back to article How long does it take an NHS doctor to turn on a computer?

Welcome again to On-Call, our regular look at situations readers have confronted when their phones ring at awkward hours and they're asked to fix things up. This week, we're sharing a tale told by reader Dan, who tells us: “A number of years ago I was in a second line tech support role at a hospital in South Devon.” Nice part …

  1. egeria

    And your point is?

    Next up the consultant who thought the cd-rom caddy was a coffee cup holder.

    Not sure I am getting the point of this story that happened a number of years ago and could equally be applied to a whole range of hard-pressed professionals for whom IT is an enabler not an end in itself.

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: And your point is?

      Yeah but look at it this way. If one of the monitors the patient was hooked up to wasn't doing anything i.e. no lights blinking on the thing, it doesn't even take a medical professional to work out it might just not be plugged in. Similar to none mechanics working out there's no fuel in your car hence it won't start. There is an inexplicable fog that descends upon people where computers are concerned and this doctor was dealing with the basics of it being switched on at the mains rather than something faulty. Yes IT is just an enabler to some people but that's kind of like saying none of us should try CPR if we see someone having a heart attack and wait for someone professional instead.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: And your point is?

        "... an inexplicable fog that descends ..." -- Martin Summers

        Spot on. I believe computers being so necessary for modern life has resulted in many people being so far beyond their comfort zone that it prevents them from thinking clearly at all. A friend trojanned their computer by following instructions when "BT" phoned them up and asked them to do loads of things. They had contacted the real BT about internet problems; and thought it was perfectly normal that BT would phone up and ask them to make computer modifications. they were pretty surprised when I told them the analogy was dismantling your washing machine because someone from "Severn Trent" had phoned you up when you had previously contacted them about low water pressure.

        To be fair, people like the ISPs have contributed to this problem by acclimatizing users to blindly following instructions, in a similar manner to some of the banks contributing to the phishing problem by not being able to resist contacting people by email.

        1. Roq D. Kasba

          Re: And your point is?

          You can be smart at one thing and dumb as a housebrick at others - lawyers fall for 419 scams, system administrators still call roofing companies. Different expertise progresses a society - it is impossible to know it all, so people specialise, and swap skills (often via the medium of a financial economy, too).

          I'd rather that doctor got on with being dumb at IT and smart at fixing people rather than being shit at both jobs.

          1. Martin Summers Silver badge

            Re: And your point is?

            "I'd rather that doctor got on with being dumb at IT and smart at fixing people rather than being shit at both jobs."

            Whilst I get your sentiment. It's not really about that. I don't want the doctor (or any other professional) to be good at IT but I would expect intelligent people (intelligent enough to become professional in the first place) to have a modicum of common sense when it comes to knowing whether something is going to work or not dependent on if it is plugged in. If they got home after a day at work and their TV wasn't working, you might think they'd check the plug. If the professional doesn't have that kind of common sense then that suggests that some of their professional decisions could possibly be questionable. Problem solving is not a profession dependant skill after all.

            1. a_yank_lurker

              Re: And your point is?

              Or hit the ON switch/button.

            2. GarethWright.com

              Re: And your point is?

              You forget that at this point they've been running from one side of the hospital to another for 14 hours straight with no break, nothing to drink or something to eat. Shouted at, argued with, comforted a family who child has just died. Spent an hour waiting for results from one system or another to print because printers are the spawn of Satan himself. Heel pricks, jabs, bags, drips, broken limbs and then there's the larger louts and pissed up arseholes, the attempted suicides and the successful the parents who bring their kids into A&E rather then buy some feckin calpol.

              I've worked in IT all my life. I've also been a carer, and I'm married to a Dr I barely ever get to see because she's constantly working 13-15 hours a day, before driving home crashing for a few hours then going back to work. Granted, she wouldn't have made the mistake of not turning a computer on, but I, sitting at home with my laptop wouldn't have blamed her if she did.

              Does common sense suffer with sleep deprivation? YES! Does that make them any less professional, no.

              Yet our government is trying to remove the maximum working hours and drop their pay by upto 30% and most of the British public doesn't have a clue about it.

            3. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: And your point is?

              We see this kind of thing all the time. I work in a research lab with more PhD's than you can shake a stick at and some of the things the boffins do is unreal. They HAVE to use IT to do their daily work and many of them have used IT for years but they just don't seem to be able to retain even the basics and ask the same questions (for which they get the same answer) time and time again. From plugging network cables in to phone sockets to not switching things on to trouble with understanding what the insert key does! Its endless. I often wonder how some of them can find there own way home at night!

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: And your point is?

                Is there a way home at night?

                Yes, but it isn't your way -it's their way.

          2. Gene Cash Silver badge
            Facepalm

            being shit at both jobs

            You mean like an American doctor? Can't even properly diagnose a broken collarbone... [facepalm]

      2. Stuart Halliday

        Re: And your point is?

        I've had people ask me if a remote control for their TV needs batteries fitted to work.

        Tempted to say it works by magic.

        Ordinary folks really have no clue how technology works.

        Worse ones are those who claim the thing should just work without any input from them.

        1. Barry Rueger

          Re: And your point is?

          "I've had people ask me if a remote control for their TV needs batteries fitted to work."

          Minor quibble, but the key fob for their car doesn't need batteries, nor do any number of "things that are sort of like a remote control," so it's not an entirely unreasonable question.

          Either that, or it's one of those things where the battery hatch is completely hidden, or can't be opened without knowing the secret handshake.

          1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

            Re: And your point is?

            Just spend a while reading comments to the science section stories in the Daily Mail. There are an AWFUL lot of people around who would need instructions (in pictures) to drag their knuckles, let alone think.

            1. a_yank_lurker

              Re: And your point is?

              Please do not insult the knuckle draggers :)

          2. Scubaman66

            Re: And your point is?

            ...Minor quibble, but the key fob for their car doesn't need batteries, ...

            erm - yes it does!

          3. Piro Silver badge

            Re: And your point is?

            What? A car key fob most certainly has a battery in it.

            1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

              Re: A car key fob most certainly has a battery in it.

              I suspect that many of these systems work on the principle of tuned circuits and resonance.

              Many Burglar alarm keyfobs certainly do not contain a battery.

              1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

                Re: A car key fob most certainly has a battery in it.

                Car keys do have a battery. It's charged when the key is in the ignition, via induction.

                1. ButlerInstitute

                  Re: A car key fob most certainly has a battery in it.

                  Or not.

                  Mine does contain a battery (a 2032).

                  It's just not obvious and a bit tricky to get at it

                  (I have replaced it once - if I'd known it was a 2032 before I bought the replacement I'd not have gone to the VW parts dept for it ......)

            2. Martin an gof Silver badge

              Re: And your point is?

              What? A car key fob most certainly has a battery in it.

              Perhaps the OP was making the point that the keyfob has a battery fitted when new, does not have an obvious "battery door" and in fact rarely needs the battery changing before 4 or 5 years. Under those circumstances most "normal people" could be forgiven for thinking it didn't actually have a battery.

              IT seems to be a particular problem for these people, and I used to illustrate it thusly:

              Newly qualified driver breaks down at the side of the road. The car juddered and stopped and won't restart. S/he calls the AA/RAC who attend and quickly diagnose a lack of fuel.

              "But I never had to put fuel in my driving instructor's car!"

              M.

              1. Known Hero

                Re: And your point is?

                "But I never had to put fuel in my driving instructor's car!"

                Yes but common sense dictates she understands the basic premise that a vehicle needs fuel. A computer does as well.

                This is not specialist knowledge and anybody caught short in this manner would be subsequently thought of as stupid, regardless of profession.

                Most likely reason he hung up so quickly without another word was because he realised the idiocy of his mistake, I have done some on that level, and have to live with my decisions and shame. -To Err is human

            3. ABehrens

              Re: And your point is?

              There seems to be some confusion between key fobs (which attach to the key ring) and key transponders (which are built into the key).

              Fobs transmit a signal to lock or unlock the doors. They certainly require a battery, which can go for years before it needs to be replaced.

              Key transponders do not have a battery. They are powered by induction, and transmit a code while they are near (within a few cm) of the ignition lock. When away from the car, they have no power and don't transmit anything.

