Working in tech support be like
Except they don’t tell you that they did something different and you have to spend half an hour just figuring that out.
Yeah. You would have had to triangulate your way around to getting the information that is exactly the information that you knew already that it was.
“Sir, I need you to go to the oil that you used and check if it is non-hydrogenated or hydrogenated. It should be printed on the back of the label.”
“What do you mean, I never had this problem before”
“Yes, I’m aware, they have changed the oil constitution recently. I’ll be able to resolve this problem for you, I just need to know if the oil is hydrogenated or not.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything”
“Can you just check the back of the bottle, please? Then I’m sure we’ll be able to get your recipe working again”
“Okay, well I didn’t actually use oil, I used toothpaste because it was expired and I wanted to get rid of it”
“Aha! Okay, I understand sir. I’m glad we were able to get to the bottom of the issue you’re having. So, if you make the recipe with toothpaste, it definitely won’t taste the same or have a good consistency. I think if you switch back to using oil you’ll find that the pancakes still taste the same as they used to”
“But I think I should be able to use toothpaste.”
“Absolutely. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Fuck this is painfully on point. Both as someone whose worked in customer service and IT.
Flashbacks to trying to get the user to admit they unplugged the monitor
Yeah, Rule 0 of tech support is “users lie.”
Oh, you already rebooted? Okay, well maybe your power cable is loose. Go ahead and shut down for me real quick, so you can unplug that power cable and plug it back in. Great, now that you’ve power cycled your computer, the problem is fixed? Glad I could help.
I’m the last stop for my help desk and I legit feel like Dr House some days.
Yeah. Users lie. They also misremember or straight up don’t notice.
To be fair tho, some of L1 can’t write for shit, and some of L1 likes going well beyond the scope of the KB and breaks more stuff in the process. Those guys usually make good L2 since they are proactive and accept feedback, they just lack discretion.
I used to work in a 3rd line tech support. Whenever we got escalations from tier 2 I’d read their notes and then start from the beginning. More often than not they would say they have checked something and not found the fault when indeed that was the fault.
Dude, ages ago when I did tech support. A simple question like: “are the lights on your modem on?” was met with a yes. Then after an hour of troubleshooting you find out, in fact, no they weren’t on the entire time and the modem was unplugged. Like, you lied, you never even checked. The real questions then become: why was the modem unplugged? Who unplugged it? What reason does one have for unplugging their modem?
@USSEthernet @Murdoc why we used to ask them if one was blinking fast or slow, it made them actually look at the modem
I just want to say, as someone who is quite tech literate, these kinds of questions are incredibly annoying to get through. I called my ISP, and they tried walking me through restarting my router when I could ping their gateway already, but not the outside world (e.g. 1.1.1.1).
But then again, I’ve worked tech support and have been on the other end with tech illiterate people, so I get it.
I just wish “shibboleet” was a real thing.
Oh man that would be amazing. My ISP at some point stopped giving out modems with the internet contract and instead only offers these shitty routers with integrated modems. I read somewhere that you can still get a modem if you asked. So I called and spend 15 minutes trying to describe the difference between a router and a modem and gave up.
When I had DSL, I bought my own modem and connected it to the same router I used at a previous place. They when to charge ~$10/month, so I spent about $20 and got a basic modem.
My current internet is Ethernet at the wall, so no need for a modem, and AFAIK the company doesn’t even provide routers (didn’t ask, I just used the one I had). All I needed was the gateway, netmask, and our static (CGNATed) IP. They wrote that in a piece of paper, which I keep in my safe so I don’t need to call them just because I reset my router or something.
I think they know who I am by now because I call pretty much every time the Internet goes out. It’s a small company (only serves my town of 30-40k people), and I’m probably the only one with a ln enterprise-y router (Mikrotik) with a separate AP (Ubiquiti). Yet I still need to do the basic troubleshooting before they’ll actually look into the traffic on their end.
I would like to just buy a modem but somehow I can’t find any cable modems in Germany. There are a few I could import from Amazon US but they apparently don’t support EuroDOCSIS. I used to have one from Cisco, provided by the ISP, that worked perfectly but with a contract change they demanded it back (a condition they did not tell me about and I’m still angry about that).
