I work in IT. More specifically I work in Networking. So every fucking day.
Best one was when I was working for an internet provider. Customer was complaining every other day their internet was not working to spec. They ordered a 100Mb service and could never get more than around 60Mb. Somehow they got it into their head that our on prem gear was the issue. But our on prem gear was gigabit capable.
But they never listened and eventually it got to the point where ceo to ceo calls were happening.
My ceo managed to make them agree to a call out where if no problem was found in our gear they would pay the $120 callout plus time for the 2 hour drive to the customer office but if I found a problem on their side we would compensate them for the services until it performs as ordered.I get there plug my laptop into their network and sure enough I get 60Mb speed tests. Moved my cable from their firewall to the spare port on our gear and get the full speed.
They wanted me to do the tests a few more times and I do and get the same result.
I looked up the spec sheet of their firewall and third line down of the throughput graph shows their setup only has a rated capacity of about 60Mb. Never heard a peep from them after that.I had a similar issue, except from the customer side. I had worked IT for 20 years in the US Air Force, and when I retired 2 years ago, I moved back in with my elderly dad in my old childhood home. I found out he was paying for 40Mb service (the best offered to our secluded countryside home), but we were lucky if we could get 15-20Mb at the best of times.
I spent several weeks troubleshooting over the phone with his ISP and they insisted it was a problem on our end. I rebooted our modem so many times, even configured it from scratch several times. I ensured the WiFi router I set up to extend the range across the house wasn’t slowing anything down along the way. I swore there was nothing out of place on our end and they needed to check the connection to our house. They didn’t believe me; thought I was just claiming to be an IT expert to skip steps and get someone out to our secluded neck of the woods (fair, but still…)
Eventually, I convinced them to send a technician out here, an hour away from their offices. The tech connected to the line outside the house and immediately packed up his tools and went back to his truck. He said he doesn’t even need to check my equipment; there’s definitely something wrong with the external line.
Turns out they have a service box at the end of my street. They don’t have a dedicated 40Mb line for my home, so they paired two 20Mb lines. One of the lines was completely disconnected; removed during maintenance and they forgot to reconnect it. The other was a shared line with my small neighborhood, which explains the drop in connection during high usage hours. The service tech connected the second line and we got twice the speed we used to.
I ended up dropping that company for Starlink shortly after, since they had no higher speeds in my area. Which was a significant improvement (200Mbps), but not quite the speeds I had hoped for. Now, thanks to Biden’s high speed Internet initiative, I’m getting Gb speeds to my neighborhood this summer. Can’t wait for that; as much of an improvement as Starlink has been over my old connection, it’s still slow compared to what I’m used to from my military service.
thanks to Biden’s high speed Internet initiative, I’m getting Gb speeds to my neighborhood this summer.
That’s actually happening this time? I’ll admit I haven’t payed any attention to this, but I kind of figured the isps would just pocket the money again.
My hometown had to request a local ISP submit a grant request to the federal government in order to fund the expansion of high speed Internet in our area. My town and 2 others were approved; a 4th town in my area was denied and needed to re-accomplish and resubmit their grant request.
I don’t know all the fine legal details of the grant, but I know that the ISP is required to put the funds toward development in the areas outlined in the grant request.
The last time our president attempted a high speed Internet initiative (I think it was Bush Jr?), they just gave money to ISPs and told them to spend it on upgrading their networks. There was no accountability, so most companies just pocketed the money.
Many times. It’s never as rewarding as you’d like, because the other party is rarely objective, and thus rarely acknowledges their defeat.
It’s usually better to ease up when you get close to a total victory and allow the opponent to save face.
After all, no matter how objectively correct you are, if you don’t change the other person’s position even a little, you’re just wasting time.
Yes. It’s always a good question to ask yourself:
Would you rather be effective or be right?
IMO it’s even worse when the other party admits to their mistakes and apologizes.
Takes out all the wind of your sails
I am someone who does that because I’m objective enough to recognize my own fallibility and that if I’m presented with reasonable and logical evidence, i will accept it and change my perspective.
It also usually stops fighting and helps progress to a constructive discussion.
I do that, too, and I regularly get the “you’re always right, I’m always wrong” commentary. I respond, no, I’m often wrong, I just don’t make a big deal out of it so you don’t notice. I’d be happy to move on without a fuss when you’re wrong, too, if you’ll allow it.
Because seriously, being wrong is not a big deal. Everybody is wrong at some point, and regularly. Just correct yourself and move on, it’s not a hit to your identity or person.
In the 2nd grade. When we got to school each morning we went to our classrooms and dropped off our stuff, then we went to the gym to wait for school to start. I was in a split class (2nd & 3rd grade in the same room) and while in the gym a 3rd grader came up and asked me what I’d do if my box of crayons went missing. I had the Crayola 128 mega box, with attached sharpener… top of the line.
Of course, when I get to class, my crayons are missing, and Tommy has a box in his desk. I walk over and tell him to give me my crayons and he says they are his. A fight is brewing, so other kids gather round. I reach down and grab the box from his desk and put them behind my back, then simply ask “If these are your crayons, where did you get them?” and he replied “My mom bought them for me at Piggly Wiggly”… I pulled the box from my back and showed everyone the ‘Wal-Mart’ sticker on the back. Then I put my crayons back in my desk.
I was always a small kid, always being picked on… this was one of my few wins as a kid and it felt so good.
