Also IT guys:
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.
Yeah, I don’t call IT anymore.
and the fact that if you do them again the issue will come back
Damn, answered your own question. Have you tried not doing the thing that breaks the computer?
Yeah, let me not do my job anymore, so you don’t have to do yours.
Goddamn IT, 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
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.
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 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.
Well there are shitty folks in every profession
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.
Fun story, I worked IT for an American Telecom company. One day I recieved a phone call from a guy who was setting up his router. We were maybe five minutes into troubleshooting. He asks if he can eat his dinner while we troubleshoot and I say “no worries”. Within thirty seconds, I hear a bang and panicd screaming. He informs me he dumped soy sauce and rice all over his router and work space. I sent a field tech to replace the router and set it up.
Edit: This comic is the norm not the unusual…
I hope they installed the waterproof version
Were you talking to Frank Reynolds?
Somehow, my phone number got printed on an ISP provided router that services like trailer parks in Arizona. So I get calls randomly asking “Hey is this ____ Internet?” & I go “No sorry, this is just some dude. But hey, where did you find this number? I just wanna know why people are keeping calling me”
And fuck if it isn’t like pulling teeth. I literally just want to know where it’s printed.
“Uhh, so this isn’t Blank Internet?” Click
“It’s the Internet number” “yeah but like where are you reading it from?” “The internet” “Oh like a website?” “No, like the internet… so you can’t fix it?”
Voicemail: “Hey this is Joe Oldman. I live at 113 blank drive. My social security number is 0000005. Can you send someone down to fix my internet? Thanks”
Finally someone under the age of 40 called me and finally said “this is the number on the back of the router” but even when I asked “So what router is it? Like where is it printed?” “Idk”. Like dude, you literally just read this number and typed it in your damn phone. What are you looking at.
Major “my computer is too slow after I installed 20 search bars” energy.
When they tell you that they know how to use a computer, it’s like someone saying they know to play chess when they only know how the pieces move.
I asked a guy for his host name today and he straight up said “No” wtf man what do you want from me then?
“The computer forgot my password” is new to me. lol good one.
“My computer hates me” I’ve heard that one
Gonna have to actually use this one next time I lock myself out of my computer.
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.
Like others have said they’re probably using Google as a password manager. When you’re making an account for anything while in the Chrome browser it recommends strong passwords for you such as UjafUif&i$ureT6hj9gzq5hvc$tcgo0be3. Would you memorize it?
I get it, but I also don’t understand the idea of letting Google suggest a random secure password for me. Probably just the Genx/Millenial in me, but I subscribe to the xkcd school of random password generation (password generator), which makes it really easy to have secure passwords that meet complexity requirements and are also easy to memorize.
Why not both then? Make your own human readable passwords, but do a different one each time and store them in a password vault.
Definitely. I don’t really do anything that is particularly sensitive, so I only have 3-4 standard passwords (that meet the most common complexity criteria) that I separate by how sensitive the information/service is, but if I truly needed more, I would absolutely be using a 3rd party password vault. I just don’t have the need right now, so I haven’t bothered.
What gets me is the people that don’t know their own passwords, don’t know how/where to look them up, and don’t even understand how to reset their passwords (because they can’t log into their own email). I don’t even know how they function in modern society.
What gets me is the people that don’t know their own passwords, don’t know how/where to look them up, and don’t even understand how to reset their passwords
I worked support for a phone manufacturer for a while and helped a lot of poor lost souls struggle to get back into their Google accounts on their new and replacement devices. I got a lot of them in, but some may have never gotten out of authentication hell
Yeah, I have my own password generation scheme. Not the most secure thing in the world but I’m at least able to log in to my accounts from other people’s computers. One of these days I’ll get around to using a password manager but I just can’t be bothered.
I’ve had the same issue with gen z to gen x. It hurts my soul each time
Caring about that has been beaten out of them by increasingly absurd password requirements over dozens of systems. They won’t memorize it, won’t write it down physically, and use the web browser to save it.
“But my system is different, I…”
Nobody cares. The password is just a speed bump in doing the thing they actually want to do.
My girlfriend (millenial) is like that as well and it is infuriating. I tell her time and time again, just use a password manager that isn’t the browser’s password manager and you are golden. You just need to remember one “complicated” password, i.e. something with more than 8 characters and that’s it.
The many times she doesn’t know her password to important account is mind boggling.
Tip for anyone using Google Chrome password manager they can access it from any other device by going to passwords.google.com in the browser and logging in (probably best in incognito if not your device).
That’s a great tip. I don’t use chrome, so I didn’t know that.
My kid sister is the same way. Bought her a quest 3 for her bday. Took 3 days to get up and running because a) she had no idea what her meta account passwords were… had always just logged in on her phone… and b) none of the forgot password functions worked because she never cleared her Gmail mailbox so it had filled up and bounced previous facebook emails landing her on their internal do not send list.
I was livid.
I know people who don’t use a password manager so every time they have to type in a pw they have to go through the reset process.
