"I closed the lid..."

Yes, never trust a user :)

Maybe a little of Column A, little of Column B. Don't forget that MS in their infinite wisdom made it so you have to basically do a shamanistic ritual now to actually shut down the computer and not just put it in "Low Power Mode" so it "wakes up faster next time you want to use it" so they might have attempted to shut it down and restart it

Yeah, I think this person is delusional. I would typically indicate I've already tried while while stating I'm proceeding to do it again. I want to keep teir one support on script so I can get to teir two, if needed.

It's also a good procedure to follow their instructions verbatim because software and hardware can be weird in non-obvious ways and those teir one instructions are often written by higher level tiers so they don't get bothered on a weekend.

It used to be about half of users lied about restarting because “That couldn’t possibly solve this problem!” Now there’s also people who truly believe they did but didn’t because MS sucks and broke shutdown. IT could be fairly confident in saying “No you didn’t.” to almost every user.

From my experience, having fastboot on will report long uptime despite the reboot. So the user in question might be telling the truth.

i once asked a kid if he turned the laptop off and on again, he said yea. so i started to try to fix the issue, nothing worked. so i decided to reboot anyway and it worked. ive never trusted anyone who responded yes to this question again

They turned their monitor off and back on again.

checks task manager Uptime of 200 days. 🙃

I had someone tell me that they had "restarted AND rebooted" their computer a couple weeks ago and I knew immediately that they had done neither.

I had to call my ISP when the connection was glitchy, and after a while they paused and asked "how many bits are in a byte?" and I said eight and then they were like "ok, let's troubleshoot this, first do this..." etc. Turns out, someone had hammered a nail straight through the cat5 cable to fasten it to the wall.

At my last job I was part IT. I never took their word for it when they said they restarted it. I always opened task manager to check. Believe it or not they weren't lying there, they did know to restart, at least before the aquisition.

At my old job I helped the IT guy out when he came across some really ridiculous Excel problems. After that he'd give my calls special attention and always hooked me up when we got new hardware.

He told me more than once that it was because he knew I knew what I was doing.

My former career was in IT, I'm a developer now. I work with a bunch of tech savvy people, but I still have the 'IT Support Aura'. I've lost count of how many times a coworker has a computer problem, asks for help, and then watches me fix it and they claim they tried the exact same thing and it didn't work. I never really have an answer besides 'computers fear me'

Before my life shifted more into integrations I was a fan of running:

systeminfo | find "System Boot"

I wasn't out to call anyone out, but sometimes users honestly believed they had rebooted and I would find of the the day's lucky 10k. It also helped to figure out which users would just blankly say they've done everything.

The ol' IT person magic touch - the second you touch the machine, it works flawlessly!

Only problem is if it's one of those problems that's workflow-based. I can't tell you how many times I've said "well it seems to work fine for me" only to watch the user do the same task in the most janky, roundabout way, and that is the source of their problem.

I’ve experienced IT support aura, both from my friends and myself when I joined IT for a while.

I’ve also experienced the evil IT aura. Sometimes when everything is working just fine and an IT worker touches or observes it, it will break inexplicably.

An IT friend asked to use my computer to play a round of Starcraft at a LAN party and I agreed. Watched him slowly sit down, extend his arms above the keyboard like a pianist, slowly rest his hands on the keyboard, and immediately got my first BSOD. Wasn’t even running anything, just sitting on the desktop.

Also the thing where you try and show the problem to any other person and it starts working just to make you look dumb. Me and my SO do that all the time: "This thing isn't working, I know you don't know how to fix it but can you come over and look at it not working so it'll work?" And I'd say at least 50% of the time it does lol

The fear effect also works the second you show the problem to someone else in IT. The only thing that makes a computer behave faster than IT being in the room is 2 people from IT.

The IT support aura is nothing more than being patient.

Users don't have patience, so when they call IT about a problem, they are forced to wait until IT gets there. Which is enough time for it to get through whatever it was calculating and start working again.

They should have asked "did you unplug it for thirty seconds and plug it back in" as the first question if how long matters.

“No, but I keep the board exposed, and I manually discharged each capacitor before plugging it back in, so same thing really.”

I usually start conversations with your crew as "Sorry, I'm probably old enough to be your mother and awful with tech. I've googled and rebooted and that's as much I can do I'm so sorry". And I say it in a grovelling tone...

Also, the number of times where a second restart clears up the issue is insane.

I had a Mac user in my office last month, I asked her to reboot her MBP, she used the power button to crash it. I'm like, is that the way you always do that? Sure, she says. I showed her the reboot option and she was like "oh neat bye." That poor fucking Mac.

When I figured that out, I was so pissed. I didn't tell you to hibernate! If I wanted you to hibernate, is have told you to do that. I said shutdown damnit.

Wtf, when did this happen?

Does shutdown /r still work fine?

Yeah it is stupid.

But easily solved by disabling fast startup.

Our philosophy, "No tickey, no worky".

It really only works if your boss backs you on that, which I'm lucky enough to have.

Wdym turning off the monitor doesn't count as a reboot?

Only 7 days?

How do you restart it wrong? And more importantly - what's the correct way to do it?

It's so annoying (and slightly embarrassing, and funny how often it happens), to restart it myself to no avail... then have it work after a second identical restart just because someone else is spectating.

Having been unofficial IT guy in a few places, when I contact any type of tech support, I give them a list of steps I've taken to try and solve the issue, which usually includes rebooting as a first or second step.

You you have a very accessible IT dept. I would restart twice and blog post about how to fix something without admin right before the pain of calling IT personally.