r/talesfromtechsupport

Got a call from a client saying: “The vending machine is smoking… I think the snacks are on fire.”

You can imagine the panic on their side. When I arrived, I was expecting to find something burned inside the machine — maybe a short circuit or something serious.

But once I opened it, everything inside actually looked fine. No burned products, no obvious damage.

So I started checking more carefully and moved to the back of the machine.

That’s where I found the real issue: the relay of the refrigeration unit had completely burned out.

There’s a small fan in that area, and it was pushing the smoke from the back into the cabinet, making it look like the whole machine was burning from the inside.

In reality, nothing inside had caught fire — it was just the relay creating all that smoke.

Weird situation, but a good reminder: sometimes the problem isn’t where it seems at first.

Ticket 1: Sunday 1450

>Hi there,
We urgently need help today to solve access issues to a SharePoint site we’ve created. Is someone available to jump on a call?
My number is 0712345678, though a video call would be preferred so that I can walk you through the site.

Ticket 2: Sunday 1505

>Hello,
This is indeed urgent. Please can someeone get in touch with us asap?

Ticket 3: Sunday 1517

>Hello,
Does anyone know how to get IT support on a Sunday? Not getting a response from the usual email address (in cc). Does anyone have a phone number or other ideas?

We don't have cover on a Sunday, unless you are on the VIP list. And the people on the VIP list have the number of the VIP Support guy. He gets paid specifically to be reachable at any time.

The Agencies we cover don't pay for general On-Call, Out of Hours or weekend support. They can, if it's prebooked and someone agrees to do it for them. I have in the past and they whined like children because it cost them £hundreds and they didn't end up needing anything.

The VIP Support guy replied (he's a helpful chap like that) on Monday at 0900 to ask if they were still having issues and it took them 90 mins to say yes, it's still very urgent :/

I could regale you with longer stories and anecdotes about this particular user, how they didn't learn after 4 years the very basics of remote work through COVID. I know the button says 'Connect' but that does not mean 'Connected'. Before I get more off track,

During COVID, many users did not have a way to work from home. Edit: To clarify our WFH situation, we're an engineering firm. WFH is remoting into your desktop in the office, and these days is a bonus, not the rule. If you dont provide your own WFH machine, youre expected to be in the office </edit> Mostly older folks. This user was given a desktop, monitor, the necessary gear to remote in. We had to claw it back, and were only able to because it was only Win10 capable. Doesn't matter how much you pout, user, it doesnt mean you can hang onto it.

So, user needs a new way to connect in. They end up getting a laptop from a friend, and I help them get setup with the VPN, Remote Desktop, and Teams. This is the extent of work we do on home machines. Otherwise, we refuse as its not work related and we dont need to be responsible.

All seems fine until user asks me 'my friends name still shows, can you remove her so I can use it?' I ask if there is a problem, nope just wants the name changed. Cool, as per policy, not doing that, recommend the required steps, what to google, or go find a shop.

Few weeks later, same story, same answers. Personal device, no I cant just do it for you, yes Im sure I can't, go find a computer shop.

However, user got tired after the third time asking, and so instead decides to ask my boss. He aggress to help user, as a personal favor since hes just like that. After he agrees, I hear user lean in closer and lower their voice, saying they asked me three times and I wouldn't do it. The nerve of me, right? Thank god, boss backed me up, stating it was policy.

Today, user comes in with their laptop, and is surprised when boss works from home on the bosses work from home day. And yet again 'I brought it all the way here, Boss said he would do it, can't you just do it?'

Nope, cant just do it. In fact, all Im just doing is keeping myself from telling you to fuck off in the nicest ways I can think of. I remain polite, remind them of all the things I already have, and that Boss is doing this as a personal favor. 'Why cant you just do it for me as a favor? You worked on it before' Because I dont want to be potentially responsible for some fuckery you do on that laptop and try to blame me for.

I'm sure this user will be back with yet another routine issue. I wouldnt be surprised if they ask me about this issue or something directly related in the future. It did take them 4 years to learn our VPN procedures after all...

First, the situation: I was working for a Cisco reseller doing professional services in the early 2010s. Got sent to one of the local school districts to help them rearrange their Internet routers and deploy a "Firewall Services Module" in a Catalyst 6509. (IYKYK) My main contact from the school is stingy and won't share credentials with me, so I'm stuck walking around the datacenter and "sliding the keyboard over" many times.

