So here's how my day is going...

CheesyGoodness · 3 months

"Golly gee, Mr. X, we're working on the problem as fast as we can...in the meantime, be assured that we will be monitoring your traffic in an attempt to get to the root of the issue, if you have any questions about the sites you've been visiting, be sure to contact us immediately!"

toastedbutts · 3 months

Send him a tiny violin and an ethernet cable.

SanityInAnarchy · 3 months

As a side note, the reason his Internet is so crappy is because he is living in a building that was built well over 50 years ago and is essentially a Faraday Cage with wire mesh in the walls.

Which still sucks -- IIRC, people in Helser ($5 says I'm a student at the same university) complain about the wired Ethernet being just as bad. Seems decent over in Roberts, but still not great -- but I'm spoiled by 100 mbit fiber at home.

Assuming this is the same university, when I first came here in '05, service generally sucked -- I seem to remember writing support and getting a form letter back. Dropped out, came back five years later, and now, the network may not always be reliable (solid brick buildings with ancient wiring is problematic), but the service is pretty much golden when you actually can fix something: Write a simple email ("nmbd on this Linux machine seems to somehow be eating tens of gigabytes of RAM!"), get a simple reply ("Not sure how that happened, but I killed and restarted it. Let me know if it does it again.") This isn't just because I used jargon, either: "I can print from this machine, but not that one." Email comes back: "You logged into the wrong domain on that one. Try this other domain."

No back and forth of me trying to escalate stuff, just problem, solution, done. Well done, sirs and/or ma'ams.

calmlunatic · 3 months

Gotta love OSI Layer 8 support.

BigChinaMan · 3 months

I'd eat some spinach, down some Amp, pump some iron, don some sunglasses then go to the kids dorm room and say to him "I am here...to kick some ass and fix networking problems. And it looks like your network is not going to be fixed any time soon"

mwerte · 3 months

I say you use some nice MAC filtering to mess with him like this

tallwookie · 3 months

reply to his email & explain that his dorm is older than his parents, and the wiring predates his grandparents.

Dead_Rooster · 3 months

You know this now leaves you with a new task to be completed first thing every morning right?

Changing his password without his knowledge.

CheesesOfNazareth · 3 months

I'd make sure this person's account got wiped periodically. But then I'm not a nice person.

raider1v11 · 3 months

this is an EXCELLENT time to respond back with the following:

Hi Friend!

I do apologize personally for your poor network performance while browsing www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com. I will be dispatching an entire team of technicians to give you a dedicated line to the world wide web. We will make sure you have no less than 100MB/s upload and download speeds. To ensure this guaranteed speed, we will be installing a traffic monitoring device on your personal, dedicated connection.

However, the added cost for this service will be added to your room at an added cost of $5,000.00 per month.

If you wish to continue with the unmonitored internet currently provided at a cost of $0.00 per month, please let us know.

Faithfully yours,

Ameyer505

emmapearl · 3 months

My Help Desk manager won't even let us deal with tickets like this, or even abusive callers. What a shithead.

crest_ · 3 months

Set the ticket to feedback status because the user failed to properly describe his problem.

porksandwich9113 · 3 months

I work in the IT department for a University as well <-- (sorry this part of the comment is obligatory) but my point is that students don't realize how old the some of these buildings are and that trying to throw in technology from the 2000s and expecting it to all work is not some easy task. Hell, most of them are too stupid to keep their windows machines clean from viruses and malware so they just drop a fuckton of money on a mac..

Over half the buildings in my school predate the internet revolution, and honestly only a handful or them were built with internet connectivity specifically in mind.

However, as a student who works in IT I am also aware of how damn slow the university is at responding to repair requests and fixing issues like this. Earlier this year an entire dormitory lost internet connectivity due to a failed router. (this affected a good 250-300 students) It took over a damn week for them to replace the router in question even though it was really a job that took a few hours or a day at most. And at my University everything is online. You turn in papers online. You check your bill online. You pay your bill online. Your class syllabus is online. You drop and add classes online. (you get my drift)
We try to be a completely paperless campus - and when the net goes down, it really should be the highest of priorities to get back up.

pipo_the_clone · 3 months

This is unexceptable, unless you know the guy and he normally doesn't do such thing(we all huff and puff sometimes), you should get this filed and taken care off.

absolutezero1287 · 3 months

The good natured IT guy sees the rude complaint and thinks to himself, "well it looks like I'm free today".

TrainFan · 3 months

"Someone who could do your job way better."

Correct response from IT: Please feel free to go ahead and do so.

therealknewman · 3 months

love love love college students.

if it makes you feel any better, i had a pretty fantastic day.

matt314159 · 3 months

Holy.... wow. Hope somebody smacks the prick down a peg or two.

whlabratz · 3 months

priority--;

thejewishgun · 3 months

ISU? Helser and Friley are probably the worst design for wireless. Can't the students still put their own routers in their rooms?

Lord_Dreadlow · 3 months

Up vote for cattle prods in IT.

Pokemansparty · 3 months

I'd place the blame on his computer having old parts that are on the fringe. I think you need a new wireless adapter in your computer because no other user is reporting an issue. You see, blah blah blah using verbiage they won't understand to describe why it's likely his computer than the building. I did that all the time.

swych · 3 months

I've never had anyone be so openly rude, but yeah, there are several "historical" buildings on my campus that are also shitty for wifi no matter what we do. Go sit in a student lounge or at the 4 Starbucks on campus or something and cry me a river!

MrDOS · 3 months

While this is definitely an inappropriate way to address anyone in tech support, I must admit to feeling his pain – Wi-Fi at my university is bad, even where the buildings aren't made of concrete, and I feel some frustration is justified in an environment charging a >$100/student/semester “technology access fee”.

dghughes · 3 months

I work in a secure room it has cinder block walls that are filled with concrete and a heavy duty mesh grid surrounds the room and the door is steel, my cellphone dies in an hour or two.

The router I use is a Linksys WRT-54G with Tomato firmware. It's boosted to 110mw and I've played around with the settings, I can get two bars on my cellphone wifi 30m away.

TheSilentWatcher · 3 months

Interesting. I lived in the same dorm in question for two years and never had any internet problems that couldn't be fixed with a simple restart. Granted I did just run an ethernet cable along the wall, but it kept things consistent.

X019 · 3 months

Helser? So you're at ISU then? heh heh heh heh. Also, I don't like your internet too much.

echotech · 3 months

Invite him over to the office and see if he can fix it. Tell him he can have access to all the resources you have.

mrascii · 3 months

I would make sure that this student has crappy Internet for the rest of his time at the school, even as those around him get better and better service.

Coldmode · 3 months

My last year in school they put an access point in every room or every other room depending on the construction of the buildings. The freshman dorms were the only ones left that were build pre-1980 and so were the only ones without good wireless, so when you became a sophomore it was like you were graduating to Wi-Fi.

ameyer505 · 3 months

[deleted]

cattacos · 3 months

And that's when I wouldn't respond at all. But hey, at least it wasn't like our last semester when our internet crapped out from all the people playing WoW. Man did I laugh at all of the emails about the importance of being able to play WoW.

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