My father did this.

I was giving him a PC tutorial and I asked him to turn off the PC and he turned off the monitor.

One of my users locked her Windows session and then signed in again, there, I rebooted.

Literally every single time!

At a previous job, I was not doing IT support but another role and I noticed a coworker had a red dot on the Windows Update status bar icon.

Told him I don't think I have seen that before, normally it is orange.

So he tells me that he is trying to see how long he can keep it going before something happens. I recommended against this, and also I normally recommend against using the desktop to store files. The laptop goes up in flames, so do your files. We have OneDrive for business, I know people hate it, but at least your stuff is... relatively safe. Backed up at least with version history.

A few weeks later I was chatting to someone else who sometimes shared my desk, and somehow I mentioned this encounter. A while later, his manager sitting ahead of us is on a phone call and we hear he is getting upset. He hangs up and turns around, tells us.

Him and one sales guy had spent hours on some proposals, worked out all the values and timings and it's gone. All that work gone. His laptop rebooted because Windows updates.

He mentions who... it is the same guy. I tell him I was just telling my desk buddy about him and how he intentionally left his laptop running for months to see what Windows Update would do and clearly he did not take my advice about rebooting and using OneDrive.

The rest of the day... this guy did not stop. Every 30 minutes or so he'd just go "All that work, gone. Why?"

We'd be walking to get lunch, talking about other things and again he'd just switch back to that and turn gloomy again.

You could also change nothing and make up an excuse to restart.

"Ok I checked the regedit HSKEY_LOCAL to ensure [company software] exists and has correct values, now we should just reboot to apply new settings."

I miss my IT days, they were fun. I once saw a USB flashdrive taped to a postcard. It was the old owners friend who had sent him pictures from a meet up.

I loved it. The old guy wanted to send pictures. And send them he did.

Also did my last favor for a guy who needed a long ethernet cable for something at home, I said sure, but we need it back by next week. He never returned it. So I told him "I'm not gonna argue, either it's on my desk tomorrow or I'll send your department an invoice so we can buy a new one."

It was on my desk next day in a tangled pile.

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.

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

On the other hand, our endpoint management solution reported long, continuous uptime even if devices were shut down. Turns out fastboot was to thank for it.

And claim they need 'more memory' when they run out of space on the local drive because they're storing all their important files in the recycle bin.

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

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.

Ooh I need to start using this

I wonder if I can get away with saying this to a client

PICNIC

When I worked for a small business MSP, my boss had an off hours call about an issue, walked the guy through rebooting their server. He was monitoring the uptime so he saw it go off. Then he told them to turn it back on. The guy said he did, but my boss never saw it come back online. He asked him if it was lit up, the guy said yes. He said "are you sure", and the guy, annoyed, said "yes! I see lights". Waited a bit longer and it never came online. He called another person at the business to check, and they too confirmed that it was lit up. So he drove 35 minutes to go to their office, walked in their network closet and hit the power button, and magically it turned on. They were seeing the lights on the router, an entirely different machine sitting on top of the server and thought it was on. The issue was fixed by the reboot alone and my boss drove home very very annoyed.

A few guys at my work actually just asled us what we wanted from the cafeteriawhen we were doing long fixes on their laptops (I work in a uni)

Just the coffee then? Black, no sugar

Protip if you bring your IT guy an eighth of weed, he'll give you admin privileges on your PC for a few days.

there's an even bigger issue there - file size (or file systems) are not taught anymore. Hell the ipad doesn't even expose a file system to its users. I work in schools and teachers and students are both as bad as each other

You're why I drink.