A ticket came in...

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Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Today's winning ticket (Luckily I don't baby sit our helpdesk, but I watch it for gems in between forum browsing)

User: :downswords:

I can't cancel a print job I don't want on my local printer, it's used up 2 packs of paper so far and it's still going!!!
Helpdesk: :allears:

And you kept feeding more paper in to it instead of turning it off because.. ?
No response from the user after that, mission accomplished.

Close second was a ticket with the only text being: Laptop needs serviced.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2011 01:36

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:56

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

jkyuusai posted:

Oh wow, I'm moving to Tallahassee in less than a week's time.

For content: Had my last lunch with one of my coworkers. Talking to him reassured me that this is a bad job situation and that I need to
Mentioned the thread, year of the joerb, etc. Advised him to read it and to also GTFO.

Make sure to hit up Barnaby's pizza when you get here, one of the only redeeming qualities of the place! :toot:

(OK, it's not that bad, but hey)

# ¿ Apr 28, 2011 21:39

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

You should probably have some kind of Change Password at Next Logon flag for accounts to stop idiots like that.

I can one up this in the land of password idiocy- I work for social security disability, and our users have 3 passwords: windows, SSA mainframe, and AS/400-iSeries. They're supposed to match, otherwise stuff doesn't work, and there is even a program that synchronizes them for you, but that's wayyyyyyy too complicated. The kicker is, required changes are every 30 days, and each system has sliiiightly different rules for passwords it will accept (No repeated characters, no common words like parts of your name, date of birth, etc), along with an enforced "Cannot re-use prior 7 passwords" rule.

Best part? I just ran stats for helpdesk tickets in the password reset category for the past 5 years, and the winning user had clocked about 160 tickets. The runner up was not even close with a mere 80.

There is not enough :psyduck:

for that...

# ¿ May 12, 2011 20:07

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

CaptainGimpy posted:

Please.....
My guys get to clean this up next month

Edited to add:
this is the site that decided they needed to move a wiring closet by cutting all of the cables with tin snips:

That's nothing.. This guy is up for renovation and cleanup this weekend:

My personal favorite parts about our computer room are the "Please keep the computer room clean!" signs, right along with using old poweredge 2600s as stands for the portable ACs we have to run! Luckily all the token ring is finally getting ripped out :v:

As far as tickets go, this is my winner for the week:

quote:

my mouse is position wrong and keeps falling off my desk can you guys come correct

The users in this area have a mix of trackballs and normal mice. Either way you look at it... :colbert:

# ¿ May 13, 2011 18:45

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Kyrosiris posted:

A ticket came in:

"question do you have does files for cod4 and if so can you install them for me. thx"

Really? REALLY?

That reminds me of when we do the IT orientation for batches of new hires- I work for Social Security, with all the expected firewalling and internet filtering that you would guess goes along with that. We'll have a batch of 40 new hires doing orientation and training about how to log on, set up their three different passwords, all that crap.

During the "How to press control-alt-delete and sign on" portion, 90% of the group will be strugging with the whole concept of hitting control-alt-delete. The other 10% will be already signed on, having mastered the art of pressing three keys at once and reading their username and default password on their orientation packet. The first thing they try and do is always go to facebook, without fail, then look really confused when nothing comes up. All this with all of us IT staff standing in the back row watching them all.

:psyduck:

# ¿ Jun 2, 2011 18:33

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

adaz posted:

We're about done transitioning 5k or so machines to windows 7 after about a month . It is proverbial hell, since users when confronted with a new OS for the first time in, oh, 8 or so years freak right the gently caress out. The best example I came up with was like when you move a cat to a new house. They just get all confused, lost in the basement, and end up howling at the stairs.

Of course, the counter example is one of our lab facilities has these custom windows xp machines with this incredibly vendor specific software/hardware poo poo in them that we just upgraded last year... from windows 95. And it took one of the software packaging team like 3 months basically solely doing that to even make that work. So yes, I imagine in 5-10 years I'll be able to say we're all completely windows 7!

internal stats posted:

code:
Vista Workstations             131394   98.2% 
XP Workstations                1985      1.5% 
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise 486       0.4% 
TOTAL                          133866    100% 
Discontinuation of Windows XP Support - Support for the Windows XP desktop/laptop image will be discontinued as of July 1, 2011. At that time, there will be no further updates to the Windows image.