          4. John Styles

            Re: And your point is?

            My car key fob needs a battery. Maybe you replace your cars before the key fob goes flat. One of my two key fobs has gone flat for a second time. Because it I'd a pain to open I get the garage to do it for two quid labour!

          5. gw0udm

            Re: And your point is?

            Err... they do need batteries! Or at least mine does.

            Or do car keyfobs also work by magic?

          6. peter 45

            Re: And your point is?

            "key fob for their car doesn't need batteries"

            Er, yes, if you want to continue pointing you key fob at the car to lock and unlock it, it does.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      90 minutes had elapsed

      "By this point, 90 minutes had elapsed"

      Well to me that shows an inability for Dan to speak fluent "user" . At the end of the day the problem was a simple one - the PC is turned off . All Dan had to do was instruct the Doctor to turn the machine on.

      He would have to do this without patronising the user and making him look like an idiot - which gets increasingly difficult as the amout of time gone by without any noticable progress gets embassingly long.

      He would also have to do it maintaing a cheery attitude and not get frustrated and snippy with the customer - also very hard the longer it goes on .

      This is the skill of desktop support - especially remote.

      I am sad that I know so much about this and less about system archtecture

      1. Daniel Hall

        Re: 90 minutes had elapsed

        If only you knew how many time i reiterated to the EU that there must be a PC tower, I got them to try and follow both cables from the back of the monitor, that they were still sure was the PC.

        It was really bad, as if I was talking to a person that had never used, nor seen a computer in their life.

  2. Terry 6 Silver badge

    I still can't get my head round this one

    Over the years the number of people (teachers mostly) who think that turning the monitor off and on is the same as doing this to the computer. It was OK when I first started mixing educational IT support and training with my main education job. Thirty years ago people saw a monitor and thought it was a TV set. So I knew that they were good at our rather technical teaching role, but that using a computer was a new way of thinking for them.

    But after a generation it is still happening. Staff would turn off the monitors at night, but leave the PCs running all weekend or potentially the whole Summer holidays. Often logged in too.

    Or the times that I got a call saying that "the email isn't working" and they hadn't turned on the f***ing computer.

    Thirty years ago I was dealing with people who grew up in the 1950s and earlier.

    These days they've all grown up with computers. And they still don't get it.

    It's not an IT problem really. It's a task much simpler than programming a 1970s VCR. Or driving a car. Let alone analysing a pattern of complex behaviours in a busy classroom.

    It's as if being asked to do something with a computer and they just surrender all thinking.

    Yes I know they're busy professionals for whom IT is an enabler. But the same could be said for any number of items that we expect people to get on and use. (We had a microwave in the staff kitchen that looked like it was there to launch a space programme, it has so many dials, settings and options, but they all managed to use it).

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      The technical support staff where I work often have to remote into the user's computer to fix a problem. We use one of the several web based remoting tools. Now these will be people who use our software all day long as part of their job so you'd think they were fairly familiar with a computer. Plus, it's the 21st century right?

      Yet several times a week one of the staff will have to walk someone through the process of opening a web browser ("do you see an icon that looks like...") then how to specify the URL ("at the top of the window is a text box...").

      It blows my mind that someone's job can involve working on a computer all day long in this day and age but they've never used a web browser. What The Feck?

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        "Now these will be people who use our software all day long as part of their job so you'd think they were fairly familiar with a computer."

        @AndrueC: Nope, I'd expect them to know how to access your software and carry out the most frequent transactions they need to do with it. General knowledge of the PC itself and the vagaries of the operating system in use may not be something they need to know. I've found with Windows users telling them to 'start the Internet' actually works better than talking about Web browsers when providing informal support to students.

        As we move into an era where most people use consumer devices (phones, tablets) to do most of what they want to do, and as the services people want to access on those devices increasingly use native applications that have the work-flow for the service baked into them, you may find you actually need to run training programmes for new staff on desktop basics - or do the IBM/Apple thing and go with the 'app' model. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out over the next 10 years or so.

        1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          No, you're saying the equivalent of saying that people shouldn't have to understand what "stop the car" means and that they should have to be told "gently press the foot brake - that's the middle pedal - until the speed drops to about five - that's the dial behind the steering wheel - then gently turn towards the pavement and press the brake a bit more (that's the middle pedal, remember), until the car stops, then put the gears in Park - that stick thing just to the left of your seat, move that until it's next to the 'P', then put the hand brake on - that's the handle just behind the gear stick you've just used, pull it upwards until it won't move any further, then take your foot off the brake.

      2. jonathanb Silver badge

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        The browser address bar is a revelation to just about everyone. Almost everyone I know types for example "facebook.com" into the Google or Bing search box and selects the first search result.

        1. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          Trying to get people to type IP addresses into the address bar is hard. I say "see the bar at the top of the screen where it says http something - type it in there. NOT the google search box in the middle of the screen." and all they here is "type this into any where you see, and type www at the beginning just in case, because he probably just forgot". .

          1. Phil Kingston

            Re: I still can't get my head round this one

            You need to get better at giving phone instructions :-)

            As a tip, you can remove some of the doubt as to which box they're typing in if you can get them to (correctly) press Alt+D

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: I still can't get my head round this one

              Then you get the situation where someone above IT doesn't understand what an "Alt" key is. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, trying to make something completely foolproof fails in the face of complete fools (and I'm talking the kinds of fools who think a keyboard is a wooden board with metal door keys hanging off of it).

              1. Zog_but_not_the_first
                Headmaster

                Re: I still can't get my head round this one

                "fools who think a keyboard is a wooden board with metal door keys hanging off of it"

                To be fair, it is.

        2. Tim Jenkins

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          "Almost everyone I know types... ...into the Google or Bing search box and selects the first search result"

          or they click the first paid search result (with the indistinguishable-to-the-average-human-eye-shading), which is how that application for a free EHIC ends up with a £49 'facilitation fee'...

        3. Phil Kingston

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          Old habits die hard.

          And if no one's taken the time to explain to users how it works, they may never know!

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: I still can't get my head round this one

            "And if no one's taken the time to explain to users how it works, they may never know!"

            And there is the heart of the matter.

            In the past, a reasonable estimate for staff training costs was to budget about 1/3rd of the IT hardware/software budget for staff training because odds were that most of your staff had little to no experience with computers. But even those companies who actually did pay for staff training rarely paid for new staff to be trained. They learned the bits they needed from the ones already trained. This lead to a general reduction in the knowledge base as is usually the case in oral tradition.

            Nowadays, almost no company trains their staff on the basics because "everybody has computers, they already know how to use them", so any training which might be provided is purely for new, specific software apps.

            Even kids at school (I mean 15-16 yo, not toddlers) don't seem to know many of the basics such as the most common keyboard shortcuts or even that TAB/ALT-TAB will navigate form fields and this is the generation who should be using PCs like it's second nature.

            1. bibs

              re: 15-16 years olds not knowing keyboard shortcuts

              "Even kids at school (I mean 15-16 yo, not toddlers) don't seem to know many of the basics such as the most common keyboard shortcuts or even that TAB/ALT-TAB will navigate form fields and this is the generation who should be using PCs like it's second nature."

              It's not second nature for them to use PCs. It's second nature for them to use touchscreens and apps where everything is spoonfed to them.

        4. Dan Watson

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          Our school's homepage has been set to the Sharepoint login screen for staff so they have instant access to the Learning Platform.

          I've lost count of the amount of times that teachers or support staff have told me they can't get on to the Internet because it's asking for a password.

          Even those who engage brain and read the screen in front of them still put their network user account details in rather than their Sharepoint ones.

          And even those who do log in correctly still ask me how they get to the Internet from the Sharepoint homepage.

          1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

            Re: I still can't get my head round this one

            Back in Win3 days our system used to have a sort-of logon system which set up various drive aliases before launching WIndows. It ended with a screen saying something like: "Remember to save your documents in drive H. Press SPACE to start Windows". The number of people who would press H at that prompt was staggering.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: I still can't get my head round this one

              We used to send out instructions to users that were...I have to say, slightly more than a 'challenge'.

              Big, red, emboldened 16pt font at the bottom - 'don't reply to this message'. Literally the last thing they would read in said message.

