Tales from the IT world...

[skyking]

Scenario: Private School in a church, with ambiguous security in the summer months.
I get the call at the beginning of school year that the internet is down for the classroom.
It is all behind a filtering proxy server, I can log into it it but things are a bit slow.
I try a few things but have to go over there. I find that someone has messed with the cabling trying to get past the filter, and have looped a couple of 16 port dumb switches together with no less than 3 patch cables!
Needless to say there was a bit of chatter on the LAN

 

[Sensai]

Originally posted by: MotionMan
My uncle is convinced that "the internet" is installed "in" his computer. He is also convinced that you have to have "the DSL" installed "in" laptops in order to use them at places like Starbucks.

I stopped trying to explain.

MotionMan

Tell him to put it this way. you move into a new house, computer = phone, internet service = phone service. no phone service installed... no communication. no internet service installed... no data communcation.

the DSL installed in laptop.. = internet antenna

hah, if that doesn't work, then use cartoon pictures

 

[SketchMaster]

*Phone rings*
?Help desk.?
?Hi, I can?t remote into my computer. I could remote into the computer yesterday.?
?Ok, did you check to make sure the computer you?re on is connected to the network??
?Yes, I can surf the web and see the network drives.?
?And you have the right computer name??
?Yup.?
?Has anyone used your computer today that you know of? Did you change any settings since yesterday??
?No, I haven?t even been at my desk today.?
?......Is your computer ON??
?No, like I said I haven?t even ? Oh.?
?Yeah? Turn on the computer and then try again; call me if you still have issues.?

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: Sensai

Originally posted by: MotionMan
My uncle is convinced that "the internet" is installed "in" his computer. He is also convinced that you have to have "the DSL" installed "in" laptops in order to use them at places like Starbucks.

I stopped trying to explain.

MotionMan

Tell him to put it this way. you move into a new house, computer = phone, internet service = phone service. no phone service installed... no communication. no internet service installed... no data communcation.

the DSL installed in laptop.. = internet antenna

hah, if that doesn't work, then use cartoon pictures

I am picturing the scene from the Simpsons where Bart is trying to explain to Homer how Marge's sister is going to blow up when she lights up her post-McGyver cigarette.

No use.

MotionMan

 

[amddude]

I had a pc one time brought into a shop I worked at, covered in cat piss. No joke.

Also, this rich guy that worked for a telephony company had us come out to work on his pc. When his wife walked out of the room for a sec he asked me how he can hide his WMP file history--didn't want his pr0n habits discovered. Awkward.

 

[RichUK]

I.T. Support Monkeys :Q

 

[Danman]

Man, reading this thread brings me back to my past helpdesk days. I do consulting so usually I don't have to deal with break/fix situations with "special" customers.

However, I recently had a "special" client that I created a new backup solution for, including a library and disk staging. He was having issues with the library after I left so I was helping him out with troubleshooting it. I was asking him "Is there a tape in the drive in the back?!" He was all confused by this, he's like, I see tapes on the sides (this is a HP MSL library with two magazines with the drive in the back). After asking him explicitly to look at the back and talking to him for ten minutes, something finally snapped in for him.

After he understood that the tape drive was in the back, he comes back with "Oh, I thought that each tape slot is a tape drive! Wow, that's neat."

/facepalm

Sad thing is, he's the main IT guy.

 

[nutxo]

Installing memory at a customers home.

Lotion and tissues next to teh monitor. When I set my elbow on the tower to unplug everythign form the back my elbow slid on something.

I tried to drive home not using my hands but when I got home I wiped down my whole interior with rubbing alcohol.

I now carry rubber gloves...


I bought a lappy form a girl. It had a broken lcd and she said she couldnt get any of her stuff off the machine.

I got home and I hooked up my monitor and there was a folder labeled " family pics ".

