Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I was hanging around one day with a friend who works for

This is my favorite Tech Tale... With over 10 years

of tech support under my belt, I keep using this one to 'prove' that nothing is impossible.

While doing support for a mail-order computer company, one of my calls went like this:

Me: tech support, how can I help you?

Customer: Every time I flush my toilet, my computer reboots.

Me: (pause)

Me: Excuse me?

Customer: Every time I flush my toilet, my computer reboots.

I spent a couple of minutes working along the lines of "if you want help, you have to tell me what's wrong.", but the customer kept insisting that was the problem.

The cause: Customer lived on a rural farm, and had low

power on the utility lines. Add that to an electric water pump, and every time he flushed the toilet, the pump would kick in, power would sag even more, and... *poof*

computer reboot...

The last call of the day can always be the worst. I was sitting here thinking that I should help out, and take that last call. I get this frantic mother on the phone saying that her daughter has broken her computer. In the background I could hear a loud noise that sounded like feedback coming from the speakers. I told her to move her mic away from the computer.

Customer: The "mic" can you spell that?

Me: M-I-C, you know you speak in to it to record your voice...

Customer: I dont speak into my computer.

Me: Do you have a microphone?

Customer: What is that?

Me: Ok, nevermind. Just turn off your computer.

Customer: The computer is off, it's broken. It is making an awful noise.

Me: Can you just go over to the computer, and press the on/off switch.

Customer: Where is that? Oh wait the computer stoped making that noise.

Me: ok looks like it is fixed, have a nice day!

I used to service a very large national company doing executive 24 hrs service.

One day late and after regular hours, I received a panicked call from a high level VP asking me to

drive over to his office right away. He didn't want to tell me what the problem was

until I got there.

I arrived but not finding him in his office, I

followed the panicky voice only to find him crouched over a large

old mainframe printer. As I approached I noticed he was somewhat

sheepish in asking me for a pair of scissors.

Seems his tie had gotten caught and both tie tabs were far into the

mechanisms of the printer, and the only thing he could reach

was the phone. The only number he remembered well was that of the tech support one!

He was a frequent caller!

A user had been receiving the audio message "a configuration error has occurred" from her PC for several months at boot up. Each time tech support arrived she had the machine ready for disassembly. Two new system boards and a new hard drive did not cure the problem, however. Another user attempted to use this PC and was unable to read a file from her floppy disk.

The problem turned out to be several small kitchen magnets placed on the PC's case immediately above disk drives. The magnets were removed and there were no more configuration errors.

We run an older 5000 node network that has many servers including a mainframe. Our system had been having some backbone problems and the entire network would go down at times. When this would happen, absolutely nothing on any servers could be accessed. Needless to say, whenever this happened we would have users calling to find out if they were unable to access because of something they did, or if the network was down. This was one of our calls concerning the network being down. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Tech: Network services, may we help you?

User (Jennifer): This is Jennifer, is the network down?

Tech: Yes, we're working on it now.

Jennifer: Well, is everything down, or just the mainframe?

Tech: Everything is down.

Jennifer: When will it be up again?

Tech: We're really not sure, we've got people out on it now.

Jennifer: This is a real hassle when the system goes down. You guys should put out a broadcast message when it goes down.

me: This is technical support, how can I help you?

User: I am having some serious troubles with the modem I bought from you folks the other day.

me: What's the problem you are having?

User: Well, it's squawking like a chicken!

me: Squawking like a chicken? Oh, you are probably talking about the noise it makes when negotiating a connection.

User: I don't know what it is, but it ain't sounding right!

me: Is this your first modem?

User: Yuppers.

me: Can you let me listen to the sound it's making?

User: Yuppers.

(The sound I heard was from a 28.8 modem)

me: Well sir, that's completely normal. I can show you how to turn down, or shut off the sound if you want.

(These calls aren't so bad. There is no way this person could have known about the squawking if he never used a modem before).

Remember those 5 1/4" disks?

Caller: Hi, just got your software and need some help installing it. I've followed the instructions but I keep getting a Drive A: not ready error.

Me: Ok, let's go through it step by step to isolate the problem, are you ready?

Caller: Sure, fire away.

Me: Ok, insert the floppy into drive A:

Caller: Ok, done that.

Me: Alright, make sure the door is closed.

Caller: Ok, hang on a sec......alright it's closed.

Me: Type "Install"

Caller: It says "not ready reading drive A:"

Me: Hmmm, describe to me exactly what you just did.

Caller: I inserted the disk, and then I closed the door to my office....

Several years ago I worked as a techie for a large financial software firm. I received a call from one of our clients that went like this;

Me: XYZ Support Desk, how can I help you?

Client: I've finished my data entry but can't get back to the main menu?

Me: Oh, no problem, just press F12 and it'll appear.

Client: Ok, but still nothing.

