I’ve been on both sides of it. One of my favorite IT moments was changing to a new phone. I couldn’t access my email until I did a two factor auth process. Of course they emailed me my code to access my account to unlock my email. Good thing I also had a pc at home with access to my email.
Then I was supporting a lab. One woman was clearly aggravated when she called. She said no matter what she did her screen was blank. I head right over and just look at it for a few secs. I check the lowest hanging fruit solution first and see the power light on her monitor isn’t on. I see it is unplugged, plug her monitor in and problem solved. I’ve never seen a more embarrassed person than her. lol
Networking has to be the most thankless job in IT. You are invisible when the system is working, which is 99% of the time. It stays up like that because they are monitoring it and maintaining it behind the scenes. When it fails though the failure can be catastrophic for everyone, we literally cannot do any work without it. Then everyone’s eyes, and criticism, is on them.
My experiences with IT across multiple organizations is that they’re understaffed and not hiring particularly competent people.
The competent people they do have are generally egomaniacs because they’re the only person or persons in a department full of idiots, and they deal with idiots all day, so they assume everyone is an idiot.
Additionally, IT is SUPER territorial. Like, noticeably so. They have 1-2 people that know what they’re doing, but their whole staff acts like they’re as smart as their smartest person, which they are, unassailably, not. I give a lot of respect to the competent and knowledgeable ones, because I realize they’re also managing a bunch of idiots that don’t know they’re idiots.
Across three different organizations, I’ve watched five members of IT fired for their arrogance. If you’re interested in doing this, simply hire an attorney, bring the smart person into the room with the arrogant idiot, and make it clear that someone in that room is not going to work for the organization in two weeks, and then explain the situation.
If you feel attacked by this, you’re one of the idiot IT staff. I’m good friends with our current CIO and security lead. I hate to break it to you, but they don’t like you either. You are described as “cannon fodder for grandpa.”
Easy to fire, easy to hire. This cartoon adequately captures the level of questions that incompetent people working in IT can feel superior about. But they’re not serious IT issues within a large organization.
That’s why you hire kids that graduated with “computer degrees.” So they can make cartoons and catch all the bullshit, while the real professionals do the real work.
Yeah a place I worked for had managers that thought that way. Then something broke and since the guy who knew how to fix it was fired a long time ago… well… I was already long gone by then. But their system was down for nearly a week.
Now if the managers established any kind of process then personality conflicts wouldn’t be an issue, everything would be documented in advance (ie. planning) and the IT would just be following an agreed upon plan. Both management and the staff know everything that’s happening and why it’s happening. And if there’s staff turnover it’s no biggie because everything is documented and the management knows where the documentation is.
But that requires work… by management. So in many places it doesn’t happen.
The reason why you have arrogant IT staff is only because they know that you don’t know how anything works and they do. They know that if you fire them you’ll be fucking over yourself because if something breaks there’s a good chance you won’t know how to fix it and it may take their replacement a long time to figure it out because you never gave the IT staff an adequate amount of time to document anything.
Sure when you fire these guys things won’t break immediately. It might be a year, even several years before that critical thing (that you never required to be documented, no time for that) breaks and the system is down for an extended period of time.
The IT guys are arrogant because their boss is too stupid to know how to manage things properly to know how things are set up. Some managers are too stupid to even know why their IT guys are arrogant. They’re arrogant because they know that by firing them, the manager is fucking himself over. They’re just underestimating how stupid their manager is.
If you feel attacked by this, you’re one of the idiot IT managers.
Across three different organizations, I’ve watched five members of IT fired for their arrogance. If you’re interested in doing this, simply hire an attorney, bring the smart person into the room with the arrogant idiot, and make it clear that someone in that room is not going to work for the organization in two weeks, and then explain the situation.
I don’t understand this. What happens when you do that?
Love these. Reminds my of the CD drive cup holder and my personal favorite at my shop was the computer was afraid of me. Every time I came near to fix the problem they were having it went away. I was told the computer must be afraid of me and knows when I’m coming
The number of people who fail to recognize what it (typically) means when an issue magically disappears while Simone is looking over their shoulder is absurd.
According to my googling, they may be by Li-Anne Dias? But the artist’s website is so bad you’re better off reading the comics when they’re reposted elsewhere
But these are so classic they even mention Windows XP
I doubt that would affect Wi-Fi, but what does affect it (at least 2.4 GHz frequencies) is microwaves. They operate at the same frequency and interfere with the router’s output waves.
My wife refused to believe me until I had her run a speed test and watch the signal drop when I started up the microwave, then rise again when I turned it off.
No. RF is not affected directly by air movement. However, it can be indirectly affected, by moving the antennae positioning, moving other objects in the way, or causing rain or snow to block the path of the RF. Source: Network Engineer for 10 years
This is why I only work for MSPs that have a closed client list, who pay the MSP for their services. They pay us to be the experts and generally we are treated as such. If a client does end up being unruly or rude, we fire them.
I have no idea why things don’t actually work and when presented with a core dump or any previous debugging the user did I panic like a little girl, so I restored to a previous system restore point, because fuck the changes you made since then and the fact that if you do them again the issue will come back, I’m just supposed to close this ticket, not actually fix things.
If it’s ACTUALLY part of your job I’ll care, if it’s some bullshit thing a wannabe IT user did to fuck their shit up that has nothing to do with their job (99% of the time it’s this) then fuck you.
It’s a business machine, not your personal test lab. Goddamn users, man. Every single time.
Your job is to break computers? If not, my guess is that you can do your job in such a way as to not break the computer. If not, the company really needs to reassess how your job is done
The implied problem you aren’t understanding is scope. Restoring your machines functionality and determining that if you do blank the universe breaks IS AN ACTUAL SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM that is in scope and highly efficient. The company probably doesn’t pay you to piddle fuck around nor does it pay the IT guy to make you piddle fucking around work out.
Digging in to the problem and figuring out an exact reproduction of the bug so that a bug can be filed with the appropriate owner of the whatever code and a fix instituted at some point would be far more interesting and fun, even more so if its in code you actually control and you can actually fix it but its likely not actually productive unless you can make a strong case for it.
The cost of fixing your stuff in 15 minutes and having you back in action is about $12.50. The cost of spending 3 days on it is $1200. Surely you understand why it works the way it works.
The implied problem you aren’t understanding is scope. Restoring your machines functionality and determining that if you do blank the universe breaks IS AN ACTUAL SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM that is in scope and highly efficient. The company probably doesn’t pay you to piddle fuck around nor does it pay the IT guy to make your piddle fucking around work out.
Fucking THANK. YOU.
This is exactly what I’m talking about, we don’t get hired so that we can accommodate some bullshit that an individual user just thinks they need. We are hired to keep your machine working in the capacity that your job requires it to work. Nowhere in our job description does it say that we have to be your little errand boy making your fuck-ass decisions function in our environment.
The company paid me to do exactly the actions I did before the system restore, which I had to redo after the system restore, and then I had to continue debugging and fixing the issue myself. Your cost analysis is fair in some cases, but it doesn’t really apply here. It wasn’t a “undo the changes so they can get back to work” situation, it was a “fix the issue so they can continue working” situation.
Also, restoring the machine to a previous state was not a fix for my issue. I wasn’t in a position where I did not have access, nor was I in one where I couldn’t revert the changes myself (even without the system restore). This was a lazy/incompetent tech, who finished their ticket and went home for the day having done nothing but inconvenience me even more, and cause me to spend even more time on the issue.
I only wish this was the only interaction I’ve ever had with IT where they proved to be more trouble than it’s worth, but sadly that’s not the case.
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