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MANY years ago I was the tier 3 tech for 900 level 1 and 2 techs working for what was then a major ISP that competed with AOL
The calls and escalations we used to get were priceless. Too many to recount. The story I tell the most is to tech people who think they have it rough now, this was back in the 14.4 modem days and windows 95 had JUST come out. I spent MANY an hour walking Grandmothers through reinstalling Windows 95 from floppy disk. " Yes Mam, its says to insert disk 23, so yes pull disk 22 out, find disk 23 insert it and hit enter. No mam you cant skip 23 because you cant find it. Yes mam your PC is useless unless and until you find it. Remember 3 hours ago when I asked you to check that you had all the disks ? Yes mam have a wonderful day "

Jumping Frog wrote:Mid-80's, was writing custom software. Had a woman call me and tell me about problems she was having with the data on her 5 1/4" diskette. I asked her to make a copy of the diskette and drop it in the mail to me.

I get the mail the next day and there is an envelope from her. It had a single sheet of paper where she had placed the diskette on the Xerox machine and made a photocopy of it.

True story.

Reminds me of before we had a scanner, the boss's wife handing me 50 paper pages and asking me to e-mail it to http://www.________" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I'll do it but first you have to get me an E-mail envelope ... or fold it small enough to fit it in the A-Drive

Jumping Frog wrote:Mid-80's, was writing custom software. Had a woman call me and tell me about problems she was having with the data on her 5 1/4" diskette. I asked her to make a copy of the diskette and drop it in the mail to me.

I get the mail the next day and there is an envelope from her. It had a single sheet of paper where she had placed the diskette on the Xerox machine and made a photocopy of it.

True story.

HEHEHEHE Okay now you have me started back when I was the IT director for a college of business at an unnamed Texas university I had sooo many of these...

One time a guy came up to the help center and said he could no longer access the data on his 5 1/4" floppy. So I ask him to see the floppy and maybe we could recover the data. So he says Cool and pulls out his wallet and then pulls said floppy from his wallet and unfolds it 4 times and says here it is. I look at it and hand it back and say oh now that one is shot. I give him a new one and tell him he cant fold them like that. He says okay thanks. Then as he walks away he rolls it up to the size of a straw and crams it in his back pack...

Another person had the same issue. I asked to see the floppy and they pull it out of their backpack and it looks like a sopapilla (a puffy tortilla) Turns out he has left it out in his car window for 2 days during the summer heat I tell him his data is gone and he cant do that. He proceeds to argue with me. Finally he gives up and goes away. An hour later he comes back and said hey my floppy isn't working. He then hands me a new floppy that he cut open with scissors and cut the puffy one open and tried to put the baked disc inside of a good case and then taped it up. Persistent bugger...

Syntyr wrote: . . .

One time a guy came up to the help center and said he could no longer access the data on his 5 1/4" floppy. So I ask him to see the floppy and maybe we could recover the data. So he says Cool and pulls out his wallet and then pulls said floppy from his wallet and unfolds it 4 times and says here it is. I look at it and hand it back and say oh now that one is shot. I give him a new one and tell him he cant fold them like that. He says okay thanks. Then as he walks away he rolls it up to the size of a straw and crams it in his back pack...

Another person had the same issue. I asked to see the floppy and they pull it out of their backpack and it looks like a sopapilla (a puffy tortilla) Turns out he has left it out in his car window for 2 days during the summer heat I tell him his data is gone and he cant do that. He proceeds to argue with me. Finally he gives up and goes away. An hour later he comes back and said hey my floppy isn't working. He then hands me a new floppy that he cut open with scissors and cut the puffy one open and tried to put the baked disc inside of a good case and then taped it up. Persistent bugger...

I actually used to service 8 inch floppy drives, and my little tale about that is the opposite. These were single density drives with "head load pads" (little pieces of felt that kept the read/write head in contact with the floppy, and we set the head with an actual ruler that fit in a special slot in the frame of the drive. Multiple recursions of "Track 0 then Track 39" and then step by individual tracks and a bevy of other tests all on a special disk from CommStore. I still have the tools, particularly the ruler.

