I had changed into scrubs, booties and hair cover to go into an operating theatre and repair a printer. I didn’t want to have to come out and do all that again if someone had forgotten to charge the electric screwdriver, so I revved it a couple of times while standing in the charge room, which was fully visible from the hallway. A passer-by glanced my way at the noise, did a double take at what might have been a surgeon testing off-the-shelf power tools before starting a procedure, and walked into a trash can. 😁
people that use their recycle bin as storage. there have been multiple. once I was at their desk, looked at their trashcan next to their desk and asked if it would be smart to store stuff in there. they got the point after that.
or the new user I setup, went to lunch, came back and needed his password reset because he forgot it already.
Had a colleague who did this regularly, till I put his new pw on a postit, and that in his coat pocket. Worked as long as the weather stayed same… It escalated away, until he let his gf call me for his password, because he did not dare to anymore. We finally gave up and set his pw fixed to “123456”. He was really good at the job, only not with his pw.
Should have given him a USB with write protected password in text file. Tell him to keep it on his person
Ok, I’m at my computer and plugged in my USB. Now what do I do?
The “store things in the recycle bin” people are the victims of a Lotus Notes-ism. The Trash folder in Notes was (is?) excluded from storage quotas, so some people started storing anything they wanted to keep there. Those people told other people to do the same without explaining why and it took on a life of its own as a technological fairy tale.
Industrial but guess it counts.
Giant motor is supposed to kick on, run for a moment in reverse, wind down, and then go forward. What is happening instead is it kicks on then the whole system goes into stopped state. Two days on the phone and I can’t figure it out, pouring over the code, trying everything.
Suddenly the guy in the field coughs and says “sorry it’s really dusty here”.
It clicks in my head. I tell him to manually push down on the contactor. He says he feels resistance I tell him that’s good and push harder. It give in and I tell him to start again. Works perfectly.
The dust had combined with the internal oil of the contactor making a sludge. The contactor has two coils, a high torque high current one for starting and a low torque low current one to hold. Not much different than a starter in a car. The sludge has stopped the second coil from engaging keeping it locked in high current. Since it was DC the coil kept drawing more and more amps until the power supply couldn’t keep the voltage high enough. Which made the PLC halt. When the PLC halted it erased all the temporary bits including the one that said it was running. The PLC stopped telling the contactor to engage and the power went back to normal.
The sequence was maybe a tenth of a second.
Loved how you broke it down even though I didn’t understand much
Thanks. Here maybe this
This is a small contactor. When that blue center part goes in 1L1 becomes connected to the 2T1 and the same things happens to the other two. Basically I am using a little bit of electricity to flip a switch on or off. Turning on or off the motor.
The blue center part is what I asked him to push in by hand.
Me: Here’s the URL for the web service I’ve just deployed. I’ve set up users and permissions so just copy it into your browser and you should see a very similar system to what you’ve been trained on with all your data in there.
Customer: All I’m getting is a blank screen.
Much panicking and headscratching later…
Me: Waaaiiiiittt, did you press Return/Go after copying the URL?
Customer: That was not in the instructions.
Anytime you make something foolproof, the universe makes a better fool.
PEBKAC is the only universal truth…
PICNIC is the other universal truth
I know pebcak but not picnic.
Problem in chair not in computer :)
Years ago I worked for a healthcare IT company that had its developers, IT administrators, and help desk all reporting to the CTO. The CTO was an MD with a computer science degree from a prestigious university.
I was in a different department entirely but I was invited to a presentation he was giving and came to the conference room a bit early. I walked in to him in a full panic trying to connect his laptop to the projector. I plugged in the HMDI and hit Win + P and he reacted like I had just defused a bomb. Really made it hard to take seriously his five year strategic plan for all of our IT projects.
A year later he took extended leave to travel internationally and came back to work with a full perm and added the word “tree” to his last name. He lasted about 6 more weeks before he announced he was leaving. He is now the CIO of a large university.
They day of the presentation was probably their first day using Windows.
I wouldn’t be surprised!
My favorite stories almost all involve other coworkers helping out the old ladies who were employed by a dry cleaners. They ranged from simple things like wildly mispronunciations of equipment that they saw and just heard how to pronounce, to borderline unbelievable like the day a coworker spent >45 minutes helping a lady get her computer working only to find out that the store only had emergency lighting because there was some power issue.
