Some people seem to have constant problems when it comes to technology, and it is usually their own fault.

What would you do if you worked on a technical help desk and one user kept calling in with an issue where his Teams program would say he is offline even when he isn’t, but it was fixed with a simple settings change?

That is what was happening to the help desk guy in this story, so eventually he wrote a script to solve the problem and made it run every five minutes in the background of the user’s computer. This helped to ensure he would never have to hear from him again.

I love this type of creative problem-solving. They may not have identified the root cause, but they fixed it anyway. Read the full story below and see what you think about it.

What icon?

One of our glorious colleagues has become a term for epic and/or weird failure. Let’s call him Smithers.

This is funny, but kind of mean.

Whenever someone runs into a strange issue, then he got Smithered. Likewise, if Bob from the quality department did something extremely stupid, then Bob Smithered himself.

On a suspiciously quiet day my IT-colleague and I are doing our usual stuff which includes taking care of our RDS farm (2008 R2), ERP system (prior to 2000 – there are newer versions but management decided not to upgrade) and other circumstances. Did I mention this happened in the post-Covid era, so just recently? No? Well, now I did.

Well, this should be easy to fix.

Suddenly, the one and only Smithers calls us from his home office. His laptop appears to be online on Teamviewer, his emails are working but his Teams is offline.

He says he only encounters this randomly at home but never at work or while he is traveling. We remote in via Teamviever and quite frankly just google-searched the situation and it told us to go into Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN-Settings and there to tick the box that says “Automatically detect settings”.

Why are those settings getting lost?

To be honest, from what I know, that shouldn’t fix the issue but it did. I have no idea how his home-office is configured and at that point I was way too afraid to ask.

A few days later, he calls again. Same issue. Same fix, but why was that checkbox not ticked? He claims he didn’t touch it, and to be honest, that is way past his skill level to dive that deep into any settings.

This should make it a really easy fix from now on.

So, I quickly wrote a batch script and put it on his desktop. As clear as I possible could and named it “Teams No Internet Connection Fix”.

I show him the icon and tell him to double-click that the next time it happens. “Uh-oh, I will do that. Appreciate you buddy!”….yeah, suuuuure buddy….

Wow, he clearly doesn’t know what he is doing.

Again a few days later…here comes our hero again. Same issue. I ask him whether he clicked the icon on his desktop. He replies “What icon?”….*Facepalm* “The one I showed you last time in the middle of your desktop?”….silence….”What icon?”

I just give up and remote into his laptop again and click the icon for him.

That’s one way to handle it.

This happened a few more times until I gave up on him. I created an scheduled task that runs every 5 minutes and executes the batch script. Now when he calls, we just tell him everyone is affected by this worldwide Teams-outage and he should check again in about 5 minutes.

I feel like that guy from Idiocracy who had to tell the cabinet of the president that he can hear the plants asking for water instead of Gatorade, as the cabinet members couldn’t comprehend the actual situation.

Good thinking.

Oh, and obviously the script was moved to a new folder directly under C:\ to prevent the genius from deleting the file on his desktop.

Some people just have the worst ‘luck’ with technology, and that seems to be the case here. At least they were able to find a workaround that solved the problem.

Check out what the people in the comments think about this weird situation.

He was clearly not careful with his equipment.

Maybe he has malware.

How do people like this keep their job?

I’m sure this guy did good work overall.

It is easy to get a reputation as a troublesome caller. In this case, however, it seems that something really was wrong with his system.

Sometimes it is easier to just find a good workaround than it is to actually dig in and look for the root cause.