As someone who’s an IT person I can tell you the vibe is actually, “Well shit, I guess I’m going to actually have to diagnose something.”
I swear I could hear the call center employee (probably not really an IT guy at this stage) sweating when I called them after a thunderstorm fried my router’s entry port and I read them the list of troubleshooting I already went through before calling them.
As an IT person, I assure you, I do not believe that you actually restarted it.
As someone who has been asked to restart the computer, even though I already did that before calling IT support… I internally sigh, but begrudgingly do it again just to appease their process. Because I assume plenty of people don’t do it and make y’alls life a tiny bit harder, when a restart would’ve fixed it
Also, how many are solved by making sure the power cable is not just plugged into the wall, but seated into the back of the computer as well?
As someone working as on-site IT support for over 15 years, I can’t tell you how often I have asked people to restart their computer over the phone and they swore they did (“multiple times even”), only for me to eventually come around to their desk and having them actually reboot the device in my presence and for the problem to actually fix itself.
One Lady I asked to restart their computer said “all right, hold on.” only to respond not even 10 seconds (!) later "I did, its still not working„ and after the third time I went to her desk and asked her to show me what she did. She leaned forward, turned off the monitor, then turned it back on. “I did this 10 times already, and its still not working”.
Some people just lie about rebooting, some simply don’t actually know how to reboot properly. After a few months, you get to know who’s lying, who’s doesn’t know better and who’s actually telling you the truth, you get to know your coworkers.
well shutdown isn’t a full restart anymore, it literally saves your issues and reloads it when it turns on. so we have to doublecheck that too. it should count as restart, but doesn’t.
Honestly, I would try the restart first (cause it was easier/more automated), and then a full shutdown and power-up. It’s been many years since I called any IT support though, but that was mu process. Cause I hated having to call for help lol
but a shutdown is NOT a restart anymore and doesn’t quit and restart processes
I hear ya, and appreciate the info because I didn’t know that. I was saying that I would do both before calling, and then again when they asked me
But this was back in like 2004-ish, so I’m not sure what was best practice back then. I would just try it all before calling lol… going so far as to shut down and unplug for a few seconds or more
Yup. User probably put the pc to sleep and woke it up.
Or turned off the monitor and turned it back on.
Or they shutdown and turn it back on, which doesn’t count in windows as restarting unless you disable fast-startup. So you get annoyed tech support thinking the user is a liar and an annoyed end user that knows they turned it off and on again.
The amount of time I reset it myself and the problem went away is too damn high.
Usually the end user kinda smirks and says huh, weird, I tried that! You must be magic!
With a lot of solar equipment, the tech support has access to a lot of settings us installers don’t, so we’ve had times where we tell the tech that we’ve done everything we can, including restarting it (and with my experience with Generac inverters, restarting them can and will break something!), and sometimes it really feels like they do click a magic button, say “how about now?”, then it works
I do believe you restarted the PC, but the program that has frozen is on the cloud, so we’ll have to restart the cloud.
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
“Ok let me check on something”
Uptime: 156 hours
"let’s restart using what I like to call, ‘the right way’ "
“I restart every day before going home”
Uptime: 19:23:07:24
Yeah… Logging off isn’t restarting…
(Brought to you by my actual day today)
E: correct autocorrect
E2: of course that’s not why I told her. I explained how fastboot sometimes takes over and doesn’t actually restart the device, only “refreshes” the experience. I recommended she restart at least once a week. We’ll see what happens.
If you are internal IT you (or someone at least) should disable fastboot though GPOs
Idk how that person’s IT works, but in mine, that would probably warrant a lot of paperwork. The techs would have to pitch the change to client management, client management would have to pitch it to change management and provide test results to show it has no side effects, then deal with the techs complaining about the uptick in tickets about slow boot times or people justifying never shutting down or restarting with it taking so long to boot.
Not that they’re actually slow, our users are just super entitled. I got to observe the rollout of automatic screen lock for security reasons, and the ensuing pushback. The audacity of having to reenter your password if you’ve spent more than ten minutes doing nothing!
Security even managed to push for reducing it to five minutes after some unfortunate incident… but it got reverted for reasons you can probably guess. Hint: shit always flows downward.
I recommend looking into Windows hello for business to reduce the usage of passwords in the first place. It’s so much nicer to use your fingerprint, face, or even a PIN.
I would never consider fingerprints or face scans to be secure even for personal devices. I guess if theres literally nothing to protect, if thats possible.
Passwords can in most scenarios be considered to be even less secure.
