Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I was working the phone this day, and as the phone rings, I pick it up.

Me: Welcome to Blabla, how may I help you?

Customer: I can't check my mail!

Me: Sir, what exactly happens when you try to check your mail?

Customer: it says something about unknown host.

Me: Go to the mailserver configuration, and tell me what it says on hostname.

Customer: it says mail.blabla.no

Me: Strange, that should be correct. Could you spell it please?

Customer: Sure, m-a-l-e-.-b-l-a-b-l-a-.-n-o

This guy had me laughing for days! Apparently he had just corrected the setting to the proper way of spelling "male"!

Once we had to reboot one of our Netware servers during working hours. After 45 minutes of sending broadcast messages "Please shutdown your computers for 15 minutes" and phoning these folks, who won't shutdown, and answering the calls "May I work now? 15 minutes have passed already? Sprry, no..." of these, who obediently shut their machines down, we finally rebooted the server, and the last call was great:

Me: Hi, what's the problem?

Him: Can i work with the network now?

Me: You can.

Him: But I see only C and D in my Explorer.

Me: You have to restart. (Logging off and on again is too complicated for most of our users)

Him: I did! Nothing happened!

Me: Try again.

Him: Must I restart Windows, or Word is enough?

Me: ...

Once upon a time in a technical support department of

a small computer company in the beautiful town of Leiden.

a strange sound was filling the room. A mouse ran away as

Niels, the local computer nerd, woke up with a loud yawn.

He looked around, but couldn't locate where the noise came

from. After spending several minutes crawling through the

papers on his desk, Niels eventually found the old dusty

telephone. He took up the receiver and said, sleepy but

friendly: "Computer Supplies Service, how can I help you?"

It must have been only a few seconds before a female voice

on the other end of the line spoke, but to Niels it seemed like

minutes. In spite of the large cloud of dust coming out

of the receiver, which felt like a hand grabbing him around

his throat, Niels recognized the voice immediately. Finally

it became clear to Niels that it was his mother's voice

that he heard, yelling all kinds of difficult-to-understand

words and sentences. In a sudden lack of brain-activity he

lost the control over his hands, and the receiver dropped

onto the wooden floor. But the loud bump this caused brought

Niels back into reality. Inside his mind the words he had

heard began to form sentences as pieces of a puzzle. "Son,"

he recalled, "you forgot your sandwiches darling!". Soon

Niels started to realize the importance of what he had just

heard. Not bothering about anything else anymore he ran

outside and jumped onto his horse. Soon he was nothing more

than a pixel on the horizon.

I was working as Internal PC support for a large corporation.

I got a phone call from a relatively new guy in the Accounting

department.

Accounting guy: Hi, I am having a problem with my Lotus Notes.

Me: Ok, what's the problem exactly?

AG: Well, all my mail is gone.

Me: Well what exactly did you do?

AG: Well I store all my mail in the TRASH folder and....

Me: Wait a minute...you store your mail in Trash?

AG: Sure! you know, for Archiving purposes....

Me: This means, every time you shut down Notes, you get a

message saying: "You have 349 notes in Trash, do you want to

delete them?"...

AG: Uh yeah....

Me: Why didn't you use the Archiving folder to store your

mail?

AG: Uh...where is it?

Me: It's right below the Trash Folder...

AG: Oh yeah, so can I get my mail back....?

Me: You deleted it.

AG: but.... etc etc etc

An IT professional I get called on to help out neighbours, pals etc with PC problems. This particular day Andy needed help sorting out a printer problem and getting a CV written.

I sorted out his printer problem and then kicked off Word CV Wizard. At the first few screens the computer already knew his name and address 'cos he'd entered them when he installed and registered the software. He'd forgotten this of course and was much surprised that the computer knew his name. Questioning me I spun him some yarn about how good Word was and how it was probably hooked into the internet to get his personal details etc etc

He was suitably impressed and pushed on formatting the CV. When the Wizard finished he was really crestfallen to find an empty shell of a CV, he really thought that Word was going to write the entire CV for him based on data culled from the net.

After a few minutes the penny dropped (nobody can be THAT stupid and breath without assistance !) and he realised he'd been wound up, luckily he saw the joke 'cos he's a big bloke!!

A friend of mine did a variety of jobs in computing including helpdesk

support and on site maintenance work.

One day, he had a phonecall while manning the helpdesk from

a user saying that their brand new PC wouldn't turn on.

Looking them up in the user database, he found that they had a dell

PC with the tool free case (for those who don't know Dell cases -

just press the two release buttons on the side and lift the case up)

You will find out why this is significant later.

After the usual troubleshooting involving power leads,

mains switches, power lights and various other things, he

found that the case was rotated 90 degrees to normal

(so the side of the case with the cooling slots was facing

forward) and the user was pressing one of the case release

buttons to try and switch the computer on!

Hi, I work on the phones at a major computer

manufactuter. (Think BLUE..ok?)

Yesterday, a gentleman calls saying he is having

problems with his laptop that was preinstalled with

Windows 95. He originally had a problem with the

floppy drive where it would only work in DOS mode

would not work in Windows..safe or normal mode.

So he takes it to his friendly local computer shop

they decide to fix it by installing Windows 98.

If you know anything about Windows 98, it will not

fix existing Windows 95 problems. Also upstalling

98 on a laptop creates its own problems since it

requires bios upgrades and removal of cardbus drivers.

At any rate the brain surgeon at the repair shop

installs the 98 upgrade and when the install prompts

to save the previous version of the operating system,

he clicks NO! So there will be no going back to the

previous OS. When he was asked..he said he installed.

Windows 98 6 or 7 times before and didn't have a

problem. Guess that means there will never be a

problem.

Idiot!

Then to make it even worse, they went to the Windows

95 cabinet files and tried to run setup, hosing the

system even more.

Can we say "Back up your data and get your system

recovery cd out"? All this for a floppy drive that

would not work under Windows 95 that we might have

been able to fix over the phone and avoid the

entire mess to begin with.

I worked as a tech in a retail computer store. Where to this day I think you get the weirdest people. This story proves my statement...

This guy comes in one day to tell me that he was walking by the store, and was wondering about an upgrade for his computer. He wanted to make sure that I would work on it for him. I said "Sure, as long as it is an IBM compatible I would be glad to work on it."

Well, the next day when I returned from my lunch break my boss told me that the man stopped by and dropped off his computer. I told him that I didn't see it on the shelf. With a dirty grin, told me that it was outside. Puzzled, I went out to take a look at it.

It was COVERED with CRUSTY dog urine! It was by far the most disgusting thing I have ever seen!

Interesting ending to the story... I called the guy and told him that he couldn't pay me enough money to work on his computer, but that I would sell him a new one. He bought a new one. He told us to trow away the old one.

My boss, the cheep skate he is, replaced the case of the computer, and re-sold the computer to someone else. I don't know if he disinfected it first.

A friend of mine who bought a second hand pc phoned me up asking me if i could repair it.

"Whats the problem" i asked

"my pipelines burst" he replied

"What do you mean?" i asked, confused.

"when i switch it on it says cache- pipeline burst, does this mean i've a burst pipeline cache or something!"

After explaning that it is safe to leave the computer on and explaning what a bios is i couldnt help but wonder if he should have a computer at all!

In November 1997 I was shopping for a new PC, my Mac having outlived it's usefulness. Not having much money, I picked the cheapest place that had an ad in a local free computer zine (I'll call it El Cheapo Computer Company). It turned out that El Cheapo was a storefront operation in a strip mall in a relatively prosperous part of town, the type of place that has three guys assembling computers in a back room and installing software from a master disk. So I got my new computer home, and not knowing anything about Win95 downloaded and installed Trumpet Winsock, which for somme reason fried my modem driver so I couldn't call out. So I took the computer back to El Cheapo and they promised to fix it-over the Thanksgiving holiday. So I get my computer back, and sure enough it still won't call out. I call them and they assure me it's fixed. Being suspicious, I decide to reinstall the driver myself from the provided disk. Sure enough, that did the trick. I have no idea what they did with my computer, if anything-maybe they didn't even touch it.

Actually I don't work in any techsupport but my story is related to the subject. Its all about networks. So my friends and I, we decided to built a network in Moscow. Now It includes few users in three houses. But now I'm in Finland and information exchange is only via e-mail. Suddenly i received such e-mail from one of the user:

Hi Max! we found out that there is another network in our house. We want to join our netwrks. So is is possible to attach second t-connector to previously installed one?

I was a little bit hmmm... (i think u got an idea) by this question. So my first reply: Yes, u can attach up to five t-connectors. After I realized that that guy really could do it, my second reply was: PLEASE!!! WAIT FOR ME!!! JUST FOUR WEEKS AND I'll DO EVERYTHING BY MYSELF!!!

I work as a lab consultant at a major university, and there

is no end to the bewildering lack of techno-savvy the users

here present. Many of our problems consist of rather simple

problems, but once in a while we get some real gems.

Today, a staff member in the Art History Department came into

my lab and said:

C: "Oh good! You are here today! I'm having trouble with that

thing again. The thing isn't showing up at all and I did

what I was suppossed to do."

Me: "Okay. Just give me a moment please."

I then walked to the other side of the lab and took a deep

breath before returning.

Me: "Okay, so what is the problem?"

C: "Well, I can't get those scans to appear on the thing and

I read the thing with step #5, and it isn't right."

Using my extensive skills (hah!) and my previous knowledge of

this users' attempts to make an image viewable on the web

(I had spent an hour with her the week before, teaching her

exactly what I was about to teach her again) I tackled the

problem, and might have kept her at bay for another week...

Needless to say, this woman wouldn't know a computer if

it flew into her cranium. But the crowning achivement was

when she was struggling with the mouse.

C: (violently shaking mouse in the air) "I can't get

this to ever work!"

Me: (supressing a giggle) "May I see?"

(the mouse operates just fine...)

Me: "I don't seem to see a problem. What is the matter?"

C: (moving the mouse to the end of the mousepad) "Well,

every time it won't reach to that part!" (shakes

mouse in the air again, looking under it.)

Me: (trying to take mouse back) "See, you can pick it up..."

(user grabs mouse, beins trying to operate it in mid air!!!)

Me: "NO! On the mouse pad!!"

enjoy!!!

--doug

Here is another good one:

This tale doesnt pick on users, but on ourselves.

It was related to me by a collegue who works in our network dept.

One bright morning one of the resident network specialists was in a bit of a hurry,

and didnt have time to shave before he went to work.

He had the presence of mind to bring his shaving kit to work, but forgot the rest of his brain at home.

When he got to the server room he had difficulties finding a place to plug his shaving machine in, so he promptly pulled

the first plug he found out of its socket.

He then continued to finish his shaving and went back to his desk.....all the time oblivious to blinking lights and phones which had started ringing.

Someone ran into the server room and shouted "Who unplugged the damn Hub???"

A beet red tech raised his hand and wished he could shirnk into the carpet...

I had worked tech support for an anonymous ISP, one of the big three let's say that. The servers for this ISP allowed flight attendants and pilots of major airlines to connect remotely, from home, to their company's mainframes without having to travel to the airports to do things. Now, on our level, we couldn't logon to said mainframes for security reasons...

well, while doing support for said ISP, we had a couple of flight attendants that called constantly. I mean, at last count there were almost 100 calls logged for this couple alone. Well, they, like other users I dealt with, had trouble accessing their mainframe for their airline. Well, we'd told them to d&r our software, d&r the special software the ISP supplied to access their mainframe multiple times. My colleagues had tried various things with these two and to no avail. Finally, one day, I had gotten these two on a call, and my cube mate shuddered and laughed because he knew that it would be a lengthy call for me. well, we finally got senior technicians in to figure out what was going on. they changed the ISP password, so that the technicians could logon to their account and access the mainframe. well, I was holding, waiting for the senior techs to do their thing, I advised the customer it would be a while, went back to holding. the senior tech came back and told me, "You have my permission to give them a swift kick in the @$$!!".

It turns out, the two flight attendants, THOUGHT, they were logging onto the pilot's mainframe, but that is what they were SUPPOSED to be seeing. the two never called back about the same issue.

Phone rings. I pick it up.

