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

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I swear, if I had the power I would make it so that people can't raise incidents by sending us an email. Here's the latest:

HI Team,

I am having issue accessing ADF from my browser. It gets stuck.
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That's it. That's the whole thing. No error message. No clue what "ADF" might be. It gets stuck.
 
arthwollipot said:
*facepalm*

I just had a consult with one of our T1s - reasonably new but not that new. He said that his caller was having problems with his internet connection - Teams meetings kept dropping out.

So I asked, is this a problem with Teams then?

No, I don't think it's Teams, I think it's their internet connection.

Their internet connection, like, going to external internet sites in the browser?

No, their teams meeting.

That's not their internet connection, that's just their local LAN connection. We can't do Teams with external people over the internet.

I'm still not sure he understood. I've heard this from callers too. It's like "internet" starts at their ethernet port.
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The overall ignorance of people on how our modern telecommunications infrastructure works is astounding. I rather suspect most people wouldn't be able to articulate the basic way a telephone works: by using a microphone to convert voice to electrical signals, then converting those signals back to sound at the other end using a speaker. (Well, these days the electrical signals usually get changed to digital packets for a good chuck of their journey.)
 
Blue Mountain said:
Australian Defence Forces? :)
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That's the only ADF I know about.

Working here can be pretty fun, though. We just had a massive argument on Teams about the meaning of "next Saturday" - whether that means the 22nd or the 29th.

On the other hand, this morning I had a massive case of thinking it's Friday when it's actually only Thursday. I really hate it when that happens.
 
arthwollipot said:
*facepalm*

I just had a consult with one of our T1s - reasonably new but not that new. He said that his caller was having problems with his internet connection - Teams meetings kept dropping out.

So I asked, is this a problem with Teams then?

No, I don't think it's Teams, I think it's their internet connection.

Their internet connection, like, going to external internet sites in the browser?

No, their teams meeting.

That's not their internet connection, that's just their local LAN connection. We can't do Teams with external people over the internet.

I'm still not sure he understood. I've heard this from callers too. It's like "internet" starts at their ethernet port.
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That is actually far more common than you might expect. We IT folks know the difference between network cables, local intranet, public internet, etc. To many users, "internet" is not even the same concept as we know it at all. They view EVERYTHING that comes into their desktop via the blue cable (or wifi for sophisticated laptop users) as "internet". Their "internet" starts where the blue cable plugs in.
 
Norman Alexander said:
That is actually far more common than you might expect. We IT folks know the difference between network cables, local intranet, public internet, etc. To many users, "internet" is not even the same concept as we know it at all. They view EVERYTHING that comes into their desktop via the blue cable (or wifi for sophisticated laptop users) as "internet". Their "internet" starts where the blue cable plugs in.
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I think it's worse than that. Nine calls out of ten I get from my family start with "my Internet isn't working" but it's not that often that it's a connectivity issue. Most of the time it's some mundane PC issue but in common parlance "there's a problem with my PC" has been replaced by "my Internet isn't working" as a general purpose cry for help.
 
Just looking for the magic phrase that gets the attention they want without having to be involved in figuring it out. If they could wave at their computer and grunt and call that a ticket, they would.
 
malbui said:
I think it's worse than that. Nine calls out of ten I get from my family start with "my Internet isn't working" but it's not that often that it's a connectivity issue. Most of the time it's some mundane PC issue but in common parlance "there's a problem with my PC" has been replaced by "my Internet isn't working" as a general purpose cry for help.
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"Is it a virus?"
 
arthwollipot said:
"Is it a virus?"
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To be fair, when it’s my father in law it’s always “I think my computer is running out of memory”.


Voiceover: his machine has 16 gigs of RAM and a 1 Tera hard drive. Neither memory nor storage is ever an issue.
 
Sister: Oh my god. She has over three hundred tabs open!
Mom: What's a tab?

Also:

Mom: My password isn't working.
Me: [consults her list of passwords] You're trying to use your Apple ID to get into Amazon is why.
Mom: But I thought Disney bought Google?

