News: 1616746506

many many idiots in my time, i've probably been that idiot more than a few times too.

Growing up at a time of "Happy Days" reruns it was often fun to roll up, snap the fingers tap something say "hey" as everyone watches the thing that wasn't working despite best efforts suddenly start to work.

sadly & thankfully the days of strategic box slapping, cable reattaching, powering down until you hear that magical sound so can immediately turn on are coming to a close.

We need a Fonz icon, the up thumb doesn't do it justice.

I caused controversy at work by claiming users were incompetent.

I got into even more trouble by claiming they were incontinent!

Oh! My bad! That's my cat I'm thinking of!

Hence the secretary's fast exit to the loo?

Incompetency isn't always a major problem by itself. I get that some users make mistakes and are not computer literate. What I do expect however is that a user will try the steps I suggest over the phone to fix an issue - even if a troubleshooting step sounds basic and/or obvious.

My patience and sympathy disappear when a user insists they've tried something when they haven't, or when they argue with me about "no it cannot be that", despite not having a shred of evidence to support their opinion here. Rocking up in person, doing exactly what I'd told them to do over the phone and watching as the issue magically disappears almost always leads to either a red face, or a burbling and fake excuse - "it wasn't like that before" etc.

This in spades my friend!

It's not someones incompetence that make helping them difficult, it's someones incompetent awareness of their own competence...

It's even more frustrating when the person involved is a fellow field engineer who swears blind he's done as asked.

The opposite of the above was when, as a user I, had those calls from BT/Microsoft engineers claiming a fault had been detected with my computer.

If it was after booze'o'clock on a Friday afternoon I'd be all concerned and follow every instruction to cure the fault and allow them to root my machine. Reading back the consequent result from my Linux desktop never quite fitted their Windows script. But they would always plough on insisting I was wrong without considering I could possibly be right - just too stupid to follow their instructions properly. If their enthusiasm waned I would plead I didn't want my PC to bring the internet down so please help because I hadn't a clue. Stringing them along was fun and a service to kill time the 'engineer' could be using to root the more vulnerable.

How I miss them now. Or have I just been taken off their calling lists for time-wasting?

user insists they've tried something when they haven't

At this point the user just becomes part of the system and is possibly a faulty component misreporting results and needs to be treated as such.

I've written a lot of scripts to remotely do stuff rather than talk the user through it - that should be kept to an absolutle minimum as the user is the least predictable component.

I've also written scripts to diagnose user feedback and detect incorrect answers to , for instance, "have you turned it off and on again?"

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You have? well WMI says machine has been on for a week - which button are you using? the one on the telly thing?

which button are you using? the one on the telly thing?

Of course, that way my computer boots up faster!

I have no problem with incompetent users - it keeps me employed for one thing. My nightmare is the users who call up to report an issue and add the dreaded phrase "I had a go at fixing it.."

I think you'd cause more controversy by claiming they were competent!

Far too many stories from the last 40 years or so to recount them all.

There was the user who was adamant she'd unplugged and replugged the power cable, that cost her boss a full call-out charge from IBM as the cable was half out of the PC..

MD of a customer insisted on a visit when I knew a reboot would fix the problem and told him so. They were only a few miles away, fortunately, but it still delayed them getting away on holiday (hence the panic) when they could have sorted it themselves in a couple of minutes.

Happens FAR too often with teachers, especially if the school still has those clapped out old interactive whiteboards. Far too often I get the call of:

"The board's not working again"

"have you rebooted the PC like we need to do every time this happens?"

"Yes!"

and when you get there a quick Ctrl+Shift+Esc shows an uptime measured in weeks.

Not that the touchscreen TVs we replaced the boards with are much better. They randomly stop playing any audio until you unplug them at the wall, but of course the teachers have "tried that" until you get to the room and do it yourself and suddenly "it didn't work when I did it".

Or just the old Winkey+P with the screen not being set to duplicate, but it was definitely set to duplicate when they looked, honest.

It's shocking how people whose job it is to teach are so unwilling to learn.

"It's shocking how people whose job it is to teach are so unwilling to learn."

Hear Hear!

When I worked Education IT there were two broad camps of teachers:

The first would say "I need to play this DVD/Video/youtube stream for a class at the end of the week. Can you help me test it?"

The second would say "I can't get this DVD/Video/Youtube steam to work, the class started 10 minutes ago..."

'S obvious: like anybody else, teachers don't like feeling that they're being shown up when their own stupid mistakes are rubbed into their faces (not that they don't deserve it!).

had similar in boardrooms

more than once its been "it just died mid meeting. very important people . come now!"

usually very important well paid person has plugged laptop into a switched off socket and ignored low battery warnings

"Happens FAR too often with teachers, especially if the school still has those clapped out old interactive whiteboards."

