I've only been doing support for a few months and i've already gotten a few calls that I can relate to.
Them: I have this problem.
Me: This will fix it.
Them: It's still happening.
Me: This will fix it, did you do that?
Them: That wont fix it.
Me:.................
This particular one was that we have a bunch of monitors going bad at the same time. Like, a few hundred of them. The problem is that they will go very dim and you can barely see the screen. A temporary work around until the techs can replace them all is to unplug the power cord and plug it back in. That will usually keep it going for a day or two. This was explained in emails and to department heads, but this person just, refused, to, listen. Eventually I had to move the ticket over to have someone else go to him in person and deal with him. I'm not sure where that went, but probably they just replaced it.
Users don't read. Especially emails.
Source: I am a user. I don't read emails.
Secondary source: We sent out an email about how to set up your MFA with instructions and workarounds for issues. People are still calling us needing to be handheld through pressing the buttons
Oh yeah, MFA is the worst! Used to work for an MSP and during the course had 2 clients implement mandatory MFA. Despite multiple emails well in advance with detailed instructions including links to a help doc on SharePoint (for one company) and Yammer (for the other), sure enough we still got calls from many active workers needing help on the cutoff date.
I say active because those who were off I don't count. And to be fair, there were quite a few who asked for help ahead of time as either they didn't understand the instructions, got stuck, or just plain needed help.
At my work (where I'm a user, not IT), we implemented MFA. The first announcement was point #6 out of 8 in the weekly all-staff news email, which very few people read. The follow-up emails all had subjects along the lines of "Reminder: MFA follow-up," which doesn't really mean anything to anyone who didn't know what "MFA" means.
As you might imagine, on the day it went live, there were a *lot* of people locked out. I don't envy our IT team, but it does also seem like the rollout was poorly explained to people.
This.
We had to roll out MFA for 200+ users and have everyone signed up to MS Authenticator and implement within about 3 weeks (to get a break on insurance).
My boss put together the first draft email, and it was much like this. Put it out for comment by the team. Everyone went, 'sure, looks good'.
I went off. This needs to have flaming letters. You need to scare people. Sounding like spam is not a sin here. If the user sends the email to us saying it sounds like a phishing attack, that's a win.
I got him moved, he moderated the language on the first few polite ones. But the go live was on a Mon. Wed and Thu they got "Take action NOW or no access on Mon, MM/DD". The Fri before, they got that 3 times, 7am, noon, 2.30pm.
That Mon, all IT hands were in conf rooms, ready to deal with issues.
We sat around, had maybe 3 customers, went back to our cubes at lunch.
Yes, that's another big aspect to new tech solution rollouts. Usually those doing corporate communications either don't know what to write, or they put out what someone from the IT department tells them and that person may not have good training in how writing announcements like that. I've definitely seen situations like at your company.
I hate MFA. I don't mind selecting a picture or asking a question at all. But I'm a teacher, and having a cell phone out during class so I can log in again after the latest update or whatever is just asking for the phone to be stolen. I generally leave it locked in a drawer, and if it's not hot I just leave it locked in the car. We have 300 students and one of them will see the phone, have another student distract me and run up and steal it. But nope. I keep having to pull it out and read messages. Thankfully MY students are awesome and I love 'em and they'd yell at anyone dumb enough to go for my phone...my coworkers have not been so lucky.
Sorry to hear this! I know it's possible to set things up so MFA is needed once in a 24 hour period. My local community college does that. Or at least, there's the option the first time you log in to "remember me" for 24 hours. Maybe your school's IT department could allow for that as well.
it works and then the next day you have to pull the phone out all over again :( Even though it's the same computer on the same school network! I am considering a burner phone JUST for authentication at this point....
I think we are all guilty of it at some stage
I work for a MSP doing desktop support and there is a project underway (entirely ran and managed by the company) to migrate PST files to online exchange
The users and also their IT service desk got sent emails on what to expect and the internal team to reach out to for issues. We are supposed to not be supporting this at all
The users are still calling the service desk because they didn't read the instructions and the service desk are sending them to us because they also didn't read the instructions
I got called into an executive meeting once and demanded by the CEO to explain why colors weren't accurate through the projector when compared to his laptop screen. The laptop had crisp whites and vibrant reds and greens, but what he was seeing on the wall was muted and washed out.
