^^lol^^

 

What a coincidence, I originally got hurt on the job (Stationary Engineer) in late ’99 which how I ended up in IT as well. No regrets but it sure has its moments.

Well, one good thing about my current schedule is I get off work at 11 am on Friday’s which means I’m out-a-here till Monday. Have a great weekend!

 

I thought this comic strip would fit right into this thread...

Comic Strip

Be sure to hit the NEXT to see the next days strip.

Gary

 

Pretty funny....


Nothing worse than taking off the headset and laughing or cracking a joke or worse calling the person a name and realizing you forgot to hit the mute button.

Back when I was managing the help desk I had to take the calls when my techs forgot to hit their mute buttons. I apologize, "Yes ma'am, I'll talk with him. Yes that was inappropriate. He said you were dumber than a what? Ok yes I'll write him up. Thank you sorry have a nice day".

I go to the tech, give me a nasty look, "Funny joke, hit the mute button next time would you please."

How could I yell at the guys in the trenches for somethign like that. Been there done that. It relieves stress and most of the time they were right....

 

Vader,

if you dont mind me asking....

What do you do now, and how did you transition into your new field AWAY from tech support/help desk crap?

Any help getting me outta here is appreciated.

 

I got burnt out doing the phone calls and defending techs from sales staff who blamed them for every problem in the software. "Just tell them to fix it" was all I heard. These guys were young (18-22) and worked hard for their money (25k-35k). I got in to arguements almost regularly defending them. That got old fast.

I managed to take a job as an IT Admin/Manger (pick the title). Heard from a friend about the job. It was great because I was a one man crew and could do things my way and answered to one person. If problems developed I had to figure them out on my own.

Now I'm in my second such position and I am not burnt out but bored out of my mind. I need challenges and this place is simply too small to give them to me.

If you are good at what you do you should have no problem getting into a tech support team for a medium sized company. Maybe if do what I did and be the one man crew. It is about selling yourself in the interview. Didn't matter what they needed I could do it. I was lucky because I knew someone and that helped get the door open.

Do you know hardware, networking, Windows or Linux, Unix, etc? I'm sure you can troubleshoot heck its what you do.

Make the resume look great and make yourself sound great on the interview.

 

Sounds like what I'm doing Zap. One man Dept, I take care of computers, printers, telecomm, security system etc. The company has about 100 employees. I bet I hit the refresh button on the GD page at least 200 times per day. What's that, once every 2.4 minutes? Sounds about right.

I got the door open by working in client services processing data and got lucky when the IT gal gave her 2-weeks notice and I was a natural fill in while they found a permanent employee......Me.

 

Thanks Vader.

Everything I know is self taught.

-I know a little about Networking, Windows, hardware, but dont know squat about Linux or Unix.

I am like anyone else, I can learn anything. I guess I bettert brush up on some Linux and Unix, and start playing with it.

 

Time I got through with Help desk I didnt want anything to do with computers or internet or anything else. I saved up forced them to fire me and took a 6 month vacation. I was putting in ALOT of hours so I savced all over time and a little here and there to do it. Since they had me working so much teh house was falling apart and I didnt have time to fix it. SO thats what I spent the 6 months doing. Then started working for a canvas products compnay where I am now. Bored to tears and not getting any hours 12-30 per week so looking for something else now as we speak.

 

Love the stories guys!! I'm the first to admit to not being a computer genius but it's hard to believe that there are people that dumb in this world!!

 

if you think tech support gets weird calls trying selling auto parts,
customer on phone , i need a starter for my car
parts salesman, ok what type of car
customer, it's a ford impala
saleman,ok is it a ford crown vic or chevy impala
customer oh its a crown vic
partsman, what engine does it have
customer it's a 350
i wont finish but you see where this is going
it's amazing how many people out there don't know anything about what they drive everyday, there the peolpe you wonder the mall parking lots for half an hour to find there car, only to realize they walked past ther bright red mustang gt three times before they accept that is there's not someone elses

 

Tech support gets the same type of calls too. Every call you have to ask what Operating System they have. 80% of the time the answer was something like 95,98 or 2000,Millenium or my personal favorite were the ones that said that they have XP then after you start they say "mine doesnt look anything like that. Are you sure you know what your doing?" Ok so what do you see? Then they describe it and it's Windows 95! Yet they still insist that they have XP. Alright so you must have an "older version" of XP. Let look at these settings then.

 

Dont forget Windows "97".
or
Windows "2001".

WTF?

I gave up on asking what OS most are running, I just assume it's either 2K or Xp. Since I am in commercial tech support, I dont know of to many network admins around running 95 or 98 on a network....they are out there, but not as common.

 

That must be nice....
I was in internet help desk for local ISP dial up, broadband and a few med sized businesses to which we also served as network admins/support. So I had all OS's. Several Windows, Macs, occasional linux. Even ran into Windows 95A once... Yea that was fun... took me an hour and a half to get that one to dial up for the poor guy! His OS had several corrupt files and we didnt have remotes service for home users try finding and replacing those over the phone on an OS that you havent even seen in over a decade.