My grandma had a prestigious tablet which was bootlooping randomly. The service store claimed it was fine and didn’t honor warranty multiple times. Well, this was a shitty alibaba rebrand anyway.
In my experience, random failure with random auto-fix is exclusively a windows feature. Turning it off and on fixes the majority of windows glitches.
The computer just trembles at the IT dude’s aura and does what it’s supposed to do because they know what they do to printers that step out of line.
I used to call that the “Techy Curse”
It’s part of the class package. We auto-resolve issues under a certain level of difficulty just by being nearby. Pretty nifty.
This only works on others computers.
If the wizard themselves experience a minor irritating tech issue, then it stays permanently and forces the wizard to use a convoluted work around instead of asking another wizard for help (this would fix it)
Haha! Yeah, that’s pretty much it :,D
We should sprinkle IT people around the offices like wifi routers. To project their aura of auto-resolving constantly throughout the workplace. As a programmer I have more of an aura of auto-breaking any system that I’m near so hopefully they cancel out
I call it the blue thumb.
I work in IT support.
A solid 80% of all issues magically disappear the second I show up.
There’s a very simple explanation for it – Clarke’s Fourth Law:
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.It’s the whole reason why IT wizards are exempt from the usual office dress code.
The long hair, beards and flowing robes (or baggy pants and XXXL T-shirts) are vital parts of the ritual.This is the actual explanation, and I do tell people when they get frustrated enough. I have the aura, I am a natural tech witch. Just call me and I’ll stand by your PC, scrolling on my phone, while you discover it now works. Bye bye now. Don’t forget to tip your IT guy.
I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.
Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.
When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue. He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that. Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.Today I (backend) asked my teamlead (frontend): “Can you help me, ‘npm run dev’ isnt running for me”
She said: “Have you 'npm install’ed?”
I hadn’t, so I quickly ended the conversation right there.
What kind of system are you using where that’s not immediately clear from the error message?
The tried and tested old system of not reading the error messages
Tech Aura. If you have it you understand. If you don’t then you watch in awed frustration as the computer that refused to work 10 seconds ago suddenly starts behaving when I.T. touches it. As an aside you know your I.T. are real wizards when stuff starts working just because they walked in the room or answered the phone. :)
my tech aura comes and goes
i once tried to log into a microsoft account for 10 minutes, and it only let me in once i took the laptop to my coworker and tried to show how it wasn’t working
and then one of my other coworkers tried to restart a camera multiple times, and it only worked when i pressed the button
You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?
This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.
And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.
They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.
Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.
I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.
One time, I was staring at a piece of code for a solid 10 minutes or so, and could not understand why it gave me a compile error.
So, I ask the senior for help, start explaining what I’ve been trying to do, scroll down to show some other code snippet, scroll back up and the compile error was gone. My IDE simply had not re-rendered properly. I have rarely sweared as much as in that moment.Unofficial IT at my work and half the time people ask for help, it suddenly works with me there and not even touching it. Granted, most of the time that’s just people having typos when typing username/passwords and managing to do it correctly the 4th attempt. And sometimes it’s just the computer being unusually slow to connect to wifi right after booting up and its connected by the time I walk over to check on it.
One of my previous tech jobs used this strategically. We would just send like a vague “hey could I get your help for a sec” which was code for “some trivial thing that has never failed before is failing now but if it thinks I’m wasting your time it’ll start working”. Half the time when the other person showed up we’d just talk about random stuff while the person tries the thing again and it would start working no need to ever know what the bug was in the first place
Magic Fingers.
I worked in IT for 25 years and this was true for a large majority of calls I got over the years. I called it the IT intimidation rule. LOL
It’s a bit of a curse, so often I come in and things magically start working… But that’s hardly satisfying, and the person that needs help just knows it’s going to bite them again… So I get to guess why it broke before it behaved for me and hopefully figure it out and fix it despite it currently working right now.
