My wife’s standing at her company’s IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.
Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.
Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of “screen broke”.
It’s the same as going to a mechanic and saying “my car doesn’t work!” No shit? That’s usually why people come here. Wanna be more specific?
My God the amount of times I have to pull the frickin issue out of people…
I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Some of it is ignorance of the technology. Which I get because you can’t expect everyone to be experts (but if you don’t know the difference between a browser and your desktop just fuck off back to the bronze age).
The other is a true lack of empathy in the context of communication. Being able to communicate effectively with an equal onus on both parties to understand and adapt the dialog until the information has effectively been transferred is not hard, really, but some people just don’t care enough about the person on the other end of the line to be bothered.
That is infuriating when you’re trying to be helpful.
It doesn’t work.
As a former IT help desk person, I can confirm that we do in fact love it when people give us good info. People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
“please call so and so, they’re having issues with their browser”
Call the user, they are out for the day. Leave message to call back
Either never hear back or the issue was not browser related
Either way, tell the original ticket creator to have the person having the issue call us if they want prompt service
People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
Shovel gay, pen have, paper end, rock good.
We know if you did or not :)
If I am calling IT to fix anything, it’s because I’ve exhausted all the usual things to fix it (restart, clear cache, make sure everything is seated, googled the issue, etc). 9 times outta 10, they’re just as stumped as I am and the device simply gets replaced. That 10th time tho it’s something I’ve never encountered but they have.
I support doing the troubleshooting yourself. Just be aware, if you call with one of those 9 out of 10 cases, we’re still going to have to do ALL of those steps again, so I can document that we tried them before sending any hardware. I’ve been burned one too many times by someone telling me they’ve already tried something.
I started in IT before switching to development. I have CCNA, A+, and Apple Pro certifications. I run Arch at home, btw. But when I have to contact IT, usually for something that needs elevated permissions or bad hardware, I’m just another user. It’s mildly infuriating to go through all the steps again, even after explaining what I did. I get it, I really do, but it’s not fun at all.
I would call IT and give them error codes and attempted remedies. They would do house calls and leave with a few rip its. Everyone in my office usually had my call IT because they (my coworkers and the IT guys) knew I’d at least tried something. If someone else from the office called IT, they knew that I was out of the office or the user was lying about something.
That’s how one becomes IT
Contacting IT is always my last line of defense and I get unreasonably frustrated when they refuse to help without walking me through basic troubleshooting. It’s like, I’ve already figured out the cause of the problem, just tell me where the button is to fix it. The worst was when I had to RMA my Pixel phone and they made me go through every step I’d already been through just to come to the same conclusion I initially came to them with.
Google support is a joke, I had to RMA a tablet, obviously went through all the troubleshooting before (factory reset included). The dude on the Hotline was like: “fantastic you did everything I would have told you. Unfortunately our system doesn’t accept that way of working I need to send you an email with the same troubleshooting steps you already did and you need to call again in a few minutes and confirm to a new support agent that you followed what the email told you”
To their credit it was accepted afterwards with no issues but that whole process is more than braindead
Having worked in IT about 12 to 15 years ago I can honestly say I just stopped believing people when they told me they did things or checked things because 99% of the time it was just a flat out lie.
And taking them at their word meant wasting my own time because usually it was just a quick fix that I suggested in the first place.
It quickly, quickly taught me that 99% of people are fucking idiots, and that even the smart ones who actually knew what they were doing with a computer could be idiots too.
because 99% of the time it was just a flat out lie.
What I don’t understand is why they lie about something directly causal to the resolution.
Pride and not wanting to sound like a dummy basically
Depending on what you’re needing done, a lot of times IT has to cover their asses. If it didn’t happen on that phone call, it didn’t happen. I always appreciate the gumption, you probably saved us like, 30 call just from figuring out other issues yourself. If it’s anything that will cost the company money, though, like replacing hardware - if I don’t take due diligence in making sure those earlier steps are done, it’s my ass on the line.
You know you’re smart enough to do the troubleshooting, but that technician has probably 1000+ users that rotate weekly, they can’t keep a log book of which ones are good and which ones will land them in the shit. I totally get the frustration, but the ones who lie about doing simple troubleshooting ruin it for everyone.
To be fair even the most technically adept person can have tunnel vision where they start digging before ruling out all the simple stuff. Yes it can feel tedious and a little condescending to follow all those steps, but you get humbled the first time it really is just an unplugged cable.
Me to Google support for a problem with my brand new pixel 3 back when the 3 was the new hotness
Me: my camera only works for one photo, then doesn’t work again until I reboot it. Then it again works only for one photo, then it gives the error “camera [number] is locked” (screenshot)
Support: that sounds like a fault. Could you reboot your phone and tell me what happens?
Me: ok. … Right I’m back. Just like for all the ten photos I took before contacting you, it worked for one photo then that same error. That makes eleven times I rebooted my phone today.
