Quote:
Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm
Our lot mostly haven't worked out how to ask why a printer isn't printing unless it has an actual error message on it. If it merely says out of paper, they just print to another printer (and another, and another until they find one with paper in), rather than put the conveniently placed paper into the printer. And no, they don't cancel the print jobs, so as soon as someone does have the sense to put paper in, out comes dozens of pages of now-unwanted stuff.
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I used to be the IT staffer at an office of my then employer. It was a call center for a market research firm, so I had servers running Solaris, SCO Open Server 5, OS/2 Warp 4, Windows NT4, and Novell Netware, plus Windows PCs running Win2k Pro and Win98SE (and one poor device running Win95 for the benefit of something that wouldn't run under anything more modern), plus several T1 lines, a PBX, two predictive dialers, and a number of dumb terminals (Wyse75s) used by interviewers.
They ran two shifts, and The staff there learned my mantra: "Is it turned on? Is it plugged in? Is it plugged into the right place? Answer all of those questions with "yes"
before we call Dennis at home in the middle of dinner..." (The office was in walking distance of home, so the staff assumed "Dennis can just pop in. No problem...")
I once got a call at home as I was starting dinner. The users couldn't log in to the Solaris server. I could get in fine remote from home, so I figured I'd better go see what was up. I got there about ten minutes later to find everyone sitting on their hands. Both the Solaris server and the Novel server were down. One or the other I could understand, but
both?
So I turned both back on, and had my irony meter peg off scale as the big mutha UPS they were plugged into hiccuped and put them down again. Okay, unplug them from the UPS, take it out of service, find other things to plug them into, bring them back up and get people working. I got back home and actually had dinner around 10pm, and was in bed about midnight.
At 2am, my phone rings. It's the night supervisor. She's having a problem reaching the NT server where the templates for the nightly report files live. I blink sleep out of my ey4es, make a couple of suggestions for work-arounds she can try, tell her if it doesn't work leave a note on my desk and I'll send the reports for her in the morning, and go back to sleep. At 2:30am, the phone rings. It's the night supervisor. She just wants to tell me she was able to send the files, and I didn't have to worry about it...
I was at a meeting the next day including the SVP in charge of my division. He asked how I was. I said "tired" and explained why. When I got to the part about the 2am and 2:30am calls, his eyes got very wide, and he said "Why is she calling you at those hours over something so trivial?" "It's because she doesn't
know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and make sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. I respect that, which is why she's still
alive right now..."
She got the sack some time later, for reasons I suspect translated to "Too dumb to do the job".