We get the new "router triangle" running and to me, things are looking good, but alas I'm just doing the router CLI thing. Meanwhile, my contact has RDPed into his desktop (back at his office) and says to me "I have zero Internet at my desk". Hmmm...Internet routing is fine on the triangle, lemme go look further down the path and check the router at his office building. Check the default route (it's learned from OSPF) and it's coming from some random router somewhere else amongst their WAN. What?

I get logged into that router, and sure enough under the OSPF process there it is: "default-information originate always". What? Why? (For those unaware, that's basically telling that router to tell all of its OSPF friends that it has a default route, or a route out to the Internet, all the time. Hint: it doesn't.) I remove that command and my contact was jumping for joy, saying "WHAT DID YOU DO? THIS IS THE FASTEST WE'VE EVER SEEN IT!" Um, OK, I removed a misconfiguration from the router at site XYZ. He was in disbelief..."No, really, what did you do? How was that command bad?" So I explain it to him. As I'm finishing my explanation, a few of his coworkers who were on site that evening for some other work are tracking him down..."what did you do to the Internet, it's SMOKING fast."

That's when the "cover story" was born. He decided this needed to be kept on the down-low, so "we made a few adjustments to the dynamic routing and after about thirty minutes, those optimizations all came together".

Next morning, I head to the IT offices first thing for "day one support", just in case we missed anything the night before. No problems, just everyone jumping for joy with how fast things were working. I said "so, could that command be lingering anywhere else?" He helped me log into a few other sites and sure enough, it was EVERYWHERE. He finally gave me the creds, and I spent the next hour or two logging into every single router (one per school, probably 60-70 schools in that district and growing by 5 a year) to remove that command. Any time anyone came in to ask why the Internet was so fast, he jumped in front of me and rattled off the same line. He also did the right thing and told his team what we fixed, and said "be sure you take that out of any templates you have".

You guessed it...later that summer, the whole district went off the Internet because one of his crew brought a new school online and yep, forgot to take that command out of his template. Ah, the joys of using commands without knowing why they matter. (And I'll be honest, I'm surprised the whole network wasn't melting down every day or every week prior to fixing it.)

Bloody 'ell, that was a strong start for the day... I got a task to write some data to a DVD/USB. Thats fine, happens. But when I opened it...

They wanted to write the user folder and vital documents from an external employee who changed status and thus basically got fired and rehired under a different name, as far as the system is concerned. They helpfully let us know that they want us to write: C/users/USERNAME and .../USERNAME/Documents. Thats all. Now, this is bleeding from so many wounds, I couldnt even decide where to start. But lets try:

1: Why are you storing vital documents in a non-backed-up place when there specifically are servers and One-Drive for that?

2: Why does the functioning of your team depend on the stuff stored in your personal drive?

3: At least give us a computer name so we can check if it is even still in existence. You know, because they get reset to zero when you hand them in.

4: The stuff stored in your drive may still be accessible, but this is not the way to access it and why the hell would you write it out instead of just copying it over.

5: You asked us to write it to a physical carrier, but provided no USB stick, and I highly doubt you have a DVD reader wherever you are.

6: Even IF we ignore all of that, I am at least 3% certain that you have no right to read external devices so it would be useless.

(7): I'm pretty sure this is the same user who wanted me to transplant his Teams history a week or two ago, because apparently that is vital as well.

After so many stories of computer-illiterate users turning tech support attempts into a grueling task, I wanted to share a success story of tech support for my grandfather, who has very little knowledge of computers but still used his brain and was extremely helpful when asking for help. 

I’ve been the go-to tech support for my grandparents for years, by dint of being the most available and the best at software and settings problems (I pass hardware issues to my brother).  They live in a different state so tech support is always via phone call. 

Grandma has always been relatively on-top of technology, she can use a tablet and a smartphone, and can reliably log into her email, Facebook, and games.  Grandpa, on the other hand, only briefly got the hang of it.  He could manage his original laptop just fine, but as the internet got more complicated and the ads got sneakier, he didn’t want to put in the effort to learn all the new safety rules or re-learn how to do everything now that Windows changed all the buttons.  He also struggles with touchscreen phones and touchpads on his laptop, he has large hands and fingers which makes precision difficult. 

