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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.
You’re catching the middle wave. Wait until the iPad kids in Gen alpha come up and don’t understand anything with a cord.
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”.
This is why being an elder millennial kinda gives you the edge, especially if you have been using computers since the 80s. Old MS-DOS machines forced you to understand how directory management worked.
I worked in customer service for 7 years. There are people who have no idea how to hang up a phone call on their cell phones… lots of them. Like I used to find one several times a week.
Been there, done that. Madrid-Valencia by train, circa 2007.
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.
Young people (13 - 18) literally cannot use a computer. They are too used to phones.
This is also true. My little siblings are all about as bad with computers as my parents. It’s really only millennials that seem to be the tech savvy generation for the most part.
You mean, only millennials are savvy with the generation of tech they grew up with.
Zoomers are the same way with AI and Social Media and Content Creation. That’s the generation of tech that they got started with, and everything I use will seem like a slow stupid dinosaur in comparison.
Looking forward to the first capcut edited long form film. Maybe it already exists. There are certain tasks which scope and complexity means it cannot be made on touchscreens or mobile. I mean, it can, but not comfortably.
I don’t disagree fully but my little brothers and sister are all horrible with all tech. Including AI and all that. Maybe they are just bad at being zoomers idk.
Yeah. I’ve got some co-workers I hate simply because they’re super young and I would have literally killed to have this job at their age. They’re going to be able to retire at such a younger age than me.
I spend a significant amount of time explaining to them how Windows works, when they should have had to go through other, shittier paying jobs to learn that stuff before getting here.
Oh, you don’t know what the registry is? Neat.
In their defense our generation should have burned the registry for the abomination it is. And all of Windows for that matter.
As a digital forensics investigator you have no idea how much I hate and love windows registry. You can find so much shit in there, and it’s such a pile of shit.
config files work fine! we just need a standardised place to put them (that apps follow)
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Commutes should be paid work.
The truck repair guys where i work do get extra pay per hour of travel.
I had to walk across campus to plug in a woman’s monitor because she was irate that her PC wasn’t working. To be fair she was very contrite afterwards. I think the cleaning person knocked it out.
I love the ones that won’t even look when you ask them if something is unplugged. ‘Of course it’s plugged in, what kind of idiot do you think I am?’ A big flaming one, cause when I instead say ‘Hey, sometimes those cables come loose without looking like it, can you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?’ every. single. person. answers with ‘Oh hey, it wasn’t plugged in at all!’ I know, dumbass, and as unamused as I am by the fact that you called me before checking the absolute basics, I am even less amused by the fact that I had to circumvent your idiocy to get you to tell me what the actual situation is.
A sign of high intelligence is a willingness to admit you don’t know everything and to admit when you are wrong.
It’s staggering how hopeless people are with basic tech, not even IT. I remember dealing with people who didn’t even know which black box was their computer and tried to convince me that because the monitor power light was on their computer must be on.
I work in IT and hear this about once a week. They also will call the computer anything but a computer. Most common name is the modem 🤦
Yeah, I feel this one. It really only takes one time getting called in at 3am because half the city has lost internet due to a janitor unplugging a rack full of routers so he’d have a place to plug in his radio while he was mopping to turn into a dick.
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.
This should come with a trigger warning and a glass of whisky.
Best I can do is a printer and a baseball bat.
I am not sure if it is worldwide, or if its just American culture (fuck i hope its just us), but I don’t believe the problem is a form of prejudice against intelligence, but rather that people with intelligence rely only on data and facts to make points. It is a sad truth that while this is the only correct way to make decisions, id guess around 70-80% of the population are simple, and when given solid evidence and reasoning you bore them. Meanwhile the sales team, while having no real evidence or reasoning for their solution was entertaining, and used simple buzzwords management understood delivered with a confident charisma.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma. It might make you hate yourself a smidge to give a report that focuses more on the emotions of decision making than the reasoning, but the alternative is that bad decisions keep being made that make your life harder. You as the one that knows what the fuck they are talking about will generally have one of the most well reasoned plans in a situation, learn how to be a better guardian of that plan.
None of this is to say any of this is our fault, its more an acceptance of the world we live in and recognizing how best to play in it.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma
You can’t beat the sales team on that front. Charisma is a key part of their job. They are literally being payed for their ability to convince people to buy things, and this works inside the organization as well as it work on customers.
I never said beat them at charisma, I said you need to work on your charisma. In this scenario your idea is still better than theirs, we are just working on presenting it better.
Scapegoats.
I blame autocorrect on that one. But thanks mate.
So you’re saying autocorrect is the…scapegoat? 👉😎👉
Yes, yes I am.
I once had to drive 3 hours to basically reseat a power cable of a tv. Also once I had to troubleshoot the private printer of the boss of the company at one of his apartments because his mistress couldn’t print anymore. It was set to letter size, the fix took 10 seconds.
I spent an hour trying to figure out why my internet connectivity wasn’t working. When I finally went to look at the router box itself I saw it had no lights. My cat had knocked a picture off of the wall and it fell right down behind some heavy furniture, knocking the plug for the power strip out of the wall.
One time a contractor my landlord hired unplugged my Internet in the middle of a meeting.
