After today I hope to be working as a helpdesk employee in a webhosting company, starting from April 1st. I hope the job interview goes well, so I'll be able to spend a bit more on my computer. Besides that, my gf's sister (who's also in IT) and me are planning on starting an ICT company, so if I get te job we'll be having a bit more money to get started
People never appreciate what theydont see- I do Technical Theatre and whadya know? Everyone claps the actors and not techies despite the plain fact that we've been working our asses to the bone- just as hard if not harder. In IT, its the tech that get shat on. Just remember you're essential - its what keeps me going when I get the power to just sod off and leave all the actors in the dark, with no sound, no costume, no props and no audience. HAHAHAHAHHAH
I work in IT for a Uni some times there is absolutely nothing to do, other times theres loads. You just have to roll with it, take the good with the bad but having a 100meg line to surf the net when work is slack is good. In our charter the call out time for a job just to be looked at is 5 days (god only knows how that number came about), I normally try to get to the job withing a day depending on the user; if its some moaning ******* I take longer
Some people really are dumb! I find it so hard not to snap at times it's untrue. I've had people trying to read there email using Excel, trying to write CDs in standard CD rom drives - "well it works with floppy discs"!?, People refering to PC base units as modems or 2ft x 2ft boxes. I've even had the fabled - "which one is the 'any key'"!!! Mind you we do support a stack of people who work on the railways so I guess it's understandable (no offence, they're just good at banging metal and swearing rather than using IT) We had an email server down this morning for a couple of hours that hosts a 1000+ mailboxes - which was nice...
I'm also part of an IT support team, and really sometimes we wonder why we are still carrying water to the sea.
One time I had some dude call me all bitching, I mean all worked up and quite livid because he couldn't get online ... well long story short, come to find out there was a power outage in his neighborhood. True story. I swear that people should be required to take a 6-hour prep course for some certificate or license before being allowed to purchase a computer.
YES!!! That is definatly what people need. More so than a drivers license imo. I can not beleive how dumb some people are. I've had that any key one as well, likewise the windows key, the plus sign, etc. Pretty much all except for plain numbers and letters. But yeah, a license to use a computer would be good. except people would need to take a month long course at least. And get an A or it is illegal for them to use a PC or a Mac. That would be nice. I would almost give my left nut for that. (sorry for the bad little thing there...)
I too work in IT, i repair toshiba and IBM laptops, and a few times ive wanted to scream and just quit, i have to stand up all day, fit warranty replacement boards, lcd screens, broken plastics, order new parts, order warranty parts, book in parts, book in hardware, do the paper work BUT on other days their isnt really much to do so i can sit here and browse the internet on two machines that are on my desk One thing that does amaze me though is that when 90% of the laptops come in, the screens are REALLY dirty, so i have to clean em before i can look at em instead of the usual clean after they are fixed. It just makes me wonder how the users of these laptops can actually work with such dirty screens.
I'm doing help desk right now as well for a multinational engineering company. I don't support any of the overseas offices though. Still there's, I think, 40-something offices stateside. I stay pretty busy. Lately, my biggest annoyance is people who don't know the difference between a "\" and a "/" and some asian guy who wants his hand heald through everything and yesterday told me it's not his job to know what workstation he needs to connect to and refused to look it up himself.
Add punishment. If they fail, they're only allowed to use Slackware 4, or some other CLI OS. They'll learn, I bet you. If not, they'll never want to touch one again. I do a little tech support here at the college I work at, but it's not just all comps. We offer courses over the TV (you watch the TV, take the test, that simple.) and I had some lady call me up to find out if she can watch it on her kitchen TV or if she had to be in the living room. I've had students sign up for internet courses without any access to the net, other than on campus. It's ridiculous (sp?).
One of the worst things at our place is remote dialup access. You have your 2000 user id and password but also a unique free phone telephone number and password for the dialup service which never changes unlike the 2000 one. Some people have laptops for home and on the road and a desktop in the office. If they change their 2000 password but don't connect their laptop directly to the network between then and dialing up the old password remains cached on the laptop and thus can't be authenticated when dialing up to the network. Therefore you have to get the user to recall the 2000 password they used the last time they sucessfully dialed up and reset it to that, otherwise they're buggered till the next time they can get the machine to a network connection..... phew. Now I don't know how well I explained that here, but imagine trying to get that across to some who when asked, 'to minimise all the windows so you're just looking at the desktop' replies, 'but I have a laptop!'
I just remembered another dumb user that I had not long ago. Somehow they managed to get to a command prompt and get it full screen where they couldn't click the x to close the window. I told them to type exit and it should go back to their desktop. I hear typing and saying the letters alloud while typing "E.X.E.T.. command not found. try this again here... E.X.E.T... command not found. This ain't workin'." I was ignoring it thinking he was playing stupid but no... me: "are you really spelling it "exet"? him: "yeah?" me: "that's the wrong spelling. try..."he started talking over me. him: "no it ain't. that's the way I've always spelled it." me: sigh "stand up and look toward the door you come in and leave through. there should be a sign near that door close to the ceiling with green letters. read that letter by letter." him: ruffling around to stand up: "E.X.I.T... ****." tap tap tap tap. "alright thanks." phone clicks... really scary that this guy is designing aircraft engines.
HOLY ****... ermmm... I better change that to little stars with them dots beside it (don't know how the swear filter works. Or how buggy it may be). That is just sad. He should be shot.
I work at a vocational high school. We have students from 15 high schools and adult education classes in the evening. The building is 11 acres and has 8000 students and more than 800 computers. I am one of three people in the IT department. Some days, I go for 9 hours without ever sitting down (even though I work an 8 hour day). Other days, I never leave the chair in front of my system. We support EVERY electronic device in the building, including TVs and VCRs. For those of you not familiar with vocational schools, they're primarily populated by the kids that are unwanted by their home schools. There's a lot of vandalism and deliberate attempts to screw up settings. Almost none of the teachers in this building have any computer training whatsoever. I make low pay and deal with the biggest idiots on the planet en masse. But you know what makes it worth it? This place would crumble without me. Nothing is more satisfying than taking all the former teachers you had (I just graduated last year) and watching how incompetent they all are. Yeah, you're making $55k a year and live in a big house and drive a nice car. You've got a college education and three degrees in math, teaching, and english. But you know what? I'm 19 years old and I'm in complete control of whether or not your machine boots so you can do your job. I OWN YOU. And afterwards, when you need a system built at home because you've rendered yours useless, I'm gonna throw together budget components and charge you four times as much as I paid for them. And if you need me to come fix it, you better be prepared to pay $25 an hour in addition to $10 just for showing up. TEACHER=OWNED
That would make one hell of a t-shirt...... Followed by quite possibly the single greates rant I have ever heard in my life. Thank you Instant Rice. Thank you.
REALVNC is useless in a place like ours, we need to be able to search for different computers in different ways other than names, the most important been able to search by payroll number which is the login. The only place RealVNC is used is for me and Aled in libraries, we're the only ones who support libraries and all public machines are locekd with two pieces of software. iCAM and Deepfreeze, I installed VNC on the Admin PC's in the library to VNC into the DeepFreeze console which sits on my desk, this way I can select an entire library and unfreeze the computer. Active directory on the Console also allowes us to connect to the Library's Domain controller and move the library logins into a folder we created which removes all restrictions etc so that we can install programs etc or run updates over the network. Pretty trick stuff.
I love DeepFreeze. Makes my job so much less of a hassle. Without it, we probably wouldn't have computers.
