I finally landed a good help desk job, in my area your lucky getting paid maybe 19 an hour and not helping that these past few months the market looks worse than when I landed here. Finally landed something at 24 to get some good internal IT experience. 7 months in and the WHOLE company is taking a 90 day 25% deduction in everyone's pay so they can get back on track. The industry I work in there was tons of lay offs just announced. They don't want to lose anyone and want to turn around. Feeling very mixed. So im basically going to make 18 and hope I have a job still. Shits so stressful. I really love working here too. Not sure if it's worth the gamble. They said they saw some good signs and we have a partnership that's suppose to make our sales really boom. Just not sure what to feel.

I'm a fiber network engineer, my company supports many businesses around the world.

I got a call from a client's end-customer.

First off, idk how tf they got the number to our NOC, this client is not paying for us to provide customer support and this line is supposed to be for clients only, even if we DO provide end-customer support.

Customer goes on and on about how they sent an email "this morning" and we haven't responded and they've asked for multiple escalations and never get a response and blah, blah, blah...

Well it's not that simple for me to just find an email because of the way our email is integrated with our ticketing system, but I give it a shot, no dice.

I ask if they have the ticket number, they don't, of course, but he says he'll look for it and provides their circuit ID in the meantime.

I look around for tickets involving that CID, and find a bunch of active tickets, including one that we received an email from the customer about 4 hours prior.

Caller says he found the ticket number and it matches the ticket I found the email in. I ack, tell him I found it and I'll send out an update. Caller says he'll call back if they don't receive anything in 30 minutes and ends the call.

So if they're pinging like this, I'm thinking this must be a hard-down, non-redundant link, their business is impacted, really important shit like that and needs fixing ASAP, right?

Fuck no. The ticket is from a report they sent in of two, single-second interruptions in the span of 30 seconds that happened almost two weeks ago. No trouble since. They're shitting their pants over a fucking priority 4 RFO request.

God, I just need one more promotion until I can focus on actually important shit and not have to answer the fucking phone anymore and deal with frivolous bullshit from clueless customers.

Just the title! I’m a SW developer at this fortune 100 co for the last 20 years, and I can’t get a 500 GB or 1 TB drive for anything. Our IT VP hates 70% of our infrastructure team, but someone must be juggling his testicles I guess.

I can buy a new 1TB Samsung or Toshiba drive down the street at Microcenter for $80, but these asshats won’t let me install “consumer products” in a work PC. Fucking tards.

https://preview.redd.it/d1jw9ebue3yc1.png?width=1329&format=png&auto=webp&s=27f3ae5cad1de8d9a86920bf92d5d33fa8e0c43e

Setting up a CAD laptop for a new hire, why do engineers need so many programs that take soooo long to install. I'm so booooored.

There is no way they are just going to drop 70% of the personal computer market on their face? Hopefully Microsoft will quit huffing AI fumes long enough to realize that putting nearly 3/4s of the world at risk of security vulnerabilities is a bad idea. I don’t think they’ll just say “either get a new computer or buy Norton or some shit, do I look like I give a fuck, buy copilot premium jackass” (maybe they will for that last part). I just think the ecological impact of Trashing that many machines is kinda concerning.

I feel like I’m posting frustrations more recently, considering more are arising.

We have a program that requires an outside entity to email a group of people a referral.

It was originally set up as a distribution group, going to 4 people.

Well, outside entity wanted an automated received response, as they felt they didn’t know whether or not their email was received.

Can’t do auto responses with dist group so change it to shared mailbox, set up auto response and give appropriate users access.

Well, users aren’t checking the shared mailbox, cause they don’t get notifications, so I create a guide on enabling notifications in 3 different ways

Received email saying two users still aren’t receiving the emails. I check, and they never opened the shared mailbox (which was shown how to in the notification guide)

Send email verifying they have access and likely just did not follow the guide

Executive member decides it isn’t working and wants to go back to the distribution list

I’m tired boss

Just quit today. Couldn't take it anymore.

Got hired to fix all of their issues. Updated their 15 year old servers.

Storing passwords in Excel sheets on share drives. Plus the Excel sheets had no real organization. Pure chaos.

They mainly use FileMakerPro as their Database Management Software, since 2015 they've been running cracked versions of it. Which I discovered going through patch files.

Oh and their Rhino AutoCad software is cracked. Plus it's running on a windows 7 computer. Which the two employees have to take turns remote logging in because only one person at a time can.

So between trying to fix FileMakerPro Troubleshooting everyone's daily issues (because I'm the only IT person) I'm also having to deal with glazed over boomers who think their computer is broken because when they have more than one external monitor plugged into it. They can't see their log in screen. So I have to explain to them that they just have to unplug the HDMI cord, and you can see your log in screen.

Oh not to mention basic insanity of like...telling them Malware has been installed on the network and they do nothing about it.

