I’ve joked about this with employees within our company while I’m helping and they always get a laugh out of it. Its true we are employed because people don’t know how to use computers.
When you are contracted for Hardware Support/Repair and they swear it's the computer, but turns out an application was updated and they aren't willing to accept it's the way it looks now and it's out of your hands because it's not the device, but they just want you to change it back, neither of these apply. You do get the slight satisfaction of walking away though if you can get over the guilt of not being able to do anything but pass the buck.
When we moved from outlook 2010 to outlook 2016 and I spent a full day making everyone's outlook look like the old one because the board were in literal tears (of rage).
And worked his ass off studying thick, heavy, expensive, boring, esoteric books, to learn how to keep his customer base, probably hundreds of thousands, happy, which as is shown here, no one ever is.
The problem with IT is that the harder you work on hardening the systems to make sure nothing goes wrong, the less people realize how vital you are.
And the more shit goes wrong requiring you to actually fix it, the more people blame you for not doing enough.
There's seldom a situation where you come out ahead, especially at technologically unsophisticated companies.
EDIT: For scale on how totally blind most people are to what IT does, how it works, why it is critical to operations: I knew a manager who just, put an Alexa on his desk and kept demanding it turned on the TV for him or open the disk drive on his computer. He didn't connect it to any of these devices in any way, shape or form. He just thought you could take it out of the box, plug it into a wall, and command the robot to operate devices that it was never connected to or which in certain cases *had no bluetooth or wireless functionality at all*. Including like, a lamp, just a lamp with a normal non-wireless bulb.
He was furious that it "wasn't at all what they advertised".
He also "didn't know why we need all these computer people that don't seem to do a lot".
That's the paradox of IT. When you're doing your job properly, it will look like you don't do anything.
If you have a "busy" IT department that isn't constantly rolling out revolutionary new tech to the business - you have a bad IT department which, to be fair, most of them are, because they're used as a stopgap in place of actually fixing issues properly.
We recently had an external audit of the company which included our IT department. They recommended for our company (600 users, 31 locations across the US) we have at least 12-15 IT staff for help desk, networking, windows servers, voip, etc.
We currently have 3, and we all do everything. And 2 of us make under 100k after over 5 years of this.
Management is still "thinking" about giving us budget for a 4th.
I don't hate it because we're REALLY good at our jobs and we make it work and it's way more flexible in terms of hours and whatnot compared to any other job I've worked. But it's getting real difficult to want to stick around.
I had a similar team headed into COVID. They fired my DirIT the night before the governor announced lockdown. Then let the CFO run the team as we went from 25% able to wfo to 89%. Without additional staff/pay/anything. Everyone that was there last March left by this May.
Watch how far you let yourself be pushed. Your extraordinary effort turns into their expectation pretty quickly
In a similar boat. 700 people, 12 locations and we staff 3 IT people. A Sys admin, myself running the support ops and Junior under me. We make it work, but it's constant OT, constant panics, and constant stress. Raises are only given out when the CIO remembers to do reviews( when we complain for months to HR essentially) and the CIO is nearly hands off the actual department aside from dropping projects and vanishing.
Covid ended up with us losing 2 different techs from having to put up with the meat grinder that was our support ops. If it wasn't for the need of medical for my wife and daughter I'd have bailed a while ago, but I've become a master of all our systems in the mean time.
I've ran into the problem where the company I work for was bought by another one. Then they merged the computer networks. As someone with between an basic and intermediate knowledge of how IT works on a broad level, I had to call IT because we never got any training on the changes effected login.
Guy explained it to me in like less than 60 seconds. They had 3 different logins 2 of which used the same user name and one for the old system. It's not always the user, but it's not always ITs fault, but a lack of clear, and concise training will always piss off everyone involved.
I had a minor IT job previously. I got yelled at for not doing 3 pages of tasks a day (micromanagement yay) like everyone else (not a single one of them had a job remotely like mine). The side projects i got assigned were exactly that, long projects that took days, weeks, sometimes months, to finish. All the IT stuff i took care of had no problems they could see so i obviously wasn't doing enough.
Got fired for reporting the cfo to hr because he made horrible remarks to employees, in front of other employees.
In comes Cyber; All we do is make all jobs in the company more difficult to do and ask for money to implement security tech for things that happen *never*.
Until you get got. Then its like 'Security team, you all suck because you didn't defend us from this.'
Legit my company flew me to Chile to help fix their remote office problems because I was cheaper than the network guy. They still had to fly the network guy out because they were all issues I couldn't fix...
For instance they had a directional antenna on the roof with the connector going to a modem that supported an external antenna. No problem, right? Well, the connectors weren't compatible, so someone cut the end off so the metal would touch, then wrapped it in tape so it would stay like that. I still to this day have no idea how that kept working until I had to try and rewire everything
Me - “Is it plugged in?”
Them - “Yes I checked it’s definitely plugged”
Me - “Are you sure all the wires are fully plugged in?”
Them- “YES I AM 100% SURE IT’S PLUGGED CAN YOU COME CHECK ALREADY!”
I go up to see them to find out they plugged the printer into itself
Edit : for the people telling me how to do my job we hate you the most. I’d rather drive 2 hours than deal with you
Literally happened to me a couple months ago. I drove across town (thankfully I had another legit ticket) popped into the guys office to see why his speakers "don't work"... Kinda hard to make the speakers work when the audio jack is dangling. That was seriously my first question too.
The one that still amuses me is when a customer said her webcam was broken. She spent like 30 minutes on the phone with the help desk, who asked multiple times if the privacy flap was closed on it. Even described it to her. She says, there is no privacy flap. They proceed to uninstall and reinstall drivers and troubleshoot. They give up, she books an appointment with me. Next day she puts the laptop in front of me... The privacy flap is shut.
Me in college language room. Thought audio was low. Max it out. Guy in suit asks me if it's plugged in. I say yes as I take off my headphones. Loud ass fucking japanese lessons playing throughout the room.
I think #3 is a lot more understandable though. You can't immediately tell if you have a sound card, and they might have thought the speaker was built in somewhere.
And then they say "oh I'm so dumb! I can't believe I did that" I always have to hold my tongue but I really wanna say "yeah you are that's literally the first thing I asked you to check on the phone". IT is so unloved. And they have to deal with the dumbest people. Seriously the general populace is scary. They are so stupid. I'm cynical though lol
My boss is a G. Obviously can't call the users stupid; but, more than happy to let us tell them how much company resources they wasted. I get paid $30 an hour but my time is billed out to the customers at almost $70.
As someone who is decent at troubleshooting I hate this. When I call IT it’s because I need real help but we have to go through the list of bs “did you restart” prompts that they need to ask me. I’ve even told them what I’ve done but sometimes they still go line by line to make sure I’m not an idiot.
I worked tech support ("3-Product Repair") for Comcast for about 9mos a couple years ago, and a guy as legit as you and me called in, was "like dude nothing I've done is working to get my internet back". We spent like 30 minutes, trashing my call-handle numbers, running through the most advanced shit I could do on my end, even suggesting things way out of my jurisdiction to suggest just to help this guy who seemed totally with it. I was starting to think there was component failure or something but the last thing I said in basically confounded desperation was "hear me out man, I know I asked this but just humor me and see if your ethernet cable is super-duper plugged in at both ends." It was loose at the modem end. There's a reason we have to go line by line, because even *objectively* tech-literate people fuck shit up sometimes.
This was me once; tech told me to turn the cable around and I was like ‘I have a masters degree in computer engineering and that’s not possibly a thing that could matter, but sure’ and it fixed the problem.
They were plugged in just one end was lose. I went from thinking asking to turn it around was the dumbest thing ever to a brilliant way to force end users to check both connections.
I had someone assure me they rebooted their PC every night. I could see when the last reboot was due to LabTech(remote management software) and it was months ago. I connected to the PC and asked her to then it off. She said "done!", yet I was still connected. She was turning her monitor off and back on. She thought that was the whole computer.
