Monday 21 March 2011

Lies Told by I.T. Support

This cartoon came about as a result of a joke conversation we had in the office today. 

It having been way too early this morning when I logged in, I had forgotten to put some files onto one of our web servers (a routine job we do every day).  The users spotted this and raised an enquiry about the missing files.  We quickly copied them over and told the users to look again (note the subtle psychological hint here that, somehow, the users were mistaken - it's a VERY important weapon in the IT Support arsenal).

Lo, and behold, the files were there, but the users then wanted to know WHY they had not been there before (our Jedi mind-tricks were not so potent after all it seemed). 

Now, seasoned IT professionals that we are, we did not want to admit to such a mundane thing as a case of numpty-itis, so we "forgot" to answer their email for a bit, hoping they'd get bored and drift away.

A bit later, one of the users, who clearly fancied himself as a bit of a techno whizz-kid, emailed in with this deathless theory: one of the files is bigger than the other two.  Is it possible that the big one blocked the other two from copying across?

Bless!

Anyway, I tried to get my boss to email the guy back with the explanation being touted in the cartoon below.  Sadly, he refused, but we had a great laugh out of the idea.



Hope you did too!

13 comments:

  1. LOL - I should share this with our IT folks - They'd love it!

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  2. Hahaaaaaaaaa. I've been somehow made project manager for a big IT based project in my new job, and spent 3 days of last week locked in a room with the IT people. I thought my head was going to fly off by the end of it. Sneaky IT folks though, I am seriously going to be paranoid about them now, no doubt I give them as many laughs with my idiotic questions too!

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  3. Loved it!
    Confirmed all my suspicions too. Beware, Niamh!

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  4. of course it IS possible for a big file to be refused by your email, especially if your inbox is full - and especially if one of the numbers in the code is a large number and blocks the line like in your picture :)

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  5. Bug - Thanks, glad it gave you a chuckle. My boos insisted we print it and put it up on our Wall of Weird at work.

    ER - and spin again!

    Gwei - IT folks like to give the impression they know more than they do by using baffling jargon half the time, and patronising over-simplifications the other half.

    Niamh - You have my sympathy being locked up with IT geeks. Whatever you do, don't show any fear :-) IT folks are mean and scornful of non-IT folks - it takes their minds of their personal inadequacies and poor social skills.

    Titus - You were right to be suspicious.

    DFTP - Ah, now the situation you're describing there is what we like to refer to as Storage Capacity Deficit. Basically, if the file is too big for your inbox, if your system allowed it in, it would crush all the other emails under its huge weight (compression error) or, if it still could not fit, then some of the data would spill out over the sides (overflow) and leak all over the inboxes next to yours. See? IT's not that hard to understand, is it :-)

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  6. Hahahahha..lolz very funny and true article. Thanks for sharing.

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  9. I consider lies like this to be little white lies, when it comes to actually delivering IT support for credible issues, all professionals will deal with the problem within a timely fashion. It's just when someone is spamming your inbox for the 1000th time because they want me to organise their folders for them via remote access. Such housekeeping issues should be within the skillset of all computer operators in my opinion, we're here to deal with problems that stop you from working, not operational and organisational issues.

    Just the rantings of an IT support guy =)

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  10. BillyZergling you're preaching to the choir, my friend!

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