My aunt did this in the late 80s and early 90s.

She used to visit the one local burger franchise so much that all the staff knew her and she basically had her own reserved booth. Her husband, 2 kids and her would be there most days a week.

They lived across the country from us, but whenever we stayed with them, we were also at the burger place almost daily.

You shouldn’t cover up the blowhole.

Dialogue at the top.

Action at the bottom.

Can’t hear anything that is said but then the action makes you scramble for the remote.

Bad mix.

I don’t know how our IT system was set up, I had no access to poke around.

But I think it was a bit relaxed, we knew some users were downloading movies in certain office locations. Told to stop rather than clamping down.

So I think everyone was just left to deal with the update schedule themselves because there were maybe… 2 or 3 desktops in the entire office. Everyone was on laptops and didn’t leave them running overnight.

At a previous job, I was not doing IT support but another role and I noticed a coworker had a red dot on the Windows Update status bar icon.

Told him I don’t think I have seen that before, normally it is orange.

So he tells me that he is trying to see how long he can keep it going before something happens. I recommended against this, and also I normally recommend against using the desktop to store files. The laptop goes up in flames, so do your files. We have OneDrive for business, I know people hate it, but at least your stuff is… relatively safe. Backed up at least with version history.

A few weeks later I was chatting to someone else who sometimes shared my desk, and somehow I mentioned this encounter. A while later, his manager sitting ahead of us is on a phone call and we hear he is getting upset. He hangs up and turns around, tells us.

Him and one sales guy had spent hours on some proposals, worked out all the values and timings and it’s gone. All that work gone. His laptop rebooted because Windows updates.

He mentions who… it is the same guy. I tell him I was just telling my desk buddy about him and how he intentionally left his laptop running for months to see what Windows Update would do and clearly he did not take my advice about rebooting and using OneDrive.

The rest of the day… this guy did not stop. Every 30 minutes or so he’d just go “All that work, gone. Why?”

We’d be walking to get lunch, talking about other things and again he’d just switch back to that and turn gloomy again.

Zero chance she knew about this though.

When I used to LAN at my friend’s house his sister would try poking around my PC when I went to the kitchen for something, told her Windows and L opened some secret menu, boom, locked her out.

Asked to restart, sees restart and shut down, chooses lock instead.

My father did this.

I was giving him a PC tutorial and I asked him to turn off the PC and he turned off the monitor.

One of my users locked her Windows session and then signed in again, there, I rebooted.

Checks the system uptime… 97 days.

You restarted it, right?

Some of their art seems to have a signature, some not.

Here is their profile: https://bsky.app/profile/falseknees.bsky.social

Remote, hybrid and on-site… everything. I am applying for everything.

Basically, I am applying for any role I have done previously and recently.

Junior, mid and senior roles.

There are loads of IT roles that overlap, so a lot of different things I can do.

I went all out applying in about August last year and I am at about 550+ applications.

I’ve probably put in about 30+ today alone.

I’ve had about 6 interviews and only 2 of them were from applications I made, the rest were organised by recruiters that contacted me.

Spoke to an old colleague of mine that did a similar job to me, he got the axe from our company after I left and it took him about 300 applications to get 3 interviews and then finally a job.

Unfortunately for me, I took a role in a niche area because I needed a visa at the time and moved onto another role afterwards but I have too little experience in that area to land another role in it.

So, my main focus is too long ago to land a role, my latest experience is too little to land a role, and my main experience is too niche for me to find any roles.

Speaking to a few recruiters and they all say the same thing, 300+ applications on every role they advertise.

I have a few saved cover letters that cover certain role types.

I either copy and paste that in or attach them.

Regardless, getting nowhere with the job search. The job market is cooked.

edit -

and this just popped up in my feed.

My old boss called me, said please come to my office… my laptop will not turn on and I cannot figure it out.

I get there, he tells me to please help him, he is probably being stupid.

I look at his laptop, I see his charger plugged in, I follow it down the desk, across the floor all the way to the wall socket where the plug lies…

He had walked the charger’s plug to the wall socket and just left it on the ground.

I plug it in, he sees me do this, laptop turns on, I leave.

Someone writing on that show had to have worked IT at some stage.

A lot of things that happened in that show resonated with my IT support experience.

I saw some clips on YT where they removed the laugh track.

It’s really hard to find the show funny when they take out the bit where it tells you when to laugh.

I’m at 200+ applications and only a few rejections, nothing else.

The job market is cooked.

We didn’t have M-Net growing up, not until later on so it would have been one of the SABCs I think.

Hell, I remember when ETV launched. Hell yeah! Another free channel to watch and I remember it came out swinging with Bay Watch reruns.

I remember a lot of 80’s shows growing up, I think we got them a bit later on because well… SA was a bit behind and we got stuff late.

I remember seeing this series as a kid growing up in South Africa.

Had no idea where it came from, it just started airing.

I’m not sure how many seasons aired, but I was old enough to remember it so would have been around 1990 onwards.