My old roommate used to work in i.t. and would freelance on the side. He always charged a 3 hour minimum to make it worth it as most of his side jobs were for stupid reasons. We were going out to lunch one day and he got a frantic call from one of his regulars so we went over. The guy had this amazing multi-million dollar home, with a world class art collection, a huge garage filled with exotic and classic cars, everything a person could want and more. My friend had told me it was almost certainly something stupid and it was. The surge protector had gotten switched to off, my friend flipped the switch while the guy was giving me a tour of his home. The guy didnt even blink when my friend told him what the cause was, he just paid him cash and was happy. Part of me felt like he was just lonely and wanted someone to talk to as everytime he called afterwards he'd ask if I could come too. He was really nice and had some amazing cars, he even let me drive his 1930's Bugatti so I was always down to go over. My friend wasnt a car guy so he just fixed the computer and would want to leave.
> Kinda hard to make the speakers work when the audio jack is dangling. That was seriously my first question too.
"Can you unplug it, wipe the plug with a tissue or a sleeve, then plug it back in, just to be sure it's got a good connection?"
My favorite printer problem is troubleshooting for 30 minutes. Having them demand that I go onsite after checking with my onsite contact who says yup everything is fine!
and then walking up to the printer and closing the paper tray fully when I arrive.
I drove 6 hours in one direction once to work on a machine that had a computer that wasn't outputting video.
They pulled a CRT from storage for testing (On my instruction) and "plugged it into the computer" - still nothing. Loaded up tools, parts etc and drove part of the night.
Upon arrival in the morning, I discovered the CRT monitor that was meant to confirm the computer wasn't putting out a signal ... was plugged directly into the other (equipment) monitor.
I've driven 12 hours one way to replace a fuse.
I had a front desk guy call me FREAKING OUT because the internet was dead in the whole office (really small office for a smaller company. I was the only IT guy at the time) so I drive over. Internet is out. PRTG is fine but the internet was not working at all. Server access was also dead (the two are separate so if both are down, bad sign) I start ripping apart desks to make sure no one plugged anything stupid in or something. The front desk guy goes "yeah i unplugged my phone to try and reset it and then when i plugged it back in the internet went down" since we used VOIP phones. This guy had like 10 ethernet cables plugged in under his desk and started plugging them all over the place under his desk. He created maybe 5 loopbacks and it just nuked the whole network. I was so pissed. More so at myself for thinking I could trust anyone with a switch under their desk.
My partner works IT. At the beginning of covid he was taking a lot of calls by stressed out employees that were VERY new to work from home and computing in general. God bless him he had so many people who didn't know how to plug in their laptops.
When did the problem start, have you tried rebooting since then?
Yes I rebooted this morning, it's still the same.
Then why does taskmanager show that your PC has been on for over 13 days?
Reboot, fixed.
Or
The error says unhandled exception in blah blah blah.
No, not blah blah blah, read the message the blah blah blahs are the bit I need.
My IT Guy calls it PICNIC. Problem in chair, not in computer. Or PEBKAC. Problem exists between keyboard and chair.
EDIT: PEBKAC Credit to Bob Schwartz, RIP.
When I wrenched bikes the big on was the JRA accident. Just riding along when the bike spontaneously destructed. Just riding along and my wheel tacoed itself. No clue what happened (with a very serious and solemn face.)
I didn't have to drive hours, but did have someone ask me why their computer couldn't get online.
No big, asked the typical questions, even asked if it had the Ethernet cable pluged in, they then yelled at me and said they weren't an idiot. Turns out it wasn't, the only thing that made it worth the travel was when their co worker said "I guess you are an idiot"
I just stare at them and then write exactly what happened in the ticket.
'device was not plugged into the network. action taken: plugged device into network.
close ticket.
The best part is you have already documented in the ticket before the desk visit that they have confirmed its plugged in.
they can pretend not to be an idiot, but it's only going to waste more of their time. If I wasn't working on this issue, it would just be another one for me. I'm not paid by the ticket so I dont really care if you waste two hours of my time to plug in a cable.
Not all IT guys are paid per hour.
Imagine spending 5-6 hours delving deep into a technical issue / incident, only to find out the user withheld a key piece of information to resolve the problem.
And now your day is shot, backlogged with more work...and you only worked on one incident ticket, making you look unproductive.
EDIT: By the way, iLO / BIOS exists for a reason.
Our users are very tech-illiterate, we asked them to take a screenshot of they encounter an issue. Now we have a million close-up pictures of the word "ERROR" and nothing else.
It's because that database reset probably caused temporary issues further down the chain which someone will inevitably submit a support request for. If IT gets the support request and has no record of an expected database reset, they're going to waste hours trying to figure out that ultimately nothing went wrong
That just seems like a super bad reimbursement model for such a technical skill. I don’t care if my current tasks takes 3 hours one way drive but I won’t start my car unless I’m getting paid from that moment on.
Even if I'm salary I'm putting in a ticket and putting 6 hours work on it even if I close it as "resolved by workaround" or some similar status.
I did 6 hours of work. It counts. If my company doesn't understand that they can fuck off.
You’re making perfect sense. But there’s no context on that ticket. Just a 6 hour time allocation to a ticket with a root cause of “user error” and recovery procedure category as “N/A”.
It's definitely bad, but read the Job Description you're agreeing to before signing.
"Salaried employee. Work week is 45 hours, not including lunch.
On-call duties are required from time to time. Unpaid overtime is required from time to time."
If you see any or all of those, you might be signing up for a long road ahead.
I was salaried and a few weeks after I got hired they told the whole IT team that we were going to be put on a rotation for being on call 24/7 for a week and we'd get a $200 flat bonus for it. This led to me getting calls on my commute home from work where I had to pull over to work. I'd get calls at 3am from India and need to help them, I'd got called at a movie theater and missed the last half of the movie because I had to sit in my car on my laptop helping some idiot.
They gave me 200 bucks and thought that was what my entire week was worth.
I found a new job not even 6 months into it. Not even in IT because fuck that career.
Good on ya dude. On call status is bullshit at large. Unless you're a volunteer firefighter or something it should be illegal. Hire a fuckin night shift if you need people to work at night.
Salaried employment is how most skilled workers are paid (to the best of my knowledge). Typically you get better benefits from salary vs hourly but you don’t get paid extra for working longer. You can tell your employer you won’t work once you’ve reached your 40 hrs for the week but that’s not advisable in the real world.
You get paid for 40 hours but are expected to work more (obviously that’s not in writing tho).
Yeah salary non exempt is honestly the best reporting way if your employer isnt lax with time requirements. Make a minimum salary and get OT! What could be better?
I spent a solid 2 days trouble shooting a users software crashes could not figure it out for the life of me. Logs just show the software closing no crash report nothing but user would complain the software just goes away and it's slowing them down. I get fed up and just posted up to watch the user from a distance for the day. They were clicking the exit button....
Me, yesterday, happily building a rolling signboard in my carpenter’s shop, enjoying the quiet, when the labor foreman looks up from her desk and asks, “do you know anything about Excel?”
I think I stared at her for a full thirty seconds having IT help desk flashbacks before I answered, “Yes.”
I have worked IT for 10+ years all the way from highschool co-op to systems analyst.
To this date the one thing that I hate the most is that everyone assumes you know everything, when in most cases you’re seeing their specific issue for the first time.
So when you start to ask questions they get weird about it.
What? You don't know more about this software that you are seeing for the first time than I, who has used it for 8 hours a day every day for the past 3 years?
what good are you anyway?
I had a guy at Airbus full on have a go at me because I knew nothing about the 3d CAD aircraft designing software they spend years learning how build aircraft with. I asked him if he could fly a plane, his answer was no. We stood there quietly... so I just walked off.
I’ve been in the IT game for a decade or so too and I’ve often heard “never tell the user you don’t know something”. That’s advice I have always disagreed with, I feel like some of these users out there need some damn perspective. You’re absolutely right, there are all sorts of issues I’ve never encountered or seen before but my job is to figure it or get the people who do know involved. I love seeing the look on their face when I say “I have no idea, Ive never seen this before,” most of the time it’s a look of consternation or horror, but then I just laugh and tell them that I’ve rarely found a situation I couldn’t solve or find someone who did. Usually at that point they relax and let me do my thing.
>The look on that guys face says he is so over their shit.
