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TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

I guess I don't get the "I am too proud to say I don't know" or "Maybe you are right let me look into that" something but poo poo come on! :suicide:

This right here is my biggest problem with our new guy. He seems to think that because he's the oldest person and used to be a manager (of a loving Longs Drugs!) that he doesn't have to listen to anyone else on the team. Nevermind that he has very little I.T. experience and even less in a healthcare environment. My main co-worker and I have both been doing this since Jan. 2000. The next guy has been doing this since ~2006, so we all have considerable more experience than this guy but he just refuses to listen. As a result, he's pissed off multiple users that now insist that only I touch their systems. Unfortunately, the director seems to think this guy's poo poo doesn't stink because he's constantly in his office kissing rear end.

He's been working on an issue for over a week now trying to get a doctor to be able to VPN & RDP into a system running Epic. I've told him multiple times that I have documentation on our I.S. Share. He opts to use the outdated documentation provided by the vendor. Surprise, surprise, he's unable to get in. Director texts me asking to contact the vendor. I lied and said I had to dig through my PST and asked him what the issue was. He had me remote in to take a look. Right away I saw that he had the old domain listed. Updated it, had the doctor try logging in and away it goes. 5 seconds. All he had to do was read my loving documentation or even ask, but no. That would make too much sense.

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Zhentar
Sep 28, 2003

Brilliant Master Genius

Lum posted:

- Most monitors are 17" 1280x1024
- Default build image set to 1024x768

I've made half a dozen site visits to observe users of the software I work on... I'm not sure I've seen a single end user that had two monitors and had both set to the right aspect ratio.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

Bob Morales posted:

Instead of using Microsoft Visio, which I've used for years and is kind of the standard diagram/flowchart program, I'm forced to use SmartDraw, which my boss bought because it was $199 instead of $299 for Visio. Cheap gently caress.

Reminds me of the Win3.1 -> NT4 migration at my first job, only replace "Visio" with "CorelDraw" and "SmartDraw" with "Powerpoint 97".

CorelDraw was really good for technical diagrams back in the day. PowerPoint, not so much.

Migishu
Oct 22, 2005

I'll eat your fucking eyeballs if you're not careful

Grimey Drawer

Scaramouche posted:

Thermal printers. Over serial.

Specifically, Zebra printers.

gently caress Zebra printers.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Lum posted:

Reminds me of the Win3.1 -> NT4 migration at my first job, only replace "Visio" with "CorelDraw" and "SmartDraw" with "Powerpoint 97".

Oh, he went on for 10 minutes about how great Visio was until MICROSOFT BOUGHT THEM AND RUINED IT

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Scaramouche posted:

Thermal printers. Over serial.

Thermal printers over USB are far far worse.

Serial works, whereas the USB version have the shittiest drivers know to man.

Gweenz
Jan 27, 2011

Migishu posted:

Specifically, Zebra printers.

gently caress Zebra printers.

Oh God yes, we work with those things and they are the stupidest loving devices on earth. For $600 you get a tiny little plastic printer that can't even remember a goddamn ip address.

This weeks annoyance? I'm changing servers at one of our clients which is a new domain. My domain migration tool works great and means I only have to take over each workstation for about 10 minutes (which is AGONY for them even though I've been watching them waste hours of time doing nothing but bullshitting with each other or searching the web, but I digress). The only problem with my tool is that it resets any saved passwords, which I did not know about. So I'm about 3 workstations into the conversion, and someone comes into where I am (they've been doing it constantly with little stupid things they need fixed, but whatever) and says:

"It's asking me for a password"
"I'll come take a look" I get in there and it's Outlook asking him for his password and he points at it. Me, trying to sound as non-condescending as possible, "Did you try your password?"

I get a generic answer about how they don't know it, nobody ever told it to them, it was set up when they got here etc etc. Since we also host their emails (well the company we work with does) I have had to call them and change every password so far. Even better? They all use Skype so I'm responsible for "losing" those passwords as well.

