1w ago

People are painful.

179 comments

"my computer won't turn on!!"
"is it plugged in?"
"hold on let me check...it's hard to tell, the power's out"
"..."
- I spent over an hour on a support call trying to walk an asshole lady through fixing her Adobe Illustrator, for her to stop mid-instructions to say she couldn’t tell me what the status was because her power was out due to a fucking hurricane in her area! 🤦‍♂️
  Side note: that was one of the two times my bosses didn’t get upset at me for telling off a customer.
  
  i actually went to school for computers for a bit, got my A+ and net+, but realized i get fucking outraged at my own computer when it has problems, i couldn't imagine the murderfest rampage that might ensue if i had to deal with morons and their bullshit computer problems--glad i didn't pursue it
  
  I'm the family tech support person so I know your pain
  It's a pain in the ass when you have a parent who won't even try to learn to do something after trying to teach them and they call you everytime they need to do something
- I once helped my parents with a few minor things on one of their computers. Two weeks later I get a call... They have no internet on any of their devices. Obviously since I was the last one to work on their stuff I was the cause of the internet issue. While on the phone I hear my dad's weather radio go off and my phone dings with a severe weather warning for their area.
  I ask if they are currently experiencing any bad weather... And they confirm that they have a very nasty thunderstorm and a confirmed tornado on the ground a few miles outside of the town... And they have no power.
  I just hung up...

I once replaced an entire power strip because the user said that it would turn off at random. So I took it back to the IT room and plugged in all the things and watched it, thinking it would short out or blow a circuit breaker or something.
Then the user called me again saying the new strip was doing the same thing and I should replace it. So I schlepped up to their office and replaced it with a third one.
Then they called me again saying it keeps happening. So finally I looked at where they had put it and it was right where they'd put it when they pushed to back their chair up from the desk.
And they didn't realize it.
- We'll stop being dicks when they stop being so dumb.
  
  I've found that being a dick is a great way to make their calls take longer and complain to your boss, which wastes time. Being nice to the idiots means less work for me.
- It amazes me that people don't make even a small effort to debug stuff themselves before calling for help. There is a youtube channel for clips from car mechanics and people bring in cars for things like "There is a knocking sound coming from the back seat" and there is a gallon jug of liquid rolling on the floor back there.
- Oh man I was expecting it to have been plugged into a switched outlet or something
- I had a label printer that was failing to work. I have spent most of the week with IT remoting into my desktop trying to figure out the issue with our cobbled together system. I finally realized after 5 days of this that the software causing the issue was on my co-worker's computer. Pointing this out to the IT guy got the problem fixed in minutes.
  Sometimes the user has no idea what is and is not signifcant. I had no idea that this was significant only that an icon with similar looks was on my co-workers cluttered desktop.
  
  I’ve been the PEBCAK enough times to not give users a hard time about it.

Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can't say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven't even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.
Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get 'That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don't need that.' Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.
- This should come with a trigger warning and a glass of whisky.
  
  Best I can do is a printer and a baseball bat.
- Scapegoats.
  
  I blame autocorrect on that one. But thanks mate.
- I am not sure if it is worldwide, or if its just American culture (fuck i hope its just us), but I don't believe the problem is a form of prejudice against intelligence, but rather that people with intelligence rely only on data and facts to make points. It is a sad truth that while this is the only correct way to make decisions, id guess around 70-80% of the population are simple, and when given solid evidence and reasoning you bore them. Meanwhile the sales team, while having no real evidence or reasoning for their solution was entertaining, and used simple buzzwords management understood delivered with a confident charisma.
  So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma. It might make you hate yourself a smidge to give a report that focuses more on the emotions of decision making than the reasoning, but the alternative is that bad decisions keep being made that make your life harder. You as the one that knows what the fuck they are talking about will generally have one of the most well reasoned plans in a situation, learn how to be a better guardian of that plan.
  None of this is to say any of this is our fault, its more an acceptance of the world we live in and recognizing how best to play in it.
  
  So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma
  You can't beat the sales team on that front. Charisma is a key part of their job. They are literally being payed for their ability to convince people to buy things, and this works inside the organization as well as it work on customers.

