Fridays in IT...

Majorscale

Back at the start of the career I was one of the IT Crowd down in the basement on the support desk. I got lots of silly phone calls but the one that topped the lot was when the PA to the MD called me to say her system (desktop pc and monitor) weren’t working. 

Me “Are the power lights on?” 

PA “Yes”
Me “Try switching the system off and then back on again... (monitor and desktop power switches duly clicked and cycled)... any lights / noise?”
PA “Yes and yes, but it’s still not showing anything, it must be broken”
Me “OK, I will come over”

...  turns out the silly mare had the PC base unit powered on but the monitor off. By cycling the power switches one of the devices would always have been switched off! Total facepalm...

Kittyfrisk

Bod said:

Bod said:

I used to repair laptops for my company.  I was once passed a laptop to repair that had a circular melted patch on the underside that was clearly from placing it on an electric hob that hadn't fully cooled - "I don't know how that happened!?" I was told.

Another time was an overheating laptop that, upon disassembly, I found a large amount of chocolate melted in the heatsink fins and lower section of the case.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.  So many it looked like they'd been deliberately stuffed in there.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.
What's the problem? It is still a laptop even if you aren't wearing clothes

Simonh

After 30 years in IT I have many MANY of these stories. My favorite of all time was however the time when one of our production directors brought in his daughters PC because it was running really slowly and I said I'd take a look as it was quite new.

He bought it into the office and we were chit chatting as you do and he was moaning that he had just had a huge phone bill to premium rate numbers and he had "found out" that it was his 16 year old daughter calling chat lines, she had admitted it and was going to pay him back over many months of pocket money.

Off he goes and we have a look at the PC, the thing is stuffed full of hidden porn, almost as soon as we turn it on it tries dialing out (this was way before home broadband and the WWW was on dial up) and it is trying to connect to a dial up porn repository on, yes you guessed it, a premium rate number.

So as it transpires little miss was very curious and spending lots of time downloading porn and when confronted with the phone bill and the chatline question decide not to fess up to the actual crime.

we deleted the porn, removed the dialer program and left her a little textpad note in her hidden folder to let her know we wouldn't be turning her in but to be more careful in the future.

20 years I worked with that guy, never had the heart to tell him the real truth, we just said it was a virus that slowed it down.

Shrews

This clip reminds me of you IT boys!  

Love the comments:  'Everyone knows a bloke like Simon, if you don't, it's you!'

Bod

Kittyfrisk said:

Bod said:

Bod said:

I used to repair laptops for my company.  I was once passed a laptop to repair that had a circular melted patch on the underside that was clearly from placing it on an electric hob that hadn't fully cooled - "I don't know how that happened!?" I was told.

Another time was an overheating laptop that, upon disassembly, I found a large amount of chocolate melted in the heatsink fins and lower section of the case.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.  So many it looked like they'd been deliberately stuffed in there.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.
What's the problem? It is still a laptop even if you aren't wearing clothes

Thing is, after typing that, I've been singing "pubes in the heatsink" to The Black Keys' Gold on the Ceiling.

You are too now, right?
 

mudslide73

Lots of denials when it comes to spillages or dropped laptops. There have been many occasions where people imagine they'll get a new one if it gets damaged (accidentally or not). The guy that does our damaged/non warranty fixes takes it personally if he has to write a laptop off. This week he glued in some smashed case threads and bent some screen side supports back while replacing a smashed screen. I very much enjoy us getting thanked through gritted teeth when they get their old one handed back. 

Danny1969

In fairness some DC sockets on some models will also break even if the user is careful. Asus are the worse, I've replaced hundreds over the last 20 years and they still use the same shitty sockets. Almost always soldered to the board. Not covered under warranty.  Acer are pretty fragile too but a lot of Acers have the socket on a harness so anyone can change it. Dell and HP used to have a fairly robust socket but that's given way to a far smaller shitty socket over the last 6 years. 