So Grandma got him a Chromebook, which we all agree in hindsight was the worst possible decision.  I’ve never used one, never even seen ChromeOS, and had no idea how to help when something went wrong. (He once got a malicious full-screen popup saying Windows was compromised and he needs to call Microsoft tech support and it took me 2 hours on the phone and googling to figure out how to clear the popup. There wasn’t even a virus.)  When the Chromebook got old, slow, and possibly infected with something, they called to ask me to pick his next laptop, purchase it with their card, have it shipped to me so I could set it up, and then ship it to them.  “Ok,” I thought, “here’s my chance to make all our lives easier.” 

I picked a “Shell Inspiration”  with the dreaded Windows 11.  I’ve never used it, my computer is old enough that it can’t update from 10, so I was a bit intimidated.  I set out to research what was different and how to “grandparent-proof” Win11.  Once I had a game plan, I got to work.  Step 1, find out exactly what he does on his computer.  Facebook, Gmail, and YouTube, check.  Step 2, install Windows without a full Microsoft account.  That required getting partway through setup, downloading the updates, then disabling the Wi-Fi router and force-shutdown the computer to make a “local-only” user account.  Check! 

Now came the tricky part, make it work as much like Windows 7 (the last one he knew well) as possible.  Rip out Cortana, disable web search in the start menu, disable a bunch of “smart” stuff in the settings, uninstall all the bloatware, set the desktop background to a nice neutral color, make programs open with Single Click, and make the system font and icon size much much bigger for ease of reading.  Whew!  Step 3, Check!  

Step 4  was software.  Malwarebytes for emergencies, and in a stroke of genius, TeamViewer for future tech support.  Goodbye Edge, hello Firefox!  Adblocker, tracker blocker, and bookmark his three sites.  Get his login information from grandma, and set up auto login.  Each site gets its own custom icon on the desktop, with the logos for Facebook, Youtube, and Gmail respectively (I’m very proud of that).  

Final step: instructions!  Screenshot the desktop, and put together a cheat sheet with each icon identified and explained.  Describe how to run Malwarebytes if something seems off.  Include username and password for the computer itself and for each site.  Save the cheat sheet to the desktop, and also print a copy to close inside the lid..  Pack the whole thing up and ship it off! 

A few days later, I got the call that grandma had set up the wifi and everything was working as intended.  Great!  Every few months during one of our calls I would ask how it was working, and the answer was always positive.  But nothing lasts forever; one day I got the dreaded call: something is Wrong with the laptop and now they need my help. 

The Problem: Youtube is playing somewhere and he can’t shut it off.  He can open a new window of Youtube using my shortcut, and it will play a second video simultaneously, and he can close that second window, but can’t find the one that’s still playing.  Ok, he’s probably got a window minimized and needs to maximize and close it.  I try to talk him through finding it but it doesn’t seem to be showing on the task bar.  He’s describing his screen very well, albeit with odd terminology (for example, a window is a “mask” and the desktop is the “start screen”), and he’s also sticking to the relevant information rather than just listing every single thing on the screen. 

A note here:  Grandpa is hard of hearing, so he often shouts when he talks, especially on phone calls, and his laptop volume is always turned to the maximum.  So for the duration of this call, he is SHOUTING over the video playing.  Luckily for me, I can’t actually hear the video through the phone, he hasn’t discovered speakerphone (much to Grandma’s relief). 

I decide with some trepidation to try to get him to bring up task manager.  He confides that he’s always afraid to touch anything on the computer because if it’s the wrong thing it’s “all messed up.”  I reassure him that he’s doing great so far, and I think he can get this.  It takes him a couple of tries to get Task Manager (I’m not sure he was clicking the Start button), but he manages ctrl+alt+del and clicks the correct option.  He describes the “mask” and sure enough, Firefox is at the top of the list.  I have him click it and tell him how to find the “end task” button, and that’s where we stall.  He can’t find it.  I make sure he’s looking at the lower right hand side of the Task Manager “mask,” not the screen itself, and that he’s looking below “the entire long list” rather than the last line on the list.  

After 5 minutes of this, he suddenly interrupts, “Wait! I’ve got this ‘Team Viewer’ thing, can that help?”  

