The look on a client's face when I ask to restart before touching anything else
I have been on the help desk for 6 years now and I still see techs skip the reboot because they think it is too basic. Last Tuesday a guy at our branch in Fresno called me about his spreadsheet freezing, and I asked him to hold the power button for 10 seconds and start it up again. He called back 4 minutes later saying it was working fine, and he had already spent 2 hours trying to fix it himself with some registry cleaner he downloaded. Here is what I keep noticing: the more someone knows, the more they want the fix to be complicated, because a simple answer feels like it cannot be the real one. It is not about being lazy either, a clean restart clears out stuck processes and bad memory in a way that no cleanup tool really matches. How many of you have had to talk a seasoned tech down from a deep dive just to get them to try the boring fix first?