|
"I just brought in a computer from home to have as a resource in the classroom... is it possible to have it connected to the network so that students can access internet, etc??? if not, that is okay, it will just be a word processor... but the problem is, i turn it on and get a wierd screen that says something like i need to download programs or something... is there any way that I can have a tech kid come in and check it out? it worked before ................ just let me know... thanks soooo much!!!!!!!" -an English teacher, whose problems did not include a broken keyboard
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2008 22:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:30 |
|
|
Golbez posted:Not only that (sorry for the necroquote but just found this thread, and Arsten's posts are amazing), but 374mb back then was a lot of money. The most optimistic estimate I can find online for 1995 hard drive prices is 25 cents a meg, meaning that porn stash alone cost the company nearly a hundred dollars. I'm surprised they didn't fire him on the spot, considering how strict they seemed otherwise. That's just a hundred dollars of hard drive space; the bandwidth consumed would also be killer.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2008 10:54
|
|
|
Midelne posted:The head of our Accounting department was one of those people here. He periodically insists that I get to work on optimizing the mix of hopelessly archaic and cutting edge SQL databases that we use in daily operation on the grounds that it's all computer stuff and I should already know this. My response after the first couple of times when I'd been here longer than a week and wasn't afraid of him anymore was to ask him which stocks were going to be major winners tomorrow, then ask why he didn't know that since it was all money stuff anyway. That sounds like it could carry a terrible risk of the money dude shooting back with "oh yeah COCK and BALL are going to be big winners tomorrow... so why can't you do something about SQL, huh?", although if that happened there would be the hilarious possibility of going into work one day and finding out that Mister Bigshot Accounting Manager just lost everything on a margin call.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2008 00:14
|
|
|
Spazz posted:
Oh, god. The Gateway 2000/2100 desktop computers were atrocious with this. A little squirrel-cage fan set on top of a short heatsink meant that after a couple of years, the dust would easily accumulate to form a curtain over the exposed heatsink, forcing the little fan to run far too hard to keep the CPU cool. gently caress those things, I wish we had never gone with Gateway for so many reasons.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2009 18:19
|
|
|
sm8000 posted:This sounds like something that was copied to directors, VPs and project managers, in addition to your supervisor(s). Hahahahaha not necessarily. Some people in education think that if you show people just how much you're putting in you'll instantly drop everything to accommodate their every whim. Also I love this part: quote:In addition, I would like to differentiate more fully my instruction by utilizing the computer-based support materials for our textbook that I was able to obtain through donation from the author and the publisher. I would bet money that this is the song of frustration for so many education IT people right here. "Help, I *just* got a bunch of poo poo for free that would realllllly help me with my classes and I neeeeeeed to start using it tomorrow, could you pleeeeease figure out a way to jimmy-rig it so it will magically not be incompatible any more?"
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2009 22:38
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:And if I ever get a copy of her infamous "lapdance" video from the company retreat I'm giving it to my lawyer, never mind what I signed when they gave me my severance package. This sounds like a really interesting story. But then given the remark about what you signed, maybe you can't tell us. If you can, though, I'd love to hear it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2009 17:55
|
|
|
guppy posted:Oh lord, most of my users don't know how. It's pretty common really. Put an icon on her desktop and she'll be satisfied. Yeah, I can't count how many times we got "WHERE IS MY EMAIL WHY DON'T I HAVE EMAIL ANY MORE WHAT HAVE YOU DONE" when we forgot to add a desktop shortcut, even though there was a shortcut right at the top of the Start Menu just above Programs.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2009 21:14
|
|
|
That reminds me of this email I got once:quote:I just brought in a computer from home to have as a resource in the Not so bad, right? That one was from an English teacher.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2009 21:32
|
|
|
potato of destiny posted:I always think it's kind of funny how basically everyone in this thread is using the exact same 6 computers. Guess nobody ever got fired for buying Dell... Oh god, I wish we'd been buying Dell for the last few years. Now we have all these Gateway computers with no warranty support on them. 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2009 23:17
|
|
|
Midelne posted:His response to a high-priority email from the district manager giving all the necessary information and directing us to talk to Ed if we need any details that only wants a response indicating when the task will be completed:
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2009 20:28
|
|
|
Wait, I just realized that this "Jeff" isn't mentioned anywhere in the DM's email. Who is Jeff?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2009 21:21
|
|
|
The Merkinman posted:This isn't a story, just a question for all the IT people in this thread. Well, until next week, our big student-information app (that EVERY TEACHER IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT USES) was not officially supported by IE7, and we weren't going to dare to put IE7 on for fear that future support requests would be shrugged off with "not a supported configuration, sorry". They're already bad enough at promptly responding to issues.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2009 17:06
|
|
|
Midelne posted:edit, response: Wait. Why is the printer on a battery backup?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2009 20:30
|
|
|
XarsonX posted:I have been doing this for too long... I remember one time some kids were mucking around on a library Wyse box (playing Flash games, which hammers our poor old terminal servers), and I decided to remote control their RDP session to the terminal server to mess around with them for a bit. It took them forever to figure out that someone else was messing with them - at one point I started typing in a URL and they exclaimed "Look, it's typing for you!"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2009 18:53
|
|
|
