A ticket came in...

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capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

A ticket came in:

quote:

Subject: Unable to create tickets

Please create a ticket to remove USER from blackberry server.

But you created this ticket....how can you not...I...why, god?

# ¿ Jul 29, 2010 23:50

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:57

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

A ticket came in:
----------
From: GHOST
Subject: GHOST

GHOST GHOST
----------

For background, our ticketing convention has us document calls that terminated before we could get contact info for a user by labeling it "GHOST". We're supposed to write them up then immediately close them.

I was checking the queues when I happened upon this ticket. Perplexed, I checked the ticket history to find it was over 3 days old. Some mouthbreather in another department (contracted support...management hired outsourced card-readers to fill the empty slots in our support infrastructure, in order to save a few cents an hour) had opened the case, and instead of closing it threw it back in to queue. His mouthbreathing supervisor then assigned it to us. Our new guy took the ticket before examining what it was, forgot about it, and left it in his queue untouched when he clocked out for the weekend.

It's been rotting in his queue for the last two days. Combine this with a dozen other cases where the outsourcers' gently caress-ups wound up in our queues, and our metrics are shot. This could disqualify the department from a bonus/incentive program that went in to effect to encourage productivity, by an HR department that isn't accountable on any discernible metrics and so will be getting the bonus. The same HR department that decided to go with outsourcing to get cheaper engineers.

There is a bottle of scotch waiting in the freezer back home. It will be empty by tomorrow morning.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2010 03:48

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Bravo, Dick. You have made my day.

Keep this thread open another month: I think the only suitable way to end this thread will be with his posting during his honeymoon period at his new job. Let it end on a good note.

Besides, we shouldn't risk tainting the new thread's first few pages with sunshine and happiness: that might give people contemplating a career in IT the wrong impression about our soul-crushing field.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2011 21:47

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

"What's this 'redundancy' you speak of? Isn't that what you call firing people who are unnecessary to the company? Like the %80 of the IT staff we let go last quarter to boost margins?"

# ¿ Mar 3, 2011 01:23

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

A ticket came in:

quote:

Sounder,

I need you to find out how we can activate our Windows licenses: we've been buying these Win7 keys for months and need them to work.

-CIO

Found out over the last few days that this guy has been buying OEM licenses for Windows 7, expecting them to work with imaged machines and somehow magically convert to volume licenses. Now I'm supposed to find a way to "make this work" without spending more money.

:suicide:

# ¿ Sep 14, 2011 17:54

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Sirotan posted:

If you have a volume license you can just go into an elevated command prompt and type:

slmgr -ipk license-key-goes-here

And it will change it. Unless you don't have a volume license in which case I'm not sure I have the whole picture.

We don't have a volume license for Windows 7. The CIO let our Software Assurance agreement die as a cost-cutting measure, and thought he could just buy a bunch of OEM licenses to get everyone upgraded in the enterprise.

Last week I showed him the activation error that Windows displays when it gets an invalid key. I thought he was going to faint the way he blanched.

And now it's my problem.

quote:

We just got an email from a user with an enormous 1.5 page writeup of all the crap he's gone through trying to get his laptop fixed. It's basically just a rant against Lenovo support. Now, you may be wondering why he was in contact with Lenovo support at all. Turns out he sent his (corporate) laptop back to them on a warranty claim, complete with our image and all his data. We are a large bank. Great job breaking all of our guidelines for business conduct and data security, buddy

How did he even get your support information? Doesn't Lenovo need like a customer number or something before assisting people? That'd be the first thing I'd withhold from users, for their own good.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2011 19:35

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Which one is worse: monochrome?

Or Technicolor?

# ¿ Sep 22, 2011 22:19

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

GWBBQ posted:

Stick with one color until you run out, then finish up with whatever is lying around.

I like to think that's what happened, that they just happened to have a shitload of different-color cable from the time they ordered equipment while on acid.

Discovered this mess when our off-domain internet was choking under a broadcast storm. Spent 30 minutes tracing cables to find out some office lady had plugged a switch in to two wall sockets. :argh:

# ¿ Sep 22, 2011 23:10

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Cpt.Wacky posted:

A few tickets came in: EHR IS DOWN!!!

