... and so my shitty Friday continues
 

On Friday I ended up dealing with two issues, that were caused by other people's stupidity. I can handle when things just go wrong, but when someone actively screws up something he doesn't have a clue about?

The first was an issue with an antivirus programme. Said antivirus got a bad virus definition file, about a month back, that marked the programmes updater as a virus. It also marks any installation programmes and updaters as viral. No big deal, since it's still running. Takes about 2 minutes to fix it.

Unless someone uninstalls it. Then you have to reinstall Windows, because the manufacturer didn't come up with a mitigation process. Guess what someone did.

Then there's the issue with these systems we have, around campus, that display date, time, news, and advertisements both for on- and off-campus clients. We had some trouble getting a couple of them to update so techie boy from the programme's manufacturer remotes into them, to tweak them. For some reason he reboots one of them before he has reset the auto-login profile name. As a result he loses access and the system is just displaying a login screen. No problem. I go on-site and fix it. He then seems to have decided that he didn't like the drive letter assignment for some bizarre reason (no idea why, since it doesn't have any effect on the software's ability to run) and completely pooches the RAID array that acts as the secondary drive. At least I THINK that's what he's done.

And here I am spending yet another day, trying to recover from these two screw-ups.

What's a programme?

It's when you refer to a piece of computer software in the correct manner, without being too lazy to add the final two letters.

Heh.. yeah, sounds pretty typical. I'm learning how to deal with people that think it's the end of the world if they can't perform one of their job functions. Types in an email "I can't save this document. An error pops up." copies supervisor on (expected) copies VP of the institution on (being a bitch). "I can't access My Documents." copies supervisor + VP..

Do not like problematic department. It's not like the added pressure helps solve any strange issues, it just hurts since I'm now nervous to perform an attempted fix that could hinder them further (granted I can reverse it, but they don't understand that!). I'm not a genius; I don't know everything! Some things can't be fixed in 5 minutes.. damn.

On the bright side I'm learning how to use Dell Kace products, so that's pretty fun.

I'm fine with it when things simply break. I'm fine with it when a user needs a little education. I'm fine with it when someone makes an honest mistake.

It drives me bloody batshit crazy when people think they know what they're doing, when what they're actually doing is lobbing a live grenade into a room.

Yeah, I understand. In the small time that I've been at the place I mistakenly helped uncover several "quick fixes" performed by support. We don't have the time to monitor what they're doing while they're in the system, or at least every move they make. I can tell you one thing though, in light of a recent discovery we're making it a point to ask exactly what they did to fix the issue at hand. Both for documentation purposes and to cover our asses..

Yup.. I left early Friday and see that a client lost connection to the internet. The ISP said there was an outage. I get a call on Sunday that the ISP says there isn't an outage (first ISP tech lied to us for some odd reason) One of my low level techs was troubleshooting for hours.. VPN worked, but internet didn't.. I looked at it for about 10 minutes after he goes.. Yeah I was clicking around inside the firewall and the internet went out at the same time.. Weird huh? :wtfru:

He unchecked the rule that allows internet traffic out... :?:

So I'm curious, in scenario one do you fault the user for uninstalling or the antivirus vendor for failing to mitigate such a rudimentary troubleshooting step?

The first scenario is something that I've seen happen with every antivirus I've ever worked with, and there are quite a few of them. I blame the manufacturer for not having a process by which the elements of the antivirus can be removed easily, by script, in case of such an eventuality.

I blame the so-called 'technician' for trying to deal with an issue that was clearly over his head. The indications from the antivirus, that were right in front of his face, were of a massive virus infection. He's not a technician, which is why I keep putting the word in quotes. My group exists specifically to deal with the sort of issues that he saw.

I blame our helpdesk for either not paying attention to instructions on how to mitigate this issue, or not understanding what they were told and not asking the necessary questions if they didn't understand. I have talked complete computer illiterates through remediation of this issue in under 5 minutes, over the phone. I can do it myself, on-site, in two.

Basically I was handed a cluster fuck; a case in which not one person did what was expected of them.

Every now and then I get a call from a user who swears that the network is down and it turns out that he just accidentally disabled his network connection via randomly clicking on the network icon in the tray.

ill take all that crap over the weeks worth of intestinial pains Ive been enjoying.