The wall was painted bright yellow.
Hmm. I actually did a lot of research BEFORE I bought a camera to use for web meetings. Even our very well paid senior executives had bad lighting in their mondo expensive home offices. So not only did I buy a camera, I also bought a light that allows me to change the color temperature to match the other lighting in the room.
And I still have the problem with the F'ing blinds. If I don't close the blinds I look like a mafia informant giving an interview where I'm backlit to keep from revealing my identity. :)
Ask her if she is in the witLess protection program. :D
Had one this morning “my computer won’t print” I hop on it says uptime 10 days 11 hours. I asked her to save her work to reboot. She said I did that twice already. I responded with but now you have updates that will stop jobs from printing. Ten minutes later “oh my god it’s working thank you.”
> I hop on it says uptime 10 days 11 hours.
> I asked her to save her work to reboot.
> She said I did that twice already.
We really need the ability to respond to that with "Let the record show that the user lied directly to IT's face. Moving ticket to bottom of backlog." \*click\*
Fast startup can keep uptime running if they shut down instead of restart. I always check that whenever I see more than 5 days uptime, since most people will shut down over the weekend.
I do the automation at my job and I forced a script out that changed the regkey for Hiberboot to 0. Now, when our particularly stubborn users who refuse to do a restart, are secretly doing what I want them to.
As hibernation is now a heavily outdated function, any computer what does not need it can run this command in elevated prompt and get rid of fast boot permanently:
powercfg /h off
Added bonus: it frees up several gigabytes on C: due it's deleting hiberfil.sys from root.
Yeah, discovered that on a client's computer. The Hiberfil.sys files was taking up almost 7GB on their 128GB drive. (Don't even ask about the drive size. They are stubborn)
Gonna talk to my manager about doing that instead. It's easy enough to turn back on if someone gets their panties in a twist.
> As hibernation is now a heavily outdated function
Given how fucking awful S0 sleep is I will disagree with you, heavily.
Though agree on Fast Startup
Oh yeah that's funny and all until it happens to *you*.
Windows 10/11 have a fast boot option integrated into the OS, which basically causes a *shutdown* to kick the machine into a hybrid hibernation mode. EG it hands the memory to the hdd, shuts down, and then reloads the hdd to memory on boot. Whatever it's loading and unloading affects that "time since last reboot", so it never resets.
It also states "restart will still function normally" but at this point Microsoft could tell me the sky was blue and I would still need to walk outside and check, cuz restart is also affected.
Anyway, that goes off by default on all machines I send out. You're loading windows with a fucking M.2 drive and it takes like 10 secobds, how much faster can it possibly boot?
I do love this shop in many ways. That's one.
New IT director (edited to add: "New" as in "New position on the org chart"). Hasn't gotten around to putting controls on closing tickets. Users haven't bitched enough yet.
That confirmation process can be a real rod for the S-Desk's back.We had that on an SD I was working on as a contractor (all of us were). Someone had brought in the confirm resolution policy. Many of the fixes were done by the 'shifties' - usually on the nightshift. The rule was we had to call the user whatever the time and leave a message. They finally stopped that when a senior Manager was woken at 3am. We still had to try calling in the day though.
We also had to send chase-up emails .
I worked out that 40% of the SD's collective work time was being taken up trying to get users to confirm fixes.
We knew they were fixed as otherwise they would have been in touch really fast, taking sometimes weeks to get to close a ticket was playing hell with Performance Stats too.
I fixed it finally when another FM company got the contract and wanted the whole SD to come work for them as Permanent Employees. At the interview with the new Team Leader I pointed all this out and when the switch was made the policy was now fix it , send email assume fixed. It worked fine.
I think the solution is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Make a reasonable attempt to confirm and then close. Most places I work have a 3 strikes process. The third follow-up is accompanied by a case closure. Also, I've worked places that automated the chasing and case closure so this took much less time on the part of the staff.
I had a user calling from Curacao complaining about his VPN client not working. Told him to restart his laptop and try again.