The clouds part, an angelic chorus sounds.  Yes!  I have him open Team Viewer while I log in on my end.  30 seconds later I have his screen on mine (thankfully the sound didn’t come through, though he assures me he can still hear that video).  I finally discover our pitfall: Windows 11 moved the End Task button to be above the list of processes, between two other buttons I didn’t know about (Run new task and Efficiency mode).  I triumphantly kill Firefox, and Grandpa shouts “That did it!! What did you do?”  I explain that they moved the button and I was telling him to look in the wrong place.  For good measure, I have him open Youtube again to make sure the hidden window wasn’t stuck in cache, but all is well (thank goodness).   He thanks me and I congratulate him on being so helpful that we got within one button press of solving the issue, and thank him for remembering Team Viewer.  

And mentally pat myself on the back for having the foresight to install it in the first place.

Not IT, just the dev everyone treats like IT because I "know computers." Standard stuff.

Last week my coworker comes over and asks if I can take a look at her machine. Says "something happened" and everything's huge. Not great detail but okay.

Go to her desk. Her screen is zoomed in to an absurd degree. Her recycle bin icon is the size of a coffee mug on screen. She can see maybe 3-4 icons at a time and she's been panning around with the mouse to find things.

First thing I check is resolution. Nope, 1920x1080. Fine. Then I notice the magnifier icon sitting in her system tray. She somehow hit Win and + at the same time (probably reaching for something) and turned on Windows Magnifier. Zoomed to somewhere around 350%.

Win+Esc. Done. Screen snaps back to normal.

She goes "HOW did you do that." As if I'd unlocked some secret admin menu.

Best part: she'd been working that way for three days. She figured out how to get to Outlook and her spreadsheets by panning around and just... adapted. Never put in a ticket, never asked anyone. Three entire workdays of navigating her computer through a keyhole.

I asked why she waited so long. She said she thought she broke something and didn't want to get in trouble.

She's 34.

Some background context is needed before I begin.

The company I work for has decided, in their infinite wisdom, to split into two companies. I work on a team developing and maintaining custom internal apps which are deployed to azure, aws, gcp, and our own data centers.

As part of this move, several apps I support must be moved from our current azure tenant to a new azure tenant, which affects both hosting & entra authentication.

Now, onto the story:

We've been having a... fun and exciting time moving applications for the past 2 months. By fun and exciting, I mean submitting a lot of paperwork about how long things will take, who is going to do them, and so on. I have fielded several complaints about timelines I submitted weeks ago being invalid because by the time someone reviewed the paperwork, my timeline had us deploying the app -- and obviously no work has started yet, since the paperwork hasn't been approved!

Today, however, is different. Today I have permission to deploy. The infrastructure requests I can't handle myself have been completed. In theory, everything can work.

Everything starts out smoothly. I'm able to deploy my resources, replicate the database, and move the source code over. A slight hiccup occurs with npm package locks and custom registry auth, but nothing I can't handle with some effort.

I deploy a fresh build of the application to the new environment and... it works! I'm able to log in, get to the home page, even navigate and load some data. This is great. I'm finally going to get things done and my managers' manager will stop pestering me with pointless daily updates.

Then one page fails to load. Alright, no need to panic. This is why we have application insights. I'll just check the request logs, and... what? The logs aren't there. I double & triple check the config. The connection string is correct.

Now I'm more than a little annoyed. Observability is how we find issues, without it, we're basically flying blind. I log into KUDU and start checking things. After nearly a full day of banging my head against the wall, I recall our app service is vnet integrated, and as such has some special™ DNS behavior so it can resolve internal URLs. I run `nameresolver` on the application insights ingest URL, and... it spits out a couple aliases to azure private link and no IP address.

Now *that* is interesting. Our app does not utilize private link at all, it only uses VNET to talk to resources deployed to our on-prem datacenters. I raise this issue with our architecture team, and it turns out this is a known issue, which is actively being worked on. Excellent.

Next time I'll check DNS first.

Moons ago myself and a colleague were tasked with setting up remote access to a remote terminal server for a customer.

We were in their office late in the day, they had all clocked off so we were free to go from machine to machine and set things up. It was all going well a relaxed end of week.

Moving on from the general office space to the executives offices it was business as usual. Just keeping ourselves entertained with the usual chatter.

Logged into the CEO's machine (these were the days when people just gave you their passwords to login), went to move the mouse over to the primary monitor on the left and... *bump*. Oh that's weird the monitors are setup the wrong way around.

Me and my colleague were shocked, someone had been using the computer like this? How long had it been? and why haven't they mentioned it to anyone?

Easy fix none the less so we went ahead and fixed that up while logged in, setup remote access and continued around the office.