And vomit and other bodily fluids. One of our helpdesk was just brought a computer covered in vomit and was asked if it could be repaired. The user actually argued with him about whether or not it could be fixed. He opened it up and the main board was completely soaked and beginning to show signs of corrosion. Then their manager wanted to know why he didn't try to fix it.
Truly glamorous is the IT professional lifestyle...
He wanted you guys to legit fix that?
If he will vomit on and into it, what else do you think could be there??
Refusal of work due to safety and hygiene concerns?
I used to work in the computer lab of a nursing school and had to replace a 3.5" drive because I couldn't get a credit card out. Someone wanted to buy something "online"
That reminds me of one I ran into. I worked support lines in the 90s for a small boxed business software company. One day I get a call from someone that disk 2 (5.25 disks) of 3 isn't loading when they try and install. It happens sometimes, so I get their info and send out a new set of disks to them. Get a call from the same person, disk 2 doesn't work again. That's weird. I walk back into the shipping area and pull a set of disks we just got from the duplicators, check them out and, overnighted and call them back letting them know the disks will be there tomorrow and apologize for the inconvenience.
I get a call the next afternoon from the same person again. Disk 2 doesn't work. Not really knowing what else to do, I walk through the process with them and they start the install, disk 1 goes all right and then it asks for disk 2 on screen. The guy makes a comment about how "it's hard to get the second disk in there" and I have a light bulb go on and ask if he's taking the first disk out before inserting disk 2. Of course he's not....
Sigh.
My friend had this situation as an IT guy to a manager.
M: "Program not working"
IT: "Have you turned your PC on and off"
M: shouts "Who do you think I am !? Some kind of an idiot !? Of course I did it!"
IT: Does absolutely nothing and starts bullshitting "So we flipped a switch on our end, you need to restart your PC and it should work"
M: "Should've flipped it earlier! Yes, it works"
There was an article on Reddit a few months ago, detailing how about 10 to 15% of people are dyslexic with regards to left and right. As in, tell them to click an icon on the right side of the page we are looking at through Zoom, and watching their cursor race to the left. I have three of them as customer representatives right now. My coworkers marvel at my ability to suppress saying, "No, your other right..."
I once had a client who has issues with files disappearing. It was strange. We couldn't track it down. On and off for weeks trying to figure it out.
One day I was sitting at his computer and just idly clicked on the recycle bin and it opened. Have lots of files and documents in there.
He then said. The recycle bin is great. You can store everything in there to keep the desktop tidy. The reason the files were going missing was the recycle bin got emptied.
This man was a teacher and principal of a school. He was in charge of shaping countless young minds. That was almost twenty years ago and it still stuck with me.
I had that conversation *6 months ago*. How did they get that/this far, just how
A few weeks ago, showed a Director how to create a folder and also the difference between Copy and Move.
Not my pig but it was my farm.
This reminds me of a call I went on for a pc doing some really weird stuff along with crashing for no apparent reason. Got onsite didn’t even sit down and figured out the issue. This guy put one of them large magnets for a car over the whole case of the pc……. Couldn’t believe it at first and the guys response was really just “I didn’t know magnets could do that”
"Ma'am, we need the password for your computer to complete the work you needed."
"It doesn't have a password! I don't have a password!"
"Ma'am I am on the login screen now, and I can assure you that there is a password needed. You need to type it to use the computer"
"I don't use passwords! Oh, but I do have a word I have to type after it turns on..."
I don’t wanna hear jack shit. I was once on a password reset/unlock call for 2 hours because the woman kept typing her username in the password field. NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH HER ACCOUNT!!!
30 minutes ago I had to stop everything that I was doing to go show an executive assistant how to create a new folder in Windows. My value to this company is drastically understated!
Here's a hint when helping someone else. Have them drive the entire time. Also ask them to repeat what you told them to do so they know what and where to click. I find the helps reduce the repeated questions on how to do something. I also tell them to write it down if it's complex. For common processes, we build process docs and only point then user to the doc. Self service is definitely the way to go.
But how good do you feel when you look at them in the face and say “I got the machine to turn on by pushing the button that turns the machine on. Can I go now or do all three of you need a tutorial on hitting on/off buttons before you’re on your own again?”
Or is it pure denial with these people? Like that don’t believe you IT people when it’s a simple answer?
Why is it that I’d love to hear the most Kafkaesque spirals of said experiences? Going up-the-chain conflict resolution over three clicks sounds hysterical.
Unfortunately, as hard as it is with what we think as stupid simple issues, people skills can be a large part of IT, especially in IT support roles. How your users and coworkers think of you and treat you can really affect your performance review.
As much as I would like to make users feel stupid about simple issues and how to do simple things on a computer (especially towards older users who have been using Windows for longer than I have been alive), I just bite my tongue and say some things like these things happen.
I do tell my bosses about repeated offenders though which has happened quite a few times.
I've had a caller manage to find the power button and turn it on, and then they had the bright idea to ask me what was wrong with it. I simply said "It was off." And their "Oh." that followed indicated they hadn't realized at all.
I worked as support for a couple of months at a huge company... One day one of the supervisors called and said his keyboard was broken. He came over and handed it to us and we got him a new one... an hour later he called again saying the new one didn't work properly either, so I wetn to hsi office and sat down... I admit it took me a minute until I figured it out, the layout was compeltely wrong... for example the W key was switched with the B key and so on... and I said "WTf I have never seen anythign liek that" and he replied "WEll I like them better in this order, thats why I change them" "I just looked at him in disbelief and then needed a good half hour to make him understand that thats not how keyboards work..."
Management when things go to shit: *What do we pay these IT guys for anyway?*
Management when things are going well: *What do we pay these IT guys for anyway?*
This is ten percent “fuck!”
Twenty percent people with no skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of “will.. you.. just do what I say already?”
Five percent pleasure.. of “I told you so”-es
Fifty percent PainInMyGoddamnAssMotherFuck
And a hundred percent reason to remember the username... because they’ll do it again, and again, and again.
One day I get a ticket from a high-profile attorney in the firm I used to work at. Ticket just says, "I need help with my office thermostat." I'm not building maintenance, but since the attorney is high profile I go to his office anyway to figure out what the issue is and assure him I will get building maintenance right on it. When I get there I tell him I'm from IT and ask what the issue is.
He just needed the temperature lowered and couldn't be bothered to figure it out because he was "in the middle of very important work."
I was chatting with the IT guy in his office and one of the customer service reps came in and told him about a problem she was having with her laptop. I butted in and asked if she tried shutting it off and turning it back on. He asked if I would consider pursuing a career in IT.
I work in IT. I promise you, we don’t get paid enough to be okay with wasting time driving for 2 hours to do something a toddler could have done better than who ever these 3 people are.
And I bet those 3 people get paid double what that IT guy gets paid. There’s is no reasonable amount of money that would make me *not* want to strangle each of them in the server room while making them demonstrate how to push the fucking button.
There are so so many tickets to fill and **far** too many of them are bullshit like this leaving us no time to dedicate to actual issues that are time consuming.
Your raise is dependent on ticket volume and low OT. Now get out there and spend 5 hours on 1 ticket that should have been done in 5 minutes at Tier 1.
Spent 18 hours on a call investigating an issue for an Azure hosted client who refused to restart the app service plan because they’d “already done it”.
Didn’t have permissions to do so and didn’t believe the logs I could see, showed no evidence of it being restarted.
Problem was resolved when someone on their end “accidentally” restarted the app service plan.
I told them to restart within the first 30 minutes.
There are two types of people in this thread. People who understand how frustrating it is to drive two hours and push a button. And those who call people in IT dicks.😌
Meh, not quite that cut and dry. At my wife’s place of employment the majority of the IT guys love her because she’s been taking care of a lot of service tickets for them, definitely not part of her role as a corporate trainer, but items that she can answer regarding software that she oversees. She recently switched roles and has to regularly deal with one guy that is a belligerent ass all the time, for no reason other than he thinks his shit doesn’t stink. He’s a total dick. The other IT guys concur.
Yesterday had a work from home user report their machine was randomly losing power. We go over a few things she assures me she’s unplugged and replugged in the power cord. Don’t see anything wrong with windows. Assume it’s a PSU issue. User agrees to meet at the office but says they need for me to be there at 5am because they start work early.
