Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] TrackPoint is trademarked. Call it a clit mouse instead.
Posts
Other than that they should be, you know, doing their job.
Of course I'm on a different vlan than the rest of them so I wouldn't be affected but then again I'm not going to youtube and download porn (yes this was a thing) or playing fantasy football.
I think I may actually try this. Thankfully we don't allow itunes here so no need to worry about that.
We have an automatic fax system that takes faxed documents and turns them into a PDF and imports them into our paperless system. (This actually saves enough money in paper/toner/equipment to pay for my salary, no joke) This system isn't amazing and able to do everything, but it works and has worked for half a decade pretty decently. However once in a great blue moon we get faxes that just can't be answered because hey, that's the nature of faxes. Sometimes calls get interrupted, sometimes the other end doesn't implement the protocol properly, whatever.
Today:
"So yeah we're getting faxes that are blank or have black lines and are just hanging out in limbo."
"Yeah, so?"
"Well we need them."
"There's nothing I can do about them, I can't magically make our fax machine call them back and go "hey you guys sent us something and we need it, resend it please.""
"Well you should, that's why it's automated so I Don't have to watch it."
"Well I can't, nothing has changed in the half a year you've been working here."
It's gotten to the point now where I'm getting very cynical about stupid shit. Every year or so we end up getting these secretaries that after half a year of working here just turn into these amazing douchenozzles and won't do anything and basically rely on me.
"Well I don't know what to do anymore then."
"Do what you've been doing for the past half a year, I can't fix other people's issues, bye."
$10 says I'll get chewed out for that, but the boss absolutely loves me. This place runs almost like a well oiled machine so a secretary getting butt hurt over 3-4 faxes a week not getting transferred correctly is low shit to him. Thank god.
I think Feral hit the nail on the head. Folder Redirection and desktop shortcuts leave much less room for silliness on the user's part.
Although I had a call earlier today where a guy's "documents all disappeared after that power outage!"
He'd managed to delete his desktop shortcut ._.
"We can't get our faxes on our network printer/fax converter emailer thing."
Well I just checked the interface and you guys are getting data through just fine. Put in a ticket with PC support, but chances are you'll have to get management to call Xerox.
"But... but out faxes."
Not a problem I can fix. Sorry.
"But you're IT!"
No ma'am. I'm administration. *tips hat, rides off into sunset*.
"Yeah we're not getting faxes."
I pick up the phone and dial the number for our fax line with speakerphone. I wait, suddenly the room fills with the noise of the faxmachine picking up. "Looks like it's working fine to me, maybe, you know, the people bitching are bitching about a busy signal because we get faxes all day long?"
"Yeah but they're tired of waiting."
"Well tell them to get a better fax machine."
I tried that over here for a couple of months and then was told by upper management to switch it back to non-paperless due to the that specific issue. People got all upset that their faxes wouldn't appear when it usually was the person who sent it who had the issue. Plus they would receive the fax in PDF and then turnaround and print it out so that they could use it while billing.
The good news is that we're looking into a huge automation upgrade that would cut out why we get so many faxes.
This is where I go:
"Okay, let me check it out for you."
*go get a diet coke*
*check email*
*change backup tape*
*chat with cute admin*
...
Then I call the user back. "Hey, I checked out the fax server. There's nothing wrong on our end. Looks like it's a problem with the fax machine the sender's using. Maybe you can call them up and ask them if there's a different machine they can use."
There's a MILF that's always flirting with me and my fellow admin.
You could chat her up. We're only vaguely interested.
Though I did a call a couple weeks ago after I put in a little MFP behind someone's desk and a couple days later I got a call from the lady next to him.
"Why doesn't faxing from this printer work?"
"It's not set up for it?"
"Oh. Can you do that?"
"Nope"
"Why not?"
"Cause there's no phone connection over there. And you have a perfectly fax machine just around the corner."
eFax all the way... unless we actually need faxes to be automatically processed by a document management server, in which case, Zetafax all the way.
Maybe hook up a fax line to the copy machine if somebody really needs to fax handwritten bullshit more than once a year.
Little one-off crappy fax machines with their little one-off crappy analog phone lines suck.
