I don't work in IT support, except unofficially for family and friends, but I still get asked questions at work especially regarding mobile phones as people know I'm a bit of an Android geek.
However, there are always some problems that are just too difficult to solve or that one can't quite believe, as was this one posed recently in the office kitchen at lunchtime:
Do you know why my camera won't work when I use the company wi-fi?
My first reaction was incredulity, why on earth would the camera on a phone, in this case a Galaxy Note, need wi-fi at all, nevermind not work on a particular network?
But I decided to ask a few questions, did she mean photo sharing, perhaps that was blocked (although though our company wi-fi has restrictions such as specific web sites that would be an odd thing to stop)?
No, she said, and vowed to go and retrieve her phone to demonstrate after I further expressed doubts about this claim.
Can you guess the what the problem was? She returned with her phone and promptly showed me - of course her definition of a camera and mine differed somewhat, she showed me an app that gave her a live feed of the security cameras in and around her house!
Of course the whole thing made sense now and I explained that there were a number of reasons why the app wouldn't work* and offered a few suggestions to remedy this.
So there you are, IT support is difficult but as in other areas off life it helps if you are both talking about the same thing :)
* For the curious it could be that the site that offers the feed was on a blacklist for some reason, or that the specific port the site needed was blocked (most web sites use port 80 by default but other ports are used for services like Skype etc. and these are sometimes barred).
