Experiences with non-techies

[The King of the Undead]

1 hour ago, Kaloob said:

Yeah, I realized that when I thought about putting it in my D630s bay.

I'll mount it into the 3.5" bay on my old Star Predator.

maybe a 3a?

[NunoLava1998]

If you're wondering, it's not satire.

[Bitter]

18 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Wait, I remember something! I once tried to yank out an Ethernet cable without pressing down on the latch first. Nearly broke both the cabel and my old laptop.

 

And yesterday, when I tried to repaste my CPU after noticing high temps on an AIO, I didn't twist the waterblock a bit to break the thermal paste and ended up pulling my R5 2600 straight out of the socket, bending some pins (if you follow me, you'll already have heard of this). I got it off with a crowbar, bent some pins back, and re-pasted with MX-4. Works great now with the new Arctic fans I put in. 

 

Don't get Arctic Silver 5 (Not the same company as the company that makes fans, CPU and GPU coolers, and MX-4). That stuff is garbage. Turned to cement in less than a year. The thermal conductivity has been tested and it's like 0.94 W/MK. 

You must have gotten some fake stuff. I've been using it for decades without problems. It does eventually set but never hard, I just cleaned some AS3 that had been on for at least 15 years and it was no firmer than soft candle wax, rubbed off with a paper towel! AS5 tests on par with plenty of other pastes regularly, certainly not a poor product just been around a long time. It's good for high pressure direct die as it doesn't pump out easily and is my go to product.

[Gegger]

there was a 64GB sandick sd card at walgreens for $50

 

along with a $30 500MB pen drive

[GrockleTD]

5 hours ago, Gegger said:

there was a 64GB sandick sd card at walgreens for $50

 

along with a $30 500MB pen drive

Walks into local Walmart- literal 32GB flash drive for 5

[The King of the Undead]

2 hours ago, GrockleTD said:

Walks into local Walmart- literal 32GB flash drive for 5

buy them out of stock!

[GilmourD]

Not sure what these last few posts have to do with experiences with non-techies...

[GilmourD]

7 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

It’s because you’re paying way too much for a 512 mb flash drive that is somehow still in production.

That's retailers taking advantage of stupidity, not tech people dealing with non tech people.

[WkdPaul]

I got a call from a family member, he needed help because they kept saying he has a virus on his PC and there's no anti-virus!

 

I ask if he has TeamViewer, and yes he does. So I get on my PC, get TeamViewer going, ask for the ID ... and I get a message that "teamviewer not running on partner computer" ...

 

Turns out, he just wrote down the TeamViewer ID and password he had on his laptop and somehow thought that would work ... the desktop didn't have TeamViewer installed! *sigh*

 

And there was no virus ... he just keeps clicking on yes every time a website asks to send desktop notifications, they already have an anti-virus (that I installed last year) and they're NOT admin of their machine. Thank God because when I ran an analysis, it flagged a few "antivirus" in his download folder that he downloaded recently (one I remember is TotalAV), like, who downloads this type of junk (it's an obvious fake antivirus).

 

How fuckin hard is it to just lookup reliable antivirus reviews (hint, it took me all of 10 seconds to get to local sites with legit antivirus - BestBuy & Staples for stores and then, Protégez-vous, francoischarron.com, commentcamarche.net for local review sites - sorry, all stuff in FR because he suck at English). And I used HIS PC to do the search, so he could see how easy it is to find.

 

And the reply : "oh! but it's so complicated!"

 

 

 

 

Again, thank God I remove his admin access!!!! (people doing IT for family member, please DO THIS!!)

[SPARTAN VI]

Yesterday we deprecated a ticketing tool (designed by my team) that utilized branching logic and simple data validation. For 3 years, this tool ensured that every ticket that came to our inbox had the minimum required amount of information to begin work, and also added a lot of telemetry that management and product teams found useful to guide their design/QA/etc. decisions. Yesterday we were forced to convert to the ticketing system that the SERVICE team uses, which has zero branching logic and next to zero data validation and nearly zero required fields. So now we get garbage tickets from service which don't even identify the system or customer. Basically, "something happened somewhere, please fix it" is the theme.

 

One resourceful person has been using screenshots of our old tool's form before we shut it down to remind himself what information to provide. I would commend this guy, but he's been actually editing the same screenshots with the customer/problem information, then attaching the screenshots to the ticket instead of keying plain text directly into the ticket. The stupidity of it all is just beyond my comprehension sometimes... 

