Brace yourselves! A new OS is coming.

I haven't shared anything for a little while and this post is one that I feel goes back to why I originally started this blog. I, like many others, reserved Windows 10 so I can get my Win10 Pro (because I currently have a copy of Win 7 Pro) when it releases the 29th (Just 6 more days from today.). I did a fresh install just a few days ago and have been running Windows Updates to keep everything prepped for when the big upgrade occurs. Today when I went to update I got this instead.

The reality of what is about to happen has sunk in. No more updates to Windows 7. Soon I shall have a whole new OS to play with. Personally I am excited for it. I enjoyed Windows 10 in the tech preview. I even have the most recent build installed on a pc where I work so I can continue to test it to see if any of our more specialized programs will face any problems with it.

I feel like it is a stable OS that offers some nice new features in a way that isn't overwhelming coming from windows 7, or even XP if you haven't made the jump from there yet. So far I also haven't seen any major compatibility issues with my games that couldn't be easily overcome with minor fixes I am already used to. That is a huge plus right there since I have an intense love of gaming.

Then again I see Windows 10 being like Windows 7 in more ways than the similar appearance. Windows 10 is a blend of Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows 7 was a blend of Windows XP and Windows Vista. Both Windows 10 and 7 were Microsoft's attempt at redemption after fucking up big time.

Windows XP was a nice, stable OS that everyone had gotten used to and liked for the most part. Then Windows threw out Vista and people wanted to see Windows burn for it because they made a bunch of ridiculous changes meant to give Windows a fresher look and be more secure. Instead Vista just pissed us off with its ridiculous User Account Control settings and instability. Then came Windows 7 to save us from Vista. Microsoft bothered to beta test it and took what people liked about Vista and XP and meld them together into a nice cohesive blend.

Now they are repeating that process. They tried to shove a unified OS down everyone's throat that was also meant to shove touchscreens down everyone's throats simultaneously. Windows 8 was ridiculously changed in unnecessary ways that added a huge learning curve for everyone because it was so overwhelmingly different. It blew like Windows Vista and in some ways even worse than Vista. Now here comes Windows 10. The question now is if it will save the day like Windows 7, or if they wills crew things up and end up with another OS everyone wants to burn them down over.

Dirty PCs

This is so much more common than anyone in IT ever wants to admit. When a user brings you a device saying it is messed up or you get old equipment and you're cleaning it up before taking it back to a new user. You bust out the cleaners and get to work. Sometimes you wish you had busted out a hazmat suit after what you see. 

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Track Ball Issue

Working for a mobile company a woman comes in with a Blackberry 8330 (I think that was the model...) She says the track ball is broken. So, take it out back, do remove the ball, and there is something some yucky debris under the ball.

After removing the detritus with tweezers, give it a spray, the ball went back in and everything worked great. When she comes in to pick up the phone I tell her something was under the ball.

A light clicked in her head.

Oh. Last night I threw up on my phone.

- User evanthesquirrel on Reddit

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3avy66/track_ball_issue/

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Avoid making this same mistake.

Source: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/keyboards_are_disgusting.png

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Everything on this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/13/ventblockers/.

The dreaded nasty keyboard.

This is what happens when a smoker smokes around a pc. I have seen it be particularly bad when the pc was in a small, enclosed room. The tar, and gunk that comes off the cigarette, cigar, or what not that does not get into your lungs gets into the insides of your pc.

I could take him.

They wondered why it crapped out on them.

Warning: The pics above are some of the less disgusting ones you can find.

Feel free to surf the web for more.  You will be amazed what horrors can be found inside a computer case or even in a mouse or keyboard.

Encyclopædia Moronica: O is for Omnipresent; Users May Think They Are

I wish I could say I had never met anyone like the guy in this Reddit user's, Gambatte, story. Sadly I would be lying if I said that.  I have met plenty of people like this.  You really hope Karma takes a nice chunk out of them at some point in time.

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It was a long, long time ago: when we waited a whole week for a brand new episode of Friends; when Ricky Martin would only make vague statements about his gender preferences; back when the dust was still settling after the whole Napster debacle; when I was but a shadow of the jaded husk that I am today.

I'd worked with an unruly School Administrator (SA) previously, but fortunately, he was transferred out to parts unknown. And there was much rejoicing.
A few months later, I was working an overnight shift, which mainly involved playing PlayStation, watching DVDs, and partaking of a single mandatory training exercise to prove that we were maintaining our operational readiness should things go horribly wrong during our shift.

