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

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JoeMorgue said:
Possibly. It's a specialized little thermal printer for printing medical labels so it might get plugged/unplugged throughout the day. I'll have to ask.

It's locally installed but shared out in AD with the local machine acting as the print server as the specialized medical software is also hosted on virtual machines on the server.
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Crap, we had the same issue at my previous job at a medical group. whatever platform they were using to label and catalog the specimens simply refused to work with a network printer. Everything had to be local.
 
Donal said:
Crap, we had the same issue at my previous job at a medical group. whatever platform they were using to label and catalog the specimens simply refused to work with a network printer. Everything had to be local.
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The medical field does "New software / old hardware" a lot.
 
JoeMorgue said:
No her session actually active as a remote desktop session on remote server for...reasons too complicated to get into here so I'd have to make her a domain admin and that group is a locked down above my paygrade.

I'll probably have to escalate to the Network Team but I hate doing that.
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Don't hesitate - escalate!

TragicMonkey said:
Also I heard that one time somebody lost an amputated leg that was going to the lab. That's not a sample you can just retake from the patient. Huge fuss, both because they couldn't find out what was medically wrong with the leg, and also because it could have popped up anywhere in the hospital (bad) or somewhere outside the hospital (much, much worse). That's the kind of thing that really ends up in the news, and it's not a good look, hospitals hacking off legs then losing them! Lady who told me this story said it never turned up, and it's been eight or nine years.
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I heard a story about a hospital actually losing a whole live person recently. And she had a broken hip, so she couldn't go very far on her own.
 
arthwollipot said:
Don't hesitate - escalate!

I heard a story about a hospital actually losing a whole live person recently. And she had a broken hip, so she couldn't go very far on her own.
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That reminds me last time I had to stay in a hospital about 5 years ago - there was an amusing incident which was IT related. Had the nurses coming around doing a head count, then a sister doing the same, then them coming around checking everyone's name bands with printed lists, then who I think was the bed manger appeared and they sorted it out.

They apparently thought they had another patient because of the number of names on a printout, it seemed that each bed should have two lines on this report, but if at the bottom of the page both lines couldn't fit on the software would print the first line on the first sheet and then repeat that record with both lines on the next page. So if you didn't know this and just counted the "first lines" you'd think there was an additional patient.
 
arthwollipot said:
Don't hesitate - escalate!

I heard a story about a hospital actually losing a whole live person recently. And she had a broken hip, so she couldn't go very far on her own.
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I felt like I had been lost one time when I spent an hour strapped to a backboard on a gurney and stuck in the bandage storage room of the ER at a nearby county hospital, but they finally turned up and got me out. That's a different story though, and not IT related.

:mad:
 
I swear, many of our callers have absolutely no idea how many times per day we hear the phrase "this is very urgent, I can't do my work."

I guess I should feel privileged that I just spoke to the most important person in the department.
 
There needs to be a "Customer Service Language Approved" way to tell someone you understand they can't do their job, but other people with more important jobs still come first.
 
quadraginta said:
My s-in-law, who has been using computers for decades on a regular basis was puzzled when she consulted me about a problem and I asked her if she had tried re-booting her computer.

She claimed to have no knowledge of the term "re-boot".

I explained it to her and walked her through the process (over the phone, no small task in itself) of right-clicking the Start button, then clicking "Shut down or restart" and then selecting "Restart".

She was stunned to discover that it fixed her problem and even more surprised when I told her that it was an age-old first step in problem solving computer glitches.

She said that next time she'd try that, but I have my doubts.

**************************************************

Now if only I had someone who could help me figure out why YouTube TV on Chrome is so screwy about connecting to my Chromecast device. Sometimes it works fine, others require all sorts of starts, stops, re-boots, incantations, and prayers to deities I don't want to believe in.

I have been unable to discover any pattern of things which works reliably. All I know is if I try enough different things enough different times in enough varying orders then sooner or later I can get it to work. Fortunately it doesn't happen all that often, and when it does I can usually get it straightened out after the first few attempts.

<snip>
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I wanted to revisit this because it turns out to be an excellent example of A) not assuming stuff, and B) It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it. In fact, sometimes that can contribute to the problem.

In the course of this go-round of trying to get my desktop Chrome browser to play nice with the Chromecast widget, which I have been using for a couple of years now to watch YouTube TV, generally smoothly and with success, but occasionally not so much, I tried all the things I had tried before, some of which had worked. At different times and in different combinations.

I got to the point where I had disconnected and rebooted everything from the router to the Chromecast to the TV to restarting the Chrome browser (a frequent winner in the past) to turning the computer wifi off and back on (which has worked occasionally) to rebooting the computer (which has also worked occasionally) to ... and this is a weird one but one that has worked in the past ... using my smart phone's YouTube TV app to connect to the Chromecast (which, oddly enough, always works) and then seeing if the computer's YouTube TV tab on Chrome was showing the connection being used, at which point I could often get it to switch over to the Chrome tab on the computer.

Another one was opening a link from the YouTube TV tab in another tab, and trying to connect from that. It would work on occasion.

