There's an infographic that circulated heavily on LinkedIn this year, and it sums up with humor something every long-time IT person already knows by heart: the gulf between what people think we do and what actually happens when nobody's watching. Here it is, in plain English.
What people think vs what we actually do
"Easy" tasks they ask for
- Turn it off and on again
- Reset passwords
- Fix the printer
- Connect to WiFi
- Install software
- Replace mouse or keyboard
What actually happens every day
- Network troubleshooting
- 24/7 system monitoring
- Security management
- User and permission management
- Patching and updates
- Access control
- VPN and firewall configuration
- Backup and recovery
- Performance monitoring
- Root cause analysis
- Documentation
- Vendor coordination
- SLA compliance
- User communication
A normal day in the chair
No two days are identical, but the structure tends to repeat:
The work you don't see
When a user opens a ticket saying "email doesn't work", what they think happens is I sit at their PC, click twice and fix it. What actually happens, in order:
- Investigation. Just this user or several? Mail client or server? Recent changes? Is the domain responding?
- Log analysis. Server log, firewall, antispam. Find the error timestamp, correlate with other events.
- Escalation if needed. If it's the hosting provider or ISP, open a ticket with them without losing the thread.
- Documentation. Record what was done, found, fixed. So the next similar incident is 5 minutes, not 50.
- Post-mortem monitoring. Verify it doesn't recur in the following days.
- Communication. Keep the user informed without spam, and their manager too if SLA requires.
- Planning. If the incident reveals a weakness, schedule the structural change.
- Root cause resolution. Not just "it works" — understand why it failed.
The uncomfortable truth
Nobody notices.
Everyone notices.
That's the paradox of the trade: success is invisible. If I've kept email up, files safe, ransomware out for six months — the natural conclusion is "nothing's happening, why am I paying you?". And when something finally breaks, we're the first to get the call.
Not complaining. Part of the job. But it helps to spell it out occasionally, so when someone says "it's just fixing the printer", they have a mental image of what's underneath.
The real goal
Keep systems stable. Keep users productive. Keep the business running.
That's the only metric that matters. Certifications, brands, equipment models — they're means. The end is that the customer's business keeps running, quietly, with nobody noticing what's happening underneath. When we pull that off, the customer doesn't even call. And for me, that's the best call of the day.
We don't just fix computers
We keep businesses running. The distinction matters.
IT support isn't an expense you see when something breaks — it's the reason you stopped having problems. If you've gone months without incidents, it's not because "there was nothing to do"; it's because someone was avoiding them silently. Respect the support. They've got your back.
Need IT support that's actually there when you need it?
If your company in Cartagena (or anywhere in Colombia — I attend remote worldwide) needs technical support that monitors, prevents and responds in less than two hours, tell me what you have and we'll build a plan that fits the real size of your operation.