This is the “I want to be back at my own desk in two minutes / this shouldn’t take long” posture.
Things are serious if the tech has to sit, and if you’re the tech and you sit right away, you’d better explain if you’re not expecting it to be serious, because users often pick up on the connection even if they don’t consciously realise it.
Users constantly offer me to sit, sometimes repeatedly. And while I appreciate the gesture, that chair means I am capitulating to the machine that is taunting me with its flippant disregard for my desire to doom scroll, drink caffeine, and talk shit on the service desk in the secret group chat from the comfort of my own desk.
I have to touch their mangy keyboard and mouse. I don’t want to use that chair unless I have to!
I’m so glad I got out of that line of work. Offices are gross.
They fart on those things!
Even the chairs!
How did you get so strong?
For every idiot with an IT problem that could be solved by possessing object permanence and the ability to read at above a 6th grade level, I do one push up.
…
Jesus Christ…
As an IT guy I am able to sit from time to time when helping users, on the floor, under the table, pulling cables.
Man, I don’t miss that. Now with wfh, I can more easily avoid this shit. Oh, you don’t know how to download and save a Teams meeting recording and want me to take 30 minutes to walk you through it over the phone? Take these instructions with screenshots for each step instead and leave me alone lol.
Sometimes that doesn’t work because the person I’m dealing with is just that clueless and can’t follow basic instructions. So I do end up having to speak with them. But I make sure to have a meeting coming up before I call them.
Wrong.
i do this whenever i think “haha this should only take a few seconds” and then i my back hurts because it took way longer than a few seconds
That position is the product of one’s “I’ll do this quickly” whishful thinking.
With experience you start figuring out when something isn’t going to be quick as you look into it, at which point you get a chair.
With even more experience you start training other people to solve their own problems before they come to you with stupid shit they could have solved themselves, as well as designing your own shit that’s meant to be used by others to avoid things like “magical sequences” (you have to call X, then Y, before you can do Z), properly handle common mistakes with good error messages that in some cases even tell people how to solve it and other such features to make it less likely for there to be usage errors and handle them elegantly when they happen in order to reduce the support load on you.
Next time I’m in this situation I’m telling the person I’m helping to get their ass off the chair. If I’m helping you the least you can do is let me sit down!
At least ask if you can sit in their lap.
Yeah cuz like you really don’t wanna be there, but to wanna be kind and also flex your skills. It’s… Complicated.
I have a bad back so I can handle this for about 4 minutes tops before I have to pull up a chair.
This will endlessly fuck your back up. Use a chair or at least squat. My old boss has a permanent bend after doing that for 25 years.
