Tales From Tech Support - Plug it in!

Last Story - Reminds me of a Burns & Allen routine.

I started a new job that is hardware T3 support, but also "engineering" and test. I would have all kinds of stories already if it weren't for me using real names on many of my accounts.

About 40 years ago I had a visiting VP for our company walk into our shop. He asked me to test a cluster of switches for his little British sports car. My boss walked in as he added, "I'm not very mechanically inclined." I laughed, "Richard, Not only are you very mechanically inclined, you are mechanically declined!" My boss started yelling at me, but Richard told him, "Shut up! Mike is right. That's why I asked him for help. This is the only site that I visit for a free HBO weekend where my video equipment is fully set up and tested. Every other site doesn't even bother to open the shipping boxes, and then I have yo go to Radio Shack or a wholesaler to get the adapters that always disappear."

Go get me the board stretcher

Video games improve hand-eye coordination and turn kids into better human beings

When I was going to college, in the computer lab, every time you logged out the machine wiped everything. You best have a good supply of floppies (early 90's). And don't forget to save it twice.

more vids, yipeeee. cat? yes I saw a kitty cat, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Hey, TFTS and MC are the topics I like the most! Thank you Uncle.

In Germany, when you start to become a mechanic, we often send the guy or girl to get Feilenfett (filegrease). In car workshops the guys sent to get a Kolbenrückholfeder (pistongetbackspring). Or Brennraumbeleuchtung (combustionchamberlight).

"It ain't got no gas in it." ~ Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade.

Nickel, the chair attack cat.

I love my VPN, most of the time. Some websites don't play too well with it so I just turn it off when accessing those. A VPN is not perfect, by any means but it's better than nothing I hope.

Plug it in story: I've told this story before, but it bears repeating. My uncle was a lead tech at a Midwest computer manufacturer way back when. One of their big customers in California had bought some new computers and just couldn't get one to work regardless of what they tried. So they paid for my uncle to fly out there, put him up in a nice hotel and rented him a car. Plus, they allowed him to bring my aunt to take vacation after he fixed the problem. Well, he gets to the customer, listens to their problems for a few minutes, goes to inspect the computer, sees the problem and plugs it in. Everything worked fine after that and my uncle and aunt enjoyed their vacation.

Edit film story: I'm old enough (68) that we didn't have computers in my schools. In fact, the most advanced equipment the school had for teaching were some brand new (my sophomore year) IBM Selectric typewriters that I learned to type on. Then wound-up transferring to another school a couple of months in due to moving and going into a typing class that still used manual typewriters. I went from touch typing to one - two finger hunt and pound (not peck) until I managed to retrain my fingers to hit the manual keys hard enough to strike the paper. Absolutely killed my WPM rate.

I've got a problem with your changed screen format:
I'm rather myopic and due to the lower resolution of the text parts of your (!) screen I have trouble reading the text.
Additional problem, though your voice is calming, due to your rapid narrative it is sometimes hard for me to understand. Now I have also troubles to read along.

Could you eithe make the text (font) a bit bigger or possibly change to your presentation in an other way?
I would be very much obliged!

Some times, you want to use whatever you are holding/working on as a suppository on User, some times, you just want to fold User into a pretzel... And User often deserve it, but, you just can't...
That old guy's story. OP should keep his phone number and call him from time to time. OP could brighten Old Guy's day and restore his own faith in humanity. Win-Win.

PDFs didn't always open in the browser. It opened in a dedicated, separate software like Adobe PDF reader.

In electronics training, while troubleshooting a circuit issue that had a burned resistor, I asked one of our new techs to go over to base supply and get a 'T-R-Double E' . Off he goes toward supply. Gets to the supply Sgt. and fills out the request form for a T-R-Double E. The supply Sgt tells him that he doesn't keep those inside the supply hut, but tells the tech that he can find them all around the base, and to "just look up"! About 30 minutes later, the baffled tech shows up at our shop, totally frustrated. Says he looked in every shop around our shop and could not find a T-R-Double E. I took he confused tech outside the back door of our hanger shop, and asked him to describe what was 20 feet in front of him? He said "a tree". I said good, now spell tree. He spells T-R-E-E, then smacks himself in the forehead as the image of what a T-R-Double E actually is. A tree! He probably walked past hundreds of them on his search for a T-R-Double E.
We razzed him for a few weeks after that, but he had a good sense of humor! 😎

We need you to go get some headlight fluid

Gosh! USA citizens are the most dumb in the world.

