Had an older coworker who was on a long call with a user; his hands got tired so he put it on speaker after a while.
At a certain point my coworker fell asleep… and so did the user on the phone (snoring).
One monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
That’s why most companies with fewer than say like a thousand people choose a username that’s almost always first letter of first name, last name and then a couple of numbers.
If you can’t remember your own name then there are bigger issues than whether you can sign into the computer.
Once upon a time before there were smartphones…
The internet existed already, e-mail as well.
We got a letter on real paper.
The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his PC screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉
It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…
I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂
no link to pic?
What’s your address they’ll mail it to you ;p
lol
I got called in to handle a situation where an employee was spying on his boss’s emails. He got caught when a read notification went out from his account.
He got called into a meeting and when they explained what it was about he didn’t say a word, but left the meeting, went back to his office, removed the hard drive from his computer and left with it.
I just had to figure out what he’d done, make sure he didn’t have any further access, and fill in until they hired someone permanent. No idea what happened after that.
Holy shit, that’s some sketch there. When you decide the least incriminating thing is to say nothing and abscond with a drive… damn.
Yeah the company I work at security would’ve 100% got that hdd from him…
“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”
“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Can you print green?”
“Green works fine!”
“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”
Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…
“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”
“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”
I did support for inexpensive, but commercial grade network equipment. I’d just been promoted to a senior support engineer 2 days earlier. My boss came to me and said “we have a customer who just deployed a over $250k of equipment and it doesn’t work. The customer, sales person and account rep are on the call, we need you to figure it out”. After an hour or so going over their setup we found out our new switch connects to a 3com switch over a fiber line. 3com was out of business at this point, but I managed to find documentation on the product online. It’s fiber ports were FDDI. Our switch only supported Ethernet (No one really supported FDDI at this time.) At which point the sales person said “we’ll just have to replace the rest of the hardware” and the customer agreed.
Once had to explain to an old lady (in full-time employment in a job that requires use of a computer) that the mouse moves around on the desk surface. She was trying to move the cursor by putting the mouse on the screen.
When trying to teach my grandpa how to use a computer, he kept lifting it into the air to make it go up on the screen. We never got past that. Also double clicking was click…1.5second…click. Couldn’t get him going any faster.
Industrial but guess it counts.
Giant motor is supposed to kick on, run for a moment in reverse, wind down, and then go forward. What is happening instead is it kicks on then the whole system goes into stopped state. Two days on the phone and I can’t figure it out, pouring over the code, trying everything.
Suddenly the guy in the field coughs and says “sorry it’s really dusty here”.
It clicks in my head. I tell him to manually push down on the contactor. He says he feels resistance I tell him that’s good and push harder. It give in and I tell him to start again. Works perfectly.
The dust had combined with the internal oil of the contactor making a sludge. The contactor has two coils, a high torque high current one for starting and a low torque low current one to hold. Not much different than a starter in a car. The sludge has stopped the second coil from engaging keeping it locked in high current. Since it was DC the coil kept drawing more and more amps until the power supply couldn’t keep the voltage high enough. Which made the PLC halt. When the PLC halted it erased all the temporary bits including the one that said it was running. The PLC stopped telling the contactor to engage and the power went back to normal.
The sequence was maybe a tenth of a second.
Loved how you broke it down even though I didn’t understand much
Thanks. Here maybe this
This is a small contactor. When that blue center part goes in 1L1 becomes connected to the 2T1 and the same things happens to the other two. Basically I am using a little bit of electricity to flip a switch on or off. Turning on or off the motor.
The blue center part is what I asked him to push in by hand.
Not tech support, but in tech, a software team with a bunch of naive Indian expats named one of the software sprints “mandigo” after Django Unchained. Only me and and Northern Irishman got it and we laughed our asses off.
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I worked for a college for a while.
All of the student records were on a mini frame IBM as400 from 1986.
The only connectivity to this device was via a 100 MB ethernet connection. There were no backups. The tape drive that was used for backing up this data I had gone defunct well before my time at the college.
I started noticing errors in the connection logs and I notified the CIO, saying that we needed to replace this box or upgrade it or do something before the connection failed or else we could lose access to data that we are federally required to maintain.
They noted my concerns, and then they let it go.
About 6 months later, the ethernet card failed.
