I cannot fathom why a sane person would state that nothing had changed when they know that they made a change.

You can screw something up without knowing you did bad. It's in the Constitution or something. So, instead of a blatant lie that will be caught, buy yourself a pair and say : "I touched this for that reason and now I think I screwed something else up. Could you help ?".

Why are people so cowardly ? Why does it take brass balls to admit that you might have made a mistake ?

Babies try standing up for weeks before getting it right, but it would seem that, as soon as a boy makes it upright, he loses the courage to stand by his actions.

Pff.

And get off my lawn !

Where I work, when something breaks, I can make money on the bets that the guilty party will say "didn't change anything".

And then, when I've spent 4 hours dismantling the process and find they have, they use one of the following:

1 - that wasn't a change, it was correction

2 - that wasn't a change, it was an update

3 - I didn't change it, the application I was updating did the update

Or some such guff.

In most places I've worked, certainly the bigger ones, company culture silently encouraged this kind of behaviour. Because "Incidents" always take priority over "Service Requests".

If you want something done quickly, report it as broken. But then you have to run with the lie until the very end, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I've had some users spend so much time "trying to fix" a problem under heavy deadlines that they genuinely forgot having made changes.

They changed a thing that shouldn't matter (or ""shouldn't"", at least), it broke, they quickly concluded it can't have been that meaningless change, spend two hours trying other things, and only then do they call for help.

Most of my work was about data format and validation, so in the end I just made sure to have ways to quickly find out what changed, and set that running while the user explains what they think the issue is. So often it was dumb shit like "opened file in Excel, excel changed the dates formats when saving" - the user "didn't change anything", but it still broke!

...and yes, sometimes, the user just lies.

During Lockdown, I once spent half an hour trying to remotely diagnose why someone's monitor was "too green" before giving up, telling them it was probably the cable needing to be replaced. I later found out they'd dropped it down the stairs and were hoping the company would give them a bigger one when replacing it.

The company would have given her a bigger monitor on request.

Scottish addresses for flats are an absolute bugger for this.

Excel does change the data formats - if you open a CSV and have somthing like SAAB in one column and 9-3 in another (to represent the Make and Range of a Swedish built car) - save it as a csv and next time you open it you will have a SAAB 09-Mar (without doing anything else). I use this behaviour to convert data into dates if stored in a non-date format.

It does tend to be majority men who tit about with stuff and break it, wire ut up wrong etc but the number of women who rock up with "it just stopped working " and their laptop is dripping wet with wine, water, coffee, soda, whatever...

I was at a conference the other day and watched literally this. Everyone was packing up to leave, a woman knocked coffee over her laptop which immediately died. She ran off to get paper towels and dried it off, then when the IT guy came over she told him without a hint of shame that it just stopped working while she was using it. With 6 or 7 witnesses standing around her who saw exactly what happened.

IT guy turned the laptop upside down and a cupful of coffee poured out. He told her it was buggered and good luck, then walked off.

Good lad.

I was asked to do a favour by a friend to have a look at his landlord's PC - the CDROM drive had stopped working. It had been worked on by a technician in a shop a few weeks before. As soon as I opened up the case I could see the drive wasn't plugged in. Quickest fix (and easiest £50, which she insisted I took, even though I refused payment for something so simple).

Then there was a several hundred mile round trip in a crappy old company pool car just to find the user had 'rewired his phone socket so he could hear if the modem was working' and then wondered why he couldn't get connected back to the main office (yes, modem - this was a looooong time ago).

This is listed in my manual as:

Standard issue user response number 3a

usually followed by:

Standard issue user response number 3b

"I only ..." or its variant "just some ..."

or some other variant flatly contradicting 3a.

Tiresome, but certainly not as annoying as Standard issue user response number 1a

a.k.a. "You lot must have changed something" or "It's all your fault"

"Don't you know how important I am?" as a get-out-of-jail-free.

"Don't you know how important I am?"

No, do you?

We had a colleague who would open all her helpdesk support requests with "Ever since you guys installed Windows 97 on my PC, my life has been hard."

Let me tell you lady, your life was hard before we gave you Office 97 - we just gave you something new to blame.

We refer to this kind of end-user as "crows", often it's almost company culture.

Why crows? They see shiny, they want shiny. To the point where we noticed whenever someone at those companies gets a new device, their colleagues suddenly get inexplicable issues with their slightly-less-shiny devices, or they even "accidentally" damage theirs.

This really boils my blood, and if at all possible we try to replace those devices with even older or worse versions. Unfortunately they generally get their way, and the shiny cycle continues..

I lIke the organisational crows because they want shiny, they get shiny and I get their cast offs which are still shiny enough....

/mine is the one painted to look like a magpie...

Yes, let the crows squabble over the shiny.

I too see the cast-offs as usually "shiny enough": it means that no-one wants to come and nick them off you.

Then you can get on with your real work unimpeded.

We ran the numbers and the claims of damage, faults etc for iPhones and iPads always spike around Apple keynote time of year.

We usually keep a stock of empty boxes so we can repack returned devices and hand those out.

Some of the regulars are in for a nasty shock this year because we've changed policy on replacing damaged devices and there's no instant replacement, instead they have to get it repaired and their cost centre pays instead of the IT budget.

At a previous employer we had a manager who always insisted on having a laptop that was slightly better than his subordinates, even though they were in technical positions that needed the extra processing power.

He persisted in this when we were under threat of factory closure, despite it being made very clear that if he was made redundant he would not be allowed to retain his new laptop*, but if he stuck with the perfectly good, and fairly powerful, existing one he probably would.