The worst for me was with the Nexus 6P, the last phone before they rebranded to Pixel. There was a known issue with the battery, where it would die when the phone said it was at like 50%. I jumped through all their troubleshooting hoops when it was obviously a hardware issue. They eventually agreed to send out a replacement and I was assured it wouldn’t have the issue. Lo and behold, it did the exact same thing as soon as I got it. I went through all the trouble shooting again and they sent ANOTHER replacement that still had the issue. I was so fed up and just kept requesting to talk to someone higher up and they eventually just sent me a Pixel 1 to shut me up.
They sent out so many Pixel 1s for that. Same exact thing happened to me.
Any time you’re working with somebody who has to deal with the general public(or general workforce) though, you gotta be understanding.
They have to sort through the clueless people who turned off their monitor, and they have to deal with the Dunning-Kruger people who lie about what they did because they think they’re so damn smart.
And if it’s the first contact level 1 type support, they may not have the expertise to tell the difference and have to rely on the scripts.
Yeah, for sure. As frustrating as it may be, I’m always understanding with the support agent. They’re just doing their job, it’s not their fault there’s a procedure they need to follow.
My buddy had google support tell him to send a screenshot of his phones screen burn in. They took a good amount of convincing before they admitted that that wouldn’t work.
Lol wait, I’ve had to do that too. I think it was for a dead pixel.
I work in our service department myself (not as support tech though), but obviously, all tickets are supposed to go through 1st level. I don’t wanna be the dick skipping queue, so I did then one time I had an issue.
There’s a unique feeling of satisfaction to submitting a ticket with basically all the 1st level troubleshooting in the notes, allowing the tech to immediately escalate it to a 2nd level team. One quick call, one check I didn’t know about, already prepared the escalation notes while it ran. Never have I heard our support sound so cheerful.
One should never skip dicks in the queue. It’s rude and they’ve been waiting.
If someone sends a bug report with minimal effort and expects me to fix I’ll skip their report unless I have nothing better to do.
Still riding the high of RMAing my Index. Included all the steps I did and the reply was essentially, “Thanks for troubleshooting, confirm your address and we’ll ship your replacement.”
My “Index” you say…🤔
You know, the fancy hat you wear so you don’t have to see the same reality that work takes place in.
This thing? https://www.indexdrums.com/shop/hardhat
This thing: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/index
Thanks that would have bothered me for weeks
I had to mess with you a little bit.
My favorite little story was while working short-term at a company. Had some issues, did my normal troubleshooting steps and Google searches, identified what I felt the issue was and knew I wouldn’t have enough access to fix it. Reached out and got a response “Blah blah blaaah schedule blah blah Remote-In.”
Later on he sent me a message and remotes into my computer. I take control quick, open up notepad, and type out “Hi!”
To this day I swear that little show earned me more difficult fake phishing attempts. Which I mention because he specifically told me one day he had experience in the information security sector. Lo’ and behold!
50/50 chance they believe you.
This why I ask “can you restart it again, and just tell me what you see, please”
The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.
I tend to just check uptime before asking this question.
If I see the machine has been up for weeks and they tell me they rebooted it, I know i’m dealing with someone who doesn’t know that pressing the power button on the monitor doesn’t turn the computer off.
Could also be windows fault.
It likes to do soft restarts and not actually restart.
I started telling my users to always hold shift when shutting down or restarting to make sure it shuts down fully.
I explain fast boot to people by saying “for some reason Microsoft went and made the Shut Down button not actually shut down your PC, it really just puts it into a ‘deep sleep’ mode, and to their credit, it lets them say that boot times are faster… But it also means that in order to FULLY restart the PC, you have to click restart… I know it’s a pain”
Usually I get looked at like I’m from another planet, but that reaction means they’ll probably remember it later.
And sometimes fast boot (I’m assuming we’re both talking about the bios setting) causes so many blue screens in windows that it becomes almost unusable.
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AFAIK fast startup only affects shutdown, clicking restart will always do a full reboot. Shift clicking shutdown will do a full shutdown like you said, but shift clicking restart will start recovery mode.
I don’t even bother checking. I tell them I’m going to do something on my side that might cause their computer to reboot and then reboot it remotely.
80 percent chance they reboot it themselves anyways.
80% seems really low
100% chance to remember the name
Yeah, 50% person actually restarted, 30% chance person is lying, 20% chance person just turned the monitor off and back on.
My buddy works IT for a company and that 20% chance is one he encountered just last week!!
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I just recently had a wfh user ship me one of his monitors back because we had exhausted every thing I could think of troubleshooting-wise. When it arrived I unboxed it, plugged it in and the damn thing worked fine. I followed up with him and finally realized he had been trying to push the damn power LED instead of the actual power button.
Searching for a button is sometimes really hard, as manufacturers are quite inventive. But then again, reading an instruction is usually an option even if it is last resort (in the list it’s right after mailing the monitor to the support, it seems)
I lied while RMAing a video card… kinda.
I spoke with an incredibly nice Indian fellow, and he asked me to try some troubleshooting. I had done all of it before, so I… pretended. But I told him all of the things I experienced when I did those steps (and lied further by giving ample time to pretend to do things.)
He RMA’d it just fine in the end and it works five years later. But I did feel bad about lying. I just didn’t want to take my whole working setup and do the troubleshooting steps again D:
You get a lot of shit MSI, but you did me goodly.