This was repeated three times to no avail.

Having verified that the client was at the point where I thought she was, and that a myriad of other things, I finally asked her to repeat *exactly* what she was doing.

Client: Here's what I'm doing, I press F (the letter) , then the number 1 and the number 2 ...

My friend, who wants to remain anonymous, works for a major

defense contractor. He is in charge of the networking staff, and recently had the dubious honor of being placed in charge of training some new hirees fresh out of college.

These recent grads (and undergrads) were hired as part of a program his company has, and this certian small Colorado college (which he only described to me as "Podunk-U") that the vice president himself was proud to claim as his Alma Mater. Many of these students were trained four-to-a-terminal on a very old version of Unix Mainframe, and taught programming on Apple II's. Only one knew Windows, and it was v3.1. Fun fun fun until daddy took the ten-base-T away...

Among having to try to explain complicated Win95 and NT networking to these students, he ended up being their "babysitter" in many cases, because some of these grads were not exactly shirt-and-tie material.

One horrified example he dumped upon me this Christmas was that the kid who know Win 3.1 sort of took it upon himself to become the assumed "leader" of this motley crew. Although no plans for revolt seem imminent, this one guy has quickly become notorious for giving really bad advice and instructions. The most recent example was a rash of lost documents, which makes any government contractor a nervous nelly.

Since these grads were kept away from damaging anything important, a lot of them ended up with nothing to do. So a lot of them ended up doing busy work, like filing, data entry, and so on. Training was taking forever because it was assumed they would come into work knowing certain things, which they did not. The missing documents was traced to such a thing:

They constantly confused the fax machine with the paper shredder. None of the kids had ever seen either.

Perhaps this one should be committed to the X-Files site,

but this is one of the best calls I've ever had.

Tech: Good afternoon Alex here.

Cust: Hi Alex. I'm from XYZ Corp and we are having a bit

of a problem with our network. We can't see any PCs

on our net.

Tech: Okay, I'll be over in about 30 minutes.

I made my way out the business to find the usual scene, no

work was being done. All appeared to be on coffee break. So

I then decided to check out one of the PCs. Right, no data.

I walked into the room that the comms rack was kept in, the

door was ajar and there was no sign of a key. I basically

dropped everything I was carrying when I noticed the fault.

NO PATCH LEADS. Someone/thing/how had stolen/borrowed or

removed leads from the patch panel.

Addendum: The leads were never recovered nor were seen at

any of the installations I visited.

A user had called to say that there was a problem with her

floppy drive. Upon inspection, I found that the diskette

would not go into the drive. I brought the PC back to the

shop to work on it and found that my floppies could be

inserted with no problems.

I returned the PC to the user

and tried her floppy again and it still could not be inserted.

I tried another of her floppies from the box she had on her

desk and it too would not go in. I then tried to move the

metal slide on the diskette and found that it would not move

at all.

Then I noticed that the label she had put on it was

the type that is supposed to wrap around the top and cover

part of the back of the diskette. She had placed the whole

label on the front covering part of the slide and not allowing

it to move freely thus preventing the diskette from being

inserted into the drive. After removing the labels on 3

different diskettes, they worked fine.

I am tech support by trade but my funniest story is personal.

A few years ago I bought a computer and began using bulletin boards. I noticed that I frequently got cut off in the middle of downloading. After days of troubleshooting and software changes I was still stumped.

Then one day while I was working on my system my husband came in and asked if I wanted to have pizza for dinner.

When I said yes he picked up the cordless phone and proceeded to dial out, using our only phone line. It seems my husband did not think that he was using the phone line as long as he was using the cordless phone.

This is now a classic family story!

Many years ago, wishing to show off the big computer I was

working on, I took my fiancee into the computer room on a

weekend. Some dastardly person had turned off this very cranky

IBM 370/158 and it was wont to have powerup problems. After

serveral tries I looked over at one of the "frames" only to

see smoke pouring out like a wet barbecue grill. Upon

opening the unit, there about in the center was a spot about

the size of a grapefruit and just glowing ruby-red.

I immediately went to the phone and called the operations

manager. We said our hellos and when he asked how things

were going I responded "Not bad, there's just a fire in the

CPU!".Sounds of panic erupted from the earpiece. Well, not

much to do but wait for the IBM CE. And a long wait it was

and when he did get there the wait got even longer 'cause

the blasted power supply cable had burned its insulation

about a foot and a half back from the connection point.

This wasn't to be an easy task of simply circimsizing the

cable at reattaching the connector. Tried that and it came

up too short. Ended up waitingfor a whole new cable. My

intended was very impressed with computers by that incident.

I worked in Tech Support for about 25 years and what I will

always remember coming from the lips of programmers are

the words "Gee, I only changed ....." and their desire to

blame their poor coding problem on the most recent

hardware/software change to the system, however far-removed

from the problem with their "enhancement".

