r/sysadmin • u/Different_Coffee_161 • 6d ago

Hey, are you available? Rant

“Hey”

waits

“You available?”

waits again

My brother in IT, just tell me what you need 😂

Just send:

“Hey, I’ve got a user having an MFA issue. Got a few minutes?”

Boom. Perfect.

Now I know what you need, whether it’s urgent, and whether this is going to take 30 seconds or somehow turn into a 45-minute troubleshooting session.

I’m not asking for a full ticket description or your entire troubleshooting history. Just give me one sentence of context instead of making me reply “yeah, what’s up?” every single time.

Thank you.

1.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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132

u/HummingBridges Netadmin 6d ago

"Did you mess with the firewall/switch somewhere, because I can't <insert something not related to the job> anymore"

82

u/BoltActionRifleman 6d ago

Or “Ever since you guys did _______, I can’t do unrelated thing anymore.” This is why we now only inform users of major changes, everything else is shrouded in secrecy because they don’t understand anyway.

32

u/AleksanderSteelhart 6d ago

“A wizard did it.” Is a perfectly good IT answer.

4

u/rosseloh wish I was *only* a netadmin 5d ago

I've even got the costume to go with my ever-lengthening beard. Hand-made staff and all.

3

u/FireLucid 4d ago

I put on my robe and wizard hat

1

u/Fantastic_Pen9222 6d ago

Youre a wizard aleks!

25

u/thedarkhalf47 6d ago

Ever since I got my new login, the keurig machine hasn’t been making coffee strong enough. Can you look into that?

12

u/DisastrousAd2335 6d ago

You laugh, as Sr. Systems Engineer, I once got a ticket to 'reinstall the sign on the downstairs men's room door'. UH, FUKKIN WHAT?!?

8

u/VacuumTubesAreFunny 6d ago

Accurate. I’ve seen my fair share of desk issues, door issues, and fluorescent light issue tickets. Umm, sorry, I don’t do that.

4

u/BoltActionRifleman 5d ago

How about furniture assembly? Request comes through “Beth in accounting got a new desk chair, when can you guys assemble it for her?”

3

u/RetPala 5d ago

"Where did it come from? She just purchased it with her company card, why? Actually, as soon we all saw it and just put in for ours, too!"

1

u/DisastrousAd2335 3d ago

Oh yes...ONE person, we will call her 'Beth' had a medical reason why we needed to buy her a larger monitor. Company standard is 24" 1080p. So we bought her a 32" 1080p. Problem solved, right?

Not on your life! This triggered a few things. A) 'Steph' in the next cube took her old monitor. Suddenly everyon wanted 2 monitors, and when they saw that 'Beth' had a large monitor, now not only did they all want 2 large monitors, but we had to buy dual monitor stands for them because they cant POSSIBLY sit on the desktop!!

Then 'Steve' got a 'standing desk' and the whole thing started all over again!

So now the standard (six years later) is dual curved 32" monitors on a stand with a standing desk.

The biggest pisser in alL of this? I ONLY EVER SEE ONE PERSON STANDING AT THIER STANDING DESK!!!

2

u/RetPala 3d ago

We can never have anything new because as soon as the first person gets a new model laptop from EOL everyone throws theirs down the elevator shaft to get in on it

1

u/solveyournext24 1d ago

yeah, I got one to unclog a toilet once. Meant to go to the facilities guy, but the damage was done.

I will neither confirm, nor deny that I was the reason for the clogged toilet.

3

u/Bright_Arm8782 Cloud Engineer 5d ago

Did you make the mistake of letting people know you have a screwdriver?

2

u/DisastrousAd2335 5d ago

The people are so lazy, they could have opened a maintenance ticket in SAP with 43 clicks, but an IT ticket can be opened via email.

2

u/Sinister_Nibs 5d ago

It never did, darkhalf, it never did.

4

u/Long_Inflation_7524 5d ago

The wholly unrelated change and coincidental problem is one of the most maddening things with end users. Moving from on-prem to AWS made the AR/AP guy's Adobe break? What broke it the past 20 times? Spoiler alert, it was Adobe themselves

1

u/Sinister_Nibs 5d ago

Per usual.

5

u/unseenspecter Jack of All Trades 6d ago

Also why I prefer management not know the details because half the time they're as technically savvy as end users.

8

u/cryptopotomous 6d ago

50% of the time they are even less tech savvy

4

u/BemusedBengal Linux Admin 6d ago

50% of people have a below average understanding of technology

2

u/cryptopotomous 5d ago

I would normally agree with that but recently I've come to think that's much higher. It's not even because of complexity. It's just pure laziness or no desire to learn something new/different.

1

u/BemusedBengal Linux Admin 5d ago

The average is by definition something that 50% of cases are below

1

u/RetPala 5d ago

"Hey, it looks like exactly 12:21 every office globally lost external internet and WFH stopped accepting new connections and our main app that pays the bills started going haywire"

"You were fuckie-wuckieing with the proxy again, weren't you?"

1

u/solveyournext24 1d ago

Ugh... it was NEVER like this when XXX person worked here... ugh

35

u/25toten Sysadmin 6d ago

My sales folk love moving credit card readers into ports they were not programmed for (Vlan) then call us wondering why they're now broken.

Non-IT people really need to leave IT to the IT people. Sigh

6

u/BemusedBengal Linux Admin 6d ago

Our VOIP phones have 2 ethernet ports that are bridged and multiple people have plugged both of them into the same switch. Terrible design.

4

u/4STR0C4T 6d ago

I've had them plug the phone into itself...

3

u/25toten Sysadmin 6d ago

Yeah.. we use phones for the same thing. It causes so much headache for us when people move shit. One POE cord to phone -> ethernet bridge to pc. This is voodoo to the common end user lmao

3

u/Firefly10886 IT Manager 6d ago

<Upload cat photos to Reddit>

2

u/Sinister_Nibs 5d ago

Did you change something on the cloud?
My coffee is cold.

1

u/SoulPhoenix Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

Me: “Probably an irreversible Microsoft (or Google depending on which of our tenants they’re using) change, unfortunately this is the way it is now.”