r/TalesFromTechSupport - Client DESTROYS Expensive Tech, Thinks RICE Is The Answer!

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Karma Stories Rob
227-207 Dundas Street East,
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The Karma Stories Podcast is hosted by Rob and covers stories from Malicious Compliance, Pro Revenge, Nuclear Revenge, Tales From Tech Support, Entitled Parents and other amazing Reddit Subreddits! You can find us on EVERY Major Podcasting Platform and on YouTube!

#redditstories #karmastories #revengestories

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome to Karma Stories Podcast
00:33 Cable Management
03:54 Car Wash Tech Woes
06:30 AD Auditing Challenges
09:03 One Server, Two Issues
10:48 Percussive Maintenance
13:09 Rice and Tech Don't Mix
15:50 HR Downplays IT Work
17:10 Closing Remarks and Call to Action

[randycarter]

I'm reminded of a scene from an old movie. Captain "Tech, the communicator is out again." Tech looking at it asked, "What did you do?" Captain replies, "Emergency repair procedure number one." Tech "You kicked it?"

[Game_Blox]

I love how creative some of the names on Reddit are. Some of them just make me laugh no matter what mood I'm in, like MrDumbAsCanBe.

[Fyrebaugh]

Hey man, line of sight can be accomplished between buildings through windows, if there isn't trees etc in the way. Some external units would have integrated heaters to keep them warm enough for ice and snow to melt off of them, keep them from freezing up etc..

[mindlessmeat]

We used to call percussive maintenance High Velocity Impact Stress Analysis Test.

[WillowDancer]

10:43 "make me wonder how that worked up where I am in Canada during the winter". It works just fine. In the late 1990's to early 2000's a friend of mine set up an internet service for a rural region about 100 km nw of Ottawa, Ontario. People got their internet via line of site radio transmission. The only problem they ever had is that they put their equipment in a cooler with a 25 watt bulb to keep it warm during the winter. Their equipment melted.

Also, prior to fiber long distance calls were transmitted via microwave towers about 20 miles apart. (Canada used miles back then.)

[gabrielleschiavo]

Percussive maintenance has been well known since Fonzie ;-))

[jdstep]

"Retainer clip!" Thats what it's called. (First story.) Thanks!

[mherrmann]

IT is like being a stagehand for a Broadway play.... if everything goes off without a hitch and noone even noticed you were there, that is when you know that you did a good job. A good boss would recognize this.

[gregorythomas]

Story 4.1: My friend in Dallas got the very first AT&T connection using microwave transmission for non-business home use in the city...was freaking awesome!

[Resavian]

The thing is, in Jails most of the menial labor is performed by "trusted" inmates and depending on the area they would need to be very trusted and also supervised, which means it isn't the moppers who are needing to be trained but the screws overseeing them.

[maxfan]

Story 3: Can I just say that IT can be unhelpful if they don't attend to tickets. I used to work in payroll, and we used a payroll system in which only one user could alter an employee's record at a time. However, the system was so general that IT and HR users would also need to alter employees' records on occasion. This could be a problem when an employee resigned - we needed to process the pay aspects of their resignation (stop their regular pay and pay out their entitlements), but we couldn't get into their record because some IT person was halfway through stopping the employee's system access when they decided to go to lunch...

[HappilyHomicidalHooligan]

Yah, he had a PhD all right...

A PhD in killing Computers...

😄😁😆😅😂🤣

[majorjohnson]

Story 1:
I had an IT job with a story like that. Professor was calling in because he couldn't get the DVD player on the overhead projector.

Problem: Cable was unplugged. Solution: someone with keys to the back of the podium had to plug the cable back in (you couldn't do it from the front).
The repeat: This same call, happened every week, like clockwork.
Except the professor would just give us random room numbers (once even telling me he was on the 6th floor of a 4 floor building). At least I knew where he was because it was the same problem as the last three times.
Finally I got a call one week where all he said was "I-- I-- It's not working!" and hung up. I never even got to "Hello, IT" much less the "have you checked to make sure that it is definitely plugged in."
The solution: Coworker, having decided that he was yanking the DVD player forward to "check to make sure it was plugged in" resulting in it becoming _unplugged, _ velcro'd the DVD player in place so that wasn't possible to do that any more (not enough vertical wiggle room).
Never heard from that professor ever again.

[Beliar]

The story about nagging HR department and possible / expected time travel reminds me of an earlier job in my career. I created a database and some web forms together with the appropriate software for user management and all users got sorted into specific classes to manage their rights - so every user can see only what they need to see (and their respective customers). Then after a year my administrator has concerns about the used password hashing algorithm (although the access is strictly internal over the intranet of my employer at the time) ..So I changed and improved password handling. Then quite some time later my team lead asks for a complete userlist... And we all stumble over the fact that nearly half the users had not logged in once since the change of the password method (I introduced a field to check if a user still had an "old" password or changed to the new method - all those users still had an old password). But its complicated if your employer "offers" a new software that is kinda mandatory on one hand but not necessary for your specific work .. so you log in once, create an account to satisfy your employer but then never return if its not necessary for your daily work

[randycarter]

IT is one of those things that when everything is working fine we don't need you. But when stuff hits the fan we need every body plus 10 to get it fixed, yesterday.

[lgninjalo]

What they aren't telling you is that those touch screens (called an HMI) used a light grid on the edges and determined where you touched the screen.

[tifforo]

Telling someone to do feature development instead of bug fixes is like telling an auto mechanic they should've installed a turbo charger in your car instead of changing the oil. Yes, one of those things might require a higher level of technical skill than the other, but the other is a really really really essential service.

[WillowDancer]

8:31 "how about just randomly disabling a couple of accounts each day and see who complains".

Um yeah. Back in the 90s there was a Nortel site in Ottawa, Canada had an extremely fast and extremely expensive internet connection called a T1 that they used for their internet. (A T1 connection could carry 24 telephone calls, 1.5 Mbps data or some combination of the two). Their accounting department didn't know what a T1 was and wondered if they need to pay several thousand dollars per month. So they stopped paying it.

The net result is that the internet for the site suddenly went down and it took IT about 1.5 days to figure out that the service was turned off. And for 1.5 days the the many thousands of employees at that site could not do their work. This turned out to be an extremely costly experiment.

[OcusticClear]

Regarding the second to last story: when it comes to trusting somebody who's competent at a job, I would prefer to hire a 'Jack of all trades and master of none' then to hire someone with a P.hD. This is for the exact reason the narrator said - a person with a PhD is a specialist in one small area of expertise and is dumb in everything else.

[tomw]

for story 4, the PhD would be a Wizard in D&D with Intelligence 19, Wisdom 3