No more XP! :dance:

We just finished migrating to Vista in December, and Win7 testing is looking to start deployment around q4 this year. There's nothing like a year of vista to make you appreciate Windows 7 all that much more. Now if only we could get a server 2008 image done and get away from running 32 bit server 2003 on machines with more than 4 gigs of ram

# ¿ Jun 13, 2011 17:40

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Ticket appears: HALP MY SCANNER WON'T SCAN.
User updates ticket: Oh I unplugged it and plugged it in again now it works, thanks!

Mind = loving blown. This user is in the same department as one that put in a ticket stating that their mouse falls off their desk when they use it, and could we please assist her in re-locating said mouse to somewhere where it didn't fall off the desk (Bonus points because the mouse in this case is a trackball)? I would have said there were not two collective brain cells to rub together left in that department, but hey!

# ¿ Jun 23, 2011 11:50

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Funny, my ticket was from our fiscal department as well!

# ¿ Jun 23, 2011 19:55

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Migishu posted:

Ummm... a ticket came in...

what we are looking for from (company) is a holistic troubleshooting mechanism here.

This would work great with one of our users. She'd plastered her workstation in "Healing cosmic wave blocking magnets" that we had to pry off of it, in addition to putting them up all over her cubible. I'm always tempted to leave notes or messages on her PC saying that IT is pointing our mind control rays at her desk to feed the :tinfoil:

, but I actually like the supervisor that's stuck dealing with this particular insane user.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2011 16:13

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

A ticket didn't come in... because our single worst user in helpdesk history quit!

I was bored, so I ran a query on our helpdesk database to see who had the most password resets for the last 5 years. Our number one user in question won the contest with... 167 tickets. For a 5 year period :aaa:

. The next closest were in the 60s ot 70s. For reference, our users have to change passwords once every 30 days. It's honestly amazing that some of these people are at all functional in real life.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2011 17:59

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Ticket appeared...
"WE are getting tonner burn on fire on our printer"

And you're putting in a ticket about this?!
:psyduck:

# ¿ Oct 4, 2011 20:07

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Asmodai_00 posted:

ex. I spent a half hour on the phone day working on a spreadsheet for someone because they can't grasp sorting.

You must have been working with the fine people of our fiscal department! (If there was just ONE group that you would expect could at least deal with basic excel usage you would think it would be finance and accounting... but noooooooo).

# ¿ Nov 1, 2011 05:03

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Billy the Mountain posted:

This is the best thing, really.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 20:09

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Oh users. We moved a department in to cubeland, and took away the speakers with their PCs in the process (They're fiscal, all they do is mash "Pay" on bills non stop, don't need them, etc.)

Ticket comes in: "Hi can i request to get speakers for my computer I need them to listen to conference calls."

:aaa:

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 23:02

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

They all have Avaya 2410s and headsets already, which makes the ticket extra :wtc:

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 23:14

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Verbatim:

"P738A16 and P738A17 have error message to load paper. None of us here could figure out what needs to be done to get rid of the error message to get the printer going. HELP."

Welp.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2011 20:11

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Farking Bastage posted:

There's quite a bit in Tallahassee due to the government presence. Although, most of it is development and I'm more of a sysadmin/network type. Should be even more after new years.

e: I'm not going to do something loving stupid and walk out in a huff or anything, since I have a wife and mortgage. I can do the job I have with my eyes closed, so I have the opportunity to really find the right thing.

Whereabouts in Tallahassee do you work? We got rid of our utterly incompetent IT director early this year, hopefully he didn't end up at your place!

# ¿ Dec 20, 2011 23:30

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

ZeitGeits posted:

I know, the more we delay the migration the worse it will get.

Here's a quick question: How did everyone else persuade their user base to look forward to, or at least accept, the switch to 7?

You roll out vista first. :rimshot:

We (SSA) actually did this. XP-> vista finished December 2010, server 2008r2 and Win7 are starting first thing 2012. :v:

# ¿ Dec 29, 2011 23:20

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Frozen-Solid posted:

Close! As it turns out, the company who wrote the software only "tests" with that one specific card. The only thing they could tell us is that running on Windows 7 won't work, and that they recommend one specific Dell Optiplex machine. Great, why didn't you tell us that one specific optiplex machine when we special ordered a box for you.