As luck would have it, I happened to recognize one of the guys pulling front desk duty - essentially, all he had to do was answer the phones and check your emails for up to eight hours at a stretch. He'd been one of the users I'd been supporting a year or two previously, so in order to break up the mutual tedium of our assigned shifts, the Friendly User (FU) and I had a friendly discussion, which dragged on for a while - as there was no pressing business for either of us to attend to, we had little else to do.

Suddenly, SA showed up - from where, I honestly don't know. I think he'd been lurking in one of the nearby offices; I suspect that was where he'd been transferred to.

SA: FU! I need your computer!

FU: Uh... Sure, I guess. Let me just log off...

SA: No! Just let me use it now!

SA was sufficiently senior that FU hesitated to refuse.

ME: Hi SA, long time no see... What's going on?

SA: I've been locked out of my office, and I need to finish some work before I go home for the night.

ME: How did you get locked out of your office?

SA: I don't know, I stepped out for a minute and the cleaners must have shut the door with my stuff still inside. I guess the door locked automatically, so now I can't get back in until someone else arrives with a key tomorrow.

During this data dump, FU had got up from his desk, and SA dived into the freshly vacated seat. He turned his attention to the screen.

SA: What? This shouldn't be here!

As it turned out, FU had a number of personal photos on his profile, which he rotated through as the Windows background. This was permitted at the time; it wasn't until later on that a mandatory company-wide background would be enforced. These photos were stored (perhaps unwisely) in a folder on the Desktop.

SA promptly opened up the folder, and started opening the pictures.

FU: What are you doing?

SA: These shouldn't be here!

And he deleted them.

ME: What... Why are you doing that?

SA: They shouldn't be here! I'm getting rid of them!

I was just as dumbfounded as FU.

ME: You realize that...

SA: Where's my stuff? It's gone! It's all gone!!!

ME: Your stuff isn't gone, it's...

SA: What! More stuff that shouldn't be here! (delete delete delete)

ME: STOP THAT!

SA was sufficiently senior to me that I theoretically should have been more respectful to him, but he was in full-blownDELETE ALL THE THINGS mode. I had to snap him out of it, and politeness wasn't working.

SA: But... All of my work is gone; all this other rubbish shouldn't be here.

ME: You realize that you intimidated FU into allowing you to access the computer using his login credentials, right? You can't do that - it's a breach of security!

SA: No, I'M using the computer!

ME: The computer doesn't know that - you need to let FU log off so you can log in! Then you'll be able to access your files, and open your applications and whatnot.

SA: Well, what am I meant to do?

ME: Go find someone to unlock your office, or find another unoccupied computer to log on to. Just leave FU to do his job on the only computer he can.

SA turned an amazing shade of red, and for a moment I was sure he was going to start screaming, explode, or have a heart attack - none of which I actually wanted to deal with.
Somehow, the moment passed without any of those things happening.

SA: Fine. I'll deal with you two later.

SA stalked off; I assume to terrorize a small village somewhere.

FU: Thanks, man. Oh God, he deleted so many photos...

ME: Let me show you some magic...

I opened the Recycle Bin, selected the recently deleted files, and hit 'Restore'.

FU: Sweeeeeet! They're all back!

As it turned out, some of those restored photos were the last pictures taken of FU with his cousin before he died, and he was very pleased to get them back. Naturally, I advised him to make sure he had a backup, even if it was just emailing the pictures to himself, one at a time.

---

It wasn't until much later that I realized that SA must have believed that somehow, any computer would "know" it was him, and present his profile. The only way I could see that belief developing is if he NEVER logged off from his office computer - so the idea of credentials, authentication, sessions... All meant nothing to him. This man regularly dealt with budgets running into millions of dollars, and yet anyone who sat at his desk while he was out to lunch or off sick would have had full access to everything.

Some days, I wonder if SA had a brother who would one day become my current CEO. I would not be surprised.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3b589h/encyclop%C3%A6dia_moronica_o_is_for_omnipresent_users/

Totally Not Tech But Still Awesome

This is totally not tech related, but it was posted by the Reddit user Wranglingmonkies (Whose stories I have have shared before). It is a really neat Imgur gallery of utility boxes he was given permission to paint in New Zealand.

http://imgur.com/a/WTJvw

Below is my personal fave from his paintings.

