rSlash - r/Talesfromtechsupport Their Computer Was FILLED WITH BEES!

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

r/Talesfromtechsupport A customer called OP because they wanted to report a bug problem. OP couldn't figure out the cause of the bug, but when the customer removed the computer case it became very obvious, very quickly. SWARMS OF BEES flew out the case and started attacking the customer! It turns out that the computer bug was an actual, literal bug problem. 🔔 Subscribe: https://bit.ly/2E3A8i6 💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/VD6eYD3 🎧 Podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/rslash ⚓ Send me a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rslash 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rslashyt/ ♪ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rslash0 🛒 Merch: http://bit.ly/rSlashMerch 🎁 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rslash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gabby here is a meditation instructor who just created her business website. Just need to choose a domain. Hmm, meditativeminds.ca or dot com. That Canada goose looks grumpy. Also, why is he here? Well Gabby, he's here to tell you that 85% of Canadians prefer supporting local business on a dot CA over a dot com. And dot CA it is. Now repeat after me.

Oooooom. We'll work on that friend. Goie, it is. Now repeat after me. Oooooooh. We'll work on that friend. Go local. Choose success. Choose Dotsie. Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best post from across Reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash Tales from Tech Support. Our next Reddit post is from Spooky Black Cat.

I used to do phone technical support for a large company. I had to deal with a lot of garbage over the years, but only once did I snap and talk back to a user. Surprisingly, it didn't go bad for me. My company decided to standardize all of their computers, changing the desktop background to the blue company logo, instead of allowing users to put whatever random photos up that could be seen by clients. Of course, this resulted in lots of calls to the help desk about it. I got a call from a manager and went through the same script I'd said a hundred

times already. The company decided to use a standard image. No, I'm sorry you can't change it, etc. The woman paused and said, Well, I see Hitler is alive and well. I was already annoyed at how much people were complaining about this, and that's who she compares me to. I responded calmly. Actually, ma'am, Hitler killed millions of people. This is just a blue background. Then I sat in silence, waiting for her to respond.

The reality of what she said hit her full force. She quickly fumbled apologies and hung up. The other desktop calls didn't stop coming, but at least I felt a little sense of accomplishment, and besides, calling us Stalin would have at least been more accurate. Down in the comments, I'm going to read this post from comedies. I'll be sure to let the VP who made this decision know you think of him as Hitler. How do you spell your name again? Our next red post is from Blimp Glorf. So this one goes back to 1999 or so. I was working in the corporate headquarters of a very large telecommunications

company responsible for the email system for headquarters. I've had about 1,100 users at the time. Like all system-mins at headquarters, I was a contractor working through a body shop outsourcer. My boss was a guy I'll call S. Sam was a site manager for the outsourcer and was a direct manager of all the contractor system admins. The customer contact was a guy I'll call James. James was what they called an IT planner, basically a systems architect. He had dotted line responsibility over all the system admins, including me. I also had a backup there who I'll call Bob.

Bob was a competent system admin capable of handling most day-to-day stuff. We normally kept staff in the office from 8 to 6 on work days with an on-call rotation for certain specialty areas including email. Back then we carried a pager for on-call duty. My on-call rotation was one week on one week off. This story happened in my off-week when Bob carried the pager. One Saturday night, around 3.30am, my home phone rang. My wife answered, and it was James calling. She grumply handed the phone to me. Now, my wife and I had just gotten home, having been home from much of

the night with our neighbors. I was, for lack of a more refined term, positively hammered at this point. James informed me that there was an email outage and that I needed to remote in and get it back up immediately and then drive to the office to start a root cause analysis. I informed him that I was in no condition to drive, let alone touch a production rig, and asked what Bob told him when he called the on-call pager. James told me that he didn't call the on-call pager because this was way too serious of a problem to trust the backup system admin. He wanted me working on this and that if I can't be relied upon to do my job when I was

needed, he'd find someone else who could and hung up the phone. I went back to sleep. The next morning, I had an email from Bob telling me that James had called him at home rather than paging the on-call rotation. It was a very simple issue. Our backup software went scurry and started writing out hundreds of gigabytes of temporary files, which filled up a critical volume on our production email server. Tim files were deleted, email services were restarted, and the problem was kicked over

to our backup software SME to figure out what had happened. The total downtime after Bob had gotten the call was about 15 minutes. The next day, I arrived at the office to a note from Sam, my manager, asking me to come see him ASAP. I went to Sam's office and sitting there with James, who was in the process of demanding that I be fired immediately for being drunk at work. From there, the conversation went something like this. Sam said, but OP wasn't at work. He was at home and wasn't in the on-call rotation this weekend. I don't want to hear about the on-call rotation. OP needs to be ready to work when I tell him to. I can't rely on an alcoholic and I want him gone. If he's not on call, he's free to do whatever he wants with his time.

