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Giving tech support is usually pretty simple, especially when the people you are supporting recognize that you are an expert and listen to your advice.

Sometimes, however, you get someone who thinks that they are a tech genius themselves, and they tend to make the whole process more difficult.

That is what the guy in this story experienced, and he had to constantly find ways to fix the issues that a ‘tech guy’ that his company supported was creating. Sadly, he didn’t have the authority to lock down his equipment to prevent him from causing even more problems.

I think this would be very frustrating, and since he is a customer instead of a coworker, you can’t even call him an idiot and get away with it. Read through the full story to see how you would handle it.

Why you don’t just buy software for your work PC without asking IT first

I worked at a small MSP that did tech support for a few small businesses.

One such business we’ll call Chinese Stone. That’s not their real name btw.

Chinese Stone makes a lot of material for kitchens and bathrooms, and one of their employees often needs support from me.

We’re gonna call him Patrick, after the starfish from SpongeBob.

This type of person is all too common.

Patrick is a walking, talking, Dunning-Kruger peak. He has just enough IT knowledge to make himself dangerous, but not enough to know he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He’d tell me about how he needs a more powerful PC because his machine struggles to run AutoCAD… only for me to learn he runs AutoCAD on a tablet because its the only way he can use a pen with it (and that’s alongside several chrome tabs and excel workbooks).

He once bought his own PC to use at work from Ali Express (it was some Chinese no-name brand fanless passively cooled NUC) and didn’t ask for anyone’s help adding it to the network, he just did it himself (incorrectly).

He’ll frequently complain about his storage being full despite the fact he won’t touch the network drives I’ve setup for him… you get the idea.

He is shady on top of stupid.

One day I get a call from Patrick. He decided he wanted to upgrade Microsoft Office on his PC to the “pro version” (he was using MS 365 for Business).

I suspect he tried to use a crack, because when I looked, he was stuck at outlook refusing to open because his license didn’t include the desktop version of Outlook.

When trying to fix it, he told me he had gotten a license for me to install for him.

I very much doubt he is going to listen.

Issue: He bought a grey-market retail key. The kind that has about a 50% chance to actually work, assuming you aren’t a colossal idiot like Patrick and tried to use a retail key with an organization account.

I spent 15 minutes educating this guy on the differences between MS365 retail and MS365 business, and a further 15 repairing the damage he did to office.

They need to keep this guy on a leash.

I wish I could lock him out of admin on his devices, but sadly that’s not my call to make.

That said, I’ve made it clear to the person who can make that call that I’m not responsible if he does something stupid.

Makes me wish Chinese Stone had a Squidward type character for a refreshing change of competency.

This is one of the frustrations of being a MSP. You have to clean up people’s messes, but you don’t have the authority to make it so people can’t make messes in the first place.

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about it.

Getting paid to deal with the stupidity makes it easier.

This commenter is exactly right.

Now this is a nightmare for tech support.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a researcher who complained about being excluded from a trip only to watch the university cancel the whole thing.

Trying to save money is good. Doing it through ignorance is costly.

This is how systems should be set up.

People who think they know what they are doing cause the biggest problems. That unearned confidence makes them think that they can do things on their own, which makes more work for everyone else.

On top of that, when it happens in a business setting, it puts the company at great risk. It is crazy that any company let’s people do this type of thing, though.