"That moment when your users blame the Wi-Fi… for a projector not turning on."
Posted by GS_OMEGA@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 76 comments
I still can't get over how creative users get when something stops working. Yesterday, someone called me in a panic because “the Wi-Fi is down and the projector won't turn on.” Turns out… it wasn't plugged in. 😅 What’s the most bizarre user assumption you’ve ever dealt with?
roffelmao@reddit
What really gets me is when the Tier 1 guys just take the users’ word for whatever they think is causing the problem and start investigating that first…
PositiveBubbles@reddit
Or they just dump to us level 3s lol
Dangerous-Ad-170@reddit
Yup, “site users describe network slowness” dropped straight into the networking queue with no troubleshooting, no critical thought, not even a specific computer name.
PositiveBubbles@reddit
Yep, that happens alot. We even get o365 or mailman issues tickets when the email being sent to either or a third party doesn't go through because the user's Outlook is offline or the email they tried to send had an attachment that was to big. Basic troubleshooting isn't a thing anymore
Manricky67@reddit
Sometimes I still do this. Need to train myself to ignore their reasoning even if sounds ok.
size0618@reddit
Strangest call I ever got (so far) in my 18 years was a regular trouble user calling from a remote location after having checked out a loaner laptop for her trip (this was back in the day when everyone used desktops) and was furious that I lied to her. I told her before she went that yes, the laptop had WiFi. What I didn’t know is that evidently she believed WiFi to be this magical always-on and connected network that works anywhere. When she arrived to her destination and discovered that the laptop wouldn’t load anything from the Internet she was pissed.
Bose_Motile@reddit
I was reminded recently how wholeheartedly some people believe that WiFi is a magical energy field that allows all technology to work. I had to educate them that technology runs on blue smoke. Magical energy fields are a myth.
AshleyAshes1984@reddit
The way we make more and more products that require 'phoning home' to even work, this is becoming increasingly true in a way.
Wifi down? Well fuck you, your smart tooth brush won't work till it can speak to the Oral-B servers.
caerbannog13@reddit
We had a firmware update brick two commercial kitchen ovens. Brilliant.
Armando22nl@reddit
True and not a good development. Recently saw a video of a laundry/Washing machine that lacks basic functions if there is no account logged into their cloud.
BioHazard357@reddit
Jeff Geerling?
Armando22nl@reddit
Yes it was. But I'm doubting now, because I think it was a dishwasher right?
RedShift9@reddit
I have this one neat trick where I don't buy stuff that relies on the internet to function.
Armando22nl@reddit
I understand but a laundry machine should not rely on internet at all :)
plumbumplumbumbum@reddit
It gets so much worse.
pdp10@reddit
Right, but you can't control what washers other people make, you can only control your own actions.
Armando22nl@reddit
I agree and if someone wants that machine he can get it. But still the machine should be able to do basic actions without connectivity.
1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit
LOL. I just read where a woman caught her husband cheating because she saw in the app that he was using his toothbrush when we was supposed to be at work!
LMAO
Drew707@reddit
I used to work in a building that also had a HUD office. We ended up switching ISPs from AT&T to Zayo. Zayo had confirmed up and down that they served our building, but we couldn't find the run anywhere, so they sent out a tech. The tech found the run in the basement parking garage. It was still labeled from the previous company that Zayo had acquired, and it ran into the electrical room rather than the telco closet which was odd. He and I traced this thing back up through the various closets to the third floor, through the plenum, and into HUD's office.
We knocked on HUD's door and were let in by the receptionist and this conversation unfolded pretty much verbatim...
And that's how some Zayo tech and I--without ID--got to go up into HUD's plenum and start pulling back fiber that could've been running the secure federal network where Internet is strictly prohibited but the Wi-Fi provides the Google.
zeus204013@reddit
What happened later? (If something happened)
Drew707@reddit
They weren't using Zayo, so the tech wanted the run pulled back to the third floor telco closet. He then spliced into it in the second floor telco closet and we got a straight fiber handoff to our main edge switch. Zayo was by far the best ISP we had used there. Reliable, affordable, and flexible. Highly recommend.
gregyoupie@reddit
I am ashamed my own son ( a "digital native") had the same assumption ariund the age of 15/16. There was a power outage for our whole neighborhhod and he asked why the Wi-fi was down. Like if our home router got electricity via the Internet cabling. He even said "but do something, call [name of our ISP] and tell them to bring the electricity back !".
zeus204013@reddit
In my city only cellular service can offer internet, but after 30 min isn't available (not calls no sms no data). This is new, and scary now that landlines are mostly unused...
