Tech Support

[fire_of_avalon]

Mostly people just make me type everything for them because I guess no one has seen 100wpm before, and being able to type as such makes me some sort of wizard.

My average typing speed hovers right around 85 wpm and my coworkers think I have seven fingers per hand.

You'd given me something to which I may aspire, madam.

[Sephex]

One of my biggest pet peeves when I was younger was when my dad used the family computer. He barely went on, but when he did it was for fantasy sports. When I asked when he would be off, he usually told me it would be after he typed a message to the league.

20 minutes later, he had a short paragraph typed. This post would have taken him around the same time back then. To be fair, he is a lot better now.

[Iceglow]

I'm the only person in my family who has any understanding of computers. I am also the only person in my household who truly understands what a computer/network is doing or attempting to do. Therefore I am automatically at home the tech guy which means I run the household network. I'm also by default the tech call out guy for my family and most of my friends in London too (seriously, I get phone calls from friends who barely see me anymore "Dude, hows it going? Yeah what days off you got coming up?" and I know what the next sentence will be automatically) I once had to teach my sister how to utilize Android safely. Considering she had owned an iPhone 3GS for the past year it took a fair while. I also had to talk my sister through the control panel on Windows 7 via the phone whilst simultaneously trying to cook lunch and eat it and read my news paper. A friend of mine was like "my computers busted" and so I ended up over his after college beer in one hand, screwdrivers and other tools on the table going through his computers guts looking for a problem. Turned out he did genuinely have one, his fan had died. 1 Donor part later from an old computer and an order placed for a proper replacement and it was sorted.

In work as I had an android phone and had studied ICT in college and thus know computers I was automatically nominated to be "tablet guy" in my department. I will point out here, I don't use my phone for much other than texting or making calls. I also dislike tablets on principle of the functionality just isn't anywhere near what I'd expect of the lowest laptop. I still don't know half the things they think I do. I also get repeatedly asked to go do minor maintenance. "Oh Steve, the track label printer is messing up again, can you take a look at it?" or even better "Steve, till 55 won't scan properly, can you investigate it for me?" the fact that we have a group of tech support guys who are paid to come in and look at these things doesn't matter. My boss will always ask me first, if I can't do it within 30 mins he'll then consider calling the tech support guys. The biggest irony is that working on a technology department you'd believe I wasn't the only one with some actual technical know-how.

[rubah]

I had a customer who didn't know what a url or address bar was a while back. He was pretty funny and kept calling me 'young lady'. Adorable old people!

[Loony BoB]

Well, I work in IT, so I guess I am IT. xD

My favourite 'pebkac' moment would almost certainly be when we got a call in for a computer which had lost power. The engineer arrived at the desk, moved the mouse, and the screen (which had gone into sleep mode while the user was on the phone) blinked into life and asked for the user to unlock the PC. Some people.

My favourite moments of all generally come from other things, though. Like logins. In one company, there was a Thomas Watt, and the userid was the first initial of your first name and then your surname. But the best one was Michael Cockburn, who worked in a company that took the first six letters of your surname and then the first initial of your first name as your ID. Unfortunate.

[Jiro]

Those are golden man.

[rubah]

That's when a good and sensitive IT department will offer to manually adjust a user name.

[Old Manus]

Pebkac is probably my favourite IT acronym of all.

[Loony BoB]

That's when a good and sensitive IT department will offer to manually adjust a user name.

We didn't control that side of things. =] But it allowed for a good giggle.

[Rantz]

I was about to burn my cards, to fall onto the IT Consultant's Last Resort(tm): Idk, it was a virus.