So I'm banking on just buying the same chipset card from the same manufacturer, with a PCI Express connection, and hoping it works. It should. There's no reason it shouldn't. Ugh.

This sounds a lot like the stuff I used to deal with- Computers running cameras connected to microscopes to do microscopy time lapses and all sorts of other types of imaging. The software is almost always flaky finicky (But still very expensive, of course) junk that will most likely freak out if you do change the card. Some of it is OK, some even good, but for each good one there is also some out there that is still running on a windows 95 machine that will never, ever change or get re-installed, because god help you if you have to set it up again.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 22:35

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

CommanderApaul posted:

I got permission from my boss to put FePsTools on all the PCs at the helpdesk, along with instructions on how to use the psinfo function, specifically for the amount of "it's running slow and I just rebooted it" calls that, after remoting in and checking task manager, have uptimes of 10+ days.

It's much easier to just say "The network shows that your PC has been running for X time straight, a reboot would likely fix the slowness" and preempting the "Have you tried rebooting?" "Yes, it didn't work" "Task Manager shows X CPU Time" "Are you calling me a liar?" tirade that we occasionally get from pissy doctors who don't like to be called out.

This owns bones. What doesn't own? Google loving searching for PsTools and having to explicitly tell it "Yes, I did mean to search for something else."

# ¿ Jan 24, 2012 23:07

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Salt Fish posted:

Anyone know anything about running php on an iSeries server? Are Zend's PHP tools/server/dev enviroment any good?

Just for the love of god make sure you have the IBM rational dev studio, because otherwise editing code on an iSeries will make you want to kill yourself. Green screen based source files are NOT friendly. Funnily enough though, you can make do with the dev studio trial, and just keep using it by setting the date backwards on your PC :v:

I haven't used PHP on my machine so I can't speak to that specifically, but I do have a ton of other crap hosted/running on it.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2012 17:13

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Moey posted:

My daily move poo poo ticket came in.

I cannot really complain, this is to just move dictation equipment from one cube to another. USB foot controls and some headphones. Why they cannot do it, I have no idea.

At least they decided to only move the equipment instead of leaving it and having the users move.

I've seen the ultimate ticket down that path:
"hi i have a problem with my mouse falling off my desk can you please assist to move mouse back"

(The user in question has a trackball. We let the FNG handle this one :v:

)

# ¿ Feb 22, 2012 04:46

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

Ugh, my last experience with as/400 was as/400 running inside of an iSeries emulator running inside of a windows95 emulator running inside of citrix. Why the hell can't these accountants move to something modern?

(Now I will have to sperg a bit since I am an iseries admin among other things at my current job)

An AS/400 is an iSeries is an i5 is a system i, and they all run i/OS of one version or another. IBM just changed the name 50 times. Funnily enough to your anecdote (Dear god windows 95, really?), it's also a virtualized (sorta) platform! One hardware system runs logical partitions that get assigned CPUs, ram, etc, with the capability to dynamically adjust resources between them and add CPUs and so on.

The system itself usually runs very well (The most I've had to do in the last two years is change the battery pack on a raid controller's cache card, and you can even do it while the system is running), the vendor software that is usually run on it, however.. There are not enough :aaa:

s for the amount of retarded poo poo I've seen from that stuff.

Think of the good side, at least the backend for anything running on an iseries is a real DB2 database, and not MS Access!

# ¿ Mar 8, 2012 22:37

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

psydude posted:

I blame lawyers for the fact that fax machines still exist.

Doctors and medical anything. By far. loving faxes, fax lines, snail mail, and paper in general. I just ran a query on some print logs and checked one of the most used printers, and we've got a Lexmark T654 that was installed a year ago that has racked up 859,000 pages printed. Despite having bizhubs with desktop faxing capability, no one knows how to use it so they just print poo poo and then run it through the fax. (Also a lot of that paper is snail mail, so just as bad.)

# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 21:12

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

couldcareless posted:

I want to think that printer has some faulty job stuck in the queue that keeps churning out pages of jumbled characters and no one in the office gave it a second thought or let IT know.