Take these words for what they are worth. I had an interesting

25 years in the field with many a morning spent watching the

sunrise from thre computer room window !

I work for an ISP, and a coworker took this call:

"When I couldn't log in, I was assuming it was a hardware problem

rather than a cache problem."

"Cache?"

"Yes, cash. My account was disabled because I didn't pay my bill."

I work for a well known ticket agency second line support.

I find it infuriating that first line support pass over

problems that just require 'switch it off, switch it on'

but i was able to have my revenge with this call:

me: y'ello, techs.

1st line support: hi, it's me. got a problem with a new

keyboard.

me: what sort of problem.

1st line support: well it's just frozen.

me: then you'll need to wait for it to thaw.

I work Tech Support, and we have several corporate customers (of varying degrees of [in]ability) who have contracted us for their HW/SW support.

I got a call from one nameless (and brain-less) customer with a Word 6.0 problem who seemed to take FOREVER to follow my lead, asking her to click here, there, open that... She kept saying, "you'll have to slow down a bit; my mouse is real erratic!" Finally I asked her if she needed me to send her a new mouse, and she replied that hers was working fine, but "it just takes me awhile because the pointer keeps moving when I turn the mouse over..."

Do what?

This lady (do some people have to be shown EVERYTHING?) had learned to hold the mouse in her hand, ball up, roll the ball around w/ her finger to move the pointer, then flip it over to click, but, of course, when you flip the mouse over, the ball (and thus, the pointer) moves, too. There was no hearing me when I suggested she put the mouse back on the desk. "That's what I'm comfortable with!"

I work for a Helpdesk in the UK. We support several of the high street stores, which do not "test" the end users intelligence before selling them a high-powered PC instead of a Playstation.

Examples of calls have been:-

1) Customer wanted to know his fax number

2) Customer wanted to know why his machine crashed everytime he played his latest audio CD - it was the Diana Tribute CD (a bit of sick British humour followed on our desk)

3) Customers installing any old printer driver because the one they have bought was not in the Windows 95 list of recognised printers.

There are loads more and we will submit them on an ad hoc basis :)

Some years ago I helped out at a charity, which had many well

meaning but not very computerate volunteers. To help them

use the various applications they needed I wrote a simple

"pick a number" menu. I didn't have any spare time during the

day to install it, so spent a couple of nights writing an

installation program that required almost no intervention.

The installation instructions were:

1: Put the RED disk in the drive.

2: Turn the computer on.

3: Wait for a message on the screen that says "Put in the BLUE disk"

4: Remove the red disk, put in the blue disk.

5: Press the space bar.

6: Wait for another message, and turn the computer off.

I sent the instructions and two disks off, and thought nothing

of it until three days later I got an anguished call:

Volunteer: How long do I have to wait until I swap the disks?

Me: Oh - a minute or so.

V: I've been waiting three days! I couldn't stay all the

time, so I've been calling in and checking to see if it's

there yet every hour or so.

M: Leave it - there's obviously a problem.

I drove across town, got keys, drove some more, got to the

office finally, disarmed burglar alarms, and 90 mins after

the phone call discovered the missing instruction:

2A: check that the monitor is turned on as well!

Not sure whether the volunteer is the idiot or I am!

Telephone call this morning:

Me: IT HelpLine - Gordon.

Her: It's XXXX. I have to change offices soon, to room 12

Me: No problem: that room is fully wired. Just let's know when you move.

Her: But I want to be sure that when I move the computer is moved carefully, so none of the files drop out!

Me; It'll be OK: just don't drop it!.

I should have told her to tape up the ventilation slots while in transit, but didn't have the heart.

It was a normal day, sitting on my desk and taking normal

calls (like always), then I got this nice call:

Tech: Tech support how may I help you?

Customer: Hi, i've been experiencing some problem with

my connection lately to your server!

Tech: Okay, and what kind of error message do you get sir?

Customer: Well...hummm..it's something like unable to DNS,

yeah I think that's it!

(Like always, members can be very vague on what they actually

get for error message, so I say to myself "i'll just check

his basic settings for now")

Tech: I see, now sir could you please open up your dialer, I

would like to verify some of the settings you have!

Customer: Oh my, I'll have to call back for that!

Tech: Are you in front of your computer, or are you able to

bring a phone near it!

Customer: No no, that's not it, I'm calling from a telephone

booth in front of my house! I can't get online

while talking to you at the same time!

I had to put the member on mute as I had to laugh my lungs

out.

Many years ago, when mice were still primative bulky add-ons

for the PC, a friend of mine who did tech work during college

told me that one day, his company got a call about a defective mouse.

"It's broken, all cracked and everything..." mentioned the

report. This was the third time this customer had this problem.

The company said that there was obvious abuse being done, and

the customer balked, saying they are fine one day, and then

"snap!" they break overnight. A heated exchange ensued.

