Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Me: Thank you for callinf ********* Tech support how may I help you?

Caller: Yes i just installed your program and went on the internet, but now my phone doesn't work when I log off.

Me: Ma'am?,....Your phone doesn't work?

Caller: Yes, it is a cordless phone and whenever I try to turn it on it just hangs up and beeps at me \

(at this point I hear three quick beeps)

Me: Ma'am...try putting the phone on the base and allowing the battery to charge....

(DUUUHHHH!!!!!))))

I work for a large national ISP, we produce and distribute our own software. The VERY first messgae that this software gives someone trying to install it is a warning to turn off any virus detection software before installing the software.

Needless to say we gat many, many calls from people who fail to do this.

One call I recieved today was from a woman who informed me that because she never learned how to turn off her virus detection software she felt that she could ignore the warning because....afterall we just put that stuff in to confuse people so they will call tech support.\

This woman had totally hosed her entire OS by ignoring this warning.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The punchline here is the location...

I work as a video tech at a University.

Yesterday, a student just walks right in and says "I'm trying to connect a VCR to my TV, I can't figure it out, I connected the wires but..."

First thing I figure, "It's not one of my machines, so I'll just talk him through it.

He promptly got so lost I just figured, "Heck, I'm bored today anyway, I'll go fix it for him." It's a common home VCR and a common home TV, sheesh.

So he leads me to the room that he's having trouble with. Suffice to say that if there was a way to screw up the install, he found it.

He was trying to run a video feed in from a computer through the VCR to the TV-I don't remember in what order he had the wires connected but he clearly had

absolutely no idea what he was doing, and had just plugged away at random.

I repeat: common home VCR, common home TV-someone with more intelligence than he had even set up the computer to provide a nice clean RCA-out cable!

Where was this idgit and his problem?

IN THE BIOCHEMISTRY LAB! Behind a big door and sign that read "BIOHAZARD SAFETY LVL 2" and various chemical hazard warnings!

Where was the professor? Sitting at his own computer not 3 feet away, apparently too important to be bothered with such common problems.

I used to work as a Field Service Engineer for a small computer firm in Liverpool UK. One of my many call-outs was to a guy who was still using a 5.25 inch disk drive. He had previously been a trainer of the AS/400 systems and this (i think) was his first experience of dealing with disks.

Anyway, he rang the office.

Me: Good Morning, *company name*, my name is Jon and how can I help?

Cust: Hi Jon - I have been trying to figure this !"£$%^& computer out that your lot sold to me.

Me: Okay Sir, what seems to be the problem?

Cust: Well, the Disk thing isnt working.

Me: Which one? Can you see the Windows screen?

Cust: I CAN see the Windows screen in front of me

Me: Okay sir. It seems to be a problem with your Floppy disk drive. I will call out to you in about 30 mins.

Cust: Okay bye

(After a long drive to the customers house, I pull up in the car and knock at the door. The customer lets me in)

Me: Okay Sir. Would you like to show me what you have been doing to save to disks?

Cust: Okay but it wont work!

*Customer proceeds to put disk into the drive and then save a file to the disk. Then the customer strolls over to his typewriter and promptly proceeds to insert the disk. I couldnt stop him from typing on it in time as I was trying to hold back the laughter*

Me: (Giggle) Okay. Let me try...

*I put a disk in the drive - saved the SAME file to the disk and wrote with a felt pen on the label of the disk.*

Me: Okay Sir, try and load this up now!

(I passed him the disk - he proceeds to load the data)

Cust: Wow! It worked.

What a Stupid fool!!!!!!!!

Me : "******* **** technical support, how can I help you?"

Cust : "Yeah. I just soldered something to my motherboard and now it's smoking."

Me (after a stunned second) : "WELL TURN IT OFF!!"

Cust : "Okay."

Me : "What did you solder to your motherboard??"

Cust : "Oh, I don't know."

Me (in case notes) : "WARRANTY VOID"

I was talking to a woman. I had to do something else, so I put the line on hold.

When I came back, I picked the phone and said:

« Ma'am? »

No answer.

I tried back:

« Ma'am??? »

And she said:

« It's Julia. Not Ma'am. »

Sorry, Miss Julia!

When somebody subscribe to our Internet Services, we give out a document for email configuration. This document have 2 sections: One for Outlook Express configuration, and another for people who use Netscape.

One day, the phone rings. Here is the conversation (M = me, C = caller)

M: Hello, technical support

C: Yes, on your documents, you say that we need to use Netscape. I don't have it.

M: Hmmm... On the document, you should have configurations for both Outlook Express AND Netscape Navigator.

C: Yes sir.

M: So, what's the problem?

C: I don't have Netscape, just Outlook Express.

M: Okay, then why don't you just read the Outlook Express section for the configuration?

C: That's what I did. I configured Outlook Express as shown on page 1, and now I'm at the page 2, but I can't find Netscape on my computer.

Woo-hoo! Maybe we should create another document saying "Use page 1 *OR* page 2" ??

I worked at one point for an ISP who sold Leased Lines to mainly business users....we were based in the Highlands of Scotland at the time.

We used to get all sorts of emails sent to us, but this one beat them all...it went something like this:

To whom it may concern

I live in America and I am trying to trace some relatives who live in Scotland, I know their name is MacDonald...Can you help me find them...

Have you any idea HOW MANY MACDONALDS live in Scotland!!!

We're a cable internet provider. Every day we have to deal with people that just come from dialup connection, and still get the "Connect to" popup window every time Internet Explorer is started. I got a call from a new subscriber. He said that every time he starts Internet Explorer, he get the "Sympatico connection". I passed trough every possible way to remove any dialup configuration, rebooted the machine, but he said he still gets the "Sympatico connection". After several minutes of searching, I finally found that the problem was not with the dialup settings. Sympatico was the home page in Internet Explorer. Every time Internet Explorer was started, he saw the Sympatico Website, but he thought he was still on their connection.

Oh god, what a day...

I'm a software developer, not a support tech, but I still get plenty of calls from friends that want free advice. One friend asked me to come over because his computer would not boot.

It looked puzzling at first glance. It was attempting to boot from the LAN card (built in to the motherboard), then giving some other odd errors before hanging. I thought it may be a bad hard drive, perhaps a virus (Chernobyl?). I asked if they had installed any new software. No, they said, but they were trying to get their scanner hooked up.

They told me that it gave them an error saying they needed to go into the BIOS and enable the bi-directional mode on the parallel port.

My friend's wife said that after she figured out how to get into the BIOS, she noticed several items were set to "disabled". Well, she thought they weren't getting the full performance out of their computer, so she enabled EVERYTHING! Boot from LAN, USB for DOS, Reserved Memory Size, PCI VGA Pallette Snoop, etc, etc.

After I learned what had happened, it was a quick fix.

I once had a call from a customer who was referred to us by his famous (or was that infamous?)ISP for continued technical support. It seems that the original issue was that on his browser (on a Win95 computer with IE 5.0) was not not bringing up one particular web page even though it was verified as being up. Okay this is usually a cookie issue. Delete your cookies directory. No more problems, right? Wrong. After several calls to the ISP, they finally get frustrated and tell him to reinstall Windows on top of itself and that should fix the problem.

This is where I came in. Since that obviously did not work, and in fact made the problem so veerrry much worse, we ended up having to reinstall windows to a clean directory.

Unfortunately our company has a policy of not bad-mouthing other companies, or even saying anything even remotely negative about it. However, since the customer realized the ISP was probably not right for her, I was happy to offer suggestions. Tee hee.

I love calls like this. Sort of:

Me: Okay, I need you to fire up...uh, do you use Internet Explorer or Netscape?

Client: Huh?

M: How do you get on the net?

C: I use Explorer.

M: Okay, fire up Explorer.

C: Right now? I mean, I need to be in front of the computer?

M: Well, yeah, that would be easiest...

C: The thing is, I'm not upstairs right now.

M: (?!) Well, can you go upstairs?

C: Not really.

M: (?!?) Okay, I'll give you the basic process to do that, call me when you're doing it if you have troubles. (I *will* get a call!) First fire up Explorer, then go to http://www...

C: The thing is, I'm kind of busy right now.

M: Uh HUH?

C: Can I call you back later?

M: Ja, sure, you do that, have a nice day! (click)

I used to work for a large mainframe computer company (this was in the 70's) as a field engineer and was on call 24 hours per day. For almost a week, every night about the same time I was called in to restart the mainframe after it mysteriously halted. After the fourth or fifth night of this, I decided to stay late and just watch to see what happened.

My vigil wasn't too tedious, since we had a new, young and very buxom computer operator on duty. Being new to the job she consienciously followed all the written operating procedures, checking off each item as she did it. One item on the list was to change the paper in the operator's console printer, which was a teletype machine (this dates me, doesn't it?). It was in an awkward position, so she had to lean over the machine to put the paper down on the paper rack behind it. I was enjoying the view from behind her when the mainframe came to a screeching halt.

"See? That happens every time I change the paper", she told me.

I restarted the mainframe, then asked her to change the paper again while I watched more closely, from the side this time, so I could get a better view.

You guessed it. Her ample frontal appendages were pressing the emergency stop button on the console when she bent over it to change the paper! Problem solved by getting a male operator to take over that particular task.

In the 70's I worked for a large mainframe company as a field engineer on an American Air Force base in England. The mainframe had remote terminals throughout the base, connected through dedicated phone lines. I got a call from a Master Sergeant in Personnel to say his terminal wasn't communicating. I arrived at his desk and began checking things out.

The terminal seemed fine, and passed all the self-diagnostics, but wouldn't talk to the mainframe at all. We often had phone line problems since the telephone installation (and the buildings)dated from WW-II, so I wasn't too surprised and commenced troubleshooting.

Imagine my surprise when I traced the line back to a terminal box about three feet from the Sergeant's desk and realized that the 40 pair telephone cable exiting the box was cut in two and six feet of it was missing! Since the cable ran along a ledge next to the Sergeant's desk, I asked him if he knew what happened to the cable.

"Oh, was that cable in use?", he said innocently. "Well I needed a place to put my coffee cup and it was in the way, so I just got rid of it".

Turned out most of the phones in that wing of the building were out, too, but nobody had made the connection or bothered to tell me. The phone repairman arrived about that time and I just pointed to the bare end of the cable and left while I could still maintain my composure.

I was at the room of my colleague and asked how she liked her new workstation. She said that she hated the desktop model and would have wanted a tower instead, so that there would be more deskspace. Since her machine did not have CD-ROM (network installations), I simply flipped the box on its side. Her face was totally stunned as she said:

"You can do that?!?"

I think I should start a service of upgrading desktop models to towers...

I work for a well known brokerage firm that has a website clients can trade in. One of the things we require before they're allowed to use the website is to agree to terms and select whether or not they're a professional i.e., CPA, financial planner or the like. I had a lady call in screaming mad and threatening to move her account. When I asked her what was wrong she said she couldn't get into the account. I asked her what she meant. She said she kept getting the same agreement over and over again and it wouldn't let her in her account. So I asked her to select her status:professional or non-professional, by clicking in the circle next to the proper choice and then hitting continue. She says that's the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard and she won't select anything. I told her that she either agreed to terms and told us her status or she wasn't getting on the website. She hung up at the point swearing at me and I sat back and had a good laugh.

Another thing I get a kick out of is when folks just don't understand what I'm talking about when I'm explaining in what I think is the simplest way possible. Okay, it's mean, but I like it. Here's the scenario: I'm designing a website for a gentleman who wants some HUGE pictures put into a Flash movie so that they can be viewed with the click of a button, one after another, after another, etc.

Me: I can certainly do that, but it's going to be one @#$% of a download!

Him: But I don't WANT anybody to download it!!!

It took me a minute to figure out what he meant. He's also the guy who doesn't know how to center text when word processing. It's terrible going through and erasing all the spaces he's used.

Long ago when I was in dial-up internet tech support I had a woman on the phone in which we were troubleshooting her Macintosh MacTCP settings. It was a simple 14.4 anaolog modem with nothing truly out of the ordinary. I must have configured about 100 of these things in the past. At this point into the conversation (over an hour) I figured we'd once again re-enter her username and password because everything else was 100% correct. I firmly confirmed her caps lock was NOT on and triple checked her username and password on our end. We removed the username and entered it according then it came time for the password. I heard her busily clicking away entering the data as expected. After that was done I started idle conversation just to ponder over the possibilities of what the problem could be. During this conversation I heard several additional key strokes on her end. She told me that she does not like the way in which her username and password do not fit squarely into the boxes provided so she was taking the liberty of centering them.

You have to be old enough to remember removable hard-drive media to understand this story.

In 1981 I trained dealer technicians from around the U.S. to repair a hard-drive that included a 5 MB (not a typo: 5 MB) removable hard disk. (For you young'uns, the disk platter in its "pizza carrier" package was about 14" across. The drive cost roughly $20,000 1981 dollars).

Technicians were taught to use a special alignment disk to effect proper drive alignment. An alignment disk had analog waveforms written on it in very specific locations. Using an alignment pack and an oscilloscope, a *skilled* technician could ensure that one drive's tracks and sectors were identical to another drive's. The process was demanding and so few field technicians ever performed the alignments properly.

The biggest issue with hard-drive removable media was the proper alignment of the read/write heads and sector sensor. The goal is to make media written on one drive readable on another. This is a key point: you can use an improperly aligned drive to write data to removable media, but you almost certainly won't be able to transport that media to another drive and read it. Stated another way, proper drive alignment doesn't make a drive "work," it makes removable media transportable.

One of my trainees was a young know-it-all I called Boy Wonder. If I said that the sun rose from the east, Boy Wonder was certain that he had seen it rise from the west at least once. I unfortunately made the mistake of telling Boy Wonder's training class that you should never take apart a hard-drive's spindle motor. (The motor that rotates the disk). This was all Boy Wonder needed to hear.

Our dealer network would occasionally send us customer disks that had been written by an improperly aligned drive. We would put the mis-aligned hard disks into our testbed drive, then gently mis-align our drive until we could read the data off the disk. We'd then transfer the contents of the 5 MB hard disk to a carton's worth of 8-1/4" Shugart floppies, re-align our testbed drive, then properly re-format the customer's disk. Finally, we'd transfer the data back from the 8-1/4" floppies to the now properly formatted hard disk and send the disk back to the dealer.

We received an urgent request to try our recovery process on 14 hard disks that contained approximately 14 months worth of bookkeping data. Seems that Wonder Boy had recently repaired a customer's hard-disk drive, after which the disks had become unreadable.

For some reason we could not get any data from any of the customer's packs no matter how hard we tried. After two days, I called Wonder Boy and questioned him. It took a while, but I discovered that shortly after he had completed my training class he had performed some experiments with a hard disk drive that was awaiting delivery to a customer. One of Wonder Boy's experiments included taking the drive's spindle motor apart then re-installing it. Shortly thereafter the disk drive was delivered to the customer and Wonder Boy forgot about it.

What Boy Wonder had managed to do was alter the geometry of the disk drive motor so that it wrote slightly elliptical tracks; this it did for 14 glorious months until the it gave out. When Boy Wonder replaced the motor with a new motor that was properly balanced and aligned the guano hit the breeze distributor.

Simply put, there was no way that *anyone* short of God himself was going to be able to recreate that specific elliptical mis-alignment in exactly the same way. This left the customer with a 14 months worth of unreadable data.

Surprisingly, Wonder Boy wasn't fired for that one. I wonder where he is today -- probably a Service Manager, or perhaps a Windows NT guru somewhere.

I work on a helpdesk that offers support to thousands of field sales reps.

One day, I receive a harried call from a user who states her e-mail is not working.

She says she communicates and the e-mails are disappearing from her outbox.

I inform the user that when you send e-mail it is supposed to disappear from the outbox.

She says "thanks" and hangs up.

It helps when users who screw up will admit it, but

it's infurating when people who are supposed to know

things *won't* admit it.

A coworker said he and his fiance's sister were using

his computer while both were tanked to the gills and

ended up deleting some the files (including system files)

and he asked if I could have a look. No problem, I said,

and he brought the computer into the office. (I'm the de

facto tech, though I admit I'm nothing special.)

I try booting up and it won't even start, so I realize I

need a boot disk to circumvent Windows which is corrupted

(redundant, I know). A computer store is a short ways

away, so on lunch I go to buy a disk. Once inside the

store, I foolishly forgot my golden rule in computer

shops: Sales people know nothing, only talk to techs.

Along comes this 35-40 year old guy, clearly a salesman

by trade; alarms should have gone off in my head, but

that's my fault.

I asked the clerk for a system disk formatted for a PC.

(Not too hard, is it?) He steps away for a minute and

brings back a disk.

Clerk: Here you are, a Windows disk.

Me: Is it formatted with the system files on it?

C: You can put your files on it, yeah.

M: No, is it formatted? My computer won't boot up.

C: It's formatted. It's good for storage.

This continued for a few more seconds before I feel like

insulting him (discretion is the better part of valour)

and I finally asked him to find someone else to talk to.

He becomes angry at my saying this, but goes in back to

find someone.

He returns with a tech, a kid...an infant, really; if he

was a day over 18, I'd be surprised. The old geezer

stands there, fuming, with arms crossed as we talk.

I asked the tech that the disk be formatted for booting a

computer whose OS is corrupt, and say that the salesman

didn't know if it was formatted for it. (I could have

been more biting, but wanted to get out of there.) With

a smile, the tech says no problem, goes in back for no

more than a minute, and returns with the disk (he even

labelled it, too). The clerk, now furious, walks away,

most likely to hide his stupidity, and I ask the tech how

much.

With a knowing smile, he says no charge, he understood

that I'd been waiting several minutes for help, and goes

back into the shop area. A nice end to an annoying ten

minutes. ^_^

Me: Tech Support, how may I help you?

User: I think someone has hacked into my computer and has gotten into my software.

Me: Why do you think that?

User: Under current user, it shows "Vincent Van Gogh".

Me: Where does it say that?

User: On the main screen that comes up when opening the program. I am really worried that someone has hacked into my program. Please let me speak with someone higher up to get this resolved.

Me: I will let you speak with one of our Level 2 technicians. One moment please.

I did not recall that the example of the main menu in the help reference shows the current user as Vincent Van Gogh. After speaking with the user for quite some time, the Level 2 technician found that the user was clicking on HELP after she launched the program. The next morning (today), I hung a copy of VanGogh's Self Portrait on the Level 2 technician's monitor, so he will see it first thing when he comes in. I can't wait to see his reaction.

As a formet support tech and the family "computer expert" I get many questions from family members for help.

My aunt had recently signed up for an email list which arrived daily in digest form. When she wanted to send a message to the list, she would simply hit reply. Mercifully (for the rest of the list members) she knew enough to delete the quoted digest, but she really didn't know how. She would scroll to the end of the message, place her cursor after the last line, and hold down the backspace key until she *backspaced* through the whole digest! She said this would sometimes take several minutes, so she eventually figured out how to balance the edge of her coffee cup on the backspace key so she could go about her business!

