Working on an IT helpdesk is quite the experience.

You’re the expert in tech, and you can quite easily see that a lot of the people around you – well, they’re not experts at all.

However, sometimes people like to act like they know what they’re doing with tech, instead of just handing it over with a word of thanks.

And the newest employee to this company the IT guy in this story works for was no exception.

Read on to find out how he got onto this tech guy’s bad side.

Blank monitor = IT blocked the switch

Over the past few months, we’ve been slowly building up one of our field offices as they’ve been hiring people.

This means sending out the occasional new workstation/monitors, etc. for new users to login to.

They get the PC, plug it into the switch on-site, and go. Pretty standard and no issues up until this one.

One day, a ticket comes into the helpdesk from the office admin out there that says “Can we please unblock port X on the switch so the new guy can access the internet?”

Let’s see why this request shocked the IT helpdesk employee.

Immediately I raised an eyebrow because we don’t “block the internet” on any of our switch ports at any other sites, and it wouldn’t make any sense for just this one port not to work when we’ve been sending them new machines for weeks now.

So I grabbed the ticket and did a bit of investigative work by opening up our remote access software where I can see the PC clearly showing as online, as well as logging into the firewall and seeing the PC connected to the switch port in question.

I responded back to the ticket saying things looked okay from my end, but figured I might be looking at the wrong PC and asked her to confirm the name of the machine (we stick a label with the PC name on every PC we send out).

Crickets.

Then, the situation escalated.

Five minutes later, the foreman for the site calls my coworker annoyed saying, “you guys need to fix this, this guy is just sitting here unable to do any work.”

Moments after that, the user himself sent in a ticket with the same description as above: “please unblock port X on the switch”.

So now I was getting annoyed, and after finally tracking down their phone number (that everyone neglected to give us) I gave the guy a call.

Let’s see what happened when he called the new employee.

I confirmed the PC name with him, remoted into the machine and saw the Windows login screen. I thought “oh, he must just not be entering his password correctly, I guess I could see why they thought it was the internet.”

So I asked him to try entering his password again to see what would happen. He said he didn’t see anything, just a blank monitor that had the word ‘English’ on it.

And then it clicked. We have been sending them newer Dell monitors that, when you first plug them in, you just have to use one of the physical buttons on the monitor to, you know, select your language, as instructed on the screen itself.

He read the message, pressed the button it told him to, and WHOA, everything worked! Go figure.

Yikes! This helpdesk advisor was stunned by the incompetency.

Now like a lot of you, I’m sure that when someone describes an issue like “the internet doesn’t work”, you run down the mental checklist of other stuff that might actually be going on that they lack the tech literacy to describe.

But this was a whole other level that I wasn’t prepared for.

How you get from a “blank” monitor to “the firewall port is blocked” is such a baffling big stretch that I’m still not quite sure how they arrived there.

It’s crazy that this new employee simply blamed IT instead of just using some common sense.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out that perhaps you have to choose the language when you set up the screen for the first time.

His lack of initiative doesn’t really bode well for his employment.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This fellow helpdesk advisor could relate.

While others speculated about how the employee could have reached this random conclusion.

Meanwhile, this Redditor called out the ridiculousness of his complaint.

Sometimes you have to just humbly accept you’re not an expert on something.

If the guy had been honest, rather than speculating about what the problem was, he likely wouldn’t have annoyed the helpdesk guy so much.

As it was, his assumption and the blame it implied really got on the advisor’s bad side.

Always try to keep the IT guys on your side!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.