Me: "ISP tech support. Can I help you?"

Caller: "Yeah, this is Mr. Ash from Balder D. Ash Computer

Consultants, and one of my customers is one of your customers.

I'm setting up her new system right now, and I want you to

help me."

Me: "Sure, I can do that."

I expect him to start asking me intelligent questions, like

"What are your server names and DNS numbers," and "How are

IPs resolved." Instead...

Caller: "Well, aren't you going to walk me through it?"

Me: (my opinion of him revised downward) "OK. Have you ever

set up a computer for Internet before?"

Caller: (getting hot under the coller) "This is the founder

of Balder D. Ash Computer Consultants!"

Me: (unimpressed) "Have you ever set up a computer for

Internet before?"

Caller: "Yes!"

Me: "Great. What kind of computer is it?"

Caller: "What does that have to do with anything?!"

Me: "Well, sir, I have to know what operating system you're

running so I can tell you where to go and what to do when

you get there...."

I keep telling people, all it takes to become

a consultant in this business are business cards and a lot

of balls. This guy proved it.

It had been one of those long days and I was really tired. Part of this story is my fault, however most people would have understood what I meant. An older gentleman was having with his Dial Up Networking so I was walking him through the settings to ensure everything was set up properly. I often get tired of always advising people to click on OK or click on next so sometimes I just tell them "say ok" We had finished checking everything and just needed to close up by clicking ok at the bottom of every screen and I mistakingly said to him Just say ok for the messages at the bottom of the screen and do that until Dial Up Networking closes and you just see your desktop. Of course the inevitable happened which did take me out of my funk. I hear this weak voice getting louder and louder by the minute as he keeps saying Ok, Ok I said OK!!!! I still feel a little bad about that one.

One of the things I do for tech support is pick up all the voice mail at night. I do this until all hours. The message that is left on the machine tells people the company is closed but if they will leave a message, someone will get back to them. Of course there are a lot of hang ups and a lot of people screaming four letter words because they are angry we aren't open and we told them we had 24 hour tech support so where are we. That one I never understand because all they need to do is follow the directions and leave a message and they will get their tech support. The ones I love the most are the really angry people who swear and carry on and then when you talk to them, the problem turns out to be something they've done wrong. For Instance..

Caller:

My name is blanky blank and I'm very angry. I've been trying for four days to connect and it keeps saying invalid password. If you can't give better service than this, I'm leaving and I'm taking all my friends with me. I demand that someone call me back and explain to me what you plan on doing about this and I expect a refund for the days I could not connect."

Ok, so I know that this is probably their fault but there is always the chance that they were dialing a new phone number that was having problems so I'm not quite certain what will happen.

I call them

ME:

Can you tell me how you are connecting to the internet and what happens when you try to connect?

Customer:

What do you mean?

Me:

What button or program do you click on to connect to the internet and after you try to connect, what happens? Do you get an error message and if so, what is it?

Customer

Oh, I click on the E (internet explorer) and then type in my username and password and then it keeps saying that my password isn't correct and I haven't changed anything so I know that everything is ok here...That means it's your fault.

ME:

Ok, well, let's take a look at your dialer and see what's in there. I just want to make sure everything is filled out properly.

Customer

Fine, but everything is ok..there's nothing wrong here.

I tell them to click on My Computer, Dial Up Networking and then we get to the Internet Connection. They check everything I tell them to and strangely enough, everything is correct. Username and password must be in lower case on this system for it to work and even that was correct.

Custonmer:

See, I told you it was your fault. I want a refund.

Me:

Ok, well let's just try to connect and see what happens. Do you have a dedicated line?

Customer:

What's that?

Me:

Do you have a line just for your computer so we can talk at the same time as you are connecting?

Customer:

yes

ME;

Ok, good, then go back to my computer, dial up networking and double click on the internet connection.

I hear some noise and then there is an audible clicking on the phone and the customer starts yelling

Customer:

MAn, this stinks...now I can't even get it to connect! Your service s--ks!

Me:

Well, I can tell by the sound that your computer is on the same line as we are talking on and you will not be able to dial in until we hang up. I thought you said you had a dedicated line.

Customer:

It is dedicated to the computer when I'm using the computer and to my phone when I'm using the phone:

(sigh)

Me:

Ok, well that's why you couldn't connect just now because you do not have a dedicated phone line which means you would have a seperate phone for your computer.

Customer:

Oh

Me:

Alright, Let's just take a look at your username and password again. Maybe you had your cap locks on.

Customer:

I told you!!!! It is not my fault. There is nothing wrong. Why don't YOU PEOPLE ever admit when you're wrong? I have my username in lower case...it says wildteach@domain name.. and my pass

ME:

Excuse Me??? Did you just say your entire email address?

Customer:

Um, yeah, my username..wildteach@domain name

why?? (sounding a little unsure now)

ME:

Because that's not your username. Your username is the name BEFORE the @sign. You are typing in your entire email address which is why you cannot connect. Just take out the @domain name and you will be ok.

Customer:

Oh, well, you guys don't make this very clear...um thanks for the help

HANG UP

It's times like this you want to strangle someone.

Sometimes I think that every tech gets a variation on the same stuff. Most of the problems, it seems, are with our elderly customers. Normally we only give tech support for the internet, but sometimes I make a judgement call and help with other things.

An elderly man phoned the tech line asking for help with his windows 95 FAX. He was upset because he couldn't get it to work. I asked him what steps he was taking to use the FAX.

Customer:

Well, I click on the FAX and I type the phone number in. Then I get my paper and put it up to the fax window but it never reads it. It doesn't do anything, just sits there.

Me: A FAX window?? You are talking about windows FAX right? Or do you have a stand alone FAX Machine?

Customer:

No, it's windows and it just won't work..I don't know what I'm doing wrong or maybe it's just the program.

ME:

Where is this Fax window you're talking about?

Customer:

The window...you know where you see all your stuff when you type.

Me: Are you talking about your monitor?

Customer: Yeah, I guess that's it. The monitor. I hold the paper up and it won't read it or take it or nothin...what's wrong?

Now do you think anyone would blame me at this point if I began laughing hysterically?

I had to explain to the poor man that a monitor is not a fax machine nor is it a scanner and does not have the capabilities to read a piece of paper by holding it up to it. I think he felt gyped.

The ISP I work for was revamping and changing some of the phone lines. The phone company we had been working with wasn't very reliable so we were slowly getting rid of those numbers and adding new numbers using a different phone company. We knew this would cause problems with the customers so we made certain that 2 months before the changeover, emails were sent to all the customers letting them know of the changes to come. Then when we got the new phone numbers, we emailed again letting everyone know the new numbers. As it grew closer to the change over, another set of emails went out once more giving the new numbers and the date of the change. Finally, the day before the change, one more go around with emails to every customer.

The first week of the new phone numbers was awful. We had over 80 calls an hour and this is a small ISP! No-one read their email.

I answer the voice mail for the company at night so when they close, it's all up to me. I remember one customer read our email, which in itself was amazing, but for some obscure reason told me "Yeah, I read it, but I didn't think it applied to me" Now why in the world would he think that?

I had another customer leave a message who was furious. "I've been calling for 3 days and the line is just busy all the time. What's wrong with YOU PEOPLE"? You have no idea how much I dislike those two words. I phone him back and asked him what number he had been dialing and sure enough, it was the old number. I told him that the number had been changed and before I could tell him what the new number was, he started arguing with me.. "No, that's impossible...the number did not change"

I was a little shocked and unsure of what to say. "Well, I'm sorry sir, but yes the phone number has been changed and here it is." So I gave him the new number. Then I told him I would walk him through putting that number into his dial up networking, so I began the process...Click on My Computer, Dial Up NEtworking, etc. Finally I get to the part where he clicks on properties and can type in the new number. After I do that I ask him to go ahead and try to connect using the new number. That's when he tells me that he did not follow my directions because he knows there is no new number and he wants to know why the number he is dialing will not work. I'm flabbergasted. I have no idea why this person will not accept tne fact that the number was changed. Finally I'm just about to give up and I ask him why he won't even try the new number. His reply,

"I didn't give you permission to change my phone number so I know it can't be that. Oh great!!! Now not only is he being rediculous but it turns out that the problem really wasn't even that he was using our old number...He was dialing his own phone number and wouldn't believe that there was a new number because he didn't authorize anyone to change his home phone number.

It's calls like this that make me want to set my hair on fire and run naked through the streets. (grin)

Since company where I work can not afford someone who is going to be only tech support for our systems, I am the one who is responsibile for all hardware and software support.

So I brought one 3,5" disk to one of girls at reception desk (Some Excel files on it):

Me: Please make copy of this disk and put it on safe place

Reception: Sure no problem.

In about 30 minutes I got call on my cell phone:

Reception: Hi, You know that disk You brought...

Me: Yes...

Reception: I can't make copy of it, it is too big.

Me: What do You mean "too big" (and thinking that maybe

I gave accidently one of ZIP disks)

Reception: You see, You've said to make copy of it.

Since we don't have copy machine here I tryed to

copy it on Fax machine but it is too thick for

Fax machine to copy it. What do You want me to

do?

I was thinking something like "Jump out of window", but with

my laughing surpresed I just said: "O.K. I'll be there in 30 minutes to fix it, don't touch anything!"

Can You belive that person has diploma "Certified Microsoft

Professinal" ????

I help people with tech questions in aol chatrooms alot this is on of the cases.

Aoler: Iam getting a burning smell i cant figure out were its coming from

Me: Open the window see if its coming from outside, see if your house is on fire anywere, check the lamp if your kinds didnt get a toy stuck on it

Aoler: No nothing

Me: Could it be coming from the computer

Aoler: Maybe

Me: Look at the back of the computer and see if the fan is moving

(it took him some time to figure out what to do but he did eventualy)

Aoler: Its not moving

Me: Well it supposed to be working to cool down the computer thats were the smell is coming from your computer is burning

Aoler: What should i do ?

Me: Turn your computer off of course and take it to a repair shop

I thought i was clear on that but the person staid in the chatroom for another 5 minutes. I tried telling him/her to turn computer off right away but they didnt get it. I guess this person just figured that if its working why bother.

Me: Hello, XYZ ISP support.

C: I can't use my computer since I installed your software!

M: What kind of problems are you having?

C: All I can get on my screen is a screen that has a "Sign up for XYZ" button on it. There are no other buttons and there's not even an X.

M: OK, hold down Ctrl and Alt and then press Delete.

C: Nothing happened.

(after several attempts to get the caller to perform Ctrl-Alt-Del...)

M: Try just turning the computer off.

C: I already tried that! I turned it off and on 5 times and it won't go away! I can't get it off my computer!

M: OK, try turning it off right now.

C: It's off now.

M: Now turn it back on please..

(3 seconds later)

C: See? It's still that same screen.

M: Did it show anything else before that screen came up?

C: No, it just showed up with it like before.

M: What button are you pressing when you turn off the computer?

C: This one right here, with the light beside it, right on the screen.

M: OK, find the power button on the big box part...

I had sold a rather pesky (computer illiterate) client a notebook computer about a year ago. One fine day I get this phone call:

CUS: My computer is making a beeping sound that I've never heard before!

ME: When did it start doing this?

CUS: About 15 minutes ago.

ME: What were you doing?

CUS: I was writing a letter.

ME: What does the beep sound like.

CUS: Here, listen...

ME: (sound familiar) Is the power adapter plugged in?

CUS: What's that?

ME: You know, the thing you plug into the wall?

CUS: Wait, let me check... Yes.

ME: Is the green light on the power adapter lit?

CUS: Yes.

ME: Is the plug from the power adapter to the back of the computer plugged in?

CUS: Oh, I guess I forgot to plug it back in after I put it back on my desk.

ME: That would do it!

CUS: But why is it beeping?

ME: That's how the computer tells you the battery is running down.

CUS: Oh, I didn't know that.

ME: Well, did you see the battery icon on your taskbar?

CUS: I was wondering why there was a battery there. It's usually a picture of a plug.

ME: The manual that came with the computer has a troubleshooting section that explains what the beeping sound means.

CUS: I threw that out.

ME: Why did you do that?

CUS: I knew I just had to call you!

