My Favorite Virus

Something most people may not know about IT is that we eventually begin to root for certain viruses. There's the big names, like Cryptolocker, Mindspark, and Conduit, but then there's my favorite one of all, that not many people know. It's called not-a-virus. Wanna know why not-a-virus is my favorite virus? Not just because of its humorous name, as if somehow you won't know it's a virus, but also because it has the guts to pretend it isn't. It's such a cute little virus. It just hops onto people's computers, doesn't do much, and just acts as a nuisance. I mean, sure, you never really want any viruses on your computer, but this one I sometimes think about just copying onto a flash drive, throwing it onto an old computer, and watching what it does with itself. I know, odd, but you know what, sometimes you want to root for the bad guy in the superhero movies.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

My favorite stories come from phone calls, partly because I don't have any preconceived notions about the person while talking to them because I can't see them, partly because that's where the best stories all come from, and partly because I rarely have to take calls. Here's a fun quick call, kinda similar to this.

Call comes in, I answer, "Thanks for calling. How may I help you?"

"My computer has frozen up and I don't know what to do."

"Have you tried turning off and back on again?"

"Yes."

"Okay, can you describe to me what's going on?"

"Well, it's stuck on my sudoku page that I was playing."

"Alright, can you locate the power button on your computer for me?"

"Okay."

"Alright, push it and hold it for about 10-15 seconds." Wait a bit. "Did the screen go black?"

"Yes it did."

"Alright, go ahead and wait a few seconds, then press the power button again."

"Alright."

"Is your computer coming back on again?"

"Yes!"

"Then you're all good to go."

Yup, that easy. Yes, she lied to me, but one of the rules of IT: Users always lie.

How to setup a printer

The call started with an older lady calling our store and asking for the General Manager. That's never a good start. Apparently she had bought a printer earlier that day and was having trouble getting it setup. Alright, that's fine, well, we'll get it figured out. She should have been sent to our remote support line, because they can remote in and take care of what's needed on the computer while she takes care of the printer. Apparently she had tried that, and had told her it would be $50 to handle it, and that nothing could be done over the phone.

At this point I figured there was a miscommunication between her and the remote support, but our GM figured he could hand off the phone to my direct manager. My manager can't help, because she knows nothing about printers. Guess who was the closest person who knew how to solve this? Yup, me. So I'm handed the phone. Now, I didn't know everything I'd mentioned earlier, so I tried to connect her with our remote support, and this is where I found all of that out, so I tell her I'll help her and we'll get the printer set up. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

It started out pretty well, I got her onto HP's website, got her to download the software for the drivers, and was getting her through the installation. That's when it stopped being easy and everything turned south.

Part of the setup process for the majority of HP home printers is to connect the printer to the computer with the help of the setup software. So I start leading her though getting the printer connected. I tell her to follow the directions on the screen of her computer, and it will help with getting them communicating properly.

Well she hadn't even turned on the printer. That's fine. Turn it on, and we'll go on from there. Well the printer itself has its own initial setup process, which can take quite a while. Now, mind you, as easy as it was to lead her through downloading the proper software for her printer on her computer, that still took about 20-25 minutes. Leading her through the setup process felt like an eternity.

Once she started going through the setup process, it starts telling her to make sure the ink is snapped shut. So I tell her to open the lid and make sure the ink is in there nice and tight. Based off my knowledge of various HP printers, I knew there were a few configurations that their ink is in, so I tried to get her to describe how it all looked, because I didn't know that particular model off-hand. Mind you, I'm flying blind. I have no idea, so I have to hope she describes it well enough for me to understand so I can continue to help her. I tell her to make sure the ink pressed in correctly, and the way she's describing everything, it sounds like the setup of a certain line of products, so I try to help her based off what I think I'm hearing. She tells me that the one ink cartridge went in fine, but the other just isn't going in. I think that's strange, so I tell her to try taking the other cartridge out to put it back in to make sure she's doing it the same way. She tries to take out the cartridge, but she says she's having trouble taking that one out. Strange. So I tell her to hold for a moment.

