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

[TragicMonkey]

*Bangs head against wall over and over*

If you call me with a problem and I show up... just show me what your problem is.

Do not sit there and walk me through every single step of your workflow. Get to where the problem actually is.

Why do so many of my users have this weird obsession with showing me their routines?

"Okay I sit down, I login, I first open this, then I open this..."

It's not confined to that situation. Some people can only think in narrative terms: they have constructed a mental story and cannot tell it out of order, or extract just the relevant bits. My mom is like that. Even in actual emergencies she cannot focus on conveying the immediately-necessary information, she has to "start at the beginning". Including in life-and-death situations. If you were to encounter my mother outside a burning building she would have to start telling the story of how the fire started before she could mention if there were anybody still inside the building. It's weird, annoying as hell, but cannot be solved. If you try to cut the narrator short and demand the relevant pieces of information they get flustered, upset, and even angry. The information they have stored is only retrievable if they begin at a certain point, otherwise they cannot make sense of it.

 

[Darat]

It's not confined to that situation. Some people can only think in narrative terms: they have constructed a mental story and cannot tell it out of order, or extract just the relevant bits. My mom is like that. Even in actual emergencies she cannot focus on conveying the immediately-necessary information, she has to "start at the beginning". Including in life-and-death situations. If you were to encounter my mother outside a burning building she would have to start telling the story of how the fire started before she could mention if there were anybody still inside the building. It's weird, annoying as hell, but cannot be solved. If you try to cut the narrator short and demand the relevant pieces of information they get flustered, upset, and even angry. The information they have stored is only retrievable if they begin at a certain point, otherwise they cannot make sense of it.

I know people like that, it is as if their minds work differently.

 

[Wudang]

One that used to drive me nuts. I'd get asked to join conference calls for problems with systems I did not or no longer supported. I'd start giving the solution and be continually talked over my people who just had to talk about why it was a problem. One bad day I was talked over for the third time and I muttered "for god's sake" and hung up. That's apparently not what people heard. Anyway I messaged the manager running the meeting and said I'd rejoin when people were ready to STFU and listen. He replied "Totally justified mate.".

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

One that used to drive me nuts. I'd get asked to join conference calls for problems with systems I did not or no longer supported. I'd start giving the solution and be continually talked over my people who just had to talk about why it was a problem. One bad day I was talked over for the third time and I muttered "for god's sake" and hung up. That's apparently not what people heard. Anyway I messaged the manager running the meeting and said I'd rejoin when people were ready to STFU and listen. He replied "Totally justified mate.".

For once you can actually Blame Management and be right. The meeting chair(person) is not doing their job when this sort of thing happens.

 

[Dr. Keith]

One of the benefits of online virtual meetings over telephone conferences: the host can mute people.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

So we have a big problem with prices of purchases.
To cut a long story short, we get "provisional" prices, and later we have to compute the final prices based on totals of some aggregates of goods.
Of course you could, once you have calculated the final prices, enter them line by line, but that is tedious (talking about potentially 200+ items).

So yesterday I wrote a short script allowing the person in charge to:
1. Download a well structured Excel file with the list of goods and dedicated columns where he can do the necessary calculations and enter the correct prices;
2. Upload the file.

Pure genius!

I sent the person in charge an email, explaining the procedure, and in attachment, as an example, the file he can now download from the application.

Yesterday evening the person in charge called to thank me, and said all went well.

This morning I checked the logs and it appears:
1. He didn't download the file;
2. He didn't upload anything.
Why are users lying?

Don't be naughty. Users don't LIE, they MISUNDERSTAND.

 

[Wudang]

For once you can actually Blame Management and be right. The meeting chair(person) is not doing their job when this sort of thing happens.

He was trying to be fair but there were a lot of the types who aren't listening and just wait for a pause so they can blurt out their "contribution".

 

[TragicMonkey]

He was trying to be fair but there were a lot of the types who aren't listening and just wait for a pause so they can blurt out their "contribution".

I have weekly meetings with a lady who "thinks aloud". She rambles for minutes on end, in a droning, whiny voice. I'm sure everyone else is also on mute so they can scream at her.

 

[Darat]

He was trying to be fair but there were a lot of the types who aren't listening and just wait for a pause so they can blurt out their "contribution".

I thought that was what meetings were for?

 

[Wudang]

I thought that was what meetings were for?

<waves hand airily> Meetings as theatre, daaahling. I decided to go Commedia dell'arte. As one does when the muse moves one.

