6. About once a week you will get a call from a user claiming their internet is upside down or sideways. Don’t get confused. They just have a laptop that lets them flip the screen orientation. Ctrl+Alt+Arrow keys will flip it back. Make sure they write this key combination down, because otherwise they will be calling back in about a week.

As far as I can remember from old days when I had to deal with user’s desktops, this shortcut comes from Intel Graphics driver and can be disabled in it’s tray utility settings.

I had a old boss who no one liked. He claimed to know everything..lol.. One day i was tired of him complaining about everything, and pulled the power out the back of the box. He called an external support technician in as he couldnt figure it out. At the time he had been giving me a lot of crap, due to me not remembering most things.. my memory was bad as i had had a near drowning and lost a lot of my memory due to lack of oxygen. I was tired of being blamed for everything, so I did it.

It wasnt right to do, but i did feel good.

Remedy == Whiskey?

Worse ive heard related to browsers was. I use you know the ah shiny one, look at there machine turns out they use Chrome.

Luke Maciak wrote:

@ Victoria:
Hehe, I did that to a fellow GA when I was in grad school. We shared an office, and I was usually there first so I installed some sort of vnc server on her machine and waited. When she arrived I would nudge the mouse when she was trying to click on something.
It lasted maybe 10 minutes before she caught on. Mostly because I couldn’t keep a straight face when she tried to show me the weird mouse behavior.

I happen to have a good poker face :) I once trolled one of my bosses (who was late for work) for an hour that I didn’t know him and he had no right to be in the server room and that I would call the security if he didn’t go away :)

Gah, #14 brings up so many memories. I’m not IT or anything related (CAD monkey by trade), but I’ve dealt with that one far too many times. And the blank stares those people give when you start listing the pros and cons of various browsers… heh.

@ Gothmog:

Hehe! Thank you for driving traffic to my site. Tell them to click all the ads. :)

@ Victoria:

Hehe, I did that to a fellow GA when I was in grad school. We shared an office, and I was usually there first so I installed some sort of vnc server on her machine and waited. When she arrived I would nudge the mouse when she was trying to click on something.

It lasted maybe 10 minutes before she caught on. Mostly because I couldn’t keep a straight face when she tried to show me the weird mouse behavior.

@ Chris Wellons:

LOL! I would watch out though. I have heard horror stories about people who have gotten in trouble they were seen doing regular power user things, and someone clueless reported them to the management for haxing.

@ MrJones:

Heh, I wish I knew a better name. I usually call it the round button in the upper left corner. But since it does not look like a regular button, a lot of people have trouble finding it.

Also, it the Word/Excel options button is located in such a weird position. It is nowhere near all the regular items on the Office menu, and it is tiny. It usually takes 2-3 tries to get people find it. You have to very patiently explain it is small, rectangular, on the bottom and to the right of the list.

Anyone got a better expression for “the office button on the upper left corner”?

most people dont know what im talking about and search around in the tabs -.-

remember that your users are going to be white collar, educated professionals. Their computer is their primary work tool. One they use for 8+ hours every single day. Most people who start in this line of business assume that this would make the users at least somewhat proficient at using their tool. This is a mistake.

I’m not in IT, but I had this mistaken assumption for awhile. I figured people who make a professional living using computers must know a lot about using them. Literally everything they do depends on it, right? My parents, both white collar workers but don’t do computer stuff specifically, are quite capable with their home computers — a solid data point to my initial assumption.

However, I quickly learned that most of my co-workers, made up of engineers and developers, know just enough to get their work done and nothing more. They also have very little interest in learning anything beyond what is absolutely needed, even if it would make their lives a lot easier in the long run. Like your list, the list of programs they know is limited to Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Matlab (for the engineers). The nice part about them knowing Matlab is that it comes with a text editor, so they can at least edit plain text files. For developers, replace Matlab with some IDE; and they only know source control as far as the Subversion extension handles it in their IDE. This is better than the engineers, for whom a source control commit consists of emailing their work to someone else (like another point you made).

I can see why you listed this as #1. It’s probably the most shocking discovery for an IT newbie. The rest of your advice is very spot on with my experience helping friends, family, and co-workers with their problems.

The nice side of being one of the few capable computer people around is I occasionally get to be viewed as some kind of mystical wizard. For example, the DNS servers at work were not responding one day last month, which for most people means “our internet’s down right now.” Naturally, I switched DNS servers when I saw this. My co-workers noticed that I was the only person at work with functional Internet access and suddenly I’m viewed as some kind of computer hacker. I really do enjoy those moments.

#2 reminds me how at some point during my glorious 7 months in bank IT we installed RAdmin on each and every computer. If the day was bad, we just f*cked with user computers, mostly by moving mouse all the time. Users then called us to complain, and we asked them in DRAMATIC voice: what were you doing when it happened? And they were like, well, I don’t know, it’s not important, blah-blah, because actually they were playing solitaire during work hours.

Hahahaha!
I am forwarding this article to my techs right now and am seriously considering making this material part of our new helpdesk on-boarding training.