Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I support about 150 people, half of them being spread across the country. I often get some of the stupidest calls you could possibly believe. One of my favorites is when a user called me up, and asked if he should enable Marcos.

I asked him to explain himself, and he said he received a Marketing report from ***** and a message popped up asking him if he wanted to enable Marcos.

After spending 10 minutes with this guy, I finally found out, that he received an excel spread sheet, that had macro's in it. Being worried of a possible virus, I asked him who sent it. It took him a few minutes to figure that out, I found out who it was and determined there wasn't a virus.

So I let him enable his Marcos.

I received a call from a fellow who said his monitor didn't work. Over the phone, I told him to check the power cables, and the connection to the PC. He said they were fine. (I was previously working on all the machines in that wing of the building the day before --including his-- installing Office 97 so I knew the monitor DID work.) When I got to his machine, I rechecked the power and signal cables. Fine. Then I looked at the power light.

I hit the power button. Viola.

His response: "I didn't know I had to hit that button."

Then I remembered that I shut down all the computers that were on after installing office. Apparently, the guy never turns the monitor off.

Get this, the guy has been working there for 15 years!

user: I am having a problem with my PC.

Me: OK whats the issue

user: Well, I was working in an application, and my pc

just froze. I waited and waited and it never moved

again. So I went to lunch, and figured while I was

gone it would ork itself out. Well, now Im back from

lunch and it still hasnt moved.

Me: Ok. Have you tried to reboot the pc?

user: What does that mean?

Me: Reboot the pc. Turn it off and on. Have you done that?

user: yes

Me: and its still frozen?

user: yes

me: Wait. You turned the PC off and on and its still in

the same spot

user: yes!

me: The exact same spot? And the PC was off?

user: FOR THE LAST TIME YES. I SHUT THE TV ON AND OFF

3 TIMES AND ITS STILL IN THE SAME SPOT!!!

The company I work has two ways to contact the tech department: Phone and e-mail. Part of our website has a form where users can fill out and send their questions directly to the tech support department. For a couple of days, however we were having problems with the website and the e-mail form was not working properly.

Within those 2-3 days, we received voice mails from at least 5 different clients regarding this. None of these voice mails made any mention whatsoever of what their original question was that they were trying to e-mail us. They all simply said, "I'm trying to e-mail you a question from your website but it's not letting me".

My last job entitled me to support AS/400 users, where frequently, the user put his or her password in wrong to many times, and the terminal would "vary off". This was a simple fix where if the end user told me their terminal number, I would simply "vary" their terminal back on to a sign on screen. Because I would get this type of call so many times, I decided to play around with the end user, having them do rituals such as rubbing the top of their terminals, or holding the keyboard above their heads, and magically, they thought that what they were doing would "vary on" their terminal, even though it was obviously me. This was all fun and games until I started getting calls where the end user would say that they have been holding their keyboard above their heads for almost twenty minutes, but their terminal would never "vary on".

Imagine you were sitting next to someone who was rubbing their terminal, or holding their keyboard above their heads. Pretty funny, huh?

At a previous job I was assistant network administrator. One day I got a call from the HR department saying that a mouse was not working. I talked to the lady on the phone and she says that the mouse jumps all over the screen. This sounding like a mouse driver problem I walked her through removing the mouse from system and then do a reboot. This will reload the mouse driver. That did not help. She explains that when she moves the mouse to the right it goes to the left and things like that. Finally I figure it is a bad mouse. So I got a new mouse and headed down to HR. When I arrived she was very happy to see me and showed me the crazy things the mouse did. If she moved up the mouse went down. Move left the mouse went right. I looked down at the desk and she was holding the mouse with the wire coming out the wrong side. She had the mouse facing the wrong way. I told her I was hoping to check her login at the server fist so I could get out of the room for a minute to stop giggling. Then I changed her mouse any way. I did not have the heart to embarrass her.

I work in a local college doing tech support where they have a graphic design program using macs. One day, one of the first semester students, using Quark, called me into the classroom, and with a very worried look on her face, said to me, "I think I did something REALLY wrong, now the computer's talking to me!"

We had forgotten to turn off the speech extention on that mac, and it was speaking the alerts.

I was working with a customer to attempt to resolve a printing problem. They printed, nothing came out of the printer. It took me literally 20 minutes to get this woman to open up the printer properties. Here is the point where I actually started to cry:

ME: Okay, Donna, what did came out of the printer?

HER: Color ons paper pine.

You can just imagine the rest of the conversation.

A user on my floor keeps having problem with his PC,

it keeps crashing and looking for some .dlls, the reason

being that the user downloaded an application from the

Internet and installed it himself on his PC, after

realizing that it was a version for NT and he was in WIN95,

he decided to delete all the files using file manager

instead of using the proper add/remove program feature.

Since than his PC is always looking for 32bit .dlls and I ended

up having to uninstall and reinstall quite a few of his applications

because everytime you opened an application it was looking for 32dlls etc.

Needless to say that this kind of situation either makes you want to cry and/or laught,

one thing for sure it keeps us working.

This happened while I was working the help desk at a local US Air Force base in jolly ol' England. The luser was one of our favorites - if you asked him, he knew everything there was about computers. He once said he could teach us techs about computers!

Me: Help desk, this is Sergeant "Phayes", How can I help you?

luser: Hey Phayes, I just turned on my computer and I got a message that says, "Non-system disk. Please remove disk and hit any key to continue." What should I do????????????

Me: Remove the disk and hit any key to continue.

I work for a tech support for a major OEm and got a call form a customer. The EU's unit wasn't loading the HDD, so I set it up for a repair so they could check the whole unit. Well, we got an e-mail from our repair center telling us that the unit had been received, but there was a problem. The EU had removed the HDD and replaced the undercover and sent the unit in........

Back in the days when I was involved with tech support, I like every

other tech support rep got some pretty strange calls. However, this one took

the cake:

Me: XXX Technical Support, Amy speaking.

User: Yes, could you answer a question for me?

Me: Sure m'am, what can I do for you?

User: What color do computers come in?? I need it to match my

newly remodeled living room.

What??? I am in tech support, not interior design!

PS- I actually did tell her. She really liked the one that came in teal.

She didn't like the $20K price tag. Yes, it was a SGI Onyx. *grin*

While working at tech support for a major ISP, I received a phone call from a middle eastern gentlemen.

He said that his computer says he had performed an illegal operation.

"But, I did not perform illegal operation. I think it must have been the activation code on the CD that I was sent."

I told him how I thought that was unlikely.

He said, "But I did not perform illegal operation and I want you to call the police and tell them not to arrest me for it."

Well, it took a bit before I could talk again and tell him that the cops weren't coming over.

But I haven't noticed him trying to get an internet account with us since (and I still look to this day).

A little while ago I was summoned to a user's workstation to deal with a reported dead monitor. The user had informed me on the phone that the monitor was not working. He assured me that he had checked the power and all the settings before calling. Based on his 'thorough' troubleshooting techniques, I assumed there was in fact a serious problem with his monitor. Upon arriving at this user's workstation, the real culprit became glaringly obvious. The user had been out of the office for a couple of days and a coworker had used his computer in his absence. Since he never turned his computer off, it never dawned on him that he should check whether his computer was turned on. The coworker had been nice and turned his computer off for him. A simple push of the power button on the computer and...'shazam'...functioning monitor.

People always want to blame computers when something goes wrong and I know this as a fact. Two years ago I was employed as a tech support engineer for a large college. My job there was to help students connect their computers to our campus network, any other assitance that I gave to them came out of my own time (and as I was also a student I had little free time).

One day I was awoken at 3:00am by a telephone call from the Hall (Dorm) Security Guard. She stated that there was a girl there that was having computer problems and she was crying (I could hear her in the background) I asked what the problem was, but the Security Guard spoke very broken english and after a couple of minutes I told hold on and I'll be right there. It didn't take me long to get there. When I arrived I found that the girl was still crying. When I asked her what the problem was she told me that she was typing her paper and she couldn't get the disk out cause it was broken. So I went and looked at the computer (a Mac) there was no disk in the drive. So I asked where the disk was and she told me that she couldn't find "a button" to eject the disk, so she pulled it out with a plyers. She gave me the pieces of the disk and I was able to put it back together, only to find that she had written only a paragraph of a paper which was due next week as well as wrecked the drive.

Moral of the story: Get an unlisted number, learn how to eject disks when using a Mac, and lastly don't break computers at 3 in the morning.

I work for a large computer superstore as a technician. Well, today, a customer called and said, "I had my computer in for service and when you installed more megabytes it messed up my gigabytes." I knew right then that this was going to be a difficult situation. Well, the lead technician got on the phone and tried to explain the difference between RAM and hard drive space. However, this was one of only two concepts that this customer could not seem to grasp. The second was that hard drives DO fail on occasion, and need to be replaced. The customer was convinced that the hard drive failure was our fault. He then demanded to speak to the technician who worked on the machine by proclaiming "bring him on!" At that point, the lead tech said he was going to end the call, which caused the customer to spew forth obscenities. This guy obviously had a few more problems than missing megabytes or gigabytes.

I did some tech support at my college computer lab. Almost everyday, we had a student who would put the disk in the wrong way. Most times, we would shut down the computer and take out the necessary tools to get the disk out. Usually once it was taken out, the disk was useless. It was funny that college aged people couldn't figure out how to insert a disk into a computer.

