Tech support stories

wizardPC · 03-02-2006, 11:11 PM

My manager shared a story with us today that I felt really needed to go on the internet, so here it is:

I do support for a piece of software that uses Oracle or SQL Server as the DB backend. If the client uses Oracle, we require that they have a DBA, because sometimes we need to do stuff manually to the DB and as you guys know, that can get sticky. So to protect ourselves, we have the DBA do these things from time to time. Things like extending the rollback space, dropping and adding tables, stuff that we could do but dont because we dont want to get blamed for hosing a Fortune 500 Oracle installation.

So a couple of years ago my manager was working in the same position that I have right now. She was working with a customer on some issue, and had to get the Oracle DBA involved. So the DBA calls my manager, and my manager gives her some things that she needs to do. The DBA needs some help, so my manager walks her through some things. This goes on for about 20 minutes, and finally my manager says to this woman making God knows how much money to be an Oracle DBA during the middle of the dotcom boom,

"You know, you really ought to know how to do this stuff."

<dramatic silence>

"Please don't tell anyone here" was the DBA's response.

CJ8501 · 03-03-2006, 01:09 AM

Wow........ shows you how many breaks women get for being just women..... damn this gov't and damn sexy woman.....

EsKALad · 03-03-2006, 01:24 AM

wow i wish i understood all the rest of the stuff he said.

Rafster · 03-03-2006, 02:40 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by wizardPC

"You know, you really ought to know how to do this stuff."

<dramatic silence>

"Please don't tell anyone here" was the DBA's response.

DarquePervert · 03-03-2006, 07:16 AM

Oh gopd that's funny.

HAving done support at various levels now for about 12 years or so, I've seen lots of stupid bull****.

When I worked at an investment firm in Cleveland, one lady was jacking around with her screen properties in WinNT4.0. One thing she did was make the buttons on the title bar (close, minimize & restore/maximize) so big that the CLOSE button took up almost her screen. All her coworkers were laughing at her, which I can wholly understand. One guy said that she could go out on Lake Erie and close her windows from out on the lage.

My coworker had to deal with this:
A client singed up for a VOIP service like Vonage to use over their phoco-supplied DSL. Well, they loved the service so much, they called the phoco and told them to have all their phonelines shut off, since they're using Vonage (or whatever) now. The phoco did just that, cutting off all their lines, including the one that has their DSL on ot.

I got a call from a client who said that their networked PCs can't talk to one another and their internet isn't working.
Started diggin into it and apparently someone used the computer that holds the share for all their data to surf for some porn and ended up installing one of those free porn dialers. That also disabled the LAN connection.
Of course, I explain what happened and he's ****ed. I also had to tell him to watch for lots of 900 charges on the store's phone bill and that the employee that did it should be reprimanded at the very least. I'm pretty certain he got canned.

Just recently, I've been working with a customer that's using a CC authorization service. They have pinpads to accept debit cards, and one of those was having problem. After hours on the phone with the client, the CC gateway and everyone, I went onsite to troubleshoot. It's a pain in the ***, since they're 45 miles away in Ft Worth. I get onsite and the pinpad is unplugged. D'OH!!!!

(That was last week).

I live this stuff.

RPI Geek · 03-03-2006, 11:52 AM

Not really a tech support one, but it kinda fits.

I'm doing some work with my uncle right now for a large-ish company. They wanted to be able to put together a few Access reports based on their SQL server. The database is one that logs security issues like logon failures, special privileges, etc. I had a hint of the problem that was to come, but didn't fully realize the scale until later.

To make the problem even bigger, I figured I'd add some nice functionality to the reports to pretty them up and make the customer real happy. I added a few fields for them to search by, put a small dump of their event log on my personal machine, and ran some tests on a small scale.

It ran great on my environment, but once I got it over there, things started timing out all over the place. Great, something more to debug.

It turns out that they log every single event that happens on their network, and it goes back for a whole year. Every time someone miffs their password, every time an account is changed, they write it to this database. To give an example, one of the quries I ran returned 4800 pages (about 8 entries per page) of logon failures.

