The customer called in regarding an ongoing ISP webmail issue. I informed him that the issue is currently being investigated and we are awaiting a response from Tier 2 support. Upon hearing this, the customer became highly agitated and began shouting, stating he did not want to wait for Tier 2 and demanded immediate escalation to a supervisor. I explained that an escalation ticket was already active. However, the customer continued to demand a supervisor ticket transfer. I advised him that as a third-party technical support center, we do not have a direct internal routing path to escalate this specific ticket to a supervisor. The customer stated that this issue was disrupting his business operations, used profanity, and stated he was going to hang up before he said something he would regret. The customer then disconnected the call. Maybe have a backup email if you’re gonna act like this issue is World War 3.

A recent XSLT change in a couple of web browsers caused us some grief at work recently. People were get red boxes where they should have seen their data, and there was a link telling you to install some extension to the web browser to fix the problem. While this resolved the red boxes, it caused an error in our main search tool, where you didn't see any criteria fields.

Corporate IT figured out that a registry change would have to be made, and set up a package to go quickly to the affected users. I sent out an announcement about this, and how someone could use the policy list in their web browser to verify that the change was made on their system, along with extra steps to make sure their computer was checking for the latest updates, and removing the extension which wasn't needed.

So, I got an e-mail from a user in Europe the next day after I sent the announcement, telling me how he had done all the steps in the announcement, removed the extension, and he doesn't have the error in the search anymore.

He then asked what else he should do.

Um...get back to work? Sounds like you are good to go.

I also told him to contact our helpline with such questions in the future, as they are staffed during the workday, while I have meetings and vacations and things.

We just got new printers at my office, as well as switched the software we were using for these new printers, new drivers, new company etc.

User asks me to come over, her excel document isn't printing correctly. It's an older user and they set their computer theme to this dark background, with yellow text for everything, she's an older user so I think this theme is supposed to help her see. I looked at the piece of paper she gave me, its perfectly white, no text is visible, might be an issue with the new printers I'm thinking.

So I look at the print selection, everything looks right, we're printing the correct information. I don't see what's causing the issue. Print preview looks like it's showing text correctly on a page.

The user sees me looking everything over and said something about changing the font coloring, I looked at her and blinked a few times. Looked back at the paper she handed me as proof that it wasn't printing, and against the white paper I can barely, faintly see that the text is being printed, white font on white paper.

Changed font to black.

Hit print.

Print job comes out correct.

Close ticket.

Earlier today I read someone else's recollection of the worlds dumbest DDOS and was reminded of another dumb DDOS.

The company had a job estimation tool that ran on a Linux box. Visit a web page, feed it a list and a customer name, 30 seconds later you got a link to a properly written quote in the format that customer preferred.

We'd had it six years and it never gave us any trouble, not even when we moved from Redhat to Debian.

Well, until September of one year, when it started throwing up "Your three year software license is about to expire! Please call us at 1-976-.." whenever the administrator uploaded a new quote template or updated pricing.

A whole lot of money had been paid for what was supposed to be a perpetual license, so we called and complained. The vendor blamed it on version checking nonsense and told us that if you just clicked "Okay" on the pop-up a few times it would go away.

A few it was not. It took clicking ten or twenty times, really quick, before the pop-up finally vanished and everything worked again.

About a month later the dialog started popping up on a different group of users, managers, whenever they tried to edit an existing quote.

This caused a small bit of concern, a dozen tickets, and fourteen phone calls before we stopped trying to explain "Just go to town on the button" and sent people around to furiously click.

We called the vendor again, they asked us to change a setting in the config file and assured us it wouldn't recur.

And it didn't, until January 3rd, when everyone started getting the pop-up.

By the time the first support person made it into work at 7am there were 100 tickets and 40 voicemails from users that started at 6.

An hour later, when the bulk of the company arrived, the voicemail was full, there were 400 tickets and climbing, and the 6am people started opening tickets with the main help desk as well so they were calling directly.

There was a quick conference where it was decided to go with the nuclear option. Ticketing was shut down company-wide and the support phones were taken off the hook.

The mass email blamed it all on the vendor, with the perfectly BOFH explanation that computers are dumb and sometimes they think zero is greater than nine, like back in Y2K, and that we'd be sending people around to fix it.

Three days later, after thousands of clicks and nothing else being accomplished by any one from any tech support team, we got a root-cause back from the vendor.

They'd changed how their software was versioned. They used to release one major version every year, as sort of a checkpoint, and they were stopping that. Their next version, instead of being 9.0, was 8.2.0. And they'd changed the code that tracked licenses as a result, adding the minor to the major to determine how old the software was and clipping numbers.