Former lifeguard here -- I used to get my worst sunburn on the tops of my feet, hated it but could never seem to stop it from happening. That said, that first story reminded me...I used to manage a user help desk at a facility known for having a lot of actual, honest-to-goodness rocket scientists (along with lots of other tech-oriented folks). I got a call from one of the scientists I had become friendly with, who told me he couldn't get one of our brand-new multi-thousand-dollar workstations to start up. I ran down the usual checklist with him, then my personal checklist, then tried whatever the heck we could brainstorm. No luck, that big ol' screen stays black. Finally, literally as a joke, I ask, "Hey, did you turn the monitor on?" There was a short silence, a curt "thankyoubye" and the line went dead. :-) Moral of the story: Even real-life rocket scientists are human beings.

You like like a lobster for sure! Lol I remember when I was younger, I went fishing with my dad in a small boat. We fell asleep. I burned my eyelids! Lmao

We have Norton's and it comes with a VPN. I never use it. Every time it comes on, it blocks legit forums that I use frequently, and I'm fairly certain it's probably blocking other things as well.

VPN - just set it up at the router then everything is behind your firewall, NAT and you don’t need to setup 20+ devices

Re saving to the C drive. In my office, it is hammered into every new person that all work is saved on the network F drive and NEVER on the C drive or desktop. Yet many of them always seem to do just that.

PDFs opening in the browser... I very much hate that. I either am wanting to download it for archiving (receipts, statement, or manual), or opening... and want to have them open in a program, not the browser!

My favorite hazing is one you read when they sent the young construction worker out for Fallopian tubes.

On a drilling rig... "Go to the warehouse and get us a can of yellow and black safety stripe paint." Or, "Go to the toolpusher and get the key to the V-Door." On a good drilling rig the toolpusher would say, "I gave it to the motorman. Go see him." Motorman would say, "The crane operator has it." The crane operator would get on the PA and say, "%#&*#, would you @$$holes quit messing with the new guy so the rest of us could get some work done around here???"

We Had a fellow at work, that when the new guy asked a question because nothing was working .... The newbie was told to check the GIGGLING PIN and if that was OK to check the KANOOTING Valve ..... LOL

A more accurate slogan for most VPNs: browse the internet from the comfort of your home with all the safety and security of a Russian coffeeshop!

Scopie = An aerospace systems operator (ASOp) or fighter controller (FC) in the Royal Air Force

RE Share drive: I worked in a small R&D lab for a while. Everyone had a desktop computer. Everyone also had a folder with their name on it located in the share drive. The share drive was small and only meant to be a way to share files from one person to another. It wasn't meant for long term file storage. It didn't take long for the share drive to fill up, and make passing work related files from one person to another impossible. The IT guy fixed it. He wrote a script that ran every day at midnight. Any file in the share drive that was 31 days old or older was automatically shredded. As in over written with random data seven times then deleted. That got rid of a lot of vacation photos, restaurant menus, and other junk files. A few people really complained loudly about it until they were reminded that using the company computers for personal purposes was expressly forbidden.

I've always been able to completely deflate anyone who's ever wanted to send me on a snipe hunt, since I actually know the etymology of that phrase. Anytime someone would try to send me on one, I'd ask when am I going to get my plane ticket to India and when do I pick up my weapon to hunt it. They'd always just look at me in abject confusion, not knowing that a snipe is a real tiny Indian bird, that if you could reliably hit made you a sniper

unfortunately, by the end of the 20th century, decades of one-up-manship lead to newbie hazing getting out of control in Australia. These blue collar asshats were often not the brightest to begin with, and started coming up with hazing that could be actually terminal. Examples of lawsuits included, high pressure air hose up the butt so intestines exploded, and throwing alcohol on the floor of the toilet cubicle and setting it alight, causing 3rd degree burns. I think the hundreds of thousands of dollars handed out in fines finally lead to hazing free work sites where this sort of crap would get you fired.