The call ended shortly thereafter with me trying to be very courteous, but wanting to strangle the customer.

This happened a LONG time ago... (by industry standards)When I was doing sales/config/support at a small computer place selling AT&T XT clones. And yes, it really happened to ME, not my cousin or a friend etc.

Me: Hello, XYZ computers, can I help you?

Cust: Hi, I need some help with this computer you sold me, I've been installing the software and learning to use things, but right now I'm stuck.

Me: What's the Problem?

Cust: I can't find the ANY key?

Me: (not getting it yet) Excuse me?

Cust: The ANY key. It says "press any key to continue", and I've been looking and looking and can't find it.

Me: (shocked silence, then more silence as I try not to laugh)

Cust: I can find PG-DN, and end, and home, and all sorts of arrows, and pause and CTRL.. But I can't find anything with the word ANY on top.

Me: I'm sorry, I guess that could be confusing if you are new to this. It means ANY of the keys on the keyboard, not one specific key.

Cust: oh...

Me: I usually use the spacebar since it's big and easy to hit.

Cust: that makes sense.. OK, Thanks.

i walk in to have this manager who belives he knows all ranting

about the rubbish he got as an excuse for a moniter.

He complains that everytime he turns it on he gets this black line down

on side.

So i turn it on and nothing but a perfect picture. I look at him to say,

"well..", and he takes me to this locker opens it. He takes

me back to the monitor and sure enough there's his line.

"See! Shit house monitor! I want it replaced!!!"

I look for a bit move the monitor and the line dissappears.

The line happened to be a shadow falling on to it from the open

locker door.

There I left him to the snickers of collegues who wished this happened

long ago.

I work for Compaq and had a strange call today......

........A man phoned in it seemed like he had been sent a incorrect Quick Restore. This is what I entered into the database as a basic summary of the call (this call lasted

35 min).......

I had severe problems understanding this customer. It turns out that he did not actually have a problem and just wanted me to be on the line if a problem occured.

He asked for my name and decided that my name was Mr

Tris,was quite happy,said he would call back if he had any other problems then promtly said 'Bye bye Mr Tris'.

and hung up.

I have studied at the university for several years, which

means that whenever some of my family has a problem with

a PC they come to me. My parents live on a small island

(only 200 people), which means that they have to fix many

problems themselves. My farther started relatively late

with computers, but has been good at catching up. He is

now the local wise-guy with PC, but the tough problems he

transfers to me. He told this story.

Someone came to him one day and said that there was a

problem with their new computer. It was very slow and took

forever to start. He went to the place to see the problem.

He booted the computer and shure enough it was working like

crazy for a very long time. My farther saw to his amazement

that the task-bar quickly filled with extremely many icons.

The problem was as it turned that under the installation of

the programs, the destination had been changed to

c:\windows\start and shure enough, the computer tried to

start all programs on the hard drive. Go figure....

ME: Thanks for calling (company) Tech Support, how can I help you?

USER: Hi, Listen, my 2 year old just dropped my keyboard and a bunch of the keys broke off.

ME: Ah. Well, normally this isn't covered under your warrenty, but as part of our customer satisfaction policy, I'd be happy to send you out a new one.

USER: Oh. Thats great. But I don't need that. I just want to know where all the keys go!

ME: Go? Uhm. You just want to...

USER: Well.. like where does the equals sign key go.

ME: ???? Next to the backspace key.

USER: And the little squiggly line?

ME: Uhm... the Tilda? (~) -- upper left corner.

USER: Great. I think I can get the rest of them. Bye! *click*

USER: Your %%!@$ Search engine doesn't work.

ME: Uhm. Could you be more specific?

USER: Whenever I put something in, it never finds anything.

ME: Could you show me what you mean?

USER: Ok. I go to Infoseek and type: germonlanguage (sic)

ME: Well. First of all, it needs to be typed: german language --you need to spell it correctly, and you need to seperate the words.

USER: Well, never mind that for now. You're just not going to convince me that it actually searches.

ME: Well, give me another example.

USER: When I Type MATH and TUTORIAL it comes up with over 30,000 matches! When I pick one it doesn't have anything to do with Algebra.

ME: Did you specify Algebra?

USER: No! But thats what I wanted. This information is totally useless to me!

ME: So why don't you specify Algebra in your search.

USER: I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO! YOUR STUPID SEARCH ENGINE DOESN'T WORK!!! I'M GOING TO AOL!!!

I work for a large computer manufacturer in a boring accounting job (no, I'm not a Tech). One afternoon, I got a strange call:

me} *(#$ Finance Dept, 'Myname' speaking.

Exasperated Old Lady} I'd appreciate it if you would help me -- I've been on the phone for hours.

me} OK, where are you calling from?

EOL} Sticksville.

me} Sorry, what firm are you with?

She gives me a name of some company I've never heard of.

me} So are you calling regarding our reports, or...?

EOL} No, I am having a technical problem and I need you to help me immediately!

me} Technical Problem? I am an accountant? How were you referred to me?

EOL} (Upset) This is so typical of your company -- you should stand behind your products...

When she calmed down and gave me her story, I understood why she had been unable to reach the right department. She had been calling numbers for my company out of the phone book, going into the company directory, and dialing random extensions somehow hoping to reach someone who could help her.

Wanting to help her out and get back to my work, I decided to help her find the right department.

me} So you mentioned you had a technical problem, what kind of equipment are you having trouble with?

EOL} UNIX.

me} Could you be more specific? Is it software, a mainframe, a workstation.

EOL} I don't understand all this jargon, I'm not a technical person.

me} Neither am I.

EOL} Your company makes UNIX equipment, does it not?

me} Yes, of course.

EOL} Well, that's what it says on my phone.

me} Phone? Could you hold for a minute?

It dawns on me. I run down to the call centre and behold a UNEX phone headset attached to each Tech's phone. I run back to my office.

me} Thanks for holding. Please turn over the UNEX box that connects your headset to your phone.

EOL} OK -- it says UNEX, a D*&Q#^$ company. Oh! There's a 1 800 number.

me} Yes, We are a computer manufacturer. We make and sell U-N-I-X products. We do not make U-N-E-X telephone products.

EOL} Thank you so much, I am going to call them...

[Click]

I work as a computer support tech for a company that supplies data to our clients, and has our own software program for the clients to use. I had a client bring in his computer so I could load the software for him. It was a Windows '98 machine, so I put an icon on his desktop to make it easy for him to start the program. I showed him how it worked, and off he went to try it at home. I knew I was in trouble with the first phone call, that came in about an hour after he left here. "How do I get (our program) on the screen?" "Which keys on the keyboard do I push?" I explained that he just needed to click on the icon on his desktop. "But how do I get it on the screen?" I told him it should load automatically with his Windows. "But how do I get it on the screen?" Finally I get it. I ask him to look for the big colourful button on his computer and push it to turn the computer on. "The computer has a power button?" The next day he calls and asks how to get it off his screen. I talk him through a shut-down (which takes 10 minutes) and then he asks, "when I get back, how I get it back on my screen again?". I remind him about the power button we talked about yesterday. He asks "the one on the monitor?".

A number of calls over the next few days on how to use our software. Then a call saying that everytime he trys to dial out he gets "no dialtone". I talk him through a reboot to reset his internal modem. Same problem. I ask if he has installed any software recently. He says no. I ask if he has changed anything about his computer. "No". Hmmm. Has he changed anything else? "I bought a fax machine". Ah hah! I ask him to carefully check the phone cord to see that it is securely plugged into the computer and the wall. He says "I can't do that". I ask why. It seems that he needed the phone cord for the new fax machine, so he had unplugged it from the computer. "Could that be the problem?"

I was Systems Programming Manager for a medium sized

IBM mainframe installation in the 1970's. We had just

ordered the second biggest System 360 mainframe that IBM

made. Management was very impressed. It was installed in

a glass-walled room on the first floor of the building,

strategically positioned so that no matter where you went

in the building, you would see this impressive sight.

The CPU was in 3 linked cabinets, each the size of a

small locker room. The front panel with all kinds of

knobs, switches, and lights was purposely made to face the

front of the building, so it would be the most visible.

Also in the room were some equally large cabinets containing

the disk drives, printers, and control units for these

devices. Along one side wall was a very large metal box

containing the under-floor air conditioning unit for the

room. All these huge boxes were the same color of official

IBM blue.

I was in the computer room one day when the president of

the company was ushering in a large group of clients. It was

his goal to try to impress them with what a technically

advanced company we were.

So, he walked everybody around the room, showing them all

the pieces, and explaining what each one did. Here's the

Central Processing Unit... this box is the high speed line

printer... and pointing right to the air conditioning unit,

he proudly pronounced that this was the Compiler!

Boy, were they impressed!

The manager of the IT department wrote that he needed some

information regarding what he called the "Y2000K

compliancy problem."

He's really thinking ahead.

A customer rings up a nationally-known British computer company to speak to a technical support person; this tech person has had a bad day.

Customer: I can't work my computer.

Tech Support: What would you like to do with it?

Cust: Well, anything; write a letter I suppose.

Tech: Do you know how to switch it on?

Cust: I've just had it installed by your company.

There now follows a list of requests, most of which the customer cannot comply with, due to a fundamental lack of knowledge about what a computer is, can do, or how it works in any way.

Tech: I think I have the solution. You'll have to pack the computer up, put everything back into the boxes and bring it back to the store.

Cust: Is that because it's broken?

Tech: (Shouting) No! It's because you're too f**king thick to own one!

The tech was sacked the very next day, but every tech support person I speak to, roars with laughter and then says they wish they had the courage to say the same.

Hello, Help Desk

Hello, my printer isn't working

Can you tell me which lights are on !

Power

No On-line light ?

No

Well, press the green button to put the printer on line.

I'm not allowed to touch any of the buttons

But, that will solve your problem.

No, I'm not allowed to touch the buttons.

Please, just press the green button and the printer will start printng.

Well, O.K. but on your head be it!

Is it working ?

Lucky for you, Yes!

This is a true story...

Where i work, they had a problem some years ago with a network server. Nearly every day, at about the same time, right after working hours, the server crashed and sooooooo bad!!!

So the techniciens decided to investigates and stay later to see what happened with that server.

The moment of truth finnaly arrives and the little maid that passes the vacuum cleaner came, unpluged the server, do her cleaning and pluged in back the server.....

Now the server are in a secure room.....

This has to be one of the strangest things that has happened

this week. I work in a small college, computer lab, as the

monitor and tech. I was working on the tech pc when someone

came up and handed me a floppy disk that she had found in a

PC. It is very common for people to leave their disks in the

computers, so I just put it in the lost and found box.

Less than a minute later the same person came back.

The disk that she had just found was her disk, that she

had just used!!!!!!

I work at the Local IS department Helpdesk at a big oil refinery in Norway. We are two tech support guys on ca 250 users.

It had been a calm day, with almost nothing to do (a rare thing), when one of the girls resposible for refinery safety came to our office with a CD in her hand.

Her: "I want this installed on my PC, but I can manage that myself. But my computer has no CD-ROM, so could you copy this to a diskette for me?"

Makes me wonder why there isn't a basic training program users have to go through....

Another case:

-------------

Had to replace a broken computer with a newer model. The old computer (486sx/33) was using an old version of our customized Windows/Office solution (Win 3.11), and it was replaced with a P60 (Win95). The case is that the two customized systems uses different passwords for the screen saver (which cannot be disabled unless you are admin)... So I installed the new PC, and told the user that the new screen saver pw was XXXXX. I had just walked up to my office (a 3 minute walk) when I got the call.

usr: "My screen saver password won't work"

me : "Well, what did you type?"

usr: "YYYYY"

me : "That's the old password. You have to type the new one"

usr: "What's that?"

me : "XXXXX". (the password is common for ALL machines - don't ask me why)

usr: "OK, thanks"

15 minutes later, I got a call from the same user.

usr: "my screen saver pw won't work"

me : "the password is XXXXX"

usr: "K, it worked. thanks"

me : "NP"

another 15-20 minutes later:

usr: "My screen..." (etc etc)

me : "I've told you 2 times now. the pw is XXXXX"

usr: "sorry I keep forgetting"

me : "OK... stay at your office. I'll be there in 5 minutes"

usr: "Thanks again"

So I started Word and made a note for the user, A4 size, that said: "THE PASSWORD IS XXXXX".

