IT tech here, lack of knowledge/skill does not bother me, lack of will to learn does.
helping people with their problems is quite fun when they are interested
Some people have this incredibly annoying habit of seeing anything remotely tech related as magic and they switch off their brain, assuming that they could never understand it.
Them: “My computer is broken”
Me:“Whats the issue?”
Them: “i dont know, i tried to open my email and its got some error message and wont open”
Me:" what does the error message say?"
Them:“err, cannot open email during update, please wait until update is complete”
Me:“is your email app updating?”
Them:"yes.
Me:“wait for it to finish and try again…”
(Obviously tbats not a real scenario, but im not good at examples and just wanted to get the general gist across)
That was something I got tired of saying, about error messages, “what do the words on the screen say?”
Yep, but it does give me job security though…
My mother tried to print but got an error message. Instead of reading it, she called me. The printer told her it was out of paper 😐
I had something so similar happen recently where a link on our external site was down. This person calls me and it literally went:
Them: “this link is broken. Can you tell them fix it?”
Me: “there’s a banner at the top of the page that says they’re trying to fix it. Here’s an alternative link.”
Them: “well that’s from last week so they should’ve fixed it by now”
Me: “must be real broken then”
Them: “well can you find their email so we can email them to tell them to fix it”
Me: “no, they’re fixing it”
Them: “well you’re IT can you email them to ask them how long it will be and tell me when it’s fixed”
No that’s not my fuckin job bud. Here’s their general contact page if you’re dying for this very non urgent thing.
It’s not annoying when they can’t do it. It’s aggravating when they refuse to learn to do it and just want you to do the whole thing for them every single time.
My managers do this to their department leaders. They can’t even work the cameras.
I always verbally walk them through it. That helps them memorize the steps and if they insist I do it I can tell them to fuck off with a clean conscience. If they don’t wanna help themselves then I won’t either. I don’t usually have a problem with this method.
And then they say “you never show me how to do anything!”
Or, they act like they understand when you do show them, but go strait to the boss the next time and complain that you refuse to show them…
I was a cashier at Walmart, once upon a time. The new guy i had to train refused to look at the corner of the screen to read the totals back to the customers. When I pointed it out that he should get in the habit of doing so his response was “I don’t feel that i should have to do that.”
I just… Walked away and got the supervisor to assign him a different trainer. I refuse to train someone above the age of 25 with that attitude.
What did he do instead? Just stare at them wordlessly until they produced currency?
Something like “you can swipe your card now,” or similar.
A minimalist approach.
I work in software engineering/development. There’s a guy on my team who manually copy/pastes every Linux command he runs, into a fucking text file. He does this so he has a record of which commands he ran. As a result, he has a 12,000 line text file, full of garbage. With few exceptions, Linux stores every command you run, chronologically, with a configurable limit. He knows this, but insists on saving all of them to a Fucking. Text. File.
Watching him work makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.
history | grep <word> and ! would blow his mind.
CTRL + r is even better
Hmm, I sometimes do this, when tackling a particular problem, along with some notes. It is often nonlinear and branching. I use it to construct a problem-solving script in the end. And it’s markdown file.
Are we OK? ;)
Sounds like you’re taking a structured approach to problem solving. Not wasting time capturing information that’s already there.
We cool.
Employer doesn’t know what he does, he does less work in the same amount of time.
I do the same, kind of but I paste them in word and format them nicely, based on my mood. Today I made a very nice initial of my npm publish command, it looks really nice.
This makes me want to rip my eyeballs just thinking about it. Jesus.
I’m imagining when they type, it is at a speed of approximately 100 words per week.
Yeah. He’s a pretty old guy and has the single-finger old man typing style.
Good lord, you can even ctrl-r to search your command history so even searchability is not a reason to copy into a text file.
I’ve shown him reverse history search several times. But he just won’t use it.
Wow.
Maybe you can show him
history > out.txtand blow his mind?With all the time you save by not copying your commands into a file for your reference, maybe you can invent a machine that will give your superior mental capacity to everyone else.
