In tradition of Johhnyguru...IT rants....

Clinotus

Golden Member
Jan 6, 2001
1,042
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Dedicated to anyone who's ever worked in system support or a help desk
of any kind.


How to Please Your I.T. Department

1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it
buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals,
dried flowers, bowling trophies and children's art. We don't have a life, and
we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

2. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages
from here.

3. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. That
way you won't be there when we need your password. It's nothing for us
to remember 700 screen saver passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping
you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your
mail because your computer won't power on at all.

5. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete
it at once. We're just testing.

6. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and
spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

7. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and
flags it as a rush delivery.

8. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's
electronics in it.

9. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer
support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

10. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call
computer support. We're collectors.

11. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T.
person's chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the
problem. We love a puzzle.

12. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don't have
cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

13. When an I.T. person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in
a scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by
shortly?" That motivates us.

14. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times.
Print jobs frequently that get sucked into black holes.

15. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to
all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

16. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly
what you mean by "My thingy blew up".

17. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

18. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your
dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were
designed to have 20kg of computer sitting on top of them.

19. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the
mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of
muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.

20. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes
button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't
bedoing it, would you?

21. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit
uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up.
We don't have any money to speak of anyway.

22. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about
that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of
professional expertise referred to as crap.

23. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call I.T.
support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and
Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional
engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.

24. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary
to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a
third party who doesn't know anything about the problem.

25. When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a
mail attachment. We've got lots of disk space on that mail server.

26. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller
chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the
queue.

27. When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company.
People out in Pofadder like to keep abreast of what's going on.

28. When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a
Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

29. Don't bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own.
Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

30. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office,
leave the documentation at home. We'll find all the settings and
drivers somewhere.

31. Keep it crashing!

 

ajskydiver

Golden Member
Jan 7, 2000
1,147
1
86
How the heck did you find our IT dept.'s preferred policy list? I want names. :)

~AJ

Seriously, you'd be amazed at how much that's like my job. You'd laugh silly if I told you what I do and am expected to do and for how $.
 

CinderElmo

Senior member
Jun 23, 2000
732
0
0
It may be a repost but what the hell.

Don't you hate it when someone introduces a virus by opening some stupid POS email proggy...which crashed their computer 6 ways til Sunday...then you spend hours trying to get it cleaned up and back to a point where it will boot.

Thinking you did some good work and earned a well deserved break once you get back to Windows...you leave the trouble machine for a bit only to come back to find the user "proving" which email the virus came from. I said yeah, thats the one alright...and thanks for showing me.
*steps outside into a clump of trees and starts mumbled cursing and shouting a la "Six days and Seven nights"*

Format C:, sorry your computer just blew itself to HELL and I can have you reloaded with a fresh install in 15 minutes. Walks away.

 

6TNINE

Banned
Oct 6, 2000
579
0
0
Don't you just love the I.T. Challenged. They simply have no idea of what they are doing w/ their systems and yet they think that they can fix it all. since they have a better computer at home running windows 97 and office 99.

Here is my favorite phrase, "I'll get to it tomarrow"

i keep telling myself that, but guess what, tomarrow never comes!



oh yeah, and you guys would laugh so hard at what i get paid. I'm crying right now.
 

LemonHead

Golden Member
Oct 28, 1999
1,041
0
76
This one really gets me.

Support phone rings....

Me: Hi help desk, this is Karl

Looser...I mean User: Uh....is this the help desk???

Me: /* blood pressure rising at thought of having to repeat myself */ Uh, yes this is the Help desk

User: Oh....uh....my computer is broke /* looooong pause. no additional information */

Me: /* shaking as I reach into desk drawer to locate gun */
 

loosbrew

Golden Member
Oct 30, 2000
1,336
1
0
if you dont have space on your desk for your coffe mug, open the empty cd tray and use that, we love to laugh at your sorry asses downstairs when we have to replce it tomorrow!

loosbrew
 

Viper GTS

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
38,107
433
136
User: Oh....uh....my computer is broke /* looooong pause. no additional information */

God I hate that. Friggin' people give you one sentence & then sit there expectantly for your words of wisdom.

