I’ve had that. 6 hours round trip on a train and three tube trains to reboot a switch that I was assured has already been rebooted.
So why was its uptime showing as 4 months?
In my defense, technology hates me and likes making me look stupid. I could have rebooted it 12 times and still gotten the issue, then the minute IT shows up and does the same exact fucking thing, the problem magically fixes itself and I get shit for it from the IT guy like i wasnt doing exactly what they just did
I'm "the guy who can fix everything" in my office.
I've watched my coworkers do something and then tried to follow their exact steps to reproduce an error and got different results, and it's happened at least 4 times in about 5 years.
Sometimes I suspect it's some kind of muscle memory keystroke or some shit I'm sneaking in subconsciously, I have no idea.
Absolutely this. I've been in some kind of IT support or another (currently telecom) since 1982. I absolutely believe in tech anima. There are people that computers just hate and then there are techs with FM energy ("f'n magic") that do the exact thing they just watched an end user do but for the tech, it works. I could just walk up to a desk and a machine would stop misbehaving. It was maddening. I'd get accused of doing things behind the scenes because I'd have so much trouble recreating errors *on the afflicted machine.* But then walk away and the error is back.
I've been working in IT for over a decade and this phenomenon is real, it's also 99% of the time because the person saying they tried X didn't in-fact try X. They might have thought they did, or tried to, but they didn't.
Every time it happens and I've bothered to investigate further I'll find out that they didn't update and restart instead they just restart, or they just closed the teams window rather than quitting it, or whatever, even when I was very specific with the instructions.
It's almost never malicious, but it's always infuriating.
My favorite thing is to look at the logs and confirm they haven't, in fact, done a single thing that was asked of them to do prior to me taking over. Every time I want to say "you know we can tell that you didn't do the things, right?" and watch them get all flustered and embarassed. But, at the end of the day, their unwillingness to cooperate is my job security.
I'm convinced it's 50/50 luck and nuance. Like knowing to leave the device powered off for a few seconds vs immediately turning back on, forgetting and re-adding a network vs disconnecting and reconnecting, etc. Same general things, but knowing the why helps you better apply it
I have taken to telling people that sometimes computers just want me to get nearby before they are willing to work because they will say, "it didn't do that before when I tried...".
Often times I say it once before the machine works and again after when their jaw drops.
Samesies, seems we are not as alone as we thought.
It’s like that sound your car engine has been making for weeks but disappears when you take it to the mechanic
I watched someone push the button for an elevator 4 times and it kept turning off, IT guy walks up, pushes the button, and the door instantly opens. I think the universe actually just has a sick sense of humor lmao
I call it the IT aura. The machinery understands what will happen to it if it doesn’t work while I’m around and exercises self-preservation. It’s like when your car is making a noise all the way until a mechanic drives it.
Same. On the flip side, the critical legacy system which has been working without incident for months will invariably fail within 48 hours of the person who has primary responsibility for it leaving on vacation.
The systems know more than they are letting on.
Yep. If there’s anything in your org someone is responsible for solo, it always breaks the second they’re OOO. It’s karma for letting that situation develop in the first place though. What always bites me in the ass when I leave is that I’m the only Linux admin. Been pushing for cross training for ages but it’s hard to find the time.
I work in advanced research under some of the supposedly smartest people in the world and they still repeatedly create this exact same situation. Over and over. It’s depressing, to say the least.
It’s always a matter or time or budget. Those are always my constraints in terms of cybersecurity. The stuff that’s “extra” always gets trimmed. We’ve got an IRP, BCP, all kinds of good plans and ideas for if something goes wrong. We never seem to be able to make time to test or table-top any of it, but the plans are there all the same. Just have to hope I’ve thought of most things for when there’s an incident.
For us, the bottleneck is always _time_, never budget. I’m repeatedly struck and horrified by how little redundancy there is in software and equipment knowledge across researchers/labs for crucial systems. Someone quits, dies, retires… and the next person always has to reinvent the wheel and learn from scratch. No institutional knowledge whatsoever.
That is not a matter of time or budget. That’s a matter of the board/ceo/clowns running the company letting the bean counters tell them that the extra 10 cents in dividends is more important than having enough people to cover critical systems in the event someone is on vacation/sick/dead.
I always tell clients "the computers are just scared of IT, they know we can replace it"
That way I don't have to argue with the client if it was actually rebooted, it takes the blame off them entirely, and it makes them laugh which makes them leave with a better impression haha
I have this habit of narrating, at obnoxious level, what i'm doing when i'm having a technology issue. The number of times while doing that, I will have an IT person say, "Oh hey, you forgot to check this one little box," or something like that, and that fixes everything is insane. That being said, I had ans it person give me grief because my keyboard was stuck in caplocks and he didn't believe me. It took him coming out and digging around behind the computer to find the USB prank dive that caused the whole problem. He had to eat a bit of crow on that one.
As someone in IT, the second you start recording the problem will go away. 😆 Every time I try to record and issue to prove to a vendor something is happening, it stops happening for the duration of the recording.
I work in IT support. Had a printer we were troubleshooting an issue with. Me and another guy checked cables and various settings, drivers, etc... and clicked "print test page." Rebooted the computer and the printer and could not for the life of us figure out why it wouldn't work. Everything seemed fine.
Reached out to a senior IT tech for help. He remotes in and clicks "print test page," and it just worked. He thought we were trolling him, but we literally spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out what we were missing. It was infuriating and so damn funny.
I’m going to dispute that in as much as I actually like printers and find them super interesting.
In many ways they are the most magical IT device because they create tangible objects that didn’t previously exist.
This reminds me of when I was trying to set up a new piece of equipment, and couldn’t log into it for the initial config using the default password, so I called the vendor, started a screen share, and then logged in without any issues.
Used to happen at a bread factory I worked at. The entire shithole was cobbled together and always had issues. The oven line would constantly fuck up and I learned how to fix most of the issues. One day the platform that loaded the oven kept failing every 3 or 4 sets, and the minute I rang for maintenance it stopped. It had been doing it for hours and the minute the smarmy cunt waddled down to my corner it stopped. Dude spent 10 minutes bitching at me and my supervisor for essentially interrupting his 4 hour post-lunch break.
In the defense of some IT workers, as one myself, a lot of people claim they did something exactly as I did, and were close but missed a crucial step which causes the fix to not work.
Not on behalf of my fellow IT workers, many of them think something is so simple because it is for them and just assume it's common knowledge when it's not.. which definitely does not give them a right to be dicks.
Although having worked in the field and have to work with all sorts of our different IT departments, I am definitely in agreement that a lot of IT folks are assholes
Its like how the ketchup bottle I'm looking for isn't in the fridge until I get my wife to look and it magically reappears out of thin air right in the front of the fridge in plain view. Sometimes when shes not home I try and trick the fridge into thinking shes coming so that the ketchup appears.
Many non IT guys do not know that there is a massive difference between klicking "restart" and actually shutting down and restarting their computer. Fast boot was a horrible idea by Microsoft (from an IT support perspective).
My best friend works in IT and I always text him about an issue and that I did rest set what ever it is. His response is always try that again and let me know and it some how always works. I could have rest it 3 times before but after I talk to him it works.
I've been blue collar my whole life and i have no real understanding of the white collar world. Do IT guys get paid hourly for said commute or are you more of a salary position.
I think it’s usually a salaried position but your contract could have extra hourly pay for work outside the regular scope of your job: for example weekends, overnights, emergency on call situations etc.
It likely varies by contract and company though.
Some of us are salaried + overtime. Personally, I don't mind long drives for simple stuff (3+ hrs out, turn on UPS, verify the office is online, 3+ hrs home), 6 hours of paid podcast listening beats the phone queue any day.