Not as long as he works for me. James then demands that I hand my office badge to him and call security from Sam's phone to have me escort it out of the building. I'm an absolute disbelief at this point. Sam gets up and goes off to points unknown, just as security arrives to see me out to the parking lot. As I'm driving off, I see James Boss, a color Michelle. Michelle is running across the street to the parking lot. Strange, but I was more focused on how the hell I was going to explain this to my wife when I got home. I got home, and my wife was sitting on the couch just absolutely livid. Now, this was really really weird because I hadn't told her what happened

yet. Those mother efforts fired you? I'm confused as hell at this point. My wife told me that Michelle called her and that I need to call her back as soon as possible. Come to find out when Sam had gone off, he was going to Michelle's office to explain the situation and keep him from firing me. Michelle heard from Sam and freaked the hell out. When I saw her running across the street, she was trying to catch me in the parking lot before I left to tell me to come back in. When Michelle couldn't find my car, she went back into the office and called the house and tending to leave me a voicemail but got my wife instead.

Michelle told my wife what had happened, promised to rain James in, and asked her to tell me to come back into the office to sort it out. So I let them stew for a while. Michelle called me about 20 minutes after I got home. We let her go to the machine. Sam called as well, just as my wife and I went out to get some lunch. Over lunch, my wife and I talked about how he would handle this, and largely for financial reasons, we decided to talk to them and let them see if we could work this out. We got back home to three more voicemails from Michelle and Sam. About 30 seconds after we walked in the door, the phone rang again. This time it was James, obviously on speakerphone.

Jay apologized to me and asked me to come back to work the next day. I agreed, but as he hung up, I could hear Michelle say to him, James, you're an effing idiot. I worked there for another year after that, before another James grew up made me leave once and for all, but that's a whole another story. And then OP made a second post with that story. So in the previous story, OP used initials for each of the characters, but I just gave them made up names because it's easier to follow along. And in this story, OP gave them

real names, but I'm gonna stick to the old names just for consistency. In early 2000, I got a phone call at home from an IT recruiter. This wasn't uncommon at all. I had at one point or another and interacted with half the sleazy recruitment agencies in my city. This call was a little bit different. It was from an in-house recruiter for a tech company, a company that was one of the shining stars of tech where I lived, with a reputation for not only having solid technology in their market, but also being a great place to work. They weren't honest to goodness Unicorn back before anyone called them that. The conversation went something like this.

Hi OP, this is Recruiter with Cool Tech Company. How are you today? I'm doing well, thanks. What can I do for you? OP, I'm calling because Lin gave me a copy of your resume and suggested that I reach out to you about a position we have open. Gabby here is a meditation instructor who just created her business website. Just need to choose a domain. Hmm, meditativeminds.ca or dot com. That Canada goose looks grumpy. Also, why is he here? Well, Gabby, he's here to tell you that 85% of Canadians prefer supporting local business on a dot CA over a dot com.

And dot CA it is. Now repeat after me. Oh, we'll work on that friend. Go local, choose success, choose dot CA. Now repeat after me. Oooooooh. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 6 live on the players and teams you're watching. And qualified bets can use our early cash out feature. So you can take your winnings to play live blackjack on the same points bet app. The platform that gives you everything you need. You know what to do. Bet on it. Point Spets Sportsbook and Casino.

And for a little bit of context, after James screwed up in the previous story, Lynn is the person who OP now reported to. Also, she utterly hated James. Now, this confused the hell out of me because Lynn was my lead, albeit through a dotted line. Let that sink in. My boss sent my resume to a recruiter without my knowledge or permission. Obviously, this was something that warranted further investigation.

So, I called Lynn. Apparently, she had just interviewed a cool tech company and didn't get the job. On the things but no things call from HR, she told the recruiter something to the effect of, well that's too bad, but I know someone else can you to talk to. OP is better at this stuff than me, and I think he'd love working at cool tech company. And then she sent over my resume. When I asked her why she did that, she just said, you have to trust me on this one, I can't say more. So I had a phone interview with the hiring manager at Cool Tech Company.

And he and I meshed well and he decided to bring me in for the full Gauntlet interview and the rest of the system administration team here. Around this time, I got a meeting request from James, who I hadn't really interacted with a lot since that time he tried, and failed to fire me. At the meeting, James informed me that the company had decided to ensource all the contract's sys admins and bring them on his direct telco employees. He had an offer letter waiting for me at the meeting. I opened the offer letter, only to discover that it had a 20% pay cut from what I was earning as a contractor.

To do the same job. There was a slight bump in terms of benefits value, but at first glance, it was obvious that this was a pay hit no matter how you added it up. James also informed me that this wasn't optional, that the insourcing was going to happen whether I liked it or not, and that this was a take-it-or-leave-it-offer. Not only was this to be a pay cut, but I would also be reporting directly to James. As would all the other newly insor-sissed men's on the team. Either one of those would be deal-breakers, but I kept my mouth shut, knowing his history.