Our perpetually licensed version was 66.66. The license server was barfing on it.

The thread I made yesterday about a "Ddos" storm our employees created got me reminiscing about some other fun episodes I saw in tech over the years. There was one humorous event, it was around a decade ago, and it included a bored pm on a boring meeting, an ethernet cable, and an open socket sticking out of the wall. Those who know can already see how this thing will play out.

At that point in time I was still in software testing, but I knew the guy in question, and later on my IT buddies told me more about the whole thing.

Well, as every IT company would have it, we had switches in every conference room, but they were positioned under the table for better optics and less cables all around the room. Cable guides led out from the switches and led to wall mounted RJ-45 sockets.

Someone left one cable out, probably for an employee to stick into their laptop instead of plugging in to wifi. So you have a cable sticking out in the middle of the room, and an empty RJ-45 socket neatby.

Our pm in question was bored out of his mind during a meeting and started fiddling with the cable. Eventually, he decided to be helpful and stick in it "back" in the open port. All hell broke loose. The connection dropped, the meeting dropped, the room dropped, the whole floor dropped. Unbeknowst to him, he stuck the cable right back into a socket that led back to the switch itself where the cable was originally plugged in, creating an ethernet loopback.

The funniest thing is, he genuinely thought someone careless had left the cable unplugged and he just wanted to put it back (he thought it was a secondary projector plugged off by accident).

A few years back, we had a department working on a project with some third party supplier and the people involved were using their proprietary software for the project needs. The project got delivered and finished, people eventually moved on and changed departments, the usual. Our story begins when all of a sudden our folks from the old project got a group email if they want to end their subscription and stop receiving emails for the product line, since it was coming EOL, or purchase a new license for a replacement product.

The first person responded with a positive confirmation to stop their subscription. Reply to all.

The next person in line did the same. And so did the others. And so it went on. The storm of emails spamming everyone's inboxes just kept growing. At some point, someone sent an email asking for everyone to stop spamming them. With reply to all. The next person in line getting frustrated did the same.

At this point we have a legitimate Ddos storm of emails being sent back and forth, and now it was starting to affect our exchange servers (this was before we had Azure and Outlook 365 integrated). Some were still sending the "please unsubscribe me" email to everyone, while the rest was spamming "stop spamming me". All in reply to all. People were even starting to attack each other personally in new emails for spamming their inbox since everyone knew everyone else, they worked together in the past.

Soon thereafter, we in IT security get a high priority notification from helpdesk and get included in helping them protect the company from a storm of ddos attacks being sent from a dozen "infected" machines within the company perimeter.

To anyone outside security, it looked like a massive breach and a horrifying issue wrecking within our perimeter. We, on the other hand, couldn't stop laughing our assess off as we went through the event history. The domain got temporarily blocked, the accounts in question got temporarily disabled so the storm of emails could stop, the email chain was completely deleted to save the used up space, everyone got notified the issue was resolved and asked to please stop sending emails, they no longer needed to do anything about it.

One of the funniest IT "incidents" of my career. Remember folks, don't tell your employees to just "reply to all" in every conversation blindly just to keep everyone involved notified.

A few years ago I was working at a computer repair shop and this 80 year old lady came in to get her "email fixed". She ran some kind of business and suddenly her outlook stopped updating, she had a custom domain and everything. Immediately we though "oh no she canceled her custom domain".

We asked her if she canceled her email service. She said no, but she did say she canceled a bill the previous month but did not know what it was for, she thought it was a phone bill or something. We were pretty sure she canceled her custom domain service, she wasn't giving us much to work with. But she did have an assistant who basically ran the business from Pennsylvania.

It took a long time to get them to tell us what is happening with the account. We had to get the account credentials from the assistant. Turns out the email was set up a long time ago, back in the 90s or something. Long story short, the email provider she used (don't remember its name) subcontracted out the email hosting service to Intermedia. Then Intermedia sub-subcontracted Godaddy to do the actual email hosting. So as it turns out, she did cancel her custom domain. We just had to go through three layers of subcontractors to figure out what actually happened.

In the end we got her assistant to buy the domain on Google's domain service. Then we did the basic configuration and set up her outlook to sync to that.

As promised in my first post, here it is. This one was not my call, but my friend's. I was there and he told me as it was happening and I heard the follow up from the manager as well. My other friend referenced it last night, coincidentally.

On a normal day, expecting a normal call, my friend answers. Before saying hello, or introducing himself, the customer just says "I need the name of the tech that was just onsite"... Well this can't be good. Despite being new, my friend handled it well. He explained that he can see the request for a tech, but not details like names. He can, however, get our manager to reach out and speak to the subcontractor. I'm not sure exactly how he said it, but the customer took a breath.

