rSlash - r/Talesfromtechsupport Dumb Karen VS IT Guy

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:10 Password 2:58 Cry 4:15 Allergies 5:41 That guy 8:48 Service desk 10:26 rSlash 13:47 CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca Welcome to r slash Tales from Tech Support, where a customer service agent tells me, r slash, to commit an actual felony. Our next Reddit post is from Denatius. So at our company, we have an IT department and a cybersecurity department. One of the many things that cybersecurity handles is password recovery and password resets.

Namely, if you forget your passwords, you have to march yourself down to cybersecurity's office and face them in person to get a password reset. The upside to this, as someone who works in the IT department, is that anything related to passwords is not my problem. Yesterday, I was at the IT department supervising the interns and running the help desk. I get a phone call. IT department, how can I help you? This is Karen, assistant VP of the bean counting department.

How can we help you, Karen? I ask. Your stupid system isn't taking my password! Okay, Karen, can you have a co-worker take five seconds to try to log themselves into your computer to see if there's a problem with the computer, I ask? I patiently wait for the banshee to strong-arm someone into doing that. He got logged in just fine, so it's only me. Well Karen, I think you're going to have to walk down to Cybersecurity to get your password reset, I explain.

But I already called you, why can't you do it for me? She shrieks. I swear I can hear her across the building. I said, I'm sorry Karen, but cyber security handles password recovery. Don't forget to take your company ID when you walk down to cyber security, I explain. At the last company I worked for, the IT department handles password recovery over the phone, so why can't you do it? Well Karen, here at this company, only cybersecurity can recover passwords, I explain.

But they said that they would write me up if I came in one more time to get a new password, so can you please do it for me? Well Karen, I don't know what to say. You're just gonna have to go down to cyber security. I'll have your job for this, you pimple-faced nerd! She proceeded to use some naughty words before hanging up on me. I wrote it up as a ticket in the ticket system and closed the ticket out, making notes of the time that she called in and her abusive language.

That afternoon my boss called me into his office. He said, I got a call from HR and you have a complaint OP. Karen in the bean counting department I ask. Why yes, care to explain yourself? He asked. I troubleshot her issue, I referred her to cyber security for a password reset and I wrote up the ticket. It's numbers such and such, I say reading it off a notepad in my pockets. Uh huh, he mutters. He looks it up on the computer. Okay, let's listen to the call log, he tells me. Seven minutes later, we're having a laugh about it, and he emails the head of the bean counting department the call log from the IT line. We also had to call into HR about

her abusive language over the phone. The moral of the story? Call logs are your friend. Our next Reddit post is from BoyinBlack. A while ago I was working at a mobile shop, and this older guy comes in and says to me, I know I'm not your customer, but I was wondering if you could help me with my iPhone. The guys that sold it to me said they don't do the setup. Another store wouldn't help me because I didn't buy it from them,

and I just noticed your store as I was leaving. Is there a way to get my photos back? I had iCloud backup turned on when I signed in, but none of my photos are on here. I asked to see his phone and look at the iCloud settings and I see that it's signed in and all the toggles are turned on. Then I checked the photo settings and noticed the photo stream option was turned off, so I switched it on and I saw that over 300 photos started to sync to his new iPhone. Then I handed back his iPhone and said, I think I solved your problem. He looked at me in shock that it only took less than a minute and he looks at his new

photos and started to cry. He then tells me that he lost his old iPhone and he thought that he lost his photos of his son and grandson who, weeks before, died in a crash. Good job, OP. Reading all these stories about stupid people and entitled jerks and tragedies and heartache, it's nice to read the occasional story that actually has a good ending. Our next Reddit post is from Denatius. So we get a ticket at our help desk support.

I can't use my computer. I'm allergic to it or something. I'm like, what? I go to check what the problem is. It's her second day with her new computer. It's a take-home laptop that's about six months old. It's a Dell Inspiron with a 15-inch display. I go down to her desk to try to get the real story and this poor girl looks like she just

tried to snort lines of pet dander off a crazy cat lady's sofa. Her makeup makes me feel sorry for her. Her waist basket is filled to the brim with tissues, but like a trooper she was trying and failing to get through her day. I flip her computer upside down, give it a good diagnostic whack, and orange hairs start coming out of it. Well, customer, I'm guessing you're allergic to cats. Yeah.

