I received your message on my answering machine this morning:
Hi this is (insert name here). We seemed to have lost connection to the network yesterday afternoon and we were still down this morning. I went into the back room and turned the router and waverider on and off in varying sequences but it didn’t seem to work.
Can you have a look at this? Thanks.
Are you kidding? We (The IT department) have not received any calls from this office reporting a problem until this morning. Had I known it was down yesterday I would have fixed it yesterday. THAT IS MY JOB!!
So you don’t call to report the problem then decide to fix it yourself!?! If you want to piss around on your personal computer at home, go ahead. Do not, however, come onto my network and start fucking with my router when you have no idea what you are doing. Just don’t touch it. I know it has pretty lights that blink but, I will repeat myself for effect, DO NOT TOUCH MY ROUTER!! If I had any authority in this company I would fire your ass today because this is now the fourth time you have messed with my hardware.
You blew apart a perfectly productive morning and now I will be working overtime…again.
No doubt. It was a reboot of a couple machines, fuckstick. 9 out of 10 support personnel would start there anyways, so it seems like he has just taken work and frustration OUT of your job.
Maybe I spent too much time out of IT, but if there was someone who knew the difference between a router and a terminal, I was happy and more than happy to allow them to reboot the fuckers to eliminate my having to traipse down there and just reboot it myself.
The problem was not the router. That is the whole issue. She had no idea what the problem was but just started flicking buttons on machines.
If your air conditioner stops working do you start flicking around on switches before having a look around? If you look around but don’t know what to look for, then wouldn’t you call someone? I don’t mind using end users to help out but I generally prefer to a)be told about the problem and b)have had a chance to look at things. Maybe I am a little too methodical in this regard, you wouldn’t guess it by this thread
And metacom, the network at this place is another pit thread altogether.
Situations like this is why our lone IT guy keeps everything except the desk computers in a locked room no one can get into but him. The guy in the cubicle next to me is himself an “expert” in computer hardware (and software, and international economics, and just about anything you can talk about. Just ask him.), and I can easily see him fucking around with stuff when our computer geek has a day off.
That is a good point since it is your equipment. However, that brings up the question of why you brought all of your equipment from home to let the company use if you didn’t want anyone else touching it.
Nice try Shagnasty. The company owns the equipment and the company’s IT personnel have been commissioned to oversee said hardware. The accountants, to my knowledge, are hired to do accounting. The techies are hired to do techie stuff. See my point?
I’m sick of ate-up IT people who think they are the only people in an organization that know their way around a network and how to troubleshoot/fix issues.
That may have been the case 10+ years ago, but there are a TON more PC / Network literate people in the workforce now. In fact, there are probably people in your organization who know MORE about IT than you do but they are busy working in other jobs creating product to make the company money.
I’m a manager who comes to work every day in a tie because I spend all day in meetings, but I routinely outperform the IT staff of our organization when it comes to solving problems. If I had a dime for everytime I kept an IT guru from formatting a harddrive because “the OS is corrupt” or “its the only way to fix it” I’d be rich. 90% of the time when that is recommended it’s because they don’t feel like actually TROUBLESHOOTING and want to take the easy way out and reformat the systems.
Don’t act all high and mighty like only the people on the IT staff know what the fuck a computer is. It just isn’t that way any more.
Sure its your equip to manage, but just because they are not on the IT staff that doesn’t make them less competant when it comes to figuring out the problem.
You have to understand it’s very difficult to be this guy. All day long “the printer stopped” “I can’t sign on” “why is it doing this ?”. Sometimes the line between what I can handle and “call the help desk” is pretty gray.
And, in defense of all my not-really-expert bretheren, I feel that my experience is usually helpful to the techie types. When I realize I’m out of my depth and call them, it takes them probably one sixth the time to talk me through something than if all the hardware was “electronic magical shit” to me.
Your rant really hit home, I hope I don’t infuriate others this way. I have only a vague idea of what a router does, but I have been known to switch ours off and on to fix stuff. Hey, it works…sometimes.
I wish we had a good computer tech at my workplace. The one we have now is in way over his head. I know because it apparently is me.
We have someone who’s supposed to be in charge of our computer system. However, her qualifications for this job are that she has the key to the cabinet where we keep the computer stuff. I had to explain to her last week what a 3 1/2 disc was.
So by default I seem to have become the guy people expect to fix their computer problems. I am not a computer expert. What real computer training I had occurred back around 1980. Which, considering how antiquated our computer system is, is sometimes surprisingly useful.
