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Admin
I had sort of the same experience with Cox Communications (btw, I ALWAYS put the "communications" at the end...doesn't sound right to say that "I'm having a problem with Cox") and the rep eventually told me that he was going to restart the network. I thought he was BS'ing me in return for being able to tell him the IP address of the router that was dropping packets. Sure enough, whatever he did, the problem was solved. Maybe he had to blow the dust off the end of the connector... :)
Admin
Let me tell one on myself.
A while ago I got a business DSL connection from a local ISP. They delivered a modem to my house, which I dutifully unpacked and installed. Powered it up and. . . no connection.
After determining that the modem itself seemed to be okay, I commenced to begin troubleshooting by swapping out the telco cable and the ethernet cable (just because). Still no joy.
Called customer service and spoke to a tech (who was actually local and knew what he was doing). He tried ringing out the line and said he couldn't find any problem on his end but he couldn't see the modem.
They sent out a tech (again, he seemed relatively competent). He futzed around and couldn't find a problem either.
They filed a report with the telco. Telco checked things out and finally sent out a tech.
The tech found. . . a bad telco cable.
The ISP's original cable was bad. So was the one I replaced it with.
I'm still not done blushing over that.
Admin
Oh, and I was trying so hard NOT to name names. ;)
If you can negotiate the 15 pages of web "support" you can actually submit a tech request to be whitelisted on port 25 and they will honor it. It's not easy and they won't help you but they will do it - better then some high speed providers around here coughCoxcough that won't ever unblock it.
=Tod
Admin
Admin
Not too long ago, I was attempting to do an upgrade for my mother to Verizon DSL. Naturally, the installation could not see the internet from the modem, yet VZ's install-diagnostics routine reported "the following problems were found: all tests pass".
After countless passes through level-1 tech support, 3 new install disks, and my bucking it 6 levels up to a senior vp, we got a technician to come to the house (they normally charge a fortune for that, but I got it gratis).
The tech wiped the installation and started over, got the same errors and insisted that it was my NIC, so I unplugged it and used the USB option. No joy. He still claimed it was the NIC, so I physically removed it from the box, rebooted and he still couldn't get the USB option to see the internet, but the diagnostics kept reporting the same erroneous non-error.
He informed me that my computer was defective, so I yanked out all the VZ software, put the NIC back in and reconnected to the internet using the previous provider, and got connected. Hmmm, a defective NIC that successfully connects to the internet in a functioning non-functional computer.
Interestingly enough, I have VZ DSL at my house, and it works fine.
I told the guy that it had to be a driver problem, but he insisted that that was not it. I told VZ to shove their service.
Admin
Or it's possible that they cycled the router you pointed them to, but out of habit put it in dumbspeak.
Sometimes you have a router that starts flipping out every few months, cycling works, and there's no budget for new hardware...
Admin
The real WTF is that she doesn't recycle!!!!
Haha, move the trash can away from the computer. That is just a practical joke against her. Probably their way of flirting with her.
Admin
You think that tech support hates average users? No way, man. I'll tell you who tech support hates.
Tech support hates technical professionals who aren't in tech support.
Or stated more broadly: anyone in IT management hates anyone who is a computer geek who isn't also in IT management. Joe User? An annoyance. The software development team? Assholes.
At every job I've worked where there has been both an IT infrastructure group and a bunch of computer professionals doing something else (say, software development, or outside consulting), the "other group" has spent considerable time and money just finding ways to get around the IT infrastructure people. Every time.
Here's an example. Quotes are approximate.
"We need to install Vista on a system here." "We don't support Vista." "That's fine - I don't need you to support it. I just need to install it." "No." "Why?" "Well, why do you need it?" "Because our clients are using it." "So?" "So, we need to test against it." "Why?" "So we can support our product." "But we don't support Vista." "GOD DAMMIT I DON'T WANT YOU TO SUPPORT VISTA. I WANT TO PERSONALLY SUPPORT OUR OWN PRODUCT ON A CLIENT WHO IS RUNNING VISTA." "Why don't you just have them install it?"
Et cetera.
Admin
I color code mine, too. It just so happens I choose gray for all of them. ;) Actually, I find the wiggle test works. Wiggle the cord at one end, follow the wiggle to the other.
Admin
That is quite true. My favorite is fighting for administrator rights on my own development systems.
Admin
I don't understand. Clearly she should have demanded that the IT department supply her with a trash can that is compatible with her PC.
Admin
sounds like they were messin with the poor lady. Incompetent, maybe, maybe not... lazy, most likely.
Admin
Wait, why does tech support have control over the infrastructure? And it sounds like the infrastructure guy is the one being an asshole...
Admin
No way: the BOFH can actually convince people that he knows his shit. This guy's just an idiot.
