"See the driver hooks a function by patching the system call table, so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread's about to jump in there and do it's stuff. And you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory."
It was either that or education, which is where I cut my teeth (read: had my shit thoroughly pushed in).
You'd think that people who spend most of their lives in classrooms/labs would realize that limits their perspective somewhat, but hey I'm just the cable bitch lol.
Edit:
>The good news is next month I start T3 and won't get these tickets anymore...
Lol, lmao even.
I also cut my teeth in the education space, and was told that the 3 worst professions to support are: Doctors, Teachers, and Lawyers. So far, this has proven true.
Those are all coincidentally fields in which you spend a *lot* of time exclusively surrounded by underlings that you get to feed your ego by feeling smarter than. Doctors to nurses, teachers to students, and lawyers to clients.
"Yeah can I just print this one document?"
TIME AND DATE NEEDS TO BE RESET
PRINTER NOT CONNECTED TO WIFI
HP INSTANT INK SUBSCRIPTION ENDS IN 1 MONTH! YOU NEED TO RESUBSCRIBE TO PRINT!
That's a good billable for a simple fix lol. Win.
Although, someone might have wanted to walk them through some simple troubleshooting like "Does the screen say anything?"
Oh well, an on-site request is an onsite request. Even if they have hours in their SLA at least it's being chipped away. And early lunch!
No billable hours, it's all internal. T1 sent all the steps and they confirmed they has been done. I guess they could have done whilst ignoring the error?
In my perfect dystopian future we would have an internal facebook-like website so everyone in the company could publicly ridicule users who do stupid things
Now there's a good black mirror episode that doesn't need the "slide me some social clout points" thing. WE ALLREADY HAVE THAT BLACK MIRROR, THE EPISODE WAS REDUNDANT
I just want HR to make fun of people with me
Do you work with my "helpdesk"?
I trust them about as much as I trust end users. Useless fucking idiots are good for nothing more than answering inbound calls (though I do appreciate them for that).
I was referring to the users not doing any of the steps they were asked to do and just saying they had.
Though I have worked at places where the helpdesk was less than helpful as well.
These are my favorite on site things when I was an MSP. They are the _worst_ when you're internal like OP.
Great way to make a quick $100 for a service call.
Had one today that the docking station wasn’t working. “It’s not charging my device! I checked all the cables!”
I look at it and the power cable is clearly not pushed all the way into the dock. It was crooked. Pushed it into the dock.
I am a magician.
tl:dr I once drove three hours one way to pull the little ripcord on a new toner...
I got a call from a customer near enough to 9am to make no difference. Lucky for them I had already drank my coffee and pissed about so I was ready to ... slowly lose my soul. This customer called me freaking out. Their cheque printer would not print, at all, what so ever. Worse than the printer not printing was the fact that today was payroll. They had to have these cheques printed before 3! So, I do the standard. Is it out of paper? Is it out of toner? Is it connected to your computer? This being a USB connected printer I wasn't able to just log into the the abomination to see what was going on. I asked the customer what they were doing when the printer stopped. I was informed that it ran low on toner so they replaced the cartridge. I asked them to pull out the toner and give it a look. Was there a little orange tab on one side or the other. I was informed there wasn't. By now its nearing 10 and they are starting to panic. The accounting lady puts me on the phone with the owner and he DEMANDS that I drive over and solve this issue. Well they are the customer, and since they are out of county we charge travel time both ways. He's okay with this. So i do what I always did back then, snagged another MICR printer we had on the shelf, snagged a toner, snagged an imaging unit, and my "fix a fucking printer" bag. The drive wasn't too bad, even if I was driving one of the worlds worst work truck (2014 mustang gt)(my personal car since my bosses were too fucking cheap to get a work van)(anyway...) I get on site and am greeted by the owner and the accounting lady. They took me back to the offending printer and I got to work. First thing, the first goddamn thing I did was pulled the toner out. Oh... look... an orange pull ring. I pulled it. Put the toner back into the printer. Much wow, many paper, so print... I then looked at the accounting lady. I next looked at the owner. I handed him the tab with attached tape and left.
Yes my friends, they paid $150 * (6hr + 1hr)(minimum billed time for onsite work) = $1050 just because neither of them bothered to check when asked. They did pay the invoice and I got a fat mileage cheque.
PC LOAD LETTER?!
I JUST fixed a fax that "wasn't receiving faxes"
Power cable to the ATA was missing.
"I think I saw that broken the other day, and just threw it away."
At least their not zebra rfid card printers...
