RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Sab669 posted:

This is basically why I hated Staples as well. Push Norton, Word, service plans and everything else with every purchase. If the whole store did really well we'd get an extra $0.50 per hour on our paycheck

The first "Tech" Job I got after getting my A+ cert was in a call center doing tech support for the warranties that Staples (and others) sold. People called in all the time because someone at the store had told them their warranty covered X thing or that they could walk in and get a replacement no questions asked. I grew to hate the sales people until I realized that A) There were plenty of people who were willing to shoot customers straight and B) This was all of course shoved down by management to get better numbers. I left that job after 9 months for a slightly less soul crushing job that I stayed at for 2 years.

In the poo poo That Pisses You Off Thread people were discussing monitor resolutions and reminded me of a particular issue I had. We had a vendor that came to over see the final install and setup of a Police Records system. Since I was am the only IT guy at this place, I ended up getting called over and over to perform IT backflips and "make it work..." I got a call from our Court Clerk telling me the Vendor said she needed a larger monitor. I go down there and she has a 20" monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024. Because she's older this usually runs at 1024x768. Not a big deal right? The software the vendor is pushing wont fit on this screen. So his solution is to get a bigger screen. This isn't the first completely batshit solution this guy has had either. The software supposedly works well and the Police Chief likes it, so I'm willing to make it work, but this guy doesn't seem to understand that we are working with a relatively small budget.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 18:47

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:00

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

I took the A+ in 2009 (I think) and they had questions about IRQ codes and specific memory locations, things I have never used since. I believe that was the last year for that particular test before they moved on and started covering Windows 7. It was also the last year before you had to do continuing education to keep your A+.

It's a pretty bullshit cert but it did get my foot in the door.

I recall the test had a question that was like "What button do you press when installing Windows XP to load a third party RAID driver?" Having only installed Windows 20 or so times at that point I couldn't recall the exact key off the top of my head. As though it were extremely important to know the exact key to hit when it was printed right on the screen during the pertinent section.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 20:25

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Man I have barely had anything to do this week until today. I have two scanners loving up, several people suddenly being prompted to log into Outlook despite domain logins being fine, and two meetings. The first meeting of course is a meeting about the second meeting.

And here I am trolling SA.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 19:53

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

KweezNArt posted:

A ticket came in...
pre:
SUBJ: I lost the internet - I must have turn off something since others have it
BODY: Assistance please.  This isn't the first time, but this time diagnostics didn't work.
You LOST the Internet?! You fool! What if the terrorists get it?!

Followed by another ticket minutes later...
pre:
SUBJ: (none)
BODY: Working again.  I wasn't the only one so it must have been the system.Thanks
And people wonder why I don't take end users seriously.

I love the user catch-all of "The System".

"Hey are you doing something to The System? My computer is running slow."

"I can't get my Pandora to work. Is there something wrong with The System?"

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 17:24

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Alereon posted:

My coworkers have developed the perfect strategy for this: if they encounter any computer problem or strange behavior, they reboot their machines. If that doesn't fix the problem, they reboot their machines AGAIN, and will simply keep rebooting and trying again until it works or someone tells them to stop. This is especially the case for network problems or things like not being able to access a mapped network drive.

When I first arrived at this job someone gave me a list of issues that had gone on since the last guy worked here and how they had been solved. Apparently at one point they were having email trouble and the solution was that someone rebooted the server....3 times. This is an old server 2003 machine that takes between 5-10 minutes to boot up fully.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 17:09

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Sirotan posted:

I just did this to a Dell GX280 and GX620 and will be delivering it to one of our sites in an hour. Win 7 32bit installed, 2gb of RAM. That's the status quo in Sirotan land.

I did get approved to buy 5 whole new desktops though. Which means I can finally recycle the remaining Dimension 4600's that I would have needed to deploy if someone's computer died.

This is going to be me in a month or two. We have 30-40 desktops still running win 7 and I was approved to replace the 15 oldest. They were all machines with single cores and less than 3gb of RAM. Hopefully once I put 15 in and shuffle some about I can have a couple of spare boxes and some extra RAM when I actually need it.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 19:29

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

I was bitching a couple of weeks ago about a new DB system our cops are getting. And the more and more I (and they) work with it we are finding out that it just seems to be a series of cobbled together ideas with a poo poo UI.

Our court clerk is an older lady and as such doesn't have the best vision. We've gotten around this in the past by lowering the resolution on the monitor. I hate the way it looks but she likes it so whatever. I get a phone call one day telling me she needs a bigger monitor. Why? One of the screens she needs to use in this application has a fixed vertical resolution of 768, she has her monitor set at 800x600 so she can see. If we switch it to 1024x768 she has trouble. Clearly the solution to this problem is to buy a bigger monitor so she can see her icons at 1024x768 and not to make the goddamn window re-sizable and add a scroll bar. We're just loving made of money over here.

