Tales From Technical Support Content
Just had one of my users trying to be cool (well as cool as IT ever gets).
Was talking to one of our asset application dev guys about adding in the dns name for our exchange box. The chick pipes up saying I know... along with the dns name there is the subway gateway J
It was the look of realisation her face made it extra funny. J
I'm a telephone Installer and was on a job to add a jack for a client that had recently bought a computer and wanted internet access.
While I'm doing the job, he asks me if I know anything about computers, which I did.
He went on to tell me about this crazy computer that he bought. He had also bought an Anti Virus program & tried to install it.
He said that he followed the directions exactly, even though they sounded real stupid.
"Ok, so what did they say to do?" I ask him.
Well it told me to "Close All Windows" before installing. He went on to say that that was the stupidest thing that he had ever heard of. "Imagine, going around the house in the middle of summer when it's 95 degrees out and closing all the windows. What the hell did that have to do with a computer?"
Boy, did he feel stupid when I explained it to him.
I work as an it admin at a company with about 200 people whick essentially means that everything with a power chord is IT,
Anyway, I was replacing a users old pc with a new one, and had insttalled all the software necessary. I only had to log on as her to fix her mail settings.
I couldn't do it. I even called her twice to verify that her password was the correct one, but still couldn't get on. So I logged on to the server and reset her password and solved that problem.
When I had set up the mail I wanted to log on with her account just to see that everything was working fine, but again, couldn't log on,
Since I knew that the password was correct, i brought up her old pc and tried to log on to that one. It worked flawless.
After about an hour I noticed that on her keyboard there was an numerical password put into some of the keys, and the reason that her password didn't work was that the password she thought that she was using was really mixed up with a bunch of numericals. She has had this for roughly two years and had never noticed!
How much do you really use your keyboard I wonder?
Not a computer problem at all...
Recently, the telephone in my office at work stopped working. This is the only office on the floor, and therefore also the only telephone on the floor but with several classrooms there. This phone is quite a well used one! We have two phones connected to the socket, one the fixed one that we were given when the office became an office, and the other a cordless one that I picked up from a charity shop.
Having sent an email to the buildings and facilities department to report this problem, I first got the reply that as it was an important issue, I should have reported it via phone and not via email.
They then sent somebody up with another phone to try it - though I had already tried using a different telephone. They tried a lot of stuff, but nothing worked. I then was told that it would be remotely sorted. It did - somehow (you'll see why in a bit) - work for about ten minutes before not working again.
Meanwhile, we were having to use our mobile phones to get any work done in the place.
After things stll not being done about four days on, I emailed again and was told that the phone line does work and that I wasn't working it properly. Erm, it's a phone line that WAS working. But it's been checked remotely and there are no problems with it. *sigh*
Eventually, over a week after I initially reported the problem, an engineer was called out who found that the line had been unplugged in the main junction box. That's what he told me, and I have little cause to disbelieve him because it's the same input into the building as our network access which is tempremental also.
But oh no, the problem was caused, according to the BF department, by the cordless phone being plugged into the system...
A woman and her father bring in a Gateway notebook.
It was a replacement for one that failed under warranty.
(More ram and harddrive and faster.)
But...
She was on the phone for an hour trying to get it to go online wirelessly.
(Needed for her work.)
The father asked me to do what I could to get it working ASAP.
No promises, but I'll try, I said.
They leave.
I turn it on.
It's not detecting the office wireless.
Too bad the new style PC card slot wouldn't accept my old PCMCIA WiFi card.
Right next to the slot is a chrome slide switch.
In tiny lettering it's labeled "off wireless on".
I slide it towards on.
New network detected.
On-line ok!
$50. (The bench minimum.)
She smiles as she pays.
She knew it would be something stupid.
She was happy to have it back and working the same day.
But...
After she left...
I have to wonder...
An hour on the phone and nobody could tell her to slide the wifi switch to 'ON"?
PS: Welcome back TechTales!
PSPS: It's 2009.
This tech horror story isn't about a simple-minded customer (I'm the customer,) nor is it about a doofus technician. No, the horror here is completely hardware related.
Let's start things off simply. When the 2008 stimulus checks showed up, my roomie and I pooled our resources and got some absolutely psychotic upgrades to our computers. Oh sure, maybe things weren't absolutely cutting edge stuff, but it was the next step down (i.e. things that weren't going to have a $300 price drop within four months.) Everything looks good, we order it, get it all hooked up, and we are *smoking* hot. Fast forward about 8 months, my roomie is starting to have screwups. Odd crashes here and there, especially with two particular games. Well, we start swapping parts (as our systems are now identical except for the hard drives and what's on them), everything from the RAM to the power supply. Finally whittle it down to a faulty motherboard, and as this thing is no longer available (Apparently they chose a particularly bad Southbridge system, I was just lucky that mine lived) we order a new one. Here's where the fun begins.
Get the mobo in. Do the "set up Windows XP so we don't have to reformat" steps, but alas it's still chunky to all hell so we reformat anyway. Spend a day installing everything again, moving data back from the second hard drive, blah blah blah. Everything's going good, no problems. Until we start playing City of Heroes (which for those that don't know, is an MMOG where you make yourself a super hero.) After about 10 minutes, his computer starts going into slide-show mode for about 30 seconds before it goes back to normal, only to wash-rinse-repeat every 2-5 minutes after. Initially we believe that somehow, some way, CoH is having conflicts with this mobo, as that's the ONLY thing that's screwing up. But, after some software testing, *one* testing program finds a fault with the memory sticks. Huh. So, we swap memory again. Still happening.
I'm still over here saying it's CoH, that was a fluke bad test. But, to get the game company's support off my nads, I start trying one stick at a time. No problems. Try the other stick. No problems. Okay MAYBE it's cause we're still on 32bit XP and this mobo really really doesn't like Windows seeing all 4 gigs in there. Put both sticks in.... No problems.
This is when roomie and I have a joint laughing fit, being that the one "con" we saw listed anywhere about the mobo was that one fellow had it not recognize both memory sticks at first. He had to install one, boot, shut down, install the other. We had the SAME bug, different systems. Everythings fixed now!!!
.... Except now the problems are happening a *half hour* into it instead of 10 minutes. Fantastic. So now we're back to square one, getting ready to start swapping parts and everything like that. I insist on one last look through the BIOS to see if maybe we missed something, or worse changed something we shouldn't have. That's when I notice the AMD Cool n' Quiet is still disabled. I look at my room-mate and go "Uh.. Why didn't we ever turn this on again?" "Because you said not to." "... No I said not to until we got everything else set up. Why didn't we do it AFTER that?" "Well we DID get everything set up, nothing stopped us from...."
That's when we both remembered that we freaked and dropped everything else hen CoH started going screwy. We enable the Cool n' Quiet, reinstall the related drivers in Windows, and the thing's been pure gravy ever since. So here's the breakdown:
1) Two unrelated hardware problems that were aggravating each other, one of which seems to be confusing even the manufacturers.
2) Four extremely knowledgable techs, six slightly less-so ones, and a small army of friends with ideas.
3) All of this only noticed by ONE GAME whose code is about as effecient as triangular wheels on a drag racer.
When it rains, it pours!
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