Our head of IT was at the meeting, and he thought we got a warning that the computer was going to restart ahead of time, Nope, we have about 5 minutes, and we can only postpone it for a little while. Not optimal when you’re trying to have a meeting on Teams. I hate it.
A project I work on is getting a write up that will go to a national audience. The project team was interviewed by the writer who then put together a draft. Wow is it bad. I don’t even know how to go about fixing it.
Our resident IT guy is blaming the 10 - 15 minute reboot notice on Microsoft. He also says it was Microsoft, not corporate IT, that forced the upgrade from Office to the Office 365 subscription. 
I actually really like the redesigned ribbon.
So, exactly, how long is this guy’s nose?
Have I mentioned the time some genius in IT thought the best time for a reboot of our entire cash register/point of sale system was 2pm on a Sunday afternoon? We’re a glorified grocery store. That’s one of our busiest times.
The church crowd had just showed up. The “we get to buy booze because it’s past noon on Sunday” crowd was in full swing. Then there were all the people who work Monday-Friday in for their weekly shopping.
All the registers in the store go down all at once.
I don’t know for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that guy no longer works for the corporation. Updates like that now take place between midnight and 5 am, and usually they don’t do all stations at once. At least, that’s how it’s done now.
At least as memorable as the tornado take-shelter events, though not quite as interesting or exciting as either the report of a grenade in the store or the time a crew of shoplifters set the store on fire in three separate locations at the same time.
So… he was minorly inconvenienced by having to get the dude the right key… and his solution is to make sure that he’ll now be inconvenienced every Saturday, because now you can’t help.
Sounds like he’s perfect management material.
Bonus: he’s also been aware for years that our big, custom in-house order processing system (that basically runs on top of Access) would be incompatible with 64-bit versions of Office, but I’ve been told he spent that time trying to get someone from corporate IT to take over development of the system. He learned what everyone should know within their first couple of years here – corporate has no idea what we do, and they don’t care as long as we’re profitable.
(He ended up working overnight to put together a workaround to make the existing program mostly usable.)
Typical email: “The computer is giving me an error when I try to (do this).”
And no one ever makes a note of what the popup error screen states.
So it’s time to play Animal, Mineral, or Vegetable.
I actually had this conversation once:
Them: I got an error message when I did such-and-such.
Me: What did it say?
Them: I don’t know. I clicked “OK” too fast.
Me: 
Wow, that’s a pretty good problem report. I’ve been dealing with just, “I have an error,” which even that is pretty verbose. Occasionally it’s an email that consists only of a subject line that says, “its not working.”
What would be nice is if you could select and then copy the text in the error screen. In my experience, there are a lot of them that don’t allow that. Yes, you can take a screen shot, but that’s another skill a lot of users don’t have.
Speaking of which - trouble reports with screen shots that don’t show the URL. Yeah, I can generally figure out which page you were on (and any screen shot is better than no screen shot), but there is good information in the address bar. Please give me an extra 20 pixels of height.
In Windows, at least, the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-A, followed by Ctrl-C will copy the text of a system alert, albeit without any visual highlight of the text copied.
It is not a great UX design, but better than nothing.
On a Mac, a screen shot of the error message pasted into the Preview app allows you to select and copy the text with its built in OCR, though, with mixed results.
This is good info for those of us who don’t know what IT wants. Thank you. And thanks for the screen shot shortcut for pop-up error messages!
Which reminds me: Requests for help that include blurry screenshots. Text illegible.
I work with highly-educated attorneys. They’re reasonably sharp with their computers and with electronic documents.
But for the life of me I can’t hammer home the idea between a copy of a document attached to an email, and a link to that same document as it exists on our document management system. It’s easy-peasy to email a link to a document; they all know how to do it.
But at least once a week I get an email attaching a copy of a document, asking me to make some change or other to it. I always have to ask, “Do you want me to change the copy which is attached to your email, or track down the same document on our system and make the changes to that one?” And every time they’re surprised that there’s a difference.
I’m not a tech genius, but I had this figured out the first day we were given the ability to embed links. Sheesh.
I remember a guy years ago who would take a screenshot of his entire desktop (not just the window with the error message) and then would paste it into MS Paint, then take a screenshot of that and email it to me. I could never figure out what he was trying to do, but by the time he was done jacking around it was impossible to read what he was trying to send me.
We sometimes need to upload documents from subtrades. Documents that are emailed to us. My coworker will print the document, scan it, and upload the scanned version. Its easier apparently.
That being said, a lot of my subtrades will send me a word or excel file of their invoice instead of a pdf. I have shown people print to pdf or export, but they do not understand.
Is his name Jack? He used to work with me. Also would print out all of his emails. Since he left, we’ve been saving a ton on paper and printer ink!
Too bad he left. You could’ve tried to sell him on my latest idea:
.
For the discerning yet unhurried gentleperson:
Each evening, we will print out your day’s texts and emails, on 24lb. premium cotton bond with a deckled edge. These will then be hand-sewn into a leather-bound tome and hand-delivered to your club, such that you may peruse them from the comfort of your leather armchair in front of the fireplace.
We once setup .procmail to forward a certain professor’s important emails to our university’s email-to-fax service. Then the email would come out the fax machine, and the admin assistant would put them in the professor’s mail box.
I think that setup was in place for a decade or so, before the university informed us we were the only user of the email-to-fax service, and they were shutting it down. I think by then the professor made the transition to electronic electronic-mail.