Rujo King
Jun 28, 2007

I say old chap have you any of the good sort of catnip if you know what I mean... harrumphaarmaammhhhmm
"Okay, should I click on 'Don't Save'?"
*Immediately clicks 'Don't Save' before I have a chance to respond.*
"HEY I WANTED TO SAVE THAT!"

Of course, it's funnier when they don't realize they've hosed up until later, and they call back asking where the file they chose not to save was saved.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

The Zebras we had were WASP branded, they did this thing where they wouldn't remember the loving label size to save their life, or would print blank labels, and you had to have the driver from some exact point in time for it to work at all.

Then you had to install this ActiveX print-pipe for this stupid IE-only web app that printed everything using ZPL and that's the only way it could talk directly to the printers.

mattfl
Aug 27, 2004

From a lot of these posts it sounds like there are many of us here who are in Healthcare IT. I've been in the field for almost 5 years now and just started a new position at a pretty large organization that supports 40+ hospitals, most of them in the southeast, with 15k+ users. Lucky for me I'm on a pretty specialized team that deals many with enterprise support so I don't actually have to deal with people in the hospitals. I have a friend who works on our help desk and the calls he tells me about are enough to make me want to put a bullet in my head, I don't know how he does it.

GargleBlaster
Mar 17, 2008

Stupid Narutard
I'm going to be nice for a change.

poo poo that doesn't piss me off: dealing with the company's founder and ex chairman (who stood down as he's now in his 80s or thereabouts, but still does some stuff here). Okay, so he's a little bit of an oldschool fat cat.. massive mansion, collection of Rolls Royces and grand pianos, the very stereotype of upper class rich person, really. But what a gentleman. Eh, he's earned it, we're still going after half a lifetime after all.

Always remembers everyone's names even if they've only been here a couple of days

Asks how you're doing, are you happy, are things going well, and seems to genuinely care about the answer

Called me up earlier just after 12, "have I caught you on your lunch? Come up later if I have, don't worry, it can wait" (nope, mine's a little later, but you know what, he's one of the few people where I'd say "yes but it's ok, as it's you, I'll quickly help out now"). Attitude makes all the difference with me. An entitled "I know you're on lunch but I want your help right now" will get a no and a shoo or a grudging low-effort participation depending on whether you're one of the guys who's involved with my salary or not. The more humble the approach, the more decent you are to work with day-to-day and the better justified it is to me (if you feel it'd be a big disadvantage to have to wait), the more likely I am to be nice and help out. I guess it's kind of like putting emails as low priority.

Says thank you. Catches you again later in the day to say it's still working fine and thank you again.

Used to put his foot down when making decisions that were important to him, but that's just good leadership and I've never, ever seen him get angry at anyone or dismiss anyone's opinions as invalid or in the least bit unvalued.

Respects and appreciates the work we do, and back when he was more involved he kept any criticism constructive, justified and favoured suggestions and offers of training or assistance if he felt there was room for improvement (over the current people's approach of "you suck at this, we'll take that responsibility off you and pay someone else to do it")


Hadn't realised how much I miss that guy being in charge, and that kind of "friendly, respectful and appreciative of your efforts" culture we used to have.

/nostalgia

teethgrinder
Oct 9, 2002

Sweevo posted:

Thermal printers over USB are far far worse.

Serial works, whereas the USB version have the shittiest drivers know to man.
Hope you love running XP for the rest of the printer's lifespan.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

GargleBlaster posted:

Hadn't realised how much I miss that guy being in charge, and that kind of "friendly, respectful and appreciative of your efforts" culture we used to have.

/nostalgia

So reading between the lines. Your good boss has gone and your place is now a shithole that is pissing you off daily?