The company that hosts it (not a professional hosting company, just another business like us but bigger) provides access through frame-relay lines. The router shows the link is down.

Did they call us preemptively to tell us there was a problem? No.
Did they answer the phone when we called? No.
Did they return our call after we left a message? No.
Did they answer our call when we called again an hour later? YES!
Did they have an ETA on repairs? Nope.

We pay about $40k/year for this wonderful service. I argued for an SLA in the contract, but they said no and my boss didn't want to fight them. Welp.

drat, they've got a pretty sweet deal going. I wish I could set up services and then only support them/interface with customers when I felt like it.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2011 00:09

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Corvettefisher posted:

I really haven't seen any sites thus far that ie9 doesn't play well with

What's especially nice about IE8 and 9 are their compatibility mode, which makes them render pages like IE7 did. Does wonders for backwards compatibility. You can even define sites that need compatibility mode in Group Policy.

I showed our apps guy, who's been dealing with IE8 issues with one of our apps, how to do this a couple months back, and his jaw hit the floor.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2011 17:27

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Two calls came in. I've discovered I'm podded:

quote:

is a non-technical secretary at a branch office. She breaks in to a sweat just setting up a Remote Assistance session.
is me.

Sounder, I need to print something from this desk, but our Branch's main printer is dead!
Okay, I've connected you to a printer that's gonna print on to expensive paper stock for now. I need to find the number to our print services contractor to fix that main printer (I'm the new guy).
Sounds good, thank you!

Twenty minutes later.

quote:

(muttering) what the hell is she calling back for? Hello?
Hi Sounder. You mentioned calling the print contractor, well, I already have the number, so I called them, they've ordered a spare part on 2-day delivery, and they walked me through a temporary repair of the main printer so that we can continue printing to it until the replacement part arrives. You can close the ticket, bye!

what...what is this strange feeling? Is this what they told me joy felt like?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2011 17:40

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Rock the gin in front of the user...computer

# ¿ Sep 30, 2011 06:02

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

madmaan posted:

2: Fear. These are the folks who have learned that you can't teach others how to do your job to keep their value. Adding team members makes them less valuable. People for the most part think of them as magicians. They need to keep up the illusion. If you know whats going on, you will also know that the the sandbagging they do isn't because all issues are complex, but because they are driving down expectations and increasing timelines. These are the folks who work 3 hour days with 5 hours of world of warcraft and lunch breaks. System admins are the most paranoid group of fucks ever created.

I'm not so sure it's a defensiveness so much as it is a tribal mentality. Speaking as a sys admin (and a former helpdesk), the biggest hurdle I had with getting in to administration was convincing the other admins I was an "us" and not a "them".

If you want to get in to administration, the best favor you can do yourself is to find opportunities to fraternize with them. Talk shop, order them a round at the bar. Assuming you already know your poo poo, it's really just a matter of putting yourself on their radar, and eventually they'll start to conclude on their own that you should be in their department.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2011 18:22

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

dpack_1 posted:

A monitor came in...

Turns out there were a few left over wide screen monitors from our recent purchases, always wanted to try out a decent sized portrait orientation, will see how this goes.

There's no way that monitor is 16:9, what aspect ratio is that?

# ¿ Oct 6, 2011 18:00

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

I can't get barcode scanner to detect it, what's it link to?

# ¿ Oct 6, 2011 20:46

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Captain Capacitor posted:

Here's a daytime version.

I shed a single tear.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2011 22:09

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Yaos posted:

Windows 7 supports imaging a smaller partition onto a larger partition and then using diskpart to extend the file system to fill the partition, however it seems that it does not do too good of a job keeping all of it's bits in order and eventually a blue screen will occur at random, or maybe it's Novell. I should just use WindowsPE and stop using G4L.

When your computer a) Blue screens and b) has Novell software installed, the Novell software is always the first suspect.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2011 18:29

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Sup new page, time for some images.

This year's spring cleaning is being done a bit late. We need the shelving sitting in an old wiring closet upstairs, so it was time to empty them. We were loathe to do this, however, because nobody has cleaned them in over 10 years, and stuff that nobody wants to deal with has just been piling up in there.