Unfortunately if shibboleet were a thing tech illiterate users would quickly learn it and use it every time.
Maybe a rotating key, like with TOTP?
Yup. Many people have a tendency to tell someone what they think they want to hear. “Is the light on?” hmmm I think they want me to say yes so… “yes”.
So you always have to make an effort to ask questions in a way that gives no indication of what the “correct” answer should be. Don’t ask “is the value in that field set to xyz”? Instead ask “what is the value you see in that field?”
some people are so very afraid of being anything but perfect they will just lie about things and insist you’re not doing enough to fix a problem with your service
I know someone who, when it’s having a panic attack and is asked a question, it asks the person asking what the correct answer is. Even if they have no way of knowing.
And this is exactly why I always humour tech support when they’re asking me which lights exactly are on, which colour, and their blinking patterns. I’ve already made the diagnosis yes the problem is on their end but it’s not like they have a way to know I’m not full of shit.
Click the start button. The start button. It’s on the bottom left. Yes, click it. You already clicked it? Don’t click it again! You clicked it again? Okay, click it again. Now on the fly out click control panel. Wait, you clicked the start button again? Okay click it again. You know what? Fuck this shit, I quit.
I remember one call where the customer didn’t know where the Start button was. I told them that it was the button on the lower left-hand corner of the screen. She said that she clicked it and everything went black. Turns out she hit the power button on her monitor.
Haha! It’s so ridiculous that I wouldn’t believe you if I hadn’t encountered similar issues myself.
After you click it, the Start Menu will appear. While the Start Menu is showing, there are some icons all the way to the left, and one of them is called Control Panel. Oh, you pushed the power button and it’s off now? Okay… Push the power button to turn the computer back on. You already did? You pushed it again and it powered off? Turn the computer back on please.
“Please unplug your computer and never touch it again.”
I legit had the following interaction.
Me: Please close all windows you have currently opened. Costumer: Ok, one moment. leaves phone, comes back 2 minutes later. Me: It will take quite long if you are not sitting in front of your computer, can you relocate there? Costumer: I am in front of the computer, i just closed all windows just like you told me. Me: dies internally
I had another client with ADSL, asked them what modem they used: Client: “My modem is colorful and full of lights!”
seriously, tech support is funny shit if it doesn’t happen to you.
I used to work in tech support for a pharmacy chain.
One day I ask the pharmacist to unplug for 10 seconds. He tells me he doesn’t know how to count to 10, just 30. Sometimes he has to count to 60, or 90, or even 180…but he doesn’t. He just counts to 30 until it looks good.
I’m sorry, what?? Are you leaving something out, or was the pharmacist mixing their own samples?
In the US, most retail pharmacists do little compounding. They mostly check for drug interactions (since most prescribers don’t talk to each other unless you’re a patient of a holistic care team) and make sure the techs and the software don’t screw up.
The joke is that most pills are dispensed in multiples of 30.
People are crazy.
I looked for the recipe this comment was made in, and in the comments, the original author of the recipe mentions replacing whole or part of the oil with applesauce which might explain why.
This might be the most rational comment I’ve ever read on Lemmy.
Hats off for putting in the effort, thank you.
Yep. Applesauce can be used as a replacement for oil in cakes and some quick breads. I’ve done it on the rare occasion I’ve been short of cooking oil for a cake. Don’t think I’ve ever swapped it in for all the oil though. It does give a bit different texture and flavor, I find it kind of pleasant myself. And youy will need to probably bake the cake for a bit longer too. YMMV based on your oven.
I personally would not use applesauce to fry in though. But perhaps Flying Squid’s mother should experiment for use and they can report back to us on the results.
It’s better as a replacement for eggs. I say this as a avid vegan baker, oil is oil. Results may vary, but there is no good substitute. And coconut oil is the best kind, IMHO. Worth the extra couple bucks.
