Admiration
1d 9h ago by reddthat.com/u/LadyButterfly in microblogmemes from reddthat.com
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.
“My last computer was all in the monitor, where’s this one?”
Found the iMac user.
FWIW, lots of brands have AIO PCs now.
They blinked slightly longer than usual
i once asked a kid if he turned the laptop off and on again, he said yea. so i started to try to fix the issue, nothing worked. so i decided to reboot anyway and it worked. ive never trusted anyone who responded yes to this question again
"Have you tried turning it off and back on?"
"yes, obviously that was THE FIRST thing I tried"
system uptime 582 days 23:59:12
Thinking about ISP problems: why the fuck do I need to restart when the issue is clearly on your end? 99% of the time restarting doesn’t do shit to resolve bad provisioning, modem-specific problems, bad coax, etc. And I don’t want to restart until I’m prompted because I’d rather some of these shitty modems that don’t keep logs have something available for inspection.
Anyway, I use all my own hardware so this really only ever happens when I try to help family and I’ve done everything on my side of the modem already.
Sadly, the number of times I've had to reboot windows two or three times to fix an issue lately has been increasing. I'm so glad I'm not in IT trying to support windows 11.
most issues we get are with windows 10 now that microsoft doenst care about the os anymore. bro we cant even print through windows 10 anymore 😭
Sadly, the number of times I’ve had to reboot windows two or three times to fix an issue lately has been increasing.
This sounds like your organization's group policy is too large or your connection from your machine to a domain controller hosting your GPOs is too slow. There's a timeout period. If all the GPO contents are not pulled down to the local machine, it stops downloading them, and lets the user continue to the Desktop. However, for lots of orgs GPOs are how they deliver settings or software, so you have to reboot again and on the next login, it will pick up downloading where it left off. It could still timeout again if there is more GPO data (or the connection is too slow). So you may have to reboot multiple times, and on one of those it will finally complete the downloads, and then suddenly everything works because all the right data or settings from the GPOs are on the local machine.
I use a Mac at work and don't have this problem. It's mostly been my parent's fairly new Windows 11 laptops. I can't stand it and feel like Windows does nothing but get in the way of productivity in a work setting. Since at least Windows 7.
Microsoft fired every developer who knew what they were doing and is defecating windows updates produced by Copilot without anyone even testing if they work.
At this point it's a miracle an updated Windows 11 even boots.
This is why I'm on Linux at home and I refuse to update my work Win11 machine past 23H2
My SO recently bought a laptop designed for (and subsequently sold with) windows 11 and I can't believe how utterly broken that system feels. It really feels like you're running an alpha. The system interface completely lacks coherence.
(For context I've been running linux for several decades)
That doesn't seem like a problem with Windows 11, but with misconfiguration on the server or on your end.
Never had to restart multiple times unless some config asked for it. And every computer at my job is running Windows 11.
I just check the last boot time, though win10 fucked that up and made shutting down not actually restart the system.... Nothing like getting schooled by an older customer because MicroSlop changed behavior.
I was just about to comment basically this. It doesn't help that MS changed the default behavior so that a lot of people that think they were shutting down their computers were actually just putting them to sleep.
One time my Mom had that same thing happen. She genuinely thought she'd been shutting down the computer but that damn "Low Power mode" for "Faster wake up" had been keeping it from fully shutting down so it hadn't actually been turned off in months. She was so fucking mad when I showed her what it had been doing.
checks task manager Uptime of 200 days. 🙃
We don't wonder. I don't even ask. We just check the uptime to confirm. Or reboot it again just to be sure.
I had someone tell me that they had "restarted AND rebooted" their computer a couple weeks ago and I knew immediately that they had done neither.
Except we can tell that you didn't...
Uptime: 237 days
"I closed the lid..."
Yes, never trust a user :)
Yeah, I think this person is delusional. I would typically indicate I've already tried while while stating I'm proceeding to do it again. I want to keep teir one support on script so I can get to teir two, if needed.
It's also a good procedure to follow their instructions verbatim because software and hardware can be weird in non-obvious ways and those teir one instructions are often written by higher level tiers so they don't get bothered on a weekend.
non-obvious ways
Reminded…
This patient's prescription was for an electron beam, so she positioned the turntable and left the room. In the room next door, shielded from the radiation, was the control terminal. The technician started keying in the prescription to begin the treatment.
