We’ve all heard the phrase ‘There is no such thing as a dumb question,’ unless you’re these people. IT employees share the dumbest conversations they had with other employees at work. Content has been edited for clarity.
Why Won’t The Computer Turn On?
“I was working IT in a hospital a couple of years back. I went to one of the offices because we had gotten a call about a computer not turning on. We would get them all the time, so this wasn’t unusual. 95% of those calls were ‘user error’ to put it nicely, so already I was expecting bad… But not this bad.
When I got there, she was right, the computer would not turn on at all. I first checked the plug. It was in the wall and looked fine in the back of the computer.
So I asked, ‘What were you doing at the time this computer stopped working?’
To which she responded with, ‘Well, I was using the water cooling feature because I thought it was too hot.’
Now, as a little bit of exposition, this model of computer had a fan port on the top of the machine that somewhat resembled a funnel. When she said ‘water cooled’ she pointed to this fan port.
‘None of the computers here are even water-cooled.’
When I walked back to my desk with the now sloshing computer, my fellows in the IT department were perplexed why I pulled the machine without approval… Until I poured out the water into a trash-can.”
Day Shift Ticket
“I was working as a swing shift server administrator for a large bank. Our location was one of three data centers.
Most nights were crazy busy; however, that night was slow. So, I took the opportunity to look for something to do. I decided to check out the Day Shift ticket queue. There was a ticket open for over a year.
The user’s monitor image would randomly shake. The team could not duplicate it and they replaced the monitor several times. Challenge accepted.
There were almost no employees there at night so I went for a walk. I found the user’s cube and the monitor looked fine. She had a very large monitor which wasn’t normal. Most employees had small LCD monitors at that point. I took a look at her coworker’s monitor and almost immediately realized what was going on.
The user on the other side of the cube wall had an electric desk fan sitting six inches from the back of the large monitor with only a cloth cube wall between them. I turned the fan on and the monitor wigged out. I left the owner of the fan a note asking her to relocate it.
I closed the ticket. The following day I was told that the day techs were given a hard time all day over how simple solving that ticket was.”
Permission
“This summer I worked for my local school-board upgrading their systems and computers;
I was at a school and had to upgrade the operating system of the staff computers. As I was about to leave for the day, one of the teachers came down the hall screaming at me, ‘What have you done?! Nothing works! I can’t see my files! Do you know what you have done!’
So I asked her to show me her computer, which I tested over the network. Everything seemed fine, programs had been reinstalled, data backed up, and drivers installed, but she was still freaking out saying she couldn’t see any of her old files. It got to the point where she was mocking and yelling at me. I have worked retail so I was able to handle it calmly but it was starting to get annoying.
So I asked her where she stored these files, and she says ‘You know!, on that sand thing!’
‘You mean SanDisk? Like a USB dongle?’ I asked.
‘Yea! The computer won’t accept it after you changed everything without my permission!’ she yelled
I ask her to show me her USB, which she pulled out of her pocket and attempted to plug into a USB port.
‘See! What did you do?! It doesn’t even fit anymore!’ she screamed at me.
At this point, I literally facepalmed, took the USB, and pushed it open, so the male adapter actually stuck out.
I plugged it into the port and walked out, while she went, ‘Oh.’
The next day I returned to the school and I walked past a class and heard her telling another teacher how ‘That IT guy broke my computer and expected me to fix it.'”
And He Was The IT MANAGER
“This guy, ‘McGuire’ was hired to replace our IT manager. That means he should know the job right?
WRONG!
He would constantly call me and the other IT guy for help when he was at a customer’s site. One time, he asked me what the command was to make a Windows Server 2003 a Domain Controller. I was stunned by this, it took me a minute to answer him.
One day, McGuire and the other IT guy were at customers’ sites, leaving me (the least experienced) there alone. No big deal I thought. When suddenly our email went down.