Zedilt@reddit
My local power company is also my ISP.
pdp10@reddit
That is unusual. Energis in the UK was a wholesaler/backbone, using pylon-strung fiber, and that's pretty rare. Retail operations by a power utility are even more rare.
Zedilt@reddit
Power companies used to be very highly regulated here in Denmark, over the years they amassed quite a bit of wealth. In 2004, they stuck a deal with the government to be allowed access to this wealth and engage in other business adventures.
They already had a lot of experience installing wires, so they decided that running fiber everywhere was the thing to do.
They already knew the local municipalities the end customers, that and quite a bit of inertia to use fiber from existing telcos that insisted that the existing ISDN network was the future.
It made sense.
After a some years the cooperation between the power companies fell apart, but at this point the large parts of Denmark had fiber installed. Some sold their fiber business to the telcos, others merged with each other growing large enough that they started to acquire some of the old telcos.
My power company decided to just keep their fiber network.
jfarre20@reddit
Whenever the power goes out at work, our ISP calls with a recorded message saying there is an outage due to electrical issues in the service area. That's how I know when the power goes out at work when I'm home and get the call.
Its crazy I get that message first before the power company message.
timwtingle@reddit
I have my wifi on battery backup which usually lasts longer than an outage. Maybe he was just ahead of himself in thinking, you know, there's got to be a way!
gregyoupie@reddit
The way it happened was funnier: it was one of the first days of his summer holidays, I was home working (laptop on battery, and tethering). I heard him get out of bed around 10 or 11 and crawl from his bed to the playroom and try to turn on the PlayStation. That is where I told him "hey, the power went out early this morning for the whole block, but the technicians are there and they are working on it. But yeah, no PlayStation I am afraid... And no hot water either, in case you want to have a shower" . He sulked, crawled back to his bed and that is where he shouted "but hey daaaaad, the wi-fi is down too!"
timwtingle@reddit
😆😝🤷🏻♂️
jmbpiano@reddit
This comment is going to sound pretty silly once PoWF comes out in a decade or so... ;)
(All joking aside, this got me looking to see if any meaningful advances in wireless power transmission had taken place recently and I turned up this. Powering devices over WiFi may not be as pie in the sky as it sounds).
Bose_Motile@reddit
https://youtu.be/EyR2-C9ggi0?si=_kzeaLlswbbvSnYy
mariachiodin@reddit
🤣🤣🤣
bobmlord1@reddit
"you know it works on magic smoke because when you see it leave the system it stops working"
caerbannog13@reddit
We had a firmware update brick two commercial kitchen ovens. Brilliant.
ledow@reddit
Users have no clue about underlying root cause or diagnostics. They'll blame anything.
In the past, I have gone to the extremes of literally getting a wifi survey company in to prove to people that there wasn't a single place on-site where you DIDN'T get Wifi, even in the middle of a busy day, and that the wifi speed was basically line-speed back to the network.
When your "website doesn't load", my dear, it has nothing to do with the wifi. When your "computer is slow", it's nothing to do with the wifi (it could be... in certain deployments... but in this case it absolutely wasn't). When your document didn't save or your email didn't arrive for ten minutes... it had nothing to do with the wifi.
After proving this it shut everyone up for about a year and then we started to get the same nonsense again.
And a lot of fixes... they're entirely placebo.
I once had a user complain that their desktop was unreasonably slow. They persistently complained and put in tickets. We'd benchmarked it, reimaged it, everything you could reasonably do... it was no different to any other desktop on site (they were literally all purchased at the same time, in the same batch, to the same spec).
It kept escalating and got to me (manager) and I did the following:
I received NOTHING but compliments about that machine for the next 2 years. It's so fantastic, so fast, so much better, everything "just works" now, thank you, thank you, etc. etc. TWO YEARS.
