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!”
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Found the guy that never worked in end user support.
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Drweb liveusb be like: hold my beer
The real world experience
“Hi so to save us some time I’ve restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one…”
“Ok sir could you restart your computer”
How is this the real world experience?
IT can have scripts and flowcharts they are required to follow, even if it is redundant to tech savvy people.
And as always, there’s an XKCD comic about it https://xkcd.com/806/
It helps too. I lost internet, did two full reboots of the modem and router. Nothing. Called support. He walked me through the process of rebooting the modem and router. It worked that time.
My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples’ Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.
The number of times I’ve had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I’m on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious…
They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn’t really save anything. I’ve had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.
I spent months trying to tell my ISP that their side of a DHCP transaction wasn’t giving me my IPv6 address, being so specific as to send them the exact offending packets but it wasn’t until I took my entire network apart, unboxed their shitbox router and plugged that in that they would believe me.
I’ve worked IT man, I get it, but jesus christ!
One day my MIL’s Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.
They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said “Let’s connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works.”
Dude looked at me like I had two heads. “It doesn’t work like that.”
I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac’s public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.
Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.
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.
🤓
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.
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.
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.
Use 7zip
If you are messing around the inside of a desktop pc, you are already more of a computer person than the average person.
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
50/50 chance they believe you.
20/80 tbh
Second rule of IT: all users lie
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.
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)
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.
80 percent chance they reboot it themselves anyways.
100% chance to remember the name
80% seems really low
“Did you make sure it’s plugged in?”
“Of course I did! Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“You mind just checking for me real quick?”
“…”
“Sir?”
“Never mind, it’s working now.”
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I had one where yes everything was plugged in but… The power strips never plugged into the wall… They were just plugged into each other.
That one turned out to be an annoying bit of cable management that I wouldn’t have had to do if they would have just left things alone and let me handle the original ticket
Never ask if it’s plugged in. Always ask them to unplug it and plug it in again. That way they don’t feel condescended to.
That’s a good tip!
I’ve unironically had this happen to me, same friend, twice.
They had the audacity to blame me, despite being generous enough to perform some basic maintenance and performance enhancements.
Then when they got home, forgot to plug it back in.
I’ve done it before, although I figured it out before asking for help. We all do dumb stuff sometimes. Just admit it and don’t be a jerk about it!
100% chance you logged off/on
How is this about programming?
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
And then it turns out you actually hadn’t restarted the computer, in my experience…
They just restarted the monitor
“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.
We know if you did or not :)
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!
“What color are the pins on the electrical cord?”
No matter the answer, you can be damn sure they rebooted.
A bit harder in the laptop era though.
Ha. That’s fantastic
I worked with a guy that would tell people that coax needed to be “released to ground” occasionally, by unhooking the cable and putting your thumb over the end. That’s how he made sure people were disconnecting and reconnecting the cable from the back of the box. He also told someone that “data might be trapped in the Ethernet cord” and advised they unplug it from both ends and swing it around their head in a circle to “loosen the stuck bits and clear the line”…
In what possible instance would they not be copper colored?
I think the idea is that average people have no clue what color they are. So they’d be forced to take it out to check and thus have to restart their PC. It’s a trick!
Altho, maybe I’m misunderstanding something because all the pins of all the electrical cords I’ve ever seen have been silver?
Meanwhile I don’t have any clue as I only disable my PSU with a switch.
I’ve seen brass colored on some older plugs.
I’d make up some BS about an old version of the product using brass or copper, and newer versions using aluminum or iron, so knowing the color will help me know how to fix it
If I had a nickel for every time I was troubleshooting with a friend and discovered they thought turning the monitor off and on again was “rebooting the computer” I’d be depressingly wealthy.
I once did a house call over an hour away to turn on elderly couples monitor back on. Didn’t feel good about giving them the bill.
Just imagine they’re MAGA
“What do you see when it’s coming back up?”
“Right back to the problem I’m having!”
“So you don’t see [insert OEM logo here]?”
“Nope. And it’s still frozen!”
“Where’s the power button you’re holding down?”
“On the monitor!”
Open the window and throw it out, please
*Shuts the laptop lid and opens it.
“Ok! It’s restarted”
IT person: “Well that was certainly quick. Are you sure you restarted it?”
Person: *Feels smug about how they were able to restart quicker than most people.