Sardine oil would like a word…
I believe you, but… you were already there, you couldn’t copy/paste, provide a screenshot or a URL?
I did not want to accidentally send more comments to the person in the screenshots way by posting a link. It was a recipe for brownies. Here is the comment made by the author:
The recipe with the comments is easy enough to find online though.
OP delivers! Thanks, this totally changes the entire context!
The other place had something like r’ I didn’t have any eggs’ that was all people giving 1 star reviews to recipes where they substituted Triceratops horn for chicken breast, and it didn’t work well.
That sub was hilarious! So many weird substitutions and people having no idea what the ingredients do for the final result. I actually learned a lot about cooking from that sub.
That is something that often bothers me with many recipes. Often I’m confused why they are using a certain weird ingredient I don’t have access to or when they have a step that I don’t understand its purpose of and the recipe doesn’t explain its reasoning or its reasoning doesn’t make any sense. I then have to improvise without any idea if the changes I’m making will significantly impact the final result.
Only very few online recipes I see explain why they are written the way they are.
You may want to check out Baker Bettie’s Better Baking Book. It’s a book of base recipes. A base recipe is a very simple recipe which can be modified and added to relatively easily. Base recipes are popular with professional kitchens, because it gets the proportions where they need to be for the baking chemistry to work right. Then you can just add your own fluff on top of it.
What makes the Better Baking Book unique is that it’s written for beginners instead of professional kitchens, so it actually explains why you’re using certain ingredients, how you may be able to substitute those ingredients, and how differing from the recipe will affect the outcome.
Thanks! I will certainly take a look at it some day. Is there also an equivalent book, but for general-purpose cooking?
That is seriously how my mother cooked when I was a kid. The dreaded words before dinner were, “this was an experiment.”
And it was always shit like this. “Well, it called for four cups of sugar, but sugar is bad for you, so I substituted potato flour.”
OMG HOhOHOhoHOhoHOoh
I was trying to build a homemade box with wood and nails, except instead of wood I used fucking Uranium, now I have cancer. DIY projects are a scam.
I wish idiots making stupid substitutions were normally that self-correcting!
You can replace SOME of the oil with applesauce. But replacing all of it (which I did find on some really shitty websites) will not work correctly.
Fat soluble flavors will be diluted by the excess water as well as not giving flour anything to bond to. Less flavor, rock hard baked good.
If you want to try using applesauce, use unsweetened applesauce and only replace (at max) 50% of the oil required for the recipe. Results may vary, I don’t see the use in lowering the fat content of a delicious baked good. I’m eating that shit full flavor, full fat, full sugar. Just eat less of it.
Outside of that tangent, the gall of this person to say “I followed the recipe exactly” when their very first sentence contradicts that completely.
full fat, full sugar
Full fat, yes, but not full sugar. We cut the sugar to like 1/3 in most recipes and it usually comes out great. Most recipes I’ve seen use way too much sugar.
Fat is way more filling than carbs for the same amount of calories, so don’t shy away from the fat. If you load up on fat and fiber, you’ll feel more satisfied on less calories, so you’re much less likely to sneak a taste of that sugary treat and totally reverse all the good you’ve been trying to do with reducing calories.
That’s nice to know.
I’ve been replacing eggs with applesauce when making muffins for the past 15 years, and I love it. My friend is allergic to eggs, so he is able to eat them too!
It isn’t crazy that the poster did the substitution, it’s is common way to replace some ingredients. She just didn’t execute properly and blamed the recipe maker/poster instead of being self-aware.
Good on you for going the extra mile for your friend!
That’s why I also replaced the flour with gravel, you see?
Satire? I feel like this has to be satire.
Have you met people?
People… What a bunch of bastards
Have you met all of them?
It’s a quote from The IT Crowd.
You were supposed to reply, I’ve met enough of them
Taking jokes from a TV series about Aspis too seriously has to be meta humor.
Aspis
How dare you
My dad is one of them. Always says that stuff does not matter. I once asked him if he followed the instructions closely and said yes. I did not believe him and so asked every point in the list individually. For every every instruction he told me that he didn’t do that.
