Want to keep the users happy? Don't call them users for a start A common complaint about IT staff is their lack of social skills. As in any industry that attracts a certain type of person, there's a high percentage of dark-room-dwelling people who can sometimes struggle to communicate. This is either through what they say or how they interact with others. Not all IT people are like this of …
"Often people will ask for something they think is the best solution to their problem, which means more questions need to be asked to find out what they are actually trying to accomplish."
This is very true. However the follow on from that is invariably "Why do you always question what I'm asking for, why can't you just do it?"
"Why do you always question what I'm asking for, why can't you just do it?"
I counter this by saying that when someone goes to the Doctor and says, "I think I have a flesh-eating disease on my leg" s/he doesn't immediately reach for the chainsaw. It's rarely sensible to skip investigation of a problem if you want a long-term resolution for it.
If they ever would investigate what I tell them.
Last example was support at Microsoft.
I wanted to try Office 365 on my mac, specifically Excel. On their download page, I'm supposed to be able to set the language I want to download. I want English, Finnish is the default language. I do so and press the button that says install. What it does is that it downloads a .exe file. Yes, it works just as web pages with trojan horses.
I fiddle around, it doesn't work. So I download the default installation that will be in "Suomi" on a webpage that is otherwise in English, idiots...! Thinking that maybe MS mac apps would work as normal mac apps does. Conform to the system setting for what language to use. But no, checking around there is only Finnish language set inside the ".app" "folder". So no chance that will become English in any way.
So I call MS support. I tell them that their download page has an error. When I set the language, I don't get a mac .dmg file but a Windows "Setup...exe" file. Which for natural reasons don't work under MacOSX.
I'm then told to repeat my bloody procedure, so I do. Now from my Work PC as support is only available normal working hours. Same error. So they figure maybe it's because I'm now on a PC. I again have to explain that I had the same error yesterday on my mac.
After a long call, they agree to send me by mail a link to a english version of Office for me. So at home I install. Guess does it work? No a freaking database error, and the 365 subscription doesn't work with it.
Have they fixed the core problem yet. No you still get the same error I told them about in first place. You are still given the wrong download file for a Windows computer.
So for freaking sake, Stop and fix what I told you to fix. STOP reading bullshit 101 helpdesk manuals and listen to what I exactly tell you, and stop doubting what I'm telling you.
I have found the best way to deal with so called support is to make a screen recording of your problem. Then repeat it. Write a manuscript with video timing where each step can be seen and when the errors happen. I have done this a couple of times when I have had the time for it. That resulted in no further stupid questions from the support persons, and that they actually tried to fix the issues.
On a mac this is easy to do but takes time and effort. On a work windows computer impossible, as you find no software available for you to do a screen recording nor a way to edit it.
So all you who work with support. Listen to your client. Whether he's a techie or not you should be able to discern in a few moments. But in both cases they are telling what they are experiencing. Whether there is a solution to it, or that it's an issue for you to solve, like faulty links on your company's homepage, you should also be able to discern in a few moments based on the type of information your client is giving you. And for FFS stop doubting what I tell you, try it first yourself before you tell me to redo what I've already done 10 times over, with the same error as a result, as I already explained to you fiftyeleven times.
Communication is a) how something is said, and b) how something is heard.
Unfortunately, when you're providing a service, you take responsibility for both a) AND b), within reason, so go out of your way to make sure the person you're dealing with feels that you're not treating them like an idiot, and that you're offering an alternative suggestion. It's not difficult, and doesn't take long. E.g. "Oh I see why you did that. If you're trying to do X, there's another way to do it that might be easier: Y."
See? Even though all I did was dispassionately state a good working practice, it can come across as condescending. Thankfully I'm not providing you a service, so I take no responsibility :)
My favourite saying in the public service IT agency I worked in was.,...
"The customer is always right about what they think! they want, not what they actually need and not what is technically feasible".
Numpty senior users telling me at the 11th hour they wanted to use the DR system as a milestone image for releases as well, does not go down well with me.
"Turn a "no" into an alternative solution"
have to completely disagree with this one... its not a creche. people need to learn that some things just get a No answer.
Sure, you could suggest using a USB stick to get the files off, but that usually is met with a response of "How do i do that, can you show me?" So once you have done that, you are now responsible for all the problems of that machine from now until the end of time. " It used to always print properly before you did that USB thing", "I never got SPAM before you did that USB thing" , " It was much faster before you did that USB thing" etc etc
So , just say NO and let people realise that this is real life and you get have everything your own way.
now, back to randomly blocking network packets.....
