Silly Clients

RedvGreen said:
Best things from my IT Support days, web design days and current days are people who initially bawk at your prices/hourly rates, then go cheaper elsewhere.

Then a few months later, they gingerly approach you and want you to fix a shambolic product. When you do, they then try to barter you down, despite contractually agreeing to a set price beforehand!??
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clientsfromhell.net

Lots of stories like that :)
 
We get all kinds of issues at the school I work at.

A teacher sends a student over to say that their monitor isn't switching on and therefore can't log in.

I pop over to take a look and say that the PC is not switching on and notice that there are no lights on in the room.

I mention this to them and say that it looks like the power is down in their building due to a power surge in the area.

They then ask when I will be able to sort out the power issue as they need Youtube to be able to teach.

I state that I'm not an electrician and that they will need to contact the maintenance team and walk out.
 
I had my very own facepalm moment yesterday, probably the best I've done in years. We have a production vid encoding system/iis smooth streaming solution that was built in beta on a VM but suffers heavily with resource on encoding. Uptake was massive and the VM has died and although in Beta it's used a lot so it's down now for encoding.

I ordered a beasty physical box with some nice Tesla GPUs in for some CUDA GPU encoding power and after a stupid amount of time some other team set it up in a DC for me and yesterday I got my server account access granted to it. (big company, many teams bla bla)

So I connect and spend the morning replicating but documenting the build and making it better and more robust than the other beta VM and by the afternoon I was up and running, albeit my benchmarks were running quite slowly. Thought it would be better when I switched on the GPU encoding anyway, so did that and it said the GPUs weren't supported... **** I haven't ordered the wrong ones have I!? Device Manager... VMware Gfx card?! ******************** I had connected to my newly provisioned Dev box... not the beasty physical machine. (My RDPs are in a list when I right click, I just clicked the top one!) Massive fail.

Makes it worse? I then had to play catch up and rush to get it all done on the right server. Finally by 8pm last night I was nearly there. Went to validate the license of Expression Encoder Pro and it comes back saying it's been used too many times...FML.

Just pay $199 and buy a new license? No, you can't. MS has discontinued it in favour of their cloud Azure stuff, which we can't use for legal reasons. It physically isn't available to buy online at all. You can't deregister the product from another machine or anything.

Massive. Giant. Face palms.
 
I have sympathy for users who usually aren't doing a job that requires them to know the ins and outs of a computer.

On the flip side, I wonder how some people on the service desk manage to lead a functional life sometimes.

Service Desk: "HALP how do I manage a group via the portal"

Me: "Click manage on the portal home screen"

Service Desk: "AH WOW"
 
I work in IT in a secondary school and I have dealt with tons of problems like the ones in here. I had one yesterday, a teacher who rang up because her Interactive Whiteboard wasn't working. I asked if it was actually switched on (a common problem after the Christmas break), and she said yes, and she'd checked all the cabling etc and everything looked fine. I went over and the USB cable was out of the back of the PC. Plugged it back in and it came straight on. She was insistent she'd checked all the cables and nothing was out. I just walked off, I was happy enough it was an easy solution rather than having to pull the whiteboard off the wall to check the cabling at that end!
 
Recent one that went on for weeks before someone grabbed me as an expert.

User : All icons on desktop are not showing.
Support : Must be something to do with X (my area) profiles , folder redirections, login scripts etc

Me - Check desktop settings.

1 hour later support came back with user had ticked

"do not show icons on desktop"


2 weeks of this call being in the support queue

!!!!
 
Davey_Pitch said:
I work in IT in a secondary school and I have dealt with tons of problems like the ones in here. I had one yesterday, a teacher who rang up because her Interactive Whiteboard wasn't working. I asked if it was actually switched on (a common problem after the Christmas break), and she said yes, and she'd checked all the cabling etc and everything looked fine. I went over and the USB cable was out of the back of the PC. Plugged it back in and it came straight on. She was insistent she'd checked all the cables and nothing was out. I just walked off, I was happy enough it was an easy solution rather than having to pull the whiteboard off the wall to check the cabling at that end!
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Argh, this is what used to wind me up the most. You'd ask people to check the most basic things, e.g. cables. They would insist they'd done it, you'd get there, oh look, cable unplugged.

Seriously, you're either so stupid you can't establish whether a cable is plugged in, or you're just lazy! :mad:
 
We had an amazing one yesterday...

Person calls in saying "I haven't received any emails all day"

Logged onto the PC to check the problem

...

The "Today" section of the inbox in outlook wasn't expanded.


:D
 
Last week the head of HR came in to see me and asked why I'd installed bugging equipment in his office.

I followed him to look at the offending piece of high-tech surveillance kit, only to have to inform him that it was a control for the air conditioning unit and it had always been there....

Sometimes you really couldn't make this stuff up !
 
Haggisman said:
Argh, this is what used to wind me up the most. You'd ask people to check the most basic things, e.g. cables. They would insist they'd done it, you'd get there, oh look, cable unplugged.

Seriously, you're either so stupid you can't establish whether a cable is plugged in, or you're just lazy! :mad:
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Yup, infuriates me too. I'd rather people just be honest with me. If they don't know what they're looking for, just tell me. I'll happily explain it so they know what to look for next time. Just don't lie to me and say you've done something when you plainly haven't.
 
Mr-White said:
If idiots didn't exist you'd be out of a job

MW
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This, 100% this.

My current manager also can't wrap her head around that stats are good when they are low...

She is always wanting high call closure rate and lots of calls closed...

I'm having issues with her at the moment as everything is working and only a few calls are coming in. This to her is under performing. It baffles me, so I literally have to break things in order to have good stats? Not the face I've fixed everything already meaning no one is raising calls?

Retard.
 
mrbell1984 said:
.. and on another note users tend to pass things on because they don't want to do something themselves so they blame it as an IT fault so the IT support can just fix it themselves. :)
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And not seem to realise that:

a) if it's something like a cable not plugged in, it's far quicker for them to plug it back in than one of us to walk down there and do it.

b) if it's someone who consistently rings with trivial NFF calls that they could fix themselves, they'll start finding all of their tickets being pushed to the back of the queue...
 
agnes said:
This, 100% this.

My current manager also can't wrap her head around that stats are good when they are low...

She is always wanting high call closure rate and lots of calls closed...

I'm having issues with her at the moment as everything is working and only a few calls are coming in. This to her is under performing. It baffles me, so I literally have to break things in order to have good stats? Not the face I've fixed everything already meaning no one is raising calls?

Retard.
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I think she maybe still wants you (and her) to have a job :p

Same at job here, all stats are then shown to CEO's CFO's etc...no calls best but management seem to love high stats :/
 
Going back a few years, I had one chap call me up to say his computer is really slow. Tried to remote on to his computer but it wouldn't load so I asked him to restart. Just as he said ok I've clicked restart, I managed to get a connection and remoted on to his PC. Screen loaded and he was flicking between the sun website and his emails. I thought thats odd, he just said he clicked restart. Anyway watched him for a bit while he was talking me through what his PC was doing.

'OK its shut down now'

'Just loading Windows'

'Just logging in now'

'Ok I'm logged in now'

At this point I asked him whether he going to restart his computer like I asked him to and his reply was, 'Oh I thought you was going to do it'

What? Why tell me you've restarted the PC if you thought I was going to do it? :confused:
 
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