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
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
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.
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.
"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.
I drove 5 hours across two states to unplug a fax machine and plug in the signage. They assured me they hadn't touched the phone line before I even left. I could only bill for the time I was there and the pay per mile was abysmal.
10 hours of my life I'll never get back.
don't worry, I took my crimping tool and shattered their tip of the line for the fax machine. The company I worked for only supported the signage. when they called to complain that I broke it I simply said, "It was like that when I got there. someone must have stepped on it."
fuck lying shit-ass users. don't fuck with IT.
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.
Oh man I was expecting it to have been plugged into a switched outlet or something
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.
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 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.
"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 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 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?
other what?
Likely other line of work
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.
I feel like I'm somewhere on this graph, elaborate
Also because you waited until Friday at 16:53, DM'd me with no details instead of logging a ticket, lied about the business impact, and didn't ~~RTFM~~ ~~Google search~~ ask Gemini/ChatGPT beforehand.
[Updated for 2025]
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.
In their defense sometimes it's hard to tell if a rack server is on from a layman's perspective. They are in a rack with other machines so it can be loud and then will still have lit LEDs front and back.
And now we can't tell them to bring their cell into the DC for a facetime, and that's just no good.
More than that, people ( or their offices) are dirty. Never saw so much dust in my life.
I’m sure if I had serviced server rooms it would have been better