The complete guide to pleasing your IT department

 

1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children's art. We don't have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

2. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

3. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won't be there when we need your password. It's nothing for us to remember 700 screen saver passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your mail because your computer won't power on at all.

5. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We're just testing.

6. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

7. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

8. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's electronics in it.

9. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

10. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We're collectors.

11. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person's chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

12. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don't have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

13. When an I.T. person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in a cathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?" that motivates us.

14. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently that get sucked into black holes.

15. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

16. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by "My thingy blew up".

17. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

18. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 20kg of computer sitting on top of them.

19. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.

20. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?

21. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don't have any money to speak of anyway.

22. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

23. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call I.T. support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.

24. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn't know anything about the problem.

25. When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We've got lots of disk space on that mail server.

26. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.

27. When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company.People out in Pofadder like to keep abreast of what's going on.

28. When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

29. Don't bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

30. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We'll find all the settings and drivers somewhere.

31. Keep it crashing!

 

ROFL

 

Thank God I don't do that kinda work anymore! Or any at all for that matter...LOL

I've come across all of those but my favorite which I'm amazed isn't there is...

"You are late, you should have been here 3 hours ago" followed by "While you are here I have a list of other things for you to look at"

Do these idiots think you only have them to look after and not realise the reason you are late is because the call before was turned into half day job because some plonker handed you a list of things to do on arrival.

 

Try doing some hard manual work..you wimps

What, so we can get paid sh1t all for working our asses off doing work that any monkey can do?

 

No thanks!

 

(Apologies to any manual workers here )

A monkey would probably solve your IT Dept. problems quicker...and for less money too!

Personally I don't have any IT Dept problems..

 

I *am* our IT dept...

 

And I'm perfect.... ...bwaahahaha

Here is a story.

I work on an internet betting site totalbet.com for Tote. They have a huge Computer department full of people who dont know whats happening.

One day a woman phone the IT dep. saying that her hard drives are missing

Drive H,I,J are not there.

Some 17 year old comes down to look, and diagnoses the problem.

"Yes your hard drives are failing, we have better replace your computer."

I was walking past and know this computer so I drop a helpful hint.

"No they where networked drives from CUST1." CUST1 is the computer behind, the computer in question is CUST2

"Right!" He said "So the hard drives on CUST1 needs replacing!"

"No, its a networked drive, the drive was mapped from CUST1"

"So the Hard Drive is not working on CUST1"

"NO!"

"So why wont it access CUST1?"

"Becuase its not switched on"

 

That is the truth.

There are some good people in our IT dep. Just they have 17 years olds to do things like, replace keyboards, mice and stuff.

 

Stuart

 

[This message has been edited by SRRAE (edited 06-12-2001).]

That's a classic, I love it.

 

Whilst not entirely IT related you might like this - it's true.

 

I work in publishing.

 

When books are created and it is intended that they are to be used for foreign languages as well as English, we create a 5th ink plate, the standard 4 plates being - Cyan, magenta, Yellow and Black, the 5th is invariably called TEXTBLACK.

 

We created a children's book like this, in order to check that the 5th plate is okay, on screen its value is set to 100% magenta so it shows bright pink, this has no effect on output as it prints as a solid colour, that colour being black.

 

We had been through all the pre press stages and were waiting for the 30,000 copies of this book to be delivered to the warehouse, our advanced orders came in only for all the text to be in PINK!

 

A little chinaman in the far east had decided that this was obvously what we wanted, you don't get much brains when you pay a grain of rice and a glass of milk a week!

 

Needless to say 30,000 copies were pulped and a lesson well learnt.

very very self gratifying.

 

i often watch the it departmeny at my work and look on in amazement. They think the sun shines out there areses because they know how to turn a pc on (whoooboogie boogie)Funny really. Yet they are in the lower paybraket in banking anyway??????

I have happened across many interesting individuals while working for 7 years in IT, before seeing the light and moving to Telecoms.

 

Was interviewing one such article for a Helpdesk position once and he was just class. He was just out of school but claimed to know everything about IT, having once switched a PC on in a lesson. I started with reasonable questions, which he couldn't answer, including one involving how you tell if a network card is working or not and finally got down to the You Can't Seriously Be This Thick While Applying For An IT Job questions.

 

All the icons on a screen are too small for comfortable viewing - what do you do?

I would change the monitor

 

Bye Bye....

 

Another chap was asked how he would cope with the Main Boss's secretary ringing at 4:55 on a Friday afternoon complaining that the presentation required for a meeting at 7pm with American counterparts would not print.

I would tell her to chill, that it wasn't our fault and that she should go home and enjoy the weekend.

 

I wanted to employ him just so that I could see that happen...

 

[This message has been edited by Ajay (edited 06-12-2001).]

And that doesn't include any of the CV fixing that goes on.

 

Had one chap on the basis of his CV which looked impeccable and extremely suited to the Network Technician role that we had currently vacant.

 

So I arranged an interview with him and he turns up in Jesus sandles and a cardigan. Brilliant! He even dresses like an IT person . However, his finger had obviously slipped on the keyboard while typing his DOB. While it clearly stated 74 on the CV, he looked more like an 84 Year of Birth.

 

While questioning him about his CV, I picked up various points and asked him about them. Suspicions mounted when he couldn't remember what he'd done and notably on one occasion when I asked him about a job he'd claimed that he had done for 3 years. Have I? Don't remember that. was not the required response...

 

Turns out, he'd once glanced through a Networking NT book and had copied down the chapter titles with a few made up positions.

I'da give him the job for entertainment value alone!

 

 

------------------

Glen

:)

I am the IT department for our 4 man company and I can understand a lot of the points on there but that has to be the most concentrated piece of sarcasm I have ever seen. No wonder IT people are seen as Nerds with no personality. I bet the guy who wrote that has a network of linux machines in his front room that he uses to host a Dungeons & Dragons theology discussion forum. One IT guy I met in the states had a bumper sticker on the back of his station wagon saying 'Linux users do it for themselves'.

 

 

Ajay,

 

The secretary ringin' up at 4:55 on a Friday afternoon bit...here's my answer to that and you just know where this is gonna go...ROFL

 

Me? I'd have been over there like a shot...main bosses secretaries tend to be well fit as they don't want a right minger projecting a bad image!

 

So I would probably have got under the desk to check out her network connection...just to be sure

 

Oh and taken my spare hard drive with me just in case! You never know! LOL

Timmy, there is a lot that I could say to that and if I knew you and the other 400 people on this forum better then I probably would, but as I don't, I'll stick to simply this :

 

Here's a couple of classic jobs i've been involved with.

Years ago we sent a number of engineers to a company who were having no end of errors on disks from a PC's 5.25" floppy drive.

We replaced the drive on about 3 occasions, then replaced the motherboard and finally swapped out the complete machine as a last resort. Still getting errors all the time and losing data. I eventually sorted it when the boss threatened to take his business elsewhere and I was told to spend a few hours there and get it sorted once and for all. At the end of the day the secretary did an accounts backup to floppy and safely stored the disk... by using a magnet to stick the disk to the side of her filing cabinet!

Another good one was getting an irate customer wanting us on site immediately as none of the PC's could run the accounts software. On arrival there was no power in the building! Te whole street was off. Silly cow just said "Well it's your job to get the computers working - that's why we have a maintenance contract"

I said yes but unfortunately we don't maintain the power station.

Once had an incredibly bright (!) student doing work experience in Luton Police Station. Nothing untoward there. Only, one Wednesday morning I got a call saying that their main PICDAR machine wasn't reading any data. PICDAR is the machine they use to photograph criminals.

 

Anyway, I grabbed a pool car and drove down to Luton to check this machine out and discovered that a floppy was wedged into the drive. I extracted it and to my surprise another one popped into view. I extracted that one and noticed still a third stuck in the drive. This one wasn't coming out so the drive had to be taken to pieces but this enterprising student had thought that FDDs were like Jukeboxes - you could just put as many disks as you liked in there and the PC would know which one you wanted to use... Of course, it does. PCs are psychic.... Psychic Computers....

and then you get the young, very blonde very hot secreatary who wants to get into IT Darling. Except you kinda have to think on the odd occasion.

 

on a smoko break

Welshguy "Yeah Manchester is pretty rough"

BlondeGirl "Really?"

Welshguy "Yep, bad people everywhere really really rough, crime rate is quite high"

BlondeGirl "oh and I thought it was nice over there"

Welshguy "Fuck off... no way.. had the worst thing happen, wanna hear?"

BlondeGirl "Yeah"

Welshguy "well I was driving on the motorway in my citroen at 70mph" (porkie #1)

BlondeGirl "uh uh"

Welshguy "and some fucking prats stole the wheels off my car!! - whilst I was in it"

BlondeGirl "Thats terrible"

 

Me and Welshguy look at each other with the "Oh my God no one can be that fucking dense" look on our faces..

 

Took her a good minute or so to click onto the fact that it's pretty difficult to steal wheels off a car thats not stationary.

 

Not IT related but just goes to show some of the hottest tottie can also be some of the densest on earth.

 

Then there's the check out girl in Atlanta who I tried to explain that in other parts of the world the days coming before the months in dd/mm/yy... she couldn't understand why keying in 15/9/77 wasn't working in her till.... after about 5 mins of explaining with the supervisor she should put it in 9/15/77 she proceeded to make the same mistake on my work collegues id .. but this was much much worse "oh not another one of these here licenses, I'll need the supervisor again" yeah like 11/11/76 can be entered differently.

 

ROFLMAO...

 

There's an average, 50% are above, therefore 50% are below, thank fuck on I'm on the plus side of that one.

 

I read a transcript of a PC help line.

To cut a long story short,

She phoned saying nothing was coming on the screen.

She was told to check the monitor is on.

Tried it still nothing.

Try looking at the back of the computer to see if the power is pluged in the back

Yes.

Is it pluged in to the wall?

Yes.

See if the power is in the back of the monitor.

I think so.

Why do you think so?

I can really see!

Why?

Theres no lights on!

Why?

Cos there is a power cut.

"Right I know your problem, take you computer apart, put it back in to the box and take it back to the shop"

"WHY?"

"Because you are too fucking think to own one"

 

This person soon lost thier job.

 

Stuart

Strangely enough that was the HP Help Line and a friend of one of my friends who shortly thereafter did not "lose" his job as such, he walked out.

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/humour/humidx.htm

 

Some Computer Humour