When I worked at an Internet Provider, I had a user who was

very much a novice. I was trying to explain to this person the

difference between disks and cd-roms. It got to the point where

I said that I would send him the "square thingies" (floppies).

The person was a nice person to speak to...but didn't have a

clue.

Needless to say, I was on the phone with them again trying to

figure out how to install the "square thingies"

Working as a tech support specialist, I answer many questions. Most of them are things that the average person would not know. But you don't have to be a tech to figure this one out:

Me: Thank you for calling ___, how may I help you?

User: I just got a question about one of your printer/copier/scanner/fax thingees....

Me: Yes?

User: Do ya hafta plug those things into your computer?

Me: (Astounded) Uhhhh.......yeah.......

User: Oh well then, I guess that there solves my problem. Thank you!

It's a good thing he hung up then, I could barely contain my laughter... :)

Okay, I can't take credit for this one, but this came through from one of my workmates...

Working in a support team, we often find ourselves having to page more 'technical' groups to get problems resolved. This brief wonder stems from a mis-interpreted pager message...

My colleague called the pager operator and left the message:

Pls call MRS on nnnn-nnn-nnn re yadda yadda yadda.

When the recently inducted tech support called back, they asked for Mrs On... My mate - he was not impressed!

Makes you wonder how many wrong pager messages there are out there at times *chuckle*

*footnote*

MRS stands for Mid-Range Services

Hi,

My story involves a new user who received a computer for Christmas. She said her modem "wouldn't talk" to her when she tried to use the mouse on it. Rather than try to decipher what she was trying to tell me, I decided to start the call by having her check resource settings in Device Manager.

I asked her if she was in front of the system and if it was booted up, and she responded by saying yes. I then asked her to RIGHT click on the My Computer icon. There was silence for a couple of minutes, so, I asked her what was happening. She said, "Nothing is happening. I did right click like you asked me to. Maybe I didn't spell it correctly. I spelled it C-L-I-C-K." Thoroughly confused, I asked her why she was spelling the word. She replied by saying she opened Wordpad and wrote the word click because I had told her to WRITE click.

Needless to say, I had to put her on hold for a little bit to compose myself. Since speaking with that customer, I always ask my customers to click using the right mouse button.

I admire all of those who seek to enhance their knowledge

of computers. However, I recommend to those who are totally

clueless about the subject to get FAMILIAR with them before

you buy a $3000 Gateway system.

I got a call from a lady that I train in computers once a week.

She told me, "I have been typing a report on this computer and

no matter what I do i get these green bars across the bottom of

my screen. Well, I am trying everything I know. Without seeing

what she is talking about I have to take what she is trying to tell

me and figure it out. When none of this works, she goes into a

panic about needing her reports the next day, yada, yada, yada, so I

tell her that I will be up to her house in about 30 minutes. I get

there look at the screen and feel like kicking myself in the butt for

listening to the ramblings of a computer idiot. Gateway screens show

the monitor volume along the bottom of the screen (as little green bars)

unless you hide it, turn it all the way down, or mute the volume.

I should have let her call Gateway Tech Support! I am sure that someone

could have used a good laugh! As for me, I didn't find it very amusing

after I drove 30 minutes to her house!

I work for a small ISP in south central Idaho and I'm simply

amazed at how many folks "just don't get it"... One call

recently from a new user....

"Hello, tech support, how may I help you?"

"I'm new and I want to know how many megabytes of AOL I get

for EBay?"

Another incredible day in tech paradise...

I'm not a tech supporter. I'm only a 16 year old Year 12

student studying in Whyalla, South Australia, but I know

something about computers.

I'm currently in a lesson called Information Processing.

About 10 minutes ago a girl sitting a few seats away was

loudly complaining about what she thought was a 'really

stupid bug'in Microsoft Word.

She had saved her Word file onto disk (or so she thought)

and when she went to open it she was annoyed at the fact

that it hadn't saved to the disk, but to the My Documents

folder on the C: drive. After several unsuccessful attempts

she had gotten so worked up that I felt I had to help.

Me: How are you saving it?

Her: I'm putting in the disk and hitting save.

Me: Are you changing directories?

Her: What's a directory???????!!!?!??!!

It seems that she was simply putting in the disk and

assuming that Word would somehow KNOW that she wanted to

save to disk.

Some people...

PS: This site is GREAT! It has relieved the monotony of

many a boring lesson.

This happened just one hour after the last incident

that I wrote about during Info Pro.

A friend of mine, who will go nameless, is somewhat

computer illiterate. He was telling me how he had

spent about an hour typing his English homework

and when he went to print it his printer wasn't

working. He then decided to hand write his English

on a piece of paper, copying it from the screen.

I quizzed him as to why he did this. I asked why he

didn't just copy the file to disk and print it off

at school. (Our school has about 100 Pentium III 450's

and about 30 printers, ranging from $3,000 lasers to

$20,000 wax printers). He replied that he didn't think

it would work as our school computers are Acers and

his is an Olivetti!!!!!!!!!!

I didn't have the heart to tell him that Olivetti

and Acer are just computer manufacturers, not completely

different systems. I simply told him to give it a go

next time.

Once again, some people...

I was working for a telecommunications company in Australia on a help desk for cable modem, when we recieved a call from an extremely worried customer.

At this particular time it was our billing week and we had about a 15 minute queue before the customers could speak to us.

Cust(very panicked): Pls help your technician has electrocuted himself- he has been lying on the floor and he has not moved.

Helpdesk:Pls calm down what is going on?

Cust reiterated her story.

Helpdesk: Have you called an Ambulance?

Cust: No,I thought I should check with you first.

It turns out that the tech was alright after a couple of days r and r, he had brushed a live wire whilst performing the installation.

I was working for a telecommunications company in Australia on a help desk for cable modem, when we recieved a call from an extremely worried customer.

At this particular time it was our billing week and we had about a 15 minute queue before the customers could speak to us.

Cust(very panicked): Pls help your technician has electrocuted himself- he has been lying on the floor and he has not moved.

Helpdesk:Pls calm down, what is going on?

Cust reiterated her story.

Helpdesk: Have you called an Ambulance?

Cust: No,I thought I should check with you first.

It turns out that the tech was alright after a couple of days r and r, he had brushed a live wire whilst performing the installation.

Me : David, technical support, may I help you ?

Him : I've got a problem... I can't use my CD-ROM drive.

Me : What do you mean ?

Him : Well, when I push on the CD-ROM drive button to open it, the tray doesn't appear. And in fact, I can't really see it...

Me : Yeah of course! (with a smile :o) ) Is there a slit where the CD-ROM drive is located ?

Him : Yes I can see it !

Me : You've just got to insert the disc in the slit to read it, that's a new technology called SLOT-IN.

Him : Oh yes ! I can read it now Thanks a lot ! Goodbye !

Me : Goodbye.

I was an IBM France site support maintenance technician at Sainte Marie (SMA)... now, in spite of the company, the computer (il)litteracy of some employees is frightening...

IBM Europe MidEast Africa support calls are routed through Zootemeer (a.k.a. ZTM), Holland, where a phone 'tech' gives a first level diagnostic, and then passes the call to site support. (sephard or sepsoft)

SHD support call - User would like a technician to install OS/2 Net.Compute platform on his 3270 dumb terminal.

- No comment.

SHD Support call - User cannot start computer. OS/2 problem. Please reclone in OS/2 NCO.

- I went onsite for the *real* diagnsotic to find that the phone sales was a member of the Gold Service - equipped with a webcam and speakers. He had a 12v adapter to power the speakers that came from his home PC. Instead of plugging the adapter into the speaker (as he did at home), he plugged the jack into the 1.5v speaker out socket at the back of his motherboard... and cooked it.

Worse, he told us that he would never have done that at home.

Poetic justice. The replacement motherboard was new-defect, and has PC was down for 2 weeks.

SHD Support Call - User cannot start PC. Reinstall OS/2 NCO. URGENT.

- I mosey on to the office in question, remove the diskette, power on....

SHD Support Call - Please change fuser on 4317K printer. URGENT

*call transmitted sephard sma -) ZTM : Please transmit to printing system division. We are not comptetant to intervene on network (or host!) printers.

*call transmitted ZTM -) sephard : User said URGENT. Please intervene ASAP

*call transmitted sephard sma -) ZTM : Please create RCMS call for PSD. sephard can *NOT* order a part.

*call transmitted ZTM -) sephard sma : The customer is not happy. Why do you not want to help?

*call closed by sepahard sma.

*call opened by ZTM : why was this call closed? Please do somthing.

*call transmitted sephard sma -) ZTM : We cannot access PSD queue to send call. You can. We cannot do anything. Please review your procedures.

*call transmitted ZTM -) SMAPRNT : sephard do not want to intervene. Can you do anything?

*call commented by : (protecting the innocent). nice ping pong game. RCMS call created n°xxx *transmitted SMAPRNT -) SMAPSD

*call commented by : SMAPSD. the fuser unit is a printer consumable and is not covered by internanl maintenance contract. The part has to be purchesed by the user. the user knows this and so do you.

*call closed by smaprnt

RCMS Call n° : xxxxx For : (protected).

Replace 540 meg HDD p/n xxhxxxx

- Just that. No address, no phone, no email....

I have nothing against the Dutch, or users.... though at times I fear interbreeding has taken place...

more to come......