Haven't got a call since.

This guy calls to the Bell service in Turkey and complains about his computer's coffee holder broken.

Operator asks what does he mean by coffee holder.

Guy explains it is that little shelf for the coffee cup that just broke while he closed it with a coffee cup inserted and spilled the coffee all around.

After a 10 minutes talk it reveals, that the guy was using his CDROM to hold a coffee.

I received an irate call that our censorsare not permitting him to send his mail because we don't approve of the way his wife spells her name. He wasn't going to take this and would find an ISP that didn't require correct grammar and spelling.

Tech: Thank you for calling AOL Tecnical Support for windows. How can I help you.

Customer: Right off I am p---ed as hell. I'm tired of you guys telling me how to spell my name and refusing to send my E-Mail. I was baptised with this name and if its good enough for God its good enough for AOL. I pay 21.95 per month and don't want you to edit my E-Mail before you will deliver it. I am not in grade school anymore.

Tech: Sir, I'm sorry for any misunderstanding but I can assure you that we do not edit your mail.

Customer: YES YOU DO. It keeps telling me that my wifes name should be spelled this way. She knows how to spell her name better than you dol

Tech: I let him vent his anger and then explained how he could go into his mail preferences and disable the spell checker. He didn't understand what a spell checker was and asked that when we do our next revision that we fix it so that it didn't keep checking his spelling and grammar.

Tech - Thank you for calling Dandy Randy's Internet, this is Randy speaking, how may I help you

Customer - Yes, I have a problemm with your service

Tech - Ok, what seems to be the problem ma'am?

Customer - Well, it seems your internet service is interfering with our intercom

Tech - Excuse me ma'am

Customer - Well, there is weird static on our intercom system. We had the landlord

come and look at it and he says its because your internet service is interfering with it

Tech - Well ma'am, I don't see how our service would interfere with your intercom, the

two are totally unrelated.

Customer - Well, it is. And another thing, we're getting weird noises on the phone

when we pick it up and my brother is on the internet.

Tech - Well ma'am, those noises are supposed to be there. It's a way for the computer

to communicate with other computers. If you're using the internet and only have 1

phone line, you will hear those noises until you disconnect from the internet.

Customer - well, we never had those noises before with the other internet company

Tech - *not even going to argue, at this point I was hitting mute to laugh* Well ma'am, that might be

true witht the other internet service provider, but we require the use of a phone line

to acces the internet

Customer - well, the weird noises? How can I make them stop?

Tech - ma'am, the noises are common with most internet service providers offering dialup acces. The only

way to stop the noises are to disconnect from the internet, then use the phone.

Customer - well I did phone the phone company about the weird noises. They came in and looked at the phone

and said there was no problem with it. It cost me 60 dollars, and I'm still hearing the weird noises.

Tech - Ma'am, those weird noises are coming from your modem when it is connected to the internet *getting frustrated at this point*

Customer - Yes, but its only happens when my brother uses the computer. Then we get weird static on our intercom.

Tech - Ok ma'am, the internet will affect your phone line when you use it. The weird noises are computers talking to each other. As for the

intercom, I'd suggest that you contact your landlord about that.

Customer - but I did, and he said that the internet was the thing affecting it.

Tech - well, this instance has never happened before ma'am. I've consulted other techs, and they have

had no occurances of this happening.

Customer - Well, could it happen.

Tech - Well, it could. But the two devices are separate from each other. On your intercom, is there static on it constantly.

Customer - Yes.

Tech - And when the computer is off, do you still hear the static?

Customer - Yes.

Tech - Well, that would suggest that it is isolated to the intercom system.

Customer - Well, the landlord looked at it, and said that was what was causing it.

Is there anyone I can talk to that I can find out if anyone complained about this before?

Tech - I can transfer you through to Customer Service, and you can file a complaint.

Customer - Could you please transfer me through

Tech - Sure... just a moment I'll transfer you through *muffling a laugh*

I do technical support at a small public New England college.

About half of the students are commuters, and we frequently get calls

about off-campus Internet access.

One day, a girl called up asking about off-campus e-mail access.

>From our conversation, I'm surprised she could even use a computer.

Phone Rings.

Me: Help Desk.

Her: How do I access E-mail from off-campus?

Me: Do you have a dedicated phone line?

Her: Wait a minute, I'll ask my boyfriend. It's his computer.

(extremely bad sign)

Her: Yes.

Me:Is it a MAC or a PC?

Her: I don't know, I'll ask my boyfriend.

Me: Does it have a little apple on it?

Her:(background- "Is this a Macintosh?") It's Windows '95.

Me: Okay, I'll walk you through setting up a Hyperterminal session.

(start walking her through)

Her:(interrupting) You mean right now?

Me: Yes, is your computer on?

Her: I'll call you back.

Five Minutes later

Me: Help Desk.

Her: It's me again.

Me: Okay, is your computer on?

Her: I'm in Prodigy.

(Great, I think, she can use Windows telnet.)

Me: Good. Do you see the space where you enter a Web Address?

Her: Yes.

Me: Okay, type "telnet://(domain name)"

(pause)

Her: It says "page not found"

Me: What?

Her: I'm in Infoseek. Should I go to Yahoo?

Me: No. Ignore what's on the screen. Is there anything at the the top that says "location"?

Her: There's a space that says "location/URL".

Me: That's it. Delete everything there and type "telnet://(domain name)"

Her: Oh! It's working!

I don't know what this girl's major was, but I hope it wasn't computer related.

I do tech support at a small New England College. Half of our students are

commuters, and we offer dial-up email access from off campus.

We're within 10 miles of two state lines. While some towns in other states are a local call, others aren't.

I got a phone call one day from an irate out-of-state student about her e-mail.

Me: Help Desk.

Her: I want a refund!!

Me: Excuse me?

Her: Your brochure said dial-up E-mail access was free! My phone bill last month was over $200.

Most of it was from accessing E-mail! I want a refund and an apology!

Me: Where do you live?

Her: New York.

Me: Access to E-mail is free. If the school is a long-distance call, like it is from you town, you have to pay those

charges yourself. That's the phone company's end, not ours.

Her: So I can't get a refund?

Me: No. Sorry.

(Phone slams down)

I am a Network/Operations manager for a firm of 40 people. This means I wear many hats Tech, software, hardware and operations.

Upon entering our company each new employee has a meeting with me. During this meeting I explain things as simple as using a mouse right up to policies. I know when your new getting alot of information at one time is overwhelming, so I also prepare a written copy of everything I tell new hires.

One of our policies is you do not install or uninstall any software yourself. Easy enough, although every so often you get someone who loads a game or something that is no big deal.

We had a gentleman working for us that swore he knew all there is to know about graphic computers and MacIntosh, and he could handle his own tech work.

About 3 months after he started working for us I got a frantic call from him (while I was working on a priority one problem of course). Seems he was clicking on the icon for Quark express but the computer was telling him the application could not be found!

I tried it myself and lo and behold it couldn't find it. I looked into if it was a problem with an alias or maybe and extension.....Finally I went to the application folder and Quark was missing.

I asked him if he had done something with the original application.

His response "Well, it was in my way while I was doing a little clean up so I threw it in the trash can with the rest of the garbage and tossed it." (With the all knowing attitude in his voice)

As if I wasn't ready to kill him enough, It also turned out that he had taken the original software to install at home to work on the project and had lost it.

Because Quark is serialized it does no good to try to load someone elses copy on his machine, but couldn't explain that to him because he knew everything.

A month later...he got fired for not knowing enough :)

I had done tech support for a major ISP at one time and one of my colleagues had relayed a story to me. He had a call quite a few years ago where the call involved messing with init strings with the modem to communicate w/our software. Well, he had began citing off this fresh, new init that would undoubtedly work... AT&F&K0&L... and he cited the letters in phonetics but had slipped up some and said, "K as in Kilo, L as in limo, I mean, Lima.." Well, it got to the end of the call, my colleague had begun to ask if there was anything else he could help with and the customer said, "I got my kilo and my limo, but I damn sure ain't got my [name of ISP]!!!"

P.S. Please keep name anonymous.

Even though I've only work as a tech for a few months I thought I'd heard everything, from "how do I double-click?" to "I need a modem?" Then one night I got a call that proved there is ALWAYS somebody DUMBER.

Me:Hello, thank you for calling !@#@$. May I please have your username? (get his name and pull up his account) What can I help you with sir?

Cust: I'm having trouble sending an email.

Me: Okay, what is the error message you get when you try to send?

Cust:Message could not be sent because the email address was rejected by the host server. Please check that you have typed in the email address correctly.

Me: Okay, what is the email address you are trying to send to?

Cust:http://judiciarycommittee@usa.gov/(some name I didn't catch).htm

Me: Okay sir, the problem is that is not an email address, it is a webpage address. You need to find the EMAIL address of the person you want to send to.

Cust: Well I got it from the newspaper so it should be correct.

Me: As I said sir that is a webpage address, it is NOT an email address. You need the EMAIL address to send email.

Cust: But why won't you let me send email to my congressman?

Me: Sir, we are not preventing you from ending email to anybody. The reason you can not send to that address is because it is a WEBPAGE address, not an EMAIL address.

Cust: Well maybe I should just find a different service provider.

Me: It doesn't matter what provider you use, you will not be able to send using that address, because it is NOT an EMAIL ADDRESS.

Cust:Well thanks (click)

I spent about five minutes laughing at this guy, and now have this image of this guy going from provider to provider to provider, trying to find one who will let him send an email to http://judiciarycommittee@usa.gov?(some name).htm

It was a normal morning and I got to work to releive the guy that works overnights for one of the ISP's we supported. We just happened to share the same workstation, and when I got in he said the computer just fritzed out, the screen went all fuzzy and wasn't working. (He acted like the damn thing BLEW up) Anyways after he left I thought I'd check it out for myself. I looked it over and found that the monitor's power plug just slipped out of the back of the monitor!! Needless to say he was the joke of the office for the day. The scary part is that he has his MCP in NT Server!!!

About a year ago, we had some workers come in and do some work on our telephone system. At that time our Networking services was doing some work on the network throughout our building. A couple of hours after they arrived, all of our machines lost their network connections. Had almost everyone in the department asking what had happened. We were confused ourselves, and after asking the network techs, they told us that one of the phone workers had plugged a telephone cable into one of the hubs. When it rang, POOF! Three floors lost their connections for about two hours.

I work the graveyard shift for a major ISP.

This call ironically came in while I was reading Tech Tales.

This user was very upset and wanted to speak to a supervisor

right from the start. She had just opened her account and

said that if she didn't get connected NOW she wanted to

cancel. Her problem was simply that 10-digit dialing was

misconfigured.

I fixed her and told her to try the connection and if it

worked, to open Netscape and open any page.

I specifically asked her if she had Netscape and she said

yes.

Since she had only one phone line I told her I would call

her back in 2 minutes to check up on what happened. This

was as a courtesy since she was complaining about waiting

15 minutes for someone to answer (it was late and there was

maybe a 2 minute queue).

Anyhow, she got connected. When I called her back the phone

was busy. It took me 5 minutes to get her back on the phone.

She told me that "Only a little box saying 'You are

connected' came up. I am an MCSE and I have never seen

anything like this before. I just want to cancel this

service."

Further questioning revealed that she had IE NOT Netscape,

and she said if it doesn't work she wants to cancel her

account. She kept referring to her desktop as "that screen"

and she had no idea how to close the Dial-Up Monitor. She

said she was used to getting connected and going straight to

a browser.

I configured auto-dial for her and she should be ok, but I

told her when Billing opens anyways. I hope she cancels

so none of my peers will ever have to deal with her! She

was definitely not PC literate! MCSE? NOT!

Lady, you are lying to me and you are not too bright!

I had a call from one of the employees at my work the other day :

There was this lady and she told me that she had placed a floppy in the computer and she got a warning that it contained a virus.

So she turned the computer of just to put it on again, but when it tried to boot she got an error saying : Insert a system disc and then press enter...

