's taking the odd call, like a good little grunt.
says he's not feeling well, should have been a warning sign.
then the phone rings, he gets it and says
"Thank you for calling ABC corp, this is "....
and proceeded to PUKE all over the phone.
everyone of us in the room turned and some of us couldn't help laughing hysterically. But we were all worried about the customer that called, I mean how horrible did that have to be?
finally we get the phone, and send the guy home, pick up the caller, and guess what, he's laughing his ass off...
those were the days.
#2 tech says HD's are immune to magnets, so proceeds to rub a magnet vigorously over a customers drive... naturally wiping all the data, including the sync marks.
#3 - only heard about these second hand:
1. customer can't fit the 5.25" disks in the 3.5" drive, so he used scissors to cut the size, and wondered why it didn't work.
2. classic - customer calls during a blackout wonders why the system doesnt work
3. major classic - Steven Foster (?) sent in motherboard to be replaced, they replaced the hard drive too, lost 2 years of his life. See if you can find the mp3/wav of this one, he swears like you wouldn't believe. too funny though.
and yes, we did have people asking where the "ANY" key was.
and then there's the tech that went out on a service call to install internet for an elderly man, old house. the stupid tech ended up wrapping the ethernet cable AROUND the iron support beam. instant electromagnet. doofus.
those were the good ol' days.
Thus causing massive confusion for people who had no indication that their password has been changed from what they typed. You can't also trim the string a user is remembering.
Well put. Where I work, we observe the same user behavior and struggle to try to get a change to occur. It's an uphill battle.
ughh... I do prepress work for customers who have no idea how computers or printing work. You have no idea just how many times I've asked for higher res versions of their artwork and ended up with .doc with scaled logos.
I don't even ask for vector stuff anymore, because every damned time I end up with a PDF or EPS with embedded JPGs.
They pay thousands of dollars for graphic artists to create artwork for their companies, and never even think to retain/request something that will look decent if used for something other than a webpage.
No it wouldn't, because Trim("Password")=Trim(" Password "). An application that includes trim as the first step of the password encryption would work regardless of whether the person remembered the leading and/or trailing space or not.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
rofl, I read the daily wtf all the time but I had somehow never seen that one. Classic.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Ha. In my previous job, over the course of a couple years, I was asked on two occasions where the "any" key was. I swear this is true. And this was working at a telecom. I made a deal - I'd tell them where the "any" key was if they would tell me how VPLS works.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
There is a reason for that. With Tech support, you're telling them how to do it themselves - and people hate that for whatever reason. They hate the time it takes, or feel like they're being bossed around, or whatever. With a doctor or an electrician, they do the work and just get paid for it. You'll notice people don't argue with the Geek Squad guys nearly as much, because they come out and do the work for you. I think it's a psychological thing more than a career thing.
Thank you for one of the first real answers to that question I have ever received.
Personally, I would still fault the user for this because they knew that going into it. They knew before they picked up the telephone that the person on the other end was going to give them instructions and that it was going to take time. They had other options available: they could have taken their computer to a shop or they could have called a company that does on-site support. They made their decision and the tech gets to suffer if they are not happy with the decision they made and that's simply unjust. Doubly so, considering that most tech support inquiries are the direct result of user error and user negligence in the first place. I wouldn't call that a psychological thing or a career thing, I would call it a personal responsibility thing.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I had a user email me to ask if (a) the network was down and/or (b) if email was down.
I hope that you were outside the network in question - it seems reasonably likely that the user was having trouble getting out of the Intranet and you blew him/her off.
Later when the user will forget about the space, they will get frustrated that they can't log in.
Why wouldn't they be able to log in when they forget the space? Trim("Password")=Trim(" Password "), so they should still be able to log in.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Screenshots inside a Word document. Yeah, that sucks. .docx
I once got a picture (of an inadvertantly damaged item) in a
I had to email the customer, "Good thing I happen to have Word 2007"...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Actually, to be fair, it does happen in other professions in various methods.
For doctors, you get people who insist they need to be treated for "condition X", which they don't actually have. Alternately, you get people who don't take their medication properly, or refuse to take medication, etc.
Mechanics: plenty of people come in with PEBIAC (Problem exists between ignition and chair), people that bitch the cost of a superior part and then bitch again when the cheap one wears out quickly, etc
Electricians: People who have wired stuff themselves in an unsafe/against-code way, or want something wired thusly
From my friends in the above industries, I'd say that tech support personnel aren't the only ones dealing with such issues. They do, however, often get stuck with customers that a mechanic/doctor/electrician might have the option of simply refusing to service.
Really?
Would you ever call the support line of the guy who invented that kind of device?
I sure as hell wouldn't...
That's because :
1. Tt takes (sometimes a lot of) time to properly explain it.
2. The overwhelming majority of the users asking for an explanation won't understand a word I'm saying.
3. Some of then get angry at me because they don't understand what I'm saying.
4. People sometimes misunderstand something completely, go hurling in the wrong direction, and you have to use a lot of time to undo the damage.
Basically, in 90% of the cases we're just kicking ourself in the balls tryting to explain things to users.
When people ask for explanation I usually mutter a terse and simplified explanation. If they look genuinely interested, or actually ask sane questions, or give a sign of actually understanding what I just said, then I might consider using more time to explain.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
No need to- you just trim on every input of a string regardless. In fact, as a given, every password encryption routine I've ever heard of STARTS with a trim. Could it be the original programmer wasn't encrypting his passwords before storage?
Your password should NEVER be stored on the disk in the way it was typed- this is a major security risk.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
When getting information from simple users (as is the usual need for a bunch of screenshots) Word or similar is absolutely the easiest and quickest way to do it. Or are you advocating talking users through making a tar archive or zip file and naming each file sensibly ("no, close down Paint, then open again, or use File/New..."). If I'm collecting a set of shots for myself then yes, I'll do separate jpgs, but for clueless users speed is of the essence and copy/paste into Word is the most convenient method for both parties. I don't need to keep the shots so who cares what form they take.
Disclaimer: I work in IT and consider myself pretty handy with computer technology in general. (though after the story you may disagree)
So its this year and Christmas. I am at home with my parents. Sis comes home with her laptop (Macbook). Parents are kind of thinking of getting a new computer eventually (as what they have is horrible). My advice is basically get a basic laptop and a wireless router so they can use it where ever and not chained to the basement. Dad's response is "you can do that"? He also asks if I can do it and still have the POS (my wording not his) still running down below. I say sure, set one up on my desktop a couple of months ago. Took me all of 10 minutes... maybe if that.
So Dad proclaims let it be so. Of course there is no decent stores in the little town I am from and I have to grit my teeth and get him something from Staples. A dlink 628 I believe it was.
However in my haste I forgot how big a POS their old computer is. I have older less powerful systems in my house, but none are as crappy as this. Mostly because in my opinion it has never been wiped and is carrying 8 years of bad decisions inside. Anyway it is an old Dell, Celeron 700 or 800 Mhz I believe. The kicker is, it is running Windows ME. The original install of Windows ME and is over 8 years old. My parents also use DSL, which being a cable user since day 1 I am not as fluent with.
So I hook everything up, and of course, it doesn't work, it couldn't be easy. I cannot access the router configuration page. No matter what I try it will not automatically detect the correct settings. The manual is less than useless giving me excellent advice about ensuring my cable is plugged in. Thanks. Anyway the advice for anything really beyond that is to call tech support.
Understand I abhor tech support with a passion. I will avoid calling almost at any cost. Most I find do not understand what they are taking about, and are simply reading procedures out of a binder. I had friends that work in tech support. None of them knew squat and did a couple weeks training course to qualify them. It really is laughable.
I did end up calling tech support. Not only did I call tech support for the router, but also for the dsl line. I did so because I figure they deal with this stuff every day, it might just be faster to ask them, than for me to figure it out on my own (which I ended up doing anyway).
Admittedly the first guy I got was pretty good. I assume the call went to India, but he knew his stuff. He was frustrated like I was with the POS computer. However he did have the best advice of the bunch (which I should have though of myself, but guess I was being too focused) which was to abandon ship on the desktop and setup the router using the Mac (which I did later with no problems).
However I still needed the get the desktop networked in and working so I was only partially done. Having at least one computer with working connection did help a lot so I could google out the answer in the end.
The desktop with Windows ME still was not detecting the right IP address, no matter what I did. Perhaps with a clean install, who knows, but they have no system disks or backup so out of the question. At this point I figure fine I will just manually configure it instead. Make it see what it needs to see but cannot currently find. However the last time I did anything like that was over 10 years ago, and I haven't done since, and couldn't remember what the heck I used to do.
So again I call good old tech support. First I call the DSL ISP support. As it is their internet connection I am trying to connect to. All they do is internet support. Surly they ALL know how to set up a manual connection in windows. Answer: A) No they do not, and even if they did they won't help you anyway. As soon as they found out that I had attached a router to "their" dsl modem, it was no longer their problem. The problem was the router. End of story. I said no, this has nothing to do with the router, I simply want to configure my windows
Perhaps you should just let us do our fucking jobs so we can go home at 5 just like you do. Thanks.
You're a support function. Your job is making our lives easier, and staying out of our way.
Swear to God this just happened today!!!! While at lunch, our network guys got a call that the network was down at one of our locations about a mile away. They stopped by on their way back from lunch, of course the network was up and running. Turns out the power had just come back up after a 2 hour outage.
I understand some of your frustrations, but I have to say that only too often, it doesn't look any better from the user side. Face it, most helpdesks are (thinly) manned by relatively inexperienced people who only took the job because they didn't know yet how tedious and frustrating it is. The service tends to be in line with that.
When you report a problem to them, you probably first have to wait for several days, because there never are enough service people. Then they will take over your computer and make the user watch while they google for the problem and its possible solution. Not necessarily a stupid thing to do, but it tends to undermine confidence. When did you last see a doctor entering your symptoms in Google? At least they don't do it while you watch.
In any large organization, somebody may have had the bright idea of appointing technology or product specialists. This usually means that there are only two people in the IT service team who are allowed to know how to reboot a Linux server. One is now in charge of the company webpage and has been officially banned by his manager from doing any service work on any server whatsoever. The other one is crossing the Sahara on a camel and not expected to return within three weeks, if ever. Users tend to find this mildly frustrating.
And woe to the user who would be so foolish as to have a client-server connectivity problem: This involves at least three people, one for the server, one for the client, and one for the network. Each is apt to report that, whatever the user may say, *his* part of it is working perfectly well -- problem solved. (And besides, they didn't change anything, and if they did nobody saw them do it.) Eternity may pass before they agree on whose fault it is, and what should be done about it.
Nevertheless, the first prize for weeping and gnashing of teeth goes to service organizations who decide that it is much better if they alone decide what hardware and software people should have. Evidently, this makes service and maintenance much easier. And it stands to reason that nobody could or should ever need a tool that is not made by Micro$oft---besides, they were given such a good deal on Vista! No need to ask the users. There is no justification for asking the users, anyway; what do users know, after all? They don't have to maintain the systems.
But absolutely the low point in confidence is reached when the IT service people approach the users and *ask* them to complain about the service. Because this is the only way in which they could hope to force a change in their wretched management.
To take it a step further....you know how to drive. ie: you already know the "superficial" knowledge I mentioned previously. You have a basic understanding of how to operate your car. You have a basic understanding of routine maintenance (or at least you know when to seek help and when it's "normally" operating). In fact, not only that, but you most likely have a drivers license - for which, you had to pass a (very) basic functional knowledge and operation test.
/. -haha
How would your mechanic feel if you had no idea how to drive but your car kept breaking down and no matter where you were in the world, he was responsible for making it run again? Sometimes there is actually something wrong with it and sometimes, there is nothing wrong with the car (user error).
- You forgot to put the key in and the car won't start -- call him!
- The steering wheel is too high -- call him!
- The car does not go because you are pushing the break instead of the gas -- call him!
- It's dark out and you want to get in your car at night -- call him!
- etc, etc, etc
Don't you think that is ridiculous at some point? I mean, don't you as the car user have a responsibility to 1/2 know what you are doing with the thing? And futhermore, wouldn't you -as a human being- want to know a little about it since you have to use it? Otherwise, why do you have it?
You see, I am of the position that users haven't taken the equivalent step of "learning to drive" with respect to computers. That is frustrating to watch because it doesn't take much common sense to see how important computers are in the world. For lots of different reasons. This is why IT has become increasingly grumpier over the years.....they have to deal with people who won't take a vested interest in helping themselves - on any level.
Thank god computers can't kill anyone when they BSOD or kernel panic, otherwise, this situation would have changed long long ago. As it stands tho, we just get to bitch about it on
This proves what? Anti-virus manufactures sell anti-virus software, not computer security training software.
Passing the buck to the anti-virus manufacturers isn't going to solve the problem. Like anything, people must exercise personal responsibility in educating themselves. There is a wealth of information available on this topic, so there really is no excuse.
In the last 2 houses Ive lived in, we could easily cook with no power.
It was propane in the last house, and NG in our new house.
I've done tech support at a senior level. Now, if I need support, it's almost always because I need some very specific info, and can handle things myself once I have it. I always start off by telling the tech my experience level, that I know exactly what piece of information I need and that I neither need nor want to be baby-stepped. (Generally, I ask them to give me the same type of support they'd want to get themselves.) A good tech will respond, ask a few questions to make sure I've not overlooked anything and give me what I need. A bad tech will just try to run me through their cheat-sheet, without thinking. (How can I tell the difference? Well, the good tech will say, "Have you..." while the bad one says, "I need you to...") If I get a bad tech that can't think outside the box, I go to their supervisor, who generally handles things somewhat better. Sorry for rambling, but it seemed better to illustrate how I get support rather than just asserting it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Maybe the solution would be something like:
"Warning! The raid system is failing! Please type in the first six letters of the alphabet to close this window. ______"
If a message is important enough, you shouldn't be able to just click it away IMO.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
"Sir, the knife has to be pointed TOWARDS your chest, not away from it. Let's give it a test. Does that hurt? Good. I've sent a customer satisfaction survey to your e-mail address. Please fill it out before dying."
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
That's actually not a rare incident. I don't even wonder how many readers nod their head to this statement because it's been an endless source to their own frustration.
One wonders why. Why do people just click away all messages sent to them by the system? I actually remember an incident where I was called to fix "something with the server". Turned out to be a raid6 system that lost three drives and thus didn't work anymore. Now, I hear you say, how can a raid6 system fail? Raid6 can lose two drives and still work. Three drives dying, power surge maybe? No.
One drive failed, but the hotspare took over. The server beeped, so the beeper was cut off. The server reported dutifully that a drive was blown, which was equally dutifully clicked away without reading it.
Another drive failed, but it still somehow managed to keep going. No beep this time since even the best beepers fail to work when they are not connected. And finally the whole system failed to provide data, or they'd probably have continued 'til a rebuilt would have been impossible.
But the real kicker was that I was being yelled at how we dare to sell a Raid6+spare as a system that prevents data loss. It does, when you don't do your best to ignore every information it gives you about an impending catastrophe.
