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

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I'm inventorying a bunch of old equipment for recycling.

I'm gonna find whoever at HP decided that putting the product and serial number on a sticker under the internal battery; and putting the internal battery under a panel that didn't pop of but was screwed on, with torx screws, under the rubber little laptop feet, was a good idea and punch them.
 
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Also what it is about this lockdown that's triggering the "Now is the time to rearrange my office/workspace" subroutine in people's head?

I swear I've been called in to rerun cables and drops because someone up and decided their desk needed be against this wall or decided they wanted their tower under their desk instead of one it or whatnot more in the last month then the rest of the last year combined.
 
Sigh. Someone thought it would be brilliant to roll out a contact-tracing tool that hinges on querying audit table data to see who had possible contact with COVID-positive patients. Unfortunately they didn't think to make the tool distinguish between people who actually opened a patient's chart versus people who run database queries that return data from a patient's chart. So now everyone who runs SQL queries is getting calls from extremely confused hospital staff asking them to confirm whether or not they had contact with particular patients. No, I promise, I'm a data monkey, I don't see patients at all, ever, and I certainly didn't see four hundred thousand patients so far this week. My queries did. If I were seeing patients I'd want a pay raise, and for seeing that many I'd expect a very pretty productivity bonus! Even our best doctors don't see more than a hundred thousand patients a day!
 
TragicMonkey said:
Dear Idiot:

For the third time you've scheduled a meeting in Microsoft Teams without providing a conference call line. Most of the invited are working from home on company-supplied equipment which does NOT include cameras or microphones. My company laptop doesn't even have a sound card. It's entirely mute. So unless you're planning to use the text chat features it's going to be a pretty damned empty call.

I suggest just using a goddamned telephone since there's absolutely no need to show anything visually for this, even if we could.

Please die horribly,
TM
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Dear Everyone: In every interaction please ask yourself this series of questions:

- Could this in person meeting be a videochat with no negative effect?
- Could this videochat be a phonecall with no negative effect?
- Could this phonecall be an e-mail with no negative effect?
- Could this e-mail be literally nothing with no negative effect?
 
JoeMorgue said:
Dear Everyone: In every interaction please ask yourself this series of questions:

- Could this in person meeting be a videochat with no negative effect?
- Could this videochat be a phonecall with no negative effect?
- Could this phonecall be an e-mail with no negative effect?
- Could this e-mail be literally nothing with no negative effect?
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80% of the time, the answer to all four questions is yes.
 
We have an IVR system, yeah I know, which clearly lays out the options people need to select for certain services. Press 1 for emergencies. Press 2 for technical services. Press 3 for building and maintenance. Press 4 for everything else. Then submenus. I know it's clear and unambiguous because I record the voice overs. That's me telling you which numbers to press.

I swear people end up just mashing buttons and arriving at a random endpoint. I know this because people end up on the followup line when they need a password reset. They end up on the followup line on their initial call. I also know this because the number of times they start their call saying "I don't know if I've come through to the right area, but..."

It's so bad that we have a standing instruction that if an inappropriate call comes through we're to transfer them back to the queue to try again.
 
I do have to say, though, that it is quite nice having access to MS Teams. It's basically Discord. We can do group chats, which is a great way for subunits to coordinate, or individual chats, like we used Skype for previously. We don't routinely do video, except for the team leaders who are doing admin meetings, but it's nice to have a good system for communication while half of us are working from home.
 
I am becoming a fan of Teams, and particularly the "code snippet" tool.

Working quite closely with two other people via teams, and the combination of audio, desktop sharing, chat window and code snippets is just awesome.

I find myself in the unusual position of having to praise Microsoft for something.

(I feel dirty)

PS. Everyone says their developer tools are good and I'm starting to see why.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Dear Everyone: In every interaction please ask yourself this series of questions:

- Could this in person meeting be a videochat with no negative effect?
- Could this videochat be a phonecall with no negative effect?
- Could this phonecall be an e-mail with no negative effect?
- Could this e-mail be literally nothing with no negative effect?
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Every meeting either needs 1-2 hours or 10 minutes. If you can't provide an agenda it's the latter.

Tools, for work we use Slack. Slack's problems are: if you start a chat with someone you can't the invite others and you can't select fonts. For someone working with Read codes and hex values this is a pain.
For personal stuff, try https://jitsi.org/ It has apps but also runs in a browser.
 
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Wudang said:
Every meeting either needs 1-2 hours or 10 minutes. If you can't provide an agenda it's the latter.

Tools, for work we use Slack. Slack's problems are: if you start a chat with someone you can't the invite others and you can't select fonts. For someone working with Read codes and hex values this is a pain.
For personal stuff, try https://jitsi.org/ It has apps but also runs in a browser.
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I was always amazed (and irritated) that at the several weekly meetings we'd have, if they were scheduled for an hour, they'd last an hour. Never mind if the issue was solved in the first 20 minutes. The rest was usually filler and wasted time. Which on occasion was fine but I often wanted to get back and do some real work.
 
Just spent 20 minutes trying to explain to two users why keeping a text document of all their medical site login passwords on the desktop of a computer with a shared login is a no-no.