But that got us thinking had we just gone and solved an long term issue on their machine, something they didn't even know could be fixed?

Or would they come in Monday morning and be cursing IT because they've changed it and they had it set the way they liked it?

Never heard any feedback on the matter, we'll never know.

I got called to check a vending machine that was acting completely crazy. It wasn’t dead, but nothing worked properly. The controls were all over the place, it kept checking the boiler, but wouldn’t actually start anything.

It was a pretty big coffee machine, so I expected some clear fault. I start going through everything — power, wiring, pump, boilers, sensors — but nothing really made sense. No obvious issue, yet the machine was basically unusable.

So I start tracing everything back more carefully.

Eventually I get to the power input area and notice the fuse looks… off.

I pull it out, and that’s when it hits me.

It wasn’t really a fuse anymore. It was wrapped in aluminum foil like some kind of “fuse sandwich”.

Turns out the customer had “fixed” it instead of replacing it.

So instead of blowing like it should, it kept letting unstable current through, which ended up damaging the control board and messing with the machine logic.

What could have been a cheap fix turned into about a 400€ repair.

All because of a “quick fix”.

A ticket came in from one of the ladies in the accounting department. Subject line: "Printer not working, URGENT, need to print contracts today." I've worked here long enough to know that "urgent" usually means "I haven't tried anything yet," so I grabbed my coffee and walked over.

She was standing next to the printer with her arms crossed, genuinely upset. Told me it had been broken since morning, that she'd already restarted her computer twice and even "reinstalled the printer" which I later found out meant she deleted it from her devices list and then panicked when it dissapeared completely. So now we had two problems. I asked her to show me exactly what happened when she tried to print. She sent a test page, we both watched the printer do absolutely nothing. No sound, no lights, no movement whatsoever. I looked at the printer. Then I looked at the wall. Then I looked back at the printer. The power cable was hanging freely about four inches from the outlet. Not half in, not loose. Just fully unpluged, dangling there in plain sight.

I plugged it in. The printer beeped, warmed up, and printed her test page and the backlog of about 11 documents that had been sitting in the queue all morning. She stared at it for a second and then said "well I didn't think to check that because it's always been plugged in." I told her that was completely fair, closed the ticket as resolved, and walked back to my desk. I have no idea how it came unplugged. I didn't ask. Some mistieries are better left alone.

I’m not tech but I quickly became the tech guy after this…

A colleague, mid 40s Japanese lady, offered to train me on a new process.

She said that the file on computer A needed to be moved to computer B. I presumed that was for a later step but that was the entire process.

In order to achieve this she proceeded to:

Print out the file in question.

Take the physical copy to the copy machine.

Scan the physical copy into the cloud.

Go to computer B and download the file.

Save the downloaded file into the desired location.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and asked her if I could try another way.

After attaching the document to a message sent from me to her on teams, I opened teams on the other computer and dragged it to the new location.

She had for years, printed out and rescanned documents, which where then shredded, in order to move data from one PC to another…

A few years ago I worked as the sole IT guy for a medium sized logistics firm and the Director there let's call him Dave was the definition of "technically illiterate but loud about it". Dave had a massive presentation for some potential investors and he spent all morning pacing around the conference room like a caged tiger. About ten minutes before the meeting starts I get a frantic radio call from his assistant saying the "speakers are dead" and Dave is currently having a meltdown.

I run down there and find Dave stabbing at his laptop screen with a finger while a pair of high end studio monitors sit completely silent on the desk. He sees me and immediately starts shouting about how we pay for "top tier equipment" and it never works when it actually matters. I do the usual checks first. Power is on. Volume is up in the OS. Everything looks fine on the software side but there is zero output. I look at the back of the laptop and see the 3.5mm audio cable just barely hanging out of the port.

I reach out to push it in and Dave literally slaps my hand away. He tells me "Don't force it !! I already tried that and I felt resistance. These things are delicate and I don't want you snapping the motherboard right before my pitch." I tried to explain that audio jacks usually need a satisfying "click" to actually engage the pins but he wasn't having it. He insisted the hardware was faulty and demanded I "fix it in the settings" instead.

