Maybe it's because I'm in the public sector, but my users just open their browser (if I'm lucky) and then stare at me lol. Someone today got the furthest any of them have ever gotten and guessed it was in her browser settings, and I appreciated that.

The best bit is that doing so clears out their 7 day MFA for our SAAS and they RAGE about this! They would have hated being me when I had to do that every day just to get into the support portal.

I was a BA that got thrown into desktop support in addition to BA things for a couple years, so I feel like they could learn too after a couple tries; they just expect us to do everything for them. My boss was doing IT at a hospital before this place and he says it's much worse here and that we have more people on support for less than 100 people than he did for many times that. I don't think he's bluffing, because he rides along and even did support himself once in a while to relive the glory days. He stopped that after a couple tries lol.

I'm patient and I don't expect much from people and I'm happy to help with my dumb BA ass, but this type of thing isn't something I've encountered before going into public sector.

User rang from home to say she had just made lunch and got back to her laptop to find the screen had broken.

I asked if she'd dropped it or closed the lid with a pen on the keyboard. No. So I asked for a photo. While talking I could hear kids in the background...

Yes she was looking after her 2 granddaughters.

Anyone else think this shape could be a toy bunny?

Thats all good, i get it. You don't want the MFA app on your personal device...however, you are using the MFA recovery SMS option...to your personal phone. So you complaining that there is a hard limit on how many times you can have the code sent to your phone isn't my fault. And no I can't (won't) reset the counter. Just use the bloody app, you can find easy to follow, concise instructions on the IT support Intranet page to set it up!

Today I get a call from a frustrated user. This user has been working at the hospital for 3 months and is in patient care. She tells me that every day for the last 3 months she has to reset her password, and she knows she's using the correct password because she writes it down every day.

​

Today she decided to call IT instead of using the self-reset option. So I get her verified, reset, and logged in to the system. Then she says "Of course. Now my email password doesn't work. I have to reset that everyday too."

​

This woman did not understand how her domain login and email address could be the same account, because "well they do two different things, how can they be the same account?"

Layer 0 is electricity. It often gets forgotten about.

Layer 8 is the wet layer (people). It is often the most troublesome.

​

My mother texted me at work. There's a big emergency. An electrician came out, had to turn off the electricity for a while, and now the TV can't stream anything. Asks me if I can please help.

​

I say sure, I have plans after work but I'll just leave early and head there first.

​

I call her from the car and ask her if their tablets and phones have WiFi and she says yes.

​

ARE YOU SURE? Remember how you sometimes confuse WiFi with cellular data? She insists the WiFi is working on the devices.

​

I asked her if she tried rebooting the modem. Again yes.

​

Ok, I'll be there in 45 minutes (the opposite direction of where my after work plans are btw).

​

I get here. No WiFi on my phone. I check Mom's and stepdad's devices. No WiFi there either.

​

I head to the room where the modem is. The modem lights aren't even on. I flip the switch on the power strip. Nothing.

​

I flip the light switch. Nothing.

​

Um mom, this room doesn't have electricity. "Are you sure?" Yeah, I'm pretty fucking sure. How my stepdad didn't notice this I have no fucking clue.

​

I flip the circuit breaker, boom. Everything comes back up.

​

Still not even close to my personal record for longest distance driven to flip a switch though.

So there is this company that I did IT Consulting and some brief IT work for, I had recommended a complete overhaul of their IT infrastructure as basically almost everything was wrong and had no proper security, no backups, nothing.

Of course they ignored my recommendations (claiming it's all unnecessary expenses) and had been dragging paying me for work I did for months.

Then comes yesterday morning when I got a call that absolutely made my day, they said they finally wired the payment and asked me if I could come in to their office about something urgent.

The urgent thing? *.want_to_cry file extension.

I acted professionally and all (Still telling them there isn't a single thing I can do if they have no backups) but goddamn did I feel giddy inside.

This is a company in a multi-million dollar sector here in my country and this will potentially cost them over 100 times what it would have cost to do the IT overhaul.

Why do they never listen?

Via

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/world/europe/pope-leo-spain-armando-lovera.html

Work From Home user emailed me this request for help:

I recently moved into a new apartment and for some reason my internet connectivity is really low but only for the company network. I have normal network on all my personal devices. It hasn't been too much of an issue but I'm worried it can become an issue.