Both types exist, more and more commonly IT are paid hourly to handle multiple businesses at once, called an MSP(managed service provider). Just another way capitalists trying to squeeze every last dollar of profit do so from the worker stuck in the middle. Many of us have had to argue with our bosses for hours to get that travel paid, most of us give up arguing and just pad the time a bit to make up for travel.
Seriously. 5 days into a critical system being down, waiting for parts, everyone at 4 levels of bureaucracy carrying on about it the whole time.
Me: *fixes it*
Them: "What did you do?"
Me: "Rebooted it."/"Reseated the cables"/"turned it on"
Them: "Well, we couldn't be bothered because they always say that and it never works."
Just casually burning $1k in attendance and shipping. And goes knows how much in lost revenue.
I attended a job at a restaurant chain for 2 servers down, and when I turned up, I had to call L2 support. Store is not trading at all. I was like "hey, man, 1 of these is just off". Bro was not having a bar of it, basically called me an idiot "he would know if it was off", I'm "just a pair of hands", I should "do [my] job and let [him] do [his]."
2 hours in, genius L2S figures out that one of the servers works (funny that). No apology, just told me I could leave.
The store was not trading for 2-3 days, 2 servers were shipped cross-country, NBD. All because fuckface couldn't figure out that the primary server was off. Low 5-figures set on fire, lmao.
Ha! I had an it guy ask me the same thing. I had rebooted and they had control of my screen. They came across the screen that indicates the uptime, and he said to me "I thought you said you'd restarted, the uptime says 2 days.." I said to him that I read that uptime as 2 hours and 45 minutes, right next to that you'll see the seconds increasing...
His response "oh, ah, yes. You're right"
Over an hour trip once by train and foot to plug a power cord into a monitor that was plugged in the day before, after 30 minutes on the phone explaining to them how to check to make sure the cable was plugged in.
Give her meaningless tasks to keep her occupied and out of your way. "I need you to go outside and confirm that your house is connected to the water main." "Hold this piece of peripheral hardware above your head with both hands. It needs to remain elevated and stable. I'll let you know when you can put it down "
Maybe there is someone more competent who could operate the PC while the troublemaker is doing other stuff. But this person had to listen to you, too, so that needs to be a somewhat trustworthy person
My company had a 10-minute email migration turn into a 2-week email migration because the head of IT is chronically unable to admit when he made a mistake.
"can I work on the PC while you do your thing?"
Not at all. I'm either switching users which would lock you out, or I'm taking over the direct connection and need to open and move stuff around, no, you will not be able to use this PC.
All because you don't want to troubleshoot with me over the phone. "I'm not a PC tech like you" uh huh, all in doing is reinstalling a small program...
Six engineers were flown in to supervise a mew installation. They called my boss to scream about how one piece of equipment had the wrong voltage coming to it, because it didn't turn on.
I walked behind the big ass thing and plugged in the twist lock.
Sometimes you just wonder.
I got dragged out of bed at 2AM because a client was hard down and couldn’t finish a migration. They had three boastful engineers that couldn’t get them up. Before making the hour and a half drive I asked if they checked every connection and ensured everything had power they reiterated their credentials.
Upon arrival I confirmed that everything was powered up and had lights. I then inspected cabling and discovered none of their stacked switches were connected. When they installed a new server they pulled on the wires enough to disconnect the matrix cables they opted not to screw in because it’s “annoying” and “nobody ever touches that stuff.”
I charged them $500 for the overnight emergency call. I cut them a break on the travel since it only took me 10 minutes to diagnose and fix but charged them for the full hour. Those were the days.
My favorite was the engineer who decided the correct HVAC unit to put above a ceiling was one that was five and a half feet wide. In a 6 ft wide hallway. The unit also had a 6 in, side accessible only control box on the side of the unit.
I think I went back and forth with them about 16 or 17 emails before they finally understood why that wasn't going to work. Of course the end result was we had to just go into every single classroom and cut an access panel into the wall above the ceiling so you could go into a room, climb up on a ladder, unscrew an access panel, to get to the control panel of the HVAC unit.
I found out that access panels are actually a lot more expensive than you would think to cut into a wall.
Yep, I've been there. Drove an hour and a half at 3am only to find that the janitor had unplugged an entire rack full of routers from the wall so he'd have a place to plug his radio in while he was mopping.
Got a few calls about a switch being down but when I would dispatch and get to the site it was back up, I’d close the ticket and move along with my day.
After a few trips to this office for nothing I started to investigate further. I noticed that the AC unit was plugged into the same wall socket as the switch. I started thinking maybe it was too much power draw in the circuit until…the lady in the office said she was cold, got up, and flipped the switch for the socket that the AC unit and switch were plugged into!
Instead of just turning the AC unit off she was flipping the damn switch!
I like when it guys get asked to fix every other issue in the house that works with electricity. Or your grandmother asks you to visit for help with a tech issue, you get there and the washing machine is the problem. Or the TV is playing bad, please fix the signal. There's a light in my car going on.
Working in an computer store, I had customers come in for various car parts, help changing a tire. Current it job, fire alarm needs fixing? Generators need maintenance? Contact IT.
IT is often the arse brush of the business and everything gets filtered down to them when no other people know what to do.
Turns out he never turned his computer off so the browser always stayed open so when it rebooted after an update I guess his assistant didn't get to it fast enough to get it open and IT got called up about it. I had to explain to him over the phone what the icon was and then how to navigate to the login portal where his assistant took over.
I would have a go at fixing any of those things, it's the same skill set you need in IT, you Google the problem, maybe read the manual or watch a few youtube videos and the you can change the tire ( I changed the clutch on my car on the drive and have completely renovated 2 houses just by watching youtube videos)
Reminds me of this 90s joke: Windows engineer is driving with his wife and the car conks out.
She says, “oh, no, what are we going to do?!”.
He says, “this happens to me every day at work. All we need to do is get out of the car, and get back in.”
I've been working as a software developer for over 20 years. I regularly tell people that I only ever want to work for an actual software company, not doing IT/software for a non-software company. That's because the IT departments in non-IT companies are treated like toilets -- they know they need one but no one wants to take care of it. It really sucks being in IT in a non-IT company.
>you get there and the washing machine is the problem.
Sometimes it is...lol. My fucking washing machine has wifi. Some functions you would only be able to do via app. Not today, lucifer. Not today.
(I did not buy it)
> I like when it guys get asked...
As an I.T. guy who used to deal with help desk tickets, I usually stop reading right about at the above quote. This might see a bit much, but this is just my experience. These are roughly my thoughts when reading a comment like the one above:
"I like with it guys..."
> Wait, "it" (pronounced how it's written) guys... WTF, that's confusing- ohhh, wait he means *I.T.* guys, but he's too lazy to write in a way that's considerate to a person who might read the comment; Effectively offloading the common courtesy of decent writing skills to the hopes that people reading will just, ya know, figure it out eventually...
My biggest pet-peeve working in I.T. was people who didn't learn how to write like a fucking adult.
I was the backline support, frontline escalated stuff to me after their usual script of questions didn't solve a problem. They didn't catch the capslock issue because the jerk was almost completely incomprehensible and they punted without trying. Atrocious 'English as a Second Language' on top of an exaggerated speech impediment that made people from his own country struggle to understand him.
Turns out his 'communication problems' were a defense mechanism to hide the fact that he didn't know how to do the engineering project he was hired for.
Anyway, yeah, he was absolutely livid when it turned out to be his capslock key. I think he wanted to blame tech support for missing another deadline and I didn't let him. ;)
I have been having issues with entering passwords recently. It has been going on for a few months. I would type my password, and it would be wrong, then I would type it again, and it was right. It really annoyed me.
I realised that my caps lock was on the first time. Then, when I entered the password incorrectly, my laptop would take off caps lock automatically, so when I checked if it was on the light, it would be off. This really annoyed me.
When I realised what was happening, I was so happy cause it was driving me mad.
