I would be happy in this situation as long as I was reimbursed for the gas cost. I love driving and the task here seems simple. So I would get to drive there, spend 15 or so minutes, drive back. Ultimate chill day.
iiiiiiitttttttttttt
you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
Why does a BJ have to be forged?
Has this IT guy not heard of wake on lan
Or is his employer the kind of person who doesn't use wake on lan
He is Ian
Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department's lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that "Jane Doe" does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn't have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn't. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
Sometimes I am reminded, that my country does not hold monopoly on incompetent idiots.
It is a universal human condition
Been doing IT for 20 years.
The one ray of hope is that the number of entirely tech illiterate people I deal with has decreased. They're retiring/dying. It's not nearly as common now to deal with people that don't understand how to literally turn something on. I also got out of the private sector, so I'm not dealing with the general public, which always made me want to drive my car into oncoming traffic on my way home every day.
But yeah, I always make a point of embarrassing someone when I have to drive somewhere to do something a toddler could have done if they put them on the phone with me.
There's a whole new generation of tech illiterates being born with a smartphone up their asses. I feel that 80's kids peaked at tech literacy, then steadily declined from the mid 90s maybe.
I'd say 2000s was when it peaked.
Knowledge peaked in the 2000s, but those are the 80's and 90's kids. The ones born in the 2000s had an iPhone with 14 and know nothing...
Yup. People under the age of 25 don't even understand files or directories.
iPhones and Chromebooks have abstracted everything away.
Defensive, or outright steering ticket notes was my FAVORITE skill. I learned of so many shitshows weeks later because my department head read my notes, shut the person down and didn't even mention it to me. It actually got a few employees in trouble with their management.
As another IT guy I'm getting less and less optimistic about that future.
Software these days """just works""" and so now you have kids and young adults who barely know how to interact with a file explorer, don't know what the different file extensions mean, or even things I would consider basic like the difference between "network connection" and "WiFi".
This is why being an elder millennial kinda gives you the edge, especially if you have been using computers since the 80s. Old MS-DOS machines forced you to understand how directory management worked.
Elder millennials and baby genXers be like
The Oregon Trail Generation will fix your shit!
You're catching the middle wave. Wait until the iPad kids in Gen alpha come up and don't understand anything with a cord.
When I used to work support for home Internet, it was accepted practice to ask if we could speak to the child in the house if we were having trouble with an adult...
Yesterday I had one of our users tell me her 7zip was "eating files".
So I told her to show me what her process was for unzipping a folder.
This bitch hit the "extract here" button on the folder as it sat in her download folder which has stuff going back to 2019 in there. So naturally the last edit dates of all the contents in that zipped folder sent things off all over her downloads folder.
I know my generation was the first to really grow up with computers but I have met people older than me that learned the basics. Some people just don't want to learn how to better use a computer.
My father was still upgrading his PC when he was 93.
Much respect. I couldn't pay my dad to build his own computer. The man will build Legos until the end of time but when I tell him building a computer is just more expensive Legos he gets scared haha.
I wrote auto-reply instructions for this one, it's the same as she was doing but one click down to make a folder to match the zip name.
That should really be standard at this point.
Not defending her, but for years I've felt like 'Extract Here' should create a subfolder by default
Extract here implies that it extracts it into the current directory.
That would be the most convenient....
Young people (13 - 18) literally cannot use a computer. They are too used to phones.
Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can't say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven't even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.
Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get 'That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don't need that.' Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.