              What do you think happened?

          2. Trixr

            Re: I still can't get my head round this one

            Sorry, that's an IT fail as well. Assuming you're in a Windows/AD environment, why don't you have SSO enabled in your SharePoint? Why are you using different credentials for just SharePoint?

            Ignore me if you're the only educational institution I've ever heard of that doesn't run on Windows.

            1. Wilseus

              Re: I still can't get my head round this one

              "Ignore me if you're the only educational institution I've ever heard of that doesn't run on Windows."

              Back when I was at school, that was about half of them!

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          IE10 is our standard browser just about everyone goes to google or bing to search rather than just type in to the address bar for what they want to search for.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        (shrugs) that's what you get from an educational system that thinks that teaching people how to use a word processor or a spreadsheet is teaching them all they need to know about IT, and that doesn't even teach them Boolean Algebra to give them some idea of the need for precision when talking about things computery. Not to mention a state that has long seemed to regard teaching arts and humanities as far more important than teaching science and technology. From this, IMHO stems most of the problems with IT-illiterate bosses making poor decisions about IT-related projects that have bedevilled the world this last quarter century or so.

        I'm heartened by what I hear of the current push to get more youngsters coding and understanding computing at a reasonably low level. I just wish something could be done about all the thirty-somethings that are essentially clueless about IT despite spending all day using computers to do their daily jobs, most of whom seem to be functionally entirely IT-illiterate.

        Mind you, that brings to mind a comment on one of E E 'Doc' Smiths Lensman tales, where a youngster expresses surprise that people in the 20th century were allowed to drive cars without having the faintest idea about calculus. Even now when I stoop and recall that passage, I go 'hmmnn", and yet have never come down conclusively on one side of that argument or the other.

        1. omikl

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          I am in total agreement with this. My kids are all being taught "IT" in a manner that is essentially preparing them to write an essay about how to prepare a presentation using PowerPoint 2010, rather than teaching them how to prepare a presentation.

          Until last year their course was so out dated that they were still talking about Zip drives (wipes away nostalgic tear) and having to memorise the layout of a pre-USB era PC back panel...

      4. Richard_L

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        @AndrueC

        It blows my mind that someone's job can involve working on a computer all day long in this day and age but they've never used a web browser. What The Feck?

        They've never knowingly used anything called a "Web Browser" nor anything really weird that only totally saddo geeks would use like "Explorer", "Firefox" or "Chrome" for that matter. Sure, they use a browser every day and it will certainly be IE or Firefox, but it's never been a "Web Browser" to them. The program that lets them view the web is completely abstracted or invisible to them, It's always more directly called "The Internet", or "Google", "MSN" or "Yahoo". Or, God forbid, "AOL".

        And as for the URL bar? Nope, they really have never ever used it! They just type the whole URL into the Bing search box on the MSN homepage when "The Internet" loads up so they can "Google it". Want to visit a different site... Close the browser and reload it to get the MSN page back, start again... And as for explaining tabbed browsing... good grief, it's like trying to explain the concept of parallel universes...

    2. illiad

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      I've got a better one... A certain manager I know, keeps saying 'the email isnt working' when the IT manager has has set 'monitoring' :) - she can see the email arriving in that inbox!...

      You forget non-tech peeps have a different way of speaking - If they say 'it doesn't work' it usually means 'it looks odd' or 'it wont do what I want'... you get there...

      "press that button'

      "huh??"

      "you see that green button "

      "oh I wondered what that did..." - she thought just pressing 'enter' did it.... {roll eyes}

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        "You forget non-tech peeps have a different way of speaking - If they say 'it doesn't work' it usually means 'it looks odd' or 'it wont do what I want'"

        Forget problem solving at school, what is needed for the majority is simply problem reporting.

        [Back in the days when there was a Use of English O level, the one we took had a picture of a room about which you had to answer questions. Very subtly, you could tell from the arm of the record player turntable that it was a mirror image, thus enabling you to answer an apparently vaguely worded question. I was an audio geek at the time and spotted it immediately; nobody else in the 6th form taking that exam had noticed. Baden-Powell used to emphasise observation as a tool for the Boy Scouts; that too might help the next generation.]

        1. YetAnotherLocksmith Silver badge

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          Arnaut, did the examiners actually realise this though?

          I lost marks in several mock exams because I gave the actual correct answers rather than the wrong one on the sheet.

          Problem is, no-one expects kids to have deep specialist knowledge of anything, & when they do odd things happen. (Ask a random kid about Minecraft at your own risk)

    3. Primus Secundus Tertius

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      @Terry 6

      But with the Amstrad word processor, turning the monitor on/off WAS the same as turning the computer on/off.

      Sugar sure was stingy with hardware quality, but he was spot on about simplicity.

    4. keithpeter Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      "But after a generation it is still happening. Staff would turn off the monitors at night, but leave the PCs running all weekend or potentially the whole Summer holidays. Often logged in too."

      Energy saving mode? Automatic log off after some hours of no activity? The PCs at both my work places do that. We have 'home drives' that follow us around as well as we use different PCs. A touch on the power switch and the PCs log off and close down in an orderly fashion after confirming the intention.

      At home: I haven't actually rebooted my big-laptop-that-stays-in-the-man-cave for about 6 weeks but that is obviously only used by me.

    5. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      Yes, I get calls all the time saying things like "I received an email from so-and-so and in order to get our orders out to so-and-so, I need to reply with a spreadsheet that I update daily, and it was being edited by John but he stopped, and it said something about a file being locked and now it won't let me send an email at all, it just won't LET me!" and the problem turns out to be that the mouse has got unplugged, or the screen is dead, or the printer has run out of paper and they want to print something before emailing it. So many times I need to say "let's backtrack, what are you actually trying to do?". Whilst they can follow complex instructions and have a deep understanding of how to raise invoices in Sage, or whatever, the problem is that many people have no diagnostic skills whatsoever. An example is that if a user has a potential internet connectivity problem and they noticed that they couldn't send an email, rather than listen to me (over the phone) and go to google chrome to check if web pages load, they go to write another email, and click send, to discover it's not working. This has happened to me time and time again. People just don't have the ability to follow a problem through and try and work out what's going on in a logical way. These are the sort of people who say "everything's slow on my computer" when they mean that one website is slow.

    6. Phil Kingston

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      I'd say it very much is an IT problem... If you, as the IT dept, want the users to adhere to a policy such as turning machines off and you don't have the nous to automate it, then you need to engage with the users and educate them.

      Either way, that IS an IT issue. Or at at least an IT issue for a decent IT dept to competently handle.

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        Either way, that IS an IT issue. Or at at least an IT issue for a decent IT dept to competently handle.

        Yup. but a one man band operation supporting the IT of a team of highly skilled professionals needs to be able to rely on the colleagues using a bit of basic common sense.

      2. a_yank_lurker

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        There are certain basic skills one should be expected to have when comes to general office equipment. At most it should a quick "5 minute" demo to get up an running.

    7. Frederic Bloggs

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      Fixing the hardware so that it is blindingly obvious that the computer is on would go a long way to solving this wetware problem. If hardware designers spent some time on usability instead of solely on aesthetics, life for support people would be soooo... much easier.

      What is it with designers hiding tinier LEDs with every new generation in less visible places? With (if one is lucky) some unfathomable symbol which is one is supposed to "intuitively" understand means POWER ON?

      1. Mephistro

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one(@ Frederic Bloggs)

        "What is it with designers hiding tinier LEDs with every new generation in less visible places?"

        Spot on! As of late, I'm finding more and more devices that either use extremely weak leds that you just can't see in a well lit room, or are only visible if you are watching at them from the 'right angle', e.g. kneeling in front of your desktop box so you can see whether the led is on or not. Even better, I've seen a few models where there's no HDD led light. Seriously, if a hardware designer doesn't know the value of knowing whether the HDD is being used or not, he should swap trades asap.

        I'd also add this stupid fashion by many/most hardware makers to draw the symbols next to buttons and connectors in, say, dark grey over black, or white over aluminium. Worse yet, it's also very common in tablets and laptops to have those symbols made in low-relief using the same colour as the background, so users can only see these symbols when/if the light is at the right angle.

