childish it support
not sure where I first learnt of it but my favourite IT childish acronym is P.E.B.K.A.C


"Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair" - basically the user is a twunt
(cornishbob is going to hell on, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:57, 12 replies)

Back in the early days of the internet,
A guy I knew couldn't access any websites.

It turns out that he'd never seen a URL written down (as they were far from ubiquitous as they are now) and therefore couldn't spell www.

Because people had only told him URLs, I asked him what he'd been typing (a conversation which quickly turned into something like a Two Ronnies sketch) he had been putting wuuw on the basis that three-w's didn't make sense. I told him what www meant and asked him what he thought wuuw stood for. He said it was probably just a made up word like email, which he'd been pronouncing like a shortened version of air-mile.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:47, Reply)

power cuts...
A few months ago we had a power outage in the building, in fact the entire street went out. The floor went completely dark, leaving the just the morning sunlight to illuminate the room. The only sound that can be heard is the sound of the building alarm and cooling fans from the racks in our server room. We ring the power company, and the poor girl answering the phone has obviously started the day with lots of panicing people seeking an update...she has no update. We ring again, in in the hope that another customer support agent might have a better idea.. no chance. We now have a pre-recorded response advising of the outage....bugger, this is going to be a big power outage. So then the immediate panic begins.. we (myself and my team) have to get all the servers shut down before the UPS runs out. Off we dash and start working on getting the servers offline. as you do.

A few mins later we hear a loud banging on the server room door. I go out to answer it, just in case it's our manager asking for an update. Alas it wasn't my manager but a guy standing with his laptop on, demanding to know why he can't get onto the internet on the wireless network.

I just turned around, walked away, closing the server room door behind me and went back to trying to saving the servers from dropping dead. (the UPS died about 30 seconds after the last server shutdown .. close one!)
(sarcasmo needs more sleep, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:47, 14 replies)

I work in IT but...
My mother in law is the worst offender I've met.

One particular case was there new dell PC, which I chose for them and even got them 3 years on-site service (as if that mattered) had frozen.
Now I knew it was my sister-in-law keeping about 90 films seeding in azureus but it was too late to shut that down by then. It was well and truly frozen.
So as you do, I told her to reset the machine.
"how do you do that?"
"Press the big power button on the front of the PC", said I.
"Ok its off now", says she.
"Ok, now switch it back on"
"Ok, I have"...."Its still frozen".

huh?
"Well you obviously haven't switched it off. You need to hold down the big power button on the front of the PC. You will hear the fan stop. The machine will be completely off. No lights or noise at all".

"Ok, its off"
"Turn it back on"
"I have, its still frozen"

"Are you just turning the monitor off?"

"Yeah"

Oh, for fucks sake.
(WOGAN'S WIG FIXER, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:45, 1 reply)

Confused
I think I need the help of IT support to translate some of these posts into English! *Does not understand half of um!*
(Grrrrr Tigers, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:43, 3 replies)

Along time ago.
I "do the computer stuff" in the office where my Nan volunteers. They go out and help retired service people filling out grant forms and stuff.

Anyway, this was in the days before the smoking ban and all the old geezers who worked there smoked like chimleys all the time in the office, and I had asthma and an overprotective Nan, so I would have to be announced before I could go in so all the old fuckers could stub out. This had the undesired consequence that whenever I went in I was the center of attention, everyone looking at me and silently cursing me for interupting their everlasting fag break.

So I get a call saying the computer is dead (they only had three, all the actual filing and stuff was done in a set of massive filing cabinets, with files dating back to people who were in their eighties in the seventies). Okay, I'll come down tomorrow.

Head down, and the machine is dead. Utterly dead. Doesn't work at all. No power, nothing. So I faff around for a bit, and decide, not really knowing what I'm doing, but not wanting to look like an idiot in front of the old colnel watching what I was doing, and hope for the best.

The problem soon became apparent. I had to explain to the old feller who sat on the other side of the desk to the computer (it was one of the old flat style ones with the monitor on top of the PC) that the fan slots in the back of the machine do not make a great substitute for an ashtray. Even if it is just now and then when the ashtray is full any you're too busy to go empty it.
(snay, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:33, Reply)

It was terrible a few years back
when the entire IT support population went into mourning. They were inconsolable for days.

Nevermind.

