I think my IT guy hates me...
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[–] 34 points 1 year ago (40 children)

My initial thought is "I don't believe you" if they claim to have already restarted the PC. Sometimes they Think they did but only put it to sleep or something, and sometimes they are just lying to seem less stupid.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (21 children)

    Once I had a user swear up and down they restarted the computer 3 times, and asked if I thought they were an idiot.

    I said, "No, I'm not saying you're an idiot, but your computer is saying it's boot time was 18 months ago."

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Spent too long in tech support - The trick with people like this is to move the goal to something that they certainly haven't done before yet still accomplishes the same goal. Here I would honest to God ask the customer to check the pins on the power cable to make sure they're straight. I don't give a damn about those pins but they have to unplug the computer to look.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    I used to see a lot of people log out and back in and think that was restarting. Still wish Windows had an uptime command

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I'm mad WMIC is gone. That thing was fucking useful, so of course Microsoft went out of their way to get rid of it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Whaaaat they removed wmic?! I used the crap out of that when I did windows admin.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Yeah. It's been deprecated for a while, but I've been running into some 11 systems where it is totally gone.

    Have fun remembering a whole buttload of random PowerShell cmdlets to do the same fucking thing as that one tool.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Does it not still show in Task Makager?

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Too many people think that just turning off the monitor is what you want them to do. They're usually the same people that refer to their entire desktop PC as "the hard drive". At least that was my experience about a decade ago.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Always pains me to watch Chuck because it's a show about an IT support guy and HE ALSO REFERS TO DESKTOP COMPUTERS AS HARD DRIVES LIKE WHAT THE FUCK, WERE THEY ACTIVELY TRYING TO DRIVE US MAD

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    This. "Lets try it again, just to be sure." ::watches them put it to sleep with the soft power button::

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    The real fun is when you can't watch what their doing because its over the phone, so you just have to hope they are doing it right. I used to hit them with the "Let's try this; hold down the power button for exactly 30 seconds, then turn it back on." Worked every time, but I did once have a guy ask me why that worked, and I didn't want to call him an idiot so I made up some BS about it being a way to "flush the power from the system" and he bought it.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't think it's dumb to tell people that power buttons often just put computers to sleep now. It's a relatively new behaviour. Until about 5 or 10 years ago power meant power off, not low power.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Even shutdown doesn't actually shut down anymore in Windows. Even on desktops. You have to change system settings or shut down via command line to get a real shutdown.

    That's why update and shutdown does a reboot instead now.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Funny enough, sometimes you used to have to hold the power button to drain the caps. That would (rarely) fix some laptop issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    One time a friend and I (both in IT at the time) tried absolutely everything to fix a bizarre computer problem, then he told me to literally pull the hard drive completely out if the case and sit unplugged overnight before putting it back in. For some reason that worked, even though unplugging everything and plugging it right back in did nothing. Asked him why and he said “No idea, I was desperate.”

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Not just laptops, even. I've fixed desktops that way. Unllug and hold power button.

    And I'm fairly sure it might still work in some exceptionally niche scenarios

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I'd just run a continuos ping and see if it dropped offline at all, and for how long.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Someone said you tell them to turn it off and unplug it, because you need a number from the plug side going into the computer. Then you coach them through the process to find the right plug, and they don't feel stupid because this is a strange process.

    Then when they say there's no numbers on the plug, you pretend like this is new and useful information, tell them to hold the power button and make sure no lights come on, and then you tell them to plug it in and turn it back on

    Now, not only have you confirmed they definitely turned off the computer without asking a bunch of potentially insulting questions, the showmanship makes them feel like this is arcane knowledge you've taught them

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is why it is not at all unreasonable to envision future IT people as basically being Comstar or the Mechanicus. People already think we do magic, just wait a hundred years and we can convince them of anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    What do you mean? I already believe I do magic. Granted, I'm not IT, I'm a dev, but I literally type words and runes and the lives of thousands of people change.

    The customer will call me and say "I need to do this, I have this problem, help" and I either say "it will be done" or I tell her to go through a series of arcane actions, maybe asking for strange sequences of actions or ask for special numbers I leave around that mean nothing to anyone aside from me and my coworker

    I literally sometimes say "this feels fucky, can you restart X or Y for me?" And my team lead is just like yeah, ok, that makes no sense let's try it. And vise versa

    You have no idea how superstitious you get as a senior dev. And it works. It's just better and faster to accept rituals that work than to dig into every problem

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