Helpless Help Desk

The job of the helpdesk is supposed to be assisting customers with their problems and trying to resolve them. Our helpdesk lady is a sweet enough person, but not exactly trained or qualified for the job. Instead of resolving simple issues, she makes tickets out of everything and passes it onto us. In any other business she wouldn't have gotten the job in the first place.

Sometimes she'll put in tickets such as "[Database program] and Outlook are not working, please investigate". The problem with this is that it always ends up being a network issue, and gets assigned to me anyway. I used to go down to the caller's office and look at their pc only to tell them that there was nothing I could do and somebody would be along to help them later. I started just assigning those tickets to the networking group. She'll often put in tickets such as "Jen is unable to open adobe files in word." Ok, that's great. Where is the problem?

Other examples include:

• "Gina called and states she is noticing a burning smell within her office area."

Was it between her ears?

• "You dan't enter the software, because you receive an error message about the data file."

Uh....what?

• "Computer is saying it has a virus and needs to download spyware."

Well then let its virus download spyware, what's your problem?

• "Cindy has asked that we defrag her computer. It is running terribly slow. Currently when she is attempting to create lesson plans from the web, she is getting a mixture of the following error messages, "...installing Windows 2003...An error has occurred. You are unable to install Windows at this time..." This has become an everyday occurrence for her. Additionally Brett has memory for her computer as well as a printer to be installed in Cindy's office. Cindy should have possession of both the printer and the ram by the COB today."

The problem with this one is that Cindy's only been an employee for a month, and her computer was re-imaged before it was given to her. She complained about how slow it was the first day. It shouldn't be near to needing to be defragmented. Adding more RAM was always the preferred option of my former boss to try to increase the speed of some of the 10 year-old dinosaur computers we have. This didn't actually increase the speed at all, but this didn't stop the department heads and other members of my department from picking up on his "solution" and demanding more RAM as a way to speed up these slow computers. Another problem with this is that they're using Windows XP and it's obviously not trying to install "Windows 2003", which doesn't exist. There's "Windows Server 2003" but they mean Office 2003. This lack of attention to detail makes it a royal pain in the ass trying to decipher these messages.

• "Frank was using his PC yesterday around 1:45 when suddenly everything went blank and he received a message pertaining to the Firewall. He has been unable to "revive" his PC since this incident. Please investigate."

Revive? Did he use a defibrillator on it? What exactly does a power loss have to do with the firewall which is in our server room in a different building on a UPS? It's probably referring to the Windows Firewall being disabled but that has nothing to do with a power loss. And what exactly does he need to "revive"? Obviously the pc boots if he can get firewall messages.

I've considered posting the more ridiculous tickets to a website, but it's already been done with sites like The Chronicles of George.

Aside from the confusing messages, helpdesk lady makes the job that much harder by putting the room number in the summary of the ticket instead of in the "room" textbox that it should go in. When you create a ticket with a customer's username it automatically adds their office number, phone number, etc; but they're all text boxes and can all be changed. This gets especially bad when somebody puts in a ticket for a room on the other side of campus from where they work.

It doesn't help that people still stop us in the hallways. No, I can't help with your database problem. Call the helpdesk and have her put in a ticket and hopefully it will get assigned to the database group instead of mine. I rarely pick up my phone anymore, because it's usually somebody from some department that I was never involved with calling anybody in IT to avoid the helpdesk. People have been calling me recently trying to get me to copy DVDs for them or install pirated software. Part of the problem is that our policy lets staff install pretty much anything they want, and we have to support their systems after the crapware corrupts files. Fortunately, we're not responsible for user data, so I usually just reimage the machines.

Aside from that, we've also gotten pushed into supporting one of the programs that was written by a programming class that professors use. The professors who wrote it won't even install it on their own machines or troubleshoot it when it stops working and insist that we do it instead.

It's time I started looking for a new job.

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New Moon

I went to see Twilight New Moon with one of my ex's and her friends on opening night. In my defense, I had nothing else to do that night and didn't have to pay for the ticket. The movie was supposed to start at 7:30 so we decided to meet at the theater at 7. I left my place at 6:45, got to the theater at about 6:55, and had to wait another 5 minutes to find a parking spot. Our theater's parking lot has only one shared entrance/exit and it's a pain to get in before or after a movie. Opening nights are terrible and not worth going to.

I met with the ex and we went into the theater since her friends had gone in ahead of us. We went inside and I saw what I expected to see, a line full of teenage girls. Some of them with their mothers. As we were walking around looking for her friends a ticket-checker walked up to us and checked our tickets. They told us to go ahead and skip the line. I thought it rather funny to walk straight past 30 or 40 people. Her friends saw us near the room that New Moon was playing in so we went in and got seats.

The room was packed 30 minutes before the movie was supposed to come on. That's probably the longest I've sat in a theater waiting on a movie. I noticed that I was one of three men in the place. In the scene where Jacob took his shirt off all the women cheered and I swear the whole room got moist. If a theater full of men did that a feminist group would shit themselves with rage.