I've been working on setting up remote access so the cops can use it in the field. Today I grabbed one of the laptops, connected it to a VPN I set up and tried to load the app. It won't launch. Here's his explanation.

"You cannot run over just a vpn.

To big. The program is not designed to have a local copy of the EXE�s and then get data over vpn.

Rather run from server, which is why you need RDP as it is running inside the LAN"

gently caress everything about this.

Edit: I think I want to get out of IT work.

Nativity In Black fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Aug 22, 2013

# ¿ Aug 22, 2013 19:16

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

guppy posted:

I had a guy tell me his MacBook was slow last week. We've been a PC shop for years, but have allowed a mixed environment starting last year. We have no training whatsoever, but we can figure out most of the basic stuff.

"It's slow" is almost invariably a bullshit claim, but sure, I'll look at it. He says it's been a problem for months, but he's only bothered to tell us about it now, and it took him a while to actually bring it in. He can't stay, he has things to do, so I look at it and I can find absolutely nothing wrong with it. I get an email at the end of the day as I'm on the way out the door containing both his description of the problem and his assistant's restatement of that description, which do not agree with each other. He says "it keeps spinning when email is open"; she says "the disc spins when Internet Explorer" is open. (Recall that this is a MacBook Pro. It is not running Parallels or anything like that. It is definitely not an "Internet Explorer" problem.) I get nothing more than those descriptions to go on. I have no idea if this is an Outlook issue or something in webmail or what.

I did finally manage to catch up with him and he says it's Outlook. (Of course, his descriptions so far have of limited accuracy, so who knows, but it's somewhere to start.) He still hasn't actually managed to bring the machine back in for me to look at.

Is he actually using Outlook? Or is it Apple's default "Mail" program? I had someone here with an iMac that was running slow and it turned out Mail was taking up like 3GB of the 4GB of RAM. It seemed like it was trying to hold the entire mailbox in RAM or something. She had Entourage installed so I just told her to use that.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 15:12

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Attempting to purchase laptops for cops that some how devolved into a 20 reply email thread involving 5 people and hitting all the classics like "Look at these things on Best Buy's website," "We need ones with a touch screen," and "(X guy) said you should look for one with an SSD." Never forgetting of course the classic of "We need the above for <$500."

I took an extra bathroom break at work so I can drink longer when I get home.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 22:35

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

gently caress PRINTERS.TXT:

I just spent 30 minutes re-installing a printer because I kept getting errors about a missing dll somewhere. I guess I don't understand why HP's driver installer can't just go "Oh you are missing a dll? Hey we happen to have it right here for you."

One of the instructions in HP's solution was to manually go through c:\Windows\inf and check oemxx.inf files to see if they pertained to the printer and delete those and reinstall the driver.

Turns out the dll is in a cab that is in the folder the installer extracts to, it just doesn't seem to know that.

RE: Email etiquette, the accounting software we use is case sensitive for pretty much everything, so finance uses caps almost all of the time. For some reason they never switch it off when composing emails. I always get giggle imagining they are yelling about really innocuous things. One person exacerbates this by ending sentences with !!!!!.

Also the chief of police said "Lol" in an email the other day. I realize it is 2013 but I'm pretty sure I still wouldn't use any net abbreviations in an email. Especially work email.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 19:05

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

RE: Cops and Firefighters with laptops.

I think the fire chief and asst. fire chief have iPads for the purpose of handling command on the outside, but generally the other guys just rely on communication.

Cops have various reasons for having them including GPS and that fancy poo poo they do where they scan license plates to see if everything is square. So far ours are just going to be for writing/printing tickets. The idea is to make it easier, so they do them more and generate more revenue for the city. A part of me hates being complicit in that (cause gently caress the police right?) but another part sees where more revenue for the city = big budget for things like paying me and buying new equipment.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 19:27

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Motronic posted:

gotta love your closest mutual aid being in a different state with a totally different radio system).

Not to go off on a somewhat unrelated tangent, but when our system gets set up for P25, I will be so happy. A lot of the adjacent departments are on the same system we are but the bigger city we are a suburb of is not. It will be nice to have the PD/FD be able to flip a channel to hit their main.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 19:39

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Storysmith posted:

How are you not on P25? You poor thing.

$$$$$

quote:

Are you at least running something trunked?

