Experiences with non-techies

[FakeNSA]

21 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

Did the Job Boss, I installed the Network Switch:

(Not my Picture)

Actually one of the less cursed switch installs I’ve seen:

at least it isn’t hanging by the RJ45 from a hole in the ceiling

[DANK_AS_gay]

49 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Don't think the left cable would survive hanging.

I have done shitty crimps but that is just I don't care level of craftsmanship.

My first time ever doing an Ethernet crimp, because the electrician or whoever is supposed to do it in my house failed to do so, And after a few fails, I crimped them better than that. Like my third try.

[Bitter]

My hardest thing is getting just the right amount of wire out from the jacket so the end crimps the plastic lock onto the jacket.

[soldier_ph]

Yooo Dude, I need some of that sick WiFi:

 

[da na]

Friend thought his alarm clock was broken because it always went off in the afternoon. Literally walked across campus to his dorm in the pouring rain to tell him how to set the alarm for AM instead of PM

[IPD]

2 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

Yooo Dude, I need some of that sick WiFi:

 

Reminds me of how expansive password sharing for Netflix accounts has become.  I expect that to reap the whirlwind for both Netflix and its customer base....

[da na]

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives | GCHQ | The Guardian

80% of this isn't hard drives. You would think an INTELLIGENCE AGENCY would know a MacBook motherboard, video card, and CPU from a hard drive platter but nah, just grind it all 

[IPD]

11 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives | GCHQ | The Guardian

80% of this isn't hard drives. You would think an INTELLIGENCE AGENCY would know a MacBook motherboard, video card, and CPU from a hard drive platter but nah, just grind it all 

A thermite grenade would probably work faster.  DeGauss used to work with anything magnetic.  But I suspect that simply flash-nuking everything to 1000C would probably do quite nicely.

[da na]

9 minutes ago, IPD said:

A thermite grenade would probably work faster.  DeGauss used to work with anything magnetic.  But I suspect that simply flash-nuking everything to 1000C would probably do quite nicely.

Yeah... they shredded everything including that one single WD blue and NVME. THEN put it through a degausser. Pretty sure they have no clue how computer data works. 
And they ground down the RAM. I find that really funny. As if it's not wiped when power is lost. 

[DANK_AS_gay]

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Yeah... they shredded everything including that one single WD blue and NVME. THEN put it through a degausser. Pretty sure they have no clue how computer data works. 
And they ground down the RAM. I find that really funny. As if it's not wiped when power is lost. 

You can never be too sure, that blue smoke stuff is hard to master. Don't want a blue smoke necromancer getting your data.

[da na]

Just now, DANK_AS_gay said:

You can never be too sure, that blue smoke stuff is hard to master. Don't want a blue smoke necromancer getting your data.

Yeah, by grinding it down they let the smoke that draws the pixels out of the GPU into the atmosphere. That's why they had to wear masks to protect themselves from inhaling it. 

[DANK_AS_gay]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

Yeah, by grinding it down they let the smoke that draws the pixels out of the GPU into the atmosphere. That's why they had to wear masks to protect themselves from inhaling it. 

Don't want pixelated lungs, it's a good thing they had PPE. I wouldn't want to be the coroner investigating that mess.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives | GCHQ | The Guardian

80% of this isn't hard drives. You would think an INTELLIGENCE AGENCY would know a MacBook motherboard, video card, and CPU from a hard drive platter but nah, just grind it all 

When in doubt destroy all chips.

[da na]

For context no rooms in my dorm have Ethernet.

 

"Hey look my room has Ethernet!"

*takes me to phone jack*

"T-that's not-"

*crams RJ45 with the clip cut off into it* "Yeah I had to cut this clip off so it would work, it still doesn't fit in though. What do I need to do?"

[WhitetailAni]

7 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

What do I need to do?

Buy a phone line subscription, and get a modem.

[da na]

5 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Buy a phone line subscription, and get a modem.

56k woooooooooo

[da na]

1 minute ago, James Evens said:

Just leave this here:

Better than the plug stacking method where you leave one slightly unplugged and piggyback other plugs off of it. Not that I'd know

[SportsNut76]

While she has gotten much better, my wife would tell me "my computer is broken".  I would ask her what is wrong, her answer again "it's broken".  Finally got her to realize I needed more information.  She knows how to use her computer, but has no idea about the workings.  Though that goes for most of the electronic devices in the house, she knows how to use them, but I am the troubleshooter/technician.

[IPD]

On 4/27/2022 at 8:33 PM, James Evens said:

Just leave this here:

Well seeing as most devices are not polarized, it won't make any difference.  Still dumb AF though, especially when a good strip surge protector is so cheap.

[Bitter]

Oh Oh I have one!

I was trouble shooting a used graphics card I bought and needed to throw together an older Intel system. I dragged my i5 4590 ITX system from the basement and set it up, installed the card, grabbed a SSD, connected it to power and monitor, pressed the power button and....no post. Grabbed a speaker for the board, pressed the button and...BEEP BEEP BEEP. I google it, says memory error. Ah what now!? I turn around and look at the board. It's got no memory in it. I called myself a few things (including a bloomin onion), grabbed whatever RAM I had laying around, and got it together and booted.

[OfficialTechSpace]

Here's a new one. Apparently my family has trouble comprehending the fact that cables are detachable on certain headphones. So, when my brother broke the cable on his new Cooler Master MH751's, he just threw them out. A replacement cable is like $4...