There isn't really much to say about the movie that hasn't been said. Edward is a stalkerish douche that treats Bella like he doesn't give a shit about her. He does creepy shit like staring at Bella while she sleeps and going through her room while she's not home. At one point he throws her through a table. And she's cool with all of that. Apparently a lot of young girls are going to grow up thinking that's what a relationship is supposed to be like. The other douche in the movie, Jacob, is a complete tool as well. Bella cock-teases him throughout the whole movie, telling him she won't be with him but he should keep trying to get with her anyway. Why not tell him you just want to be friends? Bitch. Jacob is a werewolf who spends the movie running around in the woods with a bunch of guys, all dressed in shorts and nothing else. I guess that's not gay to Mormons who write books.

Bella has no personality of her own aside from being selfish. She's a rather boring person and doesn't do anything but sit around all day staring out the window and not giving a shit about anyone but herself. She calls her father by his name like that's a cool thing to do.

I'm convinced that Stephanie Meyer never read anything about vampires before deciding to write her books. Vampires sparkle in the sunlight? What kind of bullshit is that? And running water doesn't phase them either.

I was bored one night and asked a friend to go to the movies. She has read the books and thinks they're just as stupid as I do, but they're fun to make fun of. She hadn't seen the movie yet so I went with her. It was nice to have someone to trash talk the movie with this time around, even though I think I was still the only one to laugh when Bella got thrown through the table and when she bumped her head on a rock and passed out underwater.

New Moon is worth watching if your power is out and it's the only movie playing in the theater. Otherwise I'd try to find something better to watch. Which is anything.

There is a pretty humorous post describing why the fourth and final book should be made into a movie here.

Cyanide and Happiness comic about New Moon

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Learn to drive, bitch!

It's obvious that far too many people get their drivers licenses too easily. The real question is why they get to keep their licenses. Bad drivers pose a danger not only to themselves, but to other motorists and pedestrians as well. Below are some of the common problems I notice while driving.

No turn signal. Use of the turn signal lets other drivers know that you are about to slow down and turn. This gives drivers some notice before your brake lights go on. Using the turn signal in the middle of a turn is completely useless and defeats the point. We already know you're turning. I notice cops do this all the time.

Slow turning. I know SUVs tend to roll over but it won't happen at 10 mph. Stop turning at 2 mph. I hate you.

Stopping in the entrance to a parking lot. This is especially dangerous for the people behind you as they don't know you're a moron and about to block them. So while you're sitting there jerking off or whatever you're doing, the person behind you is coming close to getting hit by oncoming traffic. Even though this is completely your fault, they would probably receive the ticket. I've had to turn into exits several times to avoid being hit because of morons doing this.

Tailgating. You're not getting anywhere any faster by riding inches away from the car in front of you. Especially if they're behind a slow driver. When people do this to me I slow down. Sometimes they learn and back off, but usually they'll stay right there and start flashing their lights and honking.

Overuse of headlights. The only real times you need to use headlights is if you're driving down a curvy road you're unfamiliar with or when you're driving somewhere an animal could run out in front of you. Other than that, turn your headlights off. And don't get pissed off when you leave them on and somebody flashes their lights at you. That isn't them being a jerk, that's you being stupid.

Driving under the minimum. Roads were made for commerce. Not for you to drive your grandkids around at 20mph in a 55mph zone with a 40mph minimum. This is an offence known as obstructing the flow of traffic. If you can't drive 40mph then sell your car and start taking a taxi. The 60 people behind you shouldn't be late for work simply because you're incompetent.

Trailing other cars through a red light. It doesn't matter if you're in line to go through the light. Once it changes red you're supposed to stop. All too often in turning lanes I'll see 6-7 cars in a row behind the stop line running the light after it changes to red. Where are cops when you need them?

More to come whenever I feel like adding things.

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Math Misfits and Other Logical Fallacies

So I'm sitting in my math class and overhear this lady talking about how she's the master of algebra and how she was going to be at the head of the class. It didn't surprise me when she was the first to raise her hand and ask a question. It did annoy me when she raised her hand every 3 minutes to ask the instructor to repeat what he had said.

After the lesson, we were working on homework independently and the instructor asked who needed help. Of course, she was the first to raise her hand and start shouting "Me! I do!" She then proceeded to ask for help for every single problem.

And the people that obviously don't know what they're doing are the first to shout the answers. What's the deal with that? Advertising how ignorant you are? I could understand if you had some idea of what you were doing and wanted to see if you are correct, but these people have no idea and are just shouting out random crap.

My cable/broadband provider runs an ad featuring a customer telling her story about how she told her hairdresser what she was paying and her hairdresser tells her it was "a really good deal". What exactly qualifies a hairdresser as an expert on cable/broadband prices? I don't ask my barber for stock quotes, nor do I ask my mechanic for recipes.

I long ago accepted that "common sense" isn't very common and that the average person on the street is functionally retarded, but I still get surprised a little more each day by how stupid they really are.

