I think some people are just more vocal than others.

Everyone in my team considers our IT equipment to be unfit for purpose, but most of them just get annoyed and tolerate it. I prefer to report everything to the helpdesk, because if they have to keep reacting to minor annoyances then it puts pressure on them to fix the underlying problems. 

alasta:

 

I prefer to report everything to the helpdesk, because if they have to keep reacting to minor annoyances then it puts pressure on them to fix the underlying problems. 

 

I've tried that technique and I just got excuses like "that's the way it is" or "it's the vendor's fault and we can't do anything". If I ask why we continue to use that vendor, "it's our standard".

/headdesk

alasta:

 

I think some people are just more vocal than others.

 

Everyone in my team considers our IT equipment to be unfit for purpose, but most of them just get annoyed and tolerate it. I prefer to report everything to the helpdesk, because if they have to keep reacting to minor annoyances then it puts pressure on them to fix the underlying problems. 

 

I class users into 3 categories. 

1) People who complain no matter how small an issue is. 

2) People who never complain no matter how big an issue is

3) Everyone else :) 

4)  People who have 'a friend' who knows what the 'problem' is and can fix it.

5)  People who have 'a friend' who Googles what the 'problem' is and thinks they can fix it.

6) People who realise that Google is going downhill fast thanks to SEO spam BS and no longer trust anything it tells them without trying it in a snapshotted VM first

SaltyNZ:

 

6) People who realise that Google is going downhill fast ...

I've been telling people that Google has all of the answers; even the incorrect ones.

The comments on this story shed a little light on why people lie about IT problems. In many businesses an "incident" is higher priority than a "request", so if you can blame IT then the issue will be resolved more quickly.

One must also remember the standard reply to "What did you do, or were doing when xxxxx happened".

Answer: I did nothing .... never touched it.

At work today: "My screens have gone black! Come and look!"

I went and looked. That was enough to fix them, as they popped back to life a few seconds after I arrived.

Behodar:

 

At work today: "My screens have gone black! Come and look!"

 

I went and looked. That was enough to fix them, as they popped back to life a few seconds after I arrived.

 

I'm picturing the user turning around in their spinny chair and saying 'See!' whilst bumping the mouse with their elbow.

Nah, he was shaking it rather vigorously :)

Seriously, I have no idea what happened: he was shaking the mouse and pressing things on the keyboard for maybe 20 seconds before I got there, so I have no idea why it took that long to "wake up".

alasta: Everyone in my team considers our IT equipment to be unfit for purpose, but most of them just get annoyed and tolerate it. 

A large amount of IT equipment and/or software is unfit for purpose, but as geeks we have the inclination and patience to fiddle with it endlessly until it sort of works most of the time.  Just a few days ago I was helping someone with something, followed the instructions exactly, and of course it didn't work because why would it?  Took about an hour of Googling to get it set up, and even then it displayed an error message saying it couldn't connect and to try again when it was already connected and running.

And there's an especially hot circle of hell reserved for whatever pendejo decided that "Something went wrong" is a perfectly fine error message.

neb:

 

And there's an especially hot circle of hell reserved for whatever pendejo decided that "Something went wrong" is a perfectly fine error message.

 

How in the world is the poor software company supposed to sell support contracts if people have a chance of fixing things themselves?!

... as well as the ubiquitous (ahem, wife), who says something is no longer working, yet when asked what she did I could "make it" it work fine? 

Retort is "But I did that", yet when one says you couldn't have otherwise it would not have worked for me either, much waving of divorce papers!!