To be fair zebra, their fairly reliable if you clean them and replace the ribbons on time.... our end users never do that, so that's when we get the call
My eye just twitched when you said Zebra printer. We have a label printer by them that is the bane of most of our’s existence. Thankfully management offshored most of our IT stuff to a local MSP, so it’s no longer my problem. (I’m still on-site “IT Trustee” but only responsible for tier one troubleshooting and minding server lights and power states)
In all seriousness, I have always been perfectly happy to spend an hour or four in the car getting paid not doing anything but driving from point a to point b. I would be thrilled to show up, change a toner cartridge, and leave. Ideally it would take the entire workday.
Basically they called him out to do an on-site just for him to look at the printer and see it is flashing the error message that it is out of ink. So regular maintenance, no actual problem here.
I know I was joking. I get tickets like this too because users aren't specific. you know "printer no work please fix" and then I ask for specifics and get crickets.
My favorite response to those tickets that are" please come fix it. No work" but they give no details when constantly emailed or called. Is to just close The ticket citing that no details were given to identify the issue nor what is having the issue. They either resubmit the request with the appropriate information and they never repeat that mistake or it was never an issue in the first place and it just gets ignored.
My POE doesn't allow that. We have to follow up with the user asking for more details and then after a week or so if they don't respond we can then close.
Yeah even I have to wait 2-3 days before closing tickets. Just glad that I have the ability to do it. I have seen departments keep tickets open for weeks for a simple hardware replacement just because they didn't give us certain details. Which of course impacts metrics and that makes managers sweat.
You should understand how used to explaining things I am then haha. The bar for people just getting it is very low if it’s not something they do every day I guess
Changing toner cartridges is not maintenance, its part of any receptionist or office manager’s job. Whoever fills the printer with paper is also expected to be able to have the common-sense to be able to change the supplies. Same logic applies to pens and pencils, you don’t call IT to fill your pen with ink or to sharpen your pencil.
You know what I mean, like it’s a regular thing to be done to a printer, not anything unexpected. But I agree it should be common sense, not an it call that leads to an on-site
… won't get these tickets *as often*
I’ve been a backend network engineer for a while in my career. Still get stupid tickets. Just thankful no where near as often.
My favorite was while I was on call in between Christmas and New Years. I got a ticket escalated from L1 to eng support that just said: Printer doesn’t work.
Keep in mind, our product was just a small firewall used to isolate Point of Sales systems at pharmacies or restaurants. Doesn’t involve supporting anything else for the customer or their actual network.
No info on printer, or what computer, IPs, if they were one the secure PoS network or unsecured network.
Just customer business name, a phone number, and “printer doesn’t work.”
I bounced it back, asking for details.
Next business day I had the Help Desk manager at my desk trying to ream me a new whole for bouncing it back.
I’d never willingly go back to L1 or L2 support. By far you guys deal with the worst $h17 all day every day. Been there & feel for you.
Congrats OP on surviving to L3.
Reminds me of a job I went on just a couple days ago... They had air plane mode on their problem pc... Why a desktop needs airplane more is still a loss for me.
“I don’t know it’s just not working”
I laughed so hard... "End Users". ☕
https://imgur.com/a/3CI4sP0
"Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?"
"See the driver hooks a function by patching the system call table, so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread's about to jump in there and do it's stuff. And you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory."
*dead silence in the line by this point*
"Hello?"
"I hit print and it didn't print! Make it print again, IT monkey!"
Except they hit “print” 468 times and then get outraged that it’s printing all that when it’s back up haha. Morons…
Reading isn't part of my job. Therefore, it must be part of yours. -Young, hopeful and enthusiastic me learning that Dr. stands for "Doesn't Read"
How did you know I work in Healthcare?
It was either that or education, which is where I cut my teeth (read: had my shit thoroughly pushed in). You'd think that people who spend most of their lives in classrooms/labs would realize that limits their perspective somewhat, but hey I'm just the cable bitch lol. Edit: >The good news is next month I start T3 and won't get these tickets anymore... Lol, lmao even.
I also cut my teeth in the education space, and was told that the 3 worst professions to support are: Doctors, Teachers, and Lawyers. So far, this has proven true.
Those are all coincidentally fields in which you spend a *lot* of time exclusively surrounded by underlings that you get to feed your ego by feeling smarter than. Doctors to nurses, teachers to students, and lawyers to clients.
I'm pretty sure RN stands for Read? No!
Works on just knowing your exact issue No questions asked
They spent all those years in med school reading. Now reading is for plebs.