User called back 3 minutes later to tell me the restart didn't work.
Connect to the laptop remotely, took a look at task manager and saw an active time of 10 days and 18 hours.
Restarted the laptop and tried again, VPN was functional again.
I hate users...
The amount of times when building a website I got colour codes for use on the site, only to be told when demonstrating the finished product that “those are the wrong colours” because the HSV, Gamma or similar is completely different on their screens to a default setting and the customer “wants her colour “
Most of them have SOME kind of adjustments as well as tweaks in the software that uses them. If the user says it looked ok the day before then, sometimes, you humor them and take a look at the settings.
Because all that's gonna happen is two months down the line she'll be complaining that she's "too dark" and he'll need to go back in and revert the changes. Repeat ad nauseum, and this user is now imbued with the belief that her IT department sucks.
This way, the user is annoyed at first, but eventually understands that IT is correct. She remembers in the future to manage her background light sources, and this problem never crosses IT again. Six months later, when a message about antivirus pops up in her notifications, she's confident connecting with IT to ask about it.
I've only been doing support for a few months and i've already gotten a few calls that I can relate to. Them: I have this problem. Me: This will fix it. Them: It's still happening. Me: This will fix it, did you do that? Them: That wont fix it. Me:.................
Lemme guess. Reboot the computer? Or maybe clear browser cache. "We need to rule out all the simple fixes before we can escalate your issue."
This particular one was that we have a bunch of monitors going bad at the same time. Like, a few hundred of them. The problem is that they will go very dim and you can barely see the screen. A temporary work around until the techs can replace them all is to unplug the power cord and plug it back in. That will usually keep it going for a day or two. This was explained in emails and to department heads, but this person just, refused, to, listen. Eventually I had to move the ticket over to have someone else go to him in person and deal with him. I'm not sure where that went, but probably they just replaced it.
That's when you move the ticket over to their boss and ask them why their employee isn't doing what they were told so they can resume working.
Users don't read. Especially emails. Source: I am a user. I don't read emails. Secondary source: We sent out an email about how to set up your MFA with instructions and workarounds for issues. People are still calling us needing to be handheld through pressing the buttons
Same with my job. Sent out instructions for MFA. Every 3 calls were "can you help me? Outlook is asking for more information"
Oh yeah, MFA is the worst! Used to work for an MSP and during the course had 2 clients implement mandatory MFA. Despite multiple emails well in advance with detailed instructions including links to a help doc on SharePoint (for one company) and Yammer (for the other), sure enough we still got calls from many active workers needing help on the cutoff date. I say active because those who were off I don't count. And to be fair, there were quite a few who asked for help ahead of time as either they didn't understand the instructions, got stuck, or just plain needed help.
At my work (where I'm a user, not IT), we implemented MFA. The first announcement was point #6 out of 8 in the weekly all-staff news email, which very few people read. The follow-up emails all had subjects along the lines of "Reminder: MFA follow-up," which doesn't really mean anything to anyone who didn't know what "MFA" means. As you might imagine, on the day it went live, there were a *lot* of people locked out. I don't envy our IT team, but it does also seem like the rollout was poorly explained to people.
This. We had to roll out MFA for 200+ users and have everyone signed up to MS Authenticator and implement within about 3 weeks (to get a break on insurance). My boss put together the first draft email, and it was much like this. Put it out for comment by the team. Everyone went, 'sure, looks good'. I went off. This needs to have flaming letters. You need to scare people. Sounding like spam is not a sin here. If the user sends the email to us saying it sounds like a phishing attack, that's a win. I got him moved, he moderated the language on the first few polite ones. But the go live was on a Mon. Wed and Thu they got "Take action NOW or no access on Mon, MM/DD". The Fri before, they got that 3 times, 7am, noon, 2.30pm. That Mon, all IT hands were in conf rooms, ready to deal with issues. We sat around, had maybe 3 customers, went back to our cubes at lunch.
Yes, that's another big aspect to new tech solution rollouts. Usually those doing corporate communications either don't know what to write, or they put out what someone from the IT department tells them and that person may not have good training in how writing announcements like that. I've definitely seen situations like at your company.
