If this is a situation you relate with, you might be an arrogant asshole.

I help people all the time with computer related issues, and they love that I do that. None of them give me the stink eye, and I never judge them or think they're idiots for not being specialized in general computing.

A long, long time ago in an internship far, far away, I encountered a user who did not need management. He remembered his passwords without writing them down, even as they changed. He could be trusted to apply software patches himself and return the media the same day. He needed nothing more from us than a friendly hello.

It has been over six hundred million seconds since then and I have yet to encounter another user such as this.

If I had a penny for every time, I was told I’m a genius for helping someone with something easy, I’d probably about a fiver.

holy shit it's a newspaper cartoon from 1993

I like the literal dinosaur in the second panel.

Yeah one of these views is more valid than the other:

"I got an error message! It says, Please right click the application and select 'Run As Administrator...' What does it mean?! What do I do?!!! Why are these instructions so confusing?!"

"I got an error on the page! It says 'Password incorrect' What does that mean? How do I fix it?" "Have you tried using the correct password?"

Heh, now do Software Engineers and IT guys…

Most people are fine.

One time I had a boss receive a spreadsheet I sent, print it out, and ask the team to verify the sums by hand.

But most of the people I work with are fine.

haha user dum

I once asked some of my friends what they were up to at work.

An accountant friend said "I'm making a VBA macro to restructure and convert our customer's XML data into an SQL transaction so that we can import it into our accounting system".

A car mechanic friend said: "I'm trying to find the specsheet for this obscure ECU so that I can flash in this profile that I've tweaked with hex editor"

A teacher friend said: "I'm setting up integration between moodle and shopify so that we wouldn't have to enroll our students manually".

And every time my response was "YOU WHAT NOW? You should work in IT"

And they always responded with something along the lines of "Yeah, nah, I'm not that smart"

And here I am, slapping webpages and forms together, earning more than all of them combined. That's really unfair, but I'm not in a position to complain.

I do feel kinda bad for people. There's very few jobs left where you don't interact with a computer in some form or another, and the reality is that it's not for everyone. Of course most people can benefit from using these "tools" but since they're always upgrading, there keeps being something new to learn.

Personally, I love technology and playing around with new tech. However, if I'm great at sales or a lawyer or something, that's where I add value, not in knowing how a computer works. So I can see how people get frustrated with it.

In the end it boils down to, pretty much everyone needs IT, but IT doesn't need everyone. Think about it, when was the last time you worked at a company where an employee didn't have a computer or need a computer for some task that they do?

Some IT guys.

Sometimes users see IT guys as mordac the preventer of information technology from Dilbert. Thank you for breaking my perfectly functional workstation again.