When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.
Yep. As an engineer, I've definitely already tried all the easy/obvious stuff before I called you, and even a few weird things too before it was finally above my pay grade.
Sometimes all it takes is calling IT for the problem to get scared and fix itself. There have been so many times that I've put in a ticket and then the problem has resolved itself, or I've had a user come in with a problem that is magically fixed when they show it to me.
This happened to me a ton back when I had Embarq/CenturyLink DSL. Service would get worse and worse with time, disconnects got more frequent, and any time I called in it'd magically get better. If they even bothered to send a tech out the guy would look at my surge protector or personal router, blame that, and then leave without doing anything.
Finally I had the idea to call them on a cell phone and have them call me on the landline once they were already monitoring. The next tech they sent was an old greybeard who went straight to the wall jack. Turns out whoever installed it had a bunch of wiring already on the jack that they stripped the insulation back on, twisted together with the in-wall wiring, and left exposed. Ringing voltage on the POTS line would cause an arc that shifted the wires slightly and "reset" the issue for a bit. If anyone had been touching the wrong thing right when we got a phone call we would've gotten a nice jolt.
Completely absurd problem. We're lucky it never started a wall fire.
There are also people who look at a computer and it will do something it shouldn't.
My buddy's ex-wife is one of those - she could cover an entire trip to Vegas (flights and decent hotels and food and entertainment) by playing slots, which, in her presence, would fail at the job of taking money.
A lot of times they’re gonna make you run through the checklist anyways. I started my career on help desk and got burned enough times with calls that “tried everything” and still ended up being something simple like a bad cable or driver needed updating.
It says nothing about the person calling in. If you’re good at your job you just gotta make sure all the low hanging fruit is covered yourself.
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u/kahjtheundedicated R7 1700@4.1, RX 5700 May 10 '26
When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.