I’m feeling kinda beat up today so I thought i’d start a new list if things that will make your IT guy jump off a bridge. Most of the time just one instance of these things will only annoy him or her but cumulatively they should be sufficient to cause mental breakdown. I will update this post over time to reflect new tactics my users have used on me and my coworkers.

1- Start your emails with the phrase “I know I’m supposed to put in a ticket, but…”

2- spend time putting a pretty background and a totally unreadable font for your email, then call for help because you can’t figure out MS Word.

3- come by at lunch to ask us technical questions. Bonus points if it is about your home system. Double bonus points if it is about the system at your side business. Be sure to acknowledge that you are interrupting an otherwise quiet and peaceful meal.

4- Make up something work related to call about so you can nag about not being able to use E-bay from your WORK computer.

5- Learn, and use “computer guy” lingo. Refuse to use it correctly. Be sure to note in our satisfaction surveys how rude it was of your technician to correct you.

UPDATE:

6- Open the program of your choice, then pick up your keyboard and mouse by the cord… swing them around above your head, being sure to hit walls, desks, co-workers, etc in such a way that multiple settings are changed and you have no possible way of knowing what you did. BONUS: Tell the IT Guy you were just trying to change your email signature.

7- When filling out the survey, be sure to point out that 5 hours was far to long of a response time for a 3-day response time ticket. It makes us happy.

8- NEVER, I mean NEVER clean the dust off your computer. This way, when you call us because your keyboard is unplugged (because you kicked the cable) we get a face full of dust, and you can say “Whew, that sure is dusty! I’ll bet that’s the dustiest computer you’ve ever seen!”. You’d be wrong.

My last post was all about my first day on call, and how I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be too bad. My day didn’t turn out to be too bad. I ended up back in the server room on Saturday night babysitting a dead server that turned out to be the worst server crash I have ever seen and has managed to make the last week of my life very interesting to say the least.

—— WARNING : GEEK CONTENT AHEAD ——–

So, the RAID 5 volume on the mail server died when one of the other network guys got the bright idea to plug another hard drive in to give us more space. In his defense, it is *supposed* to work that way, but in this case instead of giving us more space, it killed the whole array and gave us NO space… including the space where all the executive’s and department head’s e-mail lived.

Not. Good.

—— Still geeky, but more English resumes here ——

We (and by we, I mean mostly I) spent the whole weekend trying to recover the drives and get a usable server up before Monday morning and in the process recover everyone’s data.  This was particularly urgent because due to some software failures, we didn’t have a good backup of any recent e-mail. As of today, we still don’t have that data back.

I was in the office until about 11pm on Sunday trying to get a new server up so that we could at least have e-mail on Monday morning. Due to the poor state of the network and the fact that the old server was dead, it just wasn’t happening. I cried “uncle” about 10:00, and it took another hour to get things back to a workable state before leaving the office.

I determined on Sunday morning that some users still had some of their e-mail on their computers, so I wrote out some instructions for the other techs and we set about backing up as many of the computers as we could. Meanwhile, we were waiting on the consultants to call us about what the best next move would be, but about 3:30, we just couldn’t wait any longer. I made the call that we needed to blow away the whole email infrastructure and build a new server. At this point, we had been down for about 96 hours, and soon the natives would be getting restless.

Somewhere around 10:30 I got the new server online, handling mail and in the beginning stages of getting it ready for users. One of the other techs came back in to help me get things in the rack, but that turned out to be a bad idea. He decided to take this opportunity to mess with my head a little, and so I left about midnight and proceeded to spend the night having panic attacks. I’m a little prone to those anyway, and I’m sure that being tired didn’t help. EIther way I was back in the office around 9:30 the next morning, started making mailboxes for everyone on the new server. Thankfully, I managed to get out of the office before midnight on Tuesday, but spent most of the day on Wednesday working on the CEO, CFO and various other C-titled people’s computers.

