I am not sure I would have been as patient as that.

I am sure Simon might have had a different solution, possibly involving a cattle prod.

Cattle prod for the first wrong reason. Open second floor window for the second.

Ensure window-exit-bin-dive-goal for the third.

I educate and never let users get away with it, because that way leads to undeserved reputations of "IT expert" and even bigger problems in the future when they've " not got the time to sort it but I'm sure it will only take a few minutes" after they've spent hours making a complete balls of it and left a smouldering heap of crap for me to fix.

While I fully agree with you, from my distant past in helldesk I do remember one user (and only one) who was absolutely immune to any sort of teaching.

Fortunately that type are quite rare and always a useful measure of how well new staff will cope when confronted by real idiocy.

I must be an exception, but I have known more than one of those kind during my helldesk time.

Funnily enough, a lot of them were in upper management . . .

"Funnily enough, a lot of them were in upper management . . ."

TRUE upper management types are generally far too busy bending the company over a barrel to interact personally with IT; they have minions for that. In fact even their minions have minions. If you're on the Helldesk and somebody calls claiming to be UM, chances are they are a LOT lower on the slippery totem pole than they think they are and are hoping to "motivate" you with their job title. Which generally works as well as you would expect.

'The higher up you are in the company has no bearing on how fast your problem gets fixed; it just determines which floor we're on when I throw you out of the window'

Not really a wrong diagnosis, but for some reason we always get the blame for absolutely everything if we visited a site in the past week or so.

"Hello, one of your employees was here yesterday for our phone, and now our internet doesn't work" (a DECT handset was replaced).

My colleague had an encounter that took the cake: He was at a site to install an IP door intercom. The hole to the outside was already there, but inside the building he drilled a small hole through a piece of drywall to get the cable to the network cabinet. He was finishing up when the building's janitor approached him:

"Hi, were you drilling just now?"

"Yes i was installing the door intercom"

"Well the toilets are clogged now"

"....okay?"

We put an internet connecting into a school, ISDN dialup.

We had 4 machines for the kids to use, one had a 4 port 10mbps network card to work as the hub, with 3 machines plugged into it with wingate as a proxy.

The 4th connection ran up the wall, along the corridor, to the admin office, so the staff machine could share it too.

1 week later the admin machine couldn't access the internet.

We got told by the head that it was our fault, the system was crap, etc.

I walked the cable run, and pointed out that our system would be working fine if the plumbers they had had in to work on the heating system hadn't blowtorched the cable as it ran along the wall/ceiling where the pipes were.

over 2 metres of charred cat5. But it was "our fault".

If said plumbers had burned through some mains cabling instead and turned the power off to half the building, or through an alarm cable and caused a fire evacuation, the results would have been immediate and the plumbers would have obviously got the blame.

Or maybe not; who knows? Some people see "cable installed by , therefore problem caused by " even if said installation was a decade ago.

M.

I may have said before but it is well known that you can supply, install, commission and hand-over multi-million pound project, leave it running smoothly with that satisfying, low 'hum' of rotating machines operating at peak efficiency, all operating on hair-trigger, precise control, signal-lights blinking gently giving complete reassurance of a job well done. The locked, secure, unmanned station is operating perfectly, confirmed by the data-transfer to the remote operations centre. The customer, his consultant and associated hangers-on are all enjoying dinner at our expense.

It's going to be a bad day for the contractor: There's a rattle from a piece of flooring, although this wasn't in your scope of supply.

...Like, many years ago, my favorite way to as ask the user questions. Very interested and curious and, um, leading questions. This usually had one of two outcomes: 1.) They would usually realize that there was something that they didn't get but still double down on the fact that they were right, or 2.) Rarely realize that I was trying to instruct them without giving eavesdropping subordinates ammunition to use against them. Then some fucking idiot wrote a book called "Windows95 for Dummies" and EVERYONE was an expert overnight. Except for those that realized they were not in fact dummies and were willing to admit it. If they owned their ignorance and were willing to correct it we got along just fine.

