16 people who work in IT share their most ridiculous 'you have to fix this' request.

It might be a surprise to some people, but IT workers do a lot more than say 'have you tried turning it off and then back on again?'

Explaining to CEOs how to download a PDF or forward an email might be the majority of the job, but sometimes the requests become shocking ridiculous. So, when a Reddit user asked, 'IT workers, what is the most ridiculous 'you're IT, you have to fix this' request you've received?' people were ready to share the dumbest, funniest, or truly shocking client interactions they've ever experienced on the job.

1.

Our IT helpdesk (before it was renamed the support desk) eventually ended up keeping fluorescent tubes and whiteboard markers in stock because people would send complaints to the CEO that we were refusing to help when we asked them to contact the office manager for these things.

The flipside is that the CEO eventually created a new email address for people to send complaints directly to him. Very few people knew that this special CEO complaints email address actually got forwarded to the office manager.

People have the capacity for such unimaginable greatness, and such hard to believe stupidity. I was personally once reported for sabotaging a specific secretary by refusing to fix her printer. It was printing garbage.

Turns out she installed an Epson colour printer driver (from the disk that came with her friends new color printer) on her (Win95) computer so that her mono HP deskjet printer would also print color. She reported me the third time I uninstalled the bad driver and asked her not to do it again. - AlsoNotTheMamma

2.

I once had to unf*ck a friend's computer back in 2005 or so. He wanted to play Half-Life 2, but his video card was too terrible to run it smoothly.

So he uninstalled the proper video card driver, went to the nvidia website, and downloaded the driver for the most powerful new video card they currently had.

And then his monitor stopped displaying anything. Huh...who would have thought. I laughed a lot at his stupidity once he explained what he did, but at least he was honest! Went into safe mode and fixed it for him. - SavvySillybug

3.

Back in my very early career I had this customer named Mr Windsor. He was this grumpy older guy and everything was an emergency and he was always yelling about some IT issue he was having.

The most memorable is he called us livid over some site he was getting a 'Forbidden' error on. How dare we forbid him from going to his web site! I had to patiently explain that there was an issue with that site and he'd have to contact the owner.

About an hour later he calls back demanding to speak to me personally. He got an e-mail saying he had a fatal error. How DARE WE wish him to die.

Finally figured out that he'd miss spelled the e-mail address and the fatal error was coming from the mail system. I just looked up the number to the web company and told him to call. I'd love to know how that conversation went.

Anyway, a few days before Christmas we get a phone call. It's Mr Windsor. He is slurring his words and clearly been drinking something festive.

He called to apologize for being a miserable old duffer and thank us for being patient. Back to his usual miserable self after Christmas of course. Interesting character. - zerbey

4.

I got called into repair a broken printer, the guy was pretty livid as he was trying to print in a hurry. Turns out it ran out of paper...Even worse I had my boss lose his sh*t on me that his computer didn't work and made the comment that 'nothing ever works around here' (hinting that I failed at my job).

I went into his office and found that he didn't turn it on.... I pushed the power button and all I got was an 'oh.' IT support has to be one of the worst jobs. Stupid a*s people, and anytime something like a mouse battery dies your a POS. - TheOrionNebula

5.

Got a call the scanner in HR was broken. Thought to myself, we dont have a scanner in HR. Go to the office, the lady has word open and is holding a document to the screen hitting enter repeatedly. I thought no one would believe me, so I brought about 5 other techs along to corroborate -makeitrain9789

6.

One place I worked it was pretty much if it got electricity, it was IT's issue. We had to fix the water fountain that wouldn't stop running. We had to fix the coffee machine. - TheDeadGunslinger

7.

Someone refused to believe that computers need power and won’t work in a black out. - Lord_of_Furries

8.

Got a call to to remove a plug on a radio and push the wire through a small vent in the cabinet because the wire was 'unsightly.' I did this while 15 executives watched. None of them knew how to change a plug, and had never even seen the inside of one; but because it had a wire it was ITs responsibility. - dietderpsy

9.

I was a remote tech and had a woman call me and wanted me to drive 6+ hours to her facility to turn on her computer, because hitting the power button was 'not her job.' - CommodoreFiftyFour

10.

My dad used to work in software development. One of his coworkers had to call IT because his computer wasn’t turning on. Turns out his power strip was plugged into itself. He never lived that one down - fabdancer95

11.

Years ago I worked for a rather large ISP as a tech lead. A residential DSL customer called in demanding to speak to a supervisor because his internet was down and he was going to miss out on some multi-million dollar deal of he couldn't get on the internet.

He kept yelling at me throughout the call and demanded I fix it immediately. While troubleshooting the issue I could see that I couldn't reach the DSLAM his connection ran through. I advised him I would have to reach out to a dispatch center to have a tech go take a look at it.

At some point he informed me that on his way home he saw that a vehicle had run off the road into one of our boxes and it had caught fire.

He still said he was planning on suing our company if he wasn't able to be online to make this supposed deal of his. I passive aggressively suggested he go to a Starbucks and wished him well with the lawsuit. - Valaris

12.

I had a doctor ask my why the state's death certificate database didn't work for him over the weekend. Mind you, I didn't work for the state. I worked for a practice he did contract work for. I told him they were probably offline for maintenance when he tried to log in, but that wasn't good enough.

He insisted I get a hold of the state's IT department and find out what happened. The database was working just fine when he asked, btw, as he brought the working site up on his iPad right in front of me.

So a week goes by and he is in my office again and asks if I had any luck with the state IT dept. I had completely forgotten about his absurd request, so I said the following:

'As it turns out, I did! They told me some clod in their department decided to microwave a Hot Pocket on his lunch break but accidentally left a fork in with it. The microwave blew a breaker that controlled the server room.

Knocked everything offline for a bit until they got it back up and running. Everything should be fine now.' He was satisfied and walked away. Sometimes, people don't care what the answer is, just as long as they get one. - HerrDoctorBenway

13.

Lady called to report her monitor wasn’t working. After troubleshooting and asking her multiple times if everything was plugged in she finally pipes up that the monitor “doesn’t have the light on.”

The monitor wasn’t plugged in and she wanted me to wake a guy up at 3am to do it because she was dressed to nicely to do it herself because she was preparing for a meeting at 6am.

Told her to do it herself because I was not about to wake up the on call for that. She complained to our director and he literally laughed at her and her reasoning for wanting the on call sent out and she is now banned from calling in. - theSQUINTYazn

14.

The power went out in our building and the owner of the company wanted to know what we were doing to get the computers up. - brianh71

15.

I've somehow become the 'Apple Guy' at my work. We recently received a batch of brand new iPad Pros and within a week, I received a repair request due to a screen malfunctioning. Turns out by screen malfunctioning they meant completely destroyed. Shattered. Like it had been continuously hit with a hammer.

Lady is giving vague explanations about what happened, talking about how it might have fallen off her desk...onto the carpeted floor. But apparently this is something I can fix? She needed it for a meeting that afternoon.

I had to explain that this isn't something we can fix, that I'll need to go through Apple for a replacement device. Shocking news, apparently- [deleted]

16.

Back in the early 90s all of Alaska's comm. was via satellite. We would get notices from our providers when a solar storm was going to slow down our through-put.

I went upstairs to our Finance and Accounting chief to tell her the nightly processes might be late due to the storm. Her response was 'You're IT just fix it!' Never let her forget that she saw me as a god. - AKShoto