The Eternal Dance Between IT and User Logic
Nothing quite captures the beautiful absurdity of modern workplace dynamics like the relationship between IT departments and their users. I’ve been chuckling over a discussion thread about amusing IT requests that reminded me why I sometimes feel grateful to be on the development side of things rather than front-line support.
The catalyst was a boss demanding that IT solve his laptop’s battery drainage problem - without him having to plug it in or shut it down properly. When you first read that, it sounds completely unreasonable. But dig a little deeper into the responses, and you start to see there might actually be more to the story.
Several people pointed out that modern laptops, especially corporate ones loaded with bloatware and poorly configured power management, genuinely do have issues with sleep mode. Machines that should sip power overnight instead wake themselves up constantly, overheat in laptop bags, and arrive at work completely drained. It’s a legitimate problem that many of us in IT have encountered, but somehow we’ve normalised it as “user error” rather than addressing the root cause.
This got me thinking about the broader pattern of how we approach workplace technology problems. Too often, we dismiss user complaints as ignorance when they’re actually highlighting genuine usability failures. The executive who expected “wireless” to mean completely cord-free wasn’t being unreasonable - he was applying logical thinking to a technology promise that wasn’t quite what it claimed to be.
Working in Melbourne’s tech scene for the past couple of decades, I’ve witnessed this dynamic play out countless times. There’s always been this underlying tension between the people who configure systems and the people who use them daily. The IT department implements what they think is a sensible company-wide policy, users adapt their workflows around the limitations, and then everyone gets frustrated when those workarounds create new problems.
The most telling comment in that thread was from someone whose colleague kept 191 documents and 87 browser tabs open simultaneously, hadn’t updated in three years, then complained about performance. When IT finally forced a restart and updates, everything ran smoothly - for about a week. Then the user went straight back to the same habits that caused the original problems.
This isn’t really about technical literacy, though. It’s about human nature and workflow psychology. People develop routines that make sense within their role and responsibilities. That manager who won’t shut down his laptop because he’ll lose track of what he was working on? He’s not being difficult - he’s managing cognitive load in the only way he knows how.
The real frustration here isn’t with users being “stupid” or IT being “unhelpful.” It’s with organisations that deploy technology without considering how people actually work. We roll out standardised configurations that might work perfectly in a test environment but break down under the messy reality of different work styles, varying technical skills, and the simple human tendency to find workarounds rather than file support tickets.
What struck me most about reading through those anecdotes was the missed opportunities for genuine problem-solving. Instead of dismissing the battery-draining boss, what if IT took the time to understand why proper sleep mode matters to his workflow? Instead of mocking users who don’t understand the difference between “wireless” and “powerless,” what if we designed better onboarding that set realistic expectations?
I’m not suggesting we should accommodate every unreasonable request or that users bear no responsibility for learning basic technology skills. But there’s a middle ground where we acknowledge that good technology should adapt to human behaviour, not the other way around. The best IT solutions I’ve seen - whether in development or support - start with understanding the actual problem someone is trying to solve, not just the symptoms they’re reporting.
Maybe that’s the real lesson from these amusing IT tales: behind every seemingly ridiculous request is usually someone trying to do their job more effectively, armed with incomplete information about what’s actually possible. Rather than laughing at the disconnect, we might do better to bridge it.