You can only cancel Xena Warrior Princess once.
(Jelly God, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:31, Reply)

IT Sushi?
Not so much about IT Support per se, but the IT support guy at the company I used to work with once made himself a lunch that was just a tortilla wrap and a piece of supermarket bought raw cod. He was under the impression that was what sushi was.

He was also surprised to discover that Jam isn't really that healthy in large quantities.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:23, 2 replies)

Always proof read your emails before hitting send.
As with a good portion of us here, I work in IT support. Most of the time I find myself droning "have you tried turning it off and on again" down the phone n times a day, along with quite openly taking the piss out of the people I'm doing support for. They seem to quite like it for some reason.

Occasionally, I'll manage the email stack. Most of the things that come through are quite mundane- explaining the problem, and asking us to fix it as soon as possible. So far, so usual. Some of them are a little more apologetic in tone, although sometimes comically so. Such as the example below:

"I'm terribly sorry, I appear to have a cock up my end..."
( jim_bob can herd cats., Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:22, Reply)

.compost
Like a lot of b3tards, I suspect, I don't officially do IT for our company. But neither does anyone else, so I usually end up fixing it in lieu of it not working.

The other week we got a complaint from a user - by phone, natch - that he hadn't received the e-mail to activate his account. So I went into the user management system and searched for 'Fosby' (not quite his real name).

- Mr Fosby ([email protected])
- Mr Fosby ([email protected])
- MR Fosby ([email protected])
- MR Fosby ([email protected])

.compost???
(ChaRleyTroniC is invincible with his chips and cheese, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:21, Reply)

In recognition of early Archimedes operating systems...


To Arthur!!
(Vice Admiral Sir Charles Cockbrush KCB MBE DSO, who is finding it increasingly difficult to log into b3ta.com wants to duck your aunt and kick your puppy, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:18, 3 replies)

Gary Glitter
Support for an Internet hosting company seriously sucked, but once a month, generally on a Friday, we'd "glitter" the hosting boxes.

Glittering was the term used for random spot checks on accounts for illicit pornography and other dodgyness. Being slightly clammy-to-the-touch geeks, we'd obviously concentrate on the porn.

What did I learn? Bestiality is way more popular than I ever would have believed, and the most popular canine breed is the Labrador.
( rofl harris, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:15, 2 replies)

It's not just users that make stupid mistakes
We had a company come in to install a sales contact system, which centred around an FTP server in the office. The sales team each had their own client software which synchronised with head office via FTP.

It worked well for a few months... before falling over due to lack of disk space. Digging a little deeper, I found that a load of rogue directories had been created on the FTP server. These were absolutely chock full of porn videos, with a note to the effect that the server was now the property of some bunch of l33t h4x0rz.

It turned out that the people who set it up had been running it as an open FTP server, with full read/write access for anonymous users. We deleted the porn (we may have taken a backup first) and set up proper user accounts and passwords after that.

A couple of others that I've done before, so I'll keep them quick:

Coffee on keyboard at a bus depot. Some bright spark decides to dry it out with a hairdryer but can only find the hot-air gun that they use for bonding windscreens. Result = melted keyboard. Surprisingly, it still worked.

Another bus depot and another keyboard. This time, the user was fed up that people kept borrowing his keyboard and not returing it. His solution was to carefully drill two holes through the space between the function keys and the main keyboard, and then bolt the thing to his desk. He couldn't understand why it wouldn't work - he'd been very careful to only drill through the empty space between the keys.
( Horatio P Lemming, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 16:08, 1 reply)

RTFM
I worked in support and advised a customer to "RTFM". They were outraged until I explained it meant "read the Fujitsu manual". I still got a bollockin' off my boss tho. :(
(SLiQ, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:56, 2 replies)

Driving me crackers
I keep hearing a weird noise. Imagine someone trying to send morse-code, but rather than tapping a little telegraph switch, you play short bursts on a bassoon. That's what it sounds like.

I thought it was my speakers, so I turned them off, back on, checked the connections. Tried different speakrs. Took the sides of the PC to see if a fan was catching. Changed the fans in case something was vibrating. Checked the CD-ROM tray.

I then checked the central heating boiling, bled the radiators, opened the back door and had a listen in case it was some workmen up the street.

I managed to solve the mystery. The next-door neighbours have put an old TV in their dining room which joins onto my living room. It's not loud enough to hear what they're watching, but the speakers are a bit buzzy and that's all I can hear unless I go press my ear againts the wall.

