Many, many years ago I took an A+ certification course because it was provided free by the state. And a fat lot of good it did me, but it was amusing for a while all the same. (I tried to opt to just take the stupid exam, but no, you have to sit through the course.)

We were given various old office PCs to fiddle with, and would use them throughout the course for all of the electronic learning materials. In order to instill in us a sense of the Troubleshooting Spirit, I suppose, the course’s instructor would deliberately fuck with everyone’s machine overnight so you’d have to track down what he did in order to get yours working again. Naturally this resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, whining, sulking, and impressive displays of learned helplessness from the class which was always amusing to watch.

For me, anyway. I was the only person there with any computer chops and at the place I’d worked at prior to this I was the only IT person simply by default. I’ve been plugging computers together since I was big enough to hold a screwdriver. Have you ever smoked a motherboard by failing to put the two AT power plugs in with the black wires in the middle, relative to each other? Ever made your own cable select IDE ribbon by carefully chopping out pin 28’s wire with a razor blade? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.

It didn’t take long before I was forbidden to help other people with their troubleshooting stuff. Fine, I’ll sit here and play Doom until everyone’s finally ready.

I tried, and failed, to convey the notion that messing with my PC was a futile effort. Short of outright stealing some vital component from it, you weren’t going to keep me down for more than about a minute.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that most of the problems deliberately instilled in people’s machines involved unplugging some cable or another, and motherfuckers never figured this out. It’s truly astonishing how resistant people will be to considering the most obvious of solutions and starting there. Mind you, this was basically the entire point of the class so I didn’t hold out much hope for the future IT careers of my peers, to put it mildly.

One day I found that the instructor had backed my network cable out slightly but left it hanging in the socket, unclipped, just enough to look still plugged in but not make contact. Obviously the lack of blinkenlights on the jack was a major clue, but this stumped quite a few of our recruits. I must have given him a sarcastic look or something when I clicked it back in, because the next day he got clever and covered the contacts on the end of the plug with a piece of clear tape and fully plugged it back in. That was devious. Not only can you not trust the user to lie to you, but now we have to contend with active sabotage!

I got him back, though. I got into his presentation computer one day and discovered there was an unused USB header on the motherboard. One header-to-port breakout cable later and I plugged the receiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard into his machine inside the case and started messing with his cursor surreptitiously. What goes around comes around, Mr. funny guy.

I’ve heard variations of that as well, things like “could you check if the contacts are bent?” or “plug it out, wait ten seconds for any static to drain, then plug it back in firmly”.

If it works, just shrug it off as “sometimes cables are fiddly” so the user doesn’t feel like you’re blaming them for anything. Odds are they’ll realise it’s not seated properly and be glad they got away with their error.

Sounds like Millennials solving Boomer computer issues for 25 years.

40% getting people to reboot, 40% getting people to reboot despite their lies that they already did,

“Sir, I need you to reboot your computer”

“Sure, let me juuuuust restart… Huh, doesn’t seem to have solved the problem”

“Sir, I’m remoted into your computer and can see you didn’t actually reboot.”

So many goddamned times while I was on first line…

The Dr House rule of everybody lies is oddly very specific in the IT support world

40% getting people to reboot despite their lies that they already did

and that is how we know you are not lying and actually suffered through that job 😂

Back in the 1960s there was a kind of car called a Bubble Car. They had a front-opening door, that is, the door and windscreen were one, and it opened up, out and to the left. The cars also had no reverse gear.

It was thus possible to get into a state where you’d driven right up to the back wall of a garage and were then completely unable to get out.

The car wasn’t broken and otherwise worked normally. If there’d been a radio in there, that would have still worked. The seat didn’t suddenly become uncomfortable, etc. Nonetheless, the user was stuck.

What’s the point of this anecdote? Well, a computer that can be fixed by rebooting was in a state like that bubble car stuck against the back wall of the garage.

Unfortunately, with the car, there was no equivalent reset to get back outside the garage again, and usually resulted in the user screaming for help.

One thing I think about is that we make servers with ECC RAM because normal RAM has cosmic rays cause random corruption IIRC once every 100 days on average.

It’s overkill for desktops because you don’t care about 3 bit flips every year if you only have 1 machine as opposed to managing thousands in a datacenter, and you regularly restart your stuff anyway.

And then you have people who have to deal with hundreds of people who never restart their stuff.

And companies ship stuff with memory leaks all the time on top of this. US nuclear guidance systems have them, but they are not expected to have to be on constantly for weeks on end like the laptop of Joan from Marketing.

The reason for that most of the time is because the user doesn’t have any patience.

So when they are forced to wait for you to come by, the problem fixed itself because of time.

Technician Proximity Syndrome, happens in every field.

I honestly love those calls, it makes for an easy win and an amused user (normally). My favorite was when I worked for a car dealership, as I’d routinely get called into the shop for a computer issue only to have the tech go to reproduce the issue and it worked fine.

The number of times I heard “Man, now I know how my customers feel” was pretty damned funny.

Me every time I call tech support. I feel so stupid.

Sometimes I know I need to zone out a bit as the story is completely unrelated to the problem. The trick is making sure you start paying attention again at the right time.