Sometimes, the easiest answer to a tech request is simply that you can’t control someone else’s computer.

One IT engineer ran into that after a ticket landed on his team asking for help with a customer’s desktop shortcut.

Apparently, the customer had saved the company’s website to his computer, but the shortcut showed the Chrome logo instead of the company logo.

So, someone from first-level support passed the request along and asked the engineering team to advise.

The only problem was that they had no control over the customer’s personal computer or how he created his shortcuts.

Keep reading for the full story.

Can we customize the shortcuts of our customer?

I work in the engineering team doing software packaging & deployment. I was a former first-level guy.

We work for an MNC as in-house IT.

The characters are: Me, A: other third-level engineer, O: first-level engineer, U: user asking on behalf of his customer.

As soon as he read the ticket, he knew where it was going.

A: KishanPD, I need your opinion on this ticket. O sent it to us, but I honestly have no idea what we should do.

Me: Oh, okay, let’s read through the ticket and figure it out.

Ticket description from U:

Hi there, one of my customers saves http://www.ouronlinesystem.com as a shortcut on their PC. But the shortcut shows the Chrome logo instead of our company logo. Can we set it so that it will show our company logo instead? My customer told me other companies have done this for him before.

It took everything in him to approach this nicely.

O’s comment in ticket: Hi team, kindly advise.

My inner voice: KishanPD.exe has stopped responding. Would you like to try restarting the program?

Me: Kindly advise?? Well, let’s start imaging customer laptops, then we can handle these requests with no issue.

A: …Yeah, I’ll just tell O it’s not possible.

Yes, please do that.

Too funny! But for someone who’s just a computer user, it may seem pretty simple.

Let’s take a look at what the readers over at Reddit have to say.

Here’s a solution to the problem.

Exactly.

Yes, there’s always a way.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a fast food employee who shuts down a customer angry about her change with a single word.

According to this reader, setting a favicon is harder than you think.

Some requests really don’t need to make it that far.

If the customer wants a different icon on a shortcut saved to his own computer, that’s something he needs to change on his end.

There was really no reason to send this all the way to engineering.

You’d think a first-line support worker would know that too, but apparently not.