When you work at a technical help desk, you will frequently get calls from people who really don’t seem to have any idea about what they are doing.

What would you do if a caller reported that she couldn’t find a file that she was working on, but she had no idea where (or if) she saved it?

That is what the technician in this story was dealing with, and when he told the caller how to search for it, she got upset that he couldn’t just locate it for her in seconds, so she hung up.

I don’t know where your file is

There’s a lady in my office who, despite being very kind and I otherwise have no problems interacting with, drives me crazy with her tech problems, of which there are many.

Why do people insist on doing things beyond their understanding.

She tends to fiddle with things, break them, and then come to me wondering why they are broken.

This morning, she calls my phone asking for help, telling me that she has a Word file that she regularly updates, but that her most recent changes from a couple of days ago are not there, and the file says it was last saved a few days before that.

What could be causing this issue?

She wanted to know if there was anything I could do to “restore” the updated file, and I was trying to run through my options in my head.

I figured the file server backup might work but wasn’t sure since this was more likely just a case of her not saving her work.

Oh, well there’s the issue.

Then she mentions that she’s pretty sure she saved the updated version as a separate file somewhere but isn’t sure where that was.

Now my brain’s going off in a different direction, and all I could say was “I’ll need to do some digging, I can’t think of anything I can do for you off the top of my head.”

A search like this can take a very long time.

I also told her that if she just saved it somewhere, there’s really nothing I can do to find it other than searching for it in File Explorer, which I recommended she do in the meantime.

Apparently, she didn’t like that because she got frustrated and said she “would just redo all that work from the past few days if I’m not going to help her” and hangs up.

Come on lady, he isn’t a magician.

I just don’t know what I possibly could have done for her in that moment there. If the file wasn’t saved, I can’t pull it out of the ether, and if it was saved somewhere unknown, then running a general search was going to be her best bet anyways.

This just seems to be a running theme: if I can’t offer a solution then and there, I must have no idea what I’m doing and I’m impeding on their ability to do their job. I’m hoping to be out of helpdesk within the next couple of years

While frustrating, this is definitely the type of call that the help desk gets all the time, and it would get old quick.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Yeah, they are team members, not equipment.

This is really good advice.

LOL. Correct.

Why do people call for help, then refuse to follow the instructions?

This is exactly right.

IT guys are expected to just work magic.

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