And this is hardly an isolated case of stupidity. People simply close every warning information they get because "I don't understand it anyway". Without reading it, how do you KNOW whether you understand it?
I dare you to ask that question. It usually results in more yelling, but no really enlightening answers.
I think there is an explanation for this, or at least a partial one.
Microsoft makes a decent keyboard but other than that, I don't use anything Microsoft on my own machines and this has been the case for about ten or eleven years. I'll often go long periods of time without ever using Windows. If not for my friends who use it and ask me for help with problems from time to time, I might have lost the skillset. Because of that, when I do sit down at a Windows machine, I can easily see the contrast between the way things are done on it and the way things are done on other systems.
One thing about Windows that I find to be a nuisance is that so many non-critical messages will trigger system-modal dialog boxes. The examples of this are too numerous for me to begin to enumerate them here, not to mention it would be a rather boring list, but if you have experience with multiple operating systems then you have probably noticed this too. The problem with this approach is that users quickly grow accustomed to the idea that these messages are not very important and can be safely ignored. It becomes something like the "boy who cried wolf" fable, in that it sets up a situation where the occasional important error message gets ignored. Using Windows XP makes me feel this way; I can only imagine how much more true this is for Vista's UAC system.
I'm not saying that this fully explains your example involving RAID 6, only that it is a particularly egregious example of a much more general tendency.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I do the "go out and fix people's computers" work part time, and in 2 years of doing the work I have yet to have a customer argue with me about my methodology.
I sure have had a hell of a lot of customers ignore maintenance instructions, though. Oh well, more money for me.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Why would it not work, if you were trimming all user input strings, in every instance, like any good user interface design SHOULD?
Perhaps it would not work because the user would be highly confused that
[space]1h$/X
did not meet the 6 character minimum password length requirement?
When they first came out, people were picking them up and moving them on the screen, figuring there was some magical property which would move the cursor that way.
These days, (like at the local Borders) people have to be reminded that a mouse is *still* being used, and that the screen is not a touch screen.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Not long ago I was looking at a live cd on the wife's laptop. I left it in the machine and turned off the laptop. Later she turns on the laptop and starts clicking away attempting to exit the "app". Installed a new OS over the existing one and then asks "so where's my pictures?".
The problem is that most users don't know images can be used in that way.
Think about it -- they don't even know that they're files.
Just "things" that they can "import" into a Word document by going to "File > Import" (or however the hell you do it in Word).
I encounter this a lot -- most users have had some sort of basic "word processing" class (read: MS Word class) and they know how to import pictures. Most users, however, aren't instructed as to how to paste pictures inside an email, be it Outlook or something else.
And before you say, "Well, why don't they just figure it out?" know that "figuring something out" is beyond most basic users, who are shit scared of clicking something errant and screwing something up, and thus keep their explorations within applications to a bare minimum.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Anyone emailing BMP images is right squarely in the same boat as the person sending screenshots embedded in a word doc.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I misspoke. They user thinks " Password" is still the correct password. He might have even written it down.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If doctors were always listened to there would be no obese people since they are always told to exercise and eat healtier.
This is sent via an e-mail client. Since we're in MS land (os/x at a pinch) as evidenced by the use of "Word"...
The thing is that when you take a screen capture on OS X, it dumps a png to your desktop, which is ready to email.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
I have sort of a reverse situation. I used to contact AOL tech support for the express purpose of asking them questions that, as AOL "technical support", they theoretically should've know, but don't. Like questions about FDO (the 'language' AOL content is made with) and the Secure ID keychains their internal staff logged in with. Always had a good time; sorry if I ever got any AOL techs here; I was a kid. The good techs actually wanted to learn about the stuff, which actually was even more fun, to share the knowledge.
A lack of critical thinking skills is a malady that strikes a large part of the population. It's easy to understand -- just think of critical thinking as like, a limb, and these people are born without it.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
You miss the point. You don't change the password from what the user entered. You many reject the password if it doesn't meet some sort of criteria, but you don't change it from what the user remembers especially if they have to enter the password twice.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We have Word installed on almost all of our PCs, but we don't use Outlook. We actually remove it from the systems and install GroupWise, despite the fact that Outlook works fine with our GW setup.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Whenever you do something FOR someone else (such as sending them screenshots, or any kind of image), you should always try to make it easy for _them_, not for yourself. Especially if it's a support-case and you want help fast.
For me, being the reciever of the image, say I have to upload it to some ticket-system, it takes me a LOT of extra steps extracting them from the Word-document, compared to recieving it in a zip, where many OS:es can even consider it a regular foler and let me upload straight away.
First, what makes you think that the sender is intimately familiar with your use of a ticket-system, down to the details of its requirements for images?
Second, even if you think the sender is intimately familiar, you seem to have forgotten what your job is: you're support. Your job, along with all of us who have worked in support, is to make life easier for your clients. It's not their job to make life easier for us, particularly in ways that take more time for them.
Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you. So, the time spent to reformat those images is cheaper if you do it than if they do it - even more so, since you're probably more efficient at it.
But don't take my advice... Feel free to tell some VP, Partner, or whatever that he or she is the one sending you images in the wrong format and they should take the extra time to do it right.
I think you just answered one of the questions that puzzled me for ages. Could someone give that person a suitable moderation?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
End users come with very varying abilities. And the problems that need to be solved are very varying as well. I totally agree with you that end users shouldn't meddle with routing issues and similar. That does not mean that the GP can't have a valid point as well.
Can you not dump the output to a serial console or even UDP?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Amen to #5.
Call to Support, severity 1, customer is dead, escalated to 2nd, then 3rd level support, we call the customer on the provided number (within about an hour) and get a voice mail announcement that they're closed for the holidays. No alternate numbers are available and we resolve the issue quickly about a week later when the customer is open again. Sigh. I'm so happy that I'm back in Engineering.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I think one of the reasons most users hold "tech support" in such contempt is that most of the time I've had to call someone's tech support line, I get a minimum wage slave who doesn't know anything at all about the subject and can't help me the moment I leave their support-script. I.e. Microsoft. If it can't be solved by either checking to see if the computer is turned on or rebooting the computer, then it must be time to reload the OS.
I can somewhat understand the screenshot-in-word-document phenomena. Word allows you to paste images, including screen captures. Most office workers use Word daily and never touch mspaint. They dont know how to save image files but they do know how to paste things into a Word document.
OK, I'm guilty of doing #1 and encouraging other folks to email screen shots in a word doc. I know there are better ways, but 1) most people know how to open Word, but not MS paint and 2) word auto-scales the image so you don't have to worry about the resolution of the screenshot. It also lets me zoom into the photo once it gets to me, which is nice.
Can you not dump the output to a serial console or even UDP?
If I had a serial console laying around, I certainly wouldn't have been taking pictures of the screen.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Doesn't matter if the first thing in your encryption routine is a Trim, because Trim(" Password")=Trim("Password").
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yeah, what really gets me is that everything is written on the screen in front of them, yet they can't find an option in a menu, or find a help file anywhere. It's immediately "no, can't do it - not my fault". I will never have any respect for people like that, in any walk of life. People like that are why everything gets dumbed down. They seem to forget that the rest of us had to learn it at some stage.
I remember when my dad showed me the word processor on his 8086, and asked me "if you wanted to change the way this looks on the screen , where would you start ?" After a second looking at the screen, I replied "the view menu". He said, "it's nice to be intelligent, isn't it."
Too many people these days expect the answers to jump right out at them, instead of asking the right questions - ie, at least being methodical, if not logical. You for instance could make a small effort and make a note of what you are told, then in 6 months time you won't need to ask again. It's called *learning*.
But it gets worse for the multi-hatted "IT guy". He is charged with the care and feeding of the outfit's network resources, something that, should it fail, affects everyone, not just the user who can't figure out that he's holding his mouse upside down. When he has done that job well, no one notices anything. Well, except for the prick who thinks that network admins spend their time "sucking their thumb". In fact, the admin has spent time seeing to it that things operate well, and that when they are about to not operate so well, he is given enough warning that he can respond in non-panic mode. Every minute the network admin spends at someone's desk, turning the mouse around for the user, is time that is not spent on a higher value task.
over the phone support:
This is very true. When dealing with some incredibly annoying bespoke software at work, you get used to ignoring the endless stream of "error" messages which are not even warnings as it will retry anyway and pop the message back if there is a real problem.
Then something happens and you get a message completely identical to a previous one except for a tiny but critical change. Which you've dutifully clicked away without noticing.
Now the whole thing is brusted and no way to find out what it said. So all that's left to do is swear profusely and decide if it's faster to debug the current foobar as best you can or restore the previous version.
Ouch... Your back must be killing you from the couch (cause it's ALWAYS our fault...)
Yes, noticed that many times. "What was the error message?" error 0x001523408502 at 0022321503001201024902345, or something like that. I like the suggestion of enter the first six letters...
Better yet, "read this to your support person and enter the three letters your support person tells you to. If your support person is Microsoft itself, enter, 'LOL'"
Of course, adding a phrase like, "Tell your support person NOW all the following letters/numbers," for severe errors, and "Write down and email or read the following letters/numbers to your support person when you want him to fix whatever went wrong. Tell him what you were doing when this happened, open the little notebook you keep beside your computer, in which you keep a list of all the changes you make to your system, and read him the list of changes you made to your system since you last spoke with him." Would save a LOT of time.
Today I got a desperate call from a new client:
"I was on a WebEx conference call, my computer locked up, and now the partition with all my data is gone, can you HELP me remotely?" Windows showed drive sizes and sizes of his partitions. It was clear there was no room on his two drives for another partition to hold all his data. What could have happened? After some discussion, it turned out he had an external USB drive that lost power.
Sometimes the hardest part is helping people not feel stupid after stupid mistakes.
Just yesterday I got a call from a user... "hey, I'm reading this outage notice you sent for today that says 'all systems'. Is that why I can't get my email?"
so in NON-bizarro-world, you have to have a separate app to create a file from a screen shot ?
That seems pretty bizarre to me.
> i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road.
You clearly don't drive local to me, there are too many idiots around here!
+----------------- | What is the question!
Now that's the first post I've seen where somebody was actually THINKING.
However, in normal password routines, you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the encryption starting with a Trim. So no problem.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Re: your sig - for the same sad reason you never see "sneaked" rather than "snuck".
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Sometimes you have to learn how to be stupid to deal with people. Where I work they understand Excel. That's it.
If you want to send any tabulated data whatsoever, it damn well better be in an excel spreadsheet rather than ANYTHING more suited to the task. And when you're butting up against the physical limitations of the excel file format, then it's your data that has to change, not the file format. Grrrrr.
Or worse...
Open Word.
Go to the pictures you want.
Hit Ctrl-C
Go to word
Hit Ctrl-V
repeat until you get all the pictures.
You're a support function. Your job is making our lives easier, and staying out of our way.
Admin != Tech Support. Our (their, now) job is making sure the system works, not handholding the users. If you want to understand what broke, buy a damn book and a secondhand router and go to town.
You miss the point. You don't change the password from what the user entered
I'll stop you right there with a *big* disagreement. You *ALWAYS* change the password from what the user entered before storage. Storage in plain text is a big no-no.
You many reject the password if it doesn't meet some sort of criteria, but you don't change it from what the user remembers especially if they have to enter the password twice.
Incorrect- you ALWAYS change the password from what the user remembers, using the same algorithm every time. The standard method is to push whatever the user enters through a one way encryption scheme, and store the one-way encryption in the database. Then when the user types in the password again, you once again push it through the one-way encryption scheme, and compare it to what is stored in the database. By definition, a one-way encryption scheme is a "lossy" encryption, that is, bits are removed. So why not just start your encryption scheme with a Trim? In fact, most password encryption schemes do exactly that.
Anything less is an insecure system, because all one would have to do is look up the password in the database to probably crack several different systems the user has used that password on.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think sometimes it might be the that professions have the perception that someone spent time learning this through apprenticeships or many years at university and are therefore better people than that damned bespectacled nerd who only knows what to do from tinkering with those stupid computers in his parent's basement.
That and while people appreciate their cars or of course, their health, with computers it seems to be more that they HAVE to use it and resent every minute of it.
At the level of network infrastructure, I have no problem with this. Frankly, I don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of the network. I want it to work for me. I want to be able to call the IT org for help and trust they'll straighten things out when necessary.
However, IT does NOT know better than the rest of us about how to do OUR jobs and many IT policies impact them. For instance, our new security guy decided that some forms of iternet access were a Bad Thing - like e-commerce for those lazy thieving cube-dwellers out there. Too bad many of our suppliers have taken to electronic invoicing and our Accounts Payable department needs to download invoice documents via those same electronic commerce pathways you just blocked.
As another example, Excel may not be the greatest thing in the world, but if you're an accountant, for good or ill, you're stuck with it. It's a critically important tool to doing your job. So the day to push across that "latest" MS security update that's been sitting around since forever is NOT the first day of the fiscal month when every accountant in the company is under major deadline pressure to close the books and thereby knocking down everyone's computer for 2 hours.
Finally, if you a)hand me a computer system with Office on it; b)announce that you don't provide user support/help for Office, then you have no right to expect that I will do anything but regard you with suspicion. Office is what users use - it is how they interact with the computer and you've just announced you're blowing them off and yet you wonder why your users think you're a waste of time and a pain in the ass and that all IT policies are subject to workaround?
So, really, it cuts both ways.
A little common sense, a little communication, a little humility, a little training goes a long ways.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
On dumb terminals with software handshaking (which most were) a CONTROL-S is stop trasmission. A CONTROL-Q is start transmission.
Many professional office staff in those days had young, female secretaries with long nails. Guess how many time a day support staff would get a call like this: "My computer is frozen!"
When my dad got his first computer, he called and asked me: "What's a cursor?" I suggested that he invite the 13 year neighbor of their's over for lunch!
My first CompSci class was computer math. The teacher insisted that twos compliment (used exclusively by IBM) was binary!
In 1984 I tried selling a PC with the best available video card and monitor to an engineering firm. They laughed me out of the building and bought TekTronix.
My first portable computer weighed about 35 pounds. I did a presentation of our software to a law firm in Dallas. During the presentation, I wrote on their new whiteboard with permanent marker. To make matters worse, when I lifted my computer off the very elegant leather table-top, two large divots came up with my computer! We did, however, get the contract!
Enough for now!
And might not ever get that far, as Vux said above.
And as others have said... it's a bad idea to modify password input at all for many reasons.
I had a client with a RAID 5 3 drives, it was explained that they could loose 1 drive and if they should call me and I would help them order a new drive and install it. Instead the customer removed the drive and "dusted it" after replacing it the light went green . He immediately removed a second drive to dust it too, just to be safe. Now this was an accountant at the height of tax season. I asked if they had been changing the tapes in the back up regularly, they said they stopped it from backing up last year. This client learned the hard way what data recovery services cost.