This is the first of what will be many hauls.

Power cables. All of these were strewn about, no two of these cables shared a box or shelf.

One of two boxes of patch cables. Again, not sorted or spooled while we were digging them up.

"B-but we might need it at some point!"

Some 56k modems.

And our greatest catch:

Still shrinkwrapped!

Not included in images: 10 year old scanners and printers missing most of their parts, floppy drive locks (yes, they loving exist), 8 $600 KVM's that never got used for their intended project, a giant VAIO laptop that a previous tech couldn't get working so was abandoned, food wrappers, a lollipop stick (the lollipop had been eaten, and the stick was just stuck to a switch on one of the racks), a dinner plate, and a condom wrapper.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2011 23:21

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Phone posted:

Let me guess... all of the students have a crippling fear of technology and freak the gently caress out when anything happens/changes.

Content: we moved from Communicator 2007 R2 to Lync. The contacts couldn't be saved server-side so I looked up what TechNet had to say about exporting contact lists. This is what I found: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markbarr/archive/2010/04/21/how-to-export-your-communicator-2007-contacts.aspx

Yeah I think we'll be staying on OCS2007 for a while.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2011 01:54

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Daylen Drazzi posted:

A few months ago I had a user who was working at a customer's site when his computer started "acting funny". He did some Googling and figured he found the problem. Rather than contact us he talked with the customer's IT guy and had him break the laptop drive encryption. After that other weird things started happening - gee, I wonder why.

I ended up spending 6 hours on his laptop recovering a boat load of "business critical" files while he went on and on about crappy Dell laptops and how XP needed to be replaced by the company RIGHT NOW! Finally recovered his files and wiped the drive and reinstalled XP. Ended the day by telling him to call us before he has someone who is not authorized to work on our computers mess around with anything. The funny thing is he refused for over two weeks to let us do anything because we might "make it worse". He finally relented when we told him we were not going to try and troubleshoot a laptop that did not have a company-approved installation on it, and was last worked on by someone who was not employed by us.

It would be so much better if IT was considered something less than a carpet to be walked on in this company, but as far as the business is concerned IT is a cost that must be kept minimized (which is why they cut out $4m from our computer replacement budget - the whole year's budgeted amount). And they wonder why we have over 500 computers that are over 6 years old...

Oh god, how did they break hard drive encryption? What are you guys using?

# ¿ Nov 1, 2011 18:01

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Ridge_Runner_5 posted:

We're doing a major software refresh here in the coming weeks (XP to 7) and this isn't the most encouraging story to read right now.

My users will be reasonable and happy to see new things that will improve their productivity in the long run, right? Right? Why are you staring at me like that?

# ¿ Nov 2, 2011 01:46

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Powerful Two-Hander posted:

A response came in:

Now that's a robust sync mechanism! :v:

# ¿ Nov 7, 2011 21:49

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

ProtoKaiser posted:

I got this gem earlier today:
The USB jacks for my keyboard and mouse don't fit the USB ports of my new laptop.

User swings by with her mouse, and I plug it in for her. I'm still baffled.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2388#comic

# ¿ Nov 9, 2011 20:25

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

RedMagus posted:

Ah, time for a round of upgrades to the XT3 tablet! What's that co-worker? Yea, good question, I wonder if this will be the OS upgrade from XP to Win7! Lemme call my contact about that!

Ah, still on XP, drat. Well, do you know when we will swap to 7?

so... We are skipping 7 and going straight to 8. When they release a stable version. So XP for 3 more years. And support ends this year on it. Great, thanks.

I think I'll enjoy a new wine I picked up tonight. "Procrastination" seems a pretty good summary of all this.

The length of time that XP will remain in the workplace is depressing.

But not quite as depressing as knowing that some software, in 2012, still doesn't support Vista/7 or IE versions newer than 6.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 00:26

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

I've never done a WSUS setup, but....surely there's a way to force windows updates to process, and to do it transparent to the user?