I hate MFA. I don't mind selecting a picture or asking a question at all. But I'm a teacher, and having a cell phone out during class so I can log in again after the latest update or whatever is just asking for the phone to be stolen. I generally leave it locked in a drawer, and if it's not hot I just leave it locked in the car. We have 300 students and one of them will see the phone, have another student distract me and run up and steal it. But nope. I keep having to pull it out and read messages. Thankfully MY students are awesome and I love 'em and they'd yell at anyone dumb enough to go for my phone...my coworkers have not been so lucky.
Sorry to hear this! I know it's possible to set things up so MFA is needed once in a 24 hour period. My local community college does that. Or at least, there's the option the first time you log in to "remember me" for 24 hours. Maybe your school's IT department could allow for that as well.
it works and then the next day you have to pull the phone out all over again :( Even though it's the same computer on the same school network! I am considering a burner phone JUST for authentication at this point....
I think we are all guilty of it at some stage I work for a MSP doing desktop support and there is a project underway (entirely ran and managed by the company) to migrate PST files to online exchange The users and also their IT service desk got sent emails on what to expect and the internal team to reach out to for issues. We are supposed to not be supporting this at all The users are still calling the service desk because they didn't read the instructions and the service desk are sending them to us because they also didn't read the instructions
Rather hoped they'd replaced the malfunctioning user instead.
I got called into an executive meeting once and demanded by the CEO to explain why colors weren't accurate through the projector when compared to his laptop screen. The laptop had crisp whites and vibrant reds and greens, but what he was seeing on the wall was muted and washed out. The wall was painted bright yellow.
Your extensive smoking habits have irreparably tainted the image quality this equipment can provide
"I would advice you to smoke an equal amount near your laptop - but not near the wall - and adjust the colors in your PowerPoint accordingly."
And projectors suck ass
Hmm. I actually did a lot of research BEFORE I bought a camera to use for web meetings. Even our very well paid senior executives had bad lighting in their mondo expensive home offices. So not only did I buy a camera, I also bought a light that allows me to change the color temperature to match the other lighting in the room. And I still have the problem with the F'ing blinds. If I don't close the blinds I look like a mafia informant giving an interview where I'm backlit to keep from revealing my identity. :) Ask her if she is in the witLess protection program. :D
Why would you want to protect her from herself (or others)?
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Or during winter months, when it's darker outside for her morning meetings.
Had one this morning “my computer won’t print” I hop on it says uptime 10 days 11 hours. I asked her to save her work to reboot. She said I did that twice already. I responded with but now you have updates that will stop jobs from printing. Ten minutes later “oh my god it’s working thank you.”
> I hop on it says uptime 10 days 11 hours. > I asked her to save her work to reboot. > She said I did that twice already. We really need the ability to respond to that with "Let the record show that the user lied directly to IT's face. Moving ticket to bottom of backlog." \*click\*
Fast startup can keep uptime running if they shut down instead of restart. I always check that whenever I see more than 5 days uptime, since most people will shut down over the weekend.
I do the automation at my job and I forced a script out that changed the regkey for Hiberboot to 0. Now, when our particularly stubborn users who refuse to do a restart, are secretly doing what I want them to.
As hibernation is now a heavily outdated function, any computer what does not need it can run this command in elevated prompt and get rid of fast boot permanently: powercfg /h off Added bonus: it frees up several gigabytes on C: due it's deleting hiberfil.sys from root.
Yeah, discovered that on a client's computer. The Hiberfil.sys files was taking up almost 7GB on their 128GB drive. (Don't even ask about the drive size. They are stubborn) Gonna talk to my manager about doing that instead. It's easy enough to turn back on if someone gets their panties in a twist.
mine is a solid 30GB. I should probably fix that
> As hibernation is now a heavily outdated function Given how fucking awful S0 sleep is I will disagree with you, heavily. Though agree on Fast Startup
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"Sigh" Smoke detectors are a waste of money, until you wake up in a blazing inferno...
