3. A Backup in the Dark and You Removed What?

A Backup in the Dark

From: Jon

A customer called in to our office and was quite upset. The backup of a workstation to the network was failing and she was sure it was our fault. She told me the workstation was moved to a new location so I made sure it was connected to the network. She told me she could see the mapped drives and use the main network application. She proceeded to tell me that they had changed nothing on this workstation.

I went out to the site and started to look at the situation. I forced the nightly backup to run immediately, and it finished completely with no errors. I learned that a new user was using this machine, which the caller had not told me before. So I brought the new user in and started talking to her.

Me: OK, pretend it is the end of the day and you are going to go home. Show me exactly what you do.

Her: Well, I go to Start, then Shut Down. Then I wait for the computer to turn off and then I turn off the monitor.

I pointed out the obvious to her. The computer has to be ON in order to be backed up.

Ma'am, backups to computers that are shut down never happen.

You Removed What?

From: James Payne

I'm a contractor who handles all sorts of IT services, and for one of my contracts I do help desk and computer maintenance services (among others). Many (if not most) of the people that I work with are the type that only know how to deal with their computers for what is related to their jobs (sometimes not even then). The following story is about one of them.

A call came in recently from a remote office, and the call went something like this:

Me: How can I help you?

Person: My computer won't boot up any more.

Me: When you turn it on, do you hear the fans running, or see any lights on the front?

Person: Yes, when I turned it on last time the fans started, and I saw lights.

Me: Good. There are lights on the back of the computer, near the bottom, that are in a square formation. Tell me what they do when you turn it on.

Person: I can't.

Me: Why not?

Person: I removed the motherboard.

You can probably guess what I was thinking at this point, and you'd be right. The remainder of the call was clean-up work.