When my friend went to the site, he lookd at the mouse, and

it appeared that someone had stepped on it. Everyone in the

office assured him that everyone knew how to use a mouse, and

did not use it as a "foot pedal," a common chair-to-keyboard

error at the time. So an investigation was launched, and this

involved a rather angry CEO, who said the company was cheating

him, and blah blah blah...

My friend, only trying to earn college money, was being screamed

at by a very important client. In desperation, he asked if anyone

else besides the employees used the computers. After a while,

they did find out one of the night staff was using it, but he didn't

know that the mouse is commonly used on the right side of the computer.

So he would be on the computer next to it, using the mouse on the

left, and when it wouldn't work on his computer, he got angry, and

would beat it with his fist. This was an older person who

had been known to have a bad temper.

The employee was reprimanded, and my friend? He wrote on the work slip,

"Cause of Problem: Rapid percussion problem traced to user interface."

Now that's PC!

A recently hired secretary called the other day complaining about her email software not accepting her password. She assured me that she was entering it correctly and was positive that someone in Technical Support was playing games with her. I told her she must be mistaken and to go over the procedure from the beginning. I could hear her clicking and typing when prompted for her password. Again she got an error but this time I got her to read it to me. THe error message stated that the user's password was incorrect and that passwords are case-sensitive. Immediately I knew she had used an upper case letter somewhere in the entry or had the caps lock down so I asked her to type the password again making sure she didn't press the shift key at any time. Again she gets the error message so I then told her to check that the caps lock key was not enabled. After a few seconds of silence I get the response, "I don't have a caps lock key so I certainly haven't pressed it."

One of my co-workers walked into my office as I talked to her. I patiently explained that all of our keyboards had the caps lock key and she would find it located directly above the left shift key. "Carol, press the key that's above the shift key." "Which key?" "Left side of the keyboard just above the shift key." "I don't see it." "Okay let's try again, look at the left side of the keyboard, you know the side where the number keys go across the second row start with 1 then 2, etc." "Okay I'm looking but I don't see it." "Carol, you're not listening to me, look at the left side of the keyboard then locate the key directly above the shift key. It will be labeled caps lock." "No, I don't have one." Now at this point I was getting frustrated so I asked her if she knew the difference between her right and left. "I certainly do and there's no reason for you to be so rude to me." At that point I hung up and looked at my co-worker and he smiled and walked out of my office and over to the secretary's computer down the hall.

Carol was still looking at her keyboard as he walked over and pressed the caps lock key. "Oh, that key. I was pressing this one." She pointed to the num lock key of the numeric keypad. He just shook his head and turned around and headed back to my office. "I took care of it.", he said. She was pressing the num lock key.

The office manager says Santa is bringing a new secretary to that office for Christmas this year.

I support about 300 users on a LAN. A day ago I had solved

a problem for one of my techincal users (I consider a user

"technical" if they understand directories) I ran into her

in the elevator.

Me: Have you had anymore problems?

She: Well, sort of. Everytime I save a document I get

five copies of it.

(Long pause while I consider telling her that's impossible

since two files can't share the same name)

Me: What do you mean?

She: Well, if I save it on the f:\ drive it also saves a

copy on the g:\, the h:\, the k:\ and the l:\.

Of course she doesn't really have that many hard drives, they

are mapped network drives. All five of the drives were

mapped to the same directory on the server. It only took

me about a minute and a half to explain the principle since,

after all, this was one of my technical users.

I was helping a customer with her new computer - she seemed to be having problems

accessing her cdrom from the cdrom drive. I tried everything under the sun for about

30 minutes - the drivers wernt the problem - So I told her to use a different cdrom and make

sure that there were no finger prints/scratches on the disc. There were

none, she kept getting the unable to read cdrom error -

After a while I noticed that a sound was missing from my everyday

routines dealing with cdrom drive customers - turns out she was

Taking the cdrom out of the JEWL CASE looking at it making sure it

was ok then placiing it BACK int he jewl case and try to access

to the cdrom. Needless to say I was speechless.

I do customer support for a small ISP. One of my jobs

is helping people create and set up new accounts. One

day i had the following conversation with a new customer:

me: OK, now you need to choose a password for this account.

It has to be 5 to 12 characters long, and a mix of upper

and lower case letters, numbers, or symbols.

customer: what kind of letters?

me (thinking she just hadn't heard properly): uppercase and

lowercase?

customer: what??

me (realizing she doesn't know what "uppercase" and "lowercase"

mean): um... capital letters and

customer (interrupting): oh, do you mean BIG letters and

LITTLE letters?

me: uh, yeah. big and little.

customer: OK. you've got to not use these technical terms

with me.

since when are "uppercase" and "lowercase" technical terms??