If things were exactly following the routine, she'd be able to communicate with the patient via an intercom, and monitor the patient via a video camera. Sadly, that system had broken down today. Still, this patient had already had a number of treatments, so they knew what to expect, so that communication was hardly necessary. In fact, the Therac-25 and all the supporting equipment were always finicky, so "something doesn't work" practically was part of the routine.
Yes good read! (sad aspects too)
And a kinda spoiler from the next paragraph…
The technician had run this process so many times she started keying in the prescription. She'd become an extremely fast typist, at least on this device, and perhaps too fast.
Maybe a little of Column A, little of Column B. Don't forget that MS in their infinite wisdom made it so you have to basically do a shamanistic ritual now to actually shut down the computer and not just put it in "Low Power Mode" so it "wakes up faster next time you want to use it" so they might have attempted to shut it down and restart it
It used to be about half of users lied about restarting because “That couldn’t possibly solve this problem!” Now there’s also people who truly believe they did but didn’t because MS sucks and broke shutdown. IT could be fairly confident in saying “No you didn’t.” to almost every user.
From my experience, having fastboot on will report long uptime despite the reboot. So the user in question might be telling the truth.
We know you're lying.
There's a 50% or greater chance they just turned off the monitor.
I went through a computer lab and had to turn all the computers on, and infuriatingly like a third of the monitors were turned off. So I put a few computers to sleep instead 😭
Why is a champion thoroughbred racehorse talking to me on the internet?
Because it's bizarroland!
Oh. I thought I had somehow fallen into uma musume
Yeah, we (IT) figure out who has their shit together and who doesn't. Every place I've worked there are usually a few non-tech people that if they're calling me, something is actually wrong.
I had to call my ISP when the connection was glitchy, and after a while they paused and asked "how many bits are in a byte?" and I said eight and then they were like "ok, let's troubleshoot this, first do this..." etc. Turns out, someone had hammered a nail straight through the cat5 cable to fasten it to the wall.
Turns out, someone had hammered a nail straight through the cat5 cable to fasten it to the wall.
I wish that were the dumbest thing I had ever seen someone do.
My "favorite" customer was a small business owner who we set up with an on-premise exchange server (by his request). He was adamant he didn't want his e-mail hosted anywhere off-site.
He called in the next Monday, complaining about issues with his e-mails.
Turns out he switches off the power to his office building every Friday when he leaves for the weekend, to save money on electricity.
We got the exchange server running again and explained to him in detail what a server is and that it needs power to run.
He kept calling in every Monday, for months.
Eventually he started to complain about all the bills we sent him, saying he won't pay anymore until we can finally fix his e-mail issue.
So we cut him loose. Half a year later, his business domain was up for sale.
The dumbest thing I encountered was someone who claimed their CD drive was broken.
I came by, flipped the CD and then it started working.
I used to live in an apartment complex where my internet would routinely go out because their installation guy didn't want to do his job, so when someone new signed up he'd just unplug my shit and give it to someone else.
Eventually my phonecalls started with, "Nope, I'm not restarting it. We're skipping all the troubleshooting steps, and you're sending someone out right now to plug me back in."
At my last job I was part IT. I never took their word for it when they said they restarted it. I always opened task manager to check. Believe it or not they weren't lying there, they did know to restart, at least before the aquisition.
At my old job I helped the IT guy out when he came across some really ridiculous Excel problems. After that he'd give my calls special attention and always hooked me up when we got new hardware.
He told me more than once that it was because he knew I knew what I was doing.
You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Such a simple concept that is somehow lost on a lot of people.
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.
My former career was in IT, I'm a developer now. I work with a bunch of tech savvy people, but I still have the 'IT Support Aura'. I've lost count of how many times a coworker has a computer problem, asks for help, and then watches me fix it and they claim they tried the exact same thing and it didn't work. I never really have an answer besides 'computers fear me'
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.
Back when I was in that sort of role, I did it to call them out. I'd highlight it on their screen and ask if it was ok to restart the computer now.