The amount of people that don’t read instructions is ridiculous. They exist for a reason. I always read every manual for everything. Every car I’ve had, I read the manual front to back. My turtle’s new fancy water filter, read it front to back. Furniture, tech, anything, you name it. I guess I’M the outlier so I must be the weird one.
I’ve literally had to write documentation at work for a single step procedure for help desk. It consisted of me screenshotting something, circling a button in red with a red arrow pointing to it because our help desk people are incompetent.
this is the state of culinary education in most of the western world, people can’t cook for shit and will somehow burn spaghetti in a pot of water.
Culinary education? You can’t eat education, man!
Nothing wrong with the culinary education. The problem is that it doesn’t happen. Thank private education for that.
You’re, right? None of the public schools I or my siblings attended thought that stuff.
In my country, before privatisation, cooking and home economics was taught thoroughly.
It’s AI.
This might be hard to believe, but people are dumb as fuck even without the help of anything remotely resembling the current iteration of AI.
It’s still AI.
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You’ll learn. If you don’t, it’s gonna suck for you when trying to figure out what’s real.
This isn’t as crazy as it seems. In some bread and cake recipes, you can easily replace some of the oil with applesauce and have a successful bake. I’ve done this with muffins and banana bread to great success.
They’re still being foolish as you need some fat for most bakes to work and using apple sauce introduces more fiber, protein and water instead of fat, but it’s not a totally baseless substitution.
Behavior | Reasonableneses ||----------|-----------------------------------| | Substituting applesauce | 8/10 | | One-starring the recipe because it didn’t work out | 0/10 |
Lemmy supports tables? Damn, never seen one here in the comments. Good to know!
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For me it looks like this (thunder app btw):
Which client is that? I’m using Connect and can’t see the table
Tables are supported on the web page (Lemmy.world using the default UI); they just didn’t do it right (for the default UI).
Example:
Behavior Reasonableness Substituting applesauce 8/10 One-starring the recipe because it didn’t work out 0/10 Markup used to construct it:
Behavior | Reasonableness ---- | ---- Substituting applesauce | 8/10 One-starring the recipe because it didn't work out | 0/10
Note that it’s entirely possible that different Lemmy clients have different, mutually incompatible, Markdown implementations. I’ve already noticed one such difference: in the Lemmy.world default web UI,
~x~does a subscript, but in my Voyager Android app, it does a strikethru.but in my Voyager Android app, it does a strikethru
You must be using a really old version of voyager. This was fixed a while back
Could be. I’m using the F-Droid version, which tends to lag behind the Play Store version because of all the extra vetting they do.
Can you check the version in “Settings -> About”? Some users have reported issues with F-droid auto update. F-droid should be up to 2.9.1.
Thunder renders a table, but it uses a library for most of markdown (except lemmy-specific like spoilers)
I was just winging it and it worked out!
Except “one-starring the original recipe because the modified recipe didn’t work out”
Because otherwise it looks very reasonable instead of very not reasonable
"It” refers to the substitution, not the recipe.
I see your point now. For me it doesn’t really read like it, because you have it in another cell of the table which gives it too little weight as a possible context for dereferencing the pronoun, while also having a valid noun preceding the pronoun begging to become referenced by it.
Yeah, I must be fun at parties, I know 😅
I see your point. If you view the cells as separate contexts, then it would be necessary to specify that “the substitution” is the thing that didn’t work out.
Next time, try that with your car.
Lol “I followed the instructions exactly except I had my toddler vomit into the gas tank instead of using gas. Why won’t it work!? 0/5 stars.”
Instructions unclear, I substituted the car with applesauce, but it failed to properly start up or support passengers boarding, ★☆☆☆☆
applesauce instead of engine oil will be fun
You say this, but then I used to read r/justrolledintotheshop. People outright fail at substituting engine oil for engine oil from time to time. The kind of person that would try applesauce probably wouldn’t be doing more self harm than otherwise.
you mean virgin olive oil instead of motor oil?