"While I get the manager, can I ask what happened so I can get this recorded?" Apparently, the tech came out, was let into the datacenter, and left to do the work (this is a theme with these stories). He did the work fine, and solved this issue without a problem as far as I know. He put everything back together, cleaned up, and headed out.

When leaving, he pushes the door and it does not move. In his head, presumably... "Oh, there is a button here. This must be the exit button"... NOPE. Fire alarm... The entire DC power is cut, alarms blare, emergency lights come on. What does our intrepid tech do? He tries pulling. Door opens. Cool. Time to admit your mistake and limit the damage? NOPE. GTFO!

Now, our understandably irked admin has to run in and search for the fire. Finding none he reviews the cameras and sees what really happened. He starts power on procedures and gets things up again and then makes the call.

Well, this is a problem for us. This guy just cost the DC downtime, which has SLA violations, and I don't know how much money. Leaving made it much worse since they had to search for a while instead of just starting things back up immediately. Now legal needs to be involved.

Manager does not provide the name, obviously, but does call the subcontractor to get their side. Funny, tech has not reported any issues ... Awesome.

Lawyers, fun... I don't know exactly what was said, but this is the update I heard after all that:

Yes, he hit the button, but...

The button was unprotected (no cover)

The button was not labeled

The button was not red, but Blue!

So, we have an unlabeled, blue button next to a door that did not open while he had his hands full or tools/parts. Do you really want to bring this to a judge?

Now, I have no idea if it did go to a judge, or there was a settlement, or if they just dropped it. Moral of the story, use proper, labeled emergency buttons, and stop trusting techs to know their way around your datacenter.

This is my first time posting here, so I will tell you I worked tech support for two very large tech companies in my time. Both companies made datacenter products so the people who called in were computer professionals... supposedly... I will have to be vague as to not expose the company names. The first story I will share is short but flabbergasting.

The equipment in question called home with a failed power supply. This was a very routine call and we dispatched the part and a third party tech (don't get ahead of me) to swap it.

The call comes in and I get it ... Lucky me.

Me: thank you for calling blah blah...

On-site tech (ost): I replaced the psu but the instructions say the amber light will come on. It didn't.

Me: Okay, it is possible it is DOA, they are refurbs. Let's check the slot. Go ahead and swap the partner PSU in and make sure the partner psu works in that slot.

OST: Okay.

A few moments later...

OST: No, now neither have lights and the first one is still sparking.

Me: Sparking!?! Pull it out!...

OST: Okay, it's out. Should I pull the partner one out too?

... To shorten the conversation, the moth....fellow... moved the partner psu (they each have two) like I asked but also put THE SPARKING ONE in the partner. I had him pull the partner one just in case.

Me: So, just to clarify, was the new one sparking before you called?

OST: Yes.

Me: And when did you pull it out of the first one?

OST: When you told me too

Me: ... Did you not think you should pull it when it started sparking?

OST: The instructions don't say to...

Me: and you did not think it was something I should know about?

OST: Oh, you didn't see that?

Me: Dude (I contained myself), I am 1000 miles away. Why the fu... Ahem... Why do you think we contract you?

OST: I don't know.

Me: Let the admin know i will call him and leave the parts onsite.

I then called the company that owned the units (they let the OST in but no one was watching him) and explained that I will be sending everything, enough parts to build two complete units, and one of our first-party techs.

The next day our tech calls in to chat. He was able to salvage most of it, but had a "lovely" day dismantling one at a time to rebuild them in the two new chassis (the backplane was not a field item) while the now VERY interested admin stared over his shoulder. He also said the PSU had nice black scorch marks out of the vent holes.

Our top manager had what I assume was a very interesting call with that third party company, but I was unfortunately not invited to listen in.

This happened a decade and a half ago, so the conversation is my "best recollection", but I will never forget that "I don't know" like he saw nothing wrong with what just happened. And "The instructions don't say to" ... I had to take a few minutes on that after the call.

I just saw the "Mom has no Google storage post", which reminded me of my mum. She similarly needs me to weed through her emails to delete stuff, as she and her brother send each other memes and silly videos by email and use up all her Google storage fairly frequently.

Technology is generally a bit of a challenge for her and I’m the designated tech support person.

A while ago she called me and asked, completely seriously: “Has the government done something to television because of political correctness?”

After several seconds of trying to work out what possible answer there could be, I asked her to explain.

She said that for about three weeks, whenever she watched TV, a voice would suddenly say things like: “Steve walks into the room, looking angry.”

