Comment On Color Printing on Seven & More Corporate Helpdesk Stories

Color Printing on Seven (from Simon)

"I'm no longer able to print color documents," a trouble ticket from a manager on floor seven read, "the first six copies came out fine, but the rest are in black and white. I need 50 color copies."

Printer issues were among the most common, so I walked him through the standard steps: making sure he could connect to the printer, verifying his queue was empty, checking the printer settings, etc. Everything seemed to be on par, so I sent a quick test page to the printer on seven and headed up stairs.

Just as I was about to grab the sheet off the printer, it dawned on me: that wasn't a color printer. In fact, there weren't any color printers on seven at all. I walked over to the manager's office to verify that he had, in fact, sent his print jobs to the printer on floor seven.

He said that he did, and I asked if I could see the six color copies he managed to produce. I looked at the printouts on his desk and informed him that, if he wants fifty copies in yellow, typically he has to make sure there are more than six sheets of yellow color paper loaded in the printer.

Diary of a COMPUTER WON'T BOOT Ticket (from oscar)

4/7/2008 13:22 GMT;BENJAMIN;
Checked power connections and power to outlet. Monitor is on but not 
computer. Checked power button on computer's power supply, user states 
there is not one. Re-seated power connections, computer turned on for 
about 3 seconds and turned off. Details:

    Machine Name - DHO00MXL643843
    User ID - 99321
    Display Name - Burleson, Stephannie
    OS Name - Microsoft Windows XP
    Service Pack - Service Pack 2
    Serial Number - MXL644493
    Admin Access - Y OUSite - MN999-EAGAN-ETC

Assigning out per SW, setting pri3.

4/7/2008 14:09 GMT;MAURICE A;
User called for a status because her supervisor wants her to head to 
the office if it will be more than an hour ; user will bring the 
computer in with her if she has to go into the office

4/7/2008 15:11 GMT;ROBERT J;
contaced Stephanie and she had just finished carrying her pc downstairs 
and loaded it into her car.since it is already loaded shi will go ahead 
and take it into the Plano Parkway office and I will contact her when 
she gets there. I am also contacting Jorge A, 2nd hat , to alert him to
expect her

4/7/2008 16:22 GMT;ROBERT J;
Jorge is picking up her pc and will connect it for testing

4/7/2008 18:21 GMT;ROBERT J;Jorge in Plano reported that this pc is 
packed full of roaches so bad that they took the pc outside, did not even 
wwant it in the building, and took the hard drive out. He will copy the users 
data over to a share and i will copy the data to the hot swap pc which they 
want to give the user as her new pc. They are going to bag and seal the 
othe rpc and scrap it, as they do not want it in the building.

4/7/2008 19:14 GMT;JORGE H;
cleaned pc.  Yikes!  connected HD to our pointsec pc, assisted in transferring 
data.  Had cust test pc. 

4/7/2008 20:34 GMT;JORGE H;
I would like to publicly thank Terry for helping me clean out and exterminate 
all (I hope) the roaches from this computer, which has been quarantined in an 
air-tied bag. NOTE: I hope never to see anything like this ever again, 
however from now on I will be more careful when opening WAH computers!

Help-less Desk (from Paul Anderson)

At my company, there's a bit of a wall between Application Development and Network Operations. All "network and network-service related issues" must be reported through the porthole, a.k.a. Helpdesk. Quite often, this leads to interesting results.

"Helpdesk, Jerry speaking."

"Hey Jerry," I said, "this is Paul over in app dev. Our TerraTrade system has a defective ForEx feed that needs to be fixed right away. It's causing a bit of an outage, so if possible, can we open the ticket as 'Urgent'?"

"Not a problem," Jerry responded, "let me just have your name and number, and we'll take care of it."

I gave him a few more details and felt pretty happy that helpdesk was actually helpful. Five minutes after I hung up, an email message came in:

[URGENT] TICKET #71248 HAS BEEN ASSIGNED TO YOU

Not a moment later, my phone rang. I hesitantly picked it up.

"Hello is this Paul," the caller asked before I could even say Hello. I affirmed that it was me.

"Paul," he said, "this is Steve over at help desk. We've got an Urgent trouble ticket that just came in. It's for a, uh, Fortix feed defect. We just wanted to make sure you're on it?"

It took me a few minutes to explain to Steve that he was, in fact, assigning me the defect I had just reported.

RIP Rocky (from Robert V. Bolton)

Several years back, when I was working at my county government's IT department, we upgraded Microsoft Outlook on all county computers from 2000 to 2003. To save on costs, only Outlook was upgraded: the rest of Microsoft Office suite was kept on 2000. For a while, no one seemed to notice. Well, almost no one.

"I.T.," I answered, "this is Robert."

"I have a major problem," the caller said, "Rocky is missing?"

"I'm sorry... Rocky?"

"You know," she frantically replied, "my dog, Rocky! He's missing!"

"Ummm," I stumbled, "uhh... maybe you should check with the dog pound to see if they cou--"

"No," the caller scoffed, "you I.T. people don't know anything! Rocky... the dog... on my computer!"

I still had no idea what she was talking about, but after several minutes of painful back-and-forth, it finally dawned on me. She was referring to Microsoft's Office Assistant: the little animated dog that would do little tricks on the screen while you were working. Like its cousin, Clippy, Rocky also offered "helpful" tips and advice.

As it turned out, the Office Assistant DLL had a known issue when Office 2000 and Office 2003 products were used together. Following Microsoft's advice, we disabled this feature to prevent issues from occurring. Try as I might, I was unable to explain that this was a problem with Microsoft Office.

"Well, well," she huffed, "well, that's just unacceptable! I don't believe you! I can't use this stupid thing without my Rocky!! Tell your department manager to expect my call." She slammed the phone down after that.

Needless to say, I never heard a word about it from my boss. A few weeks after the incident, however, the county had us install newly-purchased copies of Office 2003. I've always wondered if this was a result of the death of Rocky on that sad day.