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We know you’re lying.
There’s a 50% or greater chance they just turned off the monitor.
I went through a computer lab and had to turn all the computers on, and infuriatingly like a third of the monitors were turned off. So I put a few computers to sleep instead 😭
Why is a champion thoroughbred racehorse talking to me on the internet?
Because it’s bizarroland!
Oh. I thought I had somehow fallen into uma musume
The amount of times people told me this when I worked IT support, and crossed over to see them on-site, and restarted their machine myself, and found it suddenly magically started working…
I’m not saying they lied, but the ‘IT Support Aura’ may be a genuine thing. Like the computer is afraid of getting scrapped so it quickly starts working.
My former career was in IT, I’m a developer now. I work with a bunch of tech savvy people, but I still have the ‘IT Support Aura’. I’ve lost count of how many times a coworker has a computer problem, asks for help, and then watches me fix it and they claim they tried the exact same thing and it didn’t work. I never really have an answer besides ‘computers fear me’
Before my life shifted more into integrations I was a fan of running:
systeminfo | find "System Boot"I wasn’t out to call anyone out, but sometimes users honestly believed they had rebooted and I would find of the the day’s lucky 10k. It also helped to figure out which users would just blankly say they’ve done everything.
I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas!
Back when I was in that sort of role, I did it to call them out. I’d highlight it on their screen and ask if it was ok to restart the computer now.
Resolution: “Technician proximity”
The ol’ IT person magic touch - the second you touch the machine, it works flawlessly!
Only problem is if it’s one of those problems that’s workflow-based. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “well it seems to work fine for me” only to watch the user do the same task in the most janky, roundabout way, and that is the source of their problem.
I’ve experienced IT support aura, both from my friends and myself when I joined IT for a while.
I’ve also experienced the evil IT aura. Sometimes when everything is working just fine and an IT worker touches or observes it, it will break inexplicably.
An IT friend asked to use my computer to play a round of Starcraft at a LAN party and I agreed. Watched him slowly sit down, extend his arms above the keyboard like a pianist, slowly rest his hands on the keyboard, and immediately got my first BSOD. Wasn’t even running anything, just sitting on the desktop.
your machine didn’t have enough minerals
Also the thing where you try and show the problem to any other person and it starts working just to make you look dumb. Me and my SO do that all the time: “This thing isn’t working, I know you don’t know how to fix it but can you come over and look at it not working so it’ll work?” And I’d say at least 50% of the time it does lol
Doing the same thing slower (because you’re explaining what you’re doing) sometimes prevents the problem from happening.
Things that aren’t working for a user sometimes work for me because I wait a bit longer between steps, e.g. waiting for the services/background-programs to finish loading instead of immediately clicking something on the desktop/panel 5 times the moment it shows up.
On the flip side, any time you want to show somebody something that should be working and you suddenly see an error message you’ve never seen before.
I’ve joked that some computers just like having someone else watch (kinky).
The fear effect also works the second you show the problem to someone else in IT. The only thing that makes a computer behave faster than IT being in the room is 2 people from IT.
The IT support aura is nothing more than being patient.
Users don’t have patience, so when they call IT about a problem, they are forced to wait until IT gets there. Which is enough time for it to get through whatever it was calculating and start working again.
Eh, so when I ask a user (who is a programmer) “did you restart your computer” and they promise me they did, they are just being impatient and lying to me?
I do not trust end users with anything.
IT guy Herr, I don’t believe you did on principle and I will make you do it again while I watch
No, I don’t care the uptime is minutes in Task Manager
Even if you tell me yes, I’m still going to double check. You have no idea how many users just say that because they think it’s a copout (which, admittedly it kinda is) when it fixes so many problems.
Also, once you lie to me you lose more respect than you would have gained by actually restarting. Trust is hard fought for and easily lost.
I usually start conversations with your crew as “Sorry, I’m probably old enough to be your mother and awful with tech. I’ve googled and rebooted and that’s as much I can do I’m so sorry”. And I say it in a grovelling tone…
Also, the number of times where a second restart clears up the issue is insane.
Sadly, Windows can never leave well enough alone. The current biggest confusion is that they changed restart vs shutdown. There are currently TONS of people who think they’re restarting their computer regularly and saving themselves a lot of pain, but Windows decided to change the definition of shutdown.
Did you restart your computer?
Yes.
Did you use start-> restart?
No, I used start -> shutdown, then powered back on!
Sorry, that doesn’t help; it saves the current running state, so when you use it later, it doesn’t need to reload everything. For what’s currently wrong, we really want to make sure we don’t just have some memory corruption. Please perform start -> restart.
Start -> Shift+shutdown also tells Windows to not use fast boot or hybrid shut or whatever…
I had a Mac user in my office last month, I asked her to reboot her MBP, she used the power button to crash it. I’m like, is that the way you always do that? Sure, she says. I showed her the reboot option and she was like “oh neat bye.” That poor fucking Mac.
When I figured that out, I was so pissed. I didn’t tell you to hibernate! If I wanted you to hibernate, is have told you to do that. I said shutdown damnit.
If they let us know they were hiber the kernel, we could have at least chose to hiber the whole damn thing and pick up where we left off.
