Tech Support Heck

[BruteForce]

Two good ones I haven't seen before.

Duly Noted from Ed

Back in the early ‘90s, I worked as a tech/salesguy at a local computer shop in London. In those days, Atari ST’s, Amigas, and Amstrad PCWs were all the rage, and we sold all sorts of software over the counter and through mail order.

One of the more popular applications was the Mini-Office Professional. It was easy to use and relatively inexpensive. One day, one of our frequent customers – a very nice, little old lady – called up, complaining about some issues with the application on her Amstrad PC 1640. After a pleasant couple of minutes, I deduced that there was a sector fault on the second 5 1/4" disk.

The old dear was more than happy to send the offending disks back to me for replacement, and I asked her to include a small note so that I’d remember what the issue was.

A few days later, a Jiffy bag (ED: translation “padded envelope”) duly arrived at the shop with a large, red “FRAGILE” stamp on the front. Enclosed were two pieces of thick cardboard to hold the offending 5 1/4" disk, a long, handwritten note with the most beautiful penmanship I’ve ever seen that detailed the exact error message she’d encountered — all neatly stapled to the disk.

Denied Wireless Access from Muki

A coworker of mine named "Jim" got a call from his manager, "Susan." She was in a panic because her inventory management software wasn't working. Not a good thing to happen to the Inventory Manager. Moreover, the software was the only software installed on the system, so Jim feared that it was a total system crash.

Upon arriving to Susan's office, Jim was pleasantly surprised to see a blank monitor — the computer was probably just turned off or there was a loose cable or something. Upon almost no further investigation, Jim found the source of the problem. The laptop dock had no laptop in it.

"Susan, where is your laptop," Jim asked.

"At home," she replied.

Jim wasn't quite sure how to take that and thought for a few seconds about how to proceed without sounding insulting.

"This workstation won't work without the computer plugged in."

Without hesitation, Susan insisted "But it's wireless!"

[Aren Jay]

A friend of ours had a 4 year old who was having a birthday. Only problem was that the cake for the kid wasn't at home but at the office.

Anyway everyone called the kid and mother and sang happy birthday and said the cake was good and that he would take a piece home for the little kid.

The kid was a little piturbed and asked.

Can't you fax me a piece?

[QWK SVT]

Not in IT, but deal with business partners who are not very computer savvy. We use a code word, to identify "user errors"... Example, one of my colleagues had an issue "Mike, my computer won't paste... What's wrong with it?" She didn't COPY anything, so of course it wouldn't paste... My reponse: "Oh... You have an I-D-ten-T error... Try now"

ID10T
:lol:

[MM2004]

I was called by the Plant Manager to assist with his LAN connection in the conference room as he was to show a presentation from my server to a group of people.

I examined the laptop and was on power, machine running and desktop appeared normal.

Seeing the ethernet wire to the machine, I verified connectivity in the port on the table, then verified it to his laptop.

Seeing no lights on his NIC, I pressed the ethernet cable in the port until it clicked. Popup searching for IP Address was noticed in his sys. tray.

Connected.

He asked me what I did; Hesitantly.

"Plugged the wire in your machine."

I could see everyone in the room holding back belly laughs as I exited.

Priceless!

Mike.

[Aren Jay]

When I worked at Safeway I was doing an IT upgrade, for email. Anyway we would have to go through the offices while everyone was away at lunch and we would need passwords. (or we would reset them).

It is amazing. After doing 500 machines. we found that about half used spring summer autumn and winter. A few used themes pertinent to their hobbies. The Gorilla guy had Gorilla. Dolphin lady yes Dolphin. Elvis Lovers "Loveelvis" or "Lovelvis" interchangeably. Not a single one had more than the minimal numbers of letters unless their word was longer. No one had numbers or CTRL 3388 type codes. or $#^&%*). Some never knew their passwords because they never turned their computers off.

Are you one of these people?

Change your password to something hard to crack.

34gtehsjr$% this is hard to crack.

summer is not.

[magindat]

Terminal to seatback interface error.

