Experiences with non-techies

[MrFixitBlankFace]

Around the house, I'm known as the "tech-assistant".  Everybody oohs and ahhs over my performance.

 

 

[Bitter]

57 minutes ago, MrFixitBlankFace said:

Around the house, I'm known as the "tech-assistant".  Everybody oohs and ahhs over my performance.

 

 

I went on vacation from work and I came back to one of three office printers working and 18 (roughly) different printers installed. 20 minutes later it's all sorted and all 3 printers work. It took them about 2 hours to break it and me 20 minutes to fix it. What do I do? I fix cars.

[Mishotaki]

I'm the IT guy at the office, I get called by the boss wife telling me that her computer doesn't work and that none of the 3 girls around her could figure out why. I get to her desk and see that the computer is on by the light, move and turn over the mouse and see that there is power to the USB.... look at the screen and see that it's not powered on... i press the power button and it's alive!

 

none of the girls could explain how they didn't think that the reason that there was no video to the computer because the screen was turned off...

 

 

Last month, I had a designer call me about her computer shutting down all of a sudden without any reason, I got there and saw that she had plugged a space heater and a toaster in her battery backup unit... when both of them were started at the same time that the computer was working, it totally flipped the breaker on the unit because it overloaded the circuit... She then tried to explain to me that there is no way that it would trip the breaker, they don't use that much power since they are simple machines that only do simple tasks... I then informed her that nothing that its sole purpose is to produce heat should be plugged in with a computer, i haven't heard anything about it since.

 

 

last year, a CAD designer moved her desk, she was proud of it and told me that she plugged everything back in and didn't need my help.... a couple months later, there was a small power outage and she called me to inform me that the damned backup battery unit was dead and needed replacement. I got there with a new unit and when i was about to do the switch, i checked the connections, only to see that all the computer equipment was plugged in the surge protection side and her cell phone charger was the only thing in the battery side... so i told her that there was 2 good news:

1- the unit doesn't need to be replaced

2- her cellphone didn't stop charging while the power was out!

[CarlBar]

14 hours ago, GilmourD said:

I've still got some machines running Win7 so what's that matter? My point is that it's a school system and kids do stupid things. We have student accounts set up to restrict certain things, like changing the wallpaper. Before my previous boss made that change to GPM there were way too many times were the wallpaper was a bunch of penises.

 

Also, it takes three minutes to join a domain but a lot more time to undo damage that some kids can do.

 

I think you missed the pat about release era. As in they've never patched, updated or done anything software wise with the computers since they initially set them up. No security updates, nadda.

 

Look at what eventually happened with the wannacry incident. If a kid managed to brick the OS they undoubtedly just threw it out and replaced it.

 

They're an IT department in name only.

 

53 minutes ago, Mishotaki said:

I'm the IT guy at the office, I get called by the boss wife telling me that her computer doesn't work and that none of the 3 girls around her could figure out why. I get to her desk and see that the computer is on by the light, move and turn over the mouse and see that there is power to the USB.... look at the screen and see that it's not powered on... i press the power button and it's alive!

 

none of the girls could explain how they didn't think that the reason that there was no video to the computer because the screen was turned off...

 

 

Last month, I had a designer call me about her computer shutting down all of a sudden without any reason, I got there and saw that she had plugged a space heater and a toaster in her battery backup unit... when both of them were started at the same time that the computer was working, it totally flipped the breaker on the unit because it overloaded the circuit... She then tried to explain to me that there is no way that it would trip the breaker, they don't use that much power since they are simple machines that only do simple tasks... I then informed her that nothing that its sole purpose is to produce heat should be plugged in with a computer, i haven't heard anything about it since.

 

 

last year, a CAD designer moved her desk, she was proud of it and told me that she plugged everything back in and didn't need my help.... a couple months later, there was a small power outage and she called me to inform me that the damned backup battery unit was dead and needed replacement. I got there with a new unit and when i was about to do the switch, i checked the connections, only to see that all the computer equipment was plugged in the surge protection side and her cell phone charger was the only thing in the battery side... so i told her that there was 2 good news:

1- the unit doesn't need to be replaced

2- her cellphone didn't stop charging while the power was out!

 

The last one is at least somewhat understandable. It sounds like she got everything else right and the UPS is a bit foa specialist piece of kit, (as an aside are you certain it was setup right before the move? Could be she just copied the original layout...).

[Guest]

My school system never even uses anything that can't be done through a web browser. Honestly, I think they should just say to hell with it and get Chromeboxes. They're trashy, but they work, they're a lot faster, and they are better fit with the system we use. We basically only use a web browser here.

Edited March 4, 2019 by hiitswilliam
because i said honestly twice lol

[Askejm]

On 1/16/2013 at 8:01 PM, D1G1TALD3ATH said:

 

LMAO! that is awesome. never seen that before. I gotta send that to a couple ppl.

Lol those doesnt really work that well. They work by forcing "unnecessary tasks" to stop or use some of the harddisk as an incredibly slow ram

[DesolationGod]

Its funny, my family think I'm some sort of tech wizard fixing all their issues when they call... little do they know i just am proficient at googling

[DrTesla]

When my friend needed more RAM on their PC for a resource-hogging game, he said 'will a flash drive give me more RAM?'.

