Reminds me of the time many years ago when I started in IT and was doing email support. We did chuckle when an email saying "Help!! I can't send emails!".
The worst bit comes when idiot lusers on Windows decide to take security matters into their own hands, and install an aftermarket firewall. This then gives them logs of what the system is doing, and since none of these fools ever reads the manual they never know what a log entry means.
So, when I was working for a Time-group subsidiary (which is still trading, amazingly enough) and got a third-line call in about a suspected hack job that had been traced back to our servers, I was suitably suspicious.
What the user had seen was a machine called fred.dns.isp.invalid (not the real name) connecting on port 53 to his machine, which he took for a hack attempt and ordered his firewall to block.
However the hacker must, he said, have done something terrible since now the internet was very, v e r y slow, as slow in fact as a PC where the primary DNS had been blocked and which was timing out and failing over onto the secondary DNS.
Apparently hysterical laughter is not a professional response to a user's problem, though at least I didn't laugh at him over the phone...
2 comments:
"Help!! I can't send emails!"
Reply:
Can you receive emails?
Yes, I've spent too long doing IT support...
The worst bit comes when idiot lusers on Windows decide to take security matters into their own hands, and install an aftermarket firewall. This then gives them logs of what the system is doing, and since none of these fools ever reads the manual they never know what a log entry means.
So, when I was working for a Time-group subsidiary (which is still trading, amazingly enough) and got a third-line call in about a suspected hack job that had been traced back to our servers, I was suitably suspicious.
What the user had seen was a machine called fred.dns.isp.invalid (not the real name) connecting on port 53 to his machine, which he took for a hack attempt and ordered his firewall to block.
However the hacker must, he said, have done something terrible since now the internet was very, v e r y slow, as slow in fact as a PC where the primary DNS had been blocked and which was timing out and failing over onto the secondary DNS.
Apparently hysterical laughter is not a professional response to a user's problem, though at least I didn't laugh at him over the phone...
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