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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
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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
> 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.
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!"
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.
I changed careers and am now a mortician. These days I get fewer stupid questions from my clients.
Why can't you fix hiiiiiiiiiiiim???
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.
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
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!"
Yes, it's made up, but it's one of the most funny tech support bits ever made! http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/
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.
There was a similar incident with a Frap spilled "near" a keyboard (stuck keys do so many wondrous things!).
I had a user who called me over to her desk and demanded, angrily, to know "why we bolt down all the monitors? Do you think we're going to steal them?" I informed her that we do not bolt or glue down any monitors, but sure enough, when I went to lift it, it felt like it was glued down. I pulled really, really hard and it ripped off the desk, to reveal a giant circle of dried coffee.
Another time, she called me over because her mouse was acting funny. I picked it up, it seemed fine, but when I took the ball out the encoders had water droplets all over them. "Why is there water in here?" "Well I spilled coffee on it so I washed it off in the sink." "Ah! well, that's the problem! Please don't ever get anything related to your computer wet" Got her a new mouse, ten minutes later, same problem, and she is angry and impatient. I came over found that there was water on the lens (replaced it with an optical) and felt her mousepad. Yep, she had also washed her mousepad.
:`-( !
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.
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
Yes, I had one of these. It's a real pain, because when something is broken, you expect to hear beep codes on the PC speaker. If the speakers are unplugged, as a result of disassembly before diagnostics, then no error messages are presented. The error would probably have been "[cp]U Fail", not "You fool" - though the latter interpretation isn't unreasonable in the context!
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
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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."
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!
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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;
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.
A user entered password is not generally something that you want to modify - at all.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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. :)
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.
As long as you use a non-polar solvent (I use ethanol or isoproplyl alcohol) of high purity and allow for a hour or 2 of drying time, you should be all right.
Ive cleaned motherboards with 90% ethanol (everclear is only good for cleaning, not drinking) and powered them on in an hour with no problems whatsoever.
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.
I'll take you at your word that your questions are serious, and try to give serious answers.
The world is a big place, with lots of valuable things to learn. Time is scarce, intellects are imperfect, and interests vary. It's almost 2010, and all I know about electricity is how to plug stuff in and how to call an electrician. I know very little about accounting, tax law, or financial investment and have no plans to learn even though they would be useful. I expect to see more solar power, but don't plan to learn much about it, even if I buy a house that uses it.
I make my living with computers because of the happy coincidence that I like them and I can get paid for it. The people you are railing against are your customers. Whether directly or indirectly, they are paying you money to know things so that they don't have to. Their time is apparently better spent being dentists or trapeeze artists. Aren't you glad you don't have to learn to do those things? Despite what you say, I think that auto-mechanics are a perfect analogy. Sometimes I ask my mechanic stupid questions, but he smiles and takes my money. We're both largely satisfied with the arrangement.
/...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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......
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
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.
An issue that I have with washing keyboards is calcium from hard water shorting out stuff in the keyboard, so that it doesn't matter how long I dry the keyboard for.
I had to take the keyboard apart and clean it with water run through a purifier.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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)
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
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?".
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?
over the phone support:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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ip address finding
A user's lack of knowledge is not a technical problem. It's a managerial one, really. Why did this person get hired if they lack the basic skills required to get the job done (like, using Office)? If a salesperson can't read, HR doesn't dispatch someone to teach them; that person gets fired for lacking the ability to do their job.
Now if it's actually a technical problem, that's what support staff is for, but don't confuse "user ignorance" with "technical problem". I don't ask my mechanic to teach me how to drive, and hell, I'm paying him out of my own pocket!
Truthfully, I'll let even user ignorance slide if I can tell they've made an honest attempt to find the answer themselves, no matter how far down the wrong track they may have been. The fact that they tried before asking is good enough for me. But when a user displays a constant pattern of:
that's when I get annoyed. Or, as is frequently the case, when the user has an abusive attitude, like their incompetence is somehow IT's fault.
I'm not suggesting IT departments are staffed by saints who can do no wrong. But I don't look for ways to circumvent the NDAs and NCs the legal department made me sign -- why are they looking for ways to circumvent the filters we put in place? I don't try to find clever ways of violating HR's sexual harassment policies without getting caught -- why are they trying to violate my "no torrents" policy?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
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.
You're an accountant, right? It is your damned job to know how to use office, not mine. I haven't got a clue how to write excel macros, but you also probably haven't got a clue how to code perl.
I'm not an accountant, okay? I haven't got a damned clue how to use Mas90. If the server starts dropping connections...call me, if you want to know how to print an invoice, don't. It is your job to know these things.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
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.
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.
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!
No, SRAM is not "permanent"...it just doesn't require refreshing like DRAM. It does, however, require power, just like DRAM. This makes them both "volatile", as opposed to non-volatile flash memory.
The difference between the SRAM and DRAM is that every DRAM cell "leaks" a bit of the charge even when power is applied, so it would eventually result in errors.