Arghggh, bad week :(

Its been one of those weeks at TCP Towers. Again[1]. Whilst the beginning of this week was quite nice (for starters I'd got over the demon flu) today has more than made up for that. I'll have to learn that if Mondays are nice[2] I can expect some really nasty days later on in the week.

Today was a nasty day. John is also having a nasty day, however his one is being cause by the magic smoke in his machine deciding to take some exercise. He power cycled his machine this morning[3] and the magic smoke decided to run around in its cage a little bit. In one of those treadmill things.... The machine was very successfully not booting up into Dos (this could be considered a good thing). However, it was having great fun checking its memory, rebooting, checking its memory, rebooting, check.... you get the idea. He has since spent most of today cursing at the hardware[4] and dealing with things like processing credit cards. The "new" hardware from our sister company, which I think they dragged up from the depths of a celler somewhere, is also being tempremental. So John is having a really fun time. I think that he's replaced almost everything other than the case itself, the PSU and the memory. The last time I saw him, he was attempting to garrot himself with an anti-static strap.....

The problem is, this means that John couldn't deal with technical support at all. Now, there is always Phil... except that he was writing a presentation in 3 hours flat. Naturally we had machine crashes and the worst printer jam we've ever had thanks to this deadline.

So this left me. With the phone. Alone, I had to face to the lusers. Whilst attempting to coherently document some code I wrote recently.

The first half of today wasn't that bad (I even got a fair amount of the documentation done :) - just the usual requests for information and such like. This meant that I had a chance to practise my dumb blonde welcoming voice :)

The problems started with the second half of the day. There were quite a few dumb lusers today, as well as a luser who knows just enough to be dangerous.

The first one was someone who I had to read our documentation on Win95 to. Several times. This luser had managed to install about 3 different network protocols. And their dial-up adapters. Naturally, the bindings were all over the place making it a very confused machine. I mean, attempting to run IPX/SPX to a PPP stack. After I had got him to clear all that up, it was then the half hour required to talk him through the rest of the documentation. Naturally, 5 minutes after I put the phone down, he was back again :(

The second luser was someone who has been with us a long time. Whilst he does sortof know what he is doing, he has great potential for some really nasty problems. And he also refuses to admit that the problems are with his end. For starters he is attempting to make use of NTMail. To his credit, he got it working fine, until one week ago when things started to break. Naturally, "he hadn't changed anything at all"[5]. Since the problems he was having were such that we'd really have known about it (multiple copies of EMail being sent out) and that we've not changed anything, the problem was at his end. He started blabbering about not being able to send a message to <some-site> and said that our mail server was sending him an error message that it couldn't resolve the hostname. Which was strange, as sitting on the mail server I could resolve <some-site> with no problem; and other customers had mailed users at <some-site> with no problem.

Could I convince this luser that the problem was at his end ? Nope, of course not. I asked him to send me a copy of this error message to give me a little bit of a rest. This luser tends to repeat himself a lot... and you need to repeat yourself lots of times. Makes the phone calls with him a little exhausting.

The rest from the luser with half a clue was interrupted by another phone call. This one showed a level of clueslessness that I've never seen before. The problem was that the computer wasn't dialing out. The dialogue was something like the following:

Me:	TCPHowCanIHelpYou ?
Luser:	I've got a problem connecting
Me:	Okay, what is happening ?
Luser:	It says "Dialing....." a couple of times and then stops
Me:	Hmmmm, can you hear the modem dialing out ?
Luser:	er, what is a modem ?
Me:	It connects the computer to the phone line
Luser:	I don't know
Me:	How is the computer connected to the phone line ?
Luser:	I'm not sure. Why is my computer connected to the phone line anyway ?
Me:	<my mind is making loops right now> To connect to the Internet, your computer has to be able to talk to ours. It does by using your phone line.
Luser:	Okay, so where does the modem fit in ?
Me:	It gives your computer the ability to talk to our computers via a phone line.
Luser:	Okay. Does this mean that I'll be making a phone call every time I go onto the Internet ?
Me:	<silently swearing> Yes.
Luser:	Fine. Sorry, but I'm not that good at this sort of thing
Me:	<thinks: you don't say> No problem. Now, can you look and see if you have a phone line going into your computer or a box next to it.
Luser:	<sounds of movement> Oh, I see a phone line going into a small white box
Me:	<yes, success> Okay, that is your modem. Does it make any sounds when Trumpet says that its dialing ?
Luser:	erm, I think it does.
Me:	What phone number are you using ?
Luser:	Phone number ?
Me:	<uh oh, batten down the hatches> Yes, you have to dial a phone number to connect to the Internet.
Luser:	Oh.
Me:	What did you put in the box which asked for "POP Telephone number" ?
Luser:	I think I put "mail.tcp.co.uk"
Me:	Ah, that sounds a little incorrect. It was asking for a telephone number.
Luser:	Was it ?
Me:	Yes, a "POP telephone number" is a telephone number.
Luser:	Oh. Well, the welcome letter didn't mention one.
Me:	<yes it does, you're just not reading the letter> The number is xxxx-xxxxxx[6]

[sigh] this call went on. And on. And on.... it took me 5 minutes to tell this luser how to open up notepad.

After the above call, I was in such a great mood for them the luser with half a clue phoned back. I'd looked at the error message that "our system had sent to him". It had been sent from his NTMail system... it wasn't anything to do with us at all. However, due to his mail setup, this bit of EMail which should have stayed internal to his machine was being sent to us and then back down to him again. Thankfully, the loop stopped there (unlike the last time he had problems with mail). However, it took me the best part of half an hour to persaude him that it was his system generating the error message and not ours. In the end, I told him that the error message was nothing like the error message that our systems return as it didn't contain the help message I wrote that all error messages contain.

I'm now thinking about what Friday can bring [sigh]

[1]	I know, it always seems "to be one of those weeks" at TCP Towers. However, some weeks are worse than others. Some are fun, some bearable and quite a few are okay if I can get to hit a few things. If anything, it shows what working for a small ISP is like... stress, stress, dumb lusers and more stress.
[2]	Monday was nice because a) I wasn't suffering from the demon flu, b) I got lots of work done and c) I got to take the warm up at the karate session I went to in the evening. That was lots of fun :)
[3]	First time in 2 weeks, Windows was starting to suffer from being left on for that amount of time.
[4]	He didn't threaten it with a hammer, which is where he could have been going wrong.
[5]	"I've not changed anything at all". One of those great lies, along with "The cheque is in the post" and "It'll work in the next release".
[6]	xxxx-xxxxxx is about right considering what our customers actually use the Internet for. We've recently had one or two customers attempting to persaude us that Warez[7] isn't a bad thing really. Yeah, right.
[7]	Here is one idea I've had recently to combat Warez... enhance the BOFH-bot so that it cancels all posts which contain encoded files :)

Posted on 21st Mar 1996