Tales From Technical Support Content
User called in stating that Windows Help windows were popping up EVERYWHERE! I Damewared in and saw about 300 windows open, all were Windows Help. I asked if there was anything laying on her keyboard, or had she recently spilled anything on it.
Turns out, the keyboard was pressed up under the corner of her monitor, and it was pressing the F1 key, spamming Windows Help...
I am a district computer technician for an ISD and we have an online help desk. Most of the time, an employee submits a help request online, and then the technicians can view their tickets online and respond. Here are a couple of the strangest requests:
One teacher requested that we change the door knob on her door because it was loose. Also, her manual pencil sharpener needed to be reattached to her wall. I simply printed out the work order and put it in the teacher's mailbox stating that she would have to submit a help request to the maintenance/custodial department for that.
Another teacher wanted us to move tables for her. Again, I printed out the work order and told her to submit a request to maintenance.
When I moved from tech support to server engineer I had thought that finally I didn't have to deal with stupid (l)users anymore. Such was not the case where the networking team was involved.
For some reason, they were working without a head of their department for about a year and had gotten complacent with their jobs. With nobody to report directly to they simply didn't bother doing more than was necessary to keep the network running.
The servers I had had a teamed NIC which meant that there two NICs in each server in case of failure that were teamed to a virtual NIC which is what the network actually saw. Provided 1 was working, the network would still see it was running.
I get an alert one day that one of the NICs had failed on a server. I go down to the machine room and confirm that this was the case. I trace the cables back, make a note of the port they're plugged into and send a message off to the network team to have them check the port.
I get the message back that that port was active so it had to be a problem with my server. I tell them that it's a teamed NIC and if all they're doing is checking for communication 1 of the NICs will still respond and give them a faulty response. No, they say they checked the patch panel and the switch and everything on their end was fine.
Okay, not a problem although this was a high-capacity production server and couldn't be taken down during the week and could only wait until the weekend before any work could be done on it. I ordered a new motherboard from HP, informed them that I would install it myself and took the responsibility for any issues that would transpire.
As this was a two person job, I got a buddy to help me out for that day. I got the motherboard, some extra cables just in case and waited for the weekend.
Saturday comes and we're there at 7am. Server goes down, we pull it from the rack and proceed to swap out the motherboard. Power it back on, it's the same issue as it was before. Okay, I swap out the network cable for another one. Same issue as before. Now, the same NIC on two different motherboards not working is too big a co-incidence so I go the low tech way of checking this. I swap the network cables to see what happens. If there was a hardware problem like they said, nothing would change. If it was a port issue like I said originally then the active NIC should switch. And they did. I swapped them back to make sure and again they switched. I did the same at the patch panel and again the ports switched.
Well, it obvious now that they didn't check the switch and just checked to see if the server was responding. I thank my friend for his help, go upstairs and fire off an e-mail to the network team explaining what just happened.
On Monday I get a response saying the exact same thing as they did before that it must be a hardware problem and all the ports are fine. I'm sorry to say that at this point I lost it. I tore into them, explained in no uncertain terms what had happened and how we had to come in on the weekend to fix this when it was a port issue. I listed all the steps taken and finally said that if they came back to me with it being a server hardware issue again I would go straight to the head of IT and the business unit that the server belonged to and the Network Team would have to explain to them why they couldn't check a port and why overtime had to be paid for their mistake?
The response I got an hour later was priceless: Sorry, one of the ports had failed and has been fixed. Can you confirm that both NICs are working?
They were working fine now. And I never had another problem with the network team when something similar happened.
One day a girl in my parallel class asked for my help, because she couldn't login on her internet providers website with her laptop. Something was wrong with her cookie-settings, but she couldn't remember the exact error.
On the next day she took her laptop to school and I had a look on it in a break. (When I did so, I was shocked her laptop was even working - nothing had ever been updated. First thing I did was updating her anti-virus...)
So I asked her to try to login, since I wanted to see the error...she does so, everything is working...okay, problem solved
Two hours later she comes to me again: she tried to log in again and it didn't work anymore...okay, I came with her to take another look, she tried to log in...everything worked just fine
This happened one more time, but after this it seemed to be working...or at least she didn't tell me anymore if it didn't
(I still don't know what the error was)
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