No common rube

Yeah, 50% person actually restarted, 30% chance person is lying, 20% chance person just turned the monitor off and back on.

80 percent chance they reboot it themselves anyways.

I tend to just check uptime before asking this question.

If I see the machine has been up for weeks and they tell me they rebooted it, I know i'm dealing with someone who doesn't know that pressing the power button on the monitor doesn't turn the computer off.

"Did you restart your computer?"

"............. yes?"

The user always lies. Or even if they don't, they can't intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.

This why I ask "can you restart it again, and just tell me what you see, please"

20/80 tbh

I've unironically had this happen to me, same friend, twice.

They had the audacity to blame me, despite being generous enough to perform some basic maintenance and performance enhancements.

Then when they got home, forgot to plug it back in.

I had one where yes everything was plugged in but... The power strips never plugged into the wall... They were just plugged into each other.

That one turned out to be an annoying bit of cable management that I wouldn't have had to do if they would have just left things alone and let me handle the original ticket

Never ask if it's plugged in. Always ask them to unplug it and plug it in again. That way they don't feel condescended to.

I mean sometimes a plug comes loose, its bad but a easy fix.

Selfcheck if you're an idiot.

Btw, be friendlier with your supporters.

I’m not really a computer person

Yes, you are.

seemed logically basic

See. You are.

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

🤓

"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.

"What do you see when it's coming back up?"

"Right back to the problem I'm having!"

"So you don't see [insert OEM logo here]?"

"Nope. And it's still frozen!"

"Where's the power button you're holding down?"

"On the monitor!"

Open the window and throw it out, please

*Shuts the laptop lid and opens it.
“Ok! It’s restarted”
IT person: “Well that was certainly quick. Are you sure you restarted it?”
Person: *Feels smug about how they were able to restart quicker than most people.

I once did a house call over an hour away to turn on elderly couples monitor back on. Didn't feel good about giving them the bill.

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)

Honestly most unsavvy people don't even realize they can turn their monitors off. Especially if the buttons are behind or under the screen, they wouldn't even know the buttons were there.

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.

I feel like there's a specific peak between total technical ignorance and a weary understanding of how fickle technology can be. On this peak is the height of arrogance, where you believe you've really got everything figured out. Part of learning is understanding that, yes, sometimes you really did just forget to plug the modem in.

As an IT person, I assure you, I do not believe that you actually restarted it.

I swear I could hear the call center employee (probably not really an IT guy at this stage) sweating when I called them after a thunderstorm fried my router's entry port and I read them the list of troubleshooting I already went through before calling them.

How is this the real world experience?

I worked with a guy that would tell people that coax needed to be "released to ground" occasionally, by unhooking the cable and putting your thumb over the end. That's how he made sure people were disconnecting and reconnecting the cable from the back of the box. He also told someone that "data might be trapped in the Ethernet cord" and advised they unplug it from both ends and swing it around their head in a circle to "loosen the stuck bits and clear the line"...

Ha. That's fantastic

In what possible instance would they not be copper colored?

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.

We have a running leader board for uptime. Servers don't count. That said, I've seen some people who think they actually are turning it off but the machine just enters sleep mode. I only trust

shutdown /r /t 0

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.

"I reboot it every night."

Processor Uptime : 191:22:19:54

"Yes I have, and I'm happy to do so again. For you."

Whenever my troubleshooting doesn't work it's because I forgot to power cycle

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.

Having worked in IT about 12 to 15 years ago I can honestly say I just stopped believing people when they told me they did things or checked things because 99% of the time it was just a flat out lie.

And taking them at their word meant wasting my own time because usually it was just a quick fix that I suggested in the first place.

It quickly, quickly taught me that 99% of people are fucking idiots, and that even the smart ones who actually knew what they were doing with a computer could be idiots too.

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.

Depending on what you're needing done, a lot of times IT has to cover their asses. If it didn't happen on that phone call, it didn't happen. I always appreciate the gumption, you probably saved us like, 30 call just from figuring out other issues yourself. If it's anything that will cost the company money, though, like replacing hardware - if I don't take due diligence in making sure those earlier steps are done, it's my ass on the line.

You know you're smart enough to do the troubleshooting, but that technician has probably 1000+ users that rotate weekly, they can't keep a log book of which ones are good and which ones will land them in the shit. I totally get the frustration, but the ones who lie about doing simple troubleshooting ruin it for everyone.

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.

To be fair even the most technically adept person can have tunnel vision where they start digging before ruling out all the simple stuff. Yes it can feel tedious and a little condescending to follow all those steps, but you get humbled the first time it really is just an unplugged cable.

As a former IT help desk person, I can confirm that we do in fact love it when people give us good info. People who write screen broke shouldn't be working with technology more advanced than a shovel

My God the amount of times I have to pull the frickin issue out of people...

It's the same as going to a mechanic and saying "my car doesn't work!" No shit? That's usually why people come here. Wanna be more specific?

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 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!

One should never skip dicks in the queue. It's rude and they've been waiting.

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

They just restarted the monitor

That's how one becomes IT

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 support doing the troubleshooting yourself. Just be aware, if you call with one of those 9 out of 10 cases, we're still going to have to do ALL of those steps again, so I can document that we tried them before sending any hardware. I've been burned one too many times by someone telling me they've already tried 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.

We know when you lie. We can see uptime stats.

Between the antics, it was too real

Found the guy that never worked in end user support.

Drweb liveusb be like: hold my beer