I just tell people the computer is afraid of me. Because it is.
It’s part of the class package. We auto-resolve issues under a certain level of difficulty just by being nearby. Pretty nifty.
I call it the blue thumb.
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.deleted by creator
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.
That tweet is obsolete since Home Assistant and ESPHome have become usable
The key is that it should remain fully functional, even when lobotomised.
Kill WiFi, alongside ZigBee and Z-Wave coordinators and all core functionality should remain.
That’s what my house does. If I kill the internet, automations still work, as well as the interface via LAN (I’ve got hairpin NAT set up to make this easier than having 2 addresses in the app), if I kill Home Assistant, all devices still function manually.
I favor ZigBee to WiFi smart devices, although the polluted spectrum in my area gives me some headaches. With WiFi devices when possible I buy premade stuff (so that it’s CE compliant), and flash ESPHome on them, or similar.Yeah, wifi is a crapshoot as to whether it might expect a cloud connection, so I have to research those devices carefully. I’m satisfied with my OpenGarage being on Wifi because I know it has no internet aspirations. I hope that Matter over Wifi devices are similarly local friendly, but I haven’t actually had anything to buy since that was an option.
Indeed, nice and layered.
If internet, wifi, internet, and zigbee/thread/zwave up, fully functional, can close my garage door from miles away
If internet is down, then everything still works within wifi range.
If local connectivity is down, well, all the local controls still work almost the same as a non-smart (the ‘on/off’ switches sit in the middle instead of being ‘on’ or ‘off’ since physical and logical state could otherwise disagree, but switch down to off, switch up to on still works).
I’m oretty certain there is not a single printer on the consumer market these days that works without wifi.
Try Brother, set 2 up in the last month, both USB connections
While I use it on WiFi, I’m fairly sure my brother laser printer has a USB connector.
I used to call that the “Techy Curse”
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 had a coworker who had constant issues with her laptop. Whenever she tried showing it to me, the issue magically fixed itself.
After this happened multiple times, she would just ask me to quickly touch the laptop to fix it. Worked every time!
Fear keeps them in line.
If you ever feel like you are losing your touch as an IT support person, destroy a computer on purpose.
That’ll bring the rest of them in line.
If you can’t win with love, fear is just as nice and will suffice, to misquote Robert Frost.
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.
You embarrassed the computer back into working. Pat yourself on the shoulder.
It’s the same with all machines. When I worked news production in television it was the same thing. Something breaks, call in the engineers, now it works once they show up.
Car making a noise. Get to mechanic. Stops making the noise.
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
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
Magic Fingers.
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
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.