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A Typical Day as a Computer Technician

I typically come in about 15 minutes late. I used to use the side-door so that my boss (who I will call Steven) wouldn't see me, but now that my office is adjacent to his it's all but impossible. This is trivial since he's god-knows-where half the time anyway. I will have anywhere from 0-4 messages on my phone which I promptly ignore.

Checking my email shows that my department chair has sent "news" that I read weeks ago on social news sites. I have several tickets open, most of them have "slow computer" as the subject. I used to run spyware/adware scanners, registry tweakers, but nothing ever helped. The hardware is old, nothing is going to make it faster. It's like taking your car to a repair shop and complaining that it doesn't have enough horsepower. I can't work miracles, take it up with the manufacturer. Still, no matter how many times I tell people there's nothing I can do about their computer being slow, they still demand for something to be done. I've made a habit of waiting until they leave, then closing out the ticket and claiming to have run registry cleaners. It's a more efficient use of my time. I could sit there and watch spyware scanners run since I get paid by the hour, but there's a 40 hour limit and I have projects that need actual work done to them and other machines with problems that can actually be fixed.


Within the first 20 minutes Steven or his boss will sometimes come up to me needing help with some random person's problem, despite the fact that it's within somebody else's department. I don't really have a problem with that except that they haven't once asked another tech to help out in one of my departments. Yes, departments. I ended up getting stuck with two departments when one of the computer techs got changed over to a network tech. The deal was that the network techs were supposed to handle all faculty/staff machines and the p.c. techs would handle all of the labs. I volunteered to take the extra department under the impression that I would be over half of 2 departments, equaling one department. Things never end up the way they're planned, so I now have 2 departments.

After returning to my office from fixing whatever trivial problem the particular user was facing (usually something that can be fixed with a reboot), Steven will question why I haven't done X today and I answer "because you had me working in someone else's department." He'll then question if I ever finished up on Y which I'll reply "I fixed that 2 weeks ago. Where have you been?" Steven is notorious for not checking his email for weeks, disappearing throughout the day, taking 4-hour lunches, and asking me to work on something then after I get started he'll ask me to drop what I'm doing and work on something else.

I'm allowed two 15-minute breaks per day on top of my lunch. The bitch part about taking a smoke break is that no smoking is allowed on campus. We'll have to carpool and drive off campus to smoke. I'm guessing they thought employees would be more productive. This is counterproductive since it takes so much longer to walk to & from our cars than simply walking outside.

Moving on with my day; I'll either print off tickets and head out to do repairs or work on an image for a classroom. Either way I'll be interrupted by a phone call or somebody stopping me in the hallway. Often times it's somebody from another tech's department who I'll refer them to. If it's somebody from my department I may go ahead and take care of it if it's a high enough priority, otherwise I put it on the backburner and tell them to submit a ticket, which they really should do from the start. Sometimes the people who filled out the ticket aren't around and left their computer logged-in and locked. They better hope they didn't have anything important running, because I will simply log them out. If I need to get into their account, I will reset their password. This may seem rude to the untrained eye, but the truth is that I don't care. I'm not there to play phone tag and wait around on people, so I can't let a little thing like a password or a lock stop me.

At some point during my rounds I'll need a piece of hardware (harddrive/ram/mouse/entire computer) which I'll need Steven to get for me. He will be nowhere to be found. Nobody is quite sure what he does all day, only that he isn't there when you need him. I originally spent half my day searching for him because I needed something and the other half avoiding him so that I could get things done without him trying to send me off to work on something trivial or something I took care of previously. Now I've learned to ignore him for the most part and just get the key to the supply closet from the secretary when I need something.

Lunch is the best part of the day. I can take it at any point but usually stick to around 12:00. The nearest restaurants are a Chinese take-out place, a Mexican sit-in place, and a couple of sandwich shops. People tend to either bring their own lunch or group up and head out together. With the exception of Steven, everybody in the IT department gets along with everyone else and a couple of the techs and I will get together after work for drinks sometimes. I would order drinks during lunch except that we often see people from other departments while out to eat and people love to gossip. It wouldn't take long before word got out and it lead back to me. I personally think an adult should be able to have a beer or two at lunch or even at work as long as they still performed their job well.

Returning to my office I'll notice by the light on my phone that I have voicemail. People really need to learn to submit tickets. This could be anything from somebody needing a software patch or a new toner cartridge to bad ram, a failing harddrive, or a printer not working.

In the event that I do not have voicemail, I'll check to see what the other techs are doing and launch a game of StarCraft with them. If they're busy I'll work on an image or possibly a project. I've written several scripts and programs to help automate my job. I have one program that has checkboxes with different programs listed that I use for automatically installing software. This is useful when I have a fresh Windows installation to work on so that I don't manually have to go through and run each installation program.

I'll take one more cigarette break and spend the rest of the day continuing whatever project I started working on before. I hate leaving things unfinished so I may stay late if I have nothing better to do. It also adds to my 40-hour work week which means I can take off early on Friday if I rack up enough hours.

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