She was quite pleased when she found out that CTRL-A, DEL would accomplish the same thing in one second.

i worked for a hydraulic pump company in tech/field support. Customer could not get their pumps to operate. ran fine for the 1st hour then quit.

went throught the normal system problems and finaly the customer issued a po# to fly from NY to Texas to get the system running. If a defect in materials, etc. the visit is no charge, all expenses paid. If it is a error on the customers part, full billing applies.

Flew to Houston, arrived at the Plant. The guy was on vacation that day, no one else could help me so back to hotel. Spent the night and back in the am.

this time the guy was there, proceeded to the pumps.

Before even turning them on, tere were several gallon jugs sitting next to the pumps with my companies name on them. I asked if they had purchased extra oil for the pumps. He stated "no, this is the spare oil that came with the pumps."

I explained that this is like buying a radio. If the batteries come with it, they need to be used to get it to work, they are not spares. No spares included.

Filled the pumps with oil, ran fine.

Customer paind the bill.

I work for an isp back office. We suppost several isp's in the nation.

I answered a call for one of the isp's. A lady who was interested in signing up wanted to know if we had a local access # for her. Naturally, I looked up her city and informed her that her city WAS listed BUT she'd have to call her operator and make sure it's a local charge. She understood, or so I thought.. and asked for the main office # so she could sign up tomorrow during normal business hours. I gave her the main office # with area code and told her she should call them tomorrow if she wished to sign up. I also mentioned this was NOT an 800 # and she may need to dial the area code to the main office.

While reading through these stories, my phone rang and all I could think was, "uhh ohhh".

Yep, it was her.

She explained to me, "I dialed the number and got a fax machine or some modem noise..."

Me : you dialed the number?

Her : Yes and it was a fax machine sound, all loud and stuff

Me : Ok, did u dial the area code?

Her : No

Me : Ok, well then if you didn't use an area code and dialed the access # and got a modem response, it should be a local call

Her : Ohhh, so do I call this # to sign up?

Me : No, call the # I gave u for the main office.

Her : I just called that # and it gave me this modem sound..

(understanding now she had dialed the main office # with no area code and got a modem of all things)

Me : Ohhh, Ok. Ma'am?

Her : Yes?

Me : You need to call the main office # WITH a 1 and area code

Her : Ohhh, Can they tell me if this # will be local?

Me : No Ma'am, you still need to call the operator for that.

Her : Oh, Ok.. I feel silly. Thanks!

We both laughed

I was working at a large University in Providence, RI as a RT-PC Systems Manager - AIX 1.0. We gave these workstations to various departments including the music department. They were happily using MACs at the time. Anyway, one day they were switching offices and I get a call from a person saying that since they moved the computer it wouldn't boot. I asked if it was plugged in and she said it was. I asked if it anything else was plugged into this outlet. Oh yes - I have a lamp plugged in and it is working. I then walked halfway across campus to find that she had plugged the powerstrip into itself and the lamp was plugged directly into the outlet. I simply said - I see the problem and plugged the powerstrip into the outlet. True story.

Found this'n in an old clipping I'd saved from a local paper, and I swear to God it's true. This is from back when Windows 95 first came out.

A local store had received a number of tech-support calls to the extent of, "I just got Windows 95, now what do I do with it?" The response "Open the package and put the CD-ROM in your computer" elicited a reply of, "Computer?"

Apparently these poor schmucks had gotten so swept up by Microsoft's hype and marketing campaign for Windows 95 that they just somehow assumed they NEEDED it, even though (1) they didn't own a computer, and (2) they didn't even know what Windows was.

man this site surely makes the days go by faster.

when i was still in high school taking comp science class i can't believe how many times, when a teacher asked a student to go around and collect our disks, the "student" would ask for my hard disk, it was thing everyday, i tried and i tried to explain that "floppy" was not because it was flexible, but because it was removable. but everytime they would ask for my hard disk... just once i wish i didn't throw out my old AT and hand my 20Meg MFN drive to her when she asked for the hard disk.

same class... we were first getting into Qbasic at the time, and i already had a fine background in it. so one time i made a program at home that would display this message:

"Danger! (flashing red) computer will explode in 100..99..98, reseting of computer will trigger bomb, do not panic just dash for the door"

when the countdown ended it made some "BEEP"s and flash the screen white.

the day i installed this program in the autoexec.bat on the server (one big HD on server connected to all the workstations) was the most fun day of my life.

on a slight side note, the security in that school was so lax, back when DOOM was huge we installed it on some of the newer machines (P75's) and just did a 20 user IPX game... as soon as the admin was overheard coming, me and a few friends rebooted and went right back to Vbasic... the whole class got ragged on by the admin... she couldn't pin it on us, even tho she knew it was us who installed it.

that's it for now, maybe next time i'll tall of the time we switched all the animated/still gif/jpgs on the school website to S&M porn.... but that is a story for another time.

thanx for reading

I do in-house support for a magazine/website/"cross-media convergence" thingee.

User (G4 w/ 256M RAM) is complaining about frequent crashes with netscape.

Yeah, we get that all the time, netscape could be better made.

Anyway, I install the latest version, and say, let me know if it happens again.

Yes, its still happening.

What kind of crashes? All memory realted, type 1, type 2, type 10... etc...

So I tell her that if the latest version of netscape didn't do it, ill reinstall her OS when she goes to lunch and see if that does the trick.

So she goes to lunch, and i go over to sit down... She has some documents open, and I check out the app switcher to see what i can close.

Well, here's what she has running (netscape crashes with memory errors):

Adobe ImageReady

Photoshop

Flash 4

Flash Player

Excel

AIM

Netscape

Outlook Express

Picture Viewer

Quicktime Player

Windows Media Player

and yes, all those haps have fairly large files extant in memory. :)

I showed my co-supporters, and one says "Cause of crashes determined to be pilot error"

My husband is a senior second level tech for a major outsource technical support company. He comes home daily with stories of users and other techs who are "not technically inclined", but these two are by far my favorite.

Yesterday, one of the first level techs from an ISP help desk calls my husband with:

"I have an end user on the line and we are trying to re-install her Windows98 s.e. We've put the CD in the drive, but nothing happens. Are we supposed to click somewhere?"

Followed in about 15 minutes with another call from the same tech:

First Level Tech: "We are still working on getting Windows98 re-installed for this end user, but she can't find her product key. Can you tell us what kind of shape this key will have?"

What I want to know is where do they find these techs and can we put them back there?

I was system administrator at a small college and I thought

I had heard and seen it all until on day I recieved this

call

me Help desk this is beau.

caller My printer doesn't work

me (suspecting a paper jam) what color are the

lights on the front of the printer

caller what lights oh there not lit up at all

me is the printer turned on and plugged in

caller yes

me (baffled) all be right over

after looking at the printer for ten seconds I found the

problem the printer was plugged into a power strip and the

power strip was plugged into its self

Beau Bauder

I had a customer call and leave a voicemail after hours:

"Hi, Robert, it's me. Yes, well, I need a refresher course...on how to turn on...and turn off...my laptop. I know you showed me yesterday, but I'm not sure if I got it right."

(sigh)

When in college as a Com Sci major, I took a PC applications class with many non-majors because I planned to be a TA for the class in my later years. One day in class they showed us how to do a key sequence to blank the screen to prevent screen burn. To unblank the screen, all you had to to was hit any key on the keyboard, which I did, and continued on with my work. 10 minutes later, I looked over at the student next to me and she said: "They shouldn't have told me to do that, I don't know how to get it back" She sat there for 10 minutes without touching ANY key on the keyboard! I reached over and hit a random key.

I received a call recently after configuring her e-mail program on her laptop. She told me no matter what she did, when she was dialing in from home she kept getting 'password invalid. I drove over 2 hours one way to her office and tested her e-mail, but was unable to figure out why she was getting the message, as it always worked when I tried it.

On my third trip to her office, I booted her computer, and noticed the 'caps lock' was on. As she is using a laptop, the number keys are shared with the letters (J is 1, K is 2, etc.) so, instead of her typing JOYFUL, she was typing 16YF43.

While working at a help desk for a major hospital, I received a call that a user was unable to print. She said every time she went to print, her computer shut off, and she had to re-type the document. After doing all the normal diagnostics, I agreed a visit to her desk was in order.

When I arrived, I asked her to show me what she was doing... she said she types the document, then flips the print switch. Print switch?? Yes, she says... on the front of the computer, there is the switch that says I for Input, and O for Output..... when she switched it to O, the computer amazingly lost power.

I work for a very large midwestern ISP doing customer service and tech support, so needless to say, I deal with a huge variety of callers every day. One day I got what I thought was a prank call...

ME: Thank you for calling (ISP name), how can I help you today?

USER: (screaming)I want to know what the $(@% you people did to my computer and what the &*#$ you're going to do about it!

ME: (shocked) ma'm, calm down. I'm here to help you, but you have to tell me what the problem is if you want me to do anything about it. What's wrong with the computer?

USER: (shouting and crying at the same time) when I get on the internet it says it's illegal! I want this to be fixed right now! I didn't do anything wrong! I just loaded your web page and now I'm in trouble and I don't know why! I'm not paying for this &$^#! Tell them I didn't do anything! (and more of the same).

ME: (beginning to think it's a joke) you're going to have to calm down. What is illegal? what error message do you get? (hint of amusement in my voice) Does it say Illegal Operation Error?

USER: (thinking this was an admission of guilt on our part, starts ranting again, but calms down slightly) It's not funny! Do you know what to do about this?

It took me almost 1/2 hour to explain the simple concept of an illegal operation error to this woman. She was convinced that the error meant that the police were coming to take her away, and that it was all our fault because it happened when she opened. She deduced this because her home page was set to our web page. Incidentally, she was running windows 3x on a 486 that her children had given her.

It was only after looking up her account that I truly believed it wasn't a co-worker having fun.. I looked up the previous notes in her account and saw in the notes that in the 9 days since she'd signed on with us, she'd called 27 times for equally bizarre problems.

I work for a rather large ISP in the midwest. We have a number of users who use us as a piggyback to AOL, since they are for some reason convinced that they NEED to use those 500 hour CDs. They end up unnecessarily paying for both services when AOL has no local dialup for them.

One day I got a call from a woman saying that she couldn't get on the internet. I asked her to read me the error she was getting. The error was "server not responding". After checking the obvious and finding that yes, she was in fact connected, pingable, etc. I asked her what page she was trying to bring up. It was an random AOL member site. I suggested that their page had possibly moved, or was temporarily down, etc., and had her type in the URL of our homepage to see if she could get other web pages. Sure enough, it worked. She sounded amazed as she asked me what this was. I told her that it was our web page, and she replied with "it looks almost like the internet. that's clever.." I thought she was confused, but it turns out she meant it. She then asked when the internet would be working again, and I again explained to her that it was only that one page that was not working, but the rest of the internet was working fine. She responded in exasperation that "I use you to get to the internet. AOL is the internet, but the internet is not a local call for me. I still need to find out what's wrong with the internet". I explained that while AOL was one gateway to the internet, we were another, and so was every other ISP in the country. No matter what I said to her, she kept insisting that she wanted me to fix "the internet". After another 10 minutes or so of this, I finally gave up and told her to contact "the internet's" tech support.

This is just a brief story that happened recently. In order to understand it, i have to give a simple description of our call system.

For our tech support call tracking we use a program that monitors all the techs and the calls they are on. It also shows where a customer is calling from including phone#, city/state,etc. Pretty cool stuff.

Anyhow, i notice that a particular call has been constantly calling up and hanging up within a 30 sec. span so that its rotating to different techs. This went on for about 5 minutes or so. I timed it so just as it disconnected i quickly dialed that number. It rang and some guy answered the phone. Here's the convo.

Cust. Hello?

ME Hi. This is Sean from Tech Support, are you having trouble getting connected sir?

Cust. Yes. I've been trying for about 6 minutes now and it won't log on.

ME Yeah i've noticed that on our call system that you've been calling in. What is the number your dialing on your modem?

Cust. It says xxx-xxxx. (sorry, cant' give #'s..hehe)

ME HRm. ok, that definately is the problem. Your modem is dialing into our Tech Support sir. What you want to do is change it to the correct access number and you should be good to go.

Cust. Ahh no wonder. Sorry about that.

ME No trouble at all sir. Have a good day. 8)

Just a simple case of error. Guy wasn't a blithering idiot in this case. I did my good deed for the day.

A woman I was doing contract work on the side for called me at work one day.

She was quite distraught. "All I have is a blank screen! I have pressed every button on the keyboard, nothing is helping!"

I said, "Have you moved your mouse?" And to which she replyed, "Whoops... That fixed it."

I answer the support lines for a very large software company. Just before my break today, a gentleman called in who needed support on his pre-installed operating system. I recommended that he contact his manufacturer for free warranty support, and he (like so many before him) said, "But it's just a simple question." Thinking I ought to cover all my bases and see if I had misdirected him, I asked him what kind of question he had.

He had "accidentally changed his font size" -- to the point that he could no longer see the entirety of any window he brought up, and therefore was having trouble changing things back. This happens often, and generally it's not something I'm willing to mess with offhand. However, this particular gentleman said that he was able to change the settings, but that he couldn't see the "OK" button to click on it with the mouse. After verifying that I had heard correctly, I asked if he had tried using the "Enter" key on his keyboard. He said he "had already entered it," but that he would go through the process again with me. Lo and behold, that simple key solved the whole problem.

I guess sometimes they really *are* simple questions.

This call goes back more than a few years.. to the days when the 5.25 drive was king.

I got a call from a major client who's computer workstation had stopped booting.

He said that all of a sudden, when he turned it on that morning it started making a horrible noise.

He then proceeded to put the phone next to the computer and indeed, a loud noise

eminated. Since I knew that this particular workstation needed to boot from a floppy

disk, I asked him to verify that the disk was in fact labeled BOOT DISK

He confirmed this and as he was told, put the disk back in

exactly as he had found it.

After a four hour drive to his site to replace what I figured was

a bad floppy drive or disk, I simply turned the disk over!!

What neither of us knew was that his five year old had come over and

taken the disk out.

At least with the "New" 3.5in disks, they won't stay in..

How many ways can YOU insert a floppy disk...

Me: "Alright, at this point I believe you're going to need

to contact the modem manufacturer-"

Customer: "Hang on, I think I can catch him before he

drives away! *sound of phone being dropped and

customer running out door*"

Doing tech support for UK mobile networks we get users who range from "incapable" to "lobotomised"

Heres a few of the queries we get daily...

----------

Tech : (deleted name) Support how can I help?

Customer : Ive started the installation of (A software package), and the screen says continue or quit. Which one shall I choose?

Tech : Continue Sir...

Customer : OK thanks for all your help, bye!

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

tech: welcome to (deleted name) support

tech: may i take your name pls

user: Mr (anon idiot)

tech: and your mobile number pls sir

user: t18s

tech: sorry, your mobile phone number sir

user: t18s

tech: the number someone dials to reach you, your phone number

user: oh

The T18s being a model of Ericsson handset...

-----------

Caller : Hi, I'm trying to download the internet onto my phone.

Tech : I don't understand what you are trying to do sir,

Caller : I want the theme of the mission impossible.

Tech : Oh...

----------

These are in addition to the countless e-mails we get saying:

From: Idiot@domain.com

To: techsupp@domain.com

Sub: E-mail

HOW DO I SEND E-MAIL THEN?

*cry*

I was working in a computer-store some years ago, and a customer went in and said that his software wont work ! (it was on 5.25 disks) !

I checked the disks and encountered a read-error, so I gave him a new set of disks !

By the next week, he came back in and gave them to me, saying "these dont work as well, though it started out fone" !

Ok, I gave him a new set of disks and went to the bosses office, and told him about that !

He then called the customer and told him, if he encountered the same problem again, we would drop by and have a look at his system !

Sometime during the next week, we got a call from that customer, that the new disks didnt work anymore. I grabbed my stuff and me and tthe boss drove to the customers office !

We didnt have to check the system ! The customer had a new way of storing his disks - attached to a pinboard - with magnets .......

How some people cann't figure out a few of their own problems I'll never know...

My friend got this call one day from a customer who apparently lived in Tornado Alley

Sub: Hi and thanks for calling (large cable internet company), My names Alan, can I get your phone number

(After bringing up customer's info) And How can I help you today ma'am?

Customer: Yeah, I can't connect to the internet

Sub: Ok, well let's just check a few things here.

So he runs through a bunch of troubleshooting steps. In the end he finds that the modem is the problem and says that he'll have to send a tech out to look at it. And just when he's about to schedule the appointment she pipes up.

Customer: Oh, one more thing. We just had a big storm here

Sub: Really?

Customer: Yeah, a tornado came through here and just destroyed the town. There are trees everywhere, and most of the houses are blown down

Sub: Wow, how long ago did this happen?

Customer: Oh, a couple of hours ago. Do you think this could have something to do with my internet problem

Lady, I think you have a far bigger problem with your head than the internet

I am a System Support Analyst but I had to help out in a Windows NT 4 training session one day.

One of the trainees said that she could login to NT. I went and watched her turn on her PC and she patiently waited for it to boot up.

Up pops up the little box with a picture of the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys on it with a prompt to press the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys to login. I asked her to press the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys to login.

When she did I had to very quickly leave the training room with the other trainers because I had to tell someone. The trainee was pressing the pictures of the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys on the screen to login!!!

This is the craziest call i ever got. I work for a scanner support in Sweden.

Me: Welcome to XXXX scanner support. How may i help you?

Cust: You said which support?

Me: XXXX scanner support.

Cust: Well the guy who i talked to a few minutes ago he told me that he will transfer me to XXXXX monitor support.

Me: Im sorry but, he has transferred you to the wrong support.

Cust: Ok. Can you help me?

Me: Sorry, i can´t help you.

Cust: Can you transfer me to the XXXXX monitor support?

Me: Sorry i cannot do that. It is a totally different manufacturer.

Cust: Ok. do you have the number to XXXXX monitor support.

Me: sorry, i do not have the phonenumber to the support.

Cust: Oh, what should i do?

Me: Check the warranty papers or the manuals to the monitor. There should a number to the right support.

Cust: Ok Thanks.

*Klick*

I'm an onsite hardware tech working for some major government contractors.

I was sent to the local army base to fix a computer that just

"wouldn't boot" and no one could find the problem. When I got

there the user said he had a meeting to go to and wouldn't be

back for a while, but go ahead and work on the computer. The

first tip to the problem was when I picked up the tower and it

rattled. I asked one of the other clerks in the office if this

was a new machine, and he assured me that it had "just arrived" onsite.

