It’s always frustrating when a computer problem keeps interrupting your work and nothing you try seems to fix it.

That’s what one employee and his coworker ran into when the coworker’s monitors kept going black.

After swapping cables and monitors without any luck, they emailed IT and copied their boss so he knew what was happening.

A few weeks later, the boss came into their office with an explanation he said came from IT.

But as he explained what they needed to change, the employee couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Read on to see what the manager suggested.

How managers try to save money

The Cast: $me: tormentor of CAD by day, Fader dictator by night, Computerguy for the sake of it. $cw: coworker who’s quite tech savvy. And $boss: our boss, businessman, not so tech savvy.

The two monitors of $cw’s workstation were going black at the same time for a few seconds, two or three times a day.

We tried everything in our scope to troubleshoot the issue (exchanging cables, switching his and my monitors, sacrificing an architect in a blood ritual), but nothing helped. It was always the monitors he was using that went black.

Suddenly, his boss appeared with some new information.

So we wrote an email to our actual IT support guy and cc’d $boss. $cw wrote down what we tried and that I didn’t have any issues.

A few weeks later, $boss comes into our office.

$boss: “$cw, I talked to IT, and it’s simple. These two monitors you are using are not compatible with your graphics card.”

He couldn’t believe what his manager said.

I looked up from my work in disbelief over the words I just heard.

$boss: “They were meant to be used with the two new workstations.” $boss is pointing at the desks of two new coworkers.

On one side, he’s right. These four shiny new 27″ displays were delivered with the new PCs, but $cw and I had given the two new coworkers our older 24″ displays as we set them up. On the other side: each of the monitors are 1440p panels, connected via HDMI with a GTX 1050 Ti (good enough for our work). Two per PC.

Then, the boss gave him some advice.

$boss: “You should switch them out, or at least connect them by DVI, because HDMI does not support this high resolution.”

$me: (while grabbing my cigarettes) “Sorry, $boss, but that’s not how it works.”

$cw is on vacation now, and I’ll see what I can do to troubleshoot a bit further. Kicking the PC didn’t do anything.

Oh no! There’s nothing worse than dealing with people who don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Let’s check out how the fine folks over at Reddit would handle this situation.

Here’s what this reader had to do.

It doesn’t sound like he did this.

That’s a really good point.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a helicopter inspector who grounds a flight after the pilot is rude to him.

Here’s someone who also suggests it’s a power issue.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting you don’t know much about computers.

But if that’s the case, you should really listen to the people who’ve already tried to fix the problem.

Had he done this, he’d know that they already tried swapping the monitors, so his explanation didn’t make much sense. Plus, being the boss doesn’t make an answer right just because you sound sure of it.

He needs to stop being so cheap and hire someone to fix the issue.