Actually, i'd go so far as to say it is now way more than just that. There has always been a percentage of the population that unable to apply critical thinking simply due to the way they are. The part that frightens me the most is the trend in the past 20 years towards critical thinking being considered a negative thing. Anyone making consistent use of critical thinking will find out very quickly that thinking is no longer popular. There are a large number of people i KNOW are able to approach problems in this fashion, but refuse to do so as that just isn't popular.
I think this is related to peoples sudden inability to read when the words are prefaced with Error, Warning, or anything of the sort.
It kinda sucks, but being well adapted socially requires a high tolerance for statements that make absolutely no sense. It seems to me like this sense of "obvious cognition == bad call" has been on the rise especially in the generations born after 1985. i do not know what happened to overall education in the early 90s in north america (not just schooling but also parental and societal exposures as well), both in canada and the states, but it has destroyed the DESIRE to think critically in a large portion of the younger populace. My only hope is that i just happen to run into a really bad sample set of people during my life to have a proper opinion.
Ice Cream has no bones.
WARNING! The RAID system is FAILING! Without intervention, DATA WILL BE LOST.
Please enter your name and [UserID|password] to close this notification: ________ "
Let there be no denial of accountability.
Back in the early 90's, I was the lead Unix Admin for a very large beeper company. Prior to my arrival the decision had been made to roll out Unix servers and X-terminals (Thin clients with embedded X servers for you young-uns) to 50+ sales offices across the country.
Part of my duties during this rollout was to hold a "brief" training session for the CSRs since their application was a character-based app that we were moving from a dedicated terminal to accessing via telnet on the X-terminal. Now, the majority of these CSRs had never seen a windowing system or used a PC, much less used a mouse to control a pointer on the screen.
I start my first session in the conference room with 8 X-terminals set up. Part-way through the training, I turn my back to jot some notes on the board and I hear a commotion behind me. I turn around to see one of the CSRs trying to pick up her X-term to move it. "What are you doing?" I asked. Seems that as she was moving the pointer across the screen she had come to the end of the mouse cable. Rather than pick up the mouse and start over again on the left side of the mouse pad, she was going to move the entire terminal to the right to free up slack in the cable so she could keep going across the table!!!
When I worked as a Mac Genius at Apple's Genius Bar, they told us that if the users ask "dumb" questions or report an issue that turns out to be user error, we should structure our replies in such a way so as not to offend the customer or make them feel stupid.
It really took the fun out of discovering ID10T errors.
"Does your email client only allows one attachment per message? Is there something wrong with zip/tar/rar/etc. archives?"
Did you even read the first line he wrote? How is it easier then that?
Ah, and the user should think about that while he is struggling with his computer? Come on, that's a bit harsh, don't you think? I would be happy enough if my relatives knew how to make a screen shot and send it to me (without my help, they are fine otherwise).
And as I've maintained, modifying password is actually MANDATORY for a secure system. Are you telling me that you actually store passwords in plain text?!?!?!?!? And if you don't, then you are actually including non-printable characters in your encryption routine?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
abcdef is easily enough to type and just click to ignore. a better solution would be force them to type in the error message itself. maybe then, they'll at least remember the message they typed?
Similar to my FoIP plan: Fist over IP. Yours would be F-SoIP: Face-Stab over IP.
I don't even ask for vector stuff anymore, because every damned time I end up with a PDF or EPS with embedded JPGs.
Snap.
When tasked with organising the artwork for poster sized versions of company logos this very thing turned an afternoon of phone calls and emails into "become an expert at tracing company logos with Illustrator."
No offense to tech support people, but compared to other professionals like mechanics and doctors, tech support is not a job that truly qualified people stay in very long. People get a lot of useless if not downright bad advice from tech support. Couple that with the bizarre-sounding (to them) things you ask them to do, and it's no wonder they are reluctant.
We should start a thread about annoying people on the other end of the phone.
Me: I need the IP address for the DNS server please.
Tech Support: What version of Windows are you using?
Me: I don't use Windows. I use Linux, but I know right where to put it in. Can you just tell me the address?
Tech Support: But our service only works with Windows. Do you have a Windows computer you could use?
Me: I haven't had a Windows partition since 1998, but I know it works on Linux because it was working up until last week when my hard drive crashed. You don't have to know anything about Linux. Just tell me the IP address for the DNS server, and I'll take care of the rest.
Tech Support: So you have Windows 98?
Me: Sure, why not?
[Tech support goes through the motions while I pretend to click and type stuff in, until he gets to the part I need.]
This space intentionally left blank.
First of all, I don't expect the sender to know anything about this. I've already got proof of the opposite, since they've evidently sent me the image in an inconvenient format. And no, the ticket system has nothing to do with it, it was just an example, but for almost ANY purpose, getting them embedded in a .doc means extra work from me.
Regarding support-fees, you're wrong. I often get mails from co-workers with lower salaries then myself, and also from co-workers with higher salary, and sometimes my own direct or indirect bosses. It really doesn't matter.
The key here is education. While it's frustrating to recieve .doc:s for me, the sender will never know that, unless I politely point it out. I usually sit down, explain the issue, and in a couple of minutes show them how I would like to get the support-mails instead. So far, all I've got is appreciation for politely showing them a better workflow, rather than scoffing at them and insulting them behind their backs, like some of the BOFH:s I've seen do.
However, I DON'T think that it is a viable alternative to just accept, like you suggest, that the sender should just send in whatever ill-formed request they want, and that it's the job of the support guy to sort it out, just because he has lower salary. Support is a two-way street, and I think decent mail-behavior is a skill everyone should learn in this century.
Classic bash.org reference aside, I think the iChoke deserves to be mentioned here.
I have one better:
At my last job, users would print screen to the printer, scan it in using the network scanner, and then attach that to an e-mail.
By the time it got to us (helpdesk) it was completely unreadable.
Actually, about a year ago at my undergrad university, my girlfriend was working at the part of the library responsible for lending out laptops, and the employee next to her had the following conversation:
...Did you have it plugged in?
Student: I was working with this laptop, and it just DIED for NO REASON!
Employee:
Student: I don't NEED to have it plugged in; it's WIRELESS.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
I once had a user call because her computer wouldn't boot. I ended up pulling the hard disk and putting it in another machine so I could recover some of her files. When I looked at it, I noticed a bunch of folders on the root of the disk with three letter names: DLL, EXE, INI, SYS, BAT, etc...
The really impressive part is that she had actually managed to move most of the system into these before hitting the files that were in use.
Perhaps you should just let us do our fucking jobs so we can go home at 5 just like you do. Thanks.
What?!? You are allowed to go home at 5, even when your systems are having issues? Where do I send my resume?
I don't expect them to know, which is why I'm politely trying to teach them.
As someone pointed out earlier in a thread, it's actually _extra_ work to make a .doc if you're mailing in Outlook, when you can just insert the screenshot directly inline in the mail. I usually get appreciation for showing them that. (I also think that you can paste directly in the file-manager, although I don't use windows a lot, so I'm not sure)
I just don't agree with parent that .doc should be accepted as an image-format due to ignorance of the situation of the recipient.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me.
Y'see, that one I don't mind so much. It shows that the person knew what the end result had to be and thought about what they could do to achieve that given what they knew.
It was needlessly complex and not very useful in the end, but when you deal with people who refuse point blank to realise that everything they've been asked to do today is a tiny variation on one common theme and NOT to phone you every single time for instructions... damned if I'm not going to be impressed if they at least try.
Because Word doesn't compress them; they will be huge.
Sure it will. Right click on a pasted screen shot. Click format picture -> compress. Select "All Pictures in Document", select "Web/Screen" then click Ok. If you are forced to use Outlook, use Word as your editor (an option in Outlook) and you can do the same thing for emails with graphics. Shrinks the size of the email by quite a bit.
Bah. You think that the people in the it industry have it hard, just imagine how hard it is to be a CS professor! I mean, these dumb kids show up paying tens of thousands of dollars of their parents money to get you to teach them, and they don't bother showing up to class, insist that they already know everything or that none of the infomation you teach them has any real world application or both. Of course the reason that did so poorly on the test was because none of the material was in the book, and they can't figure out what to study. They don't bother checking the study guide that had all the answers to every question you were going to ask right there for the last two weeks, and then they show up the last week of class pleading for extra credit to keep from failing.
As much as I hate Word, for the Average User, it's certainly easy to use that way. They generally DO NOT CARE about file size.
One of the NICE things in Word's favor is the cropping tools are really nice for narrowing the image to what you want to show. (Of course, it saves the whole image anyways ... )
I use a screen capturing application, but how many users will know how to do that, when this solution works, and works well?
"Windows Solitaire .. proved useful in familiarizing them with the use of a mouse, such as the drag-and-drop technique required for moving cards"
...
Do you have any citations for that, apart from Wikipedia that is, who are happy to accept URLS as valid citations, who may link to slashdot, who may link to Wikipedia, which would end up in
davecb5620@gmail.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, sending an email when the Internet is "down" isn't always a bad idea.
One time our connection went down to 200 bps. That isn't enough to do anything interactive, but it is enough to send a short (text only) email.
Was the Internet actually down? No. However, unless the user can do some advanced troubleshooting, they will never know the difference between down and just unusable.
Note: The ISP for our small town telco couldn't find anything wrong and had no idea where the problem was coming from. It turned out someone had plowed/piled 5 or 6 feet of snow over one of the telco's boxes. Not sure what the problem was with the equipment itself but I would guess too much moisture from the melting snow, or overheating since the vents were blocked (which would be ironic).
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Formal education is severely overvalued in terms of the actual expertise of those who have it. John Taylor Gatto (or the excellent and much shorter essay here) is a particularly good reference for this, but if you forget everything you think you know about the matter and really look into it, for yourself, as someone who will follow the facts wherever they may lead, you'll find that modern methods of instruction are some of the worst ways to lean anything. I believe that the primary purpose of i.e. college is not to impart knowledge. The primary purpose is to teach you to allow others to run your life and set your schedule and that "the experts" will tell you whether your work is any good and how useful you are. It amounts to obedience training. In a modern society where most human beings are expected to be interchangable, replacable parts of the social machinery of corporations and other large organizations, this has immediate practical value despite what I must call a dehumanizing influence. Either way, my point is that I don't know anyone who has ever carefully thought about the matter who is terribly impressed by credentials alone. It's one of those numerous examples where some of the most important things that we collectively do are not the result of a conscious choice where everyone involved calls things what they are.
I maintain that for a user to have these frustrations and take them out on the guy who's trying to help them, merely because he's a captive audience who is forced to take it, is unjust and indicative of a petty, small-minded individual. If you really want to find out what sort of person you're dealing with, don't look at how they treat their friends or their family or their boss -- look at how they treat a captive audience. If someone's work involves computers and they resent using computers, they should deal with that by either learning to like them or finding another line of work. So, I again think this is a matter of personal responsibility and to be honest with you, these chronological adults who are really nothing more than overgrown children need to grow up and learn what that is.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I just found out that a photo that I was test mailing to myself was sent to abuse@. Please accept my apologies. It won't happen again. I'm soooo embarassed......
I may be a BOFH, but no, I won't post the picture :P
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
me: sir do you know how to configure the drive?
redneck: i can figure its broke!
(true story)
Possibly my favorite things that Microsoft has ever produced are their new User Interface Guidelines, especially the Warning Messages page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511263.aspx
This page also provides a good summary of the other Interface Guidelines:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070301/updated-vista-ux-guide/
Microsoft's programmers aren't innocent, but I think quite a few of the inane warning messages are from third-party software vendors.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
How is this redundant now?
However, in normal password routines, you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the encryption starting with a Trim. So no problem.
If you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the trim, then yeah, it will be accepted, and it will work transparently for the users, but you've failed to enforce the rule. Suppose someone set their password to be:
"[space][space][space]123"
And then in future, when logging in, they could login just using "123", since that is what is actually been hashed and stored. So you've got a 6 character rule in place, and someone's bypassed it... that's no good.
Unless you again validated the supplied password strength for validity before logging in, each time verifying that they did at least enter 6 characters before submitting it to be trimmed and hashed and validated against the stored version...but that leads to other problems.
For example, if the strength rules were changed since you last logged in, you could no longer log in, as the pre-login password check would reject your password before even trying it. (e.g. suppose you had a 6 character password and the minimum was raised to 7, existing users with 6 digit passwords would be unable to login, because the pre-login check would require that they enter 7. (Which they could ironically defeat by entering their 6 digit password with a leading or trailing space...)
No, I think that route just leads to all kinds of defects and madness in general.
I think you should either trim the password -before- you check it for strength validity (and if you do that, let them know that their spaces were trimmed when you reject their password) or allow spaces and don't trim passwords (with the disadvantage that some users are going to inadvertently lead or trail their password with spaces and then not be able to login) -- so I'm leaning towards agreeing with banning leading or trailing spaces from passwords, which is what the designer in the example case did.
Maybe auto mechanics just complain about stupid things like that in places other than the internet?
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you.
That's not necessarily true. Someone who makes $10/hour probably can't find someone to fix their car for $9/hour, that doesn't mean they can't get their car fixed. Tech support is no different.
--
ip address finding
I did not realize that being a Sys Admin could warp how I viewed humanity. But after about 10 years of doing the job for an ISP I saw a bumper sticker that declared "Users are losers".
I chuckled and commented to my wife that the owner of the vehicle must be a Sys Admin or in Technical Support.
It took her a couple of minutes to explain to me that the sticker was referring to drug users.
Or you could just put the screenshots in a .zip file or something...
And that would be handier and easier how exactly? How do the screenshots become individual files without pasting them into something first, such as Paint? That method sucks if you have several to collect.
Open Word. Flip to what you need to snap. Hit Alt-PrintScreen. Flip to Word. Paste. Repeat as necessary. Save. You're not going to beat that with Paint, saving each individual shot into a specially prepared folder somewhere, then zipping that up. Work smarter not harder. What I really don't understand is how that classifies someone as an idiot.
Every time I've opened a word doc with embedded pictures the doc file version is invariably incompatible with the wordpad version I'm using and the pictures are un-viewable.
--
ip address finding
Sometimes you have to do that actually. I have done the same thing for a quite cryptic (and number heavy) BSoD.
Really, just making a textbox that didn't accept spaces or other invalid input (displaying a text message below the box when the user attempts to type an invalid character) would solve all the issues.
I believe this technique is already commonly used in several Windows applications and the OS itself. I can't remember if I've seen the same for OSX.
node-def: a tactical hacking sim. Now in open beta.
"Where is the Any Key?"
Yes. Yes, you will....
Place nail here >+
Except for the times when its not your kit thats at fault and you are being told to turn off your firewall, restart windows etc. having allready tried all of that.
User calls me and says Outlook emails aren't showing up in the inbox. They are in the special Unread Search Folder, but not in the Inbox. You can read them in the Unread folder then they disappear. I've actually seen this once before and know sometimes COM addins etc can screw things up. So i get my research together and am ready for anything when I remote in.
