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

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The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

I sent a ticket in...

As of our learning portal (LMS) system upgrade three weeks ago, if you access a particular login page for the portal using Internet Explorer--which is our enterprise default browser--and your password contains the letter V, the page deletes everything in the password field once you type V. Meaning you can't log in, essentially, because you picked a password containing the letter V that has worked fine until now.

The vendor informed us at first that this was a "narrow" problem and I was complicating things by filing a P1 ticket. Next they told us that they had a patch for the problem--a patch which was supposed to have been applied three weeks ago. :cry:

Edit: typos

The Macaroni fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Aug 15, 2013

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 19:01

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:22

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

I'm getting ready for Monday. The Monday when my boss is coming back from 7 days of vacation. 7 days in which she gave me a list of modest products to so. 7 days of which I spent 6 on the phone with our vendor and with our Service Desk because the whole world exploded for reasons unknown, people way above my pay grade got involved, and I had to answer more tickets in a week than I had in the previous month.

Monday.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2013 05:15

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

My boss got back from vacation and said, "You did a great job handling the chaos last week. Heard a lot of compliments about your patience and customer service. Good work." Wasn't expecting that. :stare:

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 17:19

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Walter_Sobchak posted:

The owner of our company routinely brings her 2 chihuahuas into the office and lets them have free reign. It's incredibly irritating, but I can't imagine them getting into our server room. Thank god for small miracles.

Previous CEO at previous job brought his two dogs to the office. Nothing like explaining to the client on the phone that yes, those are loud dogs and no, they are not outside.

Once, I had to host/escort some Swiss developers that we were partnering with. The two things that shocked them most about the US were 1) dogs in the office ("Does every office in the US have dogs?" "No.") and 2) the lack of paid parental leave. #2 really blew their minds.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 18:42

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Gavinvin posted:

Us: Did you happen to upgrade to iOS 7 recently?

User: Yes

Us: Did you get our email telling you not to upgrade?

User: Yes, but I upgraded anyways. Why is this not working? I need you to fix it right now, it's stopping me do my work.

:facepalm:

It's alarming just how "easy" Apple makes the OS upgrade for users. My sister upgraded the first day, and I said, "What the hell? You don't even like your iPhone and you don't like iOS. I can't even get into the upgrade server to download the file." She said, "Welp, there was a popup message saying 'Your upgrade is ready' so I hit the button and let it upgrade. iOS 7 sucks btw."

Amazingly, our usually horrible enterprise mobile management system (MobileIron) was ready for iOS7 at launch. I was astounded.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 15:53

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Ursine Asylum posted:

For a while at my last job, when we were freshly moved to JIRA, I snuck in and changed the ticket status "Resolved: Won't Fix" to "Resolved: gently caress You".

For me, "No Fault Found" is just as satisfying, particularly when it's someone high up the chain making the ticket.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 21:03

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

spog posted:

Let us know if you feel the need to fax a 23 page manifesto to anyone.

For a half second I was worried that larchesdanrew's station was the one involved in that awful mess.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 16:10

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

larchesdanrew posted:

Honestly, this is all I've ever known in employment. You mean to tell me there are places where people just do their jobs, rather than sit around looking for reasons to be mad at any little innocuous thing? Because that's impossible.

There are places like that because I have been at one for 2.5 years now.

- Smart, compassionate management that always has my back ("If The Macaroni says it's gonna be this way, then that's how it's gonna be.")
- A team of helpful, dedicated co-workers
- Authority to enforce my policies
- The resources I need to do my job
- Users who value my assistance and treat me with respect

Hang in there. This was absolutely not my experience prior to this job, but there is hope.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 15:54

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Woogles posted:

If he throws a shitfit, bring up your lack of access to admin credentials for things then jocularly uppercut him.

This is the best image, especially when combined with a Cockney accent. "Cheerio, guv, you'd like access to the ol' admin essentially but wotcher bloody hell fizzgig a pint, can't be done luv, innit." [punches supervisor in jaw]

# ¿ Sep 28, 2015 17:29

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Also there's no Connecticut Time anyway. And why wouldn't it be, say, California Time instead?

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 15:49

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Tambaloneus posted:

But the thread needs a guy on the inside to document the inevitable spectacular collapse! Or at the very least after you've gone, tell us which youtubes of News Fails to watch.

At the last couple of jobs, I still had friends ~~trapped~~ working there after I left who could fill me in on the inevitable death spiral. The schadenfreude isn't as sweet if you don't get to track the descent.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2015 19:57

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Volmarias posted:

I started writing a suggestion on how to mess with him, but I remembered that he's actually mentally ill so that's probably not going to end well.

