I actually want to get into IT. I like tech, don't mind dumb situations, and enjoy helping people, and doubly so if it's sarcastically helping people. Fucking shame every company wants like fourteen degrees and your first born for a level 1.
Fun story, I worked IT for an American Telecom company. One day I recieved a phone call from a guy who was setting up his router. We were maybe five minutes into troubleshooting. He asks if he can eat his dinner while we troubleshoot and I say "no worries". Within thirty seconds, I hear a bang and panicd screaming. He informs me he dumped soy sauce and rice all over his router and work space. I sent a field tech to replace the router and set it up.
I highly recommend the original Bastard Operator From Hell stories, for those who read this comic and just nod yes with their heads and mentally go "Yeah, that's how it is".
For every "I'm the bottom 10% of tech users" there is another 70% of the user base bitching about inept prioritization and service desk people who couldn't troubleshoot process issues if their life were dependent on it.
"Why doesn't Uber specific hardware that the vendor DEMANDED be put on a switch that we don't have credentials for not work seamlessly with the network?!?"
"Because it doesn't confirm to the standards of TCP/IP, and requires a dual NIC solution because God forbid they design their system to allow basic routing."
"You just don't know what you're doing!"
"No, I'm just not going to volunteer myself to learn FCoIP so that your one special system has the support it needs until we deprecate it in six months."
At one point in a former life, I was one of the trainers for the incoming helpdesk technicians. One of the practical exams we put them through involved us doing creative things to fuck with their computers before they came to class, and then having them figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Plugging the mouse from one computer into its neighbor's USB port and vice versa was one of my favorite tricks. For whatever reason, it had a 100% success rate in effectively fucking with them.
As somebody who did IT support - the last two seem perfectly normal to me:
Computer "forgot passwords" - obviosly the man is using different browser than regular and it ain't filling in his passwords. Maybee diferent profile in the same browser? Is he using the same account as usual?
Wind blowing away wi-fi. She is likely connected to the internet through a point-2-point wifi connection and there may be a tree or something along the way messing not wifi signal in her house but her connectivity to the outside. I'd refer her to her ISP, just instruct her to formulate the question a bit better.
I worked at an office once where the wifi legitimately got worse when it rained. It was because the buildings internet used an antenna instead of being wired, and the building was just barely in range of the source signal. When it rained, it was enough added distortion to make it noticeably worse.
Love these. Reminds my of the CD drive cup holder and my personal favorite at my shop was the computer was afraid of me. Every time I came near to fix the problem they were having it went away. I was told the computer must be afraid of me and knows when I'm coming
I've been on both sides of it. One of my favorite IT moments was changing to a new phone. I couldn't access my email until I did a two factor auth process. Of course they emailed me my code to access my account to unlock my email. Good thing I also had a pc at home with access to my email.
Then I was supporting a lab. One woman was clearly aggravated when she called. She said no matter what she did her screen was blank. I head right over and just look at it for a few secs. I check the lowest hanging fruit solution first and see the power light on her monitor isn't on. I see it is unplugged, plug her monitor in and problem solved. I've never seen a more embarrassed person than her. lol
Networking has to be the most thankless job in IT. You are invisible when the system is working, which is 99% of the time. It stays up like that because they are monitoring it and maintaining it behind the scenes. When it fails though the failure can be catastrophic for everyone, we literally cannot do any work without it. Then everyone's eyes, and criticism, is on them.
This is why I only work for MSPs that have a closed client list, who pay the MSP for their services. They pay us to be the experts and generally we are treated as such. If a client does end up being unruly or rude, we fire them.
Somehow, my phone number got printed on an ISP provided router that services like trailer parks in Arizona. So I get calls randomly asking "Hey is this ____ Internet?" & I go "No sorry, this is just some dude. But hey, where did you find this number? I just wanna know why people are keeping calling me"
And fuck if it isn't like pulling teeth. I literally just want to know where it's printed.
"Uhh, so this isn't Blank Internet?" Click
"It's the Internet number" "yeah but like where are you reading it from?" "The internet" "Oh like a website?" "No, like the internet... so you can't fix it?"
Voicemail: "Hey this is Joe Oldman. I live at 113 blank drive. My social security number is 0000005. Can you send someone down to fix my internet? Thanks"
Finally someone under the age of 40 called me and finally said "this is the number on the back of the router" but even when I asked "So what router is it? Like where is it printed?" "Idk". Like dude, you literally just read this number and typed it in your damn phone. What are you looking at.
My experiences with IT across multiple organizations is that they're understaffed and not hiring particularly competent people.
The competent people they do have are generally egomaniacs because they're the only person or persons in a department full of idiots, and they deal with idiots all day, so they assume everyone is an idiot.
Additionally, IT is SUPER territorial. Like, noticeably so. They have 1-2 people that know what they're doing, but their whole staff acts like they're as smart as their smartest person, which they are, unassailably, not. I give a lot of respect to the competent and knowledgeable ones, because I realize they're also managing a bunch of idiots that don't know they're idiots.
Across three different organizations, I've watched five members of IT fired for their arrogance. If you're interested in doing this, simply hire an attorney, bring the smart person into the room with the arrogant idiot, and make it clear that someone in that room is not going to work for the organization in two weeks, and then explain the situation.
If you feel attacked by this, you're one of the idiot IT staff. I'm good friends with our current CIO and security lead. I hate to break it to you, but they don't like you either. You are described as "cannon fodder for grandpa."
Easy to fire, easy to hire. This cartoon adequately captures the level of questions that incompetent people working in IT can feel superior about. But they're not serious IT issues within a large organization.
That's why you hire kids that graduated with "computer degrees." So they can make cartoons and catch all the bullshit, while the real professionals do the real work.
I have no idea why things don't actually work and when presented with a core dump or any previous debugging the user did I panic like a little girl, so I restored to a previous system restore point, because fuck the changes you made since then and the fact that if you do them again the issue will come back, I'm just supposed to close this ticket, not actually fix things.