 

EDIT: He's also convinced they were solely responsible for killing the jacks on his devices, despite them using standard 4-pole 3.5mm connectors. Without a doubt it was just from wear & tear.

[DeadnightWarrior]

I've been working as IT support for years in several big companies, so I have some very funny memories.

 

This is one of them:

 

Year 2002 in Milan, Italy, in the offices of one of the biggest and most important business banks the world. 

We're in the trading open space office, where every employee has 3 desktop PCs and 6 (six!) 19" LCD Eizo displays (remember, it's 20 years ago!).

One day, very early in the morning we got a call on behalf of the trading office boss, who someone said was making up to a BILLION Euros in one year (again, in 2002!): he was furious because two of the six displays were blank and he couldn't properly do his job.

I went to his desk and he was yelling and shouting against everything and everyone because he "had no time to lose with these stupid computers". 

I said "no problem, I'm here to help" while I was crouching to check the desktop PCs that were under his desk, surrounded by cables.

One of the three PCs was powered off so I just pushed the power button and as soon as I emerged from the cables jungle, the third PC was happily beeping and booting to Windows NT 4.0.
The boss looked at me like I was an alien and went "How did you solve that in such a short time?!" And I said "Well... If a PC is switched off, I just turn it back on!".

He remained silent for a couple of seconds and his embarassment was plain to see, until he started yelling again "Well, that's YOUR job to check these things, not mine! I don't have to waste bla bla bla..."
And I smiled, said "Sure, have a good day sir" and went away while he was still yelling!
 

[DeadnightWarrior]

Here's another one, again in that same year (2002) and in the same business bank.

 

One morning I was alone in the IT lab at about 7:30 AM, when the phone rang.

I picked it up and on the other end there was this desperate employee begging for help.

 

Now, you have to consider that many employees still used floppy disks and nearly every PC in the company had floppy drives.

 

Him: "Please, can you help me? I'm desperate! I just turned the PC on and it won't boot! It says "non boot disk" or something like that..."

Me: "Oh, OK, you just have to check if..."

Him: "Seriously, I don't know what to do if the computer's not working! I have work to do!"

Me: "Yes but don't worry, it's easy, please check..."

Him: "You don't understand! I'm in trouble! You have to help..."

Me: "CHECK IF THERE'S A DISK IN THE FLOPPY DRIVE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!"

 

A few seconds of silence followed and then...

 

Him: "IT WORKS! YOU'RE A F***IN GENIUS! I WOULDN'T HAVE MADE IT WITHOUT YOU! THANK YOU!!!"

Me: "Yeah... Have a good day!"

[da na]

1 minute ago, DeadnightWarrior said:

Here's another one, again in that same year (2002) and in the same business bank.

 

One morning I was alone in the IT lab at about 7:30 AM, when the phone rang.

I picked it up and on the other end there was this desperate employee begging for help.

 

Now, you have to consider that many employees still used floppy disks and nearly every PC in the company had floppy drives.

 

Him: "Please, can you help me? I'm desperate! I just turned the PC on and it won't boot! It says "non boot disk" or something like that..."

Me: "Oh, OK, you just have to check if..."

Him: "Seriously, I don't know what to do if the computer's not working! I have work to do!"

Me: "Yes but don't worry, it's easy, please check..."

Him: "You don't understand! I'm in trouble! You have to help..."

Me: "CHECK IF THERE'S A DISK IN THE FLOPPY DRIVE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!"

 

A few seconds of silence followed and then...

 

Him: "IT WORKS! YOU'RE A F***IN GENIUS! I WOULDN'T HAVE MADE IT WITHOUT YOU! THANK YOU!!!"

Me: "Yeah... Have a good day!"

I'm imagining this as an ASMR and I can't stop laughing 

The "CHECK IF THERE'S A FLOPPY" 

*silence*

*click*

*thud*

*swoosh*

"IT WORKS" 

[Zuvrem]

So there are many things I've encountered so im just gonna quote them :

-"If my graphics card has 2 fans does that mean it's a GTX"

 

"What's the difference between MX and RX" (they meant nvidia's laptop GPU mx SKU and AMD's desktop GPUs lol)

"I have an i5" or "i5 9th gen" it's like all i5s were the same, and even when they specify the generation there's still different i5s in one individual gen lol it's kinda confusing tho tbh I dont blame them 

 

"This motherboard might be too overkill for the 12900K" (it was a b660-hdv)
 

"Why use RAID when you can just backup your data on a flash/thumb drive or something smh" (here they completely misunderstood the point of RAID)

 

"Don't use a Ryzen 5 with an RTX 3060 it will bottleneck" (they thought the 3000 series were all the higher end ones then the 2000 series were midrange and so on with the 1000 series being entry level lol)

 

"If it's good enough for me I don't care, neither do I care about the money" (at this point idek anymore lol btw that was in LTT's discord server)

 

"I don't want/need fast speeds Ill just get an HDD for windows and my games it's cheaper and since I don't need the ssd speeds idc" (that was also in LTT's server, was so frustrating to convince them not to use an HDD as their boot drive, and at the end they didn't even listen ;-; like man why even ask for advice if you're gonna shoot it all down anyway?)

 

"No one needs anything than a 9400GT. It runs all the games I play very well so I don't understand why people are spending their money on new hardware when this is enough." (mate not everyone is a retro gamer lmao)

 

 

So yeah, that's all I can remember, there's way more but that's the most dominant in my memory rn lol. All those people were corrected and they learned from their mistakes (well at least most of them). And some of these show how manufacturers really could make their namings of the products more user friendly