I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I’ve been living in that bubble my entire life, I’m curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don’t agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.
The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press “Num lock” on the keyboard.
About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn’t work.
Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new “Num lock” button they’d never heard of before.
This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say “Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter” when typing a single “A” on a line, but didn’t know what “Caps lock” was and couldn’t find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.
Man this reminds me. I was helping an engineer support my company remotely and after a month or so of everything working fine, he emails frantically and says “THE SCREEN IS BROKEN!”
After some time, I finally figured out that he means he can’t log on to the VPN. Probably two hours of testing in and we didn’t figure it out, so we left it. The third fucking day of this I eventually was annoyed and wanted a coffee break, so i told him to reboot again. He actually rebooted this time and it works.
Caps lock had been on for like 3 days. Everything he typed was yelling because he just didn’t notice.
I later met someone in IT at his company who said that this is a fairly regular occurrence from him
That’s actually hilarious. :) Its always the best stories from tech support.
I used to do phone tech support for a device that hooked up to TVs to filter out profanity.
I would give very explicit instructions on what to plug where. It was really common for me to have people unplug everything and start over because they did something wrong, and I had no way of knowing what because they were all unreliable narrators.
On a second, third, fourth attempt I’d often hear a “OH! You said to plug that into the TOP ROW! I’ve been plugging it in to the bottom row.” Or something like that.
A call less than 30 minutes was a good call. Calls over an hour were not uncommon. If I had someone who could follow instructions, it could be as quick as a handful of minutes.