I opened up the box and all the cards were just laying loose inside

along with the cpu, ram and cables. The problems being obvious I

I put the machine back together and booted it up to test the system

only to discover that the machine had all the network specs loaded

and a personalized screen saver and a few other tweaks. I guess

some "factories" just don't know how to assemble their computers

before they ship them out the door. I never did see the "user"

again and suspected that he really didn't want to see me.

I just wanted to tell you people that I'm not very happy

with your service. I signed up a week ago, and ever since

that time, I'd been getting disconnected every five minutes!

I took my computer back to the people who built it, and they

found a setting in there that said "Disconnect if idle for

more than 5 minutes!" I WAS TOLD THIS WAS UNLIMITED ACCESS!!!

I do telephone technical support for developers for a large software company. I once took a case and tried to call the customer back:

Receptionist: "Whatever software--how may I direct your call?"

Me: "May I speak to Joe Smith, please?"

R [After pause]: "Um, I'm sorry, but he's no longer with us."

[I check case--it was created a few hours ago.]

M: "Is there someone else I could talk to?"

R: "May I ask what this regards?"

M: "Yes, he called and created a support case with us. My records indicate it was quite urgent."

R: "Just a minute." [Papers rattle.] "Sir, I'm told you can just go ahead and close the case. Thank you."

M: "Um, thanks. Goodbye." [Hang up]

I still wonder just what happened.

The students attending my NT class are trying

to log on to the system. One of the students

seems to be in trouble, spreading her fingers

all over the keyboard, and finally giving up.

Dialogue follows (M = me, S =student):

S = "Do I have to press the CTRL + ALT + DELETE keys one

by one or all at the same time?"

M = "At the same time!"

S= "But I can't! I don't have enough fingers!!"

Huh, she was really trying to hold down all the

keys C,T,R,L,+, A,L,T,+,D,E,L,E,T,E at the same time!

I was called to help when one of my co-workers got problem on road. He had started one computer which she works on and got a strange message on boot up and nothing seemed to work untill reboot. I asked her what was the messge she got and immediately realized it was one virus, "elvira".

So i went to clean up that computer and after doing that noted that only infected files were win.com and c:\upd\pkunzip.exe and c:\upd\pkzip.exe. So i went to check what else was in that dir. I found only an update pack for accounting software they were using, so i desided to call that accounting softwares helldesk to see if they also provide pkzip-stuff with their updates to see if the source was them:

(m=me t:tech support)

m: Hello, i had some problems which maybe related to (name-of-the-update), i just...

t: Yes, just doubleclick on that file, *rambleramble* press ok, provide your password *ramble* (and so on)

m: nono, i just wanted to know if..

t: It's quite simple even thou it might be confusing with all those questions just let me help you go through with it step by step now do you have the file in your sight on screen?

m: umm... This is already installed but i was going to ask about..

t: Oh yes! You can find actually a never version from our website, do you have internet connection?

m: yes, but actually i was just curios if you provide...

t: GREAT! Well let me step you through getting the update package from internet and we'll..

m: WAIT! i just wanted to know if you provide pkunzip and pkzip utilities with your update packages as...

t: no you dont need them this is self extracting...

m: *CLICK*

Phew. damn it's hard to get answers from tech support. I guess it's not them then.. no matter, should've stopped where i got the machine clean and go for lunch.

Me: Hello. Tech Support How may I help you?

Client: Yes, I cannot get my program to start up. Can you help me?

Me: Yes, First off can you double click on "My Computer" for me?

Client: How am I supposed to click on your computer if you are somehwere else?

I once got a call from one of my friends that his modem was not working. I walked him through all the software settings, and everything on the computer seemed to be configured correctly. He was using an old Hayes 1200 baud external modem, so I asked him to tell me which LEDs were lit up on the front panel. Turns out the DTR (Data Terminal Ready) LED would not come on. Considering the computer was configured correctly, the only possible problem would be an internal fault in the modem, the RS-232c port on the computer, or the cable. The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: is the RS-232c cable connected properly?

Friend: sort of

Me: what do you mean "sort of"?

Friend: well, it's not plugged all the way in at the computer

Me: ok, plug it in all the way into the socket

Friend: ok, I pushed it in

Me: is the DTR LED lit up on the modem?

Friend: no

Me: you sure the cable is in all the way?

Friend: no, not all the way

Me: plug it all the way in!

Friend: ok, but it's kind of hard. I'll go grab a hammer

And before I could tell him not to, I heard this banging noise on the phone. He then comes back on:

Friend: ok, it's all the way in now

Me: uh, ok, is your modem DTR LED lit up?

Friend: no

Me: ok, why don't you drop off the computer at my house and I'll have a look at it?

Friend: ok

He arrives at my house with his computer system. I unplugged the modem cable, and sure enough, some of the pins in the RS-232c port were bent completely sideways!!

I fixed his problem with a small slot screwdriver and needle-nose pliers.

I work for a large IT company providing 2nd level tech support for our dial up system. About 9 months ago, we had this one lady call in and say that she isn't getting a dial tone.

I think, that's cool -- and easy ticket -- and grab it before anybody else can. I talk to the lady and she says that hasn't changed anything, but it stopped working overnight sometime. She's a pretty novice user, but I walk her through testing the modem, and it checks out. I ask her if the phone line is plugged in -- and she says it is. But she still gets no dial tone.

And she swears that she hasn't changed anything. I'm thinking a telco issue, but the user plugs a phone into the jack -- and gets a dialtone.

About 20 minutes of going around in circles -- I have her follow the cable from the modem to the wall. She openly resists, and keeps saying that it worked yesterday. She follows the phone cord to her new Fax Machine/Printer that she just installed.

She missed the part where you had to plug the fax machine/printer into the wall. The best part was when she started to argue with me and said that I (and my first level tech) should had caught this earlier, so she didn't "waste half her afternoon troubleshooting"

You'd be suprised how many people in my InfoTech company aren't smart enough to run their solar powered calculator.

I'm not a paid tech supporter, although I should be, but I just had a call from a friend that sounded so much like everything else I've seen here I just had to share it. My friend is trying to install some software called Napster.

Her: Okay, I've gone to your blue web page, now what do I do?

Me: (!?) Uh...I don't have a blue web page. What's the title across the top?

H: Amazon.com

M: (Wow! I own Amazon.com now!) Okay what you need to do is go to http://www.napster.com/

H: Okay...there.

M: Click the button that says "Download" and then the link that says "Download Now!"

H: I already downloaded it.

M: (Then why are we doing this?) Okay, start it up, somewhere in the Start menu, "Napster Music Community"?

H: Don't have it.

I teach her how to use the Windows search feature and we find that there are no files called Napster or even Nap-something on the computer. After pursuading her to download it "again", even though she already did, we run the Setup.

H: Do I want the Full, Typical or Compact install?

M: (This is sounding like a RealPlayer install!) Huh? Uh...what's written across the top of this window?

H: RealPlayer Install. (No wonder. Score one for me!!)

?!? We try this a few more different ways. I eventually figure out that every time she tries to download a file in IE it tries to install RealPlayer. I could probably fix it but don't want to on the phone. After a few minutes we finally get the file downloaded some-other-how. (I don't know how.) Never figured out what the problem was. After a few more glitches we finally get Napster installed.

Now we're going through the sign-up process. After convincing her that it was okay spaces couldn't be used in the username and how to use an underscore we came to the part where you choose your connection speed.

H: 56K, right?

M: (I happen to know she has Cable.) No, cable.

H: Ohhh...is that ISDN-56K then?

M: No, Cable.

H: Oh, I see.

We're through not playing with the Proxy servers and the firewall settings finally we're online and downloading music. Now I need to show how her to decompress an MP3 so it can be put onto a CD. We try to download some software to do that and get the @#$% RealPlayer setup again...!

...

H: It's finished decoding, now it's E. N. coding. What's E. N. Coding?

She didn't have a full 74min of music so I pursuaded her not to make a CD with just one song until she could fill the whole thing up. I'll let you know when she has enough!

Love this website. Now I can "document" a call just the way you professional techs do! Please take a look at my "blue" website sometime!

Hi, I'm not a Tech Support dude and hope never to be one after reading these horror stories. Going through this great site which I recently discovered, I found an earlier story (May 1998) that I felt I had to comment on. Below is the original story copied for context -

*********

An Electrifying Query

Here's a call we received from a Foreign Office Diplomat heading for the USA from way-out Pakistan.

"I want to take my PC to the US. I am being transferred to Washington DC. My computer works on AC. Do I need some kind of converter?"

Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter

**********

Well as it turns out, the mains power is 50 Hz 240 VoltsPakistan whereas in the States its 60 Hz 110 V. So he *did* need a convertor of sorts to transfer his PC between continents.

I used to work for the local computer salesman as a "part-time techie" and this once happened. It's not really a stupid user but funny anyways...

This woman called and said that she wanted her modem installed. She did not know a thing about computers (well, at least she admitted it) and asked for me to come over and install it.

So I went there and saw the box still unopened. I opened the box, took out the phonecable and dropped on my knees to get under the desk where the socket was. As soon as I was under the desk she said:

Cust: I can see that you have the right attitude towards your customers:

Me: What do you mean?

Cust: You don't start telling how you know everything but you just keep it quiet and humbly drop on your knees.

Me: (HUH?) Yes we do, ma'am.

(So I installed the modem and got her on the information superhighway. As far as I know, she still refuses to use other service than from that company because of the "right attitude".)

I used to provide support for field techs working on home PC's on warranty contracts.

In the case of a dead system, I ask them to check the power supply voltages. (Sometimes, they actually have meters.)

On _several_ occasions, I've had them report all voltages reading zero. As I begin looking up the part number for the power supply,

the "technician" on the other end asks: "Does it need to be plugged in?" or "Should I turn it on?"

The first few times, it took me a while to overcome my amazement and answer "yes".

I work for a national ISP out of Ohio. We have select few older folk who use our service that are incredibly unknowledgable (they frequently tell us: "I don't really know what I'm doing on the Internet because I'm computer literate." I don't think they have a clear understanding of the english language as well). Thus starts the adventure with a customer that has been with us for two years (this happened yesterday, 8/8):

Her - How do I get the web?

Me - I'm sorry...what exactly do you mean?

Her - I can't get the web. How can I get it to come up?

Me - Well, double click on the Internet Explorer Icon on your desktop.

Her - No, no, no -- that brings up the Internet. I want the web.

Me - Ma'am, the web and the Internet are the same...are you having problems connecting to the Internet?

Her - No, no, no -- I have a yerall (URL) number and I want to get to it. How do I do that?

Me - Oh! You have a web ADDRESS and you want to go to it!

Her - Huh?

Me - (ignores the "Huh?") Open Internet Explorer.

Her - Yeah...

Me - In the Address bar, type the web address you have and hit the enter button on your keyboard.

Her - See! I knew I was doing something wrong! I would type it in there and it would just sit at my homepage...

As you must assume I am a 2nd level support Analyst.

However I live in Melbourne Australia and I have a call from Perth. There is lady and asking my to help her fine her docs on her HDD. I asked her to click on my computer.

She replied: How can I click on my computer while your are in melb and I am in Perth.

Then i had to correct myself and Tell her to click on her desktop on actuall my computer Icon.

Thank you, I hope I made a smile on your face.

Majid

Sometimes...

I work help desk at a fairly large Canadian ISP, supporting

DSL, dial-up, etc. One day...

A customer called up, fairly upset about not getting his

e-mail. Bitches about wanting a refund for the time wasted

with this, etc. Fine, say we'll get into that when we find

out what the problem is.

He walks through the steps - been using Netscape 4 (by default)

to get it, he goes to the menu, chooses Messenger...

And sits there, waiting for messages.

I get him to find (that took a while) and press the Get Msg

button, and in they came.

I then told him that I'd forward him on to the billing dept

to discuss his credit, but that they probably wouldn't be

too receptive, because I was including the problem description

in his account notes...

He still wanted to try.

One day, I was talking a user through diagnosing a printer

problem. During the discussion, I discovered he had a Zip

drive attached between the printer and PC, and to remove

the possibility, I told the user to unhook the ZIP drive

and plug the printer directly into the PC. He told me to

hold on and set the phone on the desk. The next thing I

hear is a lot of grunting follow by a loud pop. As soon as

he returned to the phone, I inquired about the noises I had

heard. He told me that the cable was fairly well stuck on

and he had to put a lot of effort into unhooking the cable.

It turned out that he failed to realized that he needed to

unscrew the two screws securing the cable to the PC, and

removed it by pulling as hardas he could, stripping the

screws on the PC. Since then, policy is to give fully

detailed instructions and never assume the user knows

anything.

While working at a cushy summer job I though that I could burn some of my hours away by taking tech calls from the surrounding area for no charge. As soon as the flyers were up the phone started to ring within hours.

Caller: I have a problem with my computer.

Me: What seems to be the problem?

Caller: My computer surfs the net when i leave it alone.

Me: You mean you can't get it to disconnect?

Caller: No, I know how to do that, when i shut it off and go away for a few hours it says it has been to some bad sites.

Me: What? . . . you mean it takes you to bad sites? (thinking the user has no knowledge of porn loops)

Caller: no, my net nanny tells me it has been to some pornographic sites, the times are when the computer has been off.

Me: Miss, do you have kids?

Caller Yes, why?

Me: holding back laughter, they might know what's wrong.

Caller: Those little... (click)

It's safe to say those kids had to sleep on their stomaches that night.

I work for a major railroad but not as a tech person. One day I came to work to find a coworker with a monitor that was on the fritz. I suggested he call the support people. He said that they had been by but couldn't help the problem. Noting that another monitor was on the floor (having been removed from a station that no longer needed it) right by the cubicle, I asked if they had tried it.

Well, no...hadn't thought of it. I swapped monitors and everything worked well. Duh!

I called the help desk, for my 65 year old mother, her computer had so many things going on, she received error messages, her computer froze up, and the latest was, she couldnt dial up to the internet. She was receiving an error message. I looked and under the user name on the dial up box, it had her name (janedoe@gateway.net@gateway.net@gateway.net) and just kept going, so I deleted all but the one gateway.net. Then tried to dial up again. Same thing, so I went back and the user name was back the way it was. I called Gateway.I told him the problem, he said she had an old version. I said why didnt they send her and update? He did not know. So he had me go delete things and change things. etc. Then told me to hang up and try to see if it works. Then call back. So I hung up and tried again. It didnt work. It was worse in fact. So I call back and I gave them the (work #?) It is someone different, I could hardley hear him talk. He said we would have to completely erase everything on the computer. So he told me what to do and I did then he says when I finish call back (Im getting frustrated at that point) I do what he says and completely disable the computer at that point. I call back and the next tech doesnt know what to do and wanted to know why I did all of that just for a dial up problelm. I could have killed at that point. Here my mothers computer does not work, I live 40 miles away, its getting to be 5:00 in the afternoon and I need to go home, but I cant leave her this way. So the tech has me reinstall windows. I do that and thank goodness the computer came back on. That tech hangs up and guess what? The computer is exactly the way it was when we started. So I go to dial up networking. Create a new dial up connection with gateway's number and get her on line. The computer still gets error messages, but she just closes them and goes on.

I had a caller today ask for a stagnant IP address (instead of DHCP).

Answers I didn't give her:

0.0.0.0

127.0.0.1

just unplug the cable

Somebody called in saying that the Primary Master drive isn't detected... I wasn't able to solve the problem on the phone, so I just went to his house for it... I told him to open up the case and I just ripped out all the IDE and floppy cables... as I was doing that, I saw that the HDD was "daisy-chained" with the floppy cable... He even once tried to sell me an ATI 32 MB video card for $40 that was integrated into the motherboard.

This happened to a friend of a friend of min, who's a tech supporter.

F= Friend W= Woman

F= Hello what seems to be the problem?

W= My cup holder isn't working!!!

F= Cup holder?!

W= Yeah! You know, that little tray that pops out when you press the eject button? (The CD-ROM drive in case you haven't figured it out by now) There's holes in it!!!

F= Uh.......ok........here's what I'll do. I'll come over there right now, and fix your "cup holder" ok?

So he goes over there, gives her a REAL cup holder, doesn't even TOUCH the CD-ROM Drive, and gets paid 50 bucks for doing it!

Makes me wonder what these people are doing with computers!

I got called for an onsite one day where a machine wouldn't

do anything properly. I asked the lady what she'd just

changed on her machine, and she said, nothing, that she'd

thought maybe it was slow because her son had installed a

new game on it and she wanted him to take it off. She said

that after he took it off, the PC wouldn't work--it'd start

with many errors, etc. So I was trying to copy a directory

using xcopy when i noticed that i got a "bad command or

file name" error. Checked the path-it was fine. I asked her

what game it was (basically just making conversation) when

she told me it was "Command and Conquer". I immediately had

her get her (8th grade) son and had him show me how he had

removed the program. He pulled open "Find" and searched for

"Command and Conquer" and then deleted all the results. This

is bad, considering:

c:\command.com

c:\windows\command

etc etc contain the word "command".

I have yet to figure out how the machine started with not

a single copy of command.com!

This is the same family that called me because their speakers

didn't work. I looked around back--sure enough, they were

plugged in to "speaker out" on the (ATX) motherboard. The

lady had thought that the machine was sticking out too far

under the desk and pushed it back against the wall. When

it was hard to move, she pushed harder. The motherboard

connector broke. Lucky for them, this was an AST where the

sound array and the modem (on a PCI card) are hardwired

together. I plugged the speakers into the plug on the modem

and left them with a stern warning that if they didn't have

the one computer in a hundred that was that way, it'd have

cost them a $200 motherboard.

Brilliant.

I am a tech support in the latest ISP in Lahore, Pakistan. Lahore has been growing in ISP services since several years now and this trend is due to people finding a new world on the internet. As internet is a new concept for majority of the people, simple settigns also cause a lot of problems.

One day this person calls and asks me for all the settings. When every thing is checked, he asks if we have any proxies. After i tell him that we don't, he ask again if we have any DNS entries. But instead of saying primary or secondary DNS he asks "does your server have any DNA code ?". So i politely tell him that our DNA code has not been discovered as yet !

incoming call: My computer does not work

me: wat not work???

man: nothing do nothing

me:wath kind of pc is the your??

man: I think is a Pentium III 700, the top

me:the screen is up???

man: no

me: the keyboard is on???

man: no

me: ????????

me: did you plug the PC on the wall???

man: is necessarie????

me: I think so sir....

A guy calls in and wants to know how he can restore the files that he backed up using MS backup.. heres how it went

Tech: hi how can I help you?

User: my computer was acting up so i backed up my data and ran the restore disk. But i dont know how to restore the files

Tech: are you back in windows now?

User: yes I am

Tech: Ok sir insert the disk you put your backups into.

User: what disk?

