• x4740N@lemm.ee
    2·
    53 minutes ago

    Has this IT guy not heard of wake on lan

    Or is his employer the kind of person who doesn’t use wake on lan

  • Madblood@lemmy.world
    44·
    22 hours ago

    Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.

    Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • viking@infosec.pub
      11·
      9 hours ago

      There’s a whole new generation of tech illiterates being born with a smartphone up their asses. I feel that 80’s kids peaked at tech literacy, then steadily declined from the mid 90s maybe.

    • funkyfarmington@lemmy.world
      5·
      16 hours ago

      Defensive, or outright steering ticket notes was my FAVORITE skill. I learned of so many shitshows weeks later because my department head read my notes, shut the person down and didn’t even mention it to me. It actually got a few employees in trouble with their management.

    • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
      39·
      1 day ago

      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”.

      • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.eeEnglish
        14·
        1 day ago

        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.

    • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
      8·
      21 hours ago

      When I used to work support for home Internet, it was accepted practice to ask if we could speak to the child in the house if we were having trouble with an adult…

    • Donkter@lemmy.world
      20·
      1 day ago

      You’re catching the middle wave. Wait until the iPad kids in Gen alpha come up and don’t understand anything with a cord.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      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.

  • Majorllama@lemmy.world
    332·
    1 day ago

    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.

      • Majorllama@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 hour ago

        Much respect. I couldn’t pay my dad to build his own computer. The man will build Legos until the end of time but when I tell him building a computer is just more expensive Legos he gets scared haha.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      I wrote auto-reply instructions for this one, it’s the same as she was doing but one click down to make a folder to match the zip name.

    • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      10 hours ago

      Not defending her, but for years I’ve felt like ‘Extract Here’ should create a subfolder by default

      • Majorllama@lemmy.world
        162·
        1 day ago

        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.

        • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
          74·
          1 day ago

          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.

          • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
            81·
            17 hours ago

            AI

            “Prompt Engineer” isn’t a skill

            Social Media

            The only skill is a complete disregard of privacy

            Content Creation

            Millennial kids were making animated movies with more powerful, free tools then what’s available for now. Now it’s all designed to churn out the 30 slop of the same dances to the same songs.

            • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              15 hours ago

              Hey, there was a time when “googling” something wasn’t a skill, there was a time when “vlogger” wasn’t a real career, a time when “Brand Ambassador” wasn’t a real job. Those are all things that take skill, and practice to do successfully today, and people will pay you money to do it.

              Just because an activity seems valueless to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually useless.

              If you want to property test your chatbots to avoid giving away free stuff, or leaking a bunch of data, you’re going to want a Prompt Engineer to test it.

              If you want your brand to go viral and get great advertising, or if you want to minimize the impact of negative messaging, you’re going to want a Social Media professional.

              Tell me, when was the last time you went to AlbinoBlacksheep or Newgrounds to check out flash videos anymore? Turns out that was all old slop that no one cares about for the most part as well. Either get used to the fact that tech is going to change along with the knowledge needed to operate it, or accept that you’re going to be a tech-illiterate boomer born a few decades too late.

              • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
                21·
                9 hours ago

                Hey, there was a time when “googling” something wasn’t a skill,

                And googling is not longer a skill because google enshittified their search engine.

                there was a time when “vlogger” wasn’t a real career,

                Not a career.

                a time when “Brand Ambassador” wasn’t a real job.

                It’s not a real career. At best, it’s a part time job before the corpo that hired you kicks you to the side.

                If you want to property test your chatbots to avoid giving away free stuff, or leaking a bunch of data, you’re going to want a Prompt Engineer to test it.

                I have a real job that increases the quality of life of society. Chatbots aren’t relevant to me.

                If you want your brand to go viral and get great advertising

                Kill me.

                or if you want to minimize the impact of negative messaging, you’re going to want a Social Media professional.

                That’s like trying to use a hammer to turn a screw.

          • dustyData@lemmy.world
            4·
            1 day ago

            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.

          • Majorllama@lemmy.world
            21·
            1 day ago

            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.

      • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        1 day ago

        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.

        • LeninOnAPrayer@lemm.eeEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          In their defense our generation should have burned the registry for the abomination it is. And all of Windows for that matter.

          • Tankton@lemm.eeEnglish
            4·
            24 hours ago

            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.

      • SabinStargem@lemmings.worldEnglish
        4·
        13 hours ago

        In my neck of the woods, most commutes are not paid. Only when you are at the workplace that the meter starts running. OP probably got paid only 15ish minutes, since all they had to do was press a button.

        • el_muerte@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          42 minutes ago

          If a worker comes in outside their scheduled hours, they should have a minimum call-out charge at their overtime rate.

          I’ve worked a few places where it was two hours, but I’ve had a four hour minimum before.

    • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      23 hours ago

      Si mal no recuerdo a mi hermano lo hicieron recorrer medio Vigo revisando acces points y estaban los cables sin enchufar en el rack principal … Yo estuve 3 dias dando vueltas cuando al pelotilla de mi jefe se le dió que era buena idea agarrar una imagen de disco de la DB de prod y pasarle por arriba a la de Stage poruqe era más rápido que hacer un export…

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    992·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
      13·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • AeonFelis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 day ago

        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.

        • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 day ago

          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.

  • Billybob22@feddit.ukEnglish
    20·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Ostrichgrif@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 day ago

      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 🤦

      • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
        2·
        4 hours ago

        Surprised that’s still a thing. I’ve heard it called a hard drive about as often, but I haven’t worked with home users in a long time.

      • Droechai@lemm.ee
        6·
        16 hours ago

        “He now realizes that it’s the hardware, the Mother modem, the heart itself of the hard drive, is faulty”

        A classic Swedish news article circulating the internet since forever. I hope the tech didn’t burst a blood vessel due to the mangled quote

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
    26·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      1 day ago

      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.

  • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1641·
    2 days ago

    “my computer won’t turn on!!”

    “is it plugged in?”

    “hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”

    “…”

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
      79·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • x4740N@lemm.ee
        2·
        49 minutes ago

        I’m the family tech support person so I know your pain

        It’s a pain in the ass when you have a parent who won’t even try to learn to do something after trying to teach them and they call you everytime they need to do something

      • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
        201·
        2 days ago

        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

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
          12·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 minutes ago

            One of our call metrics was that we were meant to solve one problem per call, because the customer paid for one problem to be solved. But of course we also had to balance customer satisfaction, while also limiting our time spent on calls. Joy.

            This one guy had a couple of no-brainer issues that I opted to help him fix, but the laundry list kept growing and growing, as well as the length of the call. After about an hour, and repeated attempts to explain to him that he’s over-extended his stay (so to speak), I finally had to firmly (and as politely as I could muster) tell him he’d have to call back and pay for any further support.

            He was livid of course, but I held my ground. Eventually I had to hang up on him. It just so happened that one of the VP’s from HQ was in town and in an adjacent office listening to me on my call. He came racing out of his office and shook my hand, saying that’s how support is done and how I was a rock star. It was wild.

    • saruwatarikooji@lemmy.world
      44·
      2 days ago

      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…

  • Pringles@lemm.ee
    23·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
      18·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • numanair@lemmy.ml
        4·
        1 day ago

        One time a contractor my landlord hired unplugged my Internet in the middle of a meeting.

      • LePoisson@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 day ago

        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!

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    72·
    2 days ago

    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

  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    73·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • mdurell@lemmy.world
      192·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • Natanael@infosec.pub
        14·
        1 day ago

        Yes, but it’s incompetence of the management who won’t approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
          11·
          1 day ago

          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.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        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.