Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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I wish people would learn where the power switch was on their computers. I suppose this is part of the issue that people don't know the difference between their computer, their docking station, and their monitor.

Switch the computer off.

Is that the screen?

No, it's the computer.

Which bit's that?
 
Awesome. We received an email today which said exactly this. I am copy-pasting now from the incident record.

Hi,
I am trying to setup a mailbox for the secretariat of an expert panel.
Click to expand...

Well good for you for trying!
 
Sometimes it goes in the other direction as well. My dad couldn't get into his email (password wasn't recognized) so he called the service desk:

My dad: I can't get into my email, it says my password isn't recognized.
Service desk: A link has been mailed to your account where you can reset your password.
My dad: But madam, how can get to the email your system sends me if I can't get into my email?
Service desk: ...
My dad: ...
Service desk: I've set the temporary password xyz
My dad: Ok thank you.
 
caveman1917 said:
Sometimes it goes in the other direction as well. My dad couldn't get into his email (password wasn't recognized) so he called the service desk:
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When my mother set up her first email account, she had to call the ISP and tell them the password she wanted, rather than setting it up online. She couldn't log in, and we eventually determined that the person at the ISP had misspelled the password when they put it in their system.
 
caveman1917 said:
Sometimes it goes in the other direction as well. My dad couldn't get into his email (password wasn't recognized) so he called the service desk:

My dad: I can't get into my email, it says my password isn't recognized.
Service desk: A link has been mailed to your account where you can reset your password.
My dad: But madam, how can get to the email your system sends me if I can't get into my email?
Service desk: ...
My dad: ...
Service desk: I've set the temporary password xyz
My dad: Ok thank you.
Click to expand...

I just had a similar thing trying to reset my Outlook (hotmail) password. Got locked out of the account. To get unlocked, they wanted me to log into the account first.
 
caveman1917 said:
Sometimes it goes in the other direction as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been guilty of that.

I had a user call because his mouse was not responding:

me: Okay, right-click the "My Computer" icon.
him: What?
me: Right-click on the "My Computer" icon.
him: My mouse isn't working.
me: headslap!

oops!
 
"With what shall I click it, dear Helpdesk, dear Helpdesk?
With what shall I click it, dear Helpdesk, with what?"


"With your mouse, dear user, dear user
with your mouse, dear use, your mouse"


"But my mouse is broken, dear Helpdesk, dear Helpdesk.
My mouse is broken, dear Helpdesk, it broke."


"There's a hole in my logic, dear user, dear user.
"A hole in my logic, dear user, a hole"
 
So one of my junior guys is helping one of our many, many "Oh I'm not a computer person, I have to have the process set up for me step by step and it must never change or I'll shut down" users with setting up a new shared folder to hold scanned check images in because we do health care in Florida because we still have a lot of old patients who still write physical checks.

So he's helping her setup up a new folder on the share drive set up for her department on the domain, pretty routine. While in there she spots two folders she doesn't recognizes and, apparently pretty much literally, screeches "What are those? I don't recognize those!" and just straight up deletes these two folders because, her words "I'm gonna forget where my scans go with all these folders on this share drive."

We can all see where this is going, right? The share drive is... well (spoiler alert) shared by everyone in her department, it's not like her personal drive to do with as she pleases.

20 minutes later the person who performs this lady's function at another site calls the Help Desk in a panic because two years of her work is now gone.

I mean obviously we have backups (from just last night and she noticed the folders were gone this morning when she went into them to add in some scanned checks from her site, so the backup covers everything and we've already started the restore process.
 
Blue Bubble said:
Well, I'm not a Windows-person, but I'd ask why were the permissions on these folders set so that she could delete them ? Even on a shared drive, that's not the way I would have set them up ...
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The Client's policy they dictate to us has folder permissions set based on user role. This lady, per their standards, had full control over the folder.

I'm sure they'll be revisiting that standard now.
 
JoeMorgue said:
So one of my junior guys is helping one of our many, many "Oh I'm not a computer person, I have to have the process set up for me step by step and it must never change or I'll shut down" users with setting up a new shared folder to hold scanned check images in because we do health care in Florida because we still have a lot of old patients who still write physical checks.