*BPFH*

My mother is horrible with computers. I recall, after installing my Ethernet card, a screen came up requesting username, with an okay and a cancel button.

Mother: What do I do?

Me: Push the okay button.

Mother (while searching the keyboard): Where is the okay button?

Another example of computer illiteracy

Mother: What is FTP?

Me: File Transfer Protocol.

Mother: What do you transfer?

Okay, so everyone has heard of the individual using the CD-ROM as a cup holder. You wonder, is it myth or reality? Guess what...it's real. My first job was working at a help desk part time. I was on shift one afternoon, updating the virus definitions on the server, when a call comes in.

me: "Good afternoon, technical support."

Caller: "Thank God. My computer doesn't work."

me: "Ok. What happened prior to the call. Were you working on a program, have a power outage, brownout, something like that?"

Caller: "No, nothing like that. I was in Windows and all of the sudden my computer went out."

At this point I think maybe the power cord, monitor cord, surge strip power, dead socket...

me: "Ok. Is there a power light on the monitor?"

Caller: "Nope."

me: "What about the tower itself? Are there any light on in the front, or can you hear any noises from the inside?" I also though he might have killed his monitor somehow, or pulled the cable loose from the back.

Caller: "No. It's all dead. Just like I already told you."

So I proceeded to go through routine diagnosing steps...what was he working on, was there a power outage, did someone else use his machine while he was away, prior problems, etc. After about 30 min. of getting nowhere, I recommended he bring the machine in so I could take a look at it with him.

Two hours later the customer shows up. He has his ENTIRE system with him...keyboard, mouse, monitor and two kids in tow. I really felt bad for the guy, he looked frazzled.

I hooked up the machine to one of our power strips and tried both his monitor, one of ours and all to no avail. One thing I did notice was the CD-ROM was partially open for some reason. We then asked for, and got permission to crack the case.

Once the case was opened, a rich, earthy smell assailed my nostrils. I was afraid the chip might be shot, a dead slot, loose RAM chip, etc. What I found, after flipping the case on it's side, was a really nice line of barbecued coffee on the upper righ hand corner section of his motherboard and a dried spot near the back corner of the CD-ROM itself.

I looked up from the machine, trying not to laugh and asked, very matter of factly, if he had spilled coffee on the machine recently. His response was quite innocent.

"No, that's what I have the cup holder for. I'm always real careful around the damned thing. Electricity and all."

I then asked him if he was aware that the "cup holder" was really his CD-ROM. His response to this was "No S--T? That's NOT a cup holder!?! Well, can you fix it?"

I simply replied that, for about $1000.00 or so, I would be more than happy to replace the contents of the machine that he fried. It turned out that one of his kids was pestering him, he pulled his little travel mug out of the tray and pushed it closed, then put the cup on TOP of the case. He figured that, since it had a cover, the "electricity and all" would be protected.

I don't know what happened, but it sure seemed to be the cup holder not working and we all know the warranty doesn't cover a defective one.

Whoops!!!

A man who was previously a sailor, was very aware that ships are addressed as "she" and "her".

He often wondered what gender computers should be addressed. To answer that question,

he set up two groups of computer experts. The first was comprised of women, and the second of men.

Each group was asked to recommend whether computers should be referred to in the feminine gender,

or the masculine gender. They were asked to give 4 reasons for their recommendation.

The group of women reported that the computers should be referred to in the masculine gender because:

1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.

2. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.

3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer you could have had a better model.

The men, on the other hand concluded that Computers should be referred to in the feminine gender because:

1. No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.

2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

3. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

I used to take tech support calls for an ISP, and have run into my fair share of inanity. Here's one of my favorites...

We had set one of our clients up with a website, and it had just gone up that day. That afternoon, I received a call from him. He said that he couldn't find his website online. Hmm. I ran through my checklist:

-Is the site visible from inside our network; yes.

-Is he connected and online; yes (he was at Yahoo).

-Is he typing in the web address correctly; yes.

-Is the site visible from outside our network (going out through the router and back in from the outside); yes.

-Does restarting his site fix the problem; no.

-Is the DNS pointing to the right place; yes.

As I reached the end of my checklist, I grew more and more baffled. Finally, when I asked him what the EXACT text of the error message was, he said, "It says, 'Sorry, no matches were found containing www.*****.com.'"

"Wait a second," I replied, realizing that this wasn't one of our error messages. "WHERE are you putting in the web address?"

His response was, "In the text box under the big YAHOO logo."

I excused myself for a moment and collapsed on the desk, wondering what Darwin would think.

It took me another 5 minutes to explain to him where to correctly enter the web address. When he got to his site, his response was (and I'm quoting here), "Oh." *CLICK*

I put in a note warning all techs to beware of this customer, since he had, at best, a tentative grasp of the blazingly obvious.

--Thanks for the site; it's gotten me through more days than I can count. And may the gods bless the tech who invented the term "I D 10 T"; he has given us the true gauge of human character.

A phone conversation I've had all too often at work:

Me: Tech Support, may I help you?

User: I've been using your software for some time now to send files to your BBS--it was working fine, and now it's not working at all! I get an error message that says, "Unable to open port 2" (or whatever) when I try to log on.

Me: When was the last time you were able to log on?

User: Last week! It worked fine! Now it doesn't work at all!

Me: Have you made any changes to your system?

User: No!

Me(hoping caller doesn't hear my teeth grinding together): No new hardware? No new software? Nothing at all?

User: No! Nothing has changed!

Me: (Sir or ma'am)it would be extremely unusual for the software to just stop working if nothing has changed. Are you absolutely certain nothing has changed?

User: I'm sure of it!

Me(After hoping that once, just once, someone would come clean and actually tell the truth but have realized that, yet again, a user has lied to his or her tech support person): Have you just installed the software on a new computer?

User: Yes! And I didn't change anything!

(Huh? If getting a completely new system isn't a change, what is? I get several of these a week, and they are all almost word-for-word the same.)

Hello,Tech Support...Can Ihelp you.

Oh,yes...,I Have aproblem With my computer!

I'm very sorry...,What is it?

The Drive isn't working!

Have you put anything in it?

Well.....,Itried to feed the computer!

HOW?!

I have just put an egg in it!!

I work Tech Support for one of the larger direct computer manufacturers. My last call one night was quite interesting. I answered and gave my greeting speel then asked what the problem was. After ten to fifteen minutes of alternating between trying to calm this "happily hysterical" customer down and hitting mute to yank out a few handfuls of hair, I finally discover that she has the words "Disabled startup items" on her taskbar. She was using Windows 98, so I figured out that this was a toolbar. I had her read off what she got when she right-clicked the words, hoping to hear her say "Close" so I could get off this call. It wasn't there. I had her double-left click the words. This apparantly moved the toolbar to the other side of the taskbar. I had to put her on hold when she became even more excited because she never knew it could move like that and began moving it from one side of the taskbar to the other repeatedly. After regaining my composure, I had her right click on it again and remove the checkmark under the Toolbars sub-menu. A previous tech (God bless their patience) had cleaned out the startup tab in msconfig and disabled McAfee Virus Scan. So she asked me to help her redo her virus. I asked her to please repeat that and she said "I need to put my virus back on. It's gone and I think I need it." Finally I caught on. "You mean McAfee ANTI-virus?" "Exactly!My virus!" I had her configure McAfee to run at startup again. She then asked me about a "little picture" on her desktop that she had been told to rename, so she renamed it "Cher". I told her that was a shortcut and she could delete it. "Oh! Like this Outlook Express thingy here? I can delete that too?" "If you really want to do that go ahead. Thanks for calling ******." I got off that call wishing I had just a little of whatever she was on, and wondering how I ever kept from losing it and laughing myself into a hernia while talking to her.

me: Hi, thanks....

her: My computer's running very slow lately.

me: Okay, let's check your system resources.

her: How do I do that?

me: Right click on the My Computer Icon

her: dang, ok, hang on

me: Umm, ma'am?

her: yeah hang on...

her: ok, now what?

me: Do you see the word properties on the popup menu?

her: popup menu? what popup menu?

me: did you left click or right click on icon?

her: no, im not stupid, i 'wrote' click on it

me: huh? wrote?

her: yeah, you told me to 'write' "click" the on my computer icon didnt you?

me: yes, click the right button on your mouse

her: oh, well what can i use to clean this marker off my screen?

I work for an ISP in brazil, sometimes we REALLY have some funny calls down here. all right here it goes:

me: hello, tech support, may i help you?

caller: sure. i'm having trouble dialing to my ISP.

me: ok, is your modem correctly configured?

caller: modem?

me: yeah, that thingie where the phone cable plugs in.

caller: i can't find it. can you help me?

me: is your modem internal or external?

caller: of course it's internal! it's inside the house!

(mute), minutes laughing... i transferred the call to the sales dept, where they could schedule another tech guy to go to the moron's house.

Matrix

Working for an isp, at least once a day i get a call that goes

something like this.Keep in mind that these people have a

genuis for ringing when theres at least 30 people waiting in

queue.

Me:welcome to XXXXXXX, can i have your email address please?

Client:proceeds to give physical address

M:whats the name you send email by, sorry?

C: Its not for me, its for a friend.

M:ok, so whats your friends email address?

C:i dont know they didnt tell me.

M:ok, so have you got their phone no there then ?

C:yes,xxxxxxxx

M:(does a search on it)Nothings come up there.

