Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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This job makes me so angry sometimes. I create a report for the highly specific needs of one group of people. It's very, very, very tailored to their specific purposes, each and every piece of logic debated among them and validated and documented to hell and back. So hurrah, finally it's done and I'm running it regularly and we'll call this one Report A.

Then someone wants to use Report A for something that doesn't quite work because A doesn't do what they want it to. So Report B is born, a variant of Report A that differs in all the ways necessary for this new and different purpose to work. Hurrah, now I have two reports to run regularly.

Now someone very high up (the highest, actually) has finally gotten into the loop and gets both reports for the first time. And now I have to explain why they "don't match". He thinks they should match. The whole point of having two is so they don't match, if they were supposed to match there would only ever have been one.

It's taxing my politeness skills to explain about apples vs oranges to the president of my company at 4 pm when I've been working without break since 7 am, haven't had a day off since New Years, and look likely to work through this weekend which is coincidentally both my own birthday and Mother's Day.
 
"Well sir both groups have me long lists of highly detailed requirements relating to their areas if expertise so I think the best thing is to ask them to compare their requirements and see where the discrepancies arise"?
 
arthwollipot said:
Okay, well this is one of the less informative incidents I've seen.

Short description:
webpart with searching function

Description:
webpart to be able sort records using buttons
To Subject Sent Size Categories
(someone's name) Inquiry about DIAD webinar page archive option [SEC=OFFICIAL] 21/03/2022 663 KB
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Will this be the sort of thing you want?

[IMGw=500]https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AdobeStock_325659585.jpeg[/IMGw]
 
a_unique_person said:
Error message text you can't copy paste. WTF is with that?
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It seems "text you can't copy and paste" is become more and more common and it is super-frustrating.

I have one system that I don't directly control that routinely generates an error massage that can't be copy/pasted and the only options you have are to close out the error message and send a report to the company that makes the software.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It seems "text you can't copy and paste" is become more and more common and it is super-frustrating.

I have one system that I don't directly control that routinely generates an error massage that can't be copy/pasted and the only options you have are to close out the error message and send a report to the company that makes the software.
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Does it also block screen shot?

Yeah, I hate text you can't copy too. And there does seem to be more of it. It should be going the other way. I find it very frustrating that there isn't a windows search function that can search all text fields in a window or even across windows. And browser search that claim they found text but you still don't know where it is.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Can anyone give me a hint as to why this is done? Is it to hide the failings of the writer of the software? Or just to annoy its users? :(
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Basically laziness on the part of the coders. And not unreasonable laziness in all cases. Most underlying form frameworks have a concept of "labels" and "edit boxes". Edit boxes support full editing and cut and paste etc. Label's are display only and don't support cut and paste. The programmer would have to go out of their way to make labels support cut and paste and most don't.

It's basically something that wasn't thought out well 20 years ago.
 
At one point in time many versions ago, OneNote had a quite decent OCR built in. Sure it had problems but once you'd OCRed a screencap sent by some clueless user was just a matter of tweaking any important mistakes. My wife used it for business receipts as she could scan them, auto-OCRed then she could search them for "petrol" etc.
 
xterra said:
Several days ago, I was watching something live on YouTube. In the chat window, someone said that she was watching on her phone because she "normally didn't carry her mainframe when she went out."


I suspect she meant laptop....
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Oh. I don't know. ISTR the Z-80 instruction set was intended to mimic that of the /360.
 
I used to work in PC hardware repairs for a small computer manufacturing company. I'm used to people using computer jargon wrong or not knowing what it means, but it always astonished me how badly some of the tech support guys mangled computer terminology and opened up tickets that were less than helpful.

I remember one PC which was RTM'd and the ticket simply read "replace modem".

Usually there should just be a description of the problem so we can try and replicate it and then figure out what's wrong so we could fix it. In this case there was no model in the PC, so not only did I not know what the actual problem was that needed fixing, the suggested fix didn't make any sense.

So I got onto the tech support guy who'd taken the call and opened the ticket. Turns out that the customer was very unhappy about something so they'd agreed to replace his PC with a brand new one so he had arranged to return the "base unit" (as we called it) and have a brand new one sent out. Base unit was what we called the PC case and the guts inside it, is there an actual standard term for it?

This was a common problem. Tickets that discussed the processor, the hard drive, the memory, the modem, the CPU, etc. when they meant the base unit. "power button on CPU is broken" "DVD stuck in hard drive" "USB ports on front of modem don't work" etc.

One dude used to put just "replace motherboard" on most of his tickets before we had a word with his supervisor and had it explained to him that that's no use to us, we need an actual description of what's wrong.
 
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It was also fun to see the state of some of the computers that were returned for repair.

I once found a mouse that had died inside someone's PC and basically melted and fused to the CPU heatsink.
 
JesseCuster said:
It was also fun to see the state of some of the computers that were returned for repair.

I once found a mouse that had died inside someone's PC and basically melted and fused to the CPU heatsink.
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At least you found the problem, the Engineer died!
 
Conversely: dear admins: there's a fine line between "security" and "dumb covering your ass at the user's expense." Asking that I must have a 20 character password*, including two large prime numbers, characters from old elvish script or demonic runes, and the entrails of a sacrificial goat, has nothing to do with security. In fact, it's the polar opposite of security. About 99% of humans, when asked to remember something like that, will do one or more of the following:
- reuse the hell out of it, because <bleep> remembering three dozen of THOSE abominations
- make it something trivial like their name and birthday
- tape it onto the monitor

That's not enforcing security. It's just so some dumbass in the IT department can say "not my fault" when (not if) something happens.


* Not even hyperbole. I literally just got complained at by a machine because my password wasn't 20 characters long. Literally.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Conversely: dear admins: there's a fine line between "security" and "dumb covering your ass at the user's expense." Asking that I must have a 20 character password*, including two large prime numbers, characters from old elvish script or demonic runes, and the entrails of a sacrificial goat, has nothing to do with security. In fact, it's the polar opposite of security. About 99% of humans, when asked to remember something like that, will do one or more of the following:
- reuse the hell out of it, because <bleep> remembering three dozen of THOSE abominations
- make it something trivial like their name and birthday
- tape it onto the monitor

That's not enforcing security. It's just so some dumbass in the IT department can say "not my fault" when (not if) something happens.


* Not even hyperbole. I literally just got complained at by a machine because my password wasn't 20 characters long. Literally.
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"mypasswordismorethan20characterslong!"
 
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