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We lost a fight to a branch once about space for a small rack to house a couple of switches. All we asked for was a small room with AC, or at least a vent. A little before construction started, they changed their mind and wanted it turned into a small daycare room where customers could drop off their kids while they worked on a loan or whatever these people did. They wouldn't budge on this idea at all. So plan 2 was using half of a closet down the hall, that idea was shot down because then some people would potentially have to walk an extra 4 feet to use the closet across the hall. Plan 3, we put the switches in a cabinet behind the receptionist, had contractors put vents in the front, and when the branch people weren't looking, put some in the wall on the other side of the cabinet. We've started to get more say in construction plans over the last few years, but sometimes they'd change plans and not tell anyone. Which is why we have a server room at one location that is barely wide enough for the rack. CommieGIR posted:Whenever there WAS a meeting I was present at, it was all about the ROI each department was generating, and whenever it rolled around to IT, I was met with glares of disgust because I generated none. I finally explained that my ROI was that we had 99.9% up time and never had a major outage. Still a lot of managers would mumble about how we could just get rid of IT and they would be fine I've heard this from people before and its simply jawdropping. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at Sep 19, 2010 around 07:52 |
| # ¿ Sep 19, 2010 07:43 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 04:54 |
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Yaos posted:It's great when somebody says "MY COMPUTER WON'T WORK" with no other information. Not having randomly assigned computer names is a great thing, since ours include the department and the user assigned to the workstation. And since the user side is not dependent on eDirectory/Active Directory we can throw it on any Windows computer on our network. These programs were made by one person, and currently maintained by another person after the first left. It turns out simplicity makes things easier, who knew? I wish I did not absolutely hate programming or I could help out too. Why anyone would want to make novell servers do anything beyond be formatted and turned into something useful is beyond me.
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| # ¿ Sep 22, 2010 04:41 |
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Occasionally at work we have to work with members of the general public when our employees send out confidential documents. We have a securemail service where you simply hit a button in Groupwise, or log onto the webpage and send the message from there. It sends out a email telling to user to login to the site, they login, get the file and thats it. Dead simple. Usually our contact is simply them asking us for a password reset, and we change it, send a new one out and thats it. Today, a coworker setup an account and got this: "I'm an old guy. I don't know how to all this crap your sending me and don't want to know how. If you want to give me infromation fine. But cut the secret handshakes and passwords and send me the information or just forget it, your choice." Thankfully my coworker is more professional then I am, because if I got that, I would have deleted his account and told him we won't deal with him then.
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| # ¿ Sep 25, 2010 03:02 |
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mpeg4v3 posted:I swear, there's something about printers that just drive people to insanity. Whether it be the people that design them that decide they need 200mb installation packages filled with bloatware to use them, or the insane fucknuggets like this one that think they should be magical devices that do everything they want them to do just so they don't have to get up and *gasp* walk 10 feet! Or even just the mere act of trying to get one working, which tends to be a process that can easily drive one to insanity. Where I work is currently pushing out a lot of health related promotions and things so they have to pay less on healthcare. So they run a big thing with sending out pedometers, and stressing taking walking breaks and such. What is hilarious is hearing people complain about walking too far for a printer, and then leaving work for 15 minutes to go for a walk.
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| # ¿ Sep 26, 2010 05:41 |
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Steppo posted:I've never been so close to all-user replying "You're loving dead!" before, but drat. Time to send out. "Hi everybody, if you install this, I cut your internet connection for a week!"
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| # ¿ Oct 1, 2010 00:19 |
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couldcareless posted:The first 2 sentences of that apply to me. I graduated in 09, picked this job up a little over a year ago now with very little professional knowledge in the IT field outside a college helpdesk. It was just my supervisor and my boss working there at the time. I've learned tons and for that I am thankful, but it's absolutely time for me to move on with my career to something that provides more. I would be a little more worried about being hosed by taxes myself.
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| # ¿ Oct 6, 2010 01:31 |
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IT Guy posted:You're not the only one getting the "user can't stream live radio on computer" tickets. During conversion from their old network to ours, 3 of new sites discovered that Youtube, Pandora, Sirius/Xm and a bunch of other streaming sites suddenly didn't work. They went from no webfiltering to pretty restrictive filtering overnight, and weren't happy about. When told that web policy is determined by people higher up the ladder then us, they opened multiple change orders and requests to get it unblocked. One of them came up to me and asked what they'd listen to now, and I really wanted to ask them if they've heard of this radio thing. But I mere mentioned getting a small ipod dock or a stereo, and mentioned its the same for us. They looked really upset at listening to it, but on the other hand, I did hear a lot of talk about how much faster the rest of the network was.