Yeah we currently run EDACS. A lot of people would be comfortable staying with EDACS except my boss is aware that it's EOL. We are a part of a big trunking co-op that covers a large portion of my state. Us and a group that piggy backs off of us are the only ones still on EDACS. At the end of 2014 the last parts of that system are going to get yanked by the people who own it so we have to be migrated by then. They were gonna try to get the money from a bond, but it got shot down by City Council, so we have to find it somewhere. If we get the system and location we want I think other districts will be drooling to hop on it. It covers a quarter of the state.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 22:27

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Man, for like the last 3-4 weeks I have had this weird issue where random computers suddenly start Outlook offline. You uncheck work offline and it prompts you to log in, good to go. But no one here has ever had to do that, so I get called/emailed from a phone about it. I've just been taking care of them as they pop up because I haven't had time to dig in and figure out why suddenly all the clients need to log into our exchange server again.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 15:50

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

There's a company that does some over-the-phone support for us, and at the beginning of every call there a ~1 min blurb about how they want us to take a survey, then after the call another blurb about how we're about to get a survey, then two super short questions. The support people are always great, and I want to give them a high rating every time, but loving stop making me listen to all the other survey related garbage god drat it

I worked on a helpdesk with probably the worst sup I've ever had about a year ago and they wanted us to end every call by asking people to take a survey. It was loving degrading. I didn't last long at that job for various reasons. First place I've ever been fired from.

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

gently caress Tapes...

That is all.

One of our last DAT72 tapes got eaten today. I have to order more. Compared to some things I have to buy it's not so bad, but Christ these things seem expensive.

In other news I recently decided I drink too much so after labor day I imposed a month long sobriety period on myself. I can only imagine that I'll end up incredibly bored, so I intend to start a few projects I've been putting off like building a Jamma Supergun and a media server. Maybe I will finally figure out how to use mpd.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2013 16:23

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Does Win 8 not have a log off option? I click power and I have sleep, shutdown, restart.

This is seriously the least intuitive OS I have ever loving seen. It's like you click the right maze to find the control panel, do something, go through the same maze and get a completely different set of options with no Control Panel to be found.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2013 19:32

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

TheQat posted:

Control Panel is pretty easy to get to once you know about winkey + x. I can't remember how to log off right now

Thanks for this! I'm sure it will alleviate headaches in the future.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2013 19:40

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

I got an email Monday morning (actually Saturday) from the big boss saying that the Mayor's emails (from his personal address) are getting bounced back to him (from our mail server). This happened to another person recently, and the undeliverable message didn't contain any useful information, so I contacted our domain host and asked if they had had any DNS problems recently. He got to looking and noticed we had changed our IP and thought this was done in error so he changed it back (Note: we changed our IP 6 or so months ago with the ISP). So emails stop coming through altogether. I didn't know we had any problem until someone told me our webmail wasn't working. I called him and got that sorted.

Turns out the original issue was that our spam filter seems to have blocked the guy and any sbcglobal.net address when mailing multiple people.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 16:11

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

GreenNight posted:

A vender just came in to the front desk, and the front desk lady called saying there is brats and corn for me. Cooked.

Weird rear end vender.

I had a sales person who annoys the poo poo out of me bring in cookies. I was pretty okay with that.

Edit: Had a poo poo morning, then someone calls me to turn on a TV and give me cake in repayment. I'm okay with this.

Nativity In Black fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Sep 11, 2013

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 18:35

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

evobatman posted:

Since Apple is discontinuing the iPhone 4 8GB (which we do have plenty of stock of) we're moving up to the brand new iPhone 4S 8GB

Using the oldest available platform available at all times keeps purchase and repair cost per unit down, maximizes device/charger/accessory compatibility, nobody is speculating in breaking their device to get a new one, and I get to see the dejected look in the eyes of the users and new employees when I hand them their iPhone 4. Also, when someone breaks their phone, we just swap it out from a pool of phones we have already gotten back from service, so there is no waiting for the users for "their" phones to come back from repair. We advise all users that we only support the functionality of the device, if they want to keep their pics, texts, apps etc they should make a backup on iTunes on a private computer or use iCloud.

No beer at work, but a coworker brought buns with custard and frosting (skoleboller) today!

The two top guys hear are both Apple fanboys. The day they go up for pre-order I will get asked to purchase two new ones and get bitched at until they show up. *sigh*

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 15:52

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

I'm going to take time next May to go to a horror convention the next state over. I will probably take of the Monday after EVO next year to sleep off the hangover I will have from getting drunk and watching people punch each other in video games.

Taking time off to play video games on release day may seem childish, but if you have the time and no other worries why the gently caress not?