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one(@ Frederic Bloggs)

          Funnily enough there's one place I spend my time where I do not do anything tech.

          On the rare occasions when I have to go over to the PCs I can never find the on/off switch. It is at the front, I think. A tiny grey dot on a grey surface that has lots of shapes and curves that could contain or even be a button, but aren't. And no sign of a useful glowing LED.

          Clearly the design was created and signed off by a bunch of people who never used the bloody things.

          I suspect that this is not just a computer thing.

          There seem to be lots of devices around where form is considered more important than function.

          And now I remember it, I spent a while in a part of London, years ago, where the one way systems seemed totally crazy. There were places you could see on your right, but never reach, because every right turn was blocked off, until the road you were on would suddenly have a compulsory left turn, forcing you in the opposite direction. The story told was that the guy in charge of the design went everywhere by bike.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
            Stop

            Re: I still can't get my head round this one(@ Frederic Bloggs)

            "There were places you could see on your right, but never reach, because every right turn was blocked off,"

            The "right" turns you refer to are usually signed with an arrow showing left-right-right so you cross the road at a light controlled junction rather than stop in the middle holding up traffic while waiting for someone to let you turn right or have an extra long red light so right turners can go. The first time I saw that on a busy London road I though it was quite innovative and useful.

            1. Terry 6 Silver badge

              Re: I still can't get my head round this one(@ Frederic Bloggs)

              Sadly, not there ( I can't remember what part of London it was). But yes plenty of places do have that, which is fair enough,

              I had to use that route once or twice a week for a good few months.

              I did my own exploration of the RLL options.

              There were roads where you could do that.

              Others that came into a compulsory left turn. Or the road opposite was one (not my) way.

              In fact, of course, the correct way was not to go down the main A road at all, but to take a fork, about a mile earlier on into small parallel road that only the local residents would have noticed.

              With hindsight I'd say the planners were focussed on using the road to filter traffic into town, and hadn't thought about access to the large number of small and medium businesses along the way.

              I'm starting to remember details like the van drivers delivering stuff to the place getting hopelessly lost and arriving cursing.

        2. Martin an gof Silver badge

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one(@ Frederic Bloggs)

          I'm finding more and more devices that either use extremely weak leds that you just can't see in a well lit room, or are only visible if you are watching at them from the 'right angle',

          The box I've used for my home NAS has a blue power-on LED that is so bright it's painful. It's so bright that it's almost impossible to make out what the (somewhat dim) LEDs on the HDD caddies are doing unless you stick your finger over it, and it's difficult to see the difference between the "reset" and "power" switches nearby. It's bright enough that I rarely have to turn the light on in the cupboard in order to see what I'm doing.

          But then this was a cheap rack box from a no-nonsense supplier and isn't meant to look terribly pretty :-)

          M.

      2. AndrueC Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        What is it with designers hiding tinier LEDs with every new generation in less visible places?

        Except for blue LEDs. Blue LEDs are never hidden. Blue LEDs seem to always be positioned in the most eye catching position possible. I once sent a monitor back to Amazon because the blue 'I'm awake' LED was too distracting.

        I'd also add this stupid fashion by many/most hardware makers to draw the symbols next to buttons and connectors in, say, dark grey over black, or white over aluminium

        Yeah, my last Honda Jazz had that problem. The symbols for 'H' and 'M' that were used to adjust the clock were dark grey on the light grey fascia. Since they were only needed twice a year I could never remember where they were and had to resort to phoning the dealer. Judging from the speed with which they replied I think they must have been expecting the calls and were coached in advance :)

    8. Allan George Dyer
      Paris Hilton

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      "microwave in the staff kitchen that looked like it was there to launch a space programme, it has so many dials, settings and options, but they all managed to use it"

      But, I would guess, only to the level of "press these three buttons to re-heat my lunch, do it again if it's not warm enough". What are all the other functions, anyway? With the right option, will complain about the pain in its diodes all down its left side?

      Last time I bought a microwave, I bought the cheapest because the user interface was limited to two knobs, "power" and "time", plus the door open button.

      1. MonkeyCee

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        Can't recall if it was on el Reg, but I've said many times that microwaves have a zillion ways of doing things, but almost always people (including myself) use them as follows:

        1. Put item inside

        2. Push power/whatever button that causes it to run on full for 30 seconds or 1 minute

        3. Repeat until warm

        You can have a perfectly effective microwave with a Stop, Go and Door Open buttons and nothing else :)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I still can't get my head round this one

          "You can have a perfectly effective microwave with a Stop, Go and Door Open buttons and nothing else :)"

          You forgot to think of Murphy. The reason you never see just an ON switch is because leaving a magnetron (the business part of the microwave) on for too long is a fire hazard, and you just KNOW someone who's the last one out's gonna turn on the microwave for a quick reheat, forget, and leave. That's why microwaves always operate on timers.

    9. phuzz Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      I once had this exact problem, but the thing was, at the start of the conversation I'd made a point of telling the user that the screen and the computer were separate objects, but he still spent half an hour turning the monitor on and off with me getting increasingly confused as I thought I'd ruled out the possibility that they weren't even looking at the computer.

      Right, back to trying to get a little old lady to debug a networking problem over the phone, from the lack of phone calls I suspect she's unplugged said phone...

      1. Daniel Hall

        Re: I still can't get my head round this one

        Thank you! literally what happened to me!

    10. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

      "the email isn't working"

      @Terry

      "Or the times that I got a call saying that "the email isn't working" and they hadn't turned on the f***ing computer."

      Thats the exact example I always quote. I couldnt believe it - i'd walked from one site to another to look at the problem too.

      Actually it wasnt booting cos he had a floppy disk in - but if anyone (user or helpdesk) had done ANY diagnosis the message "cant find NTdlr " or whatever would have filtered through to me .

      instead i got "email isnt working"

    11. Pedigree-Pete
      Happy

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      Different motivation Terry. :)

    12. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I still can't get my head round this one

      @Terry 6

      "It's as if being asked to do something with a computer and they just surrender all thinking."

      Fine by me, it's what keeps us employed.

  3. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Well, I've done my fair share of remote support but 'Dan' takes the biscuit taking 90 minutes before realising the PC isn't switched on at the wall. That is something done in the first few minutes if you can't remote access to the device.

  4. illiad

    May ask what is the average age of these doctors??? My bet is not less than 30 or 40... Their minds are full of **important** stuff like how to make you better, to say nothing about how to handle the massive amounts of paperwork they have to do for every patient!!

    I would rather a tech do the IT stuff, while I can get 'cured' by an expert, who most likely knows the inside of your body better than you know the complete workings of all the bits of your PC!!

    1. jonathanb Silver badge

      But switching a computer is a basic life skill along the same lines as being able to take the cap off a pen or operate a light switch.

    2. BitDr

      Turning on your computer is not an IT skill.

  5. MonkeyCee

    OH that computer...

    I've had calls logged for "computer in room 12 building X isn't working" which surprised me since I had said computer on my desk for a rebuild. Turns out that leaving the monitor, keyboard and mouse was enough to convince someone that there was a whole machine still there.

    Also spent about an hour arguing with a PC only tech about setting up iMacs. No, there are no other boxes. No, the "monitors" (as he insisted on calling them) are in fact computers. No, I'm not taking the piss. N, those "are" the computers, please just following the fuxing instructions I wrote for you. After too-ing and fro-ing for an hour, I sent him back to the office, and enlisted a couple of 12 year olds with considerable more skills in the "following instructions" and also able to touch Apple kit without turning into a retard.

    1. KA1AXY

      Re: OH that computer...

      Combining your posting with the previous one, its a stroke of genius for Jonny I've to hide the damn power switch for the Mac on the back, flush and with no hint for your groping fingers to know when they're on it.

      Every time I have to find it, I curse him.

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: OH that computer...

      "PC only tech about setting up iMacs. No, there are no other boxes."

      Even as a PC (Windows) only tech, he ought to be aware of the many and various Windows PCs which come in a single box, ie everything is in the slightly fatter than normal screen. FFS, I was seeing PCs like that at least 10 years ago. IIRC HP have a current line of them with touch screen tech included.

      PS, icon for your "PC tech", not you the poster.

