While working for a 24/hr restaurant chain in the pacific northwest many years ago. We would get overnight pages when something critical was down, so I retuned a 2am call.
Manager: So our network is down, I can run credit cards.
Me: Oh, I see your watchguard is down.
Manager: Should I know what that is.
Me: It is the device that manages your connection to the web. It may just need to be rebooted. simple fix. Reboot it now.
Manager: ah, I don't know what is what here!
Me: It is simple, it is a red box on your shelf right above where you sit in the office.
Manager......
Me: on the shelf, it is a fully red box, says Watchguard on it.
Manager: ah... I don't get it.
Me: RED box, you don't get it?
Manager: I don't know tech terms, I am a manager at a restaurant.
Me: can I talk to the dishwasher?
Manager hands over the phone to the Dishwasher
Dishwasher: yeah?
Me: Can you reboot the Watchguard, it is a red box on .....
Dishwasher: Done.
Location was back up in 3 minutes. I guess I should have said "Watchguard - in color #FF0000" What was I thinking.
"Can I talk to your dishwasher?"
Brilliant!
Dishie just wants to get back to the pit. He knows the longer he's gone the taller piles are going to be
Even better, the first time I read it I thought he was being sarcastic and ask to speak to the dishwasher... machine :D
I think about 50% of the readers did too
Haha yes! That one made me actually laugh out loud
"I'm not a tech person. Please stop talking jargon to me!"
"sir, I'm asking you to move to the left."
Left, right, up, down, what does it all mean, why are you so confusing? You want me to move? Okay! (Immediately moves to the right).
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-A-B
I used the acronym "ETA" when calling a client to let them know about when I'd be there to fix their whatever. Yeah, the customer told me she wasn't technical and I shouldn't use technical jargon to her.
also a (former) brand of peanut butter here in Oz.
Rita the Eta eater
still better than 'marge "you're soaking in it" palmolive dish washing liquid' ;)
Stop confusing her about the Electronic Technology Apparatus! She has enough on her plate as it is.
Your left or my left?
Your other left.
too. many. times.
That would have saved a plane. Russian pilot turn the wrong way due to the differences between Russian and Western artificial horizon, and limit English skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossair_Flight_498
(In the Army) Your military left!
Throws printer cable into the fryer
As IT staff married to a restaurant manager, not only do I know EXACTLY what now-defunct chain you are talking about (lemme guess - really good pie and kinda meh everything else?), but this is hilariously accurate. Spouse has actually been on the phone with restaurant tech support outlining
"I did this, this, this, and this, and this is the error code!"
"Wow. Are you one of our techs?"
"No, my wife is."
ooooooo yes, The place of PIE. :) Great catch!
Spouse was lead line cook at one of those. He also worked for one of its competitors later... and called me in to fix the printer. I took one look at the shit the franchise owner called a restaurant PC (we're talking barely enough RAM and processor to boot, bootleg software a decade out of date, and no security patches) and bluntly told him, "Honey, I've thrown better things than this in a junk pile."
BTW, told your story to dear hubby. He laughed his butt off. Good one dude!
I miss that place.
I used to tell my wife exactly what to tell the tech support guys when she needed something on her work desktop. One tech guy even told her to tell "whoever told you to word your request that way, thanks" LOL
Shari's pies for anyone curious
Oh, I figured it was Marie's.
We're not supposed to directly name businesses on here. At least not as being an employer, though you can mention brands you've used. "It was a Brother Printer" is fine, but "I worked as a tech for Brother" is not.
Okay since the brand of restaurant is now apparently defunct doesnt that make this point irrelevant?
Probably.
I was just pointing out the rules, I'm not the enforcer.
God I miss their pies. There ARE a few still around though.
Colorblind reporting (moderate
deuteromatdeutan). After googling this box, can confirm. Very red.I was imagining a deep muted red, like most tech shit.
Then I googled it.
That is the reddest thing physically possible.
Holy shit it's very red
Likewise googles...
Oh wow, my parents TV when I was growing up couldn't show a red that red.
Damn, y'all guys weren't kidding. Fire trucks are red with envy for this redness and even envy doesn't colour them as red as this thing.
Vanta-red
<checks>
You are not wrong. That's eye-exploding red.
I also checked. Wow. Yes. Red.
Yeah, on a bright HDR display, it really pops.
Holy crap! OP wasn't kidding when they described is as #FF0000!
Rediculously red
In my org we had:
Watchguard router/firewalls - VERY RED
Various brands of switches, but ALWAYS WHITE or light grey. 3Coms before they went out of business.
Which left any other color to represent their ISP premise device - cable modem, DSL modem, fiber optic router.
This let us troubleshoot by color. Much better than having to guess, or record, what color their router and switch were.
I'm getting flashbacks to the days I was on a national support desk for a big government organization and we often had issues trying to walk office staff - even the ones who were supposed to be front-line techs to the point of at least knowing how to reboot workstations - through identifying issues on server/networking gear if something was hinky.