Tech: the disk u backed your data into

User: oh i need a disk?

Tech: yes u do need a disk for that

User: oh i didnt put one in

Tech: where did u save it to?

User: C:\My documents\myback folder

Tech: you should be able to get that from that location

User: its not there??? where is my backup????

Tech: did u format your hard drive?

User: ummm yea I told u i cleaned up my pc

User went hysterical thinking of all the data he lost.. maybe next time he'll think about where he backs up his =)

Surprisingly enough, I saw this story posted by someone on some other site, but it wasn't told accurately..

Our company sends computers out for our subscribers to distribute/receive audio over a private network. We recently bought out another company, and one of the employees who worked at that company had this experience..

>From my coworker, who worked with the guy who took the call (& who has since quit):

ts: (typical stuff) can I help you?

cust: We recently got one of your computers, and there's something wrong with it. The screen is completely blank.

ts: well, can you tell me if there's a little flashing light on the front of it, by the power button?

cust: nope, no flashing light, it's completely blank.

ts: Ok, go ahead and trace the power cord from the back of the monitor for me, and see if it's plugged in.

(customer shuffles around, searching)

cust: uh, hold a second, I've got to go get a flashlight.

ts: A flashlight? What for?

cust: oh, well, the power went out.

ts (amused? annoyed? both?): Do you still have the box it came in?

cust: yes.

ts: Ok, what I want you to do is go ahead and pack the computer back into the box and ship it back to us, because you're too stupid to own a computer.

:-)

As a customer support coordinator, I sent out this apparently over-qualified MCSE to fix a networked printer problem. He calls back a while later:

Me: What's up?

MCSE: Got the everything solved. Now, it seems this customer has a serious problem with his monitor.

Me: What's the matter?

MCSE: The display goes blank every so often. It's funny - when you touch the mouse, it goes back to normal.

Me: Just make sure nobody heard that and get back here ASAP.

About 2 years ago I worked in a local Hospital in Tech. Support when a lady phoned me who had forgotten her password to the Hospital booking in system:

Lady: Hiya love, I've forgotten my password for the Hearts system.

Me: Ok - I'll just change it for you........your new password is 12345a.

Lady: Hang on a minute love while I go and get a pen and write this down.

Me: (Sigh!)

Lady: What was after 3 again love, was it 5?

Remember - these people are in charge of you medical records!!

This story is from a few years ago when I was but a lowly peon

desktop/network manager for a large metropolitan newspaper. Now

I do the same thing (clues for the clueless) on a larger scale ;-).

One of my techs came to me one day really frustrated. He had been

to see the circulation manager who was REALLY complaining about his

PC and the fact that the mouse REALLY sucked. Well, it just so happens

that the company DID buy really bad PCs at the time and they were

prone to failure (this is 1995). The tech explained that he had already

given the manager 2 other mice and that he was SURE the others worked.

Actually, he was using one of the "dead" mice himself. Well, it seems he

called again and was REALLY steamed.

A little discovery turns up the fact that the other mice had been replaced

while he was out. Actually, he was quite busy so he wasn't in the office

too much. I decided to take the case myself and made an appointment to

see him with his secretary.

On the appointed hour, I was in his office. He strode in and sat down at his

desk with a scowl. I cheerfully asked him how he was doing. He replied that he'd

be a whole lot better if he could get the *%!@$%$^@ mouse to work. Okay, show me

what's wrong. Whereupon he proceeds to pick the mouse up, turn it upside down

and tries to roll the little ball on the bottom.

((light bulb on))

After showing him how to use the mouse, he dismissed me with a wave. I left and

had a LONG laugh with the techs and his secretary ;-)..

I work in a small IT team for a firm of Chartered Surveyors. My job title is Network Admin - but - given there's only 6 of us to support over 300 of them, it becomes a little meaningless at times.

So I'm sitting there minding my own network, when the phone rings. The user on the other end can't get mail. OK, I think, I'll take her through the settings. The users run Win95 and use Outlook, so I go through the standard steps, eyes closed.

Me: Click Start, then Settings, then Control Panel.

User: Hang on - I've only just moved to this desk, I'm not sure where everything is.

Me: You've got the mouse?

User: Yes.

Me: Then click on Start - it's a button on the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

User: can you hold on - I've only just moved to this desk and I don't know where the Start button is

Me: can you hold on a moment - I just need to answer my mobile? (It "rings" in vibrate mode, so she couldn't have heard it, even it had been ringing). I put phone on hold for a moment, compose myself, and go through the same routine until she eventually sees the button.

Dave: Thanks for calling ___. May I have your service tag please?

Cust: (gives tag)

Dave: (verifies info) What can I do for you?

Cust: My system won't boot.

Dave: Power it off and power it back on.

Cust: Nope.

Dave: .. other debugging steps, 45minutes later .. Ok, we're going to have to reseat the processor. It's underneath a plastic shroud, go ahead and remove that and take the processor out and put it back in.

Cust: What's the processor look like?

Dave: (Because I know it's a P2) It looks like a Super Nintendo game cartridge.

Cust: Oh! Is that the thing that's smoking?

I decided that it was time to come in out of the stone age and into the techno

age. I started talking to people about computers, after about three months of

I had figgured out almmost what I needed for a home computer.

Then through the proverbial grapevine I found a computer.

When I looked at the computer the gentleman showed me how to shut the gizzmo down

I retuned home with my purchase a nice second hand computer.

On the Friday of the long weekend home I go with my purchase.

several days later the next week I manage to round up the nessary wireing parts and someone to do the rewiring

Due to the age of the wiring in my house I had to do sone rewiring ihad puchased the nessary parts

all that done my friend and I set the coomputer up .

Miracal of miracles evey thing is working. We proceed to clik our way throough the various programs

neiter one of us knowing how to actually use a conputer,but

we mastered opening and closing programs. then we decide enough is enough time to shut down,after three hours

we finally having been throough every nook and cranny of the programs start wondering what start does

finnaly the light comes on and someone is home and I remeberd how to shut down the computer.

which now has the name FRED, Frigging Redicolus Electronic

Device

I work for a Canadian ISP & I got a call one day from a customer who could barely speak or understand english. He kept saying there was something wrong with his Outlook Express. I tried everything, even reinstalling it. Nothing seemed to work, I was on the call for 45 minutes. About 5 minutes before we ended the call, I told the customer that he'll have to see a computer dealer, I've done all I could. His response was "It's ok, I don't use the e-mail anyway, too afraid of viruses." I could have screamed, I wasn't a happy camper.

I'm currently working as a temp providing Dial Up Support for a major ISP in the Southeastern United States. Since I don't have another job lined up at the moment I shall keep them anonymous. :)

Here is a classic case of the fundamental difference between "inexperienced" and "stupid".

me: Thank you for calling B******** Internet Services. This is David, how can I help you?

him: Yeah, I keep trying to connect and it says No Dialtone.

me: Do you have more than one phone line?

him: of course I do that's how come I know your software is screwed up!

me: (uh. okaaay). Okay sir. Why don't we check in the back of the computer to see which line is running from the jack called "line" to make sure...

him: Look, I'm not f*&^%(g stupid! Now if you're just too damned incompetent to fix my problem...

me: Okay, lets try this:

(We kill the options for "wait for dialtone before dialing", stick a couple of pauses in front of the number, check modem diagnostics etc, no luck. Mr. Customerperson is getting more and more irate by this point.).

me: Okay sir, try to attempt a dial now.

(We don't have the best headsets, but I finally hear the familiar "click" of the modem picking up).

him: See? No dialtone. Are you f*&%^#g stupid or what? I want to talk to your supervisor

me: Sir. You are on the line that your modem is on.

him: No, YOU are INCOMPETENT!.

me: Sir. Look at the back of your machine.

him: What about it?

me: see that wire plugged into "Line"?

him: Yeah, so what?

me: Pull it out.

*CLICK*

:)

Fastest way to get off a call with a jerk :). Folks, if you want to drive a car you have to learn how to drive. If you want to play on the Internet you have to learn a few things.

I found great computer humor site including some tech tales. Its URL is http://www.multimania.com/unique/ This site is in French. It does have a lot of the same stuff everybody else has. It also has some unique stuff including these gems. There are many more. I will translate these into English. (I am not translating them all word for word.)

Réellement entendu à CARREFOUR.

Acheteur : Pourquoi vendez-vous les barrettes mémoires si chères ?

Vendeur : Ce sont des barrettes de marque et sont garanties contre les

virus.

Recently heard at CARREFOUR

Buyer: Why is your RAM so expensive?

Salesman: That is brand name RAM and it's guaranteed against viruses.

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

C'est un gars qui me passe un fichier sur disquette. Comme ce fichier

est assez gros, il me l'envoit compressé. Le soir, voulant lire le

fichier, je me rends compte que je n'ai pas le décompresseur adapté. Je

téléphone alors au gars :

"Dis-donc, t'as oublié de me passer le décompresseur !

- Si, si, je l'ai compressé avec le fichier pour gagner de la place...

A guy sends me a file on disk. Since it's really big, he sends it compressed. At night, wanting to read it, I figure out I don't have the right decompression program. So I call the guy:

Hey, you forgot to give me the decompression program.

Yeah, yeah, I compressed it with the file to gain space.

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

En formation, on m'a juste demandé où se trouvaient les chiffres romains

sur le clavier du PC...!

Somebody just asked me where to find Roman Numerals on a PC keyboard. . .!

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

Toujours à EDF... Une utilisatrice à qui j'avais demandé de m'entrer son

mot de passe (celle-ci se trouvant occupée à autre chose) me dit :

"T'as qu'à le taper, c'est clitoris...

A user whom I had asked to enter her password (she was busy with something else) tells me "You can type it. It's clitoris. . ."

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

Pour continuer le tour de France, celle-ci se passe à Perros Guirec. Une

secrétaire a (enfin) fini de saisir la comptabilité de l'année sur son

logiciel. Il est 11 h 30. Elle lance alors les opérations de cloture de

l'année fiscale.

L'opération est assez longue, et n'est pas finie à 12h. Elle arrête donc

l'ordinateur (bouton on/off) avant de partir chez elle, en pensant

probablement le rallumer en rentrant.

La dernière sauvegarde ayant été faite avant la cloture de l'année précé

dente, ça fait plus d'un an à retaper. Bien sûr l'activité est saisonniè

re et cela se passe moins d'un mois avant le début de la saison...

To continue the Tour de France, this one passes to Perros Guirec . A secretaire has (finally) finished the years' bookwork on her software. It's 11:30. So she starts the work to close the fiscal year.

It's long enough, and wasn't finished at 12. So she turns off the computer (on/off button) before leaving for home, probably thinking she can just turn it on when she returns.

The last save was done before the closure of the preceding year, that meant more than a year to retype. Of course the activity is seasonal with less than a month before the beginning of the next season.

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

Au début de ma carrière, je travaillais sur Olivetti. Sur ces systèmes,

il fallait formatter les bandes avant de faire une copie de sécurité. Un

client, soucieux d'économiser quelques cassettes, se contentait

d'utiliser la même chaque jour. Jusque là, rien d'étonnant, ça arrive

souvent.

A l'époque, il fallait chaque fois reformatter les cassettes avant de

pouvoir y écrire. Evidement, ce traitement prenait beaucoup de temps, et

le client eu une idée géniale. Dès que les copies étaient terminées, il

reformattait les cassettes afin de gagner du temps pour le lendemain.

Quelle ne fut pas notre surprise lors du premier restore : "Tape empty"

!!!

At the beginning of my career, I was working on Olivetti. On those systems, it was necessary to format cassettes before you could make backups to them. A client, wanting to be cheap on tapes, used the same one every day. To backup, you had to reformat a tape each day to write to it. Evidently , that took a lot of time, and the client had a nice idea. After backing up, he would reformat the tapes to save time the next day. What a surprise when it came time for the first restore when it said, "Tape empty" !!!

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

A propos des moteurs de recherche sur Internet : notre infographiste me

demande comment trouver un plug in pour photoshop. Je lui donne

l'adresse d'Altavista et lui dit de taper ce qu il cherche dans la boîte

de dialogue. Il me dit qu il ne trouve rien ..

Je vais voir et il avait tapé dans la boîte de dialogue : "Je recherche

un plug in pour adobe photoshop version 3.0 qui réalise des puzzles"...

Concerning Internet Search Engines: Our Infographiste asks me how to find a plugin for photoshop. I give him the address for Altavista and tell him to type what he's looking for in the dialog box. He tells me that it finds nothing. I go look and this is what he typed in Altavista: "I'm looking for a plugin for Adobe Photoshop Version 3.0 that reads puzzles". . .

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

Un élève d'IUT Info 1ère année à un autre :

"Les terminaux sont en noir et blanc parce que l'administrateur a

installé une version d'UNIX trop vieille..."

An IUT Info freshman student to another: "The terminals are in black and white because the administrator installed a version of UNIX that's too old."

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

Ce même élève à un copain bidouilleur :

"Dis, comment on affiche une image à l'écran ?

- C'est simple, tu tapes : "rm -rf *" puis ENTRÉE...

- Ah... Ok ! (et il tape la commande...)

The same student to a bidouilleur friend:

"Hey, how do you display an image on the screen?

It's simple, you type: "rm -rf *" then enter. . .

OK! (and he types the command. . .)

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

Il y a quelques jours, une utilisatrice appelle notre support pour lui

indiquer que les couleurs changent au moins une fois par jour dans

Windows.

Un technicien se rend sur place, mais ne constate rien. De notre côté,

nous vérifions et revérifions et ne constatons rien d'anormal. Comme ce

problème est tout de même bizarre, je décide de renvoyer un technicien

sur place pour refaire des vérifications.

Sur place, on lui annonce que la personne est en congé de maladie, et

ceci pour un problème de rétine qui l'empêche de voir les couleurs

correctement...

There are some days, a user calls our support to say that colors change at least once a day in Windows. A technician goes to see her computer. After checking time after time, all configurations are OK. She still has a problem. The tech is resent and finds out that the person has a disease, a retina problem and she can't see colors correctly. . .

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

Un client très mécontent appela le support technique et annonça au

technicien que son ordinateur l'avait traité de "Bad" et "d'invalide".

Le technicien lui répondit qu'il ne fallait pas prendre les messages

"Bad command" et "Invalid response" comme des attaques personnelles...

A very unhappy user called tech support and announced that his computer was calling him "Bad" and "d'invalide [understood as retarded]." The tech told him not to take the messages "Bad command" and "Invalid response" as personal attacks.

I was working for a computer sales company when I got this

call:

(me) - me

(c) - Client

Me: Thanks for calling ______. Could I please have your

product ID number?

C: "______"

Me: And what seems to be the problem?

C: Well, my kid took apart my computer for my business, and

now it doesn't work.

Me: How old is your kid?

C: He's 7. He's *great* at taking things apart!

Me: Ok, Sir. (mental image of strangling client)...

C: Uh, there's a few things he couldn't find a place to put

back in...

Me: Could you describe them to me?

---

To make a long story short, the guy's kid had taken out all

of his SIMM's, and:

C: There's a little square chip that says "Pentium II" on it.

Me: (flabergasted) How did he get that off???

C: He had to use a chisel and a hammer.

Me: Sir, your motherboard is destroyed. You'll have to

purchase a new one and a new processor chip.

C: Well, I just bought it 2 months ago, so it's still

under warranty. You guys should pay for it.

Me: Sir, we do NOT pay for 'willful negligence'.

C: It was an accident.

Me: Sir, did you willingly let your son open the case on

your computer so he could 'take it apart'?

C: Yeah. So?

This was the beginning to a 10-minute discussion in which I

tried to explain that this was not considered acceptable by

the company for warranty-authorized repairs. In the end, the

client told me he was going to "sue you, you asshole" and

other similar comments. Whatever!!!

About a year ago in Sweden i drove like hell to an enraged lawyer-customer of mine, he said that he would be out of office while i fixed his computor.... Knowing that he had "Norton Disc Lock" on the compie, i asked for the pw; the lawyer claimed it to be "london"...

When the lawyer came back, now really angry, he asked why i still was there? I said i couldnt get through his lock. He stared at me and said he had a friend who had told him about support issues that it "was easy as hell to brake any lock" if You just had the skill. I then told him that i can brake it easy "as hell" by sending it to Symantec, at a mere cost of 3000 Skr. Angrily he then hit the PW himself, spelling the city of London with two "n's" it it - of course the compie went up right away...

He then said to me; "Of course, you are paid to do programming and not spelling"

I was just to amazed to say anything, has this guy deserved to own a computor?

Carter Hayes

This just happened to me....

A user came in to my office, complaining that she couldn't do her internet updates from her house. Her boss says that she should be able to, easily. She called the website hosts, and they told her it was our problem, not theirs.

So, being unfamiliar with the website that she updates, I asked to see the process from our machine (the one that works).

She opens Netscape, and types in 'netscape.com', so we go to netscapes' website. Then, she types in the URL she really needs. (I'm thinking to myself "why did she go to netscape first?")

She logs in to the server, and an entry screen pops up, with a little warning below: 'this software works only with Netscape versions 3.x to 5.x'

Everything works properly from this site.

I asked her about her home computer. What ISP? (local, good one) What browser do you use? She answers: Internet Explorer. ???? I say, this website only works with Netscape, it says so right there.

And she says, but I go to netscape.com first, so I'm working through Netscape instead of IE, right?

Urk.

This story is actually about a copy machine and totally true.

But I've changed it to be computer related.

A customer called for service saying there printer would not print

and that looked like the paper wasn't even feeing into the printer.

I asked them to try printing with a new package of paper in the printer,

they said they tried that and still would not print. So I went to the

site and sure enough there was a new package of paper in the printer.

The problem was the paper was still in the wrapper!

I have heard quite stupid phonecalls during my days as a Terch Supporter, but this one takes the price..

ME: Welcome to cd-r support, how may i help you?

Dealer: I got a question about one of your cd writers, the model with USB connection.

ME: Ok.

Dealer: Well, one of my custs wants to know if this cd writer supports an IMAC with Windows 98 as a Operating system?

ME: Is windows run under some kind of Virtual PC software? And which MAC os does your cust have.

Dealer: No, my cust do NOT have any virtual pc or MAC os!!! Only a pure Windows 98!!!

ME: Can you hold on for a minute?

Dealer: Yes.

I put dealer on hold. After a few minutes on laughing, i returned to the phone.

ME: Sorry that i had to put you on hold

Dealer: That´s all right.

ME: Well, our cd writers does not support IMAC with Windows 98.

Dealer: Ok, thank you very much for your time.

ME: Thank you.

This call saved my day...

I work as a computer lab assistant for a large university. Now, the lab I work in is inside the College of Business, which means that the students who frequent the lab aren't necessarily power users. One evening, the following exchange took place between myself and a student (who clearly lacked computer savvy, to say the least).