The best socket ever is Apple's Magsafe. You can't break it, genius design which unfortunately is now retired to USB C which is a socket that doesn't need to break, the detection circuit goes instead and the laptop sits there with an idle 5V from the USB C charger because it's not asking for the 20V it needs to charge. 

darthed1981

Shrews said:

This clip reminds me of you IT boys!  

Love the comments:  'Everyone knows a bloke like Simon, if you don't, it's you!'

That's a pretty good satire on techy people to be sure.

Also sadly accurate in that it's a pretty lonely profession!

darthed1981

Danny1969 said:

In fairness some DC sockets on some models will also break even if the user is careful. 

Yup, for sure they are fundamentally badly designed in that they are only really safe to yank at from straight, any other angle risks damage.

This however (cable hoiked across the room, socket holding weight of dangling power brick) was not a user being careful.

Emp_Fab

I've got so many of these stories.  It would take me hours to type them all up so here's one as a starter....   Way back when I first started as a field tech, my employers took a call from a shipping agent to ask if we could look at laptop belonging to the captain of a ship.  I was sent to a place called Angle, in West Wales - where the massive oil refinery was.  The deep water harbour there takes oil  and LPG supertankers.  I get to the docks security, where I'm required to hand over any forms of ignition, including the cigar lighter from my car.  I'm told where the ship is and eventually see this dayglo-orange behemoth fill my windscreen as I drive towards the dockside.  The jetty the ship is docked at is enormous, extending far into the harbour and I have to drive down it towards the ship, alongside the massive pipes used to extract the oil from it.  I can see the water below - waaaay below.  I park the car at the end of the jetty and walk the last few metres with my toolcase in hand.  I am helped down onto the deck by several Southeast Asian crew and it's an eerie feeling.  The entire ship is orange, there are signs everywhere saying "Don't even THINK of making a spark" - or words to that effect.  The air is thick with oil fumes and I'm suddenly struck by this feeling that I'm standing on a 300,000 tonne bomb.

I'm escorted to the bridge / accommodation block where I get in the lift to take me to the sixth floor where the Captain's quarters are.  After a while, he appears, laptop in hand.  He's Greek and his English is a bit rough around the edges, but he explains that it won't turn on.

So....  not having a clue what to do as I'm a noob, I start dismantling it.  He sits down to watch me work (thanks mate).  After about half an hour, I reach the point where his desk is littered with screws, cables, brackets and bits of plastic and I realise that I've reached the limit of my memory - If I remove anything else, I won't remember the reassembly sequence.  Now I'm staring at the motherboard and I have absolutely no idea what to do next.  I've never opened a laptop before and I've never seen surface-mount components before either!  In desperation, I resort to pressing down on (surface mount!) chips with my thumb and in that moment, my lack of knowledge is immediately obvious to the Captain.

He then says "You have got the new motherboard, yes ?".  Er... no...  what new motherboard  ?  "You ARE from Toshiba, yes ?".  Er... no...  I'm from a small, useless, local I.T. maintenance company.

He then expressed his displeasure at the situation, telling me that this was a new laptop that was under warranty and I was supposed to be from Toshiba to replace the motherboard.  I apologised and said I didn't know anything about that and started trying to reassemble the laptop from the millions of bits all over his desk.  I think I managed two screws before he said "You should go.  I will do this." through gritted teeth.

I didn't need asking twice.  I made my escape back to the car, back down the jetty, through the refinery, picked up the cigar lighter, parked up and smoked my brains out before finding a phone box (pre mobile days) and giving my office a tirade of abuse.

ToneControl

Kittyfrisk said:

Bod said:

Bod said:

I used to repair laptops for my company.  I was once passed a laptop to repair that had a circular melted patch on the underside that was clearly from placing it on an electric hob that hadn't fully cooled - "I don't know how that happened!?" I was told.