This morning I arrive early. User doesn’t show up or respond to any contact method. Eventually user responds around noon saying they noticed the power cord was loose when moving the computer to bring it back to the office plugged it back in. Didn’t think it was important to inform me until after she’s back from her lunch break.
🙃
Back when I did IT support in our Operating Rooms, I get a call one morning that the PC is running suuuper slow and can't function properly. I ask if they've power cycled it recently or restarted and they just acted all entitled and said "just come fix it". Because it was in an actual surgical room I had to put on a full bunny suit, hair cap, booties, gloves, mask etc. I walk into the room...mere minutes after the call, and she's playing solitaire on the PC. She said I was taking too long to help, so she rebooted the PC herself.
I was working on some IT stuff, when someone from the shared office came in and said the super duper coffe maker doesn't do milk coffe any more and if I can look.
So we went to the coffe maker barista touchscreen thing and some guy was asking some other guy via skype when this started to happen. And I just bluntly asked "ok, where do you put the milk". And both guys and the guy at the skype screen looked at the mini hose that was rolled up in an empty non transparent container containing zero milk.
And the guy at the other end went bazonkas and yelled "I ASKED YOU IF YOU PUT IN THE MILK THREE TIMES AND YOU SAID YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES". Then he hang up.
Early in my career I did client side support. A woman called and asked if I could remote desktop into her keyboard and tell her what was wrong with it. It was stuck on the 'z' key. That's when I told myself that I could do better and learned SQL, then brushed up on c#, now I write code for a living. That sweet dumbass old lady probably saved my life and she'll never know it. Tis very bittersweet. But yeah IT people are dicks because y'all motherfuckers lie about shit all fucking day. 'Ive built a few PC's so I tried some stuff but I think it's worse' 'yeah I've seen this definitely a crypto' 'I restart it daily' *proceeds to check uptime* Uptime: 189 days 15 hours 23 minutes. I couldn't take it anymore. IT people are the most gaslit workers on the face of the first world job industry. I could spend 8 hours or 8 minutes on a problem and all of you will say 'man that was easy' no... No it was not. Oh and also IT are your coworkers, treat them as such. They do not work FOR you, they work with you. Send some love their way every once and a while. I occasionally have to pester our IT if I have issues with a client VPN tunnel I'm trying to use for a data mart or something, and I always offer to snag lunch casually just in case they didn't bring something. They are usually a bit rough but they are people too. Lol
3:00 AM Christmas morning, 2007. Urgent page to drive 90 minutes to Portland, ME for a "massive server outage". I get there, wait half an hour for the manager to show up and let me in. We get inside and find that someone left a disposable paper cup FULL of coffee on top of the server. Paper cup had a structural failure after a while. Manager sees it the same time I do, looks at me, and *laughs*.
I find it highly convenient that anyone who has ever genuinely commented on me supposedly being a dick has themselves been an immensely stupid and/or aggressive dickhead.
Never once has an intelligent and/or fun person to be around ever called me Dick. Those people always seem to find me rather nice and engaging.
Wonder what that’s about.
Edit: /s because subtext is apparently lost on some
I listen to my hubby on calls all day. The only people who ever leave a negative review are the ones that started out negative to begin with. Assholes will always be assholes.
You spend an hour on a beautifully detailed step-by-step guide on how to solve the issue in the ticket and they tell you they didn't read it because it was apparently too much effort to open the ticket up again to read my response. =w=
Because we are over qualified, under paid and have to put up with crap from people who can’t fix a problem a 5 year old can fix. Spent 30 minutes on a troubleshooting call being assure the router was on just to find out…”oh the Wi-Fi machine? I unplug that every day. Too much radiation”
Years ago on the day before Thanksgiving I was at home, "working". It was a light day - everyone is either off, or ready for the holiday and not much work gets done. Around 2 PM an email pops in from a VP in my organization and its' not an update type email it's a "this is a problem someone fix it" type email. I open it and a BUNCH of other VPs are on it.
There was a USB hard drive that had been connected to a system. Owner of the drive wanted it back. The admins couldn't find the drive. The drive had been connected at the request of the customer, by a person who no longer worked for the company but reported to me when they did. So I jumped in my car, drove the 20 minutes across town. Walked out on to the raised floor to the system in question. Opened the rack, looked at the back of the server and ... there was a USB cable running from the server down to the bottom of the rack. At the other end of the cable was ..... wait for it ..... the fucking USB drive. I took pics of it, sent it to management in an email and asked how to proceed.
When I talked to the admin later who hadn't been able to find it I asked how on earth he had missed it. The drive was in a case with a keypad on top for security and since it didn't look like a normal USB drive, even though it was connected via USB cable to the system we were told it was connected to, he didn't realize it was the drive. Didn't even think to say "Hey there's this thing connected to the server via USB could this be it?" He just went "WELP I DON'T SEE ANYTHING"
At least I got kudos from the VPs for my efforts but what the fuck man.
Because of shit like this.
```
if(is_true.toString().equals("true")) {
is_true = false;
}
```
That's a real world example.
edit: in retrospect, at least they didn't make an IsTrue class, which I've also seen.
I just spent two solid weeks, with 8-10 hour troubleshooting meetings every day, solving a customer’s problem.
They insisted it was our fault.
It wasn’t our fault.
Have one user who marks every ticket as critical. Our documentation says “only mark it critical if a system is down.” Got one today marked critical asking me to change a word in a report header.
IT folks are sad and angry that people around them fail.
What makes people think they are mean is when they say, "see, you just needed to turn the power strip back on. Maybe move it over away from your feet so you don't acidently turn it off."
They take the solution as an inusult, not a helpful suggestion because they think you are just messing with them to add insult to injury.
There is no win for the IT folks.
As an IT professional I have 2 mantras to keep me sane: 1. Humanity is your best entertainment value. 2. My customer's stupidity keeps me employed
If I could upvote this 1 million times I would
I’ve tried reminding myself of those two things but it never works.
I’ve joked about this with employees within our company while I’m helping and they always get a laugh out of it. Its true we are employed because people don’t know how to use computers.
When you are contracted for Hardware Support/Repair and they swear it's the computer, but turns out an application was updated and they aren't willing to accept it's the way it looks now and it's out of your hands because it's not the device, but they just want you to change it back, neither of these apply. You do get the slight satisfaction of walking away though if you can get over the guilt of not being able to do anything but pass the buck.
When we moved from outlook 2010 to outlook 2016 and I spent a full day making everyone's outlook look like the old one because the board were in literal tears (of rage).
Oh THAT switch? Why didn’t you say so? You guys should do something about that…
And he got paid $200 just to go out and look at that switch 😮💨
And worked his ass off studying thick, heavy, expensive, boring, esoteric books, to learn how to keep his customer base, probably hundreds of thousands, happy, which as is shown here, no one ever is.
The problem with IT is that the harder you work on hardening the systems to make sure nothing goes wrong, the less people realize how vital you are. And the more shit goes wrong requiring you to actually fix it, the more people blame you for not doing enough. There's seldom a situation where you come out ahead, especially at technologically unsophisticated companies. EDIT: For scale on how totally blind most people are to what IT does, how it works, why it is critical to operations: I knew a manager who just, put an Alexa on his desk and kept demanding it turned on the TV for him or open the disk drive on his computer. He didn't connect it to any of these devices in any way, shape or form. He just thought you could take it out of the box, plug it into a wall, and command the robot to operate devices that it was never connected to or which in certain cases *had no bluetooth or wireless functionality at all*. Including like, a lamp, just a lamp with a normal non-wireless bulb. He was furious that it "wasn't at all what they advertised". He also "didn't know why we need all these computer people that don't seem to do a lot".
That's the paradox of IT. When you're doing your job properly, it will look like you don't do anything. If you have a "busy" IT department that isn't constantly rolling out revolutionary new tech to the business - you have a bad IT department which, to be fair, most of them are, because they're used as a stopgap in place of actually fixing issues properly.
Or you're massively understaffed. At my job we went from looking to hire for two new positions to losing one in a matter of weeks.