Most of our users are pretty chill, but some of them are crazy. One of my co-workers came back from a site yesterday and said that a user she was talking to told her "I didn't read that email you sent. It was too long. I don't read long emails. If you want me to read it you're gonna have to shorten it up a lot."  This... this is... these instructions are vital to doing your job right. Seriously? You're going to blatantly, arrogantly
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2009 21:58
|
|
|
Crowley posted:Highschoolers can't have candy? Those emails sound like special ed teachers to me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2009 21:42
|
|
|
On the phone today: "I borrowed a computer from upstairs to use in my office and it's not working right. It's coming up with an error: 'could not connect'..." "Are you connected to the network?" "What's a network?" I was stunned for a moment. I mean even our most grandmotherly users, while maybe not fully understanding it, at least have some familiarity with the term "network".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2009 07:52
|
|
|
thehustler posted:What's amusing about this is how the person just decided to move some hardware on her own without asking. It was a student laptop, so I didn't even try to interrogate them about it, it would be a fruitless effort. If it had been a desktop of some kind I would have looked into it further.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2009 16:21
|
|
|
afflictionwisp posted:Beaten. Approx. 200 regular employees, every single one had a desktop printer. On top of this, each of the 6 departments had 3-5 LJ 5100 network printers, and most had an additional color laserjet network printer. We had 8 more 5100's sitting in storage in various states of being broken. Was a gov't. company. Try education, where not only does every teacher get their own laser printer, a bunch of people squirrel away their old inkjet printers and demand ongoing support for those as well.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2009 16:11
|
|
|
Tony Montana posted:The professional helpdesk guy (been doing it for 10+ years) is a strange creature. Just enough people skills to enjoy talking with clients, but not enough to move into sales, convince people of stuff and make some serious money with commissions. Some people aren't really career-minded and just don't have the ambition to go further. They found a job that is generally low-stress and pays enough to live comfortably on, so they're content to keep working there. One of my co-workers is just like that; he's thought a couple of times about maybe moving on to a different job, but he figures it's safer and easier to just stay where he is. And it's not like he's in danger of losing his job unexpectedly since he works in a nice cushy public school district with a union and seniority. (I'm not that guy. But I'd like to be him someday.)
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2009 16:43
|
|
|
An actual show about computer janitors wouldn't really be about the diagnostics, it would be about retarded users, interpersonal drama, and inter-office politics. "Why the gently caress do we need to drop everything to set up a laptop for this rear end in a top hat right now?" "Because that rear end in a top hat is banging the director of marketing." "poo poo." EDIT: Oh also "greasy nerds lol" because we have to throw some of that lowest-common-denominator humor in there.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2009 18:42
|
|
|
OMGLOLetcetc posted:Yeah. It was a dinosaur HP injet printer. Unsure the model, but it wasn't a scanner. I mean....you can open up a persons body and play around with their organs, but you can't tell the difference between a printer and a scanner? Come on man. I think there was a Canon inkjet back in the late 90s that had an option where you could pull the print head and replace it with a scanning head - but I could be remembering wrong. That said, yikes.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2009 01:10
|
|
|
Shin-chan posted:Note: School Administrators, not tech admins. Oh, that's not so bad. I know I've posted this before, but this woman is being paid to teach English to high school students: quote:I just brought in a computer from home to have as a resource in the
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2009 18:07
|
|
|
Doc Faustus posted:I'd refuse her request on the grounds of using the phrase "tech kid." That wasn't in reference to the IT department; the high school used to have hand-picked "student techs" that operated out of the library, and would take care of minor poo poo like printers that had been turned off ("my printer's dead! aaaaaaa" *flips power switch* "there you go"), monitors with loose video cables, showing users how to select a different printer rather than just mash the quick-print button, that sort of thing. It was great, it meant that minor issues could get resolved pretty quickly without them having to wait for us to get out there, and sometimes we even got a little diagnostic info before we rolled out there to find out that when the user said "my computer won't get on the internet" they really meant "my computer has no network connectivity at all because some jackass stole the network cable". Unfortunately, all of the computer classes were cut due to layoffs one year, and they never got reinstated, so there was no longer anyone who could be trusted to select competent, reliable kids for the program. We were able to keep the program on life support for a couple of years by having the veteran students point out kids they knew who would be decent enough, but it eventually got scuttled when the librarian just started picking any dumbass kid who could bamboozle her with technobullshit. ("yeah, i need a new video card for my senior project, it has to be at least a 256-bit card." "You... you mean 256 megabyte, right?" "no, 256-bit  " )Oh, and those computer classes were never reinstated. It's 2009 and the high school has zero classes pertaining to the operation, maintenance, or programming of computers, and it's been that way for about five years now.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2009 21:59
|
|
|
Raluek posted:Maybe I'm just misremembering stuff from when I was in high school, but I remember there being cards with 128 and 256-bit-wide buses, where a 128MB 256-bit card was more desirable than the other way around. I haven't heard that spec being thrown around since the 8800GTS came out (did it have a 320bit interface or some poo poo? I'm even more unsure about this). The way he was saying it reminded me of when kids talked about how "well, the Nintendo 64 is 64-bit!". He "needed" it for... well, it wasn't even Game Maker, it was some terrible "build your own FPS!" program. Also I think I misremembered and it was something like 64 or 128. Either way the kid was a complete idiot for a lot of other reasons as well.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2009 16:36
|
|
|
coyo7e posted:
Could be unlimited...? I know I asked about my work phone's data plan before I started browsing news sites while I waited on something, and he came back with "totally unlimited, do whatever you want".
