Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I receive calls like this all the time. But I thought this caller was the most fun.

C: My computer is possessed! When I turn on my computer it starts trying to dial automatically.

M: Really? (Amazed she used the word automatically correctly in a sentence.)

C: Yes. I don't do anything and it trys to dial.

M: Well, that's no big deal you probably have an instant messenger program installed that is causing it to look for an internet connection.

C: What is that?

M: Well, like AIM or Yahoo messenger or MSN Messenger.

C: No that isn't it. At all! I don't even use those programs.

M: Ok well lets go check some settings. (This is my typical response to stupid people)

C: Uh Ok! (stupid mode engaged)

{We end up in the start up tab in msconfig and low and behold I have to have her take the check out of all three (AIM, YM, MSN)}

C: What did we just uncheck? (I hate it when they ask questions that they wouldn't possibly understand the answer to anyway. Why can't they just obey me like the sheep they are?)

M: Well, Maam we just stopped the instant messenger programs from running in the background.

C: The background? (See what I mean?)

M: Never mind. We fixed your posessed computer.

C: Oh. (light dimly glows)

C: Wait is AIM my buddy list thing? (The light goes out)

M: (Stupidly telling the truth...I hate it when I do that) Yes maam it is.

C: Well, I don't want you to turn it off!

M: Maam it isn't off it just isn't running in the background all the time. If you want to use it just double click on the AIM icon on your desktop.

C: That's too complicated, do I have to do it that way.

M: Yes (Me not caring at all by this point)

C: Ok. (I hear all her hopes and dreams shattering)

M: Thank you for calling _________Tech support. Click

The difference between genius and stupidity, is that genius has its limits.

ALSO

The funniest thing I have heard to date in the tech support world.

Buddy: I am so freakin board. I'm surfed out and people are stupid and I have nothing to do!

Me: Why don't you work on your CBT's (Computer Based Training)

Buddy: Its so hard to make myself study those things

Me: Why?

Buddy: Well why should I get more training? I'm already like a god to these people.

The sad thing is he's right.

Another one from dad and me.

I was sitting at my mothers comp installing something when I heard a long beep from my dad's system. Just the kind of beep you hear when the keyboard buffer overruns. As in: Stuck Key.

Sure enough, dad, who's been in computers since DOS 3.2

is running his hand over the keyboard to unjam it. No avail.

"Daughter" (he actually calls me that) "Whats wrong with the sodding thing?"

"Keyboard buffer overun, dad"

"But I can't find the stuck key, I've had this sporadically during the last week. I had to reboot to fix it. It can't have someting to do with my new table? It's happened ever since. Have I damaged it, somehow?"

He got himself a new computer table where the keyboard rests on a movable board.

But it's hardly likely he damaged his keyboard by putting it on new table.

Still the thing is beeping merrily. I walk over to him and look over his shoulder. Look, grin, laugh!

"Pull your stomach in, daddy"

Beeping stops promptly. My portly father had accidently placed his tummy on the space bar. Problem solved by shoving the keyboard back an inch so there was room for both.

Whole family laughing for hours.

Today was "the usual" - someone was filing a report for something, clicked on "continue" at the end of the page, and the computer told him that his connection "timed out" due to inactivity. He phones in in a panic - has the info he's been typing in been "lost"? One of my co-workers from the phone desk comes over to see if his report has hit my computer yet. Yep - opening it......"all there", but missing about 2/3 of the info needed to set up the incident report....The internet report page times out if you don't type something for thirty minutes.

This guy was reporting a problem from mid-November (hmmm- what took so long?) and was on the report page for just over thirty minutes - usually takes about 40 minutes to do the whole thing if things were complicated. Co-worker writes down the missing info for him and puts the sheet on my desk, promising that he will have an e-mail with a file number shortly. I fill in the whole report and make the appropriate assignments. E-mail him his number and .......

Go back over to her desk to share the funny parts of his report. #1 was the almost three month delay in reporting events - but he paniced when the computer dropped him out so he phoned in within seconds..........#2 was his job (we ask) - Mr. "Panic Button" is a Computer Network Engineer........

Hello tech support...

My service hasn't worked for 6 @#@$%$% months!!

Your company sucks!##$$%%%$@ piece o @#$#@$

O.K sir, what seems to be the problem?

I told you this piece o @#$#@$ doesn't work!

You want to hear something? here that? (CRASH, SMASh, BANG)

SIR!! SIR!! What are you doing?