Resolution: "Technician proximity"
The ol' IT person magic touch - the second you touch the machine, it works flawlessly!
Only problem is if it's one of those problems that's workflow-based. I can't tell you how many times I've said "well it seems to work fine for me" only to watch the user do the same task in the most janky, roundabout way, and that is the source of their problem.
I’ve experienced IT support aura, both from my friends and myself when I joined IT for a while.
I’ve also experienced the evil IT aura. Sometimes when everything is working just fine and an IT worker touches or observes it, it will break inexplicably.
An IT friend asked to use my computer to play a round of Starcraft at a LAN party and I agreed. Watched him slowly sit down, extend his arms above the keyboard like a pianist, slowly rest his hands on the keyboard, and immediately got my first BSOD. Wasn’t even running anything, just sitting on the desktop.
your machine didn't have enough minerals
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
I've joked that some computers just like having someone else watch (kinky).
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.
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.
I called my ISP because my internet went down. They asked if I'd unplugged the router and plugged it back in. I slightly smuggly said, "Yes." Then, they asked if I'd left it unplugged for at least 30 seconds...
Well, fuck.
They should have asked "did you unplug it for thirty seconds and plug it back in" as the first question if how long matters.
Then people would answer "yes" without a moment's thought, whether they did or didn't, rendering the question useless.
The gotcha is what makes the question at least somewhat useful to an IT person.
That's IT speak for "I don't believe you." We've been hurt before.
Nah, some electronics just have residual power in their system somewhere like in capacitors.
Unplugging and replugging with only a couple of seconds or so in between is not enough for it to fully shut down. It can keep corrupted information in their ram.
10 seconds at least, but I get when they ask for 30 seconds just to make sure.
“No, but I keep the board exposed, and I manually discharged each capacitor before plugging it back in, so same thing really.”
I do not trust end users with anything.
Even if you tell me yes, I'm still going to double check. You have no idea how many users just say that because they think it's a copout (which, admittedly it kinda is) when it fixes so many problems.
Also, once you lie to me you lose more respect than you would have gained by actually restarting. Trust is hard fought for and easily lost.
I usually start conversations with your crew as "Sorry, I'm probably old enough to be your mother and awful with tech. I've googled and rebooted and that's as much I can do I'm so sorry". And I say it in a grovelling tone...
Also, the number of times where a second restart clears up the issue is insane.
Sadly, Windows can never leave well enough alone. The current biggest confusion is that they changed restart vs shutdown. There are currently TONS of people who think they're restarting their computer regularly and saving themselves a lot of pain, but Windows decided to change the definition of shutdown.
Did you restart your computer?
Yes.
Did you use start-> restart?
No, I used start -> shutdown, then powered back on!
Sorry, that doesn't help; it saves the current running state, so when you use it later, it doesn't need to reload everything. For what's currently wrong, we really want to make sure we don't just have some memory corruption. Please perform start -> restart.
Start -> Shift+shutdown also tells Windows to not use fast boot or hybrid shut or whatever...
I had a Mac user in my office last month, I asked her to reboot her MBP, she used the power button to crash it. I'm like, is that the way you always do that? Sure, she says. I showed her the reboot option and she was like "oh neat bye." That poor fucking Mac.
When I figured that out, I was so pissed. I didn't tell you to hibernate! If I wanted you to hibernate, is have told you to do that. I said shutdown damnit.
If they let us know they were hiber the kernel, we could have at least chose to hiber the whole damn thing and pick up where we left off.
Wtf, when did this happen?
https://www.pdq.com/blog/restart-vs-shutdown/
When they introduced fast startup in windows 8 :( You can disable fast startup, which eliminates the problem. Honestly, though, it's better to use the real restart at the first sign of questionable stuff.
Considering many don't properly restart, Windows 10 / 11 are remarkably stable compared to Windows 7, and when updates force you to restart, it does it the proper way.
That's fucked I've been thinking I'm a good boy shutting down my computer whenever I don't need to use it to ensure that I don't get any slow down. Why on earth would you name it "shut down" at that point?
One of win 8's targets was to decrese boot times. Bios was slow, so Win 8.1 was designed to take advantage of UEFI. While they were there, they decided to 'cache' the kernel to make it super fast.