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2009 20:23
|
|
|
Start of a new school year, many new computers and freshly-imaged computers. "Help, I don't have Outlook on my computer!" "Click on the Start Menu." "Oh, there it is! Can you tell me how to move it over to the desktop?" Half our userbase. Oh, some of those people figure out on their own that it's located in the Start Menu - but they still call and ask how to put it on the desktop. I'm sure there's some psychological or UI/usability reason behind it which probably makes it not weird at all, but it still seems goofy to me how insistent they are that the Outlook shortcut stays on the Desktop.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2009 21:55
|
|
|
Midelne, do you have any co-workers at all who can back up what you're saying about Rod? I mean, at least when the network admin where I work fucks up, I've got comrades who will agree that he is a gently caress-up. ("there's a user group called '[workplace name] Administrators'... and everyone's in it."  )
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2009 16:21
|
|
|
quicksand posted:Please tell me you have the "Price is Right" losing horn sound on a phone/iPod so every time you run into something this stupid you can play it. If he were going to do that he might as well make horns.aiff his work phone's ringtone.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2009 22:20
|
|
|
ab0z posted:Follow up: Looks like your boss is having troubles with intermittent dropped letters.  I got completely tripped up by his response until I figured out that "cased" was supposed to be "caused" and I'm pretty sure "browse" is supposed to be "browser".I'm still not sure why he'd say that but I don't deal with networking that much so I can't say just how nonsensical that is.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2009 17:45
|
|
|
quote:[someone's] teacher computer will not boot up. It never gets to the Windows splash screen, and there is a high pitched beeping noise. I get there, the computer is off. I turn it on, it goes through the POST splash screen, then blanks the screen and starts beeping. I look down, reach over and move a textbook about four inches over, off of the ESC key it was resting on. Computer then boots normally. She was very embarrassed, but I didn't hold it against her; she's nice and she has a great rack. I'll admit it, there's definitely some favoritism towards nice, pretty girls among some members of our IT staff.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2009 22:05
|
|
|
Midelne posted:God, I wish I could put that on my resume. That's basically my job in a nutshell, minus the other sysadmin, and mine is "IT Assistant". It sounds like someone who gets coffee for the people who do the real work. "IT assistant"? Jesus. I'm pretty low on the ladder and even I get "Client Support Specialist". But then we also have a "Senior Network Administrator"... but there aren't and have never been any "junior" network administrators.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2009 19:39
|
|
|
Lord Commissar posted:
 I can't get sound on my computer! reaches over, presses power button on speakers
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2009 01:03
|
|
remotes in, unchecks 'mute'
|
Had someone call in complaining that they couldn't open their files because the computer said it was corrupt. I remoted in and double-clicked the file from My Computer, seemed to work okay. She called back and said it happened again, I remoted in while she was still there and found that she was trying to open an Excel file with Word. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2009 20:30
|
|
|
monkeybounce posted:I've set an autoresponder on my messenger to tell people to open a ticket if there's a problem. I'm the lone IT guy in my company. Basically, when I started, there was nothing but a bunch of computers connected to a T3 though one persons computer using ICS.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2009 20:58
|
|
|
Crowley posted:Private Linux machines get laughed at. Why do you run Linux in the first place if you need our help? B-b-but it's free! And easy to use! It says so on their website! 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2009 22:28
|
|
|
Negromancer posted:This is what I always did when I had to deal with CDW and softchoice reps at my old job. I never used their sites, just found what I wanted and told the rep to put together a quote for the parts I needed. Might as well make them do some work for the money they made off of our account. The best time was when I managed to make our account rep cry 2 different times over the phone. The best part was when her boss emailed my boss to tell him I could only contact her via email and that I behaved unprofessionally on the phone. What he didn't know is that I had been talking to her on speakerphone with my boss standing next to me, so he knew I was perfectly professional. He just forwarded me the email, laughed about it and told me to deal with CDW for a while instead of softchoice. How did you make her cry? I'm curious.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2009 21:57
|
|
|
