The Whole Network

Chill Uncategorized

Yes. Working in retail or help desk are the two main causes of one to hold a much, much lower assessment of humanity in general.

To an average user, “the network is down” can mean these things:

1) They kicked the power cord out of the wall.

2) They didn’t plug in their computer.

3) They didn’t turn on their monitor(s).

4) They kicked the ethernet cable out of the wall.

5) They forgot how to find the Start menu.

6) They forgot how to open some application. (Of course, when you ask which application, they usually say something inane like “Microsoft.” Yes, just “Microsoft.”)

7) The power in the building is out.

8) The change that they’ve been getting emails about for three months has occurred.

9) They forgot to turn on their wifi, or forgot their wifi password.

10) They can’t open some document.

11) They didn’t connect to VPN.

12) They forgot how to navigate to a mounted drive.

13) They are in a meeting room and didn’t plug their ethernet cable in or connect to wifi.

14) They spilled coffee and/or tea all over their computer.

15) They decided to move their computer somewhere else and plugged in everything in an absurd way that would never work.

16) They plugged in a USB drive and aren’t able to see it because it’s unformatted or broken.

17) They installed malware that’s causing browser issues.

18) A site block list is blocking some gambling site they are attempting to navigate to.

19) They can’t make a phone call because they dialed incorrectly.

20) A light on their laptop that they don’t understand is flashing (usually battery light).

Occasionally, very, very rarely, it does actually mean the network is down. However, then, the user will usually instead say something like, “I can’t get to my files!” This is a much better sign of the network being down than any user anywhere actually saying “the network is down.” In this case, the network is almost never down.

All of those above are the actual problems users have had when they’ve told me or my staff in the past that “the network is down,” by the way. Alas for all of us, not a single one of those is made up.