The Exam Apocalypse

It's exam time again and all are panicking. Cue complete chaos and the end of the world as we know it... At least until Friday.

This time of the year almost anything can happen and usually does. It's all hands on deck in our department in order to help quell the oncoming turmoil and horrors of the assessments.

And so it begins... The sky darkens, the rivers run red and as expected the phone rings:

"IT Support."

Software User Error

We have a few people that are self taught "experts" in certain software packages. These people have learnt from a book rather than from experience. So when something goes wrong they automatically blame the software and do not consider the age old lesson that books are never the same as real life.

For instance we have a guy here that considers himself a "Pro" in Adobe Flash. Now from what we have seen of his work, he is pretty good. Until something goes wrong...

"Flash isn't working on this Computer. I can't be installed properly." He reports one day. So off I go to take a look. Along the way I meet one of my colleagues coming from the other direction.

"Where you off too?" He asks.

Pulling the Plug

It's that time of year again when our computer rooms have to be completely wiped and reconfigured. We do this by imaging all the computers in bulk, one room at a time from a preconfigured image on our server.

All we have to do is boot each computer in to WinPE, select the image and away they go. They take anywhere from 50 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the image is. Once they are done we name them, add the printer and move on to the next room. Sounds easy...

One particular year we had been having a few problems with the imaging freezing and "bombing" out halfway through. It took us several days to sort the problems out, including many late evenings and early mornings. Needless to say we were running out of time and we still had over 1000 computers to be imaged.

Now our "temporary fix" was to have a portable server in the room we were imaging. This was considerably slower, but it did the job.

Password Resets

Hundreds of times a week, we have the same conversation over and over with users. It usually goes something like this:

User: "I can't get my email."

Me: "OK, are you getting an error?"

User: "Yes."

Me: "What does it say?"

User: "Dunno..."

Me: "Well can you read it out to me?"

User: "The Logon Username or Password is Incorrect."

Printer Install Problem

"I have just installed the software drivers for my new printer" says a woman proudly to me on the phone one day. " It finished the install successfully and asked me to reboot. But now it has an error every time I boot up."

"OK" I say "What is the error?"

"I don't know. I am not a computer whiz. I clicked cancel and it disappeared, the printer wont print." She says.

"Well please can you reboot again and when the error comes up read it out to me." I ask.

"Ummm. Well OK, but you will have to explain how to do that." the woman replied.