Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I work for a large South African ISP, and I couldn't believe my ears at this one today....

Cust: I'd like to cancel my account with you - I'm going to join XYZ (our main competitor)...

Me: That would be our Billing dept, Ma'am, but may I ask why you want to leave us ?

Cust: I want another Internet - I'm bloody bored with your Internet, and I want another one.

Me: Uh...exactly what about our Internet is boring, ma'am ? (hoping to find out what the heck she's talking about)

Cust: I know your Internet backwards - I've been to your shopping page, your support forum, etc, etc, etc about 300 times...

Me thinks: (lightbulb!) She's never surfed outside our site -

she thinks that's all there is !

Me: Uh, Ma'am......try this first, please.....

I work for a large National ISP, and I recieve a lot of interesting calls, but this one takes the cake

I just had the Redneck from Tartarus.... He called our CD "the little

[ISP name] record" He lived next to a country station so he had it

bleeding over into his phone... And, to top it off, he wanted to know

how to eject our "little record" He's got a really wierd CD-ROM drive

too... It has a hinged bar that swings down over the drive slot and a

little round green light...It almost looks like a 5.25" floppy drive...

In fact, that's EXACTLY what it was. He had shoved our CD, er, excuse

me, "little record" in his 5.25" drive. I don't wanna know what he was

doing with his CD-ROM drive...

Factory Manager

"My terminal is not working"

Helpdesk

"You've tried turning it on and off/"

FM

"yes, nothing happens"

HD

"any lights come on , any noises?"

FM

"No"

HD

"Youve checked its plugged in and turned on at the wall"

FM

"Of course !"

HD

"There is power in your office isn't there? Everything else is working"

Silence for about 1 minute

FM

"No looks like there isn't - the lights won't turn on, heater doesn't go .....

When can you fix my terminal?"

HD

"Um - you have to contact the electricians dept for that"

FM

"But what about my terminal?"

HD

"Tell you what sir - when you get the power back on in office and if your computer still doesn't work ring us back"

I'm priviledged to own one of the world's finest laptops ever made, but

even the best have their downtime. A recent accident sent this laptop flying,

a six foot drop into concrete, surprisingly, the only thing which died was the

sound system, but I decided to turn it in for repairs anyway, as I occasionally

listened to CD audio on the road.

Calls manufacturer's technical support :

Tech : Hello, how may I help you.. (goes through rudiments such as service code,

customer history, et. al.).. now, please describe your problem.

Me : My sound chip on the laptop is completely dead, hardware failure, doesn't

respond under any software, operating system, or driver combination (I'd earlier

tried it with everything from C&C : Tiberian Dawn to Win95 AND NT). I believe the

sound chip's dead. How do I return this system for repair?

Tech : Never mind. Let's install the drivers one more time, you have the diskette that

came with your system?

Me : Yes.

Tech : I'll walk you through it.

/* Initiate driver reinstallation just to please him */

Tech : Do you hear anything now?

Me : *checks volume and everything, but as if I haven't done this before* nope. Still

nada.

Tech : Well let's do it again.

Me : Uhh, you sure about this?

Tech : Yes. I'll walk you through it.

/* Initiate driver reinstallation, round 2. FIGHT! */

Tech : Do you hear anything now?

Me : No. (obviously not, the damn thing is dead.)

Tech : Hm.. try reinstalling the drivers again. I'll walk you through. (For the third time?!)

Me : Sheesh. I'm a systems integrator, I usually do this stuff for a living, I know it's

dead, and you're making me do this a third time when the previous tries haven't worked?

Tech : Just do it, ok? I'll walk you through..

Me : *grumble*

/* Initiate driver reinstallation, round 3. FIGHT! (I lie that it actually happened. Fact is,

the thing _IS_ dead..) */

Tech : Do you hear anything?

Me : What do you think, of course not!

Tech : OK, get out the diagnostics diskette that came with your system and run it, tell me

if you see any error codes. I'll walk you through it..

I sense an opportunity to lose this technician, who roughly rates on my intelligence scale

as "automated phone answering robot with faulty looping", and ditch him.

Me : I'm not sure where I put the disk. *lying* CALL YOU BACK *SLAM*

Popping the diagnostics disk in, it gives me the error code, informing me that the sound chip is,

obviously as I'd found out personally so long ago, is DEAD. I call back half an hour, hoping to get

a different tech, and indeed, luck be with me, I do!

Tech2 : Can I help ya?

Me : I called earlier about a dead sound chip, I'd like to return the laptop for repair.

Tech2 : Who handled your call earlier?

Me : I have no idea. (resists temptation to say "your pet robot?")

Tech2 : Never mind. Pop in the diagnostics disk and tell me the error code.

Me : *quotes error code*

Tech2 : I've got your address. We'll pick her up at six.

I appreciate the first technician trying. But doesn't it seem at times that banging your head on a

brick wall gets a little frustrating? :-P

Secondly, why didn't he start with the diagnostics first, to see if the problem was really what I'd

(rightly) claimed it to be?

But in all fairness, the laptop left home and returned in 18 hours with a fully operational ESS1688

sound chip reinstalled. Makes me think I got the robot :P

My husband works at an ISP doing technical support. I also do technical support for printers.. But what he heard the other day caught me as really good.

One of his coworkers got a message after dealing with this customer for days with his modem. He gets a letter telling him that:

I am sorry to say that I have a problem with this online tech support business. I cannot connect to the internet because my modem is not working...

We manufacture a small device that plugs into the parallel port of a PC and has an RCA plug in the side of it to hook up to a video camera. This allows video to be brought into the PC.

The following call is our department best. It proves that the average user is too stupid to live...

Tech support - may I help you?

Caller - What kind of furking ding blast device are you people selling? This thing doesn't work at all! I've been trying to capture stills with it for the past day and a half, and can't get a single picture out of it! On top of that, there's no tripod mount!

(Tripod mount? I ignore the comment for now, but since our product needs to be hooked to a parallel port to function, it puts up a red flag)

Tech Support - Uh, sir? Is the device firmly attached to the parallel port?

Caller - Huh? yeah! I take my pictures and then plug it into the parallel port!

Tech Support - You're saying you take your pictures first, and THEN hook it to the parallel port?

Caller - Uh-huh. I point it at the picture I want to take, push the big blue button, and then hook it to the computer to get my pictures out. By the way, how do those little pins actually see what picture I want to take? is it some sort of radiation detector?

(The big blue button he has been pushing is actually the battery cover. Evidently, he was under the impression that the device worked like a camera, sucking still images into the parallel port connector pins. It took twenty minutes to explain to him that he needed his own camera to make it work....)

A user called me the other day and reported that she had a disk stuck in her drive. I verified that it was a 3.5" disk. I then asked her, "If you press the little button on the front of the drive, does the disk move or eject?" "No," she replied. "Okay, ma'am. I'll transfer this ticket to the desktop guys and have someone stop by and remove the disk for you."

About an hour later, I received the updated ticket from the desktop. Their comments read: "Removed floppy disk from CDROM drive. Verified that CDROM drive still read discs. Okay to close ticket."

Technology in some people's hands is *very* scarry.

I work for an ISP in South Africa and recieve LOTS of support calls with LOTS of stupid qustions.

One Saterday afternoon I get this lady call with an email problem. I check her account and all is well and there's no large emails in her mailbox, etc. Having recently renumbered our network I figure her DNS might be a problem since her mail has worked fine up until now.

Me: Are you using Windows 95 ?

Cu: No, 97 !

(hmmm, looks like Error# 405 .... stupid (l)user) ;-)

Me: Double click on My Computer

Cu: (long pause) I don't have that

Me: (suspecting Windows 3.1) You must have that. It's normally in the top right. Do you have a START button ?

Cu: Oh wait there it is ....

(sigh of relief) I proceded to guide her to the DNS settings and changed to the new ones. We hang up so she can try recieve her mail.

2 minutes later she calls back with the same problem. She mentions something about it saying can't connect to mail server xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and contacting an administrator. Hmmm, definate Error 405 here.

Me: What mail program are you using ?

Cu: I don't know (the usual response)

Me: What does it say in the coloured bar along the top ?

Cu: Oh wait, I'm using Windows Messaging.

And there was light ..... The previous day I had the same problem. They were using Windows Messaging and were using the IP address instead of the server's name. A quick change and all was well. Who needs DNS huh ? Lets all remember the IP address of our favourite sites ;-)

For 3 days straight, the same client phones in, speaks to the same guy each time, but to no avail...... he cannot sort out why this guy cannot get connected.

Finally, on getting through another colleague of mine, this guy demands that someone comes out to his site to fix this problem. The person who was supposed to go out to this guy, phoned him first to ask him if in fact his phone line was correctly plugged into his modem.......

The customers response.....

"Modem ?!?! I need a modem ????"

(what he had his phone line plugged into we'll never know)

Customer: "I wrote this document, and when I try to save it,

the screen goes all funny! Never happened with any of the

other documents, just this one."

I go on site to see what's up. The document is announcing

a congess and appropriately named CON.WP5. F10, Save ..

and the document itself scrolls over the screen, highlighted

and improperly formatted. I'm puzzled. I try to save the

file to a floppy to have a good look at it with a hex

editor, and save it as A:\X.WP (saving typing a few characters).

Works perfectly. Only then I remember those special device

names in MS-DOS; COMx, PRN, LPTx, AUX, NUL and .. CON.

The customer had been saving to CON - MS-DOS never bothered

about the .WP5 extension - and well, CON happens to be the

screen. WordPerfect had been doing the right thing by using

MS-DOS system calls for its file handling, and MS-DOS had

done exactly what it was supposed to - which didn't coincide

with what the customer had in mind.

Another WordPerfect for DOS user phones: "My PC doesn't

start anymore, it just beeps and acts funny."

COMMAND.COM seems to be strangely small and dated yesterday.

I scan the PC for viruses and reinstall MS-DOS. Next day,

same thing happens. Must be a yet unknown virus. "Have you

used floppies on this machine?" "No, I don't even know what

side up I have to insert those things." "Has anyone else

been working on this PC?" "Well yes, a trainee" I go see

the trainee. "Well I never used computers before - I just

start WordPerfect and open the first document but I always

forget that that's the wrong one - then I go to the next file

and open that and oh, well, maybe the fourth or fifth time I

get the right document.." Wondering what he's been doing,

I let him show what happens. He starts WP, does a file list

of C:\, opens COMMAND.COM, sees it's full of garbage,

and _saves_ it under the same name, then opens whatever comes

next in the file list, and so on, finally getting to his

document. This taught me to set the 'document directory' on

something else than C:\, for those people who - rightfully

so - should not be bothered by silly operating systems and

the fact that a command interpreter does not let itself

be formatted as a WP document.

Let me first begin by saying that I know very little of computers. I can usually get by without calling tech support myself -- usually -- but that's about the extent. But I know a great deal more than my mom.

So my folks run a print shop, and I talked them into getting a computer and exploring the world of desktop publishing. I'm still working on them to get Quark or PageMaker, but my dad is happy with what my mom can do with Microsoft Publisher, so he won't budge and spend the bucks for a better program.

So my mom's always calling me trying to get out of whatever she did with Publisher. One day, she calls me, near tears, telling me that she has "broken Publisher." I try to get her to tell me what's wrong. She tells me that every Publisher file she opens is just a bunch of jibberish and she has lost all of her hard work.

Well, we try and try to figure out the problem over the phone, and with no success. I ask her what kind of jibberish is on the screen and she says it's just weird symbols.

With hindsight, I should have seen this coming, but I did not ... I went over to the shop and took a look at it myself. It turns out that she had simply managed to go up to the view menu and clicked on "Show Special Characters" or however that's worded. Simple click of the mouse and I'm the hero for the day. :)

OK, here's one in the other direction. I was using ABC for my ISP, and I got sick of their lousy service. So I decided to get a free permanent email address at geocities (since I was moving soon anyway) and then switch ISPs.

Well, so far so good, right? Right ... I thought. So I called ISP XYZ and set up an account with them. I asked them, should they ever need to contact me, if they could mail me at my new address at geocities. They said they could do even better -- have all my XYZ mail forwarded to geocities.

OK, that sounded great. So I said sure, and proceeded to change my profile at geocities to include my new email address, all the while ignoring the note that said, if you change your email address, your password will be changed and mailed to your new email address.

So I changed my profile, and they changed my password, and mailed it to my address at XYZ, which was then forwarded to my address at geocities, which I then could not access because I didn't have the new password ... man, did I feel stupid right about then ... :)

About seven or eight years ago I worked in an area that was next to one of the big server rooms where the big mainframes that tracked parts on the manufacturing line did their thing. Come about January, it abruptly got very cold in our area--to the point where several people were walking around with their coats on all day. Repeated calls to facilities maintainance did no good whatsoever.

We finally found the source of the problem by accident. Turns out the thermostat that controlled our area was in the server room (?)---and they had recently relocated one of the mainframes directly in front of it. So the thermostat thought it was about 150 degrees in our room all the time.....

I install computers for a living. The company I work for installs for a major automotive company and we were replacing their computers one day when I came across a guy who was really nervous, he said that last time they switched his computer they lost his data. I said go ahead and do you own backup and I will wait. So he started copying his files to his spot on the server. Then all of a sudden he got the blue screen he looked at me and was a mess "Help look it's going to destroy all my work" I looked sure enough fatal protection error blue screen at the bottom it said push any key, I couldn't resist, I shouted "Quick push the any key" he shouted back "Where is it I can't find it". Everything was fine we had a good laugh and he learned not to take the whole PC renewal thing so seriously. That's our job.

I once had a job that involved managing three medium-sized Unix boxes.

Came the day we needed to beef one of them up: it had just got too

slow.

Technician arrived with second processor module and additional

RAM. I was amazed that that was ALL he brought - no tools!

I found him a few minutes later trying to remove the screws

for the case with a coin. He failed His comment was that the case

must have been built "for a different country's currency".

I lent him a screwdriver.

I had to ring a Telco for some moderately technical information.

I fully expected to get a bit of a run-around, but after expalining what

I wanted to about 6 people, I got to talk to Marcy.

Marcy said that she knew EXACTLY who I had to tak to - Brian - and she'd put me

through to his phone. I was a bit surprised when Marcy answered again..

Turned out that Brian was away, and Marcy shared an office with him, so she

answered his calls when he wasn't available. So she had transfered me to herself.

