Shoutout to the retired IT guy at the library who told me to check DNS before swapping hardware

Last Tuesday I spent 2 hours swapping out a router at a client's office before some old timer at the reference desk asked if I checked DNS and that one question saved me from an hour of testing gear I didn't need to replace.

2 comments

2 Comments

wren30722d ago

and that's the thing about experience right? it teaches you to check the simple stuff first before diving into the complicated stuff... i see this all the time with my neighbor who tries to fix his lawnmower every summer. he'll spend an hour tearing apart the carburetor before i remind him to check if the spark plug wire is loose. or my friend who was convinced her phone battery was dying but it was just the brightness setting cranked all the way up. we get so caught up in thinking the problem must be big and technical that we forget the basics are usually the answer.

noahward22d ago

Yep, that's the thing about experience. It's not about knowing more complicated stuff, it's about knowing what to skip. We all get in this mindset where we think the fix has to be complex to be worth our time. But 90% of the time it's something you skipped because you assumed it was too simple. That librarian probably saved your client a few hundred bucks in hardware they didn't need. Good on them for speaking up.