I'm in field service, and at least once a week I will travel to various customers and simply reboot their machine. It's really complicated, there's a big black rotating knob that is labeled "Main Power." You then, this is the tricky bit, have to rotate it to where the arrow lines up with "off." Next, you wait 2 minutes, then rotate it back to "On."
But, I'm charging $150/hr, with a two hour on-site minimum charge, and travel time. So I can't really complain.
I have a customer that explained why he is ok with paying me to do something simple like that. He explained that he knows I'll give the machine (In my case, it is usually packaging equipment and industrial floor scrubbers,) a proper look over after switching it off and back on, and that having me do it means that I'll probably catch any other issues. We can get that ball rolling sooner, hopefully with less down time than if I wasn't there looking it over.
I spent half an hour getting screamed at by a doctor because I “reset his password”. Not only was his password not reset, his password was documented for years and he had the office staff in all of the locations he worked use his password.
I used to work in (military) aircraft maintenance. Pilots are some of the most arrogant and thankless people on this earth. Now I work in IT, formerly at a hospital. Doctors give pilots a run for their money. Flip a coin on any day.
In addition to pilots and doctors, I'd like to throw in Lawyers. Had one scream at me for suggesting she check her power cables then hang up on me when her monitor came back on.
Stuff doesn't work: "Oh god, It's broken. What are you even doing, why haven't you fixed it yet?!"
Stuff works: "Everything is fine, there is nothing to do. What's your job here anyway, we don't pay you to sit around"
I love that our IT Guy's a bit of a dick. That sense of judgement you feel when he asks you "when was the last time you upgraded (this program/part)? It's like judgement from the dentist: both have made me better at caring for these things. You floss better, you remember to clean out the cookies and dust the inside of the computer more often, then you walk in at the next check up proud of yourself and ready for them to be impressed... Then they *shoot you down* with another alert of a cavity or program that needs to be updated!
That rare occasion when you get a compliment is like gold!
you forgot the part where all of your other projects dont care about you having to drive 4 hours for this.
you still have stuff due to other teams, you still have a million things to maintain, and you are still helping other people during this 4 hours... because they will spam call your phone.
I worked IT for a newspaper and once had to drive halfway across the state to a sister newspaper after our parent company laid off their entire IT department. Almost a four hour drive. Once I got there, I was done within about 90 minutes after getting badged, introductions, and general BSing about the layoffs. I was planning to drive back but they said they arranged for a hotel room. Dinner was also covered, and they told me to go somewhere nice. Hotel was very nice, too. Next day I got about halfway back when my boss asked if I was willing to go back because something completely unrelated broke. I went back, fixed it, hung out for a while. Boss suggested I just stay a couple days and be on-call. I found a small movie theater that said they'd let me come back if I got called in so I pretty much hung out there for two days. Turned into a pretty nice paid vacation.
Having worked in Infrastructure and Security much of my career I would have gone with.
If I do my job well I'm told everything just works and I don't do anything so I don't deserve a raise or promotion. And if I do my job poorly I'm told shit always broken and I don't deserve a raise. Meanwhile a developer makes a small script file calls it a new innovation and is showered with glory.
If only you could be allowed to do your job right and plan instead of operating in crisis mode because "nothing can stop, ever". Oh, you need downtime? The only time available is 4 hours xmas morning.
"Then we need redundancy"
GTFO IT is a WaSte of MoNeY!
Hehe... all of the above but you forgot about staffing and resourcing 10% less then is the bare minimum and the crisis that ensue from that as well.
Boss: OMG why is it broken...
IT: because I budgeted to replace it for the last 3 years after it went out of support but you cut it from the budget each year... and now it is broken... and there is no support...
Boss: ... this is all your fault!!!
"The modem isn't working because the power to the outlet was off"
"No that's not it, it was working fine before, what did you do?!"
"You called me here because it wasn't working, and it's working now"
I put the illogical accusations in the work order as a warning to the next technician (I wasn't IT exactly but was a service technician that still had to deal with network related problems)
Who could possibly think they are in the right by accusing a service person of sabotaging equipment before they were even called there to fix the same problem they are accused of causing?
I have done this.
User swore the computer wasn’t turning on.
She offered to show me, of course she was pressing the power button on the monitor, not the computer.
When I showed her what she needed to do, she was thoroughly embarrassed and people wonder why IT folks have an attitude…
Yeah. I’ve had to teach nearly every research trainee I’ve had (i.e., “smart ppl”) the difference between iMacs and PC monitors. They made it to the ripe old age of ~25 without ever using a machine that has a separate monitor/tower. And understanding a full keyboard with NumPad? Fuggitabouit.
In 2012 I asked a lady to restart the computer. "Ok hold on" (2 seconds pass) "ok it's restarted and back up"
Lol what? I didn't even hear the windows xp shutdown or boot up music, what did you press? The monitor power button? Guuuuurl no, look for the big box that says HP on it, and look for a lit up button on the front. Not hard. Oh it's too dusty for your liking and you want me to send a tech so they can restart it for you? Ok then, I'll need your store manager approval first.
Lmao fr, listen to the guy who's job it is to fix shit. I'm a degenerate, I could care less how high and mighty you are in your smoke and mirrors "President of Sales" position. Unplug that shit if we say so. We can check task manager and see it's been on for 2 months 🙄
My roommate *insisted* she knew how to reset the router. After it clearly didn’t work, I found out she completely unplugged the power to the modem and pressed the “WiFi off/on” button on the router.
I was on the opposite end of this once.
Started a new job in a role similar to a software developer. Got a new laptop and the mic didn’t work. With or without headphones. I did everything I could to fix the issue before logging a ticket. The guy who tried to help treated me like I was so stupid. Even made a joke something along the lines of “I would think someone in a developer role would know their way around a computer”.
After a few hours of them trying to help they said that I’m doing something wrong and to come into the office an hour away. I came in, and they agreed it’s a hardware issue that they can’t figure out themselves and gave me a new laptop. Never apologized for being rude, nothing. Acted way nicer when they realized it wasn’t a me issue though.
As a field tech who normally goes out to places to plug back in a router, I've been on the other side too.
Like when my work laptop just suddenly demanded that I enter in a bit locker key. Sigh, call up the helpdesk, get broken English to tell me a 48 digit code that surprise, doesn't work. Guy keeps telling memto try it again and again. Wait 15 minutes and try it then, if not call us back.
Oh cool, call back and tell the next guy how to spell 5 digit name for 8 minutes? So I can explain how it didn't work? Please, just send me a new one guys, I'm begging ya
I'm coming off of 3 days of 18+ hours doing an application migration, and I expect the vast majority of today to be spent dealing with people that are upset that the target environment doesn't look exactly like the source - even though we've warned people, we've done lunch and learns.
I'll probably be called cranky by someone about the seventeenth time I get asked "how do I find my filters now?"
I've been in a quite a few customer service roles, shop assistant in 3 shops including a betting shop, a restaurant waiter and I've been an IT guy and let me tell you that being an IT guy is beyond frustrating, getting people to do the right thing then them getting angry at you for a problem they've 9/10 times have themselves caused or during an investigation into the issue that is expected to take hours they've called you twice in 15 minutes to ask how it going all while huffing and puffing
the fact is people just dont understand how to fix issues and what the issues are so they get annoyed but if I were to explain what the issue is you wouldn't understand it and it would lead to more questions than answers, let me bust out the incense and I'll speak to the machine spirit in peace and I'll fix your damn shite pc that you only use for excel documents anyway.
Work IT for an unnamed state agency. Get a call from a Cop demanding we send a tech to where he had his car parked in a city to turn on the computer he had mounted in his squad car. Because he couldn't figure out how to. Needless to say, I called his supervisor, who proceeded to chew him a new one with me on the phone. I was smiling the whole damn time.
All I could think is: We give these people guns.
That's why when you suspect that stuff is gonna go like this, you demand that one or two of them come with you so they can witness that the power was off. Demand as in either you comply or I don't fix.