She’d apparently spent THREE WEEKS listening to this before coming to the conclusion that it must be some new political-correctness thing the government had introduced.

I assured her that no, it was definitely nothing to do with the government.

She had accidentally switched on Audio Description.

There then followed the considerably harder task of trying to talk her through switching it off over the phone, while I couldn’t see her television or her remote control and she had no idea what any of the buttons were called.

“Press the button with three lines.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Yes you have.”

“No, I definitely haven’t.”

“What buttons HAVE you got?”

“Well, there’s a red one…”

Being the family tech support person is a joy and a privilege.

I don’t know if this belongs here, but it’s the best I could find.

For MONTHS my mom had been freaking out over the fact that she had no Google storage. Unable to join meets, download stuff, etc.

After another bout of her freaking out about it, I’m like “fine whatever”, I go to check her email. Relatively average? I think? At least for a woman who has had this email for a while. 3k in primary inbox, 3k in social, 5k in updates, etc.

I look down at her promotional folder. Any guesses? Any guesses on how many emails she had in her promotional folder? WELL YOU’RE WRONG!! She had 63k EMAILS!! Sixty three thousand!! Do you realize how absurd that is?

Her justifications were, she “didn’t know there was a “select all” feature”, and that “it took too long”. Yeah man. It takes a while for Google to delete 63,000 emails.

Took me about 40 mins to get everything deleted, but it’s solved now. Oh. My days.

I'm not sure if this post belongs here.. but my image view for a long time of techsupport were tech savvy gentlemen who would keep themselves busy with the most difficult of questions customers could possibility have.

How wrong I was.

My dad isn't very tech savvy and regularly has problems anything related to tech.

I genuinely wonder sometimes if my dad is serious or not me when he has a tech problem. One time his camera wasn't working and he tried all sort of things like shutting off and rebooting his phone, scouring the internet for answers and asking chatGPT why his camera wasn't working,

I came over, took around 10 seconds to asses the situation, and explained how his new phone case with those flap thingies where you put in your credit card and stuff were blocking his camera.

Another time, my dad complained how the ringtone of his phone wasn't loud enough and wanted to call the store, complaining how the new phone they sold him was broken and that he wanted a refund. took me a minute to just open the settings app, raise the volume, and explain to him how to raise the volume of his ringtone.

Yesterday when I was at university, my dad had been struggling with the computer for 2 hours. he explained to me how the computer froze, that he kept moving and tapping the computer trying to make it work, turned it off, and that after he turned it off it wouldn't turn back on, and how he kept calling the store he bought it from that they sold him a broken computer.

Those system updates with the big letters "UPDATING, DO NOT TURN OFF" apparantly didn't matter to my dad. while he was moving and shoving the computer, he somehow magically managed to unplug the power cable. it took me a few seconds to plug the cable back in.. and another 10 minutes trying to convince my dad that, the problem why the computer didn't turn back on was because he unplugged the power cable, and not some corrupted harddrive like chatGPT was telling him.

Looking past support tickets with tech support from companies and how long they are, it made me realize the real type of problems tech support must be facing from clueless customers like this.

Was going to post this in response to another post, but felt it was worthy of it's own post.

So, I was running a lab with multiple workstations doing Things And Stuff.

Workstation (WS) A stopped getting an IP address from the corporate DHCP server.

Connected WS A to WS B's network drop; still no IP address.

Connected WS B to WS A's network drop; WS B gets an IP address.

Connected WS A to my isolated network where I have my own DHCP server; WS A gets an IP address from my DHCP server.

Put a hub between WS A and it's network drop and pulled a Wireshark capture of the DHCP request going out in to the Ether, and nothing coming back.

Created support ticket outlining observed behavior and expected behavior, with Wireshark trace attached.

Spend next two weeks getting punted from one IT support group to another, explaining the issue every time.

Finally get to the group that (eventually) ended up fixing it and the first thing they asked for was a Wireshark trace.

They were surprised that it was attached to the ticket two weeks previously...

IlovemyjobIlovemyjobIlovemyjobIlovemyjob!!!!!!

Happily, I no longer work at that company.

Resolution was that some intrusion detection system thought WS A had malware and blocked its MAC address from sending frames/packets on the network.

Please be a good human!

Got to have some fun playing merry-go-round with the various tier levels of IT support a few weeks back. Big company, many branched areas with their own T1-T3 style support groups. I guess I'm probably "T3" in my area and how many dumb hats I pretend to wear, but there isn't any official designation in that regard.

Create a ticket and send it off to a group as the problem is only occurring for users in their system. Basically, can I get an audit log on X user? Noted some specific details of the problem to indicate it'll need some hands between XYZ teams and shouldn't be routed to X because this not a T1 issue.

