We were working on a project at work, and one of the people on my team sent me this, which I suspect you will appreciate!
Posted on 09/27/2020 7:09:29 PM PDT by nickcarraway
MAYBE IF I PRINT EVERYTHING IN CAPS?
On Call With the impending weekend comes another tale of courageous souls dispensing the balm of technical knowhow to those who know not. Welcome to On Call.
This week's Regomised reader is "John", who spent long decades at the sharp, pointy end of technical support.
His story takes us back a quarter of a century, to the headquarters of a national agency where he was the sole technical support person and tasked with keeping everything ticking over, from Novell servers to those newfangled Windows 95 desktops.
"I had one client," he told us, "who reacted loudly when anything stopped working."
Anyone who has never experienced this particular breed should step forward now and hand in their "knows a bit about IT" badge, since dealing with such creatures, their shouty voices, and ALL CAPS EMAILS is a rite of passage for many.
One day, however, the protestations seemed justified: "The only printer for the entire office suddenly quit."
Repeatedly clicking the Print button unsurprisingly failed to coax the HP LaserJet 4 into doing its job. The user therefore did what came naturally and sought a member of IT (in this case John was IT) to blame.
The user "stomped over to inform me of the issue," he sighed. "It's hard to say how many people could hear," he said, but we imagine those in neighbouring towns were suddenly aware of the problem.
John popped over to the user's desk, suspecting a bad job lurking in the print queue or shenanigans in the spooler. He had no joy; clearing the queue and sending a test print didn't help. The PC could definitely "see" the printer – a swift ping confirmed the thing was alive, but nothing would come out of it.
Drivers back then lacked the smarts of today, so John's next port of call was the printer itself. Perhaps it had jammed. There was an alternative, but surely no user would be so lazy?
He popped open the tray in search of the blockage and found…
…no paper had been loaded.
Popping in a ream of paper cured the problem, and the grateful HP device resumed its spewing. "Back in business," John proudly told us. The demon of the empty tray vanquished.
The user, however, had followed and, seeing that the printer was once more printing, asked what the problem was.
No doubt seeking to preserve the mystique of the IT industry, John told us: "I vaguely implied that power-cycling the printer and reseating the paper tray had reset the paper detection," rather than slap the user around the head with an empty paper packet.
This hack always found himself muttering something about having to reseat the flange rebate valve when a user wanted to understand the "magic" behind a visit from the power-cycle fairy.
"Given the embarrassed expression on her face," he said, "I'm pretty sure she saw through that explanation, and she never came to my desk again."
Ever solved a silly problem, but spared the user from office-wide embarrassment with a convoluted explanation for "you forgot to turn it on", or perhaps you were the one that couldn't be bothered to refill the printer? A special place in The Register's On Call archives is but an email away. ®
If someone wants to buy a chainsaw, the intelligent ask someone who uses them and visits a saw repair shop.
Same goes for a truck.
People who buy printers on the basis of advertisements or any other BS reason get what they deserve, including the incredibly large amount of money spent on ink which was as good as having been burned.
Free advice...
Be humble: Ask a professional (more than one is ACES). Not everyone is out to just make a commission, but the fact is that most people just don’t give a damn unless you ask for advice.
Punchline: In equipment and anything driven by firmware/software the percentage of problems resolved by a hard boot is not merely cliche’ like the answering machine in ‘The IT Crowd’.
Power cycling should rank right up there with personal finance for high schoolers, but we all know the reality.
True story: I had a 4 year-old side-by-side frostless refrigerator stop keeping cool. On the basis of evidence of a leak, I postulated that it might be refrigerant (refrigeration is NOT an area of my expertise).
I called a repair place and paid the “diagnosis fee” of $80, for which they told me that they could take it back to their shop and see what they could do, estimating that my total out of pocket might be a couple hundred more plus parts.
I balked. There was an appliance guy - former military and LEO - at my shop complex. I walked over and asked him about it one day. His response: Unplug it, let it set for 3 days minimum, see what happens.
I asked for advice and it paid off: I had that fridge for another trouble-free 8 years in my garage. In its case, it was physics, not software (frozen lines), but these days the same logic holds true for appliances (hard boot).
Funny, but true. A helicopter, squadron unnamed to protect the guilty, had a peculiar fault; namely, the generator would not work when switching from external to internal power. Multiple generators swapped and still wouldn’t work. One electrician figured out that one quick hit with a hammer reactivated the magnetic field and got the generator going.
The helicopter was permanently assigned to new pilots.
A daisy wheel printer is also incredibly slow — prints out at about the same speed as a good typist.
My recommendation for handling the evil incarnate, the printer.
Not everyone knows my name at the job, they all know about my abject hate of printers.
One of the best scenes of any movie.
PC LOAD LETTER
ever made a service call to find the extension strip was plugged into itself?
lol...I never saw that one but I did have two where the device was plugged into a switched outlet. One complaint was “only works for Fred.”
L8r
heheh...no, you are right!
There is a good amount of humor in IT work!
It is rich and fertile ground, no doubt...:)
We had a VP who refused to type in a password. If his machine rebooted, he had to call someone to come to type in his password. He was constantly sending us Info Week articles on alternatives to passwords like fingerprint readers. We fixed the problem by canceling his subscription to Info Week.
Our new head of Computer Security was also the head of the Diversity Initiative. He sent out a newsletter every month that was infected with a Word virus. Every month, we would have to clean machines that had accessed the document. He refused to believe he had a virus because, after all, he was the head of the Computer Security.
We were working on a project at work, and one of the people on my team sent me this, which I suspect you will appreciate!
LOLOL!!! give it to the noob... did you ever put some oil/fluid on a rag and act like you were cleaning up a drip while said pilot was doing preflight?
THAT is one of my all time favorites!
The REAL reason Carly Fiorino can’t get elected Dog Catcher:
Oh, so YOU’RE the one responsible for my damned HP printer!
I know all too well. And good luck printing any graphics. LoL
LOl, Yeah if it were up to me it’d be a laser printer! For myself I own a Brother Color Laser. It weighs about 40 pounds!
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