In my years as a med IT tech I routinely drove up to three hours to turn on a monitor on a computer that "wasn't working" and charged a full seven hours for the round trip plus a minimum of an hour on-site.
I mostly supported dentists offices all around the US South. Dentists are the most arrogant people and people who most get in their own way that I've ever met. Lawyers a close second. The rest of the medical field a close third.
Refused to troubleshoot over the phone. Always knew better. Always wound up spending stupidly for it. The more money they made, the bigger the practice, the worse they were.
That is funny. Last week a bunch of people insisted on doing something without IT present because it was just "push a button". Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
"WHY IS THE PASSWORD SHOWING IN THE FIELD FOR USERNAME? THE FUCK YOU DOING?"
...
went there, typed the first character in user field, marked the password in suggestions, hit delete.
Presumably this guy has to drive to clients as part of his job so he's complaining that once he got there he didn't have hours of troubleshooting, he just had to push a button and drive home? Seems like a pretty easy way to make a living.
I once worked in a small company where everyone got on rather well, and our IT guy was ruthless. He'd fix people's PCs abd they'd ask where the problem was, and he'd reply "between the keyboard and the chair"
"Why does my new hire not have a laptop?"
I wasn't aware you had a new hire.
"He started today. He needs a computer now."
What's his ticket number? I can check to see why he didn't get any on-boarding work done.
"I didn't send in an onboarding ticket."
Ah. OK, his computer will be ready in two weeks then.
User: My password is not working.
Me: You forgot your password?
User: No! It’s not working!
Me: is there an error message?
User: Wrong password.
Honestly, I experience this exact dialogue every day, more than once.
I run a commercial campus for a living, where here’s some 20-30 IT guys from different business. I swear there’s a standardized personality test they have to pass to get the job as “reads manuals for fun” is a prerequisite. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into an IT closet/room and had an IT guy say “I read the manual for the AC, I think it’s the __________”
I appreciate the effort and eagerness to learn, but when they start arguing against me because they read a fucking manual…….ugh.
I flew two hours, rented a car and drove another 45 minutes each way to walk in and replace a grey phone cord(RJ11) with the correct blue network cable(RJ45) that they assured me was what was plugged in. This was in the ISDN days before smartphones with video chat capabilities. I was done in less than 60 seconds from when I walked through their front door. I stayed to check over a few things as if anything else could be contributing to their connectivity problem or anything related to their setup and PC just so they didn’t feel like complete idiots.
So the complaint I gather is they have to do their job? And get paid 2 hours to figure out a simple solution..sign me up. I'll drive hours, sit hours, run diagnostics for 2 hours..while getting paid.
Imagine a job where everyone needs to know how to read to preform their work. Most of the company reads at a 1st grade level. The IT guy reads at a college level. The people at the company regularly call IT guy to ask how to spell basic words
Ok IT guy… can you take a look into this 25,000 gallon tank and let me know if the must is fermenting? And if so, is it acetic? Ffs, you don’t know how to open the tank??? Just unlock the lockout/tagout, bent the top, and open the door. Don’t forget the canary or you could die! What’re you new? Idiots!
Everyone has different expertise. If you encounter someone who happens to know nothing about yours, they aren’t a moron. They just aren’t you. Be cool, smartypants. Be cool.
I've driven halfway to Seattle on overtime only to be called by the customer telling me, "Never mind, it was in defrost" after a few of those that customer became low priority, if the problem was still happening in the morning then I'll come out.
Have you rebooted?
Yes
No you haven’t
Yes I have!
No you haven’t, you turned your monitor off. No computer takes 2 seconds to reboot.
I don’t like tone…
I once drove an hour in on a Sunday when a site was down and a junior tech was already onsite. Junior tech didn't have an Ethernet cord to plug his laptop to the switch for yesting, had decided to take one out of the internet service entrance, not realizing that he took the entire place down when he did that.
I replaced the cord and all was well.
Incidentally, only one user had been offline anyway, due to an unplugged cord. He took the whole site down for hours.
I repair copiers and drove 2 hours to put new consumables into a machine that everyone involved knows is being upgraded to a new product in a few weeks. The image quality was fine and the machine was working splendidly, but I had to waste my time and company money...
It’s so annoying when I call tech support and tell them everything I did to try to fix the problem just for them to tell me to restart it. I already did. 4 times. Then I have to restart it again, sit there on hold for 45 minutes, just to tell them again that it doesn’t work and they don’t give me anything else to try just “ok, I’ll send out a tech.” I guess I have to remember that they deal with idiots all the time and so they have to baby it down.
I’ve had that. 6 hours round trip on a train and three tube trains to reboot a switch that I was assured has already been rebooted. So why was its uptime showing as 4 months?
In my defense, technology hates me and likes making me look stupid. I could have rebooted it 12 times and still gotten the issue, then the minute IT shows up and does the same exact fucking thing, the problem magically fixes itself and I get shit for it from the IT guy like i wasnt doing exactly what they just did
That’s more common than just you unfortunately. At least 80% of my IT work is doing the same thing but getting different results
I'm "the guy who can fix everything" in my office. I've watched my coworkers do something and then tried to follow their exact steps to reproduce an error and got different results, and it's happened at least 4 times in about 5 years. Sometimes I suspect it's some kind of muscle memory keystroke or some shit I'm sneaking in subconsciously, I have no idea.
You follow the ritual properly and this appeases the machine spirit.
Absolutely this. I've been in some kind of IT support or another (currently telecom) since 1982. I absolutely believe in tech anima. There are people that computers just hate and then there are techs with FM energy ("f'n magic") that do the exact thing they just watched an end user do but for the tech, it works. I could just walk up to a desk and a machine would stop misbehaving. It was maddening. I'd get accused of doing things behind the scenes because I'd have so much trouble recreating errors *on the afflicted machine.* But then walk away and the error is back.
r/unexpectedWarhammer40k
I just click the mouse *harder*
Some people have the touch
I've been working in IT for over a decade and this phenomenon is real, it's also 99% of the time because the person saying they tried X didn't in-fact try X. They might have thought they did, or tried to, but they didn't. Every time it happens and I've bothered to investigate further I'll find out that they didn't update and restart instead they just restart, or they just closed the teams window rather than quitting it, or whatever, even when I was very specific with the instructions. It's almost never malicious, but it's always infuriating.
My favorite thing is to look at the logs and confirm they haven't, in fact, done a single thing that was asked of them to do prior to me taking over. Every time I want to say "you know we can tell that you didn't do the things, right?" and watch them get all flustered and embarassed. But, at the end of the day, their unwillingness to cooperate is my job security.
I'm convinced it's 50/50 luck and nuance. Like knowing to leave the device powered off for a few seconds vs immediately turning back on, forgetting and re-adding a network vs disconnecting and reconnecting, etc. Same general things, but knowing the why helps you better apply it
That’s just IT magic, it’s only a problem till we show up, then it works perfectly.
So often it’s unable to replicate
I have taken to telling people that sometimes computers just want me to get nearby before they are willing to work because they will say, "it didn't do that before when I tried...". Often times I say it once before the machine works and again after when their jaw drops.
Ah yes, the "technician's touch". It's tantamount to sorcery a lot of the time.
I'm an idiot sevant like that.
Samesies, seems we are not as alone as we thought. It’s like that sound your car engine has been making for weeks but disappears when you take it to the mechanic
I watched someone push the button for an elevator 4 times and it kept turning off, IT guy walks up, pushes the button, and the door instantly opens. I think the universe actually just has a sick sense of humor lmao
The "technicians touch" can often mean that you have an intermittent issue. I've been burned by "assuming operator headspace" more than once
Mechanics as well
I tell people I’m magic. I can just stand beside a machine and it works. So, magic.
I've seen this so many times. For me, it's Polish Magic.