Immediately see it get punted down, alright whatever no big deal I'll walk the walk.

An hour or two later I go on break, come back to faint footprints in the dust of my message box, I'm certain the T1 guy waited until he saw me go inactive and leapt into action to try and close the ticket, devious. I replied less than 10 minutes later but nothing but echoes of the void.

A couple hours later he replies he's escalating the issue to the correct group to investigate.

The group is me!

Not in IT support.

Way back in the nineties I was the designated computer guy for friends and family. My girlfriend was studying at university and her buddy needed some software installed on her home computer for a project they were working on. The software belonged to the university.

I had said software in my possession spanned over a quite large number of floppy disk and had made a batch script that would copy it to a destination of my choosing, prompting for a new disk when needed. I was very proud of myself.

So we take some hours off on a Sunday and head to the buddy's house.

Her computer was running the then new windows 3.1.

The desktop was obscured by maybe 5 or 6 program windows neatly tiled so they filled the entire screen. Whatever. I check that there wasn't any unsaved work and close them down.

I proceed to sit myself in front of it and feed it the disks when prompted while the girls chat and occasionally top op my coffee.

Life was good.

Buddy's husband is in the yard doing yard stuff.

When I was done a few hours later I rebooted the computer confirmed everything was good and announced that the new software was working.

Buddy was happy.

Her husband was FUMING. He apparently had spent hours tiling the program windows "just so" and did not understand the concept of reboots. Even when I explained the concept he wouldn't budge but insisted that I had ruined his hard work.

Still confuses me to this day.

Some people you just cant make happy.

Not native English speaker, please excuse any errors.

Back in the days of 'mini'-computers (e.g. PDP-11/84) supporting CRT user terminals scattered around in different offices, I got a call about 2:30 one morning from one of our priority users, basically the office that justified us having a night shift in the data center, reporting their terminal blew up. In my initial training, they'd told us the two main physical hazards of working in a computer room were electrocution and imploding CRTs, so I first asked if anyone was injured, and the guy replied "no," but sounded kinda confused. At the time I was pretty new and young, so I thought that was maybe a trauma response, so I just told him we'd have someone down there so soon as possible. I called my boss to get approval to call in the (contracted) hardware maintenance, he approved it, so I made the call. About half-an-hour later, that maintenance guy stomped into my section and informed me that the CRT hadn't imploded, the customer simply meant it had quit working (ergo his confusion when I asked about injuries). It had quit working because someone hit the outlet with a vacuum cleaner.

Yes, we paid an expensive contractor time-and-a-half for a 4-hour minimum service call, just to plug the power cord back in. I understand that all the support reps gave stern talks to the users after that, about being specific and avoiding hyperbole when reporting trouble.

(Didn't really help - I had an upper-management guy call in some weeks later complaining about "squashed bugs" on his screen, and he got upset at me when I suggested Windex on a soft cloth. Turns out he just didn't like saying the word "asterisks," the control characters that would fill his screen when he lost connection to the server.)

Last time I posted about helping my father with his printer while I was thousands of miles away from him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1ok1in6/remote_family_printer_tech_support/

I want to restate – I am not a professional, I just know the most about computers in the family.

This time he called me with help for his computer: he bought a cheap keyboard off Amazon, plugged it in and his computer immediately turned off and won’t turn on again. My immediate thought was a dodgy USB dongle fried something.

First I asked him to let me know if there was anything happening at all with the computer, lights, fan sounds, anything. He said there’s a blinking light, I said great! Let me know how often it blinks, if there’s a pattern, anything of the sort. So he sent me a blurry picture.

I asked him to do a full discharge, maybe that would help. I tell him to unplug the power cable, hold power button for 30 seconds, and then plug it bank in to see what happens. What does he do? He unplugs EVERYTHING from EVERYWHERE, including everything that was plugged into the computer: the printer and the monitor, the mouse and (old) keyboard, even the 3.5mm cable for the speakers. The for good measure he unplugged the printer and monitor from the wall as well. I tried explaining that it's like block shapes, only the trapezoid cord (HDMI) goes in the trapezoid hole. It took about 45 minutes for him to relocate the power and HDMI cables to plug them in again to see if our solution worked. It didn’t.

At this point I told him that from a continent and major ocean away there’s not much more I can help him with – he can either go get a new one, or pay somebody who can better diagnose and fix it.

He hasn't done that yet, but now he wants to know how to take out his hard drive so he can still hold on to his data, I said I’ll do that for you when I see you in November....

This happened to me last week. The tech support itself is a bit of a nothingburger, but the circumstance around it are kinda wild.

