Speaking as someone on the IT side (albeit as a sysadmin, not help desk), it’s because we don’t trust you. We’ve been burned enough times by believing a user that says that of course they’ve already rebooted/run the usual command/updated recently. We want to verify that this is true. We also want to see if there are any error messages or other unexpected behaviour that you immediately dismissed and failed to mention.

[–] Willem@kutsuya.dev 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

the last part is one of my biggest annoyances. People just clicking away the dialogs that almost exactly tell what is wrong and at most just say: "yeah of gave me an error but I just clicked it away and it still didn't work".

As a software developer, pretty much every error you see I made there for you to either read or screenshot and send to IT, because I had to pretty much implement each one of them. (usually with a standard library, but it's still a deliberate choice to show it to the user)

Real unexpected errors are hopefully written to logfiles, but that's not always possible (try logging an error when your system disk is no longer available).

addendum: please also include the gibberish at the end of the error, because its likely there for IT or me to find more details of this specific error in the thousands to millions of things that are logged for the software or website.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Absolutely. PEBKAC is real.

But as a good user, it still annoys the hell out of me.

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Agreed