I’m GenX and I don’t know my email password…
Though I’m 99% sure it’s in keepass somewhere.
average keepass enjoyer
ironically I think tech literacy is going down with future gens thanks to so many functions getting automated. Kids aren’t learning how their computers work because it does all of work for them
It’s like that with everything isn’t it? The problems have been off-loaded. In my company for example we used to make our own motors, now we buy them. I doubt there is anyone left who knows how to build one where I work.
I hate to be a “kids these days” person, but you’re absolutely right. My Gen Z students don’t even understand how folder/file structure works; they just download everything onto their desktop and use the search function to find what they need later. If they can’t remember what something was called, they’re SOL.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of faith in Gen Z and Alpha, but their strengths are definitely not the strengths of Millenials or Gen X.
To be fair that is basically what we are trying to get people to do though. Use a good password vault with a single strong password and two factor authentication. All other passwords should be a uniquely generated password for that application.
Yeah, I don’t know any of my passwords but the one password to rule them all.
Can you recommend a good, safe password vault?
If you’re brave enough to roll your own: KeePass XC. If not, Bitwarden. (edit for clarity)
That’s not hosting, it’s just a local file.
If you want to access your KeePass safe from multiple devices (phone, tablet, PC, etc), you have to host it somewhere.
or just sync the file using syncthing or plain old rsync?
You can put it on Google drive or something similar. You could also use syncthing (like how I do it) and you still don’t have to host anything.
I recommend bitwarden. Make sure to have a good 2fa also like Aegis or raivo
+1 for Bitwarden, wife and I use it and it works well. It lets you securely share passwords for free.
Keepass and Bitwarden are the highly recommended password managers.
I’ll be honest as an IT professional of 25 plus years I don’t know .y passwords either but that’s because I let a password manager deal with it for me.
I have had people older than me complain the comp forgot the pass in my desktop days.
There was also it’s cousin. I am definitely meeting the complexity requirements why isn’t it saving
My favorite are the services that keep rejecting the randomized passwords so I have to manually think of a password. I ain’t creative enough on the spot for that! Just accept my /dev/urandom output dammit!
If they use a password manager and randomly generated passwords, then it’s acceptable.
One of the reasons why I don’t want to use a password manager, actually. If you get locked out of that, you’re fucked.
Backups + OSS.
I use Bitwarden and JSON backups inside a 7zip. I ALWAYS backup after I make a new password that can’t be changed via email.
Good ones have an unlock token or another one time use way of unlocking it in case you forget your master password.
Ease of syncing across devices has me using an internet-based password manager (Bitwarden), but I keep a second local-only password manager (Keepass) that only stores my Bitwarden password. Just in case.
Hey that’s real smart but what if you forget the Keepass password when trying to retrieve the Bitwarden password you forgot lol?
I use Bitwarden myself and love them. Great software great organization it seems. They didn’t even send any bullshit marketing “noooo come back YOULL LOSE EVERYTHING” emails companies love to send when you downgrade from paid to free tier and that right away bumps them up in my mind.
My wife and I also keep our Keepass passwords in each other’s Bitwarden vaults.
So to lose access we’d both have to simultaneously forget our Bitwarden passwords AND be locked out of any biometric login. I consider that sufficiently unlikely.
Keepass
For those who want to keep their ass.
(panel 1) is this is just 4-eyes taken to the end-user level?
I’m not even IT and yet I feel this
‘One thing is broken’ is usually prefaced with an email explaining why a service is down but it doesn’t stop people.
For every “I’m the bottom 10% of tech users” there is another 70% of the user base bitching about inept prioritization and service desk people who couldn’t troubleshoot process issues if their life were dependent on it.
Different people different skills.
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.
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.
Yeah the MS support forums are very hit or miss. And even the hit ones usually start with a response that doesn’t appear to understand the question very deeply, followed by a “that didn’t work”, “I said in my post that I tried that and it didn’t work”, or maybe a “that’s not what I’m trying to do, I want to do x”, and then a reply with useful links.
Though to be fair, problems can come from software the user installed or fuck ups they’ve made to settings along the way. Or quiet sabotage from another user.
Once upon a time I provided phone support for Comcast and had a caller call in unable to access Facebook. I did the usual script and found her internet was otherwise working. Narrowed it down to a dns issue. I was aware of the hosts file because I was using it for ad blocking at the time so had her open that up on a whim (which I would have gotten in trouble for since it was off script). Sure enough, it was there. Someone didn’t want her accessing it.
Who knows what kinds of methods people have used to discourage other things on shared PCs. Is edge really broken or did the user’s kid get tired of everyone clicking “make it the default browser” when it begged each time it was opened so they wrote a small program that kills it as soon as it starts?
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
How many seats are they responsible for? Could be understaffing.
It’s always understaffing.
That’s because IT management theory currently holds that the more processes/workflows you standardize and consolidate the fewer things there are that break. Which means you can hire fewer help desk personnel.
Unfortunately the people usually tasked with performing this standardization is the help desk, so they don’t have the time to decrease their own workflow through standardization when they’re already filled to the brim with a backlog. At that point you’re just giving them more of a backlog.
Wind-proof router, here you go
Funnily enough, i think this might actually work to a degree
Just make sure your on one side of the room.
The empty eyes are so relatable
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“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”
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.
