During my internship proving tech support at a large software company, I encountered a number of comical user mistakes. After a while, I was surprised to discover that even someone who works in the IT industry can make a silly little mistake.
So, at that time, our company was operating mainly in Windows 7 with some Windows 10 testing. There was a System Administrator (SA) who worked across the aisle from where my cube farm was. I had previously helped this SA update Java on his Windows 7 machine, which involved closing all instances of IE. A few months later, the SA came to me again with the same problem.
SA: “Hey, I’m trying to update Java again. I tried to close all instances of IE but my desktop disappeared instead. Can you come take a look?”
I went over to his desk to take a look and sure enough, all desktop icons had disappeared and the taskbar was nowhere in sight.
Me: “How did you close IE?”
SA: “Well, I opened Task Manager and killed all explorer processes.”
Me: “Did this happen right after you killed a process?”
SA: “I am not sure…I just closed IE. Why is this happening?”
I opened Task Manager and discovered that explorer.exe is not on the processes list.
Me: “SA, you ended the wrong process.”
SA: “Well. How was I supposed to know that process was for Windows Explorer and not IE?”
Without saying anything, I expanded the “Description” tab.
– Reddit user, NateIsNastay