My father did this.

I was giving him a PC tutorial and I asked him to turn off the PC and he turned off the monitor.

One of my users locked her Windows session and then signed in again, there, I rebooted.

groan

We're about to have a generation of people become adults who never had to connect a dvd player or cable box or whatever to a TV, because the smart tv was the actual video source. Turning off the monitor and not the computer is going to be so common now...

One of my users locked her Windows session and then signed in again, there, I rebooted.

Not bad, some people these days don't know to lock the windows session.

Asked to restart, sees restart and shut down, chooses lock instead.

"Dam I guess I'll look into this and get back to you soon" then move ticket to the bottom of the queue and a month later message of teams to ask if its still an issue.

Windows+L

Zero chance she knew about this though.

When I used to LAN at my friend's house his sister would try poking around my PC when I went to the kitchen for something, told her Windows and L opened some secret menu, boom, locked her out.

Though soon to no longer be IT, i guarantee that if you bring them cookies and coffee theyll start to love you

Well is it plugged in?

My initial thought is "I don't believe you" if they claim to have already restarted the PC. Sometimes they Think they did but only put it to sleep or something, and sometimes they are just lying to seem less stupid.

Once I had a user swear up and down they restarted the computer 3 times, and asked if I thought they were an idiot.

I said, "No, I'm not saying you're an idiot, but your computer is saying it's boot time was 18 months ago."

Corporate sent me a laptop that kept not talking a charge, so I get on with an IT guy and we go through a bunch of steps then he has me open WSL and I'm like "oh this is just the terminal". He instantly went from "this is a chore" to upbeat. After that he was super helpful and even called in a RMA for the dock that we figured out was the issue (we usually have to call in our own RMAs), then once I got it he called back and walked me through flashing it to the latest firmware, rather than just emailing the instructions.

My record was 18 months from a user who swore they restarted 3 times.

I used to tell them I was checking something and open up cmd and get system uptime right after asking that.

The number of people shocked at being called out for having their PC on for over 60 days straight is enough to make anyone lose faith in humanity.

At a previous job, I was not doing IT support but another role and I noticed a coworker had a red dot on the Windows Update status bar icon.

Told him I don't think I have seen that before, normally it is orange.

So he tells me that he is trying to see how long he can keep it going before something happens. I recommended against this, and also I normally recommend against using the desktop to store files. The laptop goes up in flames, so do your files. We have OneDrive for business, I know people hate it, but at least your stuff is... relatively safe. Backed up at least with version history.

A few weeks later I was chatting to someone else who sometimes shared my desk, and somehow I mentioned this encounter. A while later, his manager sitting ahead of us is on a phone call and we hear he is getting upset. He hangs up and turns around, tells us.

Him and one sales guy had spent hours on some proposals, worked out all the values and timings and it's gone. All that work gone. His laptop rebooted because Windows updates.

He mentions who... it is the same guy. I tell him I was just telling my desk buddy about him and how he intentionally left his laptop running for months to see what Windows Update would do and clearly he did not take my advice about rebooting and using OneDrive.

The rest of the day... this guy did not stop. Every 30 minutes or so he'd just go "All that work, gone. Why?"

We'd be walking to get lunch, talking about other things and again he'd just switch back to that and turn gloomy again.

I used to see a lot of people log out and back in and think that was restarting. Still wish Windows had an uptime command

I'm mad WMIC is gone. That thing was fucking useful, so of course Microsoft went out of their way to get rid of it.

Too many people think that just turning off the monitor is what you want them to do. They're usually the same people that refer to their entire desktop PC as "the hard drive". At least that was my experience about a decade ago.

This. "Lets try it again, just to be sure." ::watches them put it to sleep with the soft power button::

Spent too long in tech support - The trick with people like this is to move the goal to something that they certainly haven't done before yet still accomplishes the same goal. Here I would honest to God ask the customer to check the pins on the power cable to make sure they're straight. I don't give a damn about those pins but they have to unplug the computer to look.