To the point that the user was telling everyone for months how I'd done some sort of special favour and given them a "new" machine and how much better it was - and EVERYONE ELSE wanted one too. It even got to the big boss's ears and I had to explain... no... it wasn't a new machine... but don't tell anyone.
The day I left, that same person was still crowing about their machine. Years AFTER I had left, speaking to my old team-mate, they were STILL crowing about their machine. He had been present for the whole debacle and never let on that it was the exact same machine, in the exact same configuration, with the exact same components, achieving the exact same benchmarks.
Users have absolutely NO IDEA what's wrong with a machine when something isn't to their liking, even when there's NOTHING WRONG AT ALL.
zeus204013@reddit
Sometimes users have a problem (like some strange behavior) but they don't know the source. Like some dude with some desktop with "rare" behavior. At first sight, nothing was wrong. But later (opening the case) discovered a of dust and an almost out of socket ram module... after cleaning the dust and reseating ram all was ok!!!
Obviously someone in my office wasn't doing good work!!
Full-Plenty661@reddit
I once got a call from the site supervisor and then spent 5 hours (2.5 hours each way) in the car, to turn on a server that about 6 different people assured me was on.
cheetah1cj@reddit
I’ve learned to make them confirm it in a way that doesn’t imply they don’t know what they’re doing. “I made some changes on my end, could you please turn it off and back on again for them to apply.” “Sometimes the power cord can get finicky, could you please unplug it and then plug it in again, making sure it’s fully plugged in.” “Could you please unplug the Ethernet from the computer and look at it to make sure there’s no damage. Perfect, plug it back in. Now let’s trace that cable to the wall and do the same thing. Make sure you follow the cable to make sure there’s not damage in the middle.”
Desnowshaite@reddit
We had a server for our phone system that had amber LEDs on when it was off and green when it was on. When asked anybody if the server was on or not they looked at it, lights were on, and then told me server is on. After the first drive to site incident the second question always was "what color are the lights on it?"
TotallyNotIT@reddit
One of my very first jobs was internet support for a DSL provider. A thing I figured out early on was that rather than asking if the modem is turned on and plugged in, ask what the lights are doing.
Every job I've had since has had some variation of that. Open ended questions are great and not enough people use them.
braytag@reddit
I.... ehhh.... ... ..... I have no words.....
ImightHaveMissed@reddit
Everything is a server
Sovey_@reddit
And every PC a modem.
miraclemike@reddit
Haha jeez reminds me of a call I got a few years ago of someone complaining they weren't on the corporate wifi .. turns out he was pulled over on the side of a highway somewhere.
PappaFrost@reddit
You'll want to FULLY embrace this logic to get funding for an entire new WiFi system, and the staff to support it.
Mdamon808@reddit
I got a call from an employee that had just changed desks and none of her equipment would power up.
Turns out she had plugged the cord from the power strip under her desk into the same power strip. So all of here devices, including the power strip. Were plugged into the power strip.
But she just couldn't understand why things weren't turning on for her.
AbaloneMysterious474@reddit
Not being able to tell the difference between wired or wireless connection. If there is only a power cable plugged in, you do not have a wired connection.
pdp10@reddit
Is a USB-C, only a power cable?
AntiAd-er@reddit
Back when I managed a VAX/VMS setup the managing director (an utter jerk imposed on us by a company that took us over) complained that his terminal was running slow. Having recently attended the VMS internals training I told him I would look at the status and see what I could find. Sat at my deck for days watching monitor and answering support calls from our customers — we developed and sold software — after which I told the MD “I can’t see anything wrong” because there wasn’t but it keep him and my equally dumb line manager out of my hair.
Most relaxing days at work I ever had. I wasn’t really watch monitor at all but the screen looked busy. Occasionally when either the MD or my line manager come over I’d frown, point to the screen, and mutter something about the large packet queue being shorter than it should be.
NeatoCheato01@reddit
I feel for our network team. So much gets blamed on the “internet not working”. 99% of the time it’s just a single site that’s not loading as quick as it usually does or they can’t login to their email or something silly.