C Oh, yeah,its a business with heaps of nos that it could

be under.I dont know which one they gave you(???????)

Their names xxxxxxxxx(insert any common name)

M:(knows its a long shot but does a search on the name

anyway in the name of customer service)

ok, Sir, our database is quite large,quite a few

xxxxxxxx's have come up here, none that match with the

no you gave me. You'll need to be more specific than that.

Do you have their acc no by any chance?

C:No, why would i have that.Whats the problem, all i want to

do is something very simple, why cant you find them?

Are your databases that disorganised?

M:??????????

I work for a fairly large regional provider that has discounted internet access for the teachers.

I had a call one fine afternoon from one of those true professionals.

She: I'm having trouble with the cd-rom.

Me: What's seem to be the trouble?

She: I can't open the case!

(Well, we have paper cases and jewel cases. I just didn't get it)

Me: Um, Does it have a plastic case?

She: Well, yeah.

Me: Are there any cracks in the case? Is it broken?

She: No.

Me: Have you ever seen a cd case before? They're all the same...

She: Of course I have. I have lots of cd's. This one doesn't work like that. (getting testy)

Me: Do you see the tabs on the top and bottum? Hold those down and try again.

She: It's not working!(getting testy)

Me: Maam, it just like any other cd case. (getting pissed)

She: No, it's...OH! There's a sticker here. Well, that was the problem. Thanks for your help.

Me: ...

It's no wonder why my son calls his teachers idiots. I thought he was just kidding until I took this job.

Error Type: Illegal Operation Error

Tech: What can I help you with today?

Customer: I am getting nothing but errors when I am trying to print a project!!!

Tech: What kind of errors are you receiving?

Customer: I don't know, but it said I did something illegal when I tried to print. Since when is it illegal to print something??

I did product support for a tax preparation software package aimed mostly at CPA's and other accounting professionals (it's a little pricey for the typical computer user). One day, a co-worker left a message on my desk that some guy from a radio station had called and wanted me to call him back. When I called, I found it was KPMG-Peat Marwick (the largest accounting firm in the world). The co-worker that took the message had been there for two years, so at some point she had to have dealt with someone from this firm.

I work as a technician at a large East Coast University. Recently a group doing a practice run for a presentation where they are trying to get grant money told me that the MultiSync display unit, (very adamantly) "did not work". These NEC projectors have never had any real problems. I decided to dig a little deeper, and told them to hook the computer back up to the projector.

Client: All the colors are off. What is on my screen is not what is being displayed.

Me: Let's take a look. Are you in the program you were running?

Client: There you see? The yellow color is brown on my screen. There are NO adjustments…. I tried to make some; {major bells go off here!} but there is no way to do it. We need a different projector, this one is broken.

Me: Ok. (as I go into the setting mode of the projector) I look at the settings, and show them that the contrast is at 100%. I bring it down to a more reasonable 60% or so, and POOF all the colors are perfect.

Client: What did you do?

Me: I adjusted the contrast. It was too high; everything was getting washed out.

Client: WHAT does contrast have to do with color??????

Me: (dumbfounded) Well, like your TV at home, it is part of the overall picture quality.

Client: No response. Could not grasp the concept.

The kicker is that they are all engineers and SHOULD know better.

Working on a helpdesk at Mobil oil, we recieved some strange calls. One day i get a call from a user saying his computer is dead, I ask him if he is getting a power light on the monitor and he responds "no". I then asked him to check the power cables and make sure they hadnt gotten unplugged somehow. After a minute or two, he gets back on the phone saying that everything is plugged in properly, then he started grumbling about how the company had just moved him to this new area, and how nothing in his cube worked, including light, clock etc... That was about the time you could almost hear him smack his head when he realized he had no power to anything,including the computer.

Turned out this was his first morning in a new cube and it hadnt been wireed for ac yet. when he realized his pc also needed power to work, he sheepishly said that he figured we would get a good laugh at his expense. I told him that he was absolutly right about that. tThe ugy had a great sense of humor, and was lauhging as we got off of the phone

I work for a package delivery company, so I am not a tech

by any means. They other day a couple of gateway boxes came

through our station. When I picked up the monitor box, I

noticed that it was rattling around inside the box.

Apparantly, this person was sending in his/her system for

service, but when he/she packed the monitor, they did not

use any packing material. They just opened the box,

put the monitor in and taped it shut.

They didn't insure it either. I wonder how they are going

to feel when they find out the monitor damaged during

delivery is not going to be covered by the shipper or the

manufacturer.

great site......sean.

one day I got a trouble call, go fix a phone no specific problem. ..... get there phone doesn t ring.... o k what did you do ? moved it over here to this jack.... o k go over no dial tone ! move it back over to jack it was in....it immediately rings person says " how did you do that?" I said " it s magic I really can t tell you , trade secrets and such" and walked out the door ......roflmao

Lady called in because her email PW wasn't working, after

doing some research we ended up changing her pw and told her

to wait half and hour and try again. It still failed and she

wanted to put it back the way it was in her user preferences

for Netscape so she ran her restore disk thinking that would

put it back. All kinds of things were screwed up after that

and she ended up calling Gateway.

I had a customer call saying that she had cable installed today and that the man that installed it was wearing nothing to show he worked for our company and all he talked about was his gun collection and all the warrents for arrest he had.

Customer was calling to complain that she didnt believe her service worked for 2 days and wanted to recieve a credit for those 2 days because she wouldnt touch her TV for fear of the installer. I told her i would transfer her to billing and she said:

"Thank you, i just dont want that man to come back out and hurt me. I think he was an Ex-Con."

When i called to transfer, even the billing department had heard of this "Killer Tech".

As the owner of a small rural ISP in West Texas, I'm never surprised at what some uses come up with. Several years ago a lady came in the office and wanted to get connected to the Internet. I explained that we offered onsite setup, but she declined saying that she was comfortable with her computer and could do the setup herself. I handed her a one paragraph instruction sheet and told her if she had any problems to give me a call. That night at about 11 pm the phone rang at my home and we had the following conversation:

ME: Hello

Cust: I've tried this thing four times and it still won't work!

ME: Okay, lets check the settings, open my computer, find the control panel and tell me when you get there.

long pause.......

ME: HELLO?

Cust: Do I need a screwdriver to open my computer?

ME: Why don't you call me in the morning, it sounds pretty serious.

While working for a large Goverment Department down under (Australia) i came in contact with a Y2K consultant being paid an offesive amount of money ($250AUS p/hr) to do what I have no idea.

This gentleman in question emailed me for instructions on making a boot disk (??????) a few moments later I get a nother email "Not working and I can not remove disk from slot".

when I got to his computer I noticed the disk was inserted upside down. when asked how he managed this the reply I feel I need to share with you "It was hard at first but got it in using my shoe"

Before I start, I just want to mention that I am a contractor, currently working in the help desk for a very large company. I've been doing help desk for 8 years now, and used to think that the majority of tech hell calls were made up for our amusement. Now I know better. Here is just one of the many, many calls we take on a daily basis:

ME: Thank you for calling the help desk. May I please have your name and user id

Caller: I'm getting an error

ME: Ok Ma'am - what program were you working in when you received the error?

Caller: I don't know - it was one of the ones on my computer

(Groan - you know it's going to be a long call when it starts out like this)

ME: OK, let's try this - what kind of error did you receive?

Caller: I have no idea - you're the help desk!!

ME: Ma'am, I'm sorry, but without knowing what program you were in, or what the error was that you received, I'm afraid any troubleshooting we do isn't going to be very effective.

Caller: Listen, I need you to fix this. I have to work!!

ME: Ok Ma'am, let's reboot your machine and...

Caller: I am NOT rebooting my machine!! That won't fix the problem.

ME: What would you suggest that we do to solve this, then, ma'am? (I'm trying very hard to be patient, but I'm 20 minutes into my lunch time as it is)

Caller: I want you to fix it!!

We went around and around on this, me desperately trying to get any kind of information I could about the error, etc., and her trying to get me to "fix" the error. Finally, she rebooted as I had asked her to do. I told her to call back if she had any more trouble, and we haven't heard from her since. I can't help but wonder if that's because she's never figured out what program she was in....

Just keep my name out if this, because my mother in law would kill me if she knew I leaked this.

My mother in law is about 60 and had previously never used a PC before. When her husband died, she inherited his Thinkpad, with a Logitec Mouse attached to it, and I taught here the basics of using Win 3.1.

A few days after the initial course, a phone call comes in from my mother in law.

She:"I do not know what is wrong with this computer, but when I click on the icons, the programs do not launch and I get funny messages. Also, the pointer moves quirky and it is difficult for me to place the cursor where I want on the screen"

Me:"OK, what happens exactly if you doubleclick on the Main icon"

She:"I get this funny menu etc..."

Me (Thinking hard and suddenly noticing a light bulb over my head):"The wire connected to your mouse, where does it come in? On the upper side of the mouse or the lower side of the mouse?"

She: "The entry of the wire is pointing towards me, so it is on the lower side."

Me: "Try turning the mouse around so the wire comes in on the top end, and now try again"

She:"Funny, now everything works OK"

Me (Trying to avoid bursting into indecent laughter):"Now in the future, always use your mouse like this, and you will be OK"

I work at a company that does inbound calls for a ISP, and I got a call from a Mac owner who was trying to install the software for the ISP and was getting disk write errors. She asked me if she wiped off the diskette would it help.

