A’rite, Bruv. Turn it off and on again — the sacred prayer of a thousand server rooms.
I work in IT. I have worked in IT for a long time. And there are things I wish every person in every office understood about the person they call when their computer does something unexpected. These are not technical things. These are cultural things. Unwritten laws. The kind of wisdom that does not appear in any onboarding document but is observed religiously by every person who has ever worn a lanyard with server room access.
So here, in no particular order, are the unspoken rules of IT support. Share this with your colleagues. Especially the one who keeps submitting tickets that just say “computer not working.”
Rule one: restart before you call
Yes, you have heard this before. Yes, you think you already do it. You do not. When IT asks “have you tried restarting?” we are not being condescending. We are eliminating the single most common cause of all computer problems: the system has been running for 47 days without a reboot and the memory is so fragmented that opening Excel feels like launching a space shuttle. Restarting fixes more problems than all other solutions combined. If you restart before calling, you will solve your own problem roughly 40% of the time. The other 60% is why we exist. But give us the 40%. We have earned it.
Rule two: describe the problem, not your diagnosis
“The internet is broken” is not helpful. “The WiFi is broken” is not helpful. “The server is down” is not helpful — and it is almost certainly wrong. What is helpful: “I cannot open any website. Chrome says DNS probe finished with no internet. I have already restarted. It started happening at 10:30 AM.” This tells me when it started, what the symptom is, what you have already tried, and the exact error message. This is the difference between a five-minute fix and a 45-minute investigation where I slowly reconstruct what actually happened while you watch me type and ask “is it fixed yet?” every two minutes.
Rule three: the ticket is not optional
I know you saw me in the corridor. I know you think a quick verbal description of your problem is more efficient than logging a ticket. It is not. The ticket is not bureaucracy. The ticket is memory. I deal with 20 problems a day. If your issue is not in the system, it does not exist. I will forget it. You will be angry that I forgot it. We will both have a worse day. Log the ticket. I will fix the thing. This is the social contract of IT support. Honour it.
Rule four: we know when you are lying about restarting
Task Manager shows system uptime. If your computer has been running for 23 days and you tell me you “just restarted,” I can see that you did not. I will not confront you. I will simply restart it myself and watch the problem disappear. You will think I performed technical wizardry. I will let you think that. But we both know the truth. The uptime counter never lies. Respect the uptime counter.
There is a uniting theme here. IT support is not about computers. It is about communication. The best users describe what happened. The best techs translate that into solutions. The worst interactions happen when the user tries to be the tech and the tech is too tired to translate. Follow these rules. Your IT department will love you. They might even prioritise your tickets. And that, in any office, is a superpower. XAXAXA!