Hey, if he's going to wind up on the evening news it would be a really short trip for the reporters to cover it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 15:55

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

MJP posted:

Am I the only IT professional in the world who doesn't really care about FO4? I'm not big on crafting, and these days I don't want to spend hours exploring stuff - I wanna play a game, kinda. It's hard to describe.

Not just you. My pre-kid routine was 1) come home 2) fix dinner for me and wife 3) go to gym, play video games, see a movie, do whatever the gently caress I wanted.

Now it's 1) come home exhausted from bad commute and baby kicking my rear end previous night 2) cook dinner for whole family 3) help daughter with homework 4) do 5 other chores 5) oh hey it's 9PM, maybe I can get in 20 minutes of Metal Gear after the kids go to sleep. No just kidding, do 2 other chores.

So yeah, I find I have less patience for things in games that I would have spent hours on before.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 20:44

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

DON'T gently caress THIS UP!

FWIW I never got a drug test until I was at the final phase of job negotiations, so you should take this as a good sign.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2015 22:57

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

My company has annual mandatory online training, i.e. "Everyone has to take the online safety presentations every year." It's essentially a condition of employment, yet every year there are people that are shocked, SHOCKED by the deadlines. We even have a fancy little dashboard that we set up to list what classes you have to take and it's color coded by status: green is complete, yellow means "deadline approaching," red means overdue.

A call came in...

:argh:

: Hey, Macaroni! How can we be expected to comply with these requirements when the dashboard provides faulty information? I don't have time for this!
:allears:

: I'm sorry for any technical problems that may have occurred. Let's take a look at your dashboard.
:argh:

: See? There's a list of 8 classes and I did them all months ago! It's broken!
:allears:

: Um, there are indeed 8 classes listed, but they're all green and the dashboard lists the date you completed them. See, there's a whole column for "Date Completed." Great work getting your requirements done early!
:argh:

: How am I supposed to know what a green dot means? If I see a list of classes, I assume that means I need to take them! I'm escalating this problem to management.
:allears:

: Please feel free to do so.

Fortunately management has already won over the C-level folks with our convenient, easy to read dashboard, so this got shut down quickly.

Sirotan posted:

I got a new coworker a bit ago that I've not posted anything about because I was worried he might be a goon. But then today I learned that he had no idea what rickrolling was.

Guess I'm safe to resume my bitching...

# ¿ Nov 18, 2015 15:46

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Is today larches' last day in the office?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2015 17:54

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

An email copied to high-level management came in:

quote:

My subordinate has completed all her required online training but is still receiving email notices about being overdue. This seems to be a common occurrence with your training system. When will this be fixed?

My reply: The system is working; she never actually completed her training. Here's a screenshot of the fifteen separate emails she's received since July informing her about upcoming and (now) past-due deadlines. And hey, here's a screenshot of the fifteen emails you received as her manager, also since July. Additionally, here's a copy of the email I personally sent you in November with a spreadsheet listing your overdue people and what they needed to get current. The system is correctly showing incomplete training as incomplete. Have a great day.

The Macaroni fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Dec 18, 2015

# ¿ Dec 18, 2015 21:40

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

guppy posted:

I'm sick and maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like all this is telling you is that the training system doesn't think she completed the training, which isn't in dispute. Isn't the question whether those notifications are accurate?

Oh, the completion was also in dispute. I didn't quote the part of the email where the manager said "MY TEAM SAID THEY FINISHED ALL REQUIRED TRAINING WHY ARE WE STILL GETTING THESE MESSAGES???"

One would think after 30 notifications about being late, you'd do more than take a person's word that they did the training.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 17:13

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

^^^^^ LOL indeed

Ozz81 posted:

Any way to login as an admin to see what users accessed the training?

Yup. For some reason the system hadn't automatically enrolled this particular user in a couple of the required classes, but she hadn't made any effort to correct the situation (and that's exactly why we have 3 different ways to communicate to people about their training status). In the odd .5% of cases where there's some registration issue, they start getting hit with emails and dashboard notifications. Most of the time when that happens, the person calls me as soon as the notification shows up and asks, "Hey, what's up with this?"

This is very much like driving with an expired license and saying, "Oh, I thought all those expiration notices you sent me were somehow wrong! And also that the expiration date right here on the license was, y'know, a friendly suggestion and not anything real."

# ¿ Dec 23, 2015 15:07

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Edit to cut down in length: nothing like busting your butt to get something delivered from a vendor on Dec 24, then have the person making the request still complain to your manager.

