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I send the request and list the troubleshooting steps I have tried. Mostly so that they know it’s not frivolous but also to avoid duplicate work.
But so often those stupid steps work. Turn it off and back on. Uninstall and reinstall.
If you want them to really like you you’ve got to list the steps you’ve already attempted and screenshot any error messages you get.
Don’t just say you got an error message, actually tell us what it was.
The number of times I get to tickets which claim up and down that there is some major fault, only for the error message to turn out to be that they didn’t enter the correct password cannot be counted.
The amount of times people told me this when I worked IT support, and crossed over to see them on-site, and restarted their machine myself, and found it suddenly magically started working…
I’m not saying they lied, but the ‘IT Support Aura’ may be a genuine thing. Like the computer is afraid of getting scrapped so it quickly starts working.
The IT support aura is nothing more than being patient.
Users don’t have patience, so when they call IT about a problem, they are forced to wait until IT gets there. Which is enough time for it to get through whatever it was calculating and start working again.
Eh, so when I ask a user (who is a programmer) “did you restart your computer” and they promise me they did, they are just being impatient and lying to me?
The fear effect also works the second you show the problem to someone else in IT. The only thing that makes a computer behave faster than IT being in the room is 2 people from IT.
Before my life shifted more into integrations I was a fan of running:
systeminfo | find "System Boot"I wasn’t out to call anyone out, but sometimes users honestly believed they had rebooted and I would find of the the day’s lucky 10k. It also helped to figure out which users would just blankly say they’ve done everything.
I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas!
Also the thing where you try and show the problem to any other person and it starts working just to make you look dumb. Me and my SO do that all the time: “This thing isn’t working, I know you don’t know how to fix it but can you come over and look at it not working so it’ll work?” And I’d say at least 50% of the time it does lol
Doing the same thing slower (because you’re explaining what you’re doing) sometimes prevents the problem from happening.
Things that aren’t working for a user sometimes work for me because I wait a bit longer between steps, e.g. waiting for the services/background-programs to finish loading instead of immediately clicking something on the desktop/panel 5 times the moment it shows up.
On the flip side, any time you want to show somebody something that should be working and you suddenly see an error message you’ve never seen before.
Yes, but then you have to wonder if the person understands what a reboot is and didn’t just quit the application or just log out of the PC and back in without a clear of RAM
They turned their monitor off and back on again.