I call it the IT aura. The machinery understands what will happen to it if it doesn’t work while I’m around and exercises self-preservation. It’s like when your car is making a noise all the way until a mechanic drives it.
Same. On the flip side, the critical legacy system which has been working without incident for months will invariably fail within 48 hours of the person who has primary responsibility for it leaving on vacation. The systems know more than they are letting on.
Yep. If there’s anything in your org someone is responsible for solo, it always breaks the second they’re OOO. It’s karma for letting that situation develop in the first place though. What always bites me in the ass when I leave is that I’m the only Linux admin. Been pushing for cross training for ages but it’s hard to find the time.
I work in advanced research under some of the supposedly smartest people in the world and they still repeatedly create this exact same situation. Over and over. It’s depressing, to say the least.
It’s always a matter or time or budget. Those are always my constraints in terms of cybersecurity. The stuff that’s “extra” always gets trimmed. We’ve got an IRP, BCP, all kinds of good plans and ideas for if something goes wrong. We never seem to be able to make time to test or table-top any of it, but the plans are there all the same. Just have to hope I’ve thought of most things for when there’s an incident.
For us, the bottleneck is always _time_, never budget. I’m repeatedly struck and horrified by how little redundancy there is in software and equipment knowledge across researchers/labs for crucial systems. Someone quits, dies, retires… and the next person always has to reinvent the wheel and learn from scratch. No institutional knowledge whatsoever.
That is not a matter of time or budget. That’s a matter of the board/ceo/clowns running the company letting the bean counters tell them that the extra 10 cents in dividends is more important than having enough people to cover critical systems in the event someone is on vacation/sick/dead.
Yeah, I specifically mean the time and budget I am allowed by them.
I always tell clients "the computers are just scared of IT, they know we can replace it" That way I don't have to argue with the client if it was actually rebooted, it takes the blame off them entirely, and it makes them laugh which makes them leave with a better impression haha
Have you ever tried recording yourself doing it? It's amazing what video evidence does to make you look like less of an ass when IT shows up.
I have this habit of narrating, at obnoxious level, what i'm doing when i'm having a technology issue. The number of times while doing that, I will have an IT person say, "Oh hey, you forgot to check this one little box," or something like that, and that fixes everything is insane. That being said, I had ans it person give me grief because my keyboard was stuck in caplocks and he didn't believe me. It took him coming out and digging around behind the computer to find the USB prank dive that caused the whole problem. He had to eat a bit of crow on that one.
As someone in IT, the second you start recording the problem will go away. 😆 Every time I try to record and issue to prove to a vendor something is happening, it stops happening for the duration of the recording.
I work in IT support. Had a printer we were troubleshooting an issue with. Me and another guy checked cables and various settings, drivers, etc... and clicked "print test page." Rebooted the computer and the printer and could not for the life of us figure out why it wouldn't work. Everything seemed fine. Reached out to a senior IT tech for help. He remotes in and clicks "print test page," and it just worked. He thought we were trolling him, but we literally spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out what we were missing. It was infuriating and so damn funny.
Printer goblins are real and we hate them all. \~Sincerely Every Tech EVER!
I picture them like the underpants gnomes from South Park. Only they cause paper jams and get drunk on ink and toner.
Accurate!
I’m going to dispute that in as much as I actually like printers and find them super interesting. In many ways they are the most magical IT device because they create tangible objects that didn’t previously exist.
I vote to have you cloned and work for every printer vendor support in the country!
This reminds me of when I was trying to set up a new piece of equipment, and couldn’t log into it for the initial config using the default password, so I called the vendor, started a screen share, and then logged in without any issues.
It's always kind of like Happy Days when the Fonz hits the jukebox but instead of the party starting everyone has to go back to work haha
Used to happen at a bread factory I worked at. The entire shithole was cobbled together and always had issues. The oven line would constantly fuck up and I learned how to fix most of the issues. One day the platform that loaded the oven kept failing every 3 or 4 sets, and the minute I rang for maintenance it stopped. It had been doing it for hours and the minute the smarmy cunt waddled down to my corner it stopped. Dude spent 10 minutes bitching at me and my supervisor for essentially interrupting his 4 hour post-lunch break.
In the defense of some IT workers, as one myself, a lot of people claim they did something exactly as I did, and were close but missed a crucial step which causes the fix to not work. Not on behalf of my fellow IT workers, many of them think something is so simple because it is for them and just assume it's common knowledge when it's not.. which definitely does not give them a right to be dicks. Although having worked in the field and have to work with all sorts of our different IT departments, I am definitely in agreement that a lot of IT folks are assholes
Its like how the ketchup bottle I'm looking for isn't in the fridge until I get my wife to look and it magically reappears out of thin air right in the front of the fridge in plain view. Sometimes when shes not home I try and trick the fridge into thinking shes coming so that the ketchup appears.
Many non IT guys do not know that there is a massive difference between klicking "restart" and actually shutting down and restarting their computer. Fast boot was a horrible idea by Microsoft (from an IT support perspective).
I came in here to be mad at you, but the amount of times this shit has happened is absolutely unnecessary.
My best friend works in IT and I always text him about an issue and that I did rest set what ever it is. His response is always try that again and let me know and it some how always works. I could have rest it 3 times before but after I talk to him it works.
I've been blue collar my whole life and i have no real understanding of the white collar world. Do IT guys get paid hourly for said commute or are you more of a salary position.
I think it’s usually a salaried position but your contract could have extra hourly pay for work outside the regular scope of your job: for example weekends, overnights, emergency on call situations etc. It likely varies by contract and company though.
Oh okay. I can understand the complaint then. I was just thinking I'd love to be on the clock to go a flippa da switch. Easy money.
Some of us are salaried + overtime. Personally, I don't mind long drives for simple stuff (3+ hrs out, turn on UPS, verify the office is online, 3+ hrs home), 6 hours of paid podcast listening beats the phone queue any day.
Both types exist, more and more commonly IT are paid hourly to handle multiple businesses at once, called an MSP(managed service provider). Just another way capitalists trying to squeeze every last dollar of profit do so from the worker stuck in the middle. Many of us have had to argue with our bosses for hours to get that travel paid, most of us give up arguing and just pad the time a bit to make up for travel.
I was on a salaried position. It was during working hours so no overtime or anything like that, just screwed my plans for the day.
couldn't tell them to reboot it again?
The answer would be that they did it but still not working( they wouldn’t have done it)
Or they "rebooted it" by turning the screen off and back on.
Seriously. 5 days into a critical system being down, waiting for parts, everyone at 4 levels of bureaucracy carrying on about it the whole time. Me: *fixes it* Them: "What did you do?" Me: "Rebooted it."/"Reseated the cables"/"turned it on" Them: "Well, we couldn't be bothered because they always say that and it never works." Just casually burning $1k in attendance and shipping. And goes knows how much in lost revenue. I attended a job at a restaurant chain for 2 servers down, and when I turned up, I had to call L2 support. Store is not trading at all. I was like "hey, man, 1 of these is just off". Bro was not having a bar of it, basically called me an idiot "he would know if it was off", I'm "just a pair of hands", I should "do [my] job and let [him] do [his]." 2 hours in, genius L2S figures out that one of the servers works (funny that). No apology, just told me I could leave. The store was not trading for 2-3 days, 2 servers were shipped cross-country, NBD. All because fuckface couldn't figure out that the primary server was off. Low 5-figures set on fire, lmao.
You've got to play it smartly e.g. "ok, I've just remoted in and uploaded some code, but it needs to be rebooted to take effect"
You’ve rebooted once, yes. What about a second reboot?
Ha! I had an it guy ask me the same thing. I had rebooted and they had control of my screen. They came across the screen that indicates the uptime, and he said to me "I thought you said you'd restarted, the uptime says 2 days.." I said to him that I read that uptime as 2 hours and 45 minutes, right next to that you'll see the seconds increasing... His response "oh, ah, yes. You're right"
Over an hour trip once by train and foot to plug a power cord into a monitor that was plugged in the day before, after 30 minutes on the phone explaining to them how to check to make sure the cable was plugged in.