The Macaroni fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Dec 28, 2015

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 18:31

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

go3 posted:

you learned a lesson i hope

Yes, actually. I recommended that we never do this year-end process again and the requester actually agreed to it. But then they still complained.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 18:43

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

It was more of a "Let's ask the vendor to do this obnoxious thing in early December, oh hey look now it's Dec 23 and if you can't make the vendor do this by Dec 24 then we will spend our holiday weekend manually performing this process!"

Okay then, even though this is a stupid, wasteful and unsecure workflow, I'll escalate as much as I can with the vendor to make this happen. Woohoo, I got them to do it! Your holiday is safe! Are you happy? No? Oh.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 19:01

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

flosofl posted:

Larches, when you present your findings, as far as you are concerned there is *only* the hosted version.

Just starting out here, you do not want to add self-hosting of an open source product to your job responsibilities right now.

Quoting for emphasis, and I'd also urge you to go for a cloud-based option if you can. Our previous solution was single-tenant hosting, and when things broke the vendor would say "Shucks, son, looks like it's just your environment! Sorry, we'll put out a patch sometime this century." Now that we're on multi-tenant cloud/butt hosting, it's either working or it's broken for all of North America.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 16:08

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Rawrbomb posted:

The other half of that is where you reported a bug 3 years ago and its still not fixed. You don't have access to the source code

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for rolling it yourself. Just it has its own advantages.

True, the sword swings both ways. But having lived on both sides of that fence, being able to point at the vendor's hosting in a multi-tenant environment gives me a lot of breathing room. (Particularly when I was not the decisionmaker on choosing the vendor.)

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 14:59

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Oyster posted:

Ahhhh. every floor has a few of those with nice red backgrounds on the desktop. Thankfully all of them only print to HP printers that I'm blessedly not responsible for.

I posted my worst abuse of "patient care" about 2 months after I started this job a few years ago, but I had a priority 1 "affecting patient care" ticket because a machine kept rebooting instead of printing. Learned later that it's a common problem with that particular model, firmware upgrade fixes it.

Got there and found out it wouldn't print her Groupon tickets to a Nickelback concert.

Wowzers. At the hospital I work at, this would pretty much lead to the execution of the person shouting "patient care!" We have a completely separate process for urgent issues that affect clinical operations, and if someone abused that there'd be hell to pay. Not to say that people don't try it occasionally. but the executives support the policy so we get to shut down the types of folks who send an email copying the whole leadership roster.

Our biggest problem here is people not reading their email. "What do you mean XYZ application is unavailable this weekend at 2:30AM, my night shift needs it then! We didn't receive any notice! Oh, those 4 system announcements and two personal emails warning us? Didn't read any of 'em. You say somebody from IT personally visited our weekly staff meeting to present this issue? I, uh, yeah."

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 17:21

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

A ticket came in: User unable to see required course in training system, please fix

Resolution: Manager requested user's account on 1/4/16, ticket came in on same day. Helpdesk intern did manage to create the user account immediately, but then promptly sent the manager instructions that were 10 months out of date. Outdated instructions did not work so user called helpdesk back and was told to create an account through the volunteer portal. Self-created accounts on the volunteer portal have no access to the required course.

So many points of failure.

pr0digal posted:

First day back from vacation and a client has an AC failure in their server room causing their RAIDs to freak out. I spend the morning getting their SAN back online and setting up e-mail notifications for their (very old) Promise RAIDs. I can't wait until we upgrade them to something that won't fail if you look at it wrong.

So if one of those old RAIDs fails, is it a...broken Promise? :haw:

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 14:31

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

OWLS! posted:

Well either their manager yelled at them to do it to do some weird show of "we care, we care I swear we care!" or their metrics basically make it impossible for email chanins to get things resolved, or you don't answer your email. Probably the first two.

It's #1. I get random calls on random tickets from a particular vendor, and 3/4 of the time it's not because they need my attention, they're just trying to put the "human touch" on me.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 15:01

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

KillHour posted:

Bing is down.
Sure is.
I need Bing.
Sorry.
Fix it!
'Kay.
(2 minutes later)
It's back! Was that you?
Sure was. Have a nice day.

That goes both ways, though.

:v:

Why aren't class schedules automatically being loaded into executives' schedules?
:geno:

Because they're sent out as Outlook calendar invites, and a person has to accept an invite for it to appear on their calendar and sync to their phone. If they decline the invite or ignore it, it's not going to show up.
:v:

I'm holding you personally responsible for fixing that!