I work tech support for an isp and was both surprised and amused by the following call.

Me: thank you for calling technical support. How may I assist you today?

Caller: Will my computer burn?

Me: Excuse me?

Caller: Will my computer burn?

I was surprised, but decided to answer the question---maybe I could get to the root of the problem if I humored the caller. I told him that yes, given the right circumstances, I imagined that his computer might burn quite nicely. The only reply I heard was a satisfied, "Good!" before the caller hung up.

I do tech support for a large company which includes backup software. Recently I got a call that went something like this:

Tech: Thank you for calling ___. How can I help you today?

Customer: I have a copy of your backup software. Does it restore?

Tech: Yes, it restores files.

Customer: Well, I can't get it to restore my hard drive.

Tech: Ok, well what kind of backup drive do you have?

Customer: What do you mean?

Tech: Are you using a tape drive or floppy?

Customer: Oh, uhh.. floppy.

Tech: Ok, let's check your setup.

(After a time consuming process in checking various parameters which checked out ok).

Tech: You're trying to restore your entire hard drive?

Customer: Yes.

Tech: From a floppy drive?

Customer: Yes.

Tech: All right. Hmm. When did you do your backup?

Customer: What backup?

Tech: The one you're trying to restore.

Customer: Look, I just purchased your software after my hard drive crashed. I've installed a new drive and I want to restore my old drive.

Tech (the light beginning to dawn): Sir, you have to have done a backup beforehand in order to restore from it.

Customer: You mean your software won't restore?

Tech (barely suppressing a giggle): Yes, it will but you have to have a backup to restore from.

Customer: It said it would restore on the box.

Tech: Yes. It will do that AFTER you have backed up your drive.

Customer: Oh, I thought it would restore right out of the box.

I work for a software company that produces networked fax software. It can get fairly complex so we always try to get through the most technically capable person on site.

One guy introduced himself as the "Computer System Administrator" of his company and went on to explain that he had called us because of the client side software not working.

After initial investigation, I asked him to obtain access to server so that we could look into the matter further. His reply was: "What's a server?"

I went on to explain that this was the baby that does all the hard work... to which he replied: "Oh, you mean that box in the corner?"

It turned out the guy was the Managing Director...

This happened when I was discussing with my mother concerning my old computer I borrowed to my sister. The computer crashed now and then and I explained to my mother that it was an old machine on which I had tested a lot of soft- and hardware so it was possible that the machine had some faults.

Upon that she claimed that it was outrageaous that a 3 year old computer was in such a bad condition. That puzzled me because I bought the PC in '92.

When I told her that she could not believe after all the year of purchase appeared when she started the computer. It turned out that she saw the windows 95 startup screen.

I work in tech support for an ISP, and we hand out Netscape on 5 disks for customers to install. One day I recieved a call from a man who was having problems installing the disks. He complained that he put the disk in, but it didn't do anything. I asked him if he ran setup.exe and he couldn't understand what I meant. So I had him click on Start)Run then type in a:\setup.exe , then click on OK. He did, an he still continued getting 'file not found' errors. After 15 minutes of going through various things, I finally asked him to read me, letter for letter, word for word what he was typing in the Run box. This is what he told me:

acolonbackslashsetupdotexe

Humm.. I wonder why that didn't work?!?!

This happened to me way back when an XT was top of the line.

My uncle had purchased an lovely XT with CGA monitor and no

hard drive, and the damn thing did not work from day one.

After running for more than 30 minutes, it would crash.

We would take it in, leave it for a day or two, then pick it

up, with their assurances that it was working, only to have

it crash again. This went on for several weeks. We figured

that they weren't really doing anything but leaving the system

on their shelf, but the kicker came when we brought it in

one Tuesday evening and were told that we could pick it up

the next evening. We dutifully returned the next evening, and

asked the tech if they had solved the problem. Very solemnly,

he replied that they could not duplicate the issue, even after

72 hours of running continuously! Needless to say, we were

impressed that he was able to compress 72 hours of running

time into 24! When we pointed this out, he turned red, and

begin to stammer and stutter. We asked for the system back

and took it to another location, where they promptly

identified the problem as a cracked motherboard and replaced

it immediately.

I didn't take this call, but a co-worker did.

We work for a software company that produces a popular Fax

program. We are able to set up calling cards for dialing

purposes. The tech confirmed the type of calling card so

that he could assign the appropriate wait signal before our

program sent the access code. The call went like this:

Tech: O.K., now we tell the program to wait for the bong.

User: (silence)

Tech: Hello?

User: My friend borrowed my bong last night. Do we have to

wait till he brings it back?

Tech: ????

The other day I took a call from a gentleman concerning our

fax program. It seems he had a bit of corruption in our

database files, and being the intelligent user that he was,

he read the directions in our manual on fixing this problem.

Part of the solution is dropping to DOS mode (older manual:).

This gentleman had to wait on hold, long distance, for 40

minutes before I got his call (got to love phone queues!)

His question: how do I get back out of DOS?

Duh, type EXIT? Or reboot, if you missed that warning upon

entering DOS mode?

It made my day!

as sad as it sounds, this story (if you want to call it a story) is true.

working with a customer for over 30 minutes, checking to see

if his modem is installed properly, the drivers are updated, and

the right protocols are setup, i just cant figure out why this

guy can't dial into our services. so then i ask, "so you're

positive your modem is plugged in correctly." knowing it could

be the problem. well, the man takes that as an insult and starts

yelling at me, saying how he is a computer pro, and would never do

something that stupid and not plug in his modem. after he's done yelling

at me, and telling me a teenage techinal support representative shouldn't

be asking such stupid questions to a "brain" like him. he ends up checking

his modem and finds it unplugged. without apology he hangs up and

continues like nothing happened.

this is really just a message to all that us tech support people have

feelings too! don't verbally abuse us anymore, we try our best to

help and assist you with all your problems! (as stupid as they are)

I received a call from a user today that a computer in her office was making a horrible noise. She said it was buzzing, and sounded like it was "spitting" at her. Curious, I went to her office and sat in front of the offending machine. Sure enough, in about a minute, a buzzing noise was heard. The user said "That's the noise I was telling you about," just as her co-worker's pager went buzzing, on vibrate, across the desk!

Tech: Internet tech support, this is A.J.

Cust: Yes, my computer is in the shop right now and I was

wondering, can I use my Brother word processing

machine to connect to the internet to retrieve my

e-mail?

This happend many years ago to my boss at the time. This was at a graphic arts service bureau and many of our clients knew only how to launch their applications and how to run them. Anything system or hardware related, they were like children. Anyway, one day, one of our clients called in and wanted to modem a file to us. There was a Mac on his end and a Mac on our end. No BBS was involved, just Mircophone II (for all you non-Mac people, it was a decent comm program) on both ends. Anyway, he wasn't able to. The phone call went something like this:

Boss: Is Microphone launched?

Client: Yes.

Boss: Is your modem on?

Client: I don't know. What does it look like?

Boss: It's a small box with red lights in the front. It's to the left of your computer. (Boss had installed client's modem personally)

Client: OK, but there are no lights on the front of it.

Boss: Reach behind it. On the right side, you'll find a switch. Flip it and you'll see the lights come on.

Client: OK.

(Several minutes go by and nothing is happening. Phone cord connected to fax line is attached correctly, but modem is not dialing out.)

Boss: OK, you see the letters under the lights on your modem? I need to know if the HS and AA lights are on.

Client: I don't see those.

Boss: They should be directly under the lights.

Client: I don't have those. I have others.

Boss: Others?

Client: Yes.

Boss: You have another set of 2 letter codes underneath your lights??? Read them to me.

Client: OK, PR AC TI CA LP ER . . .

This guy was reading his modem manufacturer, Practical Peripherals! Boss put man on hold, informed the rest of us of this little gem. He got him back and eventually got the files sent over. I don't remember the actual problem, but it was something stupid and simple. This web site is the best! Keep it going, guys!

I, along with one co-worker, handle high-level technical

support for our company's remote users. Well, the other tech

one day had a user with a printing problem. He could print

fine from DOS, but in WIN95 it was garbage. It was only with

one printer, tho, as a different make and model printer

worked fine.

After over an hour on the phone, he has the user send in his

laptop and printer (the printer was a portable), figuring it

was a device conflict or something. Well, I tell him to try

reinstalling the driver, removing the other printer driver,

and trying another printer of the same model (we have several)

None of this works. "Well, since you tried it with

a different printer of the same model, it cant be the printer"

I said. "That's true" he responds.

"Well, try an updated driver. If that doesn't work, maybe it's

a problem with WIN95."

Well, I must have given him the go ahead he was looking for,

because he completely reimaged the system. Oddly enough,

he still had the same problem. After this happened, he worked

on it for another day or two before finally "fixing" the problem.

When I asked him what it eventually was, he said:

"It was the printer. I guess I forgot that I didnt test it

with another printer."

(SIGH)

A guy called into tech support one day that couldn't get his computer to turn on. My friend Bill answered the call. Here's pretty much the dialog:

Bill: Okay sir what happends when you press the power button?

Guy: Nothing

Bill: Are you sure your pressing a powerbutton, not a button with a moon or anything on it?

Guy: I'm pressing the power button, i had to slide down a panel to get to it.

Bill: Are you sure everything is plugged in correctly?

Guy: Yeah it worked fine earlier.

Bill: Have you done anything to your computer?

Guy: I didn't do anything.

Bill: Okay sir, I can come out to your house and take a look at it.

....

Bill gives him the prices, and we show up at his house a few hours later

....

Bill opens up his computer, and the thing has an oily residue on the motherboard.

Guy: Oh yeah, that thing (points at the hd) was makin' crunchy noises, so i opened it up and sprayed some WD-40 on it.

He forgot to put the lid back on it and the first time it spun up, WD-40 went everywhere in the case shorting it out

Bill: Sir, how did this constitute doing nothing to it? Well, there's good news and bad news, the good news is, I'm not charging you anything for this visit, the bad news is that you've voided your warranty and your out whatever you spent on this computer.

And we left in a hurry...

One day at a good-sized retail store, I was in the PC department picking up a monster 2 and i walked by the counter and got to listen to a customer ask about getting a Western Digital hd. Here's how it went:

(note, read jiga-byte phonetically)

Salesperson: How can I help you sir?

Nutcase: How much are them 6 jigabyte hard drives?

Salesperson: Do you mean gigabyte sir? They run (cut off)

Nutcase: It's jigabyte son.

Salesperson: Actually sir it's gigabyte, and the 6 GIG hard drives run $(whatever they cost at the time).

Nutcase: (now irate) NO SON! IT'S JIGABYTE! I BEEN USIN COMPUTERS FOR 10 YEARS AND I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT!

I started laughing and when he turned around and glared at me i took off and laughed my way out of the store.

Thank you for calling **&&*%$ Customer Care which procuct are we

working with today.

c: a printer/scanner/fax

ok mam how can i help you.

C: well i was looking at your manual and it does not show to scan into my web page

mam how would you scan into a web page?

C: that is what i'm asking you!

Mam you have to scan and save the file then upload it to your internet provider

C: my who?

Internet provider, like At&t or AOL.

C: well i called AT&T and they said if i wanted to scan into a web page i had to call you

(Why ME?)

ok mam i'm sorry but our product can not scan into a web page in fact no product can, you'll have to learn how to

create a web page before you call any one else.

I work at an ISP in Houston, TX and I had the enjoyment of speaking with a person that didn't quite know what their

CD-ROM was. After about 10 minutes on the phone, it turned out that they had jammed their CD between what was their

cd-rom and those nifty plastic front plates and shredded it pretty bad. took a pair of pliars to get out. mailed 'em a new cd, didn't hear from them again.

A short one for everybody:

I got an e-mail from a fellow co-worker today. She wanted to know if I could put Windows98 on her machine.

Sounds simple, eh?

Too bad she has a Macintosh. ;)

I felt bad having to explain it...

I work tech support for a large isp, and every single day I get a call like this, it never ever fails.

(me)Tech support this is (names omitted) how can i help you?

(custy)I cant get online

(me)Okay let's click on my computer

(custy) How can I click on your computer?

(me)No not "my" computer.. I meant the icon that says my computer.

(them)I dont have that.

(me)Read me off all the icons

(them)The internet, network neighborhood, my briefcase (........and so on)

"10 min's later they finally see the icon."

Okay now i see it..and every single time without fail.

(click)

hello? hello?

Why must the world be such a strange and magical place. Then like 15 min's later I get the same person, talking to another tech, badmouthing me because I didnt help them.

SHEESH

Anonymous Techer

I run my own business building web pages, and occasionally

venture into fixing up various problems for my clients.

Get comfortable, this is a long story ...

I got a call from one particular client a few weeks ago.

To say this guy is not computer literate would be an understatement.

Anyway, he wants me to have a look at his computer and delete

some of his old data files that he doesn't need anymore, and

wants me to install some fonts for him.

OK, I show up at the site, sit down at the PC (which is

running WFWG 3.11 and at some stage in the murky past has

been upgraded to a P133, plus a CD-Rom & soundcard)

and I start having a look around. It is at this point that

he mentions to me that his PC is running really slow, and

that some of his apps don't work properly any more.

I went through twenty questions with him, and I finally get

an explanation.

A few weeks prior to this, he had asked someone else if they

could do the same thing for him. This young lady assured him

that it was simple, and she had done a course at the local

technical college, and was quite knowledgeable about PC's.

His simple request to her was :-

"My PC is running slow. Could you delete all my old files

from prior to July 1997"

So she did.

Almost ANYTHING that was timestamped prior to July 97, she

deleted. Including most of his WINDOWS & SYSTEM directories.

So he called in another local PC repair org. And told them

that it had been running slow, and what had happened. So,

to speed up his computer they installed DoubleSpace and

reinstalled Win 3.11 over the top of the mess.

Of course, nobody actually reinstalled any of his apps. (I

wonder if the error message about missing DLLs is bad ? :-)

I kicked over File Manager and with much fear and trepidation

started looking through the carnage.

His PC has been running slowly. There are 27Mb worth of temp

files in his temp directory (some with two year old filestamps).

No-one, including the people he had PAID to fix his computer

had bothered deleting them. (also wondering how he managed to

accumulate so many)

I inform him that I can fix it all up for him, but it will

probably be about 5 hours work, and I'd prefer to take the

PC with me to do the job (particularly so I can swear in

peace).