      1. MonkeyCee

        Re: OH that computer...

        To be fair the PC tech was between a rock and a hard place. I'm Apple friendly (they are all computers after all) so the department that had previously been told to sort their own shit out if they wanted Apples suddenly could be integrated into the rest of the school. But the previous IT support company maintained that Apples a) could not be networked because b) they would cause the servers to explode and rains of frogs to fall. Said PC tech was supplied by that company, and needed to toe the company of line of "Apple bad".

        Mind you, they where also pretty mystified when I was trying to get them to build lab PC's from a remote image from a PXE boot. Again an argument over what was possible, after reading my instructions and not following them.

        This time it was :

        - You can only build a PC from local media (he conceded that maybe a USB drive could work, but the first five minutes he insisted that DVD/CD was the only way)

        - You can't boot a machine using a network image (whilst I had just done a PXE boot in front of him)

        - The network cannot be reliable enough

        - It will take longer, and thus isn't worth the time.

        He managed to do ~10 machines in 8 hours.

        Again I summoned my pair of winged monkeys (or " year 7 students" as they are sometimes called) and we got the remaining 118 machines done in about 4 hours the next day.

        The It company was very keen to "borrow" my images and setup. So keen that I got a call from another of their clients, asking why their rebuilt machines had the school logo as the background image of their desktop.

        Of course, no tale would be complete without some proper management fail. After being there a year, at a rate 20% below my usual, I asked for my usual rate or I'd walk. Manglement thought I was bluffing, so didn't budge and I left.

        The IT company is still getting a six figure sum from the school each year. Domain admin password is still the same as when I left ~5 years ago.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In the old days...

    ...sysadmins would be physically present. Not in a far off call centre!

    1. Nick Kew

      Re: In the old days...

      How old days?

      In my first professional job in 1983, we sometimes had to 'phone the sysadmins, nearly 200 miles away. In fact, we had to 'phone them to arrange it if we wanted more than 2Kb (yes, kilobytes) of mainframe RAM to run a task.

      1. illiad

        Re: In the old days...

        83?? I think you forgot to mention that the 'mainframe' computer took up a whole room...

        There were 'personal Computers' , but they were like comparing a 'bicycle' to a car... LOL

        http://www.computerhope.com/history/1983.htm

  7. The Axe

    Doctors are not bright

    You might think doctors are intelligent. They are not, what they are good at is learning lots of information about a single thing, the body. They can regurgitate Latin names for every part of the body, but digress from the body and they are clueless. Richard Feynman's famous quote comes to mind, "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy". Just replace scientist with doctor.

    1. Primus Secundus Tertius

      Re: Doctors are not bright

      “And doctors are supposed to be bright?”

      Anyone who has been to a proper university and met medical students will pause at that assertion.

    2. PNGuinn
      FAIL

      Re: Doctors are not bright

      The sad thimg is that for many of them their computer ability just reflects ther medical ability.

      Medical school these days seems to be deskilled to the point of learning to tick boxes.

      One of my customers (nothing it related) is a a very experienced GP, of the old school. Loves medicine, loves his patients, they love him etc. He's definately not technical outside his specialisation BUT given a problem with his plumbing, his roof or his computer etc he's capable of listening CRITICALLY to a description of the fault and its possible solutions, asking RELEVANT questions and RAPIDLY agreeing to the best course of action.

      It comes from years of experience applying those self same skills to his own specialisation.

      Would you be happy trusting your most precious machinery - your mind and body and those of your loved ones - to a doctor who didn't have those skills?

      There is something greviously wrong with whole the education system today, but that's a whole new topic.

      1. Martin Summers Silver badge

        Re: Doctors are not bright

        "Would you be happy trusting your most precious machinery - your mind and body and those of your loved ones - to a doctor who didn't have those skills?"

        Amen to that.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Doctors are not bright

        "It comes from years of experience applying those self same skills to his own specialisation."

        But to a large extent that comes with experience. Newly minted medics exit medical school without the requisite 30 years experience.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Doctors are not bright

          but a medic isn't a medic when they finish at medical school that's just the first part of their training.

          And as he's a GP he hasn't no specialism! by definition he's a generalist! ;o)

      3. Pedigree-Pete

        Re: Doctors are not bright

        Correct me if I'm wrong but Doctors assess situations, ask questions, perform diagnostics & propose courses of action. Sounds like IT & many other areas of engineering to me. ie IT'S A LIFE SKILL.

  8. John Deeb

    Hmm, the reverse of this story can happen too with the "all-in-one" devices. It left me recently briefly searching for the computer case before I realized it was built into the slim monitor. Those devices are around for a while now, in defense of the good doctor. Then again, the mistaken identity between screen and PC casing is a rather common one but I personally don't find it "stupid" as the computer is in fact a computer system. That we give users systems with various switches on it for the various parts is also a bit of a design or hardware selection problem of the IT department or supplier. A coffee machine also does not have a switch for the heater, one for the pump and one for the warm bottom at various locations on the device...

    1. Charles 9

      Then again, the coffee maker only has one plug. It's not like the monitor plugs into the tower which in turn plugs into the wall (some power supplies have a piggyback capability, but practically no one ever uses it). A close analogue would be a video game console or 80's-era computer hooked to the TV. One doesn't expect to be able to turn that on and see anything without turning on the TV first.

      1. KA1AXY

        The coffee maker is designed to be operated by those not yet in complete possession of their faculties and who will react badly to any subtlety in user interface design (usually by pitching the damn thing into the bin)

        1. x 7

          "The coffee maker is designed to be operated by those who are too thick to boil a kettle...."

          FIFY

      2. illiad

        yes, computers DID have TWO sockets at the rear, so you could get mains supply for the monitor...

        More cost cutting later, it was removed, now needing TWO plugs for every PC!!! >:(

        1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

          I'm pretty sure it wasn't for cost cutting reasons, but for some, probably reasonable, electrical safety reason. I seem to remember something about wake-on-lan and monitors being an issue as well.

  9. Trollslayer

    An argument for All In One computers

    This makes things more user friendly, we need to consider the target audience.

    1. BitDr

      Re: An argument for All In One computers

      Actually an argument against them, single point of failure, monitor dies = replace whole system.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh Goodie... can we all play?

    My wife's a doctor at a large teaching hospital. Some great stories about the basic idiocy of some of the IT support guys there.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh Goodie... can we all play?

      Well that's obviously because they pay the IT support guys peanuts. The ones I know are all on agenda-for-change bands usually associated with clerical staff. Definitely not industry standard rates. I've just fought off an attempt to drop the grading for my job as sole IT support in an NHS diagnostic laboratory.

      Anonymous, because well...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Oh Goodie... can we all play?

        yep totally undervalued and under paid. We have a similar position, we basically have two sorts of workers, scientific grade and admin grade, now guess which one IT comes under!? It use to be classed as scientific but was changed so now we're classed just the same as a pen pusher. I note that places like the Land Registry still manage to pay an extra IT allowance for skilled IT workers as apart from other admin staff.

    2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: Oh Goodie... can we all play?

      Stories about IT support aren't even funny. Just too many of them.

  11. Rufus McDufus

    Ha, I once worked for Data General supporting those Clariion arrays used by hospitals. I remember one big hospital in particular, who provided a computer room for the new equipment. An onsite tech told me the story of the computer room. Initially they realised they'd forgotten something - mains power. Rip all the machines out, fit power, put machines back in. Once fitted, the realised they'd forgotten something else - network cables. Move all the machines out again, fit networking, put machines back in. Turn everything on - yay! Bugger - it's all getting rather hot. Oh no, we forgot cooling. Move machines out, fit aircon, put machines back in. Aircon not fitted properly, floods the computer room...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Ha. A hospital in south Mississippi didn't have that problem... The computer room has (or had, its been 30 years) a 4-ft raised floor, a large motor-generator set in the next room, a diesel generater outside, and is cooled by the same /very large/ system that refridgerates the morge down the hall. One thing they didn't have was smarts, well, them and their Unisys contractors. When they changed vendors from Honeywell, they needed additional perforated tiles to allow cooling the new system they were installing. To do this, they brought a large drill-press into the computer room and proceeded to turn standard 2x2 solid tiles into ventalated tiles by drilling 1/4" holes every inch... When the Honeywell CE found them doing this, he called his boss who then called the IT director and told him that his support contract would not cover any problem determined to be caused by the pounds of metal filings that were now under the raised flooring.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      When the new City Hospital was being built in Belfast in the 1970s the inital plans called for the X-Ray department to be on the top floor. Only when fitting out was started did someone realise that lead shielding was heavy, and the architects threw a fit when someone asked them about floor loading limits for the installation.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Only when fitting out was started did someone realise that lead shielding was heavy, and the architects threw a fit when someone asked them about floor loading limits for the installation."