I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.
- Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it's easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
  
  Yes, but it's incompetence of the management who won't approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space
  
  You don't often get to choose a racks location in a small office and the UPS only ran the router and switch for a hour. You sound like you have never worked in the field.
  
  You do not know how long it was taking her to plug that coffee maker into the hidden UPS
- Yes, but... There's a reason for locked doors and apcs
  
  What are apcs in this context?

About a decade ago I had to fly across the country to peel a piece of tape off a sensor. At least I got crab cakes
- I was watching a documentary about a plane that crashed, killing everyone on board, because someone left tape on a pitot tube during maintenance
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroper%C3%BA_Flight_603.
  
  Terrifying.
  Fortunately, I was not working on safety-critical systems at the time. Now I am, so this is a great case study.
  The article glosses over whether or not Boeing was even partially found at fault. In my opinion, this was a major design flaw on their part.
- I gotta ask... Why couldn't someone local do it?
  
  I'm not op, it I imagine it went something like this:
  "We've tried everything and nothing works, you gotta come down here"
  "...and you followed the instructions in the run book to the letter"?
  "yes. every instruction"
  runbook line 1 page 1: remove the tape from the sensor before installation.

- I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
  
  Have you tried turning them off and back on again?
  
  What show is it?
  
  They have to reboot their router to see it.
  
  It's really not that funny. It has a few one-liners here and there but ultimately meh.
- 0118-999-881-999-119-725...3

Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department's lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that "Jane Doe" does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn't have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn't. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
- Sometimes I am reminded, that my country does not hold monopoly on incompetent idiots.
  
  It is a universal human condition

A coworker sent me a pic of a user trying to charge a wired mouse with a surge protector. The user is a doctor. A surgeon.
I also see health care professionals break HIPAA rules CONSTANTLY despite everyone in my office telling them they're breaking rules.
- Idk, trying to charge a wired mouse sounds more like sleep deprivation than incompetence. Especially if it happened in a hospital.
- Well my mom is a doctor. She can do surgeries, clinic work, the whole thing. Sge does not know anything about computers. Electricity goes in and magic happens.
  
  Me, an IT person, am also this way but about cars. It's also a machine with inputs and outputs but it's just "fuel goes in and magical propulsion happens"

Commutes should be paid work.
- The truck repair guys where i work do get extra pay per hour of travel.
- Are they not in this context?
  
  In my neck of the woods, most commutes are not paid. Only when you are at the workplace that the meter starts running. OP probably got paid only 15ish minutes, since all they had to do was press a button.

Been doing IT for 20 years.
The one ray of hope is that the number of entirely tech illiterate people I deal with has decreased. They're retiring/dying. It's not nearly as common now to deal with people that don't understand how to literally turn something on. I also got out of the private sector, so I'm not dealing with the general public, which always made me want to drive my car into oncoming traffic on my way home every day.
But yeah, I always make a point of embarrassing someone when I have to drive somewhere to do something a toddler could have done if they put them on the phone with me.
- As another IT guy I'm getting less and less optimistic about that future.
  Software these days """just works""" and so now you have kids and young adults who barely know how to interact with a file explorer, don't know what the different file extensions mean, or even things I would consider basic like the difference between "network connection" and "WiFi".
  
  This is why being an elder millennial kinda gives you the edge, especially if you have been using computers since the 80s. Old MS-DOS machines forced you to understand how directory management worked.
- You're catching the middle wave. Wait until the iPad kids in Gen alpha come up and don't understand anything with a cord.
- There's a whole new generation of tech illiterates being born with a smartphone up their asses. I feel that 80's kids peaked at tech literacy, then steadily declined from the mid 90s maybe.
  
  I'd say 2000s was when it peaked.
- I worked in customer service for 7 years. There are people who have no idea how to hang up a phone call on their cell phones... lots of them. Like I used to find one several times a week.
- When I used to work support for home Internet, it was accepted practice to ask if we could speak to the child in the house if we were having trouble with an adult...
- Defensive, or outright steering ticket notes was my FAVORITE skill. I learned of so many shitshows weeks later because my department head read my notes, shut the person down and didn't even mention it to me. It actually got a few employees in trouble with their management.

