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

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malbui said:
The number of times people have told me something along the lines of “I didn’t read the message; I just clicked on OK”...
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I remember a case like that in a UK financial client; he was told, to his face and in the presence of three tiers of his management and myself, by a senior manager that he was clearly too stupid to be allowed access to a computer attached to their systems.
He was gone that day.
 
CORed said:
That would require actually reading the error message. My dear departed mother was a very intelligent woman who apparently turned off her brain as soon as she sat down in front of a computer. I ended up being her tech support for issues with her home computer..
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I remember years ago, when my mother's old PC was doing a Windows update, it asked for permission to update the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.
What my mother saw onscreen was "Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool", and panicked.
 
The other morning my login at work went a bit wonky and I got the error message “Provider could not perform the action since the context was acquired as silent” which was not immediately useful but which did at least possess some kind of poetic zen qualities.
 
malbui said:
The other morning my login at work went a bit wonky and I got the error message “Provider could not perform the action since the context was acquired as silent” which was not immediately useful but which did at least possess some kind of poetic zen qualities.
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Smartcard? RAS? Someone fiddling with the CA box?
 
Armitage72 said:
I remember years ago, when my mother's old PC was doing a Windows update, it asked for permission to update the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.
What my mother saw onscreen was "Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool", and panicked.
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I saw someone panicked by the Tampermonkey extension this afternoon.
 
Wudang said:
This. Using Notes at IBM Hursley was good. It was all setup nicely and extra features and stuff added like integration with the phone/voicemail system (IBM DTMail) and then corporate "standardized" it. A strange use of the word with which I was previously unfamiliar. I ended up redirecing my mail to my AIX server.
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Lotus Notes was good when it was used as it was intended to be used - as a collaborative database tool with powerful sharing functions long before Sharepoint was a glint in Microsoft's eye. Most enterprises used it as an email client, which it was not good at. Early versions of Notes didn't even have an email function. When it was added, it was basically an extension of the existing function to create new documents in a database. You were just creating the new document in someone else's Personal Holdings.
 
Giordano said:
IMO some designers of dialog boxes use the "OK" option too carelessly. I've seen dialog boxes with the only choice being "OK." So I as user have no choice to make, right. OK.... And I've seen the opposite with "No, Yes, OK" as three choices. It seems to me that Yes should mean "Yes, go ahead with the specific process that you are proposing," whereas OK should mean only that "I read and understand what you are telling me. OK man!" Maybe even better than OK would be "I understand." In the latter case perhaps it would be just educational, or related to a process or event that cannot be stopped. "You just initiated a reformatting of your hard drive. You cannot stop it now. This will change your answer if your spouse asks you how your day went tonight. Understand? Like OK dude?"
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I also think many designers over-use "Are you sure?" type dialog boxes, which tends to lead to automatic clicking through. My preference is that, unless I'm about to do something irreversible, eg. delete a file or folder, close a document without saving, or format my hard drive, I would like the software to assume I know what I'm doing and just do it.
 
arthwollipot said:
Even if the error message isn't exactly meaningful on the surface, it's usually enough to be able to recognise it and know what to do about it. The "0C:0D" error in Notes was like that. I came to know exactly how to fix that one. Can't remember now because it's been too long since I've used Lotus Notes.

Don't miss it. **** Lotus Notes.
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I completely agree with that sentiment. When my workplace was using Lotus notes, I had an email signature that contained an ASCII drawing. I had to quit using that sig because running spell check on an email with that ACII drawing would crash Lotus notes (trigger an error that would shut it down) every time. That particular bug eventually got fixed, but Lotus Notes had more bugs than a tropical rainforest.
 
CORed said:
I also think many designers over-use "Are you sure?" type dialog boxes, which tends to lead to automatic clicking through. My preference is that, unless I'm about to do something irreversible, eg. delete a file or folder, close a document without saving, or format my hard drive, I would like the software to assume I know what I'm doing and just do it.
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This may be appropriate for you, personally. But, having read these pages, do you really think it's the right way to anticipate the needs of that stereotypical 'average user'?
 
Mainframe upgrade broke icmp traffic from my servers to the mainframe.

Ancient script in play, it was old when I started working here back in 2006, the script does a ping before it continues on to do some ftp's.

Since ping was broken the script failed and broke the ancient but of course extremely important process.

I commented out the ping portion of the script and all was fine, it got us through to today.

Today, they disabled high availabilty to force traffic through only one router to fix the problem in the ancient script.

Because it's way more important for the ancient script to ping than for the router to have high availability.

My recommendations to leave the ping commented out were ignored. Because, ancient script is KING!
 
alfaniner said:
I thought "Hotmail" was a suspicious character at first, wondering if it was as legitimate as something like a "sexyhotchick" email.
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I worked with a Swede years ago whose English wasn't perfect; male/mail, it's an easy mistake...
 
CORed said:
I completely agree with that sentiment. When my workplace was using Lotus notes, I had an email signature that contained an ASCII drawing. I had to quit using that sig because running spell check on an email with that ACII drawing would crash Lotus notes (trigger an error that would shut it down) every time. That particular bug eventually got fixed, but Lotus Notes had more bugs than a tropical rainforest.
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I remember that. Hours of fun with certain clients.
 
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