Another time was an overheating laptop that, upon disassembly, I found a large amount of chocolate melted in the heatsink fins and lower section of the case.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.  So many it looked like they'd been deliberately stuffed in there.

Oh, I forgot the pubes stuck in the heatsink.
What's the problem? It is still a laptop even if you aren't wearing clothes

I thought no one under 50 had any these days?

WezV

I had a bottle of antifreeze in my car a couple of years back, it leaked all over my work bag and killed my laptop.

The IT guys were quite surprised when I openly admitted to being an idiot.    

ToneControl

It's only a limited number of users, but being the tech support for my kids is especially annoying when I had to pay for the laptops as well as try to fix them.

I at least had the sense to not give them Admin rights, so far less work for me to keep them running
I used to give them hand-me-down tower PCs, but eventually they "needed" laptops.

Of the first ones I got for them, they both used to run them on top of beds or on the carpet, one of them got stood on, ended up with the case around the keyboard bulging up by 5mm in some places, but amazingly still working. The other one got left at just the right angle so that a magnifying make up mirror concentrated the sun's rays from the window, and completely melted most of the numeric key pad keys. That one also got a knackered screen from some physical damaged I assume. I just made them use them for another 2-3 years, I allocated an external keyboard and monitor for the melted one.

Now they are over 16, I got them some quite nice ones, which they seem to be looking after

prowla

I'm just going throught the process of prepping a number of old laptops I've accumulated so I can give them away on freecycle.

I've found that:

1. The latest Windows 10 (32-bit) won't install on some older machines (Pentium M & 2 GB RAM).
2. The latest Windows 10 doesn't offer you the option of creating a local account, unless you install it without Wi-Fi enabled (either in the BIOS or if there's a switch).

Regarding giving them away; in the past week I've had:

1. A reply "Hi were abouts in <mytown> is collection please". Funny - I hadn't offered it to you yet.
2. Someone who wanted one and said they can collect, but haven't come back to confirm.
3. One saying they could collect it and sell it on in my local area for charity, except they're 200 miles away.
   

drofluf

In the early days of Windows one of the directors put in a call about “a problem with his mouse”. Apparently the cursor was stuck in the middle of the page and the mouse wouldn’t move further. On inspection it turned out that the mouse was at the edge of the desk. “I didn’t know that you could do that” was the surprised response when the tech moved the mouse to closer to the computer. 

sev112

Keep these coming please  

CoffeeAndTV

Working as the IT Operations Manager at an NHS Trust.  The worst people were the old school surgeons who bullied and shouted their way through life.  

There was one time a maxillofacial surgeon was working in the theatre and couldn’t get an application working which displayed the X-ray images.  He asked a scrub nurse to “get some one from IT down” to fix it.  He didn’t want us to connect remotely and look at the problem.

I had to go down to the theatres, scrub up, and walk in while a patient was on the table.  He started screaming and I mean screaming to the point one of the nurses said that I didn’t have to put up with this.  

I opened the correct link, he’d been opening the wrong desktop icon all along.  There were two similar but separate icons, one local, the other regional. 

Bod

Shrews said:

This clip reminds me of you IT boys!  

Love the comments:  'Everyone knows a bloke like Simon, if you don't, it's you!'

That character was originally in a show called Bruiser that featured Mitchell and Webb, Martin Freeman, Olivia Colman and Charlotte Hudson.

Bod

I've replaced the LCD panel on more than one occasion where the user's left a drawing pin on the keyboard and closed the lid.

Brio

Sales girl: My sales app won’t open any more.
Me: You’ve updated to a new version of Windows that isn’t supported yet.
No I didn’t!
Yes, you did.
No I didn’t!
Yes you did....

for about 8 hours until she admitted she had. It was literally a full day before she fessed up. She could work on her desktop but she had the laptop at home and decided to update it. This was the woman who had a meltdown when we accidentally blocked Facebook at work and cried, screamed and went home to ‘work’ from there.