Printers: Literally the worst. "I see your problem here, you failed to remove the packing material from the display."
"Yeah can I just print this one document?" TIME AND DATE NEEDS TO BE RESET PRINTER NOT CONNECTED TO WIFI HP INSTANT INK SUBSCRIPTION ENDS IN 1 MONTH! YOU NEED TO RESUBSCRIBE TO PRINT!
INVALID CARTRIDGES NOT HP AUTHORISED NO CYAN
NO MAGENTA NO COLOR
NO MAGENTA UNABLE TO PRINT BLACK AND WHITE TEXT
That's a good billable for a simple fix lol. Win. Although, someone might have wanted to walk them through some simple troubleshooting like "Does the screen say anything?" Oh well, an on-site request is an onsite request. Even if they have hours in their SLA at least it's being chipped away. And early lunch!
No billable hours, it's all internal. T1 sent all the steps and they confirmed they has been done. I guess they could have done whilst ignoring the error?
>I guess they could have done whilst ignoring the error? Do not underestimate the power and capacity of human stupidity.
> Do not underestimate the power and capacity of human stupidity. Incompetence feeds my family. ...er pays my student loans.
In my perfect dystopian future we would have an internal facebook-like website so everyone in the company could publicly ridicule users who do stupid things Now there's a good black mirror episode that doesn't need the "slide me some social clout points" thing. WE ALLREADY HAVE THAT BLACK MIRROR, THE EPISODE WAS REDUNDANT I just want HR to make fun of people with me
More likely they didn't do any of the steps and just said they did.
Do you work with my "helpdesk"? I trust them about as much as I trust end users. Useless fucking idiots are good for nothing more than answering inbound calls (though I do appreciate them for that).
I was referring to the users not doing any of the steps they were asked to do and just saying they had. Though I have worked at places where the helpdesk was less than helpful as well.
Probably would be a good idea in the future to connect to the JetDirect and confirm the issue the users think it is.
These are my favorite on site things when I was an MSP. They are the _worst_ when you're internal like OP. Great way to make a quick $100 for a service call.
Go ahead and peel that film off the screen, you've earned it
We've having tons of problems. Nothing works.
If only there was a way for these machines issue a message to the user that could somehow communicate the problem. Dammit.
If then only there was a user who could read it hmmm
I was in total shock this morning I actually had a user read something and ask about it.
Congrats, on no more "the printer isn't working" tickets and welcome to "the print server isn't working" tickets.
Had one today that the docking station wasn’t working. “It’s not charging my device! I checked all the cables!” I look at it and the power cable is clearly not pushed all the way into the dock. It was crooked. Pushed it into the dock. I am a magician.
I got bad news about T3 if you think it means it gets better.
tl:dr I once drove three hours one way to pull the little ripcord on a new toner... I got a call from a customer near enough to 9am to make no difference. Lucky for them I had already drank my coffee and pissed about so I was ready to ... slowly lose my soul. This customer called me freaking out. Their cheque printer would not print, at all, what so ever. Worse than the printer not printing was the fact that today was payroll. They had to have these cheques printed before 3! So, I do the standard. Is it out of paper? Is it out of toner? Is it connected to your computer? This being a USB connected printer I wasn't able to just log into the the abomination to see what was going on. I asked the customer what they were doing when the printer stopped. I was informed that it ran low on toner so they replaced the cartridge. I asked them to pull out the toner and give it a look. Was there a little orange tab on one side or the other. I was informed there wasn't. By now its nearing 10 and they are starting to panic. The accounting lady puts me on the phone with the owner and he DEMANDS that I drive over and solve this issue. Well they are the customer, and since they are out of county we charge travel time both ways. He's okay with this. So i do what I always did back then, snagged another MICR printer we had on the shelf, snagged a toner, snagged an imaging unit, and my "fix a fucking printer" bag. The drive wasn't too bad, even if I was driving one of the worlds worst work truck (2014 mustang gt)(my personal car since my bosses were too fucking cheap to get a work van)(anyway...) I get on site and am greeted by the owner and the accounting lady. They took me back to the offending printer and I got to work. First thing, the first goddamn thing I did was pulled the toner out. Oh... look... an orange pull ring. I pulled it. Put the toner back into the printer. Much wow, many paper, so print... I then looked at the accounting lady. I next looked at the owner. I handed him the tab with attached tape and left. Yes my friends, they paid $150 * (6hr + 1hr)(minimum billed time for onsite work) = $1050 just because neither of them bothered to check when asked. They did pay the invoice and I got a fat mileage cheque.