Just to bring this thread back up to the required level of cynicism.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
We got a couple of Meraki access points several months back and loved them. They do exactly what we want them to. So we thought to ourselves: if the access points are this nice lets give the MX series security appliances a try. Boy howdy stay far away from these things. I mean they are nice in theory and would probably work well for a small office but they lack a TON of features that other appliances in the same space have. Like for instance vpn options. When you get in to configure these things, you have zero options to configure your site to site tunnel with 3rd party devices. You have to hope your 3rd party device supports the phase 1 and 2 options that the Meraki is pushing out or else it just flat isnt going to work.

GargleBlaster
Mar 17, 2008

Stupid Narutard

Lum posted:

So reading between the lines. Your good boss has gone and your place is now a shithole that is pissing you off daily?

Just to bring this thread back up to the required level of cynicism.

Hah :D

The other top boss is reasonable enough to me (though not to everyone. I think he's given up trying to have a PA. They all used to come into our office and vent about his tantrums, and mysteriously disappear one day!) but the problem is he comes with a family and I'm pretty sure they all watch BBC Apprentice. So the culture has shifted more towards bitching, finger-pointing and the "if we act happy about anyone's work they won't improve" philosophy

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

teethgrinder posted:

Hope you love running XP for the rest of the printer's lifespan.

Which is loving awful, because they could just make a simple usb->cdc driver, but NOOOOO that would be too loving easy. (I have made many of them.)

Things NOT pissing me off today: It's new razor day! :woop:

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

GargleBlaster posted:

The other top boss is reasonable enough to me (though not to everyone. I think he's given up trying to have a PA. They all used to come into our office and vent about his tantrums, and mysteriously disappear one day!) but the problem is he comes with a family and I'm pretty sure they all watch BBC Apprentice. So the culture has shifted more towards bitching, finger-pointing and the "if we act happy about anyone's work they won't improve" philosophy

gently caress the Apprentice, and gently caress Alan Sugar. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of using an Amstrad product should know that whatever his business processes may achieve, they will not produce a quality product.

ookiimarukochan
Apr 4, 2011

Lum posted:

Reminds me of the Win3.1 -> NT4 migration at my first job, only replace "Visio" with "CorelDraw" and "SmartDraw" with "Powerpoint 97".

CorelDraw was really good for technical diagrams back in the day. PowerPoint, not so much.
We have a partner who still does this. In 2013. And they send them as PPTX files which is great given that there's only one person in engineering who uses Windows on their work machine.

teethgrinder
Oct 9, 2002

poo poo that's pissing me off: my "fixed" work 17" MacBook Pro is kernel panicking 3+ times a day. Secured a temporary replacement, and off to the Apple Store again for the third time.

Basically I'm positive the motherboard is hosed, but they're determined not to replace it for some reason. IT'S NOT THE loving RAM I PROMISE YOU.

TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

Migishu posted:

Specifically, Zebra printers.

gently caress Zebra printers.

On one hand, the ones we have rarely have issues. So, in that respect, I actually kind of like them. On the other, their menu is such a loving pain in the rear end to navigate that I hate working on them when they finally do have issues.

gently caress HP paper cassette trays. They make the goddamn paper guides out of the shittiest plastic. Add to that the end users are apparently neaderthals that seem to think they have to slam the paper and tray when refilling it and you end up with a pile of broken cassette trays.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

gently caress refurbished toner cartridges.

GargleBlaster
Mar 17, 2008

Stupid Narutard

Lum posted:

gently caress the Apprentice, and gently caress Alan Sugar. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of using an Amstrad product should know that whatever his business processes may achieve, they will not produce a quality product.

I never figured out how they stayed profitable when they were churning out stuff like this

Sirotan
Oct 17, 2006

Sirotan is a seal.


Bob Morales posted:

gently caress refurbished toner cartridges.

This is all I buy these days, they work great for me and are typically <20% the price of OEM. Every now and then we will get a bad one but the cost savings greatly outweighs the inconvenience.

Maybe you just don't have a good source for them? I use these guys a lot: http://www.suppliesoutlet.com/

TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

Sirotan posted:

This is all I buy these days, they work great for me and are typically <20% the price of OEM. Every now and then we will get a bad one but the cost savings greatly outweighs the inconvenience.

