A ticket came in...

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

Spazz: Nov 17, 2005

KomradeVirtunov posted:

I don't know if I'm more horrified by that ticket system or that there's a "clean desk policy" that is apparently enforced by IT.

They said "end of shift," could it be that there's people who rotate each shift and share a desk?

Frankly, having a clean desk makes our job easier. Having to push your filth around is bad. When I was doing a roll out over the past year for <Generic Fortune 500>, I've seen some of the most disgusting desks ever. I started a box of rubber gloves because of it. I ended up cleaning the desks of some people who had spilled coffee and let it seep under the Dell GX270 (where it kinda sits up just enough to let liquid seep under). Ugh.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 19:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 24, 2024 11:06

Midelne: Jun 19, 2002; I shouldn't trust the phones. They're full of gas.

Theageofdust posted:

I really wish the head of the company wouldn't forward me every "LOOK OUT IT IS A NEW VIRUS THAT WILL BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTER AND KICK YOUR DOG!" emails. With the exact same message.

"Better keep an eye out for this"

I usually reply with a Snopes link, since it's usually something that's been forwarded around for years. Yes, even to executives.

Ticket of the day:

quote:

Hi, I need to install the able in order to take a class

Called her back, wasn't answering the phone. Sweet.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 20:06

Beary Mancrush: Jun 9, 2002; Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

Spazz posted:

They said "end of shift," could it be that there's people who rotate each shift and share a desk?

Frankly, having a clean desk makes our job easier. Having to push your filth around is bad. When I was doing a roll out over the past year for <Generic Fortune 500>, I've seen some of the most disgusting desks ever. I started a box of rubber gloves because of it. I ended up cleaning the desks of some people who had spilled coffee and let it seep under the Dell GX270 (where it kinda sits up just enough to let liquid seep under). Ugh.

Oh god. I did a temp job where we moved workstations from one building to another on the MS campus. YUCK. Programmers are gross. It's also not cool to cut a hole in the side of your work PC because you've run out of drive slots. Duct tape and tin snips are not a reasonable mounting solution.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 20:09

Crowley: Mar 13, 2003

Lil Bukowski posted:

Oh god. I did a temp job where we moved workstations from one building to another on the MS campus. YUCK. Programmers are gross. It's also not cool to cut a hole in the side of your work PC because you've run out of drive slots. Duct tape and tin snips are not a reasonable mounting solution.

I've seen servers run like that.

Production servers.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 20:15

Xenomorph: Jun 13, 2001

Theageofdust posted:

I really wish the head of the company wouldn't forward me every "LOOK OUT IT IS A NEW VIRUS THAT WILL BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTER AND KICK YOUR DOG!" emails. With the exact same message.

"Better keep an eye out for this"

I feel insulted and angry when people talk to me about some "new virus" they just heard about in their email.

It was loving stupid when the poo poo was going around in the 90s.

You know what, I can't say "I don't understand how people keep forwarding this poo poo" - because I do understand. People are loving stupid. Keep forwarding your idiot emails, keep sending money to Nigeria, keep giving your social security number to anyone who calls you, keep waiting for your check from Microsoft for forwarding all those emails, and keep loving yourself over in your closed-off world where you refuse to wake up.
Just leave me alone.

If there is something dangerous about to happen to me, I'd like to know. But if the warning starts off saying "This is not fake!" or "Bill Gates and AOL have just made an announcement" or whatever the gently caress obviously-fake sounding message, then keep it to yourself.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 20:43

Javid: Oct 21, 2004

I created a filter to insta-trash anything with "FW:" in the subject for just that reason.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 21:03

Hoppy: Oct 20, 2004; Who do you think taught him to jump like that?

Javid posted:

I created a filter to insta-trash anything with "FW:" in the subject for just that reason.

Yeah, but you can't do that in a ticket system. A department may forward you a conversation regarding what they want.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 21:20

Spazz: Nov 17, 2005

With the virus thing, we've had people forward us actual virus' and say "IS THIS SAFE TO OPEN!?"

I've always wanted to say: Did you get any Western Union mail orders? No? Then no, stupid. Of course not.

Lil Bukowski posted:

Oh god. I did a temp job where we moved workstations from one building to another on the MS campus. YUCK. Programmers are gross. It's also not cool to cut a hole in the side of your work PC because you've run out of drive slots. Duct tape and tin snips are not a reasonable mounting solution.

There were plenty others. Doing the restore on their workstation would be awful if we weren't giving them new keyboards. I started waiting on doing the messy desks after hours when the cleaning crew was going around so I could borrow some stuff to wipe down their desk just so I wouldn't get some awful disease from the year old cup with something in it I don't know sitting on it. I brought a new meaning to the term Computer Janitor.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 22:12

UserNotFound: May 7, 2006; ???

