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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Two of the best call centers I’ve ever worked with would be Google Fiber and Intel. Both of which are probably terrible now.

    (2015) Google Fiber actually had people who understood networking, understood my personal setup, and understood what tests I had already performed to diagnose that my issue with their equipment. No faffing about with a script, I gave them my test results and got an appointment for a replacement line in like, 15 minutes, and an immediate credit on the account.

    (2009) Back when Intel made rock-solid vanilla motherboards I did a dumb and accidentally disabled legacy USB on my board, which meant that I couldn’t press F2/DEL to get back into BIOS. I called Intel, gave them the troubleshooting steps I already ran (including jumper BIOS reset), and the call center forwarded me to the engineer who designed the motherboard. He whipped up and sent a bootable CD-ROM image to update the BIOS back to default and then updated all future revisions to avoid my issue.

    I wish every call center was that good.




  • As somebody who has had to set up smartcards, yes. It’s a linux system managing that. The end-user GUI stuff is all Windows though.

    There’s a surprising amount of Linux in some hospitals… but people just don’t see it. Fetal Monitors? Probably Linux. User tracking and auditing software? Also Linux. Network downtime document viewer? Linux. Heck, the software that carts use to print sheets to the network printers is CUPS.








  • Can’t say I have any interesting stories. Most of mine are just the head-scratching “I don’t know why that didn’t work; guess I need to reinstall” kind of story. Like enabling encrypted LVM on install and suddenly nothing is visible to UEFI. Or trying to switch desktop environments using tasksel and now I have a blank screen on next reboot. That lame kind of stuff.

    My coworker though… he was mindlessly copy/pasting commands and did the classic rm -rf $UNSETVARIABLE while in / and nuked months of migrated data on his newly built system. He hadn’t even set up backups yet. Management was upset but lenient.