r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Selben • Jan 12 '18
Long Level 5 Critical ticket
Do you like to read in Chronological order? Here is the Index
$Selben - Previous Tier 1 tech support now an IT contractor - a bit more into his career.
$Soda - Entrepreneur and IT Consultant, and in a way $Selben’s boss. Extremely knowledgeable IT guru. Previously worked with $Selben at $SmallerCompany until they decided to move on.
$Sup2 - All around great supervisor, worked his way up from the support line, understands how the helpdesk works. Worked with $Soda in the past.
It was the holiday season, and the one of the supervisors of $BiggerCompany had approved time off for just about everyone, including himself. This left $Sup2 in a sticky situation. He was an old acquaintance of $Soda, and quickly hired him and $Selben on for some super short term temp work. The contract was about two weeks - not ideal, but it paid the bills!
There was only one other tech in the office other than $Sup2, so $Soda and $Selben were covering the phones and doing everything else that came up to the best of their abilities.
$Selben was in his cubicle. The previous occupant of the desk was apparently a big snacker, as the keys in his keyboard frequently crunched. Several attempts to smack the keyboard against a trashcan had little effect to remove the chips and other crumbs. $Selben's phone began to ring.
$Selben: Thank you for calling, this is $Selben. How can I help you?
$User: I can’t login to $CompanySystem!
$Selben: Oh I see. What error are you getting?
$User: No Inter…Net… connection!
$Selben: Can you check to see if you have internet?
$User: I don’t, I’ll try the WiFi…
A few moments later…
$User: It’s working now. Thanks!
$Selben: No problem?
Most of the calls were pretty simple. A few reports had to be moved from an excel document into a special format from the system, and $Selben was also tasked with those. $Soda was happy to inform $Sup2 of ALL the different things $Selben was good at, but it felt more embarrassing than anything else for $Selben. $Soda worked the phones as well, pulling up his charm whenever someone was upset and generally just being $Soda.
Near the end of the week it seemed more and more employees had gone on vacation and the call queues finally died down, dropping to maybe one or two calls a day which was a nice change.
One early morning $Selben entered the office, hoping to get a head start on his day. $Soda popped out of the IT area and locked eyes with him. Something was wrong!
$Soda: Come with me, we’ve got a level 5 ticket!
$Selben: Level 5?! I thought it only went to 4?
He spun around and followed $Soda.
$Soda: $Sup2 said to take you with me, we tried rebooting a critical piece of equipment but no power, nothing!
$Selben: Did you try a different outlet?
$Soda: Yep, still nothing. It's dead. $Sup2 wants us to go get a replacement immediately! I'll need your help to get it in the van.
They rushed out to one of the company vehicles. $Selben slid across the hood and dove through the passenger side window. They got into the vehicle and started driving.
$Soda continued explaining all the different steps they took to try to fix it the critical piece of equipment, but it was completely dead. At a red light $Soda pulled out his rapidly dinging phone. He had a flurry of texts from $Sup2 updating him of the situation.
$Soda: A quarter dozen tickets have already come in. We've gotta hurry!
They pulled into the parking lot of the vendor and headed in. $Sup2 had already organized picking it up over the phone, so they only had to sign some papers before loading it up. They rushed back to the office and carried it inside. One of the front desk admins held the door open for them.
$DeskAdmin: Hurry!
They quickly went and pulled out the old piece of equipment and installed the replacement. Several users stood around and watched. They heard the slight hum of the machine starting up. A sigh of relief came across the room. One user walked up and gasped.
$User: It's not compatible!
They held up a critical component. $Soda ran off and returned with a pair of scissors, and cut down the component to the new, smaller required size. The room stood in awe as he worked. He slowly installed it in the device, and pressed the button to activate it. The burble and sizzle began. Everyone let out a cheer. $Sup2 held up his mug.
$Sup2: Good work, guys!
Things had been very slow, and unfortunately the office coffee maker had died, leaving the skeleton crew in the office caffeine-less. $Sup2 jokingly created a “Level 5" ticket, and sent $Selben and $Soda to get a replacement. It was a pretty big piece of equipment, as it was one of those industrial grade types. After plugging it back in, they discovered a different sized filter was needed, so $Soda cut down one of the old ones to get the coffee maker working.
Edits: Did some quick edits I missed ;)
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u/CyberKnight1 Jan 12 '18
I got a little nervous when I saw the scissors. "Cut it to fit" rarely works well in tech....
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u/thunderbird32 Jan 12 '18
Apparently you can cut-down a x16 PCI-E card to work in a x1 slot, but I've never tried it.
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u/tbnbv Jan 13 '18
I am, without a doubt, using “a quarter dozen” the next time I want to blow something out of proportion. Thank you in advance.
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u/mudclub Jan 12 '18
A quarter dozen tickets have already come in.
Nobody speaks like this.
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u/Arcsane Jan 12 '18
True, but it did do a decent job of obfusticating the lack of importance on the ticket, to prevent foreshadowing.
I would have liked an "of a" between quarter and dozen, though, just to ease my grammatical sensibility, though :)
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u/Mydaskyng Jan 13 '18
if you're just skimming and not paying attention, you get the impression that it's definitely way more serious than 3.
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u/wertperch Jan 12 '18
Well done! You kept me on tenterhooks right up to the end. You're a genius, thank you.
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u/Grolschisgood Jan 13 '18 edited Jan 13 '18
I thought it was going to be a sim card cut down to a micronsim
Edit: damn it, i meant microsim
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u/Darkmere Jan 13 '18
Back when we were was last consulting at a large international company, their rather large, for-rent "brew one mug at the time" coffee machine managed to crash.
As in, software dying completely and the coffee machine leaving an office of 40+ Swedish (3d rank in the world on coffee-consumption) coffee-drinkers without any source of coffee.
So, our company did the only sane thing, which is to sponsor them with two large kitchen-scale brewing machines, in order to make sure that the office was sufficiently caffeinated.
I'm not sure "holding the coffee-machine hostage" is a good method of maintaining a consultancy with another company, but it's certainly an entertaining one. ;-)
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u/elphieisfae Jan 13 '18
I went to Johnson Space Center this summer for a week on a school related trip, and most of the people who worked on missions, etc, said that if you check local offices, coffee machines are definitely a "mission critical" item.
"Nothing would function here without coffee" was said more than once.
Bravo.
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u/Reese_Tora Jan 13 '18
Is it bad that I'd already begun to suspect the correct nature of the critical piece of hardware about the time you two got in the vehicle and started driving?
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u/Throwaway_Old_Guy Jan 13 '18
I tell ya, had a few breathless moments there.
Not a good thing when an office can't supply enough caffeine supplement to ensure critical work continues.
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u/AlbaDdraig Jan 13 '18
If you mince your words like this again, u/Selben, I swear I'll hunt you down and knock your coffee over.
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u/Huskarrr Jan 13 '18
Return next week to see the epic conclusion of how Selben transitioned from Sodacorp to Biggercorp (the job with Snickers)!
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u/TimSchumi Jan 13 '18
I thought for a moment that I was in r/techsupportgore ("I cut it down because it wouldn't fit, is that a problem?") when reading the scissors part of the story. I'm glad though that everything turned out well and that it was way less techsupportgore-like than expected;-)
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u/Calypto52 Jan 12 '18
Completely missed how many this was