User:
The NIS server for the mc machines is heavily loaded and not responding to requests quickly enough. In fact, it appears to have just crashed altogether.
____

Unix Admin:
It didn't crash. A student was intentionally exhausting memory, but eventually it recovered. The student's account has been disabled for now.
____

Unix announcement:
The account IDIOT has been disabled on the UNIX side for intentionally abusive behavior (intentionally consuming memory on lore).
_____

IDIOT:
My account was recently frozen during a lab. My TA instructed me to send an e-mail to this address concerning the freeze. I apologize for any inappropriate things that transpired from me messing around. If possible, I would appreciate having my account un-frozen. Thank you.
____

Unix Admin:
In the interest of other students, your account will remain disabled for today. You will need to come visit me tomorrow some time between 8AM and 10AM, or 2PM and 5PM. Please let me know when you are free.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 22:15

Beary Mancrush: Jun 9, 2002; Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

Spazz posted:

There were plenty others. Doing the restore on their workstation would be awful if we weren't giving them new keyboards. I started waiting on doing the messy desks after hours when the cleaning crew was going around so I could borrow some stuff to wipe down their desk just so I wouldn't get some awful disease from the year old cup with something in it I don't know sitting on it. I brought a new meaning to the term Computer Janitor.

I actually only worked that job for a night because I couldn't breathe by the time the shift was over. Apparently a lot of Indian dudes still smoke and something in beadies makes me cough. I also came home with yellow nicotine smears on my khakis.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 22:17

Spazz: Nov 17, 2005

UserNotFound posted:

:words:

What'd they run? :(){ :|:& };: ?

# ? Dec 8, 2008 22:17

Xenomorph: Jun 13, 2001

Spazz posted:

With the virus thing, we've had people forward us actual virus' and say "IS THIS SAFE TO OPEN!?"

I've always wanted to say: Did you get any Western Union mail orders? No? Then no, stupid. Of course not.

That's another thing, they will open and forward, forward, forward all the stupid "this new virus will melt your hard drive" poo poo, but will then happily open the EXE attachment from "UPS" regarding some "package" they never sent or click the "fix now" AntiVirus 2009 popup.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 22:34

Wombot: Sep 11, 2001

thelightguy posted:

I know this is old, but did he seriously censor "asinine"?

Yes.

The most likely reason for this is that he has a censor installed on his PC and misspelled "Asinine" with two 's's. However, he did yell at us for not "Speaking American", so I wouldn't put sheer lunatic idiocy past him.

# ? Dec 8, 2008 23:56

random nickname: Oct 10, 2005; Part of a healthy and well-balanced diet.

I administer accounts on mainframes and the applications that are on them. Most of the time we get requests from hiring managers or supervisers to give or revoke access to either the mainframes or an individual application. Once in a while we'll receive a request to revoke access for a user from an auditor (i.e. employee no longer works but ID is some how still in the system etc).

Received this ticket last week from an auditor (again, keep in mind that i'm an administrator):

Ticket posted:

Please revoke access to [an application] for the following user:

Random Nickname (My ID#)

That was a scary ticket to receive.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 01:01

Tom Collins: Aug 25, 2000

random nickname posted:

That was a scary ticket to receive.

What was the end result?

# ? Dec 9, 2008 01:40

ErikTheRed: Mar 12, 2007; My name is Deckard Cain and I've come on out to greet ya, so sit your ass and listen or I'm gonna have to beat ya.

UserNotFound posted:

User:
The NIS server for the mc machines is heavily loaded and not responding to requests quickly enough. In fact, it appears to have just crashed altogether.
____

Unix Admin:
It didn't crash. A student was intentionally exhausting memory, but eventually it recovered. The student's account has been disabled for now.
____

Unix announcement:
The account IDIOT has been disabled on the UNIX side for intentionally abusive behavior (intentionally consuming memory on lore).
_____

IDIOT:
My account was recently frozen during a lab. My TA instructed me to send an e-mail to this address concerning the freeze. I apologize for any inappropriate things that transpired from me messing around. If possible, I would appreciate having my account un-frozen. Thank you.
____

Unix Admin:
In the interest of other students, your account will remain disabled for today. You will need to come visit me tomorrow some time between 8AM and 10AM, or 2PM and 5PM. Please let me know when you are free.

Any chance you work for Purdue? Lore is the undergrad CS server, is it not?

ErikTheRed fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Dec 9, 2008

# ? Dec 9, 2008 05:28

random nickname: Oct 10, 2005; Part of a healthy and well-balanced diet.

Tom Collins posted:

What was the end result?

