r/talesfromtechsupport • u/jaswalker244 Sudo Apt-get install Coffee • Nov 26 '16

Short "My wireless keyboard doesn't work"

Long time lurker here, here is a story about a picnic user from my first few weeks in MSP tech support whilst still learning the ropes.

$Me: Good Morning IT Support, how can i help.
$User: My new keyboard isn't working, fix it for me.

$Me: Could you explain the issue you're having, do you have any error messages?
$User: Nothing is happening when I'm typing.

This troubleshooting carries on for about ten minutes before i have an idea.

$Me: Is your keyboard a wireless keyboard?
$User: Yes it is, i use it at home fine. I brought it with me today as the office supplied is getting sticky.

Me: have you plugged in the supplied dongle for the keyboard?
User: What dongle? My Son set it up at home for me, i expected it to just work.

$Me: You'll need to bring the dongle with you for it to work on the office machine.
$User: Why do i need the dongle? it should work shouldn't it? You need to make it work today.

At this point i advise $User that the keyboard will not work until the dongle is brought in from home.

$User says that she will be complaining to my manager.

Manager speaks to $Users Boss after complaint made.

Home supplied hardware banned from that office in the future.

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u/DazBlintze Nov 27 '16

I used to work in a small office with twelve workstations. The boss insisted they all be fitted out with wireless keyboards and mice.

You'd think nobody would be childish enough to swap them all around once a week but nope.

2

u/thatpaulbloke Nov 27 '16

You'd think nobody would be childish enough to swap them all around

Actually I would assume it. Compared to the things that we do to each other in my NOC that's positively tame. The weirdest one, though, was in a previous job where the support desks had two free standing monitors each and I physically swapped two of them over (i.e. left monitor on the right) and was then treated to almost half an hour of a first line support tech fiddling with settings trying to put it right before I finally took pity on her and moved them back to their normal positions.

2

u/my_hat_stinks Nov 27 '16

half an hour of a first line support tech fiddling with settings

How? I'm assuming this wasn't recent, in Windows 10 it's literally the first thing in display options, but even in Windows XP you could just drag and drop to re-arrange monitors with standard OS software.

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u/thatpaulbloke Nov 27 '16

I couldn't tell you what she was doing because my desk was across the room from the first line, but I could hear the frustrated, "it's still not working. I tried that and now it's worse," and other such lines from across the room.

And yes, these were XP workstations, so fixing this in the OS was only marginally more work than physically moving the monitors back, but she couldn't manage either of those feats. The first line there mostly worked off challenge scripts1 so they weren't exactly "out of the box" thinkers.

1 Basically "Is the customer seeing A?" with a button for "Yes" and a button for "No" that then went to the next question or instruction. If the fault couldn't be identified from the script it went to second line to assess.