Ha I did something similar with speakers back in the day. Learned the lesson the hard way to make sure stuff is actually plugged in as step 1 for my self troubleshooting. Spent at least an hour, maybe more, messing around with my PC, settings, checking plugs to the tower … For some reason didn’t think to check that the power for the bass (which the speakers controller passed through) was actually plugged in until way too late and with far too much frustration!
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
I was watching a documentary about a plane that crashed, killing everyone on board, because someone left tape on a pitot tube during maintenance
Terrifying.
Fortunately, I was not working on safety-critical systems at the time. Now I am, so this is a great case study.
The article glosses over whether or not Boeing was even partially found at fault. In my opinion, this was a major design flaw on their part.
Here is the documentary.
Wish it were an article.
Ice crystals in the pitot tube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
Wasps nest in the pitot tube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301
Pitot tube blocked by tape:
I gotta ask… Why couldn’t someone local do it?
I’m not op, it I imagine it went something like this:
“We’ve tried everything and nothing works, you gotta come down here”
“…and you followed the instructions in the run book to the letter”?
“yes. every instruction”
runbook line 1 page 1: remove the tape from the sensor before installation.
This is why I don’t ask them if they already did something. I just tell them we’re going to take it from the top and I need them to tell me what happens at each step. Same goes for restarting there computer. I ask them if they need to save anything because I’m going to try something that may reboot it and then I reboot it remotely (unless the up time actually shows they rebooted it).
Sounds like my mom whenever she was confronted with anything that required learning button sequences. “I don’t know how to use the microwave, you do it for me.” = “I don’t want to learn how to do it.”
I’ve definitely dealt with that exact scenario before, but I only had to walk across the building that time.
This was an interesting case because somebody decided they wanted to hide the sensors from a third-party tester, and failed to inform anyone, let alone consider the fact that those sensors were basically the defining characteristic of the product and nothing would work right if they were obscured.
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.
Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it’s easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
Yes, but it’s incompetence of the management who won’t approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space
Working with small businesses is like working in the jungle, anything goes.
There’s no budget, 3 working power sockets, the network hardware should be in a museum and there’s a beige box in the closet that absolutely can never be turned off for inexplicable reasons. The last “computer person” who touched anything left no notes and has been missing for 3 months. Also, the printer is broken.
You don’t often get to choose a racks location in a small office and the UPS only ran the router and switch for a hour. You sound like you have never worked in the field.
I’m over 30 years in the field, thanks
Then you know that what you said is not always possible to achieve in terms of preventing access.
You do not know how long it was taking her to plug that coffee maker into the hidden UPS
Yes, but… There’s a reason for locked doors and apcs
What are apcs in this context?
Battery backups
A brand that makes rack enclosures for IT gear, typically they come with a key to lock it shut
I think he wants to run her over with an armored truck.
I would assume APC, a brand of uninterrupted power supply.
Yes.
“my computer won’t turn on!!”
“is it plugged in?”
“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”
“…”
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…
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.
i actually went to school for computers for a bit, got my A+ and net+, but realized i get fucking outraged at my own computer when it has problems, i couldn’t imagine the murderfest rampage that might ensue if i had to deal with morons and their bullshit computer problems–glad i didn’t pursue it
murderfest rampage
Yep, that’s the correct level of anger, based on empirical evidence. I hate how I fumed at dumb people back in the day.
Please tell us… What was the other one?
You asked the wrong person, you probably meant to place your comment one level higher up.
other what?
Likely other line of work
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I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
They have to reboot their router to see it.
Have you tried turning them off and back on again?
THE SHOES
What show is it?
IT Crowd - go watch it now!
Thx
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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.
It amazes me that people don’t make even a small effort to debug stuff themselves before calling for help. There is a youtube channel for clips from car mechanics and people bring in cars for things like “There is a knocking sound coming from the back seat” and there is a gallon jug of liquid rolling on the floor back there.
We’ll stop being dicks when they stop being so dumb.
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.
Yeah. I was talking took over a call from another tech that had a lady berating him because he couldn’t help her because we didn’t have access to the EMR portal she was calling about. It turned out she’d had a tbi and had problems with regulating her mood. It took probably 45 minutes but I was able to talk her down and get her in touch with the right people. If I’d gotten into it with her instead of being calm we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Should I have had to listen to that? No, but if I hadn’t she wouldn’t have gotten the help she needed and it wasn’t really her fault for being that way. Obviously an edge case but you never know what people are going through.
For sure. For many of us “being a dick” means “punishing my liver.” It’s a calculated risk decision.
You’re the saint I could never be. That’s why I got into security for a bit – I can be as big a dick as I need to be that day! ;-)
I don’t think it’s a race to the bottom for fun. lol
That’s why I’m a sales engineer :)
Oh man I was expecting it to have been plugged into a switched outlet or something
I had a label printer that was failing to work. I have spent most of the week with IT remoting into my desktop trying to figure out the issue with our cobbled together system. I finally realized after 5 days of this that the software causing the issue was on my co-worker’s computer. Pointing this out to the IT guy got the problem fixed in minutes.
Sometimes the user has no idea what is and is not signifcant. I had no idea that this was significant only that an icon with similar looks was on my co-workers cluttered desktop.
I’ve been the PEBCAK enough times to not give users a hard time about it.
Ah yes the old PEBCAK/1D-10T combo.
Shudder