Though, the CEO/owner of that company gave me a few too. My favorite was the day he walked into our office, looked at a shithead coworker’s empty chair, then said to my manager (at full volume while a couple of us were on calls) “Hey fuck face, where’s porn boy?”
Not me, but I recall a story from a while back. ISP tech answers call from an irate customer who isn’t able to get online. After basic troubleshooting, the tech advises the customer to power cycle the cable modem and router…the customer scoffs, how can I do that when my power is out? 😂
Apocryphal: user reports laptop frequently crashing. Tech is putting it through paces, can’t make it crash. Tech slides it over and asks user to show them what they do differently. User touches the laptop (before they can do anything with it) and it crashes. I was told about this, I didn’t see it happen.
hada user like this, we joked she was allergic to laptops. we could never replicate the issue until she touched it
Did she name her car “dick turpin”?
I firmly believe some people emit some sort of electromagnetic interference that we don’t have a reliable way to measure yet that makes technology buggy in their hands. My spouse is one such person. I’ve watched them from across the room do exactly the right steps and not have it work. Then hand it to me and it works instantly. There’s no logical reason for this. Their mere presence near by can make some things error it seems. It’s given me a lot more patience when people describe problems that should be impossible.
A college advisor gave me the nickname of Morris Virus. Computers would go haywire, even crash (at least one death), if I was near them (and sometimes when I was about to arrive). I got kicked out of the Computer Center dozens of times. I got in trouble in other places, like at the local ISP, and got banned from touching some computers.
Streetlights would turn off as I approached and come back on after I passed them. A friend used that to find me.
A great aunt and a brother would meet up from time to time to exchange watches since watches would run faster for one and slower for the other.
Of all the tech related professions IT people are by far the most supersticious. There is a reason we put bags of ramen on top of server racks and do other weird things when preforming high risk tasks.
I’ve heard that some laptops with magnetic closures register their lid as closed when someone with a magnetic wristwatch puts their hands near the keyboard!
Nonono it’s electromagic energy being emitted…source am in IT
Tru tho …
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
I guess not everybody’s that much into tennis :)
Tennis? I thought they were talking about the other sportsball, the one where old dudes hit a ball with sticks into a hole
I was on a call once where some guy initially wanted to like block channels or something. After like 2 minutes it turned into some crazy Trump-esque rant about basically nothing. Some of my favorite quotes:
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These people out here talking like they no what’s what. They don’t know shit. But big daddy… he knows.
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I see these fools running around here playing games. I don’t play games. I play real life.
I read that in the voice of Dwight Schrute
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One monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
That’s why most companies with fewer than say like a thousand people choose a username that’s almost always first letter of first name, last name and then a couple of numbers.
If you can’t remember your own name then there are bigger issues than whether you can sign into the computer.
“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”
“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Can you print green?”
“Green works fine!”
“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”
Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…
“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”
“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”
This was way back but had a basic support call for someone who couldn’t get their mouse to work.
After speaking with them for over ten minutes and just being generally confused I cut to the chase and asked, “Ma’am, what are you doing with your mouse right now?”
The answer? She was moving the mouse around on the monitor.
Before I was officially in tech support but I was the unofficial helper in my office. I don’t recall the exact issue this person was having on their desktop but I went over to help and said “have you tried restarting?” This person, a millennial, probably younger or the same age as me, then pressed the power button on the monitor to “restart”. I’m still reeling.
Years ago I was working in a sales / support call center. One day in between calls someone posed the question of if you had to sleep with someone of the same sex who would it be. Obvuois answers were things like George Clooney Brad Pitt etc. one of our team was extremely introverted so it was normal for him not to participate.
3 weeks later he pipes up, “I’ve given this a lot of thought and If I had to sleep with a man it would be Jesus Christ” 3 weeks later. Blows my mind he was in deep contemplation for so long. I still am taken a bit back.
The reason? “Jesus seems like he’d be a considerate lover with strong hands.” Beautiful.
He was a carpenter after all
IIRC, a more literal translation of his profession would have been ‘home builder,’ and since most homes in the area at the time would have been stone, he would have been a stonemason. Jesus would have been ripped.
