Saturday, January 23, 2021

Senior Network Engineers Fail To Follow Rule Zero, Company Wastes Thousands Of Dollars


Man, this is one of those outrageous tech support tales that almost seem too full of cluelessness to be real life. We have what seems to actually be a perfectly reasonable CEO who ends up being strung along for an ungodly long amount of time, because multiple senior network engineers are unable to put their heads together to resolve a rudimentary tech issue. The thing about taking video calls is if you want folks to be able to see/hear you, you've got to allow for those functions to run on your phone. You'd think this would be common sense, but hey, some tidbits of common knowledge are lost on folks. At least the matter was resolved. 

1.

Font - r/talesfromtechsupport u/Korochun • 1d + Join 4 1 3 1 Rule Zero Long It's an average post-holiday weekday afternoon at my work, which means that I am mostly hanging out, answering various questions from our first line of contact, clarifying department rules and updating procedures. I am also checking up on various ancient work orders gathering dust in our queue, usually for lack of customer or management response, and indiscriminately nuking the ones that I can close due to lack of custom

2.

Font - Now, my emails normally don't have audio alerts, except for a select group of very high ranked people, who need urgent Tier III level attention to address their pressing problems, such as plugging in a monitor. Among the team, I'm the one on actual emails and calls that afternoon, so I pop it open. Huh, it looks like our CEO is trying to join a conference via specific app, but it's just not working. Oh, and the conference started half an hour ago and they need someone to come up "in the n

3.

Font - As I enter CEO's office one walk up the stairs later, I discover that he's got a whole setup going with a smartphone he is using for this clamped in with actual proper hardware, good lighting, the whole thing. Frankly I am impressed and relieved: this specific conferencing software doesn't play well with our firewall sometimes, but if it goes out over the smartphone wifi that's way easier - they have their own, much laxer rules. "So can you tell me exactly what is wrong?" I ask CEO after

4.

Font - "Okay," I say, "drop the session and start it again with me looking over your shoulder. Let's go step by step." Everything goes perfectly fine, the app joins a meeting, he types out a name and -- why the everliving fuck is he clicking Don't Allow to every prompt that comes up? "Why are you clicking Don't Allow to every prompt that comes up?" I ask the CEO very diplomatically. "Oh, I was told I shouldn't let apps access stuff on my phone." "If you don't let this conferencing app access you

5.

Font - "Oh, is that how it works?" "Yeah. Let me reset your permissions in the settings...here you go. Camera and audio feed. You are live." "Wow, you are great! I think they've been trying to solve my issue for over a year now with this phone app, and you fixed it in two minutes!" "Haha, no problem, you have a good day" I say as another horrible suspicion forms in my head.

6.

Font - Back at my desk, after restarting my Arknights stage (you gotta have priorities), I start digging in the call logging system. Sure enough, here is a work order sent directly to our networking team, bypassing all normal channels (me) from 14 months ago, highest priority, four different techs all going back and forth about how our CEOS phone does not permit video and audio traffic from this conferencing app over our WiFi network. Vendors have been contacted, entire network closets torn apar

7.

Font - All because none of these Senior Network Engineers ever heard of Rule Zero: Don't Trust The Customer. As a Tier III tech, I have the ability to hijack assignments and make sure that everybody involved gets a message when I close the work order. This one was particularly satisfying to close, with a solution description of "Customer was denying permission to access phone resources to the app. No actual network issue is apparent. See Work Order #" So yeah. This is why the first thing I teach

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