The only organization that used these machines in our company was called "MWR" (Mechanized Work Reporting) and the people there inputted every time sheet for every employee in the upstate region every day. If they got an error message they shut down that station and threw away the floppy, even brand new out of the box, and started over, this was company policy to keep bad data from messing up paychecks. I used to recover perfectly good floppys from the trash and reformat them back in the shop, and when MWR called and said they were out of floppys I always had a few "spares" to "loan" them, and they never knew that they were the ones that they had thrown away.

When I finished servicing a drive, it would obviously need testing, so I would pull my own special test disk out of my tool kit. This was just an old well worn disk with no envelope, which I had drawn sectors on (these were hard sectored machines) with a felt tip pen, and the hub ring was worn clear. With the case off the drive, I would load this disk and spin it up with a program I wrote in Basic which wrote and then read on all tracks and sectors (probably really redundant but this was the fun part) first on track 0 and then on track 39 and by various sectors all the way through the disk. If the machine would read and write to that disk, I was amply sure it would read and write a brand new floppy.

I kept that disk in a service guide for CommStore, just slipped between the pages.

I have a good one. My company provided computer equipment to a large NE telephone company. In fact, I serviced that equipment a their corporate data center. There was over a acre of raised floor across multiple floors.

One of the pieces of equipment was a communications controller. It was specially modified for the phone company to handle a high speed line - which the phone company maintained - between two large cities. We had another controller just like it on the other end.

Periodically, we'd get a call from the phone company's help desk that our communications controller wasn't working because they couldn't transmit with it. The service arrangement was that if they placed a service call and it turned out not to be our problem, we billed them for our time - @ $250 per hour. I always advised them of this when I took the service call. And they always said the same thing - come, your controller is broken.

To test, I had to have one of our guys dispatched to the other end. He and I would then hook up our manual test gear and coordinate our test over the phone company's voice line. We'd start the test and, sure enough, no data was passing on the the phone company maintained line. I then contacted the phone company help desk rep who had called me and he had to get in touch with their service group where an hour or more could pass before we got phone company person who was familiar with this special line. In the mean time, my other city partner and I are sitting there waiting and potentially billing. It could take an hour or two for them to figure out what was wrong. When they corrected the problem with their line, our boxes worked just fine.

We went through this drill up to 20 times each year for the 3 years that I serviced that account. The calls ranged from 3 hours to 8 hours in length, depending on how much time it took the phone company line techs to work on their problem. Never once were either of our boxes broken. Every call was because of the phone company maintained line. So some of the bills (2 of us times $250 per hour times 6 hours) were quite expensive.

I never was able to convince their help desk to call their own line people first and verify operation. Sigh......

As an IT geek, I've really enjoyed this thread so far, thanks for sharing folks.

I have another on the other side.

For a size comparison we had 55,000 PCs globally.

I went for an interview with another huge division within our company. That meant I wouldn’t have to bill my time anymore. They provided their own support. I knew the IT manager and another guy that used to be in our group. There were at least 3 other people seated in the conference room.

They asked: What would you do if you had a user that repeatedly called you for help.

I told them that I would use the mirror theory. They were all perplexed.

I told them I would get a mirror, open it, and hand it to the user and show them what the problem was. They were all ROFL when I left.

I didn’t get the job.

chasfm11 wrote:I have a good one. My company provided computer equipment to a large NE telephone company. In fact, I serviced that equipment a their corporate data center. There was over a acre of raised floor across multiple floors.

One of the pieces of equipment was a communications controller. It was specially modified for the phone company to handle a high speed line - which the phone company maintained - between two large cities. We had another controller just like it on the other end.

Periodically, we'd get a call from the phone company's help desk that our communications controller wasn't working because they couldn't transmit with it. The service arrangement was that if they placed a service call and it turned out not to be our problem, we billed them for our time - @ $250 per hour. I always advised them of this when I took the service call. And they always said the same thing - come, your controller is broken.