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 21:43

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Crowley posted:

Why don't you just push the schedules into teachers' calendars already? (just remember to disable reminders on them)

1) I just run the LMS, I don't have any power over calendars. And there are so many meeting invites flying around that if anyone opened the door to pushing items, it would be a nightmare.

2) The teachers have their own control panel for scheduling. This is the physicians and executives that are complaining about not seeing the classes they have to attend. You know, the ones their assistants signed them up for. The assistants that have delegation access to their calendars. Yeah, those ones.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2016 16:18

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Migishu posted:

Split keyboards? Hell no, thank you.

I love Microsoft keyboards but the split ones make my brain melt.

Edit: I've brought the MS keyboard I've got now to 3 of my last 4 jobs and it turns 10 years old in 2017.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 17:16

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

I spun it up at home and it was pretty nice. Made the GF put in tickets for poo poo like doing the dishes, tracked everything, it looked pretty...

This raises so many questions:

Was there an SLA for different chores?
Did this extend to shows of affection?
To whom could she escalate if a ticket went unresolved?

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 16:57

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

RadicalR posted:

I was just told that we are dumping our ancient version of BMC Magic for Service Now. Please have good news for me.

We use ServiceNow. I liked Zendesk a lot better from the admin/back end, but SN can do some decent user-facing stuff. ZD may have done that as well but I didn't work with that aspect of things when I was using it.

We transitioned from an ancient build of Remedy that pretty much looked like it did in the late 90s, so we had nowhere to go but up.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 19:48

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

Any guess who my superior was?

This is the start of some excellent niche porn.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 19:53

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

oTHi posted:

I constantly feel awful for raising so many tickets with our ERP vendor. It seems like our request volume has increased a lot since I started, but I wonder if we just didn't care to get things fixed previously. The support team there must hate me.

Not if you're leaving their support good feedback. I have tons of tickets open with our LMS vendor at any given moment, and I was positive that their support team hated me. I met with the VP of support at the vendor conference, and he said, "Are you kidding? They all love you. You're tough but you're fair, and when you leave them feedback you say really nice things even when it's like 'This product sucks but [Tech] really communicated well and tried her best.'"

I asked one of the techs later if this was true, and he said, "Yeah, pretty much. Every other client hates us and gives us 1-star ratings when we're doing our best to help. You realize that the product issues aren't our fault, and you single-handedly raise all of our averages."

I'm on a first-name basis with half their techs at this point, so it must be true.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 15:50

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

"But oracle, all I can see is goatse..."

"That is the vision of your future."

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 16:48

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

nexxai posted:

Sorry, why is anyone saying "www" in any fashion? If I say "Go to the website google.com", you can just enter "google.com" and nearly 100% of the time, the "www" is unnecessary.

Depends on the age of your user population. 30-40 and under, you just need the domain. Older folks sometimes freak out when I try it.

"W-what? No h...t...t...p and all that business? Are you sure? Is this some secret thing you're telling me? Why am I not just going through the regular site? This doesn't match the instructions I was given!"

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 18:16

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

larchesdanrew posted:

Tell me that everyone was impressed and happy with you.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 22:30

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

DigitalMocking posted:

Me: I'm sure everything is fine... checks...

I hate those moments.

"Why hello, manager whose people are always loving up the same things! How are you? Oh, one of your new people is reporting a system error? How charming! They probably closed the wrong window or typed a password incorrectly. Well, let me just try and replicate that error and ohhhhhhhhhhh poo poo."

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 16:27

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Antioch posted:

I got my god-son a Raspberry pi 2 and a book on Python for Kids for his 7th birthday. Told him if he could show me that he completed all the exercises in the book, I'd help him install Minecraft and Youtube and he'd have his own little computer.

It took him about a week, and he asked for more projects when he finished the book.

Could you link to the book you got? Might want to get this for my kid. Thanks!

SubjectVerbObject posted:

How are other folks introducing there kids to tech?

Snap Circuits Jr. for circuit building. Now I'm looking for an introduction to software.

This might call for a separate thread?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 17:04

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:22

The Macaroni: Dec 20, 2002; ...it does nothing.

Eikre posted:

How are you pushing the fix? 'Cause you could just set a batch file with some @echo and timeout to flash a command window gradually printing "ASSESSING FUCKFIX.EXE . . . . 10% hosed . . . . 70% hosed . . . . FUCKFIX COMPLETE, ITS loving FIXED."

I really want to make a progress meter like this someday.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 20:30

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

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