Never ask them if it’s plugged in. Ask them to unplug it and plug it back in. Make something up about contact patches on the cables getting corrosion. That way they can see that it’s not plugged in without feeling ashamed for not checking it.

my brain sees “I’ll be pissed and mock you” and read it to me as “I’ll piss on you”.

Not a bad punishment for people don’t plug their plugs all the way in.

And thus, the The Bastard Operator from Hell was born…

I had this with a person who said their screen stayed blank no matter what they did. I came down, saw the power light on the monitor was off, saw the plug was not plugged in, and fixed it. She was very embarrassed.

I’m not IT, just a college instructor, but you’d be amazed at how many Gen Z students have told me that they can’t log into their email because they don’t know their own password. Not even forgot; they don’t even know it in the first place because every device remembers everything for them.

“My computer hates me” I’ve heard that one

it looks fine on my end

Thanks for the extra scenario!

I like you. You have the right mindset. The main motivator for working IT support is helping people. The tech usually takes a back seat to soft skills.

On top of that, you’ll figure out that, as long as you know the fundamentals of how things work, all the details are something you can google. Figure out the fundamentals and you’ll be able to work on anything. Convincing prospective employers of this skillset is a bit more difficult.

I wish you luck and I hope I have the pleasure of working with you some day.

Certifications certifications certifications. Get your A+ or net+, apply for shitty remote help desk jobs like support.com. They will suck and you’ll get back to back calls, but keep your ears to the ground and a few months experience should be all you need to hop to something else. A lot of places are desperate for competent techs. Degrees don’t prove anything, I’m fact it seems like kids are graduating with these technical degrees and zero actual practical knowledge.

Source: My decade long IT career off just an associates degree.

I have had an IT role and been a controls engineer for many years now. There is a fair amount of overlap in duties and you only need one degree for that. Basically, a lot of it is IT for machinery. I have a hell desk support team who keeps most of the basics at bay and every time they all get sick at once I remember why I love them.

So I’m going to go against the grain here and say to get some college under your belt. A 2 year degree and a cert or two (which can even be part of your degree program, or sometimes will allow you to skip some classes saving you time and money) will easily get you into a helpdesk job, and from there you can go into whatever specialization ends up tickling your fancy.

I’ll also say, helping someone with their nth password reset doesn’t have to suck. Sometimes there’s a root cause that you can help with which makes you far more helpful than the tech who just helps them reset it 10 more times. One of my proudest achievements in a previous role was successfully teaching all of our users who’d email us a scan of a printout of a screenshot of an error message how to send us the screenshot directly, and we went from 1 ticket like that per week to none for my final 6 months. All it takes is some compassion and meeting the users where they are without judgment for the common goal of getting both of our jobs done a little easier.

The majority of people are genuinely thankful for your help. Sometimes they put off asking for help until they are very frustrated and you catch some of that heat but they calm down quickly. They also really like it if you have to sit down and work on their computer because it means they have an excuse to not work and have some coffee. There always seems to be that one person though that you dread helping because they are always pissy and sarcastic and blame you for everything.

I’m a hiring manager for a tier 1 help desk and soft skills and being able to deal with users who are bad with technology are way more important than any certification at that level. I can teach someone to do the technical stuff if they have a good attitude. If they have a shitty attitude and get frustrated on every call where the user has trouble following instructions there’s not much I can do for them. Don’t let your lack of certs/degree stop you from applying. You may end up someplace that’s desperate to get asses in seats (usually for good reason) for a bit but once you get some experience on your resume you’ll have an easier time finding someplace better.

Others have said here but for a help desk job it’s definitely more based on customer service ability. I came in from an admin job with a very long time in customer service prior to that but no other actual certs other than just being the person that people go to in the office for help and was told by my hiring manager it’s much more about ability to handle clients.

Now the next steps in my career I’m more worried about because it’s all very competitive at least where I am and everyone seems much more involved and knowledgeable of technology than I am. I know I can learn but it is pretty overwhelming.

I would interpret ‘the computer forgot my password’ as someone accidentally getting logged out of their password manager

Truly maddening

**

• Go to change password
• They also don’t know the password of the email address the reset email is sent to

*idk how to format

deleted by creator

Were you talking to Frank Reynolds?

I hope they installed the waterproof version

You were doing very well until everyone died.

Yes most management falls into this category. If you ain’t running a prison with the staff something is wrong as we can’t possibly trust these people!

They’ll still wonder why they’re paying you though sadly.

Funnily enough, i think this might actually work to a degree

Fun thing is,… the cycle repeats.

~20% of Boomers had good working knowledge of the technologies of their age, similar to today.

I see it as a fair deal. They paid my absurdly high phone bill as I fell for dial up scammers in my youth while experimenting with fresh new internet, and so I abandon all hope of lazy free time and help them with their unresponding printer now.

As someone who works in IT support, I have yet to find any significant number of support people who can’t troubleshoot process issues. What I have found in spades is management making it impossible to make any meaningful process improvements.

There’s a nontrivial number of management type folks that just want it done a specific way, regardless of how that impacts worker performance or how difficult it makes my job.

The number of times I’ve suggested improvements only to be told that the existing methodology works, is too damn high.

My first fucking thought. I’m still waiting on helpdesk to respond to an issue I’ve already chased down to a registry key because I’m not allowed workstation admin privileges. 🙄. Which I’m fine with but more than a week to respond to a ticket? Come the fuck on

Googling problems with Windows I find the majority of the results are MS support telling them to reset the OS. No attempt to debug the issue just nuke it and see if that fixes it. Then you read the next comments and inevitably they say “Nope, didn’t fix it”. I really dislike scripted responses like this.

All they hear:

You just don’t know what you’re doing!"

"No, I’m just not going to volunteer myself to learn

That’s lame and easy to figure out.

Switch to wireless mice. Maybe Logitech Unifying. Then one day pull all the dongles out and put them in a bucket.

First person to figure out how to download and install the unifying software and re-pair their mouse without using it gets a bonus.

But most people nowadays are lost without mice so they’d probably cycle through all the dongles on the laptop plugged into the projector and all move their mice until they figure out which is whose.

Oh, so the WiFi was fine, but the internet sucked when it rained. Cool.

WiFi != Internet.

You could just get a rain-proof router! /s

The password one is also when they’re on the wrong site and now they’ve just typed all their passwords and account names into microsoftoffice365.scammer.ru

And many Americans seem to call their cellular internet connection “wifi” and that can definitely be affected by the weather.

This meme seems to be from the times of WinXP, when browsers didn’t remember passwords.

Even the first one.

The mouse is moving. It’s potentially the mouse-pointer that is not moving.

Seriously.

On a side note, love you IT guys 💖 and it seems that if you ask nicely if they have time, they’ll listen and if you try to do your best they’ll be all over it to help you out the best they can.

I worked at a software developer, occasionally doing support. Had a call from a customer following up on a ticket, I looked at the record and the salty dude who took the original call had written:

Caller asked me to tell him where he saved his file. I told him “well if you can tell me where I parked my car this morning, I might be able to help you.”

Quality wasn’t a big thing with our software, the senior developer was a stoner who was off his head most of the time, others were either clueless or too busy on side hustles to give a fuck. Amazingly we developed engineering software that was used by amongst others, the atomic weapons establishment in the UK and Buckingham Palace. Happy days.

“My computer says no wifi, so anyway I started blasting.” Such Murica lol