So she called me and asked what to do !

I told her to take out the floppy and restart the computer.

She did this and told me that it still wouldn't start.

I went to her office and asked her to show me exactly what she did when I was talking to her on the phone.

So she went and took the floppy out , turned the power off , placed the floppy back in and turned the power on....?

I work at an ISP in technical support. I once had a very elderly man call up....

Me: Thank you for calling xxxxxx tech support, this is David how can I help you?

cust: I can't get connected.

Me: Do you get any kind of error message?

cust: No, no message.

Me: Well, why don't you walk me through the steps you take to get connected. Show me what you click on, etc.

cust: Ok, here's what I do..

(I hear these loud beeps)

Me: Sir, are you pushing the numbers on your phone touch pad?

cust: Well, of course. Do you think I broke the internet?

David

Me: Thank you for calling XYZ, what can I do for you?

Them: Uh, yeah, I was working with *****, Can I talk to them?

Me: They are busy at the moment, what can I do for you?

Them: ***** and I were working on setting up a dial up connection back to corporate, and my cell phone died. I would like to finish now.

I discovered that we needed to configure his new conection from scratch and dove right in.

ME: O.K. Please "Specify DNS addresses" and enter ###.###.#.##

Them: Can you repeat those numbers slowly, please?

ME: Sure, ###.###.#.##

Them: Ummmm, that doesn't fit.

Me: It doesn't fit?

Them: No, there is not enough space.

Me: Please read what you have on your screen to me.

Them: #.#.#.#....

ME: Ok. I will send a technician for assistance.

IN Flint. Mi in the early 80's we had remote terminals all over Buick Motor Division. On this particular day we got a call from the power company saying that the power for the entire complex was going down in a few minutes due to a raging fire that was just about the cut the 13Kv feeds to all the north end of Flint. We shut down everything. Shortly after the power went out for the area, I got the following call.

User: My terminal just went down! It's plugged in and turned on, but it went blank.

Me: Do you still have lights and power up there?

User: They just went out before the terminal quit.

Me: That's probably part of your problem. Turn it off for now and turn it on after the power is restored. The power company tells me that should be in 24 hours or so.

User: You can't get it running sooner?

Me: NO! It needs power.

User: OK

As I was heading to the cafeteria for my RDA of caffene this morning (Dec. 17), I passed two women talking in the hall. One of them was apparently having some major connectivity problems...

Her: "I couldn't get to the Internet this morning. They must have shut it down because of the bombing."

(Actually, everything was just running very slowly--the way it always does when the weather's nasty and half the site decides to work from home...)

Below is a transcript of a conversation I had with an unnamed customer yesterday.

HDA: ....good, ok now can you open up the Lotus Notes Desktop and right click on it.

Customer: Are you sure...you want me to write click on the desktop?

hda: yes that's right, right click on the desktop.

cust: so you are sure you want me to write click on the desktop?

hda: yep

cust: and where abouts do you want me to write click on the desktop?

hda: Right click in the middle of the monitor.

cust: ARE you absolutely sure you want me to write click in the middle of the monitor??

hda: that's right, in the middle of the monitor right click on it with the mouse.

cust: Hold on, now you want me to use a mouse to write click in the middle of the monitor?

hda: that's right.

cust: Hmmm. hold on then, I'll get a pen.

The moral of the story, don't assume that every person you deal with is computer literate:)

I work for a ISP providing access over leased lines. One of my customers was in such a

hurry for his service that he put in a business case for putting his order ahead of all

our other customers. However, around two days from delivery date the circuit engineers

turned up on his site only to find that the site wasn't much more than a building site

and had no electric. So I was asked to phone the customer to find out what was

going on.

I finally got a hold of him the day after, and asked him what was happening, his

reply was that he wasn't sure when he would have electric to the site and did we

really need it to deliver his service? Um...well YES!!!!!!!

Needless to say none of our engineers were too amused and cusotmer finally got electric

to his site two weeks after he had requested it.

It happened almost two years ago, when I worked in an ISP in Tel aviv (A major city in Israel) :

Me: "Support, Good morning, Gil is talking, how may I help you?"

He: "My Internet is not working."

(Damnit... don't you guys hate this starting sentence? I mean... of course your internet is not working, otherwise why are you calling the support?)

Me: "Can you be a bit more specific sir?"

He: "I don't know, I simply can't get connected"

Me: "What operating system are you using?"

He: "Win 93"

Me: "Win 3.11 you mean...?"

He: "Oh yeah, sorry."

Me: "Ok sir, you will have to give me a hand since I don't have win 3.11 in front of me and I admit I can't quite remember what goes on there"

He: "Of course, no problem".

... After screwing around with his windows (Of course he didn't manage to follow my instructions...) :

Me: "Sir, I am sorry, I am afraid that I have lost you, where are you now?"

He: "Me? I am in Rishon" (One of the cities in Israel...)

...

Here's a real quick one.

Tech: Thank you for calling -blank-. How can I help you?

Cust: Yeah, I just wanted to know if the Internet was on?

Tech: Yes ma'am, it sure is.

mute and place forehead on desk

A female customer once called me with a strange problem.

me: goodmorning, ... can I help you?

cust: I just bought a new PC and my keyboard is allready broke. I want it fixed imediately.

me: What seems to be the problem?

cust: sometimes the keys seem to get stuck.

me: Does this happen all the time?

cust: no, only when I get too close to my monitor.

I had no idea what could be the reasson. Till all of a sudden:

everytime she leaned forward to the screen to read what she had typed ... HER BREASTS HIT THE KEYS.

I took me a while to tell her that in a decent way.

I do tech support for a local ISP. Our users are moderately smart (a few of em) but we get a few especially bright ones. A good example:

This woman just got her computer and called us up to get Net access. She hadn't used a computer before, and her password wasn't working. She had attempted to set up her connection herself (frightening).

Me: Ok. Go into your Dial-up Networking, and double click on the connection icon.

Her: Ok.

Me: What's in your username box?

Her: Nothing.

Me: And your password box?

Her: NOTHING! I told you!

Me: Well, enter your username and password into those fields.

Her: I CAN'T!!! The arrow won't go in there!

Me: Um.. ok. Just click into the box.

Her: Aren't you listening? I CAN'T!!!! The arrow won't go in there, it turns into that bar!!

Me: A bar??

Her: Yeah, it looks like an I. It won't click in there!

Me: .......... *sigh*

Later on we found out she needed to install Client for Microsoft Networks. She didn't have her Windows CD, so i checked for cabs on the hard drive.

Her: It says 'Can't locate file on Windows 95 CD-ROM'

Me: Ok, in the 'Copy File From' box, type in c, colon, backslash, windows, back --

Her: Now slow down there. Type what again? c...

Me: Colon...

Her: Colon? What the H*** is a colon?

Me: Uhhhhh.... the two dots. Hold shift and hit the button next to the L.

Her: Ok, then what?

it went on like that for a while. turns out she dind't ahve the cabs. couldn't help her, after 40 minutes of work... *sigh*

I've had some absolutely strange calls for this short time I've been tech support. But I got this one a week or so ago, and this one makes call of the century! I will NEVER hear anything in my time that blows this away in strangeness . . . here goes . . .

The caller was a male in his 20's with a southern accent. As you will see, he did not seem very computer literate...

Me: How can I help you?

Caller: Yeah I'm having trouble getting your XYZ-brand PC tablet working with my computer.

Me: Ok, lemme get some info from you...(stuff I need to record call)

Me: Ok, now I need to know what kind of a computer you have...processor, RAM, version of Winblows

Caller: Uh, my processor says...hold on...32mb

Me: Uh, no, that's how much RAM you have ("it's gonna be one of those calls")

Caller: Oh. Ok, hold on, it says P2.

Me: Pentium II? What speed?

Caller: I dunno. It says P2.

Me: Is it a Pentium II chip or Pentium 200 chip?

Caller: I dunno....wait....it's says 200mmx.

Me: Ok good! Do you have Windows 95 or 98?

Caller: I have Windows 3.1.

Me: What?!?!?

I know there are plenty of illiterate users out there that are still using Winblows 3.x, but on a Pent. I 200?!? I was beginning to think that maybe this user had 95, but thought it was 3.x. As I find out, sure enough, it's 3.x. He claimed it was that way because a friend built it for him. I'm sure this friend also gave him a coffee cup holder for his computer too. ;)

But the call doesn't end there!

I explain to him that we don't support Winblows 3.x anymore, and that he should upgrade to 98 (or 95 if he is cheap and at a computer show). I tell him exactly what he needs to pick up from a major-but-evil national computer store chain so he can use our product.

Caller: So all I have to do is upgrade to Winblows 98?

Me: Yup. Then you can use our product.

Caller: Ok good! Can I edit pictures with your product?

Me: Well, do you have any photo editing software?

Caller: Yeah, I got Photoshop (Adobe)

Me: Which version?

Caller: I dunno...

Me: Ok, well you'll need to use at least Photoshop 4.0 in order to completely utilize our product's potential.

Caller: Ok great! We edit ad(garbled) photo's here.

Me: What did you say?

Caller: Oh, we edit adult photos here. I work for a magazine. We take nude pics and "touch them up."

Me: (happily) Oh ok. Which magazine do you work for?

Caller: I work for anonymous adult magazine.

Me: Oh ok. (My evil side wanted to press for a free subscription from him... ;-)

I thought at this point, he may be an absolute newbie, but this is kewl running into someone in his industry (Ok, I admit, tht was bad!). Boy was I wrong! This was only the beginning of the end . . . of my sanity.

Caller: Thanks for your help! I couldn't do this without you!

Me: You're welcome sir. You have a good day.

Caller: I wanna ask you something before I go.

Me: Sure, what is it?

Caller: I was wondering if you've ever done one of those sex line things?

Me: What?!?!? (I'm blown away at the question here)

Caller: Yeah. Have you ever worked for a phone sex line?

Me: Uh, no. (I'm not sure what in the heck to say here!)

Caller: Oh ok. I was wondering because you've got the voice for it.

Me: Ummmmmmmmm, ok.

Caller: Yeah. I kind of got an erection listening to you.

Me: (absolute shock and silence)

What on God's Green Earth?!?!? I've heard absolute strange calls before, but this . . . what the heck do you do? All I knew was that I had to find SOME way to get rid of him. I'm not allowed to just "hang up" on him, unless he's cussing at me. Company policy wasn't written with this kind of call in mind....

Me: uhhhhhh, okaaaaaayyyyyy......

Caller: I was wondering if you could keep talking to me? I just wanna listen to you . . .

Me: (oh boy) Um, uh, well, um.....do you want to know anything else about computers? (I have to switch the subject FAST!)

Caller: Well, I was kind of hoping you could talk to me kind of, well, sexually....

Me: (seeing a quick out) uh, no sorry

Caller: You can't? (he sounded disappointed)

Me: Nope. I can't do that on work hours.

Caller: Okay. Thanks. Bye

Phew! I was SOOOOO glad that call was over. How on God's Green Earth do you handle a call like that??? As weird as it was, I started laughing for like 10 minutes. I ran out to the rest of the guys and told them. We all broke down laughing hard! Never again will a call like that come in...

I looked at the guys phone number he gave, and it was the 702 area code - Las Vegas. How appropriate! Though it would've been more appropriate if he had an area code from the San Fernando Valley here in Cali (for those of you not in Cali, it's also known as the "porn valley"). ;)

This guy called back 15 minutes later, but I'll save that one for another time.... :)

I work as a consultant in the computer labs of my University. Weird, crazy questions/requests are part and parcel of the day to day operation, but this one, this one is a classic; the best yet.

Girl Customer walked in.......

Customer: Hi, I need some assistance with an attachment I just received over email.

Me: Sure, how can I help you?

Customer: See, the attachment is an audio file, it's a song. I would like to listen to it, but I do not have a pair of headphones with me, so can you help me print it?

Me: Mdm. you want me to help you print an audio file (bewildered look on my face)?

Customer: Yes, I can't listen to it now, so I want to print it out and read it.

Me: Ur.....Ur..............(I was lost for words)

I think what she had in mind was that the printout would be some musical score or maybe lyrics. Wouldn't it be nice if the computer can do that? Hmmmm.........