Years ago when I was doing red iron buildings we got in trouble for sending two newbies for color contrasting screws. They were told to get them no matter what. They set off and nobody saw them for the rest of the day. When they showed up they said that they were busy looking everywhere for the screws and they didn’t want to come back without them. After some questioning by the big guys they were told to stay handy in the future and we were told that if we were going to prank the help keep them in site while we did it. They would chuckle about the first day for pretty much as long as they worked there so we figured that the joke was on us and they just went into the corn field by the job site and hid out smoking and taking it easy.

Left handed screwdriver or metric shifting spanner (adjustable wrench?)

Many years ago my wife worked for a bank that had 2 branches in the same area. New empoyees would often be sent to the other branch to get Verbal Agreement forms.

"Also, RADAR* screens don't go beep at every target..."
THIS! So much THIS!
Former Radarman here, US Navy, 1964-68 and Air Force Radar Tech, 1972-88.
*That's SONAR you're thinking of! That's the one that goes BEEP!.
(Side note: In Navy Boot Camp, NTC San Diego in 1964, I was given the choice of striking for the Radarman rating or the Sonarman rating. I didn't fancy the high probability of winding up in a submarine, so I chose Radarman. Wound up on the USS Enterprise, CVN-65, in the Gulf of Tonkin.)

Back around 2005, I got written up by my female boss because she was stupid.
She'd asked for, and I'd supplied, a wireless ethernet router for her office because she couldn't be bothered to plug her laptop into the ethernet cable on her desk to get internet.
I offered to install it for her, but she swore she knew how to set it up, and that it was insulting to her to insinuate she didn't know how.
The next day, while she was in the middle of a meeting in her office with the other department heads, I got called to her office to "troubleshoot" the router I'd given her.
Turns out she thought because it was "wireless", it would magically know how to connect to the internet. She'd just plugged it in, not realizing she needed to plug the ethernet cable into it too.
When I pointed out her mistake in front of everyone, a few people snickered. It embarrassed her, so she wrote me up for insubordination.
thankfully, I was able to get a transfer to another department (managed by one of the other people in the room, actually)
No one ever wanted to work for her for long, and she eventually moved on before she got fired. I think that's how she'd managed to have a career...constantly moving from job to job before people realized just how dumb and worthless she was.

A "scopie" is a radar operator. (At least in the UK. Here in the US, we were called "Scope Dopes").

@uncle_Jon I worked at that RAF Station in Norfolk. The radar in question was the Type 85, a big beast with a range of over 280 nautical miles, the aerial of which is in my pfp. Anyway I was working on one occasion where we caught out a scopie, the not so bright guys who had to watch the displays, with this trick. That one got us in a little trouble, as we sat him down in our crew room for an hour. This was in the main engineering building, not the main Operations building. So his supervisor was not happy when he had to phone us up to find where he was. On this occasion it was because we were having issues with synchronising the direction the aerial was pointing, to the direction the display was pointing. So we were having to constantly go back up to the roof to check things out in the big 60 Ton aerial. Being the junior technician working the job, it was me that had to keep turning that aerial by hand. Every time we started the aerial back up under power there were klaxons that sounded to make sure nobody stayed on the roof. If you did you might well get a "bit" microwaved. That thing could put out in total as much microwave energy as about 85000 average microwave ovens. Yes that really was 85 THOUSAND! Even with really good bearings spinning up 60 tons of aerial to 4rpm gave the big concrete blockhouse a bit of a rumble.

"No such thing as toe nails..." ... me looking at feet ... 🤨

When I started working in the aerospace industry in the 1960s the usual one was to send the new apprentice down to the tool store for a "long weight (wait)".

once was working on a boat and the guy thought it would be funny to send me for an air anchor he didnt know that i had been to a toystore to look for something to cure my boredom and they had a blowup anchor i went there got it the guy was surprised i returned so fast i give him the thing and he s flabergasted i actualy got something that was meant to keep me bussy for a while

Love your cats.

Yeah, after the last big update (to Win11?) PDFs want to open in the browser, even though we've all got perfectly good installations of Adobe Acrobat Viewer. Several times I've had to go and adjust the default app for PDFs.

I've found to get a cat to stop scritching on my chair I gently pinch the offending paws. After 2-3 times this seems to work. Good luck.