I decided to be nice and was gonna burn her stuff to a disk and call her. It was all video and pics of her and hubby doin the nasty. She was freakin obese. It was very graphic, nightmare stuff. I decided that I couldnt face her so I just uploaded everything to a friends ftp

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Got a call from a frantic teacher,
Teacher: The program I installed is gone.
Me: What happens when you try to access it?
Teacher: Nothing, it's gone!
Me: Go to the programs folder and see if it's listed.
Teacher: I tell you it's gone!
Me: Well it's possible that it was accidentally moved from the programs folder. Is there a shortcut on the desktop?
Teacher: No but, there never was a shortcut.
Me: Well lets try a search before we try reinstalling the program. Go to Start/Search and type in the name of the program.
Teacher: It says it's in D: drive.
Me: (A light begins to dawn) Tell me, when it did work, how did you access the program?
Teacher: I didn't do anything. I put the disk in the drive and it started.

*/Facepalm/* Yep, that damn bastard autoplay again.

 

[mAdMaLuDaWg]

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper

Originally posted by: brtspears2
I get stuck with the fun battles with high resolution displays and small text and icons. A fun battle where dropping the resolution lower than native screen size results in blurry complaints. Setting the monitor to native resolution and turning up font sizes, large icons results in "well, this thing here (some obscure button in an ancient app like Eudora) didn't get bigger at all, I thought a larger monitor would let me see things larger and clearer!"

I used to have a user that was in his 70's - his vision was so poor that he used a 22" crt at 1024x768 with large fonts and scaling and all that. It had to be pretty frustrating for him.

We have a user that uses a magnifying glass to read text on his computer.

 

[Zolty]

A few things I learned from my time in a call center....

People from the south Mash on their start buttons, keyboards, and mice. They don't seem to press anything.

Redneck relay is a classic when only one phone exists in the double-wide and the computer is on the other side. Example:
Me:Could you click on the start button in the lower left corner of the screen
Redneck 1 (yelling): Mash on da start butt'n
RN 2: Mash sart
RN 3: Do what now?
RN 2: What he gotta do?
RN 1: Where is that?
Me: (sigh) <passes the buck by telling the rednecks not to call unless i can speak to the person on the computer>

Old ladys who are just so lonely they want to talk about their "Stories"; thought I didn't actually mind these people as they gave me something to do that didn't involve a computer.

When I was onsite at another job I had the pleasure of explaining that a 22in CRT was not a whiteboard and that sharpie brand markers were not erasable ($1200 well spent).

People with computer science degrees generally know very little about computers.

It is not considered a sick day when you are sick of your job.....

 

[kag]

Hehehe, I love this thread. I read (and smiled at) every single post.

A few years back I was building a computer for a close friend and somehow the parts were sent in distinct packages. We had received everything but the monitor and the hard drive. So the next day before leaving school, my friend calls home and asks his brother if Purolator had delivered another package. His brother said "oh yeah, I opened it and there's a TV and a tin box". He meant a monitor and a hard drive. It still makes me laugh years later.

----

We have two guys at work who deal with technical support but when they're both on the phone, every now and then my phone will ring for support (no one else speaks english in the office). I remember a lady who had not synchronized her Palm application in over two months (they're supposed to synchronize every single day) and for some reason her Palm crashed and she had to do a hard-reset. She called do know if we were able to retrieve her data, obviously we weren't. I felt bad having to tell her that, she had lost all of her data, even though she was pretty stupid for not synchronizing on a regular basis.

 

[kag]

Why do I seem to end 50% of the threads I reply to? Am I that boring? lol...

 

[Deviant Grasshopper]

I was perusing someone's PC and ran across a favorite link that was titled:

"Chocolate Hole Webcam"


.....it was legitimate, but funny nonetheless.

 

[Deviant Grasshopper]

Anyone else deal with cellphones?

I manage ~50 phones at my current gig, ~150 at my last place.

There are always at least 3-4 'phone abusers'... You know the type - broken charge ports, broken screens/keyboards/rollerballs, typically they go through 4-5 phones a year. It gets highly annoying to have to replace a phone every two months.