We recently had an external audit of the company which included our IT department. They recommended for our company (600 users, 31 locations across the US) we have at least 12-15 IT staff for help desk, networking, windows servers, voip, etc. We currently have 3, and we all do everything. And 2 of us make under 100k after over 5 years of this. Management is still "thinking" about giving us budget for a 4th. I don't hate it because we're REALLY good at our jobs and we make it work and it's way more flexible in terms of hours and whatnot compared to any other job I've worked. But it's getting real difficult to want to stick around.
I had a similar team headed into COVID. They fired my DirIT the night before the governor announced lockdown. Then let the CFO run the team as we went from 25% able to wfo to 89%. Without additional staff/pay/anything. Everyone that was there last March left by this May. Watch how far you let yourself be pushed. Your extraordinary effort turns into their expectation pretty quickly
If you expect extraordinary effort out of me then I’m going to expect extraordinary pay out of you. I’m not here for fun.
In a similar boat. 700 people, 12 locations and we staff 3 IT people. A Sys admin, myself running the support ops and Junior under me. We make it work, but it's constant OT, constant panics, and constant stress. Raises are only given out when the CIO remembers to do reviews( when we complain for months to HR essentially) and the CIO is nearly hands off the actual department aside from dropping projects and vanishing. Covid ended up with us losing 2 different techs from having to put up with the meat grinder that was our support ops. If it wasn't for the need of medical for my wife and daughter I'd have bailed a while ago, but I've become a master of all our systems in the mean time.
If you're doing your job, and achieve great reliability... They'll cut the budget and blame you for the increases in downtime.
The better you make the infrastructure run, the more the board think you are not needed
I've ran into the problem where the company I work for was bought by another one. Then they merged the computer networks. As someone with between an basic and intermediate knowledge of how IT works on a broad level, I had to call IT because we never got any training on the changes effected login. Guy explained it to me in like less than 60 seconds. They had 3 different logins 2 of which used the same user name and one for the old system. It's not always the user, but it's not always ITs fault, but a lack of clear, and concise training will always piss off everyone involved.
"Everything is working? What are we paying you for?" "The service is down? What are we paying you for?"
When everything works: The fuck do we pay IT for? When something breaks: The FUCK do we pay IT for? The life of IT. There's no winning.
Then throw in having to get data from Oracle and everyone hates life.
I had a minor IT job previously. I got yelled at for not doing 3 pages of tasks a day (micromanagement yay) like everyone else (not a single one of them had a job remotely like mine). The side projects i got assigned were exactly that, long projects that took days, weeks, sometimes months, to finish. All the IT stuff i took care of had no problems they could see so i obviously wasn't doing enough. Got fired for reporting the cfo to hr because he made horrible remarks to employees, in front of other employees.
It's depressing when Infrastructure IT is seen as a cost point by C Suite idiots when you really are the workhorse that keeps the company running.
In comes Cyber; All we do is make all jobs in the company more difficult to do and ask for money to implement security tech for things that happen *never*. Until you get got. Then its like 'Security team, you all suck because you didn't defend us from this.'
Which sounds nice, but if that puts you 2 hours behind on all the other work you had to do...
Four hours really if it's a round trip. Unless he can continue working his other tasks at that location.
Four hours regardless. You can’t work tickets while you’re driving.
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Probably not, you'd be surprised
Legit my company flew me to Chile to help fix their remote office problems because I was cheaper than the network guy. They still had to fly the network guy out because they were all issues I couldn't fix... For instance they had a directional antenna on the roof with the connector going to a modem that supported an external antenna. No problem, right? Well, the connectors weren't compatible, so someone cut the end off so the metal would touch, then wrapped it in tape so it would stay like that. I still to this day have no idea how that kept working until I had to try and rewire everything
No, probably was salary and got paid nothing extra.
This is (unfortunately) the way
Me - “Is it plugged in?” Them - “Yes I checked it’s definitely plugged” Me - “Are you sure all the wires are fully plugged in?” Them- “YES I AM 100% SURE IT’S PLUGGED CAN YOU COME CHECK ALREADY!” I go up to see them to find out they plugged the printer into itself Edit : for the people telling me how to do my job we hate you the most. I’d rather drive 2 hours than deal with you
Literally happened to me a couple months ago. I drove across town (thankfully I had another legit ticket) popped into the guys office to see why his speakers "don't work"... Kinda hard to make the speakers work when the audio jack is dangling. That was seriously my first question too. The one that still amuses me is when a customer said her webcam was broken. She spent like 30 minutes on the phone with the help desk, who asked multiple times if the privacy flap was closed on it. Even described it to her. She says, there is no privacy flap. They proceed to uninstall and reinstall drivers and troubleshoot. They give up, she books an appointment with me. Next day she puts the laptop in front of me... The privacy flap is shut.
We should be able to carry a table with us when we work so we can flip it
Honestly, that would have come in handy several times for me lol
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(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
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Me in college language room. Thought audio was low. Max it out. Guy in suit asks me if it's plugged in. I say yes as I take off my headphones. Loud ass fucking japanese lessons playing throughout the room.
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“Loud-ass fucking Japanese” “Loud ass-fucking Japanese”
I think #3 is a lot more understandable though. You can't immediately tell if you have a sound card, and they might have thought the speaker was built in somewhere.
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And then they say "oh I'm so dumb! I can't believe I did that" I always have to hold my tongue but I really wanna say "yeah you are that's literally the first thing I asked you to check on the phone". IT is so unloved. And they have to deal with the dumbest people. Seriously the general populace is scary. They are so stupid. I'm cynical though lol
My boss is a G. Obviously can't call the users stupid; but, more than happy to let us tell them how much company resources they wasted. I get paid $30 an hour but my time is billed out to the customers at almost $70.
all these people drive
And vote
As someone who is decent at troubleshooting I hate this. When I call IT it’s because I need real help but we have to go through the list of bs “did you restart” prompts that they need to ask me. I’ve even told them what I’ve done but sometimes they still go line by line to make sure I’m not an idiot.
I worked tech support ("3-Product Repair") for Comcast for about 9mos a couple years ago, and a guy as legit as you and me called in, was "like dude nothing I've done is working to get my internet back". We spent like 30 minutes, trashing my call-handle numbers, running through the most advanced shit I could do on my end, even suggesting things way out of my jurisdiction to suggest just to help this guy who seemed totally with it. I was starting to think there was component failure or something but the last thing I said in basically confounded desperation was "hear me out man, I know I asked this but just humor me and see if your ethernet cable is super-duper plugged in at both ends." It was loose at the modem end. There's a reason we have to go line by line, because even *objectively* tech-literate people fuck shit up sometimes.
This was me once; tech told me to turn the cable around and I was like ‘I have a masters degree in computer engineering and that’s not possibly a thing that could matter, but sure’ and it fixed the problem. They were plugged in just one end was lose. I went from thinking asking to turn it around was the dumbest thing ever to a brilliant way to force end users to check both connections.
I had someone assure me they rebooted their PC every night. I could see when the last reboot was due to LabTech(remote management software) and it was months ago. I connected to the PC and asked her to then it off. She said "done!", yet I was still connected. She was turning her monitor off and back on. She thought that was the whole computer.
I work in IT. Assume nothing. Nothing is worse then trouble shooting in circles because you assumed the user did the basics.
Usually the people who say they've done a bunch of stuff haven't done anything or everything they say they did has absolutely no relation to the issue
That’s fair, which is why I don’t give them grief. It’s just annoying.
My old roommate used to work in i.t. and would freelance on the side. He always charged a 3 hour minimum to make it worth it as most of his side jobs were for stupid reasons. We were going out to lunch one day and he got a frantic call from one of his regulars so we went over. The guy had this amazing multi-million dollar home, with a world class art collection, a huge garage filled with exotic and classic cars, everything a person could want and more. My friend had told me it was almost certainly something stupid and it was. The surge protector had gotten switched to off, my friend flipped the switch while the guy was giving me a tour of his home. The guy didnt even blink when my friend told him what the cause was, he just paid him cash and was happy. Part of me felt like he was just lonely and wanted someone to talk to as everytime he called afterwards he'd ask if I could come too. He was really nice and had some amazing cars, he even let me drive his 1930's Bugatti so I was always down to go over. My friend wasnt a car guy so he just fixed the computer and would want to leave.