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| # ¿ Oct 7, 2010 02:40 |
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Midelne posted:With three company golf shirts (two yellow, one light mint green), five company-logo baseball caps, a company mug, and a company knife, all in the same condition. It's interesting, the things people think other people will want as a reward for their work. For prizes from our christmas party, a couple of people got divot fixers. These were given as a thank you from Juniper for ordering a bunch of poo poo. So not only did people get something you can buy for about 20 cents at a golfcourse, they got ones we got for free. Its almost as good as the people who won laptop bags, but don't own laptops.
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| # ¿ Oct 8, 2010 18:35 |
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We have someone who does the Cert Salad at the end his emails, so we started adding our own. Also, doing 1st Grade, 2nd Grade up to high school is pretty effective too.
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| # ¿ Oct 13, 2010 03:42 |
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Lum posted:It's a bit more involved than that, our software does the mailmerge and outputs the jobs to an archive system with all the filing done automatically, as well as the printer, stuff like that. If they were to send the job directly to a printer all they would get would be a CSV file. Printing Paradigm.
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| # ¿ Oct 14, 2010 17:01 |
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quote:USER sent a large email from work to her home email address that totaled around 600mb in attachments, can't use email; its been retrieving for about a day and a half now, tried deleting the email from her sent items on gw webaccess still cannot use email, transferring to XX By doing this she likely hosed up the Groupwise PO for that domain until it can process the attachment, at which point it will be passed to our gateway that will instantly delete it. I mentioned that the Groupwise admins could hop in and delete the message, but that was too much work for the help desk to send it to them, so they just told her to wait and closed the ticket.
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| # ¿ Oct 27, 2010 22:29 |
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:
He isn't a close family friend if he's leaving you out to dry like that. More importantly, he isn't your friend. Tell the charity to either get money from the CEO, or tell them to piss off. Also, are a registered to run the cabling? Depending on your local laws, there might be issues with having to have cabling run by a registered contractor.
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| # ¿ Oct 28, 2010 16:34 |
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Dick Trauma posted:...and he shows up dressed as John Travolta's character, leather jacket, jeans, pompadour, etc. Ah yes, Tony, the leading man and the three of us as his servants. That is such a brilliant dick move that its almost worth applauding for.
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| # ¿ Oct 29, 2010 19:43 |
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Noel posted:This conversation reminds me how happy I am that we have a centralized IT budget, and the CFO is happy to replace desktops and laptops as their 3 year warranty runs out. We are in this weird period where we can't get new machines for anyone, but we can drop tens of thousands of dollars on blades and SAN gear for Citrix. Which explains why I travel with a laptop that only gets 9 minutes of battery life, and any attempt to replace it is met with "We'll get to it." At least I'm not some of the people at work that are still running Windows 2000 though.
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| # ¿ Nov 1, 2010 05:07 |
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So, a couple of weeks ago one of our branches caught fire and burned to the ground. Since then, we've been playing a fun game of getting a replacement facility going and getting power, sewer, telecom and etc ready at a temporary location. So last Friday, we get word the trailer is onsite and that they want to accept customers Tuesday morning at the latest. Monday rolls around, a coworker and I are ready to go in the morning, as we are looking at a 4 hour drive, but we are told to wait until after a conference call at 8:30. Conference call says they are waiting on a few things to arrive, so we wait until the 2nd call at noon, they say to head on up, and that they won't worry about opening on Tuesday. We get close to the town with our branch, but the hotels there are poo poo, so we stay about 45mins away, and drive up the next morning. We get to the site at the same time as the carpet installers are finishing the second half, a contractor is cutting another door into the trailer, and the power company is doing something to a power poll involving a chainsaw. Water/sewer isn't there yet, but portoshitters are on the way. However, power works, T1 is up, and we get phones and network up. Finally, an employee working on the project shows up, and asks why we are there. Apparently there was a conference call that happened 3 hours after we left where they decided they are at least a week out from getting the place open.
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| # ¿ Nov 3, 2010 01:55 |
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Moey posted:Does that mean drink beer and sit back for a while? Nah, just meant we were early. Would have been nice if one of the dozen people on the call felt like telling us so we weren't rushing to get there in the morning.
