Tales of the night shift

"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost) 12/07/2018 at 02:00 • Filed to: None

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I work in Information Technology, supervising the overnight shift. We handle anything and everything that may come along from 7pm to 7am for company employees and customers. Not telling the company though.

We get a lot of weird stuff through the night, mostly from people who really should be more awake when they call. Here are a few of their stories, from this week:

Tonight’s “tales from the after-hours IT desk””

1. User calls in at 2:30am, “I sent a message directly to terminal ### but I haven’t gotten a response from them! It must be your fault!” - After checking terminal logins we found that they send their message to a terminal that no-one was logged in to, so of course they didn’t respond.

2. User calls in at 8:30pm, “I’m locked out and desperately need to send this report tonight! Oh, and my VPN hasn’t worked in 8 months...” - User is a moron. We got him in enough to send his report and sent a ticket to his regional support tech to go find him and educate him.

3. User emails in at 8:15pm, “I urgently need extra network permissions to do my job today!” - check the records, and he didn’t even start this quest until 4:50 this afternoon and then by email. Urgent issues are only processed via phone call. Try again tomorrow.

NKato > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 02:41

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Just so you know, as a deaf guy, I frown on the over reliance of phone calls for urgent things. This kind of mindset, even for routine business, has lost me as a customer more times than I can count. 

Wagon Guy drives a Boostang > NKato 12/07/2018 at 02:50

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I can understand that. Fortunately in my business that’s not an issue. the folks who would ask us for “urgent” things have clear hearing as a job requirement.

After years of doing this I actually hate phone calls as any means of doing business and prefer dealing with things in email, for the paper trail if nothing else. Of course I would never rely on email if something were truly urgent, no matter what the circumstances were.

Kiltedpadre > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 02:56

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I don’t miss my job where the water treatment plant where I worked was the after hours emergency contact number for the water department.

Some of the highlights that I remember.

1) Man calls complaining there’s a leak in a line under his house. Ask if the leak is before or after his water meter. He doesn’t know (important because if after he just needs to call a plumber). Find out he lives in a trailer park which means the meters at the office and we don’t work on anything past that. After I hang up he calls back three times to have someone sent out “because he can’t get ahold of the trailer park maintenance guy and that means we gotta fix it.”

2) Another guy calls without water. I start getting his information to send someone to check because he’s not on the shut-off list. Something he says sounds fishy because he lives on a dirt road and I didn’t know of any services on dirt roads. Finally he asks about the light in his basement that started flashing when his water pressure dropped. Turns out he had recently bought a house with a cistern. He thought the cistern was some sort of holding tank and that the county would know it was low and we would pump water to him  to fill it. Nope, you have to hire a water hauler to fill it. Hope you don’t like long showers because they aren’t cheap.

3) Lady calls from a neighboring county because she thinks there’s something wrong with her water. Her water supplier came and checked and told her it was fine. I understand her concern though because this wasn’t long after Flint hit the news. I find her the contact information for an independent testing lab and let her know if she says it’s from a residential well they test at a cheaper rate.

facw > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 03:11

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I really hate when places treat electronic communications as non-urgent (unless there’s a specific reason they would be). If you can respond promptly to a phone call, you can respond promptly to an email.

Of course my company usually can’t respond promptly to either. For non-trivial items i t’s usually either file a ticket in our system and wait two weeks for a level 1 to look at it, elevate it and then wait another week for someone else to get around for it, or call in, talk to a level 1, get them to elevate it and then wait a week for someone to take a look at it. So calling is faster (especially for trivial things), but either way stuff is slow. The only real way to get things done is to go grab someone, which is both highly discouraged, and difficult to do when I’m remote.

Wagon Guy drives a Boostang > facw 12/07/2018 at 03:33

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I have a pet peeve about tickets in the system not getting responded to. If they belong to my group we’re going to take care of it now. If someone else should be fixing it, then I’m making sure they get the ticket. Their response to that depends entirely on their management.

While organizations CAN put equal emphasis on email vs. phone call, most won’t do it. I’m technically on level 2, but since there are no level 1 techs on site after 5pm, it all comes to us. Our level 1 desk can be a black hole if you try to email them or assign a ticket to them directly, so the answer is “always call”.

Mostly my job is supposed to be network monitoring, not PC Support. I’m working a router issue across town and have two others down on the other side of the state waiting for a site engineer.

CB > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 03:44

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As someone who calls IT for help in the middle of the night, thank you for your service.

pip bip - choose Corrour > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 04:44

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At least you speak English

The few times I have to call IT I end up with Indians in a call centre that are very hard to understand 

Wagon Guy drives a Boostang > pip bip - choose Corrour 12/07/2018 at 05:00

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Oh absolutely. I’ve lost a couple of jobs to overseas contracts like those. Hate them. We support people here in Texas, so we live here too.

f86sabre > Wagon Guy drives a Boostang 12/07/2018 at 05:05

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I spent 10 years working rotating shifts for the 24/7/365 engineering team at a major airline. Every 3/9 weeks I spent on mids. I saw some stuff. Beyond the normal dents, lightning strikes, cracks, worn out and missing stuff we had some of the following questions:

- can an MD-11 floor panel take the weight of a sumo wrestler.

- how do you  clean up embalming fluid? Learned the fun fact here that bodies should always be placed on the plane head forward so when the plane rotates for takeoff the embalming fluid doesn’t come out the head.

- how do you clean up fish juices

- call from Moscow. “This angle is broken” “what kind of metal do you have to fix it?” “Steel””what kind of steel””good, Russian steel!”

- can I remove X and still fly? With X being every kind of important, non removable unit you can think of