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“my computer won’t turn on!!”
“is it plugged in?”
“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”
“…”
I spent over an hour on a support call trying to walk an asshole lady through fixing her Adobe Illustrator, for her to stop mid-instructions to say she couldn’t tell me what the status was because her power was out due to a fucking hurricane in her area! 🤦♂️
Side note: that was one of the two times my bosses didn’t get upset at me for telling off a customer.
i actually went to school for computers for a bit, got my A+ and net+, but realized i get fucking outraged at my own computer when it has problems, i couldn’t imagine the murderfest rampage that might ensue if i had to deal with morons and their bullshit computer problems–glad i didn’t pursue it
murderfest rampage
Yep, that’s the correct level of anger, based on empirical evidence. I hate how I fumed at dumb people back in the day.
Please tell us… What was the other one?
You asked the wrong person, you probably meant to place your comment one level higher up.
other what?
Likely other line of work
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One of our call metrics was that we were meant to solve one problem per call, because the customer paid for one problem to be solved. But of course we also had to balance customer satisfaction, while also limiting our time spent on calls. Joy.
This one guy had a couple of no-brainer issues that I opted to help him fix, but the laundry list kept growing and growing, as well as the length of the call. After about an hour, and repeated attempts to explain to him that he’s over-extended his stay (so to speak), I finally had to firmly (and as politely as I could muster) tell him he’d have to call back and pay for any further support.
He was livid of course, but I held my ground. Eventually I had to hang up on him. It just so happened that one of the VP’s from HQ was in town and in an adjacent office listening to me on my call. He came racing out of his office and shook my hand, saying that’s how support is done and how I was a rock star. It was wild.
I’m the family tech support person so I know your pain
It’s a pain in the ass when you have a parent who won’t even try to learn to do something after trying to teach them and they call you everytime they need to do something
I once helped my parents with a few minor things on one of their computers. Two weeks later I get a call… They have no internet on any of their devices. Obviously since I was the last one to work on their stuff I was the cause of the internet issue. While on the phone I hear my dad’s weather radio go off and my phone dings with a severe weather warning for their area.
I ask if they are currently experiencing any bad weather… And they confirm that they have a very nasty thunderstorm and a confirmed tornado on the ground a few miles outside of the town… And they have no power.
I just hung up…
I once replaced an entire power strip because the user said that it would turn off at random. So I took it back to the IT room and plugged in all the things and watched it, thinking it would short out or blow a circuit breaker or something.
Then the user called me again saying the new strip was doing the same thing and I should replace it. So I schlepped up to their office and replaced it with a third one.
Then they called me again saying it keeps happening. So finally I looked at where they had put it and it was right where they’d put it when they pushed to back their chair up from the desk.
And they didn’t realize it.
We’ll stop being dicks when they stop being so dumb.
I’ve found that being a dick is a great way to make their calls take longer and complain to your boss, which wastes time. Being nice to the idiots means less work for me.
For sure. For many of us “being a dick” means “punishing my liver.” It’s a calculated risk decision.
Yeah. I was talking took over a call from another tech that had a lady berating him because he couldn’t help her because we didn’t have access to the EMR portal she was calling about. It turned out she’d had a tbi and had problems with regulating her mood. It took probably 45 minutes but I was able to talk her down and get her in touch with the right people. If I’d gotten into it with her instead of being calm we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Should I have had to listen to that? No, but if I hadn’t she wouldn’t have gotten the help she needed and it wasn’t really her fault for being that way. Obviously an edge case but you never know what people are going through.
You’re the saint I could never be. That’s why I got into security for a bit – I can be as big a dick as I need to be that day! ;-)
That’s why I’m a sales engineer :)
I don’t think it’s a race to the bottom for fun. lol
It amazes me that people don’t make even a small effort to debug stuff themselves before calling for help. There is a youtube channel for clips from car mechanics and people bring in cars for things like “There is a knocking sound coming from the back seat” and there is a gallon jug of liquid rolling on the floor back there.