I run over to the section of our store with the printers and grab the shelf display for that model and bring it back to the phone I'm talking on (it's unfortunately corded). I open up the printer, look at the ink and think that maybe she's just having trouble slotting it in correctly. I get back on the phone and ask her if the ink is sliding in correctly. She says it's just not going down, and ask her if the lever on top is all the way up. She says it is, and then starts describing the ink well. At this point we've spent about 15 minutes trying to get her ink in there correctly. As she's describing how the ink well looks, something she says finally clicks. She says the back looks light with some gold beads. It hits me like a ton of bricks that she describing the connectors on the back of the well that tell the printer that ink is in and checks levels. The ink well is empty and she has no ink in it.

I ask her if the ink is still in the box, and she gets excited, because she thinks she remembers seeing something else in the box. I hear her set the phone down, rustle around in the box, and grab plastic packaging. She comes back to the phone, then tells me she needs to get scissors to open it up. She gets the ink out of the wrapping and gets them into the printer. All right, I think, we're on track, we should be done soon. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Once her ink is in, I tell her to close the lid and the printer should finish the rest of the setup. "The listed ink cartridges are missing." DANGIT!!! Well I tell her to open it up again and make sure the inks were in there nice and snug. She checks, and she says they are. She closes the lid. "The listed ink cartridges are missing." Well, alright. Let's turn it off and back on again. Let's see what happens. "Cartridge Jam." Wut? Okay, open the lid, check the inks, close the lid. The printer is running its checks. "Success!" What!? YES! Okay. Now let's connect to the network.

I tell her to follow the directions the computer gives to connect to the network. This seems like it should be fine, but we run into a snag. She doesn't know her wifi password. So I try to figure out how to get her password. I ask her if her desktop is wired or wireless. "Wired." Nuts. Okay, well, maybe I can lead her to finding her router. Maybe it has the password. Well, that was almost impossible. Thankfully, she thought about using her cellphone to call the guy that setup her wireless network. She doesn't get a hold of him right away, but says hopefully he'll get back to her soon. Great. We're stuck without that password. I go back to trying to lead her to finding her router, until she gets distracted by a phone call. It's the guy! I here, in her responses, that he's telling her how to find the password. Yes!

She puts in the password. It connects! She runs the alignment pages on the printer. On the computer, I tell her to continue doing the setup with process. The printer list comes up. She selects it. The computer says it's connected! She prints a test page, and it goes through! She thanks me for all the help and I hang up.

All in all, leading her through a process that normally takes me maybe 20 minutes on my own, took over an hour and a half from handing me the phone to hanging up. Gotta say, that's the longest support call I've ever had to take, and I normally don't have to take any support calls. Not gonna lie though, I hope I don't have to do another one again.

Google is your friend

I know most of my stories and posts will be about people who don't know much about that device they call the computer, but this one is a bit different. This one is about my own mom.

My mom was never one you would call tech savvy when I was growing up. She knew how to use what she had, and had no real need to learn more. Now my mom is by no means an unintelligent person, so it's not that she didn't learn more because she couldn't, she just didn't need or want to. That is until recently.

Until a few years ago, if my mom had issues with her computer, she went to my dad, and if he couldn't fix it, well.. I don't actually know what they did. I've never been told. I like to believe that my dad had all the answers back then. But as I got older and started learning more about computers than what my dad knew, my mom started coming to me. I would help her with what I knew, but most of the time I just googled the answer (now class, pay attention, because this is what's called foreshadowing). And I knew how to google the answer to almost any problem.

A couple years after high school, I finally moved out of my parents place and moved into town, partially because I wanted to finally live on my own, but mostly because I wanted good internet, and my parents had no options where they lived. Once I moved out, my parents didn't get to see me much. My mom started to miss me, so she'd call me up asking me for help with things, and I'd do what I did before, and simply google the answer and fix the problem quick and be on my way.

Now, my relationship with my parents back then wasn't the greatest, so when my mom's issues started to become repetitive, I started to get irritated with helping her. I stopped wanting to help, and so I'd make up excuses about why I couldn't come fix her problems. Finally, because she wanted to see me again, she started to bribe me with home-cooked meals, something I didn't do enough for myself, and still don't for that matter. So she'd call me up with an issue, I'd come fix it and stick around for food, because mom is one of the best cooks on the planet, and we all know that.