While he was busy adjusting his tie in the mirror I just gave the cable a firm shove. *Click*. Suddenly the room was filled with the deafening blast of his intro video music which he had left on max volume while "testing". Dave jumped about a foot in the air and then looked at me with this mix of confusion and annoyance. He didnt thank me of course. He just muttered something about how the "port must have loosened up" after he worked on it and told me to get out so he could start. The best part was finding out later that his assistant had been holding his phone right next to the laptop mic earlier so they could "hear the tinny sound" through the conference bridge.

Every day the office manager is supposed to finalize the shift and then export that to Excel and drop it into a shared folder for the Dispatch team to reference(Dispatch doesn't have direct access to our database due to domain design choices years ago).

As part of that finalization step the office manager is supposed to mark what vehicles, if any, were assigned to each person. So if any issues arise, like a ticket from a speed camera, we know who was supposed to be driving that car on that day.

It is also notable that the availability export to an excel sheet is locked with a password so it can not be edited. You have to put the vehicle number into the scheduling software to have it properly show up on the sheet. Or so we thought.

We had a supervisor call trying to find out which car was driven on a particular day. Went into the system and pulled the report for their location, and all of the vehicle fields were blank, not only for that day but every day. Which didn't make sense, as Dispatch needs those car numbers and would have complained if they didn't have those.

Tried figuring out what was wrong and why it wasn't saving, because that surely must be the issue, but it was a fruitless endeavor. So I looked at the folder snapshots from the day before and noticed something...that Location's schedule export was a PDF file, not an Excel sheet like every other file. When I opened the file I saw that the vehicle numbers were handwritten.

The office manager was printing off the sheet(which is frequently multiple pages), hand writing in the assigned vehicles, then scanning that back to her e-mail, before dropping that into the file share.

When we asked her why she was doing that exactly, she said "I can just write faster than I can type".

This happened about 15 min ago and I just stopped laughing.

As mentioned in a previous post I am a long time software admin and my org just recently completed a software transition from a platform in use for 21 years.

On Tuesday, we discovered a major minor bug in the platform. Minor in that it seems really small, but major in that the ramifications could be seriously problematic.

I documented the problem and filed a priority 1 ticket with the vendor as well as providing work-around documentation to prevent unexpected consequences to the impacted team.

Cut to today which is a stat holiday and I'm the one monitoring tickets so my team can have the weekend. An email comes from a member of the affected team that has their entire team copied.

"Z report is showing the old Y, when it should be the new Y."

I responded asking if they had made the correction via the provided work-around. Confirmation comes from the user from my other post (hence pretend incompetence), letting everyone know they've resolved the issue and reminding the rest of the documented work-around.

A random member of the affected team pipes up after adding our CEO and COO into the email thread with the wisdom in the title. Before I get a chance to respond he hits back from vacation with "you mean like C bug in the old platform that you've been working around for 4 years?"

Sometimes being dysfunctional is hilarious.

We normally read about a certain software that shares a name but this story is about car windows. Tech is a hobby and I'm able to help friends with things (see prior Talesfromtechsupport posts I've done) but this past Monday a coworker asked if I knew anything about cars. He told me he parked his car and his windows (passenger, and rear passenger/driver sides) were all working but when he returned later that day, all three windows would not move despite pressing the button to raise or lower the windows. I reasoned it was unlikely all three motors gave out, and also it doesn't sound like you're hearing any noise at all which suggests that this is an electrical problem. I then thought that maybe there is a separate fuse for these other three windows and I suggested he use Gemini or something and point the phone at his 2009 RAV4's fuse box to see if it can help narrow things down. Then as we were going our separate ways I threw in, "or you know, it could be you accidentally turned the child lock button on" and he laughed and said that's probably not it.

Later that day I got this text, "Thought you'd like to know, got out of hematology Clinic a bit early and was checking out my car. 1 button push later and my windows work again.... Thanks for the help lol"

Context: Conversation with a hardware technician about an error on our software related to our local webpage. Our software won't install unless there is a SQL database it connects to. It will not run if there is not a database. In this case, the webpage and SQL are not related. The hardware techs don't work with this part of the software often.

> Me: Looks like you're having problems with webpage access. Did the customer apply the correct permissions on the web server? That frequently gets missed during implementations.

> Engineer: I don't know, but look, their SQL server doesn't have anything on the desktop!

> Me: ...Okay? SQL doesn't need anything on the desktop. That's normal. That's an entirely different server than the web server. So have they applied webpage permissions?

> E: I don't think SQL is running.