You proved it with a Walmart sticker? Smart thinking.
Not to be mean to little you, but your name should’ve been on that box - on each side, and one on the inside for good measute.
“If it’s yours then why is my name on it in 5 different spots?”
And if my grandma had wheels she would be a bike!
Yes, and in my experience it rarely if ever has the “gotcha” moment of victory that one fantasizes about. Either it was something with low stakes and the response is just “oh okay”, or it’s something more emotionally charged and the opposing side will deflect, change the subject, pretend that you’re agreeing with them or that they believed what was correct the whole time. It never seems to matter.
One example comes to mind where I almost did.
I used to drive an older Pontiac. It wasn’t the fanciest car, so it wasn’t the most performant.
One day, I was leaving a restaurant with a girl I was dating, and had to merge into traffic up a hill. I knew the car would need all the power it could get to do the merge safely, so I turned off the air-conditioning. Confused, the girl asked why I did that. I explained that air conditioning affects the performance of the car. She disagreed. She was raised a bit privileged and had only ever driven nice cars, so never noticed the performance hit of having the A/C on.
We bickered back and forth for a minute or two before I said “okay look I’ll show you” and reached to turn off the A/C. Before I could, however, she hit me with “you know, you don’t always have to be right”. I didn’t end up getting to prove it to her.
In her defense, I can be very stubborn when its something I am confident I’m correct in, and we actually argued a lot about stuff. Another example of an argument we had was over the fact that prairie dogs can carry the plague. She didn’t believe me and I remember we had to look up the answer. And that was on our second date.
I think about that line she hit me with a lot. But I also realize that in a lot of our “arguments” I was still having fun. To me, there’s a playful aspect to a good argument. As long as nobody is yelling or getting feelings hurt, it’s a fun way to pass the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize she wasn’t having fun like I was.
I feel this. Some people, like us, enjoy discussing and analyzing things. We can separate who we are as people from the things we think. If someone shows us something we hadn’t considered, our response is “Awesome, I just learned something new!”
Not everyone is like that. For some people, their self worth is tied to knowing things and being right. We need to be aware of the differences.
In my experience people who say that are invariably wrong and not capable of admitting it so they shift the blame onto your need to be right
Once when I was little my mom was yelling at me about something or other. In the heat of the moment she called me a son of a bitch, and I went “Oh?” with a single eyebrow raised over a smirk. She laughed, and that stopped the yelling.
Wait, does being funny enough to distract someone equal winning an argument? In my universe it does
When I was working retail in a technical environment I had a customer come in wanting to buy product X. Since I’ve always just wanted to help people I suggested product Y for its superior quality and longevity at a slightly higher cost. The customer started raging at me how dare I try to upsell him something he didn’t ask for. Other customers turning their head and all. He left fuming saying he’d go to another store.
A day later said customer came back into the store and I was already bracing myself. Turns out he compared the products on the website and read some reviews and realized I was right. He apologized and bought the product.
It was not really satisfying, just turning a negative into a neutral I guess.
They didn’t have to come back and tell you you were right; could have just bought it elsewhere and avoided you (out of shame for their own ignorance) so I consider that a win at your end. You can totally own that!
It’s the usual thing.
What kind of question is this? 😆 I think everyone older than 6 regularly does that. Especially when planning things and disagreeing and then you get to learn who was right. And even the kids like to bet who is right and then they look it up, ask someone or try it and one of them will have this as an outcome…
One time my dad and I were in Mexico looking for some glue to fix a chair. So walking into town, I said we need to look for Kola Loka—spelled with Ks. My dad said “Nonsense! It would be spelled with Cs.” Neither of us had seen how Krazy Glue is marketed in Spanish, but I could’ve put money on that spelling. I should’ve, because I was right dammit! And dad, who is a linguist, grudgingly admitted, “All right, I suppose you may have some linguistic talent too.” It was the only time I ever won an argument with him over anything having to do with language.
Happens all the time in my head.
Many moons ago I was in a very heated argument that you could write a fully functional program in notepad.
I was trying to explain what COM files were, they just didn’t understand enough about it.
That seems like an odd thing to argue against. Did they mean that it wasn’t possible? Or wasn’t a good idea? Or was this before scripting languages and the point was you needed a compiler? So many questions
I mean, in any instance if you can write code with ed, i don’t know why you couldn’t with notepad.
Yeah to clarify their point they didn’t believe me that it was possible to write executable code outside of an ordinary scripting language.
I would think so, at least for knowledge-based ones. Thinking about this out loud, it’s hard to feel I can claim certainty given anything seems to have the potential to remind me of the adage that one can never be certain of anything. However, there are a handful where this doubt is completely obsolete, typically because I’m talking to someone who doesn’t seem to know the answer is an obvious part of life for me. I have been wrong before and will mention so within reason (as in based on a battle of experience/testimony/proofs/contradictoriness in its equivalent to PEMDAS).
I don’t argue unless I am correct. So alot of the time I am able to successfully prove it in the moment, other times they find out on their own later. If I didn’t know for sure, why would I argue? That just seems like pointless behaviour.
I mean, there are so many questions without a correct answer. That’s usually why you get into an argument in the first place.
In reality yes, but normally who I’m arguing with it’s based on pure emotion and no logical aspects anywhere.
And the fact that there’s almost never a clear answer anyway. There are very few instances where blanket statements are true.
Also, how often do you have the scientific or journalistic background to prove your point?