I got fed up enough that I took a digital camera (which tells you how long ago it was) out to the nearest non-HQ office one day, talked my way into their server room, and carefully snapped shots of all their equipment, front and back. (And wrote down all the model numbers.)
Back at the office, they all went into the all-access wiki on supported equipment, along with commercial images pulled from searches on the model numbers, and big red circles and arrows and a paragraph on each one explaining what each one was (and where to find the power switch).
So from then on, at least we could tell a caller "Look for the grey box which has a green flashing light on the right of the front panel and the brand name DAMN EXPENSIVE next to that, then count four square ports to the left and there will be a big red switch to the left of those." Cut down on the frustration on both ends quite a bit.
you have a second Thanksgiving that couldn't be beat?
Or video call and have him move his finger around until you yell stop?
Well, it was the early 2000s. No video calls in most places.
I'm surprised that a certain cola brand didn't start a legal kerfuffle over that color and logo styling
>be me
>browsing reddit
>run across a comment chain about how red Watchguards are
>whyiseverybodysoimpressed.tar.gz
>google it
>holy shit, that's red af
Fellow colourblind here. A bad experience on the other end of tech support (no internet):
- Is the light on the box Orange or Red?
- Sorry, I can't tell - I'm in alone and I'm colourblind.
- Yes, but is it orange or red...?
Sigh...
Right!? What the fuck even is "Amber"!?
It's this nice orangeish red, you can't mistake it for anything else, trust. :P
Not colorblind, but my dad is very red-green colorblind (not sure on the specific type), and I've been asked "what color is this?!" a time or two before. He never seemed to have issues with the colored lights (he works in the hardware side of IT - I stay in the software side myself), but I don't know how.
Protan here. "Is the light red or green?
The fuck I know. It's bright.
Also colorblind, seconded. As an aside.. what color is peanut butter to you?
Red as watchdog box.
It's like a greeny-brown? Like a tan color that wants to be orange, but can't be. The Lightest Brown, I guess.
Protanomaly reporting in, very red
You're right. It's so red I can even tell it's red!
Moderate protan reporting in, yeah that box is like #FF0000. The person question would probably have to be full on monochrome or have more extreme colorblindness than I've ever heard of existing. And even then it still wouldn't explain the belligerence of just refusing to read the giant words printed on the box. I'm glad that some people finally are taking color blindness into account when thinking about things, but it's borderline insulting in this situation. I feel like people are giving this guy way too much benefit of the doubt when this reads exactly like run of the mill "microchips are involved in any way shape or form, so the end user has fully disengaged their brain and refuses to attempt to apply any critical thinking skills whatsoever" situation.
In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of inspired gospels, there appears an incredible technology used by aliens who invade Earth, which keeps anyone from caring much about it.
A battleship materializes over a cricket field, and an army starts flowing out from it. Our Hero Arthur Dent is the only person in the stadium who notices this, and it takes much convincing from him to persuade Ford Prefect that there is indeed something to be concerned about happening. (it may have happened the other way around. I need to brush up on my scriptures)
The ship gets away with this through the emission of an SEP Field. A "Somebody Else's Problem" field, which immediately convinces anyone affected that what they're seeing is not their problem, and they can safely carry on in the full knowledge that there's nothing they can or should want to do about it, and that the best thing to do in this situation is to continue having as good a time as you have been having.
I think microprocessors may contain some such a field which works on a vast majority of people. A nice medal may be in store for anyone who can prove this, if the medal givers can also get through the SEP field contained in even that kind of research.
Did you mean moderate deutan?
Indeed. My Christian childhood has me locked into just one word when starting it with "deut" lol
Chances are the dishwasher has worked there longer than the manager, and had actually re-booted the Watchguard before.
Or the dishwasher is a guy who is washing dishes to pay for his new gaming rig which is surprisingly common.
Or the dishwasher has an art degree and is able to identify stuff like "red".
LOL!!
Thank you I'll be here all night
Why would they teach technical jargon like that in grade 1?
I have helped parents who got a PC one way or the other for the home. Parents are approaching the machine like it's about to explode. The fastest way "your son/daughter around? Can I talk to them?" and be done in minutes.
Now if you tried that the kid would be a waste of time because if its not a phone they are clueless.
Oh. Man. This dates me, but one of my most interesting calls was talking a 95 year old dude in "middle of nowhere" Texas through setting up an aftermarket Blackberry he picked up at a swap meet.
That was on my top ten list behind the guy who swore he was Jesus setting up a Chinese knockoff "iPhone", the army wife desperately trying to make a video call to her husband in Iraq (during the height of that mess), and the dude trying to use his phone as a Modem with Windows XP while whacked out on demerol from a car accident.
It ranks slightly above the case where the guy reported his phone destroyed because his cow ate it and the guy whose ex-wife put $5000 worth of overage and international call charges on the bill by calling the overseas weather report and leaving it on the charger.
