No more hiding in the server room
Any Funny stories?
Anyone here have funny stories to share? I bet there are hundreds out there. Like the one about the user who calls the help desk to say their coffee cup holder is broken, when they are actually referring to their CD drawer.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mohammed Adel on -
How about a call from
user: ( I can't log in !),
IT: Why ?,
User: (I don't know !),
IT: Do you recieve any message ?,
User: (Yes),
IT: What is it ?,
User: (Can you connect remotly ?!),
*logged*
IT: Can you enter your username CORRECTLY,
User: (sorry !).
IT: ;o
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Permalink Reply by Julian Regel on -
We had a user call up with a "broken" wireless router, apparently unaware that "wireless" did not refer to the power supply.
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Permalink Reply by Tim Seymour on -
We use a help ticket system to manage help requests from users. The user goes to a web page and fills out an online form and submits it. We had a user print the online form, fill it out by hand, and then give it to us in person. The problem - her printer wouldn't work. We laughed so hard!
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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on -
I've got one user who is a barometer for the health of my network. She's far more accurate and detail oriented than any nagios configuration I could hope to implement.
As an example, one day I get a call. "Matt, something has changed", she says. I groan to myself and close my eyes. Probably a program closed with an unexpected error, there's one button, and she wants to know what to do.
"Alright, what's going on today?", I ask her.
"Do you know that thing that comes up when you use putty?"
While I was mentally questioning the wisdom of her having a shell account, I wasn't sure what she was talking about, so I asked for more details.
"You know how, after you type your password, you get a saying or something?". Ah, she was talking about the 'fortune' program.
"It doesn't do that any more".
Well, that's odd. Fortune itself is a meaningless program. It reads a string of text from a database, usually a comical phrase or story, and displays it when you log in. Fortune could disappear entirely from a machine and nothing would ever miss it. the fact that it stopped working, seemingly on its own, however, made me uneasy.
"Thanks for letting me know. I'm going to look into it", I said before I hung up. I logged into the machine, and checked for the existence of the fortune program in /usr/bin/games; sure enough, it was there. I ran /usr/games/fortune to check, and I got a pithy quote. So why wasn't it running at login?
I checked the machine's /etc/profile and it was specified as it always had been, but I noticed that it was just the command 'fortune'. Typically, if you want to be sure something executes, you give the full path to the binary: /usr/games/fortune in this case. Since this just had 'fortune', the profile was depending on '/usr/games/' to be in the path. When I checked the PATH variable, I was in for a surprise. Instead of the many directories that are typically specified to ensure that scripts around the machine run correctly, there were only three directories specified, one of which was a java installation.
Since this was obviously a human screw-up, I asked around. Sure enough, my boss the Java programmer had copied and pasted a PATH line from another machine and overwrote the existing one, and in the process blown away all the other specified locations.
So yes, had my user not noticed (and complained) about something as small as fortune disappearing, multiple scripts would have failed on that machine and I'd have been picking up the pieces for days.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on
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Once, I worked for an ISP.
A long time ago, this was a fairly peaceful job. You'd help people configure their computers to dial in, and you'd troubleshoot bad phone lines. Then the broadband thing happened. This adds a lot of complexity to the mix, because you invariably get people who think they're Vint Cerf (the guy who invented TCP/IP, essentially (yes, I'm simplifying (and using nested parenthesis. get over it) ) ) because they went to Best Buy and bought a broadband router.
Now, as it happens, I worked for an ISP that was experimenting with wireless broadband. We had APs on various radio towers around the city, and when you got our wireless service, we'd come to your house, throw an antenna up on your roof, put a box with some electronics and a radio under your eaves, and run the CAT-5 inside to whichever room you wanted. What you did with it from there was your business. So of course, people got routers. This isn't a problem at all.