        I seem to recall that the cloud chamber at Leeds University was similarly built above the ground floor. Fortunately, if the piston did come loose from its moornings it would have ended up in the graveyard.

  12. Six_Degrees

    Not Surprising

    I worked for our school system's audio visual department while in high school, servicing 10 schools with movie projectors, cassette recorders, videotape machines, and what not. When equipment failed to function properly, we were expected to either fix it, or swap it out for a working model.

    The single most common problem we encountered was that users failed to plug the machine in, and rapidly pronounced it faulty when it failed to function without power applied.

  13. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

    Actually having brain failure is not limited to "users". I spent nearly three minutes yesterday cursing at a tablet which refused to get email after I set it up correctly. Then I realised I'd forgotten to connect it to the wireless network. Well, at least it wasn't 90 minutes...

    1. Roq D. Kasba

      I was baffled why my phone screen worked perfectly in portrait mode but went off every time I turned it landscape to play some dumb game. It was a sunny day, I was wearing polarising sunglasses...we all confuse ourselves sometimes ;-)

    2. Captain DaFt

      -Actually having brain failure is not limited to "users".-

      Too true.

      One never knows when the "brain fart" will strike, as this cartoonist chronicled about his computer's "Mouse problem".

  14. BobRocket

    Cost of the kit

    If the user (of any tech) has spent a large sum of their own budget on the device in question then they will take the time to do a bit of basic diagnostics on it (check the switches, check the instructions etc.) before calling for help. If they have only paid a low price (or had it provided effectively free) then it gets no time until it is described as POS/dead and now someone elses problem (ie. yours)

    Give your users a ringfenced budget, make them buy their kit from a list of approved devices (only one actual device but with 4 descriptions and prices to give the illusion of choice) and watch the difference in behaviour.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cost of the kit

      Then what happens when the people for whom you're trying to requisition equipment are the accountants?

      1. BobRocket

        Re: Cost of the kit

        Explain to them that it is only a notional budget but that it gets the users to look after the kit better then offer them the same kit but with a bigger budget and higher prices.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cost of the kit

          Except it's the accountant's job to get all the true costs down to the penny: TCO is their responsibility. IOW, the dollar is their primary focus. The kinds of tricks you describe won't work on accountants.

  15. Stuart Halliday
    Facepalm

    Had an electrician rewire a laptop power lead (the DC end) after cutting it.

    It was wired up in reverse. The electrician wasn't phased by this (pun entended) as he stated that he wasn't aware of polarity in his job.

    Sorry? Aren't these chaps supposed to know the difference between a Live and Neutral wire??

  16. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Variation of the power-cut tale

    http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperfect.asp

    The thing that stands out in the Doctor story was that he terminated the call without any thank you. Which begs the question: in an operating theatre environment do surgeons say "pass the scalpel please" and "thank you". or is everything "gimme gimme gimme"?

    When I worked for a Computer VAR one day I had someone ringing up first thing in the morning saying that their pc was dead. He'd forgotten to turn the power on too, but to cover his embarrassment he said he was ringing anyway to place an order, which he did - something like a box of paper for the dot-matrix printer.

    1. Caustic tWit

      Re: Variation of the power-cut tale

      "The thing that stands out in the Doctor story was that he terminated the call without any thank you. Which begs the question: in an operating theatre environment do surgeons say "pass the scalpel please" and "thank you". or is everything "gimme gimme gimme"?"

      In my (lengthy) Canadian & USian experience of operating theatres the drill is "Scalpel.... Forceps..." and so on. I've never heard a "please" or "thank you" in 40 years.

    2. IvoryT

      Re: Variation of the power-cut tale

      It's a convention - Surgeons do not say thank you for items given to them during an operation. That's not because they are impolite, just that they may need hundreds of items passed to them during an operation and to formally say "thank you" every time would make operating unworkably slow. Maybe you think the full "you're welcome", or "no trouble, don't mention it" should be added every time.

      As an anaesthetist, the same applies. Apart from the occasional "ta", I thank my anaesthetic nurse at the end of a busy list, they would not thank me for slowing their day down.

      1. Roq D. Kasba

        Re: Variation of the power-cut tale

        Guess it's like ATC, you keep the chit-chat down the the minimum polite whilst conveying the detail necessary

  17. x 7

    Back to the original story.........

    I spend a lot of my time doing support at GP surgeries. Support for most of the Devon ones is run by a decent bunch of guys, but there are a small number or surgeries on a local South Devon Hospital COIN network and the support team there are the most protectionist bunch of jobsworth prats that you can imagine.

    They won't provide credentials for contract engineers to log into systems, won't provide realistic instruction to end users, and insist on site visits for the slightest simplest problem so that "they" can be in charge. In essence, as a "help desk" they fail to meet the name. It wouldn't surprise me if this story originates from that team - in which case I'd take it with a pinch of salt as its more than likely the supposed instructions were crap

    1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      Installation technicians without Admin credentials

      Been there, done that way too many times. Including the day the HelpDesk were *all* in a day-long meeting so no support calls could be made.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      won't provide credentials for contract engineers to log into systems

      Hmm. Where patient data security is an issue I wouldn't expect otherwise, particularly as the word "contract" has been used.

      1. x 7

        Re: won't provide credentials for contract engineers to log into systems

        "Hmm. Where patient data security is an issue I wouldn't expect otherwise, particularly as the word "contract" has been used.

        Valid comments, but all involved were approved by the authorities involved, had full CRB checks, and the support desk had been ordered to help - but they still refused. (Besides which you don't know the company we represented - something I can't tell you, but a "significant" player in NHS support) Jobsworths

  18. Old Used Programmer

    Power...how does that work...?

    Many years ago part of my job was to support field users who accessed the system over 2400bps modems (I *said* it was "many years ago"). The company use NEC modems that would do either standard Hayes modem commands of the day and their over command structure. One call involved a modem that just wouldn't respond no matter what I had her try. Finally, in sheer exasperation I asked what lights were on on the modem. User: "None." Me: "Is it plugged in?" Pause. "It is now." The modems had a particularly big, heavy power brick at the plug end. It had gotten kicked loose. The "what lights...is it plugged in?" became an *early* part of the troubleshooting after that.

    The modems were normally used in NEC mode. A common problem was users accidentally getting them into Hayes mode. Any time a modem "wouldn't respond" the first thing was to tell the user to type in the sequence go from Hayes mode to NEC mode. Half of them seemed to think I was a genius for fixing their problem pretty much immediately.

    1. TVC

      Re: Power...how does that work...?

      2400bps! You had it made. 300bps was the limit for a while and one or two circuits ran at 110bps - that was telex speed if I remember correctly.

      Modems! Bloody hell. Who remembers acoustic couplers with their rubber cups into which you crammed the phone handset?

      1. BitDr

        Re: Power...how does that work...?

        Acoustic modems, 300 baud, ADM3A terminals... and we had it good! The university we connected to was still all using cards, still, we had to submit compiles as jobs not as interactive sessions, (HP 3000), until we realized we could log in as a job and have the compile output sent to our terminal. The sysop wasn't too happy with us. Later, gaining access to an h/p2645a vdt, we captured the screen to a built in tape, then spooled that to a decwriter.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Power...how does that work...?

        We have down in out store room 2 Acoustic couplers. They are in hand made wooden boxes with hand written serial numbers!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Power...how does that work...?

      we did have a load of DELL USFF OptiPlex 745s (755, 760s) which all had external power bricks (the newer ranges have built in) One of the most common "my computer won't turn on" issues was users kicking out the power cables

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Power...how does that work...?