Oh man I was expecting it to have been plugged into a switched outlet or something
I had a label printer that was failing to work. I have spent most of the week with IT remoting into my desktop trying to figure out the issue with our cobbled together system. I finally realized after 5 days of this that the software causing the issue was on my co-worker’s computer. Pointing this out to the IT guy got the problem fixed in minutes.
Sometimes the user has no idea what is and is not signifcant. I had no idea that this was significant only that an icon with similar looks was on my co-workers cluttered desktop.
I’ve been the PEBCAK enough times to not give users a hard time about it.
Ah yes the old PEBCAK/1D-10T combo.
Shudder
Layer 8 issue…
…it’s a real PICNIC
Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can’t say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven’t even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get ‘That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don’t need that.’ Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.
This should come with a trigger warning and a glass of whisky.
Best I can do is a printer and a baseball bat.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
Scapegoats.
I blame autocorrect on that one. But thanks mate.
So you’re saying autocorrect is the…scapegoat? 👉😎👉
Yes, yes I am.
I am not sure if it is worldwide, or if its just American culture (fuck i hope its just us), but I don’t believe the problem is a form of prejudice against intelligence, but rather that people with intelligence rely only on data and facts to make points. It is a sad truth that while this is the only correct way to make decisions, id guess around 70-80% of the population are simple, and when given solid evidence and reasoning you bore them. Meanwhile the sales team, while having no real evidence or reasoning for their solution was entertaining, and used simple buzzwords management understood delivered with a confident charisma.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma. It might make you hate yourself a smidge to give a report that focuses more on the emotions of decision making than the reasoning, but the alternative is that bad decisions keep being made that make your life harder. You as the one that knows what the fuck they are talking about will generally have one of the most well reasoned plans in a situation, learn how to be a better guardian of that plan.
None of this is to say any of this is our fault, its more an acceptance of the world we live in and recognizing how best to play in it.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma
You can’t beat the sales team on that front. Charisma is a key part of their job. They are literally being payed for their ability to convince people to buy things, and this works inside the organization as well as it work on customers.
I never said beat them at charisma, I said you need to work on your charisma. In this scenario your idea is still better than theirs, we are just working on presenting it better.
I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.
Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it’s easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
Yes, but it’s incompetence of the management who won’t approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space
Working with small businesses is like working in the jungle, anything goes.
There’s no budget, 3 working power sockets, the network hardware should be in a museum and there’s a beige box in the closet that absolutely can never be turned off for inexplicable reasons. The last “computer person” who touched anything left no notes and has been missing for 3 months. Also, the printer is broken.
You don’t often get to choose a racks location in a small office and the UPS only ran the router and switch for a hour. You sound like you have never worked in the field.
I’m over 30 years in the field, thanks
Then you know that what you said is not always possible to achieve in terms of preventing access.
You do not know how long it was taking her to plug that coffee maker into the hidden UPS
Yes, but… There’s a reason for locked doors and apcs
What are apcs in this context?
I think he wants to run her over with an armored truck.
I would assume APC, a brand of uninterrupted power supply.
Yes.
A brand that makes rack enclosures for IT gear, typically they come with a key to lock it shut
Battery backups
About a decade ago I had to fly across the country to peel a piece of tape off a sensor. At least I got crab cakes
I was watching a documentary about a plane that crashed, killing everyone on board, because someone left tape on a pitot tube during maintenance
Terrifying.
Fortunately, I was not working on safety-critical systems at the time. Now I am, so this is a great case study.
The article glosses over whether or not Boeing was even partially found at fault. In my opinion, this was a major design flaw on their part.
Here is the documentary.
Wish it were an article.
Ice crystals in the pitot tube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
Wasps nest in the pitot tube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301
Pitot tube blocked by tape:
I gotta ask… Why couldn’t someone local do it?
I’m not op, it I imagine it went something like this:
“We’ve tried everything and nothing works, you gotta come down here”
“…and you followed the instructions in the run book to the letter”?
“yes. every instruction”
runbook line 1 page 1: remove the tape from the sensor before installation.
I’ve definitely dealt with that exact scenario before, but I only had to walk across the building that time.