Most of the time I could get the connection back to working with one or another of these efforts, sometimes with several in concert, but this last time (about the time I wrote the above post) I couldn't manage to fix it no matter what I tried or how often I tried it.

Finally I dredged up a dim memory. Something I vaguely recalled having tried before. I closed the YouTube TV tab completely, not relying on having closed Chrome or re-booting the computer to do the job for me, and then opened another one from scratch, logging on again from their website.

Duh.

It's worked just fine ever since.

(I'm sure it won't last, but I'll be ready to try this again ... and first ... next time it goes wacky.)

Moral of story, be very sure that you have actually unplugged and re-booted everything.

I felt like such an idiot. I'll be (at least a little bit) less inclined to smirk about other users computer travails in the future. For a while, anyhow.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
There needs to be a "Customer Service Language Approved" way to tell someone you understand they can't do their job, but other people with more important jobs still come first.
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That's why I'm so pleased with my current position: all requests come in via my boss, who can do the tactful stuff for me. "Hi, boss, which should I be working on: the thing worth two million bucks into revenue if it gets done before the deadline, or the thing this scatterbrained moron is idly curious about that she dreamt up while on the toilet in the loser ward?" My boss translates that into something tactful and customer service like. Although most of it was fairly reasonably expressed to begin with.
 
JoeMorgue said:
There needs to be a "Customer Service Language Approved" way to tell someone you understand they can't do their job, but other people with more important jobs still come first.
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From Spike Milligan's weighty tome "Rommel? Gunner Who?":
March 22

The morning of March the 22nd dawned. The rain had stopped. Sol ascended. We strung our damp gear on a makeshift clothes line.

“Milligan! pack your kit, you’re going up the line,” said BQMS Courtney.

“But me kit’s soaking wet!”

“Stop the war, Mr Milligan’s kit is wet.”
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quadraginta said:
I wanted to revisit this because it turns out to be an excellent example of A) not assuming stuff, and B) It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it. In fact, sometimes that can contribute to the problem.

In the course of this go-round of trying to get my desktop Chrome browser to play nice with the Chromecast widget, which I have been using for a couple of years now to watch YouTube TV, generally smoothly and with success, but occasionally not so much, I tried all the things I had tried before, some of which had worked. At different times and in different combinations.

I got to the point where I had disconnected and rebooted everything from the router to the Chromecast to the TV to restarting the Chrome browser (a frequent winner in the past) to turning the computer wifi off and back on (which has worked occasionally) to rebooting the computer (which has also worked occasionally) to ... and this is a weird one but one that has worked in the past ... using my smart phone's YouTube TV app to connect to the Chromecast (which, oddly enough, always works) and then seeing if the computer's YouTube TV tab on Chrome was showing the connection being used, at which point I could often get it to switch over to the Chrome tab on the computer.

Another one was opening a link from the YouTube TV tab in another tab, and trying to connect from that. It would work on occasion.

Most of the time I could get the connection back to working with one or another of these efforts, sometimes with several in concert, but this last time (about the time I wrote the above post) I couldn't manage to fix it no matter what I tried or how often I tried it.

Finally I dredged up a dim memory. Something I vaguely recalled having tried before. I closed the YouTube TV tab completely, not relying on having closed Chrome or re-booting the computer to do the job for me, and then opened another one from scratch, logging on again from their website.

Duh.

It's worked just fine ever since.

(I'm sure it won't last, but I'll be ready to try this again ... and first ... next time it goes wacky.)

Moral of story, be very sure that you have actually unplugged and re-booted everything.

I felt like such an idiot. I'll be (at least a little bit) less inclined to smirk about other users computer travails in the future. For a while, anyhow.
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When people complain that computers are all too complicated when we tell them to do what is slightly more than simply actions to fix a problem, they probably don't realise that some selfless nerd has deprived themselves of vitamin D for days or even weeks trying all sorts of remedies for exactly this problem, and possibly scrapping with various disparate vendors, in order to arrive at this most succinct solution so far.

Then someone will release the next version of something and the fight will start again...
 
Wudang said:
Probably been posted here before by someone but:
Why do programmers like cooking?
When you peel a carrot you don't suddenly discover your peeler is 3 versions out of date and support for carrots was dropped 2 versions ago.
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You're supposed to peel carrots?

Huh. I just scrub 'em real good and then cut 'em up.

Learn something new every day.
 
quadraginta said:
You're supposed to peel carrots?

Huh. I just scrub 'em real good and then cut 'em up.

Learn something new every day.
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Yeah, it's in the custom install options. This is a 3rd party vendor option, opinion is divided.
Carrot-sharpener.jpg
 
TragicMonkey said:
My favorite is when someone goes ahead and buys new hardware without checking to see if it's compatible with current software.
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That was a huge problem where I was. For some odd reason, doctors automatically had admin rights. Salespeople from medtech companies came in and convinced to try whatever new device or application and we were somehow responsible for supporting it.
 
I provide tech support mainly through email for a product that I develop. Here is the all too common scenario:

- User reports a problem.

I ask three simple questions, the answers to which will almost certainly identify the cause.

- Two days later, user answers question one only.

I repeat questions two and three.

- One week later, user answers question two only.

I repeat question three.

- User is never heard from again.
 
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