The user had changed the Sort by to From instead of by Date so newest go on top. "Oh me?. I didn't touch anything." Meanwhile it is a great excuse for them not to get work done. "Sorry I'll have to get back to you my email isn't working". Talk about PEBCAK.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Waaaayyyyyyyy back in the day we had a client purchase a very expensive system to run his business. His secretary (that's what we called them way back then) entered all the accounting info into the system each day and saved to a 5.5 floppy.
So they call and tell us that the data isn't saving. We go out and confirm that it is . . . did a save, did a read, you know.
Next morning they call - disc is blank. So we go out and start working through the dailly process. Secretary enters some data (not all of it, that would take hours), saves it to the disc and ejects it from the drive. We put the disc back in and read the data . . . again.
We ask her where she stored her discs and she says, "right here on the filing cabinet." She then proceeds to pull out a big industrial magnet and *THUNK* STICKS THE FUCKING DISC TO THE FILING CABINET!
That's when I lost my faith in humanity and decided to hate everyone I meet.
But that's just me. YMMV
Whilst everyones is wheeling out their dim witted user story. There are heaps of support people out their who are about as sharp as bowling balls.
I still remember one that was all upitty with me on the phone when I kept hassling him to get my email access sorted when I first joined that company. He had reset and sent me my new password not once but 3 ****ing times by (you guessed it) email. I could just picture the head rocking from side to side when he said "why you by now not for getting such a password".
The joys of off shore call centres
You know what fucks me off? When someone sends me an email then calls as I'm reading it to discuss it.... i mean wtf!!! Sometimes they are higher in the hierarchical chain so I have to bite my cheek, fortunately other times they're not and i let em have it!!!
I don't disagree that desktop support and network support are vastly different things, nor do I disagree that the IT staff should NOT be doing this stuff, simply because desktop stuff is a teaching / training issue more than anything else (until you get to hardcore automation stuff where the coding skills of the IT staff start to come into play).
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there. That's just the way the universe works, and they look like sulky and spoiled children if they refuse to accept responsibility for supporting what they shoved down everyone else's throats. That's how it plays to the rest of the world.
But there seems to be a lack of common sense involved that goes beyond even that...
There's this story: Our corporate office sent out a piece of financial reporting software we were required to use for planning and reporting. We had to install it on our computers. Now this was some years ago, pre-XP, whether it was win95 or 98 I can't remember, anyway, I dug into the documentation corporate provided, figured out what was needed, including edits to sys.ini and autoexec.bat and got up and running. There are 5 other people in the accounting department who needed this software, none of them remotely as computer sophisticated as I am, and I don't claim to be very sophisticated at all. I wrote up a HOWTO and walked it over to the IT department and explained that I expected that they didn't want everyone messing around with system configuration files, and here you go, these are the other folks who need installs....
"We don't support user applications," I was told. Well, I explained, I'm an accountant, and installing software and configuring system files isn't my job, either. So I'll pass this along to my colleagues and let them figure it out for themselves, too.
Phone started ringing off the hook in IT about 20 minutes later.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
I left it in the machine and turned off the laptop.
You did what to the laptop?
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
The one I find most amusing is when my customers see all the virus scanner popups (ie Kaspersky) and think that they are from a trojan! (Mind you, they may not be far off...)
I replace Kaspersky or whatever with Avast Home, make their security settings as quiet as possible and tell them it's fixed.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Problem is nobody has the same job for ever, nor the same responsibilities. I've been bitten enough by other people's mistakes to realize that it will be my problem eventually.
What's the big deal about giving the warning? One could give the warning AND remove the space.
Starmen.net
Re: screenshots inside a word document....
With our company set-up, a screenshot pasted directly into an Outlook e-mail can be pretty huge - multiple megabyte. A screenshot pasted into a Word doc and attached into an email is almost always less than a meg.
Windows 3.11 for workgoups.
I remember spending weeks delving in MS-DOS, QBASIC and such before a expensive repair guy told me i could rightclick on files and such, and that wildcards existed.
It was my moment of zen.
Glorious insight yet felt like a moron already.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
What I really don't understand is how that classifies someone as an idiot.
You know, I have been wondering exactly that this entire time. It's easier just to paste the screenshots into Word and go from there. I feel much better knowing I wasn't the only one wondering this!
6) Complain the network admin/ISP help desk that they can't get to a website [when they can get to other websites, so obviously the network isn't the problem]
I don't think you can infer that "obviously the network isn't the problem". Of course this could just mean that a site is down, but there are any number of genuine routing/DNS faults that would exhibit the same symptoms. I had exactly this happen when I switched from a dynamic to a static IP a couple of years ago - most UK/European sites were fine, no US sites would respond. I never got an exact diagnosis of the fault, but after a week or so of calls they sorted it out. The main problem was getting through the first level of script-reading tech support to someone who realised that the problem was actually at their end.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
I hear you. I've never understood that.
gets really bizarre when you have people (like, say, your network admin, or someone who allegedly fills this kind of position) berate you that just because the internet doesn't work the mail should be perfectly fine, and you shouldn't BS them into believing mail has anything to do with the internet.
Alas, years of pundits, TV announcers, and other ignorant people (including some who really should know better) using "internet" as a synonym for "web" have done their damage. Many have at most a tenuous grasp of the difference between mail and the web (understandable since they use the web to access their mail), and have no clue where the object they are manipulating actually is (on their computer? on a server somewhere? just in RAM and not saved?). It does not help that Microsoft has done everything in their power to blur the distinctions.
I still make a point of correcting them when it's face to face, but I fear the battle has been lost. Now we need a new word for what "internet" used to mean.
Actually, it would be cute to have to randomly put in a secret computer administrator joke."
ID10T
PEBKAC
Luddite
etc.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Yes...they do...oh GOD do they ever argue... Maybe they don't gripe at the guys who show up at their door, but the ones who come to the store will bitch, moan, and argue until you want to smack them with their own notebook.
"We'll have to check it in for a diagnostic to verify the problem before we can do anything else"* is followed immediately with "WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT FOR YOU TO DO THAT?!?! MY COMPUTER IS RUNNING FINE!!!"......they don't get the logical fallacy that if it WERE running fine, they would be at home USING it instead of bitching at us about it...
*Yes, I can usually tell what the problem is right away, but policy dictates that it has to be verified before anything can be done under warranty.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Makes me wonder why they call it Windows anyway. They've got the "brittle and easily broken" part down but the window analogy doesn't work so well without the "transparent" part, which they are definitely missing.
They call it "Windows" because it shows you all the places that it prevents you from reaching.
One of the most aggravating things for me is customers calling an issue in to the call center, I get the ticket 10 minutes later with a mangled and vague description and call to assist only to be told that my contact just left on vacation and will not be back for a week. Of course no one else knows what they really needed corrected. I now close these with a resolution of "No further trouble reported" the next day.
And then there was the time that an AT&T technician insisted that we DO NOT need dial tone to the modem to access the customer site that we DIAL into to support remotely.
Oh, the mighty ping. That could never give a false positive. A few weeks ago my brother was couldn't get to a test rig for some blackhawk fly by wire work. So he calls IT and they run the mighty ping which works. So they try to wash there hands of it all and say its not their issue. After more calls they say that my brother needs to go and grab ethernet numbers off the machine so they can try to trace. The machine is in on building on the other side of the campus and they want him to do the debugging for them. Needless to say he was pissed and refused. And IT wouldn't budge. Until a VP for the program decides to make a few calls to figure out why he wasn't get the support he pays for. In the end, IT had assigned the same IP address to a printer.
Point being, sometimes IT needs to get off the high and mighty. In the end they are supposed to support. There's a reason IT will lay off before engineering. They don't bring in the money. And this comes from someone who worked in IT for many years.
I don't know if there are operating systems out there that support pasting directly into a file. Windows 2K does not support it and neither does Thunderbird. You would have to think about a file name anyway.
IMHO, Word is good enough, even if you don't like it. There is no need for people to learn everything about computers all the time, especially if they at least thought of a smart answer to their picture-mailing-problem.
I hate Word like no other, but opening a Word document for some user supplied pictures should not be a problem. It'll definitely cost you less time than it will cost the user to send you the pictures in another format.
In the last 2 houses Ive lived in, we could easily cook with no power.
It was propane in the last house, and NG in our new house.
Nice try, but I haven't seen an LPG/NG cooker produced in the last ten years that doesn't have a Main Gas Valve operated by mains electricity. Maybe you get them in the US, but not in the UK. (Probably something to do with EU safety regulations).
This means that many people replacing their gas cooker either have to trail a lead across the kitchen or pay to have a new socket / fused spur installed. (Can't do that themselves now - more regulations)
I wish I was making this shit up, I really do....
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Word is a very handy way of assembling a collection of screenshots in much the same way that a front end loader is a very handy way of transporting butter...
Never underestimate the power of coincidence to make things seem as they arn't. Here is my own "I am in deep trouble" moment.
I was doing the monthly audit of a NT3.51 cluster that performed call routing for a telco. five nines and all that stuff.
Part of the Audit was to check that little used cables (in this case a dial in support modem) were still properly connected. We were instructed to trace the cables and verify that it had not been replugged as it was not unknown for other engineers to 'borrow' outside lines.
As i touched the cable the whole telephone exchange went dark and quiet - completely dead, lights and all.
Just as I touched the cables the exchange's "bulletproof" power died. I nearly pooed myself!
It was only half an hour later when the true cause was discovered that I could even start to laugh about it. The telco were amazed at how quickly they had an engineer on site though!
I'm sure anyone that has worked on tech support has fallen into the hole of having to tell a user that this "time we are going to use the right mouse button to click", and from that point on being asked at every click request whether it's the left or right mouse button. Oddly enough I like these users cause it means they are actually paying attention, and nearly always it's a simple case of "It's always a left click unless I specify otherwise" is enough to keep them satisfied. Nearly always.
My stores are many and varied. If they aren't my personal stories I was in the room as it happened, nothing here is second hand after the event. Here we go :
I walked past a another tech support guy, head in hands, as he repeated his attempt to get the user to right click on the screen for the umpteenth time. Eventually he came out to me and said that he twigged to what was happening when they asked how they should be spelling 'right', if it was r-i-g-h-t or w-r-i-t-e. Turns out 'right click' meant for them to type out the word click on the screen.
Another person had someone place a 3.5 inch floppy disk in the CD rom drive, close the drive bay door and on the way in the disk got pushed so it fell sideways into the tray and wedged itself in properly. They couldnt' get it out and had to call out a tech.
I personally had someone tell me that they had lost their 3.5 floppy update disk "down the back of the drive". I frantically tried to tell her that a floppy disk drive is only marginally larger than the disk itself and there is simply no space for it to go, and that if the button on the face of the drive was flush with the face of the drive (and not pushable) then there was no disk in the drive. Regardless of me telling her repeatedly that it couldn't be the problem, she got a screwdriver, pushed it into the drive and wiggled it around in an attempt to find the disk. Oddly enough she didn't find anything. She then searched her desk for the disk, and found it underneath her keyboard. She then placed it into the drive only to find that it would no longer read it.
We also received the infamous email to support asking us to contact them if we didn't receive the email.
Another person I personally had was pressing the Start button with their finger when I was asking them to 'Press the start button". Last time I ever didn't describe it as "Clicking on the start button."
To be honest that was half my bad and why I think that in a lot of cases it works both ways, which is a less entertaining anecdote but one I always bring up when repeating these stores in this context. In fact I spent a lot of time shaking my head at other tech support people as they spent 5 minutes simply repeating the same command to users over and over again as if the 50th time of saying "Right click on the desktop" is going to result in some great epiphany where they suddenly realise what you're talking about. I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to drill into my fellow support techs that your commands to the user shouldn't be the end result, but the steps required to get there, reduced to their component elements as much as possible. "Bring up the display properties" will obviously confuse most simple computer users, but "Right click on the desktop, then select Properties" isn't much more helpful if they aren't familiar with the right mouse button, or the concept of the desktop, or that there is a distinction between the desktop and the windows/icons on the desktop. Asking the user to move the mouse to a free spot on the screen that isn't on a window or an icon, and then clicking the right mouse button is more wordy and takes a bit longer, but people are more likely to follow you the first time because you're not telling them anything complicated, just simple, seperate steps. And it also removes some of the ire when people are told to do something as though they know it all inside out. I know that a lot of the cases in this thread are more complicated or true cases of stupidity but I think that basic users cop more flack than they really should when a lot of tech support people don't dumb things down as much as they should. You'd be suprised how many end users appreciate things being simplified for them as opposed to being offended.
What are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would leave filename.ext display off?
Yeah, I'm well aware of how reliable ping is. That's why I confirmed it was working by RDC'ing into their boxes over the VPN.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You could equally put a button on the bottom right labelled "Tell me again", and imagine people who click to dismiss over and over and just have it pop up again, only to finally read the button =) Maybe add a button on the bottom left: "Explain how to replace disk".
That sounds wonderful...except for the fact that you know, as a former tech supporter, that users often claim to be "power users" and say they have done "everything" and now the product is "broken". How is someone supposed to tell you from a liar?
I tried to do this just last week. I pasted the second screenshot in the email, then went to do something else. When I returned a few minutes later, the second screenshot was gone, and had been replaced with a duplicate of the first! After some investigation, it turned out that (at least on my company's version of Outlook) the problem is in the save routine, and the second screenshot was being replaced by a duplicate of the first during an autosave. You could demo the bug on demand just by saving the email you were trying to compose.
I ended up sending the guy two emails, each with one screenshot.
A guy in my company (onsite install) took a couple of trophy shots of a client's NetWare 5 system that had been running in excess of five years during an install. The thing had been in continuous operation for 1,967 days, including surviving three hard drive failures while online. He used a digital camera to take the shot straight from the console monitor because rconsole had crashed (abended) two years prior and they wouldn't reboot it to restore remote access.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
I once had a "network administrator" call up from his car to find out why his LAN couldn't connect to the Internet. I explained to him that unless he was on-site, there was nothing I could do. After the call, I added a note to our tech support database and found out that I was the third tech he'd called that day, all from his car. I'm sure that if he had been on-site, he'd not have turned out to be a real power-user.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
World of Warcraft even does this. "If you wish to delete your character, type "DELETE" into this box." Then again, one usually hopes that sysadmins are not stupid enough to ignore signs of impending failure...
Many of my applications have a black box option that's "required" for certain users. It records every message issued to the user and their response. The messages are recorded as part of a separate database thread and are deleted either when the transaction completes successfully or after a period of time. It's been more than helpful on many an occasion. It's especially entertaining as I tell the user what they clicked as a response to what they were asked. User's who've been subjected to this "option" tend to get a little more careful about reading what the system is telling them.
> I got an error on my screen
> What message text was displayed?
> I don't know, I clicked it away
Yeah, I've developed a standard line for that.
"In order to help you, I'm going to need the exact words of the error message, especially any technical-sounding parts that you didn't understand. Those are the parts that tell me what the problem is."
