Draggar to the IT rescue at the gym!

[draggar]

My wife and I headed to the 24 hour fitness to "officially" sign up (we got two year vouchers, any gym for $300 each). When it came time for the cards, they were having issues with the printers but should have the problems worked out in a few minutes. Neither my wife nor I are SCs so we said we'll do our workout and come back.

We do our workout and I'm waiting for my wife to finish her shower - they still can't print the badges. I jokingly told the sales manager that they should call their IT guy. Well, they did - he was out there today and "couldn't figure it out".

Really?

"So no one can print?"

"Right"

"To any of the three printers you have?"

"Yep"

"Are the printers directly on the network or though a print server?"

"I think directly on the network".

"So, the chances of all 3 printers or all the computers failing at the same time is slim to none. Next time your IT guy is here, have him check the router or switch to make sure it is accepting the print jobs correctly. It's a very small chance, but still one."

Then, a light goes off in my head.

"How about this - unplug one of them for about 2 minutes then plug it back in".

"What will that do?"

"It will clear out the print queue in the printer. If someone sent a bad print job to the printer nothing else will go though - like an accident on the road".

"But it is all the printers"

"Well, if you tried to print something and it didn't work, wouldn't you try a different printer? Whoever sent the bad print job probably did that, too".

"Let me go try that then (with a smile on his face). If this works, we'll have to put you on the payroll" (jokingly).

He goes and unplugs the printer and goes to help some other people. A couple of minutes later, he plugs it back in and leaves as it is warning up. Unfortunately, he didn't come back before we left but - there was a large stack of papers on the printer that wasn't there before.

When I go back tomorrow to pick up my pass I should ask if it helped.

[Andara Bledin]

Hah, nicely done.

My work gets evil .pdf files that won't print all the time. I officially hate all .pdf files because I've had more trouble with them than every other file type put together, including viruses.

I think there's only three people in the building that know how to check the print queue to clear the failures, and one of those knows because they saw me do it enough times.

^-.-^

[Difdi]

Gotta love good IT samaritans...

I once helped the librarian at my local public library fix a balky modem, simply by listening to it dial and try to connect (back in the days when 9600 bps was considered to be fast). I scribbled down a new initialization string for them, and the problem was fixed.

I kinda miss the days when you could hear what a modem was saying to another modem by listening to the telemetry...

[draggar]

I kinda miss the days when you could hear what a modem was saying to another modem by listening to the telemetry...

And you could tell what speed the other modem was on just by listening..

[mattm04]

I did that at work once. We lost power for a spit second, just long enough to cause the register to "flicker" but not shut off. The servers at each store are on a UPS and the Generator the registers are not. Some are on the generator so we can at lest check out some people during a power failure.

None of the registers could see the server. The genius Corp. help desk guy said to keep hitting a certain button combo until it worked. If it didn't work they would have to send someone out to fix it, which would take several hours. And A LOT of lost sales and SC's. The MOD confirmed the server was online. I suggested tat we just restart the POS PC's. It worked. They rebooted, connected and worked fine, except for the fact that the transactions in progress were lost.

For that i got a gift card.

[Mikkel]

And you could tell what speed the other modem was on just by listening..

You actually could, there was different sound sequences for different speeds and with practice you could hear where the initialisation went wrong. I can still remember the crashing snarl which meant a 14.4 modem in the other end.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Totally OT but I was watching You've Got Mail the other night and they have the sound of modems dialing during the opening of the movie...I said to my roommate, "I wonder if kids watch this movie now and say 'What's that noise?'"

[bean]

I did that at work once. We lost power for a spit second, just long enough to cause the register to "flicker" but not shut off. The servers at each store are on a UPS and the Generator the registers are not. Some are on the generator so we can at lest check out some people during a power failure.

None of the registers could see the server. The genius Corp. help desk guy said to keep hitting a certain button combo until it worked. If it didn't work they would have to send someone out to fix it, which would take several hours. And A LOT of lost sales and SC's. The MOD confirmed the server was online. I suggested tat we just restart the POS PC's. It worked. They rebooted, connected and worked fine, except for the fact that the transactions in progress were lost.

For that i got a gift card.

What kind of idiot decided not to put the registers on a UPS? I don't know about your registers, but ours take about 7-8 minutes from the time they're turned on until a cashier can sign in. Granted, they do run Windows XP.

Oddly enough, my store is the other way around - we have UPS's on every register, but they're not on the generator. The only things on the generator are a handful of lights, all of our scales in every department, and the outlets in the cash office, so we can still count cashiers down, the calculators and PC are on those outlets (... but the lights in the cash office aren't on the generator). Oh yeah, our electric doors are on the generator too.

I had to reboot my register today - the printer kept doing weird things... spitting out half of a receipt, printing on only one side of the paper (our printers print on both sides, really neat and saves a lot of paper), shifting all the text to one half of the receipt, and finally ending in "PRINTER ERROR" on my screen that we could not get rid of. This is after we tried power cycling the printer. I unplugged the printer 3 times before I could get the error to go away, it spat out a receipt that was covered in "Z's" (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ etc), and I was finally able to get into the supervisor menu to reboot it. (I'm not a supe, but most of the supes trust me enough to just toss me their keys when I ask for an override).

[Lachrymose]

it spat out a receipt that was covered in "Z's" (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ etc)

Awww..poor thing was just tired.

[SilverOrb]

Modems make noise?

*ducks down to avoid all the things being thrown at her head*

[JoitheArtist]

Heh. Our family dentist is also a friend of my dad's. Cool dentist too: he not only makes sure that patients are totally numb (my mom and I take a LOT of novocaine) before drilling, but instead of happy teeth posters, he has the Abbey Road cover and a Jimi Hendrix poster. Like I said, cool dentist.

Anyway, one time my dad was having a crown put on. The dentist was just getting ready to put it in place...when his forceps slipped, and the crown went down the drain!! He and my dad just looked at each other, then my dad said, "I have my toolkit in the back of my pickup. Wait here." He got up out of the chair, went to the truck, came back to the toolkit, took apart the sink, and fished the crown out of the pipe. The dentist sterilized it, and in it went!