10 Reasons Why It Sucks To Be The I.t. Guy (or Girl)

[jamesbandido]

i found this over the net ...

1. No one understands how long something actually takes. Most end users just come in and sit down at their desk, and everything works. Great. What they don’t see (or understand - or care) are the hours of work you put into getting things working correctly, fixed, restored, or whatever the task happened to be.

2. You’re never "off-duty". Even if you work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, when you come home or go out someone will still stop or call and ask you a computer question. They would never dream of asking their friend the dentist to look at their rear molar if they happened to see them out at the mall, but they have no trouble asking you about the annoying message that keeps popping up on their PC or why their sound suddenly stopped working.

3. People think if you’re in IT, you know everything about every type of computer or program. Most people understand there’s a difference between a regular car and a tractor trailer. They don’t just assume that because you know how to drive a car, you can drive a Mack truck. For some reason, however, if you’re the IT guy you must know how to fix a computer (PC and Mac), design a database, write an application, create a website, fix an xbox, hook up a wireless router, and so on.

4. You periodically hear from people you haven’t seen in years. That would be nice if they called to say hi, wanted to catch up and have some drinks, or actually wanted to offer you something. In reality, it always go the same way. They start off with, "Hey how’s it going", "How’s the family", "How are the kids" and then they jump right into it.. "Hey why I have you on the phone, I have a computer question for you…." Thats when my battery on my cell phone magically goes dead and I can’t receive calls for an hour or two (I hate when that happens)!

5. There’s very little separation between work and home. Most professions have a separation between on and off hours. When your an IT person, you usually work on computers all day, and then come home and more than likely work on them all night as well. In some respects it’s great that you can do what you love, but it doesn’t hurt to get out and get some fresh air sometime!

6. You usually have way too much junk laying around the house. As a IT guy or girl, you tend to accumulate a lot of spare parts and junk over the years, and you never throw it away because you’re just certain you’ll have a need for that 9-pin serial cable or that 2400 baud modem at some point.

7. You always have to keep updating your skills. This can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. In IT, things change pretty quickly and if you don’t update your skills you can become dated pretty quickly. Yes you were an absolute wizard with Windows 3.11 for workgroups, but not much call for those skills anymore skippy.

8. Your family and friends can’t stand to watch a movie or TV show with you if it has anything to do with tech or IT. You have a comment for every scene, whether it’s Jack Bauer getting Chloe to send detailed streaming satellite imagery to his PDA in real-time, or the movie star saving gigs of data to their thumb drive in seconds using operating systems that don’t exist with lots of scrolling numbers and graphics that don’t mean anything floating in the background just before the villain walks in. Just remember, it wouldn’t be much fun to watch people struggle with installing drivers when they’re rushing to copy those stolen files, or have their cell phone die in the middle of the satellite update because they hit a dead spot. Suspend belief for awhile and relax!

9. You always want the latest gadget. Yes you just bought a dual-core PC with latest video card and gigs of RAM just six months ago. But now there is a quad-core system with a faster video card, bigger monitor and faster memory you have your eye on. Remember, no matter what you buy, it will be obsolete in six months, so draw a line in the sand and enjoy what you have. Unless of course it’s an iPod, in which case it will be obsolete in three months with a newer version that’s smaller with twice the storage and half the price. That’s the nature of tech. Live with it.

10. No matter how sharp you are, you’re kids WILL be better than you one day. Yes you make your living in IT. Yes you keep up with most of the latest tech and gadgets, but one day your kids WILL beat you at your own game. Probably sooner than you think.

[deathadder]

It's almost upsetting how true that is...

[con]

You forget atleast one thing...
11. It's always your fault no matter if it's the harddrive crashing or hotmail not working if you cant fix it...it's your fault it's broken in the first place.

[dannybunkins]

You forget atleast one thing...
11. It's always your fault no matter if it's the harddrive crashing or hotmail not working if you cant fix it...it's your fault it's broken in the first place.

I was waiting for that one

[i845_]

It's almost upsetting how true that is...

You can say that again.

You periodically hear from people you haven’t seen in years.

Some people don't even care about the niceties. I got a call from a friend (say X) last week. Here's a transcript:

(X) Hello. i845_...?
(Me) Oye X, long time, no call... how's life?
(X) Great. Hey, I wanted to get myself a new machine...