This only works with people who believe that they don't know much about computers and that you do. Fortunately, in my position (the computer guy at a small public library) this is almost always the case, so it works like a charm. Next time they see the message they write it down verbatim and bring it to me, or, even better, they come get me while it's still on the screen. (Of course they then forget about this and go back to "We had an error message earlier" the next time there's a problem, so I have to use my standard line repeatedly. But if I use it repeatedly it works repeatedly.)
If you're in a corporate server-admin situation or something and have to support users who believe they know more about their computers than you do, my line will probably not work. I guess in that case you might have to resort to BOFH tactics or something. ("Oh, didn't you get the email? Your section of the network is offline while the firewall inspector checks everything out. I'll send you another email when it's running again. The firewall inspection shouldn't take more than a couple of days, so hopefully you'll be back online in time to get a few hours of work done before the state auditor comes to do the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance check...")
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
We had a RAID5 failure from a RAID Inc. (I'm naming them to shame them) array. It had 16 drives, 15 for the RAID and 1 hot spare. Turns out that this device beeps and turns on one global indicator light for any drive failure and pressing one button on the device to kill the beep also kills the indicator light. Second, the indicator and beep will be lost with a power cycle. Finally, the beep itself was not very loud and the indicator light was COVERED UP by a locking cover. In a university research group environment with high student turnover it is absurdly easy to miss the drive failure notices because there is only one chance to get the warning -- the drive bays do NOT have individual failure lights. If you own one of these in a very noisy server room, you had better make sure to do periodic checks and maybe set up email notification too because its indicators suck. Worst yet, when the RAID did finally go offline there was zero chance to rebuild it even after replicating the data on the failed drive because the controller would not use another physical drive in that virtual slot.
Moral to any RAID manufacturer out there: 1) ALWAYS put failure indicators on the individual drive bays. 2) When a user manages to duplicate the data on a failed drive to an identical backup via ddrescue, for god sakes let them put the old data on the new drive back into the array and bring it online.
Or one of the many programs which convert screenshots to something a little more compact than BMP?
"OK, let's put the device into loopback mode. Er, I mean, diagnostic mode. Yeah."
Sorry about replying twice, but I didn't think of this until after I'd submitted the first reply. When I call (or, more often use live chat) I generally need one, specific piece of data. As an example, my newsreader may stop connecting to the server while everything else including email is fine. After checking my config, I may go into chat to find out if either their news server is down, or if they've migrated to a different server, and if so, which. I don't need them trying to trouble-shoot my connection (Especially as I use Linux, not Windows or Mac.) or fumble around the settings on a program they've never heard of. (I've done things like that a few times over the phone. It can be done, but it's not that easy.)
If I were calling about a Windows box, and (let's say) it couldn't connect, I'd tell them that I'd checked the settings, and found $FOO. Then, if they heard/saw anything wrong, they could tell me exactly what needed changing. That's how they'd know that I wasn't BSing them about my ability.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Consumers just want someone else to "take care of it", whatever "it" might be, even if that's not feasible.
And yet the grandparent's post shows that sometimes sysadmins are indeed stupid.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
That's what's stupid. I *don't* have filename extension display turned off. Paint saved the file with "ss.png" as the name (not "ss.png.jpeg") but saved it in JPEG format.
Actually indeed, "internet" is for most people synonymous with "what IE shows me". Then on the other hand, I could get by playing MUDs while claiming I'm doing server maintainence because that was "all letters and numbers and none of them made sense"...
If you can't win the fight against ignorance and stupidity, find out how you can benefit from them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are you telling me that you actually store passwords in plain text?!?!?!?!?
Buy a clue. That is not what they are saying.
This reminds me of a sysadmin who tried to help someone with a problem with some files on a floppy. He asks for a copy of the floppy and recieves a ... photocopy of the floppy.
Doesn't matter if the first thing in your encryption routine is a Trim, because Trim(" Password")=Trim("Password").
What's the point in reducing the size of the keyspace like this?
The oddest ones were people that demanded printers be shifted bi-weekly as there were counters in some sort of trivial interdepartmental turf war. The most pathetic was the junior developer that stormed into the server room during a major outage that was affecting close to a hundred staff and demanded I stop what I was doing and put paper in the photocopier for him. Major outages that prevent people from doing their normal work do tend to generate sightseers and people who decide it's a good time to ask you about their home computer problems - so at some points you either have to get someone to run interference for you or lock the door.
how do you expect users to send you screenshots from Windows?
I used to get an instant message from my cousin who said there was some problem with his email/error message or such, and he sends a file transfer: 2.5MB over dialup is painful, only to see a full-screen snapshot, in a 24bit colour bitmap.
he slowly learned the idea of changing the default file type in Paint as JPG.
I still get multiple-page Word documents with photos embedded inside from my Dad though.
True - but I'm not talking about "I can't get to my buddy's website that he runs on his home PC using DynDNS!" type calls. I'm talking about "I can't get to my home page, you know, salon.com; why is the internet broken?" type calls. Usually (although not always) it would be that the site in question was, in fact, down; they would insist that AOL tech support fix no matter how many times we explained that we had AOL had no control over when the site would return as it was not part of AOL's network.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Optimist.
I once had a guy call and started saying that his PC wouldn't turn on. After about 2 minutes of asking him if he had done such and such, I finally said "Is the power cord plugged in?" To this he answered "I don't know, the lights won't turn on so I can't see." ...
I'd buy that.
I work for a very large company, with an army of IT guys. Our email system has always been very unreliable, and a couple of years ago they totally overhauled it. New machines, new settings, the works.
Nobody mentioned the change was coming. I guess they wanted to surprise us with some good news about our email for a change. They swapped all the stuff over the (sleepless, I'm sure) weekend so we wouldn't have any downtime, and it wouldn't interfere with work.
Once they had everything migrated, IT emailed us all the new info so we could access our email. ^_^
Not having a flash drive on hand != Not ever having a flash drive, or coworkers having a flash drive, or the virus could have come in a cheap $10-at-Walmart-1000-games disc.
That being said, I think they inadvertently triggered that NSA backdoor that allows them to hack any system in the world through the power cord.
Make sure they pay the fee before you agree to help them.
Reading these posts is quite entertaining, but upon reflection you can clearly see that our industry uses poor choices in naming things.
Click on the desktop. Since the computer sits on a desk, why did they call it a desktop?
Press the Start Button. Is that the button that starts the computer (power button)?
"Drag your CD to the trashcan" - New Mac users either question this or you hear a loud thunk a CD hits the real trashcan.
Confusion between the monitor and computer. Why does the monitor even have a power button on the front? Shouldn't it get power from the PC? Actually, the old IBM mono display from the original IBM PC did just that. One power switch for all. A good idea that went away.
It's great having a laugh, but sometimes it seems like our industry doesn't really make much of an attempt to name things clearly. When was the last time you saw a power switch clearly marked "power"?
Place nail here >+
In my experience in technical support, sharing "the why" makes users more cooperative. If you say "Do X and tell me what happens", users may underestimate the importance of doing X. If you say "I think I know what the problem is, but I need you to do X and tell me what happens to be sure" or "To check and make sure that Y is not the problem, I need you to do X and tell me if Z happens" then they realize it's an important step in getting the problem fixed.
To be fair, most people think of 'the internet' as 'stuff in my browser' and it is possible for problems to hit only certain ports and protocols. Before Vista SP1 I had this really nasty bug where every other day HTTP, POP/SMTP and IMAP would stop working, but ICMP and IRC would work. Really damn annoying to be able to say in IRC 'well, I can ping everything in the world and still talk to you, but I have to restart my computer because I can't get email or browse web pages (in any browser) thanks to Vista sucking balls.' Not only that, but that system was acting as a gateway, and other computers on the other side COULD use HTTP, POP/SMTP etc. So it was entirely some Vista-specific port/protocol exclusive failure way up in the application layer.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Back in the 80's, lady ran a program we wrote that downloaded data from some city mainframe. She calls me up, "It's just not working, no matter what I do it doesn't finish!"
"How's the diskette?" says I, "Did you check to see if it's full?"
"Yes!! It's fine! I did a directory, and it says 'Bytes remaining Ok!'"
Classic!
The Power of Pr0nimation in the Palm of Your Hand! Pr0nitor by Pr0nware
There's a huge difference between hashing/encrypting and modifying the actual input.
At this point, I cannot help but think you are deliberately being obtuse.
That is a beautiful idea! I will at least get the pleasure of knowing the user had to have read it and typed in the code before proceeded to ignore it. Thank you. -rushes to implement this in current project-
Also, consider the fact that if someone was rational they probably wouldn't be calling.
Granted, there are many problems that happen outside of the limits of someone's knowledge, but a lot of them are going to be the people who kicked their network cable out, and whose first way of dealing with this is to call someone, rather than to check first and call second.
I know people will take issue with the actual example..."what if they don't know there's a cable", etc. Substitute a power cable, or whatever you like. My point is that some people are wired to act before they think. These people call tech support more than the people that don't have this problem.
My favorite one is the "Access violation at address 004D5AD3 in module '?????.exe'. Write of addres ????????"
I mean, what the hell an end user is supposed to do with that? Just addicts them to not understanding their system.
I remember a girl, that was so addicted to this behaviour, that even after switching to linux it continued.
She called me to discover what was going wrong with her app. Ok, got there, ask her to show me. She fires up the app, types some commands, clicks away the error message and turns to me smiling: "see?"
entropy happens
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there.
I don't think any sane person would disagree. Your company was terrible to just throw software at people when they were already paying people to take care of such things who hopefully have more experience in it.
A real IT dept. or admin should know the difference between apps that are necessary for business, which get supported, and apps that aren't, which don't. The latter should really be blocked...people don't like to hear that, but hey, the company pays for the PC, and for the time it takes to clean up after a worm.
Damn straight! The Windows pop-up that pisses me off the most is when you click on a CD/DVD drive in Explorer and get "Insert disk" "Please insert a disk into drive D:." which happens mostly by accident when you're trying quickly trying to click on a different drive, or you just unplugged a USB drive you were looking at the files of so Explorer panics and tries to display the next/previous drive it sees, or you just put a disk in and the machine is still in the process of reading it.
Why the fuck can't it just passively display in the file window "No disk in drive. Please insert disk." ?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
And, as an added bonus, it's quite simple to annotate the screenshot if you're using Word.
My latest tech support for mum went like this:
I get an urgent call from mum, she can't send e-mail.
To begin with I ask if there are any error messages (she uses gmail so I tell her to look on the left side, near contacts). Everything seems to be ok.
Next, I ask her to give me more details and describe what it is that doesn't work.
She tells me that she can't type anything, some characters don't show up at all and some are wrong.
I start to suspect that she has somehow managed to do something with her keyboard layout but just to be sure, I tell her to open a new text document and just type something.
She does that and - predictably - the problem wasn't e-mail but something with the keyboard layout - or so I thought. Whilst she's doing that test, she starts to speak about her cat and I try to ignore it since I'm thinking about the problem - until I hear her say: ...you know what the cat did today, it sat right there and then began to puke so I got a lot of cleaning to do again, this time it puked all over the keyboard...
(I try not to let my head explode when I tell her to buy a new keyboard...)
5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say. ... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity. In your list, number five really captures it. I can't tell you how common that one is although it sounds like you know from experience.
Okay, I've had the reverse of this problem. Just this last year, when M$ inexplicably decided to switch from PhotoDraw to ImageComposer (both of which basically did the same thing but with radically different UIs), and I wasn't warned about this change (satellite campus; I'm a part-timer and not primarily a Windows user), I show up to teach my little unit on how to make a photo hoax using a 12-page handout I'd created with elaborate screenshots (course was for non-CS majors) and I discover 5 minutes before class that I had PhotoDraw on my computer, and also on the one student work station I'd previously tested, that nobody else has PhotoDraw, only ImageComposer, that my handout, which had taken many hours to create, was useless, and that we were about to waste 3 hours of semester's classtime.
So I went to IT and asked if they could load the software for me.
Their response was that they could not because we didn't have a license for the software for which, only the month before, we clearly did have a license.
So I asked them if something dreadful happened, like, did M$ revoke our license? Did we run out of TP and somebody had an unfortunate accident? Did the dog eat the license? Did we forget where we put it?
No, no, no and no. So I asked why the software was still on the instructor's machine. Too complicated to mess up the instructor's machine. Okay, why was it on the one student machine I checked? We don't know. Okay, so, was it okay for us to have the software on the instructor's machine and one student machine? Yes. Alrighty, so, if we can have it on two machines in the lab, why can't we have it on the other 22? Because we don't have a license for the software.
Recursion anyone? I kid you not.
Historical design flaw.
Your example about messages prefixed with "error" is something I can identify with.
In a former job we developed a piece of software which produced error messages of the form "Fatal Error: Widget is not flummoxed". So many times I'd get support tickets escalated to me that said things like "Customer reports a fatal error". (In some cases, it turned out that the support folks that were doing this, having been given a good error report over the phone that they were too lazy to write down.)
In the end I took the initiative and simply altered the message to not have the "Fatal Error" prefix. Now the customers do tend to actually try to read the message, though of course sometimes they read it wrong or struggle with the technical terms.
Sadly, the support folks -- who deal with far more error messages than individual customers do, of course -- soon started simply saying "customer reports that it failed". You can't win 'em all, I guess.
In practice, I think there's no substitute for having the software report its own errors. This is something I made some headway towards, but I left the company before I finished it. (It was a skunkworks project, of course.)
Take the responce I got moments ago from a Clearwire support person in response to a question about blocking of inbound ports 80 and 25. "Oh we don't block port 80, after all it's the 'Internet'"
After explaining the problem once again I get the "I can't answer that, you will have to call tech support" reply.
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
Couldn't agree more. Although, at my last job I actually had a few people send me screenshots in an Excel document!
I once had a customer call and inform me that his monitor must be infected with a virus, because every computer in his office he plugged the monitor into became infected.
Despite all assurances to the contrary I was unable to convince him of the (more likely correct) alternative explanations.
=-D
Well, probably because you can paste screenshots directly into your Outlook draft and sidestep the whole Word process.
Well, it's like people believe that computers run on magic and that the normal rules of physics don't apply to them.
Well, perhaps the thing to do is to convince people that it is such dangerous, powerful magic that if they do things wrong, a demon could come and eat their soul.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
You think I haven't?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
BTW, I hope that didn't come across as snippy. When the kernel panicked, I was looking all around for a serial cable. Not finding one and not wanting to waste downtime looking harder, I just snapped a picture with my cellphone so I'd have the information later. So I meant what I said earlier, but didn't intend to sound like a smartass. :-)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Story 2 - Well not a story really but something that repeats an awful lot. Because people know that my job is computers, I get a lot of calls for free tech support. Something I really hate to do, but the first or second time that someone asks for help, I'll give it to them. Well invariably it happens that someone calls and says they have some problem, which they cannot define or describe. I ask them to tell me what appears on the screen at the moment and they'll start reading EXACTLY what it says on the screen, like, "It says Phoenix and then a dash and then Award Capital Bee, Capital Eye, Capital Oh, Capital Ess, lower case V, Six decimal point" or "It says My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places..." I try to stop them but they just keep reading the whole damn screen. I really hate when that happens.
