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Testing times for helpdesk
An organisation has a limited number of VPN connections, so the IT department sets up a terminal server gateway to let some users remotely access their office PCs from home, reports pilot fish there.
"This allows these users to securely remote into their local machines in the office and keeps the VPN open for other users," fish says.
The rollout is smooth, but one staffer calls the helpdesk to say he is getting an access-denied error when he tries to use the new connection.
The Helpdesk staffer checks the user's permissions, settings, computer name, IP address, everything he can think of. Nothing appears amiss.
Finally, the staffer asks what kind of PC the user is working on at home.
User responds, "I'm not at home, I'm in the office. I just wanted to test this before I get home."
Sighs fish, "He was seeing the error because he was trying to remote to the machine he was currently using!"
Upgrade headaches
"I recently lead our company's migration from Office XP to Office 2007," Pilot fish recalls.
"All was going smoothly for nearly a week until the manager from another department down the hall comes storming into my office slams my door and demands to be returned to the previous version. I'm sympathetic because I understand the learning curve with the new version can be stressful.
"I walk down to her office to see what's up. She explains that since the new version was installed everything she opens is "blank". I ask her to open the document in question so I can see for myself what exactly is going on. She proceeds to open a PDF file that has nothing on any of the 55 pages of the document.
"I then explained that she had put all 55 pages of her document through the scanner upside down."
The lesson that PDFs are opened in Acrobat and not Office will have to wait for another day, fish decides.
It's not a game
It's the 1980s, and pilot fish has written a lease tracking application for his company's finance department. The first day it was put to use, the clerk entered all data, and then crashed the program trying to exit. Instead of pressing F10 (defined on screen as the exit key), she had done some crazy CTRL-ALT sequence which nuked the app. Fish recalls: "When I asked her why that particular key sequence, she replied "That is how you get out of Flight Simulator".
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