Admin
And if that doesn't work, try power cycling the trash can.
Admin
Captcha: stinky. You guessed.
Admin
Wow.. as a former tech guy/network admin this story makes me sick. I prided myself on being able to fix the user's problems, and I'd spend time researching it if the solution wasn't something I knew off the bat. These idiots are a disgrace to competent IT departments everywhere. Maria should report them and get the lot of them fired!
Admin
Sometimes you can get dust accumulation or even airborne yeast growing in a connector, just enough to kill the connection.
Unplugging and plugging in will dislodge the gunk and eliminate the yeast infection. (I couldn't result, sorry!)
Where I work the IT department is small but very competent, and at home my ISP is also very good. I shudder to think of people who must face the service described here every day.
Admin
The WTF is that IT guys are jerks?
Is this a suprise to anyone?
Admin
Memory timings (SPD) are usually read from the stick in slot 0. If you had a slower one in slot 1 that one might be trying to run over its speed, and causing errors. If you removed the one in slot 0 or switched them around...fixed, as you'd be running at the lower speed.
Admin
This was a standard procedure for apple IIs. The chips would work themselves loose from their sockets, so lifting the machine an inch or so and dropping it would reseat the chips. Not shoulder height, mind you.
ooh, something actually useful. I'll have to remember that.
Admin
For those annoyed at the ISP support folks who follow scripts...
They're probably outsourced (in the sense of works-for-another-company, not necessarily offshore).
My wife used to work at an ISP tech-support outsourcing shop in Durham. Amongst the many WTFs they had there:
Eventually, she upgraded to a job as a secretary, and that place went out of business.
Admin
So the tech support folks are physically in the same area as the original poster (they could tell she moved her trash can back) and not one ever thought to visit and see what the problem was?
Definitely something smells funny.
And sounds funny, too. Zoink! That's onomatopoeia.
Admin
As my tech department would say...reboot!
Actually...it works a surprisingly good amount of time...then again our workstations are using Windows and we know how much Windows likes rebooting for every little thing
Admin
Good point. Sometimes weird things happen, probably on the firmware/NVRAM level between pieces of hardware. I remember a Mac 5400 I worked on that would absolutely refuse to complete an OS install. If would go through the first few stages just fine, then balk at the end.
Finally, in desperation, I tried a random trick. I had a number of "identical 5400s to work with so I pulled the HD, put it into another 5400, and installed the OS with no trouble. Restored the HD to the original machine, and it ran just fine.
To this day, I have no idea why the install was balking, but the change-out did the trick, the machine went back into service and worked fine until the 5400s were all retired the next year.
Admin
You'd be amazed at how many otherwise-clueful people will just accept at face value tech-related advice. Add the possibility of a corporate culture that discourages competence outside your department, and there you have it...
(Personally, I'm blessed/cursed with a good IT dept. Blessed because they know what they're doing (and will adjust their instructions based on the caller's ability - I get different instructions from the lady who is just learning Excel). Cursed because they're smart enough to enforce the regs - like "no streaming audio or IM")
Admin
Admin
It's this kind of story that gives our entire industry a bad name; not just IT support staff, developers, managers, the whole lot. The whole point about being in IT support is to do JUST THAT. It's a function that (to management), soaks up budget, but doesn't contribute to the bottom line. It's also very unfortunate that some people have discovered it's an easy way to earn money; anything that someone else doesn't understand is black magic... (especially with computers) So, how do you get around this problem? It's difficult - spent $2K and get an MCSE - I can learn the answers as easily as you can. But can you deal in the real world..? I doubt it... I worked on a helpdesk at the BBC in the UK for 12 months (even though I was hired as a developer - I had an MCP, so got forced into support after the support guy left). If your business depends on IT (this did), it's essential to have people who realise they are part of the overall process. I was doing this job with 5 years embedded software experience. Once I'd started helping people to do their jobs, I was removed from my main job of software development. I never completed a major project there. But I've since held Senior Engineering positions at Panasonic, Sharp, SiGe Semiconductor and Samsung. And those jobs have come about from paying attention to the end-user.
Admin
These days, that is known as a job security strategy. The last thing you want is to get a job done. Obviously, you've never worked in government.
Admin
Ok, here's a good one.
A loong time ago (1997), in a galaxy far, far away, I wanted to get DSL in my new house. I was on friendly talking terms with the owner of the ISP I used, and up to this point I had a dedicated ISDN account. But, since the ISP was offering a new DSL service, which was faster (a whopping 384k), I signed up.
Back then, most DSL was SDSL. In this case, my ISP was a reseller for Covad. So, I signed the long and arduous contract, and waited the requisite 18 years for the tech to show up. (Actually, waiting periods were about 6 months back then.)