Agreed. Especially given their example of:
"Can I plug in my personal laptop and use it at work?"
"No" is the quick and easy answer and probably better than my alternative:
"Damn. What was your name again? Now that you've said that I have to report to your supervisor that you failed the IT Security Awareness Training and will have to take it again. You have no idea how much work you've just caused me and yourself."
"Users are directly engaged in the business of their employer --- some of them at a very high level."
You optimist.
Even if we're not talking about staff in HR, facility management, legal, accounting, audit, finance etc, i.e. users/staff in line departments, these people may *still* not be directly engaged in making profit...
I suspect a "live and let live" attitude on both sides of the tech divide would help. E.g. the fiction that IT is solely responsible for all things vaguely IT related, *including* business requirements for all IT systems unfortunately endures, as does IT not knowing or caring about what valid business needs actually are.
You forgot Facilities, although I suppose they might fall under Finance.
Worst problem child I ever had was in Facilities Management. He couldn't keep track of email for love nor money. At least once a week half an hour before quitting time we'd get a call to help him locate something in his email. Every week it took me 20 seconds to find it after using the Search feature in his MS Outlook. We had a user who was more inept, but the more inept user was always pleasant to deal with, called less frequently, and wished you a nice day. Tone from the Facilities person was always irritating.
True story (I'm a user) about someone who sits very close to me in a busy office.
IT had, a couple of weeks before, sent an email to all (with a few reminders) saying they would automatically start deleting old emails from the 'deleted' folder in Outlook (too many people hadn't set their Outlook preferences to delete on exit).
Colleague, one Monday morning: 'Why have all my saved emails disappeared? All the emails from months that I needed to keep.'
Me: 'Dunno, where were you keeping them?'
Colleague: 'In the deleted folder.'
IT, bless them, managed to retrieve some, but not all.
I've met someone like that. He told me he kept his important stuff in the deleted folder. I asked him if he kept important letters and documents in the bin under his desk. His reply was that he didn't know he could create folders and thought he had to keep them in the deleted items folder.
I meet several people who won't delete their deleted items folder "just in case"...
Not always. My "Users" are effectively peripherals - like the printers and the NAS etc. They exist because the computers (which are what really matter) don't yet have adequate voice recognition capabilities and OCR can't cope with diabolical cursive handwriting. Consequently they are easily and instantly replaceable. Not so the SysAdmins (or Developers).
I have never referred to a sysad as a geek.
That would be to think way too highly of them.
Geeks use systems to do something important, cool, funny. In an essence to work for them.
Sysads just administer systems for the system's sake. What's geeky with that, being able to read a manual and apply it, where is the geekiness in that?
"Then you've had shite sysadmins, or you haven't been paying attention."
I'd strongly lean toward the latter... I used to always be surprised how many people think that the sysadmin just sits around and plays with computers all day.
When a couple of the customer service reps mentioned that to me once, I pointed out that all they did was sit around and chat on the phone all day. It's a case of perception vs. what's actually happening
If you have good sysadmins, you don't notice 'em (or at least not very often)
If you do notice them, there's either a problem with the way they're doing things or they're trying to hold everything together with sticky tape and string thanks to mangelment thinking that computers and networks aren't important enough to spend money on.
It's not at all uncommon to find acquiustion decisions are based on lowest purchase price, vs TCO (and even if TCO is taken into account, not factoring in manhours as part of that cost). This can result in very grouchy admins.
Unless they are directly handing me cash for a pre-agreed service or good, then they are not "customers", they are "staff". We are all staff of the same organisation.
And yes, external customers who purchase services from the organisation I work for are also "customers'. Of the organisation, not me personally.
many apologies to users such as yourself
Those that "use" a computer ARE "users". That's why the name exists in the first place.
There are customers. There are clients. There are employees. If any of these people have any reason to interact with IT....they are users. It all depends on the business though. But in this world where everything is a computer (or a computer wanna-be); how does anyone expect to escape such an all-encompassing label?
I am a user and so are you. It's neither honorable nor derogatory. It is what it is. Just as we are all "human" (well, most of us anyway). We can play these politically correct word games all day long, but it will never change the simple fact that we are users. We use computers. It's not semantics. It's the way things are. Most resonable people don't have an issue with this idea. Just as most IT geeks would more more inclined to take pride in the name "geek".
101 : "Never trust the user".