Stupid people are too stupid to realise they are stupid.

The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again.

I make industrial automation software. These programs communicate with things that do stuff in the real world, and usually can't wait on the software except in limited, predefined moments. Their own programming also tends to be, ah, not terribly resilient when other bits have hiccups. Because of this, usually, the software I make is not supposed to be stopped except via a well-defined procedure, to be performed only in well-defined circumstances. Otherwise, all kinds of interesting fuckups can happen. If it happens, I'll deal with it, but I do my best to minimize such cases; for example, you can't close the program except via task manager/services or with a password.

Sometimes, I get a user who thinks himself smart because he knows that all kinds of IT problems can go away with a reboot. This kind of user reboots the PC at the first problem, which just compounds the problem instead of fixing it, and then calls me.

And then, there was that one user that did so repeatedly , even after getting told never to reboot without calling me. In one case, the program was showing him an alert stating that a sequence wasn't starting, and the SCADA by the side was telling him that an electrovalve was stuck - and guess what his solution was? On the plus side, I swore at him a lot, and he finally learned not to reboot without calling me.

Honestly I struggle to cope when people tell me things that I 'know' to be wrong, untrue and counterfactual. There's a part of my brain kicks in wanting to immediately and loudly correct them. I try to keep a lid on it these days because experience has slowly taught me that - even if it is only one time in ten - sometimes the buggers are _right_ and it's not a good look to be telling someone "that's nonsense, don't be silly, of course it's not XYZ" only to discover ten minutes later that it was, in fact a problem with XYZ.

Just talk to them like a father to his feeble-minded child.

I've learned that people don't react well to being told outright that they're wrong. I've become quite diplomatic with it. I'll often go with: "we have a saying in the IT world: trust, but verify. In the same way as an electrician will trust that you've turned the switch off but will still check that the circuit isn't live, I'd just like to confirm ..."

In the article's case that would probably be followed up with "the connection was loose at the other end, so was probably intermittent. I've re-terminated it so should be OK now" - gives them an element of them being right when we know that they were spewing bullshit.

We had a problem on an important site and the customer's 'Engineer' was an ex-colleague from a long time back. He was not technical in any way but would loudly pronounce on any electrical/mechanical/electronic issue with absolute authority and conviction. He could and did waste a lot of money solving the wrong problem.

This site had an issue that he decided was caused by an obscure phenomenon, often talked about but rarely encountered in modern times. The more likely solution was far simpler and easily sorted. In the office, we all had a good laugh at this idiot's expense before I was dispatched to investigate.

From long experience.... I know to listen carefully and investigate problems in a logical sequence, rather than arrive and state our presumed answer to the issue. On this occasion, I was fortunate to keep my powder dry, the self-proclaimed genius had indeed identified the correct issue and this was going to be an expensive incident. Not exposing his technical weaknesses, we maintained a good working relationship to correct the problem and our liabilities and expense were minimised.

Infuriatingly, sometimes, these people hit upon the right answer.

"One on't cross beams gone owt askew on't treddle"

If I just stick to that, one day I'll be right

Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

Blind squirrels! Nuts! Found one!

Here we have the classic example of the God mentality. I know all, understand all, shape young minds... How dare the IT person know more than me and use this dark art called troubleshooting to find the source of my issue.

To be fair not all Teachers/Lecturers/Academics are like this but there I think there is a sizeable amount and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Conversely with our first child many years ago my wife (a teacher) who was having a few problems "progressing" with the birth was told by the hospital midwife that "nurses and teachers are always the worst because they've read the books and won't listen to us". This attitude, summed up earlier that day by a different midwife refusing to listen to my wife who said "baby is not ready to come", insisted on medical intervention and justified it by saying "do you want your baby to die?", resulted in a traumatic experience which needn't have happened. Both sides of the family have a history of "late" babies (that is, babies born two weeks or more late), including a close relative who was born nearly four weeks late (and perfectly healthy), in the days when medics weren't quite as litigation-cautious. For our subsequent children my wife "lied" about dates, giving herself at least a week extra time, and all those children were born well within two weeks of the calculated due date (i.e. between two and three weeks "late" if the "real" dates had been used), and before any medical intervention had been forced on us.