If you think that working on a regular user’s e-mail is stressful, try explaining to the CEO of your company why the e-mail has been down for 120 hours and why we don’t have backups.

Thankfully, today was still hectic but it was really just more about supporting the other techs as they finished up moving everyone’s mailboxes over.

So that has been my week. I hate Microsoft Exchange more now than ever before, but I’ve managed to learn SO much this week. I didn’t mean to, but I think I have set myself up to always be “The Exchange Guy”. There’s one thing about it: as long as they insist on using Exchange, I should have a job!

Well, this will be post number 100 to this blog. Pretty sad really, seeing as how I’ve had this thing for nearly two years. I’m a bad blogger. I know.

I’m sitting in the office right now waiting on a file to download because once again I’ve tried the new Windows Vista, and as much as I have tried to make it work it just doesn’t. Busted. No-Go.

Ok, first, it does look pretty sharp.. I mean it’s got some pretty nice features that around service pack 2 will probably be great. I’ll be waiting til at least SP1 to try this again. The problem is that the new “Aero Glass” feature actually runs as a service (read: a separate program). This service crashes every time I highlight text, which if you’ve ever seen me read a site on the computer you’ll know that I highlight the paragraph i’m on in case I get distracted.

Second: Playing media in any player, be it WMP 11; Real; Winamp; Streams in proprietary players; etc STINKS

Let me say that again it STINKS.. You can thank (at least partially) DRM or Digital Rights Management which essentially is MS sticking it’s nose where it doesn’t belong. This nice little program makes my media players hang, and even with 2gb of RAM it makes processor use go to 100% and just stay there until you open task manager and force the process to end.

Sigh… I had higher hopes for this one… but i’m downloading an ISO of Freespire Linux to try out as a dual-boot when I format and re-install XP later this afternoon.

This morning, I had the conversation that I end up having with every new employee who is moderately computer saavy.

“No, I won’t give you administrator privileges. It’s bad policy, it gives you too much access to things you don’t need and you will break it eventually if you are admin. Not going to happen”

I was then informed (by that wonderful “i’m joking, but i’m not really joking” tone) that the user would annoy the crap out of me until I did.

“Feel free to come by and let me know what software you need installed, they pay me to maintain these machines, I don’t mind.”

So it took all the way until this afternoon before I get the e-mail.

(Paraphrase) Since i’m not administrator, I can’t put shortcuts on my desktop (end paraphrase)

That’s all well and good, except that it is in no way the truth. A guest user (which has virtually no privileges) can put shortcuts on the desktop. Now, they won’t be there when the user logs off or shuts down the computer, but it will place one on the desktop during that session.

Anyway, i’m rambling.. sorry.

So, I walk down to the users office and here is where I am validated…

“I guess it won’t let me move it because it’s in my system32 folder”…..
…
…
…

That’s right… he was screwing around in the folder that (as administrator) deleting, renaming or possibly thinking bad thoughts about a file can corrupt and damage the entire OS.

And THAT is why users can’t be administrators….

Geez.

First a programming note: you’ll notice that I have changed templates once again. This is due to some complaints about comments not working. Seems that my brilliant custom template was not allowing comments. I, not getting many comments, had not yet noticed. Thanks for pointing that out, readers.

So anyway, it is likely no secret now that I am looking at other job opportunities, and while this is an exciting time it brings some real hard work in with it. I am studying for the Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician exams… yes I feel dirty. My disdain for M$ is not a new thing to those who know me, I prefer a more open development environment, and the ability for everyone to keep the big company honest (on things like data mining and reporting). It also adds to stability and functionality if more people can see the code.

Anyway, to survive I must feed the beast and comply with this detestible… test..thingy. Now, I use MS WinXP on a daily basis, and support over 100 users of it on a regular basis. You would think I could just up and pass this test like nobody’s business, right? Nope.. the trick is, you have to answer the “Microsoft Way” of doing things, which, in the real world does not happen.

Oh well. Anyway, just an update since I haven’t blogged about anything in quite a while.