But it was just the kernel. All your apps still had to load again from scratch. They should have called it hybrid sleep visibly in the UI. But the change was confusing, so they just hit it.
Yeah it is stupid.
But easily solved by disabling fast startup.
It is easy to work around once you know it exists, personally for my one remaining windows box, I rather prefer to let fast startup do it's thing ( it is really fast ) and just re-boot it once in a while.
Does shutdown /r still work fine?
kinda hard to tell :)
i found one that talks about win 8 https://superuser.com/questions/495240/how-to-instruct-windows-8-not-to-perform-a-fast-shutdown
that says /s works and if you want fastboot at cli use /hybrid, but that's an old article, ymmv
None of them get any respect from me because I guarantee they didn't submit a fucking ticket.
Our philosophy, "No tickey, no worky".
It really only works if your boss backs you on that, which I'm lucky enough to have.
I immediately open task manager and check the CPU up time, "7:01:69:13" no you didn't, liar.
Wdym turning off the monitor doesn't count as a reboot?
Only 7 days?
Their previous IT issue was a week ago.
IT guy Herr, I don't believe you did on principle and I will make you do it again while I watch
No, I don't care the uptime is minutes in Task Manager
I would if people didn't lie so often about restarting their machines.
People often lie about restarting, and IT is pretty aware of that. In my experience, I've gotten a lot of love in situations where IT is onboarding hardware for me and having issues, and I say "hold on, let me try restarting real quick".
Having been unofficial IT guy in a few places, when I contact any type of tech support, I give them a list of steps I've taken to try and solve the issue, which usually includes rebooting as a first or second step.
You you have a very accessible IT dept. I would restart twice and blog post about how to fix something without admin right before the pain of calling IT personally.
Not anymore I'm afraid. IT at Ford is abysmal, a lot of times you can't reach anyone, and other times you have like 5 people reach out about a resolved and closed issue over a week.
They can tell you are lying. The system reports uptime.
Back in my service desk days, I used to just request to perform a restart on their behalf. If they said they already had, I'd make up some nonsense about how I had just manually edited a regkey for them remotely, and it not taking effect til another restart or something like that.
In my experience, the majority of the time someone claimed to have restarted; they either did so incorrectly, or for some reason believed it held no relevance and just wanted to get to 'the actual solution'.
That little white lie allowed them to save face, and me save time and brain cells. It was a win-win.
How do you restart it wrong? And more importantly - what's the correct way to do it?
It's so annoying (and slightly embarrassing, and funny how often it happens), to restart it myself to no avail... then have it work after a second identical restart just because someone else is spectating.
A lot of people just close the laptop lid or turn off the monitor thinking that's rebooting. Or they shutdown thinking it's better than restarting, but Windows' default shutdown is more of a close all programs and hibernate, so it often doesn't fix things.
That's crazy. Maybe that's why my work computer doesn't have an option to hibernate... Thanks!
Lies. All lies. Don't fall for the trickery. No one reboots.
there's a reason why IT asks you to reboot. a good chunk of the time, it works. It will VERY LIKELY solve your issue.
-Have you tried restarting it?
-Yes, of course.
-Can you do it again?
Every time. And in 70% of times the second reboot fixed it.
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.
This. I don't care if the error message is completely useless, I just want to know what you are actually getting.
Yes sir, I do that. I'm on both sides of these requests as I admin some of the financial software, sometimes can fix things before having to involve IT.
And to purplemonkeymad's point, OMG I don't know who writes Microsoft's error messages but they are nonsense.
"The program has stopped working."
Thanks.
If so tell IT that I already restarted they don’t believe me and the make me do it again.
I could literally call and tell them exactly what the problem and how to fix it, I just need administrator access to fix it, and they’ll still make me restart the computer first.
People will tell you they have reset the computer and mean they turned the screen on and off.
It’s true. I’m the “tech support” member of my team. The call me before they call IT. You’re absolutely right.
"Tell me what you see as it's starting back up" "It's still the same screen.." "Ok, maybe it didn't work. Walk me through your steps to restart it." "I pressed the power button on the screen to turn it off. Press it again to turn it on." "Oh, ok, ya. Click the the lower left corner of the screen with your mouse, then the power icon in that window that just popped up, then the word restart. More steps means it's more thorough, so it should this time."