Thought that was House MD rule number one. Everybody lies. Wait. That means IT lies! How deep does the rabbit hole go?
House lied and not everybody lies.
The rabbit lies too.
20/80 tbh
“Did you restart your computer?”
“… yes?”
“OK then do me a favor, shut it down, unplug the power for 5 second and plug it back in”
Everyone uses laptops that plug into workstations like desktops now.
opens task manager
sees a system uptime of 4 years
I’ll lose my tabs!
And several gigabytes of ram taken by chrome.
Restarting can be a pain too.
Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I’m not new to Linux, I’ve been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.
Installing arch itself wasn’t that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn’t recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn’t want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.
I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn’t install dhcpcd and I don’t know how to use network manager! No internet, great!
In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when… The boot menu didn’t recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?
“Oh it doesn’t appear… Wait, what’s this? No boot partition found? Oh crap…”
Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they’re called. I deleted GRUB.
Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and… It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.
Usually, I would’ve installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.
I don’t know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)
I like to imagine an IT person telling someone that story to see whether they understand it or get a stroke, as a way to check if they were telling the truth about being good with computers and having tried everything, or something.
Check if dckpcd is up
respecc
I have a dark secret. I used to have CenturyLink DSL around 5 years ago, and the tech asked me if I had restarted the modem during one of the many stints where I would get bits per second rather than the “10mbps” we were supposed to get
I lied every time. I’m sorry CenturyLink tech support employee, but man did CenturyLink suck, and man am I absolutely sure that it never fixed the issue.
At one point I filed a complaint with the FCC and got a letter from CenturyLink telling me that they knew about the complaint!
We know when you lie. We can see uptime stats.
Well no wonder I never had more bandwidth, it’s all your metrics eating it up!
The metrics are the only important part! How else are we supposed to know how good the line is unless we constantly stress test the line by collecting data? Your ability to use the line is not a useful metric, so we don’t worry about that.
Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.
He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.
I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.
If you are messing around the inside of a desktop pc, you are already more of a computer person than the average person.
Use 7zip
I’m not really a computer person
Yes, you are.
seemed logically basic
See. You are.
winzip
Yes, retro.
Did it display the payment nag screen ironically or seriously?
You thinking of WinRAR? I always assumed that was for enterprise use and they knew everyone was content to be nagged.
That’s exactly what it’s for. If you use it commercially without paying winrar will come for you, but as a personal use case it’s just ad ware. You get the product, and deal with their ad every boot. You could pay for it, but it probably the least annoying ad on the internet right now.
And we’ve all moved to 7zip now anyway. Half expecting to be told that’s outdated now too.
I’ve thought about it, because I almost feel a little guilty. I’ve used WinRAR for a decent chunk of my life, across a multitude of systems.
I still haven’t, but I think about it sometimes when I see the window.
Did they ever come for anybody though?
Enterprises are very averse to risks, and it’s very cheap, so it’s a non-brainier. But I’m not sure there’s any actual enforcement there.
I remember hearing that they have gone for companies before, but that was a while ago and, ya know, just something I read that may or may not be particularly accurate.
🤓
IT Crowd was such a great show.
Between the antics, it was too real
Show me how you reboot the PC.
*User turns off monitor
Honestly most unsavvy people don’t even realize they can turn their monitors off. Especially if the buttons are behind or under the screen, they wouldn’t even know the buttons were there.
There’s some older ones where there are actual buttons on the bottom of the screen. Beats me how the people who press them to turn it off manage to press the power button for the PC to turn it on.
I just had to search to find my work monitors’ controls yesterday! All the way on the back.
I get credit for knowing they were turnoffable though.
I remember some old movie that was on TV ~30 years ago. A terrorist group broke into some computer room to destroy the data. They shot the monitors to smithereens and ran away.
(AFAIR they weren’t Macs)
Considering our IT department replaces computers without moving over our files (like come on, just swap the drives!), I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they’d treat it.
As an IT person, hearing that someone has already restarted to try to fix it, gives me mixed feelings.
First, they might be lying. I’ve had it happen that people tell me they’ve done something when they have not. Restarting is usually an easy one to verify, just check the uptime of the system.
Second, maybe they did everything right, and actually restarted, that’s cool that they tried something before calling in. I appreciate that.
Third, if the second thing is true then, I’m now frustrated, because now I have to get dirty with whatever is happening since a reboot that should have fixed the problem, didn’t fix it. I know it’s not going to be an easy fix. Most of the time, I’m right, unfortunately.
I’m all for users trying stuff before calling in. But recognise that you don’t, and shouldn’t have access to some things. Sometimes that’s administrator rights, sometimes that’s a piece of software, sometimes it’s the ability to turn off the AV/firewall.
It can be a lot of things. If you’re not sure if what you’re trying won’t screw things up more than they already are, then don’t do it. If it’s something simple that you know how to do, go for it. If you happen to get it fixed, so much the better.
“Customer self resolved” is usually the fastest way to get a problem resolved. That’s good for you, for me, and good for everyone.
100% chance you logged off/on
I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”
Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