I caught up with Lynn a few minutes later. She took one look at my face and knew what had just happened. This is why I told you to trust me she said before I even said a word. I could have kissed her. So a couple of weeks later I went in for the full interview at Quiltet Company, which resulted in an offer that would have been a no-brainer to accept even if I hadn't just had my pay cuts. I received that offer just before the planned effective date of the in-sourcing and pay hit. The next day, I walked into Lin's cube and let her know that I'd gotten the job. She got this look of utter delight on her face and said to me, you have to let me be there when you tell Jim. So we walked over to his office

together and I told him. He looked absolutely floored and as he usually did when he didn't get his way, immediately went into argument mode. All the other cis admins took the job. You're making a big mistake. Do you think that little company is gonna last? The problem was that because of the planned insourcing, there was no mechanism to continue to pay me past the end of that week, as the company's contract with the outsourcer was expiring. Enter Michelle. Michelle was Jim's boss, who I had a great relationship with. Now I felt genuinely bad about this, because IT operations at corporate headquarters was

her responsibility, and this left her with not only no email server support, but only a day to figure out how to ensure continuity. I was perfectly willing to give two weeks notice per custom mind you, they just didn't have a straightforward way to pay me for it. So Michelle called me into her office after James left for the day. I told her that I was already in the interview process at the time that James gave me the offer, and the fact that it was such a big pay cut made it a no-brainer to continue. Michelle had an utterly shocked look on her face and said to me,

pay cut, you all were supposed to be kept at your current pay level. What I found out later, through my mole, Lynn, was that James Nick collected to relay that instruction to the company HR when they were preparing the offer letters. They prepared the offers at what HR deemed to be the market rate, which in this case was a substantial pay hit. I never found out if he did that on purpose, but given that he'd complained in the past that he thought that we were overpaid for what we did, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that he did. Anyway, even though Marie upped the offer to match my current pay rate, so much for take

it or leave it. And promise that I'd be reporting to her given my past history with James, I still declined as my new job had a lot more long-term opportunity. Incidentally, I ended up staying at Cool Tech Company for over eight years. It was the best career move I ever made. My only regret about it was that I was never able to get Linna job there. On the other hand, Michelle stepped in and took away all of James' supervisory responsibility over the Siss & Men's, sticking him in a strict technical role. He lasted a few months at for that and bailed out to a much smaller company.

Our next post is from ClicketyClickety. I was a Tier 1 remote support tech. This was one of my first official IT jobs and I was a young, fresh-faced, wide-eyed kid with a working knowledge of some kind of code, and the ability to install Java with over a 50% success rate. Rain-Ring went to phone and I perked up. Another customer desperately in need on the Brink of Disaster had called upon me to single-handedly resolve their problem and leave them 110% satisfied.

A problem I alone had the keys to fix. So long as it was within the exceptionally narrow purview of the types of problems that I was trained to handle. Thanks for calling Tech Support MegaCorp, my name is OP, can I have your name and client number please? There was a long pause, and then the person slowly gave me their info. I plugged it into my system and bam! I looked at my clients info. They were based out in Washington State, a very remote office, easily three or four hours drive from the nearest Sidesupport Analyst. If I couldn't fix their issue, they might not be

up and running for days. I was their last hope. So our computer's been running really slow. The guy starts out and I jump on it. I see, let me see if you have any hanging processes going on. Do you know what version of Java you're running? Have you recently uninstalled or reinstalled any programs? No to all of these. Our remote session was lagging for sure, but I couldn't find out what the cause was. See, it started after this storm, and the guy went on to a ramble about the weather,

and how they've been dealing with landslides and other unrelated things. Meanwhile, I keep scrounging for data in the system. The processor was just running so slow, and it's been hot, and the computer smells pretty funny. I stopped. Smells funny. Have you, um, cleaned it recently to get dust out of it? I felt like a genius. Once he vacuumed all that up, he'd be good to go. There was a long pause while the guy presumably took off the case of the PC, then...

Ah! Oh my god! Ah! Over there! Strings of profanity, then quiet. Sir, I asked after a moment, are you still there? Is everything okay? No! He shouts. There's a hole in the wall and it looks like they got in after the storm.

Some, God, they've built a hive! What? He repeated himself. So yeah, can you like get someone out here with a new PC or something? I know it's hard to get someone out here and all. Undeterred, I assured them that I'd have something out there as soon as I could. I typed up the ticket and sent it on its way, and I never heard how it got resolved. But I will never forget that ticket as I typed it out.

Computer completely filled with bees, sending to death-side support. I learned something important that day. Never take a problem at base value, or assume you have all the pertinent info, no matter how usual it may seem. Listen when the customer gives you background info. Some of it might be important, and never ever choose to work in deathside repair in the mountains. And that's why, in every coder spreadsheet I've ever written, somewhere you'll find the

phrase, computer completely filled with bees. To remind myself that, no matter how much I feel like a genius, there's always room for being completely wrong and completely surprised. So basically OP, what you're telling us is that his computer had multiple bugs? That was our slash tales from Check Support, and if you like this content, then check out my podcast where I published extra episodes. Also be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. published extra episodes. Also, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit

podcast episodes every single day.