Will this day never end?

A little while after the events in the previous post I got a call from our alarm company for a burglar alarm. Went to the alarm panel and it said there was a techician in the building, but I could neither find him nor re-set the alarm panel. Called the alarm company back and found out they couldn't reach him, either. He finally got the message from them and came and found me - he set off the alarm and cost me about 30 minutes wasted effort trying to figure out what was going on!

THEN, three of our printers pooped out. What a day.

A good day

Yesterday was a good day at the library. Company X FINALLY sent someone to repair our public printers (which have been down for several weeks), so now we only have one out of service (it needs a part, of course).

Our alarm system, which had been malfunctioning for several days, requiring a bypass (sounds like open heart surgery, doesn't it? Sometimes it feels like it - with ME as the patient!), was repaired by a very nice technician who actually asked for me so he could give me an update before he left - amazing!

I contacted the company that supports our color copiers (not our black and white copiers - that's a DIFFERENT company) and scheduled a service call to put our color copier back in service (which has been down since May). I'm hoping they will be out by next week sometime - that would be awesome.

The person in charge of the city tech support department called to tell me that all of our computers will be upgraded next week, which supposedly will help with some of the issues we've been having. We'll see, but it was good to hear anyway.

We got a new volunteer who is in library school and is a workaholic - she got SO much done it was wonderful.

I got my odious monthly reports finished ON TIME! Whoo-hoo!

The A/C didn't go off - it stayed on ALL DAY!

And (this is not technically library related, but it really made my day), my very generous BF gave me a 1 terabyte (!!) external hard drive for my computer at home. What a nice guy. :-)

Tech support - ha!

We've had a public printer down for over a month so today I called the IT department to check on the status of the request and they said "huh, I guess we never got around to calling that in to [company X]." (I'll just call them X from now on.) So they called X about it. Now WE are not allowed to call X directly; we have to go through IT. I guess I should have followed up weeks ago. Sigh...

Anyway, a nice guy from X called me back within 20 minutes and asked me to do some test prints and call him back. He said they should be able to tell exactly what was wrong from the test prints, and that's all I would need to do. (Oh - we were getting "dirty" prints with extra ink all down the side of each page.)

So I did the test prints and called X back, was on hold for at LEAST 15 minutes, and finally got a different person. I explained what the other guy had told me to do and after asking me a BUNCH more questions she said, "Now have you cleaned the [something] window?" I'm like, "cleaned the WHAT?" She said, "All you have to do is get your cleaning wand, remove the fusing oil unit and clean the [something] window behind the fusing oil unit, being careful not to touch the [something]." I said, "First, we don't have a 'cleaning wand', and second, I don't have time to do this right now, so when I get off the desk I'm going to have to go over to the printer, take it apart, clean something with a tool I don't have, and then call back and wait on hold for ANOTHER 15 minutes." Her response: "Well, if you had called us standing right in front of the printer like we say in our guidelines you would be able to do it right away instead of having this delay." (Delivered in a sarcastic, snarky tone.) So I said, "Well, I thought YOU guys were the tech support for these printers - so far, it seems like I'm doing all the work and X hasn't done much of anything. We're not the ones who are supposed to be going into the printer and cleaning it out - that's your job." Whereupon she hung up on me.

Now granted, I was sort of a jerk, but what she was asking wasn't within my "realm of expectation," and of course hanging up on me wasn't particularly helpful. I called our IT folks back and told them about the call and they confirmed that our service contract with X only requires that we: fill the paper trays, clear paper jams, and replace ink cartridges. Nowhere in our contract does it say that we are responsible for cleaning the inside of the machine. So I hope to god that somebody comes and fixes the damned machine - our one remaining printer is currently being used by 40 computers and it's wearing out fast.

This is the kind of experience that gives tech support a bad name.