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| # ¿ Nov 3, 2010 02:42 |
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I got a ticket today from our HD about a user unable to get a network address after a computer upgrade. Ticket mentions a lot of troubleshooting on the PC, using ipconfig, rebooting a bunch, reseating the network cable, but at the end of the ticket they mention the cable is plugged into a wallport with two ports. I call the user up, have him plug into the other port on the wall, and suddenly his machine works. 20 minutes of troubleshooting that never included "is this poo poo plugged in."
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| # ¿ Nov 17, 2010 18:51 |
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The Fool posted:ipconfig should have shown "Media Disconnected," which should have been the end of the road right there. I think he knows how to type in the command, not what it actually means.
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| # ¿ Nov 18, 2010 02:05 |
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So a site is working on a new board room, and they have been getting ideas on how to set it up. This came in an email today: "The idea for having a 70+ inch TV on the east wall has been nixed because of the expense. Beavis and Butthead would like to look into utilizing a projector for their video needs." So at some point, this seemed reasonable enough for someone to bring it to a project manager. They also don't want any cables on the floor, which is doable of you plan for it in advance, which they haven't. They also wondered if placing a camera for the video conference system on the same wall as the projector screen will be too bright. On the other hand, I got my $25 christmas bonus this week. So yay.
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| # ¿ Nov 23, 2010 22:53 |
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Gunjin posted:As long as the projector is aimed properly this is no problem. For where they want it, it will be an issue. Other impressive setups we have: In one board room, board members complained of having to turn to face the camera and TV. So somewhere at the site decided the proper response was to add another TV, and put each TV on a different wall facing the long side of the table. So now people sitting on the table simply have to look up to see a TV, however they only have one camera, and that is still at the end of the table, so anyone watching gets to see the sides of their heads. Also, we get complaints that people calling in have issues hearing them, as the microphone they have is at one end of the room. One group put their TV and videoconference equipment at one of the table, along with an expensive ceiling mounted microphone. Then they decided they didn't like looking in that direction of the room, so they moved the TV and video unit to the other side of the room. However, the mic didn't move, and people sitting closest to the TV are almost inaudible. We have also received complaints about this. One site had the TV and videoconf equipment sitting on a table at the end of a table. They moved the equipment to a smaller table in the corner of the room, and then decided to leave it there. This meant that for all their calls, the people on that side of the table to turn around in their chairs, and no one could sit at the farthest corner. You would think for devices that cost as much as a small car people would put a little more effort into their setup.
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| # ¿ Nov 24, 2010 04:13 |
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Neurozys posted:All the 8+ year old kids at my company Christmas party got iPads. I got a $25 gift certificate to Dunkin Donuts. My boss just keeps buying iPads for everyone except the people he employs. It's getting a little weird. No mentions of holiday bonuses so far either. The "gift" I won at our company Christmas party was a bag of mints. Turns out all of the prizes worth more then about 5 dollars are gifts from vendors for buying their poo poo or used equipment. I could have won a 4 year old Dell 620 Inspiron laptop that still had our security stickers fixed to it. However, it was probably our last company Christmas party, as corporate is complaining about how expensive it was. Renting out a hotel meeting room along with mediocre catered food must cost a ton.
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| # ¿ Dec 12, 2010 19:26 |
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Arsten posted:I don't understand why filters are used at all. I mean, probably porn filters, but otherwise, why would you block "social and living"? How many companies lose enough money to even justify bothering with something like that? We block just about everything because our overlords said to. Its seriously crazy what gets blocked at work. We have .gov sites get blocked because they can be "political". If an online news article has the word sex in it's URL, that poo poo is blocked. It would be a lot more comical if I didn't have to deal with the thing blocking so much, and its a gigantic pain in the rear end picking out where and why a site is blocked. Our email filter blocks swearing and "naughty words" based on the amount. Saying gently caress You in an email is 15 points, while racial/ethnic/sexual slurs can be 25-30 points. At 50 points the message is quarantined. When we first set it up, I sent a email with a Tossed Salad Man post in it, and it was around 400 points. I gave up trying to figure out why we do most of this, but I guess we did save dozens of employees a bunch of chain-forwarded Tiger Woods jokes last year.