Understandable but not the best advice. In real life and more complex environments a reported problem is not just the plain description of an error or a determined failure of a task. In those environments with regular intervals serious problems occur which cannot just be replicated at will. If it was so easy, we're not talking about "dragons" to slay but more young kittens to play with. Such helpdesk will be replaced by robots tomorrow.
My advice would be not to dismiss the reported problem just because it cannot be instantaneously replicated or there aren't any error messages which can be looked up. The art here is to determine what the best follow-up might be. Asking the right questions in the right way (some psychological insight might be handy) could reveal quick enough in which category the problem falls (just user imagination or a serious issue like being hacked).
Time pressure might put some limits on the approach above. And yet you have to use some spider sense to make the judgement call and at least try to explain to the one reporting the problem which information is needed, let them take note of times, circumstances while letting them start thinking about their own report. Sometimes you can almost literally see the fog lift and not just a problem but also a suggested explanation will be given to you by the same person, client, user, bugger or lets just call them "security risks"...
I think "Never trust the user" is more in the context of "Don't trust the user's description of a problem" rather than assume they're outright lying. So when they say "My PC isn't getting email", the problem may just as likely be "Nobody in the office has any networking at all". Without being intentionally misleading, they often describe only part of a symptom and could send you off on a wild goose chase.
Of course there are certain questions that you can absolutely guarantee users will lie about, "Have you changed anything recently?" and "Have you checked it's plugged in?" are classic examples because nobody wants to think they broke something or that they've asked a dumb question. That's why good IT folk sometimes suggest "remove the plug, waiting a few seconds, then plug it back in" - because 99% of the time that's the moment when the user spots their mistake but allows them to resolve the issue without seeming foolish.
So agree with you. I've had so many calls over the years from clients with email problems where it turns out the Internet connection is down. But they're users, they don't make that same mental connection.
The other thing I'd add to the list is honesty. Admit when you make mistakes, come clean on screwups, and users are more likely to trust you. Also when something really isn't your fault they're far more likely to believe you.
Indeed, I was just on the receiving end of this attitude when a co worker asked me to find out why our credit card processing system stopped working and the upstream provider blamed us because "no one else is having the same problem"
Turns our their SSL certificate was on it's last day and we were the first to notice because we were in an earlier timezone (gmt+1). If I hadn't caught it their staff would have been having a *very* bad day in a few more hours.
I never trust what my customers tell me.
Rule 1: Don't listen to the customer's description of the problem
Rule 2: Absolutely never listen to the customer's proposed "solution". Remember, if their "solution" had a cat's chance in hell of working, they'd have tried it and it would have worked, and they wouldn't have called me.
To rephrase the above, find out what the customers really need to do rather than what they want to do. They'll often be more pleased with the result. Case in point - a customer once asked me to bring a CD Writer for their computer.
1. They already had a CD writer
2. I asked her why they needed one. Shetold me that they wanted to save their pictures onto them.
3. I asked why she wanted to save their pictures onto CDs when she already did backups onto a portable drive. She told me so that she could transfer the pictures to their husband's computer.
4. I asked why she wanted to transfer the pictures onto her husband's computer. She told me that she sometimes wanted to sit at her husband's computer if he wasn't using it because it had a bigger screen to edit her photos with
5. So I suggested "how about a system where you can sync the photos on the two computers together so that if she edits a photo on one computer, the edits will show on the other, and all she needs to do is run a program to synchronise the two.
6. She said "AH!! That *just* what I wanted! I knew that's what it was but didn't know how to explain it....
So I asked "Why?" THREE times to determine what she really needed rather than what she said she wanted....
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the BOFHness of your comment, I try to think of what my tame mechanic must think when I ask his opinion on the state of my suspension bushes. I know enough to know what to look for, but he knows whether that clunking is the bottom arm chassis bush, or actually, the entirely unrelated gearbox support mount.
I can't tell because I don't spend enough time under the car.
There's definitely a middle ground, normally involving just being a human being about it, I find...
Although that said, my mechanic finds my diagnosis attempts hilarious, so maybe I should be less gentle with the use....staff ;-)
Today I had to correct three people during a conversation with them (together) lasting about five minutes because they kept referring to their computers as either a modem, a hard drive, a power pack and rather oddly, a "TCP Stack" . And the number of people I meet who tell me that their computer "crashed - what could that be?"
True...but having spent 25 years as a Chief Purser for a now defunct airline...and the past 15 years in the IT business as a sysadmin..."stupid is as stupid does" knows no specific industry.