So I went to the server room to see what was going on after I couldn’t remote into the Exchange server. I pulled up the server on our KVM and saw that one of the hard drives in the mirror had failed. I told the COO and CFO this, and that it should only take a few hours to rebuild the mirror once I get the drive in. Meanwhile, McGuire came back, hearing how the email was down, and proceeded to the server room.
When I got back with the replacement drive, there he was, with a stupid look on his face. He unplugged the good drive while the server was on (these were not hot swap drives) thus destroying all the data. The mirror could no longer be rebuilt, I had to start from scratch. Then he had the AUDACITY to leave to go back to his customer…
The whole time I was being asked when the email would be back up. When the COO finally came up and talked to me, I told him what he did, and he just shook his head. I had no idea how he wasn’t fired that day.”
Wrong Label
“I worked IT, but I had a lot of downtimes so I helped out some of the clerical staff with their filing from time to time. The nature of our business required us to group packs of files by state. Everyone was too lazy to then further sort them by alphabetical or SSN order, so we never bother sorting by anything other than the state. There’s basically no real way to mess up here.
So we just sorted these huge stacks of papers in the conference room and were dragging back piles one state at a time to the cleaned-out filing room and making labels for the state each drawer would contain. The girl making the labels made the label ‘NE – New England’.
When gently confronted with the mistake, she started getting angry insisting it was, and then proceeded to not speak to anyone for the rest of the week. We had to look back at some of the other labels she made, and she had written ‘NB’ for Nebraska.
It’s even more incomprehensible seeing as how she works with these forms EVERY DAY, was involved in resorting all those forms we were moving into the filing room, and is responsible for our incoming and outgoing mail. She’s also an American, in case anyone wants to play the foreigner card.”
He Was No Expert
“A couple of years ago, the person who was handling troubleshooting files asked me to help her send an email. We recently changed to a web-based system for handling emails on our Mac machines. So I gave her a quick verbal ‘how to’ over the phone and she asked if I could come to her desk to walk her through it step by step. No joke.
My job involved a fair amount of desktop publishing-related design work. My coworker, according to my hiring manager, had 20 years of graphic design experience. When my other coworker was out of town for a week, this 20-year veteran asked me why he couldn’t move just the box around some text in InDesign without moving the text with it.
Later he asked me why he couldn’t unlock a PDF. I said, ‘What password are you typing in?’
He said, ‘Password.’
Me: ‘Right, what password are you using?’
Him: ‘Password!’
Me, ‘Hang on. Are you typing the word password as the password?’
Him: ‘Yes, password.'”
Adobe Photoshop vs Photoshop
“One of the professors supported by my office needed to purchase a download of Photoshop from the Adobe website. So I went to our receptionist, a woman in her 60s who had difficulty with new-fangled computers. I didn’t ever mind helping her, since it was my job, but she coupled it up with getting very defensive. She resented her own misunderstanding and took it out on me when we tried to fix a problem.
Anyway, she was the only one in the office who had a university credit card, which we needed for purchasing a Photoshop license. So the conversation went as followed:
Me: ‘John needs a license to download Photoshop. Could you please go to Adobe’s website and I’ll show you exactly what he needs?’
Her: ‘I spoke with John. He doesn’t want Adobe, he wants Photoshop.’
Me: ‘Right. Adobe Photoshop.’
Her: ‘Yes. Not Adobe. Photoshop. He needs Photoshop.’
Me: ‘Right. Could you please go to Adobe dot com and I’ll show you-‘
Her: ‘He doesn’t need Adobe. He needs Photoshop!’
Me: ‘Adobe is the name of the company. Photoshop is a particular product they make. I think you’re thinking of Reader, which is-‘
Her: ‘Look. John told me, and I’m telling you. He needs Photoshop.’
Me: ‘Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Can I please use your computer-‘
Her: ‘No. You need to teach me, not show me.’
Me: ‘Alright. Go to Adobe dot com.’
Her: ‘But he doesn’t need Adobe! He needs Photoshop!’
I swear I thought I was being punked. This went on for about five minutes before I gave up, went to my desk, went to Adobe’s site and the license purchasing page, and emailed it to her.”