 

I almost cried.

[Gegger]

Someone tried to sell me a Dell Dimension E310 saying it had Windows 10 Pro. Me: You don't say? He fired up and showed me the system, I'm like WTF don't tell me that this is Windows 10 Pro, it's Windows XP (here comes the nostalgia). I walked out after that.

[Gegger]

Oooh I remember one! In my middle school of about 1600 students, we have 2 IT people (luckily they know how to ACTUALLY DO STUFF). When my classmates' Chromebook freezes/breaks, and the teacher is dumb, I always end up fixing it  "How do you restart a Chromebook" "My Chrome OS got deleted" "My Chromebook turned off" "My Chromebook can't connect to Wifi" (their wifi wasn't on) "Where's the power button" also, keep in mind that this is a school that uses Chromebooks in almost every class.

[PeterT]

Back in 2015 era, when I was in highschool we were given the task to edit photos with gimp, at the begging of the year. And I'm like uh, I literally have no experience in it, soo what about Adobe Ps(which i already was very used to). To the next lesson i went with a bootable win10 and a portable version of PS CS6 on it. It worked really well, i also remapped all the school network folders so nobody noticed anything. I did all the tasks and saved everything to the network drive. Everything was fine until the end of the year, when i booted into my portable os and all of a sudden all the network drives was unreachable. Ok, I turn on the computer next to mine, to see what's the changes. And of course my teacher noticed that I'm not working on the given task and asked what am i doing. I told him that on my computer that specific drive haven't been mapped. He tried refrieshing the  explorer window, and other useless things. After a minute or so, one of the "console tech guys" said how about a reboot. And woala, it solved it, cause the boot order. And the teacher said, thanks *guy's name*. And i was facepalming so hard in myself that the teacher noticed and asked, if i did something bad that "disconnected the pc from the network". And I didn't want to tell him the truth, so just sit back silently to the computer. 

[Koeshi]

On 3/5/2019 at 8:13 AM, DrTesla said:

When my friend needed more RAM on their PC for a resource-hogging game, he said 'will a flash drive give me more RAM?'

Well strictly speaking you could connect it and configure it as swap/VRAM space, so it kind of would have more RAM.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Schnoz said:

Well, it would be dirt slow, and the only thing viable as constantly-used virtual memory is a reasonably fast SSD (or an unused HDD in a pinch). The USB interface simply is too slow for fast tranfers.

Someone doesn't remember "ready boost" from Microsoft.

[soldier_ph]

So my class teacher is 62 years old and when ever he is doing something at his Laptop he literally stares into his screen taking minutes to proced simple tasks like opening his 

Google Drive.

 

And I'm always like:

 

Sir, you have to click the Google Chrome Browser icon

No, that's your libre office writer

It's the red, green and yellow' icon *points at the icon*

Ok, now click on those 9 little Buttons at the top right corner *accidentally closes the window*

Sir  please...

 

 

[N1NJ4W4RR10R]

4 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Alright, so most of us with a limited source of cash-monies know that building a PC is a balance of price and perforance, and this is what drives manufacturers like Dell to cut corners everywhere.

 

This guy at my school had $1500 for a PC, and I gave him one of @LukeSavenije's PCPartpicker lists. But, there was quite a bit of money spent on "unnecessary" additions like a case and a good cooler. He was focusing purely on performance only (he wanted to get maximum FPS in games). So, I got him the basics with some smart shopping, with a 9900K, X390 mobo, fancy 32 GB DDR4-(i forgot the frequency), 256 GB NVMe SSD, and an RTX 2080.

 

This guy had a history of being stubborn. He was utterly convinced that building a PC was purely CPU and GPU performance. There were several substitutions he made:

 

So, instead of the Masterliquid Lite 240 I proposed to him, which cost around $87 at the time of research, he pointed out that he thought that it was super overpowered for this CPU. No matter how I told him that even the sustained PL2 power draw of the 9900K is 210 watts, and even the cooler I gave him was a stretch. Bitch refused and he instead got this cooler he found by putting the price "Low to High" arrangement on Newegg:

 

Besides the fact that that was a 60mm fan on an EXTRUDED aluminum cooler, that was even on an incompatible socket, which should be the LEAST of your worries! (he used thermal tape to secure it, which has a conductivity of 1.0 W/MK). Yep, this is going to be another story of utter GENIUSES building destroying PCs.

 

Next up, RAM. He thought heatspreaders and high ram speeds were not needed. Yyyyeah, you can compromise on that. However, as I said, he was focusing purely on CPU and GPU performance for gaming, and got a single $20 4 GB stick of RAM. Yes, 4 GB of s i n g l e c h a n n e l memory.

 

The last notable thing he compromised on was the case. He found a sale on this case. It has essentially no forced ventilation even though it comes with a fan. The reason is because that fan has no intake. Yep, a 9900K with an open air RTX 2080 is going to be nice and toasty there.

 

I built the Pc for him, getting several painful cuts on my fingers in the process. Windows 10 was successfully installed, and it runs games "fine".