Me: Hi, can I help you?

Him: Yeah, can you tell me how to make some changes to an email message?

Me: Sure, what do you need to change?

Him: Well, I typed in some stuff that I probably shouldn't have, and I want to get rid of it.

(Can this fellow never have used the backspace key before?? At this point, I began to briefly explain the directional keys and the backspace key.)

Him: No, I know all that. But I already typed the message, and now I want to change it.

(Hmmmmmm... something smells fishy here.)

Me: I'm not sure I understand. You typed in the message earlier, and now you want to edit it?

Him: Yeah, I typed it in yesterday.

(Huh?? Now, the default email program we use in the lab is web-based, and doesn't have an "outbox" feature. This is getting more and more interesting.)

Me: You typed it in yesterday...

Him: Yeah, I sent it yesterday. How do I get it back?

Me: You want to change a message you already sent?

Him: Yeah.

(At this point, all I could do was blink.)

Me: So you already sent the message, yes?

Him: Yeah.

Me: You typed it in, and clicked on the "Send" button?

Him: Yeah.

(I wait a minute to see if this sinks into his mind. It doesn't. He's still looking at me expectantly.)

Me: Then it's gone. You can't get it back.

Him: You mean I can't change it now?

You get the idea. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'm enrolled in the same school he is.

TS: Hello, Tech Support.

CSR: Yes, I just installed your program last night and I can't enter my passwords into ANY of my windows programs.

TS: Ma'am, could you try to enter a password right now for me.

CSR: I just did!

TS: What happened?

CSR: Nothing! Nothing is showing up when I type!

TS: Ma'am, is your keyboard plugged in?

CSR: One second...[background noise] Oh....sorry...[click!]

In the DSL food chain there are ILEC's (Bell Atlanic, Pac-Bell ect.), CLEC's (North Point, Covad, Rythums, ect.), and then their are ISP's. When this happened I was working in a rather large CLEC's dispatching team.

I recive a call from my boss saying that we have an angry End User (EU) on the line and we need a tech dispatched right away (what else is new). I give the EU a call to let him know that the Tech is on the way and when I do the EU desides that he is going to tell me what the problem is. The EU then tells me that he can't use ANY of his computers, can't make or recive calls (I was calling him on his cell), and if "we didn't get out here RIGHT THE F**K NOW" he was going to sue us.

I calm the EU down and dispatch our best tech out to the site when we found out what happened. Here's my conversation with the Tech after he was done 3 hours later:

Dispatch (D)

Tech (T)

D: Thank you for calling CLEC dispatch how can I help you?

T: Dispatch, this is "Tech" calling on number ###

D: got it. ok what's up with this one?

T: Well, (long drawn out pause as the tech gathers thoughts)

D: well...?

T: ok... here it is. this EU had a schedualed install today with (contractor name here).

D: alright what was the issue?

T: well, when the tech installed the DSL he took out the phone line (not a big issue, easy fix), but then started asking the EU all sorts of questions cuse he had another Tech in training with him. The tech in training asked the EU if he had a NIC card. Of coarse the EU didn't know, and then demanded that he have one. The Sr. tech tried to explain to the EU that they don't do NIC card installs cuse their insurance won't cover them monkeying with his machine. EU still wanted a NIC card and the the Sr. tech finaly gave in. He opened the box and installed a NIC card.

D: ok...? So why did all the computers go out?

T: well, the Tech installed THE WRONG NIC CARD in the server which then brought down all the other computers.

D: ----

T: hello?

D: ::sigh:: ok. so is the EU up and running?

T: no.

D: why not?

T: when the other tech installed the new NIC card, he TOOK OUT THE EXISTING ONE, and set it on top of the HD which then fried the correct NIC card. Now the NIC card that the EU has is the wrong one for the computer. --- BUT... his DSL works now.

Company I worked for in the mid-1980s decided to join the

computer revolution. Ordered a pile of 286s with lots of

software, etc - but didn't bother about training. "The

staff can learn by doing..." was the management's attitude.

As I was the only person with prior computer experience I

inevitably became defacto support person.

Lots of programs of that era had the famous "press any key

to..." message appearing regularly. Of course the #1 question was

"where's the ANY key?" Despite countless repetitions many

people *still* weren't clued to the idea that you just press Enter.

After hearing this question for the millionth time :) one day,

I borrowed an engraving tool from our workshop, went to every

computer in the company, and engraved the word ANY on the number pad's Enter key.

Next day I spun some doubletalk about a minor DOS upgrade making it possible to have an ANY key on each computer.

The staff *loved* the "new" systems - and I got a pay bonus that week for my "brilliant work". But I still wonder if the boss *really* understood what I had done? ;-)

Ok, this is a familiar theme I realize, but I still can't believe the depth of stupidity I encountered in this situation.

Last year, when I worked at another ISP (which I shall call myISP), I got a call from a lady who was considering switching from AOL to myISP.

No problem, right? Easy sale.......wrong.

me: Ok, ma'am, what would you like your username to be?

her: What's a username?

(ok, so some people don't know)

me: That will be the first part of the email address to

which you'll be assigned, e.g. (your username)@myISP.com

her: oh...sheila, i guess.

me: ok ma'am, now I need a password, at least 6 characters in length and containing at least 1 number.

her: -long pause- what do you mean, a password? I just gave you my password.

me: no, ma'am, that is your username (trying to clear things up)...the first part of your email address...(remember? comeon, work with me)

her: oh yeah, ok. so why do i need a password?

(how do you explain what a password is and why you need one? seems pretty self-explanatory to me, but...)

me: it's like when you were a kid in a club and you didn't want just anyone to be in your club, you had a password to gain access...

her: ohhh ok, you mean like my AOL password?

me: yes, exactly.

her: I can't give out my AOL password.

me: no, ma'am, that's not what I'm asking for; I'm asking for a new password to be used with our service.

her: I have a friend who knows a lot about computers and she says I shouldn't give out my password.

me: yes ma'am, in general that's good advice, but I'm not asking for your AOL password, but for a new password...

her: I just don't think i should give you my password.

me; (trying very hard to sound...and be patient)...ma'am...how are we supposed to sign you up with our service without a username and a password?

(after 15 or 20 more minutes going around in circles, explaining that the username is to identify and is visible, but the password is not visible so that no one else may use her account.......she still could not grasp the idea that she could have an AOL user/pass AND a myISP user/pass. I didn't even try to persuade her to stop using AOL, which in retrospect might have been the wiser course of action)

her: I'll have to discuss it with my husband (click)

*sigh* Oh well, at least no one in our call center had to deal with her again.

One other, less depressing, story: I had a lady call me and tell me that her computer laughed at her (due to a Windows 95 wav file that sounds like kids laughing when windows shuts down).

My favorite, though, is from a customer of still another ISP where I used to work, a couple of years ago; "My computer keeps making noises like Tweeky from Buck Rogers (her system kept prompting her to insert a floppy disk). We both had a laugh at that one.

Hey, sometimes that's all you can do when you have one of those "#*&% I hate computers" days :)

I've been in tech support for my University's Internet service for the past four years now, and I've heard some great stuff in that time. I've helped people who were plugging their phone cord in their network card, people who dialling themselves and getting angry with us because they get a busy signal, people who download files and don't know where it went or what it was named but want me to find it for them, and so on. You name it, and I've probably taken a call on it at one time or another. Here's a excerpt from a lady that almost got redirected to a *ahem* interesting web site due to a misunderstanding.

Caller: I want to know how to use a search engine. I've heard about them before but have never used one.

Me: Okay, that's no problem. I'll talk you through it. Which one do you want to try? There's yahoo.com ... hotbot.com ...

Caller: The hot one. I want to try that one.

Me: Great. Type in www.hotbot.com in the Address bar.

Caller: Okay... (mumbling to her self as she types) www dot hotbox dot com

Me: Excuse me. What did you just say?

Caller: Hotbox.com

Me: (Stressing) Whoah whoah whoah! Don't do anything. We want to go to www.hotBOT.com with a 'T'. Not an 'X'. I'm not sure what hotbox.com is, but it certainly isn't a search engine.

I had a computer user in my department call me to say that the diskette wouldn't go into the diskette drive. I walked him throught it over the phone to make sure that he was putting the disk in correctly. I decided to go up and check if there was something lodged in the drive. When I got there I found that he had taken a label that was meant to fold over the top of the diskette and stuck it on with the top of the label at the top of the diskette. This put the bottom of the label directly over the metal slide cover, effectively locking it into place. This is why the diskette would not fit into the drive.

This one happened back in the mid 80's. I was a computer operator for the state operated rail system in Australia. We were running on an IBM mainframe and most of the users were using the big old IBM 3270 'green screen' terminals.

We got a call from the main reservations office a block or two down the road from the data centre. The clerk claimed that he had "a big green arrow in the middle of the screen. It's taking up the whole screen".

The shift supervisor went down to the office to have a look.

If you've ever seen an IBM green screen you'll know that when you press the shift or caps lock keys, a little green upwards pointing arrow all of about 1/4 inch high appears right at the bottom of the screen indicating that you are in all CAPS mode. He'd hit the CAPS lock key and was panicking over this 'big green arrow'.

Sigh.

I was working for Sykes Enterprises which is a company that does outsourcing for other computer companies like Best Buy, Gateway and Microsoft. Well anyway one day I was doing tech support for Gateway and I get this call from some guy. I go through the script, giving my name badge number and asking for his name and computer serial number.

After I get through with that, he immediately tells me he needs a new power supply for his computer, I was told during training to go through the troubleshooting no matter what even if you get another tech on the other end. Well I tell him this and we go through the list and order him a new power supply.

The weirdest part was I ended up having to send a call up to the next level to a real gateway tech and I could swear that it was the same guy I had just talked to earlier in the day.

I felt this one needed to be shared.

I'm 23 and graduating in Comp-Science.

Which means nothing by itself. however, I've been tinker with computers for a while now, so I have, at least, some sense of what a computer is.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, my mother decided to buy a computer herself.

Since we live apart, she didn't have one in her place since I moved out (~3 years ago).

I got her a nice deal, 3 times faster than the one I am using, for a price slightly lower than what I payed for this one.

I happened to be on vacation there when this all happened, so I installed the computer for her, set up her internet connection, and put some software on (Office).

A couple of days later she's in for her first 'computer lesson'.

i go through the usual basics (software vs hardware, parts of a computer, keyboard, mouse, monitor,...), and then let her turn it on.

Windows comes up with the pre-installed guide "Computers for Idiots".

I let her go through that, since it seems to perfectly fit :-)

First screen, fine, she presses '1' and moves on to the first section of the guide.

then she presses -) on the keyboard and goes on to page 2.

So on, untill the guide is trying to teach her how to use the mouse.

To show her how to click, the guide says something like:

"To move on to the next page, click on (icon of an arrow facing right)"

She stopped, looked around on the screen, looked at me with an annoyed look on her face, complained that there was no right-arrow anywhere to be clicked.

I insisted she looked better.

My grandamother was there, 2 generations away from me, and was already smiling.

We shared a look of pity, and some inter-generational fun.

After 10 minutes, my mother was still looking for the only right-arrow on the screen, the one in the above message.

Once I told her (I had to, she wouldn't find it!), she laughed histerically, I felt so sad, and so young, and my grandmother was probably thinking she must have done something wrong somewhere along the line...

I'll refrain from telling you particulars on the fact that in the next few days my mother showed *a lot* of problems in:

- move the mouse in the intended direction (as in "move it right", and she moves it up);

- double-clicking

- clicking (as in while clicking she'd move it off the hot-spot)

- typing (astonishing, since she had been a journalist for some time !)

- shutting down (and I tell you, it's scary to come back home, find the computer in a different room, all unplugged, and KNOW within yourself that she did a hard-shut-down instead of the Start-)ShutDown that parks the head over the HD !)

Which could all be understood, if she wasn't, all along, asking me how to do stock-trading and home-swapping on-line !

Once I got back from my vacation, she once called me and said that this home-swapping site on the net wouldn't let her in, even if she put her password in as log-in.

I told her about case-sensitiveness, and asked what the password was. Well, she told me that it was ********, the password I knew, since I set-up her internet account.

Which makes me wonder how to get all the 'incorrect log-in' data from the net,since a nice shareof those must be people's Internet-accounts info, or their ATM PINs, or stuff like that, right ?

BTW, I'm really scared, since one day I'll be in her shoes, when my kids / grandkids / [younger people in general] will be laughing at my ineptitude...

This story came from a former associate. Back in the old days when CP/M on the Z-80 was king, this guy sold computers (mostly to industry). One Friday, a fellow walked in and said he wanted to buy a computer. Thrusting a list at my friend, he said "Here. I need this." Looking at the list, my friend said "Just what are you planning to do; maybe I can make some alternate suggestions." The customer responded "Look, that's what I need--if you aren't interested in selling it, I'll go elsewhere." Remembering that the customer is always right, my friend accumulated the equipment and billed this fellow about $10,000. The following Monday, the guy came back in; yelling and cursing, he slammed the CPU box down on the counter. My friend asked what was wrong, and was told "It doesn't work."

My friend asked for more information. "Look, I'm an amateur astronomer; I just bought this automated equatorial mount for my telescope. According to the documentation that came with it, the equipment I bought should be able to drive the telescope. So, Saturday night, I hooked it all up, set up the telescope, and told the computer to track Pluto. All it did is give me some weird error message."

"OK," said my friend, "what kind of software are you using with it?" The customer got that wonderful look we all know so well and replied "Software?"

I used to work for a small group of people who would put up small businesses on a web site. Our customers were pretty good, except when this one company hired a complete ditzoid to be our liason for their publishing department. Here's how the conversation went [shortened version]:

(Me) Okay, in order to change that text, you will need to send us an updated version.

(Her) Um. Okay, why?

(Me) We can't update anything until we know what to put.

(Her) Uh... what?

(Me) You said that the company profile page is out of date, and your department has made a new text to put on that page, right?

(Her) Uh huh...

(Me) [speaking slowly] So... you have to send me the text, or I won't know what to put there.

(Her) Well, I don't have it.

(Me) Have what?

(Her) This... "tegsst" or whatever you call it.

(Me) Text. TEXT! The words that need changed.

(Her) Well, I didn't change it.

(Me) [slapping head] I KNOW that. But you just told me that the publishing department said that the company profile page needed change. Can you tell me what needs changed?

(Her) [sound of ruffling through paper] This.

(Me) [After long pause] This what?

(Her) This here. [I hear her ruffling paper]

(Me) I can't see it over the phone. Please e-mail it to me.

(Her) What is your address?

(Me) [blahblah@blahblah.com]

(Her) That's it? No zip code or state or anything?

(Me) That's our e-mail address.

(Her) Hon, even an ee-mail address has a zip code.

(Me) [someone kill me] No, it doesn't. You mail it with your computer.

(Her) [horrified] I'm not mailing my computer to nobody!

(Me) No, just send the file.

(Her) I can't send anything without a zip code!

This goes on for a while, and then she gets mad and hangs up. We call her back, and she puts us on hold and hangs up again. My boss calls the direct line to that company's manager, and then an hour later I got a call back.

(Her) [sobbing] You made them yell at me!

(Me) [My boss] had to call someone else to get them to tell you what to do. I am sorry you got yelled at. I didn't tell them to yell at you. [just to fire your ass]

(Her) Okay, okay... I send the text. I printed it out, now what is your zip code?

(Me) Didn't they give you an e-mail address to send it to? You don't even have to print anything, you just send the text in an e-mail through your computer from your desk.

(Her) You mean I have to re-type this in the computer again??? [screams and hangs up]

I let my boss handle the call. About six months later, the company went out of business. I think it was their incompetant secretary myself, but...

As one of the only people in my class who know a lot about computers, I get a lot of questions. Here is one that I remember well.

User: My mac is getting really slow. What is wrong?

Me: Well, how much ram do you have?

User: 64 megabytes.

Me: That should be enough. Do you have a lot of extensions turned on?

Etc.

Finally after finding nothing wrong he askes: Isn't the ram disk supposed to make the computer faster?

Turns out he had set the ram disk to as high as it would go, which used up all the ram.

AOL told me to download a new modem)

I work for an ISP in Washington. The day was going normally untill I get this call:

m=me

c=pissed chick

m: tech support this is ****

c:hello I called in a couple of hours ago and I got the worst customer service I have ever had. I have been thinking about it and it was just rude.

m: do you remember his name ma'am

c:No but if I heard his voice I would know who he was in a Noew York Minute. God forbid it sounded like he was just a kid not old enough to drink or smoke or anything

m: OK well what was the problem so that i can figure out who it was

c: Well one of my friends was able to help me and he was nice and did it for free. That was all that kid had to do because this is a service that I pay for and all he has to do is be nice

m: Ok so what was the problem

c:It was a little CD-rom problem. And all he had to do was be nice. I think that he needs to go to church or read the bible or something.

Now we just do ISP connections we don't hold hands. The guy who answered the call did help her out and told her what to do. He said that she started getting all wierd.

She proceeded to go off in her sothern accent cussing about my other tech calling him a bastard and so forth... I wish I could remember all of what she said. I had her on mute and I was telling him what she was saying, we were laughing so hard at this lady. Finaly she just said that she was done, thanks and hung up on me.... what an evening

One of the techs said here that he had problem trying to find the / from a normal "keep it in your hand" - type calculator since there is only the "minus with two dots". I thought it as a good joke until I had to instruct my girlfriend (we are both students and quite computer experts):

Me: So what's the problem?

She: I need to do a dir *.ini but the problem is that I booted to safe mode command prompt and this keyboard layout does not have the * where it should be. You know this better so could you help me, please?

Me: That's not a problem - use the multiplication sign at the number pad.

She: There's no such a thing.

Me: (What the --ll?) Yes there is, just next to the division sign. You are looking at the right side of keyboard, right?

She: Yes, and there isn't... Wait a minute... These "X" and that minus with dots? Gee, really didn't recognize them anymore. Who uses those symbols anyway?

So we had a good laugh at that. (And from that point on she could do all settings needed without my help, what a darling) I myself spent a good five minutes after that call wondering why that division symbol looks so stupid even though it has been there as long as I can remember...

In my first IT job some 6 years ago (I'm now 25) I was contracting for Big Blue on behalf of a roll-out company installing NT servers and workstations into banks within the UK.

Having never been on the install/support side of technology before, I was amazed to come across the following huge blunders that greeted me over the course of the six month project...

Sweaty Mouse

The banks into which we were installing these systems had not had any PC-based equipment before - they were used to green-screen terminals. Having installed the NT server into the rack before lunch and got the software installed and configured, we came back to find one of the bank tellers surrounded by PC boxes, practising on her new PC (with the power off) like a kid with a new toy.

