What seems obvious to one person can be completely invisible to someone else.

Imagine you walked someone through a simple shutdown and reboot, but minutes later, you were still waiting for their computer to come back on. What would you think happened?

In the following story, one tech support employee finds themselves in this exact scenario and didn’t see this coming. Here’s how it all played out.

Buttons are hard

I worked tech support for car dealerships for a while and will always remember this call.

A very common call we would get required us to remote into users’ PCs, install a file, and have them shut down and reboot their PCs, not restart.

If they needed to restart, I could have done that on my side, but a shutdown and restart can’t happen obviously, as I can’t access the physical PC.

It still wasn’t back up.

I had a call with a mother-daughter duo, and after instructing them to shut down the PC, I waited a minute and let them know they could turn it back on.

I hear the mom ask the daughter from across the room to turn it on. We wait several minutes, and I ask if it’s back on.

She said no and asked her daughter to do it again. Several more minutes pass, and I ask again.

She was pressing the wrong button.

This time, Mom gets up and walks over to her daughter, asking her again to turn on the computer. It turns out she was just turning the monitor on and off on repeat.

She had only ever used laptops and just assumed the power button was the everything power button. Mom and I had a good laugh about it and went on with our days.

The job sucked, but the people were great.

Wow! At least they can laugh about it now.

Let’s see if the people over at Reddit have ever dealt with anything similar to this.

This person doesn’t like just a restart.

Sometimes, even a photo can’t save you.

This is good to know.

It sure isn’t.

Now she knows!

Luckily, it was something simple to fix.

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