Had a company tell us we needed to get our ticket numbers up, but we didn't have any open tickets to close. We were told users shouldn't have their machines up for more than 5 days without a restart because updates and such were pushed and w.e bs reasons. Just started running reports for uptime and had each tech ping 10 users and tell them to restart or kick off a restart if the machine had no logged on users on it. Poof 150 extra tickets a week from our office. When there is 75,000+ computers on the network... There are always computers that haven't been restarted in a week.

Only job I've ever had to create busy work at. And it was solely because they forced a return to office, so instead of supporting 60,000 employees we were small groups supporting far less (maybe 100 in my building).

Horribly inefficient

Yeah, had that. Reboots take longer than 5 seconds.

"Oh you mean reset the hard drive?"

If that is what we must call it to end this conversation, then yes.

One time a friend and I (both in IT at the time) tried absolutely everything to fix a bizarre computer problem, then he told me to literally pull the hard drive completely out if the case and sit unplugged overnight before putting it back in. For some reason that worked, even though unplugging everything and plugging it right back in did nothing. Asked him why and he said “No idea, I was desperate.”

Related to PEBKAC: In Estonian we have a saying: "the problem is in the cardan between the seat and the steering wheel"

Supposedly a fairly eccentric teacher I had (businessman and ex 90s "connected" guy got bored and wanted to teach middle school shop class to confirm the rumors that kids are indeed getting stupider compared to the "good old days") once managed to get an employee of his to go to the parts store to ask for said "cardan" for their car after asking him for advice.

Ooh I need to start using this

I wonder if I can get away with saying this to a client

Just the coffee then? Black, no sugar

When I worked for a small business MSP, my boss had an off hours call about an issue, walked the guy through rebooting their server. He was monitoring the uptime so he saw it go off. Then he told them to turn it back on. The guy said he did, but my boss never saw it come back online. He asked him if it was lit up, the guy said yes. He said "are you sure", and the guy, annoyed, said "yes! I see lights". Waited a bit longer and it never came online. He called another person at the business to check, and they too confirmed that it was lit up. So he drove 35 minutes to go to their office, walked in their network closet and hit the power button, and magically it turned on. They were seeing the lights on the router, an entirely different machine sitting on top of the server and thought it was on. The issue was fixed by the reboot alone and my boss drove home very very annoyed.

I miss my IT days, they were fun. I once saw a USB flashdrive taped to a postcard. It was the old owners friend who had sent him pictures from a meet up.

I loved it. The old guy wanted to send pictures. And send them he did.

Also did my last favor for a guy who needed a long ethernet cable for something at home, I said sure, but we need it back by next week. He never returned it. So I told him "I'm not gonna argue, either it's on my desk tomorrow or I'll send your department an invoice so we can buy a new one."

It was on my desk next day in a tangled pile.

Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE it's plugged in?

I know even more that don't know how to log off....

You should just reboot the second you log in and say that's how the system is set up

Yeah, my job didn't pay for any of that fancy stuff. This was a wmic command.

This is why it is not at all unreasonable to envision future IT people as basically being Comstar or the Mechanicus. People already think we do magic, just wait a hundred years and we can convince them of anything.

Not just laptops, or desktops, but I've had it work on Printers, though you had to unplug the cable from both ends for it to work for whatever reason.

you know what's funny about turning it off and on? my home isp had a problem. the uplink packets were dropping very often, downlink was fine. I called tech support.

as usual they said the 'IT hello'. I said already tried. the guy made me restart everything on call. nothing changed. soon they sent two guys. they came all the way to turn the optical interface off and on and tp change the dns to isp one (obviously I never use that). they soon realized the problem isn't here and called the isp. after some furious cussword exchanges they told the isp the IT mantra. and voila! they restarted their switch (cutting off internt to an entire locality lol) and everything went normal. that day I knew the true power of that mantra.

We hate everyone, because you people only bring us your problems 99% of the time and no one cares about our problems

I bought my IT guy an Excel mug that said something like Freak in the Sheets. He had been helping me transfer files from one computer to another (old computer had an expanding battery issue) and said he appreciated novelty mugs. He was being a real pal about it. So, I got him a mug. I didn't solve any of his problems, but I did let him vent some about them.

Protip if you bring your IT guy an eighth of weed, he'll give you admin privileges on your PC for a few days.

At my job I deal with IT a lot for one of our server rooms since one of the computers I use that runs an entire floor is linked to that server. It often goes haywire and needs a simple reset.

I kid you not every time I call I tell them this is common and all I need them to do is reset the server remotely (I can’t get in cuz the room is locked by IT which surprise works from home). They proceed to ignore me and pull out their bullshit checklist and run through 20 different troubleshooting protocols before finally getting to the last one(reset the server) and it finally works.

Like I would think a simple reset would be the first thing they try.

We also hate everyone b/c when the encounter the tiniest bit of friction in their device usage they run to IT without even trying to think of what the cause may be. Maybe, just maybe, trying to put 35GB of pics on a 16GB USB drive is the problem, and not some major computer issue.