When I was flying, the standard line was "they checked their brain when they checked their luggage". All too true.
The main thing I have found in 50+ years of working in "service industries" is that most, but not all, IT types have no clue about what "customer service" really is.
If you want to provide a good service for the "Clients" of the IT system the solution is quite simple.
Put yourself into their position: Sit behind their desk, learn a little of the "chore" that they have to perform and understand how you as an IT Professional can help alleviate the burden. Solving their problems might cause some new problems for you but it is usually short term.
In IT, I feel that we are lucky to have interesting jobs, for the most part.... Personally I would hate to be sat in front of a computer doing accounting, or working in the claims dept. etc... So if we can make their life’s easier, it also undoubtedly will make our lives easier..
"Put yourself into their position: Sit behind their desk, learn a little of the "chore" that they have to perform and understand how you as an IT Professional can help alleviate the burden. Solving their problems might cause some new problems for you but it is usually short term."
Hmm. Empathy.
We've heard of that.
Personally, doing internal IT rather than for external types, I call the people I work with, and to whom I provide a service, 'colleagues' - because I don't work for them, I work *with* them; I'm just in a different line of work.
'Them & us' separations just cause problems in my experience.
Absolutely 100% agree.
I think quite a lot of It is an issue of respect, I used to work for the NHS and consultants and Doctors thought that because you were in IT you were an idiot and something to be bullied as a lesser human being. Then you had the lower paid personnel who - although often less computer literate - were usually polite and well meaning. The key is to deal with the first group in a courteous and professional manner and if necessary raise a complaint afterwards. However you can only do that if you treat the later (and often frustrating group) of people in a friendly and helpful manner and not look down on them for not knowing how to right click.
Even the most experienced of us (that really doesn't mean me) are users to some other sysadmin/help desk jockey, etc, unless you know everything about every bit of technology/software that you use at work or at home.
So, be nice to your clients/customers/colleagues/whatever, or the wheel of karma will come full circle when you need support ;-)
I'm lucky enough to work for a small tech company where everyone is their own IT support, but if other areas of tech support (e.g. internet providers, phone companies etc) are anything to go by, it's easier to employ 100 useless-but-polite people who have no idea what you're talking about and just serve to give you the run-around than to employ a single person who actually might solve the problem. I don't like it but that's the world we live in.
Whenever I report a problem, I try to give exactly the kind of information I would ask my customers to give me, but usually I find the person I'm talking to has no understanding of what I'm trying to achieve and no skills, training, aptitude or interest in interpreting my input or resolving the problem.
You realise that most service providers, be it IT, banking or insurance, have at least one or two levels of "Customer Service" you have to go through until you can reach an actual fully qualified staff member. Your best bet is to get it logged with all the info needed, and wait for a call back.
Unless you already pay (or your custom is worth) a direct line to the specialists you need. Much the same way that if you walk into a bank, the counter assistant isn't going to give you a loan. But if your Sir Moneybags, then the manager whisks you away so you never actually deal with the counter assistant or loan officer.
In my time on assorted varietys of service desks, a lot of the improvements consist of getting the people who can do the complex tasks to ONLY do those, and get the simple tasks done by those who can't handle the more fiddly stuff. Even if it means making all the people calling with complex problems have either run the gauntlet of ensuring it's not a known issue, or know enough to insist the call is handed to person/group x. Since your high value staff are busy, it's almost certain that you can't just call them. However, when your job gets to them, they can in fact fix it. Or you fault is one of many stemming from the same root cause, and all that's going to happen is that will be fixed, and then your job closed.
As for getting internet providers or phone companies to do ANYTHING it's beyond me. Almost nothing can actually be changed by anyone short of selling you something. If you're paying top dollar for your service, then they should be excellent (and usually are, like most premium services), if you've taken the cheapest option (and not checked what their support is like) then don't be shocked when you're talking to Bangalore and being given the run around. Because that's the support you paid for. Not that I've anything against Indian call centres, at least I can go off script without losing my job as compared to those poor buggers.
My personal gripe is people blaming IT for business decisions. Especially outsourced IT, since that seems to be one of the "advantages" from management perspective. Approval for new laptop denied? I can tell you what the policy is, and even who said no (sometimes we couldn't tell them that). But I can't issue you one without the right sign offs. System is too "slow" (unresponsive) because it's now all done on a TS, yelling at me that your home computer is faster and that "I don't know IT" will not suddenly make me reverse the policy. God forbid that I point out where this should be raised, they are far too busy to actually write a complaint but can chew my ear off. Oh, and if I put this feedback in, it gets ignored ("staff are to use the correct feedback methods").