Now this woman must have been in her late 50s, and had obviously never used a PC before in her life. The reason I know this is because wires and cables were everywhere, there was no power cord attached, and the bank teller was sat at her desk with a determined look on her face, her shoes off, and was trying with her toes to reach the buttons on her mouse which sat neatly on the floor. She thought it was a dictation system for secretaries!

Heads or Tails

Again, on the same project:

I get a call from my boss who asks me to go back to one of the tellers at the bank and demonstrate how to use the mouse on her new PC. Seems everything worked, but worked the reverse of how she wanted.

You've guessed it - because it was a mouse, she assumed the 'tail' had to come out of the bottom, and so the mouse was upside-down and every function was reversed! Doh!

Glass Mousemat

I get a call from a bank teller saying that her mouse is awfully big and doesn't work very well. Now alarm bells are already ringing at the 'mouse is too big' statement. What the hell's she up to?!

She continues to explain, saying that the mouse 'obscures what I'm trying to work on'. Now this sounds horrendous, so there's no alternative but to pay her a visit. There's only so much you can see or do over a phone...

I arrive to be greeted by the teller. I ask her to demonstrate the problem to me. She picks up the mouse, places it on the screen with a clunk, and starts running the mouse across the surface of her monitor. Doh!

Wrist Action

My immediate supervisor was a guy called Ray (lucky for you I don't remember your surname, Ray!) who was in his early fifties.

Now Ray had somehow blagged his way into not only the IT industry, but also into getting our firm to believe he'd make a good team-leader.

On our first install of the day he insists on reading the manual for the install line by line. I mean, we've been on the project four months and he still doesn't recognise the screens he's seeing. Getting frustrated after half an hour, I try to hurry him up a bit. He gets annoyed, and tells me to leave him alone. Furthermore, he says, every time he tries to do something he's presented with an hour-glass instead of a mouse-pointer. When the hour-glass is up, he can't click on anything. **Uh-oh!**

Tongue-in-cheek, I proceed to explain to him that the egg-timer pops up if there's a problem. To help get rid of the problem, he needs to take the mouse and shake it violently so that the hour-glass on the screen shakes. After enough shaking, I tell him, the hour-glass will turn over, the sand will run through to the other side, and the problem will be fixed. I walk away, tears of mirth streaming down my cheeks, leaving Ray puffing and panting through shaking the mouse with both hands like a can of spray-paint...

Coffee Cup Holder

I get a call from head office asking me to check out a busted PC. No more details, as the user can't tell her monitor from her elbow.

I arrive onsite and meet the user, who tells me her PC broke because the coffee-cup holder retracted and knocked her coffee all over her keyboard. Turns out she thought the CD-ROM tray was a coffee-cup holder...

Is it me, or should bank staff forget about computers and complicated stuff like that, and stick to cocking up our bank accounts...?

A guy I know works for a major isp.He got this call.

luser:I have an idea for a website but I dont know how to put it on the net.

Tech:Ok, sir have you ever heard of HTML?

luser:What?

Tech:Thats ok sir you can use a program called Frontpage express to do it for you.

luser:Program?, what do you mean?

Tech:Its like MS Word only it edits your work into the code needed to put it on the web.

luser:Whats that then?

Tech:What? MS Word?

luser:Yes!

Tech:If you go to START/PROGRAMS, you will find MS Word in there.

luser:What are you talking about?Start Programs.I have no Programs.

Tech: You have no programs on your PC?

luser:PC?I dont own a computer!!!

Tech:(infuriated)SIR,You need a PC to put up a website,what exactly were you planning to design your website with?

luser:I have it wrote down on paper.

Tech:Sir, go and buy a PC and call back.

Unbelievable!!!

Working for a software company for 4+ years can be rewarding, especially if you started in Tech Support and get yourself promoted into another position later-on. ;)

While I have countless tales of "user brilliance", the most poignant comes from an informal, in-house encounter.

One day, a Marketing Rep' came to me and asked if I could help him. His laptop, which he had been using for some time, would not run our own software product. Something about "not enough memory". Having it installed and working was important, since he needed to demonstrate our product to some potential customers.

I personally reviewed the system's summary of resources; Windows "System Resources" were at 80+ percent (nominal), the machine's 1.5 GB hard-disk appeared to have generous space available, and there was 32 MB of RAM installed.

Thinking that there may be some "junk" that needed to be cleared-out, I immediately examined \Windows\Temp. Sure enough, there were a number of files (about fifty, I guess) stuck there. I used the forcible-delete method (Shift+Del), which skips the Window$ "Recycle Bin" and erases the files directly.

Now, there's two bits of explanation that I have to do. First, Window$ "Virtual Memory" is a funny thing; it will take available disk space and use it as System Memory, but it will not erase any existing data to do that -- not even "recycled" data. Second, in the drive properties, Window$ will display "recycled data" as free space on the disk (to see how much "recycled data" you have, you need to actually open the Recycle Bin).

Thinking of these, I go to the desktop and notice the "full" Recycle Bin icon. After right-clicking the Recycle Bin icon and selecting "Empty Recycle Bin", the following prompt appears, much to the chargrin of the Marketing Rep'...

Are you sure you want to

permanently delete these 25,614 items?

After clicking on "Yes" and waiting a few minutes for the 900+ MB purge to complete, our product worked just fine.

Empty your trash on occassion, good people. It does tend to stink-up the works after a while.

Back in the dim, dark days of the 5 1/4" floppy disks, I received a call from a customer who was trying to install Lotus 1-2-3 on her IBM PC. I asked her what the problem was and she told me that she had read the instructions and inserted disk #1 (of 3) and ran the install procedure. When she was prompted for disk #2, she inserted it and pressed Enter, as instructed. It didn't work, so, thinking that the disks were mislabeled, she inserted disk #3 and pressed Enter again, to no avail. I assumed that she had a defective disk, but when she rebooted, she received the old Invalid System Disk error and insisted on my personal visit.

It was hard to choke back the laughter when I discovered her problem. When it said Insert Disk #2 and Press Enter, she did so, without removing Disk #1. When I got there, she had all 3 disks jammed into the disk drive.

Well, he wasn't my boss, but he was my boss's boss when I worked for a Network Consulting firm in the Chicago suburbs.

He had quite a rep for losing his temper when things weren't going his way, so I shouldn't have been surprised when he stormed into our tech room demanding to know if the server was down again, since he couldn't access the network.

I was two steps behind him back to his office. There, in plain sight right in front of his desk, was the network cable, completely unattached to either computer or wall jack.

I'm teaching a series of computer classes in my organization for new computer users and those who are really struggling with some of the basic computer concepts. On the day we covered the mouse and what it's used for I made one point over and over again:

ME: Remember, when someone says "click" it means on the left mouse button. You'll only use the right button when someone specifically says "right-click." Any questions?

10 STUDENTS: (silence)

ME: Okay, move your mouse until the pointer is over on the right side of the screen, away from all the icons . . . everybody there?

10 STUDENTS: (nodding)

ME: Okay, here we go: *right-click* with your mouse. What happened?

10 STUDENTS: Oooh! Aaah! A menu!

ME: Yes. Now, point at the "Arrange Icons" entry on the menu.

PROBLEM STUDENT: What button do I click?

ME: You don't have to click any buttons. Just point at the words "Arrange Icons." And I'll say it one more time: "click" always means the left button, "right-click" means the right button. Now, move your pointer to the right, onto the sub-menu, and *click* on the words "By Name."

PROBLEM STUDENT: Which button?

ME: (long pause, hoping one of the other nine will volunteer the answer) "Click" means left, "right-click" means right.

ANOTHER STUDENT: So, what did you say?

ME: I said, "Click on the words 'By Name.'"

PROBLEM STUDENT: So, right-click?

ME: No.

PROBLEM STUDENT: But . . . I don't get it.

ME: (summoning every ounce of patience) Okay, what don't you get?

PROBLEM STUDENT: I dunno! It's too much to remember!

ME: Maybe you should take a little break then, 'cause "drag-and-drop" is gonna be Hell!

As the tale unfolds, keep in mind that I'm not a member of our organization's Information System's Department, just a friendly worker whose more proficient with computer technology than some others.

ME: Hello, this is Me.

USER: Yeah. It's User over in This Department. I need my printer cartridge changed.

ME: (pause) And you're telling me this because?

USER: Well, you have to come and do it 'cause I don't know how.

ME: No-oo. I can talk you through it, or you can call ISD.

USER: Oh, well they'll never come.

ME: Okay, do you want me to talk you through it?"

USER: Fine!

I proceed to talk this impatient user through the process from start to finish, in infitinte detail, including printing a test page at the end to make sure everything's working fine. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rings again and:

USER: You screwed something up!

ME: Really? How so?

USER: The printer isn't printing all the ink!

ME: What do you mean?

USER: All the colors aren't coming out?

ME: What colors are missing?

USER: White!

ME: (long pause) There is no white ink.

USER: Right.

ME: No, what I'm saying is there is no such thing as white ink.

USER: Yes there is! I used to print it all the time!

ME: You did, huh?

USER: Well, yes! I'm not stupid!

ME: Okay, let me ask you this -- what color paper are you printing on?

USER: White.

ME: Mm-hm. And how can you tell that the white ink is missing?

USER: Well, the places where it's supposed to be white are dry!

ME: Mm-hm. Okay now, tell me this. How does whatever you're printing look? Pretty much the same as before?

USER: Yes, except for the white ink missing.

ME: Okay, tell you what. Try to go with it the way it is for the time being, and I'll call ISD for you and let them know about this problem.

USER: Well, why can't you just tell me what to do now?

ME: I could do that, User, but I'd probably lose my job.

I've been working tech support for the local computer retailer for a few yearss now, and after reading some of the posts here, I've decided to add my best story (so far).

The woman who called me started off with the standard... "I've purchaced a computer from you people and picked it up yesterday...". It turns out that she couldn't get any sound out of the computer. I started off by telling her to find an audio CD and put that in the drive, then I asked the standard questions: speakers plugged in the right jack, turned on, volume knob up. Since that didn't help, I asked her to go into the volume controls, after a few minutes of walking her through how to double-click the "little yellow speaker icon... next to the time", I finally got the Volume Control Panel open... I had her adjust the CD volume all the way up and I asked her if the CD was still playing... she informed me it was.

At this point I was starting to get stumped. I decided to try the "speaker plugged in" route again. I asked her to unplug the speakers and move them to the next jack over.

All of a sudden, loud music came over the phone line. She came back to the phone laughing. I asked her "Can you hear anything now?". We where both laughing as she thanked me and hung up.

First off, let me give you some background: I work as a support tech for a company that processes ATM transactions. I deal not only with the idiots on the street who are trying to get the ATM's to work, but also with the owners, users, and store-owners. Here is one of my favorite calls:

We had a merchant call in wanting us to give him the encryption keys for his ATM. We fought with him for an hour, explaining that we can't do that, we can only give them to the company that owns the ATM. Finaly my boss say to give him one shot.

These keys are alpha-numeric, 16 digits long, and there are two of them.On the machine he was using, you enter the alpha characters by pressing a large blue button, then the number that corresponds to the letter you want. For a "C" you would press [BLUE][2][2][2]. Then you move the selection to the right.

Imagine, if you will, that I am talking to the owner of the Quickie Mart on the Simpsons:

Me= "Okay sir, press the blue key, then press 2 twice."

He= "Ok. Blue {beep} 2 {beep} 2{beep}. I have an 'A'."

Me= "Ok, press the arrow and press 3."

He= "Ok. Arrow key, 3. I tink I got it."

He= "I need an E. Blue key {beep} 3 {beep} 3 {beep}. Ok."

....after putting him on speaker phone, he gets finished with the first key....

He= "Ok, thees one much easier. Blue {beep} 3 {beep} 3 {beep} Arrow {beep} 2 {beep} 3 {beep} Blue {beep} 2 {beep}..."

He= "Eet look like it work!"

Me= "Yes sir, it worked.

He= "Wooooohooooo!"

The sad thing was, he was smarter than most certified Diebold technicians...

(Our favorite joke- "Hi, my name is Bob, I'm a certified Diebold tech. Could you hold on a sec? *Do you want fries with that Happy Meal?*")

Yesterday I was at work (meep meep, Wile E. Coyote, you get the picture) and I got this call:

Me: And what operating system are you running, sir?

Customer: Win98, since that's what you support.

Me: (eyebrows raised slightly) Okay. Now let's go to Start, then Run, and --

Customer: My IP address is (IP).

Me: (eyebrows raised a bit) Great; that's a valid IP address. Now --

Customer: My system is fine, I've checked it. I'm calling to report a downed nameserver.

Me: (eyebrows crawling up into my hairline) Um...okay, sir, and what's the IP address of that?

Customer: (IP).

And it resolved to a nameserver. It wasn't down, but that was okay; the mere fact that he knew what he was talking about was enough to secure my respect. He was way way ahead of me throughout the call, and he managed to teach me some things about networking (not that hard, but unexpected from a customer). At the end of it, before I transferred him (seriously -- do you expect anyone this intelligent would call before he'd done all the troubleshooting possible at the client end?), I asked,

Me: Sir, if I may ask, what operating system are you really running?

Customer: Red Hat 6.2. I've also got Win2K, Mandrake, and BeOS running on some of my boxes here.

Me: CCNA?

Him: (laughing) CCNE.

Me: Thought so. You have a nice day, sir.

(CCNA == Cisco Certified Network Admin; CCNE == Cisco Certified Network Engineer. CCNE's are the Men You Do Not Mess With in the networking world. They could design the Internet from scratch.)

It's a truism in the tech support world, I've found, that people who call themselves 'network admins' aren't, whereas the people who are need say nothing at all -- it shows.

I am a Instore tech at a leading electronics resaler.

One day a customer comes into me with a monitor box, and starts talking about modem trouble. So im talking to him makeing sure he has the modem plugged into Line and not phone which is a very common problem well he tells me he's not really sure that could be the problem. He was very persistant on getting the problem fixed now right away. Im like ok put your computer on the desk and I will mark the line spot for you and test your modem out. So he goes to the monitor box and pulls out a monitor, Im like I don't need that wheres the computer. Well all he had was the monitor so he quietly left the store. I never saw him again I guess once he figured out the monitor wasn't where the modem was he went home read the manual and hooked up his modem correctly.

This story is about stupid techs and customers.

I do tech support for a computer manufacture. One of our "staff" was replacing an older cdrom that had gone out. Since we ran out of what the customer had, we were replacing with a different model.

The customer called in, and stated that they had got the cdrom in, but it still wasn't reading. I checked the status of the replacement, and found out that we had replaced an IDE cdrom with a SCSI cdrom. I then asked for verification that the customer had installed the drive. They assured me they had. I asked them if they noticed that the new cdrom had 10 extra pins. They said they had, but just centered the connecter in the middle.

Needless to say, we replaced the drive again.

This happened to me sometime back.............

In one of my customers place, there was Data corruption due to virus attack....

when informed to the Systems Incharge on this he mentioned!!

Oh!! i should ask my guys not to step in to the Computer Lab with their shoes on...these guys roam around the town and accumulate virus on my machines......

I had to hide my face to LOL!!

~bhanu

Hello tech support, I just have a little question: You see,

I sometimes find Internet to be annoyingly slow, so I asked

a computer-super-expert friend of mine why, and he said it's

probably caused by a slow modem-connection. So I've been doing

some thinking and came up with an great idea that I think would

solve this problem: What if I simply download the entire Internet to

my harddrive, how would I go about doing that?

I was, for several years, the manager of a local retail electronics store, and folks had questions, I usually had answers. For the last 2 years, I was also the store computer tech, and I ran into some of the most amazing bubbleheads I have ever seen. This one, however, not only took the cake, he also took the entire serving set and the icing dercorating tips! Here is a fairly accurate reproduction of our conversation:

Customer **SLAMS** into the store, stalks over to the counter, and **SLAMS** a modem, in the box, down in front of me, glaring at me as though he wants to find out how my blood might taste.

Cust: I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!!!!

Me (in my secret identity as Mr Helpful): What seems to be the trouble, sir?

Cust: This f---ing thing is a piece of junk! It doesn't work! I bought it a the **BIG RED R** store in The City Up The Road, and they told me it would get me on the Internet, but it DON'T!!! I want my money back!!!

Me: Okay, help me out, here...What happens when you try to log on to the net?

Cust: Nothing, man! Not one f---ing thing!! It's junk!!!

Me: Stop swearing sir, or you'll have to leave. I am TRYING to help you. Now tell me, what kind of computer do you have?

Cust: What the f...What are you talking about? I just want to get on the Internet!

Me: Understood, but I am trying to figure out if that modem just isn't compatible with your computer. So I need to know what sort of computer you have. (At this point I was thinking that he had perhaps bought a PC modem for a Mac, vice versa, or had such an old machine that...)

Cust: I have no idea what YOU'RE talking about. I was talking to my friend about the Internet, and he said you need a modem to get on it, so I went and got one. I hooked the phone line to it, in the jack that says "Phone Line", and nothing happens!

Me(With light dawning like a nuclear blast flash): Sir, do you HAVE a computer?

Cust: No! What the f...Look, I don't have a computer, and don't want a computer, I just want to get on the Internet!

Me: Sir, you need a computer to put the modem INTO to get on the Internet. The modem simply is a device for gathering data through the phone lines and translating for a computer, and sending data out over the phone lines FROM a computer.

Cust: Alls (not a typo!) I know is my friend told me if I want to get on the Internet, I need a modem. I got a modem, but it don't work! I want my money back!

Me (trying one last time to inject sanity): Sir, you put a modem INTO a COMPUTER. You MUST HAVE a computer for this to get you onto--

Cust: Oh, you don't know what the F--K you talking about! Just give me back my money, and I'll go somewhere where I can find someone who KNOWS about this stuff! Boy, "You got questions, we got answers"! What a bunch of BS!!!

I CHEERFULLY refunded his money, and suggested a computer store across town...Where worked a tech whom I didn't much like...True story. I have witnesses.

Radar Rider

I heard this one from a frined of mine that works for a large ISP...

My friend worked as a NOC Engineer for an ISP, and the company desided that they were going to install DSL in the NOC room. Now when you get DSL installed you have to call the ISP to configure the router/modum/bridge and here's how the call goes-

ISP: Thank you for calling ***, this is *** how can I help you?

Tech: Yes hi, this is "really dumb tech" here, calling to config a router.

ISP: OK. Can I get your location and phone number?

Tech: Hold on one sec... (asking people in the background)

address is- 1234 ABC St. suite 111

ISP: (relizes that this is the address of THEIR office) One more time what was that address again?

Tech: 1234 ABC St. Suite 111

ISP: (snicker) can I get your call back number?

Tech: Sure... 555-555-5555

ISP: Hold on, I'll be right there...

Tech: (compleatly confused) WHAT?!?!