Remember that you aren’t replacing 64 character passwords with fingerprints. You are replacing 8 character shit passwords with fingerprints.
Also pretty much everyone in IT security agrees that passwordless is the way to go.
Passwords REALLY fucking sucks for so many reasons.
I do understand the point that the biometrics are replacing very short pins usually, oftentimes 4 digits only but I dont quite see how that makes the passcodes worse than the biometrics.
I’d say even a 6 digit passcode with a randomized number pad, alongside an emergency wipe pin, would do better than biometrics, which also need to have a passcode setup as backup anyhow.
Maybe you could play out a few scenarios that illustrate your point?
windows doesnt actually shut down, its some kind of hybrid hibernation now. it only really reboots if you actually reboot. so they may actually be “shutting down” every day.
They have successfully circumvented the reboot. I just always turn that setting off. SSDs are ubiquitous, nobody needs a fake shutdown. It just causes more issues.
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”.
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.
My God the amount of times I have to pull the frickin issue out of people…
It doesn’t work.
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’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?
Its actually the worst advice when you haven’t figured out what it is, something like a virus (ransom ware, ad shit or similar) usually only works after a restart, if you don’t restart, the IT guy can remove it without much damage.
Drweb liveusb be like: hold my beer
Found the guy that never worked in end user support.
What do you consider end user?
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!”
100% chance you logged off/on
Meanwhile I had an IT guy think I was just being an idiot. He was so confident I hadn’t checked something. Felt good when I showed him where it went wrong.
Then you look at the uptime. 247 days. No longer have you been elevated. Now you’re the vilest of vile. You’re the user that lies. You just say what you think we want to hear, don’t you? Well, now you’re getting put on hold. For as long as your uptime was.
Except when they’re not lying but windows by default has ‘fast-startup’ enabled, so every time they shutdown the uptime never resets.
looks nervously at my personal computer that has been running constantly for 5 years
Yup this is exactly what I was going to post. Was in the industry for 10 years and call me pessimistic but the second they told me they’d already rebooted I’d check uptime.
We have a running leader board for uptime. Servers don’t count. That said, I’ve seen some people who think they actually are turning it off but the machine just enters sleep mode. I only trust
shutdown /r /t 0I just press the power button/switch on the UPS/PSU/wall.
unless you do it from a running system (which you shouldn’t, unless you want everything corrupted, that won’t help. windows has a feature called fast startup that only kinda shuts down your PC, even if you unplug it, so things that would get fixed by an actual reboot wouldn’t be fixed in your case
Thankfully, I’m not on Windows.
But the switch is only to make sure it is off. Of course I poweroff before that.…
Trust me! I really do!
IT people casually telling users to turn off all the breakers for 30s
To be fair, I do IT for convenience stores. Sometimes we have to reboot pumps or similar, and all we can do is have them throw a breaker for 30 seconds lmao
I’m remote so either I trust the user or push commands. I know which I prefer
Hello there REISUBber!
Is everyone using kpatch then? Because uptime if you’re still running 3.12 is silly.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
How is this about programming?
As there are not many subs on Lemmy, things do get overlap.
I didn’t say it was. It’s adjacent, and based on the vote % it seems like most people don’t have an issue with a meme about IT.
It’s about IT. Close enough
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.
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!
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.
I will not believe you anyways and reboot just in case.
Whenever my troubleshooting doesn’t work it’s because I forgot to power cycle
“Yes I have, and I’m happy to do so again. For you.”
“I reboot it every night.”
Processor Uptime : 191:22:19:54
I think the right processor up time is 192:168:1:1
Something overflowed somewhere…
Show me how you reboot the PC.
*User turns off monitor
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only to login and see rhat they actually didn’t restart. They just said so because they think you wont find out 😂
“Yes I rebooted.”
- The guy that somehow managed to survive 180 days of random power outages.
Told somebody to restart and they just went “OK, done it” like 2 seconds later. In the HDD era.
Turns out they just turned the monitor on and off. 👍
I feel like there’s a specific peak between total technical ignorance and a weary understanding of how fickle technology can be. On this peak is the height of arrogance, where you believe you’ve really got everything figured out. Part of learning is understanding that, yes, sometimes you really did just forget to plug the modem in.
Yep, that one where the person on the peak starts lecturing you in abstract terms about trying the simplest hypotheses and such, while you are trying to solve their problem.
I know the philosophy part that asshole is talking about, only he has no bloody clue which part is simple and which is not here.
It was a hang port on a switch in that case.