Me: ummm, Team Lead, can you take a look at this ticket..
Team Lead: Sure. Hmmm, just looks like a standard revoke request.
Me: Take a look at the user.
Team Lead: Uh? ....oh. Ummm, are you getting fired?
Me: Am I?!
Team Lead: I don't think so...Let's have Team Manager look at this.
Team Manager: Hmmmm...are you getting fired?
Me: Am I?!
Team Lead: I didn't fire him...
Team Manager: I'm pretty sure only I can fire him, I think...
Me: Did you?
Team Manager: It would be a dick thing to do to make him revoke his own access before we escorted him out of the building. Anyways, what do think we should do about this, Random Nickname?
Me: Well, technically I could just revoke my account and it wouldn't really change anything. Because I have administrative rights to the Mainframe the application resides on, I can just go re-activate my account whenever I need specific access to that application. In the end, this ticket is basically a 2 minute waste of my time.

So in the end, nothing really happened. It was a pretty useless ticket, but we're still scratching our heads as to why it would happen in the first place.

My notes for the ticket looked like this:

[MY ID]: revoked access to application for user [my ID]
[MY ID]: resumed access to application for user [my ID] to confirm user [my ID] had been revoked.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 07:03

Javid: Oct 21, 2004

Not knowing your user id scheme, I'm assuming it was just a typo or general fuckup.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 07:33

Sergeant Rock: Apr 28, 2002; "... call the expert at kissing and stuff..."

It could be worse - you might have had to escort yourself from the building, or kick the gently caress out of yourself in the car park.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 11:11

oversteer: Jun 6, 2005

UserNotFound posted:

Unix Admin:
It didn't crash. A student was intentionally exhausting memory, but eventually it recovered. The student's account has been disabled for now.

I managed to do this entirely accidentally while in my university summer holiday in 1999. I wanted to get to the top of a "top sites" banner list (when you got ranked on a portal by the number of downloads of a banner placed on your site). I was running a ringtones/logos portal and the higher I was, the more money I made.

So having had a term of UNIX lessons I had the bright idea to use our university servers to run a script once a minute (from cron)

#!/bin/bash
lynx -s http://bannersites/siteid=1234 > /dev/null

This was good, but not enough. (No idea why I didn't use wget). So I ran the cron script from a second server.

Still not enough.

So I duplicated the wget's a bit. Still not enough.

Next was to use my newly found BASH for/next loops to run a new script every minute, calling that script each time..

#!/bin/bash
for ((i=1;i<=10;i+=1)); do
bannerscript.sh &
done

For some reason this still wasn't enough. So I increased the for() to 100 times. I was climbing the rankings neatly so I left it to it.

Sadly the banner script took a few seconds to run each time, and within a few minutes I'd managed to tie up all the processes for each server, causing the network admins to send me rather irritable emails while they worked out what was going on, then when they realised what I was doing! Still, I didn't get banned or anything..

# ? Dec 9, 2008 13:51

Hoppy: Oct 20, 2004; Who do you think taught him to jump like that?

When I send you an email asking for approval to give your subordinate something, it comes from [helpdeskaddress]@[mycompany].com It has the ticket number in the subject, and any replies to there go into the ticket. I'm trying to get documented approval. So when I need a reply, don't reply or forward to my individual address!

A user this morning twice replied to me directly instead of the email address I sent from. The third time I asked him to reply to the email address in the email, he instead replied to our internal department email, labeled Desktop Team (desktop department use only).

Forwarding it from myself isn't good enough, as forwards could easily be forged in our ticket system since they show as plaintext. Direct replies list the username of who replied, taken from the ticket system based on his email address.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 14:32

Accipiter: Jan 24, 2004; SINATRA.

Hoppy posted:

When I send you an email asking for approval to give your subordinate something, it comes from [helpdeskaddress]@[mycompany].com It has the ticket number in the subject, and any replies to there go into the ticket. I'm trying to get documented approval. So when I need a reply, don't reply or forward to my individual address!

This is a ridiculously easy problem to solve. Change the reply-to address in the e-mail and don't sign them with anything other than "Sincerely, Such-and-such Helpdesk"

# ? Dec 9, 2008 14:44

Hoppy: Oct 20, 2004; Who do you think taught him to jump like that?

The reply to is the address I want it sent to, and the email automatically signs when sent from inside our ticket system. It looks like

quote:

Do some stuff and then reply to this email with your approval.

Thank you,

Hoppy
Infrastructure Support

The user is actually going out of their way to remove the email address in the reply, look me up, put my name in instead. My email address is not the reply to, nor is it in the signature.

Everything from Thank you on down is automatically inserted.
You can also tell who is new in the helpdesk because they will sign the email in the ticket, giving you

newguy posted:

Hi do this kthx

Thanks,
New Guy, helpdesk

Thank you,

New Guy
Infrastructure support

# ? Dec 9, 2008 16:06

WickedMetalHead: Mar 9, 2007; /dev/null

Hoppy posted:

The user is actually going out of their way to remove the email address in the reply, look me up, put my name in instead. My email address is not the reply to, nor is it in the signature.

