Sysadmin 'fixed' PC by hiding it on a bookshelf for a few weeks Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly column in which we recount readers' tales of jobs gone wrong, often at times or for reasons that are just plain wrong. This week, meet “Aaron”, who once worked for a construction company he says “didn't need in-house IT but had delusions of grandeur and so employed me.” The company had …
So, Aaron didn't even bother to listen to the user and didn't even bother to take a look at the PC. Because he was really busy looking after 30 machines? Because he wanted to sit and read The Register all day?
If Aaron had looked at the machine first, established there was no problem and then left it on the shelf that might have been different.
Unfortunately as a sysadmin and developer for 30 years, I've been on the receiving end of the Aarons of this world when I have needed them to fix a problem on a PC or a Mac and they won't even listen. Mostly I can fix my own problems, but occasionally I've worked at places where it's been locked down and I don't have local admin.
Probably the user was a twat too by the sound of it. You are all twats. And so am I (from the number of thumbs down). :-P Now get back to work.
Yes, we're all twats. We've all had the whiny, loud, obnoxious, know-it-all user who's a pain the backside. I think Aaron handled this very well. I've done the same thing but usually will fire up the machine in the lab before sticking it on the shelf. Others, I just take it back to the lab and take it back in a day or so.
Which reminds of one user who insisted that when there was any problem, that the computer or printer obviously needed to be turned off for a day or two to "rest".... I think they (the user) needed a rest.. maybe a long weekend with alcohol...
The other choices left in dealing with these types (reference BOFH) are not socially or legally acceptable in real life.
1) presuming he knows better about the best tool for a job than the person actually doing the job.
2) Wasting time and hurting someone elses productivity.
3) Lording it up and being a roadblock instead of helping support/enable the guy to use tech to do the actual business of the company more effectively so earn the company more money (i.e. what IT are in most cases ACTUALLY paid to do).
Aaron sounds like the dictionary definition of a twat to me. Also coincidentally perfectly fits the "little Hitler" stereotype that you find in so many companies IT departments. Its only sad that he quit before they could rightfully fire his ass for massive incompetence.
Sometimes the little Hitler is a prick, but most of the time he or she is just trying to keep a lid on things so they can actually do their job.
Supporting 30 machines is a doddle, if those machines are all the same model, running a standard environment, with relatively standard software which is still within support from the vendor.
When, as is more common, those machines are bought on the cheap from down the shops from 10 different vendors running 3 different OS versions, two of which are out of support, with each one slightly different depending on which bloatware the manufacturer installed and they're hooked into a domain controller from before the dawn of time it's much much harder.
If you want to get by on a shoestring IT budget you absolutely have to say no to anything your users don't absolutely need.
That doesn't mean Aaron wasn't a prat, but the reason your IT guy says no is because every time you ask for something special it makes his or her job significantly harder and if it isn't going to substantially increase the profitability of the business it's probably not worth it.
I have known "users" (a very loose term for some) that refused to take any computer security seriously even after having a serious malware infection. So having an idiot complain that something is not working when it is obviously working is very annoying. Sometimes the best solution is to sit tight and do nothing because nothing is broken.
Nope, I have to agree with the title. Aaron may have been right in this case, but he's doing what we all hate when the users do it - ignoring what he's told because he thinks he knows best.
If he'd looked at it, decided it was fine, and left it on the shelf so the idiot thinks it is being looked after, then all well and good, but by not bothering to check the device out first, he's potentially wasting everybody's time.
Let's be realistic, Aaron is a big part of why the company went bust. Hired to facilitate growth he proceeded to spend his day having a wank and spoofing the other employees.
He had a chance to help a company go big and he wanked it away.
Heavens help me if I ever hire an Aaron.
"English really needs such a word...." Well, at a place I worked a few years back, the IT Helldesk chaps called it a "Ford". At the time, certain Thames Valley Ford dealerships had got in trouble with Trading Standards for a series of customer complaints. What had happened was, when a customer came in with what the mechanics considered a nonsense complaint, e,g.; "My gearbox is too noisy", but the item was inside warranty and actually working fine, they would swap the problem item with the one from another customer's car and claim they had put in a new unit under warranty. They were caught when a suspicious customer called the Ford factory to ask about the warranty extension on his "new" engine. Much tickled by that, the IT team would take two "problem" laptops or desktops, mark them as "Ford" jobs, switch some components between the laptops, and then give them back to their owners as "repaired".
"Used in situations where the bloody thing just works after having a rest on the well-lit working bench, so the fault is never seen."
It is not unknown for a user to report a genuine fault - but when the device is returned to me it works perfectly even on extended testing. The fault does not recur when the user gets it back either. My explanation to the user: "It just wanted a ride in a car".