That's my modem that I paid $75.00 for and I'm smashing it with a hammer!! I paid for it and I'll smash it!!

Sir!!Sir!! Please stop that's a $75.00 installation fee, That modem is a $600.00 modem!

Silence on the other end, then a dial tone.

Which brings me a tech to my point....Sometimes SILENCE IS GOLDEN!! Why he hung up is a mystery...he's going to have to call back about that modem problem sooner or later... ha,ha,ha,

This is for my spouse, who gets to listen to me complain

about babysitting "system admins" through basic procedures...

Last Friday while my spouse went to class my friends and

I spent the evening playing cards and trying to listen to

CD's on the stereo...when my partner got home, I told her

it was time for a new CD player -- the CD's played fine

in the computer, but I had 6 in the stereo and none would

play. I played a tape and the radio to rule out the

speakers and such, but as an A+ and MCP, I know enough NOT

to play with stuff I don't know, so did not want to tear

the stereo apart. Turns out there was no need -- when

spouse removed the CD's from the cartridge label-up (the way

the computer likes them) and replaced them label-down (like

the stereo prefers) they worked just fine.

I do a little basic tech support for a friend who owns a ISP. Here are a couple of real tales that happened to me.

I had a machine with a lot of IRQ problems and two drives. I foolishly tried to download linux not knowing that linux would install to the second disk. As luck would have it, the install didn't take and the installer didn't work, which I didn't know. When I booted back up I was greated with the boot loader waiting for a command. I eventually worked myself into a can't install any sytem situation and wound up taking my machine to an engineer who was a former ISP and who builds linux boxes and networks. I told him what had happened and left my machine while I went shopping. The next day I returned to find my PC wouldn't shut down. Engineer explained to me that this was a Windows issue and he had documentation to show me. The cover was off the pc and I took a quick peek inside before I told him that the shut down errors were caused by IRQ conflicts. I then went to my machine, shut it down and changed the position of the video and nic cards. Then I rebooted. When I shut it down Windows closed properly. I paid $45 for his support. Then I went home and resolved the IRQ problems that had been irritating me for a year. I ordered a new system, but not from him.

One Saturday my ISP called and asked me to find out why a customer couldn't get mail. They had tried phone support and after two weeks this guy still didn't have mail. I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, but I have a clue most of the time. When I get there the customer sits me down and tells me how he programmed main frames during the Korean War to which I replied that today's comuters could make a grown man cry. He agreed and I swear I saw a tear form. While we were waiting for his machine to boot he says his wife gave it to him. Wife is a Mac user who wanted to learn Windows and five machines later decided she didn't like it. He got the last one. The pc moved like a pregnant yak and I asked him when he defragged last. "Never", said he. Then I found just a little over 3,000 files in the Temp directory. Five hours later I was still deleting files and getting ready to defrag. He called it quits and I went back the next day.

I made a few adjustments and started the defrag. He wife comes in and inquires what I am doing. I exlain and she says, "How do I do that?" I almost fell out of my chair. I've never seen a Mac. I explain this and she repeat the question. I can see where this is going so I say, "To defrag this is what I do in Windows." I'm half-way thru the pc defrag and she returns. "Hey that worked! Now how do ? ....." I repeated myself. This went on all day. By the time I was finished I had repaired two machines not one.

Now the defrag was done and the machine was moving at the speed of light by comparison. I checked the DUN and email and everything was set up correctly. I thought I was finished. Wrong. I couldn't get his email either. After an hour of trying I call the ISP and ask him for the email log in and password. The conversation sounded like this:

ISP: What login are you talking about?

Me: The login for John Doe.

ISP: What login and user is he using?

Me: jdoe; xxxxxx.

ISP: He doesn't have an account.

Me: What????? Say that again.

ISP: Tell him he needs his own account.

Me: Set it up; I'll have his wife call you tomorrow.

John had been trying to use a name and a password that didn't exist to get his mail thru his wife's account. I explained it to her and went home $150 richer thinking he got a bargain.

I thought that was the end of it until John called me the next day. He couldn't get into the Ford webpage and John Deere websites. Before I left the night before I set up his machine home page to open to a site I created for new clients. One of the areas featured a HTML web page optomizer window that connected to the old WebGarage site. John had been entering the URL for an HTML check and not in the browser window. He jokingly said I'd have to return to the house to teach him how to find webpages. I said if I did it would cost him another $150. He never called again.

