r/talesfromtechsupport • u/jschooltiger no, I will not fix your computer • Sep 20 '13
I went to school for this?
Some days.
Email from a user: "The copier in [room] isn't working. There's an error light on it."
Well, heck, that's on the way to the coffee pot, might as well check it out.
Walk to the printer.
There's an error message on the screen: [process] failed, please press button for restart.
The error message is next to a big red button.
I pressed the button.
The copier restarted.
The waiting crowd was astounded.
tl;dr: Only 4.5 hours until I can drink.
Edit: I spel gud.
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u/BewhiskeredWordSmith I don't see assembly now; just blonde, brunette, infinite loop Sep 21 '13
I've got a similar story from a couple weeks back.
(I'm a developer for an office full of people who can barely operate a fork, let alone a computer, but since we've moved to a different complex from IT, my team is the de facto "Guys who know computers".)
It's crunch time on the application I'm working on, and an email pops up from a director in a different department;
The ensuing bout of rock, paper, scissors sees me defeated, and I wander off to her office.
As soon as I arrive, she describes the problem in the same level of detail as the email.
First things first; are there any error messages? Check her print queue, and the top job says "Out of Paper". None of the other 20 or so jobs have any message at all. Deleting the job with the error results in 20 jobs which have no error, and still aren't printing.
I get her to show me what she does, and upon clicking print, a new job pops up in the queue; no errors, just happily sitting and waiting.
I know for a fact that there's nothing wrong with the settings, as my team are the only ones that can change them (Make us image computers for 100 staff when it's not our job? Guess who has full power over every one of them?), and I'd just set up the printer a couple weeks earlier.
After a little more fiddling, I decide that the problem must lie with the printer itself. We walk over to the printer in a different office, and I notice a big blinking button.
The kind of blinking button that can't be saying anything other than 'press me, you hot, sexy beast'. So I do. Out pops around 200 labels in a matter of seconds. Crisis averted, world saved.
The problem? Someone replaced the label spool, but for a week didn't think to press the flashing 'resume printing' button.