When you work in tech support, you always get to know certain people who seem to have a lot of problems.

Sometimes they are very nice people, but they just don’t know how to use computers very well.

That is what happened in this story, so when upgrading her computer, the IT guy made sure her desktop looked identical, only to find that she hated her cluttered desktop when she asked him to clean it up.

How asking one simple question could have saved me days of work

About 20 years ago, I worked in a meat processing plant.

Who knew meat processing plants even used computers?

Back then I did an unpaid internship there (in order to get my qualification to go to a technical university) and I was hired to help with phasing out older computers and replacing them with new ones.

The process was easy: They bought a bunch of new computers, we (that is my boss and I) were tasked with setting them up and then replacing the previously best machines with those new ones.

This is an efficient way to update computers.

The machines we took away from them were cleaned up and would replace even older machines and so on with the end goal of replacing the machine in “boning” (the place where the meat was separated from the bones for further processing) which still ran on DOS.

Lots of people are like this lady.

Among the recipients of the newest machines was one older lady that was scared of technology and especially any changes to her work environment.

She was sweet and kind and utterly helpless when it came to anything IT (She was also close to retirement and also managed to use the software she needed for her daily work, so no one was angry, when she needed help because she accidentally hit the wrong keys on her keyboard and now Excel looked “funny” (she managed to hide the taskbar)).

This is nice of him.

In order to make the transition from her current computer to the new one as easy as possible for her, I recreated her current environment as closely as possible.

Don’t ask me how, but I was able to log in as her (she might have given me her password or maybe we had gotten an image of her machine or something? I really do not remember anymore).

That is not a very good way to do things, but oh well.

Her desktop was a mess. Every bit of space on the screen had the icon of a program on it. (As this was 20 years ago and the screens were smaller back then, I think she had about 30 or so icons in total)

So, in order to fulfill my task I looked up every programm on her desktop, downloaded and installed it (if they had newer icons I made sure to change those to the older icon she was used to).

He really went above and beyond for her.

All in all, setting up her PC took me a few days with all the added work, instead of the 1-2h I needed for all the others.

I installed the new machine at her desk after she was already gone (she only worked half days) and left a sticky note to call me, when she came in the next day.

Let’s see how this goes.

The next day came around and she called and I went to her desk.

First hurdle: How to switch the box on (by pressing the one and only button on the front of the box) -> she was happy to see how quickly it booted up! And even more delighted to see all her familiar icons and even her dog (her desktop background).

Hopefully, everything will work.

Then I asked her to test a few of the programs she needs on a daily basis.

She opend Excel and two more custom programs that had been made for my company, logged into all three and clicked around a bit, once again happy that everything worked the way she is used to.

Oh my gosh.

I asked her to test some of the many other programs as well (I was afraid that the versions I had found were too new for her and I would have to hunt down older ones) and she told me: “Oh, I don’t really use those.”

Only to add a heartbeat later “Can they be removed?”

<Queue internal screaming>

That is just too funny. While he wasted a lot of time, I’m sure he was happy to do it for such a nice lady.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This sounds like a good way to do restores.

Tech guys like this are appreciated.

This person has done something similar I bet.

This is almost certainly true.

Yeah, it is still a good thing to do.

Now that is an IT guy who cares.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.