To test, I had to have one of our guys dispatched to the other end. He and I would then hook up our manual test gear and coordinate our test over the phone company's voice line. We'd start the test and, sure enough, no data was passing on the the phone company maintained line. I then contacted the phone company help desk rep who had called me and he had to get in touch with their service group where an hour or more could pass before we got phone company person who was familiar with this special line. In the mean time, my other city partner and I are sitting there waiting and potentially billing. It could take an hour or two for them to figure out what was wrong. When they corrected the problem with their line, our boxes worked just fine.

We went through this drill up to 20 times each year for the 3 years that I serviced that account. The calls ranged from 3 hours to 8 hours in length, depending on how much time it took the phone company line techs to work on their problem. Never once were either of our boxes broken. Every call was because of the phone company maintained line. So some of the bills (2 of us times $250 per hour times 6 hours) were quite expensive.

I never was able to convince their help desk to call their own line people first and verify operation. Sigh......

And I bet we know each other, because I was the phone company tech, and they always waited until the last minute to call me. I did find a few times where the controller was at fault, but most of those were where they made a mistake and called me first. They always, always, without regard for anything else, based who they would call on the error message and lights on the control panel, and they rarely got it right.

My favorite along those lines was a repeated commercial power failure. Commercial power is the responsibility of the customer not the phone company, but the first time I got sent, nobody knew what had failed and power was on to everything else. I discovered an adjunct breaker panel with one 15A breaker dedicated to the equipment, which was per company requirements, reset the breaker and was declared all sorts of hero by the night supervisor, who happened to be a friend of my wife's. The next time it happened, dispatch called me direct because my name was on the ticket in big red letters - the night supervisor had insisted that I be the one that got sent. Didn't even bother to pick up my truck or tools, just walked in and reset the breaker.

After a couple of iterations of this I rewired a couple of the phones so they would ring direct through rather than through the system with no power, and the next time it happened I just rolled over in bed and called the number I had wired direct and had them go trip the breaker. Despite instructions to the customer to just check the breaker whenever it happened, they persisted in calling the company, which was generating me a minimum four hours pay each time, for rolling over in bed and instructing them on where to find the breaker and reset it.

Finally, with my boss' blessing, I went over and did a little investigation. First of all, I already knew that these calls always came in after 11PM on Tuesday night, every other week, so I asked what occurred on the night in question. They told me that was the night the floors got cleaned. Next I did a little check of the equipment and found that although the company's requirement was that the equipment be on a dedicated circuit with NO outlets, there was an outlet in the circuit at the end of the panel, placed there for ease of use by technicians. I disabled the outlet and the trouble never happened again, and did myself out of an extra four hours pay every two weeks.

On further investigation I found out that the floor cleaners had been trying to plug their buffer into that outlet, and when it didn't work, they went on to the next, but not until they had popped the breaker.

Valk wrote:I have another on the other side.

For a size comparison we had 55,000 PCs globally.

I went for an interview with another huge division within our company. That meant I wouldn’t have to bill my time anymore. They provided their own support. I knew the IT manager and another guy that used to be in our group. There were at least 3 other people seated in the conference room.

They asked: What would you do if you had a user that repeatedly called you for help.

I told them that I would use the mirror theory. They were all perplexed.

I told them I would get a mirror, open it, and hand it to the user and show them what the problem was. They were all ROFL when I left.

I didn’t get the job.

Yeah, "Operator Error" was a standard ticket close out code.

And then there was the time I went to the Conrail railroad yards and found that a 1200BPS data set (this was well before dial-up became even close to common) had had its power supply (wall wart) located in such a way that people had used it for a foot rest, and they had pulled the security screw right out of the outlet resulting in no power to the data set. In 1983 the companies had split so AT&T wass a separate entity from NY Telephone, and the test desks were still right next to each other, but new procedures dictated that they couldn't just share information in person any more, everything had to be by phone.