That said, I have formulated one basic rule I have asked everyone to follow when they play with the computers: If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.
And how would you like it if another manager came up and started telling “your” people what to do because hey, he’s a fully qualified manager and he thought your people were slacking off?
I am fully capable of troubleshooting OS and hardware problems too, but after you’ve spent eight hours trying to figure out why a particular problem is occurring and then end up reimaging it anyway, you’ll realize it is often more efficient to just do that from the start.
If anyone in my organization started opening up “their” computer or playing around with routers, they would be in a world of trouble if it’s not their responsibility.
I’m not arguing that fact. Everyone has a job and they should do theirs and leave others alone. What I am arguing is that the mentality that is routinely displayed on this board by people in the IT industry is bullshit. This thread is just the straw that broke the camels back.
I don’t have time to put together a post with the 100 cites that you could find from the Pit in just the last year, but we have all seen the, almost routine, posts on this board where “SDMB poster who is an IT tech” is pissed because some “dumbfucker who thinks he knows shit about computers” is poking around on the network/fucking with the hardware.
Suprise motherfuckers! Just because someone isn’t on the payroll as an IT worker doesn’t mean they don’t know as much if not more than you about IT in gerneral.
Pretty soon kids are going to come out of high school with the necessary qualifications to do 95% of the IT jobs that you uber nerds are doing now. Get used to the general public being as smart as you on this shit. We are almost there already.
I’m not a janitor but thats not going to stop me from taking out the trash when I know where the dumpster is. This is the same thing.
This is not the behavior of someone who knows what the fuck she is doing. This is the behavior of a stupid asshole who only thinks she knows what the fuck she is doing. If she knew what the fuck she was doing she would have fixed the problem and this thread wouldn’t be here.
[sub]I seem to have a surplus of fucks in my word file today.[/sub]
Well, I don’t know about your company, but many companys, including the last one I worked for, have discovered that doing a reload from image is faster than troubleshooting and fixing. its not a matter of taking the easy way out, but economics…the techs were given X number of minutes to fix a problem, then use an automated script to re-image the machine. As an admin I personally was a little higher up on the food chain than a lot of the techs who were required to do this, and therefore I usually fixed the problem, and didnt get screwed with over it…but I saw many people get in trouble because some know it all manager wouldnt let them follow policy and do what they were required to do by THEIR manager.
No, but it sure as hell may mean that they are more informed on the configuration and the company policiys on that particular network. Often times I spent time fixing problems created by people who although they knew about computers, or networks…may have even worked in that capacity at one time…but they didnt know about something going on that day, or something on that particular network.
Theres a real good reason that companys that have the least network problems are the companys that doing such things is grounds for termination.
I agree with some of your rant (yeah, IT support personel could improve their attitudes a bit–the bit about having the guy fired in the OP irked me. If, in fact, the entire office couldn’t connect, and the router was set up correctly, power cycling it is harmless). But the above ain’t true.
“PC support person” accounts for less then 5% of the IT jobs in the country–high schools aren’t about to start offering courses on serious software development, the nitty gritty of Unix, the major databases (e.g., Oracle), etc. High school students certainly are getting more computer literate. My 17 year old sister and her friends are quite adept at using instant messaging and browsing the web. But if I hand her a NetApp, a SunFire, and the latest Oracle media I don’t see her handing me back a database a day later (nor do I see kids being able to do that 10 years from now…) If I threw a router into the picture she wouldn’t be any more succesful.
Okay, could someone explain to me what a router and what a waverider are, what they do, and what happens when people start turning them on and off like that?
(Although I would think that common sense tells you that it’s fucked up to just start randomly flipping buttons and switches when you don’t even know what the problem is)
I’d like to give the OP a guarded AMEN, except for the fact he (?) wanted said tinkerer fired, that’s a bit harsh, unless of course the tinkering was malicious.
Personally, I encourage our EU’s to fix their own problems. They can’t screw things up so badly I can’t fix them, so I let them have at it, this way, it encourages them to learn to fix things on their own, benefitting me of course, because I still get paid the same, and can work on more pressing issues like installs and the like. Of course, every little thing they do is monitored, so I can tell when and why the poop hits the paddles.
I run a small network, including several mobile clients on a dedicated RF backbone, and the EU’s can screw things up like nobodys’ business, and I fix it, hardware or software, because it’s what I do. Greenback, i know it’s frustrating, but you’ve gotta let it go, and use the OT to buy something cool.
Guin, This should give you all about about routers you’ll need to know.
