Don't mess with the IT staff

So today one of our users tried to claim that they were not receiving the emails from their professor. Well if you are going to make that claim, realize that the IT staff has ways to verify that emails arrived and some of them will stand up in court as legal proof. So after hearing that this person was not receiving their emails I checked their account. I logged into their email account to test if it was sending and receiving emails just fine when what do I see but all 3 of the emails in question. Oh it gets better folks. 2 out of those 3 emails were READ. And one of them was even forwarded. So I take a screencap and forward that on to the person that contacted me about the other persons problem. I was very tactful in my wording of the email pointing out this persons lie. I dont know what the final outcome is going to be but it did feel good to prove that our technology actually works. Also it makes me wonder how many times this happens and we in the IT Dept dont hear about it. So moral of the day is dont lie when it comes to technology cuz it will tell the truth and make you look foolish.

Whats in a name

So we use a piece of software to track our work orders and one of the features of the software is some pre-packaged reports. One of these reports is one that gives you that average time that it takes for a certain technician to complete a work order. This report is great but it doesnt reflect the true numbers as we have projects that stay on our work order list for long periods of time. So I took it upon myself to customize a report that gives the average time to complete work orders but leaves out the projects. I got the report created and went to import that report into the program. Well that is when the fun started. The program threw an error when i went to import. Of course the error message was nothing helpful. I posted on a forum about the software asking for any advice from others who use the software. So I kept trying different things and eventually this afternoon I figured out what the problem was. Apparently the filename that I created the report with was what was causing the error. I tried importing the report with a different file name and what do you know it worked and now runs just beautifully. So apparently there is a lot in a name.

Doing the wrong thing

So recently we have had multiple users who despite doing things properly in the past have started using the wrong avenues to ask for password resets. It must be something caused by the recent bout of sunshine we have had here. It must be frying the brains of these poor oregonians who arent used to seeing the sun.

Change of Pace

So I just got back this week to work after being on vacation for a week. I was in Washington DC doing one of my other passions photography. It was a very nice change of pace from dealing with computer issues to be dealing with taking pics of 8th graders as we visited different places. Over the 6 days that we were in the DC and surrounding area I ended up taking over 700 pictures. 450 of those were for me and around 270 of them were for the trip video that will be put together by the tour company. But alas the fun of that trip has come to an end and I am now back to work fixing computer problems and such. It was a fairly uneventful week yet still busy. This coming week is finals week which means that the students will be leaving and the profs will be leaving for the summer very soon as well. That will allow us to get started on our summer projects. Our summer projects are going to be a lot of fun but a lot of work. Yay for the start of summer.