Customer: My DSL line is down.
Me: Ok, what exactly is happening.
Customer: It doesn't work.
Me: No sh!t ma'am, but what is happening?
Customer: Nothing.
Me: {Madly pressing the 'Die!' button on my phone)

That and the people that do NO troubleshooting before they call you. Network admins that call to have US walk them through determining whether the problem is on their end or ours. At LEAST do us a favor & eliminate your side of things before you call us. I don't want to have to figure out your network by playing 20 questions, that's your job.

Viper GTS
 

yakko

Lifer
Apr 18, 2000
25,455
2
0
Similar to many calls I have had.

Them: I can't sign on.
Me: What is it doing?
Them: Nothing?
Me: Nothing at all.
Them: Nope.
Me: Not even an error message?
Them: No. It just gets to checking password and then says that it is invalid.
Me: So it is doing something just not signing on?
Them with no clue: Right.




Actual call from last night.

Him: I have had DSL since the 15th and it still doesn't work.
Me: Well what is it doing when you try to sign on?
Him: It is giving me an error message about some network.
Me: What does the message say?
Him: Something about needing a network installed.
Me: What is the exact error message? (I ask knowing there are two similar messages like this but with two extremely different fixes)
Him: That is close enough to what it said.
Me: Sir I need the exact error message to fix this.
Him: No you don't. That is close enough.
Me: Sir without the exact message I can't go any further.
Him yelling now: WELL THEN I WILL JUST CANCEL THE GOD DAMN SERVICE.
Me with a smile in my voice: Ok sir. Hold just a moment please. /places guy on hold for a few minutes then transfered to cancelations
Him: *cut off by the hold button.*
 

DefRef

Diamond Member
Nov 9, 2000
4,041
1
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I refer to our (l)users as "hamsters" because they click on everything like hamsters trying to get more crack injected into their brains.

We had a virus outbreak (can't remember which one it was) that attached to the network servers and started deleting files after trashing the local system. (It replaced all Office docs with 0 byte copies with the same name. No recovery.:|) We had sent a warning note to everyone warning them a few weeks earlier to avoid a particular file attachment name and to update their anti-virus DATs. A variant that wasn't detectable with the old DAT, but had the same name showed up and the idiots clicked on it in their neverending hope that a Dilbert hologram would appear and hand them a chocolate chip cookie.

Our staff spent 3-1/2 days on NOTHING but the virus and the users were like, "I can't print." We had to tell them, "If we don't stop this virus, you won't have anything to print." We went desk to desk (over 2000 users at our site!) to verify that everyone had updated to the new DAT and many users acted like we were bothering them or claimed that they had updated. When we actually checked to verify, some not only hadn't updated their DATs, but they were running the previous version of McAfee's that couldn't detect an elephant in a phone booth.

I've always thought a virus file could be titled "Click_here_to_destroy_your_PC_and_kill_your_dog.exe" and a good percentage of "eye-dee-ten-tees" (write it out;)) would lunge for it in hopes of getting the cookie.
 

teknoid

Senior member
Nov 10, 1999
468
0
0
I've posted this before, but... Here's the list of observations derived from my current assignment...

Whether it is network related or not, everything is the fault of the network administrator.

There are always 1.5 cables for every available port.

The fact that a report printed fine yesterday does not necessarily mean it will print at all today.

Users will ask the same questions over and over and over?

The average user can remember no less than 26 birth dates, 44 telephone numbers, 15 addresses but can not seem to remember a 5 character password.

Any given run of Cat-5 cable will be exactly 4? too short.

If you have 6? patch cables in stock you?ll need 8? cables, if you have 8? patch cables in stock you?ll need 10? cables, if you have?

An idiot with a pair of wire cutters is a recipe for a network disaster.

In spite of what Microsoft says, R.A.S. really stands ?Really Ambiguous Sh!t?