Some time ago (when 5.25" floppies were common), I received an urgent call from our executive secretary. She was frantic. She had all of the senior personnel performance evaluations on a disk, and on that day they were to be printed, reviewed, and signed. The problem was that the evaluations were all coming out scrambled.

I responded post haste to her distress call (seeing my own evaluation was on that disk) and surveyed the scene. When I asked her for the disk so I could check it for viruses, she pulled it off of a hook, used her fingernail to scratch off a piece of hair clinging to the disk surface, and handed it to me. To increase her efficiency, she had punched a hole in the disk to hang it on the hook because she wanted it handy since she was accessing it many times a day lately. Needless to say, everyone who submitted evaluations to her worked late that night.

On the positive side, this single incident gave me the support I needed to procure and install the new 3.5" drives on all of the computers. I pointed out the protective cover to keep hair out, and the hole at the top that could be used by future secretaries to hang the disk without loosing the data.

I enjoy the tales as good as anyone and I have heard almost all of them first-hand... but I experienced one that hasn't shown up on Tech Tales™ yet...

As any tech knows, it's about half way to lunch and there's not really much going on, just a boring day as usual... then you get the call that has you laughing for a week!

The call happened a couple of months ago, but I don't think I'll forget too much of ii... It went something like this...

(Me) Thank you for calling OUR ISP, what seems to be the trouble?

(Customer) Well, I'm having trouble installing your software. I think you need to send me a new one...

(Me) Well what seems to be the trouble with it? (same question, different answer)

(Customer) I put the CD in and nothing is working.

(Me) You mean when you put it in, nothing came up on the screen? (No Auto-insert notifation? Possible I guess)

(Customer) Nope, It must be broken. You need to fix it for me right now.

(Me) (Right, I'll be right over...) Let's Try something, Double-click My Computer and double-click the icon that looks like a CD, What happened now?

(Customer) Nothing.

(Me) Nothing, are you sure?

(Customer) Nope, nothing, wait do you mean "Drive D not ready"

(Me) Not ready, ok try replacing the CD in the drive.

(Customer) That's what I want you to do!

(Me) No, I mean take the CD out of the CD-Rom and put it back in...

(Customer) I can't.

(Me) You can't? Why?

(Customer) You can't get the CD out once you put it in there, I KNOW, I'VE TRIED!

(Me) (mic muted for a brief moment) Do you see a little button next to the 24X on the front of your computer?

(Customer) Yes.

(Me) Push it.

(A long pause)

(Customer) Boy, I've never seen it do that before...

(Me) (now I'm confused) If you haven't seen that before, then where did you put the CD?

(Customer) I put them in the little slot below the 24X.

(Me) (mic muted even longer while I conduct myself...) Wait a minute, you said them, is that right?

(Customer) Yeah, that's something else I wanted to know, how many more CD's do I need to put in there?

(Me) MORE? How many do you have???

(Customer) Well it says 24, I only put three in there so far.

I had to put him on hold while I nearly died laughing.

I realized what had happened, this idiot squeezed the CD's into the space between the case and the CD rom, they were just sitting in his computer. He asked me how to get them out and I told him he needed to take it to a computer shop and explain his plight.

This is the funniest one I ever actually witnessed, but I hear about others all the time...

Being an Internet addict sometimes means you have to make sacrifices. In our case, this means dealing with the idiot conglomerate (hereafter IC) that controls access to our precious DSL.

The other night, when our connection went down, my husband called the service line for the IC. Luckily, the first person he talked to knew the problem was out of his league, and offered to transfer the call. Unluckily, the wait on the line was approximately thirty minutes.

So my husband spent the time making sure the monitor was attached to the correct computer (there's three on his desk), making sure he had the modem documentation, etc. I was idly typing on my computer and could hear most of the call once the DSL tech was finally on the line.

My husband patiently explains the problem, reads off various error messages and serial numbers, and then going through various menus to change settings.

After fussings and messings about, he reboots the computer as requested. This takes some time, as it's running a Pentium 233. Once that is completed, it still doesn't work, so the tech has him try something else and reboot again. Still no go.

Finally, about twenty minutes later (and almost an hour after the start of the call), I hear a "Really?" My husband requests a pen from me, flings the cap across the room, writes something down and hangs up.

I asked what the problem was. He told me, "They changed their DNS." For those of you who don't know, this is similar to the dial-in number for any ISP-- if they change it, you're dialing the wrong number and can't get in.

