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

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Norman Alexander said:
Awards that apply nationwide, across industry sectors, not just per company. Also medical insurance that is divorced from employment. But that's another conversation...

We had a Canadian stay with us while she started her first job here in Australia. She had not heard of this either, which sort of surprised me. She was very surprised to be paid extra for working weekends and public holidays.
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While I was working for <> I had issues while working in USAia with locals, as I fully expected to be paid for all the hours worked, at the appropriate rates. I pointed out that as I was employed in a civilised country and that if they refused to sign off on the hours I'd be taking the matter further.
 
arthwollipot said:
When we go off-queue, we have a code that we set ourselves to so that the system reports it accurately. On our old system this was called "Lunch". Now it's called "Meal".

Which means that when I post into the chat "It's mealtime!", it sounds so dystopian.
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:D You remind me of something from a recent munch (pun unintended) that's probably not suited for this forum.....

:D
 
JoeMorgue said:
When first hired on with the company they used a payroll company who's app only had "Clock In" and "Clock Out."

Last year we migrated to a new payroll company and THEIR app has "Clock In Day", "Clock In Lunch", "Clock Out Day" and "Clock Out Lunch."

Now quick with no training to you Clock Out Lunch to go to lunch or Clock In Lunch to go to lunch?
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If lunch is unpaid, i.e. no statutory paid mealbreaks, I'd assume COL when going "off-duty" and CIL when returning.
Bit I'm told that I've frequently too logical.
 
novaphile said:
I'm reminded of a very strange one...

A report that has worked flawlessly since forever.

Written in SAS.

Suddenly stopped working, and of course the organisation didn't have anyone who knew SAS anymore.

Somehow they found me, I have no idea how, maybe they asked everyone in the organisation with an IT role.

It had been about 10 years since I'd worked with SAS but agreed to look over the output from the mainframe, and found hundreds of errors, all starting with the first time the code tried to load an input file.

So I asked the 'user' if he could open that folder and give me a copy of the file, thinking that a previous step may have produced a malformed file.

User says: "Oh it's not in that folder anymore, I didn't like having it there, so I'm keeping it in a new place now."
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Back in Ye Old Days I was a software developer on Windows NT 5.0 (yep, that one). Then it was renamed 'Windows 2000' and someone decided to rename all the input directories from NT5 to W2K. Without modifying the 8,500 line build script.......

Of course the idiot decided to rearrange a bunch of other directories at the same time, so F&R wasn't enough.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I'm not bothered by people simply not knowing things, it's when someone demonstrates zero interest and no attempts to figure it out that bugs me. People who use the same application day in, day out for years and have never even clicked on all the menu options at the top to see what's there. People who just say "it's broken again" without watching how you fix it to learn from it. People who never think to just fricking Google the problem in case there's an easy solution.

In my view, "being a technical person" isn't about what you know, it's about having the drive to find out.
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I've said it multiple times in this and similar thread.

99% of the grief for IT People isn't that their user base doesn't "know computers." It's that they have put "I don't know computers" on their character sheets. It's not that they don't know computers. It's that in their heads they just aren't the kind of person who knows computers.

To them "a computer person" is just something you are, not skills you have or don't have.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I've said it multiple times in this and similar thread.

99% of the grief for IT People isn't that their user base doesn't "know computers." It's that they have put "I don't know computers" on their character sheets. It's not that they don't know computers. It's that in their heads they just aren't the kind of person who knows computers.

To them "a computer person" is just something you are, not skills you have or don't have.
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I've had this from people. I generally inform them that this effectively makes them unemployable in the current world and mention that it'll be taken into consideration.
 
Dear User: if I send you an email saying "Okay, so this is how we'll proceed. Sound okay?" and then five bullet points, the fourth one is always something I want but you don't. And you'll agree to it because you only read the first two and last bullet points, and respond with "Sounds good!". Now I can do as I think should be done, and if you ever raise an objection I've got it in writing that you agreed to it.
 
catsmate said:
I've had this from people. I generally inform them that this effectively makes them unemployable in the current world and mention that it'll be taken into consideration.
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Yeah that's fine in a tech field. I'm in the medical field where "45-60 year old woman who loudly declares they don't know anything about computers more often then they take a breath yet has a job that is 100% done entirely on a computer" is 90% of my user base.

I'm not allowed to fire my users.
 
I'm trying to install a simple piece of software, a common, COTS program from a well known major supplier of scanners, that's already installed on multiple computers throughout our organization and is on the approved software list.

3 separate security programs have blocked it. I've had to get each one unblock manually.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Yeah that's fine in a tech field. I'm in the medical field where "45-60 year old woman who loudly declares they don't know anything about computers more often then they take a breath yet has a job that is 100% done entirely on a computer" is 90% of my user base.

I'm not allowed to fire my users.
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I did think by the time I was this age all the kids would be a gee-whizz on these new darn computer things and it would be me that would be struggling to cope with the latest stuff*. Sadly it's turned out that nope that's not the case. Kids today (you know under 30!) can use their phones OK, they can use (to a certain extent) some apps, they can use a mouse and keyboard but they are as clueless as my elders were when it comes to understanding what they are using and why they do certain things. I now know it was never because my elders were old, it was they had no interest in learning something new.

Apple has become a huge company by marketing to this group! :D


*Just a note refusing to learn how Twitter & Facebook UI works is a totally deliberate and conscious decision. The hours it has saved me from being the go-to for Facebook would have got me to the moon and back by now - I simply smile and say "No idea never use it". Since I'm the go to for anything that even is vaguely "computer stuff" in my peer group it really flummoxes them but I've realised one thing - they don't think I have to "learn" this stuff it's as if they think I'm somehow evolved to be able to use any piece of computerised equipment ever designed and created.
 
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We are starting to see more and more users, younger Docs especially, who are way more picky about their computers than we've dealt with in the past. Our higher ups and drafted up and Bring Your Own Device policy right now.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Dear User: if I send you an email saying "Okay, so this is how we'll proceed. Sound okay?" and then five bullet points, the fourth one is always something I want but you don't. And you'll agree to it because you only read the first two and last bullet points, and respond with "Sounds good!". Now I can do as I think should be done, and if you ever raise an objection I've got it in writing that you agreed to it.
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Why are you telling them that?
 
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