ISP: don't go anywhere I'll be right there. (hangs up phone)

At this point the Tech is terribly confused and is asking everyone in the NOC what the F**K is going on

Tech's phone rings: Hello?

ISP: (on his cell standing in the door way) turn around...

Tech: WHAT?!?! (turns around to see guy talking on cell phone and promptly hangs up the phone)

Everyone there got a good laugh out of that one let me tell you! :)

I was working with a user on installing some software.

At the end of the installation, the system asks for a

write-protected disk to backup a password file.

The system Prompted for the write-protected disk, then the

conversation proceeded:

Tech: Do you have a write-protected disk?

user: Yes let me go and get it.

Note: After a minute or two, the user came back and asked:

User: I have a problem; my disk is creamed colored, will

it still work?

Tech: I said a write-protected disk.

Hi there,

I used to work for Sony Playstation in Foster City California, answering the technical help line. While working there, I had the pleasure of talking to the stupidest people ever to walk the plant. One day, I got a call from a guy who sounded like he was in his late teens/ early 20's. This guy went out and bought himself the game 'Tekken', a arcarde video game that was transfered onto disc for the Playstation. When he called in and got me, he was totally irate because on his television screen it said 'please insert 25 cents to play' and he couldn't find the quarter slot on his Playstation.

I work as Tech Support for a regional ISP in Wisconsin and I frequently get calls from sweet old ladies.

However, one lady made me laugh.

Me: Are you by your computer?

Lady: No, it's downstairs?

Me: Do you have a phone by the computer?

Lady: You don't understand, I had double hip replacement surgery a week ago and can't move real well.

Me: I'm sorry...

Lady: I'll call you back when I'm by the computer. Bye.

4 hours later:

Lady: Hi Randy. I'm by my computer now.

A customer brought a PC in, complaining that no matter

where he plugged his keyboard in the back of his pc, it wouldnt work.

Turns out the customer had taken the ps2 -) serial adapter from his mouse and tried to plug his keyboard in to a serial port!!

We all couldnt help laughing when a guest brought his PC in and told us he had "run it over".

And yep, his PC had a big "tyre" mark in it.

Cost him a penny or two :)

HAHAHHAHAHAHHA!

I provide IT support within an educational establishment. A few days ago, one of the professors came to me in a panic. "My pc won't start up. It just freezes if you click on anything". I asked him if he had installed any software lately. The answer, of course, was nothing at all. I take a look. Sure enough this pc is an old dog. It's struggling to have Windows 95 as it's o/s and there are more passwords on it than there are days in the week.

On the (really slow) start-up I recieved the error message "Iexplore has caused exeption error blah blah" If I clicked OK the pc froze. Anything and everything that was clicked on, froze. I *did* find a CD in the drive for part of my efforts. After about a day of freezing and rebooting, I manage to get into the add/remove programs and saw (just before it froze) that IE5.1 and all its wonderful tools had been installed. I visited the Prof.

me: You said you haven't installed any software, right?

Prof: not at all!

me: I found this installation disc in the CD-ROM.

Prof: Arh! That lives in there to run the experimental software. It can't be loaded to hard disk.

me: Alright. When did you install IE5?

Prof: I haven't

me: Its installed. It was installed 2 days ago. Who else has access to you pc and passwords?

prof: No-one, my office is always locked.

me(very ticked off and spiteful by this time): i'm afraid there's nothing I can do, i'll have to reformat your HDD........Did you back up your data?

Do NOT lie to me!

BTW-I saved his data but he doesn't know that yet!!:)

i work for bellsouth internet service doing tech support.fun job,really.anyway i get this call from this guy who cant get his internet service to work,i ask him if he has the bellsouth cd.he said whats it look like.its blue i said .ok found it,wheres it go?in the cd drive(STUPID!)he puts it in,2 minutes later he says it aint working.(this guy lives in alabama and its his first computer.)i asked him what kind of computer is it,he says its an imac,ok what does the cd say on it?duuuh windows 95,ok hold please.i put him on hold ,laughed my ass off for 5 minutes,got him back on the phone and said sir,its nnnnnnnooooooooooot gonna work,thanx for calling buh bye.

I did support second level support for a mid sized company. What that meant was that people would call a helpdesk and if the person on the helpdesk couldn't help them over the phone I would be sent out to take a look.

One fine afternoon the person manning the helpdesk came and found me. He had a strange expression on his face. "I've got a call from A." Now A had been calling every other day with some problem or another, this is no reason for the expression on my coworker's face.

"She has a spider in her keyboard" his smile broke the surface. "She wants you to come and fix it." I sighed, grabbed my can of air spray and wandered over to A's desk.

"It crawled in there, and it won't come out." She said as I came in. I took the keyboard apart, sprayed air between the keys and found no spider. I put the keyboard back together, and try with all my might not to laugh. She was still afraid to touch the keyboard, but since it all seemed to work I told her that I couldn't bring a new one.

Ten minutes after I left I got a call from my helpdesk associate, who told me A called back and the spider crawled out on it's own.

hehe.. a little background first:

I work the phones for a very large ISP and get alot of silly calls.

Today I got the following call:

Jim called sounding very snippy and unpleasant.

He stated that ever since he had deleted emails from our company,

he is no longer able to find his URL. He demanded to know

what his URL was and implied I did something to it. Just

to make sure I understood him, I asked "you mean the Uniform Resource

Locator, right sir?" and he snippily replied "yes, of course. what else would I

be talking about?". I stifled laughter as I directed him to the URL for our newuser page

and wished him a nice day..

My friend Patrick told me about a conversation between him and a friend of his. It went something like this:

P=Patrick

F=Friend

Background Info: Friend had brought her computer to Patrick's house for him to look at because of some unrelated technical problem.

(Friend calls Patrick at aprox 3am)

P: (Looking on the caller ID) This better be good, I have class in the morning.

F: PATRICK! You have to help me! Something is majorly wrong with my computer!

P: What? I have your computer....

F: You just took that big box thing.... I just want to write some letters...all I need is my keyboard and monitor right? Keyboard to type it, monitor to see it.....right.....????

P: #$%&*#$ *click*

I work 2nd shift help desk for a growing ISP. I just got off the phone with a user I won't to soon forget. To start off with his username was "foot". He called up because he was having an issue accessing web-pages. The technical reason for his problem is that we disabled the web-proxy server a week beforehand and he had just now gotten around to calling. When we took down the proxy we put up an Apache server on port 8080 to automaticly bring up a web-page we screen shots and instructions of how to change the settings to fix the problem. I asked him what he had up on his screen and he responded that he had his prefrences up. So I told him to go ahead and click on the plus sign next to Advanced. He responded that when he clicked on the plus sign that it didn't do anything... I asked him if he was right clicking or left clicking. He said he was left clicking and nothing was happening. It was then that I realized he was clicking the screen shot displayed on the web-page. From now on I will never assume that the user has a clue of whats going on.

This call was actually taken by my co-worker who sits next to me.

Tech: And how may I help you sir?

Jerk: Yeah, I accidentally dropped my tape drive out the

window.

Tech: (suppressing laughter) Well sir, um, I'm sorry to

hear that....

(He looks at the serial number and sees the drive is

over 3.5 years old.)

We can't replace the drive....

Jerk: (cutting him off) I really don't want a replacement,

I would just be happy with a refund.

Tech: Well sir, I'm sorry but your drive is out of warranty

and we can't replace it OR give you a refund.

Jerk: Well, I never thought it was a good product anyway, so

I want a refund.

Tech: First of all sir, your drive is over 3 years old.

Second of all, even if you did have a warranty,

dropping the drive out the window, whether

accidentally or on purpose, automatically voids it.

Jerk: I don't care about warranties. I didn't like the

drive. I want a REFUND.

Tech: Well, you're not going to get one.

Jerk: Give me your supervisor. I bet he'll give me a

refund!!

Tech: He won't when I tell him your drive is out of

warranty...

Jerk: You don't have to tell him that.

Tech: Well then I'll tell him you dropped it out the window.

Jerk: You don't have to tell him that either.

Tech: Yes I do sir, and I will...

Jerk: Just give me your g**d*** supervisor.

Tech: OK, but you're NOT getting a refund.

Jerk: Fine then....I see this is not going my way... *CLICK*

The nerve of some people....hmm, if I crash my 5 year old car and call Chevy, do you think they'll give me a refund? I never liked it anyway....*laugh*

After the call, the tech looked the guy up in our database, and he had never called once.

If he never needed tech support, the drive could not have been that bad....

I work for an ISP as frontline tech and I recently received a call which made me really consider quitting the job... But, I still work there. Some day, some guy called with a question about Outlook, on which I replied the default answer to those questions, that it isn't a program made by our ISP, so sod off and RTFM. Yeah, uh, okay, replied the caller, and uh, I have another question, uh. When I play Flightsimulator, it keeps on crashing, can you help me with it? Mute, WTF?, unmute? No, I'm afraid that isn't a program by our ISP as well... Sorry, have a nice day...

Some people....

I work for a help desk that supports AS400's, in an industry that doesn't require people to be very literate in computers. That is a recipe for disaster on the tech support phones!

I actually received the floowing call:

ME:Information Services, this is --- how may I help you?

USER:I have an error message and I know what caused it.

ME:(thinking it's possible)What caused it?

USER: I pressed F1 too hard.

ME: You hit F1 too hard?

USER: Yeah, it always gives me errors when I do that.

I had to put her on hold very fast, because I just couldn't hold the laughter in!!

Bare with me its a long story but i still cant beleive it acctualy happend

I used to work tech support for a major ISP, nicknamed Minnow. We had stupid people calling everyday. This was just One of the many times i was sitting back asking myself "How are these people allowed to call me?"

Me: Hello how may i help you?

Caller: I need to get on to the internet.

Me: Do you have an account with Us (now keep in mind the company I work for is a long distance company and an ISP)

Caller:yes.

Me: can i get your phone number with the area code first

( i kept asking questions for the next 15 min trying to find the account with no success, I also kept asking if She had an Internet account or a Long Distance account I finaly got it out of her that we had sent her software and it had a defualt temp UN/PW on the case, and that is why she thought she had and account with us already.

Me: Put the CD-Rom in the drive

Caller: It doesn't fit!!

Me: what do you mean?

Caller: Hold on.

( screams at kids )

Caller: hello, yeah it doesnt fit.

Me: you mean it wont fit on the tray.

Caller: what tray?

Me: when you push the button on the CD-Rom Drive a tray should come out.

Caller: CD-Rom Drive?

Me: yeah when you eject the tray it looks kindof like a cup holder.

Caller: Oh OK.

( screams at kids )

Me: Ok now is it running?

Caller: is what running?

Me: the Setup program it should be autorunning

Caller: yeah it is.

(i then take her through the set up and we get an error Insufficiant Hard Drive space)

Me: how big is your hard drive?

Caller what is that?

Me: what, your hard drive?

Caller: YEAH!!!

Me: Its what holds all the information in your computer.

Caller: i dont see it!

Me: No you wouldn't its inside your computer

Caller: Then HOW AM I SUPPOSE TO KNOW HOW BIG IT IS!!!?

Me: Can i put you on hold

Caller: yes

( i then take a second wondering how someone could ever be this dumb, but it gets worse!!)

Me: Thank you for holding.

Caller: are we going to get this to work day?

Me: i hope so. Ok what i want you to do is close the setup and double click on My Computer.

Caller: I cant see your computer.

Me: No its an icon on the Desktop, or start screen of the computer

Caller: So i need to reboot?

Me: No, it should be in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

Caller: Look there it is, ok

Me: Now right click on the C drive.

Caller: OK

Me: now click on properties on the bottem.

Caller: Right or left.

Me: it doesn't matter.

Caller: FINE!! Ok now what.

Me: what does it say for total space and free space.

Caller: it says 1.2gb for total and 608k for free.

Me: WOW!

Caller: what?

Me: (kind of chuckling) ok what you need to do is clean up your hard drive.

Caller: i dont think i should do that.

Me: then you won't be able to get on the internet you dont have enough space for our software. (thinking thank god i can get rid of her)

Caller: i dont want to open my computer.

Me: oh i'm sorry i ment you need to remove some program from your computer.

Caller: I cant.

Me: why?

Caller: I cant get on the internet.

Me: WHAT??!!

Caller: I cant remove anything off of my hard drive because i cant get on the internet.

Me: Ok, well thank you for calling "company name" have a nice day. *CLICK*

I was so frusterated with her at that point if i didn't hang up i would have drove to her house and hit her in the forhead with a brick!!!!

Thank you for reading my tale,

Sahros Shadowcaster

I used to support a number of PCs on a quite large site. One day a lady phoned to say that her mouse was behaving "funny". The pointer was not going in the right direction, apparently. I was busy, so I posted her a replacement.

The next day, she phoned again with the same problem. Immediately I guessed that the serial port of her PC was probably cooked (wrong), so I went over to investigate/replace the part. This was a walk of just over a mile.

When I arrived at the user's office I was amazed and scared to discover that she had been using the mouse 'sideways'. She worked in an office full of computer users, and none of them had been able to convince her that she was using the mouse incorrectly!

A couple of years ago I was working at a place in sweden wich helps unemployed person how o use a computer. On of the pupils were having problems printig, and I very nicel, talked her through the entire printing process. A couple of minutes later, I walk back to her to see how she's doing, and she say's "this printer is sooo slow, I klicked on print 5 times before something happened..." You can guess what happened. An we had also put in extra hard paper because we were making business cards in Powerpoint. Also, the person who managed the computers there werent too bright. When he formatted the HD:s he used quick format and wndered why there were so many problems. He also used the win95 backup, and wondered why the copies werent exactly the same on every computer....

a few weeks ago i got a phonecall from a friend of mine. he was complaining that windows would load, but the windows directory wasn't there.

I got him to bring his system over to my place so i could have a look at it. we set it up on my work station and booted his system. it loaded fine and i noticed that his wallpapers from Plus! had dissappered.

i started to look through his drive. first running scandisk i found no problms and i then ran an anti-virus to make sure his system was clean. his system was clean of virii so i prceeded to windows explorer. i looked on his C:\ drive and couldnt find windows.

i checked the folder options and told it to show all files. i then refreshed it and saw the windows diectory.

it had turned out that he had put the folder to hidden so he couldn't accidently delete it. (as if he could!) he continued saying he must have forgot that he hid it and panicked.

i gave him a thump around the head and chrged him $35- for looking at his system and sent him on his way.

it also turned out he had deleted all the background images in plus to save disk space!!!

It's funny how employees who log-on multiple times per day can forget how and why it is they log on.

While a coworker was away I used her computer. Upon her return I receive multiple voicemails summoning to her office. I promptly arrived only to be greeted with an angry coworker demanding to know why I had deleted all her icons and her emails. It took less than a second to realise she'd logged on as me. Every password on this network are the same. She had entered her (our) password and either ignored or did not see that my username was in the username box. Having logged on as me, she was presented with my profile's settings. IE none of the millions of icons she had on her desktop etc..

A simple enough mistake however upon having been explained how and why we are meant to log on, she still did not understand. My explanation wasn't enough and she was still annoyed so I logged her back on and as if by magic all the stuff "I deleted" had returned. I left her office and she kept grumbling still thinking it was all my fault. Nice, eh?

This sort of thing happens all the time too. Today someone tried to connect to a shared database. The program can connect to different databases by changing the settings. She knew she wanted to connect to a different server and changed the settings appropriately. What managed to evade her completely was why she could not log in. The usernames on this system are the employee's full name with an underscore. In the username box, in capitals, about 10 pixels away from the logon button was written someone else's username. Again I had used that machine before so I was summoned again to explain myself.

Is there some sort of mask over the username? Maybe where we techs see *s in the password box, lusers see normal writing and vice versa for the username box. Who knows. There's plenty of evidence here to suggest lusers are a different species to the rest of us. Sadly they aren't engangered...

Many a year ago whilst working for a Life & Pensions Company in England, I decided to modify the command.com on a machine there (DOS6.2 and Win 3.1 days). If there was, say, an error whilst trying to read a floppy, instead of displaying "Abort, Retry, Fail?", I modified it to "Abort, Retry, F**k?".

I thought no more of it until a couple of months later when some users started complaining that they might have a virus and one of my colleagues witnessed the F**k message.

I never owned up to this but the machine I'd been playing with was being built as the de-facto standard for the company and the build had been given to the PC supplier who was dutifully cloning this build onto all new PCs......

Okay. I'm at work and I take a call. I do the whole "Thank you for calling our tech support" thing and I get no response...I listen for a moment and what should I hear? A tv showing a Wal-Mart commercial and heavy breathing in the background. At this point I simply said "I don't know...and I don't want to know" and I hung up.

Had a guy on the phone just yesterday. Basic problem, no sound coming out of his speakers attached to the new monitor he bought. Made sure his speakers were powered speakers and then we started to go through the basic connection stuff and making sure everything was hooked up properly.

Well I tell him we need to check the connections on the computer and the speakers to make sure everything is connected properly. He says okay and then he takes his portable phone and starts to crawl into the space behind the computer desk.

Next thing I hear is a god awful screaching and then a lot of noise as something is evidently being broken into multiple pieces and stuff is being scattered around the room.

I start saying the users name to see if he's okay and the next thing I hear is lots of violent cussing and ask him if he's okay.

He says he is but that his computer, computer desk and monitor are totally destroyed. Apparently from the way he describes it he was trying to get into a better position and used the desk as a hand placement and tried to move into a better position when the entire desk just collapsed.

His pants were torn, computer case was smashed, monitor had been flung across the room and had a crack in it and everything he had inside his desk was demolished.

The good part of this story is that he sued the store that put the desk together in his home for shoddy workmanship and won more than enough money to replace everything and have lots left over.

Radiken

I was working at a large University in Massachusetts doing

tech support when a student called, asking about her laptop.

Her laptop screen was no longer working and she was wondering

if when her tv fell on the laptop it would've broken the

computer.

ok I work for a large high-speed isp in Quebec, and from time to time I get calls such as: "where's my mouse??". But this one is great

M: Large ISP tech support, phil speaking, how can I help you?

H: Yes, I'm from Compaq Canada calling from Houston, I would like to know why you say our modems are crappy.

M: Just a second sir, I'll get all the information needed to answer you.

(hold, yell I got a Compaq guy on the line to everyone, then talk to a senior to ask him exactly what's wrong and blah)

M: Ok sir, well first of all, some people from your enterprise are paid to deal of that kind of things with some other people from our enterprise.

H: Yeah, well, I don't know how to get to them.

M: Anyway. (explain all the tech stuff why HSP modems are so cheap)

H: Please wait a moment (now I hear the guy talking to someone else, and also a BABY CRYING IN THE BACKGROUND). ok I'm back. Is there a number to call to your highly-graded people?