"Bad" customer service can be a deliberate policy. If you know it's going to be 45+ minutes before your ISP answers the phone, why ever bother calling? If feedback on decisions is made too difficult, then you never have to deal with negative results. Ryanair as a case unto itself...
I had an interesting twist on that "business model" a few days ago. One of those phone scammer types called the house about an error they found on our computers. When I told him to put away the F***ing script and talk to me like a tech he kept on reading the script. Same thing the next day. And a couple days later the same guy called but said his name was Kevin instead of Martin. After saying, "Look, Martin, just tell me what the error code is that you've detected..." he hung up. I haven't heard from them since.
Mass email from IT senior manager addressing "users" and requesting some action of them but failing to explain how to do it.
Helldesk tickets regularly closed without proper resolution, IT managers repeatedly fail to turn up to management meetings to explain themselves.
But users would be grateful if the IT dept could stop torrenting to the servers long enough to do *anything*.
"Often people will ask for something they think is the best solution to their problem, which means more questions need to be asked to find out what they are actually trying to accomplish."
And unfortunately not just users. Standard answer to most question is "What are you trying to do/achieve?"
Number of times that has resulted in completely different solution.
No sys admins.
You may not like them.
You may think they are ignorant vermin (and some times you may be right). :(
But they are (substantially) why your role exists.
No one whose as big a control freak as some of you are will like to admit that fact.
But it is a fact.
Every step of nicety and negotiation takes time. If you're in a business that pays for this service.. Wonderful.. If you're in a service that treats things as a treadmill that the technicians can never catch up with.. The politeness is a luxury that can't always be afforded when people decide to be less than helpful from the 'user' side.
This artical is very good, but it forgets to tell us not to use tech jargon or acronyms that the users will not know. We also need to be aware we know stuff and they don't, so when they call needing something simple they are not being an ID10T, they simply do not know the same information as us and often we forget we could not do their job. We need need to look after them in the same way we would want them to look after us if the roles were reversed.
If you are too nice to them they ask for more while still treating you like shit and blaming you for the way Microsoft do this that and the other. Basically there is no win, but there is a balance. Do as much as you can behind the scenes, make them think you are amazing by keeping them in the dark, if there need a file restored don't tell them about shadow copies, do the restore yourself and they will love you.
Always ask for resources when they ask for systems, that way you can tie the expense to users, they will be questioned on cost, not you.
Never give out your mobile number, they will think you are there to fix their kids PC at the weekend, if they get your number and call at the weekend go ballistic at them, it's a war out there people, and we are being attacked by those who want everything for nothing and those who will sell the moon on a stick and say you can do it without a rocket.
"Some users want to know every intricate detail about their brand new laptop and how to use all the fancy new options"
Why has as item been procured when the user has not specified EXACTLEY what their needs are and justified their choice?
So "we" have spent £1000+ on a notebook with Core i7/3G etc.. when all they are going to do with it is a few email/word docs, forever check their Fakebook profile and play angry birds?
What is wrong with you people?
Large multinational company. 18,000+ staff. Standard systems. Michelle in HR needs a new desktop? Dell Core i5 with 8 gigs RAM and an SSD. Dave in Finance needs one? Well he's going to be crunching a lot of numbers, so Dell Core i5 with *16* gigs RAM and an SSD.
Or do you want to try supporting every conceivable Windows, Mac, and xNix system available?
Find the "power user" in every department (there is always one). Have a chat when you see them about the latest and greatest gadgetry, buy them a beer when you meet them in a pub, and listen to their opinions about how they get their work done and where they think the tools they get from IT are insufficient.
The ROI (of your time and beer money) will be :
- sometimes surprisingly insightful remarks on business processes (often easily changed) that otherwise don't get to IT
- someone in the department (sales, accountancy, HR or whatever) that will be able to help with issues the less computer literate have, thus freeing up your time for more important tasks
Another thing : when I need support (from an isp for example), I always stay polite and perform the actions they ask for, even if I know where the issue is. Remember, first line with these guys is almost always scripted, and the people manning the desk are more often than not cannon fodder who are trying to work their way up from the trenches. Make some small talk if possible, or a remark on how hard hell desk can be. In many cases they will escalate the issue as soon as they can. If you get to the point where someone can fix your problem, remember the name and send an e-mail to thank them afterwards.
