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.
Found the guy that never worked in end user support.
What do you consider end user?
Drweb liveusb be like: hold my beer
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!
This also works on IT managers if you say “can we use AI to do that?”.
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?
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
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.
Yup. User probably put the pc to sleep and woke it up.
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.
Or turned off the monitor and turned it back on.
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 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
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.
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.
Except when they’re not lying but windows by default has ‘fast-startup’ enabled, so every time they shutdown the uptime never resets.
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.
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!
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!
Is everyone using kpatch then? Because uptime if you’re still running 3.12 is silly.
looks nervously at my personal computer that has been running constantly for 5 years
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.
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.
And we’ve all moved to 7zip now anyway. Half expecting to be told that’s outdated now too.
🤓
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
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.
IT Crowd was such a great show.
Between the antics, it was too real
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”.
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
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?
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 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.
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.
That’s how one becomes IT
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
50/50 chance they believe you.
The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.
This why I ask “can you restart it again, and just tell me what you see, please”
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.
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.
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.
“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.
20/80 tbh
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!!
Second rule of IT: all users lie
Thought that was House MD rule number one. Everybody lies. Wait. That means IT lies! How deep does the rabbit hole go?
The rabbit lies too.
House lied and not everybody lies.
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.
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…
“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.”
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!
I mean sometimes a plug comes loose, its bad but a easy fix.
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!
