This afternoon I was talking to one of my tech's at another location and asked him to check on one of the end users in his building. She had contacted me about an issue on her PC one of the other tech's had worked on, and now she was having more issues. I knew he could handle it, so I was giving him the basics of the issue. Here's our chat in IM:
Me: Has *user name* called you yet?
Tech: It doesn't appear so
Me: *other tech name* worked on her computer and now she's having more issues. I told her to call you and you would help her...lol
Tech: he's been playing with paging file on his pc, i'd be willing to bet he messed with hers as well lol
Me: Paging file isn't going to make it run faster
Tech: I know this and you know this but...
Me: LOL
Tech: Anymore around here I just shake my head and walk away
Me: If you have time today or tomorrow, would you go see her? Set her page file back to default?
Tech: Night before last spent 4 hours stripping the ends of an ethernet cable to put an RJ45 connector on it..........
Me: He probably either shrunk the page file or made it too big for the drive to handle
Me: Wait...4 hours??
Tech: Yes, stripping each individual wires, and it not work so he would try over and over...
Me: Wow...
Me: Tell him to stop...just...stop...that makes my head hurt
Tech: You can't make this stuff up lol
There's one on every team...lol.
XKCD hit the nail on the head...
Well it's been almost 3 years since my last post, but my current job has prompted me to revive the blog. I've said for years that IT folks must be invisible. We HAVE to be! We go into an office, or other location, to work on a technical problem and the people in the room seem to forget we have ears, or think they can push an imaginary "mute" button so we don't hear anything being discussed while we are present. I'll just say this... if you want information or "dirt" on someone, find your nearest IT tech. You can guarantee they've heard or seen something you'd be interested in.
Take today for example, our office is fairly large. After being "evicted" from our actual office, I had to find someplace for me and my 3 techs to "live." I found a storage room, that was once a small conference room, that was literally filled from floor to ceiling, and wall to wall with old, discarded or retired IT equipment. There was everything in there from retired rack mount servers to some old dinosaur of a PC that looked like it was made in the 70's. Under all that was a large table and a few broken down chairs. We Cleaned everything out, and I had 4 decent sized cubicles installed. It still has IT equipment in it, but 99% is usable, or stacked to go to PC recycle. We have plenty of room, and a door. It's nice to be able to close the door and get some quiet, not to mention regulate the temperature in the room (we also have a network/server rack in the room) since we don't control the thermostat. Today the door was closed and me and one of my tech's were working trouble tickets at our desks. The door opens and in walks the Senior Manager of our call center, followed by the director of the call center. They close the door and begin discussing an issue with a couple of employees. Not discussing them with us, but between each themselves. After a few minutes of discussion, the director says he will take care of the issue, they walk out and close the door. My tech sends me an IM (he literally sits 4 feet from me): "IT so unassuming they do secrets meetings in our office while we're in here"
So just remember, just because we're quiet, unassuming, and may not be very talkative does not equate to our being deaf or blind.
