I definitely agree that you don’t just butt into a strangers conversation in public. That’s just weird.
When it comes to tech though you have to at least get where those guys are comming from. It’s not because you’re a woman, it’s because it’s tech. You can’t assume people know anything about tech otherwise you’ll be half way through explaining the thing before you find out that the person you’re explaining it to doesn’t know what a right mouse button is and they think the internet is an icon on their desktop. You can’t know what everyone else knows so the easiest thing is to assume they know nothing. If you work in IT or any other tech field long enough it’s really easy to wind up talking to everyone like they lick windows just because that’s the safest thing to assume until proven otherwise.
As far as the IT guys avoiding you, they may just feel awkward for treating you like a window licker, or they may just be leaving you alone because now they know that you know what you’re doing. I work in a different support job now but I still have coworkers that I don’t really interact with because I know them and trust them enough to do most stuff on their own. However that also means that if they seek me out then something is very wrong and it’s probably going to be a pain in the ass because if it wasn’t then they would have fixed it themselves.
I definitely agree that you don’t just butt into a strangers conversation in public. That’s just weird.
When it comes to tech though you have to at least get where those guys are comming from. It’s not because you’re a woman, it’s because it’s tech. You can’t assume people know anything about tech otherwise you’ll be half way through explaining the thing before you find out that the person you’re explaining it to doesn’t know what a right mouse button is and they think the internet is an icon on their desktop. You can’t know what everyone else knows so the easiest thing is to assume they know nothing. If you work in IT or any other tech field long enough it’s really easy to wind up talking to everyone like they lick windows just because that’s the safest thing to assume until proven otherwise.
As far as the IT guys avoiding you, they may just feel awkward for treating you like a window licker, or they may just be leaving you alone because now they know that you know what you’re doing. I work in a different support job now but I still have coworkers that I don’t really interact with because I know them and trust them enough to do most stuff on their own. However that also means that if they seek me out then something is very wrong and it’s probably going to be a pain in the ass because if it wasn’t then they would have fixed it themselves.