So I called the local special service test desk, and they check the circuit and saw it ok, then they added the AT&T special service test desk, who checked the circuit and saw it ok, then they added the Allentown PA special service test desk, and they saw it ok, so they added Conrail in Pittsburgh, who confirmed that the circuit looked ok to them, so they turned it back up, and then they said they wanted to check with the end user, and the phone on the next desk rang, and the guy sitting there told those assembled on the phone that the circuit seemed to be ok to him, he was back up and working, but there was a technician next to him and why didn't he let us talk to him and confirm everything. So he handed me the phone and I asked myself if everything was ok, and told me that it was all up and working, and we closed all the tickets and calls.

I used multiple anchors and tye wraps to fasten the power supply to the wall.

Just the phone call took more than an hour.

SQLGeek wrote:As an IT geek, I've really enjoyed this thread so far, thanks for sharing folks.

I could swamp the forum with war stories. I spent 9 years in direct service and then a while in indirect (secondary support) and management for the field. In a later job, I was technical support for services and we sold help desks to companies, both setting them up from scratch and taking over and revamping existing ones. When we were doing due diligence on existing help desks, I'd often get a chance to monitor daily activities and periodic reporting. I thought that my company was going to make me pay them for allowing me to attend entertainment of that caliber. Privately, we'd laugh until our sides hurt at some of the things that we saw. It was often more entertaining than some of the comedy clubs with a cover charge.

The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.

chasfm11 wrote:

SQLGeek wrote:As an IT geek, I've really enjoyed this thread so far, thanks for sharing folks.

I could swamp the forum with war stories. I spent 9 years in direct service and then a while in indirect (secondary support) and management for the field. In a later job, I was technical support for services and we sold help desks to companies, both setting them up from scratch and taking over and revamping existing ones. When we were doing due diligence on existing help desks, I'd often get a chance to monitor daily activities and periodic reporting. I thought that my company was going to make me pay them for allowing me to attend entertainment of that caliber. Privately, we'd laugh until our sides hurt at some of the things that we saw. It was often more entertaining than some of the comedy clubs with a cover charge.

The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.

Yeah, with 28 years at NY Telephone, a year and a half at NYNEX Computer Services, 3 year at Bellcore, 3 years at Tellabs, three years at Alcatel, less than a year at Acterna, just over a year at Wai-Wise, my store of war stories is vast, and over half of them are true. Making my collection, half vast.

jimlongley

Where are you now?

chasfm11 wrote:
The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.

In a similar vein, DBAs, server admins and application support all have their own stories and finger pointing. I've lost count of the number of times there's been an application issue and the first to blame is the database, especially if it's a third party vendor app because they are infallible, just ask them.

SQLGeek wrote:

chasfm11 wrote:


In a similar vein, DBAs, server admins and application support all have their own stories and finger pointing. I've lost count of the number of times there's been an application issue and the first to blame is the database, especially if it's a third party vendor app because they are infallible, just ask them.

And I thought you had ran too many queries with not enough information.

jimlongley wrote:
I kept that disk in a service guide for CommStore, just slipped between the pages.

Yep we had some old Magna SL Word Processors that used 8" discs.

Once we were upgrading from system 370 IBM mainframe to a 390. Well these are large water cooled units. The 370 was already shut down and the 390 was up and running. They were seperated in side by side raised floor rooms. The doors all had combination key locks on them. Well the IBM engineer was there and waiting on the physical plant guys to come in to shut the water down and start removing the old 370. Well he thought he would help the process along and start breaking down the connections. So he drops the gates on the 4" incoming water line and proceeds to bust the connection. Well not being a physical plant guy he didn't stop to verify that the water flow had ceased and pressure was removed from the system. So when he wrenched over the connection gallons and gallons of water started spraying in in to the room directly beneath the raised flooring headed directly to the currently in operation 390. So he ran to the door and started beating on the window to try to get all of the computer center techs out of the room before they got electrocuted or a fire started. About that time the water hit the electric mains and pops the breakers and shut the whole facility down.

Lots of lessons were learned by many people that day... Never saw that engineer again although I understand he was still working for IBM...