I was helping a customer with her new computer - she seemed to be having problems

accessing her cdrom from the cdrom drive. I tried everything under the sun for about

30 minutes - the drivers weren't the problem - So I told her to use a different cdrom and make

sure that there were no finger prints/scratches on the disc. There were none, she kept getting the unable to read cdrom error - after

a while I noticed that a sound was missing from my everyday

routines dealing with cdrom drive customers - turns out she was

Taking the cdrom out of the JEWEL CASE looking at it making sure it

was ok then placiing it BACK in the jewel case and try to access

to the cdrom. Needless to say I was speechless.

A friend of mine went to my company's PC tech support office (which I haunt regularly). He was looking for a new video card for his home system that would be faster and allow higher resolutions. D.(we'll call him D. for now), the PC tech, procured a nice new video card for him. He was a little leary about installing it, but he is an electrical engineer and the card was Plug n' Play, so we told him to plug it in, boot the machine (Win 95), follow the onscreen instructions and he should be alright.

Well, the next day he comes in looking sad saying that his computer was completely fried, and he didn't know what went wrong. D. asked him exactly what he did. He said that he removed the cover, removed the old video card, and attempted to plug in the new one. As he was inserting the card, he said he saw a blue flash, a curl of smoke, and then the computer would not boot. Don said "You mean you tried to plug the video card in while the machine was ON???!!" And our friend responded, "Yea, sure....You told me yesterday that it was Plug n' Play!" The MB and vid card were toast. Guess he never heard of Hot Swap....

Back around 1990, I was working at a large company that still permitted employees to smoke at their desks. The 'tech support' person for one of our small products (which involved customers dialing in to our system to retrieve information) was a heavy smoker.

One day, she had trouble using her computer because some of the keys were clogged by cigarette ash. She asked a friend what to do. He showed her how to tip the keyboard up and tap it on the desk to dislodge the crud from the keys. Keys now worked, she was happy.

As fate would have it, a little while later, a customer calls in having trouble logging in to our service because a key needed to enter their password was not working.

tech: "Don't worry, I know what to do. Grab your keyboard firmly by both sides."

customer: "Okay."

tech: "Now tilt the keyboard up 90 degrees."

customer: "Okay."

tech: "Now firmly rap in on your desk three times."

customer: (clunk..clunk...clunk)"Okay."

tech: "is it working now?"

customer: "No, now I'm getting an error. It says 'Data error reading drive c:.'"

tech: "What kind on computer do you have?"

customer: "A Toshiba laptop..."

My associate received a call inquiring whether we could work on a printer. The caller stated that she thought that this problem probably wasn't covered under warranty, so she decided to call us to see if we could fix it.

My associates found out that it was an HP 820 inkjet printer that will not feed any paper in. The normal paper try grinds before the envelope feeder starts.

My associate stated that it sounded like the printer was jammed and asked if the caller if any paper was jammed in the printer.

"No. but my 17-year old daughter left her Graham cracker on the paper feed and it was pulled into the printer!"

My associate told the caller that she may have to buy a new printer because, "that's the way the cookie crumbles."

A few years ago, I was doing voice tech support. One day, I got a call from a customer using the DOS product on a 286. He was clearly, um, not familiar with the technology.

He could not get the software to perform. We stepped through the process, and the problem was not procedural. Reviewing the symptoms, I had cause to think he was out of room on the hard disk. I asked him how much free space he had on his machine, and he said (a verbatim quote):

"Ya know, my wife gets up there on the internet every night, and she downloaded 10 hours of free space. Is that enough?"

Customers: can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.

CUSTOMER: "My Internet won't fit into my computer."

TECH: "I'm not sure what you mean, what is your Internet?"

CUSTOMER: "well it says "installation software" on it,but it's too big for the slot in my computer."

TECH: "Oh, ok. Is it round? How many are there?"

CUSTOMER: "Yes, it's round, just like one of those things I have music on. There's just one."

TECH: "It seems you don't have a drive equipped for circles. I'll send some 'squares' out to you. They'll get there in about 3 to 4 days.

CUSTOMER: "Thanks. Hopefully now I'll be able to get connected!"

The lady called back a few days later and I was lucky

enough to get her call again. She got the squares, but

wanted to make sure she was supposed to put them in her

computer 'printing side up.'

Story: Tech: Good morning, Tech. support, speaking.

User: Yes, hello, my name is reverent So-and-So would you like to have my transfer-number?

Tech: Yes please!

User: OK, the number is xxxxxx, are you happy now?

Tech: I am happy sir.

User: Good, that means I have done my job again. Have a nice day CLICK

(It took the Tech involved a few minutes to realize what had happened)

A customer brought their PC in to our computer service center and complained that the new sound card that they had purchased from a competitor wasn't working. I asked them if they had the card installed by the vendor or if they had done the work themselves. The customer replied that he had installed the card himself, but the salesperson had given him step by step instructions on the process.

