Tech Helpdesk Blorg

2007-01-19T18:33:00.000-08:00

I was out sick Wednesday and Thursday due to a cold that I think my wife passed on to me.
Back on my feet friday, to find that my manager waffled. He decided to go ahead and pay the phone guys their extra cost due to their mistake. I am disappointed, but he realizes the brand of support they have been giving us. He says to give them one more chance. If they don't shine, we take our money to someone else who knows the product better and is willing to go the extra mile for their customers.
The poor fax project has been feeling neglected, and is reacting in kind, by being stubborn and refusing to let me remotely manage the server. So I spent some quality time with it, just fax server and me in the server room giving it the TLC it wanted; getting the Active Directory sync configured and pasting in DN's for proper fax routing through Exchange.
Then I hit the HomeRun of the month!
I figured out the ACD call routing problem that manager had been constantly bugging me about. I had put in the call to our phone support guys but unsuprisingly, got no response. So I started reading manuals, of course! After about two hours of reading I unearthed the purest gold that ever was found in these hills! A few clicks, a few check boxes and a half hour of teaching the folks in that department the two steps needed to make this work, and it we hit the motherload! Tested the solution and it works beautifully! The manager is very pleased, and happy with me, finally.
A great end to a downer week.

2007-01-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

And now back to Phone Upgrade: the Reality show, now fortified with even more scripted drama!
We arrived this morning to an email from the phone guys. They are appealing to our long-standing relationship.
I personally like these guys, they are nice, but I don't feel any loyalty or indebtedness to them. My boss feels differently.
They say they can't afford to eat that much of a cost; I shrugged. That's my problem? So I'm supposed to take pity on them for making that mistake? That doesn't usually fly in the business world.
Our company can't afford it either. Our belts are tight, we are running lean, spending is all but frozen. That mistake is going to put our project approval in danger of cancelation. Sorry but we don't want to blow our tight budget either.
My manager and I hash it out for quite a while. He is wavering, I've expressed my argument as best I could.
What burns is that the extra cost is for 1 year of support from them. However, I often call them with questions and frequently get the response that they don't know. Sometimes a week will go by before I get any response, sometimes not at all. That's not what I call good suppot. Often while their tech will be looking up the answers in the manuals, which I have, I will find the answers in the manuals myself. Is that what I'm paying them for?
My manager is off to meet with Accounting and with Executives; we'll see what happens.

2007-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

What a mess has been made of this day. Fought little fires around the office and on the phone with users this morning.
Then our phone vendor called us in the middle of the day and told us that they made an error on the price quote for our phone system upgrade, so we will have to pay them $3000 more. I was shocked. I sputter a reply that I had to talk to my manager.
Both he and I flipped out! Excuse me? You're telling me I have to pay for your mistake?!? What planet did these guys come from?
My manager and I quickly briefed our cheif counsel on the fallout of events, he then agreed, we are not under obligation to pay for thier mistake.
So we sent them an email reply, we had an agreed upon price and we were not going to pay more than that.
I left the office stewing over it; but then I suppose our vendor is stewing up quite a larger kettle of worry than I.
And we have Monday off for a three-day weekend, good, let them worry a little more. They would be fools to let me $50k deal go over this.

2007-01-11T22:42:00.000-08:00

Dear me, very little progress on the fax project has been made except the realization that a lot more work needs to be done than I realized. Sigh.
Most of the day was intensly occupied by planning one of the two new offices' dial tone and internet circuits. Multiple digital connection vendors telling me, DSL no, then DSL yes but static IP: no, then DSL with 1 static: yes! Is a vpn over ADSL's 768bps up going to be too slow? We think not, as we have the same scenerio in two other offices which seem to run just fine.
Lunch was the most delicious Thai curry basil noodles I have ever had. I going back there and bringing my whole posse.
Then the afternoon decended into madness as we dealt with our phone system upgrade vendor claiming we had to pay for one of their mistakes, which, logically, we refuse to . Our company lawyer is backing us, which bestowes some small hope.
My boss is ready to find a new vendor.

2007-01-09T22:57:00.001-08:00

Turned off my alarm and promptly fell back asleep this morning.
Got to work late but juiced up from the tasty fruit of the jamba.
Tackled a few early morning helpdesk emails and tried to dive into
the fax project but got completely sidetracked by Steve Jobs keynote
at Macworld. Spent the next 2 hours with my pulse racing seeing the
news and new products announced. I love Macs, always have, always
will. Thats not a popular opinion in an industry dominated by
redmond drones. But I was thrilled when OS X was introduced, as it
merged my other favorite OS into Macs, unix.
I love that Linux too.
After pledging my wallet to Apple's chic new devices, I jacked into
one of three conference calls with our vendor today about the
impending phone system upgrade. Still no solution to the ACD call
forwarding frustration.
Drooled over the iPhone once again as I showed my buddy in marketing
the slick new device, now he wants one too.
Logistics are getting swampy. We've got two new offices opening but
also equipment to pick up from two closed offices, all in different
states. Not to mention phone and data circuits to order and install
dates to coordinate.
Towards the end of the day we got the conference calls handled and I
finally made some good progress on the fax server. I'm hoping if I
can spend some quality time with this baby tomorrow, it actually
might stand up on its own legs and walk by tomorrow night or
Thursday. They sure do grow up quick.

