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I have to regularly help my aging mother (and sometimes neighbors) with their phones. The damn thing of every manufacturer having their own Android version(s)/skin(s), and UI/UX designers changing the layout every new version of an app, makes me want to violently slap their collective faces with a large trout
The annoying part of this is that any good UX person will tell you not to keep changing things around, but they get overruled by MBAs and shareholders.
the newest feature MUST BE most obvious so the metrics make it look worthwhile.
The metrics are the most important thing, haven’t you gone to business school?
Literally the shutdown menu being replaced by that shitty ai menu on android. and no manufacturer can object to it cause its a google requirement for being allowed to ship the play store…
That ex0lains where that bullshit came from…
Pretty sure that’s copying a change Apple made first, turning the power button into an assistant button. Because adding another button for that, is obviously out of the question.
My phone has a dedicated assistant button and the power button is separate. The assistant button can be programmed to do a few different things based on if you short, long or double press it. Some of the functions aren’t AI. Some.
There are of course exceptions since there’s over a dozen Android manufacturers trying to differentiate themselves. But the default Android behavior used by most of them was changed to match Apple back in 2021 with Android 12.
Last time I checked, both AnyDesk and RustDesk can remote access Android phones. You will need to set it up in person, because the install is too complicated for non-technical person.
You will need to set it up in person, because the install is too complicated for non-technical person.
but also because whatever you search for in the play store, you are lucky if the first result with big font and icon is not malware but just a competitor to what you actually wanted. and guess what will people install. outrageous.
also afaik rustdesk had an abuse problem and now you can only connect aftet a bigtech login… or with a custom server.
How can she
/slap?
And that’s why remote desktops became a standard in the desktop support industry.
Phone support in the 1990s was an absolute blast… 30 minutes round and around before “oh, NOW I understand what you’re trying to describe.”
When I worked a help desk job, I once spent seventeen minutes trying to describe to a customer where the semicolon is on a keyboard. I know how long it was because my then-manager listened in and thought it so ridiculous that he sent me the recording of the call because it made him laugh.
This is relevant because the reason I wanted her to type a semicolon was to press shift+semicolon to type the web address used by my employer to grant remote access. I don’t remember why she needed to type http: … It was more than half my life ago. I was probably following a script or maybe I made the mistake of saying the full URL and the customer fixated on it.
Point is, though remote management is better now than it was, it doesn’t solve all woes.
I remember decades ago when I did desktop support, we had found a software which could initiate remote desktop without the user (in our network) having to do anything on their end. IT Security was not happy with us when they eventually found out, but it was so goddamn convenient while it worked :D
And the scam industry. Previously the scammers had spent long hours on the phone with my father to get to his bank account (must have been frustrating that it’s usually empty), now he has anydesk and they can be more efficient. To bad because he enjoyed the attention.
And this is why I left IT. It was either gonna be an aneurysm or a bullet. The meme about tech workers leaving to become farmers is a legit path, my fellow IT workers.
It was a mainframe programmer I knew who left to drive a public bus
EXACT CHANGE ONLY!!!
Our buses use any of prox card, paywave card, app
No trouble with cash
It is annoying but their ignorance and unwillingness to learn keeps me employed so I try not to complain too much about it. Plus, most of the people I help are generally appreciative and kind so that makes helping them feel like less of a chore. I can also shoot the shit with them for a little bit and break up the monotony in the day. Silver linings and all that
Listen here, buddy. That needs to be labeled “not safe for IT” because it gave me PTSD.
Apologies
“Now stop scrolling”
user keeps scrolling
“Seriously stop moving”
user scrolls faster
Too many letters. Ain’t nobody going to count them. Wouldn’t surprise me if that were a reason people didn’t post 😄
True. Should rename to i7t12
and then they get angry and bitch about you being rude, unhelpful and how you “didn’t know how to fix the problem”.
Remote control is the way to solve this. Non-technical people are not good input devices
Your clients knew how to use the mouse?!?
I had a guy who literally couldn’t use a mouse. Master’s Degree in electrical engineering, used to manage a department of 10 engineers.
Then he developed a glue huffing habit and ended up working for us…
Nightmare fuel
I asked a client to close all open windows and he literally stood up and shut all windows in his apartment. I’ve had heard that as a bad joke before, but i experienced it live during a support call.
Edit: another highlight was the client who answered the question what 56k modem she used with the words: “My modem is lit up and colorful.” This experience probably was the start of making everything glow in RGB as soon as we had blue leds figured out.
I’ve had heard that as a bad joke before, but i experienced it live during a support call.
This reminds me of a turkish standup bit. Paraphrased :
You know we have these regional jokes about people from the north right? Well, I went to do a show there, and I didn’t realise that those jokes are actually events that happen there every day. While I was there, I ended up being in several of these jokes, and in one of them, I was the englishman! When we were trying to get back , I went up to an older gent and I said “uncle, do you know where the airport is” and he responded to me “the airplane airport?” No, there’s a ZEPPLIN that takes off from Rize every half an hour, direct to Istanbul!