This is where you ignore ticket emails sent to your address.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 16:11

Hoppy: Oct 20, 2004; Who do you think taught him to jump like that?

WickedMetalHead posted:

This is where you ignore ticket emails sent to your address.

Would love to do that, but I have to keep good metrics if I want to get out of helpdesk. Required one year in helpdesk for most people here in IT before you can move up.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 16:17

Spazz: Nov 17, 2005

Hoppy posted:

Would love to do that, but I have to keep good metrics if I want to get out of helpdesk. Required one year in helpdesk for most people here in IT before you can move up.

Put something at the footer in all caps and bold saying to only reply and do not remove the ticket number.

I know exactly what you're going to. I've also had people create new e-mails when they should be forwarding what we've been discussing rather then trying to paraphrase.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 16:31

UserNotFound: May 7, 2006; ???

ErikTheRed posted:

Any chance you work for Purdue? Lore is the undergrad CS server, is it not?

How does a management student know what the undergrad CS server is?

# ? Dec 9, 2008 16:44

Spazz: Nov 17, 2005

UserNotFound posted:

How does a management student know what the undergrad CS server is?

nmap 10.0.0.0/8 ?

# ? Dec 9, 2008 18:06

ErikTheRed: Mar 12, 2007; My name is Deckard Cain and I've come on out to greet ya, so sit your ass and listen or I'm gonna have to beat ya.

UserNotFound posted:

How does a management student know what the undergrad CS server is?

I have friends in CS. I swear it's every CS student's fantasy to crash that thing.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 19:41

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Arsten posted:

Ticket Opener: uhenae
Ticket Description: user hard to understand/he seems to be talking about his de computer not properly syncing records
Ticket Status: closed
Ticket Remarks: u00741-user led me to bathroom/said in broken english that computer is not syncing/the toilet isnt flushing/informed user to call ext 089 next time/will tell janitorial this time/closed ticket
Ticket Bill: d00010

"Syncing records" will now go right up there along with "sending emails" and "calling my broker" as euphemisms for a trip to the men's room.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 20:25

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

borrowedladder posted:

"Syncing records" will now go right up there along with "sending emails" and "calling my broker" as euphemisms for a trip to the men's room.

Don't forget "compiling" for the developers.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 20:30

Hawzy: Dec 13, 2002

borrowedladder posted:

"Syncing records" will now go right up there along with "sending emails" and "calling my broker" as euphemisms for a trip to the men's room.

The comman slang at my company is "internal project".

# ? Dec 9, 2008 20:31

Mandals: Aug 31, 2004; Isn't it pretty to think so.

Got this one last week:

ther be bugs eating up the scren

# ? Dec 9, 2008 20:44

Weedle: May 31, 2006

Mandals posted:

Got this one last week:

ther be bugs eating up the scren

For some reason this one made me laugh more than anything. I imagine the terrified sender furiously banging out an email, frantically attempting to finish it before the bugs get to it.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 21:34

EVGA Longoria: Dec 25, 2005; Let's go exploring!

Mandals posted:

Got this one last week:

ther be bugs eating up the scren

Why couldn't I get tickets like this?

Best one I ever got:

"HEY GUYS,"

That was the total text of the ticket.

# ? Dec 9, 2008 21:38

boo_radley: Dec 30, 2005; Politeness costs nothing

borrowedladder posted:

"Syncing records" will now go right up there along with "sending emails" and "calling my broker" as euphemisms for a trip to the men's room.

"I need to see what Brown can do for me."

# ? Dec 9, 2008 21:45

syphon: Jan 1, 2001

boo_radley posted:

"I need to see what Brown can do for me."

"Gotta go RTT this new Build"

('RTT' usually means Release To Test... you can guess that the last T is changed to)

# ? Dec 9, 2008 22:48

monkeybounce: Feb 9, 2007

The best ticket I've ever seen was escalated to me by on of our completely idiotic support desk people--whom I've since gotten fired.

Status: Escalated
Technician: monkeybounce
Category: Router/Switch
SubCategory: VLAN Modification
Computer: USERNAME-WS
Subject: []

User reports that he can not sit comfortably in chair. Requesting new chair like one in [conference room]

Enteredby:SupportMoron

Now, when a name is selected in our ticketing software, the Category box populates with those areas in which we are proficient in order to prevent ticket mis-routing.

So, not only did someone actually request a new chair from our IT department, but the moron in support escalated it to me as a Router/Switch change?

Also, the chairs in the conference room are all high back leather executive chairs...

As a quick derail: Do you guys ticket by user or ticket by machine?

# ? Dec 10, 2008 02:00