This was not meant to be a gloating post. I’m simply explaining someone’s terrible and infuriating workflow.
I’m slowly learning not to look into any of my coworkers’ workflows
Sometimes I get tasked to help him fix his problems. I usually just end up checking out his branch and fixing it myself.
This one here is for your co-worker only! Not for you, not for anyone else, just for him:
I’m losing my patience with three people. In none of the cases it’s tech illiteracy, it’s something interacting with it:
- Friend who calls me every 2~3 months because he forgot his Facebook password. It reached a point that I annotated his password in my machine, but I don’t need it because I memorised it.
- Neighbour who sends a 10min audio file, full of contextually irrelevant stuff, to ask a simple “how do I do X?”. No, 10min is not an exaggeration.
- Mum. Asking her any relevant piece of info means asking the same question up to five times in a row, because: she didn’t hear it, didn’t pay attention to it, answered something “random”, assigned it a name that only her knows.
I’m not even a “computer guy” dammit. I don’t work with programming, IT, or related.
I get #1 from my family rather often. And I set them up with password managers. SIGH
At this rate I don’t even know what to do:
- 2FA - he struggles with it, so I had to turn it off
- writing his password in a piece of paper, telling him to store it - he lost it
- making an easy to remember password for him - he’s still forgetting it
- telling him “I don’t remember” - he’ll come here and ask me to reset it
What concerns me the most is that, if I didn’t do this for him, someone else would. And some people give no fucks about the others’ privacy. Like, I’m grateful that he trusts me, but he shouldn’t be relying on trust on first place!
Yeah, I might get to the point with him where I say, " if you can’t manage your password, it’s not really safe for you to be using Facebook. There are too many bad actors who try to take advantage of people online."
Either he should have enough wit about him to remember where he has stored his password (sticky note under keyboard?) or he probably shouldn’t be sharing things online. He is going to get scammed.
I worked at a Verizon store and had a few customer’s passwords memorized because they were in with problems weekly.
Ouch.
How many of those were Karens expecting this to be your job? Just curious, it’s one thing to help clueless people, another to help clueless and entitled ones. (At least the friend that I mentioned is a bro. A dumbarse when it comes to this stuff, but still a bro.)
There were plenty of Karens, but I only went the extra mile of setting things up for friendly people.
Just a heads up, if seemingly simple things can only be fixed by going away and calling someone else, there’s a good chance you could have been nicer.
Of course, sometimes that is the only way.
I’ve been spending my week trying to train someone barely capable of anything why feeling bad for her because it’s not her fault and life is complicated for her.
No, most definitely not. Mostly considering I’m on help desk to help those that need IT assistance.
I did years of that and I couldn’t stand users who simply refuse to learn. When the user doesn’t even read the error message on their screen they don’t deserve my help
They don’t need to learn, that’s why you were paid/hired for…I don’t understand the problem here
If your job requires basic computer skills and you don’t have them, it’s a waste of IT’s time
So very true. No-one seems to reason like this with other work areas.
Does anyone assume the office assistant that orders pens and notebooks to be able to, or expected to, fix any issue related to written down notes?
Does anyone assume the person incharge of keeping tools in a workshop to fix issues related to actually using the tools?
Does anyone assume the person responsible for chemicals in a lab to solve issues with s running experiment?
Does anyone assume that it is the chefs responsibility for you to know reasonable etiquette and not slurp your soups and wipe your mouth with with your tie?
There is a difference between supplying a working, correct tool and doing the work that uses it and I’m not even in IT…
Remote in and do ur job, they don’t care about problems not related to their job, it’s preventing their job and you would be hired to fix it.
That’s literally a part of its job…
It’s not IT’s job to teach you skills your job description requires
For example there was a lady at my last helpdesk job who would come and ask how to convert a PowerPoint to pdf ALL the time. And when you try showing her, she just threw her hands up and said “can’t you just do it for me?”
That’s not what helpdesk is for. If you don’t know how to do the job you agreed to, that’s not IT’s problem…
Lol I do it all for them. It’s just easier.
No. Computers are hard. Especially if they aren’t built for you.
Oh yes indeed!