Thinking outside the box (ugh, buzzword) isn't my strong point.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:52, Reply)

Not strictly on topic or een relavent for QOTW as it is a question, But:
I'm sick of people using my university's mailing list to find rooms and recover lost mobile phones and cameras, so is it ok to use 419 baiting style techniques against them?
Get them to wait outside the library at silly hours, arrange viewings to random houses, that sort of thing.
Freshers week starts on Saturday so answers by then would be appreciated.
( AS, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:48, 3 replies)

Another common IT cure-it-all:
RTFM

Read The Fucking Manual
( snee held his breath since, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:36, 9 replies)

Press F1
My brother works in IT, as do I, and once related the following tale of a support call:

Bro: Ok, press F1 for the menu
Customer: *beep*
Bro: Hello? You need to press F1 to get the menu up.
Customer: *beep*
Bro: Are you pressing 1 on the phone?

They were.
(BadgerSmaker, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:35, Reply)

Is it bad
that I looked at my dads browser cache once when I was fixing something? Is it bad that it was mostly of the (legal) teen variety? Is it bad that I know what my dad wanks to? Is it worse that he's a teacher?
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:32, 7 replies)

9 years ago
I worked for the directory arm of KCom. It was split into two departments. Telesales and production. The servers were installed by a third-party company in London somewhere, but in order to save a bit of cash on the support front, the production manager went on a short course on MS Back Office 4.5. It worked, she did a good job of it and it did save a bit of cash. Her and the sales manager weren't thrifty tight arses nor were they the sort that spent profits on unnecessary things (like the sort of thing you'll have read about in the Bosses QOTW). They had a good balance of it.

However, she was only concerned with the server stuff and making sure Access/Goldmine database was up and running on users' machines. Anything less severe such as printers not working, and probably any other desktop problem you could think of was solved by people getting together and fixing it themselves with the aid of the occasional search on the fledgling Google.

That was until I came along. I'm far from being an expert, but I knew a little bit about a lot of things and being officially the 'webmaster' for a portal that never really got off the ground, I became the unofficial 'computer guy'. Several times a day I got "SLVA, can you have a look at this?"

But it wasn't just technical faults, it was stuff like formatting a table in Word, or how to save a file attached to an email.

I didn't mind, the failing portal meant I had plenty of spare time on my hands. I didn't mind reading up on the client-side part of MS Exchange because I'm slightly nerdy (I once went round and changed the computer names from something generic to the name of Jupiter's moons and I was Ganymede. I don't think anybody noticed or cared).

Then I began to feel a bit exploited. People started asking advice on buying a computer, or bringing me a magazine and asking which would be the best printer to buy. The straw that broke the camel's back was when a supervisor turned up for work with her laptop and her scanner and asked if I could set it up for her. I told her just this once, but that's it, I'm too busy (a titanic lie) plus I might get into grief with the boss.

I sent an email telling everyone to stop taking the piss. It worked though.

The moral of the story, don't be the 'yeah sure, I'll take a look' IT guy.

Click if you've been exploited and abused in the workplace.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:29, 8 replies)

My Mum
She is not brilliant with computer, she basically doesn't care enough about them to be interested and learn stuff. So she will call me or if i am in the same house and say things like "I clicked on it and it didn't work", which would be fine if I was watching her but i would normally be in a different room. She also has a knack for read out all the information on the screen that I don't need to know while managing to ignore the key bits I do need to know. Or in the case of the time she needed a had to send a fax from the puter telling me why she was sending it, who it was being sent to (and a bit about them), why they need it, what it said and some other stuff I have forgotten. What she did not tell me was what needed to be send and the relative number. I digress

As her IT guy she rented my services out to a friend of hers, there family computer is having issues and not connecting to the internet. So we arrive at there house. I am lead to the computer in question. I have a look at it, check setting, suggest they by a new one (it was very old and quite shit), looked at the setting on their son's machine, offered to do a clean install etc etc. Nothing seemed to be working. After 45 minutes my mum wander in and says "oh when i have problems like this i check the connections" at which point the husband of her friend reaches over to the router and pushes the cable properly into the machine and it works. Doh.