[FloRolf]

So I own around 5 pairs of headphones in different price ranges and use cases and everyone knows it. 

My sister just had a "what color beats should I get?" in her Instagram story and I don't know what to say.... 

What can I do to get her on the right track? 

[SlayerOfHellWyrm]

3 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

So I own around 5 pairs of headphones in different price ranges and use cases and everyone knows it. 

My sister just had a "what color beats should I get?" in her Instagram story and I don't know what to say.... 

What can I do to get her on the right track? 

If she wants Beats, and likes the sound of them, let her be. Not everyone like a flat frequency response curve, some people really like the sound of Beats. Let them make that decision because music and sound are subjective and preferential to the individual.

[soldier_ph]

Black fat spoiled (Apple spoiled) kid points at the Fingerprint reader from an old Dell Inspiron Laptop from like 2007 and asks the Teacher: Is this Touch ID ????

 

Teacher: I don't f***** know

 

Black fat kid: This is Touch ID 

 

That's the same guy who asked me many times if I had an iPhone or any other "i" devices, like wtf......

 

This story is like 2 years old btw.

[FloRolf]

1 hour ago, SlayerOfHellWyrm said:

If she wants Beats, and likes the sound of them, let her be. Not everyone like a flat frequency response curve, some people really like the sound of Beats. Let them make that decision because music and sound are subjective and preferential to the individual.

I'm 99% sure she's never heard them because she just buys stuff with a well known name on it. 

Also there are better headphones with fun sound signatures out there, not every good pair is flat and analytical. 

[SlayerOfHellWyrm]

43 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

I'm 99% sure she's never heard them because she just buys stuff with a well known name on it. 

Also there are better headphones with fun sound signatures out there, not every good pair is flat and analytical. 

My point remains. If you think she's never heard them, then expose her to headphones you have and see if that's how she wants to go that route. If she wants to buy Beats because of the name, then that's on her. Not everyone cares about fidelity or value. Some people are shallow and care only about the brand names for vanity sake.

[Bitter]

Get her some of the Chinese rip-off Beats, they're really the same as the real Beats right down to the steel weights they add to make them feel expensive for no reason. Oo I hate that in products. If you want to get her something decent sounding without breaking the bank look at AKG for some closed back head phones and stick some Beats logos on them.

[jackmarino35]

having to tell people how to restart a windows computer...

[SPARTAN VI]

I'll try to be kind because there's a chance he may find this post:

 

My buddy recently swapped to another Z270 board after his original board had a catastrophic failure of its south bridge (e.g. burned and smoke), which took out all but one PCI-Express port with it. His new board is an ASRock Z270 Extreme4 and worked fine out of the box. Last night, he got it into his head to install drivers for hardware he didn't have, such as Optane drivers, when his PC started to BSOD constantly. It got to the point where the Windows Boot Manager no longer even detected the OS anymore. So the cost of this experiment was reinstalling Win10 at 2AM ET. 

[NunoLava1998]

I bought a mini ITX case from Silverstone (ML08B) a mini ITX motherboard and a f****** non modular power supply to go with it. 

 

It's good I'm not going to attempt cable management and case is quite wide

[DoctorNick]

Yes every day. I work on a school as a IT guy. Teachers, fine creatures, but some of the most non-techie people in existence. I smoke alot of weed to deal with the extreme traumas I get from work.

[ThisIsDonut]

I am a lighting designer for concerts/events etc... so I work with a lot of tech savvy people, audio engineers, riggers, etc, all of these guys use CAD software and other virtual design stuff so USUALLY, its not like being IT-Guy for your grandparents... but without fail one of my lighting buddies with no real first hand experience with PCs other than buying them at best-buy will say, "Hey man, I'm thinking of building my own rig like you did...."

now I used to get really excited when this would happen, in my mind I immediately start calculating what CPUs and GPUs are out and on sale, what kind of power we could put into a nice rig for the person, and how excited they would be to have a super nice, super fast system that they got to build first hand with me....

I said USED TO.

Because this has happened at least 5 times now, and EVERY SINGLE TIME... they buy some OP desktop from Wal-Mart and say to me, "Ahhh man, I bought a pre-built, I got thinking about it and building my own would be too hard"

I LITERALLY JUST OFFERED TO SPEC AND BUILD IT FOR YOU!!??!! 

