That’s not acceptable, I need this done now.

[mattm04]

I wish we *could* do that. The drives we have (which are at least in a mirrored array (only 2 drives tho)) are too small to hold a hell of a lot of "user" files, as most of the spare space is taken up by company data and the like. I just got in the habit of backing up my (non-confidential) files to my own offsite FTP every so often.

Part of the problem with space is this...(Non-Geeks, feel free to bypass this) -- We have MS Server 2003/SBSSERV, Terminal Services, and Exchange on our rackmount server-ish thing. All of these are Not only on the SAME COMPUTER, they're all on the SAME HARD DRIVE. Note, also, that I said "ish". Said system is not actually on an actual rack. It's on a plank of plywood which juts out more than a foot into our little file room.

Is it just me, or is this setup just asking for trouble?

Oh yes, bonus points if you guessed that the file room where this is kept is on a separate A/C thermostat from the rest of the office -- it uses the hallway's thermo, so we cannot control it, and it usually gets shut off completely on weekends. Thus, we have 3 or 4 little fans pointed at it at any given time. Also, the A/C vent which is about 6 inches from said server tends to leak. A lot. Fortunately it has yet to flow onto the server, but still. And, oh yes, we need to reboot it every week or two to keep it from overwhelming itself and seizing up mid-business day.

Note that the only reason we are no longer using a Pentium 3 ~1.8 ghz sytem as the server is thanks to Hurricane Katrina, after which our network dudes finally convinced the boss to upgrade to a server that costs more than found hundred bucks to replace.

The most powerful system is the office -- by far -- is a 2ghz dual core. I have more than once had to cannibalize old systems, ripping out old ram and HD's, to "upgrade" the "recent" systems (read: less than 6 years old) by dropping in another 512mb of ram and a 40 gig drive. I'm so glad that I will soon be out of that place. Let someone else deal with it.

I know how it feels. At a NFP i vol at our servers (1 file, 1 to run our member mgmt app, 1 to run our public wifi) are in a copy room that only the NFP staff are supposed to access that is off the mail room. Numerous people have access to the mail room but the door between mail and copy room never seems to be locked. Numerous times some one will wander in as say oh a computer is left on lets shut it off to save money" see the sign saying do not shut off and still hit the power button or just pull the plug from the wall. I finally got our finance people to give me money for a rack so this horror will end soon.

[EricKei]

I wish we *could* do that. The drives we have (which are at least in a mirrored array (only 2 drives tho)) are too small to hold a hell of a lot of "user" files, as most of the spare space is taken up by company data and the like. I just got in the habit of backing up my (non-confidential) files to my own offsite FTP every so often.

Part of the problem with space is this...(Non-Geeks, feel free to bypass this) -- We have MS Server 2003/SBSSERV, Terminal Services, and Exchange on our rackmount server-ish thing. All of these are Not only on the SAME COMPUTER, they're all on the SAME HARD DRIVE. Note, also, that I said "ish". Said system is not actually on an actual rack. It's on a plank of plywood which juts out more than a foot into our little file room.

Is it just me, or is this setup just asking for trouble?

Oh yes, bonus points if you guessed that the file room where this is kept is on a separate A/C thermostat from the rest of the office -- it uses the hallway's thermo, so we cannot control it, and it usually gets shut off completely on weekends. Thus, we have 3 or 4 little fans pointed at it at any given time. Also, the A/C vent which is about 6 inches from said server tends to leak. A lot. Fortunately it has yet to flow onto the server, but still. And, oh yes, we need to reboot it every week or two to keep it from overwhelming itself and seizing up mid-business day.

Note that the only reason we are no longer using a Pentium 3 ~1.8 ghz sytem as the server is thanks to Hurricane Katrina, after which our network dudes finally convinced the boss to upgrade to a server that costs more than found hundred bucks to replace.

The most powerful system is the office -- by far -- is a 2ghz dual core. I have more than once had to cannibalize old systems, ripping out old ram and HD's, to "upgrade" the "recent" systems (read: less than 6 years old) by dropping in another 512mb of ram and a 40 gig drive. I'm so glad that I will soon be out of that place. Let someone else deal with it.

[Eric the Grey]

On a similar subject, we had someone save over 20gb of stuff to our departmental share today. We were down to 200kb of space.

How much you want to be it's MP3's.


Eric the Grey

[technical.angel]

Does anyone else notice that network server use is at extremes? Either someone doesn't even know the thing exists, or they save EVERY BLOODY FILE to it.

On a similar subject, we had someone save over 20gb of stuff to our departmental share today. We were down to 200kb of space.

[Bandit]

If you're a CS major and you pull that kind of bonehead move, you need another major before you graduate!

Edited for truth.

B

[Racket_Man]

If you're a CS major and you pull that kind of bonehead move, you need another year before you graduate!

OM Fracking G This is what schools are turning out in the IT/CS majors now???????? on that note I think I will try some other field when I go back to school in the future. if that is what I will be dealing with you can have it.

hell another year...... this guy needs about 5 years more in school

even back 30 years ago when I was in school for CS/IT they stressed/beat it into us/yelled at us/swore at us to make FRACKING BACKUPS esp it it was IMPORTANT STUFF remember one of Murphy's law's

[Hyndis]

On that topic of saving important files to a hard drive, I had one worse.