The previous comment regarding empathy: well, if you are a true BOFH, you'll recognize its uses to make your life easier.
IT advocates, power user, 1st level support, the secretary who does all the bosses computing....
Many names, similar principle. Find people you trust, and give them more ability/authority to fix or report things to you. Gives you the handy 2 way filter, and more ability to get the truth of what happened. I don't care _who_ broke a thing, but knowing _how_ means hopefully it can be avoided in the future.
Same happens for passing things up (if you are a helldesker), having people in storage/server/networks teams (and problem management if they exist) that trust your judgement so that you can raise issues to them informally, and who won't ignore you as being a phone muppet.
Because they don't want to admit they opened that dodgy email of Miley twerking, because they spilled coffee all over the keyboard when you warned them that would happen, because they *know* they shouldn't have deleted that file and now claim that the computer 'just did it', because they were meant to file that report yesterday and 'the system lost it'.
The average user (yes, they use the system so they're users. Like people who drive cars are drivers. Get over it) the average user with a problem does not think 'how can I supply the sysadmin with enough information to fix this problem?' S/he thinks 'how can I get this issue fixed so that I don't look bad or stupid?'
Nevertheless it's a good idea to be polite to the average user, because if you have arranged the system to that it's possible for one of them to actually screw up something other than their own data, you darn well should be apologizing.
When I'm asked a "how do I do this" question, it's now standard to ask "why" five times so I can boil it down from what the user thinks they're trying to do, and what they actually (without knowing it) actually want.
I'm afraid they will always be "users" to me.
I've never had a problem with admins referring to me and my colleagues as "the users." We use the systems, and so that's what we are. But when one of them refers to us collectively as "my users" it makes me so angry I want to rip their head from their shoulders and pee down the neck hole.
Over the years I've noticed a few folk here on the Reg forums who in my fantasy world would be in danger of winding up with a well urinated oesophagus. We are not "your" anything. We are fellow employees.
Well, what would normally be meant is "the users who I have primary responsibility for supporting" as opposed to some other group of users. In exactly the same way, a manager is likely to say "my staff" meaning the part of the organisation for which he has primary managerial responsibility.
Why does it annoy you so much?
...what would normally be meant...
In some ideal workplaces, perhaps, but certainly not all. It's all about the context. Believe me, when some admins use the words "my users" (with an often strongly implied, and sometimes explicit, "fucking useless" between them) it's not for the reason you outline.
Why does it annoy you so much?
I also have issues.
Well in three years I have gone through three IT Operations Managers - one step down from CIO level - and in each case they could not get over the stupidity of our "Users", the volume of Help Desk requests we get daily for such a small user base, the lack of communication from both the "Users" and their "Managers" and the complete lack of willingness for anyone outside of IT to get off their butts and read back what the error message on the printers LCD actually says, because "it's broken" isn't a valid error for any of the manufacturers I've ever worked on.
However they have learned not to complain when I ask them to reboot because their softphone has crashed or because they haven't restarted/shutdown in two weeks and have started having niggling issues, because time and time again, I have proven a reboot to fix 80% of the general problems they have.
I have been teaching people to PC's since ZARDAX wp on the APPLE IIE, we started early, eventually getting IBM PC-XTs, with 2.11 DOS / Wordstar ? /DB/Lotus, so I have seen a lot of New Users ...
On Apple IIE & Early PC's, the "ANY KEY" to continue, trapped some, they couldn't find it ...
(Sneak into room, watch them spend 15-20 mins scouring keyboard for it, before they ask)
Only early PC, units had 51/4 Twin Floppys to start, we added 20 meg HDs, Students would put the disk between the 2 floppy mechanisms in desktop, I would have to dismantle drives to get disks out, I put tape over gap, they pull it off and some USER would do it again .....
When I managed a shop, once a USER came in with his Amiga, a "DigiView" for his Amiga, Complainling Very Loudly that is Crap, he apparently didn't read any instructions, decided that it should be fitted to Amiga Video port (23 pin d-shell), but it is a parallel port device ( 25 pin d=shell), so did he read instructions ?, did he ask someone ? NO.... He hacked back the d=shell port shields on Amiga & Digiview with needlenose pliers, and tried to bend to the pins to fit where he thought they should go, and even turned it on, just not in my shop .... So this fine example of USERdom decided that it was our fault, that he was cronically stupid, demanding a replacement of both gizmotrons, he didn't get it .....
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