I don’t work in tech support, but I am knowledgeable in troubleshooting, especially when it comes to software issues. I often help friends with PC issues in a telegram group I am in.
Today, we were all discussing playing a game as a group, and someone mentioned that they couldn’t play the game because it crashes and freezes at random. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to help.
Me: “How much RAM do you have?”
Friend: “I have 16 GB.”
Me: “How much does the game use?”
Friend: “I allocated it 2 GB. But most of the RAM is taken up by Chrome.”
I was confused. Yeah, Chrome is kind of notorious for eating up RAM, but there was no way it was using up nearly 16 GB of it. Nonetheless, I stated the obvious:
Me: “Then close Chrome when you play the game. Force-close it in Task Manager.”
Friend: “I don’t want to do that. It takes forever to start Chrome up again.”
Obviously, it wouldn’t take that long to start Chrome again, so I was confused. I let some other friends do some tech-support-talking for a bit, and then [Friend] revealed the actual problem.
Friend: “I have 1,850 tabs open.”
Me: “Why do you have so many tabs open?”
Friend: “I’ve just done it for so long that I’m used to it.”
Friend #2: “Dude, close some of them!”
Friend: “I don’t want to, and I don’t want to bookmark them because that will take forever.”
At that point, I gave up.
Me: “You know the problem and the solution to the problem. I can’t help if you don’t want to fix it.”
And I moved on. I knew their claim that it would “take too long to restart the browser” was bogus now, since they were never going to close it to begin with.
I will never understand how people can know the problem AND the solution to it but still decide to ask for help, knowing full well that they will never fix it anyway.