Back in the early days of PC's in the work place (IBM PC era) there was three acceptable ways of fixing faults
1) Promise the PC an extra 10 volts
2) Promise the PC a date with te fax machine/copiers
3) Slip the cleaners £5 to accidentally to push of off the desk/down the stair well.
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"In which case, take them past the nearest WEEE facility and a couple of waste disposal sites, and make sure they get a long, hard look."
I've had occasion to suggest to users that the next time it fails, just pretend to make the call to support but make sure it's in "earshot" of the affected device. Then it will start behaving itself knowing I might be on my way a big screwdriver!
And during the valohoito interval, there is time for some kalsarikännit*.
* 14 to 1 chance I didn't get the grammar right. Syyllisyytensä...
I have occasional problems with cablers who insist their cable run is fine, even though it is obviously not, sometimes just telling them you are going to reconfigure some switch ports, tell them give it a couple of minutes and then ask them to call you back once the device lights up is enough for them to save face and hurriedly rush of to re-terminate the ends. MW
The number of computers I've sent out (after making sure they were working), only to have them mysteriously fail (the most recent one they even tried plugging it into a different PSU to check if that was the problem). So they get sent back to me (after I've scrambled to send out a replacement), only to have the 'broken' machine fire straight up on my workbench.
Occasionally people wonder why those of us who work in IT assume that users are idiots. This is one of those reasons.
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"So Del whacks it and up it comes..."
You may laugh, but the old ceramic 286s used to get so hot(*) that they'd cause thermal problems with their sockets. They'd power up and work for a couple of minutes, then lockup. A whack would reseat the CPU socket fingers and off it would go until switched off and let cool.
The advice given was (obvoiusly) "Don't turn it off"
(*) Hot enough that touching one resulted in a sizzling sound and a blackend fingerprint left behind. I sported a huge fingertip blister for 10 days.(**) Very few of them were ever fitted with heatsinks despite the obvious benefits.
(**) The only other time this occured is when I inadvisedly made contact with a 1980s vintage photocopier fuser in the days when they weren't adequately protected against such things. Even old valve amps didn't get that hot.
At one time the local jokster could produce a "humorous" image of his buttcheeks by sitting on the office copier. But then came the day when the full sized copier was replaced by a desktop sized unit. Jokster did not realize that the glass plate on the copier was now much closer to the (very hot) high intensity lamp. Ah, the scream of pain accompanied by the smell of burning flesh! The explanation submitted to the corporate nurse would have been...interesting...
"You may laugh, but the old ceramic 286s used to get so hot(*) that they'd cause thermal problems with their sockets."
Yep, thermal creep. Incredibly common when RAM was up to 36 DiL chips in sockets. Many, many call outs simply involved clicking the RAM chips back into their sockets. Metal legs into metal spring loaded sockets with wild temrepture variations between hot daytime running and night time powered off and no building heating. Post Xmas was always the worst because everything was off for at at least few days, including the heating.
I went to one where it was so dusty inside I could barely see the components on the mother board. Tipped it on it's side to start blowing/brushing out some of the dust and half the RAM chips just fell off the board. The user described symptom? "It crashes 3 or 4 times per day. I was surprised it was even booting up at all considering what was the cause!
Speaking about thermal creep, I was still in college and we went to a ski camp. Of course we took the computer with us, it was Apple ][+ at that time. After many hours on the road, including a couple going up the snow covered valley, we plugged in the machines and the floppy disks would spin too fast.
That was quite unexpected as we thought that cold grease would be more sticky and have them spin too slow. After a good night in the dormitories, the floppies were back to their normal behaviour.
You may remember the old BBC computers, where one had to take off the cover and push all the chips down into their sockets periodically - constant on/off switching caused the chips to work loose. I never had the problem, since I didn’t ever switch mine off, except for maintenance, or installing a Solidisk board.
There's an old story of an engineer being called out to fix a machine, might have been a computer or some other machine, and after rthe machine was working again, the manager in the department which ran the machine came in spluttering and shouted "You charged us 339 quid, when all you did was to hit it with a hammer!" "Ah." was the reply: "30 pounds is me standard call out fee. The 300 pounds is for knowing exactly when , how and where to hit it."
I can seee my own way out - I've been calleed away to look at an Altair 8.
"As it sounds, just swap out their "faulty" unit for a new one, and then put it back on the shelf for the next time."
Went live with a new comms front end processor. Then we noticed one line unit was not synchronising. Senior engineer did a board change on the fly without powering the rack down - while saying "I'd rap the knuckles of any junior engineer who tried this". New board worked ok. Looked at the old one. It had a repair shop tag attached to it with the tla "NFF".***
***"No Fault Found"
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