Stories From Your "Computer Guy" Vol.1

Welcome to the first edition of Stories From Your "Computer Guy". This is the first series to come to my blog, featuring all sorts of things I deal with on a daily bases as an IT professional. IT horror stories, incompetent user stories, flukes, and most importantly, bad IT jokes! Bad IT jokes? Bad IT jokes! (There's a TCP joke for you already!)

Today's Story: An Inability to Follow Directions.

It always amazed me that the average Joe doesn't want to know anything at all about computers. The moment something doesn't work as expected or the user doesn't understand something they immediately give up and want someone else to fix their problem. All too many times have I been greeted by angry users on a tirade about how computers are "stupid" and manufacturers purposely make bad products that "don't work" etcetera, etcetera. I've heard it all, especially since my first real job in IT was at a Best Buy fixing Samsung phones and tablets.

I used to always think things like, "Once I'm out of here, and working for a real IT firm/company I won't have to deal with these unreasonably angry customers anymore!" I used to dream about a work environment where everyone could do at least the most simple things like googling for a quick answer.

Fast forward about two or so years later, I'm working for an IT contracting company. I am offered a contract with a local school district as a full time on site contractor. This is a great step forward to me and I happily accepted the position. A long last my dream was coming true. Or so I thought...

Now I'm a few months into that contract, and for the most part it has been wonderful. However there is one thing that has really thrown me off since realizing it. I mostly help teachers and administrative staff. Administrative I expected to be a little more needy since, logically, they spend more time on their computers, typing away emails, making schedules and spreadsheets, etc. Once again, I was wrong. I could safely say that 75% of my time is helping teachers.

Working with teachers, you would think that they would be easy to deal with, and should be good at active listening and following direction.

Never in my life have I dealt with a group so incapable of following the most basic directions. Of course it goes without saying that most of them are alright; A few are just so bad, it makes me feel like its everyone! I never actually had to deal with turning peoples computers off then back on and that alone fixing their issues. I always thought it was joke, the kind you see on TV.

(It IS a joke right?)

If you have ever spent any reasonable amount of time on a computer, especially Windows 10 or Apple users in general, you are probably used to updates. You are probably used to updates showing up fairly regularly, and if you're really perceptive, you have probably noticed that Windows 10 has an update ready on the 2nd and almost every 4th Tuesday of every month. We call this Patch Tuesday in the IT world.

Despite sharing this information in the form of a mass email to each and every district member, I would regularly get work tickets for teachers complaining that a bunch of programs are not working all of a sudden. At first, I always thought, they must be having separate issues, or the update didn't apply correctly and broke something.

Before continuing, I think it is important to note at this point that our district didn't always have a great IT team like we do now, and a lot of our network infrastructure isn't set up in the most easy to understand way. We actually had a token ring hub that we have since removed in a classroom at the beginning of the year. So remoting into a computer can sometimes be difficult depending on where we physically are within the district. So most problems are solved face to face.

I would often show up to a classroom to be greeted by a grand applause by the teacher and students. (the kids love a guy that can get their teacher to shut up for a few minutes) Moments later I would be bombarded with a long complicated story of everything the teacher was doing before the problem arises (and I mean EVERYTHING) and everything they "tried" to get it working again. I say, "tried" because 90% of the things they supposedly tried they didn't really try at all. Again and again I would ask, "Did you try restarting it?" They always say they tried that. Yet there is a fun feature in windows task manager that tell you how long a computer has been active since it's last reboot.

(And you're sure you restarted it?)

Of course after initiating a reboot, windows would apply updates it has been trying to apply for over a week. I let the teacher know to not touch it and let it run and that depending on just how many updates there are (and there where often A LOT) it could take anywhere from ten minutes to a hour. Seems like a pretty simple instruction set right? Nope, not for a teacher. Less than an hour later I would get another ticket "Update isn't working" or something to that obscure effect. I show back up and lo and behold the screen is black but the computer is clearly still powered on (Power LED fading in and out)

Of course I ask what happened, and they respond to the effect of, "nothing, it just stopped working again." Obviously this is not true. Little do the teachers know, in almost every room I've got a band of spys keeping an eye on things.

(Nothing gets kids attention like the possibility of getting a teach in trouble)

More often than not a kid would run up and say "Nuh-uh, she pressed the button and it broke!" the button being the power button. These teachers where deliberately doing what I said not to do. They wouldn't let updates run untouched, because for one reason or another they had it in their minds that NOW is a good time to actually restart their computer by force. While still doing it wrong to add insult to injury. They where putting their computers to sleep while updating.

It wasn't long before I realized, I'm the teacher now and I have a classroom full of children that have a hard time following directions. Much like a real classroom too, it was just a group of kids making it worse for everyone, especially me. It eventually had gotten so bad, I actually had to write a simple Command Prompt script that does nothing but restart their computers. I named it "fix-all tool" to make it sound appealing and put it on every computer and told them to run it before calling me. Sure enough, calls to do a simple restart or update stopped almost completely.

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