I had to place her on mute before I started laughing. I did help her get the software loaded on to her system and she was surfing with in the hour.

I worked TechSup for a small ISP a little while ago. We had some filters set up to keep people from using foul language in our chat rooms and/or downloading Warez or Porno. If one of these things happened, their account was suspended and they had to call us and get it reactivated. One night, I recieved this call:

(The user will be referred to as Susan)

Me: Good Evening Yadda Yadda...

Susan: Hello, I'm having trouble logging in to the system.

I bring up her account status..Whoops, terms violation.

Me: Well, it appears that someone downloaded a lot of "Adult Oriented Files" and later, in a chatroom, cussed out a few people including a moderator. According to our records, that was somewhere around 12:30 last night. We've got a word for word log of what was said.

Susan: That couldn't have happened. I was asleep. The only person who could have done that was..Hold on a second.

She covers the receiver, but I could still hear it very loudly:

Susan: !!!!BIIIILLLLLLYYYYY!!!! GET YOUR BUTT DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!

Billy: What do you need? I'm in the middle of a game.

Wrong response kid.

Susan: I'm going to put you on speaker phone, would you mind telling me exactly what was said...

So I sat there reading off the script of what was said in the chat room. I could hear the kid in the backgound getting the sense knocked out..or into him after every bad word I said.

The real kicker was when I told her how much prono had been transferred (58 megs. Ahh Puberty).

The call ended with her stating that "I can assure you that this will **never** happen again.

My coworkers had a great time listening to the recording over and over again.

I wish I could have seen the kid's face.

I have been in Tech Support for 15 years, and here are some of the things I hear from my Junior Support staff

Listening on a call, right in the middle the tech goes -

"Maam, Please hold while I go Pee, If I don't go soon, I will burst" Puts user on hold, runs to bathroom, returns in 5 minutes, "Thanks, I am much better now"

A new tech on the bench (Black Woman), I am not prejudice, I just think that if you have an attitude, don't do TS.

She was speaking with one of my favorite clients on the site, helping her with an MS Office application.

The other techs are quitely working on their calls when she booms out

"I Don't care what that other tech told you, I am giving you the instructions to follow"

A woman on the desk get's a call from the site's PITA

Frank ***** ater working for several minutes Tech "hits" mute button and exclaims F*** YOU, Frank !!!!

(She missed the Mute Button)

He Hangs up and calls the Supervisor

Life is a blast when the newbies are IT10Ts

I had a woman call up about a CD burner.

She had heard about Video CDs and wanted to make one. I told her that while the hardware on the drive does support the Video CD spec, the software won't allow you to produce them. She has to get other software.

"Well how exactly do I play this video CD when I get it made? Will it work in a regular CD player?"

"You mean like a stereo?"

"Yeah."

*pause*

"Well, no. You need at least a TV to view it on. Otherwise where will the image be projected?"

"Well I don't know!!"

"Yes, you need at least a TV."

She hung up. 20 minutes later, a fellow techy came up to me and said that he had gotten my video CD lady again. She said that I was really mean (I guess for asking HER a question). He told her exactly what I had told her earlier.

I mean do these people even try?

This little tale doesn’t really have anything to do with a specific call I’ve taken—not really. But it has found its way into my personal store of folklore, and I thought you all might like to hear it.

This was a while ago, when I was working as a TSR for a company that did outsourcing for pretty large computer company (if you think that big-time OEM manufacturers do their own support these days, you another thing coming). Anyways, doing that type of support brought out many different types of users, but mainly the usual three: the stupid user, the rude user, and the worst combination, the stupid-and-rude user. Many of us were guilty of Mute Abuse, whereby that ever-so-handy mute function was used so that a tech could pause, insult the customer (their lineage, children, pets, etc…), recover, and continue the call with a good deal of the previous stress alleviated. We did this only every now and then, and only when the call demanded it (honest!). However, there was one tech…

We’ll call him Richard; simply because, well, that was his name (Dreadfully sorry, old boy—but anonymity is reserved for the innocent). The particular cube warrior was a work of art. On the phone, while actually talking to a customer, he was the most polite, professional person you have ever heard. He even got multiple Kudos (pat-on-the-backs called in by customers to the tech’s supervisor) on a daily basis.

However, many times during the call—I think we clocked him at ten in one sitting—he would use the mute button on his call box and proceed to utter a string of verbal concoctions that would make a season Army drill sergeant blush. Then, “click,” he would be back on the line, as sweet as an 80 year old Sunday school teacher. It was quite the thing to listen to.

In fact, a few of us were discussing Richard’s unique way of stress management one day on break. One of us (no names mentioned here) remarked, “Some day he’s gonna wear out that mute button. Can you imagine what would happen when he did?”

We all laughed a bit as the image of our good friend Richard appeared…but our laughter died down as almost simultaneously an evil look appeared in all our eyes. We ran out of the break room as fast as we could, stopping only for a moment at my cube so that I could pick up my Leatherman. It was Richard’s day off, so our next stop was to be his cube—but first, I needed to grab a dead call box from the supply (junk) room. Now, at that point in time our call center was using a few different types of call boxes. Some had flip switches, some had actual buttons, and some—like Richard’s—were a variation on the older Unex boxes, and had a slider-toggle switch. I grabbed a box that had recently gone to meet its maker, and we went to work. It was a simple matter to pop open both boxes to get at the insides, and within a matter of moments we had extracted our objects of interest—the mute switches. Now, the way these things worked was simple: the internal switch (inside the box) was just a little vertical plastic piece, and the external switch was composed of two vertical plastic prongs that clipped around the internal switch, moving it whenever the external was. Using the saw tool on my handy lil’ device, we removed the two prongs from the external switch on the old box, and replaced it with the external switch on Richard’s box. A few screws replaced, and the old defective box returned to its final resting place, we slunk off to our respective cubes to await the mirth that would ensue.

I was not there a few days later when Richard came back to work. But I’m told his first call of the day was a customer who had decided to install AOL 4.0, right when it first came out (you know, THAT version).

He wasn’t working there anymore when I arrived.

I felt pretty bad about the whole thing when I learned of the final result. But seeing as he went to a managerial position at a very prominent circuitry manufacturing company, and we were all laid off a few months later when our client decided to “relieve us of our obligation,” I think we did him a favor.

Still, to have been there when he realized that, yes, the mute switch was in the correct place, but, yes, the customer did just hear what he had to say…

It’s Karma, Rich. Karma.

Keep smiling, people. If you can’t have genuine sanity, at least try to fake it.

A friend of mine purchased a new computer. This friend

experiences frequent challenges when using fax machines,

or any other mechanical device, therefore, was quite

impressed with his ability to connect the cables, etc.

with ease.

"The instructions were well written and the illustrations

were precise", he exclaimed with much enthusiasm.

"The trick was finding the "on" button. I looked for that

thing for an hour! But, I figured it out and all was well."

"The monitor displayed, as it should, and the keyboard worked

great but I couldn't get the mouse to work. I disconnect and

reconnected that thing for as long as I could stand it and finally

had to call for technical help. The tech was very nice, and very

patient. He asked me to test various things; the end result

was him asking me to either purchase another mouse (and I would

be reimbursed), or to send mine back and they would replace it.

Fair enough, I thought and left the computer alone."

"My impatient, at that point and time, 8 year old daughter decided

she would like to have a go at it. Sat down in front of the

computer, peeled the "safety tape" from the mouse, and

proceeded to "make pretty pictures with Paint"!"

Please share "credit" with Ramon!

I work for the Logitech support, and i once had a call, here is how it went.

Me: Logitech hotline, this is Brian Speaking.

Cust: Yes hi i have a proble with one of your products.

Me: Ok do you have the modelnumber?

Cust: Yes just a minute and i will check.....

Me: ok.

Cust: Oh it is xxxxxxxx.

Me: Tryed to find it in the database over our products.

Hmmm i can't find this product in our database

What kind of product is it?

Cust: It's a microwave oven...

Me: ........ What? a microwave oven? i'm sorry

you seem to have called the vrong number, this

Logitech and we don't make Microwave ovens.

Cust: Ohh, ok. sorry

I can promise you, me and my colleges had a really god laugh.

Take a moment-feel like a genius!

# 15 is the best one!!!!

Take heart, anyone among you who believes you are Technologically challenged, you "ain't seen nuthin'yet".

This is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article:

1. Compaq is considering changing the command "Press Any Key" to "Press Return Key" because of the flood of calls asking where the "Any" key is.

2. AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on.

The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

3. Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter

arrived from the customer along with photocopies of the floppies.

4. A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door.

The customer asked the tech to hold on and was heard putting the phone down,

getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his room.

5. Another Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting,

the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting

the "send" key.

6. Yet another Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it by filling up

his tub with soap and water and soaking the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys and washing them individually.

7. A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was "bad and an invalid." The tech explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.

8. A confused caller to IBM was having troubles printing documents. He told the technician that the computer had said it "couldn't find printer." The user had also tried turning the computer screen to face the printer but that his computer still couldn't "see" the printer".

9. An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring

the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

10. Another customer called Compaq tech support to say her brand-new computer wouldn't work. She said she

unpacked the unit, plugged it in and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened

when she pressed the power switch, she asked, "What power switch?"

