I'm corn-fused

[friendofjimmyk]

Okay, I'm not sure where this belongs...maybe in the oops section...but it's all technical stuff.

Our computers went down and the radio was on the fritz today. Weeee! No biggie, provided we don't get really busy.

Well, when I call the help desks for each issue - one - inner company -handles the computers, another company - outer - handles the radio.

They each ask questions that stump me. I know enough about computers to get the job done, but if something goes silly - anything beyond basic trouble shooting is out of my league.

The computer techs were asking questions that may have well been in another language. I felt so dumb when all I could do was say, "huh?" He asked for my serial number and I gave him some super long number I found on the computer and I wasn't even half way through when he said, "Whoa, I don't think that's it." But he did take the whole number...he was probably thinking, "This chic is an idiot!"

The radio people were the same...all this talk about channels and partitions and radio talk...I felt so silly.

I joked about my complete incompetence with them and I hope that they really found it as funny as it sounded and it was not just sympathy laughter when they really wanted to

There is one complaint that I have about the computer issues - we operate this system called the COM Manager. I do believe that we are the only ones in this call center that operate the COM Manager between two citites. (There are eight states in our "footprint") What it is - our dispatch program receives a call - then the COM Manager sends the information electronically to the trucks....well, that is down right now...NO ONE at the help desk knows what this system is...why?

Because it's operated by one computer that sits at our corporate headquarters. (WHY IT IS NOT HERE BEHIND US IS BEYOND MY ENTIRE DEPARTMENT) Anyway, when this system goes down - I KID YOU NOT - 98% of the time - the issue is that it needs to be reset. Meaning, someone has to walk over to the computer at headquarters and hit a button and reset it! THAT'S IT! Well, of course, the most often that this system goes down is - WHEN NO ONE IS AT CORPORATE - they are not there 24 hours! Again, why that system is NOT at the 24 hour call center is beyond us.

[Der Cute]

So your main used application is on a server in a different area?

Have you suggested to the Gods @ Corporate to put in a REMOTE ADMINISTRATION application onto server?
That will let someone in London fiddle w/ a machine in New Jersey.

Tell the Corporate Lackeys to put RA onto the server. Then have a 24/7 oncall human (IT of course) to be available if the COM app goes down.

Then call the 24/7 number, wake up IT person. They go to their desk @ home and remotely connect to the COM thingy and reboot it from afar.

They can then crawl back into bed and you get your COM running.

Cutegeeknoob

[friendofjimmyk]

Have you suggested to the Gods @ Corporate to put in a REMOTE ADMINISTRATION application onto server?
That will let someone in London fiddle w/ a machine in New Jersey.

Believe it or not, we have the remote thing available...the problem is...finding the one Tech person at the help desk that knows what COM Manager is. Most of them confuse it with another program.

That COM went down twice today. The first time, the guy on line had no idea what was going on...the next time, it was fixed in milliseconds.

Another funny tech thing that happened today...they were rebooting one system and failed to tell everyone that the program would probably run slow and some users may experience outages. Well, mine ran slow - until I logged off and logged back in - VIOLA! problem solved. I informed other people to do that and they were just FREAKIN' OUT in a crisis mentality and I just had to laugh as I sat there with a working system.