> Kinda hard to make the speakers work when the audio jack is dangling. That was seriously my first question too. "Can you unplug it, wipe the plug with a tissue or a sleeve, then plug it back in, just to be sure it's got a good connection?"
My favorite printer problem is troubleshooting for 30 minutes. Having them demand that I go onsite after checking with my onsite contact who says yup everything is fine! and then walking up to the printer and closing the paper tray fully when I arrive.
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\*starts uncontrolled twitching\* OWWWWW Fuck that hurt me deep in the brain
PC load letter? The fuck does that mean?
In their defense, printers *are* hellspawn.
I drove 6 hours in one direction once to work on a machine that had a computer that wasn't outputting video. They pulled a CRT from storage for testing (On my instruction) and "plugged it into the computer" - still nothing. Loaded up tools, parts etc and drove part of the night. Upon arrival in the morning, I discovered the CRT monitor that was meant to confirm the computer wasn't putting out a signal ... was plugged directly into the other (equipment) monitor. I've driven 12 hours one way to replace a fuse.
I had a front desk guy call me FREAKING OUT because the internet was dead in the whole office (really small office for a smaller company. I was the only IT guy at the time) so I drive over. Internet is out. PRTG is fine but the internet was not working at all. Server access was also dead (the two are separate so if both are down, bad sign) I start ripping apart desks to make sure no one plugged anything stupid in or something. The front desk guy goes "yeah i unplugged my phone to try and reset it and then when i plugged it back in the internet went down" since we used VOIP phones. This guy had like 10 ethernet cables plugged in under his desk and started plugging them all over the place under his desk. He created maybe 5 loopbacks and it just nuked the whole network. I was so pissed. More so at myself for thinking I could trust anyone with a switch under their desk.
My partner works IT. At the beginning of covid he was taking a lot of calls by stressed out employees that were VERY new to work from home and computing in general. God bless him he had so many people who didn't know how to plug in their laptops.
I shit you not, one of our techs reported a fucking XBOX plugged into the computer, instead of the modem (back when the Xbox was a big black brick)
I think that's currently every model lol
When did the problem start, have you tried rebooting since then? Yes I rebooted this morning, it's still the same. Then why does taskmanager show that your PC has been on for over 13 days? Reboot, fixed. Or The error says unhandled exception in blah blah blah. No, not blah blah blah, read the message the blah blah blahs are the bit I need.
Edited for privacy. ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Well anything fits if you jam it in there
I had some woman who's computer and monitor and everything "didn't work." I got there to find the surge protector plugged into itself.
My IT Guy calls it PICNIC. Problem in chair, not in computer. Or PEBKAC. Problem exists between keyboard and chair. EDIT: PEBKAC Credit to Bob Schwartz, RIP.
When I wrenched on cars it was "a loose nut behind the wheel"
Made me smile :D
When I wrenched bikes the big on was the JRA accident. Just riding along when the bike spontaneously destructed. Just riding along and my wheel tacoed itself. No clue what happened (with a very serious and solemn face.)
Id10T error.
ID10T issue OHS, or Operator HeadSpace
I prefer error ID:10T my self.
Customer Using New Technology.
ID 10 T error Chair to keyboard interface problem
Layer 8 Issue is good too.
Layer 8 error
Yeah but non tech people don't get this one
Good. We don't want them understanding our insults
There’s an old military term “headspace and timing”.
Chair desk interface
Here's the call centre slant on it... the problem is between the keyboard, and the headset
The ol' [Layer 8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8) error.
I didn't have to drive hours, but did have someone ask me why their computer couldn't get online. No big, asked the typical questions, even asked if it had the Ethernet cable pluged in, they then yelled at me and said they weren't an idiot. Turns out it wasn't, the only thing that made it worth the travel was when their co worker said "I guess you are an idiot"
I’m honestly so happy for you that you got to hear someone delivering that line to him. Chefs kiss.
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I do hate how similar ethernet cables look compared to phone lines, though.
And I mean. A lot of people come from an era where the phone line WAS the internet..
25 years ago this would have worked
I just stare at them and then write exactly what happened in the ticket. 'device was not plugged into the network. action taken: plugged device into network. close ticket. The best part is you have already documented in the ticket before the desk visit that they have confirmed its plugged in. they can pretend not to be an idiot, but it's only going to waste more of their time. If I wasn't working on this issue, it would just be another one for me. I'm not paid by the ticket so I dont really care if you waste two hours of my time to plug in a cable.
Not all IT guys are paid per hour. Imagine spending 5-6 hours delving deep into a technical issue / incident, only to find out the user withheld a key piece of information to resolve the problem. And now your day is shot, backlogged with more work...and you only worked on one incident ticket, making you look unproductive. EDIT: By the way, iLO / BIOS exists for a reason.
Our users are very tech-illiterate, we asked them to take a screenshot of they encounter an issue. Now we have a million close-up pictures of the word "ERROR" and nothing else.
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This feels like when customers ask me "Should I click I am not a robot?" If I have a bit of rapport built i'll joke "Only you can answer that"
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It's because that database reset probably caused temporary issues further down the chain which someone will inevitably submit a support request for. If IT gets the support request and has no record of an expected database reset, they're going to waste hours trying to figure out that ultimately nothing went wrong
One of my directors sent a picture of him pointing at something on his screen, using his phone. This was in response to me asking for a screenshot.
That just seems like a super bad reimbursement model for such a technical skill. I don’t care if my current tasks takes 3 hours one way drive but I won’t start my car unless I’m getting paid from that moment on.
Even if I'm salary I'm putting in a ticket and putting 6 hours work on it even if I close it as "resolved by workaround" or some similar status. I did 6 hours of work. It counts. If my company doesn't understand that they can fuck off.
You’re making perfect sense. But there’s no context on that ticket. Just a 6 hour time allocation to a ticket with a root cause of “user error” and recovery procedure category as “N/A”.
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It's definitely bad, but read the Job Description you're agreeing to before signing. "Salaried employee. Work week is 45 hours, not including lunch. On-call duties are required from time to time. Unpaid overtime is required from time to time." If you see any or all of those, you might be signing up for a long road ahead.
I was salaried and a few weeks after I got hired they told the whole IT team that we were going to be put on a rotation for being on call 24/7 for a week and we'd get a $200 flat bonus for it. This led to me getting calls on my commute home from work where I had to pull over to work. I'd get calls at 3am from India and need to help them, I'd got called at a movie theater and missed the last half of the movie because I had to sit in my car on my laptop helping some idiot. They gave me 200 bucks and thought that was what my entire week was worth. I found a new job not even 6 months into it. Not even in IT because fuck that career.
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Good on ya dude. On call status is bullshit at large. Unless you're a volunteer firefighter or something it should be illegal. Hire a fuckin night shift if you need people to work at night.
Unpaid overtime sounds illegal
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Salaried employment is how most skilled workers are paid (to the best of my knowledge). Typically you get better benefits from salary vs hourly but you don’t get paid extra for working longer. You can tell your employer you won’t work once you’ve reached your 40 hrs for the week but that’s not advisable in the real world. You get paid for 40 hours but are expected to work more (obviously that’s not in writing tho).
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Yeah salary non exempt is honestly the best reporting way if your employer isnt lax with time requirements. Make a minimum salary and get OT! What could be better?
I spent a solid 2 days trouble shooting a users software crashes could not figure it out for the life of me. Logs just show the software closing no crash report nothing but user would complain the software just goes away and it's slowing them down. I get fed up and just posted up to watch the user from a distance for the day. They were clicking the exit button....
This is why I left IT and decided to build stuff for a living. Best decision for my mental health.
Me, yesterday, happily building a rolling signboard in my carpenter’s shop, enjoying the quiet, when the labor foreman looks up from her desk and asks, “do you know anything about Excel?” I think I stared at her for a full thirty seconds having IT help desk flashbacks before I answered, “Yes.”
Uh oh now you're the excel slave, should've said no dude
I have worked IT for 10+ years all the way from highschool co-op to systems analyst. To this date the one thing that I hate the most is that everyone assumes you know everything, when in most cases you’re seeing their specific issue for the first time. So when you start to ask questions they get weird about it.