11. Another IBM customer had troubles installing software and rang for support. "I put in the first disk, and that was OK. It said to put in the second disk, and I had some problems with the disk. When it said to put in the third disk, I couldn't even fit it in...." The user hadn't realized that "Insert Disk 2" meant to remove Disk 1 first.

12. In a similar incident, a customer had followed the instructions for installing software. The instructions said to remove the disk from its cover and insert into the drive. The user had physically removed the casing of the disk and wondered why

there were problems.

13. True story from a Novell NetWire Sysop:

Caller: "Hello, is the Tech Support?"

Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"

Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"

Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"

Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."

Tech: "Please excuse me. If I seem a bit stumped, it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional at a

trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?"

Caller: It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotional. It just has '4X' on it."

At this point, the Tech Rep had to mute the caller because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard.

The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder and snapped it off the drive.

14. A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. The tech asked her if she was running

it under "Windows." The woman responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that is a good point. The man

sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window and his printer is working fine."

15. Tech Support: "O.K. Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter "P" to bring up the Program Manager."

Customer: "I don't have a 'P'."

Tech: "On your keyboard, Bob."

Customer: "What do you mean?"

Tech: "'P' on your keyboard, Bob."

Customer: "I'm not going to do that!

Back in good old Windows 3.1, I got a call from a manager saying his computer was "all messed up". I requested more description, but he said "you just have to see it." I went down to his desk to find that all of his icons where sitting on top of each other. He told me he had tried fixing it himself, but every time he rebooted, it went back. Someone had sabotaged his dekstop big time. They had changed the spacing between icons so that auto-arrange didn't work right, and had turned off the Save Settings on Exit, so that when he re-arranged them manually, they went back to being messed up when he rebooted. No problem, I fixed it in a jiffy. I was about to walk away, when he stops me and says he has one more problem. He opens up MS Word and types in his name. As soon as he hit the space bar, Auto-Correct kicked in and replaced his name with a rather nasty word (won't repeat it here so as not to offend). I fixed him up, but I could never tell him which one of his employees had done it. If I had known, I would have given them kudos for originality.

Me: Hello tech support how can I help you?

Customer: Well, when I click on the browser icon I get a connect to screen.

Me: Do click click on the CONNECT button?

Customer: Well I push on the X and everythings goes away and I have to start over.

After putting him on the mute and having a good laugh and sharing this I was finally able to explain that he was using the wrong button.

This wasn't one of my calls, but I found it so goddam funny I'm posting it

Another guy that works in the same call centre as I do got a caller with the following error message:

Unable to retrieve message #82

The Server pop.XXXX.net responded: Take a Bottle of Ammonia and Squirt in Eyes and Nose.

Turns out this was a corrupt message returning a portion of the body of the message (a top command revealed this, I imagine)

What can I say, I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

I just hope the guy that got this error didn't try to rectify the problem by actually doing this.

As buddy put it in the call log, it is a funny frigging coincidence.

I work at a large call centre in Canada for Compaq computers. Late one evening I recieved a call from a nice old lady who "had a quick question" about why her computer wasn't working. She said that her button on the screen for networking wouldn't let her access the other computers on the network. The first thought that came to mind was "I only know windows 95 and 98 single operating systems, I have never worked on a network other than accessing one". I procedded to troubleshoot anyway and asked her "how many computers were on the network?" The nice old lady replied "There are alot I think". I asked her if she had a network card and she said no so I said how is she connecting to the network and she replied "this is the internet right?" I informed her, unfortunatley that that was for a LAN not the net and she would need to call an ISP or setup a home network which is no easy task for a newbie. Her reply to this was "so do you think I should buy another 1 or 2 computers and set up a network so this button will work?"

Thats what I call someone with more money than they know what to do with.

When I was in 10th grade, I took a course in computer programming. In the lab, we used QBASIC (mid-80's). While I was working on a program project, a girl from another class was in the lab typing away working on an English paper. After about 45min, she asked me if I would help her save it and print it. I went over to her workstation, took one look at her "paper", and noticed that words such as IF, AND, THEN, ELSE, were all bolded and in caps. It turns out she typed her entire essay in QBASIC and not in a word processor....you think she would have caught on.

I heard a storie once from a relative of mine (uncle)who worked at a helpdesk. He received a phonecall from a man who had problems starting his computer. So my Uncle asked the man if all the cables were in the right spot. The guy who called said he couldn't tell since they were behind the desk. My uncle told him to check anyway and the man got under his desk and said he still couldn't see because the lights were off. ''Well why don't you put them on'' my uncle said. And the man answers:''I can't, the whole naborhood is cut of with electricty because of maintenance at the powerplant''

I once built and installed a small peer to peer network of 6 computers in an office of a small local company. The users had previously been using dumb terminals off of a unix server with one database program installed which did all of their accounting and kept track of all of their contacts. No one had ever used any version of windows before, and had never had anything other than a dumb terminal. I got a call one day that the computer that was used as the file server was giving them a "no-system disk error".

Me "Is there a floppy disk in the floppy drive?"

User "No there isn't."

Me "Try rebooting the computer."

User "OK. (A few minutes later) It says the same thing."

Me "Are you sure there isn't a floppy disk in the floppy drive?"

User "Yes, I'm sure."

Me "OK, I'll be right over."

After driving 12 miles across town to the company's office, I walked in to find a floppy disk in the floppy drive. I removed the disk and rebooted. The computer came right up.

User "Well I didn't put that in there!"

This is just one of many stories I have about this office!

(On a portable computer)

C: I need to use a floppy disk & all I have in my computer is the CD Rom drive.

T: Ok, all we need to do is swap the drives. Do you have your floppy drive there?

C: Yes, it's in my hands

(walk cust thru removal of cd drive)

T: Ok, now just put the floppy drive in the hole that we just pulled the cd rom drive out of.

C: It won't snap it, it's too loose. It doesn't fit the same

T: Ma'am, did you put the disk in that hole?

C: yes......

T: Ok, you need to pull the disk out, get your floppy drive, it's probably in your carrying case....

Needless to say, we got the drive in & then she could use the floppy drive :)

I accualy am a tech support at a local ISP in town, but this story comes from an "off duty" experiance.

My good buddy Brian's father is into computers as well as his fathers friends. So when ever Brian's dad, or his dad's friends have a PC problem they have Brian fix it. One day I had the luck to be at Brian's house when his dad's friend Ted came over with his a PC problem. He lugged his tower over brought it down to the basement where Brian and I gave it a look. We asked him "Whats the problem with it" he replies "well the CD-ROM stoped working" Brian and I's first asumption was that the drivers got uninstalled. So we booted up the box and went into device manager and every thing looked fine. So we decided to try to play a music CD in it. (NOTE: It was those old CD-ROM drives with the caddy's that you had to take out, put the cd in, shut it, and then put it back in) So we hit eject and out comes the gooyest,stickyest CD caddy have ever seen. There was a frickin peanut butter and jelly sandwich totaly cramed in the caddy. We all just dropped to the floor laughing till we turned blue.

Ted's guess was that it was one of his kids, none the less the most bizzare tech story of mying. True story.

While working on a helpdesk for a very large manufacturer of professional broadcasdting equipment, we received a call from a gentleman wanting a part for a camera. The customer was asked for the model of the camera so we could look up a parts list. He advised he didnt know. We insisted that we could do nothing without this so he eventually managed to come up with "It's black and about the size of a box of Swan Vesta" He was most suprised we could not help him from this!!!! It turned out to not even be one of out units. We made the parts, but the unit was put together by another manufacturer who is responsible for support!!!

I work as an operator for the IM department at a mid-sized

hospital. One day I received a call from a user stating

that they were trying to sent multiple file attachments

through their email but every time they clicked on send it

kept saying Invalid Path or Filename and it wouldn't send the

the files. She explained that she was sending them from the

A: drive. I asked her if she had the disk in the drive and

she said; Yes, I have one of them in! I asked her if all the

files were on that disk and she said; No, I have them on two

different diskettes...Do they all need to be on that disk

to send them??

DUH!! And these are the people that we trust our lives

with!?!? SCARY!!!

I work for an ISP in Toronto and Ijust got the following

call:

Me: Good afternoon tech support

User: I didn't get a response to my email.

Me: Did you send it to support?

User: No, to mtvvj@aol.com. Did it get there?

Me: Did it bounce back to you with an error message?

User: No but they haven't answered.

Me: When did you send it?

User: About the 21st.

Me: So today?

User: Maybe the 17th.

Me: They probably get a lot of mail give it a few days.

I just this call and I'm am still wondering how he made it to the college he's calling from. The customer has a very thick Chinse accent and is very hard to understand

Me: Thank you for calling Dell Tech support

Cust: I can't install MS office 2000

Me: Ok,..Have you tried other CD in your CD-ROM

Cust: Yes they work fine.

(At this time I'm thinking "To hell with my smokebreak", I hate software prob's)

Me: let's try this, I want you to right click with your mouse on the icon of "my computer". (You know why I word it that way) We go ahead and make sure his drivers are working (which they are if they can use other CD's just fine, I take alot of calls for Colleges and I have to calm down many a students)

Cust: So what are you going to do to fix this?

Me:(after muting for a sec) Well let me ask you a question.

Cust: Yeah I guess

Me:(WOW!This guy is a two time loser) Have you ever had

Office 2K on your system?

Cust: Yes

Me: have you ever.....uninstalled it

Cust:.....what do you mean?

