- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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.
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
🤓
“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.
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.
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.
You can recommend all you want, the decision is far removed from me
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?
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)
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.”
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.
She leaned forward, turned off the monitor, then turned it back on. “I did this 10 times already, and its still not working”.
And this is why I couldn’t work in IT support; I just don’t have the patience for certain things. I always love teaching people new things, but most people don’t care when it comes to computers; they just want it to work effortlessly even when they’re the one screwing it up.
And especially working on-site! Oh my life, I bet there’s that same few people… just constantly failing to even try lmao
Only to login and see rhat they actually didn’t restart. They just said so because they think you wont find out 😂
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. 👍
“Yes I rebooted.”
- The guy that somehow managed to survive 180 days of random power outages.
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”
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.
How is this the real world experience?
I will not believe you anyways and reboot just in case.
“I reboot it every night.”
Processor Uptime : 191:22:19:54
Whenever my troubleshooting doesn’t work it’s because I forgot to power cycle
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
looks nervously at my personal computer that has been running constantly for 5 years
Except when they’re not lying but windows by default has ‘fast-startup’ enabled, so every time they shutdown the uptime never resets.
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.
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!”
Restarting can be a pain too.
Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I’m not new to Linux, I’ve been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.
Installing arch itself wasn’t that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn’t recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn’t want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.
I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn’t install dhcpcd and I don’t know how to use network manager! No internet, great!
In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when… The boot menu didn’t recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?
“Oh it doesn’t appear… Wait, what’s this? No boot partition found? Oh crap…”
Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they’re called. I deleted GRUB.
Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and… It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.
Usually, I would’ve installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.
I don’t know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)
I like to imagine an IT person telling someone that story to see whether they understand it or get a stroke, as a way to check if they were telling the truth about being good with computers and having tried everything, or something.
respecc
Check if dckpcd is up
And then it turns out you actually hadn’t restarted the computer, in my experience…
They just restarted the monitor
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.
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.
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!
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 started in IT before switching to development. I have CCNA, A+, and Apple Pro certifications. I run Arch at home, btw. But when I have to contact IT, usually for something that needs elevated permissions or bad hardware, I’m just another user. It’s mildly infuriating to go through all the steps again, even after explaining what I did. I get it, I really do, but it’s not fun at all.
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.