 

[CORed]

Back in the day our first laptops at work - nice beige Toshiba 486s - had trackballs that clipped onto the right-hand side of the machine. Brilliantly, if they got disconnected, which they often did because of clumsiness, they weren't recognised if you reconnected them. You had to reboot the machine. This was... irritating.

A lot of the older Windows versions required a reboot for damn near any change you made. This was even true on server versinos prior to Windows 2000. Perhaps the worst case I dealt with was Windows 95, which for any change in network configuration, required not only a reboot, but that you insert the install CD for the OS, regardless of whether necessary drivers were already installed or not. And if you didn't have that install CD, nothing was getting changed.

 

[CORed]

I recall stories from long ago of secretaries switching from word processors to using computer and causing problems as they often typed "l" instead of "1" as touch typing positions a finger on "l".

A lot of typewriters didn't even have a "1" key(I think IBM Selectrics and maybe some other high end models did). You were intended to use the "l".

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter. When I started using computers, it took me years to break the habit of snapping my wrist to give the key a good pounding with every keystroke.

 

[CORed]

Here's something infuriating. We have a task that the T2 on the late shift is required to do once a week. We check in on all our staff who are posted overseas to make sure they've logged on within the last 30 days. If they don't, their account is automatically made inactive and it's a pain in the bum for them to get it reactivated.

So far so good. Last logon is an attribute that is tracked in Active Directory. Look them up, open their Properties, and wait! the Attribute Editor tab is missing!

We have to go to their Member Of tab, open their Role Group Properties (assigned according to their position in the org structure of the department), close the user's Properties, check the Members tab of the Group Properties, double click the user there to reopen the user's Properties and now we can see the Attribute Editor tab.

That's crazy. Any other AD users have something like this?

Try using the command line "net user <userid> /domain" will get you a lot of information about the user including last login.

 

[Hellbound]

Try using the command line "net user /domain" will get you a lot of information about the user including last login.

Yeah, that too; good catch . PowerShell tends to be my go-to, so I forget about the older stuff.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[arthwollipot]

Try using the command line "net user <userid> /domain" will get you a lot of information about the user including last login.

That's... really, really helpful. I think I'm going to submit a Process Improvement.

ETA: Done. I'll let you know the results. Thanks.

 

[Norman Alexander]

I have weekly meetings with a lady who "thinks aloud". She rambles for minutes on end, in a droning, whiny voice. I'm sure everyone else is also on mute so they can scream at her.

Or get coffee.

 

[arthwollipot]

I have weekly meetings with a lady who "thinks aloud". She rambles for minutes on end, in a droning, whiny voice. I'm sure everyone else is also on mute so they can scream at her.

I've definitely had callers like that.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I've definitely had callers like that.

Have you also had callers on the other end of the spectrum? Where they start out with, "I'm having this specific problem: when I try X, Z happens instead of Y, and I've so far tried this, this and this to fix it, with some success, but it really looks like there might be an issue with system."

 

[Blue Mountain]

Has anyone done something like this?

You: All, right, I want you to open application-name.

User: Sorry, I'm not a computer person. How do you do that?

You: Hmm, I understand. Are you a car person?

User: What?

You: I man, for your car do you have a complete run of all the service manuals, an OBD reader, a car lift in your garage, you've re-flashed the computer's ECU to get better gas mileage, you spend your evenings and weekends planning and participating in car rallies, and you're the Most Knowledgeable User on the forms dedicated to your car's manufacturer?

User: Uhhh ... no ...

You: But you have a driver's license, right?

 

[quadraginta]

I think you must be thinking of a different product.

The Trackman is symmetrical along the long access, it can be placed in any position you like and does not in any way have a 'handedness'

Over time Logitech has changed and added to their product line of pointing devices, and their nomenclature has moved along with those changes.

Being somewhat long-in-the-tooth and more a creature of habit than I would like, I still refer to their trackball devices that look like this;

[Logitech Trackman circa 1995]

as a Trackman, which is what they were called three decades ago when they first came out, and Logitech didn't have the product you describe in their lineup. All of their first seven trackball products, from 1989 through 1993 all looked basically like this, and were all known as a Trackman.

They continued to use the Trackman label as a class name for further, newer trackball type devices for a while after that, adding it as a prefix even for the more ambidextrous finger operated models, but by then it was too late for me.

As you can see, that device is very insistently right-handed. Their most recent iteration of this design currently carries the moniker "MX Ergo", with no reference to "Trackman" at all. But, after so many years of using that design in all its iterations, I still think of it as a Trackman.

My apologies for being set in my ways. I'll try to do better.