Like, bro for $27 an hour. I'm done. Bye. Got a job interview for a place that offered me 110k.

That was a real wild ride. Should have known though, seeing all the people they had fired and all the people who had quit.

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https://preview.redd.it/e573guvh1mxc1.jpg?width=505&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b6dda3f7ea0b888c73ac543f438c91de6f786513

Coworker: This laptop needs to be set up.
Me: What's not done on it yet since it was in use already?
Coworker: The BIOS is not set up.
Me: So it needs a password or does it need an update?
Coworker: There is no BIOS.
Me: smiles and nods

Disclaimer: No, they are not technically inclined in any way, shape, or form. No, I do not blame them since they are amazing in another field I have no idea about. Yes, it still makes me die a little on the inside. No, I am not going to explain it to them for the 4th time - it does not seem to stick at all.

Seems a little overkill for Outlook, Teams, and Edge. We are about to complete the project to upgrade every machine to 16 GB. It is not even finished yet and they approved the 32 GB project. I guess the government just enjoys wasting money and time, who would have guessed lol. 32 GB of RAM paired with an i5.

I received a call on my company phone from our Health Systems Specialist (only handles our eMR, nothing else)

"Hey, this Medical Provider's mouse keeps disappearing! I tried to help but couldn't do it, can you please assist?"

​

Sure thing! I am over at this building on the other side of the small town, give me a few minutes and I'll be over.

[do 3 minute drive over to building, arrived at location within 5 minutes of the phone call. They are outside and stop me before going inside to take a look]

"Listen, you need to have more urgency. Our providers get irritated and if they can't do their work we can get paid!"

​

????????

how much more urgent can I be?

Anyone else's company / management abuse their helpdesk as makeshift infrastructure?

I'm not a telecom or a sysadmin. My company doesn't have a helpdesk tier 2, or a real fine line between job duties of helpdesk and infrastructure. We have a whole team for infrastructure, comprised of 5 sysadmins, 1 associate and 2 seniors. We watched our telecommunications sysadmin leave and the hungry vultures called management waited for someone to ask questions.

I started to question about day-to-day issues. They gave me more access to answer those questions or fix those issues. Sooner or later, I was being milked as a makeshift sysadmin for helpdesk pay.

They never gave me training or scheduled anything for me to learn the systems. I figured my way around, I self-taught myself and I actually have a better understanding then he did of the system. I see his mistakes, or the things he did a weird way for no apparent reason. I'd love to ask, why the fuck did you do this instead of that. Why are these 2 things different, when the end result is the same.

It's clear to me how he went helpdesk to sysadmin, and the treatment he got.

Understand to get to my level of knowledge with no training, and no one to ask questions on a shitty voip service that has 3 different web services, 3 applications for management and finally about 8 servers - I should have fucked alot.

Here are some points I really should have fucked up - and things I should have NEVER done as a helpdesk agent.

Ever seen a helpdesk user do roll out for a very large system update on linux? I didn't know anything about Linux or how to manage this server. Management gave me a shrug and said, "if it fails, just tell the morning sr admin to run a backup". I am an hourly worker, I started early in the morning, I read linux and the phone system documentation and made a plan. I stayed on till midnight with a list of commands I need to run. It fucking worked.

I pushed a major software update to all phone users via Intune. I had to learn Intune. We aren't a modern desktop company (yet). A guy before me that played with Intune said we can't do shit with the current setup, blaming our hybrid set up. 1 week of planning - and basically setting up Intune. I was going to push them in small batches as to not push a 1gb+ update for 500 users through our vpn. I accidently pushed 500 users to update at 3pm on a workday. Turns out for some reason it got delayed by 2 hours and after business hours, the vpn started to feel the impact that was resolved after 5 hours. This is when my company found out Intune is usable if you have the right person.

Voicemails go down, and a lot of shit is going on. We found out backups aren't on the server, we find out that if it locks up whilst we restart the server - shit hits the fans in terms of data. The voicemail server isn't just voicemails...it also hosts the basic directory of numbers. Those disappear, I am remaking all extensions off reports I pulled 6 months ago. Most reports not detailing the things I'd need. The other servers would be confused - they have their own directory of numbers but...they all reference the one that might break. I make a quick backup of the failing server and start the process mid workday. It locks up, and I witness it crash. Panic follows and I activate the backup. (This was a clone via VMware, not really a backup). All the data is there, voicemails are working. The failing server is still having major issues to this day but it's working. I did turn on backups after all this happened.

I am milking this for my resume and leaving the company here soon. I won't become a sysadmin (or associate) under management that has treated me like this and still only gives 3% for a raise. Historically you have to threaten them for more. I make a shit ton in overtime, but I am acting as a sysadmin and a tier 2 support for my team at average tier 1 pay.