Monthly Archives: February 2007

New Tech Rant

One of these days, I’ll dig up that post about tech support. For now, here’s a new tech rant.

The other day, we started getting a number of calls from Stevenson. Users were online but couldn’t browse. Things had been working earlier in the day. Sometimes they could get email, but the web just wouldn’t work. About the third call, I walked around and asked if everyone was seeing the same thing. All three of us were. All our Tier 2 was out and the supervisor was at lunch. So I sent an email to netadmin, told him we were all seeing this issue and that I could send details if he’d like. Also told him we did not have any Tier 2 folks to look at this, since our supervisor told us we have to say this when we send emails directly to netadmin.

So what was the response? A request for more details? No, we got an email telling us how to troubleshoot dns issues by trying to ping the dns servers and basically telling me that this was a browser issue. Oh, and that he was sorry we didn’t have any Tier 2 folks around but things were tough for him because he was the only one in netadmin that day.

So we kept getting calls. I talked with the other tech and he had about three trouble tickets out on the same issue. Finally our supervisor was back and I told him that I didn’t care what they thought, we still had an issue in Stevenson. He must have had a few calls on it too, because about 20 minutes later we had another email from netadmin. This one said there was a problem in Stevenson, high packet loss on the T-1s and a tech was being dispatched. When we got word that the issue was resolved, I called back everyone with the problem. Miraculously, it had been fixed for all of them.

It took longer to type out that worthless email than it would have taken to check the stats on that part of the network. At the very least, he might have checked to see if we’d already done the things he wanted done. He might have read the email that said all THREE of us were seeing the same problem. Instead, we had to sit around and take more calls until someone finally convinced them to look into the issue. This is dumb netadmin behavior. If you ever get in a position to be a netadmin, work smarter than this. It will save you a lot of time.