The ?CAPS LOCK? key spontaneously turns itself on when users aren?t looking.

The ?NUM LOCK? key spontaneously turns itself off when users aren?t looking.

Nobody is quite sure what the ?SCROLL LOCK? key does.

In spite of what most users believe, turning off the monitor is NOT the same thing as logging off.

If a given print job did not print the first twelve times a user sends it, it will most likely not print the next twelve times that it is sent.

Regardless of hard disk capacity it?s never quite enough to hold all of the user?s data.

Regardless of tape drive capacity it?s never quite enough to back up the full capacity of the hard disk(s).

The fact that it plugs into the wall does NOT make it the responsibility of the network administrator.

In spite of what Microsoft says, NT really stands ?Not Today?.

In spite of what Novell says, NW really stands ?Now What??.

Punch-Down tools have a ?designed-in? affinity for creating holes in the installers? fingers.

NEVER?EVER? buy a ?cheap? crimp tool and expect it to work properly.

Any given network design will require 1.5 times the cable specified by the designer.

Drive mappings don?t, firewalls won?t, security isn?t, proxy servers can?t, personal settings aren?t.

Design a foolproof system and only a fool can effectively use it.

A creative idiot can circumvent even the best security.

A network can be (a) Fast (b) Secure (c) Simple (d) Cheap. Pick three.

There?s always a ?cracker? out there with (a) more time than you, (b) more brains than you, and (c) more caffeine than you.

 

Cyberian

Diamond Member
Jun 17, 2000
9,999
1
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<< Me: What is it doing?
Them: Nothing?
Me: Nothing at all.
Them: Nope.
>>



Me: What seems to be the problem?
They: My screen is blank.
Me: Totally blank?
They: Yes.
Me: Nothing at all on the screen?
They: No.

<Me drives 30+ miles in inclement weather>

At the top left of the screen in white letters on a black background -

&quot;301 - Keyboard error&quot;
 

palad

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2000
1,586
0
0


<< We know exactly what you mean by &quot;My thingy blew up&quot;. >>



Last time I told my doctor this, he prescribed ointment and bed rest. :)
 

somethingwitty

Golden Member
Aug 1, 2000
1,420
1
0
I don't think I've posted this story before-but I've told so many people that I might have...(would I be the first person to repost his own post? :))

Anyways, I'm not in the IT industry, but I helped a bunch of my hallmates with computer problems last year, and here's my favorite story.

12:30am, night before a final, i get a frantic knock on my door. Girl from down the hall (blond...that was the first thing my sister asked me to confirm when I told her this story) &quot;I have a 40 page paper due tomorrow, I'm on 39, and my computer is F-ed up completely! I can't type anything-for example, when I try &quot;D&quot;, I get something like 'D7we5'&quot;.

I go to her room, and confirm that her keyboard really is screwed up. Now, two thoughts are in my mind-something spilled on the keyboard or some kind of virus/joke that re-mapped her keys. As I'm standing there looking at it, she accuses her friend, who has some computer knowledge, of f-ing with her system.

First thing I notice is that there are beer cans next to the keyboard, and I notice some liquid under the keyboard. hmmm, maybe she spilled beer on it. &quot;no, i swear-i wasnt that drunk&quot;. So I go ahead and install a free virus scan program (naturally, she didnt already have virus scan). As I'm running a scan, I again ask about the beer-again, she points at her friend and blames him for f-ing it up somehow. 40 minutes later, with 5 minutes left in the scan:

Me: &quot;ok, let's go through this one more time-what was the sequence of events?&quot;
her: &quot;well, I was typing the paper, saved it, spilled some water on the keyboard....&quot;
Me: (inturrupts with look of disbelief-wondering how she forgot this fact)
her: &quot;but water wouldn't fvck it up, would it?&quot;

That was pretty much the end of that.

one other funny story about this girl (and her roommate)-after moving into their room at the start of the year, they turned on their boombox to realize that the volume was set on mute...oops, didnt bring the remote.

(again, sorry if this was a repost :))