I wanna say someone did that, so yes? Also: window washer fluid, and the occasional transmission fluid chaser.
if my car is overheated by the side of the road and I have no water, is it ok to pee into the radiator?
I have pretty good aimI put gasoline in my diesel motor, wtf is wrong, it won’t work
😬
(Fun fact: putting gasoline in a diesel engine is way worse than putting diesel in a gas engine. In the latter case, it won’t run until you replace the fuel with the correct stuff. In the former case, it pretty quickly destroys the engine.)
Yeah, the fuel injection on modem diesels requires very high pressure and the pumps that form that pressure rewire very tight tolerances/clearances and rely on the fuel as lubricant. Without it, they grind themselves up, ruining both themselves and the injectors downstream with a shower of metal particles.
The entire fuel system has to be replaced.If I’m not mistaken, it’ll kill old diesel engines, too.
I think it depends, I’ve known of someone doing it in an old wreck years ago, and after refilling with the correct fuel it ran as well as it did before (which is to say it smoked and sounded like a bag of spanners). No idea how much it may have shortened what life it had left, but it wasn’t instant death.
Thanks for letting me know, 8 didn’t actually know that. I don’t think I’ll ever own a Diesel vehicle but I’ll keep it in mind that it’s not so simple as emptying the tank lol
Baking is a science, not an art. You want cooking for that. You can’t just randomly switch shit and expect it to work. If you must substitute, do some research first and expect to have to fiddle with stuff to get things to come out tolerable.
Baking is as much of an art as cooking is. It is just much less complacent with mistakes.
As soon as you get the notion of what to mix to achieve a given result, or which technique produces another, you can start throwing things together and see what comes out.
I burned, fumbled and messed up my share of cooking/baking and I regret nothing.
Yeah bread is an art, much like sculpture. You gotta learn to feel the dough and the air to understand what size of a scoche you need to give it and of what.
also much more punishing if you do make a mistake. Oh you added too much flour and the consistency is wrong? Well now you gotta add a whole new egg and a bit of everything :)
That’s the good part.
You just wanted a small test batch. Guess what? That extra pinch of anything now requires you to add an obscene amount of everything else to rebalance the thing.
Congratulations! You now have enough to feed the entire block, twice.
I know it’s not baking baking, but that’s how I ended up with too many crepes recently. The recepie I was using gave me a consistency of pancake batter instead of much more fluid crepe batter, so I added more milk, oh haha a bit too much milk, bit more flour, mmm close, bit more milk, ah perfect. And then I had crepes for breakfast and lunch for 3 days in a row, squeezed in some blasphemy crepe burritors for dinner as well. Not that I’m complaining that much, but the plan was just lunch crepes and a bit left-over for breakfast the next day lol
Funny how those things happen.
“Here is your shit pie, Your Grace. I regret nothing.”
This sounds awfully as a quote from a film or a series, involving either slaves or some weird revenge between an angry housekeeper and a stupid lord.
Applesauce is considered a substitute of oil when baking. There was a time that applesauce was cheaper and easier to come by than cooking oils. It’s been done for a very long time.
Applesauce is a totally acceptable replacement for oil right?
Supposedly, but I assume you have to be familiar with baking with applesauce, and not just read somewhere that apple sauce can replace “oil, butter, or eggs” and just shoot for the moon.
Wait, really? I was joking, that seems like it would not do any of the things that something like oil or butter would do when baking something.
It can work pretty well, usually in baked good that have a high moisture content like banana bread. It is certainly not a 1/1 substitute. Best practice is to follow a known recipe, or have played around enough to know what changing fat, sugar, water, levels will do. Just changing something like sugar level will change not just sweetness, but gluten formation, browning, moisture retention. It can be complex.
Reminds me of advice I got from my grandma: Cooking is a hobby, baking is science.
Nah, i do a great job of just getting stoned and winging it when i bake. People usually love it
Are these other people also stoned when they try it?
Baking is black magic.
Convince me otherwise. 😛
As an egg replacement in cakes it works okayish. Roughly one or two tablespoons per egg, but it of course depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
I sometimes replace my butter on toast with eggs with applesauce on toast with applesauce. I call it a pile of sadness.