This was an interesting case because somebody decided they wanted to hide the sensors from a third-party tester, and failed to inform anyone, let alone consider the fact that those sensors were basically the defining characteristic of the product and nothing would work right if they were obscured.
This is why I don’t ask them if they already did something. I just tell them we’re going to take it from the top and I need them to tell me what happens at each step. Same goes for restarting there computer. I ask them if they need to save anything because I’m going to try something that may reboot it and then I reboot it remotely (unless the up time actually shows they rebooted it).
Sounds like my mom whenever she was confronted with anything that required learning button sequences. “I don’t know how to use the microwave, you do it for me.” = “I don’t want to learn how to do it.”
I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
Have you tried turning them off and back on again?
THE SHOES
What show is it?
IT Crowd - go watch it now!
Thx
They have to reboot their router to see it.
It’s really not that funny. It has a few one-liners here and there but ultimately meh.
0118-999-881-999-119-725…3
Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
Sometimes I am reminded, that my country does not hold monopoly on incompetent idiots.
It is a universal human condition
A coworker sent me a pic of a user trying to charge a wired mouse with a surge protector. The user is a doctor. A surgeon.
I also see health care professionals break HIPAA rules CONSTANTLY despite everyone in my office telling them they’re breaking rules.
Idk, trying to charge a wired mouse sounds more like sleep deprivation than incompetence. Especially if it happened in a hospital.
Well my mom is a doctor. She can do surgeries, clinic work, the whole thing. Sge does not know anything about computers. Electricity goes in and magic happens.
Me, an IT person, am also this way but about cars. It’s also a machine with inputs and outputs but it’s just “fuel goes in and magical propulsion happens”
Commutes should be paid work.
The truck repair guys where i work do get extra pay per hour of travel.
Are they not in this context?
In my neck of the woods, most commutes are not paid. Only when you are at the workplace that the meter starts running. OP probably got paid only 15ish minutes, since all they had to do was press a button.
If a worker comes in outside their scheduled hours, they should have a minimum call-out charge at their overtime rate.
I’ve worked a few places where it was two hours, but I’ve had a four hour minimum before.
Been doing IT for 20 years.
The one ray of hope is that the number of entirely tech illiterate people I deal with has decreased. They’re retiring/dying. It’s not nearly as common now to deal with people that don’t understand how to literally turn something on. I also got out of the private sector, so I’m not dealing with the general public, which always made me want to drive my car into oncoming traffic on my way home every day.
But yeah, I always make a point of embarrassing someone when I have to drive somewhere to do something a toddler could have done if they put them on the phone with me.
As another IT guy I’m getting less and less optimistic about that future.
Software these days “”“just works”“” and so now you have kids and young adults who barely know how to interact with a file explorer, don’t know what the different file extensions mean, or even things I would consider basic like the difference between “network connection” and “WiFi”.
This is why being an elder millennial kinda gives you the edge, especially if you have been using computers since the 80s. Old MS-DOS machines forced you to understand how directory management worked.
Elder millennials and baby genXers be like
The Oregon Trail Generation will fix your shit!
You’re catching the middle wave. Wait until the iPad kids in Gen alpha come up and don’t understand anything with a cord.
There’s a whole new generation of tech illiterates being born with a smartphone up their asses. I feel that 80’s kids peaked at tech literacy, then steadily declined from the mid 90s maybe.
I’d say 2000s was when it peaked.
Knowledge peaked in the 2000s, but those are the 80’s and 90’s kids. The ones born in the 2000s had an iPhone with 14 and know nothing…
Yup. People under the age of 25 don’t even understand files or directories.
iPhones and Chromebooks have abstracted everything away.
Thankfully Chromebooks have very low popularity outside US
I worked in customer service for 7 years. There are people who have no idea how to hang up a phone call on their cell phones… lots of them. Like I used to find one several times a week.
When I used to work support for home Internet, it was accepted practice to ask if we could speak to the child in the house if we were having trouble with an adult…
Defensive, or outright steering ticket notes was my FAVORITE skill. I learned of so many shitshows weeks later because my department head read my notes, shut the person down and didn’t even mention it to me. It actually got a few employees in trouble with their management.