With SDSL, a tech has to come to your house and do various Super Safisticated Measurements before the router can be plugged into the wall. So, the tech came to my house, and installed the router. But, no service. After a few hours of this, the tech said, "Ok, home office thinks they know what the problem is and it's on their side" and left.
After a week of various back-and-forth, the tech came out again, worked for 4 hours, and left with no service. Another week went by.
Then, the owner of the ISP called me at work. "Umm, can I talk to you for a second? Covad says they won't come out to your house again because it's infested with fleas." WTF? I had a couple of cats but there were no insects to speak of. Anywhere.
After another week of work, and an escalation to a VP (which most likely only occurred due to the lie about the insects), they found a problem between two telephone trunk providers, and voiala- I had service!
Admin
This is exactly the type of behaviour that infuriates me as a developer. Support guys who are totally blind to the primary goals of a company as a whole (like generate profit), and only follow procedures. DIAF.
Admin
Obviously she didn't move the trashcan far enough away. She has only herself to blame.
-- Not Your Friend (Sysadmin Aura +3)
Admin
Repeat after me - VMWare....
Once you get that approved, you can tell the IT guys to pound sand.
I understand their position - they can't allow unsupported environments hitting the production net. But virtualization lets you avoid that (or avoid getting caught doing it)
Admin
Are all you guys balking at this suggestion aware that most cable modems run an embedded OS like Vxworks (or similar) and are not immune to bugs, hangs and exploits? Or did you all think that cable modems mystically magically run with no software whatsoever?
Admin
Speaking as one of those "support guys" who sidelines as an admin due to unrealistic IT budgets, you are kind of right and kind of wrong.
Yes, developers need to have more control of their boxes. Problem is that a very large percentage of developers seem to think they know more about their computers than they actually do. The reason there's limitations on developer access to the OS in some organizations is that unfettered control results in technical support having to spend the time unbreaking their machine (it doesn't matter if previously it was agreed that "we'll support our own stuff"... when the devs can't figure out the problem, they're gonna call us, which was the whole situation the agreement was meant to circumvent).
Furthermore, it's a pretty frequent seen event that the development lab in any sizable organization is a hotbed of poorly configured and insecure machines. One solution to this is to segment them off from the rest of the network, which is fine until they need access to enterprise resources, and then they start bitching that they need access to the live network. Nuh uh.
As such, if infrastructure and technical support are smart (and experienced), they will have a procedure in place for having people request new machines and justify the business need for them. This discourages people from just going up and asking for an extra machine on a whim, and puts in place a business process whereby someone is directly responsible for maintaining the machine when they fuck it up.
Of course, this could be avoided by having an admin who just supports development, but that's pretty rare in my experience.
Admin
My very first co-op job, I was working on tidying up a database that was used by an installed app. The app ran unbearably slow, however, like 4+ minutes from double-click to usable state. Other computers loaded the app in 20 or 30 seconds.
So I complain and a techie comes out to check my network connection. My connection tests fine, so the techie starts fiddling around, trying to find a problem. As I watched, she hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, brought up the process list, thought for a moment, and said "Hmm, this process is taking up a lot of CPU time. Maybe we should try to end it."
Of course she couldn't end it. After all, it was the System Idle Process.
Admin
this gives "Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?!" a whole new meaning...
Admin
Admin
Total fake. Seriously, nobody's this dumb.
Admin
Good point, I work in IT and see the same situation, it is our POLICY to give a local admin account but the regular user login (with access to the domain resources) is a restricted user.. you can obviously see why this is from a security standpoint.
I hear no end to "certain" people complaining that they "need" admin for their regular account to do their work. The problem is it is a POLICY, as soon as we start making exceptions then EVERYONE wants to be part of the exception and there is no way to ever draw a line.
What's most frustrating is that I know what work these people are doing, i do the same stuff in my spare time for fun and have verified that everything they want to do can be done (albiet it's slightly more of a PITA) with the way we currently have it configured.
As for the trashcan, there has to be some other explanation, from my experience i can say i have seen many a ticket submitted that was caused by a space heater to close to the tower, or a tower too close to the user (one user had printing problems with their usb printer, turns out they kept kicking the usb cable loose), or a trash can that is possibly restricting airflow or pulling cables loose?!?
Admin
Actually, they did not believe it ... they just thought you were criminally insane, and therefore not worth arguing with.
Admin
I was wondering, WTF, an ethernet cable with three plugs? And WTF does the rest of the sentence mean? It took me a couple of people commenting on the right meaning of it before I figured it out.
Time to go to bed, I guess...
