In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:
Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT
Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.
In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.
Oh man, I feel your pain… I was in general customer-facing support for three different enterprise security/identity service providers from 2014 until a year ago. That shit was torturous sometimes. Now with that third of those three I’m the dedicated guy for just two of our larger customers and it’s fuckin great compared to that. Always dealing with the same handful of very very competent people is so refreshing.
I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.
But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…
In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:
Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT
Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.
In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.
Oh man, I feel your pain… I was in general customer-facing support for three different enterprise security/identity service providers from 2014 until a year ago. That shit was torturous sometimes. Now with that third of those three I’m the dedicated guy for just two of our larger customers and it’s fuckin great compared to that. Always dealing with the same handful of very very competent people is so refreshing.
I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.
But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…