The confusion we’re describing here might sound minor to someone who’s never done professional IT support—but at any kind of scale, it adds up very quickly. A single, badly confused employee can require several hours to sort out—particularly when the support they actually need may very well be for a home computer, which hasn’t been set up for corporate access and control in the first place.
One single confused computer-incompetent person can keep a helpdesk person tied up for days at a time, sometimes. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen.
For a sister company (note: I didn’t manage the IT for this company. If I did, this would’ve never happened) where a user forgot her passwords and changed some to something unknown, I spent more than two days fixing all the problems this caused, including a complete remote rebuild of her machine. One user. More than two days of me doing almost nothing else! (And this isn’t unusual. Some of the worst users basically need their own full-time helpdesk person.)
It’s shocking when you realize how little most people know about how to use their own computers — even very easy things, like what actual applications they open to complete their daily work.