The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

The company I work for used to be hosted on 3dcart. One day the site went down and their support couldn't tell us why. After over 24 hours of downtime they restored service but left 5 days of all records and customizations across the entire store, from the DB to the damn templates. Their support apologized for the outage blaming the disaster on a combination of hard disk failure and a bad update to their backup script. They were not willing to assist us in any way. We were forced to manually enter 5 days of orders (which gave them new order numbers and caused more problems), products and template changes, with order data coming from an internal email which was luckily CC'd on the order confirmation email. Thank God for whoever setup that CC, it saved our asses. In the end it cost our company thousands of dollars and 3dcart never composited us in any way.

I get some error when deleting an azure service so I put a support ticket asking for help. Just as I am about to close my computer for the day I receive an email saying:

"Product team will disable the account xxxxx from backend".

The xxxxx is our subscription number. The subscription that hosts not only that service but also production servers and databases, storage accounts containing backups, etc.

I replied to the email so hopefully disaster is avoided otherwise tomorrow wont be a happy day.

A few months ago I applied for an IT Support role managing computer systems for a smaller manufacturing corporation. Now some back story, I'm a recent college grad looking for work and this hit my radar. I did well in the phone interview and really enjoyed the in person interview as well.

However, if I was offered the role I'd be the only person working on their infrastructure. The person who I interviewed with was leaving and thus his position was available. It was kinda strange to interview with the person you'd be replacing.

I started asking questions about their critical infrastructure and how they manage it. Short answer is they don't know.

I asked about off-site disaster recovery. "Oh we back everything up to a 2TB disk and I take it home every day."
I asked "What if that backup fails?"
Their response was "That would suck."

The company decided to go with a managed IT solution instead of me as I don't have the required experience in their eyes. The previous guy left because they we're stuck in their ways.
Yah, no thank you.

At uni we had "pleasure" to attend lectures held by some really old professor. First one was total disaster, since he had laptop that should be already taken to the museum. He tried to connect the projector, but I am almost sure that Windows 95 does not support it. Of course he called help, but the other guy was obviously no help. To our suprise professor canceled the lecture and next time he showed up whith brand new laptop with Windows 10. Of course there were troubles with the projector again 😂

Solaris CBE is a joke. Oracle, do us a favor and donate this operating system soon to try to recover it from the disaster that was the death of OpenSolaris.
Support Illumos and leave this task to those who like it and know what they are doing.