During a MS Teams meeting, a coworker offered a heads up that leaving our laptops plugged in/docked for long periods of time can cause damage to the internal battery, and that we should start unplugging them occasionally and let the battery deplete. I recognized that I'd not unplugged my laptop in MONTHS, so as a precaution, I unplugged it. it went to sleep, and I was unable to turn it on again. I called our IT department, and after several minutes of me giving and repeating my credentials to the tech, we finally got to my explaining my issue. I made it very clear that as my laptop had ostensibly died, I didn't have access to my email, so someone needed to CALL me to tell me where to bring it (since COVID, our home office has moved to a temporary location; I don't know where it is or even if our IT department is there.) I missed almost a full day of work Thursday and half the day today as I literally could not do my job without my laptop. I finally called them back, and of course, they had emailed me the fix Thursday despite my expressing very clearly that I didn't have access to my email (it requires a soft token only accessible from a company-issued laptop to access from any other device.) Apparently, these HP laptops can go into a "deep sleep" which requires you hold the power button down for 30 seconds; I've never heard of such a thing as a 30-second long-press; who would do that with a device that's not responding at all??
Long story short, I'm having to catch up after missing a day and a half of work because our IT geniuses can't follow simple instructions despite being notorious for acting as if we're the idiots, and they know better than the rest of us. The snooty b*tch I got on the phone this morning had the nerve to catch an attitude when she found that they HAD emailed me instructions on how to restore my shit before I reminded her that my issue was that I didn't have access to ANY company assets, least of which being THE EMAIL THEY SENT.