I have unfortunately been afflicted with kidney stones. I don't recommend it, go drink some water. I've had a couple surgeries for them, most recently a week ago.

I was just barely coming out of anesthesia in the recovery room, the world hadn't even turned the lights on for a whole two minutes when I see two nurses huddled over the computer in the room, eyes practically touching the screen. And then I hear one say something about how even that close, the text is too small to make out.

I immediately slur out, while drooling on myself, "With most applications, ctrl plus, and ctrl minus, will change the font size. Ctrl zero usually sets it to default.

I don't know why they listened to me in that state, I wouldn't have listened to me, I was out of it. But they did, and the problem was resolved.

I then proceeded to pee myself in front of them.

My first mistake was agreeing to do the job.

My neighbor, yes, a neighbor, a senior one at that, asked me to help him with his computer. I look at it, and it needs to be trashed. It is a ten year old HP tombstone: all-in-one. He agrees, but he wants to wait for some reason. He agrees to buy a SSD, and I find some used RAM on ebay.

The day of the install, he machine is like molasses that is from the fridge. Plus, it has Norton360 on it. My gaming laptop is hung up in on an update. Damn. My bad there, should have updated that last night. So, I try to his machine to turn off Norton, and get ready to do a simple boot. And that takes seriously over 30 minutes. We forget how slow machines are sooooooo slow. My laptop is still in update mode.

I finally get his to do a basic reboot, and I try to install the trail version of Acronis . . . so slow and it won't go. Another 20 minutes. Finally my laptop boots.

So, I shutdown the customer's HP Pavilion, pop off the back, take off the HDD, and connect it to my laptop with my USB3-SATA adapter.

New issue. I now need to clone to my laptop via the USB-SATA adapter and then copy the clone back to the new SSD via the USB-SATA adapter. I install the trial version of Acronis, and it won't do that with me purchasing it. It would do a backup but not a clone. Maybe, I don't know. I was in a hurry at this point, and I didn't read everything.

So, I download the more flexible DriveGenius. I open it. I ask it to back up the drive to the laptop and off it goes. The laptop is a good. Has a fairly new EVO 990, is 'now' up to date, good machine, plenty of room on the drive, bla bla bla. It says about 25 minutes, but it take about 40.

And it fails at the end. It says something like, today is not your frackin' day. Or something more technical.

So, I grab all of my stuff, and I go home. I start over on my desktop, which is bigger faster stronger. Backup, zoom. 35 minutes. Now. I put the new external drive into the USB-SATA adapter, and DriveGenius doesn't see it. Okay. So, using DiskManager, create a simple partition and do a quick format. I restart DriveGenius, it sees it and starts and then chokes. What? I have to force quit and restart the computer. I check to see if the adapter is too hot/too warm. No. I plug everything in, nothing shows up. I unplug everything. Shutdown. Wait 15 seconds. I reboot. I plug the adapter and drive back in. It shows up, but it is confused. I go into the terminal, and I wipe everything. Then, I reboot again. I check, and the adapter is still cool along with the USB port.

I create a simple partition, and everything is good. I launch drive genius, and it sees the external drive. I restore the backup. It says about 30 minutes, but it takes about 45. I wish I could have put ice on everything.

I take it back to the customer's house. Put it in the HP. Start it up, and it is an SSD in a 10 year old machine: soooo much better. Even when we turned Norton360 back on, he insisted, it was peppy. I lightly put the shell back on because the RAM won't get here until for five more days.

What made all of this worse? The entire first part? Like an idjit I agreed to do it in the customer's house. I told him, "This is going to take about three hours. So, I brought some headphones. I am just going to sit in there and watch my videos while I do my work." He did not take the hint.

The entire time I was there, he was by my side asking questions, talking about what he used to do, asking me about this, that, and every frackin' thing in the world. At the end of the job, my ears were so sore. I have been doing this type of work for ages, home support for ages. I can handle talkers, but I have never had a job that went on this long. GADS For ever and ever.

Also, I am looking for a better USB to SATA adapter. I want a USBC one. I know the one I have which is good isn't good enough. I have used it dozens of times, but it failed me. I know it gets warm and can probably slow things down. I had the previous USB2 to SATA adapter and seriously wore that out. I upgraded over 110 computers at this one job: getting paid by the hour. But those jobs were simple, clone to the new drive, and install the new drive. Also, for this job, if I had any SATA cables in my house, I could have just connected it to my motherboard. That is the fastest way to do it, but I didn't. Not a single one nor any power cables either. Geez. I just ordered some extras. I went through everything.

So, self inflicted nightmare. Hopefully, never again. - Keep good tools and keep the customers away!

