The Support Joke
-
The Support Joke
After seeing this poll about support horror stories, I started thinking about some of the funny ones I've had happen to me or while I was around. I started out supporting a network and slowly moved into database work, so I've seen some things happen that were humorous. So this week's poll is:
What are your favorite DBA Support Stories?
I'm not sure how funny this will be in the telling, but it had me on the ground when it happened. In the early 90s there were 5 of us on a network support team for over 1000 nodes. Needless to say we were busy, but it was a great team and job. We supported a power plant, so most of our end users weren't that technically literate. Novell was the game with DOS booting most PCs.
So one day I was sitting in the bullpen with a couple other people and our intern. He was a smart kid from a local college and this was his 1st semester with us, rotating between school and work each of the next 4 semesters. So he takes a call from security and they are having issues with the PC. So he goes through the 4 or 5 common issues and finally says to reboot it.
Silence for 30 seconds and then "what to you mean it's still frozen?"
So he asks what the guy did, asks for a reboot again and gets the same response. The same frozen screen is there.
Our intern is getting irate at this point and says "Just turn off the power, let it sit for a minute and turn it back on"
Silence and then "IT CAN'T SHOW THE SAME THING. POWER IT OFF..."
I'm giggling because I know who the guy is on the other end and I realize what he's done.
Bobby, our intern, is now yelling, "JUST TURN IT OFF. TURN IT OFF. FORGET IT, I'LL BE RIGHT THERE". He hangs up disgusted and heads out to the plant. I know how annoying it can be since it's a long walk (we were on a square mile plus campus) and getting through security is a hassle. I guess it also doesn't help to have one of your team with his head down on his desk laughing.
Because I've gone through it before and we usually have to explain things to someone 4 or 5 time before they stop calling. PCs were new back then and most people didn't correlate that the monitor isn't the PC. So this guy was turning off the monitor, then turning it back on. Since he never touched the actual computer, it's no surprise the same thing was there. Bobby hadn't been here long enough to go through this, so he couldn't imagine how the computer could reboot to the same screen.
It was kind if a right of passage, so I had to let him go through it. He forgave me later for laughing at him and not helping him. And he understood that it was funny and he'd probably have a chance to get another intern a semester or two down the road.
That one sure made my day.
Steve Jones
-
I have to say my favorite story is of a user that wanted me to recode the report she ran to print the day's purchase orders. What she wanted was for certain information to be printed only on the middle sheet of a triplicate carbonless pre-printed purchase order form that was loaded in the PO Line printer...
I don't think she ever really understood why I couldn't print something only on the middle page of the form...
-
My mother called me one day worried that she had done something really bad. She said that she had deleted everything on the desktop of the computer (which is where mothers keep all of the important stuff). She was really upset.
I told her that she must have accidentally dragged everything off of the screen. I told her to right-click on the screen and auto-arrange the icons and they would appear. She said I would have to tell her step by step very slowly. So, I said, "First thing you need to do is right-click on the desktop."
My mom said, "Just a minute," and set down the phone. A few seconds later, she picked up the phone again, and I heard her whispering to herself, "C .... l .... i .... "
I asked, "Mom, what are you doing?"
She said, "I'm writing click on the desk top like you said to."
My blog: SQL Soldier[/url]
SQL Server Best Practices: SQL Server Best Practices
Twitter: @SQLSoldier
My book: Pro SQL Server 2008 Mirroring[/url]
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, Data Platform MVP
Database Engineer at BlueMountain Capital Management[/url] -
I worked supporting an old dos based accounting system where a lot of the users were people who who not computer literate and where most commands had to be run using dos commands.
Once day a client called in with a problem and I took her into the DOS prompt and asked her to type in CD..
We kept on getting the error unrecognised file or command. I eventually realised that she was typing in CD DOT DOT
-
Hey Steve, that was long ago... no wonder they had problems with what is what. I had a similar thing happen to me some 6 years ago (we had desktops at that time):
Call from accounting dept.: Hello, we are making inventory, could you please tell me the registration number on your computer?
Reply: Sure, it's 1234-1.
Accounting: No, no, that can't be it. The 1 at the end is never used for computers.
Reply: Sorry, it is as I said. There is no other number on the PC.
Accounting: No, no! You must have misunderstood me, I need the number from your computer, not from the box under the computer.
-
The monitor on and off is still a common one for me today, also get annoyed with people referring to the actually PC as the hard drive.
-
I had a similar scenario ealier in the week with my dad; I was talking him through getting his Windows 98 installation CD to run from the DOS prompt (long story why), and he could not fathom the difference between a forward slash and a backslash.
The second half of the conversation was muddled with "backslash - NEXT TO THE Z!" and "forward slash - UNDER THE QUESTION MARK!"
It was quite frustrating. He found it quite funny. "The backslash leans backwards and the forward slash leans forwards" didn't seem to help at all.
