the most annoying shit ever

I had a guy call in a week ago asking for help getting into his newly issued iPad. I go through the standard PINs for the company iPads and nothing works. He's getting frustrated. He mentions that he just got this iPad from his manager who ordered it for him. I ask him to flip over the iPad and provide me the model number to see if maybe that will help in case this specific model has a new pass code or something.

While I'm waiting for that information, I look up tickets from his manager and see if I can see information about the iPad. Only ticket that shows up for new equipment is for a laptop, dock, and monitor. I ask if his "iPad" is a HP laptop and he says incredibly sarcastically, "Duh, that's what I've been telling you." Right...

I'm dumbfounded and ask him if his email and SSO password work, and he tries it then says "Yeah, that worked, why didn't you have me do that earlier? I have a customer sitting here waiting on me and you're wasting my time." Took all of my self-control to not tell that guy that I can't help him if he's a moron who doesn't know the difference between an iPad and a laptop.

He left a dissatisfied review after I closed the ticket because of course I'm the moron.

I was a chicken and just hung up.

This happened to my boyfriend and I have to relay the story.

This is a story about an IT system that failed us, not the other way around.

My boyfriend studies at an University in Canada, and everyone knows IT systems inside schools leaves... Much to be desired.

I graduated CS a few years back so he always goes to me when he has a problem, and this time around he's locked out of the school website. Wrong password.

I found it strange, caus he's using a password manager. And obviously a website "can't forget my password"......

Try to change it, fails, needs the aforementioned incorrect password. Try the security questions, of course he doesn't remember what his,case sensitive, definition of happiness was 2 years ago (a real question)

So he calls IT, he gets put with a guy and... Their new password policies changed. Instead of being at least 8 characters, it HAS to be 8 characters... And my BF's current password was LONGER than that.

Yes. His password, that was currently in the system, did not pass the new password policies, thus didn't allow him to log in. The policy was checked upon creating a new password AND upon login. (Or it was applied on a clear text database, which I prefer to not think about, I'm on my third drink)

I am surprised that their system, which is for the third largest university in Canada, even holds on. Even I struggle to go through the obtuse af steps to get his laptop connected to their wifi.

A moment of silence for all university students, and another one for all the understaffed IT departments

So today I took a stab at a project that has been stumping my colleagues for three weeks. After 6 hours of research, trial, and error I figured out the problem that had been stumping them. I’m not 100% sure this is all correct but this is what I have pieced together.

The scene: my company accepted a contract from a printing company, they had a massive old dinosaur of a machine designed to print on and cut vinyl sheets. For almost 30 years this thing has been chugging away connected to a DOS machine. Well that DOS machine finally died. My company was contracted to get this printer working with the most modern computer we can. Technically that would have been Windows Vista. So we set up an XP machine for them because we are not savages. That was three weeks ago. In that time multiple coworkers have tried to get this printer to talk to the computer. The printer has a serial and a parallel input. Since we had an old tough book that had a serial port we decided to go that direction. Three weeks of failure.

Finally I took a stab at it. I checked every aspect of the connection, the drivers, the cable, the ports, the software, the dip switches, everything. It all appeared correct in isolation but would not work together. After exhausting every resource about the printer I could find online I resigned myself to flipping between reading about the tough book’s hardware and windows XP. That’s when it hit me. Serial is not a natively supported port in windows XP, you need a secondary driver not included in the OS to run it. I should also note that windows claims that COM1 is the default serial port. When I checked device manager it listed the serial port as COM1.

Here is where my speculation comes in: I’m pretty sure windows XP loads port drivers in priority and the native drivers get priority before aftermarket drivers. I’m also pretty sure that, despite what the lying device manager says, it assigns COM ports in ascending order based on which port driver loads first.

So in my case the printer was actually on COM3 even though the computer said that was a USB port and COM1 was the serial port.

Three weeks of my coworkers time and six hours of my time because WINDOWS LIES!

New ticket:

This came in my Junk Mail.

--- Begin forwarded message ---
[obvious junk message here]

https://i.redd.it/tshkruur5zfe1.gif

My favorite is the branch on the bottom left which is only supported by clip

Calls Restart-Service -Name "CoolService" a script.

It's funny. That's all.

XXX.gov employees,

Starting on January 28, 2025, OPM (Office of Personnel Management) began sending out important federal workforce announcements to all federal employees. These announcements (marked '[EXTERNAL]' by mail server) are legitimate and can be trusted. We recommend all employees read the emails.

Please consider all emails from HR@OPM.gov to be legitimate.

I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit the sub, but I don’t know where else to post this.

I work for a very small (3 people including me) company that mainly specializes in working with home users. Occasionally, we do some work for small businesses, but it’s mainly for minor issues. I am pretty inexperienced in the grand scope of IT, as in most of my job is definitely entry-level problems that most people who don’t work specifically in this industry could solve after doing a bit of reasearch and trial and error.

Yesterday, I get an email about an appointment for the following day, the appointment is with a company that specializes in renting and operating private jets. The company said that they were having issues with their network and I was supposed to go and troubleshoot them. I immediately thought that the job seemed a little out of my depth, but most of the time, things that seem like they will be complex turn out to be not that bad.

I was supposed to be use a cable tester for this job, but I have never used one previously and still was not clear on what I was supposed to do when I left for the appointment. I was already nervous before I even showed up.

To add to my already-heightened nervous state, I pulled into what I presume to be a restricted area at the Airport where they were located at (to be fair, they left the gate open and my GPS took me there.) and was followed by an airport security car until I finally found the right parking lot.

This building was WAY bigger than any small business I had ever been To. After entering, i spoke briefly to the general manager, who directed me to their “resident IT guy”. This man had a very thick Hispanic accent, and I couldn’t really understand what he was saying.I asked him what the problem was, and he started talking about how they recently switched to Starlink internet, and after that, their phones and printers started dropping connections at random. At this point I was completely panicked. And did not even know where to begin, I was only told that they had one Managed switch and therefore were a smaller org, but they were going to take me to tour the whole building and look at multiple switches.

What really set me over the edge is when the first switch they showed me was in a ceiling that was about 15-17 feet high. I had never been up in a ceiling before to look at cables and I have little to no “handyman” abilities. I asked them if I could make a call, and called my coworker to tell him that I was going to pass on this job. I went inside and told them this was out of our wheelhouse and told them to call another company that I previously worked for, as they were more suited for this scale of IT work.

Now already, there were definitely things I probably could have done better. for one, I feel like I gave up too early. I barely even looked at their network for ten minutes, but I was under the impression that I didn’t want to waste their time and money. I also didn’t want to be responsible for any mistakes that took down their network. “Corporate Private Jet Operator and Renter” seems like a much more high-stakes job than “Local Irrigation installation and maintenance company” (an example company that I’ve done work for in the past). I was already in a panicked state, and I’ve learned from past experience that you tend to make mistakes when you’re panicked.

This entire situation is a wake-up call that I need to start practicing and learning more about networking so I can be more confident in my abilities moving forward.

(To comment on my experience, I have been working in IT since I was 18, I’ve been at my current job for 2.5 years now. I have some schooling at a really shitty community college,but I admittedly didn’t learn very much because I’m trying to work a full time job and go to school at the same time, and for most of 2024 I was dealing with mental health issues as well)