# ¿ Feb 25, 2012 00:36

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Pod chat: While working on an issue in Accounts Recovery the other day, one of the AR reps told me he'd identified a bug in some third-party software we use. Before I could turn around and roll my eyes, he then mentioned he replicated the issue on other workstations in his department, then called the vendor and got a fix. He offered to forward me a link to the patch and suggested I deploy it using Group Policy.

An accountant...Group Policy...

Turns out he's former IT. He got the hell out early in his career and in to accountancy, and the older guys in our IT department all know he can be relied upon as an early adopter and tester. Our accounting departments never submit tickets because he fixes them all, all while getting his normal work done. And never complains. And trained his co-workers to trust and respect the IT dept.

I want to get hired on full-time here so god drat much.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 01:34

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

SamDabbers posted:

This and a monitor. Cheap and easy to deploy.

Sorry to quote this from several pages back, but it needs to be said: these adapters aren't very versatile. We've been using a shitton of these at my office while they were on XP, and discovered just a few months back that they don't play nice with some of our HP's onboard graphics (the ones with an Intel chipset on the motherboard) on Vista/7: graphical glitches and related problems all over the place. Some kind of driver drama. Now we're buying up other adapters to replace them.

They're a good option if your hardware works with them, but you need to thoroughly test them with all of your computer types to make sure they'll work as intended.

# ¿ May 14, 2012 18:58

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Just hit my mailbox:

quote:

From: LinkedIn
To: <the EVERYONE IN ENTIRE COMPANY mailing list>

Hello, <computer-illiterate 80-year-old lady up in accounting>,

This email is to confirm that you've successfully changed your password.

Did I miss something here about LinkedIn messaging, or did our dear accounting lady register on LinkedIn with the mailing address of our entire org?

Oh well, time to figure out why we have mailing lists that allow external senders...

# ¿ Dec 6, 2012 06:03

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

TWBalls posted:

Yeah, we haven't set that up. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Some of these users have huge profiles due to copying music over to the computer. I don't really mind that they do that, since I'd much rather they listen to their own music rather than 100's of user streaming music, but it would make things a bitch if we were to implement that.

Actually, now that I think about it, we do have it set up for the radiologists (they have special profiles due to their Dicom & dictation software apparently), but since they primarily stick to a set few machines, it's only slow when we swap out the PC and it has to re-download everything again.

As I swap their PC, I've been teaching the users to store their important poo poo on their personal network share. Most have caught on, but there are a few that haven't.

Do you have SA archives? If so, BangersInMyKnickers started an excellent thread on roaming profiles that includes stuff you can do to mitigate large profiles.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 18:02

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Syano posted:

I don't post in this thread enough... this was pretty funny today. We were in our colo center installing some new dr site gear. In the next rack space over, someone, could be anyone, from some random company has a monitor installed in their colo rack connected to a server that they happened to be logged in to using logmein or something similar and is doing work on that server. We watch for a few minutes sort of amused, then this happens. This was not a recalled command either. The guy literally typed it out every time. See if you can spot whats wrong. Sorry for the weird cage in the foreground, this is obviously a locked rack I couldn't get in to

You should probably delete this image, or at least edit it to block out the domain info of the user (it's in the directory path). People looking at the shot will know which organization this computer belongs to. And that its admin doesn't know how to do remote administration properly.

# ¿ May 21, 2013 20:24

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Scikar posted:

That doesn't give you any grounds to assume that KennyG is asking for a way to give you a ticket with a deadline of yesterday. He just wants a way of telling you that even though he understands that you might not be able to do something today, and even though he can't expect it to be done today, and even though he's not going to be mad or upset with you if he doesn't get it today, it would help him out a lot if you can do it today, as long as that doesn't hurt anything else that's important.

That sounds like something that could easily be typed out in the Description or Comments field of your average ticketing system. I know I would never look at a "requested time" field if one were present in my tickets, and might even actively remove it so as not to distract me from "actual deadline".

# ¿ Aug 6, 2013 20:57

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:57

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

Antioch posted:

You dudes are making me super nervous about deploying DFS next month.
I'm supposed to be using our Citrix Profiles servers as the first transferred data after the testing is complete.

Not familiar with Citrix Profiles, but it's probably a bad idea. Roaming profiles are not supported for DFS replication.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 01:33

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > A ticket came in...