They had changed their service without letting their users know (in our case, rather abruptly in the midst of a session), and the tech wasn't bright enough TO SEE THAT THE WRONG DNS MIGHT BE A PROBLEM.

I work in the registrar's office of our college. network/application wise we run several things:

- oracle clients

- web browsers

- network logins with mapped drives..

sometimes when one (or more) of these connections drop (ie. oracle database is slow, a remote website is down, etc)

i'll be asked "Is the Internet down?". i now say "Yes it is, but it should be back up around 8:30am when the rest of the IT people get in.")

i *don't* say this in a bad way, it just makes everybody happy to get a nice easy answer.

i'll then do my usual round of tests to see what/where seems to be down exactly and if it is another resource that i do not have access to (dns, specific routers, etc..) i'll forward it to IT at 8:30am when they get in :)

An elderly lady phones our internet tech line and she is yelling and calling our support all kinds of names because she had to look up our phone number and call us to fix her internet connection.

Her main concern was that she had pushed the F1 button on her computer 2 days ago for help and no one had phoned her back yet.

I rang up tech support to ask why they had banned users from running a webserver on their home computer on a cable modem line. This is the response I got...

Me: Hi, I'd like to ask why I can't run a webserver from my computer

Tech Support: Well, it's technical

Me: I know about computers, please give me the technical explanation

Tech Support: The RF (Radio Frequency) of upstream bandwidth is so low that it looks like noise on the line and stops everyones connection to the internet

Me: (shocked) You do realise that the RF of upstream is one frequency?

Tech Support: Yes, but it is so low that it is noise

Me: (laughing) RF is ONE frequency, what are you talking about?

Tech Support: (angry) Look, if you run a webserver, everyone that is connected to the same router will get cut off!

Me: (uncontrollable laughter)

btw, I was allowed to run a webserver after :)

I was one of many computer support folks at a major

research university, providing whatever IT help was needed

in a department -- systems, network and server management;

hardware & software procurement, installation and support;

training; trouble-shooting, etc. I ran upstairs to brainstorm

with a friend with the same job in another department one day,

and was glancing at some items on her desk while she finished

a phone call.

me: Hey Candy, this looks like a great idea, but you never

did it. What's "IUHC" mean?

["IUHC" was scribbled on the top of the proposal, which

was about a year old.]

C: [laughing] It was a great idea, but we didn't do it

because we figured they'd never get it. The student

who was working with me wrote that on there. IUHC

means "insufficient user head capacity."

I've used the acronym ever since.

Note: Since most EU's don't know the difference between CMOS and BIOS (and get confused if you try to explain it), I just refer to everything in the "system setup" as BIOS.

I work in tech support for one of the major hard drive manufacturers. One day a customer called in saying she can't see her hard drive. A fairly common problem generally understood to mean that the drive is not detected by the system BIOS or by the operating system. First a quick autodetect in the BIOS for the new drive. Nada, only the original drive is being detected. Moving right along, I ask her how the drive she is installing is jumpered. She has it jumpered correctly. I verify that it on the correct connector of the Ultra ATA cable - it is. Hmmm. I try a few other tricks of the trade with jumper settings and BIOS settings to try to get around limitations of the BIOS to no avail. Note: she patiently follows along and does everything I say to the letter. After about 15-20 minutes, she clarifies her original problem by telling me that she meant she wants to remove the original hard drive and replace it with the new one (which she has been holding in her hand this whole time, not connected to the system!!! ). The problem is that she can't physically locate the old drive in her system to remove it. AARRGGHH! I was able to guide her along until she found the original drive and ended the call at that point. I never checked to see if she called back, but I wouldn't doubt for a second that she did.

A few years ago, I worked for Radio Shack. Our particular store was well-known for the veteran salesmen and their product knowledge, so we had quite a few people calling and asking general questions about our products. This story isn't about a computer-related tech support question, but it's so good, I have to tell it. The call went something like this:

(me)Radio Shack, this is Kevin, how can I help you?

(caller)Uh...yea, I bought one of your radar detectors a few days ago and it's not working right. I just got a ticket!

(me)Ok...so the radar detector didn't go off at all?

(caller)Hell yeah...it lit up like a Christmas tree!

(me)I'm not sure I understand what's wrong, then, sir...

(caller)I got a ticket! I thought you could drive as fast as you wanted and the cops couldn't tell how fast you were going.

