Client: “The video doesn’t work, and my presentation is in five minutes!”
Me: “Okay, no problem. We will get to the bottom of this. What exactly is happening?”
Client: “I double-click the video file, and all I get is a black screen! No picture and no sound.”
Me: “Did you press ‘play’?”
Client: “Oh, there it goes. Thanks!”
I get an email from the CEO of one of our client companies.
CEO: “I’m receiving a popup which I find unprofessional and annoying.”
Said popup is a notification from our RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) system prompting the user to reboot their PC to complete the installation of patches we push out on a scheduled basis.
I respond letting her know what it’s about.
Me: “I will change the frequency so this only happens once a month, but you’ll need to reboot your PC so it can complete the update installation and get rid of the popup.”
One week later, she sends another email with a picture of the notification.
CEO: “This popup is unprofessional and annoying!”
Me: “You need to restart your PC for the installation of updates to complete and for the notification to disappear.”
Ten minutes later, she responds.
CEO: “I’ve rebooted, but the notification is still present.”
I logged in to our RMM and checked her PC’s uptime. It was at ninety-nine days and four hours, and it was still going. I decided to call her out on her BS; I took a screenshot of the uptime and attached it to my email response, letting her know her PC was never restarted.
I haven’t heard back from her since.
I used to teach a basic computer course for adults. When I was teaching them how to use email, I had them all set up accounts and partner up with the person sitting next to them to practice sending each other emails.
Me: “Type in your neighbor’s address and send them a test email.”
One woman gets very upset.
Woman: “Mine is broken!”
I look at her screen and see the problem straight away.
Me: “Ma’am, you’re typing in your neighbor’s home address instead of the email address.”
Woman: “Yes, her address, like you said.”
Me: “You need to type in her email address — the electronic mail address — not the physical home address.”
Woman: “You’re not making sense! An address is an address! This message will go to the post office, and they’ll post the message to my neighbor!”
Me: “That’s not what email is, ma’am.”
Woman: “Can I get a better teacher?”
Related:
Email Fail, Part 39
Email Fail, Part 38
Email Fail, Part 37
Email Fail, Part 36
Email Fail, Part 35
I receive a call from a user.
User: “My laptop isn’t working.”
Me: “Can you elaborate for me?”
User: “It just keeps going to a white screen every time I restart instead of to the login screen.”
Oh, no. I know exactly what’s happened, and it’s the first time this has happened at this job.
I go to the user’s location and take a look at their laptop. Sure enough, the laptop is sitting at the boot menu. The solid-state drive isn’t listed as a boot device, only a PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) boot. Well, no big deal; all of our users are set up to have shortcuts to shared folders over the network and are instructed that anything important should be saved there.
I inform [User] that the machine should be under warranty and that I’ll just go retrieve a new one for them. Before I go on my way to get a replacement baselined for them, they seem to start panicking.
User: “So, you’re saying all the data on the drive is gone?”
Me: “Yes, it seems like the solid state failed. This is not a common issue at all, but all of your documents saved to the shared folders are on a server, so you shouldn’t have lost anything.”
User: “…”
Me: “You were saving your work to your shared folders, weren’t you?”
User: “No, I wasn’t. It was taking forever to transfer documents onto it, so I just saved them to a folder on my desktop.”
Me: “That’s weird; it shouldn’t take that long to transfer documents onto the server. And you know that the IT disclosure form you filled out when you were hired said to save your work into the shared folders.”
User: “Well, it was taking forever because I was working from home over Wi-Fi! This is a huge problem! I just lost four months’ worth of work!”
Me: *Internally facepalming* “So, you were working from home for a while and didn’t think to save all your work upon getting back?”
User: “I got really busy and didn’t think about it! This is completely unacceptable. I have so much work to catch up on! Can’t you do anything?”
Me: “Like I said before, no. This is why those shared folders are set up. Sorry.”
At this point, I couldn’t tell if they were ready to blow a fuse or completely break down, and I didn’t care to stick around and find out.
I got back to the office and got their new machine ready to go for them pronto, and I finished setting up a service request on the old machine. I then made sure to send out a PSA to every user reminding them to back up any documents they have if they haven’t done so already. Then, I told my boss that we should start sending out similar PSAs every month to drill it into our users’ heads.
When I got back to [User], they accepted defeat and begrudgingly took the replacement laptop from me. I felt bad for them, gave them my condolences, and went on my way.
Please use your shared folders. It will save you heartbreak and it will save us headaches.
I work in maintenance at a very nice community college. My job includes installing and removing keyboard trays, assembling desks, hanging photos in offices, etc.
I’m headed down a hallway to a teacher’s office when one of the IT guys comes out of the office I’m headed to, shaking his head.
Me: “What’s up, [Coworker]?”
Coworker: “[Teacher] called down to IT complaining that her computer was making a strange noise every time she tried to save something, so she had to shut it down to prevent any damage to it.”
Me: “What was it doing?”
Coworker: “She showed me! She would get a document ready to save, but when she clicked on ‘Save’, her hard drive would activate, making that humming, clattering noise that hard drives make, so she would freak out and force a cold boot — hold the power switch until the computer shuts off. That, of course, made her lose the document and have to wait for her machine to boot up again.”
I was incredulous, my mouth agape.
Me: “So, what did you tell her?”
Coworker: “To stop doing that!”
He turns away, shaking his head again.
Coworker: “These people are teaching our kids — at college!”