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“Are you sure all the wires are connected, USB and power?” (Relating to a scanner.)
“Yes, I’ve checked several times.”
get there, USB is firmly connected but the power connector was hanging like 2cm belown the desk, clearly visible when you looked at the back of the scanner.
At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn’t read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn’t read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
“No you’re wrong, it worked before!”
"Mam, it’s very clearly labeled ‘CD’ right here."
It wasn’t really any help talking back to 40-something office Karens as a teenager. The amount of excuses people will go to avoid saying essentially “Oh I see now, that was a silly mistake I’ve made, thank you helping.”
The people who swallowed their pride and admitted they screwed up made me want to help them more in the future. Especially if they wanted to learn how to fix it themselves in the future. Same for people who had a legit problem but were calm about it. The people who treated you like the cause of everything or just liked to bitch, well I made sure I took a long trip to the bathroom before getting to them.
“Wait, that (completely needless, umpteenth) ticket we have open on your keyboard ‘making weird noises’ hasn’t been dealt with yet? Oh I’m sorry, sir, I did label it ‘urgent’ like you asked. Yes, sir, right away sir. Well, there’s a few things I have to get to before, but I’m confident I’ll make it there today, tomorrow at the latest.”
hang up, lift feet on the desk, delete ticket, make a new one set to lowest priority
Million times this.
I refuse to help just because you “don’t know computers” and just want someone to do it for you. 90% of your job is on the computer you better fucking try at least.
I once spent 10 hours travelling from Toronto to Iowa (and back to Toronto) to flip a switch on a printer that multiple people had failed to figure out how to flip.
Yesterday I had one of our users tell me her 7zip was “eating files”.
So I told her to show me what her process was for unzipping a folder.
This bitch hit the “extract here” button on the folder as it sat in her download folder which has stuff going back to 2019 in there. So naturally the last edit dates of all the contents in that zipped folder sent things off all over her downloads folder.
I know my generation was the first to really grow up with computers but I have met people older than me that learned the basics. Some people just don’t want to learn how to better use a computer.
Young people (13 - 18) literally cannot use a computer. They are too used to phones.
This is also true. My little siblings are all about as bad with computers as my parents. It’s really only millennials that seem to be the tech savvy generation for the most part.
As usual gen x is forgotten
You mean, only millennials are savvy with the generation of tech they grew up with.
Zoomers are the same way with AI and Social Media and Content Creation. That’s the generation of tech that they got started with, and everything I use will seem like a slow stupid dinosaur in comparison.
AI
“Prompt Engineer” isn’t a skill
Social Media
The only skill is a complete disregard of privacy
Content Creation
Millennial kids were making animated movies with more powerful, free tools then what’s available for now. Now it’s all designed to churn out the 30 slop of the same dances to the same songs.
Hey, there was a time when “googling” something wasn’t a skill, there was a time when “vlogger” wasn’t a real career, a time when “Brand Ambassador” wasn’t a real job. Those are all things that take skill, and practice to do successfully today, and people will pay you money to do it.
Just because an activity seems valueless to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually useless.
If you want to property test your chatbots to avoid giving away free stuff, or leaking a bunch of data, you’re going to want a Prompt Engineer to test it.
If you want your brand to go viral and get great advertising, or if you want to minimize the impact of negative messaging, you’re going to want a Social Media professional.
Tell me, when was the last time you went to AlbinoBlacksheep or Newgrounds to check out flash videos anymore? Turns out that was all old slop that no one cares about for the most part as well. Either get used to the fact that tech is going to change along with the knowledge needed to operate it, or accept that you’re going to be a tech-illiterate boomer born a few decades too late.
Hey, there was a time when “googling” something wasn’t a skill,
And googling is not longer a skill because google enshittified their search engine.
there was a time when “vlogger” wasn’t a real career,
Not a career.
a time when “Brand Ambassador” wasn’t a real job.
It’s not a real career. At best, it’s a part time job before the corpo that hired you kicks you to the side.
