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Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can’t say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven’t even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get ‘That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don’t need that.’ Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.
Scapegoats.
I blame autocorrect on that one. But thanks mate.
So you’re saying autocorrect is the…scapegoat? 👉😎👉
Yes, yes I am.
I am not sure if it is worldwide, or if its just American culture (fuck i hope its just us), but I don’t believe the problem is a form of prejudice against intelligence, but rather that people with intelligence rely only on data and facts to make points. It is a sad truth that while this is the only correct way to make decisions, id guess around 70-80% of the population are simple, and when given solid evidence and reasoning you bore them. Meanwhile the sales team, while having no real evidence or reasoning for their solution was entertaining, and used simple buzzwords management understood delivered with a confident charisma.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma. It might make you hate yourself a smidge to give a report that focuses more on the emotions of decision making than the reasoning, but the alternative is that bad decisions keep being made that make your life harder. You as the one that knows what the fuck they are talking about will generally have one of the most well reasoned plans in a situation, learn how to be a better guardian of that plan.
None of this is to say any of this is our fault, its more an acceptance of the world we live in and recognizing how best to play in it.
“my computer won’t turn on!!”
“is it plugged in?”
“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”
“…”
I spent over an hour on a support call trying to walk an asshole lady through fixing her Adobe Illustrator, for her to stop mid-instructions to say she couldn’t tell me what the status was because her power was out due to a fucking hurricane in her area! 🤦♂️
Side note: that was one of the two times my bosses didn’t get upset at me for telling off a customer.
i actually went to school for computers for a bit, got my A+ and net+, but realized i get fucking outraged at my own computer when it has problems, i couldn’t imagine the murderfest rampage that might ensue if i had to deal with morons and their bullshit computer problems–glad i didn’t pursue it
murderfest rampage
Yep, that’s the correct level of anger, based on empirical evidence. I hate how I fumed at dumb people back in the day.
Please tell us… What was the other one?
You asked the wrong person, you probably meant to place your comment one level higher up.
other what?
Likely other line of work
deleted by creator
I once helped my parents with a few minor things on one of their computers. Two weeks later I get a call… They have no internet on any of their devices. Obviously since I was the last one to work on their stuff I was the cause of the internet issue. While on the phone I hear my dad’s weather radio go off and my phone dings with a severe weather warning for their area.
I ask if they are currently experiencing any bad weather… And they confirm that they have a very nasty thunderstorm and a confirmed tornado on the ground a few miles outside of the town… And they have no power.
I just hung up…
I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.
Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it’s easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
Yes, but… There’s a reason for locked doors and apcs
What are apcs in this context?
I think he wants to run her over with an armored truck.
A brand that makes rack enclosures for IT gear, typically they come with a key to lock it shut
I would assume APC, a brand of uninterrupted power supply.
Yes.
About a decade ago I had to fly across the country to peel a piece of tape off a sensor. At least I got crab cakes
I gotta ask… Why couldn’t someone local do it?
I’m not op, it I imagine it went something like this:
“We’ve tried everything and nothing works, you gotta come down here”
“…and you followed the instructions in the run book to the letter”?
“yes. every instruction”
runbook line 1 page 1: remove the tape from the sensor before installation.
I’ve definitely dealt with that exact scenario before, but I only had to walk across the building that time.
This was an interesting case because somebody decided they wanted to hide the sensors from a third-party tester, and failed to inform anyone, let alone consider the fact that those sensors were basically the defining characteristic of the product and nothing would work right if they were obscured.
Sounds like my mom whenever she was confronted with anything that required learning button sequences. “I don’t know how to use the microwave, you do it for me.” = “I don’t want to learn how to do it.”
I was watching a documentary about a plane that crashed, killing everyone on board, because someone left tape on a pitot tube during maintenance
I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
They have to reboot their router to see it.
Have you tried turning them off and back on again?
What show is it?
IT Crowd - go watch it now!
Thx
I once replaced an entire power strip because the user said that it would turn off at random. So I took it back to the IT room and plugged in all the things and watched it, thinking it would short out or blow a circuit breaker or something.
Then the user called me again saying the new strip was doing the same thing and I should replace it. So I schlepped up to their office and replaced it with a third one.
Then they called me again saying it keeps happening. So finally I looked at where they had put it and it was right where they’d put it when they pushed to back their chair up from the desk.
And they didn’t realize it.
We’ll stop being dicks when they stop being so dumb.
I’ve found that being a dick is a great way to make their calls take longer and complain to your boss, which wastes time. Being nice to the idiots means less work for me.
For sure. For many of us “being a dick” means “punishing my liver.” It’s a calculated risk decision.
You’re the saint I could never be. That’s why I got into security for a bit – I can be as big a dick as I need to be that day! ;-)
I don’t think it’s a race to the bottom for fun. lol
That’s why I’m a sales engineer :)
It amazes me that people don’t make even a small effort to debug stuff themselves before calling for help. There is a youtube channel for clips from car mechanics and people bring in cars for things like “There is a knocking sound coming from the back seat” and there is a gallon jug of liquid rolling on the floor back there.
Oh man I was expecting it to have been plugged into a switched outlet or something
I had a label printer that was failing to work. I have spent most of the week with IT remoting into my desktop trying to figure out the issue with our cobbled together system. I finally realized after 5 days of this that the software causing the issue was on my co-worker’s computer. Pointing this out to the IT guy got the problem fixed in minutes.
