You've probably heard that old adage about the new hire who goes in for their first day of training ready to do everything by the book but is instead surprised and maybe even disappointed when they're instead taught all of the shortcuts that the experienced grizzled employee has developed over the years, cutting out the parts of the process that are superfluous and unnecessary. The problem is that by learning and only using the shortcuts in the first instance, they're never going to understand…

When it's your job to ensure important information is protected, and someone insists that you delete it, even if it's the client themself, you'd be right to pause for a moment and reassess the situation if something doesn't sound quite right. Clients tend to woefully overestimate their abilities in the matter they're contracting you to handle, so they may be asking you to do something they don't fully understand the implications of. This tech support specialist worked for a small organization,…

Trust that the employee knows how to do their job.

Higher education is interesting in the sense that it can mean wildly different things because—well, people are wildly different themselves. We perceive, retain, and apply information completely differently from one another. No two people are the same. While holding an advanced degree can mean you're intelligent, it doesn't necessarily mean that, and it's usually the people who insist that they're better and smarter than everyone else because of their degree who fall into that “not necessarily”…

Every person who has ever worked in IT or Tech Support knows that having sharp 'people skills' is just as important as understanding computers and technology. Every day, those employees have to deal with people having technological issues, so they need to know not only how to handle the problem, but also how to handle the people with that problem. That can get incredibly tricky, as people are not at their best when they are having issues, and many simply don't want to learn when their issues ha…

Earlier in my career, working for a retail organization that also had a workshop providing maintenance and break-fix work, I received some sage advice from a wizened and weary mechanic who had been dealing with unruly customers for far too long. “Bend over backward to solve their problem today, and they become your permanent problem.” See, there are plenty of people in this world just looking for the attention of someone, and if you make it your problem to help them, they'll identify you as som…

There's something about stories of time in the military that just really tick all boxes. For one thing, you have archetypical authoritarian figures aplenty who have a very real and absolute authority over their subordinates, the kind of power that a overstepping assistant retail manager or wizened doctor's office receptionist would salivate buckets over. The thing is, in this type of environment, you're going to be ordered to do things that you don't agree with or that just plain old don't make…

It feels like the more specialized someone is at one thing, the worse they are at others, and the more educated and specialized they are, the more surprising the things they can't do will be.It's almost as if living your life with a singular drive and focus leaves you as a not-very-well-rounded individual, probably one of the reasons celebrities are being consistently picked apart in the landscape of the modern social media levels of exposure they're placed under. We're quickly reaching a point…

This web designer was responsible for managing and maintaining a collection of websites that their organization maintained for clients, but their organization had a particularly strange policy where requests from clients always needed to be considered with their boss telling them that they couldn't say no to requests, regardless of whether or not the requests actually made any sense, were actually good ideas“features” or would bog down and ruin the performance and interface of the web sites. Gr…

Tech support guys have seen it all–from power outages and troubleshooting, to complete idiocracy, IT guys must cultivate some serious patience to deal with the technologically illiterate folks of the world.

Technology has made our jobs both easier and harder at the same time. Why? Because technology often has a mind of its own and decides to work on its own terms. It can be so frustrating when you're trying to get work done, and the internet goes out or some issue with your computer interferes with your progress. Back in the 90s, a quick kick to the side of the modem would usually fix the problem, but it's not that simple nowadays. It's also frustrating when the tech team takes an average of fiv...

Just because you have a degree doesn't make you smart, and that is pretty obvious when you take a close look at people who have graduated from college. Let's talk about school. A student's quick thinking saved the day when his school's computers encountered a recurring shutdown issue. The school relied on a program that reset changes after logout, requiring students to save work on the server. But a licensing issue caused the PCs to shut down after 20 minutes, deleting unsaved work and frustrat…

Instant karma is the best, especially when it involves a manager who is out to get a new hire for no reason other than ego. This story is about a new IT manager, who clashed with a paranoid facilities manager at the manufacturing company they both worked at. The IT guy knew his stuff, but the micromanager was overprotective of jobs that 'belonged' to him, and often told him to get lost. For context, the micromanager controlled a critical production machine with an outdated computer system, and…

Once I had a very incompetent coworker who was just the nicest person to walk the face of the earth. Seriously, it was so hard to be angry at her for not doing her job well because she was always so chipper and thoughtful. Much like Lucy in this story. One employee took to r/talesfromtechsupport to share a story about their coworker, Lucy, who began working as a HelpDesk technician at a financial company. They did password resets, fixed Windows issues, and basically did all of the tech stuff re…

Whether you're a computer wiz or technologically challenged, we can all agree that there's one office appliance that has earned the award for ‘Worst Piece of Equipment Ever Made’: The printer.

When you work at a call center, every day is different. You never know who's going to pick up the phone and call you that day. Will you get the super polite Gen X-er in need of genuine support, the Karen who thinks she knows best (even though she's the one who called in the first place), or the boomer who takes 45 minutes to explain they need help with something they could have easily Googled? Sometimes, the lines are dead, and you can goof around with your coworkers, and sometimes, you can't...