We had a ticket that escalated to a P1 because a key worker kept having trouble with MFA.
I took the escalation and went through the login process. They had configured phone call mfs which the robot would say “press # to confirm your access”.
They were pressing # on their computer keyboard.
<Picard facepalm>
The spread in knowledge between clients, and what we could actually accomplish with them was enormous. We had one client whose NT4.0 died completely during installation of a modem driver (wtf btw. But nowadays your antivirus company remotely kills your os).
We actually went along and helped him reinstall NT incl. everything network over the phone, and it went well. (Took a few hours tho, installation from 3.5" disks was never the fastest thing)
And then you had clients where making them focus enough on the action on the screen was nearly impossible, making the easiest things a 30 minute call.
I don’t use discord. Recently, I tried to get into a community server because what can you do.
They have a bot set up. You get access to an isolated channel and have to confirm you’ve read the rules by checking a checkbox, whatever good that does. People who use discord may know what I’m talking about.
For the life of me, I didn’t get that I have to click the emoji reaction to the post. I write software for a living. I know what reactions to posts are, but they were disabled. Clicking such an emoji to interact with it is a discord exclusive option, usually that opens a list of people who have reacted.
And holy shit was the “community support” dude a dick about it.Sometimes you just have to be patient with people. It might be the most obvious thing to you, and it’s just a blind spot for others, despite everything.
Clicking emoji reactions works the same in MS teams at least.
But yeah, sometimes the supposedly obvious thing just doesn’t click. I’m so blind to a lot of modern UX that people seem to like and need help finding the most basic shit because everything is an icon with no text. And giving directions from looking at a screen is just kind of hard.
TIL
Imagine a world where everyone has some CLI for most of the stuff, even if alongside GUI
- How do I X?
- Ctrl+Alt+T and paste this.(Even though it’s not good for security)
You want not good for security? Just ssh into their machine and fix it from a terminal.
“I wrote it down and glued it to the screen and its not fixed. Do you even know how to do your job?”
This is what clickfix is based on.
I feel like that’s more to do with age, than tech proficiency.
Definitely felt the meme when assisting my mother with tasks.
Definitely been the meme when a new UI redesign happened that completely bamboozled whatever priors I had to the point that I seemingly could not notice large buttons on a sidebar that I wasn’t expecting.
I think it’s neither age nor tech, it’s how the human brain works. Same thing happens on a sailboat: “Pull on that red line. The one by your right hand. No, not the blue one, the red one that’s directly in front of you, inches from your hand…”
Cheese is on the top shelf instead of the middle shelf, “We’re out of cheese!”
How I hate switching between my phone/computer and my partner’s phone/computer. We don’t even have the same keyboard! Everything is in a different place! So frustrating
As someone who rebinds the Capslock key to be a special modifier (mostly for switching windows), it freaks people out sometimes when I’m typing on their machine and then suddenly stART WRITING LIKE THIS
I wince with pain every time I want to exit a Windows terminal and only end up typing a
^Dcharacter.Yes! Or Ctrl-R
I have a shortcut to switch keyboard layouts, and I switch layouts to find “weird symbols” all the time… I am almost unable to type on any other computer
I learned Autocad 14 on my own machine across a couple of months. Customized my input tablet and keyboard shortcuts to make my common tasks easier.
Then I went to a machine shop to have my widgets built, and tried to use their Autocad - and I was completely helpless, asking “how do you … ?” for the most common tasks. I never bothered to customize key-shortcuts again, I don’t work alone on a single machine enough to make it worthwhile.
we’re… we’re teaching ourselves habits that place us firmly into a friendless corner 😢
Why not just keep a small keyboard with you that remembers your short cuts and macros?
It should be plug and play on mobile devices too if friends want you to type something there
I actually would love a portable version of that, as long as it unpacked to a 70% keyboard. Anything smaller would drive me crazy
I don’t narrate clicking and typing directions to people anymore. If you want my help, you stand up and I sit down.
Sometimes giving the fish is the right choice.
Teach a man to fish, tomorrow he has already forgotten. If he was going to catch his own fish, he would have learned how to long before this.
If you try, you might fail. The lesson is : never try.
This is the way
The thing I learned from help desk was a profiency at mastering the mute button.
Right up until you miss the button and don’t notice. Or it just decides not to mute you. And then your customer gets an earful of just how you feel about them. And then you get an earful about how your manager feels about you.
The thing I learned from help desk was how to say “Thank you sir, and have a nice day!” outloud but actually mean “Eat shit and die, you asshole” in my head
This never happened. I was a fucking ninja.
The closest I came to something like that was when the customer on someone else’s call heard me, but they were crying with laughter. Fortunately, they only caught me when I roasted someone pretty damn hard.
They also heard me switch gears, and although it drove the tech’s AHT up a bit, it was so funny to her that she asked me out. We ended up dating for three years. (dated the tech/csr, not the customer. The customer was being a Karen until she heard me, and then she changed her tone and the tech’s call went much smoother.)