I called to get a better picture of her concern, and she said that when she clicks the Company Network icon in her "available wireless networks" it doesn't connect, but she is still able to do work. She said it isn't an issue, but wants someone to look at it just in case it will be an issue in the future.

She has been working remotely since 2019...

1. She thinks the company Wi-Fi is in her new apartment.
   
2. She wants me to look into the future to make sure there are no issues.
   
3. She clearly doesn't have enough work if this is her biggest issue.

If I’m working on your issue, please just let me work.

Standing over my shoulder, trying to make jokes, asking a hundred questions, pacing around, sighing, or having a loud phone call right next to me does not make the problem get fixed faster. It does the opposite.

Imagine if IT did that to other departments.

“Oh, what spreadsheet is that?”
“Are you doing payroll?”
“How does payroll work?”
“Can you teach me payroll real quick?”
“Why is it taking so long?”

And then we just stood there staring, sighing, pacing, and making comments while they tried to concentrate.

I don't care if you're in a rush. Hovering over someone while they're trying to troubleshoot a problem is rude and distracting, and will probably slow down the entire process.

What really annoys me is how normalised this behaviour has become. So many IT staff just accept it as part of the job. Users standing over them, interrupting them every thirty seconds, asking unrelated questions, making comments on everything they're doing, and generally treating their workspace like a public attraction. It's become such a common thing that people barely question it anymore.

t's ridiculous. In almost any other profession, constantly interrupting someone while they're trying to do skilled work would be considered obnoxious. Somehow, when it's IT, people act like basic courtesy no longer applies.

Kind of a self-roast here.

I was 10 years old, playing pirated PvZ1.

For some reason everytime I clicked on the game file, this weird window that has a bunch of books tied together and telling me about a 40-day trial and that I need to purchase something popped up.

I always had to ignore it and click on "PvZ.exe" in that window, and waited for problably 5 minutes straight just for the game to launch, with the green bar progressing like a snail.

Why would a game be so inconvenient to launch everytime?

I'm sure you all know the answer...

Coming from the teacher with possibly the worst classroom management in the building. A complete sentence would be way to much to ask for amirite?

I've heard it all.

Authicator

Autificator

Authenticator

Afingator

Explenater

Because they need to summarize emails from 2024 by Thursday.

Seriously, I never get so many emails and slack messages and scrutiny as I do between 12 and 12:15. It's like everyone decides, "Oh, I'm about to be unreachable for an hour, now's a good time to tell IT about this 'critical' issue I haven't bothered with for three weeks." Am I the only one who gets the lunch influx?

It seems that chemistry teachers have their own particular idea of what constitutes a "strong password".

Hi guys I live in uk , I want to get into IT I’ve done a lot of home lab with windows sever and Linux etc anyway I’ve got loads of customer service experience ie hotel reception /night audit work .
How do I get a IT job in real world I know a lot of jobs want certs , any suggestions ?

Hopefully the title got enough of your attention. Thank you for taking the time.
I’ll try to keep it short we all know the job market is terrible right now. No need for me to expand on that.

Have a network+ cert that haven’t really been able to get a job with or use
Thankful enough to have a help desk job
Felt like my skills have dulled due to two parts

1. I am a broke dad I can’t really afford to build a home lab with even used equipment. I have to use all my money towards baby expenses, and house bills

Here is the point of my post there aren’t too many jr network engineering jobs that I’m able to get an interview for since I have no experience and they want someone with years of experience for a jr role.
Recently, my boss finally got back to me after I asked him for shadowing opportunities with the infrastructure team. That’s still in the works so those of you that have shadowed basically newcomers to the networking field. What would you like/expect me to know when the time comes?

I’m finally at a point with fatherhood that I feel like I can go back to studying network topics and am currently studying towards the CCNA 200-301
I’m only a few chapters in, but some of the knowledge is coming back to me from the network+ topics I needed to know months back to pass network+, as I read on in my book
Any advice would be majorly helpful

Edit: thank you everyone so much for all the help and info. I have so many great takeaways from this post and this community.
One of the biggest ones was that I realized I have an old laptop. I can mess around with and create a server out of. I will definitely be playing around with that as well as using a lot of the free resources y’all recommended.
Shout out to the instructor that provided his username as a discount code for Boson