Admin
I have to say that as an MCSE who has moved-up through the ranks as a lowly tech support, help desk grunt, that this article is true to the game with regard to many IT "professionals" that I've run into. Heck, I used to not be too far away from the exception to the rule back when I was a tech support geek.
However, not all of us "hate" users. We don't even hate, really. Dislike is a better term, possibly even despise, those who refuse to learn and rely solely on someone else to deal with an issue instead of at least attempting to resolve the problem they're having themselves. I could use my data processing team as an example, but I'll spare you the details because the majority of you users all ready have your minds made up. And that's fine. We'll still get paid for our "advanced technical knowledge" regardless of how you, the user, feels about us.
Why, you may ask? Because we're not doing what WE want to do. We're doing what we're REQUIRED to do or what we've been DIRECTED to do by someone else, usually a CIO who was/is REQUIRED to or DIRECTED to have done by the CEO, who runs the company that pays you.
Should you, the user, have to deal with the 'tude? No, not all. And you shouldn't. Lay down the law! Let that geek know that you don't have to deal with their condescending attitude. Because you don't. No one should have to deal with a hostile environment at work. Clients are hostile enough without having to deal with bad customer service from your own co-workers. It's certainly not professional, and I try my hardest when I'm dealing with users not to condescend or treat them like idiots, regardless of whether it's true of who the user is. ;-)
Admin
Oh, it's totally true. Techies like us are probably much worse to deal with because we think we know everything. I was once completely dismissive of the idea that the line to my DSL modem was unplugged, only to find that my girlfriend's cat had in fact knocked the plug out of the wall, and I hadn't thought to check before calling. Now I do whatever they tell me to do, no matter how ridiculous.
"Oh, my trash can? Sure, I'll move it."
Admin
And some people will carry their work-around-the-IT attitude to other jobs, often prompting a WHY DIDN'T YOU CALL ME MONTHS AGO when everything melts down because their stuff was never added to backup, or some off the wall request turns into an investigation into months of attempting to badly recreate applications already available to them, like excel spreadsheets with a variety of incorrect formulae.
To some degree I can understand and praise getting stuff done without bothering me, but not when it leaves someone pissed off and blaming me for something I never knew about.
Admin
It seems like the amount of help these IT people offer is pretty much in line with those who work for my big company. Since moving from a small company to a much bigger one (30x as big) I must say that the complete lack of tech support availability is the most annoying difference.
Admin
Speaking as someone who's been on all sides of this equation, I think that giving devs admin access to their boxes is usually warrented. However, the standard fix for any problem that comes up when they have already agreed to support the box themselves should be "restore to base image". Don't want to lose all of those tweaks? Figure it out or go back to the base image and start again. This isn't too bad if you segregate the standard User-specific folders on a separate partition so those aren't lost as well. You just have to re-install any additional programs/plugins that aren't part of the base image.
As a rule, I tend to avoid involving the other IT staff unless I'm convinced that the problem is beyond something installed on my machine - i.e. really hardware related or server/network related. Otherwise, I deal with whatever mess I've made of my machine (or the software installed has made of my machine).
-Pete
Admin
Yay!! Thanks for making that point. In my work as a tech, the first thing I would do with newly arrived PCs was to:
Made for very quick restores in cases where the system would go kablooey beyond repair.
It also made me quite unpopular with my fellow techies, who contended that users who didn't save to the network had only themselves to blame when Computer Services would nuke-and-pave the machine, blowing away any data contained on it.
Admin
I had a similar experience (with a computer, not the hopedesk). When the PC was next to the monitor, it would work fine. When moved 1 foot away under a desk overhang, it refused to boot. Working at Siemens at the time, the techheads had all sorts of complex theories involving electromagnetic fields (it was a vey active electrical environment). It turned out to be a dodgy keyboard cable which broke contact when stretched a little too far. Still, I prefered the more exotic theories we came up with.
Admin
Bah...
There exists a common myth that halon is highly toxic; this is just because it can cause giddiness and mildly impaired perception, and also due to the risk of combustion byproducts during a fire. Experimental animals have also been exposed to 2% concentrations of Halon 1301 for 30 hours per week for 4 months, with no discernible health effects at all.
Halon will cause you to be giddy and cold, but it's not toxic. Toxic chemicals can be produced during a fire with Halon released, but this must have metals burning to interact with the Halon, or the materials burning producing the toxic chemicals themselves. Have you ever been inside a room that Halon has been released? I HIGHLY doubt it. Anyone who thinks that they actually release the Halon during a systems TEST is full of it. We may sound the alarms, test the sensors with canned smoke and check the heat sensors, but the tests always start by disconnecting solenoid from the canisters of Halon to prevent having to totally replace the system once the halon has been discharged.
Have you ever read the safety data sheet involved with your Halon system before making such comments?