“What color are the pins on the electrical cord?”
No matter the answer, you can be damn sure they rebooted.
A bit harder in the laptop era though.
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”…
In what possible instance would they not be copper colored?
I think the idea is that average people have no clue what color they are. So they’d be forced to take it out to check and thus have to restart their PC. It’s a trick!
Altho, maybe I’m misunderstanding something because all the pins of all the electrical cords I’ve ever seen have been silver?
I’ve seen brass colored on some older plugs.
Meanwhile I don’t have any clue as I only disable my PSU with a switch.
I’d make up some BS about an old version of the product using brass or copper, and newer versions using aluminum or iron, so knowing the color will help me know how to fix it
Ha. That’s fantastic
I will not believe you anyways and reboot just in case.
“I reboot it every night.”
Processor Uptime : 191:22:19:54
I think the right processor up time is 192:168:1:1
Something overflowed somewhere…
Whenever my troubleshooting doesn’t work it’s because I forgot to power cycle
“Yes I have, and I’m happy to do so again. For you.”
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
I have a dark secret. I used to have CenturyLink DSL around 5 years ago, and the tech asked me if I had restarted the modem during one of the many stints where I would get bits per second rather than the “10mbps” we were supposed to get
I lied every time. I’m sorry CenturyLink tech support employee, but man did CenturyLink suck, and man am I absolutely sure that it never fixed the issue.
At one point I filed a complaint with the FCC and got a letter from CenturyLink telling me that they knew about the complaint!
We know when you lie. We can see uptime stats.
Well no wonder I never had more bandwidth, it’s all your metrics eating it up!
The metrics are the only important part! How else are we supposed to know how good the line is unless we constantly stress test the line by collecting data? Your ability to use the line is not a useful metric, so we don’t worry about that.
We know if you did or not :)
Its actually the worst advice when you haven’t figured out what it is, something like a virus (ransom ware, ad shit or similar) usually only works after a restart, if you don’t restart, the IT guy can remove it without much damage.
Drweb liveusb be like: hold my beer
Found the guy that never worked in end user support.
What do you consider end user?
If I had a nickel for every time I was troubleshooting with a friend and discovered they thought turning the monitor off and on again was “rebooting the computer” I’d be depressingly wealthy.
*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.
Just imagine they’re MAGA
“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
100% chance you logged off/on
50/50 chance they believe you.
deleted by creator
I just recently had a wfh user ship me one of his monitors back because we had exhausted every thing I could think of troubleshooting-wise. When it arrived I unboxed it, plugged it in and the damn thing worked fine. I followed up with him and finally realized he had been trying to push the damn power LED instead of the actual power button.
Searching for a button is sometimes really hard, as manufacturers are quite inventive. But then again, reading an instruction is usually an option even if it is last resort (in the list it’s right after mailing the monitor to the support, it seems)
Thought that was House MD rule number one. Everybody lies. Wait. That means IT lies! How deep does the rabbit hole go?
House lied and not everybody lies.
The rabbit lies too.
I lied while RMAing a video card… kinda.
I spoke with an incredibly nice Indian fellow, and he asked me to try some troubleshooting. I had done all of it before, so I… pretended. But I told him all of the things I experienced when I did those steps (and lied further by giving ample time to pretend to do things.)
He RMA’d it just fine in the end and it works five years later. But I did feel bad about lying. I just didn’t want to take my whole working setup and do the troubleshooting steps again D:
You get a lot of shit MSI, but you did me goodly.
“Did you restart your computer?”
“… yes?”
opens task manager
sees a system uptime of 4 years
I’ll lose my tabs!
And several gigabytes of ram taken by chrome.
“OK then do me a favor, shut it down, unplug the power for 5 second and plug it back in”
Everyone uses laptops that plug into workstations like desktops now.
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.
I don’t even bother checking. I tell them I’m going to do something on my side that might cause their computer to reboot and then reboot it remotely.
Could also be windows fault.
It likes to do soft restarts and not actually restart.
I started telling my users to always hold shift when shutting down or restarting to make sure it shuts down fully.
I explain fast boot to people by saying “for some reason Microsoft went and made the Shut Down button not actually shut down your PC, it really just puts it into a ‘deep sleep’ mode, and to their credit, it lets them say that boot times are faster… But it also means that in order to FULLY restart the PC, you have to click restart… I know it’s a pain”
Usually I get looked at like I’m from another planet, but that reaction means they’ll probably remember it later.
And sometimes fast boot (I’m assuming we’re both talking about the bios setting) causes so many blue screens in windows that it becomes almost unusable.
AFAIK fast startup only affects shutdown, clicking restart will always do a full reboot. Shift clicking shutdown will do a full shutdown like you said, but shift clicking restart will start recovery mode.
This why I ask “can you restart it again, and just tell me what you see, please”
80 percent chance they reboot it themselves anyways.
100% chance to remember the name
80% seems really low
Yeah, 50% person actually restarted, 30% chance person is lying, 20% chance person just turned the monitor off and back on.
My buddy works IT for a company and that 20% chance is one he encountered just last week!!
20/80 tbh
The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.
I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”
Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”
Show me how you reboot the PC.
*User turns off monitor
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.
There’s some older ones where there are actual buttons on the bottom of the screen. Beats me how the people who press them to turn it off manage to press the power button for the PC to turn it on.
I just had to search to find my work monitors’ controls yesterday! All the way on the back.
I get credit for knowing they were turnoffable though.
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)
Considering our IT department replaces computers without moving over our files (like come on, just swap the drives!), I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they’d treat it.
And then it turns out you actually hadn’t restarted the computer, in my experience…
They just restarted the monitor
If I am calling IT to fix anything, it’s because I’ve exhausted all the usual things to fix it (restart, clear cache, make sure everything is seated, googled the issue, etc). 9 times outta 10, they’re just as stumped as I am and the device simply gets replaced. That 10th time tho it’s something I’ve never encountered but they have.
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.
That’s how one becomes IT
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.
My wife’s standing at her company’s IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.
Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.
Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of “screen broke”.
My God the amount of times I have to pull the frickin issue out of people…
I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Some of it is ignorance of the technology. Which I get because you can’t expect everyone to be experts (but if you don’t know the difference between a browser and your desktop just fuck off back to the bronze age).
The other is a true lack of empathy in the context of communication. Being able to communicate effectively with an equal onus on both parties to understand and adapt the dialog until the information has effectively been transferred is not hard, really, but some people just don’t care enough about the person on the other end of the line to be bothered.
That is infuriating when you’re trying to be helpful.
It doesn’t work.
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?
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
People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
Shovel gay, pen have, paper end, rock good.
“please call so and so, they’re having issues with their browser”
Call the user, they are out for the day. Leave message to call back
Either never hear back or the issue was not browser related
Either way, tell the original ticket creator to have the person having the issue call us if they want prompt service
IT Crowd was such a great show.
Between the antics, it was too real