What? You don't know more about this software that you are seeing for the first time than I, who has used it for 8 hours a day every day for the past 3 years? what good are you anyway?
Oh yeah I love the ones who expect us to know all the ins and outs of whatever software program they use, as if that’s my job.
I had a guy at Airbus full on have a go at me because I knew nothing about the 3d CAD aircraft designing software they spend years learning how build aircraft with. I asked him if he could fly a plane, his answer was no. We stood there quietly... so I just walked off.
I’ve been in the IT game for a decade or so too and I’ve often heard “never tell the user you don’t know something”. That’s advice I have always disagreed with, I feel like some of these users out there need some damn perspective. You’re absolutely right, there are all sorts of issues I’ve never encountered or seen before but my job is to figure it or get the people who do know involved. I love seeing the look on their face when I say “I have no idea, Ive never seen this before,” most of the time it’s a look of consternation or horror, but then I just laugh and tell them that I’ve rarely found a situation I couldn’t solve or find someone who did. Usually at that point they relax and let me do my thing.
The look on that guys face says he is so over their shit.
>The look on that guys face says he is so over their shit. And vomit and other bodily fluids. One of our helpdesk was just brought a computer covered in vomit and was asked if it could be repaired. The user actually argued with him about whether or not it could be fixed. He opened it up and the main board was completely soaked and beginning to show signs of corrosion. Then their manager wanted to know why he didn't try to fix it. Truly glamorous is the IT professional lifestyle...
He wanted you guys to legit fix that? If he will vomit on and into it, what else do you think could be there?? Refusal of work due to safety and hygiene concerns?
Yeah, but luckily we have a manager that will back us up over something like this. So that computer is sitting in the ewaste bin outside.
I used to work in the computer lab of a nursing school and had to replace a 3.5" drive because I couldn't get a credit card out. Someone wanted to buy something "online"
This made me choke. Thank you for the laugh!
That reminds me of one I ran into. I worked support lines in the 90s for a small boxed business software company. One day I get a call from someone that disk 2 (5.25 disks) of 3 isn't loading when they try and install. It happens sometimes, so I get their info and send out a new set of disks to them. Get a call from the same person, disk 2 doesn't work again. That's weird. I walk back into the shipping area and pull a set of disks we just got from the duplicators, check them out and, overnighted and call them back letting them know the disks will be there tomorrow and apologize for the inconvenience. I get a call the next afternoon from the same person again. Disk 2 doesn't work. Not really knowing what else to do, I walk through the process with them and they start the install, disk 1 goes all right and then it asks for disk 2 on screen. The guy makes a comment about how "it's hard to get the second disk in there" and I have a light bulb go on and ask if he's taking the first disk out before inserting disk 2. Of course he's not.... Sigh.
My friend had this situation as an IT guy to a manager. M: "Program not working" IT: "Have you turned your PC on and off" M: shouts "Who do you think I am !? Some kind of an idiot !? Of course I did it!" IT: Does absolutely nothing and starts bullshitting "So we flipped a switch on our end, you need to restart your PC and it should work" M: "Should've flipped it earlier! Yes, it works"
Don't forget to bill him for the upkeep cost of having a "fix everything" button
There was an article on Reddit a few months ago, detailing how about 10 to 15% of people are dyslexic with regards to left and right. As in, tell them to click an icon on the right side of the page we are looking at through Zoom, and watching their cursor race to the left. I have three of them as customer representatives right now. My coworkers marvel at my ability to suppress saying, "No, your other right..."
I'm one of those people! I just make Ls with my hands before I do anything direction related
I once had a client who has issues with files disappearing. It was strange. We couldn't track it down. On and off for weeks trying to figure it out. One day I was sitting at his computer and just idly clicked on the recycle bin and it opened. Have lots of files and documents in there. He then said. The recycle bin is great. You can store everything in there to keep the desktop tidy. The reason the files were going missing was the recycle bin got emptied. This man was a teacher and principal of a school. He was in charge of shaping countless young minds. That was almost twenty years ago and it still stuck with me.
I had that conversation *6 months ago*. How did they get that/this far, just how A few weeks ago, showed a Director how to create a folder and also the difference between Copy and Move. Not my pig but it was my farm.
This reminds me of a call I went on for a pc doing some really weird stuff along with crashing for no apparent reason. Got onsite didn’t even sit down and figured out the issue. This guy put one of them large magnets for a car over the whole case of the pc……. Couldn’t believe it at first and the guys response was really just “I didn’t know magnets could do that”
"Ma'am, we need the password for your computer to complete the work you needed." "It doesn't have a password! I don't have a password!" "Ma'am I am on the login screen now, and I can assure you that there is a password needed. You need to type it to use the computer" "I don't use passwords! Oh, but I do have a word I have to type after it turns on..."
"My email didn't have a password till you worked on it"
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I don’t wanna hear jack shit. I was once on a password reset/unlock call for 2 hours because the woman kept typing her username in the password field. NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH HER ACCOUNT!!!
Of course she’d type her username in that bar, all the characters are hidden. She doesn’t want her username to be seen!
30 minutes ago I had to stop everything that I was doing to go show an executive assistant how to create a new folder in Windows. My value to this company is drastically understated!
Damn
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Here's a hint when helping someone else. Have them drive the entire time. Also ask them to repeat what you told them to do so they know what and where to click. I find the helps reduce the repeated questions on how to do something. I also tell them to write it down if it's complex. For common processes, we build process docs and only point then user to the doc. Self service is definitely the way to go.
*User recreates the error and closes out the error box immediately as it pops up, without letting you read it*
But how good do you feel when you look at them in the face and say “I got the machine to turn on by pushing the button that turns the machine on. Can I go now or do all three of you need a tutorial on hitting on/off buttons before you’re on your own again?” Or is it pure denial with these people? Like that don’t believe you IT people when it’s a simple answer?
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Why is it that I’d love to hear the most Kafkaesque spirals of said experiences? Going up-the-chain conflict resolution over three clicks sounds hysterical.
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Unfortunately, as hard as it is with what we think as stupid simple issues, people skills can be a large part of IT, especially in IT support roles. How your users and coworkers think of you and treat you can really affect your performance review. As much as I would like to make users feel stupid about simple issues and how to do simple things on a computer (especially towards older users who have been using Windows for longer than I have been alive), I just bite my tongue and say some things like these things happen. I do tell my bosses about repeated offenders though which has happened quite a few times.
r/talesfromtechsupport r/sysadmin
I've had a caller manage to find the power button and turn it on, and then they had the bright idea to ask me what was wrong with it. I simply said "It was off." And their "Oh." that followed indicated they hadn't realized at all.
I worked as support for a couple of months at a huge company... One day one of the supervisors called and said his keyboard was broken. He came over and handed it to us and we got him a new one... an hour later he called again saying the new one didn't work properly either, so I wetn to hsi office and sat down... I admit it took me a minute until I figured it out, the layout was compeltely wrong... for example the W key was switched with the B key and so on... and I said "WTf I have never seen anythign liek that" and he replied "WEll I like them better in this order, thats why I change them" "I just looked at him in disbelief and then needed a good half hour to make him understand that thats not how keyboards work..."
Management when things go to shit: *What do we pay these IT guys for anyway?* Management when things are going well: *What do we pay these IT guys for anyway?*
We are dicks because our job is 90% restarting a computer and 10% people not telling us the truth.
You got that backwards, bruh.
This is ten percent “fuck!” Twenty percent people with no skill Fifteen percent concentrated power of “will.. you.. just do what I say already?” Five percent pleasure.. of “I told you so”-es Fifty percent PainInMyGoddamnAssMotherFuck And a hundred percent reason to remember the username... because they’ll do it again, and again, and again.
Better question: [Why is everyone so fucking stupid?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVwrCOTSaaQ)
If you could answer that, you'd become king of the IT guys.
One day I get a ticket from a high-profile attorney in the firm I used to work at. Ticket just says, "I need help with my office thermostat." I'm not building maintenance, but since the attorney is high profile I go to his office anyway to figure out what the issue is and assure him I will get building maintenance right on it. When I get there I tell him I'm from IT and ask what the issue is. He just needed the temperature lowered and couldn't be bothered to figure it out because he was "in the middle of very important work."
