"[Office Story] Some doozies I've had in the last 2 weeks" Topic

Disclaimer…same as before…

Sooooo..
Nothing adventuresome on the side of me, where I have any cool, or snippy comments…but working the tech side of a corporation, and getting approx 60 calls a day, I can get some interesting scenarios…
Here are some: (for your entertainment)…

1: Person calls me the other day…"I need a new blackberry, and I need to see if my old one is under warranty…."

Me: "Why?" I say. "What happened?"

Person: "The dog ate it."

Me: "Excuse me..which part?"

Person: "The ENTIRE blackberry. The dog ate it…"

Needless to say it was under warranty and I am afraid for what they might have to send the company to prove that the dog at the blackberry…

2: Person calls me: "I need you to resynch my passwords and validate my pc login on my pc."

Me: "Okay.." Gets users login. Checks account, directories, and passwords. "Okay. Now go ahead and try to login to your pc, and lets see if the validation worked."

Person: "I can't."

Me: "Why?"

Person: "I'm not at my computer."

Me: "Okay, are you in the office. I can wait till you get to your cubicle."

Person: "No…I mean…my computer is not here…It's been unhooked and is sitting in the back seat of my car…"

Me: …..

3: Admin: "My boss told me to open up a trouble ticket from you for her pc."

Me: "What's the problem?"

Admin: "She's not able to login, and someone told her that it's because she has a virus on her computer."

Me: "Ummmm…" I check her account. Her domain is locked due to password violations. I unlock it. "No she doesn't have a virus. She just locked up her account."

Admin: "She says she has a virus and she's my boss so she must have one."

Me: "Ummm…okay…so who is the person that told her she has one."

Admin: "I don't know. She's not here to tell me. But she sent me a message saying she wants a ticket opened."

Me: *sigh* (and a ticket was opened with a quick message of apology to the field tech who got it…)

4: Person: "I need a new keyboard."

Me: "Okay…what's wrong with it."

Person: "My dog peed on it."

Me: "Say…what?"

Person: "Yeah…my dog peed on my keyboard…"

Me: "How did your dog get on the desk to pee on your keyboard?"

Person: "It wasn't on my desk…"

Me: "What was your keyboard doing on the floor then?"

Person: "I don't think you wanna know…"

Me: …..(being very quiet as I order them a new keyboard…)

5:
Admin Asst: My boss is out for the day but he wants me to call you and open up a trouble ticket for his computer.

Me: "Ummmm…okay…what's the problem?"

Admin Asst: "I don't know. He just said "I'm having issues with my powerpoint." and then left".

Me: "Did he say anything else about what kind of issues?"

Admin: "No..he was going to go play golf…just that he had "issues with it"…."

Me: …..

6: Last part of a conversation:
Me: "So let me get this straight…You want me to try to go to a non corporation site, which happens to be a State Of California Govt. Site, which I have no valid access to; try to hack into it illegally, and pull your records from it's database so you can receive and illegal printout of your certifications because you don't want to have to ask your new boss to request a copy?"

Person: "Yes…is there a problem with this?"

Me:…..

More to come….

Submitted Respectfully…

My cupholder quit working.

Don't joke…I've had that one….

I love call tech support and ask them to fax me over some more paper since we are all out.

We're small enough they know me and ignore me or get revenge by taking over my computer remotely.

I like your stories . They make mine at work seem small. Know what supervisor means? Adult babysitter.

Adult babysitter is right. Sometimes I feel like the only guy in the building who knows where the magic green start button is.

"K! I can't get this going! Help!"

Me: "Did you try hitting this start button?"

"….. Yeah, that would work, yeah."

The Dog ate it……

I had a worker ask me to replace the bulb in their monitor.

& then I freaked another worker out when I told her the reason the network was slow for everyone was because she had a big planter sitting on the network cable & it was constricting the flow.

HAHAHA!!! "Fax me over some more paper" hehe…

My dog chewed on my cell phone, does that count Murph.

Two from my (thankfully past) support experiences

1. I was first to arrive at our companies support desk at a client one morning, and picked up a call from a rather excitable Irish lady who was meant to be doing some training in a top floor training room. Like a lot of people, her accent tended to thicken up under pressure, but I got the idea that there was a problem with Windows in the training room. Picked up some Windows install diskettes (it was that long ago) and went to investigate. It turned out that overnight strong winds had sucked two of the rooms windows out of their frames and down onto the (thankfully unoccupied) car park. Put my disks down and called the building manager.