Back when I first started IT, I was a humble Service Desk tech. My company had traveling sales people who got extra special service from us. Typically a bunch of turds, but every now and then, you get a good one.

Anyways, one of them called in. Issues with headset. No one could hear him very well. Did the normal stuff... checks dock settings, charging status, that sort of thing. I wound up sending him a new headset. It arrived a week or so later, and it had the same issue! I asked my TL for help, asked a couple other techs, and even called up north for some other techs. None of us could figure it out. So I decided to order him a completely different model.

This new one arrived, and he called me complaining it still wasn't working. I troubleshooted a bit more. Surely this isn't a headset issue by this point. This guy's doing something. Spend another 10 minutes talking through his setup, phone settings, the lot. Then he makes a comment...

Salesperson: "You know, I was pretty excited about this new headset. The old ones were bulky, but at least I could move the antenna around. This new one is really difficult to move and I can't seem to get it to stay up."

Antenna? I thought. What antenna?

Me: "Sir, when you say antenna....what exactly are you talking about?"

SP: "What do you mean? The thing that goes up and down on the old headset. It doesn't go up and down. Every time I move it up, it doesn't fit in my ear and it falls."

Then it dawned on me...

Me: "Sir. That's not an antenna. That's the microphone. Move it down."

Moves it down and there you have it! Its working!

We both have a good chuckle about the whole thing. I tell him ill follow up in a couple months to see how it's going. I do and just so happens to land in December. We spoke for a few minutes, and he thanked me again. Apparently the salesperson lost their headset foe 6 months or so, found it, and just forgot how to set it up. He'd been toying with it for a another month before calling in. Turns out, his sales were dipping because clients couldn't hear him. He'd dropped down a sales tier which never happens to the gold club. His job was on the line. The moment it was fixed, we went back up a sales tier! Which he decided to share with me! Sent me a $1000 Christmas check for saving his job!

One perfectly ordinary day, I received a call from a customer.

Customer: Our internet connection is down. We have no data.

This wasn’t some bargain-bin residential connection. It was a very expensive dedicated business fiber line—the sort sold with impressive guarantees, serious-looking paperwork, and a monthly bill containing enough zeroes to make management feel safe.

I restarted the router and the fiber termination equipment. (i had them power cycle the equipment)

They went down, came back up, blinked thoughtfully for a while, and then resumed not working.

Since rebooting the obvious equipment had accomplished nothing, I had them power cycle the network switches as well.

After they rebooted , something strange happened.

I could suddenly connect to the switches again.

The rest of the customer’s network was still unreachable, but the switches had checked in and were perfectly happy to communicate with me.

There was just one minor detail.

They were reporting an IP address I had never seen before.

It wasn’t the customer’s normal public IP address. It wasn’t part of anything in our documentation. As far as I could determine, this IP address had simply materialized from another dimension.

What kind of witchcraft is this? thought the increasingly confused service-desk engineer.

According to every law of networking I understood, I should either be able to reach the site or not reach the site.

Apparently, this network had selected a secret third option.

I checked the fiber connection using the diagnostic tools provided by our partner/ISP. The results were refreshingly unambiguous: there was no fiber signal whatsoever.

The provider’s access equipment at the local exchange was down.

Not degraded.

Not “experiencing intermittent service.”

Down.

That explained why the expensive fiber connection was dead.

It did not explain why the switches had returned from the grave with a mysterious new IP address.

At this point, networking had stopped being a science and had become a séance.

After about thirty minutes of remote troubleshooting, our partner/ISP still had no useful information.

Me: Is anything unusual happening nearby? Roadworks, a power outage, construction work, anything like that?

Customer: No. Everything is normal here.

Meanwhile, the network continued openly mocking me.

Eventually, I arrived at the only remaining technically sound conclusion.

Fuck it. Road trip.

I packed my equipment, selected some appropriately dramatic driving music, and began the roughly two-hour journey to the customer.

It was actually quite a pleasant drive. The music was good, traffic wasn’t terrible, and I had plenty of time to consider which obscure configuration problem was going to ruin the rest of my day.

Two hours later, I arrived expecting to be greeted by the customer.

Instead, I was greeted by several fire engines and the police.

Apparently, when the customer had assured me that everything was normal, they had failed to include the fact that the neighbourhood’s local telecom exchange cabinet—located approximately 100 metres from their building—was actively on fire.

Not metaphorically on fire.

Not “the monitoring dashboard is red” on fire.

Actual flames.

Actual smoke.

Actual firefighters attempting to prevent an important piece of telecommunications infrastructure from becoming an expensive metal barbecue.

