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“The computer forgot my password” is new to me. lol good one.
I’m not IT, just a college instructor, but you’d be amazed at how many Gen Z students have told me that they can’t log into their email because they don’t know their own password. Not even forgot; they don’t even know it in the first place because every device remembers everything for them.
To be fair that is basically what we are trying to get people to do though. Use a good password vault with a single strong password and two factor authentication. All other passwords should be a uniquely generated password for that application.
Yeah, I don’t know any of my passwords but the one password to rule them all.
“My computer hates me” I’ve heard that one
Here’s some more pixels
https://lemmy.kya.moe/imgproxy?src=i.imgur.com%2f5izytWM.jpeg
it looks fine on my end
Thanks for the extra scenario!
I actually want to get into IT. I like tech, don’t mind dumb situations, and enjoy helping people, and doubly so if it’s sarcastically helping people. Fucking shame every company wants like fourteen degrees and your first born for a level 1.
I like you. You have the right mindset. The main motivator for working IT support is helping people. The tech usually takes a back seat to soft skills.
On top of that, you’ll figure out that, as long as you know the fundamentals of how things work, all the details are something you can google. Figure out the fundamentals and you’ll be able to work on anything. Convincing prospective employers of this skillset is a bit more difficult.
I wish you luck and I hope I have the pleasure of working with you some day.
I’ve been dealing with hardware and software issues since my first computer years ago. Like many of us it was either do, or take the PC out back and mourn its passing. I do lack the certifications, even if the knowledge is there. It seems I have some work in front of me.
I do appreciate the words of encouragement. Barring the rare toxic frequent ticketer, most people who have issues just don’t jive with tech well and are yet forced to use it, oh and the stubborn ones. That majority who need legitimate help are the ones I like most and even more I enjoy the challenge of finding ways to explain things to them in a way that clicks. Maybe save a support ticket in the future.
Certifications certifications certifications. Get your A+ or net+, apply for shitty remote help desk jobs like support.com. They will suck and you’ll get back to back calls, but keep your ears to the ground and a few months experience should be all you need to hop to something else. A lot of places are desperate for competent techs. Degrees don’t prove anything, I’m fact it seems like kids are graduating with these technical degrees and zero actual practical knowledge.
Source: My decade long IT career off just an associates degree.
I can confirm this. I was able to get a decent job right out of highschool with my certs I got at a technical college. Really as long as you can prove that you’re a fast learner, passionate about tech, and have the skillet to back it up it’s not hard to find a job. In my experience at least, which to be fair is only 6 years
I bet find an IT job is a lot easier when you are called MasterNerd
Absolutely correct. Every single place outside of giants like Google take equivalent work experience instead of a degree. I dont even have an AA but I have 16 years experience and 11 certifications and make low 6 figures.
I vouch for that. That’s how it is done. Good job laying down the steps; want to add that job hopping is important too early on.
- Get a phone help support job 1.5. Keep applying to get other better paying support job, within or outside the company
- Work in parallel getting trained and certified in A+ etc 2.5. Keep applying to get other better paying support job
- Get more certificates 3.5 Keep applying to other jobs of interest and desired pay
- Repeat step 3.5 until retirement.
I have had an IT role and been a controls engineer for many years now. There is a fair amount of overlap in duties and you only need one degree for that. Basically, a lot of it is IT for machinery. I have a hell desk support team who keeps most of the basics at bay and every time they all get sick at once I remember why I love them.
I like how you skipped the preludes and just call them the hell desk. I am 100% sure that isn’t a typo and I’m never going to check to see if you edit it just in case.
You are correct. It wasn’t a typo. I stole it from the BOFH (bastard operator from ) Which if you are in IT you should read and laugh.
What machinery do you mean? Industrial machinery of some kind?
Industrial, government, chemical, even residential if the place is big enough.
So I’m going to go against the grain here and say to get some college under your belt. A 2 year degree and a cert or two (which can even be part of your degree program, or sometimes will allow you to skip some classes saving you time and money) will easily get you into a helpdesk job, and from there you can go into whatever specialization ends up tickling your fancy.