Also:

Mom: Something's wrong with my phone, it keeps making a beeping noise even when I turn it off.
Me: That's not your phone, it's your carbon monoxide detector low battery alert.
Mom: Alexa! Turn off carbon monoxide!
Alexa: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Mom: ALEXA! TURN OFF--
 
Norman Alexander said:
That is actually far more common than you might expect. We IT folks know the difference between network cables, local intranet, public internet, etc. To many users, "internet" is not even the same concept as we know it at all. They view EVERYTHING that comes into their desktop via the blue cable (or wifi for sophisticated laptop users) as "internet". Their "internet" starts where the blue cable plugs in.
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Apologies if I've posted this before, but my all time favourite is the employee who was having trouble connecting to my application. (Hence passed up the tree to me.)

Further conversation revealed that he was unable to log on to the desktop computer at all.

Since I couldn't see that computer ID on the network, I asked him to double check the 'blue cable' and wriggle the plugs at the computer and where it plugs into the wall...

"Uhm, there isn't a blue cable..."

It turned out that he'd found an old computer in a cupboard, plonked it onto a spare desk, and connected up the power cords. Pretty good initiative, but stuck from there.

Unfortunately, at that point I had to refer him back to his local IT support because:

1) There was no way for me to get him an ethernet cable.

2) There was no ethernet port in the room with the desk.

3) The PC would not be allowed to connect to the network

(There is an automatic policy that bans PCs from connecting to the network if they haven't connected for a period of time and I didn't have access to the tool that adds PCs to that list, or the ability to re-build the PC's OS and software to put it into a condition where we'd allow it back onto the network list.)

Noting that the user didn't realise that a desktop computer needed a network cable, imagine how difficult it was for me to explain the above.

In hindsight, I don't blame the help desk for passing the caller to me, because the user had called in with:

"I'm having trouble connecting to [Application Name]"

And they had checked to ensure that he was a member of an appropriate AD group, and had an active account on my system.

From the user's point of view, that was his problem, because he was in goal mode, i.e. "I need another computer that can access [Application] and it would be very handy if it was in this room."

:D
 
We sometimes get people calling us and asking us to reimage their computer.

How about you tell us what's wrong, and let us decide whether a full reimage is warranted?

Of course, this doesn't apply to developers who have a genuine need to occasionally just wipe clean and start over. This is ordinary users who have heard that we sometimes reimage computers to fix problems, therefore they have a problem and they immediately jump to reimaging, even for trivial issues.
 
arthwollipot said:
We sometimes get people calling us and asking us to reimage their computer.

How about you tell us what's wrong, and let us decide whether a full reimage is warranted?

Of course, this doesn't apply to developers who have a genuine need to occasionally just wipe clean and start over. This is ordinary users who have heard that we sometimes reimage computers to fix problems, therefore they have a problem and they immediately jump to reimaging, even for trivial issues.
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Tell them that if reimaging fixed everything then we would have done it to management years ago.
 
Microsoft.

Explain it to my like I'm 5 what possible purpose in this or any other possible universe it serves to not be able to copy-paste out of the "Subject" like in Office 2013?

Why is copy/pasting getting so hit and miss across the industry anyway?
 
JoeMorgue said:
Microsoft.

Explain it to my like I'm 5 what possible purpose in this or any other possible universe it serves to not be able to copy-paste out of the "Subject" like in Office 2013?

Why is copy/pasting getting so hit and miss across the industry anyway?
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I can copy and paste out of and into the subject line in Outlook? :confused:
 
//Addendum// I'm in the built in Windows 10 Mail App, not Outlook.

I can highlight the Subject line of an e-mail, which is how we get our tickets with the tickets numbers attached, so I can copy paste it into our ticketing system to look up the ticket I've been assigned to work. It's very annoying.
 
I"m still waiting for the print multiple copies of a page in miniature to function without entering 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 as was promised in 1999.
 
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