Floundering Users

Received my November 16 copy of Computerworld this morning and of course had to turn to the SharkTank page during my first spare moments.

User works in South America, corporate offices are in the USA. User visits head office once or twice a year, and "major" Windows maintenance is performed then, if IT can get their hands on his laptop. Last year, he had Gizmo Project (the VOIP app that Google just bought) installed, but stopped using it and asked IT to remove it.

We installed an new office copier/printer last week. Today User comes to me saying it isn't working right - its cutting off the tops of page.

I ask if it was a print job or copy job and User gets furious - of course its a print job I'm told or they wouldn't have asked me.

A teacher approached me today with "a problem that is driving me mad".
At home and elsewhere in the School, the teacher is able to login to our domain and e-mail.
However, in that teacher's homeroom it was different. Reboot, check connections, etc - the teacher could not login, but only in that classroom.

Over the past week, two support requests arrived from different users with difficulties sending e-mail. Both had attempted a few times to resend the same messages with returning errors from the server.

Since 95% of our e-mail woes are malformed addresses (yes, user error at some point), the first thing to check was to where they were sending.

Okay, I realize this is the era of un-educated individuals, and people unable to use correct grammar and spelling. Part of this is thanks to the world of texting, but a good portion of this is the lack of education. Here is a prime example of what I am speaking of - I was barely able to understand what this fellow was saying.

When the password change utility quit working, I emailed the person to get it going again. She promptly fixed it, and sent a very polite note notifying me. "Sorry for the incontinence."
I laughed, and started a new folder for emails with great examples of typos.

Our company has a help desk, all the users have been given the toll free number to call, along with the e-mail address. I took the liberty of posting their web form on every desktop so they can quickly and easily submit a ticket. I have changed my voicemail to include the e-mail address and phone number for the help desk for IT issues.

One day that the retail chain I used to work IT for: I got a call just made me stare at the the phone. A machine was at a stop error, nothing strange about that is there. Not the normal strange I've generally posted. Turns out the lightning hit the transformer outside, and an employee typing on the keyboard literally got knocked off his feet.

I am sure we have all had similar issues. User calls us or submits a ticket for urgent support... 5 minutes before they leave for the weekend. I had a user do this to me recently about a failed network line. In my office, we need maintenance to assist with testing network lines, but urgent tickets must be resolved to the customer's satisfaction within 24 hours of being submitted.