Anyway, we are reaching derailment territory, so for content:

I have had two different computers with different printers randomly start giving an error message that says "The printer has not yet responded...." Then you click and set the default printer and it prints.

gently caress printers.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2013 21:31

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

My boss is a big Apple fanboy so he was going around yesterday telling everyone to update. When it didn't work immediately because Apple's servers were hammered people called me wondering why.

Me: Everyone is trying to download it right now, you may have to wait
Everyone: But I want it now
Me: :sotw:

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 15:47

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

So my mom's laptop got hosed up. Stopped booting altogether. I'm still not convinced that it was the hard drive but trying to boot to the system recovery or even a USB image didn't work at all until I put in a different drive.

Anyway, I'm on my third attempt to install Win 7 because it keeps getting hosed up and going to a startup repair loop. At first I thought it was Windows update, but now I think it's Toshiba's lovely drivers.

Everyone who says Linux is hard has never installed Windows and had to deal with going to an OEM site to download loving drivers, hoping you get the right ones.

I think I have it now, I just need to find the right video driver.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2013 22:46

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

I was drug tested as a condition of employment and they reserve the right to random ones, but they generally only do it if they have cause to believe you are showing up to work hosed up.

What's great though is that as a right to work state if they want you gone they can find basically any reason to fire you. If someone were to refuse a drug test, even if they can't be fired for that alone, they can be let go for "performance" and there's no real way to fight it.

But right to work laws are great right? Because unions are bad and big business is good right?

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 16:30

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

So I'm getting tired of my current position and rather than look for another similar position I'm considering getting some business cards printed up and striking out as a "consultant." Have any of you other goons done anything like this successfully?

I have plenty of ways I could get my card in the hands of potential customers, I'm just not sure if it's a feasible thing.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2013 18:36

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Dick Trauma posted:

Enginseer?

Technomancer(R)

(I actually owned technomancers.org at one point when I was sure I was going to make my own IT support business.)

Nativity In Black fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Sep 25, 2013

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 15:24

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Our email domain was blacklisted for the second time in a year. Was able to track it down to a computer shared by several cops.

I'm also fairly certain that it was a result of me disabling the spam filter a week or two ago because the mayor couldn't get an email to the PD, because he was blacklisted. Or all of sbcglobal.net was. Or something.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 16:28

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Caged posted:

"MY CONTACTS!!!"

I worked at a place where copying the NK2 file to the desktop so that it would get captured in a standard backup was part of the procedures.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 16:25

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

Got a call yesterday from someone who was pissed off because a computer in a conference room was working. Couldn't get Outlook to connect to the Exchange server. I think it had a 169.254.x.x address. So I tried to /release /renew. Got an error that the RPC server was unavailable. The service was running and I don't have an option to restart it so it's reboot time. After the reboot everything comes up and connects. Okay. I leave.

Later my boss comes in all mad because I am supposed to be updating these at regular intervals (despite the fact that that wouldn't have prevented this anyway.) He was mad because they tried to pull up a Youtube video and it wouldn't play. They updated flash and still nothing. I went over there later and it loaded in Chrome no problem. Firefox would play a couple seconds and error out. I think Flash was crashing. Anyway, I was in a poo poo mood about it so I walked off and made lunch. Come back a bit later and it loads no problem. I resolve to come back later and clean out the startup items and remove some of the bloat on the computer.

After lunch I go back and start uninstalling bullshit only to realize it has lost its IP config again. Same error. I think this is related to an ongoing issue we have been having about DNS not resolving correctly internally, causing Outlook to not auth right and other apps to give hostname errors. I was able to run DCDIAG and find out that we have a delegated domain name missing a "glue a record" but I don't know enough about DNS to fix that or if it would actually be causing the problem.

I may have to call in our contractor who used to be backup for the guy I replaced. He charges something like $100/hr. I've been rather proud of the fact that he hasn't been here for about 4-5 months now, as I think his visits were much more frequent before I started this job. *sigh*

# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 16:00

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:00

Nativity In Black: Oct 24, 2012; If you're gonna have roads, you're gonna have roadkill.

anthonypants posted:

In my experience, local/municipal governments excel at extremely short-term thinking.

I had a position that was basically the "IT guy" for a municipality. This was around the time that XP and Server 2003 were entering EOL. I told my boss with a large margin of time that this was around the corner. They did a bi-annual budget. Budget talks came around, Police and Fire got their go and then when I said that we *should* spend 8k or so deploying new machines we could get by with spending 2k by only replacing the machines that wouldn't run win7 and just upgrading the OS on the others.

You can guess which option they picked.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2016 01:32

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?