M: Sure! Just call at 1-877-555-5555 (that's the number to get hooked on cable tv)

H: Ok thank you.

-- End of call --

I'm gona laugh about this one for a while now.

Ok, I get a call from a secretary saying that every once in a while, her screen gets wavy, and it was happening right now, so I should hurry to her desk and see it.

I get to her desk, scratched my chin, and turned off the little fan that she had duct-taped to the top of her monitor. I told her it was an EMF(ElectoMagnetic Field) caused by a PIBCAK (Problem In Between Chair and Keyboard)

Unbelievable . . . She calls me back the next day with the same problem. "I thought you fixed it." I walked over and turned off the fan again, and began to remove it from the top of her monitor. She tells me she wants it right there and not to move it. This created a dilemma for me that could only be immediately solved by Jose Cuervo.

Believe it or not, later that week, she complained to my department head that I was not fixing her problem, and within weeks, I began to persue other employment opportunities.

One day, our payroll person gives me a call to help her with logging into a bank for direct deposit. She showed me the several steps that she did to do this each week. I resolved her modem problem (disconnected line) and wrote a script so all of these steps could be done by clicking on one desktop icon. We tested it that Wednesday, and verified live on the phone with the bank that the transaction was receieved and acceptable.

A few weeks later, I go on vacation, and she installs a new dialup program. Nobody gets direct deposit for two weeks.

With 600 employees, the data transfer took no more than several seconds, so I can understand her imperative need to upgrade a critical system without IT support.

I work for a very large American retail drugstore chain, I won't say exactly who, but you can by our stock for less than a McDonalds happy meal. Every day, we get our share of problems reported by the pharmacists, and the store managers, so I thought that I would share a few of the quick ones with everyone.

Drawer on register 5 if shut too hard makes loud noise

The space bar will place a space between words

Option 2 on answering machine will not take refills (Refills are option 1)

Monitor screen in office doing the jello shake

Telxon dead, replaced battery about 4 months ago, won't even turn on, held funeral

Employee dropped telxon & now scanning light is not working. Execution of employee will take place off the premises at dawn on 6/8/2000

Printer groans like it's constipated.

Register #4... Mgr doesn't work, tried hitting hard also, still won't work

I'm not a tech but I am pretty knowledgeable about computers, so when my ISP changed from static to dynamic IP and forgot to tell me about it my connection died. After trying many things I gave up and called...here's how it went:

Me : Hi, my connection is out, I've tried (drivers, cables, configs, change subnet, change DNS servers, etc...)

Tech : Ok, open Internet Explorer and tell me what you see.

Me : (Obviously getting an error) I get an error, but I know that, the problem is with the connection, I can't even ping your server.

Tech : Hmmm...try hitting "refresh", IE sometimes has problems.

Me : I told you, I can't even ping from a DOS box, much less access the net from IE.

Tech : Of course you can't ping from a DOS box, the internet doesn't work in DOS.

Me : Uhh...OK, sorry (If I wanted this guy to tell me what was wrong I'd have to play along).

Tech : Ok, let's try rebooting your computer.

Me : Ok...[reboot], done.

Tech : Now try using IE again, this time type in www.myISP.com.

Me : Nope, nothing.

Tech : Right-click on "My Computer" (FINALLY!) and click "properties".

Me : Done...

Tech : Read to me what is under "Device Manager" in "Network adapters".

Me : Read my net card to him.

Tech : Hmmm...strange...I don't have that on my system. (!?)

Me : (REEAAAALLLYYY trying to sound calm and not sarcastic) Of course you don't, that probably means we have different network cards.

Tech : Oh...then that's your problem. Get a "reads me his card" and install that.

Me : (just for fun) How do I do that?

Tech : Double click your card, then click "update driver" and look for "his card" and select that, then reboot. It should fix the problem.

Me : (Playing solitaire so he can hear mouse clicks), Ok, done. Do I need to do anything else now?

Tech : Yes, you have to configure your IP settings. Click network...blah blah...

Me : Ok, thankyou.

Now, if this genius thinks I can't ping from a DOS box and assumes I need the same exact network card that's in his system, how the HELL does he know how to configure IP settings?

A client called to say her laser printer wouldn't work on her new Apple PowerBook. She said that her keyboard and mouse didn't work, either. It would have taken me 45 minutes to get there, so I tried to work things out over the phone.

Since the peripherals were running through the same USB hub, I figured the hub was the problem. After prompting, she said the indicator lights on the hub were off, but the AC adapter was plugged in, and the USB uplink cable was plugged into the back of the PowerBook.

After about 30 minutes of troubleshooting, she said, "Oh." She had unplugged the USB cable from the computer earlier and replugged it into the Ethernet port.

I work for tech support for the largest online brokerage firm. I just got a customer on my line who was getting our message that a particular area of our website requires 128-bit encryption, which is true. He swears to me that he already has this, so to verify, I wanted to him to check his cipher strength in IE.

The customer tells me he can't do that because he only has one phone line. No problem, I instructed him to start IE, and when it tries to connect, click 'cancel'.

He says, "OK, I'll try that." and hangs up!

Um, good riddance!

Please note I am not an "official" tech person, I am just the run of the mill computer nerd who knows enough to convince friends that I am the one they need to call in time of trouble...

Got a call from a friend one night frantic cause his pointer will not move when he moves his mouse...I go through the usual questions to try to fix this over the phone...Finally after racking my brain, I decided to just jet over to his house and see if I could figure it out...As SOON as I picked up the mouse I knew what the problem was...I turned it over, the ball was missing...apparently his 8 year old decided to take the ball out and use it for something else...

I was working for a high school while was going there. I was working on installing all the software on a new computer we got in our computerlab. Then I heard over the intercom Jim get to room 107 right away. So I walked to room 107 wondering what was wrong. I went in and asked the teacher what was wrong. She said that her computer would not recognise the CD. It was a mac so it should've recognised it right away. So I popped out the CD and when I did I realised that it had gotten jammed. Well I put it in the tray right and closed the tray to again find that it got jammed. Well this time when I took out the CD I looked inside and found out that somebody had put a 3 1/2 inch floppy in the tray thinking that it was a floppy drive. so I took out the CD Drive opened it up and took out the disk. I replaced the CD Drive and tried the CD again and this time it worked perfectly.

I'm not a professional techie but I help my friends a lot. When there is a problem that cannot be easily tracked down (happens irregularly and at any moment) I call it a OF-Bug. (OF = Oh F*ck) This is what happened with one of my friends:

My friend had upgraded his computer (bought new motherboard and processor) and called to me saying that it made some weird crashes and errors. From now on:

Me = Well, you know.

MF = My Friend.

Me: So do these eroors and crashes happen at same situations?

MF: No, They happen all of a sudden, sometimes during boot, sometimes it runs for hours!

Me: (To myself) Great, an OF-Bug.

Me: Well, I come over, I've got nothing else to do anyways.

So I go there. True, the machine gives errors all the time with no apparent reason. This cannot be because of software errors, It must be the new motherboard. Could there be one card loose or something? I open the case and look for the cards. Nope, they're tight but the motherboard is somewhat bent...

At this point my eyes really rolled off from my head. This guy had actually screwed the motherboard _DIRECTLY_ on the metal back plate of the case. With no stands. I could see the vision of bright blue sparks in the darkness of the case...

Me: I see the problem now... You have no stands under the motherboard.

MF: Does it need those?

Me: (Frustrated) Yes! They prevent short circuits with the metal panel!

MF: I was kind of wondering that... The stands the last motherboard had are over there...

Long story short:

I put the stands to their right points, close the case and boot the machine. It actually WORKED with NO ERRORS! (And still does as far as I know - a though little piece of hardware, I'd say.) This guy is now a soon-to-be master of science in physics. I wonder how he made it through the electromagnetics course with that IQ...

Nice site, keep it up.

I work for an online brokerage company, and we have a tool where you can track the performance of your portfolio. While the system normally tries to update itself, there are times when a manual adjustment must be made (especially on older transactions). In order to keep track of what our system entered and what the customer did, we have a small blue '+' sign that indicates the transaction was either entered or modified by the customer.

I just got a customer on my line who was confused because he was showing a loss on one of his positions. He was not at the computer, and probing for information showed no results. He was stuck on "Your company has made a mistake on this."

So, I logged into his account and went into the portfolio area. Upon looking at his transaction details, the transaction listing his buy has a reported commission of $7480, which should have been $74.80. A simple missing the decimal point. No big deal. Plus, there was a blue '+' sign next to it, saying he had changed it or put it in himself.

My general policy is not to fix these problems myself, but to educate the customer so he doesn't have to keep calling every time something changes. I instructed the customer on how to fix it.

He was adamant and yelling at me that he didn't do it, he didn't touch it... and it was my company's fault. I told him that we put a sign in there to tell us when it is modified on the web, and that sign is there. He then wanted to speak to a supervisor, but rather than to bother my manager with this stupid piddley problem, I told him that it's not a big deal and it just need a simple adjustment.

He said "Well, why don't you do it?"

I just wanted to get this as***** off the phone, so I said "Fine.", made the adjustment, and said, "You're now showing a gain of $325. Bye."

Hope no one was listening to that call! :)

This is a classic case of why you should need a license to use a computer. This particular bonehead is a friend of my dad's who I've spent many an hour upgrading and installing things for.

One day he calls me because Windows won't boot. There's a message about a missing file. I assume it's the message you get sometimes when you uninstall something, and Win.INI or the registry still has a reference to it... you know.

So, I drive over there thinking this was going to be an easy fix. Guess what the message is?

Command interpreter is missing or corrupt. Enter the path to your commmand interpreter (C:\command.com)

So, I restart and boot with a boot disk, sys c:. Reboot. Now, Windows can't boot because WIN.COM is missing or corrupt. Nice. Just for kicks, I do a dir/s *.COM. There is no file on his hard drive that ends in .COM! I'm thinking "What, did he think they were web sites?" He never did tell me what he did...if he even knows. Hell, he may have just deleted his Windows folder, I didn't check enough.

Turns out I had to reinstall Windows and all his software because even his registry was completely hosed.

Next time, I'm charging him!

I support the web site of a brokerage firm. So, we support a large variety of internet providers and methods...

Right now, I'm on the phone with a *93 year old* woman with a WebTV... I don't think I need to say more.

After a long day at work, I decided to have an early nights sleep. So there I was in bed, dreaming of various females, whem my mobile phone rang.

WHo was it? The director of the company I *used* to work for (that company went bankrupt after I left). She sounded really desperate, and this is how the conversation went...

Me: Urrrrg.... hello?

Them: Hi Mark, it's ****, I need your help urgently...

Me: Uhhhh, what time is it?

Them: 2:30AM

Me: (Thinking it must be really, really important) WHat's wrong?

Them: I'm drawing up a business plan, but I'm having some problems. I need a word that describes setting up web sites that fit the clients needs...

Me: And what's the problem?

Them: Do you know the word I'm trying to find?

Me: Uh, what?

Them: I need a word...

Me: Solutions

Them: Thanks.

Me: (If I wasn't really tired, I'd have gotten out of bed and killed her) Can I go back to sleep now?

Them: Oh shit, didn't realise I'd woken you up, sor...

Me: *click*

A few years ago, I was setting up a Freeserve dial-out on my Linux box. I needed to find the DNS server IP addresses, so I called tech support (a premium rate number).

It went a bit like this...

Me: Hi. I'm trying to set up Freeserve on Linux, could I please have the DNS server IP addresses?

Them: What version of Windows are you running?

Me: I'm not running Windows. I'm trying to set it up on Linux

Them: Ok. What operating system are you running?

Me: Linux

Them: Ok. If you load Internet Explorer...

Me: I'm running Linux, Internet Explorer doesn't run on Linux

Them: Oh. What version of Windows was it again?

Me: Linux.

Them: Oh, let me speak to my supervisor...

[on hold for 10 minutes]

Them: Sorry, Freeserve doesn't work with that version of Windows.

Me: *click*

I am not a tech support person. I am just a an operator in a call center. I just received the following call, and I truely feel for the techie who will eventually encounter this caller:

Me: Thank you for calling yada yada yada....

Cust: Customer Service, please.

Me: Your needing Technical Support?

Cust: I guess.

Me: On what product?

Cust: On a driver.

Me: You need to download a driver?

Cust: No, I have the driver.

Me: Ok, what product are you using the driver for?

Cust: my modem.

(Keep in mind that Im wanting an actually product name like Pavilion or CD Writer.)

Me: Installed in a.....?

Cust: PC

Me: (DUH) What type of PC?

Cust: (getting frustrated) Hewlett Packard!!!

Me: Pavilian? (pronouncing it Pa-vil-ion) Vectra?

Cust: I dont know.

Me: What does it say on the front of your computer?

Cust: (pronouncing it....) Pa-val-on

Me: (Holding back laughter and tears) the number you need to call is.......

Just took this call a few minutes ago

Me: Hi and thanks for calling (Big Cable Internet Company)

Cust: Yeah I can't get online

Me: Ok, well your modem seems to have sync let's check your settings

We run through his settings and get him to reboot his machine. Tries to getonline and it works

Me: Ok so we're good to go here

Cust: Yep looks to be working great. I think it was my kids they were on here fooling around with a few things

Me: Yeah, I think you should tell those kids not to do this or next time they'll be punished

I swear to god it just slipped out

This one falls under the "Stupid Tech" category. It's really sad.

I help run and code for a web site, and due to an increase in hits, we were forced to move from a crappy provider, to a higher quality host. This involved our IP address changing.

I was talking to one of the other admins on ICQ and he mentioned that the URL brought him to the new site, while mine was still taking me to the old one. So, I called my ISP to find out when the next update of their DNS servers would take place. For some reason, my FTP program decided to crash when confronted with an IP address to connect to instead of a URL.

My first call yielded no results. He tried the site and got the same thing I did, but eventually decided he couldn't help me. Fine. I'll just wait 24 hours.

In 24 hours, I am still getting the old site, so I call back. I explained that we had changed our site's IP address and I needed to know when their DNS servers would update so I could get the new site. She asks me if I've cleared my cache. Knowing that wasn't the problem, I asked, "Oh, so that will help my email, too?" (checking my email also checked the old server) She's like "Um, no..." So, painfully, I explained to her what a DNS server was. It's pretty sad to have to teach the tech on the phone. :)

So, she transfers me to an engineer, who, thankfully, knows what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, he doesn't know when they will update, but try again in a few minutes. In a few minutes, it worked. I'll never know if he did it himself, or what, but hey....

I'm not a tech, just a 15-year-year old guy who knows something about computers. We're setting up a friend's computer. We've tested everything except the CD-Rom. So we put in a CD and hit play. We get music for about 3 seconds, then it quits. So I try the basics, can it play other Audio CDs (no), a conflict somewhere else (no), etc. Then we decide to check the speakers and find that they are plugged into "Line In". So I plug it in the right place and it works fine.

But we never found out where that 3 seconds of sound came from. It was like some little gremlin unplugged it from the right place and put it in "Line In" after three seconds.

I recieved a request for a report from the CIO. I printed the report duplex and sent it over. He called back to ask why I only sent him odd numbered pages. Told him to turn the pages over. Surprise! There were all the even numbered pages.

Since I work in Tech Support (on the Help Desk) of a large City Council, I get all sorts of strange calls. Unfortunately this one came from my mother who was at home.

Mum: I'm trying to send an email and the computer says that the modem isn't responding.

Me: Did you turn on the modem? (external modem that I had installed a couple of days ago)

Mum: Yes.

Me: Are there lights on the front of the modem?

Mum: No.

Me: Is the modem power supply plugged in at the wall?

Mum: Yes.

Me: Well, can you see any other other problems?

Mum: No.

Me: Sorry, but I'll have to check it when I get home.

After checking I found that the power lead to the modem had been pulled out at the back (no doubt while turning on the modem). You'd think I would have asked ALL the obvious questions, wouldn't you.

It was my second day working on the Help Desk of a large City Council and I was still very fresh and new, so I was asking all the right questions and being very diligent. Probably looking past the simple answers for the hard ones, too.

A young lady who was new to the organisation rang in with a problem with Word Perfect. She was having trouble printing labels on a network printer.

I asked all the troubleshooting questions I could think of to narrow down the problem before sending a tech to visit.

Could other people print OK to this printer?

Yes.

Could she print OK to other network printers?

Yes.

Could she print to this printer from another application?

Huh?

I had her start a different type of application and "yes" she could print OK.

Could she print a different WP document to this printer?

She hadn't tried so I asked her to do so. No problems.

Hmmm, perhaps a corrupt label file? Maybe the document itself was corrupted? We'd better check.

Could you print the labels out on plain paper for me and tell me how it goes?

"That's the problem" she says, "They keep printing out on plain paper".

Silence for a few seconds and then I find the courage to say "Ahhh....have you put..ummm..*labels* in the printer?"

Another uncomfortable silence followed and then she says "Ohh, do you have to do that? Where are the labels?"

I'm afraid I couldn't tell her where the labels were in their office.

Another call at work from my computer-illiterate mother.

I answered the phone with the usual greetings etc and the person at the other end of the line said "It's me!"

Well, when you take 80 to 100 calls per day, that doesn't mean much, so I cautiously "Ah, yes, how can I help you?"

The person at the other end said "All the pictures are gone!"

I think "All the *pictures* are gone??? What the hell?" That's when I recognised the voice and asked about the pictures.

Mum said again "All my pictures are gone!"

"Have we been robbed?" I ask (foolishly, apparently).

"No, all my picture things"

The light begins to dawn. "Ahh, you're sitting in front of your computer, aren't you" I guess.

"Of course I am. Why else would I call you?"

"So, what pictures are gone?" I ask.

"All the ones in my letter" comes the answer.

Pictures?? In her letters?? I haven't noticed her using graphics in her letters and I'm a bit surprised that she found out how to do that on her own. So I ask if she has put graphics in the body of the document (in lay terms, of course).

"No" she says "The pictures I click on to do things"

???? "Click on to do things?" "In Word?"

"Yes, at the top of the screen!"

Ahh, the *Toolbar*! "You've lost the Toolbar"

"Well, *I* didn't do anything to it" she says.

So I ran through putting the Toolbar back and she was OK.

Sometimes the techs aren't exactly bright, either.

One of our IT-literate consultants had a problem with his email client that was preventing him from getting into his Inbox. A desktop tech was sent to fix it. The tech arrived while the consultant was in a meeting and proceeded to sort out the problem.

When the consultant returned to his desk, there was no note to say that the tech had been or what the status was on this job. However, the PC had been turned off, so the consultant assumed that someone had been to fix the PC. After firing up the PC, the consultant opened his email client and checked his mail. Sure enough, there was an email message from the tech which read something along the lines of:

"Your problem should be fixed now. If you still can't get in to your email, please ring the Help Desk and quote job number *****."

Way to go , guys!!