"Are you sure all the wires are connected, USB and power?" (Relating to a scanner.)
"Yes, I've checked several times."
get there, USB is firmly connected but the power connector was hanging like 2cm belown the desk, clearly visible when you looked at the back of the scanner.
At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn't read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
- At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn't read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
  "No you're wrong, it worked before!"
  
  "Mam, it's very clearly labeled 'CD' right here."
  It wasn't really any help talking back to 40-something office Karens as a teenager. The amount of excuses people will go to avoid saying essentially "Oh I see now, that was a silly mistake I've made, thank you helping."

Yesterday I had one of our users tell me her 7zip was "eating files".
So I told her to show me what her process was for unzipping a folder.
This bitch hit the "extract here" button on the folder as it sat in her download folder which has stuff going back to 2019 in there. So naturally the last edit dates of all the contents in that zipped folder sent things off all over her downloads folder.
I know my generation was the first to really grow up with computers but I have met people older than me that learned the basics. Some people just don't want to learn how to better use a computer.
- Young people (13 - 18) literally cannot use a computer. They are too used to phones.
  
  This is also true. My little siblings are all about as bad with computers as my parents. It's really only millennials that seem to be the tech savvy generation for the most part.
  
  Yeah. I've got some co-workers I hate simply because they're super young and I would have literally killed to have this job at their age. They're going to be able to retire at such a younger age than me.
  I spend a significant amount of time explaining to them how Windows works, when they should have had to go through other, shittier paying jobs to learn that stuff before getting here.
  Oh, you don't know what the registry is? Neat.
- Not defending her, but for years I've felt like 'Extract Here' should create a subfolder by default
  
  Extract here implies that it extracts it into the current directory.
  
  That would be the most convenient....
- My father was still upgrading his PC when he was 93.
  
  Much respect. I couldn't pay my dad to build his own computer. The man will build Legos until the end of time but when I tell him building a computer is just more expensive Legos he gets scared haha.
- I wrote auto-reply instructions for this one, it's the same as she was doing but one click down to make a folder to match the zip name.
  
  That should really be standard at this point.

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.

You can be as much of a dick as you want, so long as you are right, and can get shit done.
If you are the kind of IT supergenius that responds to a "my laptop won't connect to the company network" ticket with "ok I'll just remote into your laptop real quick", you better the friendliest guy around.
- Users don’t want help. They want reassurance. They want you to be on their side until all their problems are solved. If you can fake that until they believe you they’ll do whatever you want to solve the problem. Especially if you tell them it’s a super secret IT guy thing.
  I’ve met a total of three users who didn’t respond well to you treating them like someone picked from the audience to help a magician.
  
  This is so true, doing everything you can to take it from an antagonistic relationship to a "we're in this together, lucky for us both I know some cool stuff" kinda scenario? Golden. Back when I dabbled, the worst repeat customers would end up requesting me, and end up happy. I moved on lol, those folks suck.
  Interestingly I did industrial controls for a while too and it's the exact same dynamic. Client just wants to know their [PC | gigantic 24/7 mfg plant] is gonna be okay, it wasn't their fault, and they were right to call for help.
  Edit: clarity
- Being dependent on support guys that are not that bright can be really annoying, especially if you are from the field too. As an IT student while working off my civil service days I had a few situations like that.
  For example, one didn't understand why plugging the Ethernet splitter (splits 4 twisted pairs into 2x 2 twisted pairs) into the switch instead of the structured cabling wasn't working.
- I feel like I'm somewhere on this graph, elaborate
- *really, not opposed to fake quick.

I had to walk across campus to plug in a woman's monitor because she was irate that her PC wasn't working. To be fair she was very contrite afterwards. I think the cleaning person knocked it out.
- I love the ones that won't even look when you ask them if something is unplugged. 'Of course it's plugged in, what kind of idiot do you think I am?' A big flaming one, cause when I instead say 'Hey, sometimes those cables come loose without looking like it, can you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?' every. single. person. answers with 'Oh hey, it wasn't plugged in at all!' I know, dumbass, and as unamused as I am by the fact that you called me before checking the absolute basics, I am even less amused by the fact that I had to circumvent your idiocy to get you to tell me what the actual situation is.
  
  A sign of high intelligence is a willingness to admit you don't know everything and to admit when you are wrong.

