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Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Garrison said:
So today I had to deal with the flipside of terrible callers. I've currently been loaned out to help the desk at a major governmental organization. Twice today I pick up calls from customer who've spoke to members of the permanent team, and they give me their ticket number and explain what they were told on the phone. So I look at the tickets and there's, nothing. Nothing about what they said to the customer, no action taken, just a ticket that's been sat in someone's queue for days waiting for, whatever.

This is why some people get so angry with tech support, they start expecting that if they raise incidents nothing get done.
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Don’t get me started. The one that absolutely drives me towards gruesome murder is when we get a request in, and it’s a problem we had before. I find the old ticket to see what was wrong and what the fix was. It has s single note entry “Problem Resolved”. Nothing in what the issue was, what resolved it, who resolved it. And from supposedly trained IT people.

If I ever become s manager, that will be a firing* offense.


*-squad. Firing squad.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Hellbound said:
Don’t get me started. The one that absolutely drives me towards gruesome murder is when we get a request in, and it’s a problem we had before. I find the old ticket to see what was wrong and what the fix was. It has s single note entry “Problem Resolved”. Nothing in what the issue was, what resolved it, who resolved it. And from supposedly trained IT people.

If I ever become s manager, that will be a firing* offense.


*-squad. Firing squad.
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Back during my very short and unpleasant (it ended in court) as a software developed for <REDACTED> we were working on Version 5 of an immensely popular commonly used piece of software. We had bugs in <our giant unreliable bug database> that were identical to those for Version 4. The Resolution field for over two hundred of them was CLOSED AS FIXED.
With no data as to how they were fixed. Most were by three people, none of whom still worked for <REDACTED>.
 
catsmate said:
Then they should be used an issued device with proper security and management.
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Some of them do. Others don't want to carry around two phones all the time, quite understandably in my opinion. InTune is the security package that allows them to access secure data. Here's what it says about it on our Knowledge Base.

Microsoft Intune is a service that focusses on mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM), providing users with a way in which to access departmental information and applications via a mobile device.

The Intune platform is run by the department, with each registered user connecting via a client installed on their mobile device.

The client will create a work profile on the mobile device, allowing departmental versions of applications including MS Outlook and MS Teams to be run securely on the device.
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In other news, it's a public holiday again and once again I am working. Yay for holiday pay, and happy birthday to Her Majesty the Queen. It's not really her birthday - that's in April - but today is the day that we have off because of it. Except for some places. Which is why I get to work today.
 
Gotta love non-technical managers being over technical people. Mine just failed to realize the point of my polite, friendly, explanation-filled email was to trick her into assuming responsibility for some very bad data. I raised some thoughtful objections, asked if I should go ahead, and she said yes. CYA accomplished. She really should have taken a few minutes to wonder why I would write four paragraphs of technical stuff to her for no reason.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Gotta love non-technical managers being over technical people. Mine just failed to realize the point of my polite, friendly, explanation-filled email was to trick her into assuming responsibility for some very bad data. I raised some thoughtful objections, asked if I should go ahead, and she said yes. CYA accomplished. She really should have taken a few minutes to wonder why I would write four paragraphs of technical stuff to her for no reason.
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:D :thumbsup:

So will you be watching the disaster unfold from afar? Or up-close and on triple time?
 
I just figured out a thing. One of our automated tools for creating VoIP accounts was just throwing an error when trying to create the account. I just worked out exactly why. There is one field in one section of the account that is limited to 22 characters, presumably because that is the limitation on the physical phone itself. In other places in the account, the full name is accepted normally. Try and create a VoIP account with a name that is longer than 22 characters, and it throws an error.

This automated tool doesn't actually display a meaningful error message though, just "failed to create the account" so it took a little bit of sleuthing on my part to figure it out.
 
arthwollipot said:
I just figured out a thing. One of our automated tools for creating VoIP accounts was just throwing an error when trying to create the account. I just worked out exactly why. There is one field in one section of the account that is limited to 22 characters, presumably because that is the limitation on the physical phone itself. In other places in the account, the full name is accepted normally. Try and create a VoIP account with a name that is longer than 22 characters, and it throws an error.

