I used to work with a guy who would answer the Help Desk phone like this:

“Have you tried rebooting the computer, call me back when you have” CLICK!!

Priceless…

I know exactly where you’re coming from - deal with the same “lack of initiative” mindset every day it seems. One of the things that bothers me is that so many people seem to have no critical thinking/problem solving skills whatsoever. It makes me wonder how some people have made it through life thus far…

I have had the folks to that turn on you as though it’s up to you to tell them WHY computers are designed the way they are.

I think the ones that take the cake are the ones that call me to solve the problem and when I’m onsite seem eager for me to call tech support. They don’t seem to get it when I explain that I’m doing exactly what level I (and possible level 2) tech support would have us do to try and solve the problem. (Why did you call me here anyway?)

I work in the IT department of a company as a senior tech looking after everything from servers to desktops to desktop printers etc. There are days I get calls like you have described but they won’t even power the system off and on. They say it is not their job and wait until someone will go over to their area and power the system off and on for them. We have gone to an outsourced Helpdesk because of calls like this and will not respond until we have an open ticket from the Helpdesk. This may mean the user waits for 2 hours before we receive the ticket. We are hoping this will help with the user doing what is asked.

Ahhh Windows IT support where restarts and reinstallations are actually proposed as tech solutions. Do you also turn up your radios when your muffler is going bad?

Some might feel actually finding the cause of problem is preferable, logging the issue and looking for trends.Rebooting is quality support like the death penalty is birth control.

What MCSE boot camp did you use?

In reply to Aquaadverse:

OK genius. Here’s a scenario for you. Internal modem on a PC is still connected to a network. There is no way to disconnect it in Windows. What do you do?

Windows has been running an uptime of 300 days and has slowed down considerably. What do you do?

You can’t delete a file in Windows because a process has it. What’s easier, restarting or trying to track the process that has it?

People call with these scenarios and are happy to be shown that a restart fixes their issue NOW. That’s the only thing they care about. They don’t care about what caused it. They just want to work NOW. Hence a restart is the only solution.

not the only solution, but usually the most effective one per dollar an hour worth of tech support and employee time.

If it werent for crappy programs and drivers that did this sort of crap, a restart wouldnt be necessary to fix this sort of thing.

Feel free to switch over to linux and find there are virtually no drivers for modems, printers, or modern video cards taking advantage of their full non-generic featureset (or any features at all perhaps).

I recently set up a linux server as a mail-to-fax gateway. Took me a good 2 months off and on when I had nothing more critical to do, to actually get it accomplished, betwen the 4 year old documentation which was sometimes valid, usually not, digging thru dozens of man pages, hardware support and drivers, and writing my own shell scripts and installing tons of packages, in most case resorting to compiling them and installing all their dependencies when that didnt immediately work, or modifying their source even, to be able perform translation from arbitrary formats to PS or PDF. Much of that was due to MS Office conversion scripts not really existing out there aside from 1 or 2 which first demand your first born child in order to work properly.

Sometimes, something that works NOW and requires a few reboots, is thousands of dollars cheaper than a system that will work until the hardware fails but needs very little administration time until then. When the hardware fails, you’re back to square one either way if the software used in the past no longer is supported ot no longer supports your hardware, so there are often times just too much to worry about to do things ‘the right way’.

Some organizations don’t have the budget to hire a $60,000/yr specialist, or do but won’t bother to do it, so ‘optimal’ tech solutions are not always in place.

I wouldn’t say it was Linux’s fault per se, mostly the fault of the vendors of the software, and of hardware companies for not supplying drivers for linux, or opening their specs so someone can write their own drivers for the hardware, but it is pretty damn hard to justify 300 hours of tech support time on getting a linux server to work when buying a copy of XP, WinFax Pro, and maybe some new hardware, and spending 2-10 hours of tech support time could have also gotten the job done.

In my case this was more of a ‘learning how to do it with linux’ project than a ‘get it done as soon and cheaply as possible’ project, but if given the choice to do it all over again, I for damn sure would have went with a cheap shoddy windows solution over a cheap shoddy linux solution, due to all these factors.

Notice that in each case it was the fault of the hardware and software vendors, NOT the operating system…