I try keep my ID10T errors between an LLM and myself now. I diligently follow all of it’s first steps that I know won’t work. Excuse me, what do you mean check pihole is installed? Of course its, oh it errored and didn’t install. New chat copy-paste error.
Happened today actually. apt didn’t have access to the internet because the pi’s DNS was set to 100.100.100.100. GPT didn’t figure that out, it did politely ask me whether lighttpd.conf not existing was because pihole didn’t exist after I just, ahem, installed it.
Aww
And lose face the next time the internet goes out and they’re blowing on their cable like an idiot in front of everyone. Love it!
It makes it run better. Same as game cartridges.
Who cares saves a ticket.
This is how superstitions start.
" It’s bad luck to put your shoes on the table"
Okay Grandma, if that’s what it takes for you to accept germ theory, I’m in.
Just tell them to unplug and plug back in without the added step about blowing on it. I tell people to do that all the time when a plugged device doesn’t work. Fixes things all the time.
Yup, superstitions like “blowing on the NES cartridge to remove dust will make it work.”
In some cases this could introduce enough moisture to get a connection.
And could also corrode the cartridge. I knew a guy whose son absolutely ruined a Pokémon 3DS cartridge that way.
why tf would you put your shoes on the table
It’s comfy to have my feet up
How else are you going to reason with animals?
I used to say, “Look, I already know you have it plugged in, but unplug and plug it in again to re-seat it. You get that out of the way while I keep looking on my end.”
Boom! You didn’t call them stupid and got them engaged as a partner in the troubleshooting process.
Had one lady on the phone, “I’m sure the cable is screwed in, but from my end, it looks for all the world like it’s not.”
She was offended but finally looked. Lo and behold, unplugged. Here’s the kicker, she starts demanding that I explain why the maid would do that. She wasn’t merely exclaiming about the maid’s malfeasance, she wanted me to explain it.
A favorite was telling a guy it looked utterly disconnected, like the cable wasn’t even plugged in. (We could kinda tell from our end.) “Hold on a minute.” I hear the backdoor screen slam, he’s gone for 3 minutes, modem comes on!
“What did you find?!”
“Cable company came to disconnect my neighbor, got my line instead, screwed it back in.”
LOL, our idiot disco tech left the pedestal unlocked AND got the wrong customer.
I used to work for a cable company. I remember a coworker telling me a long time ago that one of the challenges they used to have was making sure the caller’s TV was tuned to the correct channel. So, the conversation would go like this:
“Please change the channel to 27” (or any other random number that isn’t a locally used channel) “What do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change it to 3, now what do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change to channel 4” “It works!”
For those that don’t know, there was a long period of time where the auxiliary input into TVs was tuned to either channel 3 or channel 4. There was a good chance that the customer didn’t know which one was correct for their TV and would have assumed that it was already set correctly if you asked.
Another tip for IT folk out there.
When offering a user a laptop bag, don’t ask them if they want a laptop bag. Ask them what color laptop bag they’d like.
When I started doing this acceptance of laptop bags went from 50% to 100%.
You’ll have to stock a variety of colors, but it’s a small price to pay to encourage the use of laptop bags.
Ask them if they want the light or the heavy duty. It’s the same bag. No one cares.
Everyone knows the dark grey heavy duty bags are the best.
But the titanium-colored bags are so much less bulky!
these are all lies, gunmetal is the ideal color
Same concept applies in sales. The way you phrase the question can help get the answer that you want
I used to ask customers to unplug their modem, tell me were the pins on the plug all brass or did it have black tips so I knew which model they had.
In reality I just wanted them to turn the damn thing off and on again
This is a really solid solution. Everyone knows about the "did you turn it off and on again? " trope so instead of them pretending or what not you make them feel like they’re problem solving with you.
I used to say I wanted to test an idea, open up a terminal, run some basic commands like ls and grep. Then ask them to do a restart so none of my tests would “cause a conflict”.
Works constantly.
This also probably increases the chance that they will actually look at the cable and touch it instead of just answering that it’s obviously plugged in. Brilliant!
Once had the guy on the phone tell me to unplug the Ethernet cable and flip it around. I was thinking like, “What? Are Ethernet cables one-way? That doesn’t make sense…but whatever”. Lo and behold, it worked…one end wasn’t all the way in 😓
When I was still at university (20+ years ago) a girl asked my to help her figure out why her Internet in her dorm room wasn’t working. My first question was “is it plugged in?” She said it was, so that evening I went to her room to check it out. First thing I did was find the end of her network cable and plug it back into her computer. When I pointed out that she had said it was definitely plugged in she responded with “I thought you meant the power cable”. I almost pointed out that if the power cable was not plugged in then I’m pretty sure she would not have been complaining that the internet was not working but at this point it was obvious that she was just using her “computer problems” to get me to come to her room and that she was the one that unplugged the cable. The most ridiculous part is that all she had to say was “hey, you should come to my room” and I would have happily obliged.
that’s it??? You are not going to tell us what followed sexually?
Well something was plugged in the hole eventually
It wasn’t sexual. She had a gun, two sodas, and Mortal Kombat installed.