Guy was working on his last major project to graduate college as a computer science major. He had saved the project to a flash drive.

He made no backups to the files.



You can see where this one is going!

In any event, the guy's flash drive was dead. Flash drives do have a high mortality rate due to how portable they are. Those things take a lot of abuse in their daily travels through pockets, being dropped, being sat on, and so forth.

Of course, the guy was furious. There was nothing I could do to help him. If its dead, its dead. I suggested contacting another company for data recovery, but no, he insisted I magically fix it for him over the phone.

Right before he hung up, he yelled at me and blamed me for making him flunk college and miss graduation.


If you're a CS major and you pull that kind of bonehead move, you need another year before you graduate!

[Wordsworth]

I blame the plethora of "How to Get Good Customer Service" articles that inevitably suggest stating firmly what you want them to do for you. For some reason, they fail to understand that there are some things you can't do for them, not because you don't want to or don't feel like it, but because can't means can't.

Also the ones that suggest speaking to a supervisor which results in people thinking they have to speak with a supervisor to do stupid things, such as change their address.

[protege]

Oh, and one more fail here: You saved your presentation to your hard drive, and not your network drive! You know, the one that gets backed up on a regular basis...

Ugh. Been there, done that. Now-gone idiot co-irker J was *notorious* for this. He'd save his "important" files to his hard drive...and then bitch when his computer had problems, and I had to temporarily swap it for another one. Well, dipshit, if you'd save it to the server, which is backed up *every* night, we wouldn't have this problem. Instead, whatever problem I was trying to fix, would take much longer than it should have...because he kept bugging me why "my important files aren't on the server" and how the backup "should fix that."

Again, I can't make a backup of something...that isn't there in the first place! Sorry, but I have better things to do with my time than go through a dozen computers and make sure the documents are there. If you can't be bothered to put it on the server, it's not my problem. Oh, and don't go whining to the boss--he'll tell you the same thing I did

[Eric the Grey]

Don'tcha just love people who expect the impossible?

I had one guy who insisted that *I* fix his computer immediately because he had a presentation (that he's "worked for weeks on") he needed to finish (still?) for a meeting in 5 hours. Now, not only did this call come through at 2 am (Mountain time), when nobody was around here who could do anything, but he was on the east coast, and the error said there was no bootable disk available...

Hmmm, dead hard drive, me approximately 1600 miles away = me not being able to fix your computer which in turn = your presentation is going to suck

The likelihood of the plant tech being able to pull his presentation off of that hard drive is slim, but possible. However, even given the time difference, it was only 4am there, meaning that nobody is going to be around to help him for another 2-3 hours.

So, Fail because you didn't finish your oh-so-important presentation early and had to rush in early to finish it up before the meeting.

Fail because you cannot grasp the fact that a dead hard drive is a bad thing that has no simple fix, unless the data on said drive is not important.

Oh, and one more fail here: You saved your presentation to your hard drive, and not your network drive! You know, the one that gets backed up on a regular basis...


Eric the Grey

[Hyndis]

I had one of those calls, almost word for word.


Issue was that one of our products broke. Its okay though, still covered under warranty!

He sent the broke one back in, however we were temporarily out of stock of that item, so there was a bit of a delay in sending back the replacement.




For a good 30 minutes or so the conversation went like this:



"I'm sorry sir, we do not have that item in stock. I cannot ship what we do not have."

"UNACCEPTABLE!! I need this now. Ship it now. I want it here today!"



So yeah, he basically wanted me to pull a piece of delicate electronics out of my ass, along with a teleporter and/or time machine, and then deliver the goods to him without having to also ship it halfway across the planet.

[sld72382]

Woman calls in on the service plan line, saying she had a power outage and when she booted up her computer afterwords, all her data was gone and the machine has been reset to factory levels. Translation: she ran a recovery not knowing what it does and is now hating herself for it. Of course, she wants her data back.

Bear in mind that only the store has the necessary software to try and retrieve data, and also recovering data over the phone is a not covered AT ALL due to liability reasons. You can’t even go as far as doing an “*.doc” (or insert any file type) search.

So here goes part of the conversation:

Me: I’m sorry ma’am, but data recovery is not covered over the phone due to liability reasons, you will need to bring it to the store where they have the needed software.

SC: That’s not acceptable, I need this done now.

Me: Again Ma’am, only the store has the needed software and due to liability reasons beyond that we cannot do this over the phone, you will indeed need to bring to store.

SC: That’s not acceptable, I need this done now.

Me: I’m sorry ma’am, but there really is no other info I can give you. You really do need to bring it to the store.

SC: That’s not acceptable, I need this done now.

Me: Ma’am I’m sorry but I don’t know what to say to you that would be different. You will need to take the computer into the store if you want to have your data recovered.

SC: That’s not acceptable, I need this done now.

Rinse and repeat for 24 minutes of her saying the same thing whenever I said anything to her. Finally, after placing her on hold to talk to a sup about this, I walked back to my desk and she hung up.

A couple of minutes later, another sup walks over to me after hearing what I said about the customer and said this: “You could have at least did an asterisk dot whatever search and shut her up.”

To which I said, “and I would put your name in the notes so If I fail an audit for trying to recover data over the phone I would counter and say you told me to do it.” He walked away after that.

Watch, knowing my luck the customer is going to send a bad email survey saying I refused to help her.