        Which I think is fair enough. You can expect a user to know about which bit to switch on and off. But if there's a lousy bit of stupid design, they should not be expected to deal with that.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In fairness...

    ...we all have our weak areas in life, things that just confound us even though we know we should know better.

    But that's not the problem - if someone puts their hands up and says 'I don't know what I did wrong, just help' - no problem. I think the majority of support techs get wound up when the accompanying attitude is out-of-whack as well as the computer. 'I didn't do anything'. 'It changed my password by itself'. Come on, don't BS me, and I won't BS you. Let's just work together to get this fixed.

    It's the circumstances in which the attitude gets turned up to 11 because the ego is at risk of toppling...those are the difficult times for me at least.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: In fairness...

      "I think the majority of support techs get wound up when the accompanying attitude is out-of-whack as well as the computer. 'I didn't do anything'. 'It changed my password by itself'. Come on, don't BS me, and I won't BS you. Let's just work together to get this fixed."

      Then what happens when you get an actual case of the password being changed by someone other than the user, meaning the guy desperate to get the notes before catching a flight really is at his wit's end through no fault of his own?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: In fairness...

        Have you heard of someone else changing another's password? The big requirement and notice of "don't give out your pass/account to other staff" is a big warning for a reason.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: In fairness...

          "Have you heard of someone else changing another's password?"

          Yes. It's called being hacked.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: In fairness...

      I will always rather help the "I don't know, can you fix it?" types as opposed to "here's the problem and the fix but I don't have permissions to do it" types. We had one guy in Customer Service who "knew everything there was to know"... finally manglement sent out an email telling everyone to ignore his advice as 100% of the time it was flat wrong and caused more problems when people followed that advice. Funny... he still works here and still spouts his garbage. Did I mention, he's a gamer (Xbox) and knows all about this IT stuff?

    3. KA1AXY

      Re: In fairness...

      Ahhh! The good old Omnitec 701. You could ask into a terminal room and whistle them on. The attached Teletypes would chatter their welcomes.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Only 90 minutes

    I was forced to do IT support for our family business; my sister once spent THREE HOURS wiggling a mouse (to get the computer to wake up), before calling for help (10pm by then).

    It then turned out that, despite the fact she had been using the PC for 6 years, she still thought the screen was the computer.

    Mummy had been helpfully leaving it in standby mode all this time, but for some reason had switched it off before going on holiday for a fortnight.

    it took nearly another hour to talk her through how to identify and start the PC.

  21. Mark York 3 Silver badge
    Holmes

    Knowing the difference!

    But Live is only "live" for 50% of the time, unlike DC.

    On a amusing side note of user lack of foresight - Great mirth was had last evening at the the expense of someone who has just discovered that the kitchen's adjustable ceiling lights are surprise surprise adjustable!

    She unknown to me on occasion had used a torch just to see & operate the coffee machines in the evenings.

    I'm somewhat in the shit for posting that story on Faecesbook last night with seeing family & friends commenting.

    1. Pookietoo

      Re: But Live is only "live" for 50% of the time

      No, if it's connected it's always live - the live and neutral supply lines don't take turns at pushing the electrons.

  22. ecofeco Silver badge

    I can relate

    I have had similar calls. One of the most common are the ones where the user will not shut up and take directions resulting in a call that could have taken 10 minutes now taking 30 minutes or longer.

    Although my all time common favorite is just getting them to give me their damn name.

    That's right, just getting their name can take 10 minutes. Sweet Chocolate Jesus!

    Second favorite? Calling 10 minutes before they have to leave work and then asking if they need to stay but insisting they can't. Followed closely by "I'm going out of the country tomorrow morning, can you do this thing that usually takes 24 hours to get done, before I leave?"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I can relate

      or the ones that argue the toss over what you're asking them to do to fix the problem. Who's the one here with 20 years IT experience and who's the one that can barley turn on a light switch!?

  23. TVC

    Intelligence and education does not always equate with common sense

    A room full of engineers, scientists and other assorted bods were gathered to see a presentation on a more-complex- than-rocket-science type gizmo they were all working on.

    They had been battling for some time, trying to get the projector to work so they could view the PowerPoint, but had failed and were on the point of dissembling it but decided instead to call my I T Help Desk.

    My I T Technician entered, said nothing, removed the lens cap and departed without a word.

    Intelligence and education does not always equate with common sense.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Intelligence and education does not always equate with common sense

      "Intelligence and education does not always equate with common sense."

      Yes. Overthinking the problem when you are used to only dealing with complex problems sometimes leads to not even considering the simple solutions. Also know as the "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" syndrome.

  24. OzBob

    So what we need is 2-fold,...

    a) a diagram behind the device showing an outline of the PC and the location of status LEDs and control switches. So you can say "find power LED on diagram, locate on box and tell me what colour it is",

    b) an IT baccalurate in 3 tiered stages. Seriously, in the 80s my public service job included briefing users hired in the 50s on what a mainframe did and how networks actually worked, in a 30 min standup as part of a 3 day course for "intro to computing". And they would turn out to be the lowest maintenance users afterwards. It is kind of assumed that non-technical people understand a lot of these concepts, a recognised "computer user" course where concepts are covered would go a long way to reducing these sorts of calls.

  25. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    I have noticed that a lot of people can't tell the difference between "have and "of", "your" and "you are", "than" and "then", or "their" and "there". And, funnily enough, they mostly seem to be young people. I guess all generations have their limitations.

  26. IvoryT

    Oh ha ha

    Well as a doctor in a very large new hospital in the UK we are faced with the following: a network that can take 20 minutes to give you a working computer after sign-in. We have to carry a hospital Blackberry, an internal phone, a pager, a proximity card for doors, a separate proximity card for labour-ward emergencies, a third proximity card for one of the theatres, a card with a single-sign-in thingy, a hospital laptop. We are faced with hardware boot-up passwords, then multiple system access passwords all with different periods of password-ageing so you can't keep them in sync. When we phone IT help desk about anything they try to break any request down into multiple jobs each of which is given a job number (we presume they charge per job) - even for requests that could be easily and instantly dealt with over the phone. Regularly a password which works one minute will refuse to work an hour later needing a phone call (we keep our enforced multiple passwords written down otherwise our jobs would not be possible). We have completely different usernames for the systems we access (I mean, good grief!!!).

    In short it is a monumental, embarrassing IT mess, but hey have a bit of fun at a doctor's expense.

    1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Oh ha ha

      One day the media will pick up om a case where a password expiring also caused a patient to expire. This will no doubt be blamed on the doctor because it is an easier scenario to present to their readership, but it is of course, not black-and-white as they make out. The case for the doctor is that apart from the long hours etc. they are additionally stressed out from carrying unnecessary responsibility for remembering passwords and humping a ton of equipment around with them. (How about the concept of a doctor having a Caddy follow him/her around? "Gimme a No. 5 iron". Oh of course that's an extra salary).

      The parallel of this in my field (IT support) is where a critical recovery process is delayed purely as a result of a password not being known, or an EULA key not being available.

    2. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: Oh ha ha

      Fair enough. We can't argue with that.

    3. GarethWright.com

      Re: Oh ha ha

      So I hear.

      Meditech 5 - yuuuuuuuk!

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh ha ha

      but I bet most if not all of this isn't the fault or the poor bugger who has to deal with 1st line support! Who'll probably be being paid a 20% of what you're earning!

      1. IvoryT

        Re: Oh ha ha

        No, not his fault, but an utter IT failure from the ground up. This morning 2 children nearly didn't get treated because of poor IT provision. We can get PACs in one room, but it falls over in the other. Though email is the opposite way round. Clinical staff now well used to: program fail (today on fresh boot with a single click ... "Unable to load Carestream, instance already loading, please wait."). What to do? Some now go instinctively to task-manager to shut down the offending processes, or reboot and have another horrible wait. Dear medical software writers, you charge enough - why not write your software so that on close it cleans up its memory footprint,

        In theatre, once we get a PACS x-ray on screen to guide an operation, it ruddy times-out and we need to get theatre staff to sign in again. We have asked till we're blue in the face to get the time-out increased so we can at least do an operation uninterrupted, but it seems to be beyond our IT dept to do this. I could go on and on, as a computer-literate clinician I am simply embarrassed at how appalling our medical IT provision is.

