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The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/Half_MT on 2025-06-12 14:39:05+00:00.

I’m currently working at the Help Desk in a university library. I’m the unofficial team lead so I’m fielding most tickets since it’s the summer semester and tickets are slow.

Had a professor come up to the desk a few days ago, telling me her laptop won’t upgrade to Windows 11 and the battery keeps losing charge. Quick test shows that yes indeed, the battery is borked, so I replace it with one of the multitude I have salvaged from broken PC’s the university just throws out. But this story isn’t about my boundless private junkyard. It’s about this professor.

I address why her computer won’t upgrade to Windows 11 and it’s because her hard drive is nearly full. 226 GB out of a 256GB SSD. Not enough space to upgrade. Easy fix?

…no.

I ask her if she uses her OneDrive and she tells me no. I tell her it’s quite easy and secure, and since the university pays for 5TB per professor, she’ll never have to worry about running out of space. Her response.

“Oh I don’t use that. Everyone can see it. See? This means I am on the Internet and everyone can see what’s on my computer” she says, pointing to the C: drive icon in file explorer. I collect myself and explain this is not the case. I convince her we can use OneDrive as a backup while I replace her hard drive since the university has no means of cloning drives. I start to walk her through the procedure, unaware of the verbal torpedo speeding towards me that will forever hurt my brain to think of.

Me: “Okay, first click on your documents folder.”

Her: “What’s click?”

This just didn’t derail my train of thought, it sent it into orbit. This kicked off an hour session of me explaining what clicking is, that a hard drive with partitions is like a pie chart, that people can’t see what her computer has on it without her password, that she has to double click on desktop icons, what double clicking is, and that when windows says Hi on her screen during a first login, it’s not a Microsoft rep trying to talk to her.

I resolved her issues, installed the new drive, put all her old data back, and she happily went on her way. At least her reception was positive and she wrote my director a glowing thank you note about me. But “What’s click?” will now and forever be my bar of questions that makes the record scratch go off in my brain.