Complaining to the ticket guy won't make your tickets get resolved any faster...

I have been in this guy's shoes. I worked at a telecommunications company call center. People are often straight up a**holes.  They often think you just refuse to do something because you don't want to work, or you don't give them information because you just don't want to. They don't realize that often you are held to a particular script and not allowed to give out some info if it isn't something that the other call reps would know, or because it just isn't information you are given access to. Heck sometimes it is information that even your supervisor doesn't have access to.  All they think is that you have nothing better to do that sit there and deny them access to the information they need. I even had a woman once that got upset that I couldn't tell her how to change the parental control settings on her kid's iPhones that her ex-husband had given them. I worked for an internet company, but that doesn't make a person an all around tech-support person for you.

A couple of other incidents that grind my gears so to speak is when people wait until the last second to put in a ticket for something and then complain when it isn't done on time, or when someone complains that they have been experiencing a problem for weeks, months or years but they just put in a ticket an hour ago for it.  They bitch and you are just sitting there thinking, "If this was such a problem, why did you only just now complain about it?"

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It's been a while since I've posted anything about my time at the "Brisby" Company but there was a post recently that knocked a good one loose from memory.

The Call Center was open 24/7. Occasionally I'd be asked to cover a 3rd shift because they were short. It would get me time and a half, and I liked the money, plus I could really spend the time reading a book or something (looking back, I should have spent more time studying for certs then - c'est la vie.)

It was usually pretty quiet. For the first half of a 3rd shift, mostly your calls were going to come from restaurants over the park areas that were closing and were having issues with the cash register system, and maybe a few from West Coast people staying in the office late. But between 0030 and 0500, it was pretty dead. But one call would come in a couple of times a week.

A call about Maximo. That's IBM's asset management platform. It was used by technicians who keep the rides running to know where the parts are that they need to fix them. You know, so people don't keep going straight into a wall when the roller coaster was supposed to turn. Maximo was not known for its stability (at least not around where I was). From my experience, it went down at least twice a week, and the response team was...not the best.

The ride maintenance guys are fairly nice but also not exactly the brightest bulbs. Most of them had been there 15 years plus and didn't need to keep on things like "them newfangled computers".

It had been a bad week. I forget what was going on exactly; I'm fairly certain I was starting to burn out from being on the phones, and while I was being told I was going to be hired on by the new contracting company, they were for some reason dragging their feet, and I was getting really frustrated, because moving over to the new company from my current subcontractor company meant more money and benefits. But no one knew anything, and between the new contracting company and the subcontractor, they were just pointing fingers at each other.

It's about 1 in the morning and the phone rings. "Brisby Customer Call Center, this is MickCollins, how can I help you."

RideTech: "Yeah this is RideTech over in Sorcery Caliphate. Maximo is down again." Me: "Ok, let me get your info and I'll submit a ticket to the Maximo team." I do this, generate the ticket, fire it off to the team and hang up.

An hour later, same guy calls back. RT: "Maximo's still down." I look up the ticket info. Looks like no one from their team has even looked at it yet. I pass this on to the caller. RT: "Awright."

Half hour later, phone rings again. Same guy. RT: "Maximo's still down! When are you going to fix this shit?" I look up the ticket. Still unacknowledged. I don't have the power to call anyone (I don't have a number for them, it's just an internal team." In the meantime.... RT: "I can't believe this. We can't get anything done half the time because we can't find our shit to fix anything! You guys don't know what the fuck you're..." I finally lose it. Me: "LISTEN! I am NOT in charge of this piece of shit system! I just have to take tickets from everyone and pass them on and hope they get fixed eventually! If it was up to me, I'd take a suitcase nuke and blow that fucking thing away, because it's shit! I get calls about it at least twice a week! You think I like that??!?!!"

Dead silence. I get the feeling the guy's looking at the phone.

I let silence reign for about 20 seconds.

Me: "I'll add a note in here that you contacted us multiple times and that their service level lately is crap. That's all I can do here. Call back in an hour and I'll let you know if they're working on it or not."

RT: "....alright." He hangs up.

The 3rd shift lead is just laughing his ass off hearing this exchange. He's a guy on the happy pills, because he was an Apache pilot over in the Middle East during the first Gulf War and was running late when he was subway three stops away from the WTC on 9/11 and has some....we'll call them issues.

