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

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Microsoft Teams is okay on a technical aspect, but it suffers the same problem of being "too connected" so everyone just reaches out to everybody as their first step in doing anything.

It's the "Signal to Noise Ratio" problem.
 
I have a OneNote page full of boilerplates that I commonly copy and paste into stuff. Like this:

Client called to follow up request. Advised that a technician would be in contact when available.

and this:

We require some additional information regarding the nature of your problem in order to proceed with this request. Please phone the Service Desk on ext XXXXX so that we can investigate the problem for you. When you call, please quote the job number II******* and provide your computer's asset number.

and this:

Service Desk staff are unable to respond to direct phone calls, emails, Teams or Skype messages. Please phone the Service Desk on ext XXXXX, or (XX) XXXX XXXX, or alternatively email xxx@xxx.xx.
 
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arthwollipot said:
So the Department has just rolled out Cisco Jabber to all staff. Jabber is a soft phone that allows people to make and take calls via their PC rather than their desk phone. This is part of the mobile workspace initiative that will allow staff to work remotely much more easily.

Something was just pointed out to me that I hadn't thought of, though in hindsight it is obvious. We are always telling people to reboot their computer. Guess what happens when you do that while you're on a Jabber call?

*click*
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We also run Jabber, but primarily for the messaging functions. It does tie into our phones, but those phones are still separate VoIP devices. I can adjust my VoIP phone from Jabber (set call forwarding, use the computer to auto-dial, etc), but it’s a separate device.

In fact, I use it while working from home do my office line rings through to my cell phone.

Thus sounds more like a bad decision made for budget reasons than bad software :)


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Pro tip # 2391: never become so annoying to the IT staff over minor issues that they decide to pursue automating your entire job, making you unnecessary. Lady crossed a line this morning at 9. By 10 we had approval for the project to build things to replace her functionality entirely. It's 10:45 and we've already got the initial planning done and are writing the framework. She's going to regret her attitude. And buying that house recently, probably.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Pro tip # 2391: never become so annoying to the IT staff over minor issues that they decide to pursue automating your entire job, making you unnecessary. Lady crossed a line this morning at 9. By 10 we had approval for the project to build things to replace her functionality entirely. It's 10:45 and we've already got the initial planning done and are writing the framework. She's going to regret her attitude. And buying that house recently, probably.
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:D :thumbsup:
 
TragicMonkey said:
Pro tip # 2391: never become so annoying to the IT staff over minor issues that they decide to pursue automating your entire job, making you unnecessary. Lady crossed a line this morning at 9. By 10 we had approval for the project to build things to replace her functionality entirely. It's 10:45 and we've already got the initial planning done and are writing the framework. She's going to regret her attitude. And buying that house recently, probably.
Click to expand...

*Citizen Kane Clapping Gif*
 
TragicMonkey said:
Pro tip # 2391: never become so annoying to the IT staff over minor issues that they decide to pursue automating your entire job, making you unnecessary. Lady crossed a line this morning at 9. By 10 we had approval for the project to build things to replace her functionality entirely. It's 10:45 and we've already got the initial planning done and are writing the framework. She's going to regret her attitude. And buying that house recently, probably.
Click to expand...

"Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script." :D
 
New work kit. And I am delighted that none of the apps were pre-installed and it keeps cycling through downloading and restarting
 
Remember this?

arthwollipot said:
Remember this?

An identical brand-new printer in our other smartcard office is jamming every second or third card. Really getting stuck in there, too. To the point that trying to remove the card makes a very bad crunching noise.

A service call has been made with the vendor. Because this damn thing is doing nothing until it's been looked at by a licensed technician.

These new printers were supposed to make things easier. :mad:
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The technician is coming to service the card printers tomorrow. That's only taken them a month.

Today, I'm not even trying to use the printer. I'm just taking and uploading the photos, and I'll print the cards on the old printer upstairs this afternoon, and call them back to the smartcard office to collect them tomorrow.
 
I had just come downstairs to start handing out the cards to people for whom I'd had to print on the old printer upstairs, when the evacuation drill alert sounded.

I was a floor warden for the Bureau of Statistics during the 2016 Census. When we did our evacuation drill over there, we emptied the building of several thousand staff in about 4 and a half minutes. This has... not been as efficient as that. It's also taking forever to file everybody back into the building after it was all over.
 
And on the reverse note, no: not everything imaginable can be automated. This thing I do monthly, which requires running a query nine times, that takes six hundred values as parameters (values that have nothing in common in the database, so they have to be individually listed in the query, I mean, there's nothing distinguishing this list from all the other values it might contain instead), that involves four SQL partitions, five CTEs, eight temp tables, and an hour of pivoting in Excel...no, I can't just "automate" that to have it appear "on a dashboard somewhere" in an application I don't have rights to. Even if the users could agree on the base question of what data they actually want returned (they can't agree, and it's been different every month)!

eta: oh, and this is fun: they all want the "high level numbers" but a minority want to be able to drill down from there to the detail...the detail is between two and six million rows of data. What, precisely, are you going to do with six million rows of data? Read them all? I think that would take an entire human lifespan to do. Also it wouldn't be informative because the question they're interested in is why the events listed in the data occurred, which information is not contained within the data itself. The database (and I) can only say that Event 1209032 occurred, we cannot divine why it occurred instead of a different event not in the data, or what would have happened if it had occurred in a different manner.

I think some people heard the word "Oracle" in connection to a database and thought the things are actual oracles.
 
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Well, the good news is that the technician has come and serviced all the card printers, and they appear to be working successfully - over 40 cards were printed on one machine earlier today with no problems.
 
arthwollipot said:
Well, the good news is that the technician has come and serviced all the card printers, and they appear to be working successfully - over 40 cards were printed on one machine earlier today with no problems.
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Yeah, but Jeff only needed one card. What is he supposed to do with forty?
 
New thing that is eating up too much of my time.

"We have vendor that needs to do a presentation. He has a twee hipster little laptop that only has one USB-C connector, all the projector has is a VGA and a full sized HDMI. Could you immediately manifest the necessary dongles from the aether? Oh and quickly because the presentation starts .0004 nanoseconds."
 
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