[Pops]

I wish you guys would stop talking about me!

[arejayesss]

34gtehsjr$% this is hard to crack.



Not anymore! Thanks for the paypal gift. WooHoo I should call dennis for a vortech now:burnout:

[Breadfan]

I did a demo years ago for some in our company, mainly the group who were mad at me for disallowing four digit passwords, and showed them how easy LC4 would crack dictionary passwords, literally in seconds, then let it run for a few days trying to crack a securely designed password...

Luckily a lot of the world is catching up for what I do now I don't have to worry password rules are mandated and rules built into the domains.

Of course that's great in the office but many users still have no passwords or weak passwords at home.

[Breadfan]

I'm sure more and more stories will come back to me...but I do recall one rather "challenging" user I supported years ago, got a kick one day becuase he put in a reqeust for a new monitor.

I thought that was odd, as he got an upgrade recently. Perhaps the monitor had failed, so I walked over to check it out.

I found the monitor was on, and functioning fine, but his desktop had locked up.

He goes "See! I move my mouse and it doesn't move on the screen, the monitor is broken, it's not changing the image!"

Also...

One of my favorite things back in my workstation support days was the people who had some form of OCD. Some were cool, but some were also rather annoying.

One guy came in on a weekend and spent TWO DAYS arranging his office the perfect way he wanted it. He also raided the supplies to get several keyboard and monitor extension cords, as he placed is tower 22 feet from the point the keyboard and monitor would sit on the desk. He ran the cords up under the desk so they weren't visible, making no less than 5 90 degree turns.

He has a wireless mouse too (one of the first gen Logitech wireless mice), and his workstation was far enough away that the wireless mouse would lose connection quite often...and I would get called in each time...

He got the "penalty mouse" as a result. I found the "penalty mouse" while cleaning out the supply closet. It a logitech 3 button mouse circa 1986. it was big, bulky, and very square and quite uncomfrotable to use. Think of it as a beige brick with three buttons on top. It worked with the right adapters though! I used it to keep problem users in line, you didn't wanna get the penalty mouse for the afternoon...

But you know, when it came to users like this, problem users with OCD, well, I always enjoyed folks like this, espcially a commonality they had which was placing pens and pencils in a VERY certain order with a very specific amount space in between each one. I used to either knock one askew or rearrange them just to keep things interesting...I also learned a few shakes from a salt shaker onto the super clean desk surface can bring hours of fun as they swipe and swipe all day - a few grains of salt can be a real pain to get rid of!

[Breadfan]

Here's another fun prank for you all. This one can be dangerous so make sure you are around to to point and laugh before the user goes nuts...or you get fired for tampering with equipment, or beat up, etc etc...as a result this is presented for entertainment purposes only! Use at your own risk preferrably to people smaller and slower than you...

This works well on Windows...

1.) User leaves and does not lock their workstation. Tisk Tisk! This violates security policy!

2.) Use Prt Scrn to take a full desktop screenshot. Use paint to save as a .bmp file

3.) Hide the desktop icons (varies by Windows versions) righ clickt on desktop, expand "Arrange Icons" uncheck "Show Desktop Icons"

4.) Drag bottom task bar to shrink it into hidden mode.

5.) Go to desktop properties and set the screenshot as the desktop wallpaper.

6.) Prepare for laughter on your part and seemingly neverending frustration on users part

- The effeect is this you get the start menu and desktop and icons as a PICTURE only as the screenshot is the background. Clickin on them does nothing. Rebooting doesn't help becuase the icons and taskbar are hidden. (You can restore as right clicking owrks just turn icons back on and pull the taskbar back up. Smart users may discover this, you can hide their icons better by moving them to a folder and saving elsewhere and unchecking the system icons from appearing in the display settings, all reversible. Works well b/c most users go into frekaout mode when left click = no worky)

- Why you need to watch: Know someone who did this and the victim rebooted several times, figured their machine was dead and began to reformat this disk and reinstall Windows...

;)

Note - presented for entertainment purposes only