(Am I just unclear or is he just beyond the realm of basic comprension?).

Me: Sir did you ever remove Microsoft office 2000 from your computer?

Cust: No!

Me: Then why do you want to install it?!?!?

Cust:(15 seconds of silence)*CLICK*

WELL WE HAVE A MOTTO HERE:

ANOTHER ONE DOWN,ANOTHER ONE GONE, ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!

Just recently (ie, 4 seconds ago) I overheard my

teacher telling a student about saving a file on

to disk.

The student had already saved a copy of her work

onto the hard drive, and wanted to save a copy

onto the teacher's disk. Rather than getting the

girl to just go to save as and save it on the

a:, the teacher insisted that the only way

(the ONLY way) to do it was to copy the entire

lot and paste it into a new file.

But it doesn't end there. The name of the file

that the student was trying to save was the

same name as another file that existed on the

disk. When the error came up saying that there

was already a file with that name on the disk,

the teacher got REALLY angry with the netadmin,

saying things like, 'he's incompetant, he's

an idiot' etc. She honestly thought that the

problem was that the server wasn't set up correctly

or that the computer itself was faulty. She

rebooted the computer about 4 billion times,

and even resorted to restarting the printer

(on the other side of the room!!!) in an attempt

to save the file. Finally, exhausted with my

attempts to hide my laughter, I asked her to

try one simple thing, just to see if it would

work. I asked her to rename the file. She

put up a lot of resistance, but finally submitted

and when the file saved perfectly, she just

looked at me and said, 'lucky guess'.

Sadly, this teacher teaches desktop publishing,

information technology, and information processing.

Ah, the school system is such a wonderful thing.

Overheard this call between the tech behind me and a customer:

"Yes ma'am, that's .org... NO, not .orgy! That's probably why you couldn't send mail, you were sending it to .orgy!"

I worked some time ago for a local internet centre attached to a university. We were resellers/agents for an ISP which at that time sold pre-paid internet hours to it's customers.

I forget the exact wording but it went something like this:

Customer: I want my internet money back!

Me: Ok, why? Is there a problem?

Customer: I have had internet for 6 months and I only get error messages - your ISP is hopeless.

During the course of my trying to determine his exact problem, I asked:

Me: What type of modem do you have?

Customer: Modem? What modem, I don't have a bloody modem!!!

At that point I refered him back to the shop where he bought the computer - managing to keep a straight face...

BTW: I noticed a recent mention of pager mistakes and thought I would relate a page I received as a member of a local volunteer fire brigade.

The intended message was:

House Alight, corner of **** St and **** St...

What we received was:

How's The Light, corner of **** St and **** St...

Customer : "Hi, our connection seems to be down"

Me : "Okay, I can ping your router, here's the IP address, can you ping it ?"

Customer : "No, I can't"

Me : "Do you have a firewall ?"

Customer : "Yes, the guy's installing it right now."

As a server administrator for a small section of a CSU college, I work with some student assistants to provide full technical support during the work week. Since I myself am a student, I can't be on-duty every hour. This one assistant, however, whom I have no say in to be able to hire or fire, really screwed up recently. Here's an excerpt of an email I got while away on a school day -- Names changed to protect the innocent:

Subject: Emergency!!!

MENACEKILLER,

WE ARE HAVING A PROBLEM WITH THE EXCHANGE SERVER. TESTER & BOSS CAN'T OPEN THEIR EMAIL. IT WAS BECAUSE I HAD TO RESTART THE COMPUTER IN ORDER FOR THE STAFF TO USE EPSON PRINTER.

BOSS WANTS YOU TO COME TO CHECK ON THE EXCHANGE SERVER IMMEDIATELY TODAY.

STOOPID LAB ASSISTANT

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

The "computer" was our danged MICROSOFT NT EXCHANGE SERVER! Several mission critical users lost email access and schedules for half the day. Man, when I go back into work, I'm gonna have a talk with that idiot.... Keep up the great site!

MenaceKiller

The place where a friend of mine works was going through the process of upgrading all of their computers. On one computer in particular, they had determined they needed more memory. One of the senior partners got it into her head that they needed more "Meg." My friend tried to tell her that what they needed was RAM, but she insisted that the machine had plenty of RAM and that they needed more Meg -- specifically, about 16 megabytes of Meg. He got tired of arguing with her and said to go down to the computer store and buy some Meg.

She came back with an envelope with RAM in it -- on the envelope was written "16 megabytes of Meg."

"The salesman tried to tell me the same thing you did," she told my friend, "but then he went and talked to his manager, and he set him straight. Now go install this Meg."

While working as a Network Design Engineer for a major automotive company I had the great job of answering any question that had to do with anything electronic. I'm not sure how people link computer folks to knowing everything there is about any electronic device but it never seems to fail.

One day I was working on something and one of the VP's (she happened to be female but I'm sure it could happen to anyone) asked me to help her with the vending maching in their cafateria. Seeing how computers and vending machines have so much in common I can see her logic pattern but I went with her anyway.

When I got to the vending machine I saw a standard machine that had numerous items behind glass with a number and the price above it. To the right I saw white keys labeled 1 to 32 for your selection, a place to put your money, and a place to get your change. After studying it for a minute or so I gave up and told her I don't see any problems with it. She told me to watch.

She takes out some money, put it in and tells me she wants item number 13. Well instead of pushing the button 13 she presses button 10 and then button 3. Well as you can guess item 10 comes out not item 13. She looks at me and tells me it won't give her what she wants. "No matter how quickly I hit the buttons I always get item 10!" she says as I try to hold my laughter in. I had to remind her that they have all the numbers so she only has to hit the button 13 for her item.

I work as a tech for an ISP and at times I also work as a mentor. When other techs need help they call me or one of the other 3 mentors. Well I got a call from a tech asking if a person could get connected to our ISP from his boat. He wanted to connect using a cell phone. He was getting a slow connection and wanted to know if he could get a better I told the tech that the customer could go up the coast to get a better connection.

He did have DSL but he had to have as real of cable from the shore to his boat to do it. All the mentors were laughing so hard that we almost fell to the floor.

While browsing through your site for some comic relief between calls, I was trying to decide on the perfect call to submit. Then it came in.

We'll just call him Ray. Ray is a new customer at our ISP, and sighed and hissed while I collected his information for our databases (on his very first call for tech support). Finally, after dragging his first and last name, phone number and address from his irritated self, we got down to business. Seems like ever since we installed our software on his computer, windows 98 prompts for a network login adn password. I told Ray that this was because our network is set up as a LAN, and Win98 detects that and alters accordingly. This will not prevent him from using his computer, there are several different ways to bypass it (click ok, click cancel, press escape, etc) as well as disable it. HOWEVER, as far as disabling that, XXXISP will not allow me to support customization of Windows, and so he could push escape or ok or cancel and not have to worry about it. Customer told me I obviously didn't know what he was talking about and demanded to speak with a technical support rep. Informed Ray that I was a technical support rep, and had been for some number of years. Ray snorted and asked to speak to his installer, Joe (I work at the national call center for this ISP, Joe is some schmuck who was contracted by our affiliates to plug modems in). Informed customer that reaching Joe would be quite impossible and probably quite expensive. Ray insisted on speaking to Joe, because "he was smart". Customer became enraged when I told him that Joe did not work at the same location as me, then he demanded to speak to my supervisor.

And proceeded to tell him how stupid I was while my supervisor miked him and laughed his ass off. And proceeded to tell the customer to try our suggestions.....and then call microsoft. and the ever popular answer....."but they charge!!!!"

On wednesday feb.23,00 i recieved a phone call from a woman who said that she thought she had ruined her computer.

I asked the woman why she thought she destroyed her computer.She replied,"well I recieved an error message while downloading the new version of Netscape 4.7.The message told me that I didn't have enough free space,so my daughter and I took the computer box apart and began removing parts and wires that were behind where I insert the disk."

At this point I couldnt stop laughing I had to put the customer on hold so that I could tell the representative next to me what this woman had done.When I got back on the phone with the customer she said,"Well did I destroy my computer or will it be okay?" I advised her that she needed to contact her manufacturer for her computer and explain to them what she had doen because there wasnt anything that I could do for her.

The customer thought that by removing the parts from behind the disk drive that it would free up some space.

This definitley is a call I will never forget!!!

I worked at a Staples up here in Canada and handled all of the tech support for the store. We had a lady come in to return a cordless telephone she had bought a couple of days earlier. She had to wait a bit so she was already pissed by the time I got to her.

Me: Is there anything wrong with the phone, or are you dissatisfied with the quality?

Her: It doesn't god damn work. There's no !@#$ing dial tone.

Me: Ok, there's no need for that kind of language. Did you press the talk button? You don't get a dial tone when you pick up the handset like a regular phone.

Her: Do I look like I'm stupid? I pressed the god damn talk botton and nothing happened.

Me: Could it be a problem with your phone service? Do the other phones in your house work?

Her (talking very loud): The problem is with this !@#$ing phone you sold me.

Me: Did you check the phone with other jacks in the house?

Her: What?

Me: Did you plug it in to other jacks?

Her: Uhhhhh..You don't have to plug it in, it's a cordless.

Me: Ummmm...Just the handset is cordless you have to connect the base to a jack just like a regular phone.