Yup, this, 100%

Although it does great things for my reputation when I can walk in to a classroom, press a couple of buttons and the problem goes away.

We spent weeks getting abuse from HR about data regularly disappearing from their shared drive. Of course, they absolutely definitely were not deleting it themselves, it was all the fault of IT. They got all the top-nobs involved, demanding that we fix the "IT Issue". There were borderline threating emails & phone calls from directors & board members, promising dire repercussions if our mistakes weren't immediately identified & rectified, preferably served up with a sacrificial head or two.

We monitored. We logged. We investigated.

All the deletions were done by the same account - a member of HR. File activity even continued when that person was on holiday. Digging deeper, we found that because the HR dept had an annoyingly high turnover of temps and contractors, one user figured out that it was easier to simply share their own login details with them all, rather than get new accounts created. They also intentionally left a desktop unlocked and permanently logged in to that account, so that anyone passing through could sit down and use it without so much as even having to log in.

We passed out conclusions up the chain, and heard literally nothing back. An apology would have been nice, but hey, HR.

I have come to expect nothing less from Human Rectum departments

Where the user has convinced themselves that only an expert can fix the problem. No matter how patiently you try to explain a solution, their conviction that they can't solve it is absolute. Time constraints and panic feed this conviction far beyond the place where reason can reach them.

...Has saved many a wasted mile of technician time and rage. The problem is when said tech won't work, and the user on the other end of the phone will not listen to straightforward instructions without applying their own interpretation to them.

Remoting away...

User on phone: I just need to pop out for a while

Me: That's ok...

tapitty tapitty tapitty... I'll just refresh their IP address.... ARGH!!!

Even worse when the IP being refreshed is in a small cabin under a large tower on top of a faraway hill.

Have done that...and made the subsequent trip.

Sometimes stuff actually just doesn't sort itself when the user does it :-( My wife's work laptop is a particularly recalcitrant beast and I have watched her do the steps which haven't worked, only for them to work when I do them. Don't know if it's a magic touch or just a more brutal one...

I have a similar problem with my wife's overlocking sewing machine. It's a bit of a sod to thread, it must be admitted - four spools, each of which has to go round EXACTLY the right path.

But I've sat and watched my wife do it, and checked what she's done, and it looks right, and it doesn't work properly. But if I do it (or my daughter does it!), it works. Well, to be fair, it works 90% of the time - the other 10% it doesn't work for me or my daughter either, and we also have to cut the threads and start again (again...)

It's got to the point that we're seriously considering upgrading to a self-threading machine...

Not the most stimulating work day, but there are certainly harder ways to earn a wage (and a tip, and a bonus).

TOTAL SPOILER in the article headline!

thanks!

we do like to guess you know!

usually we guess the cleaning lady unpluged the server.

I coulda got this one - having been in the same situation myself thanks to some appallingly bad communication by the victim user and the helpdesk.

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Right , im off to start reading the article now ...

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edit:

ok , i didnt see the total violent refusal / inabilty by the user to accept the situation. Thats new

I worked at BT directory enquiries briefly in the 90s. They used green screen dumb terminals with bespoke software, keyboards etc.

Our trainer told us of one support job he did to fix a broken monitor - wasn't displaying anything - which involved him driving a 200 mile round trip only to fix the problem by turning up the contrast up.

I had a similar thing, had a 5 hour drive from Uxbridge to Newton Abbott to restart a server, and then a 5 hour drive back.

When I worked on a helpdesk for a company that supplied robotics for a Dark Warehousing operation.

Me: Hello, Company X helpdesk, How can I help

Customer: Your ****ing robot has stopped working again

Me: OK, Try removing the poster advertising the departmental football match off the wall again so that the robot can read the bar code and know where it is please.

Customer: There is no poster on the wall, Staff are told not to put them up.

Me: OK, Based on previous calls from your company, please remove the poster advertising the departmental football match off the wall again so that the robot can read the bar code and know where it is please.

Customer: Your robots are ****ing cr** they are always breaking down.

Me: Looking at the previous logs from your company, this is a common problem and the despatched engineer simply removes the poster.

Customer: (lots of ***** and ****)

Me: Well, I can dispatch a enginner and if it is found to be a user fault, you will be charged accorsding

Customer: Lots more *****s and ****s

Engineer duly dispatched and next day the first task was to issue an invoice for "Removal of user generated media preventing robot to operate in an efficient and effective way"- translation - The field maintenance guy walked into the warehouse, went straight to the wall and removed poster advertising football match of wall, to which the robot started up and carried on.