Diskilla@reddit
During my training years I once drove about 250 miles to a client to switch out the "broken" screen from a CEO. Beforehand he screamed at me if I think he is stupid because I asked if it is turned on. I did not bother to unpack or even unoad the new screen, just walked in without greeting anybody, looked him straight in the eyes while pushing the button on his screen whitch magically was fixed by that. His head turned red as a tomato and my last ever sentence to this guy was: Don't ever scream at me again. Then I just left while he started to scream at his staff about my "unprofessional behaviour". About three hours later, when I returned to the office, my boss told me this guy called, already screaming because I was unprofessional and they kicked him out as a client in that moment. They cancelled all contracts with them because he was an abusive asshole and a week later we collected every hardware we ever delivered. This CEO was nowhere to be seen. The whole thing even escalated into court, but i don't know how that ended. Left them about a year after this, when I was a finished System Engineer.
BlairBuoyant@reddit
If users didn’t have problems and need me to assuage their ego, I would not have a job.
bobmlord1@reddit
I had a non-staff member knock on my door and point to his phone on our guest Wi-Fi and say "you need to restart your router" when our Internet was down because of a cut fiber line.
TotallyNotIT@reddit
The best reply would be to slowly close the door without saying a word or breaking eye contact.
West_Walk1001@reddit
WIFI = Internet now.
Unless you're mobile then, Data = Internet.
HappyDadOfFourJesus@reddit
"Please submit a ticket and we'll address it accordingly."
ohv_@reddit
User complaint checks out
XxsrorrimxX@reddit
I would flip
Desnowshaite@reddit
A user once asked me for her personal Hotmail account's password and then got angry when I told her I can't help with that. Apparently IT should know everything IT.
samuelt525@reddit
bro my it manager couldnt get the fucking teams meeting to work cause he didnt realize the mic wasnt plugged in. Are you checking to see if the MIC IS EVEN RECOGNIZED
mrlinkwii@reddit
i mean not the wirdest thing i have heard ,. their have been numerous post on this subreddit like this that has happened
bluehairminerboy@reddit
ISP came into change their router and the wireless name/password changed, that must be linked to the fact a third party blocked their e-mails.
Break2FixIT@reddit
At least you don't have IT members saying, I rebooted the AP every time they had issues because it "fixed" the issue. And the staff members ask for that IT member because they always fix their problems.
redditinyourdreams@reddit
This week I had a new user not know how to move a window to another screen…
redditinyourdreams@reddit
They get paid 30k more than me
xSchizogenie@reddit
Vs (me)
Hehehehe I feel it
BadMoodinTheMorning@reddit
FYI, some wireless hdmi dongles use 5ghz range to connect to the receiver. We used those to connect people to the projector.
When we started to turn on 5Ghz range on the Wifi we started having issues with those dongles, they stopped working. The fix was to set up not using 5.5-5.6 Ghz range on the Wifi.
themanonthemooo@reddit
It’s always DNS
UMustBeNooHere@reddit
It's never DNS.
Oh shit, it was DNS.
pfrary@reddit
I had connected a users laptop to the WiFi and they assumed it would work for them at home.
i-took-my-meds@reddit
I've been there: "Emergency!!!! 9 1 1 ! ! ! 1 ! Site-wide Internet outage!!!! You need to drive all the way ovwer here right now and fix it!!!! HHHHEEEELLLLLPPPPP" Okay, so I see their router is very much online as are other endpoints, call the guy up and help him plug in the Ethernet cable, and whaddya know his network drives all turn green...
BoiledRhombus@reddit
Reminds me of this classic: https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE
BonelessComputer@reddit
That Microsoft Excel caused the whole network to go down. It was only coincidental that there was an internet outage.
Evernight2025@reddit
Entire dispatch station went dark during a blizzard. Got an SOS call at 2 AM. Nothing would power on. Walked them through all troubleshooting steps I could think of with my half awake brain and they assured me power was plugged in.
Got my gear on and went out to the parking lot and there was lots of snow. Attempted to make an exit in my 2007 Chevy Impala and got high centered twice trying to get out and had to shovel my way out.
Made the drive that took over four times longer than it should have and finally arrived. Walked in to dispatch, crawled under the desk and plugged the station back in and turned everything on and then left without saying anything word.
Apparently the dispatcher had gotten bored and decided to vacuum under the desk, thus knocking the power cord out.
aiperception@reddit
Why are we still plugging in our computer, since everything is wireless now?