And I'll need his Win disks, his apps disks, and all the driver

disks. He hands me a plastic shopping bag and says "they're

all in there."

The guy is running WinFWG 3.11 and MS-Works. In the bag is a

full set of Win95 install disks, and a full set of Office 95

Pro disks. No drivers for the weird CD-Rom or the soundcard.

Eventually we track down TWO sets of 3.11 disks, DOS 6.2 and

the MS-Works install disks. (Still no driver disks of course.)

I stepped back into his cubicle just in time to watch him shut

down the PC so I can take it. In the middle of typing a letter

in Works, he just hits the power switch. (Now we know where

all the temp files came from...). I explained to him why not

to do that, while trying not to cry or ROTFL.

I took the lot home, pulled his 400Mb HD out and dropped it

into my PC, installed DriveSpace, and started looking around.

copied everything across, and then did a full re-install of

Dos, Win and all his apps. Then went through his directories

one by one and tracked down all his data files, which he just

saves in whichever directory he happens to be in.

And just to top it all off.

When I took the PC back the next day, I asked how the 5.25"

floppy drive had become warped beyond all usability.

It seems that during winter, *somebody* (much finger pointing

was involved), goes into his office first thing, and turns his

heater on for him. The PC sits on the floor ... guess where

the heater was aimed ...

I work for a publishing company that puts out demo CD's on the covers of our magazines. I work in the support dept, which supports problems readers might be having with the CD's.

this is a call I recieved the other day:

Me- Good afternoon Tech Support?

reader- Why have I only got a 5" disk on the magazine?

me-how old is the magazine sir? (thinking he might have an ancient mag with a 5 1/4" disk on it)

reader- Its this months, why won't it fit into my drive?

me- are you talking about a CD sir?

reader- no i am talking about the 5" disk that came on the magazine.

me- Do you have a CD-ROM drive?

Reader- no, do i need one? all I want to do is to run this disk.

me- well it is actually a CD sir, you do need a CD-ROM drive to run it.

Reader- So it won't run in my 3" drive?

me- no sir, its too big..

Reader- oh.. (click)

God knows why he would want to buy a magazine with a CD on it when he hasn't got a CD ROM drive..

Tony G

I was formerly in charge of technology for a medium sized restaurant management company. We had just completed a rollout of all-in-one fax/copier/printer units to our restaurants. The new hardware was supposed to cut down on costly document courier and reproduction services used by the stores for making copies.

A month goes by and we are reviewing the new hardware. Everything looks great save for one of our restaurants in Dallas. It is still spending large amounts of money to reproduce documents! The General Manager it seams, not distinguishing between faxing and other abilities of the printer, did not want to get charged Long Distance every time he made a copy!

Recently I received what should be a normal call.

My cd-rom has a cd stuck in it!

Will you come out to look at it?

I get to the customer's site and notice the cd is a front loader(this is a compaq front loading drive with no tray)

Realizing that the drive may be bad I removed it from the system. I decided to attempt to retrieve the cd from the drive before installing the new drive. Upon removal of the front cover I noticed the problem....

the drive was jamed with a 3-1/2" floppy. The user of course denied any wrong doing.

I work as a lab monitor at a local county community college.

It was a quite day today so I was just surffing the net, when

I noticed that someone had been hovering round the printer,

for at least 30 seconds, this was strange as nothing was printing.

I checked the printer jobs on the network and could see that this

person had tried to print 5 times. I got up to look at the printer

(with the person still staring at it) flashing across the printer

control panel was paper tray empty. I guess he thought it would

fill up again if he left it long enough. :)

I was the pc dept Intern for a large aircraft manafacture.

As I was out going through the open support calls I noticed

that more and more people were getting the terminology mixed up

they were calling the computer the hard drive, the monitor was

now the computer. This was getting confusing for us techs

trying to work out what the problem was, and was eveyone now

calling things by the wrong name. Later that month all

was revealed when I was in the Help desk and overheard some calls

the help desk employee was telling some one over the phone

to try pressing the reset button on their hard drive, eeeeekkkkkkk:)

(===================================================================)

While at the same helpless desk at the same company I recived a page

from a fellow tech, so I pick up a phone at an empty desk, and

just as I started dialing, I got screamed at to put the phone

down. I put the phone down thinking that it may explode or something.

It turns out that this phone was for incoming calls from techs only,

It seamed strange that I was not told about this number (as I was

a tech there)later I checked with all the other techs, no one else

had heard of it either. It seams that no one on the helpless desk

had thought to tell any of the techs about their hot line.

I wonder why the had no calls from it yet.

I'm just a kid although I have a knowledge of computers and like programming. Both of these tales happened to my friend Nicholas.

Tale 1:

Nicholas's Uncle was trying to fix his laptops trackball, his uncle, ofcourse has hired some tech supps who could not figure out the problem but still charged him around $100. Then Nicholas came, deleted some conflicting phony device in the Device Manager and

hey presto!

Tale 2:

Nichooas's computer had had some driver problems and would not function properly, both Nicholas and I suggested using the Windows 95 CD to restore the drivers but nooooooooooo..

Nicholas's Dad has to call Microsoft in the US, format the HDD, reinstall everything and pay one hell of a phone bill (calling from New Zealand).

I support an OEM computer not known for its bright users and got this call one day shortly after I started.

CUS: I'm can't get on the internet.

ME: Ok, what error message are you receiving when you try to log on?

CUS: It says it can't detect a dial tone.

ME: Ok, do you have the phone cord plugged into the outlet labled line?

CUS: Ya, I hooked it up just like it said.

ME: OK, lets go ahead and click on start.

CUS: Ok, you'll have to let me write it down and call you back.

ME: Are you not at the computer?

CUS: No, I don't have a phone line at my house. I'm calling from a pay phone down the street.

Another one is...

CUS: My computer just shuts off sometimes when I'm using it.

ME: What do you see on the screen just before it shuts off?

CUS: Nothing, I'll just be working on it and it'll shut off.

ME: Have you had any power surges lately?

CUS: No, theres no surges here, cause I don't use the power company.

ME: Then how do you have power to the computer?

CUS: Oh, I run it strait off of a gas generator.

With no surge protecter either.

One more...

CUS: My CD player won't pop out.

ME: You mean the tray wont open?

CUS: yes, I push the button and I can hear it try, but it won't come out.

ME: And has it always done this?

CUS: No, It opened the first time, then I put a CD in and since then, it won't open. Also, those pictures you put in the manual is wrong.

ME: What do you mean?

CUS: They try goes up and down, now side to side.

ME: You mean the CDRom drive is sidways?

CUS: Ya, your picture is drawn wrong.

At that time, I realized that they had the wrong manual. The model the got was a tower and the manual was for a desktop. They laid the tower on its side and the CDRom was fall up and blocking the tray from opening. We had to send a tech out.

I was called to set up a printer for one of the secretaries in the school building where I work. I removed the old printer and started to pull the new printer box out from under the table where it had been sitting. I lift the box up and this white powdery stuff falls out of the hand-hold. I'm thinking, "Oh geez, a mouse got in there and chewed up some styrofoam. How am I going to get it out of there and not look like a sissy?" Well, I opened the box and started to carefully unpack it. When I pulled the toner cartrige out, I saw what had made the mess. The printer was filled with big, black ants! They were everywhere, inside and out. I evicted the ones I could and hooked it up, but no good, it was dead and had to be returned for service. I knew that software could have bugs, but this was my first (and hopefully last) experience with a printer having bugs.

I used to work for a hotel management company- a bunch of doctors, lawyers, etc who want to learn to run hotels. This regional manager would come in about once a week to make it clear how horrible our hotel was. "In Boston, we don't do it that way." "In Boston, we use the start button, and not the desktop icon" -petty things.

One day he brings me a diskette with a document that he wants printed out. He was unable to figure out how to print from his expensive laptop, so he wanted me to print it on my computer. Out of 16 files, 12 of them has viruses. Needless to say, I printed his document and left the disk infected. "In Philadelphia, we don't like pushy know-it-alls."

PS- I ended up crashing my own pc (a 386, 100meg HD) from the virus so they could purchase me a new Pentium 100. Woohoo!

customer called saying her mouse had stopped working.

(me) what was she doing when this happend.

(customer) nothing in particular just using your software and it stopped.

(me) did the mouse suddenly stop.

(customer) yes.

(me) what is on the screen now.

(customer) just your program and the mouse pointer.

(me) and it now doesn't move when you move the mouse.

(customer) no.

(me) so nothing untoward has happend to make it stop working

(customer) do you think it could be affected by someone slamming a door on the cable.

(me) yes could you check the cable.

(customer) it appears to be in two sections.

(me) you mean the cable has been cut in two.

(customer) do you think this could be the problem.

(me) Madam we will despatch a new mouse to you today.

I have a good artist friend who had an old 486 computer which recently had been making some noise. She took it to me, and after taking it apart, I found it was a Frankenputer that had once been a server, and had two HUGE fans in addition to the power supply. One of the fans was really dusty, and that's what was making the noise. I discussed the options with her, and since she could stand the noise, and it wasn't the hard drive or anything, she said to just leave it.

Six months later, she decides to move, and what won't fit in her car has to go. She decides to give me the computer, knowing I'll find a good home for it, but after she gives it to me, she admits that her boyfriend had severly damaged the computer since I had seen it, and she has been afraid to boot it up since. When I last saw the computer, it was working fine. This is what her boyfriend did in six months:

1. Installed tons of sharware, and unisntalled it by just deleting directories. At bootup, there were no less than three "Windows cannot find blahblah.vxd" errors. He had installed at least two Virus-detection programs with were competing with each other, making bootup very slow indeed.

2. Never emptied his cache files. It took 5 minutes to delete them to the Recycle Bin, and another 2 minutes to empty the bin. His cache files and temp files accounted for about 20% of the hard drive space. When he ran out of space, he started deleting "files he didn't need" like regedit, sysedit, defrag, and a few others, making diagnostics impossible. I was told Windows had been reinstalled about 3 times because he kept deleting files.

3. In an attempt to "fix the noise" he ripped off the plastic front, demouting the floppy and CD-ROM, and breaking the plastic tabs that held the front on. Then he opened the computer, and decided the modem was making the noise, and TORE the speaker off. Needless the say, the modem was hosed. He threw the speaker away. Then he decided to oil the fans with WD40. That fixed the noise alright, and coated everything in the case with a slippery film that would burn a little when the chip got hot.

4. RAM was in one of the ISA slots. I am not sure if he's responsible for this.

5. He was a smoker. Anyone who has ever looked inside the computer of a smoker knows how disgusting this is. Now just think what it does to your lungs.

The motherboard eventually fried, and I ended up using the working parts to build another computer. I told my friend to never, ever, ever let her boyfriend in the inside of a computer again. She agreed, and said when she bought a new one at her new place, she'd get a Gateway or something with a warrantee, because they put tape across the back to prevent you from opening your system (or you void the warrantee).

A number of years ago, I worked on a proprietary OS called

CTOS. In this OS, you could type in abbreviations of

commands and the system would recognize them and run the

program.

We were doing some user training on OFIS Writer, the word

processor for CTOS. The instructor had gotten the students

to log in to the system, and she was instructing them on

how to start OFIS Writer. She told them to type in O space

W (the first letter of the two words OFIS and Writer) and

press the Go key. One woman just couldn't get it to work,

and the teacher went to see what was wrong. The student

was typing in "ospacew" and pressing the Go key. From then

on the teacher would say "type in O, press the spacebar and

type in W".

I'm a secretary at a local ISP, and occasionally take a tech call or two myself. This was overheard in the office.....

Head Tech: Ma'am, I'm sorry but I just can not help you until you learn how to double click.

This is a call I recieved recently, while working for an ISP, which only goes to show people should be required to take lessons before they are allowed to buy computers. I should warn you this is extemely long.

A guy called in needing to configure his computer to access our service. Naturally the first thing I asked for was his username. His response?

Cust: Uhhh, username? I don't know anything about that.

Me:(thinking:this NOT a good sign) Okay, not a problem. Can I have your last name please?

I managed to pull up his account and start going through our regular setup. This normally takes between 5-10 minutes, depending on how long it takes to get a person to right click.

Me:Go into My Computer.

Cust:I don't see that.

Me: Are you on your desktop?

Cust: Yes.

Me: Okay My computer is usually in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Can you see it now?

Cust: Yes

Me: Okay go into My Computer. (short pause) Now go in Dial-up Networking.

Cust: I don't see that.

Me: What do you see on your screen?

Cust: Uhh My Computer, Network Neighborhood, Recycle Bin. (in other words his desktop)

Me: Okay, double click on My Computer.

Cust: Nothing's happening

Me: Try again

Cust: Nothing.

Me: Okay, I want you to try using your RIGHT mouse button to click on My Computer and then clicking on open.

Cust: Okay.

Me: now what do have on your sceen?

Cust A little window pop up that has My Computer at the top.

Me:(YESS!!) Okay. Now go into Dial-up Networking

Cust: I don't see something that says that.

Me(okay we just need to add it in the windows setup) Okay go into Control panel

Cust: I don't see that.

Me:(!!!!) Okay can you scroll any?

Cust: What?

Me: Nevermind, Can you maximize this window?

Cust: What do you mean maximize?

Me:(ARRRGGHHH!) In the upper right hand of the window, you have a little black x, a box, and a minus sign. Just click on the box to maximize this window.

Cust: Ohh now I see Dial-up networking.

Me: [smack] Okay go into Dial-up Networking

Cust: Double-click it?

Me: Yes

Cust: Nothing's happening.

Me: Are you double-clicking?

Cust: Yes.

Me( I didn't think there was anything wrong with his mouse since he was able to move around and could right click) Okay, keep trying. Just click as fast as you can.

Cust: Okay now it opened up.

Note the problem was the guy didn't have a clue on how to use his mouse. When I told him to double-click he would click-pause-click. And as a result when I wanted him to go into something I would have say now double-click as fast as you can on the blank icon. I would also have to repeat the intructions several times. So a simple ten minute procedure turned into an hourlong ordeal.

I now firmly believe that people should be given a quick lesson on "how to use a mouse" before they leave the store.

I work for a small ISP in a rural community. We offer tech support for our online customers only and any problems that may occur from that. Below is a transcript of the most interesting call I have received to date.