I was a hardware tech at a cell phone, tablet and computer shop. For a while the boss hired this lady around 22 years old to work up front. Now this chick couldn’t cut a piece of plastic to save her life!
See, there’s different size SIM cards out there, and sometimes when upgrading a phone you gotta physically cut the SIM card to a smaller size. We actually had all the proper punchout tools, but somehow she couldn’t even manage to put the card in the indented area the right way.
She’d sometimes put the card in upside down or backwards, cutting the SIM card all wrong and destroying it. And even when she did manage to cut the card the right way, the card might have slight burrs on the edges.
Now of course that’s not her fault, that’s an imperfection of the punchout tool. But she didn’t even have the common sense to pull the fingernail file from her own purse, or come ask a tech in the back for a file, to remove the burrs.
So not only did she destroy many SIM cards, but she even destroyed many SIM slots in the phone by forcing a card with burrs into it.
Well, one day it’s just me and her working. Coincidentally, we had like five iPhone 5s come in all back to back. 2 busted screens, 2 bad charger ports, and a bad speaker I think. Keep in mind I’m the only tech that day.
As these phones came in, everyone asks about how long should it take? She tells them all the typical 20 minutes!
Like WTF? Does this dumb chick not realize that I can’t fix them all simultaneously?! All these customers are gonna come back mad at me because I didn’t finish in the ridiculous timeframe she quoted them.
20+20+20+20+20, duh! Common sense should have told her it’s gonna be a while.
Anyways, I wanted to punch her to be perfectly honest, but I decided to go out back and punch a brick wall instead.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Mum writes all passwords down…in random notebooks and on scraps of paper.
Want to set up Netflix on new device? Time to guess which email was used and hope we find the password for it so we can reset the Netflix password again.
Absolutely nightmarish.
My mum’s an academic so she’s been using computers all her life, she’s not exactly “techy” but I am eternally grateful I was able to get her set up with bitwarden as a password manager.
There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I’ll tell him to check something, he’ll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn’t actually check what I told him to.
The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it’s usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She’s always immensely appreciative and acts like I’m the smartest person in the goddamn world. It’s honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.
I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn’t have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks…
I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can’t understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you’d think they’d at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.
My father has been using computers for 50 years and hasn’t seemed to really learn anything. His work had one of the first personal conouters, an Altair, and we had C64s and early DOS machines when I was a kid. He could do excel, word, general word processing, had spreadsheets back in the early days of Lotus… at this point he gets confused and frustrated by like, the CVS website. Doesn’t ask for help though, just keeps doing his knows what and getting angry about it, then when I try to help (like, “oh, your credit card number is entered wrong”) he just gets angry and says “this is a SIMPLE THING! I DONT NEED HELP!” Like, okay, you’ve been overlooking this error message on a website and acting pissed for 15 minutes, but whatever.
you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here
We all tend to think that the existing technology when we grew up was the benchmark and always existed. Many people are alive today that went to college before computers even existed. Back then the closest thing to a computer filled a room and worked with punch cards. On the smartphone side, how many even remember those pink pads that were used to write down phone messages. Or dial up internet over a phone line with those strange noises as the connection was made.
No, but I think this is only because I’m the ‘tech guy’ in my family and I’ve had years of helping my grandparents in their misadventures in using Windows, and I know it’s not their fault that they don’t understand, so I’m naturally patient with them
I’m mostly patient with my parents or friends as long as they try to understand. But I’m a software engineer and when my very well paid coworkers don’t understand how to operate their IDE for the fifth time that day I have a hard time not to bite them in the neck.
I didn’t lose my patience but it did make me think of a tale. I was once asked by a coworker to see if they were visible in a zoom event they were attending (goofy concern to begin with since they had left their desk to come to me to ask). Upon return to their cube, with the meeting still ongoing I pointed out that no, they weren’t visible or audible in the meeting because they didn’t have a webcam. This was during the “return to office” phase of the pandemic and our in-office stuff was decidedly pre-pandemic so none of the workstations were equipped with videoconferencing equipment.
I’m not even IT staff.