So he's helping her setup up a new folder on the share drive set up for her department on the domain, pretty routine. While in there she spots two folders she doesn't recognizes and, apparently pretty much literally, screeches "What are those? I don't recognize those!" and just straight up deletes these two folders because, her words "I'm gonna forget where my scans go with all these folders on this share drive."

We can all see where this is going, right? The share drive is... well (spoiler alert) shared by everyone in her department, it's not like her personal drive to do with as she pleases.

20 minutes later the person who performs this lady's function at another site calls the Help Desk in a panic because two years of her work is now gone.

I mean obviously we have backups (from just last night and she noticed the folders were gone this morning when she went into them to add in some scanned checks from her site, so the backup covers everything and we've already started the restore process.
Click to expand...
I hope the user's department is billed for the time wasted hand-holding and the time and effort of the recovery op?
 
My first real job out of college was at a coffee roasting plant, and I had to deal with programming conversions involving case, pound and each.

I remember being annoyed at this, and continually saying to myself, I can't wait until I don't have to convert case/pound/each anymore.

My next job at a healthcare company I had to deal with really complex percentages & rules - and I thought UGH, that didn't make things any better ..
Maybe my NEXT job?

Now I work on a system and I have to convert TIME, which is the worst of them all.. I long for the simple days of case, pound each.
 
Not me, but a developer I worked with on an app that (among many other things) stored customer DOB as recorded on their state ID card (driver's license or similar).

For a good user experience, the app simply asked the customer to put in their DOB as it appeared on their ID.

On the backend, this was a major headache, as somehow the fifty states were able to produce a seemingly infinite variety of date formats. mm-dd-yyyy, mm/dd/yy, mm-yyyy, month yyyy, etc.

It was this developer's job to account for all the different formats in use, and convert them all to a single format to be used within the app itself.
 
theprestige said:
Not me, but a developer I worked with on an app that (among many other things) stored customer DOB as recorded on their state ID card (driver's license or similar).

For a good user experience, the app simply asked the customer to put in their DOB as it appeared on their ID.

On the backend, this was a major headache, as somehow the fifty states were able to produce a seemingly infinite variety of date formats. mm-dd-yyyy, mm/dd/yy, mm-yyyy, month yyyy, etc.

It was this developer's job to account for all the different formats in use, and convert them all to a single format to be used within the app itself.
Click to expand...

It seems to me that asking for a specific format and doing some input validation to enforce that would have been way easier to program, and not place an unreasonable burden on the user. Besides, I have no doubt that many users would come up with their own format, regardless of instructions to put it in as it appears on the ID, and trying to account for that nearly infinite number of variations would be just about impossible.
 
CORed said:
It seems to me that asking for a specific format and doing some input validation to enforce that would have been way easier to program, and not place an unreasonable burden on the user. Besides, I have no doubt that many users would come up with their own format, regardless of instructions to put it in as it appears on the ID, and trying to account for that nearly infinite number of variations would be just about impossible.
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The distinct impression I got, working with user interface design and development teams, was that user experience is serious business, and cannot be so easily dismissed with "and not place an unreasonable burden on the user".

And this app was definitely serious business. It was a major source of revenue for the company. So major that any significant drop in customer base would almost certainly have sunk the company within a year. And the app guides the user through an inherently obnoxious and frustrating process. Anything that made the process even the tiniest bit more obnoxious was likely to drive off some customers. Avoiding that if practical was extremely important to our design and dev teams.

"Nearly infinite" was a bit of hyperbole on my part. In reality, the 50 states came down to a handful of different formats. It took the developer only a couple weeks to figure it out. They were pain-in-the-ass weeks, though.

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I think it's important to distinguish between "in-house" users and paying customers. With your own employees, for example, it can be reasonable to ask them to input data according to a convention. But with paying customers, it can often be better to put as few format requirements on them as possible, and handle varying input formats in the backend.
 
Obxkcd
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