So we supplied him with the new shiny, shiny and, when the inevitable redundancies came through, requested it's return, having made sure his old one had been officially "redeployed" (to a pallet in a Birmingham warehouse but he didn't know that) so he couldn't try and get that one back. He held out on the return until almost the last possible day when he was informed by HR that he would be reported to the Police for theft - that did the trick, even though we knew full well they wouldn't, and probably couldn't, take any action.

So his scheming meant he ended up with nothing instead of accepting a usable laptop for free.

*We set a limit on the net book value, below which any equipment could be retained on redundancy - strangely it was just slightly higher than the anticipated value of the IT team's equipment!

Users can be really stupid, and I don't mean willfully. They can genuinely not see our understand the obvious.

I took a support call once, I don't remember what the issue was but the lady could not seem to navigate through the menus. Even 0 enter 0 enter 0 enter failed to get her to the main menu. The screen stayed the same. In desperation, I asked her to press the secret, magic debug key combination. She said it was still the same. But, when asked if the screen now displayed "Debug: H)ex edit, F)iles" and so on, she allowed that it did. In fact, that was the only thing displayed, and she had never used the magic debug key before, so, in her mind, "same as before" meant "wonder-filled and different".

I can't remember if I hung up on her or kept helping. I'd like to say it was the latter but I've got such little patience for fools that I probably did hang up on her. At least I didn't swear.

I think the stupidest I ever had, which the user herself admitted was a blonde moment, was the call, "How do I turn my computer off?" This was back in the days of physical hardware power switches and the "You may now turn off your computer" message.

Having suggested she press the same button as she'd used to turn it on she replied, "I know that - but I've forgotten since this morning!" Given that she had an HP tower with a big white button in the top corner* I'm really not sure how she couldn't see it but I told her where it was and she was grateful for the help.

*Unlike an Apricot PC compatible where the power switch was a grey rectangle on the back, amongst the various plugs and sockets, that looked just like a cover over something - even I had to RTFM for that one.

I make bespoke MES software for industrial plants. I try to protect users from themselves as much as possible, but, ultimately, there are times when the software has to ask for something and has no way to validate the user's response before Doing Things. The Things it Does won't blow anything up, but a wrong answer can and will cause expensive wastes of time and materials.

Obviously, users sometimes screw up. Some of them try to claim that they clicked the right button, but the software "went mad". There are logs, but logs are a technical thing, hard to understand.

Which is why I just dump a screenshot whenever certain critical buttons are clicked.

I can't see red faces through the phone, but, oh, the embarrassed silences...

I changed nothing. I took my private laptop on holiday, returned back home, plugged in, didn’t work.

Turned out my monitor officially needed a Thunderbolt cable, but a plain USB-C cable could sometimes depending on the positioning of the stars also just barely work. Before holidays my cable that should never have worked _reliably_ just worked, after holidays it didn’t.

I volunteer at the local library assisting mobile phone / tablet / laptop users with their many & varied issues.

During lockdown, I was asked to do a telephone session with an elderly lady who was having problems with her laptop.

The session went badly - nothing I suggested worked, the screens seemed all to pot, etc, etc. Eventually in desperation I asked her for the model name & number so I could look it up online. She was unable to do that as it was a hand-me-down machine from "the daughter". So I said when next the daughter sees her would she ask the daughter for the details & I'll see what I can do on the next scheduled call in a weeks time.

Next week arrived & I asked if she had the details of her laptop. Oh yes, daughter says its an iPad laptop...

I suspect everyone who has ever worked tech support has a multitude of stories like this.

I too am old and can remember -

Businesses 'losing internet connections' because someone had switched the phone plug to the fax machine and not switched it back.

The secretary that had kicked the socket under her desk breaking the modem cable.

Broken printers that were out of paper

Servers unresponsive with a kettle plugged into the power socket

Desktops that "had just stopped working" but were filled with sugary tea/coffee/coke (full sugar fizzy drinks being the destroyers of all things electrical).

PCs on workshop floors filled with soot/dust/metal shavings

(definitely not) Dropped computers with crashed disk heads

Crital work on floppy discs erased by phones or magnets in clothing

any many more joyous repair jobs

Edward's corvid client § only attached both ends of a single HDMI cable to two monitors, it's the truly gifted who manage a similar trick with two ports of a dumb switch* with a single patch lead. (* basically an ethernet bridge)

"My internet stopped working." - (So has everyone else's. ;)

Super glue or epoxy is a real temptation here. ;)

Enterprise switches can handle (limit) the traffic from these sabotaged switches but weren't always configured to do so or some possibly lacked the capability.

To be fair users are often blind sided by things that they cannot be expected to know or understand.

Notebook docking stations with network interfaces accessed from the notebook via USB or thunderbolt normally have an ethernet (Mac) address from the docking station. A user borrowing another dock or temporarily using another desk is then confused by their notebook having a different IP address or on a different network. DELL docks attached to DELL notebooks apparently configure the dock with the notebook's unique "mac" address (unlike many of their owners ultrathins aren't thick enough for a RJ45 socket and therefore lack ethernet hardware.)

The wifi mac address could also be assigned as this is/was allowed by the early RFCs. Originally Sun machines would assign the mac address stored in the nvram chip to each of its interfaces. Try telling that to a 20-something networking "expert." ;) "More things in heaven and earth, Horatio...."

§ crows and ravens are normally a lot brighter than the average PC user.