-
I've had that monitor one myself. Worse thing was I was on out-of-hours support & was woken at 3am by the user to deal with it!
-
When I was at my previous job I got a support call from one of our Florida offices. They kept on receiving some sort of network error. He tried calling his local support people but they kept saying it was a problem with the software.
From my years of experience I knew that it wasn't a software problem. He mentioned that he had an extra LAN card so I told him to change it. A few minutes later he called back asking me that if a fried Lizard inside the PC would cause the problems. I couldn't believe it a small lizard had somehow crawled into the PC and got fried. I told him at least now he had something to eat for lunch.
I'll never forget that.
Roberta
-
My story was absolutely not funny at the time...
I was working for a dot com where the Harvard grad president had a "think outside the box" epiphany. This computer stuff, anyone can do it, so, everyone in the company was encouraged to help out at every job. Subsequently every QA person, all the sales staff and even the receptionist had SA access to the servers (BTW, the receptionist was the only person I knew in the company with enough sense to never use it, not even once).
So, we've sold our product to a major new customer and I've spent several days getting their database set up, data migrated, etc. Everything is ready to go for the training & pilot the next day. Meanwhile, one of our helpful sales pukes decides that he needs to do once last check of the system, including a careful analysis of the SQL Server box(6.5 at the time). I get a call, late in the evening, "There's something wrong with the database." Sure enough. It's offline. I try starting the service and it hangs. I reboot the server and the service still hangs. I check the error logs and they've got some cryptic messages. I work all night long, constantly firing emails to my boss, the company president, the sales puke, trying to fix the problem and get information on what happened. "Nothing" they keep telling me. All night long I labor. Can't fix it. I decide to go into the office in the morning, just so I can talk to people face to face. I sit the everyone down and ask, "What happened." Mr. Salesman finally says, "Well, I was looking through the server and cleaning things up. The only thing I deleted was this database that we didn't need. Someone had created a database there called tempdb, so I dropped it." I cursed for at least 15 minutes straight while I fixed the problem.
The real capper is, the salesman got an award that the boss gave out to people who tried hard but failed. I got a reprimand for cursing. I quit that company after I found another job.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore RooseveltAuthor of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning -
I have two that stand out, going back about 15 years to the days of 5-1/4" floppies. The program I supported would back up files to floppy disk before transmitting them to a central computer.
In the first case, the user called, saying that the floppy drive was bad, because every time she tried to backup the files for transmission, the diskette had to be reformatted. After the reformat, everything would work the rest of the day, but the problem would happen again the next day. Before we swapped out her floppy drive, I asked her to show me exactly what she was doing when the error occurred. She went through the file preparation, then said, "I get the disk to backup the files..." and turned to the filing cabinet, where the diskette was held to the side with a refrigerator magnet. I said, "I think we've found the problem."
Second case, a different user called and explained that the files would not back up, and the floppy disk would not reformat. I told her to try again, using a "clean" diskette. She obliged by inserting a diskette that she had taken to the sink and dutifully washed in sudsy water.
That drive got replaced. -
hands down one of the funniest things I have ever read.
-
Back in the mid-90's I had a user that could no longer read the text in the title bar of any of her applications. We had recently converted to Win95 and people were trying out all the fancy new things it had. I finally figured out that she had set the background and foreground colors to the same value. She was trying to read green text on a green background. I set her system back to default colors and explained to her why she couldn't read it. A couple of weeks later she has the same problem. I set everything back to defaults and told her that the computer had a bug that couldn't be fixed and she would have the same problem every time she changed the color settings. Problem solved.
Robert
-
Back in the late 80's I was working in the systems support group of a company that sold turnkey computer systems. One day I received a call from a fellow employee who supported one of the 'applications' of the system. She proceeded to tell me that she received a call from a customer who was having a problem with the application, so she wanted me to give her some background information on what type of system they had. I pulled up the customer's records and started reading off the system specs. "It's a 380 system, x type processor, x amount of memory, 30 meg drive....", at which point she interrupted me and said "I don't want to know their address, I want to know what type of system they have!!!"
-
Apart from the numerous exploits of people telling me their computer is completely broken and not working at all (well actually it boots, loads word etc but gives an error when a certain app is used like...) I did recently have a classic one with a 'faulty' logon.
The user could not logon.
She contacted her support who contacted me as third party (and third line) support. I reset her password and mailed back the new password. Still not working.
I reset again and checked the new password. No problem.
Except for the user. Second line support go over the whole logon thing with her several times over the phone. No Joy.
2nd line call me and say she is requesting an engineering escalation for a bug in our system.
I agree to take over and arrange a conference call with 2nd line and the user.
I setup a session with SQL profiler running so I can capture the logon request. (yes I know a lack of security here!!)
User attempts to logon and.....
It seems that running SQL profiler fixed the issue! "Do I need you to run this everytime I want to login?"
Made my day.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 31 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply