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A pie chart labelled “How I fix stuff working in IT”
The biggest segment is "Restart whatever isn’t working2 The second biggest segment is “Quick google search” The last segment is “IT placebo effect: My mere presence has fixed the issue”
That’s not a placebo effect, it’s a tech aura. It levels up with experience. Eventually it even works over the phone or remote. But since it’s a party buff it doesn’t work for your own tech problems, only others’.
Or the gremlins that move the electrons across the logic gates want to make you look stupid in front of your boss. Which is why you call them over to say “Boss the system is down” and when they take a look it works as expected. I solved this by making an extra bitcoin wallet and depositing 0.001% of my salary religiously. No such issues have happened since.
An then there’s the foolproof method of getting fired for telling the boss that the system is down
My favorite personal IT story is about a big printer we had that kept jamming, but every time the tech showed up to take a look it would start working again. One time he had just arrived and was standing there talking to the manager, and we all heard the thing resume printing all by itself. Unable to observe the problem or get it to fail while he was there, he finally brought in a wallet-size photo of himself and taped it to the inside of the cover, so it was looking right at the print head.
I swear on everything holy in this world, that printer never jammed again.
At my office, we call it “proximity dot exe.” Every device we use has a proximity protocol it runs in the background. When something starts giving us error messages and one of the IT people comes around, it immediately starts acting right… like nothing was wrong in the first place.
My office calls it Computer Mana. Some people have a lot of computer mana, some people are bone dry. But like pokemon gym badges, computers will sometimes act up and refuse to follow orders if you don’t have enough computer mana.
that green pie is mostly my pie.
I always walk away from green situations saying “Well, glad I could fix it!” with a wink
My mother has the opposite effect. Her mere presence makes electronics behave oddly. The number of times IT has said to her “I’ve never seen this before” is ridiculous. One of my favorites was when spell check on word started flagging everything as a spelling mistake. This was of course because she SOMEHOW changed the reference dictionary to Portuguese. With key shortcuts. Unknowingly. More than once
That is a PEBKAC right there.
When working tech support for the cable company it was always interesting when I got a call that had to be escalated. I’d always check back on the notes and find out they mostly would just send out a truck and the technician would report back that the customer was just stupid.
my phrasing was always “I’ve been known to intimidate some electronics in my day”
Today I fixed a routing issue by merely enabling logging of some rules in the firewall. Probably something wasn’t applied properly, but I like to think it was my touch that did it
I always called that “the technician’s aura” myself. The reverse, where someone seems to cause it equipment to malfunction spontaneously wherever they go, I call “the jinx aura”.
Naturally I’m an it technician and ended up marrying a jinx, so the world stays precariously balanced on our area.
At my office, we call it “proximity dot exe.” Every device we use has a proximity protocol it runs in the background. When something starts giving us your messages and one of the IT people comes around it immediately starts acting right… like nothing was wrong in the first place.
It’s not a gift, it’s a curse. Do you know how hard it is to fix things where you are cosmically cockblocked from replicating the problem? (I mean, you guys probably do)
Imagine repairing an engine making a weird noise in an old used car, the owner just bought it, only the owner can hear it, and their last mode of transportation was a donkey.
IT using domain expansion to fix the problem.
You forgot one, the classic 1D10T error. In that case, you have to contact HR to have the PEBKAC removed.
For Teams make sure you logout and then log back in. That restarts the session. Restarting your computer does nothing to Teams.