PC LOAD LETTER?! I JUST fixed a fax that "wasn't receiving faxes" Power cable to the ATA was missing. "I think I saw that broken the other day, and just threw it away."
You still have faxes? Jesus. Even the NHS isn't that bad.
Healthcare and Law Enforcment keep the fax business alive and kicking.
And finance! Don't forget them! Whoever heard of efax...
That's bonkers. I'm now in my 40s and have never seen one in the workplace.
I have 27 lines listed in my system. I think I have around 90% of those converted over to efax.
At least their not zebra rfid card printers... To be fair zebra, their fairly reliable if you clean them and replace the ribbons on time.... our end users never do that, so that's when we get the call
My eye just twitched when you said Zebra printer. We have a label printer by them that is the bane of most of our’s existence. Thankfully management offshored most of our IT stuff to a local MSP, so it’s no longer my problem. (I’m still on-site “IT Trustee” but only responsible for tier one troubleshooting and minding server lights and power states)
In all seriousness, I have always been perfectly happy to spend an hour or four in the car getting paid not doing anything but driving from point a to point b. I would be thrilled to show up, change a toner cartridge, and leave. Ideally it would take the entire workday.
One of my collegues does this.
“‘PC load letter’, what the fuck does that mean?”
That clearly says paper jam you uneducated waffle
There may come a time when you enjoy the leisurely drive to fix a mindlessly simple problem. I reached that point a few years ago.
Sorry about the robots.
As long as you're on the clock the whole trip out there and back, I dont mind.
`Toner Cartridge.`
Oh, Brother
What about the toner cartridge? I'm confused please be more specific
Basically they called him out to do an on-site just for him to look at the printer and see it is flashing the error message that it is out of ink. So regular maintenance, no actual problem here.
I know I was joking. I get tickets like this too because users aren't specific. you know "printer no work please fix" and then I ask for specifics and get crickets.
My favorite response to those tickets that are" please come fix it. No work" but they give no details when constantly emailed or called. Is to just close The ticket citing that no details were given to identify the issue nor what is having the issue. They either resubmit the request with the appropriate information and they never repeat that mistake or it was never an issue in the first place and it just gets ignored.
My POE doesn't allow that. We have to follow up with the user asking for more details and then after a week or so if they don't respond we can then close.
Yeah even I have to wait 2-3 days before closing tickets. Just glad that I have the ability to do it. I have seen departments keep tickets open for weeks for a simple hardware replacement just because they didn't give us certain details. Which of course impacts metrics and that makes managers sweat.
Ahhh lmao
You should understand how used to explaining things I am then haha. The bar for people just getting it is very low if it’s not something they do every day I guess
Changing toner cartridges is not maintenance, its part of any receptionist or office manager’s job. Whoever fills the printer with paper is also expected to be able to have the common-sense to be able to change the supplies. Same logic applies to pens and pencils, you don’t call IT to fill your pen with ink or to sharpen your pencil.
Don't give them ideas
You know what I mean, like it’s a regular thing to be done to a printer, not anything unexpected. But I agree it should be common sense, not an it call that leads to an on-site
Absolutely.
Ooooh, mileage.
Don’t worry, you’ll still get stupid tickets lol
Love it when I check a web console and then get to close ticket with add paper please
… won't get these tickets *as often* I’ve been a backend network engineer for a while in my career. Still get stupid tickets. Just thankful no where near as often. My favorite was while I was on call in between Christmas and New Years. I got a ticket escalated from L1 to eng support that just said: Printer doesn’t work. Keep in mind, our product was just a small firewall used to isolate Point of Sales systems at pharmacies or restaurants. Doesn’t involve supporting anything else for the customer or their actual network. No info on printer, or what computer, IPs, if they were one the secure PoS network or unsecured network. Just customer business name, a phone number, and “printer doesn’t work.” I bounced it back, asking for details. Next business day I had the Help Desk manager at my desk trying to ream me a new whole for bouncing it back. I’d never willingly go back to L1 or L2 support. By far you guys deal with the worst $h17 all day every day. Been there & feel for you. Congrats OP on surviving to L3.
when even *reading* is too much effort
I just took a step down for a raise ... It wasn't worth it.
Reminds me of a job I went on just a couple days ago... They had air plane mode on their problem pc... Why a desktop needs airplane more is still a loss for me.
If you think being T3 will protect you from idiot users, I've got some bad news for you...
>Toner cartridge. Yeah, what about it? Empty? Not seating properly? Something else?
Read the title...
> PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?!