When you’re an expert in something, one thing becomes quite clear.

Lots of other people think they’re experts too – and they’re definitely not.

The IT helpdesk employee in this story was used to users wrongly diagnosing their computer problems.

But the insistence of this user was stronger than most.

Read on to find out what happened.

That’s not quite how that works.

It was a Friday morning and a Teams message popped up from a user.

They were rudely complaining that the Dell command update software and the updates it provides had messed up their laptop (Dell command update is BIOS and driver updates).

They said they were left with no choice but to install them because the laptop was so very slow.

Now they couldn’t get on to anything on the network even with the VPN connected while working from home.

But this tech guy suspected that there was more to the story than the user realised.

Already preparing for this user to be difficult, I suspected that the actual issue would not have anything to with the updates, and was more likely something to do with our temperamental VPN.

So I requested confirmation of the difficulties they were having in the form of a screenshot of the error.

This arrived and confirmed my suspicion the the VPN was indeed the cause of this user’s woes.

Read on to find out more.

Now, with the VPN, once you connect you need to allow time for it to confirm that your device is a secure company device. This takes about 60 seconds after connecting.

If you don’t wait then the VPN says “not a secure company device,” and you get no access to the network.

This appeared to be what had happened to the user.

Annoying, but easily fixable by disconnecting and reconnecting the VPN and waiting the 60 seconds before accessing the network.

Let’s see what he did with this information.

I provided those instructions to the user, advising that it looked like a VPN issue so please follow those steps of disconnecting, reconnecting, waiting for a minute, then trying again.

Straight away the user came back saying that they didn’t think it was a VPN issue as it had been connected for ages, and that it must be the updates.

They continued that whenever the laptop becomes unbearably slow they always check the updates, and there were always updates there to be installed.

Read on to find out how the helpdesk employee felt about that.

Okay, so they’ve put two and two together and come up with something that looks like four but isn’t.

What they have is the whole thing a little backward, and I get it.

If the updates are always there when there is an issue, then obviously they are the cause of the issue (completely ignoring that installing the resolves the issue)/s.

I get the logic behind the thought, but it doesn’t quite add up.

So the guy continued to try to help.

So I explained that yes, there are likely to be Dell updates when the laptop goes slow, but no, it’s not the existence of those updates that make it go slow.

I told them that when drivers are outdated they can cause the laptop to run slow, because they are potentially causing errors that slow it down.

I then confirmed that when the drivers are out of date, new and up to date ones are released, which is why installing them resolves the issues with the laptop performance.

I also reiterated that they needed to follow the steps with the VPN to see if the issue was resolved (which it very likely would be) and we could try some further troubleshooting if that doesn’t resolve it.

Let’s see what happened next.

Very reluctantly, the user agreed to follow the instructions.

Lo and behold, everything worked again!

Though I’m still not entirely sure they believed me that the updates being installed didn’t cause the VPN issue, and don’t cause the laptop to go slow…

It must be difficult to work in this field when people continue to patronise you.

Sure, people think that they know better – but in reality, they need to trust the experts.

After all, if they were experts themselves, they wouldn’t need the issue fixed for them.

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

This person laughed about the users’ assumption.

While this helpdesk employee felt his pain.

Meanwhile, this guy was done with trying to explain things.

This helpdesk employee is absolutely right to try to explain things clearly to the user.

But it really seemed like they didn’t want to know.

If he’d had a little more patience, instead of jumping to conclusions, he likely wouldn’t have made such an arbitrary mistake.

He just needed to slow down.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.