Tech support nightmares... I have mine. Do you?
 

So in my mainstream life I manage networks, Microsoft Active Directory / Entra ID, Security etc, and as a favour to one of my larger clients, I support some people in his office, including his wife who does some excel stuff.

Several times a week she calls because her computer has 1 error or another popping up. It ads up to a few hours a week of support.

Anyway I was on-site yesterday and I just happened to be looking in her direction to see her power-off her computer, then power-on, then power-off, on-off / on-off several times in a row. Her reason? "This is the only way to make it see her USB thumbdrive"

ARGH!!!!

Forget the fact that it is against her own company policy to use USB drives, she is causing complete havaok to her machine. "I know what I'm doing" she says, getting pissed at me for even asking the question. "I've been doing this for years and it always works" she says.

ARGH....

i did desktop support years ago for a big hospital, it was nothing but nightmares dealing with users.

The amount of people that use terrible, repeated passwords makes my head spin.

LOL :1orglaugh Brilliant and funny story, indeed. Not to you, Sir. I can only imagine your face looking at her killswitching it off/on. :Oh crap :upsidedow

Yeah... it was really surprising. What was worse though was her insistance that it worked. Forget all the other problems this kind of thing creates... to her, it didn't matter.

Back in the early 2000s I was looking after about 8 different computers, networked together at the studios. All was OK for a while, after Id done the initial sort out that was needed, but then nearly every day, I started getting weird errors that didn't make any sense...

Long story short, one of the employees who lived on site, had taken to sneaking around in the dead of night, in order to build his very own 'secret' computer - To be located and connected to the network in his own room, unknown to anyone else...

Well that in itself is bad enough, but heres the kicker - He was building 'HIS' PC, by using parts out of the other computers! - Stick of ram here, network card there etc... And he knew enough to swap parts around as well to try and cover himself - Meaning actual processors were being swapped between systems, as well as plug and play cards!

He covered his tracks for a good while, by always leaving the systems working, but as you can imagine, weird error after weird error that made ZERO sense whatsoever!

That was my experience of trying to do someone a favour!

Last spring I was called in to a client for disaster recovery. This company with almost 500 employees was hit with ransomware. The company chose not to pay it (smart!). Instead, I put a plan in place to re-fromat and re-image every single machine with domain credentials and Azure Active Directory identity management. I setup a plan to do it, trained some employees, to help, and made an assembly-line of clean-up / re-image of every single user. It worked like a charm until...

... their help desk started getting complaints by the employees that their old passwords could no longer be used. They would call and "insist" that they be allowed to use their old passwords like "password" and "12345" (no damn kidding), felt entitled, and threatened to go over the poor tech support people's head to the boss and "get them fired" unless they could use their old passwords.

Explaining that the new password policies had to be more complex and longer because of cyber-security issues meant nothing to some of them.

I felt so bad because the disaster recovery effort went pretty well but took almost 3 weeks to fully recover from when it should have taken only 2, thanks to the low-security-aware / don't-give-a-fuck employees. Wow.

"Ignorance is a bliss." :1orglaugh

Worst thing about my tech guy is he only takes Google play cards.

He partially refunds me all the time but always seems to send me way too much back then I need to send him more cards.