ME: Hello, Generic ISP, My name is "JOHN", How may I help you?

Customer: Hi, my name is "SALLY" and my printer won't work.

ENOUGH SAID?!?!?

I used to be in PC tech support for a large insurance company.

This was back when 5.25" drives were common. Just for fun

I would label an old disk "BACKUP - DO NOT ERASE". I then

used a heavy duty magnet to mount the disk on the metal

overhead compartment in my cube. I got great reactions from

people who come it with their own support questions. I think

it may have even helped to reduce my work load :)

I work as an I.T. consultant for a small firm in the north-east of England. Most of my friends own PCs and, knowing what I do for a living, I get asked to sort out various problems they may have with their PCs.

Recently I bought a Zip drive for use at home. The 100mb capacity is all that I really need for transferring work between home and the office. One of my acquaintances thought it would be a good idea to get a Zip drive - so he went out and bought one and proceeded to fit it in his wife's brand new PC. When the floppy disc drive stopped working I got a phone call asking for help. When I took the case off the PC I found that the ribbon cable for the floppy drive was incorrectly fitted - i.e., upside down and connected by the "drive B" connector. Apparently he had to remove the floppy drive to gain access to the 3.5 inch drive bay so that he could fit the Zip drive but he didn't take notice of which way round the ribbon cable went. I simply refitted the correct connector the right way round and suggested next time he added new hardware he should be more careful.

This little escapade didn't deter him from playing about with the insides of PCs because he reckons that if various components were difficult to fit they wouldn't be on sale to the general public for DIY fitting.

The same guy is a committee member for an armed servicemen's/WW II veterans club. The club uses a (rather old) PC to keep track of its membership and finances. At one of the meetings he suggested that a Zip drive be fitted to their PC for the purpose of making back ups and, by all accounts, he made a sales pitch that would have put some sales professionals to shame. Did I mention that he volunteered to fit the drive himself? Well he did - you can guess the rest.

One evening I visited his house and noticed there was an extra PC sitting on the floor beside the two others they already owned. It didn't take long for him to bring up the subject of fitting a Zip drive and then to ask for my help.

I thought I'd get some idea of what exactly was wrong with the PC. I was told that the floppy drive wouldn't read any discs that were known to be good as they worked on the other PCs, and the Zip drive wouldn't work. As I was taking the case off this PC I thought it was another case of refitting the floppy drive ribbon cable properly - it turned out not to be as easy as that.

The Zip drive had been connected to the floppy "Drive B" connector - hence the floppy drive problems. The Zip drive itself had to have two of the IDE connector pins straightened as the shorter floppy drive connector had been inserted with quite some force bending the two pins at the far end. Out of curiosity I asked him what kind of Zip drive he'd bought, he responded that it was a SCSI device - which threw me somewhat as I expected him to say IDE or ATAPI (it said ATAPI on the box which was in plain view). I then asked him why it had been connected to the floppy controller instead of the hard disc controller - his reply was that there wasn't any free IDE connectors (the PC had one IDE hard drive and ATAPI CD-ROM) and the floppy controller had one free so he had used that.

I eventually sorted the Zip drive out by connecting it to the IDE as slave and disconnecting the CD-ROM drive (the PC only supported 2 IDE devices).

It amazes me that people can be so ignorant as to not really know what they're buying (he didn't know the difference between IDE and SCSI), totally disregard the installation and operating instructions, and then after botching the installation still expecting it to work.

The true story of how one of the biggest projects in Europe nearly came to a grinding halt!

Background: A large software house in the UK developing a $500,000,000 project. The PC software

was being written by 50+ developers, and had been underway for one year when we took on a new technical

support guy. Here's how he nearly blew 50 man years of work.

P****s primary role in the Development Team was to provide the administration of the development PC environment and to administer the building of software releases. This role involved:

1. Establishment and maintenance of the NT4.0 development PC's and servers;

2. Creation and maintenance of a backup strategy for the development servers;

3. Preparation and building of development test environments;

4. Provision of general NT-level expertise and consultancy to the Development Team.

P**** joined us in January 1998 following the departure of XXXXX - also in less than favourable circumstances. In the early part of his time with us P**** spent a lot of time putting in place a backup regime for the then one and only development server which contained the Source for all the counter code.

He also spent much of his time 'cannibalising' faulty machines to create usable development and test machines for the team's use.

In March of this year P**** advised us that the development server was dangerously close to capacity and requested permission to establish a second server on which to locate the source code control system (SourceSafe).

Permission was given and P**** proceeded to move the source to the new server, which was established with its own backup tape drive. The two servers were also configured to act as Primary and Secondary Domain controllers, each providing a backup of the other and each independantly backed up to tapes on a five-day cycle. This is the situation which existed up until his week of glory.

On Monday 22.6.98 the backup tape device on the main server failed. During the course of the week a total of 5 x 2Gb hard discs in a variety of development/test machines also failed, culminating in the 2Gb hard disc in the backup server failing on Monday 29.6.98. The 2Gb drive in this machine was used to hold the operating system and software, with a separate 6.4Gb drive in the machine holding the SourceSafe system. P**** attempted to retrieve the situation by removing the SourceSafe drive from the failed server (at this time the drive was undamaged and perfectly usable) and placing it in another PC so as to

re-establish the service to the development team. In the course of this action P**** admits that he damaged the disc with the result that the disc became unusable. P**** blamed this on 'rushing' the job and the pressure to

restore the SouceSafe system quickly.

The failure of the SouceSafe disk was brought to our attention on Wednesday 1.7.98 and it was agreed to re-locate the sourcesafe database on another server and restore the files from the latest tape backup of the development server. After extensive checking it was discovered that the tape backups from the development server did not contain any of the sourcesafe files, only files from the 'C:' drive of the failed machine. Subsequent

enquiries about utilising the main server and/or its backup tapes revealed that the server was not up to date (or complete) and that all the backup tapes (5) had been wiped clean when the tape drive failed the previous week.

At this point it was decided to send the failed 6.4 Gb drive containing the sourcesafe database to a specialist Disc Recovery company to see if the data could be retrieved. This action was successful and the data has been fully recovered - at a cost of $17,000.

On 2.7.98 I interviewed P**** in private and asked him to explain the events of the last week (documented above). P**** agreed that he was culpable for the damage to the disc and for the fact that there were no usable backup

tapes to restore the system from. He explained that when the main server backup device failed, he had obtained a copy of some new backup software (ArcServe) so that the main server and the backup server could both be backed up on the working tape backup system of the backup server. He installed the software and had thought that it was working correctly but this has since proved to be incorrect. He admitted that he had not examined the backup tapes thoroughly enough to verify that the correct files had been secured. When questioned as to how it was that the original backup tapes had all been wiped clean by a tape

drive known to be faulty, P**** was unable to offer any satisfactory explanation.

>From my years with Verifone, a major maker of credit card terminals:

Customer returns a terminal with this note: "Does not work when not plugged in"... I gave it a full checkout, and returned it with the comment "YES" (Battery powered credit card terminals were many years in the future yet)

A major customer bought a large number of terminals from us, plus a lot of barcode wands to implement their project. Things were going great, then we get a call from the customer, telling us how these damn wands are failing all over the place. Well, there's two types of wands, one protects the tip, but requires cleaning, and one leaves the tip exposed, but dosen't require cleaning. They bought the second type of course. (wait it gets funny!) Their sales rep suggests this wonderful solution. She wants to put a heavy rubber ring on the back of the wand, so that the back end will fall faster than the front, and protect the tip.

(Gallileio anyone?)

BTW: The "jigabyte" guy was right. Look it up.

I thought the same thing when I saw "Back to the Future".

1.21 Gigawatts!!(Giga is pronounced Jiga!)

I spent a summer doing tech support for a small Western Massachusetts bank. That summer, the bank merged with another bank.

Among other things, the two servers were merged the Thursday before Memorial Day.

The techs found out the next day, when irate users called up wondering why they couldn't log in.

During the merger, the Help Desk number was somehow released as the accounts number.

Every day for two weeks, I had phone calls like this.

Me: "Help Desk"

Customer: "Hi, I'm calling to check my account balance."

Me: "Sir, you have the wrong number, this is the Help Desk."

Customer:"This is the number I was given for account balances."

Me: "Try calling our main switchboard. Their number is ***-****."

Customer: "Thank you."

I work at a college Help Desk. One of our labs has 16 MACs connected (through Ethertalk) to a laser printer.

Frequently, people will attempt to print *very* large print jobs (one was 5 megs). If it takes a while to print, they send it again.

They usually they leave, frustrated.

Eventually, someone else tries to print. They fail, and they enlist one of the techs.

Since almost none of the users can shut down a MAC program (forget actually shutting down a MAC), we have to

go around to all the other operating MACs, find the rogue print queue, and clear it.

The standing record for the most print jobs one one machine is 38.

My company had a couple of test terminals placed with a major bank on trial. HUGE potential sale.

After a few days, they called to tell us that our terminals were failing all the time, but our competition's terminals were working just fine. They thought there might be some compatibility problems with their phone systems. The boss gave me this one to handle.

Well... I got my stuff together, and beat feet for the airport. First, I had to fly from Honolulu to LAX. Then overnight in LAX. Then up early for a flight to Mexico City. Then overnight again (decent hotel!) Meet our local rep in the morning, go to the bank, talk story for a while, then out to lunch with him and the bank fellow. After lunch, we can go look at the terminals.

Ok, so I start running diagnostics, measuring voltages, everything looks cool. I run a test transaction, everything's fine. I run another one, it's dead. Good, Dead, Good, Dead... I call the bank guy in and tell him that I think the trouble's on the host end.. He gets clearances, and arrainges for us to go see the host end. It turns out that this is in Acapulco, another plane flight away.. So, overnight in the nice hotel again, then up in the AM, and fly to Acapulco. Drive around, check out the shops, then finally off to the host.. The host turns out to be two modems in a closet, with a mux, feeding back to mexico city on a leased line. One of the modems NEVER ANSWERS.. Off to spend the rest of the afternoon talking story at a nice restaraunt before flying home through the same stops.

It turns out that they had done all their testing alternately, ours then the competition's, dialing into the Acapulco host lines. (WHY?) So somehow we lucked out, and every time we were tested, we were routed to the defective modem!

Still, all in all, it wasn't a bad way to spend a few days!

:)

I had to do a little bit of supporting over phone to one of my friends one day. He is a bright young man, but hasn't used a computer very much. But he is willing to learn.

He too enjoyes tech-tales like me. Especially the one about the "cup holder", that is why I am giving you this story.

One day he called me and said the computer wouldn't work. He switched it on, and nothing happened. I asked him if the power was on, and the light beside the switch turned green. He confirmed this. Then I asked him if he used the computer switch and not the switch on the screen. He told me he was. I then became a bit confused, because I suspected at least some sounds when the computer tried to boot.

He came me to rescue with another question: "But the big box on the floor, the one with the "cup holder", has that got anything to do with it??

Even though I had specifically asked which switch he was using he considered the screen to be the computer, and was determined this was the actual "computer". Clearifying the components and locating the right switch was a big help for him....

A friend of mine has a computer, running windows 95.

My friends girlfriend wanted to use office 97, but my

friend stated that to use office 97 you had to be running

windows 98.

me: tech support, who can i help you?

customer: yes, i got this screen and I'm really worried. I'm not sure what to do.

me: ok, what does it say?

cu: it says "installation was successful. press the 'finish' key to complete the process.

me: ok.... what options do we have to choose from?

cu: well, theres just a 'finish' button at the bottom.

me: (for god's sake!) ok, lets click on the finish button.

cu: well, what if I lose all my data??????

me: it'll be just fine. just click on 'finish'

cu: ok, that screen went away. now what?

me: that means we're all done.

cu: but I'm just looking at my screen.

me: what screen do you mean?

cu: the one with the start button and the pictures on the left.

me: that's your windows screen. that means we're all done

cu: but wheres my data? THE PROGRAM ERASED ALL MY DATA!

me: (whispering)Our Computer, who art in cubicle, give me the strength to either hang up or kill this fool.

I work for a small ISP who use online sign-up to build their customer base. And am astonished at the most basic misunderstanding of technology..

To first create an account they must use a generic username/password combination.

Madam:I keep getting refused access to your service , now why would that be?

Supp:Do you have a computer,modem..connected to a phoneline?

-Yes to all the rudimentary checks-

Madam:I used your disk to install the software.

Supp:How did that go madam?

Madam:fine it all seemed to work.

Supp:Do you get an error message when you dial-in?

Madam:No nothing

Supp: What about your modem, do you hear it dial?

Madam: Oh yes it makes beeps and asks for a username and password.

Supp: Well it seems that you have managed most of it o.k

Madam:could you be engaged?

Supp: um no not really. Lets check your spelling..username please.

Madam:Knight

Supp:Is that with a K?

Madam:Does it matter?

Supp:Absolutely! It's character accurate. (don't you know!)

Madam: Well we spell it with a 'K'. But if it's going to confuse then whichever way you think. (sounding shaky now)

Supp: Which way it's spelt on your account is really what matters madam.

Madam: but that's what I'm trying to do...

Supp:Excuse me, do you HAVE an account?

Madam:NO

Supp: (heavy breathing) lets start again shall we.

Madam:I don't think much of this Internet so far. I don't think I'll bother

This happened a while ago when Win 3.1x was the thing.

ID10T: How do I get to DOS?

ME: What do you mean?

ID10T: I type WIN to get to Windows, how do I get to DOS?

Later in the call....

ID10T: What is this COMMAND.COM, CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT file?

ME: (Thinking to myself - You need to delete those files, you are unworthy of using your computer) Sir, don't worry about those files, they are not for you to touch... they are necessary for the system to work.

This guy was not worthy of an IDIOT's book.

I work for a local ISP in michigan. Many of our customers can be accurately described as having just enough knowledge to be dangerous...for example, once I received a call from a gentleman who thought the 56k limit on modems using a regular dial-up connection (no multilink) didn't apply to him...

Me: Opening spiel, can I help you?

Cust: I wanna know why you guys aren't letting me connect at anything higher than 47000!!