2007-01-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

Had the hardest time waking up this morning; was in a thick london
style fog until the coffee finally brewed at 9:30am. I may have to don the cap of barista if the usual suspects don't get it done earlier.

Browsed through yesterdays firewall logs: video streaming up the
wazoo, whatever a wazoo is... not sure, I digress, Googlevideo, YouTubers, eBaums, on and on. We have a policy, but enforcement is lax, everyone wants to watch a funny clip now and then, but there are some obvious offenders.
Slogging my way through the email changes that must be engineered before we start dumping faxes into folks inboxes; must try to think of all the special cases before we do the switch over. I finally finished calling all concerned parties to resolve their fax sharing issues and ran out into the warm wind for lunch.

Spent lunch caving the recesses of my brain for 'the idea'. That one singularity, a web based business, the next MySpace, the next YouTube, its out there...somewhere.

Back into the fray and the phone call load this morning has been mercifully light. I am thankful.
Scanned through the summary of this mornings firewall logs, and there it was, the number (or name) of the beast, sextracker.com. Yet another user surfing the pr0n wave. With one swift stroke of keys I shunted the username and appropriate firewall logs over to HR. They love handling that stuff. With so many different departments visiting so many different sites, and that doesn't take into account all the different sites the agents visit, we blacklist sites instead of whitelist, otherwise I spend all day fielding calls asking why someone can't visit www.blahblah.com (this is not a plug for blahblah.com, I have no idea who those people are)

One of the managers informed me that the call forwarding system we setup on Friday didn't work, his agents are not getting the calls. Upon investigation, lo and behold, he's right. Darn it, thought I had it wrapped up that time. Went overtime trying different experiments but none of them worked.
The phone system refuses to send an ACD call to an external number, probably by design.
Must call phone system system support in the morning.
On a bright note, we are only a few weeks away from the phone system install, and therefore I know what I will be spending the majority of my time on once I finish this fax upgrade: the phone system upgrade!!
One fun part will be using my newly aquired CCNA skillz in making sure all my switches all play nice with the new system!

2007-01-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

Frustrations are the name of the game.
I'm trying to sort out all the details of our fax server upgrade.
It will deliver new faxes into users email inbox, instead of relying on a fax client app.
But the users have built a sticky web of shared fax boxes that they now depend on.
So to accomodate, we must create more email boxes and duplicate the existing shared structure.
Tedium.

On the security battlefront, I keep dreaming of Singe-Sign-on and Two-Factor Authentication.
Maybe some beautiful shining day, budget strings will be loose and generous and management will see the true benefits of these systems.
Since my superiors don't see the glorious path that mine eyes do behold, its up to me to convince them. All the industry rags say using fear as a motivator is not the way to get security projects approved. But if I can't make them drink the kood-aid of industry standard paranoia, whats a geek to do?
Productivity increases! Legal compliance!
I don't think those reasons are enought to get the projects all the way through the door.
Were in a spending freeze until March, so I better be ready to move on these before some other department figures out how to spend our money.

2003-10-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

User writes: "I can save my work on point"

IT Response: "Really? Great. Thanx for updating us on the status.
You can tell me when its working any time."

2003-08-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

User writes:
"My computer is weird.
I can't describe it, it's just... weird."

IT Response:
"So...tell me about 'weird.'
Tell to me about your mother."

2003-07-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

Hello. The printer is not working.

Dear User, I know.
Sigh. :(
Right when my Library of Congress dump was almost complete.

2003-05-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

To whom this may concern, When is the server going to be working?

Dear User, that depends on you. Our server was installed with the latest usage detection software and shuts off any user that it detects downloading porn. Please desist from all such activity. This note has been forwarded to management.

2003-04-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

Do you know if the PPO plan covers chiropractic?

Dear user, Absolutly! No need to contact HR on this one.
I've got a great chiropractor! He takes EVERYthing. (but he prefers cash)

2003-04-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

The internet is not working

Dear user, we have notified the Office of the President of the United States of America and the Office of Homeland Security of this catastrophic worldwide meltdown. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. You should be able to surf the web once global communications have been restored.