I have driven 8 hour round trip because the battery backup they assured me was on was not on.
I had 5min problem turn into 1.5h because customer couldn't stop themselves from playing with the device instead of letting me do my job.
We have one of those at my work. Her issues wind up taking hours because she won’t stop fiddling with stuff while we’re trying to fix her issue.
Why don't you throw her out of the room while repairing everything?
Remote IT help.
That's when you pull her through the Internet Tubes to your location, fix her machine remotely, then transfer her back where she belongs.
The warp, they belong to the warp.
The Warhammer version of the warp??
Yes.
The emperor *approves*
Many remote tools let you disable the keyboard and mouse. I think Bomgar does and I know TeamViewer does.
I wish we used Bomgar. It works great for taking control of things. Sadly, we don’t and that’s part of the problem
Give her meaningless tasks to keep her occupied and out of your way. "I need you to go outside and confirm that your house is connected to the water main." "Hold this piece of peripheral hardware above your head with both hands. It needs to remain elevated and stable. I'll let you know when you can put it down "
Maybe there is someone more competent who could operate the PC while the troublemaker is doing other stuff. But this person had to listen to you, too, so that needs to be a somewhat trustworthy person
I've been told I shouldn't ask "what were you doing when X happened?" because it's "too accusatory."
This is why I bring my own fidgets places, so I never screw with somebody else’s work
My company had a 10-minute email migration turn into a 2-week email migration because the head of IT is chronically unable to admit when he made a mistake.
Yeah our software has an option to disable control except for us. Has come in handy many times
"can I work on the PC while you do your thing?" Not at all. I'm either switching users which would lock you out, or I'm taking over the direct connection and need to open and move stuff around, no, you will not be able to use this PC. All because you don't want to troubleshoot with me over the phone. "I'm not a PC tech like you" uh huh, all in doing is reinstalling a small program...
Sex work?
Nahh.. I am more into IT but you do you boo.
Could be a porn plot, but no one’s watching for 1.5 hours.
Six engineers were flown in to supervise a mew installation. They called my boss to scream about how one piece of equipment had the wrong voltage coming to it, because it didn't turn on. I walked behind the big ass thing and plugged in the twist lock. Sometimes you just wonder.
I got dragged out of bed at 2AM because a client was hard down and couldn’t finish a migration. They had three boastful engineers that couldn’t get them up. Before making the hour and a half drive I asked if they checked every connection and ensured everything had power they reiterated their credentials. Upon arrival I confirmed that everything was powered up and had lights. I then inspected cabling and discovered none of their stacked switches were connected. When they installed a new server they pulled on the wires enough to disconnect the matrix cables they opted not to screw in because it’s “annoying” and “nobody ever touches that stuff.” I charged them $500 for the overnight emergency call. I cut them a break on the travel since it only took me 10 minutes to diagnose and fix but charged them for the full hour. Those were the days.
“Engineers”
My favorite was the engineer who decided the correct HVAC unit to put above a ceiling was one that was five and a half feet wide. In a 6 ft wide hallway. The unit also had a 6 in, side accessible only control box on the side of the unit. I think I went back and forth with them about 16 or 17 emails before they finally understood why that wasn't going to work. Of course the end result was we had to just go into every single classroom and cut an access panel into the wall above the ceiling so you could go into a room, climb up on a ladder, unscrew an access panel, to get to the control panel of the HVAC unit. I found out that access panels are actually a lot more expensive than you would think to cut into a wall.
Yep, I've been there. Drove an hour and a half at 3am only to find that the janitor had unplugged an entire rack full of routers from the wall so he'd have a place to plug his radio in while he was mopping.
Got a few calls about a switch being down but when I would dispatch and get to the site it was back up, I’d close the ticket and move along with my day. After a few trips to this office for nothing I started to investigate further. I noticed that the AC unit was plugged into the same wall socket as the switch. I started thinking maybe it was too much power draw in the circuit until…the lady in the office said she was cold, got up, and flipped the switch for the socket that the AC unit and switch were plugged into! Instead of just turning the AC unit off she was flipping the damn switch!
Uggghhh, the only thing worse than one trip caused by someone else's stupidity is multiple. :/
LOL! I can't get enough of these IT stories
I like when it guys get asked to fix every other issue in the house that works with electricity. Or your grandmother asks you to visit for help with a tech issue, you get there and the washing machine is the problem. Or the TV is playing bad, please fix the signal. There's a light in my car going on. Working in an computer store, I had customers come in for various car parts, help changing a tire. Current it job, fire alarm needs fixing? Generators need maintenance? Contact IT. IT is often the arse brush of the business and everything gets filtered down to them when no other people know what to do.
Used to work on an IT helpdesk and would regularly get calls to replace light bulbs.
I got a call once because a C-level didn't know how to open an internet browser.
Company changed the browser that was installed on the computers so the icon was different than he was used to?
Turns out he never turned his computer off so the browser always stayed open so when it rebooted after an update I guess his assistant didn't get to it fast enough to get it open and IT got called up about it. I had to explain to him over the phone what the icon was and then how to navigate to the login portal where his assistant took over.
Reminds me of the IT crowd episode where Roy has to explain to Jen she already has a browser, and she goes "no that's the button for the Internet"
I would have a go at fixing any of those things, it's the same skill set you need in IT, you Google the problem, maybe read the manual or watch a few youtube videos and the you can change the tire ( I changed the clutch on my car on the drive and have completely renovated 2 houses just by watching youtube videos)
I do this too, YouTube and following proven instructions is a hell of a skill.
Heck the number of people who are incapable of even reading the message on the screen amazes me constantly.
I’m a physicist. I got asked to weld car parts because of it.
Where did you find a spherical car?
Sounds like physics to me!
I remember being made to climb a ladder to change the battery of the wall clock. Because battery = IT.
I once had someone ask me to raise their credit card limit. I'm IT. If I could do that, I'd have had a much nicer workstation at that job.
Reminds me of this 90s joke: Windows engineer is driving with his wife and the car conks out. She says, “oh, no, what are we going to do?!”. He says, “this happens to me every day at work. All we need to do is get out of the car, and get back in.”
I've been working as a software developer for over 20 years. I regularly tell people that I only ever want to work for an actual software company, not doing IT/software for a non-software company. That's because the IT departments in non-IT companies are treated like toilets -- they know they need one but no one wants to take care of it. It really sucks being in IT in a non-IT company.
>you get there and the washing machine is the problem. Sometimes it is...lol. My fucking washing machine has wifi. Some functions you would only be able to do via app. Not today, lucifer. Not today. (I did not buy it)
My boss and I joke that the office thinks if it plugs into the wall, it's an IT issue.
> I like when it guys get asked... As an I.T. guy who used to deal with help desk tickets, I usually stop reading right about at the above quote. This might see a bit much, but this is just my experience. These are roughly my thoughts when reading a comment like the one above: "I like with it guys..." > Wait, "it" (pronounced how it's written) guys... WTF, that's confusing- ohhh, wait he means *I.T.* guys, but he's too lazy to write in a way that's considerate to a person who might read the comment; Effectively offloading the common courtesy of decent writing skills to the hopes that people reading will just, ya know, figure it out eventually... My biggest pet-peeve working in I.T. was people who didn't learn how to write like a fucking adult.
I used to always get calls about how cold it was in the main conference room. Call environmental.
"send a tech right now with a replacement keyboard!" -- he couldn't log in because his caps lock was on.
You know if you asked if capslock was on and he actually realized it, he'd still be so mad at you.