This automated tool doesn't actually display a meaningful error message though, just "failed to create the account" so it took a little bit of sleuthing on my part to figure it out.
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Good job Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegel*steinhausen*bergerdorff*welche*vor*altern*waren*gewissenhaft*schafers*wessen*schafe*waren*wohl*gepflege*und*sorgfaltigkeit*beschutzen*vor*angreifen*durch*ihr*raubgierig*feinde*welche*vor*altern*zwolfhundert*tausend*jahres*voran*die*erscheinen*von*der*erste*erdemensch*der*raumschiff*genacht*mit*tungstein*und*sieben*iridium*elektrisch*motors*gebrauch*licht*als*sein*ursprung*von*kraft*gestart*sein*lange*fahrt*hinzwischen*sternartig*raum*auf*der*suchen*nachbarschaft*der*stern*welche*gehabt*bewohnbar*planeten*kreise*drehen*sich*und*wohin*der*neue*rasse*von*verstandig*menschlichkeit*konnte*fortpflanzen*und*sich*erfreuen*an*lebenslanglich*freude*und*ruhe*mit*nicht*ein*furcht*vor*angreifen*vor*anderer*intelligent*geschopfs*von*hinzwischen*sternartig*raum Sr. never worked for your organisation!
 
JoeMorgue said:
It's listed as a bullet item on our long range plan for a couple of monthly status meetings now, but no firm has been set for rolling it out. I'm hoping it just doesn't happen.
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Obviously a review panel is needed for deep study of the objective. Once it gets beyond twelve people and starts budding sub-committees it's dead in the water.
 
Have a site down because the Comcast Business Modem won't power on.

After spending 2 hours on hold and then over an hour going down the checklist:

Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Have you tried restarting it?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Do you see any activities lights?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Unplug it from the wall, wait 10 seconds..."
Me: "IT... WON'T... POWER... ON."

I got an appointment for a tech to show up between 10 and 12 today. It's almost 4. I've been on hold since 2, and their chat window literally has "Thank you for your continued patience, we will be with you momentarily." repeated 49 times (I counted.)
 
JoeMorgue said:
Have a site down because the Comcast Business Modem won't power on.

After spending 2 hours on hold and then over an hour going down the checklist:

Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Have you tried restarting it?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Do you see any activities lights?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Unplug it from the wall, wait 10 seconds..."
Me: "IT... WON'T... POWER... ON."

I got an appointment for a tech to show up between 10 and 12 today. It's almost 4. I've been on hold since 2, and their chat window literally has "Thank you for your continued patience, we will be with you momentarily." repeated 49 times (I counted.)
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They are trying to see if you can break the record.
 
The finally answered the chat at about 60 repeats of the message (I had stopped counting at that point) and it took me 10 more minutes of them going through the script to learn that the guy should be here in 30-45 minutes.

My workday ends in 60 minutes.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Have a site down because the Comcast Business Modem won't power on.

After spending 2 hours on hold and then over an hour going down the checklist:

Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Have you tried restarting it?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Do you see any activities lights?"
Me: "It won't power on."
Comcast: "Unplug it from the wall, wait 10 seconds..."
Me: "IT... WON'T... POWER... ON."

I got an appointment for a tech to show up between 10 and 12 today. It's almost 4. I've been on hold since 2, and their chat window literally has "Thank you for your continued patience, we will be with you momentarily." repeated 49 times (I counted.)
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Saw a comic the other day. Guy on a phone being told “Your call is important to us. Please hold until it is unimportant to you”
 
arthwollipot said:
This automated tool doesn't actually display a meaningful error message though, just "failed to create the account" so it took a little bit of sleuthing on my part to figure it out.
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^ This. Just what is it with lazy / incompetent / just plain stupid programmers who can't tell you why something went wrong, only that it did?

"Could not contact web site." WHY? No network connection? No DNS record for it? No route to host? Site doesn't respond on port 80 or 443? Accepted the connection but broke it again? Returned a funky 5xx error?

Some messages, Windows being the most notable offender here, are literally "Something went wrong." A lot of Windows apps will give an error code like "0x8001dead" and expect you to look it up yourself. But putting that string into a search engine usually gives you lot of hits like "What does error code 0x8001dead mean?" Sites with a bit more information all too often offer boatloads of speculation and very little of practical use.
 
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