        Once IT begins to get its collective act together, then I might accept this slagging-off of my clinical colleagues. Until then ...

        1. BitDr

          Re: Oh ha ha

          You don't sound/read like a computer illiterate. This kind of thing like a blanket policy for the hospital image. We had this problem where I once worked, a corporate image of Windows rolled out to all and sundry to standardize the base O/S, with tweaks to differentiate developers machines from user machines, or in your case it would be machines for the Operating Theatre, Imaging, clinical, ER, or administrative.

          I feel for you. Frame it as a Health & Safety issue, see if they take notice.

    5. BitDr

      Re: Oh ha ha

      Not the same as not understanding how to turn on the machine. What you describe is a total failure to implement a cohesive security/privacy policy across departmental boundaries. Sounds like egos were being stepped on and everyone made up their own rules.

  27. This post has been deleted by its author

  28. The Quiet One

    Nothing new here....

    I once spent 20 minutes talking to a user about why they could not logon to the VPN from home. After tracing the problem back as far as her internet connection, she proclaimed....

    "The internet is plugged in, I just pressed the button to make the flashy lights go off because they are annoying".

    You can't help some people, and that's why I drink.

  29. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    The thing about this type of story is that they make a nice little anecdote for colleagues or even a forum on the interwebs, but as a story on an IT news site? No.

    I've got loads of them after very nearly 30 years in IT; there was the woman who sent me a photocopy of a 5.25" floppy when I asked for a copy of her data disk; or the man who answered "yes" to the question "is there a green light on the front?" only for me to find much later the monitor was switched off - "you didn't ask if the light was lit!". You know what most of them taught me? That I was expecting to much of the user. That's not being patronising. What you need consider is what the user actually NEEDS to know to do their job day to day. Don't take anything for granted beyond that.

    I'll often hear colleagues mocking an end user's lack of knowledge - "he didn't even know what an Ethernet cable looked like!" - and then have to explain to that same colleague that the router isn't issuing any more DHCP adresses because 8 out of the pool of 10 addresses are in use and there are 2 conflicts. I don't then mock that same colleague because the didn't know what show ip dhcp conflict looked like.

    Don't mock an end user for their lack of IT knowledge until you have the same knowledge of every appliance you use. Are you sure mechanics and plumbers don't make jokes about you?

    1. BitDr

      > Don't mock an end user for their lack of IT knowledge until you have the same knowledge of every appliance you use.

      I don'[t mock people for their lack of IT knowledge, I mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding the basic use of the technology they use ion their day to day lives.

      > Are you sure mechanics and plumbers don't make jokes about you?

      I'm sure they do, but then I trust them about as far as I could throw them. Recently, while standing in an engine rebuilders shop needing some work done to a cylinder head, the shop owner tells me that they don't have a milling machine and can't do cylinder head work; all the while behind him was a machinist using a milling machine working on a cylinder head! Uh huh. I played dumb and left, I wouldn't trust him to tighten a nut to the correct torque.

  30. Daniel Hall
    Thumb Up

    Thanks el reg

    Didnt actually think that would make it to print, nice :-)

  31. Sam Haine

    Gosh Dan, you're so smart.

    A PACS monitor is quite a bit more substantial than a normal LCD monitor and so not that difficult to confuse with an all-in-one unit.

    The doctor gave you the asset number of the monitor, so why did it take you so long to identify it as such?

    Since you wasted 90 minutes while a patient that needed an X-Ray looking at waited, I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out why the doctor didn't say thank you.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    PC's, Mainframes, Medical devices, Building management systems...

    All fine,

    but can I work out how to scan, collate or even copy on the work multi function printer - no.

    Is there a manual - no

    Is there a customised UI - yes so internet manual useless

    copy does not work until logged in, logging in lists all the items on the print server...

    What do all the buttons do anyway...

  33. Halfmad

    Yes we're all so funny.. but

    I'm sure there's a website somewhere that a doctor is recounting the time an IT guy told him about the difficulty he had satisfying his wife, how she'd never climax and was rarely "ready" for him.

    No doubt the doctor tried gently to explain that she wasn't turned on.

  34. Custard Fridge

    Brainspace full

    Academics are well known for lacking IT skills - it's not their specialist area. They use their brainspace for that and not IT.

    I always used to operate the overhead projector for the head of Theology at my college during lectures because he'd never learnt how to do it. He wasn't lazy, it just wasn't for him. Doctorates all over the shop, used to work for the Pope etc. OHP? Fail. Someone else will solve that.

    Doctors - the more senior, the more 'right' they have to be all the time to save lives.

    However thinking that you are right on a topic you no little about is, as we know, common for IT.

    Teachers - married to one - works with IT all day long, but lacks the IT support required.

    Schools spend the money on the sparkling new equipment. Having worked in hundreds of schools the majority had some kit in that nobody could fix, and often had no support contract to ask someone who could. The IT staff they had where overworked and always underpaid, and where managed by IT Teachers who had usually been teachers all their careers and so not IT people. With the best will in the world it won't work as well as having IT people manage them.

    We live in a world of specialisms. Get used to it. It keeps us in work anyway.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Brainspace full

      IT staff are being managed by IT Teachers flies in the face of "we work in a world of specialisms". Obviously someone doesn't think so. A teacher that is not an IT person but is teaching IT is a part of the problem, that they are also managing IT people just exacerbates the situation.

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get this all the time with new Dell AOI

    Part of my job is occasionally interacting with end users (Doctors) in Hospitals, since all the old desk units were replaced with Dell 9030 all in ones the amount of call outs due to 'computer not switching on' went up 800%, in a way I blame Dell almost as much as the end user as they assume the computer is just a monitor and the power button is on the side and not marked clearly enough.

    It's annoying when you make a call out after asking them repeatedly if they have turned the machine on then get there to find it's not turned on so turn it on and just leave.

    I find Doctors are the worst for not following simply guided instructions, other users seem to have more common sense,

    Just last week had one doctor that was adamant that his powerpoint (which was less than a megabyte) contained a 10 minute video file and went ballistic when I pointed out it simply wasn't possible, the audience knew it as well so the guy was just making himself look foolish.

    1. x 7

      Re: Get this all the time with new Dell AOI

      "It's annoying when you make a call out after asking them repeatedly if they have turned the machine on then get there to find it's not turned on so turn it on and just leave."

      In that statement you've just failed the first test of being a techie.

      You never NEVER ever simply tell customers to "turn it on". You always describe the button and location to them, and ask them to tell you what it looks like and what markings are on it, THEN you tell them to press it. You can never assume that what the customer assumes is the power button, actually is.

      You're annoyed? Think what frustration the customer feels when the help desk is manifestly incapable of providing help

    2. YetAnotherLocksmith Silver badge

      Re: Get this all the time with new Dell AOI

      Not sure I believe you.

      A PowerPoint under 10mb?

  36. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    "Academics are well known for lacking IT skills - it's not their specialist area. They use their brainspace for that and not IT."

    But that's exactly the same as forgiving somebody because "using a pen and paper" is not their specialist area. It's pure, basic, life-skills like knowing how to operate a light switch.

  37. x 7

    How long does it take for a GP to turn on a PC?

    Most don't - the reception staff do it first thing in the morning because they take so long to boot into Window

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Snap!

    I had the same issue. It was a clinician who's PC was stuck shutting down (running win98). Powered off and on the device, no change. Held the button for 5 seconds, same thing. When I asked them to describe the button and surroundings they said, "All I can see is a label saying AOC and a button... why are you laughing..."

  39. Cynic_999

    People don't know about or forget about the hidden parts of devices that they don't usually interact with. I've "repaired" TV sets where the poor picture was the result of the aerial amplifier being switched off or unplugged, but I don't blame the non-technical user for not even knowing that they had such a device.

    After all, the only on/off switch on any of the things that the average computer user interacts with in on the monitor, and in many work places the computer is tucked away somewhere out of plain sight (just like the aerial amp), and often have a power switch that is even more hidden.

    One of our office printers has its power switch in such an unlikely position that it took me 15 minutes to find it - and I knew what I was looking for!

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