Experts do not always know best - or maybe they do, but they often can't or won't see the bigger picture.

I only count two? is the sub-editor seeing double after a christmas party?

Depends whether you count "the real problem is the inbox is full" as separate from "I can check for email".

Working to support our military on various sites in the south and west country 1997-2001, (UK) this type of thing was common especially the Civvies who always would use the usualbut i can do this on my pc faster at home. or it worked earlier (to find it hadnt worked for weeks due to the user being on excercise for three months) and thier account was locked out for password in activity.

Though the favourite was the cleaners unplugging PCs to use the hoover and not plug them back in

I just remember the graveyards a full of people who were the full bottle on self diagnosis and as a consequence earnt an early mark.

I will be honest and say most of the people who have been enthusiastic in offering diagnoses had in the past been victim to piss poor support from the cattle wrangling fraternity who would abandon them to their predicament if an obvious, simple solution wasn't quickly evident.

Once you have "trained" them to trust a solution will be provided—period—they are more likely to give a description of the problem as they see it instead of their conjectured solution to their view of the problem. Compounding the felony their solution is often recast as a description which to the novice support both very misleading and confusing.

The best client is the one who doesn't know a bean about IT, doesn't want to, and for the trifecta, is devoid of imagination. Saves a lot of time.

I've had cases like that, as I grew older I tried (usually succesfully) variants of the theme

Oh yeah, this is a typical microsoft thing, see, the error message makes it looks like your mailbox is full, this happens a lot, whereas actaully what the error message means is that the printer is out of paper. These messages confuses a lot of people .. I mean, printer is out of paper is such a vague message ..... it could mean anything

Or

Ah, yes, you thught the printer was out pf paper, and that's why you couldn't print ... yes, too many popups, yeah, I used to just click them away too .. but sometimes they may be helpful, like if you get 20 popups that say `` no network detected'' that could mean that there is no network, so let's have a look at the back of the computer ...

ah you move dit a bit, so you could put your feet under your desk ... yeah, ... i complained about that to manintenance as well ... they should have put the computers more to the left .... yeah ... see this little white cable that's now lying on the floor ? ... yeah, bloody beancounters, we asked for 10m cables, but they only had budget for 5m cables ... yeah .. so if we just move the box back a little, and then put this white cable back in ... see ... yeah .. it's printing again ... yeah, so let me just take these 500pages of blank paper you alreayd put on your desk for me to put in the printer, and i'll take them back to supllies ...

The most incomprehensible message I ever got was on the LCD screen of a fax machine .

After much googling and PDF user manual crawling I finally deciphered it :

"out of paper"

This was leagues more cryptic than the old "PC Load Letter" , it may well have been in hex.

[1]Office Space

[1] https://youtu.be/DkZIDla1b4A

I've often found the main sources of pain to be the Phd holders....such things like "oh, I wanted to make sure the button worked so I pressed harder and now it doesn't" or "I locked the robots joints up using console commands and twisted them to see what would happen, now it doesn't power up"

Admittedly some of them are genuinely lovely people who do their best not to break stuff and ask first before trying.

Then you get the know-it-all arseholes who are very intelligent, yet very stupid.

My favourite from the early 2000s:

A message was sent round to all users saying that the network would be down for about an hour on a particular day to allow for some routine maintenance (IIRC replacing a flaky hub that lived in a cupboard and was prone to overheating).

Cue multiple phone calls "I can't get on the network", etc etc

In fact the contractors had the replacement up and working in 45 minutes but it didn't stop the bleating.