Ah, you too are familiar with the secrets of the Omnissiah...
Realistically, as long as you’re polite or even just professional you’d get my respect. When I worked for an MSP some of the elitism of my coworkers was annoying. One older dude who I was providing support for asked how I “know all this stuff” about computers. Not only because it was my job but as I said him I’ve been messing around with computers since I was a kid. And a lot of that was breaking shit and having to fix it so my parents didn’t get mad.
Glad I don’t do support directly anymore and if someone is rude or abusive; we can just terminate communication with them.
Ive found myself being rude with Amazon support a few times, but I try to be clear it's with Amazon, not them, personally.
I swear to God, though, it's like the entire world fired all their designers. I feel like every time I turn around, things are poorly made or thought out, lately.
Tech support is somewhat different, for MSPs at least. In so far as billing and resolving the customers problem is usually aligned. Customer/tech support for places like Amazon or adobe is different. Adobe for example will typically only help out (resolving a billing dispute for example) only if you make it apparent you’ll leave/report them to a consumer bureau and they’re instructed in this fashion.
The design choices are also sometimes shit on purpose. I get it though and was bitching about similar on a different post recently regarding Nextdoor making unsubscribing from notifications intentionally infuriating to do. Only offering to unsubscribe from all when you begin the account deactivation process.
I bought a pair of ice trays recently that were the most spectacular failure of every single aspect of production I've ever experienced.
They didn't stack properly, and the cups were spaced, so you couldn't just tilt it and let it fill. And then the second time I emptied them, after 3 days, they all fucking shattered on me with normal twisting. I wrote the company an email explaining to them like children, how fucking retarded they are.
I wish that applied in my workplace, where the IT staff treat you like a regular user every single time and go through their little scripts when you're clearly telling them what the actual issue is, you just don't have permissions to fix it.
For example, when debugging containerised .net applications through Visual Studio and Docker Desktop on a Windows system, there's a Powershell script called GetVsDebug which gets you the files you need to debug, since they aren't included in the installation by default. Normally, if you have admin rights on the machine, it'll just run that script quietly, get the files and you're set. In my workplace, Powershell scripts are banned from running from anything that doesn't have admin rights, including Visual Studio, so it was failing to run every single time.
IT told me to restart my PC, asking me what Visual Studio was, asking me to get a link to it on the Company Portal, trying to get my to re-install it. They even offered to get a new Laptop when I was outright telling them, "None of that is going to work. The issue is that this software doesn't have the permissions to run powershell scripts", but nooooope... In the end I just went looking for the script and ran it manually using my own admin privileges and from now on I only ask IT to do something if it is literally impossible for me to do it myself. Other devs are going to have the exact same issue in the future but I'm not going into that mess again.
That's all well and good, but I hope you realize you're the exception and not the norm. I'd be willing to bet most workplace users would be unable to set up a computer at their desk unaided if you handed them the workstation and monitor in boxes and told them to have at it.
You'd think IT would be able to look at the team and job title and skip the script though, or even just read the description of the ticket.
I went into a computer repair shop, and the dude was so impressed when I told him my personal stuff was on the 2tb D drive, and not the tiny C drive.
The only correct answer is yes 3 times
but have you gotten to "when's the last time you restarted it?" asking for a friend.
Mac troubleshooting be like: any issue > reimage the machine
As an IT person, I can assure you that the respect not only does not increase, but you get tagged as a liar who won't follow instructions.
We are well aware you have not tried restarting your computer, and that if we tell you to you almost certainly won't, because you believe you know better.
...but what if you've already tried restarting it like 30 times, and have actually tried trouble shooting? I don't think I've ever once contacted support without restarting everything possible 10 times.
Software Dev here I've typically done 90% of the steps before I call help desk to fix whatever random bullshit Microsoft or enterprise problem I'm having. Once they start down a path I'll tell them every step I've already done before they ask. So we can get to the magic step that will actually fix the problem.
Wrong thread
What? How? xD I haven't seen this post, I replies to a different one.
Yeah sometimes that happens, it's a bit weird
Ah thanks, so it's not me haha! I already started to doubt reality /jk