Why not just send the word file in place of the screen shot? :P
zosxavius photography
Jeez, so many stories I could share. I guess the best one is the cheeseburger in the CD ROM.
Back before I started my own company, I worked as a contractor for various federal agencies. I would always run into lifers, people who had worked at these places for years and let their standards drop for grooming and personal responsibility because there was no way they could ever be fired. Anyways, a lifer was working on some cables beneath the raised floors, and was reaching down after something near the bottom. He was simultaneously eating a cheesebuger, and you could see all kinds of sauces dripping from the thing. Realizing the size of his belly prohibited easy retrieval of whatever it was he was after under the floor, this lifer stopped to put down his cheeseburger so he could lay out and get some extra reach.
Lo and behold, the place he chose to put his cheeseburger was the outstretched tray of a cd rom, and the tray closed while he was spread out on the floor. Bits and pieces of the cheeseburger made their way into the server, which in turn caught fire, which in turn set off various fire supression systems and lead to the evacuation of the facility.
Silicon smells awful when it burns and can quickly overwhelm you in an enclosed space. The lifer got himself out of the building promptly and was allowed to keep his job despite shutting down the facility and royally f***ing up the project I was working on. I was laid off after a couple days, when everyone realized they were going to need to procure new servers to replace the ones that had been damaged in the fire and that the procurement process would take months.
I try to remember this story when things go wrong at my company, and be understanding to people affected by the ding-dangitiness of others.
M
I once scanned and blew up a logo from a business card (to about 2'*2') Not fun, but it worked out. Kinda.
And the author of such a software must take care of the i18n of it well, because "the alphabet" means different things to different people, while it doesn't make sense at all for some.
On the other hand, this design is already in use by some programs. One of them is an antivirus suite for Windows. When the user tries to stop the program, it shows a window with a message like "By doing this you'll not be able to protect your computer from viruses" etc., and the user will have to solve a CAPTCHA to proceed. (BTW that program sucks as hard as any other antivirus software.)
Personally I don't think this is a good design. Messages like "the RAID is failing" are intended to be read by admins, part of whose job is to read error messages and fix the problem instead of "clicking it away". Also, remember when you prevent the user from doing stupid things, you are at the same time preventing him/her from doing smart things.
I don't think a computer program should try to work around human mistakes. And it can't.
Anyway, that's just my 2c.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I can understand ignorant questions, because a lot of the stuff we do is pretty complex and non-obvious. I just can't understand dumb questions, the ones that show a complete lack of critical thinking.
Mistake, I think. The capacity and willingness to engage in critical thinking are rare. I write "and willingness", but perhaps "and will" would be better.
There are a great many people who are nominally literate, but don't habitually read. They see a notice and think - Oh, a notice. Reading it takes a specific act of will. It is the same with critical thinking, only the skill itself is rarer, and not necessarily even recognised by many of those who do have it as a mode of mental activity available to be used.
Maybe the messages should also come up more frequently and be more clear.
The Raid is failing. Your data is FUCKED. Call someone to fix this shit, NOW, or your boss will shitcan your ass so fast that you'll be in the unemployment line YESTERDAY!!!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Got a call to go to a guy because his computer was acting weird, possible virus.
I got onsite and asked the older man what the problem was. He said that solitaire is acting weird and the computer just isn't acting right.
I sat down at the computer and tested things.
It took TWO fingers to click the mouse buttons, and even that hurt a bit. The mouse was obviously well past its death.
I went to my truck, grabbed a new mouse, and had him try it out. "Hey its working great now!" We spent the next 45 minutes "checking things" so that he didn't feel a fool and he thanked me.
It wasn't the user that was stupid, he just didn't know how easy it should have been. Its still funny though.
Then there's the time I went onsite to a computer that wouldn't turn on. It powered up but wouldn't post, this after a power outage. I unplugged the computer power cord, pressed the power button, waited 30 seconds and plugged it back in.
It booted beautifully. Spent the next 45 minutes doing a checkup to avoid making the customer feel dumb.
To the people who....
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
not exactly tech support, but once i had a professor ask me to email him my assignments cause he lost them. i did them again and emailed him, he asked me to do them by hand and scan them. so i did,
then he wasnt happy with images, so he asked me to put the scanned images in a word document. then i had to split the word document for each assignment.
One wonders why. Why do people just click away all messages sent to them by the system?
Actually I tend to wonder if a message is important why doesn't it get logged? Instead a modal dialog box that prevents the user from continuing operation is popped up and once it is closed the information is lost. You're honestly asking why some double speak the user doesn't understand that gets in the way of them continuing to work or trying to fix the problem gets closed??? I really don't think it's the user that's being stupid here.
Why isn't it the standard that when an important (critical) error message is popped up it's not logged (along with the response) to the system log? Then the IT support community collectively waste millions of hours getting the user to recreate the problem (which sometimes can't be done). THAT is stupid.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy.
Please mod this -1 Naive.
Never heard of "alternative" medicine? Or people who kill themselves or burn down their homes illegally rewiring the place?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You bet - get them involved - explain it any way you can - give full tech acronyms and jargon - or dumb it way down to "its the button on the right at the top of the mouse" - describe simple shapes and positions - use analogies. The downside - you end up with a host of clients that only want to speak to you.
I have suffered from a similar problem, we had an IP address assigned and then there was a merger of ISP:s and suddenly our internet connection died on us.
After a few days I tried to ping our address and then it was revealed that I got an answer - and our firewall was configured to be absolutely silent.
That was one of those WTF moments. And shortly after that we changed ISP since the ISP after that merger was a complete nutjob.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Agreed - and thought I would add a little anecdotal evidence. I have found some professions require more assistance than others - the one I find most interesting is how often nurses have difficulty with simple tasks - my belief is there job is in some ways a life and death roller coaster and loading toner in the machine correctly is low on their radar. By the way I think very highly of nurses - salt of the earth and all that. Unsurprisingly lawyers are the rudest as a rule and quite often have difficult with simple things also - I aint making any excuses for them.
I think the problem is that they *think* they know something. Your last point still applies, of course--if they are asking for help, they should be cooperative. But the problem is that they think they know dramatically more than they really do.
Problem there is that they actually do know quite a lot, but they just aren't yet aware of how much there is to know, which is rather vast.
expandfairuse.org
I have to disagree with you. The thing with tech support is that you are telling the end user how to do something diffrently then they have been doing. Sometimes that is somehing they have been doing a certain way for a number of years.
When someone calls an electrician 90% of the time that person hasnt even changed a fuse or a breaker in thier lifetime, but in tech support your telling someone how to do something with a computer that they have used for a really long time. Hence they believe they have expert knowledge of the system they are using.
They get away with it for a period of time until something happens that hinders thier way of operating thier system to the way they are used to. And telling them they have been doing something wrong the whole time and they need to change thier habit not only brings suprise but also resent.
Without being specific younger generation accountants and financual systems come to mind. They do something a certain way in a system for awhile that essentially will break the process of something that needs to be done quarterly or yearly.
The president of my company's parent company mentioned that IT is never appreciated like other functions of a company, because "all systems working" is treated as normal, but never as an exceptionally good situation that can go awry for any or no reason. The only time a company's IT staff is ever given any attention is when something breaks. If you fix it (and that's often a huge if), you're a hero, you might get a Dilbert-style cheap plastic award, then it's back to work on the same small-as-possible budget and long-as-legally-possible hours. Hardly anyone will remember you for fixing the system downtime last week, because they will likely remember, for some reason, the incompetence of your staff not preventing said downtime and costing the company thousands, if not millions of sales/dollars/etc.
One of the approaches he takes is encouraging the client to take as much consideration about preventive measures as possible, including the inevitable hardware failure or system panic, and being sure every operator knows what to do in most situations, and who to call if they're not sure. That's common sense, but in the cost-cutting corporate culture, it's an approach that's too often eschewed, and their IT staff pays the price down the line.
My conclusion, then, is that corporate culture probably should change from the arms race of who can do the most with the least cost. However, I don't see any viable replacement, so I would expect the clusterfuck that was the beginning of my comment to continue.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
"Do not touch the operational end of the Device. Do not look into the operational end of the Device. Do not submerge the Device in liquid, even partially. Most important, under no circustances should you- (static)"
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document ???????? Why would you object to that? The end user took time to provide you with information that will help you resolve the issue. A screenshot in a word document is way better than a phone conversation where they state "I got some kind of an error but I dont remember what it is." If you are annoyed that you have to open a word document to resolve an issue for a user that tried to help you do your job then the problem lies with you. Also on the flip side I learned that providing end users with screenshots in a word document with simple detailed instructions will eventually make them learn the process on thier own instead of calling you back. And as a result your work load will decrease significantly since you can send that document to all the users involved with the process. 2) Ask what FTP is when they're supposed to be a server admin 3) Can't run a select statement but are supposed to be the DBA. Points 2 and 3 are sad but true. The frequency I see these points validated isnt sad, its horrific as well as shocking. 4) insist the network is up even though we don't see any packets through an *inline* appliance If they say the network is up (when its actually down) tell the end user to continue working hard and being an invaluble employee to the company, if you dont hear from them in 15 min id reevaluate what your doing. 5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say. Welcome to the corporate world where you must spoon feed those that are the reason you get a pay check. ... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
We all read bash.org buddy, stop stealing other ppls crap and find something else to do when your not maintaing your little sisters network.
I once had a user that had a strange (to her) dialog box.
She could take a screenshot of the box only (alt+print screen, so not that clueless after all), print it, and faxed it to me with a handwritten note asking 'what should I do?'.
I should add that the dialog box only had a 'OK' button, and that was the only option...
TopCod3r is a very sucesfull troll on the thedailywtf.com site. He make "border limit" comments that abuse the fact no one can read sacasm under the internet to troll hard some readers of that site. Today, only the nick is a warning for a troll post will follow.
-Woof woof woof!
Well the opposite can also be true. I've provided support to customers on a 6+ digit support contract that still refuse to do what I ask of them.
Some people just like to complain . . .
That's because you aren't in the target market.
I don't think it is a good idea to teach people that it is ok to enter their username and password in windows that unexpectedly pop up on their screen. As for accountability, you don't need that for messages that were just providing information which the user only had to see and didn't give them any choices to make. Besides the way you'd achieve accountability would be to log the information, but if all such warnings were logged the original problem would already be solved, so no need to come up with creative ways to prevent the user from closing the window.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
One time, while attempting barrel roll, I accidentally a whole noun.
5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say.
I love this one. I talk to people and know I can fix an issue over the phone so I ask them to do what will fix the issue. Say something simple like "power cycle your router" and they refuse yet when I tell tell I can't get anyone out to fix the issue for a few days they demand someone today even after I explain that resetting the router would fix their issue. Eventually they just go "fine I'll just wait".
It's a sign of security theatre, they wanted people to feel secure about Vista, so they added a lot of "yes" clicks, which people ultimately won't read and thus the critical 1% of warnings which actually matter will get ignored as well.
They do it because in the end they can say that vista did notify you, and you ignored it so it's not their problem. Security theatre at it's best (worst?)
I'm hoping that Microsoft understands that this theatre is not helping security, and actively try to monitor what messages can be removed from the UAC, but it's only a small fleeting snowball of hope which has no basis in reality.
Not only is it a bad format, but it is also virtually impossible to get word to display the screenshot 1:1 on your screen, so you are going to be reading some text that is blurry because it was scaled up or down a few percent. Well, I have experienced worse. A user once did the following to me:
The screen shot in that form was useless, but at least the explanation was a bit of use. So then one have to open an external application to read a piece of text they didn't bother to put in the body and only in an attachment.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Because MS Word is a proprietary application which has poor backwards compatibility with its native format... not to mention that not everyone has the money for MS Office.
Getting a free ware or open source application that can open zip files is trivial. Having to pirate or purchase MS Word is not.
Besides that, you've only simplified the problem by about two steps... saving yourself a grand total of about 2-3 seconds per screenshot.
One night a few of us were sitting round a friend's house (a highly paid IT professional) listening to some music being played out from his PC. I noticed that notepad kept opening and strange words were appearing, then lots of windows would open and the machine would go mental. Cue my friend; "someone's fucking hacking me!", he opens Notepad and starts typing "Leave the fuck alone, I know who you are" etc etc, while we laugh at his rage. Later that night I discovered that the Speach recognition had been turned on and the Mic was picking up the music and our background chatter. It was interesting to see how Windows interpreted inane chatter and minimal techno...
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't."
I knew someone who died of that. When his doctor told him he'd developed a dangerous and usually fatal diabetic complication, he insisted that it couldn't possibly have happened, his diabetes was under complete control, and he was going to go and find a competant doctor. He died of the complication he couldn't possibly have had 3 days later.
The relevant part? He was a sysadmin, one who constantly ranted about the stupidity of users who never listened to him.
I hope you realise that you're the one in the wrong here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Me too!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just make your validation error message say "Passwords must contain at least 6 letters, numbers or punctuation marks." Or a variation thereof. It's a good idea anyway to signal the user to use something other than letters. Alternatively, if it's discarded due to a trim, make the validation message say "Space characters do not count toward the 6 character limit." (Or something a bit friendlier.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Well, maybe once...
I'm sure you know this, but there are 2 reasons why you don't get complaints while performing "on site" or "drop off and pickup latter" repairs.
1) They are not doing the work, you are!
2) You most likely do it so fast (not total time, but clicks/minute) that even if they were paying attention, they would never be able to tell what the hell you were doing anyways...
10) Call from their cell phone - in the car, while driving - to get support for a program that runs on a desktop.
I've had people calling me from home about a problem on their office machine (or vice versa) fairly regularly. Granted this was before cell phones became ubiquitous.
They were a bit puzzled when I told them I couldn't help them. Most of the time of course it was fairly difficult helping them when in front of their machines as well because of the usual "something happened" "what happened?" "I don't know" "what do you mean?" "some kind of message" "what did it say?" "I don't know, I closed it" exchanges that everybody loves so (edited for brevity).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Yep, and the BMP files will be about 3MB each.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I once received a screen shot in a word document of the client's email program. Inside the email being viewed was a screen shot of MS Paint. Inside MS Paint was a screen shot of our application with red circles drawn around certain fields to highlight them.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
> Now we need a new word for what "internet" used to mean.
We already have such terminology. Depending on exactly what you're getting at you can say things like "connectivity", "TCP/IP", "network infrastructure", or even something as direct as "Can you reach the router one hop directly upstream from you, on the other end of your T1 line?"
But, of course, end users don't think in such precise terms. They say "internet" and mean, you know, whatever it was they were trying to do just now, which may or may not actually involve the internet at all. Having a new word that is supposed to mean a certain thing won't change this; they'll misuse the new word, if they use it at all, just like the old words.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Why? Do you route to slashdot via your companies VPN and web proxy? The first thing I do after connecting to the VPN is fix the routing table so all the office IP's are reachable via the VPN, but everything else goes straight out my ADSL modem.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
No offense to tech support people, but compared to other professionals like mechanics and doctors, tech support is not a job that truly qualified people stay in very long.