Okay, I asked what the problem was specifically. The customer replied that when he attempts to install the software, he receives messages that the hardware cannot be located. I gave the customer a receipt for his machine and told him to stop by in an hour and we should have it ready to go. I was expecting a conflict with another device and it should be relatively easy to mend.

I put the PC on the bench and attempted to connect speakers. I couldn't find any audio jacks on any of the cards in the rear of the machine. I thought to myself that the customer hadn't installed the card at all! I opened the PC and to my amazement there was the sound card on top of the power supply! I called the customer and explained the problem and he immediately became upset with the vendor with whom he had purchased the card. The sales person had said that installation was a snap; first you open the case, second, you insert the card

One of our VP's had his admin. assistant go on maternity leave. A temp was called in to cover the period for which she was going to be gone. There was trouble from day one.

After explaining to her our environment she stated that she felt pretty confident that she could "handle the fort because of the computer training she had received."

She called me back about a half hour later stating she was having problems reading the program on a floppy she had been given to install on her notebook. She said that she had put the diskette in the drive and was not able to access it.

I went to her work area and saw the PC she was running with. As per our standard, we use the external floppy to read diskettes. I asked her for hers but she said that she didn't have one. I went to another user and got his external floppy drive and plugged it in.

I asked her for the floppy so I could check it. She proceeded then to eject the CD rom bay and there on top was the floppy!!

So much for Computer Training....

tech support guy (me) talking to a customer at a radio

station in Georgia: Okay that should about fix our problems.

Now to finish off we need to reboot your machine.

caller (older lady): Uh. Okay. How do I do that?

tech support guy: just press CTRL/ALT/DEL.

caller: press whu-at?

tech support guy: just press the ... oh, well. Just turn the

machine off. count to ten. then turn it back on.

caller: hang on a minute. let me get the disk jockey.

(several minutes on hold)

caller: Okay. we turned the station's transmitter off and

back on. now what?

tech support guy: (unable to answer while rolling on the

floor in laughter and disbelief)

I work for a major software manufacturer and thought I had

heard some silly things until I got this particular customer

and then I *knew* I had heard the best.

He called in with problems with his software. He seemed a

little less than savvy so I was trying to be as specific and

clear as possible. After a bit of troubleshooting I realized

that the behavior he was getting wasn't indicative of a

program-based problem and I thought that the issue might go

a bit deeper into problems with his Macintosh operating

system. At this point I asked him, "This is really strange

behavior you're getting here. Tell me, has your computer

crashed lately?"

After a long pause (*much* longer than necessary) he

replied, "No. It's been sitting here on my desk the whole

time."

Oy!

Back in the very very early days of PCs -- back when if you had one at home, you were probably not the only kid on the block but the only kid in town (kid being relative, of course) -- I was trying to help a friend who was the System Engineer for the local newspaper. Because I had sent my modem -- acoustical, 300 baud -- to the manufacturer for repairs a few days before, I didn't have a convenient link to his system but we needed to transfer some files.

Being a provident individual, my friend called a taxi and send over on of their modems which they used for reporters in the field to send in stories quickly.

Hooking the new modem up was no great problem and, quickly enough, I was able to send data through to the newspaper's computer.

The problem arose, however, when he attempted to send material back to me for correction and review. Suddenly, nothing was working.

Putting a line tester on his end, he confirm that, yes, data was going out.

Doing the same on my end, however, nothing was coming in.

Of course, listening on the line, it was difficult to say which 'noise' was coming from which end of the line.

The upshot of the situation -- as we finally realized several hours later -- was that the modems the newspaper used ... were one-way only. That is, they would transmit from the field but they did not receive in return. Of course, that also meant no handshaking or error correction but, apparently, they were considerably cheaper that way.

Besides, everyone knows there's no point in trying to tell a reporter anything at long distance ... Unless you can hit them with a two-by-four to get their attention, they won't listen anyway.

(Oh, yes ... the newspaper's computer also lacked a floppy disk. It only accepted paper tape ... or modem inputs.)

Some users ... you can't teach them.

It was going to be one of those days. Someone was ringing for support just as the first

coffee of the morning was reaching my lips ...

"Hi Neil, we've got a printer problem in customer services."

"OK. I'll be along in a minute," I say.

"Well can you sort it out now?" the voice at the other end pleads. "I need to print this

important report before nine." (Yes, and I'd like to finish my coffee in peace as well.)

Two minutes later I'm in the customer services office, coffee mug in hand. The office has three PCs running WP5.1 for DOS and one laptop running MS Office connected via an automatic switch to a laserjet printer. The problem is odd characters printing out

from the manager's laptop.

"Hmmm," I ponder, after checking all the connections are up to scratch. "Could be a corrupt printer driver. Do me a favour and send something to the printer from one of PCs."