Me 0 mum 1

oh and she once asked me to stop surfing porn as she was getting so much porn junk mail in her hotmail account.... I helpfully explained my surfing habits were not influencing her junk mail.
(StyX is staring at you, yes YOU!!!, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:23, Reply)

IT support you say? i'll got a million!
But only 2 for now, both pearoasts cause i'm too busy rebooting PC's

The Tourettes Kid!
www.b3ta.com/questions/bastardcolleagues/post116318


Dr. Shipman Called!
www.b3ta.com/questions/callcentres/post517725

Infact, save time. Just look back at all my old answers. Thanks for calling.
(TheManofScience, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:23, Reply)

How I got the sack from IT Support
Re-written and reposted from the "Onosecond" QOTW

I arrived for my shift one day to find the grown-ups in our department running around in small circles pulling out their hair and shouting "It's fucked! It's fucked!" because our hugely expensive computer network had decided to take a day off.

Eventually, somebody decided the best course of action was to turn it off and back on again, and after several hours, the behemoth roared back into life and the batphone from the MD's office stopped ringing.

The boss stuck his head round the door and said with huge smile on his face: "Scary - do us a favour - send an on-screen message to all users to let 'em know the computer's no longer fucked."

So I did.

"ALL USERS: COMPUTER NO LONGER FUCKED"

We laughed.

Then, I dropped my coffee mug. It landed on the Enter key.

Our network had several hundred users in many varied locations round the world, some of whom earned mind-boggling sums of money and had the ears of movers-and-shakers in both industry and government.

I was no longer one of them.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:20, 5 replies)

Used to offer a "No Questions Asked"
pooter fixing service a few years ago. Many a sheepish bloke would arrive with a broken laptop or desktop, too scared to let the missis know about it, and be utterly mortified when the door was answered by a woman (me, that would be) who would say, "Hiya - alright ? Let's see what the trouble is then." It was invariably some porn related virus / malware / fuck up. As long as said activity didn't involve kids, I cared not a jot. Embarrassed the hell out of most of them tho. Mwahaha.

Worst IT newbie stupidity came from my dad tho.
Bought himself a pc. Managed to plug it all in correctly. He's on the phone to me as I go through the Windows 95 set up with him. I couldn't figure why all my instructions seemed to be gibberish to him, and why the messages on his screen were absolutely not what I expect to hear during the setup. We were getting no where fast. As I was a hundred miles or so away popping round to see what was up wasn't going to be possible.
"You're definitely using the left mouse button when I say "Click", right ?" I ask.
"Yup," says he.
After a moments head scratching I figure it - being a total newbie to computers, and having never actually even seen one up close before now, he has taken the mouse idea literally, and has it upside down with the cable pointing out of the bottom like a tail. Thus left button equalled right button.

I've never let him forget it.
(womanwhocanonlylivewithdogs, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:17, 1 reply)

A collection
I have a certain level of computer skills and knowledge i.e. i can fix most common windows software problems with the use of my memory, google and in worse case a clean install. Simple examples

When working for a company I resolved the printer issues nearly all the sales teams were facing. Hit print, printer need to have the green button pressed, printing occurred. I changed the default paper size from Legal to A4, woo go me.

When doing IT assistant role at a different company I was tasked with changing all the screen resolution from the default 640x480 to a whooping 800x600. The number of complains the next day. One woman said "I can't read the shortcuts" which was the word shortcut....

At the same company a new manager started working, I set up her computer and was sat across the way. She was having problems, double click wasn't working, asked for help. She informed me her mouse wasn't working properly. So i checked it, re-installed drivers, possible changed her mouse. All worked fine for me. She tried, not fixed. So i asked her to show me what she was doing. Turns out she was clicking left then her chubby finger was click the right button.
(StyX is staring at you, yes YOU!!!, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:13, 2 replies)

Gerald Fucking Ratner
My brother and I both found ourselves working in the IT industry, providing technical support to idiots in large companies.

While I preferred to wait and plan my awful revenge, my brother went for the full-on Bastard Operator from Hell route, and specialised in bawling out particularly stupid end users, because they deserved it.

So, while I sat at my desk devising painful death on the end users at a tyre and accessories company that rhymed with "Motorgay", little brother stalked the corridors at his company's HQ, rounding on the guy who had just left a particularly snarky message on his department's phone over the late arrival or otherwise of some printed reports.

Result: Stand-up toe-to-toe argument which ended with the victim's mumbled apology in front of a stunned office, before going off to a corner, wishing for death.

Eventually, the silence was broken.