Wtf, when did this happen?
https://www.pdq.com/blog/restart-vs-shutdown/
When they introduced fast startup in windows 8 :( You can disable fast startup, which eliminates the problem. Honestly, though, it’s better to use the real restart at the first sign of questionable stuff.
Considering many don’t properly restart, Windows 10 / 11 are remarkably stable compared to Windows 7, and when updates force you to restart, it does it the proper way.
That’s fucked I’ve been thinking I’m a good boy shutting down my computer whenever I don’t need to use it to ensure that I don’t get any slow down. Why on earth would you name it “shut down” at that point?
One of win 8’s targets was to decrese boot times. Bios was slow, so Win 8.1 was designed to take advantage of UEFI. While they were there, they decided to ‘cache’ the kernel to make it super fast.
But it was just the kernel. All your apps still had to load again from scratch. They should have called it hybrid sleep visibly in the UI. But the change was confusing, so they just hit it.
Yeah it is stupid.
But easily solved by disabling fast startup.
It is easy to work around once you know it exists, personally for my one remaining windows box, I rather prefer to let fast startup do it’s thing ( it is really fast ) and just re-boot it once in a while.
Does shutdown /r still work fine?
kinda hard to tell :)
i found one that talks about win 8 https://superuser.com/questions/495240/how-to-instruct-windows-8-not-to-perform-a-fast-shutdown
that says /s works and if you want fastboot at cli use /hybrid, but that’s an old article, ymmv
Back in my service desk days, I used to just request to perform a restart on their behalf. If they said they already had, I’d make up some nonsense about how I had just manually edited a regkey for them remotely, and it not taking effect til another restart or something like that.
In my experience, the majority of the time someone claimed to have restarted; they either did so incorrectly, or for some reason believed it held no relevance and just wanted to get to ‘the actual solution’.
That little white lie allowed them to save face, and me save time and brain cells. It was a win-win.
How do you restart it wrong? And more importantly - what’s the correct way to do it?
It’s so annoying (and slightly embarrassing, and funny how often it happens), to restart it myself to no avail… then have it work after a second identical restart just because someone else is spectating.
A lot of people just close the laptop lid or turn off the monitor thinking that’s rebooting. Or they shutdown thinking it’s better than restarting, but Windows’ default shutdown is more of a close all programs and hibernate, so it often doesn’t fix things.
I’ve heard holding Shift when clicking Shutdown performs a real Shutdown, and anectodally it seems to work, but I can’t be sure.
That’s crazy. Maybe that’s why my work computer doesn’t have an option to hibernate… Thanks!
I think Windows actually disables hibernation on some computers now, but ‘Fast startup’ (the hibernate instead of shutdown feature) works independently from hibernation, so it’s definitely possible for it still to be enabled.
They can tell you are lying. The system reports uptime.
People often lie about restarting, and IT is pretty aware of that. In my experience, I’ve gotten a lot of love in situations where IT is onboarding hardware for me and having issues, and I say “hold on, let me try restarting real quick”.
Having been unofficial IT guy in a few places, when I contact any type of tech support, I give them a list of steps I’ve taken to try and solve the issue, which usually includes rebooting as a first or second step.
You you have a very accessible IT dept. I would restart twice and blog post about how to fix something without admin right before the pain of calling IT personally.
Not anymore I’m afraid. IT at Ford is abysmal, a lot of times you can’t reach anyone, and other times you have like 5 people reach out about a resolved and closed issue over a week.
Lies. All lies. Don’t fall for the trickery. No one reboots.
I send the request and list the troubleshooting steps I have tried. Mostly so that they know it’s not frivolous but also to avoid duplicate work.
But so often those stupid steps work. Turn it off and back on. Uninstall and reinstall.
If you want them to really like you you’ve got to list the steps you’ve already attempted and screenshot any error messages you get.
Don’t just say you got an error message, actually tell us what it was.
The number of times I get to tickets which claim up and down that there is some major fault, only for the error message to turn out to be that they didn’t enter the correct password cannot be counted.
This. I don’t care if the error message is completely useless, I just want to know what you are actually getting.
Yes sir, I do that. I’m on both sides of these requests as I admin some of the financial software, sometimes can fix things before having to involve IT.
And to purplemonkeymad’s point, OMG I don’t know who writes Microsoft’s error messages but they are nonsense.
“The program has stopped working.”
Thanks.
If so tell IT that I already restarted they don’t believe me and the make me do it again.
I could literally call and tell them exactly what the problem and how to fix it, I just need administrator access to fix it, and they’ll still make me restart the computer first.
People will tell you they have reset the computer and mean they turned the screen on and off.
“Tell me what you see as it’s starting back up” “It’s still the same screen…” “Ok, maybe it didn’t work. Walk me through your steps to restart it.” “I pressed the power button on the screen to turn it off. Press it again to turn it on.” “Oh, ok, ya. Click the the lower left corner of the screen with your mouse, then the power icon in that window that just popped up, then the word restart. More steps means it’s more thorough, so it should this time.”
It’s true. I’m the “tech support” member of my team. The call me before they call IT. You’re absolutely right.
I usually think "they are lying*
I went into a computer repair shop, and the dude was so impressed when I told him my personal stuff was on the 2tb D drive, and not the tiny C drive.