And they won't hear changing their policies... I still need to figure this one out.

tom2112 · 03-03-2006, 12:19 PM

About 6 years ago, I was doing a major system migration for a hospital. They moved from dumb terminals and light pens to WindowsNT PC's with mice. I just finished removing the old terminal and placing a new PC at a nursing station, and a woman walks up, sits down, picks up the mouse and starts touching it to the screen - like a light pen - clicking and not getting anywhere. She turns to me and says "hey, this new computer doesn't work." Keep in mind that every employee had a three day training on the new system!

tom2112 · 03-03-2006, 12:21 PM

Another time, in the same hospital, I get a call from a doctor's office that their PC doesn't work. (I love that - no other info, it just doesn't work!)

Anyway, I go up to the office and check it out, and the doctor had all this stuff plugged into a surge protector: PC, monitor, speakers, printer, AND THE SURGE PROTECTOR! Yes, it was plugged into itself - not the wall. And this guy is a DOCTOR!

tom2112 · 03-03-2006, 12:24 PM

Back in the "good old days" of 5.25" floppy disks, I told a customer to send me a copy of a disk that was giving them problems. A few days later, I got a double-sided photo copy of the disk in the mail!

tom2112 · 03-03-2006, 12:27 PM

Another one from the 5.25" days: I got a call from our accounting department: a software sales person was there to demo their new payroll program, but it wouldn't work. They kept getting a cannot read from drive A error. After going through several things on the phone with the person, I went down to accounting. Sure enough, the chuckle-heads hadn't flipped the little lever that closes the disk in the drive! And the stupid software demo person couldn't figure it out!!

tom2112 · 03-03-2006, 12:30 PM

Also from the 5.25" days: a programmer friend of mine call me, laughing his butt off. He tells me he was on the phone with some chuckle-head who was having trouble installing their software. It was a package with 5 diskettes. The had four of the five jammed into the drive, but couldn't get the fifth one in!

MatrixPC · 03-03-2006, 12:32 PM

$hit that sound VERY familiar.
Sometime I have to help the fu<king DBA to do the job. No I am only a programmer.

DaveB · 03-03-2006, 01:00 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by RPI Geek

Not really a tech support one, but it kinda fits.

I'm doing some work with my uncle right now for a large-ish company. They wanted to be able to put together a few Access reports based on their SQL server. The database is one that logs security issues like logon failures, special privileges, etc. I had a hint of the problem that was to come, but didn't fully realize the scale until later.

To make the problem even bigger, I figured I'd add some nice functionality to the reports to pretty them up and make the customer real happy. I added a few fields for them to search by, put a small dump of their event log on my personal machine, and ran some tests on a small scale.

It ran great on my environment, but once I got it over there, things started timing out all over the place. Great, something more to debug.

It turns out that they log every single event that happens on their network, and it goes back for a whole year. Every time someone miffs their password, every time an account is changed, they write it to this database. To give an example, one of the quries I ran returned 4800 pages (about 8 entries per page) of logon failures.

And they won't hear changing their policies... I still need to figure this one out.

RPI Geek,

Access is a single threaded database engine and not very robust. Wheras, with SQL server, you can return a million or more rows of data in under a minute if the database is properly tuned with the right indices and on relatively decent hardware. If you put your queries into SQL Sever stored procedures it may help with the performance even further.

Your problem is definately solveable and not all that complicated. Have you made any progress on it?

DaveB · 03-03-2006, 01:17 PM

Back in the early 80's, when we still used card readers for the mainframe computers, I was talking with one of the IBM FE's. He told me they had a card punch machine at another company and the circuit boards kept blowing out. He said they were having a devil of time determining the cause. Until he was there one day and this big, fat, woman comes walking over to the card punch. Her legs were so thick her nylons rubbed as she walked. She sits down at the card punch and unleashes a massive static shock on the machine and toasts the board right then and there! LOL!

The fix? She was no longer allowed to wear nylons!!!!

DaveB · 03-03-2006, 01:20 PM

When I first started in I.T. in 1980 I received a call from some woman who wanted her FOCUS turned on. I thought to myself, "What the hell? How can I turn on her focus? Its got to be a knob somewhere on her monitor." I told her I could not help her.

Later, I learned that FOCUS was the name of a software application she wanted me to start. The joke was on me!

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