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| # ¿ Dec 13, 2010 05:56 |
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Nomex posted:We retired some equipment this week. Today is hard drive destruction day. I know a lot of people recommend running at least 3 erases on a hard disk before recycling. The problem is those people don't have this many drives: I'd rather use thermite.
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| # ¿ Dec 23, 2010 17:50 |
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Crowley posted:1: Place on sharp edge 1: Carefully mix thermite without causing damage to both self and surroundings. 2: Pile harddrives, set bags of thermite on pile. 3: Light 4: Watch as fire destroys all harddrives, along with significant damage to pavement.
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| # ¿ Dec 23, 2010 21:02 |
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Our Webproxy is blocking Google's main page as a virus this morning, yay!
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| # ¿ Dec 24, 2010 15:36 |
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Thelonious Funk posted:I honestly thought this was just a joke that there are people like this when reaching a female in any call center. After working in one, it's so sad to find out that is how they're treated. (Funny though, especially when they escalate to a female supervisor.) Back when I worked on a help desk years ago, we had a user who would hang up whenever one of the female techs answered. If he was desperate enough to stay on the line, he would ask to be transferred to one of the guys claiming it was about a previous issue. When we caught on, the ladies would transfer him between them until he gave up for awhile. He finally said something rude to one of them, so we transferred him our boss who passed along his comments to HR and got his rear end fired. Happy day was had by all.
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| # ¿ Dec 27, 2010 03:47 |
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Johnny Aztec posted:So, you intentionally created a hostile work environment with the intention of goading and harassing someone? Since you seem to have reading problems, try to pay attention. He was rude to women because he didn't think they knew anything, and would avoid talking to them because they wasted his time. He said this to one of the male techs that he didn't think women knew anything, and wouldn't bother. He was apparently rude to the women he worked with as well. Here is the thing with how the real world works, you really don't get to choose who you deal with. If you are rude to people, expect them to be rude back, and not treat you like a special flower because you may or may not have a behavior problem. None of your examples are reasons to be an rear end in a top hat. So, in return for him being an rear end in a top hat to people, he got his rear end fired.
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| # ¿ Dec 27, 2010 22:13 |
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Coworker called one of our locations because we got some alerts from their UPS, and then we lost our connection for a few minutes, so he wanted to check up on them. Turns out the UPS had started beeping which deeply annoys her, so she called the help desk to ask about it, and they said its ok to unplug everything from it, and plug things directly into the wall or power strips. So when my coworker calls her up, she is oddly pissed about us asking about it, as she already called the HD and got permission to do this. Coworker asks if she has a minute, or can volunteer someone to look at the UPS and bring things back in line, and she gives him lip about it. So he tells her to box up the UPS and mail it us, and we'll look at it, probably find no faults with it, and send it back, and they eat the shipping both ways. So now a bunch of expensive equipment is sitting on wallpower in a area with frequent outages and bad wiring thanks to this idiot. No idea what the help desk person was thinking, but I've seriously given up hope for most of them for any kind of basic troubleshooting. Many people in the company have simply stopped calling them, and instead call people in upper tiers direct because they know its the only way to get poo poo fixed in a timely fashion.
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| # ¿ Jan 4, 2011 06:46 |
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kampy posted:Hopefully all of that is tracked by some kind of ticketing system, otherwise you'll be seeing this from some manager pretty soon. Not worried about that. The people that are calling us directly are people who tell management how upset they are. We've been trying to get more support on the help desk, as it doesn't make sense to have us walking someone through tracing a cable from the patch panel to the switch.
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| # ¿ Jan 4, 2011 16:53 |
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We no longer face as many IT issues as before, the helpdesk seems to be doing a great job. Time to save $dollars by moving all support functions to them.
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We had a category on our reviews for "Volunteer work, community projects, etc while representing our company." I appreciated losing points on my review because of this.Dick Trauma posted:Bottom line: if a performance review is the first time your employee is learning about a problem you aren't doing it right. Word. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2011 around 17:17 |
| # ¿ Jan 6, 2011 17:15 |
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rolleyes posted:It's the standard short-sighted "money above all else" technique employed by bad managers with no thought for consequences, such as morale goes down the toilet (nothing like the feeling of being unable to improve your station in life to get motivation up!) and productivity goes with it. Or the employee in which the company has invested 2 years of training and development leaves after 2.5 years because some useless middle manager denied him a decent raise. Usually said middle manager will still believe they did the right thing while, effectively, a £50k company asset is lost for the sake of £1k. You mean the middle manager just saved his department 50k!