Her (yelling): Are you !@#$ing stupid? I told you it's a god damn cordless phone. This is ridiculous I waited here for 15 !@#$ing minutes and you don't even know what your're talking about. I'm never shopping here again, I'm going to !@#$ing Costco where they sell quality products and stand behind what they sell.

Me: You'd probably best do that because none of the phones we sell here would work for you.

Her (on her way out): Go to hell!

Me: Save me a seat.

Her: !@#$ you!

Being tech in a industrial manufaturer we do it all from setup

to repair to dignostics to network administration.

We got in a PC for a salesman that was going to work from home, nice PII whip-ass unit

with a 32x CDROM, sound, 17" monitor, 56k modem 10 gig HD

that was probably going to do nothing more than serve as

an email terminal (pity).

We get the unit, set it up with all our company settings

and "extras" and sent it out. 2 months later the dude calls

and says he has never been able to "get logged in" - which

after a hair pulling 1/2 hour question and answer session

eventually meant that he couldn't get dialed in - and THEN

I finally found out it's because the monitor was dead! What

the heck he thought turning the thing on and clicking around

with the mouse looking at a black screen would do is beyond

me. We finally decide it's the vid-card and rather than trust

this maroon with a screw drive inside a piece of hi-tech

equipment I elect to have him send it in.

After I got it I determined the vid card just needed to be reseated, so 15 minutes

after I opened the box it was back in it and on it's way back to him

via overnight delevery.

*3* MONTHS later he calls back and says that it still

didn't work and never did. Remembering our last session I

cut right to the chase and determined that the vid card was

loose again. After describing how to reseat the card

(rather than waste another $50 each way and 3 days time) he

finally admits that he hasn't even GOT a screwdriver. So I go

through the steps again very carefully again, describing

step-by-step exactly what to do, removing the cover,

unscrewing the cards mount screw and carefully pulling the

card free and then reinserting it. I told him to call me

when he obtained a screw driver and I would coach him over

the phone.

Yep, 2 more months go by and I get another call, said he had

done what we told him to and it still didn't work. I just

told him to send it in again and I would fix it. What I got

back was a mess. ALL the MB standoffs were crushed, the MB

was cracked and the screw on the slot that held the vid card

was mangled to hell. I called and quized him to make sure

that maybe it wasn't done during shipment:

ME: Hey I got back the machine and noticed a lot of damage,

when you removed the vid card did you remove the screw

holding it down first?

HE: Screw?

ME: Yeah the screw that held the edge of the card to the PC?

HE: Screw?

ME: Yeah the phillips head screw on the edge?

HE: Screw?

After getting more than one syllable at a time out of him he finally

admited that he never removed the screw. "It did kinda

come out hard." was his response. Then he admited to mashing the card

back in which busted every plstic standoff in the thing and

cracked the motherboard where the metal grounding standoff was.

His excuse: "I'm not very PC literate" !!!!!!

AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I am a high school student, and have spent much of my life messing around with computers.

This last year, the main computer lab in my school, which i use for my programming class, has been plauged by problems. None of the clients could read the network, programs wont load, and several just didnt boot proporly.

The school tech spent the first semmester playing around with various client computers, installing, uninstalling, deleting files, and making problems woorse. Finally, he declared that all 35 computers would need new hard drives. The total cost was $200 per computer, and would cost the school board $7000, plus whatever they would have to pay the tech to install them.

After a few days without computers, I asked the teacher, "As long as these things are fried anyway, why dont you let me mess around with them, it's not like I can do more damage."

After a few minutes of reading "Cannot connect to server" messages, I asked, "Where is the server?" The teacher led me down the hall, and up to a room above the main office. There was the server, I played with this for a while, tried to get online, and it told me it couldn't find the network either. I carfully slid the server out from the wall, and found the hubs for each of the computer labs on a rack behind it. But there was nothing connecting the server to any of the hubs.

I found a loose end laying on the floor. I know nothing about networking, but this didnt seem right to me. So I looked around the back of the server for somewhere to plug it in, and viola! In one stroke, every computer in the school worked, the tech guy was fired, and the school board is down $7000 and has 35 worthless hard drives!

I am a high school student, and I help out may friends and relatives to save real tech support people from some of the more stupid calls.

I just got home from one of my most stupid calls ever.

My frined (No name, protecting the hoplessly stupid) was very proud to announce that he had doubled his hard drive space! But now, his computer wouldn't start! My first guess:He ran drivespace, and the OS wasn't loading the drivespace driver. So I go there to fix things, only to find that he didn't use drivespace, he used fdisk. Asking just how he doubled his disk space, he said (with a big smile) "There was some stupid thing called a partion taking up 16gig of space! I just deleted it, so now I have 32gig!" I promptly slapped the smile off his face.

Working for an ISP in Fort Worth, Texas, I haerd a message on the tech support answering machine, This lady called at 2 am and complained

her mouse and keyboard did not work and the Software that the ISP had her install gave her a virus, she went on about everything, never once left her name,

account information , nothing, in the end of the call she said all her screen says now is...

"It is safe to shut your computer off at this time"

Thisa lady called every night for over a month at the same time every morning.

Then one weekend when we where doing a server upgrade the phone rang and I picked it up,It was the lady on the answering machine,

She was happy that we where open at that hour and then started to Give her whole story........again......I let this lady go on for about 5 minutes then asked her to go to her computer

and push the button on the front of her computer that said "RESET"

when she pushed the Button, her Windows OS then rebooted and came to life,

The lady then said " O' Lordy, it is alive, My mouse works!!!!"

she hung up the phone , and never found out who she was.

Talk about an Id10T error.

This goes back to the very early 90's. A user called me in

tears. Some project she had been working on for weeks was

on a 5 1/4" floppy which had died.

I went to her PC and typed DIR at the A:\ prompt, and I too

got an "unable to read..." error. I said to her that maybe

it was the drive that died and not the disk. I reached for

the disk in drive A: but it was empty. The door had been

closed, but there was no disk. There was no disk in drive B:

either.

(Don't forget, but this woman is still crying. No make that

all out bawling.)

I looked a little closer and I spotted the disk.

She had not put the disk in the drive, but rather in the

tiny space between drive A and drive B.

By the end of the day every employee, vender and customer

had heard about it.

Q: I downloaded your trial version of CaptureEze Pro and I really like its versatility.

But I am having difficulty figuring out how to scroll a page that is not an internet page. How can I get CaptureEze Pro to let me scroll the entire image to capture it as one graphic?

A: The scrolling option is designed for internet pages. It will work with some other scrolling pages, but not all. If it fails to scroll the page then it will not work with that application.

Customer Service

Application Techniques

I'm a secretary - not tech support - at a large university. I was the support person for a man who was way overpaid and, during my first month on the job, told a colleague - in my presence, no less - that when it came to using a Mac I was a "1" compared to him. This same man would call me at least once a day to ask what to do when his machine froze. He would inevitably be working on a "very important project" and because he wasn't bright enough to save every once in a while (and I was just too bitchy to explain the concept of autosave), he would lose all his work. And he always acted as if it were my fault that his only option would be to restart the machine! Go figure.

I provide tech support for service technicians working on a variety of home PC's

On several occasions, while helping them troubleshoot dead systems, I've asked them to check the power supply voltages.

Of the very few who actually have voltmeters, several have asked if they needed to have the power turned on to measure the power supply voltages !

The scary thing about this is that these people might be servicing YOUR computer!

February 29, 2000

User called with an issue. Seems she was creating a price book and was attempting enter an expiration date of February 29.... of next year. System kept returning a message to her that the date was invalid. She called to find out why this was happening. We attempted to explain (with doubtful success) that she would have to enter either February 28 or March 1 for expiration dates in 2001.

I'm presently working at a gas station (between tech jobs), and I had a customer that I feel should not be behind the wheel of a car... or in front of a computer.

He came in and wanted to use the ATM machine to pay for his gas. We have a little console to one side that's designed for a special fleet card, and ONLY for that card. It has a sign taped to it saying NOT AN ATM MACHINE. He swipes his card through it anyway, and it starts beeping, "ERROR." (This is common... we usually get about 2 a day doing this)

I hold out my hand for the card, and he realizes he's made a mistake. I swipe the card through our machine, and then instruct him:

Me: "Key in your code (Pointing at the other keypad). Press hard, the keys don't work well."

He starts searching the keypad.

I repeat the instructions, and he looks up at me and says, "Where's the HARD key?"

I stifle a grin, and rephrase the instruction. Then he gets it.

A friend of mine had a rather interesting call not too long ago. It was a good example of how Tech Support Agents must relate to a customer on /their/ level of thinking.

It went as follows:

(C)ustomer: "What's this flashy-toothpick-thing on my

screen?"

(T)ech (pauses for a while): "...what do you mean?"

C: "On my screen. There's this flashy toothpick thing. What

does it do?"

T: "..." (thought process: What the heck is she talking

about?...waitaminnit) "Ma'am, what kind of program

brings up the flashy-toothpick-thing?"

C: "..? Oh! Microsoft Word."

T: "..." (thought process: ...cursor...) "I want you to hit

the 'h' key on your keyboard. What do you see?"

C: "An h. And the flashy-toothpick-thing."

T: "Ma'am, the flashy-toothpick-thing serves a vital

purpose. You see, what it does is it takes whatever

letters you've typed onto your keyboard, and barfs

it up onto your screen."

C: "OH! That's really helpful!"

...-.-; People are strange.