I’ll also say, helping someone with their nth password reset doesn’t have to suck. Sometimes there’s a root cause that you can help with which makes you far more helpful than the tech who just helps them reset it 10 more times. One of my proudest achievements in a previous role was successfully teaching all of our users who’d email us a scan of a printout of a screenshot of an error message how to send us the screenshot directly, and we went from 1 ticket like that per week to none for my final 6 months. All it takes is some compassion and meeting the users where they are without judgment for the common goal of getting both of our jobs done a little easier.
Unfortunately I’m already dealing with student loans and two degrees under my belt. So certifications and a shotgun approach to applications might be my least stressful path. I’ve always been tech support for friends and family, have built several computers, and good lord the micro Chernobyl event that was a PC I left with my parents and younger sister when I went away for several months. “Oh that? It just stopped working one day.” Did you know that back on I think Win7 you can bypass some start up errors by mashing the backspace key like you’re a triple expresso’d up Sonic? Cause that was the only way it’d even let me scoot into the actual boot process once I did what I could in safe mode.
Anyway, I digress.
Ah so a very different point in your career than most of us seem to have thought. Probably your best bet is to get an easy cert that shows basic PC knowledge and/or start throwing applications out in all directions. If you can get 6-12 months on your resume at a slog of a callcenter or other shitty entry level support role that should be enough to kickstart you into an IT career if that’s the direction you want to go. Get onto a corporate helpdesk and use that time to figure out what you need to learn and go from there.
I’m a hiring manager for a tier 1 help desk and soft skills and being able to deal with users who are bad with technology are way more important than any certification at that level. I can teach someone to do the technical stuff if they have a good attitude. If they have a shitty attitude and get frustrated on every call where the user has trouble following instructions there’s not much I can do for them. Don’t let your lack of certs/degree stop you from applying. You may end up someplace that’s desperate to get asses in seats (usually for good reason) for a bit but once you get some experience on your resume you’ll have an easier time finding someplace better.
I have zero issues helping people, I love it. What I won’t do it help people with the same issue over and over because they won’t pay attention and refuse to learn. Nothing pisses me off faster than repeating myself over and over and having to keep resetting your password and setup your VPN because you keep going into the settings and fucking with it instead of just connecting like we did when I taught you how.
Currently dealing with a guy with 2 Mac’s, a mini and pro and everyday one of them isn’t working because he keeps going to the VPN and changing shit rather than clicking “connect” from the task menu. Jesus fuck it’s annoying.
The majority of people are genuinely thankful for your help. Sometimes they put off asking for help until they are very frustrated and you catch some of that heat but they calm down quickly. They also really like it if you have to sit down and work on their computer because it means they have an excuse to not work and have some coffee. There always seems to be that one person though that you dread helping because they are always pissy and sarcastic and blame you for everything.
Others have said here but for a help desk job it’s definitely more based on customer service ability. I came in from an admin job with a very long time in customer service prior to that but no other actual certs other than just being the person that people go to in the office for help and was told by my hiring manager it’s much more about ability to handle clients.
Now the next steps in my career I’m more worried about because it’s all very competitive at least where I am and everyone seems much more involved and knowledgeable of technology than I am. I know I can learn but it is pretty overwhelming.
In defense of ‘the computer forgot my password’ guy I’m sure we’ve all experienced the following sequence.
- Incorrect password
- Go to change password
- New password cannot be the same as the old password
I would interpret ‘the computer forgot my password’ as someone accidentally getting logged out of their password manager
Truly maddening
**
- Go to change password
- They also don’t know the password of the email address the reset email is sent to
*idk how to format
This struggle is real. Except I forget which email address I used because I use a lot of aliases.
Normally my password manager would handle it but sometimes there’s re-branding and a new domain and the password manager can’t figure it out.
deleted by creator
I’m sorry to tell you this so hastily but everyone else is a bot, it is just you and everything you’ve experienced is completely unique to you.