And unless the fax machine actually breaks (like, pops a rubber band or something) it's not getting replaced. Or moved out of the basement.
DropBox invite link - get 250MB extra free.
Fucking email. My parents have figured out email. They grew up in farm country in communist post-war Poland, which is practically indistinguishable from the western world circa 1800. If they can cross a 100+ year technological gap, you can cross a 20 year old one.
Also; protip: Don't give staff access-level school network accounts to the fifty-year-old French teacher who still hasn't figured out that there are two types of pens that work on whiteboards and one of them is a bad idea. The kids will find out the default password and have their way with the account.
DropBox invite link - get 250MB extra free.
Shouldn't you be assigning random passwords that they can then change?
Why bother with Zetafax if you're paying for eFax? You can write a processor application to pull data from a email or web service just as easily as from a directory where Zetafax prints a tiff image.
Though Zetafax is the fucking bees knees atm just because of the price difference between them. After 3 months we've already bought 3 Zetafax server licenses with how many faxes we get. Their client is absolutely crap though.
DropBox invite link - get 250MB extra free.
And yet, here I am, reading this thread. It's not like schadenfreude; I honestly feel sorry for everyone in here that has to deal with retarded users.
Ugh.
Anyway, my favorite line was, "Here, let me Google that for you," especially for things that were completely out of my jurisdiction/department.
"Hey, what's the phone number for x company?"
"I don't know, I'm not the operator."
"Well, do you think you could maybe find out?"
"Sure, let me Google that for you."
"Thanks!"
I was never busted for it either; every user thought I was just being helpful.
Sure, I seethe on the inside if they are intentionally retarded, but I can still deal with them professionally.
Like, I get that not every user is going to know how to do everything. That's why we're here.
However, I got frustrated when I'd get pulled in to a user shit storm over something that I/my department had no control over because of the company's management. When it's a large company you can just say, "Look, I understand your frustration, but we can't do anything about this because we don't make that decision," and the user will generally be all right with it.
My experience has always been with small companies, where the user knows that we can't do anything about it and still throws a shit fit about whatever the problem is.
My other source of animosity for users is when they tried to get me to do their work for them. No, it's not a big deal for me to look up a phone number, but when I'm required to do it because we're so focused on customer service, the user knows they can get away with it every time. That directly leads to me and my team having to do other peoples' work because of that precedent.
Also, I hate users because I'm an asshole. So there's that.
Or, fixing a printer problem that was the result of an empty paper tray. Yeah that was the last time I did that. I walked out there, looked at the error message "OUT OF PAPER" on the display of the printer and pull out the tray and threw it on their desk and said, "That's why your printer isn't printing."
try dealing with the medical industry. email? web forms? no, but we can fax it over....
/this will change
//obama's gonna make you join the 21st century
Joe's Stream.
You need to read BOFH.
Joe's Stream.
He just quit/was fired today.
Gonna be a long goddamn couple of weeks.
I support multiple companies. Most of them are fine with eFax. We only use Zetafax when we need supported integration with records management platforms.
Dude, that sucks.
I work in local goverment IT for a small town in Colorado for the city IT department. The county IT came in about 3 weeks ago and set up the voting stuff for the election today. I gave them a block of 11 IP addresses to bypass our network and go right to the Internet for them to check people off coming in to vote.
Cue to today. There is a line an hour long out the door. All the counties laptops are locking up and timing out. I'm getting yelled at by the head of IT for the county that the computers are locking up. There is a county IT guy there thatnhas been sitting around the entire day and doesn't know at all what the problem is or what he is doing. I finally got on the router console and switched the port over to a outside comcast network we have for testing and downloading large files.
Now I had confirmed with myselve that the comcast connection was up and running. I told the county IT guy to switch the 5 laptops they had to DHCP off static. As I watch him do this I see that each computer has the same static IP address from the 11 I gave them original. All the computers were running the same IP address....................
So the computers come back up, and they cheer the county guy for fixing all their problems
This is after the election judge came up to me and said "I hope you know that the democrat and republican people here are judge this towns problems today because of you."
I'm going home to drink my brain into oblivion.
Holy shit WTF. Did he not see the popup you get when that happens?
Wow. That's unbelievable.
But I'm a dick.