Maybe you just don't have a good source for them? I use these guys a lot: http://www.suppliesoutlet.com/

All we get from our printer repair company are refurbs as well. The last company, we had a lot of issues. Some were complete duds, some worked but the chip wasn't reflashed properly so it would give the 'non-genuine HP cartridge' error, but would at least still print.

Haven't really had any issues with the supplier that the new company uses.

Also, today is a joyous day. The new guy is out today. For once, I can go a day without him loving up any systems and him constantly walking by my desk and glaring at me.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Sirotan posted:

This is all I buy these days, they work great for me and are typically <20% the price of OEM. Every now and then we will get a bad one but the cost savings greatly outweighs the inconvenience.

Maybe you just don't have a good source for them? I use these guys a lot: http://www.suppliesoutlet.com/

Less toner, worse quality, puke all over your printer once in a while. Especially bad with the colors

Gunjin
Apr 27, 2004

Om nom nom

Dick Trauma posted:

People who leave a voicemail saying "Call me" or "I have a quick question." Just tell me what you want in the message, you dumbshits. You don't have to keep your message below five seconds.

My work has a 15 second limit on voicemail because of super harsh data retention policies the government has put on our industry. If they don't just say "Hello it's X call me at #" they just get cut off.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Bob Morales posted:

Less toner, worse quality, puke all over your printer once in a while. Especially bad with the colors

I learned that lesson a long time ago. I don't gently caress with anything but OEM carts anymore. Not worth the hassle. If they don't like how much they cost they can stop loving printing so much.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

skipdogg posted:

I learned that lesson a long time ago. I don't gently caress with anything but OEM carts anymore. Not worth the hassle. If they don't like how much they cost they can stop loving printing so much.

The other problem where I work is they have given almost every person in the company their own lovely desktop laser printer, instead of doing a big printer for each department like any normal company would do. So you're swapping cartridges out every 3,000 pages and you've got 3-4 models out there, connected via USB so you can't manage them.

Bonus points for continuing to buy the HP Lasers with wifi that you can't disable, so there are 50 HP_00232 SSId's broadcasting in any given area of the building.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

GargleBlaster posted:

I never figured out how they stayed profitable when they were churning out stuff like this



Ahahaha, that loving thing.

How they sold that was "suitable for old people", so that people who couldn't be bothered to buy grandma a Windows 95 machine, and then spend an eternity fixing it, could buy one of those so they could avoid having to handwrite letters to gran.

TWBalls posted:

All we get from our printer repair company are refurbs as well.

Pictured this as receiving a package from the printer company and in it is a 3 legged cat.

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

RE: Thermal printers

Zebra is a pain in the rear end to get working in general, but I do think they're a bit easier to get working with OPOS.

Epson in terrible in all respects. Everything, drivers, compatibility, OS, eventual print quality. The only thing in their favour is they last forever.

Star was actually the least pain but I think something is going on with them because all of their popular models I used to source are EOL and I haven't seen many replacements.

Interfaces in order of desirability and modernity:
- Wireless
- Lan/Ethernet
- Bluetooth (weird but I've seen it)
- Native USB
- RS232/Parallel/LPT (you'd think this should be lower but these strangely Just Work in my experience)
- Serial
- USB Faking Serial
- Custom serial over (x), where x can be DS9, RJ45, RJ49, etc. with custom pinouts

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

I stopped buying cheap HP printers. They're loving junk, and crazy expensive to operate. I won't buy anything less than a 3xxx series printer and prefer a 4xxx series unit. I switched most of those folks to comparable Brother units and haven't really had any issues to be honest.

GargleBlaster
Mar 17, 2008

Stupid Narutard

Lum posted:

Ahahaha, that loving thing.

How they sold that was "suitable for old people", so that people who couldn't be bothered to buy grandma a Windows 95 machine, and then spend an eternity fixing it, could buy one of those so they could avoid having to handwrite letters to gran.

