this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt

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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?

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[–] x4740N@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Emerald@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[–] hakunawazo@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Why does a BJ have to be forged?

[–] solsangraal@lemmy.zip 166 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"my computer won't turn on!!"

"is it plugged in?"

"hold on let me check...it's hard to tell, the power's out"

"..."

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 79 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

[–] x4740N@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago

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

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[–] saruwatarikooji@lemmy.world 44 points 1 week ago

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...

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 101 points 1 week ago (8 children)

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.

[–] crank0271@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We'll stop being dicks when they stop being so dumb.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 99 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

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.

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[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 73 points 1 week ago (14 children)

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.

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[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 71 points 1 week ago (10 children)

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

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 64 points 1 week ago (10 children)
[–] Bahnd@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

0118-999-881-999-119-725...3

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[–] Madblood@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world 44 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] SabinStargem 44 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Commutes should be paid work.

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[–] DarkFuture@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'd say 2000s was when it peaked.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Knowledge peaked in the 2000s, but those are the 80's and 90's kids. The ones born in the 2000s had an iPhone with 14 and know nothing...

[–] krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yup. People under the age of 25 don't even understand files or directories.

iPhones and Chromebooks have abstracted everything away.

[–] mrvictory1@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago

Thankfully Chromebooks have very low popularity outside US

[–] Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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".

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[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

"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.

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[–] Majorllama@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (20 children)

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.

[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My father was still upgrading his PC when he was 93.

[–] Majorllama@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Majorllama@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

That should really be standard at this point.

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