Hahahah, look at how optimistic this one is!

pre:

Jobs by Document Length		
	        Count	Avg job length
1-2 Pages	18118	1
3-4 Pages	6583	3
5-10 Pages	16407	7
11-20 Pages	11583	14
21-30 Pages	4630	25
31-50 Pages	6070	37
51-74 Pages	2006	59
75-100 Pages	552	83
101+ Pages	95	118
Total	66044	

Last Printed Job
2012-04-03 
 
Media Sheet Count 
Picked Sheets
877076

Supply Information	
Black Toner	
Install Date	3/28/2012
Toner Level	40%

Looks like a toner cart every week and a half or so for this one.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 21:49

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Blue_monday posted:

As mentioned, the medical community. I can send a couple of hundred faxes in a week. I've actually grown kind of fond of the fax machine. Though I greatly prefer email and I wish more of the offices in my city used them.

Funny printer story (I guess run of the mill in this thread):

Our big awesome Minolta printer ran out of toner. The replacement we had was the wrong kind. I hauled out the toner and shook it. I was treated like a goddamn wizard.

I don't know how we managed to get the wrong toner cartridges. The place we get them from supplied us the printer, and its the only printer we have through them...

We have a pile of about 150 boxes of toner for T654s in my building alone :shepicide:

# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 02:11

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

rscott posted:

snip

The joys of working in a machine shop. If you can't tell from the pictures, that...stuff is a horrible mixture of lubricant from our CNC machines, dust and aluminum dust/shavings. Also a bonus of how messy the server room is.

This is still way, way better than cracking open a machine used by a smoker. I popped open a dead machine someone brought in not suspecting anything out of the ordinary, and the foul, sticky, vile smelling brown mess caked on every surface inside the case made me want to puke. You get all the voluminous-ness of normal dust bunnies, but instead of brushing or blowing off, it's heavy and gummy. Yech.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 20:48

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Rhymenoserous posted:

I need to know how this happens, because I used to be a heavy smoker, and a good portion of my smoking was done in front of my PC while playing the hell out of some Battlefield 1942. The inside of my case was pristine (Aside from the normal dust bunnies). Is it because it wasn't on my desk at face level or what?

EDIT: And I'm terrible about blowing out the case with canned air/compressor i.e. I never did it till I broke it down for resale four years later.

Maybe brand or type of cigs or something? I have no earthly idea, but the worst one I saw was just like what Craptacular described in his post.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 21:34

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

FISHMANPET posted:

In Powdered Toast Man's case I'm guessing this woman is under 30, so even less excuse. But I'm still amazed at how bad kids today are at computers.

Our last group hire was about 40 or so people, we have them all in one of our training rooms to do the initial intro on our systems, how to log on, set their passwords, etc. We have 5 or so people from systems standing around the room helping with this, but about 90% start out struggling with the very first "control-alt-delete" to log in to windows. The other 10% have ignored whatever we've been saying, logged in (These are the "smart ones" because they can not only read their username and the huge bold default password next to it in their packet of info, they also managed to change their password from the default without getting tripped up on the whole password rules things), and proceed to try and go to facebook, which is of course blocked. This is in the middle of getting a speech about how they will get fired for loving around on any social/sharing/anything site at work, because government and working with personal information/social security numbers/etc.

I think the record for quickest time from set password to forgot password ticket I've seen while here (that the user admitted to, at least) was about 10 minutes. Incidentally this is also the time it takes our PCs to lock themselves if you're not doing anything! Our current "Memory of a loving goldfish with Alzheimer's" award goes to one user that has submitted 179 password reset tickets over the lifetime of our helpdesk database, which goes back to mid 2005, for 2.5 fuckupsper month, EVERY SINGLE MONTH. Yea.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 14:41

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Ticket came in: HALP MY MOUSE AND KEYBOARD AREN'T WORKING I AM PUTTING IN THIS TICKET FROM COWORKER DERP'S MACHINE.

Ticket closed: Turned user's machine on. Keyboard and mouse now work.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2012 18:13

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

I love passive aggressive as gently caress tickets.