I seem to remember toying with the idea, getting an image in my mind of her squinting over her glasses and prodding the little keys trying to figure it out (as she does with the TV remote, oh boy the TV remote) and came to the conclusion that most of the older generation just aren't really cut out for that sort of thing, whether it involves a clunky Microsoft OS or not :)

TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

Lum posted:

Pictured this as receiving a package from the printer company and in it is a 3 legged cat.

Oh my god, that cat is adorable. :3:

Speaking of things that seemingly last forever but are EOL, we're looking into replacements for these Fujitsu 4120 scanners that were originally purchased back in 2001. For most of them, any issues encountered have been replacing the pick roller or pad separator. Other issues are the occasional melted roller, probably due to the lamp (pre-LED style) constantly being on from constant use and the TWAIN driver occasionally hanging; often due to something with the scanner itself. If you simply reboot the system, it'll hang the driver again. We end up having to unplug the power, reboot and wait until Windows is back up, plug the power back in and hit the power button. Then it works great until the next time it decides to puke all over itself again. Here again, I suspect it's because they're so old and to be fair, are used very often daily. Unfortunately, everything that's under $500. has been absolute poo poo. So, we're currently forced to wait until the purchasing freeze is lifted, then we'll be buying some new Fujitsu 6130's. Hopefully they're as good as the old 4120's were.

stevewm
May 10, 2005

TWBalls posted:

:words:
then we'll be buying some new Fujitsu 6130's. Hopefully they're as good as the old 4120's were.

I'll chime in and say they are. We have had several for over a year now, no problems thus far. No problems with the scanner locking up or anything. The 6130 still uses CCFL light sources and they do get a little warm when on. No way it could melt anything though...

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Things pissing me off. If you're going to book an hour of my time to pitch me your product and bring a 'sales engineer' along, you better know your poo poo. If I ask you a pretty basic question about a feature your product has and you answer with "I don't know", that poo poo is weak son. I'm half tempted to try to find this guys boss and tell him how disappointing his 'sales pitch' was.

If you sell it, you should know it.

TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

stevewm posted:

I'll chime in and say they are. We have had several for over a year now, no problems thus far. No problems with the scanner locking up or anything. The 6130 still uses CCFL light sources and they do get a little warm when on. No way it could melt anything though...

Thanks, that's definitely reassuring. The 4120's appear to have what looks like a fluorescent tube for lighting, but it seems to break down the rollers so that they become soft and mushy, like a jellybean that's been in the sun. That then keeps it from rolling and the poor motor starts squealing something awful. I'm currently looking at our pile of dead scanners to see if there was one that happened to die of a bad board that I can scavenge the rollers from to get this poor admitting person back up and running until we can finally order new scanners.

Varkk
Apr 17, 2004

Sweevo posted:

Thermal printers over USB are far far worse.

Serial works, whereas the USB version have the shittiest drivers know to man.

Usually the USB thermal printers are just the serial ones with a cheap USB->serial adapter built in, ships with crappy drivers (often 32bit WinXP only even today) and no documentation on the adapter to hunt out a different driver. If by some miracle you do get it to work chances are when the PC restarts the virtual com port created by the USB->serial adapter is going to change.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

WebSense posted:

Access to this web page is restricted at this time.

Reason:
This Websense category is filtered: Sex.

WebSense pisses me off daily.

Today's random filter of the day is that this, the second page of an IT bitch thread, is being filtered because somehow it is flagged as having sexual content. How dare you interrupt my browsing.

Well done WenSense! Well done!

Kerpal
Jul 20, 2003

Well that's weird.
I have had pretty good experience so far with Zebra printers. Most of the issues were simple calibration problems or wear and tear solved with simple maintenance. Their thermal label printers have been solid.

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GargleBlaster
Mar 17, 2008

Stupid Narutard

Agrikk posted:

Sex filter

That's what you get for visiting expert-sexchange.com!

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