(me)**moment of muffled laughter**Uh, no, sir. A radar detector only DETECTS radar signals...it doesn't jam them.

(caller)Oh...uh, well how much do your radar jammers cost?

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

Here's one more...

(me)Radio Shack...can I help you?

(lady)Uh, yes sir. I just bought a couple of your batteries yesterday and none of them will recharge.

(me)Does the "Charge" light come on when you put the batteries in?

(lady)I don't have a charger. I do just like it says on the battery and put it in backwards to recharge.

(me)Uh, it says to do that on the battery?

(lady)Well, it says right here on the battery: "Do not dispose of in fire, recharge, put in backwards..."

(me)Ok, maam...what that means is DON'T do any of the following: DON'T dispose of the batteries in fire, DON'T recharge, and DON'T put the batteries in backwards.

(lady)Well you guys should make the instructions on these things a little easier to understand!

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

These are only a few of the tech-related calls that kept us on our toes and in stitches...and yes, I did have the question about the cup holder/cd rom. "...the damn thing tries to pull my cup into it when I restart my computer!"

This happened to me when I was getting my start in Tech Support. I was working in another department and doing odd jobs for the IT department (hoping for a chance to get my foot in the door and switch departments). Back then, we mostly used Macs, but a few pilot users were getting PCs with Windows 95. Windows 95 being very new back then, we hadn't made any use of system or user policies.

Anyhow, one user (I must say to his credit: he at least admitted when he'd screwed something up) came to me with his new Win95 computer and said it wouldn't boot anymore. I tried to boot it and got "non-system or disk error". I asked him if he had done anything and he had, wanting to make his hard disk "neat", moved all the files (autoexec.bat, config.sys, io.sys, etc.) to a directories he had created himself on c:\ (System - remember: previous Mac user).

He had done something dumb, but was at least willing to admit that it was probably his fault and was able to tell me exactly what directories he had created for the files. So, using a start diskette, I was able to boot from a start diskette and, using good old DOS commands, move the files back where they belonged and perform a SYS C: on the hard drive. He stood by while I was doing this and was quite impressed (my stock went up a few points on that day!). I explained to him (in simple terms) that a PC was not a Mac, and that there were things he could see on his hard disk that he wasn't supposed to touch (I'm a staunch PC fan, but I must admit, the Mac is often more idiot proof than Win 9x).

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

Another situation, same guy: he had filled up his hard disk with tons of stuff and ran into a "disk full" error when wanting to save a document (at that time, the PCs weren't yet on the LAN). I informed him that he had to look for documents he didn't need (in "My Documents" of course - I didn't leave THAT door wide open), and back them up on diskette, if necessary, then delete them. Later, he called back and claimed he had done just that (getting rid of 100MB plus, he claimed), but still had a "disk full" error. I took a look at the computer and found 100MB plus in his Recycle Bin (which had not been emptied)! I explained to him the necessity of emptying the Recycle Bin (I assumed a Mac user would have known about that).

We often get e-mails from our IS people instructing us to turn off our computers so they may reset the server. Usually they give us a time when we can log back on, except for last week when they sent the following e-mail "In case you hadn’t realized you can now log back on to you PC’s".

I work for an isp and one morning a women called up complaining that our software had locked her computer. I asked if she could control - alt- delete out of the program

and she said she only had control -options- delete. when I ask what operating system she was using she said Mac OS9. Upom hearing this I asked if she had read our system requirements of windows 95 or greater. she replied "yes ,but I thought you were joking."

All credit for this story goes to Vance Taylor of VTT Computer Services, Black Mountain, North Carolina.

I am often in the habit of staying at Vance's house and on this particular instance quite a few of us were there. We were all lounging in the living room that also serves as his office when the phone rang. As usual he motioned for quiet. He picked up the phone and said, "VTT Computer Services." He listened intently and this odd expression came over his face. He said "Excuse me, ma'am. Could I get you to repeat that,please." and hit the button to turn on the spreaker phone. A woman's voice broke through the static with a slightly harried tone and said, " Yes. I said my computer is smoking. I think someone is sending fire through my email. What should I do?" Stunned silence. He turned off the speaker phone and calmly advised the lady to turn off her computer and unplug it. He then set up an appointment with her to see if he could fix the problem. All in this easy can-do voice. Then he hung up and started laughing. Soon all of us were laughing as well.