Fun story, I worked IT for an American Telecom company. One day I recieved a phone call from a guy who was setting up his router. We were maybe five minutes into troubleshooting. He asks if he can eat his dinner while we troubleshoot and I say “no worries”. Within thirty seconds, I hear a bang and panicd screaming. He informs me he dumped soy sauce and rice all over his router and work space. I sent a field tech to replace the router and set it up.
Edit: This comic is the norm not the unusual…
Were you talking to Frank Reynolds?
I hope they installed the waterproof version
Wind-proof router, here you go
Funnily enough, i think this might actually work to a degree
Just make sure your on one side of the room.
For every “I’m the bottom 10% of tech users” there is another 70% of the user base bitching about inept prioritization and service desk people who couldn’t troubleshoot process issues if their life were dependent on it.
Different people different skills.
As someone who works in IT support, I have yet to find any significant number of support people who can’t troubleshoot process issues. What I have found in spades is management making it impossible to make any meaningful process improvements.
There’s a nontrivial number of management type folks that just want it done a specific way, regardless of how that impacts worker performance or how difficult it makes my job.
The number of times I’ve suggested improvements only to be told that the existing methodology works, is too damn high.
My first fucking thought. I’m still waiting on helpdesk to respond to an issue I’ve already chased down to a registry key because I’m not allowed workstation admin privileges. 🙄. Which I’m fine with but more than a week to respond to a ticket? Come the fuck on
How many seats are they responsible for? Could be understaffing.
It’s always understaffing.
That’s because IT management theory currently holds that the more processes/workflows you standardize and consolidate the fewer things there are that break. Which means you can hire fewer help desk personnel.
Unfortunately the people usually tasked with performing this standardization is the help desk, so they don’t have the time to decrease their own workflow through standardization when they’re already filled to the brim with a backlog. At that point you’re just giving them more of a backlog.
Googling problems with Windows I find the majority of the results are MS support telling them to reset the OS. No attempt to debug the issue just nuke it and see if that fixes it. Then you read the next comments and inevitably they say “Nope, didn’t fix it”. I really dislike scripted responses like this.
Yeah the MS support forums are very hit or miss. And even the hit ones usually start with a response that doesn’t appear to understand the question very deeply, followed by a “that didn’t work”, “I said in my post that I tried that and it didn’t work”, or maybe a “that’s not what I’m trying to do, I want to do x”, and then a reply with useful links.
Though to be fair, problems can come from software the user installed or fuck ups they’ve made to settings along the way. Or quiet sabotage from another user.
Once upon a time I provided phone support for Comcast and had a caller call in unable to access Facebook. I did the usual script and found her internet was otherwise working. Narrowed it down to a dns issue. I was aware of the hosts file because I was using it for ad blocking at the time so had her open that up on a whim (which I would have gotten in trouble for since it was off script). Sure enough, it was there. Someone didn’t want her accessing it.
Who knows what kinds of methods people have used to discourage other things on shared PCs. Is edge really broken or did the user’s kid get tired of everyone clicking “make it the default browser” when it begged each time it was opened so they wrote a small program that kills it as soon as it starts?
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”
Yes most management falls into this category. If you ain’t running a prison with the staff something is wrong as we can’t possibly trust these people!
They’ll still wonder why they’re paying you though sadly.
At one point in a former life, I was one of the trainers for the incoming helpdesk technicians. One of the practical exams we put them through involved us doing creative things to fuck with their computers before they came to class, and then having them figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Plugging the mouse from one computer into its neighbor’s USB port and vice versa was one of my favorite tricks. For whatever reason, it had a 100% success rate in effectively fucking with them.
That’s lame and easy to figure out.
Switch to wireless mice. Maybe Logitech Unifying. Then one day pull all the dongles out and put them in a bucket.
First person to figure out how to download and install the unifying software and re-pair their mouse without using it gets a bonus.
But most people nowadays are lost without mice so they’d probably cycle through all the dongles on the laptop plugged into the projector and all move their mice until they figure out which is whose.