Sheesh!

[wheelnut]

This is soooooo scary and very accurate. Two weeks ago I was ... persuaded to rebuild my sisters windows pc because she had elected (for reasons only known to her) to turn off the anti-virus and firewall. I had put them on her PC for a very good reason and told her so, but did she listen, did she hell as like! Result, 451 viruses (or it is virii?) crawl into her beloved PC. I had to use linux to get the data off of it and a week of my life that I will never get back to fix the damned thing. Also, as part of this, she is using iTunes. I told her in no uncertain terms that I know nothing about iTunes as I have no use for it and had never even seen it, yet she starts to moan when it won't sync to her iPod (another device that I do not have nor do I want - my MP3 player works quite nicely thank you).
To top it all, she works in the IT section of the local hospital and is on an IT course!!!!!!!!!
If she asks for one more thing........ she will probably get it cos I like my job and she is very good at putting me on a guilt trip.

*steps off soapbox*

Moral of the story - tell "no-one" that you work with computers, you will never hear the end of it.

[deathadder]

Moral of the story - tell "no-one" that you work with computers, you will never hear the end of it.

Most of the time it doesn't matter if you don't tell someone, a partner/parent/sibling will do that for you

[con]

Most of the time it doesn't matter if you don't tell someone, a partner/parent/sibling will do that for you

LOL, the countless times my wife has told me XYZ called and asked if you could....for free, ofcourse.

[deathadder]

Before now I have had to tell a few people, who were starting to take the p*ss that I charge £100 call out, and £75 per hour (I don't I'm not a contractor) always to shocked looks. Which quickly disappear when I remind them that they wouldn't expect to give my car a service, or decorate my living room without something in it for them.

It really does make me wonder why people think that just because we're IT people, our time is less valuable than theirs...

[mrrangerman43]

Well I have to say, I don't think this subject is limited just to IT. I'm not a IT person by job title, but I do work on a lot of computers.

wheelnut
Result, 451 viruses (or it is virii?) crawl into her beloved PC.

The worse I have seen was just this year, I was given a system to work on, they said "It's getting slow and has popups" I told them they most likely have a virus and or spyware on it. They say "we keep the anti-virus up to date and scanned it and it didn't say we had any."

Long story short, I took the system home, pulled the drive and scanned it with my system. I let it scan for maybe 10-15 min. came back to see the progress. All I could do was laugh, I wasn't even a tenth of the way through the drive and it listed 17353 trojans were found. Moral of that story is, keep your kids off of limewire.

[jamesbandido]

its been well-known that viruses/trojans attach themselves to IMs specially Yahoo! Messenger ...
they're the type that suddenly send out messages in foreign languages (ie thai or vietnamese) ...
some have already un-installed the YM app and re-installed it again ...
but it keeps on coming back ...
recently, my officemate was affected with such ...
i informed him and even our officemates ...
much to my dismay, he was outright mad at me telling what i did was "below the belt and uncalled for"
isnt it right to let others also to be aware ?
** deep heavy sigh**

[tucolino]

ok a bit unrelated, but doctors get a similar thing as well... friends of relatives coming over at parties to tell you that they have a pain here and there. what could it be?

[leonpmu]

ok a bit unrelated, but doctors get a similar thing as well... friends of relatives coming over at parties to tell you that they have a pain here and there. what could it be?

A virus!!!

This thing is so funny yet so true, Iḿ sure that my office is the same as all of you out there, which is a complete bomb, with spares lying everywhere on all different versions of age and working condition...

[E1PHOTON]

OOOOH yeah. Wwe have Sun SPARC's from all over the time spectrum. The place is a mess!

[klackenfus]

It's all so true! I have a favorite story about this. I run the I.T. group for my company but I still do some hands on stuff. I had a user say that he couldn't upload a file to the corporate FTP server. So, I SSHd into the Linux (VSFTP) server to see what was going on. His question to me was "why are you in DOS, why don't you just go to Internet Explorer?" When I stated that I wasn't in "DOS" and was "talking to the server" his response was "well that seems pretty stupid to type when you can use the mouse." I'm your typical sarcastic I.T. guy with a low tolerance for stupidity. So, my response was "I hope you're good at your job because you sure suck at mine." I don't think I've heard from that guy in about a year now. Oh well...