My reader isn't working

Posted by GouchGrease@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 23 comments

Just discovered this place so I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring.

I work at a car wash tech company. People call us all day long telling us that something is broken and they need us to fix it. Anything from prices to soap timing to Recharge plans to barcode readers to printers to... it's a nightmare, but overall the job isn't bad. We even get some decent clientele, though very few actually know how to even use a computer. Some of the older sites still use DOS.

I had a guy calling in tell me his XPT (the pay kiosk) is telling him that his Fastpass reader is disabled. I work with this guy for over an hours. Check cables, check power, check 30 different settings in his database, check the Phoenix block connecting the fastpass. Nothing gets this error to go away. The thing is even enabled I the XPT's maintenance mode.

I finally get a video session - this part is my fault, should have done it earlier admittedly - and just so happen to notice there's a big ol blank space where the FP reader usually is.

At this point I have my head in my hands and I ask "Sir, does your site use Fastpass" and he replies with a quick and cheery "Oh! No."

Had to mute and laugh my ass off for a while before telling him to disable it in maintenance mode. At least he was nice, but my customers are on a different level of stupid. Over an hour, and this man didn't think it was important to mention he DOESN'T USE the thing that's having an issue.

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tmofee@reddit

We have something similar. We have these self serve betting machines, when they were first installed they came with a magnetic card reader with the scanner - the idea is that the venues could integrate them with their members cards.

No one did that. Ever.

So eventually they started sending out these scanners without the card reader. No big deal, apart from when the terminal freaks out and loses its settings, and looks for a card reader which doesn’t exist

Rockeye_@reddit

I bet the missing inferential step was the customer thinking but not saying "I don't even use fastpass, so why is it showing me an error message about it? Surely the tech will make the error go away."

djshiva@reddit

There is nothing like working in IT to understand that most people cannot communicate worth a damn.

I get daily calls of "I can't log into my PC" when what's really happening is that they can't log in to their email.

Or my other favorite: "My computer is running really slow" when what they mean is "my internet is slow."

FireLucid@reddit

Used to get "Is the server down?" for just about anything. No, it never was.

Taulath_Jaeger@reddit

Better yet, "Is there a problem with The System?" and it turns out they haven't received any emails that morning(no technical error, just nobody sent them anything), or the printer was taking longer than they liked to print a document

haven't received any emails that morning

You are giving me flashbacks of Outlook going into offline mode.

Oof yeah. We used to have macbooks with 128GB SSDs and they would run out of space constantly. We didn't have monitoring set up on them so usually the first sign was someone saying that their outlook was stuck in offline mode or refusing to open. Was so glad when we finally got upgrades approved

ammit_souleater@reddit

"My $Software does not open" turns out the psu died...

GrimmReapperrr@reddit

I did a course in Software Development years back but due to financial difficulties and responsibilities gave it up and found another job. So I have some knowledge when things dont go wrong. Years ago a new tech in our company had to fix some issue on my Pc. Something I could have figured out but due to company policy/admin rights couldnt. He connected remotely and fumbled around for some time before I just had enough of my time being wasted and told him to check X and Y. Problem solved in a jiffy. Anyways so whenever I have issues with my PC, I will give them the most detail I can think of. My call logs probably has the longest descriptions

oloryn@reddit

Sometimes, this doesn't work, though. If I get to the point that I have to email vendor tech support, I tend to go into detail, also. That's great when it works, but sometimes the tech on the other end ignores all of the detail, just scans the email to determine the nature of the problem, and then shoots off the standard response to that kind of problem (which invariably includes doing things that my detail (if read) reveals have already been checked.

Today I had a "the scanner isn't working" when the scanned items weren't being tagged with metadata correctly after uploading.

shoesafe@reddit

It tells you how people can think differently about tools.

To somebody who deals with lots of different tools, all the details about each tool are important. But to somebody who only uses one tool per task (and/or one task per tool) it's not very important to distinguish the tool from its function.

So if you use the scanner when you need to get metadata, and that's the only way you use the scanner, if it stops getting metadata then from your perspective the scanner isn't working.

ttlanhil@reddit

Or people saying "my internet is slow" when they mean "my internet connection is slow"? 😁

ReadWriteSign@reddit

I'm seeing what feels like an increasing amount of people told to open their internet and go to a website, who then open their app store. I hates it, I does.

shukoroshi@reddit

I don't entirely blame the user for this one, and instead put partial blame on the OEM.

Using "disabled" as a status indicates that the FP reader is turned off. And, if something can be turned on/off, then it's implied that it's installed. A status indicating that it's "Not Installed" would be explicit and better eliminate ambiguity.

Heck, OP even fell victim to the misleading error message by spending hours diagnosing it. Furthermore, it even allowed them to enable it in maintenance mode, even though it wasn't present. The system had opportunities to indicate the FP reader wasn't installed, but didn't.

androshalforc1@reddit

A status indicating that it's "Not Installed" would be explicit and better eliminate ambiguity.

I’m not sure about that, if i received an error saying something is not installed i would assume its present But missing the drivers. If I’m not familiar with the component being referenced how would i now if it’s supposed to be there or not.

The better solution would be to disable the warning

That's a far more elegant solution.

NotYourNanny@reddit

And he was correct. Eventually.

GouchGrease@reddit (OP)

Sounds about right lol

Geminii27@reddit

I can imagine him having worked at a FP-equipped site before, and maybe assuming that this site was having it auto-installed or some such - because why else would it be coming up with that error?

Our customers like to touch shit they aren't supposed to, so I assume he was in maintenance mode for whatever reason and turned it on

But who knows. They guy also claimed he'd been calling in for weeks and it was the first case we'd opened for their site about anything hardware related in over a year, so he could've been lying about way more. Our customers do that a lot

HMS_Slartibartfast@reddit

Did you check that the ID-10-T was set to "Remote" instead of "Autonomous" at the beginning of the call?

DiodeInc@reddit

How does it even happen. People, I swear.