I worked at an office once where the wifi legitimately got worse when it rained. It was because the buildings internet used an antenna instead of being wired, and the building was just barely in range of the source signal. When it rained, it was enough added distortion to make it noticeably worse.
Oh, so the WiFi was fine, but the internet sucked when it rained. Cool.
WiFi != Internet.
Ive had to explain this soo many times to users that I’ve gotten tired and just roll with them with the misconception
I still live in hope. It’s a dark dreary place.
I have to constantly explain to my wife that if she can’t reach a website it is likely on their end and there is nothing I can do until they fix it. I explain there is a chain of connections involved and me sitting and staring at her laptop for an hour isn’t going to fix it.
No one said that wtf
You could just get a rain-proof router! /s
As somebody who did IT support - the last two seem perfectly normal to me:
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Computer “forgot passwords” - obviosly the man is using different browser than regular and it ain’t filling in his passwords. Maybee diferent profile in the same browser? Is he using the same account as usual?
-
Wind blowing away wi-fi. She is likely connected to the internet through a point-2-point wifi connection and there may be a tree or something along the way messing not wifi signal in her house but her connectivity to the outside. I’d refer her to her ISP, just instruct her to formulate the question a bit better.
The password one is also when they’re on the wrong site and now they’ve just typed all their passwords and account names into microsoftoffice365.scammer.ru
This meme seems to be from the times of WinXP, when browsers didn’t remember passwords.
And many Americans seem to call their cellular internet connection “wifi” and that can definitely be affected by the weather.
How does an indoor wireless connection get affected by wind?
it doesn’t. but people call their LTE / 5G / etc. “wifi”.
Sorry, I didn’t read the comment properly. Thanks.
Even the first one.
The mouse is moving. It’s potentially the mouse-pointer that is not moving.
Seriously.
On a side note, love you IT guys 💖 and it seems that if you ask nicely if they have time, they’ll listen and if you try to do your best they’ll be all over it to help you out the best they can.
I worked at a software developer, occasionally doing support. Had a call from a customer following up on a ticket, I looked at the record and the salty dude who took the original call had written:
Caller asked me to tell him where he saved his file. I told him “well if you can tell me where I parked my car this morning, I might be able to help you.”
Quality wasn’t a big thing with our software, the senior developer was a stoner who was off his head most of the time, others were either clueless or too busy on side hustles to give a fuck. Amazingly we developed engineering software that was used by amongst others, the atomic weapons establishment in the UK and Buckingham Palace. Happy days.
Hey, at least your bugs didn’t result in the prosecution of 700+ sub-postmasters. Silver linings and all that.
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My coworker had a customer shoot his router. So, yes alot of American small business owners are Frank Reynolds.
“My computer says no wifi, so anyway I started blasting.” Such Murica lol
I’ve been on both sides of it. One of my favorite IT moments was changing to a new phone. I couldn’t access my email until I did a two factor auth process. Of course they emailed me my code to access my account to unlock my email. Good thing I also had a pc at home with access to my email.
Then I was supporting a lab. One woman was clearly aggravated when she called. She said no matter what she did her screen was blank. I head right over and just look at it for a few secs. I check the lowest hanging fruit solution first and see the power light on her monitor isn’t on. I see it is unplugged, plug her monitor in and problem solved. I’ve never seen a more embarrassed person than her. lol
Networking has to be the most thankless job in IT. You are invisible when the system is working, which is 99% of the time. It stays up like that because they are monitoring it and maintaining it behind the scenes. When it fails though the failure can be catastrophic for everyone, we literally cannot do any work without it. Then everyone’s eyes, and criticism, is on them.
I love the artwork !! Who is the artist?
According to my googling, they may be by Li-Anne Dias? But the artist’s website is so bad you’re better off reading the comics when they’re reposted elsewhere
But these are so classic they even mention Windows XP
I asked a guy for his host name today and he straight up said “No” wtf man what do you want from me then?