(not bad, considering I don't get that kind of speed at home, but I figured I would try to help the guy out. After much wrangling with him, first trying to convince him that A) *we* personally don't limit his speed as far as his rate, and B) that contrary to popular belief, V.90 is still not the cure-all for the difference between X2 and K56Flex, he grudgingly admitted that perhaps it wasn't our fault...then he drops this on me:)

Cust: I just don't get it though, Two weeks ago, before I replaced my old (33.6) modem with a new (K56Flex) one, I was logging on at 115200...

(and believe me, I tried my damndest to explain how the speed at which your modem sends info to your PC is not the same as the speed which your modem connects to other modems...oh well...)

This story requires a little preface. Part of my job involves

installing and configuring network cards for our network,

and the most common problems we have are with protocol

settings. The following call was a textbook routine

problem, one I had talked users through likely a thousand

times. Literally.

Me: Thank you for calling the help desk, what can I do for

you?

User: I can't see any computers in Network Neighborhood,

but Netscape and Eudora are working fine.

Me: Ah, sounds like a problem with your IPX/SPX protocol.

User: We don't use IPX on this campus.

Me: Yes, we do. Your web browser and mail program work on

TCP/IP, but if you want to browse workgroups, you need

IPX/SPX.

User: This university runs on TCP/IP only. It always has.

Me: Humor me, do you have IPX installed?

User: No. And I don't need to install it.

[insert half-hour long argument followed by fifteen minutes

of running through reinstalling his adapter because that's

what he wants, and checking all TCP/IP settings AND

reinstalling TCP/IP...]

Me: Well, now we've tried everything, please, pretty please,

for the love of GOD [okay, I didn't really put it that way]

would you CONSIDER installing IPX?

User: Okay, I'll try anything at this point.

[click, click, click, IPX is installed, he reboots.]

User: OHMIGOD it worked! Well, I guess I just played with

the settings enough. Sometimes all you have to do is

remove and add things and reboot.

Me: Yes, sir, I'm sure that was it.

[head thunks on table]

I have been reading the Tech Tales and had many laughs and feelings of disbelief. One of the things that I have noticed is the number of misspellings or missing words in the narratives. It seems to me that the narrators are proving how un-techy THEY can be.

It just proves that we can all fall prey to the level of non-technically inclined at one point or another. If it hasn't happened to you, just what, it will. Unfortunately, the more knowledge we receive the more we realize how much we really do not know!

Working as a salesman in a London based Apple VAR I overheard one of my colleagues trying to answer a question regarding virtual memory. After listening to the 'valued' customer for a considerable time my colleague was heard to say (n an effort to dispose of the call as quickly as possible and at the same time displaying his own lack of knowledge)"I'm sorry Sir, we don't have virtual memory in stock until next week - phone again then and we should be able to help you"

Anon

I got a call one evening from the user (who, for the sake of

argument, we'll call simon) of an old Data General AOS

system and had to talk him through a reboot:

(me) Go to the boot terminal, check it's at the SCP/CLI

prompt and type "B space 24", (followed by enter)

(simon) "it comes up with an error message"

I repeat this simple instruction with ever-increasingly

redundant detail and frustration, including letter by letter

dictation "now hit the space bar, now 2, now 4 now hit

enter".

(simon) "it still comes up with an error message"

(me) OK, I'll drive in and have a look.

I arrive, mystified by the state of affairs, I ask the user

to type while I watch - when I say 'space bar' he enters a

hyphen - I scream 'Stop! - why are you doing that??'

(simon) "Well, I thought, sort of, that you didn't just want

an empty space, so I thought I'd better, well, put a dash in

to fill up the gap"

(me) Inarticulate scream of rage followed by trip to pub for

soothing pints of beer.

Hello, I work for a pretty large internet provider and I get about 3 or 4 calls like this a day, it's horrible.

"Hi this is Andy thank you for calling (big name here) how can I help you tonight?"

"Well Andy, I just want to let you know that I am very computer stupid so you'll have to take it slow with me."

Well that's all fine and dandy, I don't mind that ... this is the horrible part. I tell them to do something and I get ....

"This won't work, you don't know what your talking about"

"Ok sir, you tell me what you think we need to do to fix this"

They go on for about 20 minutes having me do all these things that have absolutley nothing to do with the problem. After we are done with that I have them try it and of course, it still doesn't work. So then I get to say .....

"Ok sir, are you ready to listen to me now?"

After that they don't give me anymore problems. Please remember, if you call tech support don't argue with the person that you called for help, it's just annoying.

I work doing on-site technical support. One day a customer

called me to help install some apps in his computer. When I

arrived at the site, I started to verify his computer. I

found that it was a 486 with 4 megs of ram and 400megs HD.

Then when I booted it up, I was completely surprised: Windows

98 was installed! (how do they do that?)

30 minutes later (Win98 is soooo slow...) I started to see

what's installed - Just Microsoft Office 97 Professional (!)

Then I saw that were only 15 megs free. I told him that

I couldn't install more apps since the HD was completely

full (he don't wanted to uninstall Win98). Then he quickly

replied: then let's clean the desk!

Oh my...

I start to imagine if Microsoft said that Win98 could run

on 286's...........

I was working in my electronic retail establishment when ringing up a ladies' purchase. I dragged the items in from of the beeping scanner.

BEEP BEEEP BEEP BEEP

One small item rang up at fifty cents and the lady stopped me.

"The sign said those were two for a dollar!" she said insistantly.

I thought she was joking so I laughed, then she got really mad and looked at me.

"What's so funny? You want me to talk to your manager? The sign said those were two for a dollar and I won't pay you more!"

My jaw dropped when I found she was serious, but it sure made me want to laugh even more!

A common complaint : I saved some files to C-drive and now I can't find them.

Why? Because now you are using a different PC! Only stuff on network drives will follow you around.

Another true story : I got this new PC, and was using the tray as a cup holder. Someone came past and told me to stop doing it, since it was a CD-ROM drive.

My mouse doesn't work!

Why? Did you check that it was plugged in at the back? Sometimes they don't look for the obvious.

Another one is telling the same person over and over again how to fix a problem. They go to the trouble to write it down, and then phone back a few days later with the same problem.

Did you try rebooting? The answer is always Yes. Get there, reboot the PC, and everything works fine. "Must be your presence that made a difference!

I work for an Insurance company on Helpdesk supporting office and home based staff. One afternoon a user called me up:

- "The printer in the office is making an awful smell when it prints"

me - "Well, is it printing alright?"

- "Yeah, but this smell...."

me - "I'll send a tech up to see you"

I had only worked in the job for around 3 months having no former knowledge of computers but thought this was a bit strange.

A tech went to visit. By the side of the printer was a plant. The plant was watered by god-knows-what and was creating one hell of a stink!

I work for a media company, and early in 97 we were building a very large website for a client. We were asked to put together a demo so the client could show off what had been done. I got a big chunk of the site working, and arranged to have the files copied to a CD (the location for the demo would not have net access). I informed the producer of the project that browsers would need to be installed on the demo machines. He said OK.

When we arrived, there were no browsers on any of the machines. I asked the producer why, and he said, "Oh, I didn't think you needed a browser if you were running the site from a CD".

I work for the repair division of a large nationwide retail chain. We see approximately 500 systems in our shop each month. With that kind of volume, you can't help but see odd things.

Every once in a while, we'll get a customer whose children, or even themselves, put foreign objects in the computer.

Most recently, a customer that I dealt with was complaining that the system would lock up when he used his DVD-rom drive. Put it on the bench, diagnose a dead drive, order a replacement from the MFR under warranty.

New unit comes in, I pull out the customer's cd from the old unit then remove the drive. The drive rattles when it's removed. Out of curiosity, I disassemble the drive.

Inside I found a 1.5" long wooden dowel used for assembling an O'Sullivan desk.

I can remember a while ago when another tech was diagnosing a system the customer brought in because of the ever-devious "Invalid System Disk" error.

Our tech ejected the disk from the a: drive and the system worked just perfectly. The customer had merely forgotten to remove it before rebooting.

He felt sorry for the customer, so he defragged, scandisked, and virus scanned his hard drive for free.

The real taker is when our old service center manager was working on a system that did not have any video or POST.

Opening up the machine revealed that a small rat had crawled through the open slot covers on the back of the system. It thought it was a great place to sleep... until the computer was turned on and the rodent caused everything to short circuit. Including himself.

We had a joking debate as to what tool to use to remove the carcass... a screw grabber or a spatula.

There's many other stories along this line. Far too many to list. We get at least one a week.

I once had a customer call and tell me the internet isn't working.

When I asked the problem he said he only heard a loud screeching

sound. I then told him that was his modem connecting to ours.

Now that he understood what that was he wanted to know what to

do next because he told me that nobody would talk back to him.

Very confused I asked him exactly what he was doing. He then

very confident with himself told me that he was dialing the

internet on his phone and when he heard the screeching he

started to talk but nobody would talk back to him.

This was a message received in our Customer Service E-Mail a week or so ago:

On our telephone bill we had a couple of charges for telephone calls that actually were e-mail messages. The telephone company representative told me that that happens when a person has used up their time. These charges were very small, so I'm not upset about that, but they could be bigger, I suppose. The way our account is set up, we can't really tell how much time we have used or have left. What I want to know is how we can keep this from happening again.

Thanks.

User Deleted.

I got a call the from a lady who recieved our installation disk to setup internet on her computer. I went through the normal spell to install her software. She explained to me that the computer was given to her YEARS ago and is a 486 with 25mh and 4 meg of ram. A flag went up and I asked her what kind of modem she has. She said " MODEM...what's a Modem? " Come to find out she doesn't have a modem and thought she could get on the internet because she was internet access at her job.

Give me that bottle of asprin.....

This was told to me by someone else and It also happen to me too....

A lady came in to our office and wanted to get an email address for herself. We kindly explain that she would have to sign up for internet access to get e-mail. She responded that she didn't want internet access because she didn't have a modem. It took them nearly 15 minutes to explain that she needed have a modem to get e-mail. She didn't understand that e-mail means ( electronic mail )

I finally relize users out there really scares me....:|.

Howdy ya'll, I had some fun with microsoft tech help for windows 98

I had just got done transfereing all my files from windows95

to my new windows98 & then deleted win95. While trying to run

win98 the fax wasn't working, so the guy at tech support was

helping us fix the problem, we tryed for over an hour with no

luck. Then the the fool was telling us to do this & that. We

are not to 'puter literate, so we weren't sure what was gonna

happen. The "bright guy" had us reformat the drive, not

telling us that all would be deleted until after it was gone

I wish 1/2 the fools there had some idea of what they were

doing to us.

I'm in second line support. A user told me about something

that first line-support had told her. Apparently, there's a

three-key combination which speeds up downloads in MS Mail.

Any idea which three keys?

Yup - *that* three-key combination!

I had to explain to the user that there was a slight

possibility that someone was winding her up!

For the cretin I heard about today on our helpline.

This chap needed to format his HD and reinstall Windows. Before he did so, he copied all his documents. Now he wanted us to help him restore them.

Shame he'd copied them onto another folder on the hard drive.

"Hey, I need to knock my house down and rebuild it. I'll put all the furniture in the bedroom. It'll be safe there."

I work for a big Uk computer sales company, this is a tale i heard.

This woman rang our tech support and said her coffee cup holder had broken.

We say we don't sell coffee cup holders,

So she is blabbering alone telling us how she got her PC from us and now the coffee cup holder doesn't work any more, we say the PC doesn't come with a coffe cup holder, so we try and help her.

We figured out that she thought the cd rom drive wos a coffe cup holder and now it doesn't holder cups any more.

We get them all.

‚‚‚‚‚I'm in tech support and generally have a favorable outlook on the people that do this work. But I recently received a call that convinced me beyond all doubt that there are techs that are too stupid to live and shouldn't be allowed near a phone. I won't name names but this user was the second victim of this tech that I have gotten calls from. I feel for them.‚

The user called in with a "Windows could not find a file that may be needed..." error. This is normally an easy 10 or 15-minute call.‚

This poor user was stuck with the tech for over 5 hours doing endless boots to recreate the error message (no troubleshooting in evidence, just rebooting to see if the error would go away by itself). They eventually "did some other stuff" that was not mentioned in the call record.‚

The user was then handed some "homework" which he did before calling back to see what to do next.‚

The user was told to print out his SYSTEM.INI, delete it and then re-type it in. He was never told what to do after that. In his case, it had been upgraded over Windows 3.11 and had LOTS of entries. It took him almost 90 minutes to type it back in.‚

I'm still in the dark as to what this was supposed to accomplish...and why he was told to do this in the first place.

The son of a former colleague of mine worked the internal Help Desk for a company. There was a rule that calls from people above a certain level of management had to be handled personally, not over the phone.

He got a call from a (female) fast-track manager high enough on the scale to rate personal attention. When our hero arrived at her desk, she said "I can't get my mouse pointer all the way down the screen." Her mouse pad was next to her keyboard, on one of those wrist-rest monstrosities sitting on a sliding keyboard drawer -- a setup that many companies are convinced will eliminate Carpal Tunnel Syndrome but which usually increases it instead. The mouse was resting against the wrist rest, with no more available travel downwards.

Our hero said, "Do this," picked up the mouse, moved it toward the top of the pad, put it back down and scrolled the cursor to the bottom of the screen.

The manager looked at him and asked, "Will I have to do this every time?" Duh!

He should have told her to requisition Dogbert's $75 mouse mat extender!

I'm a Senior Systems Analyst with a large insurance company, and have been programming for almost 30 years.

The "Induhvidual" who used to be the Business Analyst for my group was a rather twitchy, ah, "female person." One day she came to me and asked how she could get her Word document back. It seems she'd typed a document, gotten it to look the way she wanted it, printed it, and hit Exit. When Word asked if she wanted to Save the document (which she had not done yet), as she put it, "My brain said 'yes' but my fingers said 'no'."

I asked, "Do you still have the hard copy?"

"Yes."

"Good. Start typing it again. And SAVE it this time."

"But there's an automatic backup -- why can't I get it from that?"

"Because, once you said you didn't want to save it, Word said 'OK, she really doesn't want it anymore' and deleted the automatic backup."

"But that's stupid."

"That's the way it works. What's stupid is Not Saving your document. You can't blame Word for that. Better start typing."

I am the only computer person in our small company. Everyone comes to me with the smallest problems.

One of our most computer-savvy employees stopped me in the hall.

HE: "I can't get a movie to play off a CD. Can you take a look at it?"