I let them know that our only way to get data into or out of this machine has gone offline and cannot be resuscitated.
They asked me to fix it I told them I can’t. The card was down. I had gone through the proper processes of rebooting the machine and opening it up to take a look but couldn’t find anything wrong with it I tried reseeding the cards, but this system is old as shit and they didn’t make parts for it anymore and even if they did the school would have to buy it and the school is too cheap to buy them.
People are running around scared for losing their jobs because the consequence for this not coming back up could be so severe as to cause the entire college to be shut down.
Okay so now that the sage is set, a few days later the former IT guy happened to stop by the college. This dude was 70 something years old if he was a day, and I saw him out in the corridors.
I walked at tuna I was like hey man just so you know the as400 network connection is down, do you have any tips on how I might bring it back up?
He said hang on a second.
I let him into the server room and he waved his hands in the air over the as 400 and said try it again.
And sure as shit, the fucking network connection came back up.
I lost my shit.
The administrators for the college lost their shit.
Everyone’s fucking mind was blown, and somehow they suddenly magically had the money to purchase a cloud as400 and upload all of our data to it within the next 6 weeks.
I got to retire that box but I’m never ever going to forget how somebody fixed a 40 year old ethernet card by waving their fucking hands in the air
This reminds me of the magic / more magic switch.
Hahaha, he was having you pretty good! 😅
Magic! Have you ever tried magic yourself? I mean stage magic, not the one with old ladies looking into glass balls and puffing weird smoke.
One of their principles is: “It always happens before it happens”. Means, you have to prepare things and then, when things appear, it looks like magic because nobody has watched you when you prepared it.
My explanation to that magical AS400 is this:
The old IT guy wasn’t there by accident. No way. He was there because somebody had called him. He was the only known person who could ever fix the problem after all. Then he had fixed the AS400 already, while you did not watch. Later when you met him, he decided to play his little show, and well, later he had a good laugh…
That’s a good guess, bits it’s highly unlikely as he showed up in the afternoon and I had been working on it not an hour before.
That and I was the only person other than the CIO who had access to the server room.
My friend recently introduced the concept of the machine spirit to me; the idea that all computers and machines have spirits and that the more complex and complicated the machine and software, the higher the level of technomage required to submit it. Most computers and desktops have low machine spirits so people with basic knowledge can make it work, but machines with purpose or that are complicated require high level technomages to operate. I think about that sometimes when I can fix my friends stuff in minutes but my machine will have issues that take days or weeks to fix.
I’ve long bought into the idea of the machine spirit, and I have so many anecdotal stories about it. Most of the time it’s stuff like the mechanics laughing because they finally get to be on the other side of TPS (Technician Proximity Syndrome), but others are more amusing to me. Like the number of times I’ve fixed something by threatening to microwave the machine piece by piece and further turn it into the desktop/server of Theseus.
Sounds like when someone calls me and whatever it is suddenly works when I do it. I always tell them it just got spooked back in line by the IT guy.
This makes sense. My level was too low to reactivate the ancient artifact. Hopefully I’ve leveled up since then.
A long time ago had an attorney call in looking for help dialing internationally. I said “sure we can help you call abroad” and he said, “well first I’d have to get her number.”
…I think about that shit all the time and its been like 12 years.
I don’t know if that’s a great or terrible dad joke.
The best dad jokes are both.
Not me, but I recall a story from a while back. ISP tech answers call from an irate customer who isn’t able to get online. After basic troubleshooting, the tech advises the customer to power cycle the cable modem and router…the customer scoffs, how can I do that when my power is out? 😂
Years ago I worked for a healthcare IT company that had its developers, IT administrators, and help desk all reporting to the CTO. The CTO was an MD with a computer science degree from a prestigious university.
I was in a different department entirely but I was invited to a presentation he was giving and came to the conference room a bit early. I walked in to him in a full panic trying to connect his laptop to the projector. I plugged in the HMDI and hit Win + P and he reacted like I had just defused a bomb. Really made it hard to take seriously his five year strategic plan for all of our IT projects.
A year later he took extended leave to travel internationally and came back to work with a full perm and added the word “tree” to his last name. He lasted about 6 more weeks before he announced he was leaving. He is now the CIO of a large university.
They day of the presentation was probably their first day using Windows.
I wouldn’t be surprised!
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
I guess not everybody’s that much into tennis :)