If you want to property test your chatbots to avoid giving away free stuff, or leaking a bunch of data, you’re going to want a Prompt Engineer to test it.
I have a real job that increases the quality of life of society. Chatbots aren’t relevant to me.
If you want your brand to go viral and get great advertising
Kill me.
or if you want to minimize the impact of negative messaging, you’re going to want a Social Media professional.
That’s like trying to use a hammer to turn a screw.
Looking forward to the first capcut edited long form film. Maybe it already exists. There are certain tasks which scope and complexity means it cannot be made on touchscreens or mobile. I mean, it can, but not comfortably.
I don’t disagree fully but my little brothers and sister are all horrible with all tech. Including AI and all that. Maybe they are just bad at being zoomers idk.
Gen x coughs in commodore 64 basic…
Yeah. I’ve got some co-workers I hate simply because they’re super young and I would have literally killed to have this job at their age. They’re going to be able to retire at such a younger age than me.
I spend a significant amount of time explaining to them how Windows works, when they should have had to go through other, shittier paying jobs to learn that stuff before getting here.
Oh, you don’t know what the registry is? Neat.
In their defense our generation should have burned the registry for the abomination it is. And all of Windows for that matter.
As a digital forensics investigator you have no idea how much I hate and love windows registry. You can find so much shit in there, and it’s such a pile of shit.
config files work fine! we just need a standardised place to put them (that apps follow)
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Not defending her, but for years I’ve felt like ‘Extract Here’ should create a subfolder by default
Extract here implies that it extracts it into the current directory.
That would be the most convenient…
My father was still upgrading his PC when he was 93.
Much respect. I couldn’t pay my dad to build his own computer. The man will build Legos until the end of time but when I tell him building a computer is just more expensive Legos he gets scared haha.
I wrote auto-reply instructions for this one, it’s the same as she was doing but one click down to make a folder to match the zip name.
That should really be standard at this point.
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I could only bill for the time I was there and the pay per mile was abysmal.
This is one of the best changes going from IT to the trades. My billable hours now start the moment I get in my work van at home and end the moment I get out of my van at home. Our time is billed the same regardless of if it’s drive time or time on site. If a customer hundreds of miles away wants me on their site at 1AM to fix their screwup then I am more than happy spending hours just driving, listening to podcasts, and making double time after hours pay the whole way.
I recently had a job where I had to drive 3 hours to a customer site and the only work I wound up having to do there was make a phonecall to their building automation person which the customer could have done on their own.
Customers who can’t follow basic instructions went from being the bane of my existance to being the most lucrative and relaxing part of my job.
You are the type of it worker this meme is referring to.
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You can be as much of a dick as you want, so long as you are right, and can get shit done.
If you are the kind of IT supergenius that responds to a “my laptop won’t connect to the company network” ticket with “ok I’ll just remote into your laptop real quick”, you better the friendliest guy around.
Users don’t want help. They want reassurance. They want you to be on their side until all their problems are solved. If you can fake that until they believe you they’ll do whatever you want to solve the problem. Especially if you tell them it’s a super secret IT guy thing.
I’ve met a total of three users who didn’t respond well to you treating them like someone picked from the audience to help a magician.
This is so true, doing everything you can to take it from an antagonistic relationship to a “we’re in this together, lucky for us both I know some cool stuff” kinda scenario? Golden. Back when I dabbled, the worst repeat customers would end up requesting me, and end up happy. I moved on lol, those folks suck.
Interestingly I did industrial controls for a while too and it’s the exact same dynamic. Client just wants to know their [PC | gigantic 24/7 mfg plant] is gonna be okay, it wasn’t their fault, and they were right to call for help.
Edit: clarity
Being dependent on support guys that are not that bright can be really annoying, especially if you are from the field too. As an IT student while working off my civil service days I had a few situations like that.
For example, one didn’t understand why plugging the Ethernet splitter (splits 4 twisted pairs into 2x 2 twisted pairs) into the switch instead of the structured cabling wasn’t working.
I feel like I’m somewhere on this graph, elaborate
*really, not opposed to fake quick.