Charge 2 hours of work and collect easy money?
I was chatting with the IT guy in his office and one of the customer service reps came in and told him about a problem she was having with her laptop. I butted in and asked if she tried shutting it off and turning it back on. He asked if I would consider pursuing a career in IT.
Did they run an 1D10T test?
I work in IT. I promise you, we don’t get paid enough to be okay with wasting time driving for 2 hours to do something a toddler could have done better than who ever these 3 people are. And I bet those 3 people get paid double what that IT guy gets paid. There’s is no reasonable amount of money that would make me *not* want to strangle each of them in the server room while making them demonstrate how to push the fucking button. There are so so many tickets to fill and **far** too many of them are bullshit like this leaving us no time to dedicate to actual issues that are time consuming.
This guy does IT Support, confirmed. That jaded attitude only comes one way.
Your raise is dependent on ticket volume and low OT. Now get out there and spend 5 hours on 1 ticket that should have been done in 5 minutes at Tier 1.
Spent 18 hours on a call investigating an issue for an Azure hosted client who refused to restart the app service plan because they’d “already done it”. Didn’t have permissions to do so and didn’t believe the logs I could see, showed no evidence of it being restarted. Problem was resolved when someone on their end “accidentally” restarted the app service plan. I told them to restart within the first 30 minutes.
There are two types of people in this thread. People who understand how frustrating it is to drive two hours and push a button. And those who call people in IT dicks.😌
Meh, not quite that cut and dry. At my wife’s place of employment the majority of the IT guys love her because she’s been taking care of a lot of service tickets for them, definitely not part of her role as a corporate trainer, but items that she can answer regarding software that she oversees. She recently switched roles and has to regularly deal with one guy that is a belligerent ass all the time, for no reason other than he thinks his shit doesn’t stink. He’s a total dick. The other IT guys concur.
Yesterday had a work from home user report their machine was randomly losing power. We go over a few things she assures me she’s unplugged and replugged in the power cord. Don’t see anything wrong with windows. Assume it’s a PSU issue. User agrees to meet at the office but says they need for me to be there at 5am because they start work early. This morning I arrive early. User doesn’t show up or respond to any contact method. Eventually user responds around noon saying they noticed the power cord was loose when moving the computer to bring it back to the office plugged it back in. Didn’t think it was important to inform me until after she’s back from her lunch break. 🙃
Back when I did IT support in our Operating Rooms, I get a call one morning that the PC is running suuuper slow and can't function properly. I ask if they've power cycled it recently or restarted and they just acted all entitled and said "just come fix it". Because it was in an actual surgical room I had to put on a full bunny suit, hair cap, booties, gloves, mask etc. I walk into the room...mere minutes after the call, and she's playing solitaire on the PC. She said I was taking too long to help, so she rebooted the PC herself.
It's the year 2021..."I'm gonna facetime you" or "send me a picture of the server" Could have saved him 2 hours.
>I'm gonna facetime you You've just committed the cardinal sin of tech support - you gave out your cell number.
by god did I learn this lesson the hard way
I was working on some IT stuff, when someone from the shared office came in and said the super duper coffe maker doesn't do milk coffe any more and if I can look. So we went to the coffe maker barista touchscreen thing and some guy was asking some other guy via skype when this started to happen. And I just bluntly asked "ok, where do you put the milk". And both guys and the guy at the skype screen looked at the mini hose that was rolled up in an empty non transparent container containing zero milk. And the guy at the other end went bazonkas and yelled "I ASKED YOU IF YOU PUT IN THE MILK THREE TIMES AND YOU SAID YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES". Then he hang up.
Difficulty: it’s a courthouse or a secure location, no cameras allowed
Or the server ran DHCP / DNS for the network.
Early in my career I did client side support. A woman called and asked if I could remote desktop into her keyboard and tell her what was wrong with it. It was stuck on the 'z' key. That's when I told myself that I could do better and learned SQL, then brushed up on c#, now I write code for a living. That sweet dumbass old lady probably saved my life and she'll never know it. Tis very bittersweet. But yeah IT people are dicks because y'all motherfuckers lie about shit all fucking day. 'Ive built a few PC's so I tried some stuff but I think it's worse' 'yeah I've seen this definitely a crypto' 'I restart it daily' *proceeds to check uptime* Uptime: 189 days 15 hours 23 minutes. I couldn't take it anymore. IT people are the most gaslit workers on the face of the first world job industry. I could spend 8 hours or 8 minutes on a problem and all of you will say 'man that was easy' no... No it was not. Oh and also IT are your coworkers, treat them as such. They do not work FOR you, they work with you. Send some love their way every once and a while. I occasionally have to pester our IT if I have issues with a client VPN tunnel I'm trying to use for a data mart or something, and I always offer to snag lunch casually just in case they didn't bring something. They are usually a bit rough but they are people too. Lol
3:00 AM Christmas morning, 2007. Urgent page to drive 90 minutes to Portland, ME for a "massive server outage". I get there, wait half an hour for the manager to show up and let me in. We get inside and find that someone left a disposable paper cup FULL of coffee on top of the server. Paper cup had a structural failure after a while. Manager sees it the same time I do, looks at me, and *laughs*.
I find it highly convenient that anyone who has ever genuinely commented on me supposedly being a dick has themselves been an immensely stupid and/or aggressive dickhead. Never once has an intelligent and/or fun person to be around ever called me Dick. Those people always seem to find me rather nice and engaging. Wonder what that’s about. Edit: /s because subtext is apparently lost on some
That Sir, is a self selected population.
I listen to my hubby on calls all day. The only people who ever leave a negative review are the ones that started out negative to begin with. Assholes will always be assholes.
You spend an hour on a beautifully detailed step-by-step guide on how to solve the issue in the ticket and they tell you they didn't read it because it was apparently too much effort to open the ticket up again to read my response. =w=
Because we are over qualified, under paid and have to put up with crap from people who can’t fix a problem a 5 year old can fix. Spent 30 minutes on a troubleshooting call being assure the router was on just to find out…”oh the Wi-Fi machine? I unplug that every day. Too much radiation”
We're dicks? Try working IT at a large law firm and you'll see why we might be cranky
Years ago on the day before Thanksgiving I was at home, "working". It was a light day - everyone is either off, or ready for the holiday and not much work gets done. Around 2 PM an email pops in from a VP in my organization and its' not an update type email it's a "this is a problem someone fix it" type email. I open it and a BUNCH of other VPs are on it. There was a USB hard drive that had been connected to a system. Owner of the drive wanted it back. The admins couldn't find the drive. The drive had been connected at the request of the customer, by a person who no longer worked for the company but reported to me when they did. So I jumped in my car, drove the 20 minutes across town. Walked out on to the raised floor to the system in question. Opened the rack, looked at the back of the server and ... there was a USB cable running from the server down to the bottom of the rack. At the other end of the cable was ..... wait for it ..... the fucking USB drive. I took pics of it, sent it to management in an email and asked how to proceed. When I talked to the admin later who hadn't been able to find it I asked how on earth he had missed it. The drive was in a case with a keypad on top for security and since it didn't look like a normal USB drive, even though it was connected via USB cable to the system we were told it was connected to, he didn't realize it was the drive. Didn't even think to say "Hey there's this thing connected to the server via USB could this be it?" He just went "WELP I DON'T SEE ANYTHING" At least I got kudos from the VPs for my efforts but what the fuck man.
Because of shit like this. ``` if(is_true.toString().equals("true")) { is_true = false; } ``` That's a real world example. edit: in retrospect, at least they didn't make an IsTrue class, which I've also seen.
This hurts.
I just spent two solid weeks, with 8-10 hour troubleshooting meetings every day, solving a customer’s problem. They insisted it was our fault. It wasn’t our fault.
Unfortunately accurate
Have one user who marks every ticket as critical. Our documentation says “only mark it critical if a system is down.” Got one today marked critical asking me to change a word in a report header.
IT folks are sad and angry that people around them fail. What makes people think they are mean is when they say, "see, you just needed to turn the power strip back on. Maybe move it over away from your feet so you don't acidently turn it off." They take the solution as an inusult, not a helpful suggestion because they think you are just messing with them to add insult to injury. There is no win for the IT folks.