"You do have any idea who that was?"

"Err… no."

"Gerald Fucking Ratner"

Days later, a clearly rattled Gerald Fucking Ratner made his now famous "total crap" speech and wiped half a billion off the company's value.

If you are a former Ratner's worker, my brother would like to point out he is not sorry in the slightest.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:09, 1 reply)

The whole of the internet
This is a bit geeky. In 1995, I'm fairly positive I had a copy of most of the internet. Or specifically, the world wide web.

I worked for a (at the time) large IT support company, about 250 people all doing telephone suport for loads of companies too lazy to do it themselves. We were pioneers of the outsourced support really. Anyway, thats 250 people, all quite clued up and with quite a lot of kit.

We supported loads of things, and two in particular caught my attention. 1 - a new fangled web crawling program, and a program that would combine all the free space on networked PC's and use it as a giant, fault tolerant NAS - (quite brilliant really, and I've never seen anything like it since. I think someone could clear up wiht a decent modern version). Oh and we had a fucking awesome internet connection - I believe it was 128Kbps over ISDN. That, in 1995, was, as I said, fucking awesome.

There was only one thing for it. We should make a copy of the internet. We did some maths. You ready?

In 1995 there were about 200,000 websites, and we assumed 2Mb for each of them - thats 400GB. Trivial these days to store this. In 1995, the harddrives were about 1GB in decent PC's, and we had about 700 PC's knocking about.

Downloading 400GB over 128K is a different matter. in fact its about 10,000 hours. Never mind, we had time and more importantly a system administrator who was in on it and happy to oblige.

The internet access was shit at work for about 2 years.

It never really finished, the internet changed far to quickly for us to keep up.

However, for a lot of that time we had a local copy of the internet that we could search. You could find a website locally in about 3 to 4 hours. Beat that Google.

So, utterly futile but a fantastic waste of time and a hell of a learning curve.

Tell that to kids these days, and they wont believe you.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:06, 7 replies)

A funny thing happened the other day
I've just been trying to bridge two network interfaces on one of our storage machines. I made sure the right modules were loaded, changed /etc/conf.d/net so that bridge_br0 included the right interface names, but whenever I brought the interface up and started dhcpcd, all I got was a UDP storm, which made our Cisco router light up like a Christmas tree.

Imagine my embarrassment when I realised I'd forgotten to enable the spanning tree protocol! I added "stp on" to brctl_br0 and everything was fine.

True story
(netpixie you should reconsider your life choices., Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:05, 10 replies)

I work in IT...
...it's a bit dull.
( Aenesis, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:04, 1 reply)

Could Have Been Sacked
I recently had a meeting with the female HR manager at work regarding some upcoming paternity leave. She is a woman, in her 50's, who is the very definition of mutton dressed as lamb. She always has her tiny, shriveled, sultana-like breasts half hanging out and wears clothes that are designed for women much younger and trimmer than herself. Coupled with the fact that she talks for England, I wasn’t looking forward to the ‘brief’ meeting anyway. As her office is a glass box situated at the end of the open plan part where most of us work, fellow employees are always aware when others are in the ‘Office of Doom’.

After the meeting, which went on much longer than it needed to, I received an email from a fellow worker, Dave, merely asking ‘Good Meeting?’
I replied with, ‘Nah, not really, all I could think about was sucking mouldy oysters from HR manager’s clunge’ – to which I heard a guffaw upon receipt of said email.

I received no response and forgot about it until 15 or so minutes later, when I saw Dave frantically clicking on the mouse of the HR Manager’s computer. Baffled, I waited for him to come out of her office and asked him what had happened. As he explained what he’d done, I realised I’d been a lucky man. He’d tried to forward it to another worker, James. After 10 or so minutes, James said, “Erm, still haven’t got that email you tried to forward me – you sure it’s been sent?”
When checking his sent items, Dave realised he’d actually sent it to the HR Manager instead.

I still thank God to this day that she wasn’t in her office at the time he forwarded the email to her by accident, and that she hadn’t locked her computer. I’m still also very grateful that James questioned where the email was. However, the thing I’m most grateful for is the fact that I received IT Support from the unlikeliest of sources, and that Dave managed to run into her office and delete the email.

Oh yeah, and once, I put 'kind Retards' instead of 'Kind Regards' on the end of an email by accident. Nobody could help me on that one.
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:04, 7 replies)