Since we have to get up at 6am for a 12 hour shift, we don't usually feel like having breakfast at that time of the morning. So we have it at work.

A co-worker decided that fateful morning to have a bowl of cerial and milk, at his desk. Mistake No 1. Not being the most careful eater, he managed to overturn the bowl dumping the majority of the milk into his main keyboard.

Now this had the rest of us laughing everyway, since we could see it coming from miles off.

Anyway, his first thought was to empty the keyboard of milk, and promptly turned it upside down. Then ran for the paper towels to sop up the mess. Mistake No 2.

He had upturned the keyboard onto a pen, which picked the most opportune time to discover the backspace key. As he was scrounging for cleaning goods, his keyboard was steadily deleting the 2 page email he had just written, character by character. Watching this email un-write itself had us out of action and rolling for about 30 minutes.

Luckily a quick "undo" brought it back, but couldn't remove the extreme red from his face. One keyboard for the dead pile and one tale for the funny file.

I work for a tech support company that provides support for about 50 affiliates. We provide our own on-line registration with fairly easy instructions. A guy called in and first of all, he wanted to know if he would see the "dot" key, he couldn't find the "next" button (because I said hit 'next' instead of telling him to click it on the screen) and for his e-mail address, he put 'usernameataffiliate.com' because the @ wouldn't work. He had to get his 8-year-old son to explain that he had to HOLD DOWN the shift key when hitting the number 2, not one, then the other.

Hey, I love this job!!!

This story happened a couple of months ago. A friend of mine became manager of a small tourist office somewhere in Belgium and was telling me that story when she came in. When she got into office, the first thing she did was to check out the budget for the year. She realised that they had a tremendous budget for computer maintenance, that was quite surprising since they only had one computer. After a few days, the secretary comes to her and tells her that the computer was broken again and that she had to call a tech to come in! My friend decided to go and check out for herself! when she went there, she saw that everything was fine and that the document had been minimized in Windows 95, she maximised it and the secretary was quite surprised to recover her document. At that point the secretary explained that when by mistake she clicked the little underscore rather than the little cross, she always had needed a computer expert to come down and fix the issue, who would invoice every time.... No doubt they had a tremendous budget!

Over the years, there has been a gradual transition from

traditional tape-to-tape editing suites to non-linear

digital video editing suites. This has meant a lot of

computer-illiterate editors have been forced to learn the new technology. Here is one of my favourite support calls:

(client) When I try to capture some video, it says that

I can't because the volume is full. I have turned

the volume on the speakers right down and it still

doesn't work.

I was supporting a customer in a small business through a

rather long procedure that required logging into the LAN

as Supervisor. The company doesn't have much security,

the company name is the Supervisor's Password (I know,

Management would not allow it changed) I didn't want this

user to remember the Supervisor's Password, so when it was

time for the password, I gave her 2 letters, paused asked

her about her kids, when she was done I gave her a few more

letters, and asked another question, then finally the last

letter and the enter key. We did our thing, she follows

directions quite precisly, so much so, that when I was done,

I said, now go ahead and type Login then your User name.

Then I said, now enter your Password, and everything is

back to normal now. After much typing, the user asked, is

"and everything is back to normal now" one word? With a sigh

I said no.

My company lent a client a laptop to work out his home.

He called with a problem sending data to his printer.

After going to his home and checking the entire system, I told him the problem was with a program he loaded that we where not supporting and that he needed to call the program maker.

He decided to ask his "computer expert" friend from a rival company for help. A few days later I got a call from him that none of his programs were working. After questioning him as to what happened, he said he and his friend deleted the offending program and reinstalled it to no avail.

I had his laptop sent to my office, and when I started it the problem was obvious. To prepare the laptop to reinstall the program his friend ran a dos command....

FORMAT C:\

sure solved the problems, for him.

I work in retail sales for a major computer manufacturer,

but I also do phone support and tech work. One day I got

this call from an older gentleman tring to install software

from his cd.

me - blah blah blah Rob speaking, how may I help you.

caller - I'm trying to install software but I can't find the

two dots.

me - Two dots....how do you mean? (still clueless)

caller - Well the instructions say to type D two dots, slash

setup dot exe. I can't find the two dots.

me - Ohhh you mean the colon (:) .. that the key next to the

L.

caller - doesn't work.

me - What do you mean....what did you get?

caller - I got a dot above a squigly line.

me - Trying not to laugh, That's the semi-colon sir (;), you

have to push the shiftkey as well.

caller - Still didn't work

me - What happened?

caller - I got the dot over a squiggly line ..er semi-colon

again

me - You have to hold down the shiftkey while you push the

colon key.

caller - oh okay.

5 second silience

caller - It doesn't work.

me - What happened?

caller - It says file not found.

me - You typed in D:\setup.exe ?

caller - Yes

me - What letter is your cd-rom?

caller - It's D

me - Then it should have worked, what type of computer do

you have (some of our computers use G as their cd-rom)

caller - I have a blah blah

me - Okay you need to type G:\setup.exe

caller - But the instructions say D:\setup.exe

me - That's correct sir but the D is just a place holder

it means to type the letter of your cd-rom whatever it

may be.

caller - oh

me - Did that work?

caller - yes, thanks

I never Heard from him again, must've taken a typing coarse.

Whilst wprkng as PC Support for a local hospital.

This involved on of the PC's at the nurses stations on the wards, i recieved the call from what is generally refered to as "The Looney Bin" saying - "Can you come and have a look at our PC" to which I reply "Why, what seems to be the trouble?". Imagine my shock when the reply of "Well, one of the patients urinted onto it and now it doesn't work". To my knowledge this PC has not been attended to by any member of the support staff yet, the job was on the helpdesk database for7 months before it was just deleted because no-one woud take it.

I was network manager at large (and prestigious) scientific establishment when I got what is probably my funniest call.

The background was that one group were experiencing ‘wobble’ on their monitors, due to a bandly installed 3-phase supply nearby. While waiting for the electricians to come back and fix the fault, we provided them with some surge/RF protected power strips which appeared to reduce the effect.

Me: Hello, ( ---- ) group; how can I help?

User: This is Professor Somebody. Look, one of your people has installed a coffee-pot on my computer and I want it removed!

Me: (bemused) Did you say ‘coffee-pot’?

Prof: Yes, and it’s interrupting my work. I want it uninstalled!

Me: (very bemused) Is this a screen-saver or something?

Prof: What!? No, it’s a ‘COFFEE’ ‘POT’! A POT you make COFFEE in, and my computer won’t boot unless the damn thing’s plugged in!

Me: (astoundingly bemused) Um... (pause) Um... (pause) I’ll be right up, okay?

Suprisingly the user was quite right, his computer would absolutely not boot unless the coffee-pot was plugged in and turned on. Of course it was nothing we had done. Apparently this professor had noticed the shiny new power-strips of the other group, found out that they ‘reduce screen wobble’ and had promptly ordered the biggest and most expensive model from the same manufacturer for no reason other than greed. This particular model had one bright red ‘master’ socket and four white ‘slave’ sockets; when whatever was plugged into the master was switched on, all the slaves were switched on, and vice versa. Of course the big red socket was just perfect for this professor to plug his personal little coffee-maker into, hence the only way for his computer to receive power was to make lots of coffee (I work in a similar manner).

One quick swap of the mains leads and the problem is solved. Not only was the professor not embarrassed by the incident, he was overjoyed to have a ‘computer operated coffee-pot’ (ie. he now has to turn the computer on to make coffee) and took every opportunity to show it to everyone who visited!

Oxygen is just wasted on some people!

Working for a Technical Support Center, based out of Canada, we provide support for many American states. One being Georgia. Many cannot understand my 'Canadian' accent and I sometimes find the long southern drawl near impossible at times.

One of the first calls I received that morning was from a user in Georiga...it goes as follows:

Me: Thank-you for calling Tech Support, ****** speaking, how may I help you?

User: (In southern drawl) Muh critter stopped workin'!!

Me: (More or less thinking this is a problem for a vet, not a technician) You're CRITTER stopped working sir? I am sorry, but I am not understanding what you mean.

User: Muh critter, y'know, the CRITTER!

Me: To be honest sir, I do not know what you mean by a critter.

User: The CRITTER, the (mumbling) thingy...

Me: Pardon, sir, the WHAT thingy?

User: THE CLICKY THING! THE **CRITTER!!**

Me: The MOUSE sir?

User: Yeh, that's it, the mouse!!

Me: Ok, sorry sir, but we cannot provide support for hardware, we only provide support for Internet dial-up accounts.

User: @#$%^&*!!! (click!)

As false as this may sound, I can assure this you this actullay happened!

I just retrieved a message off my voicemail.

Our company is slowly switching over (I am sorry

to say) from Netscape to Internet Explorer. So,

for now, most users have both on their machines.

My message: "So ... that web site you showed me

before - was that on Netscape or Internet Explorer?"

Ok, I'm not a technician but a friend of mine is and he told me about things people have done. Here are a few of them:(don't ask me why these are only women, I don't know)

He once saw a lady using her mouse but because she reached the end of the mouse pad, she lifted her leg and put it beside the pad to continue moving the mouse onto something, not knowing that she could lift the mouse and reposition it elsewhere on the pad.

He was once called to some other lady's house because she said that her computer was keeping all the disks she put into it. Once he arrived, he asked her to show him what she was doing. She did and he immediately knew what the problem was. She was inserting the disks in a hole just below the floppy disk drive so when my friend opened the computer, he found about 20 floppy disks.

One day, he went to another lady's house because her floppy disk drive wasn't working. When he arrived she showed him what she did to try to use her floppy disks. He found out that she was folding her 5.25" disk to fit in the 3.5 floppy disk drive.

As Chief Technician, i rearely went out intot he field anymore, which is just fine with me! But we got into one of those times where we just had to much business for the regualr complement of techs to handle. So that means I had to go out. We had just signed up a new account for a service agreement. God Bless Salesmen!

I finally found the music store that was signed up. as i walked inside i was immediatly aware that they had cats in the building. Not only could i see them but thier aroma was unmistakeable.

The customer pointed to the machine that was to be checked out and serviced as per our agreement. ( God BLESS salesmen)

As soon as i pulled the PC case out from between the desk and wall, i found that it was sitting IMMEDIATLY next to the litter box that the cats use FREQUENTLY! God (sorta) BLESS salesmen)

It was also aparent that the litter box had not been emptied in several months at least and the computer had been covered with the Cats business! GOD XXXX SALESMEN

I had to leave three times to get freash air and keep from wretching! DAMNED SALESMEN!!!!

fortunatly, the pc lasted longer than his contract ans we didnt renew it! ( I wonder if that salesman ever heard of "DRAWING AND QUARTERING"?

I am not a tech support person, but this event is just too weird to pass up:

My friend's office has a secretary who claims to be PC savvy - even though she thinks the monitor button starts the computer and is amazed when the network printers start when she hasn't printed anything.

However, one day, she complains that her PC isn't working. After several attempts by some other staff members, it appeared that the machine was truly hosed. So they called in a professional.

After two days of diagnostics, the tech guy discovered that the Windows OS had been split between the C drive and the D drive - a feat nearly impossible to perform intentionally. Better still, the last command at the DOS prompt read:

C:\ Dear Mary,

I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you...

I once took a call from an older lady from a banking center experiencing a problem with her PC.

her: " There is something wrong with my computer. The screen is black and it isnt making any noise."

me: "How long have you been having this problem ?"

her: " It started Friday and i was too busy to call it in"

me: (it was Tuesday) " So you have had the problem for 3 days?"

her: "yes and i need someone to take a look at it"

me: " What kind of PC is it?"

( she told me and it was the exact PC I had in front of me)

me: "How are you turning the PC on?"

her: " Well I press the button on the front of the PC."

me: " which button?"

her: " the button at the upper right had corner of the machine."

me: ( I wasnt sure how to tell her she was using the floppy drive button to turn the PC on and had been doing this for 3 days)

I got a call the other day while doing tech support... this is paraphrased, but went something like this:

Me: Good evening and thank you for calling tech support. This is Sierra, can I get your username please?