I once had to drive 3 hours to basically reseat a power cable of a tv. Also once I had to troubleshoot the private printer of the boss of the company at one of his apartments because his mistress couldn't print anymore. It was set to letter size, the fix took 10 seconds.
- I spent an hour trying to figure out why my internet connectivity wasn't working. When I finally went to look at the router box itself I saw it had no lights. My cat had knocked a picture off of the wall and it fell right down behind some heavy furniture, knocking the plug for the power strip out of the wall.
  
  Ha I did something similar with speakers back in the day. Learned the lesson the hard way to make sure stuff is actually plugged in as step 1 for my self troubleshooting. Spent at least an hour, maybe more, messing around with my PC, settings, checking plugs to the tower ... For some reason didn't think to check that the power for the bass (which the speakers controller passed through) was actually plugged in until way too late and with far too much frustration!
  
  One time a contractor my landlord hired unplugged my Internet in the middle of a meeting.

It's staggering how hopeless people are with basic tech, not even IT. I remember dealing with people who didn't even know which black box was their computer and tried to convince me that because the monitor power light was on their computer must be on.
- I work in IT and hear this about once a week. They also will call the computer anything but a computer. Most common name is the modem 🤦
  
  "He now realizes that it's the hardware, the Mother modem, the heart itself of the hard drive, is faulty"
  A classic Swedish news article circulating the internet since forever. I hope the tech didn't burst a blood vessel due to the mangled quote
  
  Surprised that's still a thing. I've heard it called a hard drive about as often, but I haven't worked with home users in a long time.

Yeah, I feel this one. It really only takes one time getting called in at 3am because half the city has lost internet due to a janitor unplugging a rack full of routers so he'd have a place to plug in his radio while he was mopping to turn into a dick.

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.

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]

Been there, done that. Madrid-Valencia by train, circa 2007.
- Si mal no recuerdo a mi hermano lo hicieron recorrer medio Vigo revisando acces points y estaban los cables sin enchufar en el rack principal ... Yo estuve 3 dias dando vueltas cuando al pelotilla de mi jefe se le dió que era buena idea agarrar una imagen de disco de la DB de prod y pasarle por arriba a la de Stage poruqe era más rápido que hacer un export...

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

He ain't wrong. I've literally powered down, and back up, a server that solved the issue.

People = Shit
- https://youtube.com/watch?v=wji4kNKfX-U

Has this IT guy not heard of wake on lan
Or is his employer the kind of person who doesn't use wake on lan
- He is Ian

Why does a BJ have to be forged?

I would be happy in this situation as long as I was reimbursed for the gas cost. I love driving and the task here seems simple. So I would get to drive there, spend 15 or so minutes, drive back. Ultimate chill day.

The problem here is the lack of KVM. That's not a serious IT guy, it's a junior noob who should not be allowed to touch live infrastructure.
- Or a business that doesn't value IT input and will see a ilo or iim as an unnecessary expense. Then they wonder why thing take so long to fix.
  
  Well, same shit - utter incompetence.

If you have to drive 3 hours to push a power button then that sounds like you're way too far from the jobsite, aka a management problem where they're trying to contract IT consultants nowhere near their business or hiring too few people who know how to work a button.
- Or,, why are we hiring people who don't know how to press a button properly?
  
  It's not about knowing how to press a button, it's about knowing which button and when.
  
  This and like wtf are they hiring out of town IT consultants when they need a much higher level of service, apparently.
- Some companies have multiple offices and doesn't necessarily have IT staff on-site at all of them
  
  If you need this level of service you definitely need to hire somebody who can manage to at least follow technical directions at site.
  I've worked at places where the only people who can follow technical directions don't have access to the server. Its very much managers not wanting to pay a person on site to manage critical infrastructure.
- It's more about the size of the area on-call IT personnel are expected to cover, cause they're frequently huge. It's normally not a problem because the more remote regions have less hardware and thus are less likely to have issues, but it does happen occasionally.
  
  It shouldn't happen for a power button. Even if your IT people are regional, you need somebody on site who can follow technical directions so emergency drives aren't necessary if you have something like a server that needs to stay up.
  I've seen this happen, its always because managers make bad decisions.

179 comments