You are, in fact, allergic to the previous user's critters and there's a whole mess of fuzz contaminating this computer. I'll get you another spare computer. Looks like no one bothered cleaning this up when it went back into circulation. I'm sorry. I got it directly from someone else. They said it was working just fine. Okay, why don't you take a breather and get cleaned up, and I'll bring you up something

that I know was cleaned properly. So yeah, I spent my morning de-catting a laptop. You never stop seeing new things in this job. Today it was someone allergic to her laptop. Our next reddit post is from Longsun Odyssey. I got a new job as an IT support and I really wanted to make a good impression, so I dove into resolving my first ever help desk tickets in my life with the help of my supervisor who's exceptionally helpful but can have a bit of

a temper at times. Not towards his staff, but useless users. Day 2 swings around and I'm feeling positive. A new ticket comes in from this guy named Jeff. Jeff puts in a ticket saying that an Access database was throwing an error. I contact him through Teams chat. He says, the Access database has an error. I need this to do my job and report crucial statistics.

I'm exceptionally busy. It needs fixing now. Okay, my supervisor has told me that we can resolve this by reinstalling the application. It's a relatively quick fix, but you'll be unable to work for 20 minutes while we configure it on your laptop. Five minutes pass. This is unacceptable. You said it would be fixed in 20 minutes! As I'm wondering how 5 minutes now means 20 minutes, I say, Office is just reinstalling, which includes access. As you can see from the progress bar,

it's about 33% done. Please bear with me as it completes. No! This is unacceptable! Cancel the installation now so I can go back to working. I'll be making a complaint! At this point, I'm terrified. No one treated me like this at my last job. Now someone is making a complaint on my second day on the job. I try to be polite and say that I'll leave the ticket open and pending until we can get the issue resolved for him. Before I can even walk down the corridor to explain the situation to my supervisor, I hear him speaking with a raised voice on the phone. My supervisor says,

If this application is so crucial to your job, why won't you let my staff work on resolving it for you? Until you can provide us with an hour of your time when we can work on your laptop, your ticket will be on hold. It is now your responsibility to book that time in your calendar for us to complete the work. It's now been three months, and Jeff has requested that we take his laptop and install the office package and configure the database overnight, requiring us to stay after hours.

This was refused, and after he asked when the ticket would be resolved three times, I raced it with my supervisor again. Now I know why my boss is so appreciated. My supervisor said, just close the ticket buddy. I guarantee you that when you close it, he'll call again and he'll be denied a final time. This guy's a dickhead! I closed the ticket and he called instantly. He got told somewhat politely where to shove it and next time, if he has an urgent job

that needs completing, to be cooperative. I love having supportive superiors who tell users what's what when they're acting like idiots. What I don't understand is, how was this guy not willing to wait 20 minutes for you to fix it, but he was able to wait 3 months while the ticket sits at limbo? Something tells me his problem wasn't nearly as much of an emergency as he was making it out to be. Our next reddit post is from Imperator Noctis. I was working service desk and it was getting towards the end of the day and we were winding

down before leaving at 5 when I had a call from a VERY angry man who ran a small business. He'd logged a ticket the day before for being unable to print to a specific printer. However, he could walk 20 more meters and collect his documents from another perfectly fine printer. The job had been with the senior engineers for the day because obviously this is not the highest priority issue that we'd had today. Despite being polite and offering to speak with a team leader, this guy flips out. I don't want you to speak with the manager, I want you to effing fix it!

My boss is very good about us not taking abuse from customers, so I immediately message my boss and tell him that things are about to go south. I tell the customer, I'm sorry I can't fix it, but I'll organize an engineer to give him a call tomorrow and speak with my team leader. He does not take this well and immediately yells, I wanna speak with your effing manager! I say of course and go to transfer the call. My boss picks up and I say to my boss, I've got a gentleman who wants to speak to my effing manager.