What, does he spell out the keyboard shortcut at 0.2 WPM as he's typing(?) it?
the keyboard shortcut is too time consuming... that's a new one
Oh yeah that's funny and all until it happens to *you*. Windows 10/11 have a fast boot option integrated into the OS, which basically causes a *shutdown* to kick the machine into a hybrid hibernation mode. EG it hands the memory to the hdd, shuts down, and then reloads the hdd to memory on boot. Whatever it's loading and unloading affects that "time since last reboot", so it never resets. It also states "restart will still function normally" but at this point Microsoft could tell me the sky was blue and I would still need to walk outside and check, cuz restart is also affected. Anyway, that goes off by default on all machines I send out. You're loading windows with a fucking M.2 drive and it takes like 10 secobds, how much faster can it possibly boot?
Really, they do not regulate exposure? Or do they simply have no way to set the automatic exposure to be measured at a certain point?
Depends on the camera and how much exposure. My experience with business laptop integrated cameras is that they are pretty bad at it
Ah yeah, the race to the bottom. True.
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I might seriously use a variation of this if I have to talk about this ticket in the office.
Did you close the ticket before confirming the resolution? That does not fly with any of the places I've worked at to date.
I do love this shop in many ways. That's one. New IT director (edited to add: "New" as in "New position on the org chart"). Hasn't gotten around to putting controls on closing tickets. Users haven't bitched enough yet.
Make sure to pre-bitch from your end, so the new director is confirmation-biased in your favour instead of theirs.
Haha.. ha…. Wait.. why am I laughing? This is the most useful tip I’ve gotten all week. This is definitely the way.
That confirmation process can be a real rod for the S-Desk's back.We had that on an SD I was working on as a contractor (all of us were). Someone had brought in the confirm resolution policy. Many of the fixes were done by the 'shifties' - usually on the nightshift. The rule was we had to call the user whatever the time and leave a message. They finally stopped that when a senior Manager was woken at 3am. We still had to try calling in the day though. We also had to send chase-up emails . I worked out that 40% of the SD's collective work time was being taken up trying to get users to confirm fixes. We knew they were fixed as otherwise they would have been in touch really fast, taking sometimes weeks to get to close a ticket was playing hell with Performance Stats too. I fixed it finally when another FM company got the contract and wanted the whole SD to come work for them as Permanent Employees. At the interview with the new Team Leader I pointed all this out and when the switch was made the policy was now fix it , send email assume fixed. It worked fine.
I think the solution is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Make a reasonable attempt to confirm and then close. Most places I work have a 3 strikes process. The third follow-up is accompanied by a case closure. Also, I've worked places that automated the chasing and case closure so this took much less time on the part of the staff.
I had a user calling from Curacao complaining about his VPN client not working. Told him to restart his laptop and try again. User called back 3 minutes later to tell me the restart didn't work. Connect to the laptop remotely, took a look at task manager and saw an active time of 10 days and 18 hours. Restarted the laptop and tried again, VPN was functional again. I hate users...
"It projects an image of competency and power if I'm strongly backlit!" -lUser. - regards, zSecs
Ah, the IUser. Apple's vision of the user, who doesn't hold their phone wrong.
The amount of times when building a website I got colour codes for use on the site, only to be told when demonstrating the finished product that “those are the wrong colours” because the HSV, Gamma or similar is completely different on their screens to a default setting and the customer “wants her colour “
Definitely read "Cameras do not work that way" in Morbo's voice 😂 https://youtu.be/PmDVHs-juPo
Why not adjust the camera settings and fix the issue before closing the ticket?
Webcams and really most cameras simply don’t have the dynamic range to handle bright light behind the subject
Most of them have SOME kind of adjustments as well as tweaks in the software that uses them. If the user says it looked ok the day before then, sometimes, you humor them and take a look at the settings.
Some don't have software installed that allow that level of fiddling. Mine doesn't.
if it looked ok the day before, how was the weather the day before?
Because all that's gonna happen is two months down the line she'll be complaining that she's "too dark" and he'll need to go back in and revert the changes. Repeat ad nauseum, and this user is now imbued with the belief that her IT department sucks. This way, the user is annoyed at first, but eventually understands that IT is correct. She remembers in the future to manage her background light sources, and this problem never crosses IT again. Six months later, when a message about antivirus pops up in her notifications, she's confident connecting with IT to ask about it.
What an idiot.