Welcome to the brave new post-dot bomb recession economy, I know qualified geeks who have been coding and messing about with computers since they were kids, who have held "real" IT or development jobs and who have college educations who have been doing first line tech support for several years.
Admittedly, you probably couldn't tell the difference between these people and the unqualified high school dropout drones in a normal call since they're doing a job they don't want to be doing, they're getting paid $12/hr and even if they wanted to they're most often not allowed to use their knowledge to help the end user ("no, proper procedure is to file a ticket to 2nd line who then check that you've checked everything with the user before escalating it to 3rd line" "But if someone would just give us access to $TOOL we could fix these problems immediately instead of spending ten minutes arguing with the user and checking off a bunch of stuff on a list" "Sorry, procedure, now go back to your computer and stop complaining or we'll replace you with someone who doesn't complain as much.").
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
if you suspect its not plugged in, tell them there might be dust in the connector. take it out, blow on it, put it back. more believable to the semi-computer-literate.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
I worked for a computer company with black and white spotted boxes. One night I got a call and the elderly gentleman couldn't really speak English. I'm pretty sure he was Korean but I am no expert on accents so I can't say for sure. He thought his wife might be better at English so he handed the phone off to her. She was a lot better and we fixed a few minor driver issues. Then came the bombshell. "My husband froppy dick no work." I said "what?" and she said it again. "My husband froppy dick no work." I figured it out right away she meant the her husband's computer's floppy disk was broken, but at this point I had to mute her before I started to crack up because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. Just as I hit mute on my com I heard my manager and our senior tech break out laughing nearby. They had been doing a routine review of my technical and customer service performance. I was quite famous on the call floor for while.
I was able to help her with her froppy dick by sending her a new floppy disk drive. A few days latter she called back and one of the guys on my team got the call and helped her install the froppy dick. He almost died trying to hold it in when she said something to the effect of "you send me froppy dick but I can't get old one out." With his help her and her husband managed to get the drive installed, but they bent the pins on the motherboard and we had to send a tech to their house to install the new board.
Yeah - add on to this, that the way many Windows app works, the modals will request information that may actually be hidden in a window behind the modal dialog. Except Windows won't let you click on, drag, move, bring-to-top, etc. the window behind the modal.
I've seen the reverse problem in Vista though, where non-model errors pop-up behind other windows, and you never even realized they're there.
Windows is a user interface nightmare.
Probably the best post I've seen on this topic so far.
:)
I do IT, everything from Implementing redundant firewalls to helping Joe figure out why his computer isn't working (Joe, the computer is turned off again). And your approach is 90% of the battle with users.
Don't make then feel stupid
Do help them
Try and keep on their good side, make jokes, generally be cheery.
When the cookies / treats / chocolate come around, you'll be sure to get some
They are likely doing a valuable job for the company (ok, maybe not sometimes), and are just not good with computers
There's a huge difference between hashing/encrypting and modifying the actual input.
Really? In what way? And if so, how is a Trim different from any other hash function?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
They are saying that they NEVER change the original string. That would, to me, indicate that they're storing the original string.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I was working tech support for a small dial up ISP and part of my job was telephone tech support for our 2,000 dial up users. The phone rang an a little old lady asked "Is the internet down?" Me "No mam the internet is fine. What seems to be the problem?" Her "Nothing happens when I push the button on the modem." At this point I figured that she didn't have an external modem so when she said modem she was talking about the tower, system unit... whatever you want to call it. I said "Well mam is it plugged in?" Her "Yes I can see where it's plugged into the power strip. I'm going to cut to the chase here. It turns out that her husband had unplugged the power strip to run the vacuum cleaner. When he finished he plugged the strip back into itself. For some reason it didn't work that way. AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
Or use an OS with sensible tools built in, and go Command+Shift+3 and pick up the PNG from the desktop.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Hmmm. I think I'll try this logic next time I have to go to the doctor or call in a plumber or electrician. There is a difference between five minutes of poking and prodding followed by a prescription and an explanation of the biochemistry behind what the medication does. If you want the latter, you go to school and you learn about it. Otherwise just take the slip of paper to the pharmacist and let the poor guy get on with the next patient. Same thing with IT. If you want to understand the system in depth ... go and learn it on your own time and pay someone who's job it is to teach that stuff. Otherwise, follow the instructions and let the IT guy get on with the job of keeping your company's network running.
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.
You don't know many doctors or mechanics on a personal basis, do you?
> Why do people just click away all messages
Because years of experience with badly-designed software has trained them to do so. Software is always bugging them with messages they can't understand, usually in application-modal dialog boxes that *must* be clicked away in order to do *anything* further.
Web browsers have historically been extremely bad about this. Oh, I can't load the page you're looking for because I can't reach the DNS server, not that you know what that means. (Modern browsers use a non-modal error page for this, but just a few years ago it was a modal dialog.) Oh, no, if you send your search terms to AltaVista _unencrypted_, some evil villian might be able to read them! Are you really sure you want to do this? (There's no excuse for this message ever being displayed at all, modally or otherwise. It's pure unmitigated superfluous information overload.) Oh, say, the site you're visiting uses encryption, did you know that? (Ditto with the last one.) Oh, now you're visiting a site that _doesn't_ use encryption. (Ibid.) Ack, the certificate from _this_ https site expires in 2012, but your computer clock thinks it's 2069, probably because your CMOS battery is dead, and I can't be bothered to check a publicly available time source to determine whether this is even close to right. (This is _almost_ forgivable, but it is without question the leading cause of expired certificate warnings, and the whole idea of an expired certificate is completely incomprehensible to five nines of all users anyway.)
But it isn't _just_ web browsers. LOTS of software regularly hits the user in the face with needless modal dialog boxes containing technical information that the user cannot be expected to understand, and the only thing to do is click it away.
Any technical error information of this kind should *always* be appended to a logfile, so that it's accessible later; not doing so is bad programming. Also displaying it for the user to see is okay, and in some cases necessary, but an application-modal dialog is absolutely the WRONG way to do so.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's not that you're always fighting with users but they all have a similar lack of common sense when using a computer, i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road.
You haven't driven in St. Louis in the rain, have you? With the first sign of precipitation, drivers become as stupid as the stereotypical computer user. Scary.
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't."
Actually, often they do. Denial is the first step in the Kubler-Ross model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
I get this, and variations of it, so commonly it nigh drives me insane.
Hello, program X is broke/has bug/not working.
Could you give me a description of the problem
When I run the program, I get an error.
What does the error say?
"File /foo/bar/bah not found."
The file mentioned is invariably an input file the user had to designate, such as "someprog --input /foo/bar/bah". So I pause, waiting for the glow of realization to descend upon them .....when it never comes.
Do you know what the problem might be? Can you fix it?
Is the error message correct? Does the file not exist?
I don't know.
Could you check?
Another pause.
The file isn't there....what do I do?
You should probably attempt to give the program the path to a file that exists. . .
This happens so often I have to count to 10 in my head and focus on not letting the irritation enter my voice. Did I mention that the majority of people I support are 2 and 3rd year Neuroscience PhD students and PhD researchers/professors?
I would have to disagree.
In the case of doctors, I'm sure you could go to any doctor and get plenty of anecdotes regarding patients refusing to heed their advice. For example, the doctor says "You have to quit smoking, or you will die." and then watches the patient light up the moment they step out of the office.
With mechanics, I would expect similar stories. "I told him he needed a new oil pump, but he ignored me. Now he needs a new engine." From my experience, mistrust of mechanics is pretty common.
I suspect the real difference in behavior is based on the separation. Much like how people behave differently in online forums than they would in real life, the simple separation of the telephone line makes users more likely to be blunt about their unwillingness to take advice, whereas in face-to-face relations with doctors or mechanics, they simply nod, agree, and then ignore.
being a support technician for a major Communications company, explaining Why is a good way to help customers, but it is one that sadly isn't understood by a great many technicians. Any ISP that gives their techs scripts they MUST follow for every call, is a company not worth being with. I'm happy that my company doesn't give me a script. I NEED to know what the heck I'm talking about to get the job done, and I can trust that 90% (ok, maybe about 80%) of the people I work with know what they're talking about as well. And the ones who don't? well, that's why there's internal escalation procedures.
Training your technicians the how and why is ultimately more useful than giving people a script. If you want to give scripted answers to customers, give it to them on a CD, or in a manual, so they don't need to call in. Make your techs work for their money, by giving them the freedom to answer the obscure.
Got a call from the guy hired to be the "computer expert" at one particular office of the firm I worked at. The office manager had decided that he wanted a color printer, done an end-run around the IT department to get it, and then wanted it networked. The "computer expert" couldn't get it done, so he called the help desk.
We tried to set the thing up every which way, but no matter what we did, we couldn't get the computer to recognize that there was a printer attached. Is it plugged in? Yes. Is it turned on? Yes. Eventually we sent our field guy to check it out.
The printer's USB cable was plugged in all right - to the computer's serial port, jammed over the lower 4 pins.
I find it funny that in a thread about thing stupid users do you post that Paint is stupid when it asked you what to name your bitmap image and it did what you told it to do... :) Maybe if it had popped up a warning when it detected that you used the string ".png" in your file's name you could have clicked OK without reading it, hehe.
Aye, no. A lot of it is tedious, simple work - defragging, virus updates, etc. that I have the time to explain it to them while it runs to the background. Most customers don't listen to me in the long run anyway, ha...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
do you work for the military?
Most people in geeky professions love feeling smart and useful. Then, when a user comes along asking them to be useful and show their intelligence (i.e. help) the geek scorns their lack of knowledge instead of being happy to help. Yes it might be the hundredth time you've answered that question, but just look at it as "this is why I'm the expert" instead of "I'm an expert and you you're asking me THAT again?"
Nice ones. The screen shot wrapped in a doc pushes me over the edge every time. I'd add:
6) Ask if the subnet mask is the 255.255.255 one when they are supposed to be a network admin.
When asked, "please give me the machines ip address, gateway ip address, subnet mask, and dns server ip address" a network administrator asked me, "is that the 255.255.255 one?"
7) Google your Answer to see if you are correct.
I told a client, "You need to open specific ports on your firewall to allow access to the specific services your wanting to provide your customers with". His response was, "Bullshit! I'm googling that. If I don't find it I will take your device out of line and it will work." My response was, "Call me back and let me know how that works out".
8) Send you an email in the middle of the night to call first thing in the morning but take the next day off.
This has happened to everyone I'm betting.
9) Disconnect the firewall to "avoid conflicts with the new ips" and cuss the living shit out of you for the "internet" being down.
I had a client installing a new IPS in line with the one they already had. In order to "avoid any conflicts" they removed the firewall (not the other ids, the firewall). They called me and asked/told/cussed, "the internet is down what did you guys do?".
10) Insist that the "purple cable can not be a crossover cable because crossover cables are red".
The clients "network assistant fixed the problem" by telling his boss to go check to see if he could get on the internet and plugged the purple cable in as soon as he was out of the room.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
>Wow, bitter mcuh? Getting angry at your customer or co-worker further alienates you, and creates more of an us/them division that will ensure your increased agitation and anger in the future. As a vet with 30 years experience in computing, with 2 sons in IT, I know the importance of communication at your customer's level, and the increased satisfaction that good communication brings to both parties. The majority of my customers don't want to know how to perform surgery, but they do want to know what went wrong, and what will fix it. By communicating effectively, my customers are happy to let me do my job, and to call me again in the future. Your customer doesn't want to know how to create a static route, but more to know why it is necessary, and what went wrong. Not in full technicolor description, but in brief but helpful explanation. If I put up a wall of technical jargon (granulomatous meningoencephalitis anyone?), am terse or grumpy, then I get complaints. Explaining things at the client's level of understanding brings trust, cooperation, and job satisfaction (and a surprising amount of gifts over and above my fees). And I still get way from work at closing time. Any job can become just a job if you take the wrong attitude. When your dissatisfaction levels increase that you take such a cynical attitude, it is time to look for something more satisfying (ie change job), or change your work habits so the job is rewarding for you. My sons both love their IT jobs. Yes, they do occasionally get frustrated at some stupid responses, but they socialise with the non-IT people, they respect them for their own knowledge, and are respected for their own skills. And they get chocolates and wine too. And most of the time they do their fucking jobs and go home at 5 just like ordinary people.
And this is hardly an isolated case of stupidity. People simply close every warning information they get because "I don't understand it anyway". Without reading it, how do you KNOW whether you understand it?
I was doing tech support for a dialup ISP about ten years ago, and I had a customer call in with some sort of problem. I could tell she'd had experience calling tech support before, because instead of closing the error dialog before calling, she had left it on the screen so she could read it to me over the phone.
So she read me the error message, and then I paraphrased it back to her. She immediately recognized the problem and said she knew how to fix that, and hung up. I was glad, because I had absolutely no idea (it wasn't anything Internet-related).
Had she attempted to understand the error message, rather than treating it as a secret code written in a magical language that only tech support people can comprehend, she would have been just fine.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
As for accountability, you don't need that for messages that were just providing information which the user only had to see...
Accountability is required. Someone saw the warning. Someone read and understood the warning: they complied with it's directive. The company/organisation has the right to know who it was. (I forgot to specify earlier that the entered deatils are logged.)
My initial thought was to enter just a name, but realised people would implicate their co-workers, hence some form of password is required. I don't like the idea either.
... and didn't give them any choices to make.
Now that's just incorrect. They had the choice to heed the incoming warning and alert the appropriate personnel, or to ignore it and accept responsibility for data losses.
this isn't directly related to support, just my personal anecdote about this 2nd-guessing you've explained so well:
A few years back I had a girlfriend. really. and I bought an original xbox because she liked video games.
We were playing some game, Hunter, I believe, because it had a redhead on the cover(take a guess at that one)
as most of us know, sometimes, sometimes quite often, when you kill someone in a video game, they may drop a weapon. and, depending on the game, or the situation in the game, they may not necessarily drop a weapon. either way, this is usually very visible on screen.
well this girl stumbled across a weapon on the ground after killing someone, and then decided she must run over every single killed enemy's body for their weapon, even though she'd only seen this with a very small percentage of the enemies we had killed so far(like maybe 25% at best), and could visually look to know whether or not there was a weapon on the ground anywhere on screen.
despite my going to school for and being employed as a computer programmer, despite my having played hundreds more hours of video games than her, despite clear visual evidence within the game itself, no suggestion, no explanation, no comment of any sort on my part could convince her that only SOME of the characters we killed would actually drop a weapon. She just HAD to check every single dead body for a weapon, not by looking on screen, but by running over their dead body with her character.
needless to say, it made the game take quite a bit longer, and killed any desire I had to play video games with her, or try to carry on any rational semi-intelligent conversation. if you don't have that, man, then you've really got less than nothing when the sex runs out ;-)
"I'm paying $20 a month and I demand you let me online now!" (From a caller in a small town experiencing a power outage.)