monkeybounce posted:Our phone system lets you check on the hold message and music being played by pressing *86. It will just start playing over the speaker or handset and never end until you disconnect the call. I was out in one of the schools a couple weeks ago, and heard the intercom click on, followed by a couple of keypresses and then the hold music. It went on for at least a minute before someone picked up and asked "Hello? Are you still waiting?"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2009 23:27
|
|
|
This morning I went out to one of the schools to make sure state testing kicked off correctly in one of the computer labs. I get there and the god drat computers have maybe four inches of space between them; the teacher spaced all the computers out around the outer wall, no center island like that lab used to have. Something about wanting more room for kids to sit at and do math problems with her rather than on the math software that the school blew an incredible amount of money on. Testing starts without incident, and I go and talk to the 'test coordinator' and explain that the kids are shoulder-to-shoulder and maybe they ought to have a look at that. === Then as I'm working on a couple computers in another lab - which were giving me fits as I'd had to install a replacement NIC (the god drat onboard NICs are failing on the Gateway/MPC 2610s for some loving reason) and the Intel drivers appeared to be incredibly picky about how they were installed - some god drat kid comes up to me and starts completely whipping around his e-dick about how he knows so much and could totally break our network security. Ooh, you know about MAC address spoofing, big man I'm real scared of you and your hacker prowess. He kept going on and on and on about poo poo, like how "oh yeah man if i know your usernames i can just brute force it all  " so I just cut to the point and said "okay so what would you suggest we do to correct these security flaws" and he said "you can't. it's pointless to try. " Then he said "you guys should totally hire me", and I just laughed in his face and told him we weren't hiring poo poo seeing as I almost got laid off a few months ago and might get laid off a few months from now. In retrospect I wish I'd asked him what the point of hiring him would be if he doesn't know how to fix all these massive security holes he sees everywhere. It's especially amusing since right before leaving he went on this rambling rant about how trying to control internet and computer access for students is "bullshit"; okay so basically you'd be at odds with certain legally-mandated policies (CIPA) from the very beginning?? Okay whatever. I've talked to him before, I remember one time he came up to me with the biggest loving  face ever, thinking he was hot poo poo because the Cisco phones would actually tell him the IP address (!!) of our DHCP server and of course that was just such a security hole and he couldn't believe we would leave something so open.Also while I was in there I saw a kid actually wearing a Star Trek TNG uniform in school. It's "spirit week" or whatever and the theme for today was "future" or something. Whatever. loving kid couldn't even get the god drat uniform right. === I get an urgent email from the test coordinator I talked to earlier - wants to see me ASAP. I hurry upstairs thinking there's been some terrible catastrophic failure in one of the testing labs, but she just wanted to say "uh yeah they really ARE spaced shoulder-to-shoulder, that poo poo needs to be fixed. go grab a network cable to get the center island connected, I'll rustle up a couple of teacher aids to go help move the computers" Aids come back after I got the cable, said the teacher didn't want to "disrupt testing for the kids" by moving the computers (not all the computers were even in use at the time), okay whatever I'll see you guys in about half an hour when they get out of class, I've got some other stuff to do in the building. About ten minutes later I get a phone call. Dumbass lab teacher needs my help connecting computers. Already? Whatever. I get up there and of course she's short on power strips because she hosed up the lab placement (it used to be a relatively functional lab), so I go scrounge up another and we wind up daisy-chaining three power strips to power six computers. Great. Whatever. === After that things start to wind down. "My laptop won't FN + F4 to switch between screen/projector to screen only." Restart, hey it works, how about that? "This computer won't boot properly." Re-image that sucker! Finally I get called to take a look at someone's "really simple, quick glitch" problem, and inside I'm wincing thinking it's going to be a huge pain in the rear end. Turns out they had a chair leaning up against their SMART board and freaking out the mouse. A wonderful little victory to end the morning with. I get back to the office around 12:30. Nobody's there. Wonderful - I check out for lunch. I think part of it was aggravated by not getting enough sleep last night, but it seemed like I was getting tugged back and forth between poo poo and more poo poo for hours this morning.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2009 03:29
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:30 |
|
|
Jesus, I've been out sick for the last couple of days, it's not going to be fun going back in to work tomorrow. I peeked at my email inbox this evening, there's already poo poo about "have you looked at this??" when the answer is very clearly "no, I haven't been in yet this week!"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2009 04:17
|
|