This is back in early 2000s before google was around and you used yahoo, ask jeeves, or lycos. My grandmother took the family to see some stupid play about survivors of a plane crash. Apparently it was inspired by an actual plqne crash in canada or something. The next day she calls me because she wants me to find her info on the actual events. But this is how she asked. "Could you use your computer wizardry and nurse the information out of the ether."
Bet that was an interesting conversation
I'm assuming that was on purpose?
Im an independent tech that works with seniors. Which means i have a day job amd tech is my hobby. Its funny sometimes how they cant tell you whats going on other than "it doesnt work"
"SIR, I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT I AM NOT A COMPUTER PERSON, YOU'RE REFUSING TO HELP ME SO I'M GOING TO HANG UP"
Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit he was color blind? Red/green is pretty common, especially among men. Or perhaps he's just that dumb. I've known both.
(I work with a manager who is so colorblind he basically sees in black & white. His choices for Windows theme is . . . garish.)
I'll vote for dumb. I'm colorblind, the rest of the description "box that says watchguard" would be enough to find the thing.
The box is aggressively red (google it), you'd have to be extremely colorblind to confuse it with gray or black of normal machines in that room.
Its not like there are orange or green boxes to confuse it with.
Aggressively, violently red
I read this and wondered why you wanted to talk to the machine that washes the dishes.Â
and this stupidity after my first coffee of the morning!
oh man, Didn't think of it that way. The position at the time was called a DMO "Dish Machine Operator" but as it was pointed out, I think I just wanted to talk to a machine at that point, It was 2 in the morning....
Oh, the dishwasher isnt available? What about the refrigerator?
No I read it like that too, I thought they were saying he was so stupid they'd rather speak to a machine ðŸ˜
Dont feel bad. I thought the same thing. I thought he was making a point about how ridiculous the guy was being
I could have explained my stupidity if I hadn't had my first coffee in the morning, but this was after said coffee ;)
I mean, that first coffee needs some time to kick in.
I thought the same for a second thinking they were basically saying the dishwashing machine was more capable until I realised they were talking about a person (who clearly is also more capable)
What was the tech term he didn’t know? Red? Shelf? Box?
It was box...that was way above their paygrade
Manager is a excuse generator, dishwasher have wants to help.
"Stanley walked through the *red* door!"
I'm not a Restaurant manager and yet if someone said "white to go tray", I can at least identify that.
Since when did shapes, colours and letters become tech jargon? 😨
Oh, right.. always has been 🫩
Certain people enter into an obstinate "Anti Tech Mode" the moment they talk to someone they perceive as "technical". It doesn't matter what you say to them, because in that mode, their brain refuses to parse any information. It just blanket says "Nope, this is all tech jargon, you don't understand any of it. Tell him you're not technical, in a tone of increasing exasperation".
Drives me mental.
sir I am NOT a watch guard person!
Nothing to Lose (1997)
There's a spider on your head.
What?
There's a spider on yo head.
Look, I'm sorry, I'm not up on all this jive talkin', home boy lingo, what's that supposed to mean? "There's a spider on your head"?
It means there's a spider on your motherfuckin' head, man!
They wanted you to magically push the button from your location. Having worked in IT Support for years, I could smell that manager's response coming a mile away.
Was he colorblind?
No, I think they were just frustrated and lack of training never went over the equipment in the store. Sometimes at 2am it can get busy.
When all the bars let out. Not just busy, but lousy with drunks
Good point. No training and 2 am. Second job too perhaps?
Maybe the person is colorblind?
And also cant read.
Functionally illiterate, possibly. That does happen.
That would make sense only if there are also machines that are orange or green or some other color that can be confused with red. Colorblindness means you have trouble differentiating certain colors, like red and green. It doesn't mean that red color is completely invisible or that you mistake bright red for black color of normal routers and switches.
You'd hope he'd know the difference between a red hot chilli pepper and a green one.
Or at least Red and White wine.
There is a claim I've seen several times that most wine Sommeliers cannot tell the difference between red wine and white wine by taste when blindfolded. I don't have any evidence to back that claim up (I've seen it on various forums), but it wouldn't surprise me if it started with restaurant managers claiming they're the Sommelier.
We use Sophos RED devices at all if our remote offices and showrooms and what really pisses me off is that they aren't red. You need to reboot your RED device
I can't see anything RED
Its white but it says RED on it and Sophos
Nope.
Actually, red is a hard one. Lots of men (about 8%) are red-green colorblind and don't really know it.
But beyond that, yeah.
wouldn't he have looked for a box that could be red or green?
You would think, yeah. But people tend to hide this shit, and just push the question away (often angrily) rather than saying something like "I don't know what red looks like, I always say the wrong thing when my wife asks me about color, I don't get it "
(Similarly people will do a lot to not admit that they can't read very well.)
I tell 'em straight out I'm colorblind and that MY colors aren't like their colors (so strong protan I only see 1/10th the colors of a normal person).