justWhy
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Because most people are idiotic liars…
Person X has an issue with his Modem at home, I ask if he rebooted his modem. He says yes multiple times, when you check the logs it states it has been powered on for over a year. “people LIE” -Gregory House
WHY would you lie about this kind of stuff, we don’t judge as we only want to fix the issues. People are often embarrassed if an issue would be fixed by such a simple action that they lie. The trouble begins when the IT guy confronts them with their lie, then the IT guy is the asshole. Excuse me, you lied to me forcing me to come over to you and fix it with the solution I presented in the first 10 seconds of the conversation.
Yesterday I spent 20 minutes trying to explain to my manager the difference between a “final url” and a “final url suffix” and how if I changed the instructions of *where to input the data* I would also have to change the *input data itself* or clients would wind up putting in data that doesn’t work, despite their insistence that I should “only change the instructions”. I eventually gave up, took a screenshot of my changes with both the instructions and the data changed, and asked “is this good?”
They said yes.
I’ve had that. 6 hours round trip on a train and three tube trains to reboot a switch that I was assured has already been rebooted. So why was its uptime showing as 4 months?
Six engineers were flown in to supervise a mew installation. They called my boss to scream about how one piece of equipment had the wrong voltage coming to it, because it didn’t turn on.
I walked behind the big ass thing and plugged in the twist lock.
Sometimes you just wonder.
The whole team is writing php7 procedurals code because the manager does not understand object oriented programming. And he bitch about team not writing maintainable codes.
Just do the needful.
Ministry IT staffer: “the update doesn’t work”
Me: “did you follow the checklist I meticulously prepared for you?”
Ministry IT staffer: “No”
Me: 🤷♂️
Last week I got stuck on a 30-minute support call explaining how to copy/paste to a user who has been using computers for 30 years but didn’t believe there was a “magical clipboard” that keeps text and images just by pushing a button that you could then replicate into other applications just by pushing another button, because they had never done it before and refused to even try it while I waited.
They’re either dicks or very laid back and helpful.
Behave like a dick towards people who behave like dicks to you, but just treat someone nice when they treat you nice. It’s not that hard
u/bot-sleuth-bot
At least he got paid.
Durring Covid, my Instrumentation professor made me fly 700 MILES back to Michigan for a lab, and pay $100 for a hotel room out of my own pocket, just so I could get “hands on experience” plugging a computer fan into the wall…. TWICE.
Fuck you, Dr. G.
That is ~70% of all callouts.
And of course the customer complains when you charge them. After you advised them there would be a callout fee if the issue was customer caused.
Edit: this is at a University, so things might be structured a bit differently. I work in academic records, but I’m also a report designer as a secondary role.
One of my favorite IT moments was during a zoom call with our reporting consultant. IT was having trouble getting the results they expected in a report, and the consultant was baffled. They use a system called Argos. Most people build Argos report queries using a janky visual query designer (I hate it). So I pulled up SSMS, connected to our reporting DB, and quickly built the query by hand. It worked fine, it was fast, and the T-SQL was actually legible and formatted neatly. IT was like, “you just wrote that?”
Yeah, my degree is in Computer Science. I’ve been programming since before I was even a teenager in the 80s on a commodore 64. I eventually picked up Visual Basic and got into C++ when I first went to college in 1999. I dropped out and joined the army. That’s when I started using C# and .Net 1.0. I loved backend programming, using ADO.Net, building SPROCs. Of course now I’d use an ORM like EFCore or something like Dapper.
So now I occasionally get calls from the analyst in IT asking for help with a report. I tell him to put in a ticket! Payback’s a bitch.
Try turning it off and on again?
Remote access to a customer’s computer was not working, so off I go on a two hour drive, to find the usb modem disconnected.
Months later, similar problem with a different customer. I make sure to ask if the modem’s USB cable is connected, which they swear it is. So off I go THREE hours drive this time, to find the USB cable connected. Into the Ethernet port.
Schrödinger’s Server: It’s simultaneously ON and OFF until an IT guy drives 2 hours to observe it
40% of my tickets are solved by sending a screenshot of the documentation with the relevant passage highlighted.
Because our bosses are asses and we have to go through it.
Autism
Because all end users lie. You troubleshoot something in good faith that they are telling the truth, then see through the lie and realize that you have sometimes spent hours on something that they could have told you from the beginning and therefore had handled more quickly (probably happens less often now, as I assume they are lying). But yes, there is a reason why you now avoid contact with them.
Fucking oath man.
