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An IT Worker Faced a “Worst Case Scenario” Fixing a Campus Printer. The Condescending Academic Attitude That Made the Shift Unbearable.

young woman repairing a printer

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One scary fact about life is that you never really know what someone is thinking about you. They can be nice to your face, but they might be talking about you behind your back.

Imagine working in tech support and helping someone with their printer. You are kind, helpful, and yes, it’s taking a while to fix the problem, but you don’t give up and eventually get the printer working. What would you do if you found out the person you were helping was bad mouthing you behind your back?

In this story, one college student who is working in tech support encounters this exact situation. She’s helping a librarian at the university library who is having trouble with her printer.

While the librarian is nice to her face, she says some pretty mean things behind her back.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

“I’m so sick of the entire IT department! She’s too dumb to figure it out herself!”

I’m a college student and have been working at my university library’s tech support for a few years.

We service all of the staff members in the whole library, most of which are very sweet librarians and the rest are awful human beings.

One woman had a big problem with her printer.

In comes Staff Member (SM), a middle aged woman whom I haven’t dealt with too often. SM’s printer keeps jamming so I bring it to the IT bench to inspect, searching for scraps of paper or any damage.

I then get on Dell support for 1.5 hours and they determine it needs replacement rollers, so I tell SM that it will take 24 hours for them to send the rollers and for me to reinstall her printer.

The next day (Friday) the replacement rollers don’t fix the issue, so Dell sends a brand new printer that will arrive on Monday.

I tell SM that I will setup her new printer once we receive it.

The new printer created new problems.

On Monday, I plug in the new printer and test it and there’s some new issues.

My coworker and I spent over an hour trying to work on it, failed to realize that I needed to move over the imaging drums from the previous printer.

So at the end of my shift I apologize to SM and tell her we needed to work on it more tomorrow and I’ll bring it down first thing.

So on Tuesday, I bring down her new printer. It’s not networked so it connects directly to her PC. Well, when I connect it guess what happens?

The problems continue…

PC doesn’t recognize it, so I tell her I need to play around with some settings.

After 10 mins nothing is working so I tell her I’m going to consult my supervisor about what to do and I’ll come down as soon as I have a solution.

It’s worth noting that SM wasn’t supposed to have a personal printer to begin with.

She recently moved offices and the new one happened to have a printer in it so she’s been using this only for the past couple of months, meanwhile there is a shared network printer literally 5 feet from her office that everyone else in the area uses and she has access to.

Yikes! OP found out what this woman really thinks of her!

Anyway, I go back upstairs and google what to do (like all good IT techs) and my coworker comes in, he says “uhh, I was just downstairs helping [person] and I overhear SM going ballistic. She says ‘I am so sick of this IT department. They hire the most incompetent students possible. I don’t understand why it’s taken her 3 days to fix this printer. How hard can it possibly be?! I don’t even think she got me an actual new printer. And of course she had to ask [supervisor] for help because SHE DOESNT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PRINTERS!!! She’s too dumb to figure it out herself!’”

At this point I’m speechless.

Not only did I get her a brand new printer when I didn’t have to, but I have been nothing but kind and apologetic to her.

Yes, it wasn’t a quick fix. But guess what?! NOT MY FAULT. We all know tech has a mind of its own and sometimes things just don’t work out.

The printer was finally fixed, but the problems didn’t end there.

So I’m incredibly ticked off but I found a solution to the issue (thank god for IT forums) and I go downstairs and install the printer correctly, test print, everything is fine.

I say “I’m so sorry this has taken so long, everything that could’ve gone wrong did but it’s all working now!”

She says “oh my, no apologies necessary at all. I know none of this is your fault. I really appreciate it.”

Fake witch but anyway, I’m about to leave and her internet shuts off. Just completely stops working.

Thankfully, this was an easier problem to solve.

I run the troubleshooter, try everything under my belt. I apologize again, tell her I’ll grab her a new network cable and see if that helps.

She says “I know you’ll figure it out sooner or later” ugh.

Luckily my coworker dealt with this exact issue before and knew what to do, so I fix it and again apologize cause it’s taken time away from her work.

She says “seriously don’t worry about it, the world isn’t ending because my freaking internet shut off. You’re fine.”

The woman’s attitude really is baffling.

So that was the end to my painful encounter with this woman.

I cannot possibly believe why someone would have so much hatred towards a student worker making $13/hour, and I literally catered to her by myself, spent over 2 hours on Dell support chat, was incredibly nice to her the entire process.

Some people are just incredibly entitled and think IT requires no critical thinking.

Hopefully she doesn’t have to deal with her ever again.

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Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I agree!

One person reassures OP that printers are known for being problematic.

Thankfully, I think the woman was a librarian and not a professor.

This person shares a lesson learned the hard way.

The easy solution would’ve been to simply not fix or replace the printer. She wasn’t supposed to have it anyway. She was lucky to get a new printer and should’ve been grateful.

The most annoying part is that she was overly nice to OP’s face but bad mouthing her behind her back.

There’s nothing worse than a two-faced liar.

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