Programmer Humor

50/50 chance they believe you.

"Did you make sure it's plugged in?"

"Of course I did! Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"You mind just checking for me real quick?"

"..."

"Sir?"

"Never mind, it's working now."

Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I'd torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn't work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.

He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I'm not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.

I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a "whoa retro." which hurt me deeply.

"Ok let me check on something"

Uptime: 156 hours

"let's restart using what I like to call, 'the right way' "

If I had a nickel for every time I was troubleshooting with a friend and discovered they thought turning the monitor off and on again was "rebooting the computer" I'd be depressingly wealthy.

Only to login and see rhat they actually didn't restart. They just said so because they think you wont find out 😂

Show me how you reboot the PC.

*User turns off monitor

As someone who's an IT person I can tell you the vibe is actually, "Well shit, I guess I'm going to actually have to diagnose something."

The real world experience

"Hi so to save us some time I've restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one..."

"Ok sir could you restart your computer"

"What color are the pins on the electrical cord?"

No matter the answer, you can be damn sure they rebooted.

A bit harder in the laptop era though.

I will not believe you anyways and reboot just in case.

Then you look at the uptime. 247 days. No longer have you been elevated. Now you're the vilest of vile. You're the user that lies. You just say what you think we want to hear, don't you? Well, now you're getting put on hold. For as long as your uptime was.

Contacting IT is always my last line of defense and I get unreasonably frustrated when they refuse to help without walking me through basic troubleshooting. It's like, I've already figured out the cause of the problem, just tell me where the button is to fix it. The worst was when I had to RMA my Pixel phone and they made me go through every step I'd already been through just to come to the same conclusion I initially came to them with.

My wife's standing at her company's IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.

Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.

Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of "screen broke".

I work in our service department myself (not as support tech though), but obviously, all tickets are supposed to go through 1st level. I don't wanna be the dick skipping queue, so I did then one time I had an issue.

There's a unique feeling of satisfaction to submitting a ticket with basically all the 1st level troubleshooting in the notes, allowing the tech to immediately escalate it to a 2nd level team. One quick call, one check I didn't know about, already prepared the escalation notes while it ran. Never have I heard our support sound so cheerful.

I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, "Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working."

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I've joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they're completely clueless. "Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren't showing a power outage right now!"

Restarting can be a pain too.

Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I'm not new to Linux, I've been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.

Installing arch itself wasn't that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn't recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn't want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.

I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn't install dhcpcd and I don't know how to use network manager! No internet, great!

In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when... The boot menu didn't recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?

"Oh it doesn't appear... Wait, what's this? No boot partition found? Oh crap..."

Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they're called. I deleted GRUB.

Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and... It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.

Usually, I would've installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.

I don't know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)

As an IT person, hearing that someone has already restarted to try to fix it, gives me mixed feelings.

First, they might be lying. I've had it happen that people tell me they've done something when they have not. Restarting is usually an easy one to verify, just check the uptime of the system.

Second, maybe they did everything right, and actually restarted, that's cool that they tried something before calling in. I appreciate that.

Third, if the second thing is true then, I'm now frustrated, because now I have to get dirty with whatever is happening since a reboot that should have fixed the problem, didn't fix it. I know it's not going to be an easy fix. Most of the time, I'm right, unfortunately.

I'm all for users trying stuff before calling in. But recognise that you don't, and shouldn't have access to some things. Sometimes that's administrator rights, sometimes that's a piece of software, sometimes it's the ability to turn off the AV/firewall.

It can be a lot of things. If you're not sure if what you're trying won't screw things up more than they already are, then don't do it. If it's something simple that you know how to do, go for it. If you happen to get it fixed, so much the better.

"Customer self resolved" is usually the fastest way to get a problem resolved. That's good for you, for me, and good for everyone.

And then it turns out you actually hadn't restarted the computer, in my experience..