Sometimes the user has no idea what is and is not signifcant. I had no idea that this was significant only that an icon with similar looks was on my co-workers cluttered desktop.
I’ve been the PEBCAK enough times to not give users a hard time about it.
Ah yes the old PEBCAK/1D-10T combo.
Shudder
I had to walk across campus to plug in a woman’s monitor because she was irate that her PC wasn’t working. To be fair she was very contrite afterwards. I think the cleaning person knocked it out.
A coworker sent me a pic of a user trying to charge a wired mouse with a surge protector. The user is a doctor. A surgeon.
I also see health care professionals break HIPAA rules CONSTANTLY despite everyone in my office telling them they’re breaking rules.
Idk, trying to charge a wired mouse sounds more like sleep deprivation than incompetence. Especially if it happened in a hospital.
I once had to drive 3 hours to basically reseat a power cable of a tv. Also once I had to troubleshoot the private printer of the boss of the company at one of his apartments because his mistress couldn’t print anymore. It was set to letter size, the fix took 10 seconds.
I spent an hour trying to figure out why my internet connectivity wasn’t working. When I finally went to look at the router box itself I saw it had no lights. My cat had knocked a picture off of the wall and it fell right down behind some heavy furniture, knocking the plug for the power strip out of the wall.
Commutes should be paid work.
“Are you sure all the wires are connected, USB and power?” (Relating to a scanner.)
“Yes, I’ve checked several times.”
get there, USB is firmly connected but the power connector was hanging like 2cm belown the desk, clearly visible when you looked at the back of the scanner.
At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn’t read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn’t read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.
“No you’re wrong, it worked before!”
"Mam, it’s very clearly labeled ‘CD’ right here."
It wasn’t really any help talking back to 40-something office Karens as a teenager. The amount of excuses people will go to avoid saying essentially “Oh I see now, that was a silly mistake I’ve made, thank you helping.”
The people who swallowed their pride and admitted they screwed up made me want to help them more in the future. Especially if they wanted to learn how to fix it themselves in the future.
“Wait, that (completely needless, umpteenth) ticket we have open on your keyboard ‘making weird noises’ hasn’t been dealt with yet? Oh I’m sorry, sir, I did label it ‘urgent’ like you asked. Yes, sir, right away sir. Well, there’s a few things I have to get to before, but I’m confident I’ll make it there today, tomorrow at the latest.”
hang up, lift feet on the desk, delete ticket, make a new one set to lowest priority
You can be as much of a dick as you want, so long as you are right, and can get shit done.
If you are the kind of IT supergenius that responds to a “my laptop won’t connect to the company network” ticket with “ok I’ll just remote into your laptop real quick”, you better the friendliest guy around.
Users don’t want help. They want reassurance. They want you to be on their side until all their problems are solved. If you can fake that until they believe you they’ll do whatever you want to solve the problem. Especially if you tell them it’s a super secret IT guy thing.
I’ve met a total of three users who didn’t respond well to you treating them like someone picked from the audience to help a magician.
This is so true, doing everything you can to take it from an antagonistic relationship to a “we’re in this together, lucky for us both I know some cool stuff” kinda scenario? Golden. Back when I dabbled, the worst repeat customers would end up requesting me, and end up happy. I moved on lol, those folks suck.
Interestingly I did industrial controls for a while too and it’s the exact same dynamic. Client just wants to know their [PC | gigantic 24/7 mfg plant] is gonna be okay, it wasn’t their fault, and they were right to call for help.
Edit: clarity
Being dependent on support guys that are not that bright can be really annoying, especially if you are from the field too. As an IT student while working off my civil service days I had a few situations like that.
For example, one didn’t understand why plugging the Ethernet splitter (splits 4 twisted pairs into 2x 2 twisted pairs) into the switch instead of the structured cabling wasn’t working.
I feel like I’m somewhere on this graph, elaborate
*really, not opposed to fake quick.
I drove 5 hours across two states to unplug a fax machine and plug in the signage. They assured me they hadn’t touched the phone line before I even left. I could only bill for the time I was there and the pay per mile was abysmal.
10 hours of my life I’ll never get back.
don’t worry, I took my crimping tool and shattered their tip of the line for the fax machine. The company I worked for only supported the signage. when they called to complain that I broke it I simply said, “It was like that when I got there. someone must have stepped on it.”
fuck lying shit-ass users. don’t fuck with IT.
I could only bill for the time I was there and the pay per mile was abysmal.
This is one of the best changes going from IT to the trades. My billable hours now start the moment I get in my work van at home and end the moment I get out of my van at home. Our time is billed the same regardless of if it’s drive time or time on site. If a customer hundreds of miles away wants me on their site at 1AM to fix their screwup then I am more than happy spending hours just driving, listening to podcasts, and making double time after hours pay the whole way.
I recently had a job where I had to drive 3 hours to a customer site and the only work I wound up having to do there was make a phonecall to their building automation person which the customer could have done on their own.
Customers who can’t follow basic instructions went from being the bane of my existance to being the most lucrative and relaxing part of my job.
You are the type of it worker this meme is referring to.
I know…that’s why I shared. 🤷
I once spent 10 hours travelling from Toronto to Iowa (and back to Toronto) to flip a switch on a printer that multiple people had failed to figure out how to flip.
He ain’t wrong. I’ve literally powered down, and back up, a server that solved the issue.