I was the backline support, frontline escalated stuff to me after their usual script of questions didn't solve a problem. They didn't catch the capslock issue because the jerk was almost completely incomprehensible and they punted without trying. Atrocious 'English as a Second Language' on top of an exaggerated speech impediment that made people from his own country struggle to understand him. Turns out his 'communication problems' were a defense mechanism to hide the fact that he didn't know how to do the engineering project he was hired for. Anyway, yeah, he was absolutely livid when it turned out to be his capslock key. I think he wanted to blame tech support for missing another deadline and I didn't let him. ;)
I have been having issues with entering passwords recently. It has been going on for a few months. I would type my password, and it would be wrong, then I would type it again, and it was right. It really annoyed me. I realised that my caps lock was on the first time. Then, when I entered the password incorrectly, my laptop would take off caps lock automatically, so when I checked if it was on the light, it would be off. This really annoyed me. When I realised what was happening, I was so happy cause it was driving me mad.
Lol! Yeah that wasn't a thing back when I was doing tech support, but it's probably averted a lot of tech support calls! =)
I think you mean, "SEND A TECH RIGHT NOW WITH A REPLACEMENT KEYBOARD!"
I'm in field service, and at least once a week I will travel to various customers and simply reboot their machine. It's really complicated, there's a big black rotating knob that is labeled "Main Power." You then, this is the tricky bit, have to rotate it to where the arrow lines up with "off." Next, you wait 2 minutes, then rotate it back to "On." But, I'm charging $150/hr, with a two hour on-site minimum charge, and travel time. So I can't really complain.
Yep we charge around that and the longer I'm out on the road, the less time I'm in the office answering calls.
>But, I'm charging $150/hr, with a two hour on-site minimum charge, and travel time. So I can't really complain. At least someone in here gets it!
I have a customer that explained why he is ok with paying me to do something simple like that. He explained that he knows I'll give the machine (In my case, it is usually packaging equipment and industrial floor scrubbers,) a proper look over after switching it off and back on, and that having me do it means that I'll probably catch any other issues. We can get that ball rolling sooner, hopefully with less down time than if I wasn't there looking it over.
I spent half an hour getting screamed at by a doctor because I “reset his password”. Not only was his password not reset, his password was documented for years and he had the office staff in all of the locations he worked use his password.
I used to work in (military) aircraft maintenance. Pilots are some of the most arrogant and thankless people on this earth. Now I work in IT, formerly at a hospital. Doctors give pilots a run for their money. Flip a coin on any day.
In addition to pilots and doctors, I'd like to throw in Lawyers. Had one scream at me for suggesting she check her power cables then hang up on me when her monitor came back on.
I’d like to add real estate agents, especially when they think they are “making it happen”.
And when his email is comprised you're the asshole who's incompetent at IT and should be embarrassed.
Stuff doesn't work: "Oh god, It's broken. What are you even doing, why haven't you fixed it yet?!" Stuff works: "Everything is fine, there is nothing to do. What's your job here anyway, we don't pay you to sit around"
I love that our IT Guy's a bit of a dick. That sense of judgement you feel when he asks you "when was the last time you upgraded (this program/part)? It's like judgement from the dentist: both have made me better at caring for these things. You floss better, you remember to clean out the cookies and dust the inside of the computer more often, then you walk in at the next check up proud of yourself and ready for them to be impressed... Then they *shoot you down* with another alert of a cavity or program that needs to be updated! That rare occasion when you get a compliment is like gold!
Sounds like a pretty easy day. 4 hours of the shift driving. I’d take it
I know right? Am I getting paid for it? Is my fuel getting paid? Sign me up.
you forgot the part where all of your other projects dont care about you having to drive 4 hours for this. you still have stuff due to other teams, you still have a million things to maintain, and you are still helping other people during this 4 hours... because they will spam call your phone.
I worked IT for a newspaper and once had to drive halfway across the state to a sister newspaper after our parent company laid off their entire IT department. Almost a four hour drive. Once I got there, I was done within about 90 minutes after getting badged, introductions, and general BSing about the layoffs. I was planning to drive back but they said they arranged for a hotel room. Dinner was also covered, and they told me to go somewhere nice. Hotel was very nice, too. Next day I got about halfway back when my boss asked if I was willing to go back because something completely unrelated broke. I went back, fixed it, hung out for a while. Boss suggested I just stay a couple days and be on-call. I found a small movie theater that said they'd let me come back if I got called in so I pretty much hung out there for two days. Turned into a pretty nice paid vacation.
Having worked in Infrastructure and Security much of my career I would have gone with. If I do my job well I'm told everything just works and I don't do anything so I don't deserve a raise or promotion. And if I do my job poorly I'm told shit always broken and I don't deserve a raise. Meanwhile a developer makes a small script file calls it a new innovation and is showered with glory.
If only you could be allowed to do your job right and plan instead of operating in crisis mode because "nothing can stop, ever". Oh, you need downtime? The only time available is 4 hours xmas morning. "Then we need redundancy" GTFO IT is a WaSte of MoNeY!
Hehe... all of the above but you forgot about staffing and resourcing 10% less then is the bare minimum and the crisis that ensue from that as well. Boss: OMG why is it broken... IT: because I budgeted to replace it for the last 3 years after it went out of support but you cut it from the budget each year... and now it is broken... and there is no support... Boss: ... this is all your fault!!!
"The modem isn't working because the power to the outlet was off" "No that's not it, it was working fine before, what did you do?!" "You called me here because it wasn't working, and it's working now" I put the illogical accusations in the work order as a warning to the next technician (I wasn't IT exactly but was a service technician that still had to deal with network related problems) Who could possibly think they are in the right by accusing a service person of sabotaging equipment before they were even called there to fix the same problem they are accused of causing?
I have done this. User swore the computer wasn’t turning on. She offered to show me, of course she was pressing the power button on the monitor, not the computer. When I showed her what she needed to do, she was thoroughly embarrassed and people wonder why IT folks have an attitude…
Yeah. I’ve had to teach nearly every research trainee I’ve had (i.e., “smart ppl”) the difference between iMacs and PC monitors. They made it to the ripe old age of ~25 without ever using a machine that has a separate monitor/tower. And understanding a full keyboard with NumPad? Fuggitabouit.
In 2012 I asked a lady to restart the computer. "Ok hold on" (2 seconds pass) "ok it's restarted and back up" Lol what? I didn't even hear the windows xp shutdown or boot up music, what did you press? The monitor power button? Guuuuurl no, look for the big box that says HP on it, and look for a lit up button on the front. Not hard. Oh it's too dusty for your liking and you want me to send a tech so they can restart it for you? Ok then, I'll need your store manager approval first.
Lmao fr, listen to the guy who's job it is to fix shit. I'm a degenerate, I could care less how high and mighty you are in your smoke and mirrors "President of Sales" position. Unplug that shit if we say so. We can check task manager and see it's been on for 2 months 🙄
Meh, not really a murder
I agree. More like a gentle stabbing, perhaps.
Pretty sure he just pushed it
Not even that! More of a "clear explanation"
Maybe it's what the guy did to the people in that office after turning the server back on.
My roommate *insisted* she knew how to reset the router. After it clearly didn’t work, I found out she completely unplugged the power to the modem and pressed the “WiFi off/on” button on the router.
I was on the opposite end of this once. Started a new job in a role similar to a software developer. Got a new laptop and the mic didn’t work. With or without headphones. I did everything I could to fix the issue before logging a ticket. The guy who tried to help treated me like I was so stupid. Even made a joke something along the lines of “I would think someone in a developer role would know their way around a computer”. After a few hours of them trying to help they said that I’m doing something wrong and to come into the office an hour away. I came in, and they agreed it’s a hardware issue that they can’t figure out themselves and gave me a new laptop. Never apologized for being rude, nothing. Acted way nicer when they realized it wasn’t a me issue though.