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| # ¿ Jan 6, 2011 22:32 |
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I know the 50k didn't mean their salary, but it was a convenient number. Guess I need to work on my bad joke cert. Where I work they wouldn't factor in something like "how much it cost to turn someone into a professional", because they don't see that. As far as I can tell, they would rather pay exorbitant fees to a consulting firm rather then offer a higher wage to existing employee or bring someone on full time. They were surprised when trying to a Citrix admin hired that most of them wanted to be paid good wages, and didn't want to work for 35k/yr. So they took one of the guys who already worked for us, gave him a minor raise, and a Citrix book. I almost have a feeling at times they feel that training isn't worth it, because once someone is trained, they start looking at leaving.
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| # ¿ Jan 7, 2011 00:03 |
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enotnert posted:I'm leaving it. . . I just dug around and found a way to disable port 80 access and redirect all web requests on a random port. Depending on the printer, you don't even need any sort of admin access to it. Some of the older HP's you could set the display through command line LPT commands.
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| # ¿ Jan 15, 2011 06:34 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Emailed the COO this morning. Signed my offer letter and sent it back to the new place. Now I'm just waiting for her to tell me that the background check is done and I can resign. Remember to upper deck the executive toilet. Its the gift that keeps on giving.
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| # ¿ Jan 26, 2011 18:19 |
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mono posted:That's pretty glorious. I have no idea as to how they thought they'd get by with just one helpdesk guy. Guess they got to find out how'd they do with 0. Funny to think about what would happen when people call in for support and nothing happens.
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| # ¿ Jan 27, 2011 19:04 |
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I got word before leaving today that some of our board members are unable to access our secure file transfer site. Now, dealing with outside users is painful enough, but now imagine that these people are: A.) Generally old. B.) Using god knows what as their computer. C.) May or may not be using this from home, or their work computer wherever they work. D.) Are used to giving instructions, not following them. I got some screenshots sent in from one of the C-levels, and one of the errors is because they are using OpenDNS, and one of OpenDNS's resolvers can't find our address of the server we are using. One or two are odd SSL errors, but most of the others are people who can't remember a goddamn password and blame us for it. I shouldn't hate friday, but I'm going to tomorrow.
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| # ¿ Jan 28, 2011 06:04 |
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I think this year at work we are going to have to make a decision how to handle iPhones. We've been able to avoid them because AT&T doesn't have service in the state where our corporate HQ is, but now that they are on verizon, could be time for a change. Wonder how well they work with Groupwise.
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| # ¿ Feb 10, 2011 06:26 |
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I'm not sure what Stygian abyss sign installers come from, but dear god. A coworker has been working with some of our branches to move signs from an old firewall we used to separate them from the main network, and onto a DMZ port on our branch firewalls. Mainly this is just to get things standardized and to remove 8 year old equipment. Anyway, this involves two steps: 1.)Change IP of sign. 2.)Physically move the end of a CAT5 cable by 5 inches and plug into another port. Apparently, step 1 is the tough one, as none of the installers know how to do this. Not just "I don't know, let me look at the manual" but "I don't know, we will have to send it to the manufacturer to change it, oh, this takes 2+ weeks." So one sign was sent out, and either our new IP addresses didn't make the journey, or it was ignored. Sign came back in on Monday, and it had the wrong IP. Not just by a little bit, but 3/4 octets were wrong, the subnet was wrong, and they hadn't put in a gateway. We went onsite, fixed it and had it working in 3 minutes, and we'd never seen the admin software for the sign before. We drove for an hour to fix something in less then 5 minutes all because these idiots can't click on the Option button, then Connection Settings. Glad I get paid by the hour.
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| # ¿ Feb 11, 2011 04:32 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Welp... the beautiful receptionist insisted I order some free lunch and so I did, fresh from Barney's Burgers. Our receptionist says the flowers some of the ladies here got for valentines day made her have breathing problems. So now flowers have to be removed by end of day, or she'll throw them away. So, I'll trade ya.
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| # ¿ Feb 16, 2011 23:53 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 04:54 |
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deadtear posted:Hose her desk down with pollen. Her "sensitivity" to odors is her merely trying to find a way to retire and land a tasty lawsuit.
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| # ¿ Feb 17, 2011 01:45 |
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