“Mom, can we have applebutter?”
“No honey, we have applebutter at home.”
Reverse applesauce sandwich
This is probably sarcastic, but in case it’s not: Applesauce is a vegan substitute for eggs, not oil. There is no substitute for oil as many oils are already vegan. You can definitely substitute animal-based fats like butter and lard for others like coconut oil to make a recipe vegan.
Nothing can replace the blubbery taste of whale oil unfortunately.
It was sarcastic/joking, but wow I had no idea! They seem so dissimilar, I never would’ve thought that would work. Didn’t think I’d learn this much about baking today lol, thanks!
How would using lard instead of coconut oil make something vegan?
I meant the other way. Substitute out lard and substitute in coconut oil.
“Substitute X for Y” means “replace Y with X,” i.e., “for Y, use X instead.”
“Substitute X with Y” would mean “replace X with Y.”
Now, you’re going to just brag around with that knowledge of yours, and teach everyone how to write things so that things are correctly understood by the reader?
That’s a helpful goal, go on, please
I’ve heard it both ways.
(The above is 50% sincere and 50% a Psych reference.)
Yes, people sometimes say things incorrectly, like the commenter I originally replied to.
The OP graphic says “I followed the recipie exactly”, which they did not, so somehow I doubt that “facts” matter to them, who are making hyperbolic claims for emotional appeals rather than descriptive purposes.
Absolutely. 1:1 swap even so it’s odd that their dish failed.
I’ve heard about replacing eggs with applesauce to turn a baking recipe vegan. But the oil?
Also, if you don’t want an unholy amalgamation of way too much fat and sugar, why even go for brownies?
Blood can also be used as a substitute in baking. Pretty sure it’s in lieu of eggs. Not curious enough to ruin a perfectly good batch of brownies though :(
I love that your concern is the integrity of the brownies, not the sourcing of the blood.
I’m literally carrying around like a gallon of the stuff, sourcing it isn’t a problem.
…like in a gallon jug?
No! You think I’m made of money? The blood will stain and I’m not gonna get another gallon jug every month. I just use a big glass jar. Weirdo.
Good brownies are hard to come by; unsuspecting neighbors however, are not.
Priorities, man.
I have a lovely book on recipes with blood, I’ll give ya give ya the name once I find it
Edit, lol took just a second, blood by Jennifer McLagan
I’ll have to get that for when my Klingon friends come over.
That was a “fine enough” substitute before commercial egg replacers got as good and commonplace as they are now. I’ll still do it for some recipes as I like the added apple flavor and moisture, but I generally use Ener-G Egg Replacer for replacing eggs in a dough mix and maple syrup for egg washes when vegan baking these days.
maple syrup for egg washes
Holy shit that sounds awesome. And not just as a replacement for egg wash, a maple syrup wash sounds incredible just on it’s own merits
Apple Sauce is a mixture of pulp and water, what little fatty acids are available are tied up, so it does not function as an oil substitute. Oil and Water have completely different properties.
I guess I don’t know for sure, but my vegan acquaintces say they use applesauce in brownie recipes and it fuckin slaps.
They are replacing some of the sugar with it, not the fat. I’m a fan of both normal and the applesauce variants, but you need to understand the science behind the normal ingredients before you swap them out for others. Baking is science.
Actually we replace eggs with it. You can also use a banana or something called a flaxseed egg, which is simply one part flaxseed and three parts water. Let it sit for ten minutes.
This is the correct answer. My SO baked a lot and has used all of these. However, most of the recipes she’s baked recently have been fully vegan recipes right off the get-go, so they didn’t require egg substitues iirc.
Bianca Zapatka has a whole website dedicated to amazing vegan cooking and baking recipes - anyone interested in that should give them a shot:
Seconding that website! Also, https://www.zuckerjagdwurst.com/en is great!
No they replace the eggs lol
Especially for anything that needs to rise. So it’ll be less of an issue for brownies and more of an issue with cakes and breads.
It was 2021, none of us were in our right minds.