Their entire excuse was just to repeat "well I can't remember all of them" over and over.
 
Tried to find out the status of my stimulus check. After entering all the info on the IRS site, it came back with an error and said "Something's wrong" but it doesn't tell you where the error is. Double- and triple-checked my entries. Which led to my being locked out of the site for 24 hours.

It would be nice if I had a hint of what field might have a problem. SSN, Name, address, zip, bank routing #, bank account #, and several other fields that required entry.
 
alfaniner said:
Tried to find out the status of my stimulus check. After entering all the info on the IRS site, it came back with an error and said "Something's wrong" but it doesn't tell you where the error is. Double- and triple-checked my entries. Which led to my being locked out of the site for 24 hours.

It would be nice if I had a hint of what field might have a problem. SSN, Name, address, zip, bank routing #, bank account #, and several other fields that required entry.
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The problem with that approach is it leaks information to people trying to break into the system.

"The ZIP code is incorrect."
"Oh, good, at least I have a known address."

"Incorrect routing code."
"Ah! Name, address, and ZIP code are lining up. Now I just have to work on the bank routing information."

The risk I just described is mitigated by the "three strikes and you're out until tomorrow" check. That prevents people and computers from hammering away using thousands of combinations until they hit one that works.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Just spent 20 minutes trying to explain to two users why keeping a text document of all their medical site login passwords on the desktop of a computer with a shared login is a no-no.

Their entire excuse was just to repeat "well I can't remember all of them" over and over.
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In some organizations that would be cause for disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.

Also, KeePass.
 
Blue Mountain said:
In some organizations that would be cause for disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.

Also, KeePass.
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But you don't understand these are "widdle ole' women" who "just aren't computer people."

These people can barely work a web browser. Getting them to use KeePass would be like teaching string theory to a potato.
 
JoeMorgue said:
But you don't understand these are "widdle ole' women" who "just aren't computer people."

These people can barely work a web browser. Getting them to use KeePass would be like teaching string theory to a potato.
Click to expand...

A couple of jobs ago I had to call a user to troubleshoot some problem at their site. She logged in as herself and the problem didn't occur. So she said "it happened to Mary, I'll log in as her." I was still stunned speechless when she shouted to someone in the background "Is Mary's password still 'JesusIsLord', or is that Christine's? Hello? I'm going to log in as Anne, instead. Let me just read this stickynote."
 
JoeMorgue said:
I'm inventorying a bunch of old equipment for recycling.

I'm gonna find whoever at HP decided that putting the product and serial number on a sticker under the internal battery; and putting the internal battery under a panel that didn't pop of but was screwed on, with torx screws, under the rubber little laptop feet, was a good idea and punch them.
Click to expand...
That's someone in China who designed that. Yeah, not a good idea.

But you can get the same info via the OS. Probably faster?

https://support.hp.com/au-en/document/c04559742
 
TragicMonkey said:
A couple of jobs ago I had to call a user to troubleshoot some problem at their site. She logged in as herself and the problem didn't occur. So she said "it happened to Mary, I'll log in as her." I was still stunned speechless when she shouted to someone in the background "Is Mary's password still 'JesusIsLord', or is that Christine's? Hello? I'm going to log in as Anne, instead. Let me just read this stickynote."
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In a previous job I had to very patiently explain to someone that someone else knowing his credentials means that if that person does something underhanded or illegal, there is no way to prove that he didn't do it.

This was the same person who scanned his signature as a jpg to add to official documents.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Sigh. Someone thought it would be brilliant to roll out a contact-tracing tool that hinges on querying audit table data to see who had possible contact with COVID-positive patients. Unfortunately they didn't think to make the tool distinguish between people who actually opened a patient's chart versus people who run database queries that return data from a patient's chart. So now everyone who runs SQL queries is getting calls from extremely confused hospital staff asking them to confirm whether or not they had contact with particular patients. No, I promise, I'm a data monkey, I don't see patients at all, ever, and I certainly didn't see four hundred thousand patients so far this week. My queries did. If I were seeing patients I'd want a pay raise, and for seeing that many I'd expect a very pretty productivity bonus! Even our best doctors don't see more than a hundred thousand patients a day!
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Go for the money. After the first couple of hundred million dollars, they might try to fix the problem.
 
TragicMonkey said:
A couple of jobs ago I had to call a user to troubleshoot some problem at their site. She logged in as herself and the problem didn't occur. So she said "it happened to Mary, I'll log in as her." I was still stunned speechless when she shouted to someone in the background "Is Mary's password still 'JesusIsLord', or is that Christine's? Hello? I'm going to log in as Anne, instead. Let me just read this stickynote."
Click to expand...
Just so you know, every professional IT techie has been through that. To most users, passwords are not "a good security idea". They are a stupid and unnecessary barrier to doing work, put there by geeks, which has to be bypassed the easiest possible way.

There is no cure for this stupidity beyond taking their PC access off them entirely and keeping them on paper only. And even then, I have been told of "widdle ol' ladies" still having the bad habit of leaving incriminating and/or highly private typed memos and letters lying about the place...!
 
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