RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
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Geek on the Hill
I have a SOHO client who adds new meaning to PEBKAC. (This is the same guy I mentioned in another thread who took about half an hour of phone support to plug in his keyboard. And the guy has a Ph.D, mind you.)
So when he called me yesterday and told me that Sage Support (ACT) had told him he had a network problem and that's why ACT couldn't sync, I figured user error: He only has one desktop and one laptop and it's a simple peer-to-peer Windows network, so how much could go wrong? I was going to T/S it over the phone, but it had been a while since I'd been there; so I scheduled him for an onsite today.
Good thing, too.
When I got there, the first thing I noticed was that his background was pink. The second thing I noticed was that Trend Micro wasn't running. So I checked MSCONFIG and found that almost everything in the startup except ACT had been disabled -- on both machines -- by Sage support a few days ago in the course of trying to fix the sync problem.
Most importantly, they'd turned off the Trend antivirus and the automated Internet backup and left them that way, which is pretty irresponsible in my book.
In this case, the problem was a simple one: Gary (the client) had been having trouble with his cable connection, and had been "borrowing" his neighbor's unsecured wireless connection instead of using his own router. Once the cable connection was fixed, he never changed the connection back; so although both machines had Internet, they weren't connected to each other.
When Sage connected remotely, I guess they didn't notice that the two computers had different WAN IP's, which I think would have clued me in that something wasn't kosher.
But that part is excusable. What's not excusable is disabling a client's virus protection and backup, and leaving the machines in that state. And I get this all the time. The worst offenders are the support people from AOL and HP, but I've occasionally encountered it from other vendors' support people.
Once I fixed the problems, I called ACT and yelled at them for a while for leaving my client's machine unprotected. They actually agreed and apologized, to their credit. But I'm really getting tired of phone tech people using remote connections to mess up my clients' systems, just so the crappy software they have to support will work.
I understand the position they're in. I've been there. Management at most of these outfits beats it into Level-1 guys that their job is to get the caller off the phone. But if there's a genuine resource problem or a conflict, let the user know so they can get it corrected. Don't just go turning things off -- especially security and backup programs.
I tell my techs all the time that MSCONFIG is a diagnostic tool, not a corrective one. Once they diagnose the problem, I want them to fix it using the proper tools. If they can't, then I'll come over personally and we'll work on it together. But in the end, when they return MSCONFIG to "Normal Startup," the machine should work properly. I think using MSCONFIG as a permanent fix is amateurish, at best.
At least, that's my opinion. Anyone else have other opinions on this?
So when he called me yesterday and told me that Sage Support (ACT) had told him he had a network problem and that's why ACT couldn't sync, I figured user error: He only has one desktop and one laptop and it's a simple peer-to-peer Windows network, so how much could go wrong? I was going to T/S it over the phone, but it had been a while since I'd been there; so I scheduled him for an onsite today.
Good thing, too.
When I got there, the first thing I noticed was that his background was pink. The second thing I noticed was that Trend Micro wasn't running. So I checked MSCONFIG and found that almost everything in the startup except ACT had been disabled -- on both machines -- by Sage support a few days ago in the course of trying to fix the sync problem.
Most importantly, they'd turned off the Trend antivirus and the automated Internet backup and left them that way, which is pretty irresponsible in my book.
In this case, the problem was a simple one: Gary (the client) had been having trouble with his cable connection, and had been "borrowing" his neighbor's unsecured wireless connection instead of using his own router. Once the cable connection was fixed, he never changed the connection back; so although both machines had Internet, they weren't connected to each other.
When Sage connected remotely, I guess they didn't notice that the two computers had different WAN IP's, which I think would have clued me in that something wasn't kosher.
But that part is excusable. What's not excusable is disabling a client's virus protection and backup, and leaving the machines in that state. And I get this all the time. The worst offenders are the support people from AOL and HP, but I've occasionally encountered it from other vendors' support people.
Once I fixed the problems, I called ACT and yelled at them for a while for leaving my client's machine unprotected. They actually agreed and apologized, to their credit. But I'm really getting tired of phone tech people using remote connections to mess up my clients' systems, just so the crappy software they have to support will work.
I understand the position they're in. I've been there. Management at most of these outfits beats it into Level-1 guys that their job is to get the caller off the phone. But if there's a genuine resource problem or a conflict, let the user know so they can get it corrected. Don't just go turning things off -- especially security and backup programs.
I tell my techs all the time that MSCONFIG is a diagnostic tool, not a corrective one. Once they diagnose the problem, I want them to fix it using the proper tools. If they can't, then I'll come over personally and we'll work on it together. But in the end, when they return MSCONFIG to "Normal Startup," the machine should work properly. I think using MSCONFIG as a permanent fix is amateurish, at best.
At least, that's my opinion. Anyone else have other opinions on this?
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