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The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/Ndog4664 on 2025-01-25 12:35:45+00:00.
Time for more stories however obligatory warning on my grammar, I didn't go to college and was considered special in high school.
story :1 - 12 hours of work in less then 7, wait now 6
My job is tech support related but is pretty broad fixing automation machinery, industrial IJPs, bio-testing, networking, servers, and monitoring software. We start every day off with a "morning meeting", time doesn't exist when you work nights, where we get our worksheets for scheduled preventative maintenance and usually 15 minutes to prep for work before we get reactive maintenance calls. I was told I was needed immediately because a piece of critical equipment preventing 2 machines from running was down all day because the evening shift had no one trained on it. Day shift, the people who do the preventive maintenance on it, were aware of the issue and apparently hoped I would replace the broken part. Sadly, for them, that wasn't going to happen. I was given 12 hours of work to do in 7 and was just handed more, sounds like a day shift problem. Anyways, national support gave permission to hot swap the equipment for a backup hot spare and 1 hour later the new one is installed, and machinery is backup. now I got 6 hours for 12 hours of work. don't ask how that was done.
Fast forward to the morning where day shift starts having a tantrum because I didn't do their job. Fun, the guy only has 7 hours to do like 4 hours of work. 3 days later, still hasn't been fixed. Not my problem. This guy can't be pleased, he gets mad if I touch "his equipment" and fix it and he gets mad if I don't fix it. fun...
story :2 - IBM fault
We all have that one person, you know the one that shouldn't be trusted with anything more complicated than a toaster and even that is questionable. I got called due a piece of machinery that kept locking up. I show up to find the operator facetiming someone and not looking at the computer saying they had a jam. they just kept pressing start over and over hoping it would go away. after removing everything that got shoved into the OCR camera and putting back on the belting that came off, it worked, who knew...
story :3 - The marriage between a KVM and a keyboard
My work in their infinite wisdom when we upgraded from windows xp to windows 10 went from mechanical keyboards to membrane ones. In an industrial setting the keys start to rip off over time and a fellow tech wanted to replace a broken keyboard on a machine. They tried a new one, same model, no dice, they plugged directly into the computers, and it worked, but not with the KVM. They tried a new KVM and it still didn't work. At this point they called me.
First, I made sure I could reproduce the issue, after testing multiple keyboards with multiple computers and that they were working but not with multiple KVMs. I test known good keyboards from other computers with multiple KVMs and they all worked. I tested almost 30 keyboards all with the same model number as the ones already in use. Still unsure on how to verify if this was the issue and maybe someone can tell me but from my research, all the keyboards that weren't compatible with the KVMs were manufactured on the same day. USB keyboards have a couple different communication standards and not all standards are compatible with KVMs. I believe some manufacturing change happened so even though they were the same model they were made no longer compatible with the KVMs. I found only one new keyboard not made on that day and it worked.