The problem was when people didn't understand how to hook them up (which was the majority of the time). In the best of all possible worlds, the routers just wouldn't work, and they'd take them back. Every once in a while, we got a special case, who would see the WAN and LAN labels and get confused...so confused that they'd plug the LAN side into the radio, and try to get internet from the WAN side.
Everyone here should know how this story ends right now, but if you don't, here's what happens. The router assigns IP addresses using DHCP out the LAN interface. Normally this is connected to your home computer, and it allows you to get on the internet without manually typing all sorts of IP address information. Because this guy plugged his router up backwords, he was handing out IP addresses to our other customers.
Thanks to the simplistic nature of the infrastructure, each AP held 40ish sessions, and there could be a dozen APs on a tower, connected together via a switch. This means that, worst case scenario, one guy plugging his router in backwards would cause 480 people to fall off of the internet. This is a Bad Thing(tm).
We went through a couple of sessions of this until I figured out what was happening. I ended up plugging my laptop directly into the network, grabbing a lease from his router, logging in (using the default login, of course. he couldn't connect to reset it), and disabling dhcp on the LAN interface. Our problems stopped then.
A funny addendum to this story. I started taking Cisco classes the next fall. I ran into the guy in my class. He was so upset that he couldn't figure out how to hook the router up that he signed up for CCNA classes.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on
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Alright, one more quick one before I go to bed.
Before I worked for the wireless-broadband ISP, I did tech support in an outsourced callcenter for a very large southern telco with dialup internet.
Because they covered a large swath of the south, from Florida to the Carolinas in the North and Louisiana in the West, I got some very strange dialects. It was equally as likely to get someone who spoke Spanish as someone who spoke English, and sometimes you'd even get creole in the mix.
The best thing I've ever heard on the phone was a very creole-sounding person from Louisiana who, for the entirety of the phone call, referred to his mouse as "this critter". And he didn't click the mouse, he "mashed the critter".
It was all I could do to not ask if he planned to turn it into jambalaya if it broke...
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Permalink Reply by Simon Pollock on -
Rob - You'll remember this one well...
"Graphic Artist" has a new, high end, color laser printer to play with... all the bells and whistles! She thinks' she's got it all sorted as she feeds the t-shirt that she's attempting to print onto directly into the second paper tray!! The rollers grab and grind and chug and SOMEHOW (go HP go!) manage to get the T-shirt material close enough to something hot that it starts smoking! (All witnessed and duly passed on) she frantically attempts to retrieve said garment from the smoking molten plastic lump that was a lovely new laser printer... to no avail! it's not letting go... At this point, the learned woman places a foot against the printer and pulls with all her might - the printer knows it's beat and lets go. Parts and elting plastic bits and teeth and nylon go flying... printer, a write off.
This story is many years old (6) but still gets a good laugh when relayed over a pint of three.
Sime
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Permalink Reply by Rob Atkinson on -
Oh lord I nearly forgot all about her, one of the funniest days of my life that was :0)
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Permalink Reply by Rick on -
I too once worked for an ISP in a small town. One story I remember is when an elderly lady called in cursing us for turning off her computer every time she went on vacation. After trying to explain to the customer that there is no way we could/would remotely turn off her PC when she goes on vacation I asked her what lights were lit on the tower/monitor. Turns out her daughter would house sit for her when she went on vacation and turn her monitor off each time after she left. Since we were her ISP she figured anything that happened to her PC was because of something we did so she never bothered to even ask the daughter.
I remember that particular customer calling an awful lot..
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Permalink Reply by Rob Atkinson on
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Some great stories here, keep them coming though...
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Permalink Reply by Nick Whalen on -
(Names have been changed to protect the guilty)
Sales Girl 1: HEY i'M HAVING TROUBLE W/ MY GMAIL
Sales Girl 1: oh maybe the caps are the trouble
Sales Girl 1: yup
Sales Girl 1: that was it. sorry for the interruption
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Permalink Reply by Rob Atkinson on
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Can just imagine the poor guys face - priceless :0)
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