I: "You should be able just to double click on the file and it will start."

HE: "I can't even get that far."

I: "Okay, I'll go look at it right now."

HE: "It's all set up. The CD is in the drive."

So I sat at his desk and tried to look at the contents of his CD drive. It gave me an error message "Cannot access drive."

I tried again. Same result.

I opened the drive and looked at the CD. The first thing I noticed was the DVD insignia at the bottom of the label.

I: "It's not the same thing, schmuck!"

I work deskside support and I received a high priority call ticket for a user whose automated virus update was not working at logon.

When I got there I asked the user to log off and on again, so he reached for the monitor power button and flicked it off and on.

This guy had only ever entered his login password once, and that was when he started at the company a month ago!!!

We have been sold a Cisco 1603 ISDN router

and an IOS 11.3(3)T upgrade;

unfortunately the router didn't come with

enough memory to accept the upgrade...

-thank you for calling xxx-isp

-the number i'm dialing into is not working

check number, user dialing into old number, gave new number

-why do you guys don't tell us that the number is about to change?

-sir, you should've gotten an e-mail that your local access number

is changing

-e-mail? i never read those durn things...

-(mute)@#$%@#

This didn't happen to me, but to my brother, although I was listening in at the time...

He was doing some some support on a system, and the users had drafted in a guy who usually digs holes in roads to cover someone on sick leave.

This guy was really trying hard, and it had called numerous times all week. This particular call was about 5:30 on a Friday night...

He had managed to log out of the network and had no idea how to get in, and my Brother had finally found out he was at C:\, so was talking him through getting back to F:\Login

Bro: Hold down the shift key, and press f, the press return

User: OK, I've done that.

Bro: Does it say F:\LOGIN ?

User erm, no.

Bro: What can you see on the screen?

User: C:\FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

I didn't know whether to piss myself or cry!

Most users get the correct names for the programs that they use to browse, or rather attempt to browse with. Here are a few confusing ones that took a little while to figure out.

outlet express -) huh? OH! OUTLOOK express

windows exploder -) self evident...

netscape explorer -) I'm confused, well he at least has SOME browser, don't know which one though.

nutscrape -) mispronounced?

netscrape -) often used by real techs.

internet exploder -) often used by techs, and not always as just an "oops" when talking to the user

I work for a company that does tech support for scanners and one day a

lady called and said that whenever she tried to scan, nothing would

happen. She had a very common error message and after troubleshooting it

for a few minutes, I asked if the green power light on the front was on. She

responded by asking " Where would I find that?" Then I had her describe

what was on her desk. And the scanner was not there. The only thing I could

do was refer her to Gateway to see why they did not send it. But I always

wonder how she was trying to scan.

User: Hello? Is that the help desk?

Helpdesk: Yes, can I help you?

User: Well, I'm afraid your programs won't print.

Helpdesk: What exactly happened?

User: When I click on print nothing happens.

(the usual stuff follows - is the Printer on, connected correctly, got paper, etc.)

Helpdesk: Ok. Can you get to the DOS prompt?

User: no.

Helpdesk: Why can't you get to the DOS prompt?

User: Because I'm the only one in the room and I don't want to leave the computer unattended.

As a Systems/Network Administrator for various public

and private organizations, I've dealt with some

interesting problems. I must also admit that I have an

evil side that pops out on occasion. After months of

dealing with everyone elses problems, I decided to test

the user population (on April 1st) to see just how bad

it could get.....

I sent an email from the admin account to all users

informing them that due to some hardware problems on

the server, we were running out of disk space. In order

to help conserve space, any documents that were over a half

page long should be saved in a 4pt font.

At last count....15 of the 45 users in the building were duped.

......Some still have documents in 4pt fonts.....I just don't

have the heart to tell them the truth.....

I used to do DTP some time ago in a large solicitor's in London, England. I wasn't in support but I knew almost as much as the techies did, having been using computers since the early '80s.

We were having trouble printing large jobs out to our colour printer, I knew exactly what the problem was. There was very little room on the server to spool the job and I called my boss (who was a techie) and explained the problem. She tried printing from her machine and it was fine, thinking it was the capacity of out HDs that was the problem, even though there was still plenty of space left on both machines that we used. She eventually went to sort it out.

Some days later she came back with the conclusion that the server was getting low on space and that she'd attach the printer to another server! Exactly the diagnosis of the problem I'd told her.

That wasn't the only incident where I'd known more than the official techies and it was fun watching the gears in their brains turn as they tried to work out the problem. I didn't have the heart to tell them the obvious.

This is a history that really happened, and that is the reason I believe the other crazy histories I read in this section:

I work for a medium computer related company, in the Technical Support team, well, one day I came to the cubicle of the manager of the Accounting department, which wad a problem with the floppy drive. The point is that I had to replace it. That means disconnect all cables, TAKE the computer from the cubicle, open it and change the floppy. This was all done next to her cubicle because she needed the computer working pretty soon, so she saw the entire process of taking it from there. Well I was doing the change when someone from her department came by and requested from her a report, that she already had in hand, she told her to wait a second while she print the report (just she had no computer to print the report!!) As she discovered her computer was on but nothing in the screen (translation: Led's monitor was on), she started to turn it on and off repeteadly. until she call me to ask why this was happening (All this happened within about 3 minutes of trying unsuccessfully). At that time I finished closing her computer and installed at its place, so she could now print her report. I do not want to explain how she felt when she saw me putting back the computer at her desk.

Several years ago, while I was working for a computer store, I had to help a customer locate a part. I had been shelving software, and I heard a voice from behind me:

Customer: I need a 9-pin to 9-pin adapter, but I can't seem to find the one I need.

Without even looking at the customer, I took the two steps to my right, and looked at the rack.

Me: Do you need a female-to-female, male-to-female, or male-to-male?

I heard nothing but a giggle, so I turned to look at the customer - a six-foot tall transvestite with 5-o'clock shadow and a prominent Adam's apple, wearing a turquoise knit mini-dress and stiletto-heeled boots...

While working in the training center of a large computer store, I often got calls that should have been routed to the tech support people. Since their line was often busy, people would give up and call the training center.

A woman called me one day, and said, "I bought a new computer at your store to replace the old one. While I was transferring all of my files to the new computer, it wouldn't give me any of my disks back."

Hmmmmm. "How many of your disks does the computer have right now?"

"About fifty or so." she answered.

"Ma'am, can you bring the computer down to the store? Just shut it down, turn it off, unplug all of the cables, and bring the computer itself into the store. Take it to the front counter, and they'll page me. I think I'd better take a look at it."

She brought the computer into the store about twenty minutes later, and the front counter paged me. When I opened the full-sized tower case, fifty-three 5.25" floppy disks fell out of it. Two of the disks were still stuck between the 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives, where a slight gap had remained between the face plates. She hadn't actually put any of the disks into the floppy drive, but slid them just below it, where they fell off into the main portion of the machine.

I can only imagine what kinds of fireworks there might have been if they'd been 3.5" disks, and the metal shutters had shorted something.

I didn't take this call but a co-worker of mine did.

We worked for a typesetter manufacturer and supported

1800 dpi black and white printers. No big deal, right?

Well, one day we had a call like this....

End User (EU): My printer is printing out purple.

Tech: (warning flag immediately goes up) Purple?

EU: Yes.

Tech: That's not possible, it's a black and white printer.

It can't print in purple or any other color.

EU: (getting aggitated) I'm telling you it's printing out

purple!

Tech: Well, let's open up the case and take a look inside.

EU opens up printer chassis and takes a peek inside.

Tech: Do you see anything?

EU: Yes. Crayons.

Apparently the EU had a kid who put some color crayons INTO

the printer. The crayons melted on the fuser. Needless to

say, the EU was not happy with her kid for destroying a

$8,000 piece of equipment!

The tech than went over repair options.

I used to work for a computer mail order company and sold

virtually anything in regards to computers. One day I got

a call from a customer who was looking for a monitor stand.

This was not an unusual request, as, like I said, we sold

everything.

End User (EU): Yeah, I'm looking for a monitor stand.

Me: Ok. What size is your monitor?

EU: I dunno.

We went through some things, he measured it out and he had

a standard 14" monitor. Fine.

Me: I gave him a price of $30 for a cheap plastic monitor

stand.

EU: Wow, that's cheap. The last stand cost me $1500.

Me: $1500?

EU: Yeah. Got it from Gateway.

After further discusiion, it turns out he didn't need

a $30 cheap plastic monitor stand. He needed a new computer!

this is about the biggest pain I've ever dealt with:

after owning my system for a year and a half one of the color guns on my monitor went bad and since I had a 3 year warranty I did the logical thing and called for a replacement.

First I tried Tech support, the call went sometning like this:

tech: (usual BS, name, serial number, etc.) "What seems to be your problem?"

me: "One of the color guns on my monitor is bad"

tech: "ok well what is it doing?"

me: "everything is in shades of pink"

tech: "well that is usualy the video driver"

me: "no, I have reinstalled the rivers twice and tried it on two computers"

tech: "well lets try it again, could you please get you driver cd that came with your momitor"

me: "I could but I have a new aftermarket video card"

tech: "oh well that could be the probem, some of our monitors don't work with other brand video cards"

(tech call continued in much this fashion for another half hour until I finnaly got him to send a replacement)

finnaly the new monitor arived, it was crap, it had a section of burned out pixels, and the image was warped. once again I called tech support and after another halfhour they agreed to send me a third monitor which never came. I packed up the new one and sent it back.

well i called tech support again, and the call went much the same way as the first did but once again then sent a new monitor. This time it got there and worked but was a 15" instead of a 17"!!!

called tech support again, new monitor again, a new 15"!!

called tech support again, they said that since I had a 15" they couldn't give me a 17 without upgrading me.

I told them the reason I had the 15 is because of their mistake, so I was transfered to customer relations.

Customer realtions said that I had to talk to sales support.

Sales support said I had to talk to add on sales and tried to transfer me.

Tech support picked up, and I told them I was waiting for add on sales. So they transfered me.... back to customer realtions, who transfered me to sales support who said that they can't transfer me to add on sales and that I would have to call this new number!

Well I called the number and finnaly got someone in add on sales. Once I got to talk to a human they were confused that I was told to call them because all they can do is sell it to me!! Well by this time after talking to probavly their entire staff I yelled at the guy at the other end of the phone and got his manager.

the manager told me that he would take care of it and that he would call me back the next day... it's been a week!!!!

I do tech support for a major computer manuf. I was told the story about a lady who got a message on her laptop that said,"FEED ME" so she started to put crackers in the floppy drive of her notebook.The message kept on appearing so she kept on stuffing crackers in the drive slot. It became a problem when she wanted to use the hard drive. I understand it took quite sometime to inform her that this kind of thing would not be covered under the warranty

Ok I have heard a bunch but this was the funniest I have ever seen.......

I worked at best buy a couple years ago and you can imagine what kind of idiots we got for computer customers. I was working at the tech bench when a lady brought in her HP computer. She was complaining that her cd-rom and scanner weren't working. For those of you who aren't familier with the HP's from a couple years back they used to have a few models with built in photo scanners. Well I pretty much guessed what her problem was, sure enough when I opened it up there was a CD jammed in the photo scanner and in the cd-rom was, you got it, a photograph!!!!

oh yeah and there is one more...

once we had this customer come in who had a 3.2 gig HDD on his computer and he was buying a 6.4 to add to it because he was out of space. Well we turned her on and found out what was on his computer, Windows 95 and 3 gigs of porn, nothing else!!! I don't know where he got that much I I sure don't know how he was going to find another 6 gig of it!!!!!

I've worked for a log time doing freelance computer repair and such and I do a lot of setups. Well one day I got a call from an older gentleman who said he was having trouble turning on his computer. I asked him what kind of computer he had and asked him if he was using the power switch on the front of the computer.

"oh you mean I don't use that foot pedal thingy?"

It seems he had the mouse on the floor and was pushing the buttons with his feet!!!

On more,

Another time I had a guy call me up and complain that his mouse was really hard to use. I asked him what the problem was and he said that the cursor was going the wrong way and that the buttons should be easier to reach. So I told him to turn it over.

"oh"

thats all he said before the I heard the dial tone!

This isn't a story but a tip for all you fed up techs:

I have used this and it worked every time....

I tell customers when they are doing something stupid that it is an ID-10-T error, get it ID10T!!

I'm a tech for a nationa ISP, I solve (l)user problems all day but every now and then I make the occasional stupid mistake...

One day I wasn't really thinking when a disk got stuck in the drive, I've had this problem a lot of times when the dusk cover on the disks are bent a little bit, usualy can getthe disk out by gently pushing the dust cover down and pulling the disk out. Well on this day I didn't have anything that would fit in there so I pulled out a crisp new $20 bill, folded it into quartes and tried to pry it with that. I guess I got a little carried away and my hand slipped and sure enought the whole $20 went in there. by the time I got the disk and the bill out both were shredded nicely. I guess 20 is pretty cheap for a computer fix but it's an expensive lesson to learn!!!

I work for a law firm which connects to a state supported Workers' Compensation site by telnet to obtain information. About three weeks ago for some reason, not yet determined, we stopped being able to reach the site. I called the help desk at the site to find out if there had been any changes lately in the ISP address and to get the telephone number which would allow us to dial in directly. The woman on the help desk couldn't tell me either of their pieces of information. She gave me another number to call in the computer center. I called this number. The second person also couldn't answer either of my questions. She gave me a third number . . . ok, the third one had the information.

Then the next day I am told by another employee at the firm that we were going to have to go back to Windows 3.1 on one computer so we could make the telnet connection. I ask him why since I know we were telneting in for a year with a machine running Windows 95 He says the help desk at Workers' Compensation said that we could only connect on 3.1 using a specific communications program. After some inquiry, it turn out the people on the help(less) desk have only been trained to answer questions for users who are running Windows 3.1 and the specific program. They were trained apparently before Windows 95 became available and being the state no one thought to update them when the rest of the world updated.

I am a tech, i called tech support.......for a good reason.

No laughing....:)

I called AOL, to pick on them i leave this.

I called for my cousin..yes, we BOTH have AOL, why not...they are free accounts.

Well, i called to find out WHY his 'links' outside the AOL world did not work.

Well, I called Xisa (X is replaced w/ another letter) and she was ...slow.

