When people don’t ask for help: the IT problems agencies carry in silence
Three real stories from real offices. None of the people involved raised a hand.
There is a corner of the internet where IT professionals share what they see at work. Most of it stays technical. But occasionally a story surfaces that is not really about technology at all.
The three below are drawn from r/sysadmin, a Reddit community of IT professionals. We have anonymised and paraphrased each one. What connects them is not the technical problem. It is the reason the problem went unreported.
People in offices adapt to broken things. They work around them, absorb the friction, and get on with their day. The cost of that adaptation almost never shows up anywhere.
Six months. 200 rows. A pocket calculator.
An IT technician arrived at a small accounting firm to look at a reported issue. Subject line on the ticket: “Excel acting weird.”
He went to the user’s desk. She was in her late fifties. Well-regarded. Clearly good at her job. She opened a spreadsheet, then reached into her drawer and pulled out a calculator.
She had been manually recalculating every formula in a 200-row spreadsheet. Every day. For six months.
Two settings had been accidentally changed at some point. The spreadsheet was set to manual calculation mode, and show formulas had been switched on. Every cell displayed the formula text instead of a result. Nothing recalculated automatically.
She had assumed she caused the problem. She did not want to raise it. So she bought a calculator and got on with the job.
The technician fixed both settings in fifteen seconds.
“So how long has that been fixable?” The user, after six months of daily workaround became a fifteen-second fix. Source: r/sysadmin
She was not embarrassed. She just nodded slowly and said: “well, that explains why my wrists hurt.”
What this cost
At a conservative estimate, two extra hours of manual work each day across six months comes to around 250 hours. At any reasonable rate for a finance professional, that is a meaningful sum. It never appeared on any budget conversation or any report. It was simply absorbed into the working week.
The AI was really onto something. It is a shame you don’t have those features.”
A software support team received a ticket asking them to activate several product features. Nobody recognised the names. They checked the documentation. They spoke to the development team. Nothing matched.
Eventually someone said: those names sound like something an AI tool would invent. They went back to the customer and asked him directly.
He had used ChatGPT to research how to complete a task with their software. ChatGPT responded with a confident overview of several features, including instructions for contacting support to activate them. He had followed the instructions carefully.
The features did not exist. They were invented by the AI.
When told this, he was not embarrassed. He was mildly annoyed. The features sounded genuinely useful, and he felt the company was missing a trick by not offering them.
“The AI was really onto something. It is a shame you don’t have these features.” The customer, after learning the features were hallucinated. Source: r/sysadmin
What this cost
The support team spent considerable time investigating a request with no basis in reality. Across an agency where staff regularly act on AI output without checking it, that kind of misdirected effort compounds quickly. The greater risk is not the wasted hours inside the business. It is the moment the same unchecked output shapes a client recommendation, a brief, or a deliverable.
Three days navigating her desktop through a keyhole.
A developer was asked to look at a colleague’s computer. “Something happened,” she said. “Everything’s huge.”
The screen was zoomed to around 400%. Her recycle bin icon was the size of a coffee mug. She had been panning across the screen with her mouse to find Outlook, her files, everything she needed. She had been doing this for three full working days.
Windows Magnifier had been switched on accidentally, almost certainly from a stray key combination. One shortcut turned it off. The screen returned to normal immediately.
When asked why she had not reported it, she said she thought she had broken something and did not want to get in trouble.
She was 34.
What this cost
Three days of sharply reduced output, from a single accidental keypress. Across a team of 30, with all the small undisclosed workarounds people carry quietly through a working week, the total becomes hard to dismiss. None of it appears in any metric. It is the invisible overhead of a team working harder than they need to.
The thing all three have in common
None of these problems were complicated. All three were fixed quickly once someone looked. The technology did not fail. The people involved simply did not feel comfortable asking for help.
That happens for different reasons. Sometimes people assume the fault is theirs and do not want to admit it. Sometimes asking feels like an interruption. Sometimes there is just no obvious, easy route to get support without making a formal thing of it.