2. Even longer ago, went to call on a colleague who's monitor had stopped working. Turned out he had the power cable coming out of one of those small power-and-network hatches in the floor. It had slipped out of the correct chanel, and his chair resting on the hatch had chomped through the power cable. That one could have been a lot worse!

That's better than the willful sabotage I see when subbing for computer teachers. Students will disconnect cables, rotate monitors screens, get around filters, and generally see what they can screw up for the teacher. School's reaction is to send for a tech and have them fix it. My reaction is to write the student up and let their parents babysit them for three days.

Charles

There is a great show in the UK called the IT Crowd I think Murphy should be one of their writers

There's been a few times when I have had a visiting high heid yin in the touch down area come over to demand iunstant love and attention when their laptop wouldn't power up.

<flick on switch/plug in>

"Oh"

I used to support military IT. We had a virus on the network, so we announced that there was a virus on the network and that no one should get on the network until the virus had been eradicated. Some nobhead General's adjutant told his General (That's right, 4 stars!!) that since the Generals computer was wireless he could go ahead and get on the network because "everyone knows that virus's cannot be transmitted over a wireless network." I wasn't going to let my EM's take the heat on this. So I stand in front of the General and tell him, not only does his computer have the virus, but I cannot do anything to fix it because I only have a secret clearance and he has to take it back to the Pentagon to get it fixed. Fortunately, I was a Major (and still got promoted to LTC) and his adjutant was a Major too. I don't know if he got promoted. There was some major pucker factor on that one!

Way back when (we were still using Vax terminals connected to a mainframe – only a few lucky people actyually had PCs at their desk), I was the database and system manager for the library at a major Silicon Valley firm, my boss was berated by *her* boss (head of the library) that I wasn't doing my job – "the machine" was down, it had been down for a week, and I hadn't even bothered to tell anyone, let alone fix it.

Well, this was a surprise to my boss (cool lady that she was), as no-one else seemed to have this problem. She went into her bosses office to see if she could troube shoot before handing it off to me, and yep, the Vax terminal was turned off.

There's a reason we called the head of the Library "The Boss From Another Planet".

Reading this, I'm reminded at just how fortunate I am to have such a great bunch of end users at my company. We just never get stories quite like these, and I'm not sorry to have no such stories to share. ;-)

We get all sorts like this at work. Our students seem to think the things listed by olddat are funny, as are jamming playing cards,biscuits, you name it into floppy drives or cd/dvd roms. We also get silly calls from staff as listed.
Current one is we have one classroom, which has an interactive whiteboard and a machine linked up to it, and a ceiling mount projector. I get called up because when the move the mouse, it draws over the screen. A bit bemused by this I wander up, see the fault and point out that where the 4 pens and eraser tools are not in their correct storage areas on the IWB (interactive whiteboard) the system thinks there are in use, and thus moving the mouse is the same as using one of the pens on the board and will 'draw' on what you see.
A bit hard to explain here, but basically each storage area has a sensor to tell if the tool is there or not. If it's not, it assumes it's in use. When all of them are handily stored in a staffroom and not where they should be it won't work properly.
Of course, the flip side is where some silly arse told the principle that our degree students should be allowed to use the computer rooms unattended and be given the combination codes for the doorpads, we get things like this taken. And of course, these students don't let other students into the room,nor give them the codes, oh no! Oh, and for two of our rooms, the staff have put the bloody access code up on the noticeboard right next to both rooms.
Of course, it's pure co-incidence that all the rooms that students have access to outside of their normal lessons (now all of them) tend to get more problems. The other joy is we have a no food or drink in computer rooms – but the lecturers ignore it,thus the students do, and apparently they have all been told 'well, water is ok' to have in the rooms.I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but even I know water and electrical equipment don't get along!

It's fun, really it is ;-)
Luckily, after nearly 9 years there, I've got to know most lecturers, and can get away with a fair bit and have good banter – plus they know the do'sand don'ts and we to a degree kind of manage things. Being able to tell them they're a bloody idiot and what have they broken this time makes it a bit easier. Sigh, I guess it could be worse, I could have taken up teaching full time :-)