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. ®
Of course, there were other pioneers in IT who tipped me to those solutions when I had run afoul of them myself... :-[
“In Soviet Russia, YOU boot computer!”
Probably not voice-controlled. Try clicking “print.”
Try to find a good used HP 8600 series printer or another one that uses these cheap massive black carts: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4PK-950-XL-951XL-Ink-Cartridges-for-HP-Officejet-Pro-8100-8600-8610/391328446143?hash=item5b1cfe36bf:g:ELwAAOSw2A9ei6pS
I used to be the sole IT guy for a gov’t agency as well. Most of the people I supported had PhD’s and were utterly brilliant, as it was a gov’t research lab. I have had the “my computer won’t wake up” when the power button solved the problem, to the most bizarre issue one time.
I had travelled back to home for xmas, and got a call from one of our remote sites, where they had critical life health safety systems which depended on these servers. I had created a “fail over” server, and mounted it on the same rack as the primary server. I also had two disks running disk duplicating software, where there was always a “fail over” hard drive as a spare within the primary server. I got a call from the IT guy from a gov’t installation that the server had “blue screened” and was toast. I asked him, to reboot and on the startup menu he could simply choose disk2 to go live, as it was completely seperate. The boot menu had not come up on reboot, but he did somewhat remember that they had needed an extra hard drive, some months back and had “requisitioned” the spare in the server, seeing as there was a backup server, wiped it clean, and used it in another pc on base.
So I asked him to fire up the fail over server, so I could connect remotely to it, and make sure it was configured properly. He then informed me that they had reorganized the emergency operations center about a month ago, and had taken the spare server out of the rack, and had put it in their office, and figured they could just swap it into the rack if there was ever a problem. The problem was that this being Christmas day, nobody could find the guy to ask him where he had placed the server. So, nobody knew where it was.
The long and short of the story was that I had to talk this somewhat computer savvy person how to download the “DoD’s gold master disk image” of whatever version of server software we had been running at the time, which took about 3 hours. Then, had him install a copy of the remote control software we used, and sent him an encryption key, and I logged in, and all in all, I spent about 14 hours that Christmas day, rebuilding that server.
My favorite of all time was the actual Microsoft “HOW TO” page, that was posted by some fedup Microsoft tech support guy. More commonly known as the “RTFM” page. This actual microsoft page told people how to “Read The F****ng Manual”, and was not censored. It was posted on the old MSDN website, and was really served by Microsoft servers for some time, though it’s been said the guy who wrote it’s career was not as long as the time the page lasted.
Hmmmm. I think I might need to buy more ink for my EcoTank in about July or so...
LOLOLOL!!!
This reminds me of an incident I encountered in the 1970s when I worked for a computer time-sharing company. Got a support call from a very lovely but technically inept young lady one day, telling me that she couldn’t get connected to our network. After many minutes of making suggestions like turning off her terminal, making sure she had called the correct number, etc., she came back with a giggle and an answer for me. It turned out that the acoustic coupler (that’s how we rolled in those days) was unplugged. Once she plugged it in, all was fine.
For many years afterward, whenever I’d get a technical support question that seemed to defy logic, I would ask if everything was plugged in and turned on. I’d usually preface it with an “I know this may sound silly, but...”. Don’t laugh, I actually solved one or two questions with this technique.
I hope you got an extra vacation day.
In the rest of the office our reports sort of meandered around before arriving the next day with a hangover. And if you had entered the wrong perimeters then heaven help you.
But while accountants have strange and mystical powers even they are helpless before the power of THE CONSULTANT who apparently had a brother-in-law who could supply the office with new (well more sort of refurbished) computers.
And so he was forced to stand and watch while his beloved carefully modified computer was hauled off and a new (sort of, more refurbished) computer loaded with enough bloatware to float right off the desk was left.
But the cost accountant was a man with a plan. And a screwdriver. And a hard drive he had carefully removed.
And they lived happily ever after.
Okay. I named the file “test with no caps”.
Now it says the file name is too long.
Salary. I worked 5 years without a day off for one stretch, because we could not find competent help to take some of the load. Steep learning curve with very specialized software, where the system is connected by spread spectrum radios to a remote network, which are all encrypted private frequencies. Back then there were few pure computer science people roaming freely, and I came to IT with an electrical engineering background. So, programming and whatnot were all within my comfort zone.
Heavy background checks, would usually kill most hackers who knew what they were doing. I did get this National Laboratory’s “employee of the year award”, for $5,000, for going above and beyond to support our programs.
That’ll learn me!
When computers were first installed at the business I worked. This happened in 1992. A woman started using the CD tray as a place for her coffee cup! This is not a hoax!!!! It really happened.
I have a Epson XP-620 inkjet and use it with my windows 7 desktop pc.
I almost replaced it this past month as it was printing with streaky lines and no matter how many cleanings or adding a new cartridge, it was not printing right.
The fix was to uninstall all the printing software and restart the pc. I next went to the Epson website and downloaded the latest software and it now prints perfectly. Maybe some Windows update messed with the printing software?
BTW a good source of ink is www.4inkjets.com
I have used them since 2007 and their refill ink is as good as the OEM ink. You will save 2 to 3 times the money with the refill. The ink does not fade. I also use HP Bright White 100 brightness paper and their photo paper.
Haha. No. But I would hear the tech say under his breath: "Oh my g--."
It was the mid-1980's. I worked the night shift. In case of computer trouble, we had to call a number and talk to this tech on the phone. Always the same guy.
He learned to explain things to me like this: "Are you in the computer room? There should be a big box with blinking lights..."
Another time:
TECH: There should be a box high up on the wall.
ME: We see it.
Coworker stands on a chair to reach the box.
TECH (to me): Turn it off.
ME (to coworker): Turn it off.
COWORKER (to me): Okay... how do I turn it off?
ME (to tech): How do we turn it off?
TECH: Oh my g--. Okay. Okay. Look for the button that says on and off...
Heehee. We had so much fun with him.
“...the HP3830 inkjet printer...”
First mistake after which all which follow are owned by that person.
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