As IT guy with 15 years of experience I’ll clarify this one for all of you. You have at least 20 things to do a day and if you wasted 6 hours driving plus the thing, the 20 things doesn’t disappear into thin air they add to the 20 things from the next day and you have 40 things and half of this are a day old so are considered, because users are counts, URGENT.
Because they live in a world where if something isn’t working everyone will notice and complain. If Jill in human resources vanishes for a month, no one will notice or care far as things getting done, sadly things may even improve.(sorry Jill)
I mean… did you get paid for the drive?? cuz… money 🤷♀️ sounds like pretty low effort work
Because if I spend 20 fixing the issue that the user created without being a big old show and dance I get 5 other stupid problems. I’m here to fix the problem not to entertain the end user
I would choose violence
Power of my troubleshooting method is testing customers to see if they are letting to me 😂. Most of the time, they are. Some how they think, adding random symptoms will make fix their issue, rather potentially send me down a rabbit hole to something completely unrelated. Thankfully, I’m good at detecting bullshit.
Seriously? This was just reposted like 3 days ago…. On a meme that’s from August 2021… like… the date is right there in the post.
Just tell them to check the plug. Make up some asinine lie about buffers and data being stuck in the outlet. Forces them to unplug it and plug it back in.
Yeah, we’ve all had our fill of helpless end users (many of whom get paid more than we do) at this point
What i hate about people is that they can’t answer exactly what you ask them. They’ll just straight lie to your face multiple times and they won’t realize it.
I worked for the campus phone company when I was in college (mid 90s). One day I got a trouble ticket that a phone was dead. I did the standard diagnostics, found nothing, and then called the office and politely asked if they could double-check that the phone was plugged in. They yelled at me that “of course the phone is plugged in!” so I politely said I’d be there in a few minutes. Rolled across campus, looked under the desk and plugged the phone back in.
I remember once someone called yelling at me that we sent them the wrong printer cable, and I let her go on her ran for like 5 min, then said “flip over the cable and try it the other way”. I could hear her shock when it worked, and she just hung up.
You just described life with my husband.
Dam bro got paid to work
Man this reminds me of a client that was forced to drive 4 hours across state lines to restart a modem because nobody on site would do it but kept assuring them they had. Poor guy. Anytime he’s a dick to me on the phone I just think of the bs he’s dealing with lol
Because JoAnn has signed into the same computer and same three sites for the last untold number of years, and she still calls me twice a week because she forgot her password, and she can’t tell which password she set last time because they are all on sticky notes on her desk.
If there’s any sub that should be able to detect bot posts I’d assume this sub would be the one, but no, you guys suck at it.
Not in IT. Just work the electronics section at a store. I bet they get even dumber questions than I do and this job has soured my trust/opinions on the intelligence of the general public
Sounds like an easy work day, something tells me this guy is going to find something to justify being a dick no matter what
In short: because the laity gets on our nerves. You do not call a Magos just to *turn on* a printer.
I will agree, I’ve had the pleasure of working around several IT directors, both inside the company and then in other companies when I was an outside sales rep.
There definitely is a sense of elitism among them. When they walk around the office with a certain authoritarian, pompous attitude like “I’m the most important person in this company. And I help the boss make big decisions.”
Or they walk around as if the weight of the office is on their shoulders alone and they’re pissed off at everybody because “nobody knows how to use technology but me and it’s so frustrating,” not realizing that if people knew everything about technology, you wouldn’t have JOB!
Selling an IT director is almost impossible. It’s the same as trying to sell tools to an engineer. You can’t teach them anything because they already know everything and even if they don’t they think they do.
“IT Director” …more like “nerd that makes 3X my salary to install apps and setup email handles.”
I once had to drive an hour in the snow to a satellite office to investigate a report that a computer was not accepting any input. After asking all the questions about checking the keyboard/mouse were seated correctly and if they’d tried power cycling the machine, I drove over there. Only to discover they’d spilled an entire can of soda on the keyboard and didn’t deem that important to mention during the previous discussion. And that was the general manager for that location.
Did he get paid to do it? Sounds kind of chill
I’m not even in the IT department, and I had to drive about 40 minutes just to help our CEO drag some files from his USB to his desktop.
I don’t get it. He got paid IT salary to drive for two hours? Easier money than I’ve ever made
We used to mess with the IT people all the time, especially if they were dicks.
Seems like a really easy job
I had a coworker get flown out to Phoenix, AZ in July (it was 116°F) to press a button on our product, because the customer could not figure out how to do it, even with step-by-step instructions over a video call.
We were a small company and we needed to have the best customer service to beat our megacorporation competitors.