As I became more mature over time, and my relationship began improving with my parents, I tried to find time to spend with my parents, regardless of helping them with anything. But I wanted to make that clear to my mom what I was doing. So I took on the task of teaching her how to google.

Now, I'm sharing the tech industry's number one secret, and may be outcast by my peers for this, but knowing how to google is every computer techs number one tool. You could literally have never seen a Windows operating system in your life, but if you know how to google, you can do almost anything. In fact, I'd say 90% of the time when you talk to a tech over the phone, they're just googling the answer if they're not on a script. And I taught my mom this secret.

It started with something easy. I taught my mom how to use Google Now on her phone. I very vividly remember the very first thing she googled, because it was probably one of the funniest things that has ever happened in our family, but given the nature of it, I'd rather not share this particular part of the story over the internet, but will be glad to tell you should you ever ask me in person. Her first few things were asking google how to spell certain words, because though my mom knows everything a person could know about the human body (she's a nurse), spelling was never her strong point. That's fine. She just has to ask google, and it'll read off the proper spelling for her.

From there, it went to minor technical problems. Her laptop was having issues connecting to the internet. She googles it on her phone, and it tells her to try restarting the computer. It happens to work, and she's back to doing work on her computer. She has trouble with saving a word document to her flash drive. She googles it, it gives her the instructions, and she saves the document without any problems.

Then one day, she takes on a task that I wouldn't even be comfortable with unless I was the supporting tech for this piece of hardware. My mom and dad used to own their own medical clinic, my dad being a family physician. They needed a file server to keep all of their patients' records backed up as part of HIPAA guidelines, but one day their file server starts beeping. To give a little background, this particular file server was an older model Dell server, running Windows Server 2003, with RAID. To the non-techies reading this, the server is like a giant file cabinet, keeping copies of all of the files. RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. What that means is there are multiple hard drives all working together, kind of like having multiple file cabinets. In this particular kind of RAID setup, if one of the hard drives goes bad, there are copies on the other hard drives of everything, and when you replace the bad hard drive, the others work together to repair the server, and replace the files on the new hard drive as needed.

My mom had learned to google many an issue, but this was something I would have thought a bit beyond what she'd learned to do so far. But she managed to find the model number of the server, google what the beeping meant, figured out which hard drive needed to be replaced, then found where my dad kept an extra hard drive, pulled out the old one, put in the new one, then sat and waited for the server to repair itself. And she didn't have to do any of that either. My parents have a tech service they pay for, and could have just had the guy come out and fix it. But she fixed it all on her own!

When my dad told me later the story of what happened, I was amazed. I figured my mom would be able to handle her day-to-day issues no problem, but I didn't expect her to progress that far! I started joking with her that if she kept that up, she could do my job. She didn't think that was quite as funny as I did, but she's become quite capable with her google-fu. Here's the moral of my story: It doesn't matter how old you are, you can always learn something new, and the best skill in this technologically advanced age to learn is how to properly use google. If you know how to google, you know how to do almost anything.

What do you know?

I know a lot of my stories focus on old people, but that's because they are the majority of my clients. This story, however, is about a much younger person.

Contrary to popular belief with my typical clientele, I do not know what I know because of my age. I know what I know because I was either taught it, or actively sought out the information. A lot of what I know I was taught by my dad. My age had nothing to do with it, I learned it because I wanted to. But to be told that I know about computers because I grew up around computers I think would be similar to telling a guitarist he's so good because he grew up with a guitar in the home. He's definitely not good because he practiced constantly and worked to perfect his skill. No, it's simply because of the presence of the guitar.

To refute this kind of thinking, one of my favorite stories to share with those who would make these kinds of statements is about a college student I had to help, someone a few years younger than me. Now, I've helped lots of college students, and will help more as time goes on, but this one in particular stands out because of what happened.

This student comes running up to my counter, clearly in a panic. We weren't busy that day, so I was free to help her right away. She seems mortified and ready to break down in tears. I get her to calm down long enough to tell me what's going on. She tells me that her mouse has stopped working, and she can't use the touchpad because it's been broken for a long time (she'd had the computer for a few years by that point) and she didn't know what to do, because she didn't have any money to buy a new mouse right then, and she had a paper due that night, and she couldn't do anything without the mouse.
 

