Common Sense...Where Did It Go?

Here's a question that burns me. What has happened to common sense?

Maybe this is more of a venting than anything else. The rational part of me says that people do things that seem to lack common sense because I'm not seeing the world through their eyes with their priorities. Maybe my mechanic thinks the same thing about me not seeing the importance of rotating my tires. I don't know.

But some things still just floor me.

I work in IT, as you know. I repair systems and do maintenance and half a dozen other things that are considered gruntwork done by someone off the street even though 99% of the coworkers profess they aren't "computer people" and have no idea how to do what I'm doing. Irony is a good friend of mine.

I was doing a set of updates on a coworker's system. She left the room to do something else, and I had happened to have a schedule to keep (namely wanted to take care of some things at home so I couldn't be an hour and a half late as is often the case). Plus my boss likes making me feel like dirt if I'm "wasting time" by not doing multiple repairs at the same time. So I figured I'd try it his way and let him have the "I told you so" moment.

A reboot of the laptop in question came up and said there were still more updates. This time? Service Pack 3 for XP. I didn't even realize this person hadn't reported it was out of date by this much. She'd apparently had it at home during upgrade times for so long...yikes!

So I started the update. For those who don't know, service packs are big. They're really big. Like on this laptop we're talking an hour of work. So I hit control-alt-del, locked the workstation, and went to another room to get two more tasks checkmarked off.

(Note-locking the workstation means that when the user comes back, it says they have to hit control-alt-delete and log in as the administrative user because the system is currently in use, and if you log in with administrative privileges it warns that the other user will be logged out and unsaved work will be lost).

I didn't think much of it. The user is college educated. She surely can read. I left and came back an hour later, hoping to have it at a point where I could basically button it up until the next day or so to complete other minor updates that wouldn't take anywhere near as long (hopefully).

I came back to a computer that was shut off.

She apparently came in and shut everything off. Mid upgrade.

Again, if you don't know...service packs replace a lot of SYSTEM files. As in, if it was partially working on the system and you shut it down, it could no longer boot. If she shut it off during a file operation, it could have damaged the filesystem as well. Basically she rolled the dice to find out if her computer was completely and utterly screwed up now.

She ignored the warning.

She ignored the fact that I was doing upgrades (she knew I was working on it).

She didn't put two and two together that if I had locked the system and left, I was planning on coming back.

In short, my boss didn't get his I Told You So moment and I had an extra hour of work re-applying the service pack, grateful that the computer still booted after she had cut it off mid-upgrade. I got home an hour later. As usual. And a bit more ticked with yet another reminder of why I spend so much time babysitting systems when doing upgrades instead of looking productive.

Not reading these warnings are right up there with leaving pee on the lip of the toilet seat. It's common sense. Wipe it up. The warning is right there, you knew I was working on it, don't mess with it. The analogy isn't perfect since there are times where you might not notice the pee on the seat thing...but Windows, for all its flaws, will still tell you that the user is still logged in and give you a warning about unsaved work. For the love of $Deity pay attention and think. It's too easy and common for people to just disregard anything "computerized" as being out of their league so they reflexively dismiss whatever it's doing as too complicated. I'm not asking you to give the pros and cons of cooperative vs. preemptive multitasking, just to stop and use your college educated mind to decipher a warning on the screen. Or at least take it to someone else who would know! You have no idea how many people will call the help desk and just say "The computer is giving an error thing," with no elaboration. What does the error thing say? What were you doing?

I'm not magic. I'm not in the movie world where hackers can control airliners using a magic set of commands from a secret supercomputer in the bowels of the Pentagon, and I sure as hell can't divine what your issue is with a few keystrokes and the description consisting of "it gave an error."

Please...I wish people would just take a few moments to use a little more common sense. I'm paid to fix problems with the computer that you don't want to deal with. But still, I really wish you'd give an accurate summary of the problem with what is presented to you...at a minimum, the actual error message, not a paraphrased listing of jargon that you are making up as you go along. Or read the error message for a moment and see that maybe, when it says that a particular user is logged in already, think that it's in the middle of doing something that maybe you shouldn't play with.

I'm venting and I know it. Maybe others out there have had similar experiences, only in different fields. Please share! I'd love to know that this isn't a tech-only phenomena. Or at least not feel like I'm the only one having these issues.