Tech bros just reinstall Arch a thousand times, IT workers actually know how those OSs operate in an enterprise environment and how to fix all of the services that they correlate to.
According to my googling, they may be by Li-Anne Dias? But the artist’s website is so bad you’re better off reading the comics when they’re reposted elsewhere
But these are so classic they even mention Windows XP
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.
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.
Switch to wireless mice. Maybe Logitech Unifying. Then one day pull all the dongles out and put them in a bucket.
First person to figure out how to download and install the unifying software and re-pair their mouse without using it gets a bonus.
But most people nowadays are lost without mice so they’d probably cycle through all the dongles on the laptop plugged into the projector and all move their mice until they figure out which is whose.
A person who knew thoroughly how to install software and get computers up and running in the 80’s and 90’s, now had no interest at all in learning how to use a cellphone. Cognitive decline/brain shrink inevitably started happening at age 40 or so and it made it more and more difficult to understand the new tech.
Similar thing happens with music, and keeping up to date with new artists and so forth. As you get older I guess you just start to not give a shit as much at all about the newfangled jibjabs and doohickeys.
Idk. I’m not in IT, but I’ve always seemed to have a tendency to try to troubleshoot tech problems.
I help out my coworkers, parents, and even my younger sibling on occasion (he’s in his early 20s). If it’s solely an age thing, then you’d think I wouldn’t be doing it with those similar to my own age or younger than me.
At work I even figured out why our headsets (vital to our job) would intermittently fail and stop working, absolutely destroying our workflow. Our IT department couldn’t manage to figure it out. But I eventually found that it intermittently conflicted with a program on the computer (Microsoft Teams).
I’m absolutely no genius and my knowledge is probably rather minimal. But I think it’s a difference in attitude and affinity for the stuff.
Yeah no. Most of em just decided they don’t have to learn anything anymore and have this learned helplessness with technology. I have seen 70 year olds trouble shoot a computer like champions but a dude in his 50’s just “isn’t good with computers” and can’t change the font size in word without his hand held
I see it as a fair deal. They paid my absurdly high phone bill as I fell for dial up scammers in my youth while experimenting with fresh new internet, and so I abandon all hope of lazy free time and help them with their unresponding printer now.
I have no idea why things don’t actually work and when presented with a core dump I panic like a little girl, so I restored to a previous system restore point, because fuck the changes you made since then, I’m just supposed to close this ticket, not actually fix things.
If it’s ACTUALLY part of your job I’ll care, if it’s some bullshit thing a wannabe IT user did to fuck their shit up that has nothing to do with their job (99% of the time it’s this) then fuck you.
It’s a business machine, not your personal test lab. Goddamn users, man. Every single time.
Your job is to break computers? If not, my guess is that you can do your job in such a way as to not break the computer. If not, the company really needs to reassess how your job is done
The implied problem you aren’t understanding is scope. Restoring your machines functionality and determining that if you do blank the universe breaks IS AN ACTUAL SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM that is in scope and highly efficient. The company probably doesn’t pay you to piddle fuck around nor does it pay the IT guy to make you piddle fucking around work out.
Digging in to the problem and figuring out an exact reproduction of the bug so that a bug can be filed with the appropriate owner of the whatever code and a fix instituted at some point would be far more interesting and fun, even more so if its in code you actually control and you can actually fix it but its likely not actually productive unless you can make a strong case for it.
The cost of fixing your stuff in 15 minutes and having you back in action is about $12.50. The cost of spending 3 days on it is $1200. Surely you understand why it works the way it works.
The company paid me to do exactly the actions I did before the system restore, which I had to redo after the system restore, and then I had to continue debugging and fixing the issue myself. Your cost analysis is fair in some cases, but it doesn’t really apply here. It wasn’t a “undo the changes so they can get back to work” situation, it was a “fix the issue so they can continue working” situation.
Also, restoring the machine to a previous state was not a fix for my issue. I wasn’t in a position where I did not have access, nor was I in one where I couldn’t revert the changes myself (even without the system restore). This was a lazy/incompetent tech, who finished their ticket and went home for the day having done nothing but inconvenience me even more, and cause me to spend even more time on the issue.
I only wish this was the only interaction I’ve ever had with IT where they proved to be more trouble than it’s worth, but sadly that’s not the case.
The implied problem you aren’t understanding is scope. Restoring your machines functionality and determining that if you do blank the universe breaks IS AN ACTUAL SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM that is in scope and highly efficient. The company probably doesn’t pay you to piddle fuck around nor does it pay the IT guy to make your piddle fucking around work out.
Fucking THANK. YOU.
This is exactly what I’m talking about, we don’t get hired so that we can accommodate some bullshit that an individual user just thinks they need. We are hired to keep your machine working in the capacity that your job requires it to work. Nowhere in our job description does it say that we have to be your little errand boy making your fuck-ass decisions function in our environment.
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.
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.
My first fucking thought. I’m still waiting on helpdesk to respond to an issue I’ve already chased down to a registry key because I’m not allowed workstation admin privileges. 🙄. Which I’m fine with but more than a week to respond to a ticket? Come the fuck on
As someone who works in IT support, I have yet to find any significant number of support people who can’t troubleshoot process issues. What I have found in spades is management making it impossible to make any meaningful process improvements.
There’s a nontrivial number of management type folks that just want it done a specific way, regardless of how that impacts worker performance or how difficult it makes my job.
The number of times I’ve suggested improvements only to be told that the existing methodology works, is too damn high.
Googling problems with Windows I find the majority of the results are MS support telling them to reset the OS. No attempt to debug the issue just nuke it and see if that fixes it. Then you read the next comments and inevitably they say “Nope, didn’t fix it”. I really dislike scripted responses like this.
Yeah the MS support forums are very hit or miss. And even the hit ones usually start with a response that doesn’t appear to understand the question very deeply, followed by a “that didn’t work”, “I said in my post that I tried that and it didn’t work”, or maybe a “that’s not what I’m trying to do, I want to do x”, and then a reply with useful links.
Though to be fair, problems can come from software the user installed or fuck ups they’ve made to settings along the way. Or quiet sabotage from another user.
Once upon a time I provided phone support for Comcast and had a caller call in unable to access Facebook. I did the usual script and found her internet was otherwise working. Narrowed it down to a dns issue. I was aware of the hosts file because I was using it for ad blocking at the time so had her open that up on a whim (which I would have gotten in trouble for since it was off script). Sure enough, it was there. Someone didn’t want her accessing it.
Who knows what kinds of methods people have used to discourage other things on shared PCs. Is edge really broken or did the user’s kid get tired of everyone clicking “make it the default browser” when it begged each time it was opened so they wrote a small program that kills it as soon as it starts?
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.
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