"OK," says the manager.

From the printer comes a page with one line of characters at the top, 'e^%&ftgi g96*^ 0'

"That's odd," I deduce - (thinking that this isnít going to be a five-minute job). "Can

you send something again."

"OK," replies the ever so helpful manager.

And again, from the printer, comes a page with one line of characters at the top, to wit

'e^%&ftgi g96*^ 0.'

After another 15-20 minutes passes while I check cables and printer set-up - both

laptop and desktop PC are still showing a similar fault. I then remember my coffee.

"Bugger it," my annoyance really starting to show. "My coffee must be cold now.

Where did I leave it?"

"Over here," replies the ever, ever so helpful manager, pointing to the desk by the door. As I

wander over, I happen to glance at the screen of the PC heís been using whilst being

ever, EVER so helpful in sending something to the printer for me. That something is

one line of text, yes, you guessed it ... 'e^%&ftgi g96*^ 0'

Of course it was all my fault. I'd said 'esend something down' thinking he'd send a file,

of course he just ran his fingers over the keyboard.

'Something' is such a technical word don't you think?

By the way - It was a corrupt Windows driver.

I had a customer on the phone the other day with a old

slow system. After waiting a few minutes for it to

boot up I fianlly decided to asked the customer if she was

up and operating yet.

ME: OK Ma'am are you at the Desktop yet?

HER: Desktop?? No I am in Philly!!

After few moments of my silent disbelief.

I knew she was very serious.

HER: Is that what you meant? I'm a little new to this.

ME: (to myself) No kidding. I was going to ask for your

resume.

That was about the most intelligant bit of info. she gave me

the entire call. I decided it was best not to even attempt to

explain to her what I really meant.

We keep rec'g calls on my graveyard shift on of our Hotline phones (for system outages/emergencies...)

Somehow people are dialing this number thinking it's the psychic friends network... I either answer and tell them that the network is down for maintanance or transfer the call to my second (and higher) level support area for assistance...

We use the customer's phone number as a way of linking to

their database record, so the first question we ask is, "May

I have your phone number?"

One customer replied, "Sure," and proceded to type her

phone number on the telephone keypad! After the beeps ended

I thought, "Ok, simple mistake, I'll try again."

So I said, "I'm sorry, but could you speak the number into the phone?" She said "Ok," and entered her phone number into the keypad

again! I was in for a long call...

While working as second-line LAN support:

Clueless helpdesk operator: There was a call yesterday after you left, user reported 'hard disk is full error message', do you know what the problem is?

me: The hard disk is full

operator: Where is it full?

me: (trying to keep a straight face) Well, all over really...

I was given a call for someone in our building that had an excessively noisy a: drive, also the little button won't come out. I went to the customer's desk assuming that I would have to do the usual and remove a paperclip, staple, or some of the other normal items. I inspected the a: drive a standard 3.5, and could see no problems, therefore, I booted up the PC, while watching and listening very carefully. Nothing, it seemed to work fine, and in fact during the POST routine check seemed very quiet. Thinking that a head could be out of alignment I inserted a new, blank floppy, nothing; formatted, nothing, quiet smooth; tried copying files to and erasing from, no problem, still quiet.

I was about to give up when the person finally arrived at the office and came in, I calmly asked the exact circumstances of the problem. She had been reading a file from the floppy with explorer, when finished she removed the diskette, but the button wouldn't come back out, and the next she started explorer the a: drive made a lot of noise.

Trying my very best not to laugh, I explained to her that these things were normal, and that everything should work fine now. I hadn't laughed yet, but when the guy at the next cubicle stood up and said "Yeah, I was gonna tell you that yesterday, but you seemed to upset to believe me!", I beat a hasty retreat with my hand pretending to cover a bad cough.

Customer: "It's Mrs X here. I purchased a PC from you about

3 days ago."

Tech: "Yes, I can remember that."

Customer: "Well, I left the computer on last night and went

away for about half an hour. When I came back,

my PC had a virus! I'm too scared to turn it

back on!"

(Addendum, we check our PCs and pre-load antivirus software

from a CDROM disc. This was our first person who claimed

to have a 'VIRUS').

Tech: "Have you by any chance accepted software from

anyone in the last 24 hours?"

Customer: "No, I've been playing Solitaire."

Tech: "Fine, was there any messages on the screen

depicting saying 'Your PC is infected' or the

like?"

Customer: "No, these little bugs began to appear and

started to eat leaves. I just screamed and

turned off the computer, I'm too scared in case

I've broken something!"

Tech: "What you have discovered is what we call a

Screen Saver. Those bugs that eat leaves are

totally harmless. And no, your PC has not got

a virus."

Addendum: We install additional screen savers as part of

a CD we compile with useful bits of shareware.

The BUGS screensaver was a commonly used saver

as most people saw the humourous concept of a

"Bug in the system".

