A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
My job title is "IT support engineer". No, I don't know why your email is slow. No, I don't fix stuff on your work laptop. Call me when you have a 1.8PB storage volume that is throwing errors, or when the robotics and automation can't talk to their controller.
Luckily I'm getting a new title next month, along with a new employer.
I've heard someone with a similar job reply with "does your computer cost more than a house? No? Then I can't help you"
Love it. I gotta start using that one.
Table Games Dealer here. “Help us make money” – listen, if the dealer knew how to beat the house they’d be a player. The dealer is a terrible player, that’s why they’re on their side of the table.
Ohhhhh. From "table games dealer" I thought you owned a tabletop gaming store. Selling, like, Settlers of Catan and D&D and stuff. Took me a minute to realise you're a casino employee.
Psst! Hey buddy, over here!
You need any Warhammer stuff?
Making sure your fruit and veg is washed, half the time we've dropped it on the dirty floor and just do a quick dust off.
If you're not fully washing your fresh produce when you get home, do it from now on, people are fucking disgusting and will sneeze in their hands meer seconds before picking up, handling and then putting back the stuff on the shelf, contaminating the rest.
We did an experiment in my microbiology teaching lab once where we made cell cultures from some food we had blended without washing first, comparing spinach to raw hamburger.
The spinach was worse. MUCH worse. It also had nastier types of cultures that popped up. I have always washed my veggies thoroughly since that day.
That’s why I eats me spinach - it’s fer me immune system!
I'm a software developer. All my relatives assume that I know how to troubleshoot every computer problem they have. From cleaning up crapware-ridden ancient Windows XP laptops to replacing failed hard drives, they call me for help.
I mean I do, but that's not the point!
I have a degree in computer science. Today I was defeated by my mother's laptop not detecting its fucking webcam. Downloaded the official driver from HP but I have no clue whether that one even got installed because the install scripts always ended weirdly fast without a success or error message. I will never buy a cheap HP laptop again.
I consider cheap laptops to be on par with a raspberry pi. It'll get the job done, but it's going to take some work to get there.
HP inkjets. Nightmare fuel.
I'm an electrician, a lot of people assume electricians are lighting specialist. We are not.
I have lighting vendors calculate photometrics for commercial jobs and I do what is common sense for residential.
Why does my mini fridge keep tripping my GFCI outlet? Is it a bad motor or is it just never good to put a compressor motor on a GFI?
Edit: Actually this comment made a lot of sense and is making me think through some things. Home run comes into the GFCI outlet first then daisy chains over to where the mini fridge is.
I work retail. Contrary to popular belief, I DO NOT always know whether a particular item is in stock or not, unless I consult the computer. I do not have the exact price of every item committed to memory. I don’t even know the expiration date of every single coupon. Some customers think I suck at my job, but I haven’t gotten any complaints from the people who pay me, so…
I'm always amazed when people know what shelves and aisles things are at off the top their head. I am asking 100% expecting people needing to ask some who runs that department or to check the system.
It takes a while to learn, but now I’m glad I know where some of the weird, obscure items are that people rarely ask for. It’s nice not to have to scour the store thinking “I just KNOW I’ve seen it around here somewhere…”
Nah if you stock it you learn. Almost can't help it.
Maybe I say thisas someone that can't find my own stuff around my house lol
Yeah but you're not paid to restock your house for 8h a day lol.
Back in the day there were stores that could definitely answer such questions. The employees were trained to be able to tell you which aisle (side and end) you could find their products.
Not anymore. Guess the training got cut so the CEO could get his quarterly bonus for being a genius. /s
I worked a Lowe’s and people honestly seemed to think I knew everything about every product in that store.
Doubly so if you just got back from time off or helping another store.
I do DevOps engineering, but to most family I just say computers which means I am an expert at everything online and can help make an app for their phones or make crypto.
Luckly managing expectations IS part of my job lol
I'm a Linux software engineer and my in-laws always want me to fix their emails, troubleshoot their Windows driver problems, or work out why their printer is no longer working. Often all three on the same day. Its so difficult to explain to them I'm not "that kind" of computer guy.
What I'm saying is.. can you come to my in-laws house and do expectation management for me? I'm bad at that.
Dealing with your shit.
Not. My. Job.
Fix your PC. Yes, I work in technology, and yeah, I probably CAN fix your PC. Not my job.
Not my current job, but people working in a large department store knowing where individual item is.
Most can point you to a department, but not even an aisle. But not everyone who works in a department store works for the department store. Anything that's not in their line of vision might as well not exist in the store at all.
From my time in IT - that issue that's been really bugging you? The one you still haven't logged a ticket for? Not my job to look at it.
True story that seems to repeat every Friday.
I mean, it was totally fun to catch up on the issues you're experiencing, but helldesk is over there and the ticket they'll put into the system is the very next thing that can happen on this. No rush. I've got lots to do.
I am an accountant and cannot even begin to count the number of people who asked me to do their taxes. I do not do tax accounting, never have, it's a whole separate department where I work, and at every job I've worked. I'm not sure the tax people even think of themselves as accountants.
Can you do a quick financial professional jargon check for us?
I have an accountant, and she's employed for her expertise in the UK tax code as applicable to small businesses.
I understand that there are also accountants who work like financial engineers, trying to find tax-efficient schemes for large businesses. What's your business?
I am in sports now, we are international but employ consultants for international tax stuff. It's way too complicated. Our internal tax department does do some of the financial planning, yes, tax minimizing schemes as you say, working with the legal department. They also do some general reconciling of the tax liability accounts, sales tax and VAT on merch, that part is accounting but the planning stuff is more like legal work than finance.
Mental health crisis clinician: dementia is not considered a "mental health" issue
Also, we can't force people to get help just because they are acting wildly "crazy"... Even if it's clearly psychosis, mania, etc. Even if the cops are getting called everyday because the person keeps trashing stores or harassing people. (And, in my state, the cops aren't allowed to arrest them either, BECAUSE the behavior is due to mental illness).
There's some serious issues with our mental health system in the US.
Writing code.
Okay, you have my attention. What do you do where people think you Do write code, but of course you do not? It's web devel, isn't it?
most IT work doesn’t require the ability to write any code
If you keep it small-scale, I guess. But, sooner or later unless you work in one of those finger-paint kits like checkpoint, you're going to need to write some terraform, chef or - fuck no - Ansible. The latter is less code than codes, or perhaps a suicide note, but it's still out there.
Hell; my boss, leading a team in an org so big and old that it's got a dedicated AIX group, separate from its Solaris group, still writes perl for tooling and is only now worried who'll pick it up when she retires. Old IT, new IT, big IT; they all write something.
Speaking as someone who's been in IT from kernel 1.2.x, if you're not coding then you must be running the bucket truck. Do I win?
Yeah, you’re much better off if you can at least automate stuff by writing scripts.
But, you often get people who think IT work is software and application development. And the reverse: It is often assumed programmers are good at building or troubleshooting computers and networks.
Based on all the stories I've heard so far about senior engineers, if you get promoted high enough you don't even have time to write code anymore