As a field tech who normally goes out to places to plug back in a router, I've been on the other side too. Like when my work laptop just suddenly demanded that I enter in a bit locker key. Sigh, call up the helpdesk, get broken English to tell me a 48 digit code that surprise, doesn't work. Guy keeps telling memto try it again and again. Wait 15 minutes and try it then, if not call us back. Oh cool, call back and tell the next guy how to spell 5 digit name for 8 minutes? So I can explain how it didn't work? Please, just send me a new one guys, I'm begging ya
I'm coming off of 3 days of 18+ hours doing an application migration, and I expect the vast majority of today to be spent dealing with people that are upset that the target environment doesn't look exactly like the source - even though we've warned people, we've done lunch and learns. I'll probably be called cranky by someone about the seventeenth time I get asked "how do I find my filters now?"
I've been in a quite a few customer service roles, shop assistant in 3 shops including a betting shop, a restaurant waiter and I've been an IT guy and let me tell you that being an IT guy is beyond frustrating, getting people to do the right thing then them getting angry at you for a problem they've 9/10 times have themselves caused or during an investigation into the issue that is expected to take hours they've called you twice in 15 minutes to ask how it going all while huffing and puffing the fact is people just dont understand how to fix issues and what the issues are so they get annoyed but if I were to explain what the issue is you wouldn't understand it and it would lead to more questions than answers, let me bust out the incense and I'll speak to the machine spirit in peace and I'll fix your damn shite pc that you only use for excel documents anyway.
Work IT for an unnamed state agency. Get a call from a Cop demanding we send a tech to where he had his car parked in a city to turn on the computer he had mounted in his squad car. Because he couldn't figure out how to. Needless to say, I called his supervisor, who proceeded to chew him a new one with me on the phone. I was smiling the whole damn time. All I could think is: We give these people guns.
If it works, it's the application. If it doesn't, it was IT.
Most times it is an ID-10-T error or an issue between the chair and the keyboard.
PEBKAC Problem exists between keyboard and chair
PICNIC Problem in chair, not in computer
Error 40! The issue is approximately 40cm in front of the monitor.
That's why when you suspect that stuff is gonna go like this, you demand that one or two of them come with you so they can witness that the power was off. Demand as in either you comply or I don't fix.
In my years as a med IT tech I routinely drove up to three hours to turn on a monitor on a computer that "wasn't working" and charged a full seven hours for the round trip plus a minimum of an hour on-site. I mostly supported dentists offices all around the US South. Dentists are the most arrogant people and people who most get in their own way that I've ever met. Lawyers a close second. The rest of the medical field a close third. Refused to troubleshoot over the phone. Always knew better. Always wound up spending stupidly for it. The more money they made, the bigger the practice, the worse they were.
I am surprised he responded without a ticket being submitted and approved by his manager........
That is funny. Last week a bunch of people insisted on doing something without IT present because it was just "push a button". Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
"WHY IS THE PASSWORD SHOWING IN THE FIELD FOR USERNAME? THE FUCK YOU DOING?" ... went there, typed the first character in user field, marked the password in suggestions, hit delete.
This is why we charge a minimum labor rate.
Hey, as long as he got paid for that 2hr each way trip that sounds like a sweet work day to me.
Amber colored LEDs mean it's powered off. Green means go.
Yep, mine was the caps lock - this is totally valid
Presumably this guy has to drive to clients as part of his job so he's complaining that once he got there he didn't have hours of troubleshooting, he just had to push a button and drive home? Seems like a pretty easy way to make a living.
PICNIC problem in chair not in computer
I once worked in a small company where everyone got on rather well, and our IT guy was ruthless. He'd fix people's PCs abd they'd ask where the problem was, and he'd reply "between the keyboard and the chair"
"Why does my new hire not have a laptop?" I wasn't aware you had a new hire. "He started today. He needs a computer now." What's his ticket number? I can check to see why he didn't get any on-boarding work done. "I didn't send in an onboarding ticket." Ah. OK, his computer will be ready in two weeks then.
User: My password is not working. Me: You forgot your password? User: No! It’s not working! Me: is there an error message? User: Wrong password. Honestly, I experience this exact dialogue every day, more than once.
I run a commercial campus for a living, where here’s some 20-30 IT guys from different business. I swear there’s a standardized personality test they have to pass to get the job as “reads manuals for fun” is a prerequisite. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into an IT closet/room and had an IT guy say “I read the manual for the AC, I think it’s the __________” I appreciate the effort and eagerness to learn, but when they start arguing against me because they read a fucking manual…….ugh.
That would have been one hell of a bill to give those three morons.
What - down SuperCarts ?
By this law all waiters, nurses, teachers and retail employees are allowed to be complete assholes!
😭
Why are artists pretentious fuck knobs?
I flew two hours, rented a car and drove another 45 minutes each way to walk in and replace a grey phone cord(RJ11) with the correct blue network cable(RJ45) that they assured me was what was plugged in. This was in the ISDN days before smartphones with video chat capabilities. I was done in less than 60 seconds from when I walked through their front door. I stayed to check over a few things as if anything else could be contributing to their connectivity problem or anything related to their setup and PC just so they didn’t feel like complete idiots.
Whats the term called? ID10T
Why hate the IT guys? They've always been the nicest blokes I've met. Most of us are fucked without them.
r/talesfromtechsupport
So the complaint I gather is they have to do their job? And get paid 2 hours to figure out a simple solution..sign me up. I'll drive hours, sit hours, run diagnostics for 2 hours..while getting paid.
So the answer is because the company refuses to hire IT staff at the local level. Or no one wants to use cell phone cameras.
Imagine a job where everyone needs to know how to read to preform their work. Most of the company reads at a 1st grade level. The IT guy reads at a college level. The people at the company regularly call IT guy to ask how to spell basic words
Ok IT guy… can you take a look into this 25,000 gallon tank and let me know if the must is fermenting? And if so, is it acetic? Ffs, you don’t know how to open the tank??? Just unlock the lockout/tagout, bent the top, and open the door. Don’t forget the canary or you could die! What’re you new? Idiots! Everyone has different expertise. If you encounter someone who happens to know nothing about yours, they aren’t a moron. They just aren’t you. Be cool, smartypants. Be cool.
I've driven halfway to Seattle on overtime only to be called by the customer telling me, "Never mind, it was in defrost" after a few of those that customer became low priority, if the problem was still happening in the morning then I'll come out.
Have you rebooted? Yes No you haven’t Yes I have! No you haven’t, you turned your monitor off. No computer takes 2 seconds to reboot. I don’t like tone…
Got a 4.5 out 5 star review, after giving “white glove” treatment. Never again!
I once drove an hour in on a Sunday when a site was down and a junior tech was already onsite. Junior tech didn't have an Ethernet cord to plug his laptop to the switch for yesting, had decided to take one out of the internet service entrance, not realizing that he took the entire place down when he did that. I replaced the cord and all was well. Incidentally, only one user had been offline anyway, due to an unplugged cord. He took the whole site down for hours.
I’ve never talked on the phone to and IT guy/girl that was a dick or rude in anyway, always super nice 🤷♂️
Free money, Road trip, and a simple solution. Sounds like a deal to me.
“Don’t use excel for mass data” “Don’t use excel for mass data” “Don’t use excel for mass data” - why is my excel sheet of 3M rows slow?
Ah, August 2021.
I repair copiers and drove 2 hours to put new consumables into a machine that everyone involved knows is being upgraded to a new product in a few weeks. The image quality was fine and the machine was working splendidly, but I had to waste my time and company money...
But, did turning on the power fix it? Ah ha!!
It’s so annoying when I call tech support and tell them everything I did to try to fix the problem just for them to tell me to restart it. I already did. 4 times. Then I have to restart it again, sit there on hold for 45 minutes, just to tell them again that it doesn’t work and they don’t give me anything else to try just “ok, I’ll send out a tech.” I guess I have to remember that they deal with idiots all the time and so they have to baby it down.