I received a call from a woman who claimed that when she put the cd-rom in her cd-rom drive, that it vibrated rather violently.. so

much so, that she said it shook her entire table and chair!

Having seen some cd's be manufactured "out of round" or misbalanced,

I just assumed that the fact that it had shaken her entire table and chair was just some wild embellishment. I asked her to remove the cd from the cd-rom drive and she quickly said that she had already done so after it started vibrating so bad, when just then her call waiting kicked in...

"be right back" she said...

"ok.." I said.

when she returned, she said the person calling was her father on the other side of town, and just wanted to make sure she was alright

being that an earthquake had just taken place.

Once while helping a woman to eradicate an error she was

receiving while using the CD-ROM software, we asked her to

disable any TSR programs which might be loading in her

startup files. We then asked her to reboot her computer.

She shut windows95 down and as it instructs, she turned the

machine off, waited a few seconds and began to reboot it.

However, after a few seconds into the boot, the computer just

shut itself off. She mentioned that the power went out in her

apartment as well. Looking out the window, she noticed the

power was out on her entire block.

"My husband's going to kill me"... she said...

A man calls us claming his brand new pc is badly built and is not working properly. He has bought it the day before and we are very surprised. I ask the man whats wrong and he says - one or more lamps are not connected right or have odd behaviour, we ask him to bring the computer and will fix it for him... He comes back, we start the computer and instantly he cries out look there it goes again its a glitch with that lamp!

- It´s the harddisk LED........

In the old days, when complete programs fit on to one floppy disk, we kept getting complaints from one of our customers. We exchanged faulty diskettes three or four times, after receiving a new one he'd call back shortly after saying he kept getting read errors. So finally I went over to his site ... just to see that he stored his floppies using magnets attached to a magnetic pinboard.

Story: me: thank you for calling tech support, help you?

cust: I havn't been able to get into my internet account since

I opened it two months ago.. YOU'D BETTER FIX THIS

OR I'M GOING TO QUIT IT AND GO WITH SOMEONE ELSE

me: what error are you getting when you try to log in?

cust: It says "invalid password or member id"

me: are you sure your account is up to date?

cust: yes

me: has your credit card expired or have you gotten a

new one issued

cust: no!

me: well.. {35 min.s of trouble shooting win95 .PWL files

and password caching}

cust: (getting irrate)NONE OF THIS IS WORKING... YOU'RE

WASTING MY TIME

me: maybe you should contact customer service and check

to make sure that they have the correct credit card

in the accounts data base

cust: I don't know how they could have that credit card

listed.. I cancelled that one two months ago.

note: I feel that this failure is my fault for answering the phone at that moment...

We're an ISP Helpdesk and last week a guy here had to help a lady with a problem on her Macintosh:

Tech: "Okay, hold down the Apple key and press F."

Lady: "It doesn't come up like you said it would, it just beeps!"

Tech: "Are you sure you're holding down the key with the Apple on it while pressing F?"

Lady: *sound of grunting as she presses the Apple key with great gusto* "I'm sure, the key at the top of the keyboard, but it's not working!"

Wait.. Key at the top of the keyboard?

Turned out the lady was pushing the Apple emblem at the top of her keyboard, which wasn't a key at all.

USUALLY, TO KEEP FROM BEING BORED TO THE POINT OF CHEWING ON MY MIKE, I WILL TRY TO THINK OF THE SUBJECT OF THE NEXT CALL. "BRUTO" CALLS UP FROM SOMEWHERE IN UPSTATE NY, AND SAYS THAT HE IS NOT ABLE TO GET ONLINE. I GET THE USUAL INFO FROM HIM AND ASK IF HE IS GETTING AN ERROR MESSAGE. HE REPLIED "CAN YOU SENSE MY ERROR MESSAGE?". I TOLD HIM THAT THIS WAS TECH SUPPORT NOT THE PSYCHIC FRIENDS NETWORK. WE FIXED THE PROBLEM, AND SAID OUR GOODBYES. FROM THEN ON, I HAVE BEEN PREDICTING ERROR MESSAGES AND SYSTEMS. IT'S A GOOD WAY TO TROUBLE SHOOT. HALF-TECH & HALF-PSYCHIC MACE SIGNING OFF...............

Another subsidery of this financial company was further up

the north on England. In one corner of the office was a rack

of modems. Now we are all familiar with the phone call that goes

"My bit of kit. has blown up". Meaning it has stopped working.

I had another phone call from this customer who, I must add,

was quite technical and usually gave a good technical description

of the problem.

Customer: Our modem rack has blown up.

Me: OK, but what is the actual problem.

Customer: The modem rack has blown up.

Me: Yes I understand the modem rack isn't working but I

need more of a problem description.

Customer: The modem rack has REALLY blown up, they heard the

bang two floors below.