Typical day in IT Support :P

I hope you will forgive me for a third hand story, but I'm one of those evil developers, not a support per se. But I thought you'd enjoy this story anyway. So this happened to a colleague of a colleague:

$Hero - our hero. $Cop - A representative of our hard worked law enforcement agency.

So $Hero is happily speeding along in his car, running a few yellow lights a bit late, etc. Finally, the law catches up to him and pulls him over. Here's how the conversation went:

$Cop: Can I see your driving license, please?

$Hero (with smug grin): Certainly. Here it is, officer.

$Cop takes license back to motorcycle and speaks into radio.

$Hero: It's not going to help you any, though.

$Cop (with no reaction): What do you mean?

$Hero (with wider grin): The server you have to check it against is down.

$Cop (still no reaction): And why do you say that?

$Hero: Because I'm the guy they called to get on site and get it up again.

Our hero did not get a fine this time. Instead he got a police escort to his workplace.

Source: reddit r/talesfromtechsupport

Other guy: Hello! I need your help! I don't have my password for my gmail ! Help!

Me: Okay, ... (proceed to guide him where to recover the passwords), Now enter you email in.

Other guy: Well i don't remember it either, Help me get my email.

Me: ...

Fml

So my parents got speakers integrated into their monitor. A few years ago (like 3-4) they made me turn off the sound because it annoyed them since all they did were playing some shitty flash games and some office work. Now they needed the sound back on and this is how it happened.

1. Confirm they plugged the right cable in. I know them so I knew that could be a problem

2. Made them download Teamviewer because I know they can't even doubleclick without guidance

Now the juicy part was to tell them they need to turn on sound on the monitor. As I was watching via teamviewer I saw them trying to click on the menu items from said monitor. Took me 5 minutes to explain that their mouse can't do shit on that because they need to navigate with the buttons underneath the monitor.

Turned out they couldnt get things right and I had no idea what they were seeing because they explanations went like "All I can see is Main Menu and Exit." - "Is that really all dad?" "Yes thats all. Main Menu, Brightness and Exit" turnes out the middle part is interchangable like "Brightness, Saturation, etc..."

After 2 hours I gave up and told them to pick up my speakers tomorrow

A day in the life of the tech support guy on the other side of the phone .. 😔

Everyday tech support struggles:

- "I can't find my document."

- "Ok where did you save it?"

- "In Word."

- "I understand you saved it in Word but where did you save the file to?"

- "I'm not sure, Word did the rest"

I build my friend's pc
He didn't had windows
The site where we bought the oem license was messed up
and yes... I had to use teamviewer to disable his adblocker...
Oh, and 12 hours later to activate windows...
And yes, it was me spending 10 minutes on the phone to acivate his windows key since we got a already used license...
Adding it up, including the whatsapp remote support, If I would st art charing I would get rich...

This is adorable

<b>Issue #19: Kicker Table physics engine</b>
CEO: Physics engine is weird, please fix

Me: *levels table* Physics engine calibrated, needs further testing.

Not really a dev rant, more of a "home tech support" kind of rant but I guess a lot of devs will relate...

So I was looking at building myself a little storage server, mostly for backups and stuff. This led to the fail of this rant: I thought it would be a good idea to convince my father to switch from using a ton of USB HDDs to get himself a NAS.

This is where I didn't think things through...

The only place he was able to set up the NAS is in the living room. Now I have to use my noise cancelling headphones all day just to not have to hear those HDDs rumbling around in there🤦

(also, I specifically got some super quiet fans for my gaming PC in the living room, but now I realize I could have saved some money and gotten some louder ones, since that NAS is so much louder...)

I'm assigned with doing Guides for customers that need connections through Microsoft Remote Desktop.

I made one on a Windows laptop, fine, but they also need guides for Mac OsX and iOS. Dat emacs-fingertorture screenshot buttoncombo.. and once I was done with that I needed a quick way to put 20 odd screenshots on my working computer ( Linux ) and edit them to have a unified design and to also share it with my coworker, so I put them up on Google drive. It started acting up right away with compressing for download in Linux.. then on the Windows computer......... and once I had the zips Windows internal unzipped couldn't unzip them, neither could 7zip................. neither could Linux Unzip -e ................ I ended up just downloading them one by one on both computers, I almost got a nosebleed from that..

Need to setup computer for grandpa. Which distro will save me from live time support?

Thought of Chromium OS?

Techsupport vs Client