The guy never called back (much to the Lead's dismay, because he wanted to listen on speakerphone). I looked at 0400 and someone had finally acknowledged the ticket and was working on it.

I didn't get written up, but I knew I wasn't going to be able to stick around there much longer...it wasn't worth the cost to my soul.

- User MickCollins from Reddit

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3b3lke/complaining_to_the_ticket_guy_wont_make_your/

"Hey my map isn't loading" or the tale of the failing switchover

So I'm just going about my normal business as IT (Reddit, "Have you reloaded?", "You didn't reload.") when a user complains of her mapping system not loading. I go over and see that it is in fact not loading and a refresh is certainly not fixing it. I get it to finally load and then head back to my desk.

Not two minutes later, "Hey my phone isn't loading" "Help! Nothing is loading". Cue panic mode. Nothing was keeping a constant connection, calls were dropping left and right, and overall a loud hum of users all thinking they were the first to have an issue. I sit down at a few machines to try and diagnose what was going on but nothing seemed apparent.

I'm back at my desk still churning away at solutions when I hear somebody say, "Hey I can't clock out"... Then it hits me. Our time card system is IP locked so it can only be used when coming from a certain IP. We had been failing over to our secondary Internet connection which in most circumstances would be fine. Well this time it wasn't. I pop open a shell and constantly poll my current external IP

168.xx
168.xx
168.xx
75.xx
75.xx
75.xx
75.xx
75.xx
168.xx
168.xx
168.xx
168.xx

About every ten seconds we had a new external IP. Obviously bad for VOIP communication. We setup most of our users on a backup wifi connection/a couple hotspots just to get them by while we sorted out what to do.

Forty minutes talking to our NOC (network operations center) and emailing back and forth and we still didn't really have an answer. My boss comes over and says, "Why don't we just unplug the primary?" OHMYGODWHYDIDNTWEDOTHIS30MINUTESAGO Secondary became the only connection and although a slower circuit we had a constant connection.

What caused all this? Primary ISP had a fiber line cut in the area. Our routers saw those issues and started falling over to secondary (mapping not really loading/VOIP being dropped). 10 seconds goes by and the routers think that the main connection is back up (which it was intermittently) and switch back over. Rinse lather repeat for forty minutes.

And now I'm back home and have 30 second delays on IRC :| (Same ISP)

TL;DR Internet connections issues, routers can't handle the truth

EDIT: Grammar

- User parkerlreed on Reddit

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3b17dt/hey_my_map_isnt_loading_or_the_tale_of_the/

I found this story very interesting. It is funny how simple a solution, how ever temporary a solution, can be sometimes. 

No, the url goes up there

I had to share this one because as a result of reading this post and its comments afterwards I learned something new. I already knew that in most browsers you can press the F6 key and it will highlight the web address bar. This helps when you get that person that keeps trying to type a web address in a search bar instead of in the actual web address bar of their browser. In the comments of the post below I learned that ctrl+L (It doesn't have to be capital. I just did that to make it stand out as the letter L instead of a 1 or an I.) also works to do this. Another helpful shortcut I would like to share is that in most browsers you can press ctrl+d to auto add a page to your bookmarks. Most pages will give you options of where to put the bookmark in your favorites when you do this in case you want it on the favorite bar, in your regular favorites menu or under a specific folder in your favorites. Anyhow, onto the post.

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I'm not actually in IT but around my small office I am the one who helps out with people not knowing how to use software. Like seriously they don't know how to use some of the simplest of software.

I asked front desk lady (FDL) to try some instructions that I created to see if the general population could figure them out.

FDL: Sure no problem

Monkey: Great! Thanks for helping me. Ok go to x.com

FDL: types in x.com into Bing

Now i know that not everyone gets they can just type it into the top bar so I sigh and let it continue.

FDL: looks around the screen I don't see "start here" (the next step)

Monkey: Go to x.com

FDL: looks around the screen again What do I do now?

Monkey: sighs heavily You searched for x.com the URL goes up here points to URL You are still at Bing a search engine. You need to actually go to x.com

FDL: O ok... continues with task

This women has been using a computer here for years but can't figure out how to go to a website. I just don't get it. O this person also saves her files by emailing them to her self. Yes she actually emails her files to herself to save them.

- User wranglingmonkies on Reddit

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2esth0/no_the_url_goes_up_there/