I asked what the fix was...she took all my info (did not give my last name..I enjoy my animity).

Well, she denied me service w/o it. Grrrr, call me Mr. Last. I said...call me Danny.

Ok, my info was taken...jotted down (slow in recording it).

Put me on hold...HOLD. (Not that this should be a tough issue)

I waited, and waited....normal I am sure.

She came back, told me to do the following ....

Upgrade my AOL Browser to 128 Bit [kool](runs on top of IE4 because this is win98)

I asked, are you sure you want to do this?

Yes mr Last, if you do this it should correct it. [good use of should].

Do you understand that this would reinstall IE4?

You will upgrade your browser...

you DO understand that IE4 is intregrated into the win98 OS?

I have been told that this will work.

Great....thanks. Any other options besides this?

This will correct what your problem is.

Sure, I will try that. Thanks.

This was unbelieveable.....anyone else have this happen. AOL techies...sorry, (not really working for AOL)

Anyways....

I know, I am a tech. I work for a contract outfit (like many techs) and the major ISP that I work for (cannot say there name because of legal issues)

WE DONT KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING...most of us dont, not by stupidity, but by lack of info leacked by out company(s).

Danny.

I was teaching a group of new office specialist to perform

some basic Netware supervisor functions. I wanted to teach

them how to salvage delated files so I had them create a few

files. Then I said "Now go to the DOS prompt of the

home directory and 'type delete star dot star'."

One woman called to me and said "I'm getting an error

message". When I looked I found she had typed (literally)

"delete star dot star".

While working for a big Japanise company I get a call from product testing,

Tech: Good Morning tech Support

User: Good Morning, I've spilt tea on my keyboard, what should I do?

Tech: Thats o.k, keyboards are pretty sturdy things, take it over to a tap and gebtley run water over the keys, then place the keyboard in a warm dry place. OK.

User: O.K thank you.

3 hours later the product testing manager walks in looking very cross.

He turns round to all the tech support staff and says

"Who told my secretary to wash my laptop under the sink!"

Thanks!

I work for a company that does Tech support for 10 ISP's. Not only do I answer the tech calls I also answer the email that comes in. We receive many odd-ball email. This one especially got the tech center laughing:

Tech Support:

I need help with this, you know what it is. How do I use it?

Customer

I posted it on our memo board with the comment:

Thank you for emailing Psychic Friends Technical Support.

*HUM HUM HUM* Your problem is now fixed. Have a nice day.

Some people just don't need new technology! I used to sell

office equipment and people seem to want tech support from

their dealer.

Lady customer:

How do I hook up my new fax?

Me:

First you need to plug it into an outlet. Then you will

disconnect the phone so you can...

(CLICK)

She hung up. Her husband called back and explained she

didn't realize disconnecting the phone from the wall would

cut her off.

(smack)

Oct. 1986

I get this service call to repair a couple of Columbia PC's

at San Quentin prison. I walk to the front gate with my tool case and this guard stops me to search my case. After

showing him the correct paper work he asks if I know about the hostage situation here at the prison. By now I'm thinking what the hell have I got myself into here. He explains to me that "If I get taken hostage, the state will

try to help me but I'm basically on my own!

I work in a major brokerage house and had this call from a

senior manager at who was at home and trying to dial in.

His secretary passed me the call saying that he could read his

e-mail but could not open any files from his L: drive.

Me: Hello, I understand your having problems with your L drive

SM: Yes I can't access it, I get all the letters up to i

but I need L, I need to access my files now....

(Much swearing and slagging off of computers/IT dept etc)

Me: OK I'll help sort it out, are you in Explorer or File Manager

SM: File Manager

Me: OK, what do you see under the menu bar

SM: I see some icons.

Me: OK under that there are some letters

SM: Yeah, a,c,e,f,i but I need L

Me: OK that last letter isn't an i it's a lower case l.

SM: er, OK thanks

(click)

As one of the few people in my dorm who actually *knows* anything about computers, I'm consulted on a regular basis to help install software, remove 'viruses' and add hardware, etc.

One night I went upstairs to help a friend of mine

install an Ethernet card on her laptop, which she hadn't

been able to do. I went through the installation of the

software with her, following the windows wizard, and the

installation went fine. Then we went to adjust the settings

so that she could connect to the network. I became

frustrated VERY quickly, going through her control panel

settings for 'dial-up' access, when that wasn't what we

wanted. Finally, I looked at her desktop, to try to edit

the settings through the Network Neighborhood icon. Imagine

my surprise when I discovered that she DIDN'T HAVE a Network

Neighborhood Icon.

When I asked where it was, she responded that her computer

didn't come with one. I just looked at her, knowing that Windows

installs that automatically. The problem was solved 2 hours later

with a long-distance call to California- her father had deleted

everything that he felt she wouldn't need to use while at college.

This also explained why her computer couldn't find Office 97.

My dorm has a computer liason who is responsible for

maintaining the computer lab downstairs.

Needless to say, she knows nothing about computers- I have no

idea why she was elected, there being four Computer Science majors

in the dorm.

I was in the lab the other night helping a friend word-proccess a paper

(same friend who's father deleted Office 97) when the computer

liason came in. She'd had a report of a virus on one of the IBM's.

These are old IBM's, running windows 3.1 and starting in DOS.

She took one look at the computer and went to go call the computer

service desk. As I heard her say something about a 'Defragmentation Virus', I

looked over at the screen of the computer to see defrag running, doing

exactly what it was supposed to- defragmenting the computer.

I wonder how hard the service tech laughed- I was rolling on the floor.

Quite a while ago, I was working for a company with a niche

market in retail. I got a call at 4:55 EST from a woman in

New Mexico (a few hours behind). Her printer (dot matrix)

was acting funny: it would print for a while, and then stop.

She'd turn it off, and then on, and it would print for a

while and then stop. Since we needed to shut down for the

day, I promised that I would examine her configuration (we

has files on each client) and call her back first thing

her time.

The next day, I looked at her file and figured that the

problem was wit hprinter flow control - it was set for

handshaking and should have been set for XON/XOFF. Before

I could call her, she called me:

She: Guess what, I figued it out!

(I knew she wasn't too technical, so I was pleased that

she had taken an interest in these things).

Me: What did you find?

She: It's the 'W'.

Me: The what?

She: The 'W'.

(this has got to be good...)

Me: Can you elaborate?

She: Sure! You know how the 'W' is wider than all the

other letters?

Me: (suspiciously) yes...

She: Well, it's getting stuck in the printer cable, and

none of the other letters can get by. I've tried

reducing the font, straightening the cable, but

nothing works. Can you help me?

(At this point, I put her on hold and laughed. My boss

poked his head out from his cubicle, and I told him. He

laughed. I regained composure, and continued:)

Me: That's good work, but let me try an alternate strategy.

(we then went through changine the flow control setting).

She: Hey, it works! See, I knew I was right.

Me: Pardon?

She: Well, we changed the X-thingy, and 'X' is the letter

after 'W'.

Me: Glad things are working, talk to you later.

When I was working for a company that serviced the retail

industry, October was a busy month. That was the time that

the stores would place their Christmas orders, based on

the previous year's sales and modified by the current

trends. Since our software tracked this all, we were a

critical part. No surprise that I go the following panicked

call:

She: All my reports are coming out zero.

(this is bad)

Me: Fax me a copy of the report.

(Indeed, all zeroes, everywhere. I dialed into their system

to look at the report, and it was all zeroes. I ran the

report myself: all zeroes. I'm starting to get very worried

about the possibility of a major meltdown - either on their

system, or by my management if I couldn't fix it. I looked

at the data files, and they are empty. I looked at the

daily transaction journaling files, and THEY were empty.

This is very very bad. I had a suspicion...)

Me: (name), by any chance have you folks been *entering*

the daily data?

She: No, we don't have time for that!

Me: How do you expect to get data out if you don't put data

*in*?

She: It's a computer, it's supposed to know all that stuff.

Me: It's not going to work that way...

She: Can't you just wave your magic wand and make it better?

Me: I can wave my magic wand, but *this* isn't what is

going to be made better... (hang up)

....I have seena nd heard some good ones in my time but this was a gotchya!

Tech: Hello (ISP) how may i help you?

Cust: Hello I'm having problems with attchments

Tech: What sort of problem?

Cust: when i download an attchment it says that the program to open it with is too old, and do i want to down load the current

Version, i do this and It gose to the windows log on screan and all my icons are gone.

Tech: (Huumm, wonder what could be doing that?) Ok, what are you using to get E-mail?

Cust: I don't know.

Tech: (I don't like the sound of that) Ok what Web browser are you using?

Cust: I don't know

Tech: (this is not going well) Ok what operating system are you running? I.E. win95/win98?

Cust: Oh Win95.

Tech: (great were getting somewhere) Ok do you want to go to start..

Cust: I can't.

Tech: why's that?

Cust I'm not at that computer.

Tech: ok can you go to that computer?

Cust: No its not here.

Tech: ok when you get to that computer can you phone us back and we will help you out.

Cust: I cant do that ither

Tech: and why is that?

Cust: It's not my computer.

Tech: (Son of a ^&*(%#$%^) Ok can you get the person who owns the computer to phone?

Cust: No they don't live in the (country) they live in (country).

Tech: well sorry there is nothing I can do for you with out having you at the computer.

Cust: Well why did I phne you then....(load click)

........Yes why did she phone??

I do support for a newspaper, and my normal shift covers

deadline. When I started my job, I was told that the Sports

department had a problem with computers crashing randomly

and corrupting open Quark documents. This often meant

rebuilding an entire layout on deadline.

The News department had a similar problem, but with much

less frequency and often with little or no damage due to

good backup habits.

The inconsistent, sporadic nature of the problem made it

difficult to troubleshoot. It was hard to explain why it

would affect Sports and not News. I reinstalled the Sports

workstation from scratch, to no avail. I also ruled out

network issues. I chalked it up to user error and went on

to other projects, but the problem persisted. There were

loud howls about being late due to computer problems and the

sports department hotly contested my original diagnosis.

It wasn't until it happened twice in one night, when I was

near the desk working on another problem and I heard the

paginator say, "I did it again and it crashed! It does that

every time!" that I was able to pin her down. I demanded to

know precisely what she was trying to do, and she said she

was just using the shortcut keys to delete some text.

Quark X-Press (wonderful program, really) uses control, alt,

and shift, in a variety of combinations, as shortcut keys.

Our sports paginator had been using control-shift-alt to

select something, and was holding those keys down with one

hand while she hit delete with the other. Being a Windows 3.1

user, she rebooted the computer every time. When she left

not long after the diagnosis, she still said that she was

a professional, highly trained in the program, and we had a

strange setup in order to have a computer that would do that.

Today it was reported to me from the marketing dept that and I quote "microsoft is dead" this is alegedly due to the fact that some one cant open MS exchange. so it must be true!

With greetings to all other, suffering techies!

Some background informations:

I am doing support for scientific software, at a company in

Germany. We also provide support for a nearby ISP, who does

also sell a third-party GUI-program, to create User-Websites

w/o need to have much skills. This program is available as

English and German version.

Sure, that many of those users will use it, many w/o any

basic knowledge about the Internet and/or a computer!!

Usually, my colleagues do handle those calls, but when they

were out to lunch, I did help out at their extension.

:-)

Now, let´s start with the stories about what I called **PU**

(i.e. PowerUsers)! I wiped out out all involved company- and

product-names.

PU1:

didn´t buy *web-space* at this provider, because he considered his local

harddisk being more than sufficient with 1GB!

PU2:

due to busy phonelines, he tried to sneak through to our manager/boss,

simply to ask, how to center a text-object! Well, he already had found

*center-text* as option, but didn´t even try and called, being insecure.

Well, he couldn´t speak Engl either. (But imho, *centered* and the German

*zentriert* do differ soooo much!)

PU3:

was very happy, that the program did **compress* his site so

efficiently!!! (Sure, that he had only uploaded the INDEX.HTM to his

provider!)

PU4: (calling himself a real Webmaster!!!)

... did ask, what *local-host* and *proxy*, *url !!* etc. means (he missed

such vital informations in the online-help. I assume, it´s there.), before

he could use the program purpose-intended! (latter literally

translated from his pseudo-techie-management-gibberish)!

PU5:

did install also a second PC as local server, to check before uploading

(internal test-browsing with IE or Navigator is possible). But although

he did use the exact(!) sample-settings from the online-help, even

character by character: it didn´t run, never would, preview always

complaining about host-not-found-something! (The help mentioned s.th.

like: ***insert your local-host-url here, e.g. www.Xyzxyz.com*** !

Yep1:Xyzxyz is the manufacturer of an included second program, an

html-editor and yep2, he even typed this cryptical **e.g.**!).

PU6:

complained about the slow performance. Performance of uploading with WS-

FTP-Pro (a completely independent other program)!!! (Some pretty colorful

background-TIFs in truecolor and 1024x786, uncompressed!) might look nice,

but explained!

PU7:

didn´t neither own a modem, nor an ISDN-card for a phone-connection. And

in addition, he even hadn´t bought his webaccess, too. Just pressed a button

for **publish**, an imho misleading-named option, which only collects all

stuff on the harddisk in the upload-directory.

PU8:

Quote(translated): What *IS* a Provi.., Provid.., Pro-whatever??

(no joke!)

PU9:

Quote(transl.): I cannot any speak English, thus I have AAAA as

provider, not BBBB(which does have a local German site!). Could you

translate all that manual stuff till Friday (i.e. hundresd of pages within

two days) and sent it to me by FAX?? Pleeease!

Besides: he had insisted in bying the most recent English version!

OK, ok, I will stop now. Cannot help myself, to start ROTFL again,

remembering those calls very well! Meanwhile, the amount of such

calls even increased!

:-D

I was mentoring with my friend at my new computer job,

and he took a pretty funny call about a software issue

...

him: Ok mam, We only support hardware, your extended service

warranty will only cover physical damage to the computer

customer: oh so if it were to get struck by lightning or

something?

him: yes, lightning, even if it blew up

customer: (GASP) THEY DO THAT?

I received a call from someone in marketing - their monitor was on the fritz. Sure enough, it was flickering all the time.

As I was replacing the old monitor (removing and replacing stickynote after stickynote), they ask if there's any sensitive information that would need to be erased.

Fighting back tears, I told them it didn't.