And SHOW YOU what I'm doing so you can see its NOT HARD and you can DO IT YOURSELF.

... I still have by far the nicest PC of all my Lighting Desginer colleagues ... lol.

[DoctorNick]

On 8/14/2019 at 5:38 PM, ThisIsDonut said:

I am a lighting designer for concerts/events etc... so I work with a lot of tech savvy people, audio engineers, riggers, etc, all of these guys use CAD software and other virtual design stuff so USUALLY, its not like being IT-Guy for your grandparents... but without fail one of my lighting buddies with no real first hand experience with PCs other than buying them at best-buy will say, "Hey man, I'm thinking of building my own rig like you did...."

now I used to get really excited when this would happen, in my mind I immediately start calculating what CPUs and GPUs are out and on sale, what kind of power we could put into a nice rig for the person, and how excited they would be to have a super nice, super fast system that they got to build first hand with me....

I said USED TO.

Because this has happened at least 5 times now, and EVERY SINGLE TIME... they buy some OP desktop from Wal-Mart and say to me, "Ahhh man, I bought a pre-built, I got thinking about it and building my own would be too hard"

I LITERALLY JUST OFFERED TO SPEC AND BUILD IT FOR YOU!!??!! 

And SHOW YOU what I'm doing so you can see its NOT HARD and you can DO IT YOURSELF.

... I still have by far the nicest PC of all my Lighting Desginer colleagues ... lol.

Yes in generel people don't appreciate the time and energy used by "the IT guy" 

[Lucroarna]

I work in IT as the sole IT specialist for a medium sized distributor.

 

I've got a few for the thread.

 

- Everyone calls anything involving a computer, or the phones, "The System" - You'll overhear someone complaining about something not printing, and someone else yells out their cube "Yeah, Lucroarna must be doing something on the system"

- I took over my role, so I had to replace 41 (!!!) PCs with Windows 10 Pro desktops. I have one user who consistently complains that she now has to press the power button to turn on her PC.

- I have one user who does not understand how the minimize button works in Windows, and asked if I could remove it, because he doesn't like that he has to click them on the taskbar after minimizing them.

- I have a user who loves shortcuts - and always makes them inside of directories to her desktop. She will later delete the shortcut in her directory, which breaks the shortcut on her Desktop. To this day, I still get calls letting me know about the "Shortcut Glitch on the system".

- We use a software for all of our inventory management, and it's only accesible via remote desktop. The old IT guy named the shortcut to Remote Desktop after the software. So when people call for issues, they always say they're having an issue with the software, when it's an issue with Outlook inside of remote desktop. Everything we do "in the system" is called "<software name here>".

- I recently found out a user uses their work email for everything. Including a bad purchase online, that ended with our exchange being overloaded with spam emails to this one person. After 1,700 emails to one inbox in 10 minutes, I was easily able to convince our company to include new company policies regarding personal use of emails. I am now hated for this travesty - how dare I.

- User had an issue with his laptop - was acting slow. I hopped on remotely, and several porn pop-ups came up when opening chrome. He goes "I dunno how those got there, they just come up!". I don't think he realizes these pop ups only come up when you look at porn, and if you're millennial who grew up in the 90's-00's, you know this excuse only worked in that day and age. I'm assuming his kid used it on him at some point.

- Phone service goes out, everyone says the internet is going slow, too

- Internet service goes out, everyone says the phones are acting weird, too.

- I had a user whose file management involved downloading a PDF, saving it to a CD, putting the CD into a jewel case, opening a file cabinet, putting the jewel case inside a file, and locking the file cabinet. I explained that he re-created windows, and showed him how to save these files on the network (As they should be, they are company documentation intended for his job role). He told me it's the same thing but in a different way, and refuses to change.

 

I thought IT would be fun, but it's just funny.

[Koeshi]

On 8/16/2019 at 9:55 PM, Lucroarna said:

I have one user who consistently complains that she now has to press the power button to turn on her PC

How did they turn them on before?

 

On 8/16/2019 at 9:55 PM, Lucroarna said:

I recently found out a user uses their work email for everything

Just the one?  Is it your first week to have only found one?

[GrockleTD]

2 hours ago, Koeshi said:

How did they turn them on before?

 

Just the one?  Is it your first week to have only found one?

Probably asleep vs. actually turned off but tech illiterate so not knowing the difference.