Cust: James

Immediately suspicious (we have in the neighborhood of 9000 users and a username like 'james' would have been taken quite some time ago and users who have been around that long rarely need tech support), I look the user up in the database, and sure enough, the account had been created in early 1996.

Me: Is this Jim?

Cust: No, this is Tony. It's my friend's account.

Me: Can I get an address for verification?

Cust: 1323 Whatever Way (I don't remember exactly what he said. At any rate it wasn't even close to what's in the database).

Me: That's not the address we have on record. Are you sure that's his username?

Cust: He said it was James.

Me: When was the account created?

Cust: Just a couple days ago.

Me: Well the account of 'james' was created quite some time ago. This isn't your friend's account. What's your friend's name; maybe I can look it up that way?

Cust: Jim Smith.

Me: *pause* Well normally I'd be willing to look the account up by last name but with a name like 'smith' it would take all week. I suggest you call your friend and find out what the username is. Until then we can't help you here.

At this point there was a pause on the other end of the phone.

Cust: Has your system been hacked recently?

Ahem?

Me: No, it hasn't. To my knowledge our user database has never been hacked at all and if any of our systems have been hacked then it was nothing vital and I wasn't notified.

Cust: Are you sure?

Me: Positive.

*click*

Never did get to the technical question, though I have a feeling he was going to ask what his password was...

I work at the helpdesk of an international ISP so we get the wildest calls from bewildered users.

One evening one of my collegues got this phonecall:

Tech: Good evening, ISP Helpdesk John Doe speaking.

User: Hi, I get this message about my password not being correctly?

Tech: We'll have a look sir... which operating system do you use?

User Windows 95 Dutch.

[Now in my language, Dutch, the 'My Computer' icon on the desktop of Win95 is translated as 'Deze Computer'

which should be in translation 'This computer'

Tech: Ok Sir... I'll walk you through this. Do you see [techie takes breath break to stress the quotes]

'This Computer'

User [After a infitessimal moment of silence]: Of course mam! Do you think I'm stupid

Apparantly the user was referring to the computer itself.

This is the thruth and nothing else but the thruth.

A collegue of me gets the following call:

Techie: Good evening, ISP Helpdesk. How can I help you?

User: The mouse is dead!

Techie [eyes lit up]: you did feed it regurarly, did you?

User: Oh darn.

I work for an internet provider, but we occasionally get calls that are completely unrelated. Okay, we frequently get calls that are completely unrelated and often get yelled at when we tell the customer to call Microsoft because Word isn't working, but on occasion it's a simple fix and we don't mind helping the customer.

I answered the phone one day with my usual speech and after bringing up the user's information I ask, "And what can I help you with this evening?"

"My computer won't boot up."

"What error message did it give you?"

"Invalid system disk or disk error. Please replace and press any key."

"Take the floppy disk out of your disk drive and hit enter."

"Oh! It's working now! Thanks!"

I didn't bother logging the call.

I work as part of an email problem solving team for an ISP.

Our customers send us emails detailing their problems, and

we answer them. At least, thats the idea.

This conversation took place over the course of a number of

days, with emails going back and forth. These are EXACT

quotes of the ENTIRE emails sent and received, minus the

header information and the 'thank you for mailing's.

Mr X

"Sort it out. Its not working."

Support

"Please detail the problem you are having, with any relevant

error messages; and we should be able to assist you straight

away."

Mr X

"Its in my computer."

Support

"Are you getting an error message? We need to know what the

problem is before we can help you with it."

Mr X

"There is an error message. I click OK."

Support

"What is the error message? We cannot help you if you are

not able to tell us what the message says. If you can give

us some more information, we will be more than happy to

assist you with this problem."

Mr X

"You guys are useless. I'm changing Service Providers."

me: Okay, now double-click on My Computer.

Client: YOUR computer???

Client: What did you do to my 'O:' drive??!

me: hunh? Are you having a problem logging onto a network drive?

Client: Yes #$%@!, I can't find my 'O' drive!

me: (lightbulb finally going on) Ahhh...okay...we will need to remap your 'O' drive. What is the name of the shared folder you go to on the 'O' drive?

Client: It's MY 'O' drive! I don't care who else shares it. And its NOT a folder, it's my 'O' drive, and it has all sorts of folders on it.

Me: (patience mode 'ON') Right...but your 'O' drive is really a folder on a big network drive. On your computer, it's labelled 'O' to trick the computer into thinking that folder is a seperate drive. In order to map drive 'O' to the right share, I have to know what it's called and where it is. See, I could have access to that same "drive" and call it "Z" on my computer.

Client: You get your own 'O' drive! Give me MY 'O' drive back right now, or I'm calling the IT manager!

As a sidelight--I was into my dentist a while back, and he was commenting on how badly worn down my back teeth are. He asked me, "Do you spend a lot of time grinding or clenching your teeth?"

First call Monday AM:

Me:Okay, double-click on My Computer.

User: YOUR COMPUTER???!!!

While out of town one day, I was helping our accountant over the phone who was having trouble accessing a file on one of our network drives. Wanting to find out if he had lost his network connections, I asked him to go to "My Computer". "OK, hold on", he said, and then immediately put me on hold. A minute or so later he picked up the phone and said "OK, I'm at your computer, now what?"

This goes back to the dark ages, but I still giggle about it occasionally.

I was working for a hospital many years ago that was in the process of going to a token-ring network. I was coming back from unbunging a remote printer and happened to cut thru the admitting area. I see Jerry, our network guy standing around whistling and looking at the ceiling while about 6 admitting clerks are crawling around on their hands and knees peering into file cabinets and under desks.

I asked Jerry what in heck was going on, and one of the admitting clerks pipes up and says:"Oh...Jerry's lost a token. We're helping him try to find it!"Jerry gives me a grin and a wink, and I managed to dive around the corner before falling over laughing.

Turns out that Jerry had been muttering about a test token not being "seen" on his ring, and one of the clerks quite logically asked him where he'd seen it last...the rest, as they say, is IT history.

My DH told me this one the other night while I was driving us home after work...I laughed so hard I had to pull the car over.

He works at a major inner-city hospital/medical school complex, as a field tech, and as often happens, there are "differences of opinion" between the wiring folks and the PC techs.

Anyway...he's been thru an exhaustive troubleshoot on a network connectivity issue, and has determined that the LAN jack is "bad". The Network "god" is insistant that that jack is perfect because he did the wiring and patching himself. Argument goes on for a while, and finally DH grabs his testing equipment and drags Net geek off to wiring closet. He's got another guy "toning" (sending signals from the LAN jack to the hub or patch panel so that you can verify connections) so that he can find the "right" connection.

Network guy is still blathering on when DH gets back the tone report from his colleague.

Without saying a word, DH unplugs LAN connection at patch panel, plugs in his testing phone handset and hands it to the network guy...the look on this guy's face when heard a DIALTONE was just priceless

Having become tired of serving as the family "service" bureau; I purchased PCs for my sister and my mother. BOTH are complete computer novices.

While my sister has convinced me that the ability to learn technical stuff is definitely inherited as a recessive, my mother actually startled the heck out of me. Mom is in her sixties, btw...and has been earnestly beavering away at her tutorials.

She provided a few giggles by asking if my computer also came with a "fishtank", and if mine could talk to me also (meaning did I have the WIndows "reef" screensaver, and did my system also have sound capabilities)

Then, she called me up having experienced her very first GPF (like I said, she's a REAL newbie)...and I explained that this probably happened because one program was running in part of the computer's memory, and another program tried to use the same part of memory, and even if she wasn't using another program, if it was "open" it could still be reserving a "spot". Okay...so far so good...then she says (and this is REALLY profound) "But, I'm very confused!" and I started to explain all this again. She interrupted me: "No! I understand all that. What I don't understand is how on earth Windows can be multi-tasking if everything has to take turns using files and memory and the CPU and the disk and stuff! Not only that, but I shouldn't have to have all this stuff in memory just sitting around waiting for something to do. Why can't the computer just "unfold things" when I need them, and then fold them up again when I'm done with them?"

I nearly fell over, and jokingly told my mother that (since she'd just neatly described daemons and compiling modules to the kernel on the fly) if she'd already grasped that, she'd be ready to start playing with Unix pretty soon.

Her reply left me gasping for air and pounding the table: "Dear, what on EARTH do harems and whatnot have to do with computing?"

Once I explained the it was "U-NIX" and that it was an operating system...she informed me that the "company" needed to change the name of that operating system because it really gave one the wrong impression--a direct quote follows: "Windows (tm) is a pretty dumb name for an operating system, but a name that implies emasculation is REALLY stupid!"

I'm gonna have to dump Linux on the sparc station just to show mum that "unix" does indeed have the necessary...errrr...equipment.

As a promo, the isp I work for sends out an external modem for opening an account. I really only know software issues and can set the modem up, maybe I don't know about hardware, but it sounded wrong to me!

Me: Thanks for calling XYZ internet company, how may I help you?

Customer: I am having problems setting up this modem.

Me: Where are you running into problems?

Customer: Well, I took out my internal modem and put in yours instead.

Me: You put in our External Modem?

Customer: Yes, and I have no place to plug it in.

Me: You put the external modem INSIDE your computer?

Customer: Yes, but that didn't work, so I took it out.

Me: Well, that is because it is an EXTERNAL modem meaning it needs to be hooked up to the outside of the computer.

Customer: I know what external mean, I made this computer myself.

(and he put the EXTERNAL MODEM INSIDE the computer?)

Me: OK, what does the cable look like that you are using to connect the modem to the computer?

Customer: I am not using a cable, I am using a Ribbon. The ribbon is 10 pin and the only place on the motherboard is 8 pin.

Me: You need to hook up the modem to the outside of the computer, not to the motherboard.

Customer: Well, I tried that but the ribbon that connects the hook up on the outside to the motherboard does not have a place to go.

(OK, some people should not be allowed to build computers)

Me: Maybe you should go to your local computer store with your computer and get them to help you out.

Customer: OK, thanks.

A friend of mine who work for an ISP:

Client: Could you guys do me a favor?

Tech: Sure, what is it?

Client: Well I'm a moving soon

Tech: Okay, can I have your new address?

Client: Sure, it's [...]. Now I was just wondering if you guys could send my emails to the new address?

Tech: What do you mean?

Client: well since I am moving, I don't want to loose the messages people will send me, so could you forward them to my new address?

Tech: but you still have the same email address?

Client: Yes but I would like you to send those email to my new house?

Tech: (not wanting to explain everything from the start) Ok, I'll do that for you...

i am a graphics designer using autocad. a couple of years ago, the engineer i was doing a project for, came by my work station to check on his job. he questioned me if i was drawing this object he wanted to the correct scale and he proceeded to grab my ruler and he held it up to my monitor to measure the object. i just about split a gut laughing as the monitor does not display actual sizes as they are either magnified large or small depending on your size monitor but never actual scale. this guy has a masters degree in engineering and here a schlump like me with no degree, explaining to him that you can't get a actual reading off a monitor. at present, this guy is now my supervisor.

Ok, if my first story that I submitted makes it on here, I'm the guy that had the crazy guy from the south whose 'critter' was broken. This call happens to come from the same state, Georgia...

The user was experiencing frequent disconnects from the internet and we had already tried some init strings...the conversation gets interesting:

Me: Ok sir, so you have &'F'(as in FOXTROT)&'C'(as in CHARLIE)1&'D'(as in DELTA)2'S'(as in SIERRA)...

User: What, WHAT? What was that last letter?!?!?!?

Me: It was 'S', sir, 'S' is in SIERRA...

User: I'm sorry, I don't understand you....What was it?

Me: (Silent ARGH!!) 'S' as in SAMANTHA, SNAKE, SIERRA, SILO...

User: (Getting ARNGY!) I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?!?!?!?

Me: (At this point, a little PO'ed) PRESS 'S' sir, the letter that comes BEFORE 'T' in the alphabet...'S' the LETTER.

User: (Probably has a BLANK look, pratically yelling at me) Listen here, you have to make yourself clear. I am not understanding you at all, if I did, I wouldn't be asking you to explain this to me...