I work as a tech support for lawyer's office and this

is a quick one.

One secretary stop me to tell me the lawyer's laptop

freezed so bad that he cannot even do shut off when he

pushes the power button.

He was not in his office (thank god!!) I said Ok, I'll

take a look at it.

I entered in his office and I could not believe my eyes on

what I saw!!!

There was this big magnet on one of the laptop's little

speaker (integrated in the system). Frustrated,I disconnect

the laptop, take off the battery and reopen the machine to

see if there was more dammage... Fortunetly (for me not him),

the HD was not touched.

Told the secretary to nerver, NEVER put a magnet on a

computer.

Back in college I had to use the dorm Mac lab for something

or other. While I was waiting for a free computer the lab

monitor gets called to one of the computers, I sorta tag

along. What did I see ?

A very frustrated lab monitor explaining to the poor girl at

the computer that folding (yes folding) a 5 1/2 floppy

and slipping it into the 3 1/4 drive just is'nt going to

work.

BEING A TECH FOR WEBTV I RECENTLY HAD A GENTLEMEN CALL IN MAD AS FIRE BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN SURFING THE WEB AND CAME ACCROSS A PAGE THAT ASKED HIM TO HIT ENTER. WELL BEING THAT ON A WEB TV THEY DON'T HAVE A KEY CALLED ENTER HE CALLED TECH SUPPORT. AFTER EXPLAINING TO THE GENTLEMEN THAT THE RETURN KEY IS THE SAME AS THE ENTER KEY HE DEMANDED TO SPEAK TO A SUPERVISOR, I WAS REALLY UNSURE OF WHY SO I ASKED. HE STATED THAT HE DID NOT BELIVE ME AND THAT IT COULD NOT BE THAT EASY. WELL AFTER SOME TIME OF TRYING TO GET HIM TO BELIVE ME I FINALLY GOT A SUPERVISOR AND HE INFORMED THE CUSTOMER OF EXACT SAME THING. AT THIS POINT THE CALLER FELT REALLY DUMB. WHEN ASKED IF THERE WAS ANYTHING ELSE WE COULD HELP HIM WITH HE JUST KINDA MUTTER NO I THINK THAT ANSWERS THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO TOOK UP SO MUCH OF MY TIME. WHAT HE WAS MEANING IS THAT AT THAT TIME OF DAY HE PROBABLY WAITED ON HOLD FOR ME AT LEAST 15-20 MINUTES, THEN OTHER 10 WITH ME AND SO ON AND SO FORTH.

When I worked as a tech in an accounting software, I got a call from

a customer. The initial assesment was that the network drive

Shortcut was, for some reason, lost. I decided to help the

customer map a new network drive (This was with Win95).

Me : Ok, using your mouse, right-click on Nettwork Neiborhood, you should

see a small menu appear.

Customer : Right-click?

Me: Yes, using the right side button of your mouse, click once.

Customer: Which hand should I use to get that button.......

Just a quick story during a chat with an internet developper friend of mine. This has taken place in a bar around 10 PM, my friend and I are discussing computers, his girlfriend acts as she does understand something but is probably convinced that a gigabyte must have be done by somebody with a big mouth:

Me: "My company purchased a new file server recently, HD capacity of 24 Gigabyte"

My friend : "What kind of work are you doing on this machine to require such a capacity, this probably represents something as 150.000 phone books"

Her, looking a little puzzled: "Is that true, yellow or white pages?"

No comments.

I work as a techie for a large computer company. We get all sorts. One problem was that we coudn't get the fax modem to work on a particular machine. An updated driver solved the problem no bother, but...

Me "Good afternoon, welcome to xxxxxx, can I help you"

User "Well I can send or recieve faxes anymore"

Me "OK, well what has changed since you last sent a fax"

User "Well I got this disk from you, put it on and the fax worked fine. The other day I was out and bought a book and it mentions Windows Messaging. I didn't have Windows Messaging installed on my machine"

Me "yes, that's right, the setup removes it"

User "So I though that if I removed the driver for the modem then I would get Windows messaging back. But now the fax won't work"

Figure out what my reply was...

I was working tech support for a small university, where one

woman was promoted and subsequently moved from the first floor

to the second floor of the building. Soon afterwards, she

complained that her computer was running more slowly since

it was moved upstairs.

We checked the machine out for faulty hardware connections,

fragmented hard drive, viruses, the whole nine yards.

Everything seemed to be just fine with her computer.

She wasn't convinced. She insisted that her computer ran

more slowly upstairs than it did downstairs. We even went

so far as to have a tech consultant stand behind her and

watch her do some of her everyday computing tasks.

She wasn't doing anything that would affect the performance

of her machine.

Finally, she confided her deepest suspicions to us: could

there be some kind of "field" upstairs that was affecting

her computer?

One of the consultants, who had recently been offered another

position, and who had nothing to lose by being a smarta**,

went upstairs with his toy Star Trek Tricorder, and started

"scanning" the room upstairs. He nodded thoughtfully as he

took the readings, pointing the tricorder around the room.

"Yep, Mary," he finally said, slowing down his tricorder

sweep. "There _is_ a field in here." His tricorder came to

a stop, pointing directly at her. "And it's coming from

you!"

The calls from this user stopped immediately afterwards.

In the mid-eighties in the U.K., a close friend of mine was the manager of a very big music store in the Midlands. The hot ticket for music sequencing at the time was the Atari 1040 ST (built-in MIDI ports) w/ C-Lab's 'Creator' software. A member of an internationally known band (*just for you chaps, I'll tell you it was UB40) had just bought the set-up and couldn't get it to work... computers were a new experience for musicians as evidenced by this story. I swear it's true.

Mngr: How can I help you?

Cust: I can't get my computer to work.

Mngr: What seems to be the problem?

Cust: I dunno... it won't load the program.

He leads the customer through various tries, etc.

Mngr: Perhaps you've got a defective disk. Send me a copy and I'll check it out.

Cust: Ok.

Not long after, my friend received an envelope in the mail. He opened it and found the customer had indeed sent him a copy: a photocopy of the disk.

A teacher with a new NT workstation complained that she had been unable to use her new computer for the whole class period after a tech had worked on it because he left his name was in the username field ...

I have been in the industry for 5 years, and have been working on computers all my life. I have received some of the best support and I have received some of the worst. I have supported some of the stupidest beings that have graced this planet and I have suported some of the most intelligent computer users. I have seen me things, nonetheless this particular incident keeps my coworkers and myself baffled.

I was working as a technical consultant for upper level management for some large entertaiment companies. A CEO was having trouble with his TO***BA T***a and it's particular PCMCIA slot. I had worked it over and had come to the conclusion that the slot was physically broken on the board. Most likely due to a fall. I wanted to cover my bases, so I called TO***BA and after exhaustive explaining was told it **HAD** to be a microsoft driver problem with Card and Socket Services or Cardbus. I relunctantly called Microsoft to satisfy TO***BA's whim. I was by this time 4 hours into something I have already diagnosed and was somewhat irate with Microsoft's customer support. I finally reached a "technician" (I use this word litely) and began describing my problem in what seemed to me fairly basic language considering I was supposed to be talking to a PCMCIA/DRIVER specialist. At the end of my lengthy explanation schpeal, he said and I qoute, "Whow! I don't know, let me get some help." At this point I burst out laughing. Of all the things to say to a customer, paying per minute for his call, "Whoa!" would not have been my first choice. He then put me on with someone else, who cleary could not diagnose my problem either. At any rate, I returned the laptop to the manufacturer and they returned a restored computer.

All I know is that next time I have to fix someone's problem, I will tried not to use any of the following words in my reply: "Duh," "Huh?," "What's that?," "Oops," "Why do I always get the hard ones," or "&#(*%#ing piece of crap." I would encourage the rest of you Support personel to follow that simple rule.

Here's a quickie:

I was in my hall of my college dorm last year, and another girl down the hall has this problem. Because I installed something on her computer for her a few weeks ago she thinks I'm a computer genious, and asks me all her "tough" questions.

Her: Hey, can you help me, I can't check my e-mail.

Me: I guess, what's wrong with it?

Her: I don't know. I tried it a bunch of times, and it just isn't working.

Me: When did it stop working?

Her: Just now.

Me: What is the error message?

(we go over to her computer, and it doesn't accept her password)

Me: Hit the Caps Lock key and try it again.

(solves her problem)

Here's a classic. Customer calls in, his 5¼ floppy drive isn't working properly. He's got Windows 98 installed, but he can't find the cd, torn the house apart looking. He has another one on order. Anyways, sure enough, floppy doesn't show up in device manager. Can't do much without the cd, decided to check the bios. Turned on floppy b: in there and hey, a floppy drive detected!

But here's the kicker. Tried to have him do a test read on it...but hmmm, the floppy won't go in...looks like something's in there...can't quite get it...honey? You know what this is in here? I dunno...looks like a cd...

While working for an International Chemical Company we were called by a CEO..

'Why has the company E-mail system been down for a two weeks??' (It was based on a big central server)

Gasps of disbelief - down for 10 Seconds and 600 users scream. We sent someone to investigate....

and discovered that the power lead had falled out of his PC!

I'm not a tech, but I do play one on TV. Not really.

About two years ago, I decided to hang a scanner off my new

PC at home. This was back in the days when you paid $350

for a scanner you can buy for $0.59 on a blister pack at

the computer store checkout line today.

Being a conscientious computer user, I thought it would be

a good idea to put a SCSI terminator at the end of the SCSI

device chain I had to install for the new scanner. I did a

little research and discovered I could put a passive SCSI

terminator between the SCSI cable and the scanner's main

SCSI port. So, I'm off to the stuporstore for the SCSI

terminator.

Since my employer, the Really Big Aerospace Company, has a

deal at the local outlet of a big computer chain (name

stars with COMP and ends with the initials of a famous

country...hint : it's NOT CompUSSR), I thought I'd try to

get the SCSI terminator there. Basically, we just show our

work id at the corporate purchase desk and the store, in

turn, promises to give us some anesthetic before hitting us

over the head and robbing us blind, rather than just beating

us senseless like they do for everyone else.

It's a Saturday, so all the bright little high-schoolers are

on duty, each and every one proud to be part of the

technological revolution, wearing their bright red shirts

like Starfleet security men from the 60's, ready to be shot,

crushed, or discombobulated to save Captain Kirk or

Mr. Spock from a hangnail.

Knowing that SCSI is mostly an Apple thing (at that time,

this was true), I wandered over to the tiny corner of the

store reserved for Apple stuff. I find an isle-end display

with all sorts of Apple cables, adaptors, etc. Since, to my

knowledge, "SCSI is SCSI", I knew a passive SCSI terminator

for Apple should also work well for a PC SCSI connection;

all I can find is a $50 active-type terminator, not the $15

passive one I'm looking for. So, as a last resort, I flag

down a pimply-faced little redshirt and ask him where I

might find "a passive SCSI terminator".

After a few minutes of confused noises from Junior (remember

those sounds Butthead made - Uh huh....hu ...uhhhhhhh ...

huh huh... ?), I managed to pry from his rusty bear-trap of

a brain that he had no clue what I was asking for. "Is

there anyone here who might be a better choice to talk to ?"

I ask with wasted breath. Junior tells me he'll go look and

try to find someone; I figure he'll send an assistant

manager or at least someone old enough to vote.

A few mintes later, a new pizza-faced little Martian wanders

up to me and says he was sent to help. I ask Dexter here

for a "passive SCSI terminator". He begins walking all the

way across the store toward the hig-value items section

(expensive but small stuff that would be too easy to steal

if you could actually touch it). I'm thinking "Maybe it's

available at the counter .. but wait ... why would they

protect a $15 item like Fort Knox Gold, but leave the $50

version of the same item on the floor for anyone to pocket

and walk out with ?"

Midway into this store trek, Dexter stops dead in the middle

of the PC games section. Pointing to a bottom shelf loaded

with obnoxious PC games of every type and kind, he manages

to wrench these words from the grey mush inside his pointy

little head :

"These are all the Terminator games we got."

I smiled, thoroughly stunned. I then thanked him, watched

him skip away to sell a computer to some poor underinformed

idiot, and promtly left the building for fear that such

incompetence might be catching.

I swear ... it REALLY happened.

I am sure that you won't believe this, but this is a true

story. A client of mine had bought a CD writer, and I told

him that he could write MP3s on the CD instead of CD audio.

This way he can put more songs on one CD. Some days ago he

called me and told that:

C: I wrote some MP3 files on the CD, and they don't want to

play in my radio!

T: Oh, at the moment I don't know a radio that can play MP3

files from a CD...

C: But I loaded the CD and it said that there were something

on there (if you put a data CD on your radio, it'll tell

you in minutes the size of your data)

Later he asked me if there's a way to put more than 74

minutes of audio on an audio CD.........

I worked in the school computer labs for all 4 years I was

in college. We had a dedicated lab for Autocad R12, with

Autocad and all it's associated files on one dedicated

540mb hard drive. The students in the classes would usually

use the same computer throughout the entire class, so you

could track down problems to one or two users, and this

particular pc was used a woman in the afternoon class.

Well, one evening a studen tried to use the computer and

Autocad would not run, apparently due to a lack of hard

drive space for the swap file. The results from Checkdisk,

92mb in lost clusters, 400k free on the hard drive. This

usually only happened if the power went out or the computer

locked and had to be reset, which dumped all of the

contents of the swap file to the hard disk as a lost cluster.

Ran Checkdisk with the /f option, fixed the problem, Autocad

ran fine. Later that week, I just happened to be in the

lab when she was leaving, and her routine answered the

mystery. Instead of typing exit or quit, she saved her

drawing to disk, and shut the computer off, causing the

lost cluster problem.

I waited for her to leave, turned the computer back on, ran

Checkdisk, and within the week, she had managed to eat up

another 20mb of the hard drive. Fixed the problem, again,

and I decided to tell the instructor, mainly because I

didn't want to run Checkdisk a couple of times a week on

that pc. I thought he was going to lose it when I told him,

it seems he had a lot of problem with her not following

directions, and then asking stupid questions. Next class,

I made a point of being near the door when he started, and

he gave one of those general chew out the class speeches.

He told the class what had happened without naming names,

and told them that if he had a another report of this

happening again, he would fail the student, no questions

asked.

Needless to say, I never had that problem again.