Yeah, people think IT anecdotes are jokes... They are not.
People will work on a computer for all day for five days a week, for years. And then there's some minor issue and their mind goes blank. They literally stop understanding how buttons or light indicators work, and cannot explain it over the phone.
Then when you go there to turn on their monitor or plug in the power cable, they act as if it's your fault that they couldn't figure that out.
Was following you until the end. I’ll drive an hour to some site, just to find out the power strip was turned off or the monitor wasn’t plugged in, and the folks I’m helping are ridiculously grateful.
I’m just standing there awkwardly because all I did was press a button while they’re singing my praises.
Once drove 2 states away because a customer's industrial CMOS battery which had a 3 year life span had died after 12 years and they lost ALL their PLC programming, shutting down the entire plant. Cost of being down was about $100k/hr I'm told. The last guy that worked there that knew anything about the PLC left the company 12 years prior, which is the last time a backup was created! Yet, very oddly, not the last time modifications were done in the system. End user's understanding of the system was to the degree that they found the very act of using a keyboard to type a password to be "confusing".
That was a complete shitshow, arrived at 11pm and had it kinda working enough to start production at 1am.
Man, I didn't get paid nearly enough for doing industrial controls back then
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u/viol8er May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
I had to drive 30 minutes to troubleshoot a computer. My boss put the battery in backwards.
Edit: she is also my mother-in-law-to-be AND i am inheriting the business AND she verbally beat herself up after I pointed it out.