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Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
So when something goes wrong, they feel helpless. This is not unfounded, but it can often make the problem worse.
Depending on the person, this can lead to blaming or blame-dodging behavior. IT folks — did you ever ask someone what the error message was and they say "It's not my fault!" or "It's not my job to fix it, you're the computer person!" ... as if blame ever helped!
The "tech person" differs not so much in knowledge but in having a different emotional response to tech doing a weird/broken thing: when something goes wrong, they jump to curiosity. It's not "I already know how to fix this" but "We don't know what happened here yet, but we can find out." Knowledge comes from exercising this curiosity.
But this is not something that everyone can do, because people who feel unsafe don't typically go to curiosity to resolve their unsafety.
I have worked in IT for 10+ years, IT support is 90% psycology, especially over the phone.
Agreed. For me personally, I've got 3 things I do to which helps me figure out the problem most of the time without demeaning the customer or implying that they don't have the knowledge.
1: Asking the right questions. My two most important and first ones are "What is it doing?", and/or "What is it not doing?". I find the question "what's wrong with it?" to be almost entirely ineffective.
2: Talking in an appropriate technical level to the person you're talking to. Eg, a 80 year old vs a 50 year old.
3: Using simple analogies. Eg. A CPU is like a brain, a motherboard like a body, a video card like legs to run really fast etc.
I have also found that admitting to making the same misstake yourself from time to time really helps, unlocking their account? It's fine, it happens plenty of times for myself as well, especially since we at the IT team have four different personal accounts with different uses and passwords.
Regarding passwords, depending on what the user works with and if they use exterbal services they need to logon to, I will also offer to install a password manager for them, and set up the initial database while giving them a tour of it and how to use it, many users really liked it and used it ever since.