My boss gives me a grin and says to put it through. My boss sits on the phone for five seconds before asking him to stop swearing. I didn't hear this part, but evidently the customer didn't stop cussing. My manager immediately hung up on the customer, spoke with the director, and had all services for this customer cancelled. My manager then says that you did absolutely the right thing and says if he ever calls back we're to put him straight through and never to help him with anything. So this kind of reminds me of a phone call that I just had like two days ago, where I

had to escalate to a manager but not in like a toxic Karen way, in like a, are you kidding me way? Last year I moved into a new house and predictably we've been getting a lot of mail from the previous owner but one company, Capital One, is going absolutely ballistic with the mail they've been sending us. I am not exaggerating. Literally, last week I got five individual letters from Capital One to the previous owner. And I'm like, okay, this is getting too far.

I'm tired of carting this mail back and forth. It's like a pile of trash I have to carry from my mailbox to my home because these people won't stop sending me mail. Anyways, I call up Capital One. Hi, my name's Dabney and I recently moved into a new house. I'm currently getting mail from you guys that's addressed to the previous owner. Okay, what's your account number? My account number? I don't have an account number. It's not my account. You don't have an account number? No, I'm not a customer with you guys. I'm just getting someone else's mail. Look, could you please just stop sending me the mail?

It's going to the wrong address. We can't make that change because you're not the primary account holder. But the account holder doesn't live here. Yes,'t make that change because you're not the primary account holder. But the account holder doesn't live here. Yes, I understand that sir. You're gonna have to get the account owner on the phone so I can speak to him. Get the account owner? Dude, I never even met the guy. He doesn't live here.

I don't know a thing about him. Well then I'm sorry but I can't help you. So let me get this straight. You're sending me someone else's mail and I'm telling you that you're sending it to the wrong person and your response is to not change it to keep sending me their mail? That's correct sir. So I'm supposed to just keep getting this guy's mail for the rest of my life?

What am I supposed to do with all this mail? That mail has confidential information so we recommend that you destroy every letter that you get. You want me to destroy someone else's mail? Isn't that like a federal offense or something? I can't speak to that sir, but it does have confidential information so you shouldn't open it. Okay, can you just get me a supervisor?

My supervisor is going to tell you the exact same thing. Okay, well then get your supervisor so they can tell me the exact same thing. Fine. Okay, I'll transfer you now. Hello, this is the supervisor of the help desk. Can I help you? I explain the situation and she goes, oh, you're getting another customer's mail? Oh, that's a big problem.

Okay, let me cancel that for you immediately. And it was done. And she did it. She was just like tap, tap, tap, tap. Done. Our next Reddit post is from SorryForBeingDutch. for you immediately. And it was done! And she did it! She was just like tap tap tap tap. Done! Our next reddit post is from SorryForBeingDutch. This happened a while back, but it's the best thing that ever happened to me at work. True story.

So I was hired by a big defense company with over 3500 employees. They like upgraded tanks and naval weapons. As you can imagine, this was a very big company. I worked in building number 34, and if you had to go somewhere quick, you took a bike or an electric car. I usually did second line support, but we had a couple of people call in sick, so they asked me to do first line support. It was Friday and not much was happening.

Then the phone rings. Yes, hello? This is the secretary of the CEO. We need you to come over now. We have a big problem. What seems to be wrong? Mr. CEO is trying to open a file in Word, but every time he does this, scramble text is showing up. I think we're being hacked! This was a big issue since a couple of weeks before this, a group of activists broke into the company and climbed on top of our radar tower. I said, I'll take a look from here and take over your screen.

Hang on. So I take over his screen and this is what happens. File open. I open a Word file and suddenly a bunch of random characters start typing across the screen. I don't know what this is. You see? This is so weird. Now, at this point, I knew exactly what was wrong, but I wanted to see it in person.

You don't just walk into the CEO's office every day. I said, okay, I'll be there as soon as possible. So I grabbed the electric car, drive over, and five minutes later I walk into the executive building. It was a very nice building, totally different from the building where I work. They even had their own dining room and bar. The security guy sees me coming and waves me through. He was told that I'd be coming and understood the importance. I get out of the elevator at the top floor and I'm greeted by the secretary, a manager,

and some other assistant, all a bit panicked. Come over here and have a look at this! The CEO says. He shows me the word file he has open, and of course there's a bunch of random characters written across it. So I look at the CEO. I look at every single person in that room. You could feel the suspense.

I look back at the computer. I pick up the newspaper that was on top of the keyboard and ask, try again please. The looks on their face? Priceless. Also, I got a free lunch with the CEO. That was r slash Tales from Tech Support, and if you like this content,

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