I'll say this, because of my knowledge and skills with computers, and many other tech people reading this will relate, it is entirely possible to do everything on a computer without a mouse, and if you learn what to do, can make certain tasks even faster without one. I wasn't going to teach her the intricacies of using keyboard shortcuts right then, so I figured I'd fix the issue at hand. Why her mouse wasn't working. So I ask her if she has the mouse with her, she pulls it out of the laptop bag, and hands it to me. I notice it's wireless, see there's no dongle plugged into the laptop, and find the dongle in its compartment in the mouse. I take out the dongle, plug it into one of her free USB ports, and... the mouse works! I ask her if the issue is intermittent (read: random), and she tells me no, it didn't work at all. She's overjoyed that I fixed it! But then she asks me the question I always get.

"What did you do?"

I tell her I only plugged in the dongle and moved the mouse to see if it had connected and nothing else. She looks at me confused.

"What did you plug in?"

I show her the wireless dongle for the mouse.

"This is the wireless dongle that tells the computer to connect to the mouse."

She goes wide-eyed and her face turns red. Apparently, she'd never thought to check for that. She tells me her brother had borrowed the mouse right before it stopped working, and he must have returned it to her with the dongle in the compartment, and she'd forgotten it existed because it had been plugged into her computer since she bought the mouse.

So that's one of many stories of young people who don't know something about computers. I see it often, and I always wish those same older folks were around to witness it so they'd see that their age has nothing to do with learning how to use a computer.

Always Ask Questions

Here's another recent one from a few days ago. I'm already getting people in who say they absolutely hate Windows 10. I'll be completely honest, it's no surprise to me. Anytime changes are made to what's familiar, no matter how much better the new thing is, there will be someone who hates it. Enter today's player in our theatre. She's an older lady who has her laptop in a bag. I'm in a particularly busy rush, so when she comes up to the counter while I'm helping two other people and sets her bag down, I'm not inclined to rush to her aid. I finish with the people I'm helping and finally make my way over to her.

She says that she absolutely hates Windows 10 and wants it reverted back to the way it was. This is absolutely possible, as long as you didn't tell the upgrade to wipe your computer, so I open up the recovery window to revert it back to her old operating system. It (thankfully) gives me the option to revert to Windows 7, and since she has our support plan, I start making paperwork for it while starting the process to put it back to 7.

The whole process of reverting it took only about twenty minutes, and once her login screen came up, I had her log in to see how things look and she says to me, "Oh, my husband will be so happy he has solitaire back." My jaw drops. I ask her, "Was that why you didn't like Windows 10?" "Of course, my husband can't play solitaire on it, so it was basically useless." What I could have done before reverting the computer back to 7 was find out why she didn't like 10, then explain to her that solitaire was still there, and create a pin on the taskbar for it. What I didn't do was find out why she didn't like Windows 10 before reverting it, and so just let her leave. I didn't feel like taking the time to explain it.

So this one is partially on me. As part of my job I'm supposed to ask questions to properly understand the issues at hand. However, I let my exhaustion, and the fact that I found her a tad rude, get in the way of me doing my job properly, and so left her without knowing full well what options were available to her. I could have explained to her where Solitaire was, taught her some of the differences between 7 and 10 (of which there aren't many), and possibly gotten her to keep it on 10. Oh well, if she comes back later and wants 10 back on, I'll gladly do it for her.

The Magical Button

I got another quick one today. This one happened really early on in my career in this position. A couple comes up to my counter and tell me their brand new computer is already broken. I open up the laptop to look at what might be going on, press the power button, and turn to see their faces, wide-eyed, mouths open, looking like they'd just seen a ghost.

"How'd you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Turn it on?"

Yup, they hadn't pressed the power button. They apparently had had a desktop before they bought this laptop, and it had been setup for them to power on automatically after returning from a power failure of any kind. So they literally had never turned on their old computer. I wasn't about to change that for them, for fear of ruining the battery in the long run, but I explained to them that they would now have to turn on the computer, and would occasionally have to shut it down.