September 2007

Your company put water on my motherboard.

The ISP I work for (Xtra) just launched a closed portal called Bubble - This is one call we got that just shows people think technology can do anything.

Customer Perception: Email
Notes:
Cust believes that there is moisture in his PC as a result of downloading the bubble.

- Cust believes he has taken the PC down to the local PC technician and found that to be the issue.

Advised cust that this can not be the case as the bubble is a piece of software, not a physical bubble.

- Cust maintains that it is an issue caused by the bubble and he needs a new motherboard.

Advised that the bubble is not capable of producing moisture as it is a piece of software.

- Cust then advised that he has been an share holder in our company since 1993.

- He advises that he was a foundation shareholder.

Advised cust that this may be the case however it does not change the fact that the bubble is not a physical bubble and that it is physically impossible to transmit a bubble over an electrical current or a frequency.

- Cust then supplied the following email address: ******@anotherisp.net.nz

Advised that it is then odd that the bubble was downloaded by his son in law on to his PC as it is only for Xtra customers.

- Cust wants to know what Xtra are going to do about his PC.

- Cust advises that he has been reading about the trouble that the bubble has been causing and wants to know why we would put moisture in people PCs.

Advised that there were issues - software related, however we are not putting moisture in peoples computers.

- Advised that I cannot help with his PC as it is not an issue incurred by Xtra.

Referred cust back to his local PC tech.

There was a simpler answer we could have given:

Advise the customer that in our opinion, the problem lay with the organic interface and that the customer should seek the advice of a PC technician: Xtra will be happy to pay for repairs if the PC tech proved that the problem was moisture from the Xtra bubble.

Anonymous Tech Supporter

Word Version

I was helping a girl with a problem with word, and I was asking her some questions.

Here is the conversation

M - Me
S - She

M: Wich version of Word do you have?
S: I don't know
S: The one on the computer
S: Microsoft

Duh

Tim

Are You Using That?

There's this lady that works over in Marketing. She s rather meek and mild mannered, so when I go into her area to help a user with their computer I ask her if I can borrow her chair. At first she would get up and pass me the chair with no questions asked, at which point I would scoot into someone else s cube to help them with their problem. She would stand there for a minute with a look on her face of what do I do now?

These days when I ask her for her chair she firmly says no! as she giggles. I give her an "attagirl!" and go grab a spare from someone else.

Hennepin

How do you speel that?

So reading some of these and thought I'd contribute my own story or two. I've been working tech support for a Canadian ISP for about the last year and a half to two years, and I've got a few whoppers. One of my favorites came lately.

Customer calls me, we're troubleshooting his internet. AFter a while and realizing this guy is slightly... well, really dense, I figure his internet is just fine.

So we're going to do a google search to show him that indeed his internet is working.

Me: Have you ever used google?
Him: Yes.
Me: Okay, go to google.
Him: It says it can't find... oh, sorry, I spelled it wrong. How do you spell google again?
Me: g-o-o-g-l-e.
Him: Okay, so there's an 'r' in there?
Me:.................................no.

Anonymous Tech Supporter

The "dsmod" command fixes all!

This isn't a help desk style tale, but it is still a good story. I am a help desk rep of overall a little over a year now. Back when I was in college, I majored in Computer Networking Technology. In my second year I had a teacher who was pretty much in our opinion someone who may have been pretending that she knew what she was talking about.

The one moment that got me was this: I came in one day to our little server setup. We came in to find our main server was stuck in a boot-up loop. It would get as far as showing the Windows Server 2k3 logo, then reboot itself.

We determined that a repair from the install cd would do the trick after asking around. However we did not know what to put in for a command when it came time to ask for one. So to keep things moving we asked our teacher. She came over and looked over the situation. She suggested that we use the "dsmod" command.

For those who don't know, "dsmod" is a command that only works when windows is actually running. As she walked away, my partner and I just kinda chuckled because it was the bonehead play of the day for us.

Marc K.