A well-run IT setup addresses this directly. It makes help feel accessible rather than formal. It checks in proactively rather than waiting for things to break. It builds the kind of working relationship where someone feels comfortable saying “something seems off” before the six months are up.
Most agencies we speak to do not have that. They have someone internal who handles the obvious things, or a break-fix arrangement that only activates when something stops working entirely. The quiet, compounding costs sit between those two states, unnoticed and unmeasured.
That is the gap a good IT partner fills.
Any of this feel familiar?
We work exclusively with creative, comms, PR, and marketing agencies. If something in these stories rang true, we would be glad to have a straightforward conversation about where things currently stand at your agency. No pitch. No obligation.
The conversation takes around 30 minutes. We typically speak with MDs, Operations Managers, and Finance Directors.
About this post
Rodell Gordon is a Digital Marketing Executive at Cubit Technology. With experience supporting over a dozen different industries, from smart homes to urban greening solutions, he joined Cubit to help agencies develop their IT infrastructure with managed IT solutions.
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FAQs
Why do employees not report IT problems?
Research and experience point to a few consistent reasons. Many people assume the problem is their own fault and do not want to admit it. Others worry about being seen as unable to cope, or feel that raising a small issue is an imposition on a busy team. Some simply do not know who to contact or find the process too formal for something that feels minor. The result is that people adapt instead: they work around broken tools, absorb the extra effort, and say nothing. The problem does not go away. It compounds quietly over weeks or months.
How much does unreported IT friction cost a business?
It is difficult to measure precisely, which is part of the problem. A UK study found that the average employee loses around 27 minutes per day to IT issues, most of which goes unreported. Across a 20-person agency, that adds up to several weeks of lost productive time each year. The cost is not just time: when people work around broken tools rather than fixing them, the quality of their output suffers too. Because this kind of loss never appears on a report or a budget line, most businesses have no accurate picture of what it costs them.
What is the difference between break-fix IT support and managed IT support?
Break-fix support means calling someone when something stops working. You pay for the time spent fixing it, and the relationship ends there. Managed IT support, by contrast, operates on a proactive, subscription basis. Rather than waiting for problems to break, a managed service provider monitors systems continuously, prevents issues before they cause disruption, and provides an accessible help desk for staff to use daily. For agencies, the practical difference is that managed support catches the small, unreported problems that break-fix arrangements never see.
What IT support do creative and marketing agencies need?
Creative and comms agencies have specific IT requirements that differ from general business users. They typically run large files across shared drives, use specialist software for design and production, and operate with tight client deadlines that make downtime costly. They also tend to grow and shrink project teams quickly, which puts pressure on user management and access controls. A good IT partner for an agency understands these pressures and provides support that is accessible to non-technical staff, responsive to deadline-driven work patterns, and able to scale alongside project demands.
How do I know if my agency needs a managed IT provider?
A few signs are worth looking for. Staff frequently work around IT issues rather than reporting them. Technology problems regularly affect client deadlines or deliverables. There is no clear, easy route for someone to get help with a small issue. IT costs are unpredictable month to month. No one is proactively checking whether your systems are secure or up to date. If several of these are true, a managed IT provider is likely to save the business more than it costs.
Can AI tools like ChatGPT give wrong IT advice?
Yes, and this is a growing problem for businesses. AI tools including ChatGPT, Gemini, and others generate text based on patterns in training data rather than verified facts. When asked about specific software features, technical configurations, or product capabilities, they sometimes produce confident, detailed answers that are entirely incorrect. When staff act on inaccurate AI output, the cost is not just the time lost investigating a dead end. It is the downstream effect when incorrect information shapes a decision, a client recommendation, or a deliverable. AI tools are genuinely useful for many tasks. Verifying technical information before acting on it is an important habit to build.
What should I look for in an IT partner for my agency?
Sector understanding matters more than most agency leaders expect. An IT provider that works primarily with financial services or manufacturing will approach your business differently from one that understands how creative agencies operate. Beyond that, look for transparent pricing with no hidden project fees, a UK-based help desk rather than offshore support, clear response time commitments in writing, and a proactive approach to maintenance rather than a reactive one. The best indicator is whether the provider asks about your business first and proposes solutions second.