Ticket comes in:
"Computer is slow, application XYZ loads and displays documents really slowly, pc stops responding, even after I reboot. However, I know what will happen. You will ask me to reproduce these difficulties and I will not be able to. This has happened non stop for 4 days! This is affecting my work!"

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 17:42

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Farking Bastage posted:

This interview Thursday may be pretty awesome. It will be a practical one according to guy I talked to. They will sit me down in front of some cisco gear to configure. It's for a state agency, so it's not some recruiter bullshit that I can tell.

Good luck, last time we tried to hire anyone as a state agency we got the most abysmal jokes of applicants that it was hard to even take any of them at all seriously. If you even know how to sign in to a router to configure it, you're probably ahead of the curve!
(I'm not kidding, we came up with a dead simple little quiz type thing, basic vb.net and SQL questions, half MULTIPLE CHOICE to boot, 50 possible points. With the most generous grading, the "best" candidate got an 8. :smith:

)

# ¿ Apr 24, 2012 16:17

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Rohaq posted:

So I'm tracking down some scripts on an IIS server which are being run as a specific, real user with admin rights, which is pretty terrible.

I've got a list of some files, but I was wondering if there's a quick way to generate a report on every file on a site, so I can quickly browse over any files we might have missed. Anybody ever done anything like this before?

What kind of attributes in a report? You could just use a plain windows search for all files in a site's directory and then use something like sysexporter to dump the contents of the search window to excel or a text file or whatever you feel like.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 15:16

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Potato Alley posted:

I definitely do this - old Dell 2600 (5U monster desktop-turned-rack) that was a client's Timberline Estimating & Accounting server, On-Screen Takeoff server, and a couple other things I'm forgetting. When I finally turned that piece of poo poo off I think the shutdown reason was "gently caress you, die in a fire, you are the worst server it is you, ok gently caress off kthxbye".

That was a satisfying day.

This, but with a Poweredge 6600. You know, the one with quad P4-Xeons. The original ones, that ran at 1.4 ghz.

It was our exchange server.

yup.
:sigh:

# ¿ May 31, 2012 22:04

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

AlexDeGruven posted:

As long as I've worked in this business (14 years in healthcare IT), I've come to the conclusion that having a major hippocampus trauma is a requirement for the job (whether that happens before the interview, during the interview, or once the job is accepted is up to the hiring manager, of course).

The hippocampus is a big part in the brain's process of storing short-term memory in long-term memory, among some other things

I, too, work for a place that employs a large number of doctors. I just ran a query on our helpdesk database, and fully 38% of our password reset tickets come in on Mondays, with the grand champion password fuckup having a total of 189 password resets over a 4 years.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2012 22:42

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Naramyth posted:

I'm going to e/n bitch about printers and printing and coddling people who are "above" clearing a paper jam.

Our printers need to be replaced because they have over a million prints each in like 4 years. Last week the bottom drawer of one of the printers hosed up and wouldn't lift correctly, that has also been fixed.

Only a million sheets in 4 years? psh.

(This is one of 184 printers we have between our 6 offices :barf:

)

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 15:50

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Flipperwaldt posted:

Coupons.

Hahah, that would be terrible, but that printer isn't color. And we all know that only the much more expensive color toner is suitable for coupon printing! (This is in fact the only use our color printers ever see, but that's not a surprise.)

I'm a dba/random odd systems jobs guy for social security disability, and literally all of our communication with people that apply is through mail. Unending piles of snail mail, and faxes (Doctor's offices live on loving faxes). When we send someone to a doctor for an exam, often times they send that person's entire stack of medical records along with them, which the doctor usually tosses in the trash after scanning the first few pages. Our parking lot is generally occupied by dueling paper delivery semis and shredit shredding and recycling trucks

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 16:24

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Nebulis01 posted:

Holy poo poo, at least you're only 9500 pages per month over the recommended maximum for the monthly duty cycle (assuming I can do math on a Monday morning)

Welp, we're getting 69 new T654s to replace ones installed last year, sooooo. :toot:

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 16:33

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Oh yea, they're all on contract for parts and stuff like that. Probably a good 50% of each of our office CJ's job is baby sitting the printer repair guys and replacing toner.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 17:25

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:56

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Oh users.
Ticket, verbatim:
"PRINTRE NEED MORE LASER INK"

:commissar:

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 20:02

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