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[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

Why do some people not understand "Cause and Effect"?

This guy called into the helpdesk saying that he can't log into his terminal. They sent it over to me. I talk to him for a bit. I get out of him that "someone was messing with the wires" a little bit ago and that's when this all started.

"Did you . . . by chance . . . Check to see that the wires were in securely after they messed with them?" "no . . ."

Had him check the wires. Low and behold it suddenly started working. Yeesh if someone was messing with the wires right before something suddenly stopped working . . . Wouldn't common sense say that it's something that they did?

This is what we call job security. So long as people need someone to think for them, I'll be employed.

EDIT - Scary. I just told this story to one of my coworkers when he got back from lunch. What he said "Don't these people understand cause and effect?" Scary when you start to think just like your coworkers . . .

Comments

[anaesthete.livejournal.com]

Then there are the cracksmokers who understand it just enough to be dangerous.

After being shown 2134834598 reasons Windows is clearly McHosed on many levels, we get a response like, "But I didn't have this problem until I installed your software!"

Concurrence does not necessarily imply causation. The concept and these words are usually too big for most of them to understand :P

[buckaction.livejournal.com]

"Yeesh if someone was messing with the wires right before something suddenly stopped working . . . Wouldn't common sense say that it's something that they did?"

In the case of wiring, sure that would be the first thing i'd think too... but it's not always true, and unfortunately, I got the opposite where people take the "last thing done must have caused [totally unrelated issue]" to a massive extreme.

I've heard people say some wild shit, It wasn't all that long ago i had a customer that brought in a machine he tried to replace the CD-RW drive in it with a DVD burner and screwed it up... the wiring was a mess, jumpers were set wrong, cables plugged into the wrong place, etc.. i fixed that all up, checking the CD-RW drive for good measure. When I tested the drive worked fine, but I noticed that his NIC wasn't working right (broken Winsock and a borked TCP stack - corrected that easily enough -repaired Winsock, rebuilt TCP/IP, updated NIC drivers).

It turns out that yes, his broken internet access was the reason he wanted to replace the CD-RW... his reasoning? the last thing he was doing before his internet access died was trying to burn a CD, when the PC "went crazy and shut itself down".

Obviously something in software broke, and he just assumed that because he was burning a CD at the time, that must have been the cause of the problem.

It's simple stuff to us, but I actually prefer when my customers DOESN'T try to think for themselves and DON'T mess with things they don't really understand because they have a tendency to just make it worse.

Sure, you might say i shouldn't complain, it was billable work after all, but I wouldn't consider it "job security", I have enough work to do as it is. This guy went ahead and started making assumptions about things he did not understand.. the intelligent thing to do when presented with a problem that you do not fully comphrend is to stop, and get someone that does know... when you think of it that way, your guy actually did the smart thing by getting you to assist him.