> Me: Our software literally can't install or run without SQL. It's fine. As long as SQL is installed, it's running. There is no "window" or "software" that has to be up. It's a back-end process. Now, the webpage permissions...?

> E: How can I see if SQL is installed?

> Me: -sigh- Check add/remove programs or the start menu.

> E: It only has [sends screenshot of five different SQL tools that indicates that SQL is installed] but no "SQL" program.

> Me: That is SQL. SQL is installed. It is running. We literally wouldn't be able to install and run the software and see the webpage error if SQL wasn't there.

> E: Ok

> Me: So, do they have the correct permissions set for the webpage?

> E: They have SQL 2019 installed, is that a problem?

> Me: -heavy sigh- That's literally the recommended version we support. Please log off of the SQL server. We don't need to be on it.

> E: Ok

> Me: Please, just tell me, has the customer applied permissions to the webpage?

> E: I don't know, I'll ask.

This took over 40mins of back and forth and I still don't know if they've applied permissions yet 🫠

I am a software admin in an industry that you'd swear would be on the cutting edge. And if you think about military contractors who develop some of the tech we all eventually benefit from: you'd be right... well usually.

For those of us in the civilian sphere though; change comes slow, glacial even.

We recently transitioned from our 20 year-old primary platform to a new one. 6 months of blood, sweat, tears, and some new gray hairs for me. But we got it done.

Many of my users though were married to the old system and not happy with the change. Their objections were partly that it was different and partly that the new system no longer allowed our operation to behave like it was the wild west. Nothing brings out user animosity like justified permissions restrictions.

One in particular loves to send in support tickets that consist mostly of vague complaints with little directional hits thrown in. After many back and forth emails (it is mandated that we never do his initial troubleshooting over the phone for... reasons), my team can usually translate his vague complaints into an actual task he's struggling with.

At this point it is moved to a recorded call.

The conversation from here generally goes as follows:

Support: if I understand you correctly you are attempting X task and it's not happening as fast as you want.

User: Yes, it was so easy in the old system, why can't it be like the old system.

Support: I understand, using a new system can be frustrating, but you know how unstable the old system was. You wouldn't want us to continue using a system that puts (insert very VIP client here)'s data at risk because we didn't upgrade? Let's see what we can do for this issue.

Are you completing process X via steps D, E, F, G, H, & I.

User: Yes... insert vague complaints again.

Support: While those steps do work, try step A, B, C, D, you should get the same results, but much faster.

User: That does work and it is faster. (tone should be as begrudging as possible)

Support: Wonderful, do you think that will help you complete task X more efficiently and reduce some of your frustration?

User: No. I don't like steps A - D. I'm going to do it the other way.

User: hangs up.

We've been fully in the new system for 6 ish months now and this call happens so frequently, I had to ban facepalming because my team were giving themselves bruises and start to plot vengeance. As of three weeks ago his tickets are now exclusively directed to myself and our IT manager because as soon as we respond the answer is usually "never mind" because he knows we won't tolerate his pretend incompetence.

when I worked in IT support back in the 90's I would get some great issues to deal with.

we had a remote office, Glasgow about 200 miles away, and we had a problem when one guy would have to enter some numbers into a standard spreadsheet, save it to a 5 1/4 floppy (told you it was from a long time ago), and send it to the office next door to add their data.

The problem was when the guy next door tried to load the file it would never work. this went on for weeks with us sending brand new floppy disks to Glasgow. still no luck.

I was sent up there with the task of solving this conundrum. It didn't take long.

Turns out guy 1 entered his data into the spreadsheet correctly, saved it correctly, wrote a message for guy 2 on a post-it note then proceeded to staple the note to the floppy disk. Guy 2 would then rip off the note, pop it into his PC and wonder why it never worked.

£400 round trip for 5 minutes of 'problem solving'

For context, I am not in IT support directly but in engineering where I manage a fleet of Ubuntu devices. So I became the de facto tech support for all known friends and family.

I sold an old laptop to a friend's friend. Cloned the drive and then did a fresh windows install. Office setup etc. Very standard. Friend is happy and a few months go by no worries.

Friend comes back and asks me to take a look. The device is stuck in a boot loop. Ask what happened and I am told: "My emails were too full so I did a factory reset".

Could not escape the boot loop so I redid a windows install and no issues since.

I thought it was worth sharing due to how I am still in shock at the train of thought that went:
Email spam --> Factory reset --> Needs fresh OS install