 

The CPU fan runs at 50% or something like that at idle, and under load, it can sustain 1.8 GHz on all cores with the GPU about 40% below its expected base clock.

 

He's still wondering why his PC runs slow.

I have a sudden case of the depressions.

 

Thing probably runs worse then my system

[Beef Boss]

People not knowing to configure DHCP you have to enable it on the router, smh. 

Or "can you have a mac address if you aren't using a Mac?" 

[Herman Mcpootis]

19 hours ago, Schnoz said:

 

now i finally understand the purpose of prebuilt gaming PCs.

[Gegger]

I had this "Media Lab" (techy art class?) teacher that said the screen (laptops) was the CPU. There was only 1 other techie in the class and we were both trying not to laugh and we were getting stared at.....I lost my faith in a tech-literate world that day...

 

Also when your school wastes $10000 on MacBook Pros that don't even get used, and some 100+ iMacs that get used once per school year...

 

And when my classmate stupidly decided to hack open his Chromebook, I had to fix it. He had somehow taken apart the whole thing without breaking anything. iFixit's Acer Chromebook R11 repair guide is GREAT *wink* not sponsored btw then my teacher yelled at me for "tampering with another student's devices"...

[mr moose]

So my latest experience with non techies was a police officer giving a cybersecurity lecture to kids who claimed emphatically that google owns facebook.

 

Apart from that stupid error and the claims that google can use your facebook photos for advertising without your consent it was a good lecture.  I just wish they wouldn't make such simple mistakes when talking too teenagers,  people (especially the younger generations) have a bad habit of dismissing everything said because of one error.

 

 

[Nebari]

Ooo... let's see now...

 

- The user who reported that the cyan toner leaked but upon inspection the printer was covered in yellow... (less technical and more basic color recognition).

- Having to explain to a user, "no ma'am, we can't take a bad review off of Facebook. Because we don't own Facebook."

- The older computer users that will not accept that they made a mistake but that "the computers are out to get them" and "they never had this trouble before."

- "You will not leave my office until you make Outlook look and behave like Groupwise."

- "The students are playing violent first-person shooters in the lab. Please block the entire .io domain."

- "16:9 is the same as 4:3. The projector is clearly broken." (we have this one posted on the wall at work)

- "I put 32 GB of RAM in my machine but it's still slow!" "Sir, you're still using Win 7 32-bit..." "Does that matter?"

- ANYTHING REGARDING GOOGLE CLOUD PRINT

- "This batch file I wrote to automate this task isn't working." "Sorry to hear that, we don't support users' random batch files" <looks at files in the ticket> "How the heck do you write object-oriented batch files???"

 

[Don Vielenio]

So many possibilities to loose faith in humanity...

- User wrote an email, having problems with windows, nothing more, literally. First, it can't be a problem with Windows, users system is Linux based. What it could be:
  - Printer has no paper
  - Monitor is switched off

  - Does not remember password

  - Caps Lock is active
  - User does not remember how to do their job and needs someone to stand next to them to nod constantly

- Just taking network cable out of office computer and wondering why their notebook does not get network... bad MAC filtering

- Users not reading mails and write all their stuff onto system volume instead of dedicated much larger volume for long term storage

- During maintenance of IMAP server user wrote mail it's unaccessable

- EVERY NEW USER tries to install steam

- User asking for packages already installed but where to lazy to check it themselves

- User bought software A for doing stuff with videos, after buying realizing A needed videos in different codex than their camera recorded, so they demanded us to convert all their videos in a week... Do not know the word please and thanks...

- User is unable to use a windows notebook, demands a macBook

Just a few, I'm not remembering everything, would make me to depressed.

[soldier_ph]

Non techie slangs I heard in the last little while:

 

"The Computer is dumb"

"Can I borrow your USB (USB C) Cable to plug in my iPhone ?"

"Your OP5t is a shit phone" says an iPhone user.

"The Internet is based on weather clouds", they say that because they don't know the difference between actual weather clouds and data clouds.

"Shall I get Pen and Paper for you to write down some notes ?", I'm literally holding my phone in my hand so I open my notes App and hold the phone up into his face.

"When people aspecially my parents tell me what time it is", I wear a Garmin fenix 5x Smartwatch with an Always on Display...

 

 

 

[Bananasplit_00]

2 hours ago, Don Vielenio said:

- User is unable to use a windows notebook, demands a macBook

I had a short internship as a backup IT guy and one person in the whole building DEMANDED a macbook to do any work what so ever... Im not sure why people like that arent just fired

[Don Vielenio]

8 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

I had a short internship as a backup IT guy and one person in the whole building DEMANDED a macbook to do any work what so ever... Im not sure why people like that arent just fired

Working for public services makes it harder to fire those people, most the time it's more like, "DEAL WITH IT!"

[2SidedPolygon]

Was watching Men In Black with my mom a week or so ago, when it came to the scene where whathisname was using a hypothetical GPS where you can see things in extreme detail in realtime, zooming in on a person in their yard.
I commented, "I wonder if one of these days we'll actually be able to have something that advanced", and my mom went on and on about how the government already has the technology and can spy on anybody on earth with satellites from space.