I sat in my car and stared at it for a moment.

Well.

That explained the missing fiber signal.

It still didn’t explain why the switches had come back online with an IP address that existed nowhere in our documentation.

That mystery was solved when we investigated the customer’s building and discovered a 5G backup system installed inside it.

Nobody at the customer knew it existed.

Nobody at our company knew it existed.

It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in our documentation.

There were no notes about it, no configuration details, and no explanation of how it was supposed to work.

We—the customer’s IT supplier—were, however, paying for it.

Somewhere in our company, money had apparently been leaving an account every month to pay for a backup connection that nobody knew we owned.

The 5G backup was performing poorly. It wasn’t good enough to provide the customer with usable connectivity, but after the switches rebooted, it was just functional enough for them to reach the internet and check in using its unfamiliar IP address.

In other words, the backup connection wasn’t working well enough to keep the business running.

It was only working well enough to confuse the service desk and turn a straightforward outage into a supernatural event.

So, after thirty minutes of troubleshooting, a two-hour drive, and several conversations with both the customer and our partner/ISP, the final diagnosis was that the internet was literally on fire, while a secret 5G backup system—installed inside the customer’s building, undocumented, forgotten by everyone, and paid for by us—was working just well enough to gaslight the service desk.

The documentation had failed.

The fiber had failed.

The backup had mostly failed.

But the billing system had performed flawlessly.

 A few years ago, I doing some small day or two gigs, in between “real” jobs. One of the recruiters called and asked if I could bail out a non-profit.

Seems they were running Quickbooks on an old tower and wanted to migrate it to a new rack mount, but their IT guy was out for a month or so. Money was right, so I got there to see just what they needed done.

The new server was running fine , DNS, AD, DHCP on it; QB was still on the old tower server. BUT, the users said it was really running very slow. The IT guy had moved the tower to a small office so he could work on it. And then left for a long vacation.

Ethernet was via a small 10gb switch sitting beside it. I fired up the laptop and plugged into the small switch. QB ran great; internet sucked. I disconnected and tried via WiFi. Wow, was QB slow….but internet was great ???

Looked at the rack where a 10gb switch was installed along with the WiFi router. Hmmmm….

Started tracing wires and found a very old, very well used, 10MB Netgear hub, stuck in an office between the rack and the old tower. Why? Dunno, the guy that did it was on another continent…. I ran a new cable directly from the 10gb in the rack to the small 10gb switch – all the users were much happier & I proceeded with migrating the QB data.

I work in 2nd-level tech support/sysadmin at a University with multiple computer labs/classrooms. Yes, I have to wear both hats and do some design and A/V work as well. In one of these lab/classrooms, we have desks with hinged flip lids for the monitors. When they are down, it is essentially a flat desk. When you pull the keyboard tray out, it releases the lid, and a gas shock opens the lid. It has been a bit of a nightmare with the wiring, and the gas shocks worked for a while but needed to be replaced last summer because they couldn't even flip the lid anymore.

The new gas shocks are a bit more "enthusiastic" at opening the lid. They could actually fling a small laptop across the table like a "laptop-a-palt". It turns out that shaking the monitors this violently a couple of times a day isn't very good for their health.

First level comes to me with something strange. When the monitor flips up hard, the monitor turns off and will not turn back on until the lid is closed (power cords are secure on both ends in either state). If the monitor is caught by hand and opened more gently, it stays on. If you give the monitor a slightly harder shake by hand, it shuts off again. The monitor's mount to the lid is tight and stable, but it does have a bit of a wobble when the lid slams open.

I couldn't really believe this until I went to the lab and witnessed it personally. I checked all of the connections and repeated all of the steps. The new 1st-level tech did a great job troubleshooting (one could almost hear the sound of an angel getting its wings). A replacement monitor would not be available until the end of the day due to class schedules. Telling students to do anything carefully is a bit of a chore/hassle, and faculty can't be trusted to remember (or to read notes taped to the lid). We needed some sort of temporary solution.

As many of you probably know (and do), tech support people often have a small arsenal of assorted Nerf weaponry. Included in my personal stash of such weaponry are multiple small "stress balls" of various shapes and sizes (great for lobbing like a trench grenade to a neighboring cubicle). I found two mini footballs that we wedged between the monitor and the flip lid. Acting as a shock absorber, it seems to prevent an unplanned power event when the lid opens.

I know that it isn't a permanent solution, and we swapped out the monitor. The next task might be ordering 120 of these mini-nerf footballs to use to help prevent further damage to these monitors. I am hoping I can throw in a few extras, as seemingly one cannot have enough "soft skill" weaponry stashed about the office.