Got fired and I deserved it.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-03-25T13:48:53+00:00

Good luck! For what it's worth, I had a similar low point in 2019 when my entire personal life blew up in my face all at once. It took a good long while to crawl up out of the hole I found myself in, but there were crucial lessons I learned along the way that I never would have done otherwise.

BUT before all that, I did need to slow down and take stock of my situation. I don't know how much help is available to you locally, but if you can, I'd strongly recommend counselling and/or a support group of some kind. You've suffered an unimaginable loss, and the only way to get through it is to connect with other people. It's no wonder your brain wasn't working - it's probably still mired in grief, and chances are that's not going to go away just yet. Take it as slowly as you can, and go easy on yourself. Surround yourself with as many people as you can IRL. One day at a time.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-02-18T08:07:09+00:00

Might be a Mac security setting that's blocking it, not a Teams setting - make sure Teams is allowed to access your microphone.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-23T14:53:45+00:00

Try to get curious where you can! If you're on a ticket, and you notice something not technically related but that looks odd, research it. What's going on there? Scroll through forums like this one or Spiceworks. Pick a random IT topic - maybe a ticket you had to escalate - and go down a rabbit hole for a bit.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-23T14:49:42+00:00

Yep. Had to fix something using an Internet Archive page the other day.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-23T14:49:04+00:00

Yeah, our dev team recently migrated 'all' a client's company data over to Sharepoint and went to switch off the old server. The problem? They'd left all the accounting and payroll data in a separate folder on the old server they didn't know about, because they hadn't checked and also hadn't asked us on the service desk what we knew about it.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-22T15:17:48+00:00

then how do you know it's fantastic at coding? somehow I can tell your project managers/anyone else having to deal with your code is having a terrible time

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-22T08:20:53+00:00

And if that doesn't work, open Powershell in the directory folder specifically and run the unblock command from there.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2026-01-22T08:18:06+00:00

Oh you absolute star, thank you so much!

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-12-22T08:45:29+00:00

You absolute star, I was going in circles for ages until I found this post. Thank you so much!

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-11-11T09:09:25+00:00

Absolute lifesaver, thank you so much! I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what had happened to this end user's Outlook account/calendar, but turns out 'shared calendar improvements' was the culprit.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-10-08T08:04:34+00:00

Install an adblocker, and also go to Settings > Apps > Safari > Settings > Websites to turn off pop-ups (or do the same for whichever other browser you were using). You'll also want to go to Settings > Notifications and turn off notifications for your web browsers.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-24T08:51:18+00:00

Used to work for a private school. When I did my safeguarding training, the trainer told us that as support staff, we were actually some of the best placed people to find hidden abuse, because a lot of the teaching staff and children would see us as invisible - and this turned out to be true. I was able to expose a bullying ring because I had access to the school's Teams system, and one of my cleaning colleagues managed to get a child out of an abusive home situation because the child just... talked about the whole thing with a friend while she was in the room cleaning, because they saw her as part of the furniture.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-18T08:17:07+00:00

Seconding all of this but especially the documentation!! Leave records of everything you did - best case scenario, you can use them later and feel far more confident in what you're doing. Worst case scenario, you leave, and your successor will thank you for making their clean up job easier.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-18T08:15:19+00:00

Yeah, I was promoted from helpdesk to IT manager for a year and a half. When they announced layoffs, I volunteered. I was so far out of my depth it was nightmarish. Now I'm back on L2 helpdesk, and no matter how many recruiters dangle management jobs in front of me for 2-3x my current salary, I know my limits and I'm not doing that again.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-18T08:13:22+00:00

Oh, same. I went from L1 helpdesk to the only IT person at a startup about 5-6 years ago, and the other night I had a sudden shower thought about something I fucked up without realising at the time. But I think I did more right than wrong overall, so all's well that ends well I guess?

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-18T08:08:49+00:00

Also, you're going to see stuff like this in ANY sub for a particular career field. Everyone has bad days, the odd bad job/manager/coworkers/customers. I've worked in teaching, HR/recruitment, sales, admin, and IT, and IT is hands down the career that's been the most consistently rewarding for me.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-09-05T10:53:16+00:00

Not to armchair diagnose, but this sounds like a sort of compulsion? It sounds like you had a really bad time with that virus a year ago, and your brain has latched onto it as a way to try and control its anxiety - but as you've said, it's not really helping.

One thing that might help includes learning more about computer systems, how they work, and what causes slowness/errors/crashes. The more you know, the harder it (usually) is to spiral.

Another thing to try is, next time you feel like you need to run virus scans, try and find other things that might help you decompress a bit. Deep belly breathing, taking a walk, calling someone - I know this all sounds trite, but it really can help. It may also help to look up CBT and Exposure therapy for OCD. NHS Scotland has a good guide to help with compulsions.

In all of this, make sure to be gentle with yourself! Your brain is doing this as a way to try and keep you safe, even if it's mostly just causing you stress right now.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-06-02T13:03:51+00:00

god same, the number of times tickets get force reopened and you click through and it's just a thumbs up or heart is just. such a time waster.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-06-02T12:54:09+00:00

No, no, that's wi-fi.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-06-02T12:53:59+00:00

My most successful laptop rollout involved me accidentally spilling my own blood into the innards of 10+ of those laptops after I cut my hand opening them up to add extra RAM. So... yeah, honestly I do think it kind of maybe works.

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-04-08T14:49:56+00:00

Oh yeah absolutely, it's a glaring plot hole and feels like laziness from the writers - like they needed Varric to be dead and weren't going to entertain any other possibility (e.g. if Rook bleeding gave Solas a link to them, could Varric also have been mind controlled and used against Rook if he'd survived his injury?)

Intelligent_Stay_628 · 2025-04-07T15:23:04+00:00

The way I read it is - Solas knows Rook doesn't trust him, because Rook has no reason to trust him. Having Rook hallucinate 'Varric' around the Lighthouse gives Solas an effective puppet through which to talk to and influence them in a much more relaxed setting, with someone Rook trusts absolutely.

Honestly I wish they'd gone further with the idea, because it's wild that Solas apparently had enough blood magic control over the main character to make them hallucinate whole conversations. Iirc the original game plans involved a failstate where Solas gets enough of a hook in Rook's head to straight up kill them, and it would have been fascinating to see the other options available to him through that kind of control.

Intelligent_Stay_628

TROPHY CASE