In September 2001, a customer in Manhattan called Earthlink to complain about his DSL service being down, and angrily threatened to cancel his account and switch to another ISP if they didn't fix it within 24 hours. He was politely informed that his Central Office was under water, and that he was more than welcome to cancel his service (an early termination fee would apply).
Yes, this is why his DSL was down.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I would be quite delighted to encounter a user who is interested in learning. That's the kind of person for whom I would go well out of my way to help. Most of the time, they don't know and they don't want to know and they resent the very idea of ever wanting to know. This includes situations where the initial problem would never have happened if they would learn a little more about how to use the system. What the majority of users seem to want is for the administrator to wave a magic wand and solve all of their problems without involving the user at all, even though the fact is that user error is the primary cause of support calls. I call them "permanent newbies" because these are the folks who can use a machine for five years without learning much more about it than what they knew the first day. If you are one of the rare users who accepts the very natural idea of becoming gradually more knowledgable about a machine the more you use it, please understand how unusual this is.
If you want to conduct an experiment, try working in a sysadmin type of role. Wait for a user to call you up and attempt to fully explain the nature of the problem to them. Note the hostile response, and note that you are regarded with contempt instead of being perceived as a friendly admin who is willing to take the time to educate and work with users. Wait for nine more calls and receive nine more hostile responses. You will then understand why admins don't do this and you may also understand why people who routinely catch flak from those they are sincerely trying to help might see humor ("wise knowing inside jokes") as one of the healthier ways to deal with this.
Believe me when I tell you that sysadmins aren't fond of this situation either. If you sincerely want to learn and grow and improve your skills with the tools that you use every day, and are willing to work with the IT department as part of this process, then you are so rare as to be statistically insignificant. I cannot prove this, but I believe that most sysadmins want to work with machines and networks and find themselves working with users instead. Users who so thoroughly resent having a problem in the first place (as though anything else humans do never has problems) that they neither appreciate nor respect the person who is trying to help them. I assure you that no sysadmin has ever tried to imagine the best possible scenario and come up with this one.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If it will also work through regular phone lines, I'll be the first one in line to buy it.
file:
It kills me to explain, yet again, that memory is chips and is NOT the same thing as disk space. People see memory (resource) errors on their windows machines, then delete a couple of files but can't figure out why they still have the same error.
I think this has more to do with her inability to admit that she was wrong than with your credentials or your competence. Lots of people, especially authority figures and significant others, seem to think that they are saving face or preserving respect by never admitting that they were wrong or made a mistake, when the reality is that refusing to admit when you were wrong when it's painfully obvious is a great way to lose respect. I'm not really sure where this idea comes from. It's as though such people are constantly evaluating everything in terms of "who comes out of this looking superior?" This is a self-imposed limitation like any other. It's a shame because as long as this is true, it guarantees that they will never understand that you can be a human being and make mistakes and learn from them without anyone being superior or inferior to anyone else.
As soon as it does run out, that's when you find out whether it was another fling or if you really have something good.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I took great joy in sending an "Teh intarnets is down!!" email a few months ago to our network guy. Exchange servers worked...dedicated line to the main office worked...outbound link from our office? Not so much. :-) He got the email, I still couldn't get to google.com.
Perhaps Microsoft could embed a replacement for Clippy the Paperclip--say, Stabby the Sabre? "I see you are trying to stab someone in the face. Would you like help? I'll grab the bastard from behind."
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
I'm sorry but if they are that much more concerned about being popular, then either they are cowards or they do not deserve the credit for thinking ability that you are giving them.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - J . Krishnamurti.
At some point you need your own idea of what health (mental and physical) looks like and you need the strength to continuously refine that idea and try to live up to it regardless of what anyone else is doing. This is the fallacy of the current method of defining who is and is not "well-adjusted". It is defined more in terms of what everyone else is doing and less in terms of objective criteria.
I have studied psychology and found it to be superficial and unsatisfying compared to Eastern philosophy (non-theistic philosophy, not religion) in terms of finding real answers to why we have the problems that we do. In fact, manipulating outward behavior is about the only thing at which modern psychology seems to excel. I reject the notion that it should be used for this purpose, as the centrally managed existence is the very antithesis of people who think for themselves and live their own lives. I am not a therapist and I am not a psychologist, so what follows is the product of my own critical thinking and nothing more.
The number of people I know who are not and have never been on some kind of anti-depressant or other psychological medication is a short list indeed. I believe our society is sick; in fact, "collective madness" is probably not too strong of a term to use. It is quite natural that a healthy person will be unhappy or otherwise suffer from living in a society that is not only sick but also shows no real interest in getting well. For various reasons, we don't really like to deal with underlying causes and put them to rest. So we see each case of this as a list of symptoms and we have become very clever at creating medications that address those symptoms without seriously questioning why they exist and why they are increasing. We give those to people who aren't happy here and tell them to buck up, meanwhile no truly satisfying improvements to the way we live occur. I am not saying that there are no people who truly need to be medicated, only that they didn't get that way in a vacuum.
The educational system as we know it today was created by people who wanted to meet the needs of business during the Industrial Revolution. The biggest fear of the Industrial Revolution tycoons was "overproduction", that is, they saw the American traditions of independence and self-sufficiency and the entrepreneurial spirit as tremendous threats to their control of markets that required large initial investments. The current educational system was (openly) designed to produce people who kne
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Oooh, hey, here's a relevant anecdote:
I switched from DSL to cable about six months back, and it was installed on a Friday morning when my wife was the only one home. The guy who installed it told her he'd verified that everything was online, etc.
That night I came home hoping to use my new blazing fast internet, but found that it didn't work. I made sure everything was physically connected right, etc., and I was able to connect to the configuration page on the modem from my network, but my wireless router couldn't get a DHCP address.
So I called the cable company. I patiently, politely walked through about twenty minutes of "can you power cycle the machine" and "are you certain you see two green lights and a blinking light" before I offered my theory that there was some setting on the modem that switched it between being a transparent router and being a NAT. I was informed that, no, there was no such setting on any of their modems. The guy also told me that my connection clearly did work because he was currently pinging my machine. I unplugged everything except the modem and asked if he could still ping "my computer". Yep, he could. He finally told me that my only option was to return the modem to a service center and get a new one, so I hung up and called back, hoping to get someone who knew what they were talking about.
The next lady I talked to was very polite, and I spent another 20 minutes walking through the "reboot your windows and tell me when you're done" steps. She eventually told me I'd have to get the modem replaced. I asked her about the NAT theory, and she assured me that I was babbling nonsense. I think she comped me $5.00 in the end since guy who came to our house didn't set it up right.
Finally, after I got off the phone with the second tech, I remembered that they hadn't disconnected our DSL yet. I plugged into it, went to google, typed in something like "DLX-4000 secret admin password" and immediately got instructions for elevating myself in the modem's configuration page. That allowed me to reset the modem to the factory default settings, which turned it into a transparent router. It's been working fine ever since.
So, to answer your question, tech support people are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty fucking dumb, too. I guess if they weren't, they'd be engineers.
Can't always blame the user for clicking away warnings when there are way too many trivial warning boxes and messages (depending on the OS of course). In windoze especially. Yes, I know my wireless connection is connected; I'm on it. Yes, I'm sure I want to empty my spam folder. No, I don't want to clean up my icons. Sheesh.
I'm going to be disposing of a 21" CRT as soon as I get around to lugging it down the stairs (assuming that I don't trip and break my neck doing it). Giving it to a customer with a 60+ year old user with vision issues. She wants a bigger picture, so 1024x768 is what she uses since it's the minimum for an application; it looks like crap on the LCD she's using now. I suspect that she'll be very pleased with the improvement in picture quality. When I offered it to these folks the response was "What do you want for it?"
"My floor space back."
fencepost
just a little off
> Microsoft makes a decent keyboard but other than that, I don't use anything Microsoft on my own machines
Actually their mice are also decent, and some of their fonts are pretty good...
> One thing about Windows that I find to be a nuisance is that so many
> non-critical messages will trigger system-modal dialog boxes.
Actually, these days most of them are only application-modal. It's still a problem, but system-modal dialogs (which I associate mainly with Windows 3.x) were even worse.
The problem isn't entirely unique to Windows. Web browsers, including the major open-source ones, were guilty of extreme overuse of application-modal dialog boxes for frequent non-critical and sometimes even inconsequential messages until fairly recently.
But yes, it does tend to be a particularly common annoyance on Windows systems. The fault lies mostly with the application vendors, but the paradigm that the OS and its documentation encourage are not entirely irrelevant.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The funniest support call I ever had was from my boss (of a software company), trying to install a set of floppy disks using our install script (written in PowerBatch IIRC) on his laptop, on a train, communicating via his mobile phone (he often did this, as he seemed to like doing things at the worst possible times and in the worst situations).
Anyway, the batch script looked for a specific MS-DOS disk label in order to verify that the correct disk was in the drive, and it appeared that his disk set didn't have the correct labels set, so we asked him to change the label (to DISK#3 or somesuch). A while later he rang back and said it hadn't helped - he'd stuck a new label on the disk and surprisingly the software hadn't recognised this...
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Are many of your clients referred to you by sysadmins after asking stupid questions?
> i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road [as on computers].
Where do you live? I want to visit sometime and drive around, even if I don't really need to get anywhere, just for the sheer experience of driving in a place where people exhibit common sense on the road.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
In cases like that... never trust end-users to notify you of problems that can cause data loss if left unfixed.
On Linux, go with a simple bash script to monitor the arrays and e-mail / page you when they go bad. Then learn how to use Nagios or other monitoring software as a primary notification system. (The bash script then becomes a backup system for times when the monitoring software is having other issues.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Because they're assuming that everyone has word?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I worked in-store support at Best Buy in the days before the Geek Squad. While my store was in a city, in the not so distant rural areas, there were people who didn't have phone service or power and never had. This was also during the infancy of the "sign up for three years of dial-up and get a $400 rebate" which they could use on a $400 PC we happened to sell. With "free" PC's and and a mass of people with zero exposure to technology beyond a tractor, you can see where this is going. "I couldn't get on the internet last night. Was it down?" Cust: I can't get on American Online. (which is what "they" called any ISP) Me: [goes through all of the normal checks]Are you talking to me on the same line you try to connect with? Cust: No. Me: So you have two phone lines? Cust: I don't have a phone. I'm on my neighbor's cordless phone. Me: You'll need a phone line to connect to the internet, sir. Cust: [sputtercussgripe] Another gentleman came in to get a spiffy new 56K modem. We offered to install it for him for the standard $45. He looked at us and then at the modem. We could see the wheels turning. Shortly after, we got the standard "You're a bunch of overpaid monkeys and I can do this myself" followed by the "I have no idea how to do this for myself so I'm going to pump you for free information." One of our techs took pity on the gentleman and gave him a crash course in IRQ's, ISA/PCI slots and the like. We received a very confused phone call a few hours later, and the same tech explained jumpers to the customer. The next morning he was waiting on our doorstep with his computer and the modem. Upon examination, we discovered that he had, indeed, removed all of the jumpers. He had also removed everything else with wire cutters. There was another instance similar to the previous. You can simply use your imagination substituting a SCSI HD, IDE cable, a rubber mallet and throw in some raunchy gay porn for a wildcard. Another free computer user brought in a machine that had dried Coke all over the outside of the case. Even in cases of obvious abuse, we would still take a look at the computer since it usually made the user feel a bit better. I had a pretty good idea what I would find when I opened the case...but I was wrong. The Coke itself might not have actually destroyed the computer. However, the dozens of roaches that ran out when I pried to side panel off surely did. While most instances worthy of note were caused by ignorance on the part of the user, many were also the result of a complete lack of common sense. That is what makes them laughable.
> For me, being the reciever of the image, say I have to upload it to some ticket-system,
> it takes me a LOT of extra steps extracting them from the Word-document
The way I count, it only takes one step more than extracting them from a zipfile. You're not actually trying to use Word to do it, are you? That would be a real pain, sure, but why would you do it that way? Just use OpenOffice to do a quick Save As to ODF, and voila, you've got yourself a zipfile. No big deal.
Now, if they were sending you screenshots in a Publisher document, *that* would be a pain.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has
> an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you.
That would seem to make sense, but it's not always the case. In the industry I currently work in, for instance, it is widely considered a foregone conclusion that an IT person, if you can afford to hire one, will necessarily make more money than most of your other employees.
However, I don't see what the big deal is about getting screenshots in a Word document. It's a de facto standard format that's easy to deal with, takes just one operation in OpenOffice to convert it to a (specialized) zipfile from which you can extract the images using standard tools. It's not something I'd complain about. On the contrary, if any of my users not only remembered *how* to take screenshots but also thought to *do* it when having a problem, and sent them to me, I think I'd faint.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> I use Outlook
Hand in your geek card, quick. As a slashdot reader, you should definitely know better than to use Outlook. The most insecure mail program you should even *consider* using is Thunderbird, and that only because it's a Mozilla product. Pegasus or Eudora are better, but still a little too end-user-oriented to gain you any real geek points. Ideally you should be using something not just secure, but also inherently geeky, and either cli-based or embedded into or integrated with a text editor. Gnus is good, or you could get by with a combo Mutt/vim setup, with an aalib-based viewer for image attachments. Or for serious geek cred you could write your own mailreader, preferably in a pure-functional language.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Interesting idea. :) Or, i suppose I could use something like wv or docvert. In any case, pretty much overhead, in clicks and whatnot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
That's not always an option. First, often you're pressed into using whatever the local environment dictates. This is, to my never-ending pain, most of the times some sort of MS system.
And second, when dealing with financial institutions, paranoia is running rampart. You will NEVER get them to agree to an alarm being sent to you, no matter whether text message or mail. Be also prepared to have the root password changed on you and you being yelled at when you require it (alternates between "why the hell don't you know it, what kinda support is this?" and "we can't tell you, this is top secret stuff, now fix it without!").
I'm only in this for the money. You learn to swallow a lot of abuse when an hour of your time borders the four digits...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's "that's".
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - J . Krishnamurti.
That just nutshell'd my current mental state. Thanks a ton for the quote and the references.
I was about to say that its nice to see someone browsing at 0 or -1 too but i guess thats a like mindedness kind of parallel =). As for the educational system side of things, i put Woodrow Wilson right up front for the blame game. The point i was really wanting to make though is that that is only PART of the systems of "Education". Societal exposure, parental involvement, and media play huge roles apart from just schooling itself.
Ice Cream has no bones.
In the real world of business, Outlook is often the required MUA.
By setting "view all e-mail in plain text", you remove most of the things that make Outlook unsecure. BTW, Outlook, like every other computer program (except maybe Eliza) is not "insecure", as that would require an emotional state.
They'd just hide it in a corner of the screen "so that it wouldn't get in the way, I need to get work done you know".