one of those funny dumb user stories just happened to me

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
9,558
0
76
Dear Penthouse Forums, I never thought it would happen to me...

Oh wait, wrong place. But THIS story is still awful. I feel confident this person doesn't read AT and might see this. The usual disclaimer: don't complain about how long this is, I can't help it.

I do monitoring for client companies' networks and servers. One customer, a cell company, uses a device that expands their network by acting as a radio tower, and sending the data over the Internet with a VPN to a central server, which then puts it onto their regular network. It's a mini-cellular tower. They lease the devices to businesses, and also provide them to their own executives and some field engineers.

I just had one of these users call in complaining that the device's LED was orange, indicating no connection to the server. This person has called in on several other occasions and already knew that she needed to reset her cable modem, her own router, and the Cisco router that the device connects to (it's a complicated set-up due to security), but it was still down.

So I checked, the VPN tunnel was down. Given that it's a customer-owned Internet connection there's not a whole lot we can do. So I sent her to her computer to do a traceroute to the concentrator the VPN goes to. It gets to her cable/DSL router and dies as network unreachable. I told her the ISP may be doing maintenance or be having an outage because the traffic isn't getting to the server that is required for the device to work.

Then I thought to ask, "Your regular Internet service is working okay, right? You can get to the Web?"

She answered "Oh, no, we can't get online at all right now."
 

MedicBob

Diamond Member
Nov 29, 2001
4,151
1
0
Originally posted by: dquan97
I sometimes have to ask the obvious questions first :D


Like, Are the lights on? No, we are having a power outage.

Users are great.
 

Uhtrinity

Platinum Member
Dec 21, 2003
2,263
202
106
A few weeks ago one of the teachers came into the computer lab saying her computer was freaking out. I went to her classroom and saw that she had MS Word open and it was automatically inserting some text and a tab, and was now on page 15. I moved my hand in the shape of a cross, and said, "Demons, I cast ye out!", while subtly moving the clipboard that was sitting on the edge of her keyboard. She was literally freaked out and thought I had really exorcised her computer.

Her husband also works at the school and I was nice enough to share the story with him
 

MrDudeMan

Lifer
Jan 15, 2001
15,069
94
91
Originally posted by: Uhtrinity
A few weeks ago one of the teachers came into the computer lab saying her computer was freaking out. I went to her classroom and saw that she had MS Word open and it was automatically inserting some text and a tab, and was now on page 15. I moved my hand in the shape of a cross, and said, "Demons, I cast ye out!", while subtly moving the clipboard that was sitting on the edge of her keyboard. She was literally freaked out and thought I had really exorcised her computer.

Her husband also works at the school and I was nice enough to share the story with him

haha awesome
 

mrSHEiK124

Lifer
Mar 6, 2004
11,488
2
0
Originally posted by: MrDudeMan
Originally posted by: Uhtrinity
A few weeks ago one of the teachers came into the computer lab saying her computer was freaking out. I went to her classroom and saw that she had MS Word open and it was automatically inserting some text and a tab, and was now on page 15. I moved my hand in the shape of a cross, and said, "Demons, I cast ye out!", while subtly moving the clipboard that was sitting on the edge of her keyboard. She was literally freaked out and thought I had really exorcised her computer.

Her husband also works at the school and I was nice enough to share the story with him

haha awesome

:laugh: LMAO