Me: (Guess how I am reacting!) SIR, ALL I ASK IS YOU PRESS THE LETTER 'S' ON YOUR KEYBOARD ONCE...ONE TIME. NO MORE, NO LESS...JUST THE LETTER 'S' (So, it rhymes, it worked!)

User: (Acting high and mighty) Well, WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY THAT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?!??

Me: (Not gonna say anything!) After the 'S', sir, it's the number 10...

15 minutes of arguing on the spelling of 'S'. The end result was the guy thought he had won too...sometimes I wonder about them...espically the ones that have 'DR.' in front of that name...(We have a few!)

------------------

Yes, another story from down south...(Georgia)

I guess spelling isn't the strongest point of some users in that area...

Me: That's 'C'(as in CAT)1... *I NEVER get to finish*

User: Huh? What's that? Did you say 'B'? (I'm beginning to wonder about these people!)

Me: No, sir. That's 'C', 'C' as in CAT...

User: Is that 'B' as in CAT?

Me: (Thinking - Yes, yes it is...next, it's going to be 'S' as in STOOPID!) Uhh...no sir, it's 'C' as in CHARLIE...

User: Oh, 'C'!! Ok....and...what's next?

Me: (Thinking - 'D', as in DUMB USER!)

It certainly makes you think...these are NORMAL people, who probably have NORMAL jobs, go to work everyday, do what they do and then come home, turn into a vegetable and call us at tech support. They certainly do become a good entertainer during parties and such when I am asked about my job....most people can't think of anyone who can be so stupid!!

------------------

Last story from the south...

Me: Thank you for calling technical support, (Insert Name) speaking, can I get your login userid, please?

User: Is there a problem with your servers tonight? I cannot stay logged in. It keeps hanging up on me...

Me: There are no problems that have been reported at this time, but I will keep an eyes out and report to the supervisor...meanwhile, we can check your settings just to make sure...(Didn't I say CHECK? Not FORMAT! Sheesh!)

User: There is NOTHING wrong with **MY** computer. I haven't touched it since the day I got it and it's always worked...there's something wrong with ***YOU GUYS!***

Me: (We are not his ISP, we are tech support for his ISP! ***YOU GUYS!*** doesn't cut it!) SIR, SOMETIMES, WINDOWS `95 LIKES TO DO THINGS ON IT'S OWN, I JUST SUGGESTED THAT WE CHECK YOUR SETTINGS AS THERE ARE NO NETWORK PROBLEMS REPORTED AT THIS TIME. IF THERE WAS THE NETWORK ENGINEERS WILL PAGE US...

User: Ok, fine...

Me: Ok, thank you sir. I'll have you double click the 'My Computer' icon there...

User: No thank you, **** off, good night....*SLAM*

Guess what? The whole time, there was NO network problem and this guy was a jerk towards us, calling three times later on to receive the same answer...At least he said thank you with his *** off...(grin)

It's ME! The guy with the tales from down south...this one comes from SOUTH DAKOTA...A real nice guy called up...it goes as follows:

User: I cancelled my account and I want on the internet RIGHT NOW!

Me: Sir, I'm sorry, but we are just technical support, we cannot activate accounts from our end. You'll have to call Customer Service in the morning.

User: I can't call them in the morning, you do it!

Me: Sir, I can't! We do have have that access!

** Meanwhile, something clicks in my head....this guy TOLD me he CANCELLED his account! Duh, no wonder he can't get logged in...This guy isn't overly bright, or too damn stubborn to listen...

User: YOU DO IT...DO IT NOW!

Me: *groan* Ok, sir, I cannot do it...you will have to call Customer Service...

User: I already told you, I can't call them in the morning...

Me: Sir, may I ask why?

User: I have no phone...

** Where the hell is he calling from then? Needlesss to say, he hung up...good riddence...

THE NEXT NIGHT...

Me: Tech Support, (Insert Name) speaking, can I have your login userid please?

User: xxxxxx@isp.net and that last technician that I was talking to last night promised that he'd have the owner call me personally and he never did...what's his name? I want him fired!!

Me: Well, sir, that last technician that you were speaking to last night was me...and I NEVER promised you that...(instant BURN, you think he'd give up by now...)

User: @!@#$%^%*&&*&(*&^%$$#^%^*& (Plus other things!)

** So, he yells and screams, I speak with a supervisor and I get the go ahead to transfer him to a supervisor who has to PAGE the owner of the ISP and have her activate the account right then and there...at like 10:00pm HER TIME! The next day, I get called into the office and told that this user had received ONE MONTH FREE for ***HIS*** troubles!!!!!

How's that for justice? You do a lot of yelling, tell me you cancelled the account, tell me what you think of me in 'nice' terms, scream at the supervisors, get personally put through to the owner of the ISP and receive one month free for your troubles?!?? Wish I could do that...

I never id get in trouble for that...but if for any reason I happen to be linked to my stories, I MIGHT...=) Let's hope not...we all know the users never visit here!!!

One wonderful morning on a week filled with horrid network failures, the phone rang and I once again picked up the line. My caller was at one of our Tennessee offices and wanted to know what he had to do to turn off the server for his site. I asked why he needed to do this and he curtly replied that they were getting new carpet put in the office and they needed to move everything out of the room where the server was. I infromed him we would have to call the Infrastructure team and get permission to take the server down during production hours. He said he would hold.

Now, I'm a suspicious tech and while I called the Infra team, I began pinging the server in question. Before Infra answered the phone, the server stopped responding. I popped back to the customer and he had dropped from the line. I called the user back and he was strangely 'unavailable' so I spoke to his admin assistant who calmly informed me that her boss had unplugged the server without shutting it down.

The server was a WinNT BDC, print server and appl server for 3 cities.

And he did that cause he was an office manager who a) didn't plan ahead and b) wasn't willing to make a couple of carpet dudes wait for 5 minutes while we took the server off the net in a more appropriate fashion.

A tech call rings into our national ISP tech center. I get the user's information and she starts to explain the problem. She is having problems connecting, and has spoken to four other techs before me that day. I spend almost an hour trying to analyze her settings and get her connected when I finally decide to have her explain EXACTLY what happens when she tries to connect. She says:

"Ok. I push connect and I hear it dial, but then this damn terrible screeching noise comes on."

I say:

"What do you do at that point?"

She replies:

"I push cancel."

:)

At my former place of employment (a hellhole, lowest bidder, help desk subcontact place called Sitel Technical Services), I worked on a contact that did internal help desk support for a major telecommunications company.

So one day one of their employees reached out and touched me from home. He was having problems with his Toshiba laptop and wanted to have me help him fix it. After the first few questions it became clear he was not dialed in which would explain why he cannot send mail to his commrade. The user then admitted that he HAD been dialed in but he disconnected so he could make some lunch while on the phone. I explained that we were wasting time by TSing a machine that wasn't on line. He then decided he would cooperate and dial in.

After he was on line again, we walked throught the steps he was taking to send his buddy an email in an attempt to reproduce his problem. As he was addressing it I realized that what he had done was send to a Personal Address Book entry that was no longer a valid address. (He needed to use the Global Address as the mail server naming convention had changed). Just as the lights were coming on in my head I heard a loud crash on the other end of the line (followed by no small amounts of profanity).

me: Sir, what was that?

him: I dropped my **&#@^$%! laptop.

me: What happened?

him: I was walking back to the kitchen and reached the end of the modem cord.

me: Oh..... (I was really at a loss)

him: so what is wrong with my mail?

me: oh, yeah. You need to address from the global address list and then make a new personal address list entry for that person. That will fix the problem.

him: Umm, okay. Let me try this.......(long silence)

me: What's happening?

him: I'm having trouble with the pointer thing (Toshiba has this little green eraser in the center of the keyboard to be used as a mouse).

me:What kind of trouble?

him: It keeps falling out and the pointer doesn't move.

me: When did this start?

him:After I dropped it.

me: (lights came on in the attic) Sir, did anything else get damaged when you dropped it?

him: Well there is this long crack accross the entire case......

needless to say, he didn't have a problem before but he ended up with one.

This is actually a story from a friend and colleague

of mine who works in the IT department at a hospital

in SE London. (Let's call him Gary).

One day he gets a phone call from one of the computer users

his department supports: (Let's call him Stupid):

(Phone rings)

Gary: Hello IT helpdesk

Stupid: Hi, I've received a floppy disk from Hospital X

which has some documents on it that I need, but when I

try and run it from the drive it comes up unable to read

disk

Gary: Okay, where are you based?

Stupid: I'm over at site X.

Gary: Well, if you can try and copy the disk and send it to

me over at site Y, I can try and get the files off of it for

you.

Stupid: Okay I will send it in the internal mail.

Next day Gary (the name has been changed to protect the

innocent) receives an internal envelope with two pieces of

paper in it. On one piece of paper is a photocopy of the top

side of the disk, and on the second piece of paper is a

photocopy of the underside of the disk.

Poor Gary cried for days!!!

While I am not a techie, I know enough that I get asked questions, but plead igonorance enough so that when I say "I don't know", they believe me, and find someone else. And to admit to any real techie that the cause of a problem was probably me. Even so, when my friend related this story the solution was something even I knew...or so I thought...

(Back when you booted to DOS and typed 'win' to get to Windows. U = user, F = Frank, the poor guy who went through this)

U: How to I start Windows?

F: Oh, type Win at the prompt.

U: It says "Bad command or file name"

F: Great, okay bye....wait, say that again?

U: Bad command or file name.

F: Uhh...type cd windows and type win again.

U: Same thing.

F: Huh. Type dir and tell me what you see.

U: blah, blah, blah..win this, win that...blah

F: Okay....

(Omit two hours of walking through everything possible, O\S, all relevant files, etc, etc.)

F: I'm stumped. Looks like we'll have to reinstall windows.

U: Oh man.

F: Well, get your disks...

(At this point, obvious light bulb hits Frank)

F: by the way, how are you spelling 'win'?

(Did I mention that Frank has a southern accent??)

U: W-H-E-N, why?

F: I can't believe this...I shoulda guessed...try W-I-N.

U: Okay...

F: Are you in?

U: Yep. Thanks.

It wouldn't have been that bad, well, yes it would, but just a few days ago the same question had come up, and when Frank told him to type 'win' the first time, he had spelled it out...specifically because of his accent.

When I was in college I worked for a large computer retailer. We sold to quite a few novice users. Every now and then we'd get a customer that was just so stupid they would never be able to figure out the computer. Since our push that year was for better customer service we would take back computers no matter if they weren't defective. In our returns database we actually had a CTSTU return code (Customer To Stupid To Use Computer), unfortunately a customer overheard one of the techs explaining to a newbie what the abbriviation was for. Neededless to say the code disappeared off our database rather quickly.

Working as a tech support for a software development

company, there is occassion when a patch for one of our

products requires a "patch"

A couple of times I have encountered the following scenario:

"Oh, I am sorry, there is a problem with the program. We do

have a patch for that and I will be happy to mail that to

you right away."

Customer response:

"Oh would be be possible you could just fax me with that

instead"

I remember it like yesterday. The first LUG (Linux Users Group) meeting for Fredericton NB.... Id prolly setup about 3 computers that morning.

Then this guy came walking in with his computer under his arm and an antistatic bag... his friend carrying his monitor...

He proceeds to open up the anti static bag and pull out a 3 1/2 " drive... and connect the power and bus cables to it. Then he turns on the computer.

I don't want to sound cruel ;} but what happened after that moment was a riot. You have to remember that this is a non-smoking building after all ;}.

I smelled something funny, and turned around just in time to see flames and smoke... billowing out the fan of this poor sod's powersupply.

Turns out the floppy drive's power adapter just decided to "miss" the ground wire of the power lead. It proceeded to melt the plastic on the wires, AND short the powersupply.

Needless to say Linux didn't get on this computer ;}...

Thank you, for not smoking.

A luser called and was wondering where the heck the mouse plugged in!

I asked, "what shape is the mouse plug?"

"Round"

I then said, "Ok, do you see a round socket in the back of the computer about the same size as that plug"

"Yes"

Then the crowning question, "is there a little picture of a mouse above that hole?"

"Yes"

"That's the port the mouse goes in"

"Oh"

(Hang Up Sound)