A little later that week the same woman called to ask if he could fix her email (on her new computer). When he got there, she had hooked the phone to the answering machine, the answering machine to the computer, and back again. Nowhere was a line out connection made. It was just a big loop. I am at this point forcibly reminded of a bumper sticker on another tech friends car. It reads, "You need some chlorine in your gene pool."

Absolutely right.

Being an Internet Helpdesk Operator, you get some good ones, but I have actually taken a call about the cup holder. The caller was just enquiring about why it cost so much to replace. What can you say? I told him that he would have to speak to his local computer store, because we don't sell those and therefore, I'm not very well versed in the pricing structure of those items.

I used to work for a paging company, My job was to receive calls and type in the message as the caller requested. Also, people would ring up when something went wrong like the messages didn't arrive and stuff like that.

Anyway, I got this call from some fella, He said to "Can you send someone a message?" I said "yes of course I can thats what I do. What is your message?" He went on to explain that he had never used a paging service before and would I be patient with him, etc. To cut a long story short, it turned out that He had found this pager and wanted to send the owner a message, I said fine what is his pager number, (the number dialled automatically is selected, so I assumed he meant a different pager.

No.

He said to me I found his pager I have it here in my hands, I want to send him a message, I see, said I, Do you know how a pager works? He said yeah you type the message and the owner gets it....

He would not accept that a message wouldn't go to the owner but instead to the pager that he had in his hands.

After a long discussion I eventually put him on to the manufacturers number see if they could talk some sense into him.

I can't help that I'm an evil Systems Administrator. Users made me this way. I feel that when a new person joins my company, it's my duty to give them a little taste of what is in store for them.

I got a call from a new member of the accounting team one morning. She claimed that her mouse would not work in Excel, but did work fine in anything else. Hhhmmmm. I thought of just telling her to re-boot, but she WAS new.

I began explaining that her mouse was connected to her motherboard by a PS/2 expansion card and that the connection can come a little loose sometimes. (This confused her thoroughly, thus making her willing to do whatever I told her next.)

I went on to explain that if she were to kick her computer with medium force, it should re-seat the connection. I warned her about kicking it too hard because of the possibility of damaging other components. I asked her to set the phone down next to the computer and kick it with medium force three times. I told her that she needed to put the phone by it so I could judge if she kicked with the correct force.

Like clockwork she set the phone next to the computer and kicked the box twice before I head her supervisor scream "What are you doing??!!" The "poor" luser picked the phone back up and said that she couldn't tell if the mouse was working because her screen went blank. She refused to kick it anymore.

I told her I'd be right over. Final assessment: plug the monitor cord back in and reboot the machine. All is now well.

When I switched from Desktop support to Network administrative support, I knew I would still be dealing with clueless endusers. Examples below.

If you have been told how to sign in across AS400 servers and you have NOT followed clear instructions given to you, blame the admin, lose one week of work, then send in exactly the same request you originally sent. Called, left message to follow the instructions he was given.

If you don't get equipment for a VIP that you think should have been delivered the same day, call the network admin of a different company than you work for and DEMAND the phone number for acquisitions for your company. (I took real satisfaction in explaining that I no longer worked for her company and would not tell her anything.)

A really good one from the other company. Same VP of that other company who asked me why a printer would not print without paper was screaming for his secretary to call somebody and get them up here NOW! when he had a problem with his desktop. Secretary reached over politely and turned his computer ON for him.

The scary thing is that many of these people we read about in TechTales profess to be intelligent, have more college than I ever did, yet can't find their a$$e$ with both hands until you help them. My wife ends up rolling on the floor laughing so hard she's crying when I tell her about our average days. Enjoy.

I'm working for a multimedia company as an administrator. We get a lot of mail daily so it was only a mather of time that a virus was attached. It was possible to remove that virus, but our apprentice some how got inspired by that mail.

Two day later he sends a mail to all of us with a self coded VB routine that calls an IE in fullscreen and shows a DOS session that is formating the C: drive.

I don't have to say that I wasn't very happy as this happed on my screen. But still my colleagues and I knew this could only be a fake...

Except the boss.

He was in such a panic that he just ripped out the powercord of his computer and losing the work of hours!

After all the apprentice is still working for us.

It's 9:15 AM. I am a little tired as I

go through the morning system checks at my

companies network.

I hear a knock on the door.

One of the users wants to ask a quick technical question,

and, not really looking up from my screen, I tell her I'd

give it a shot.

She asks "What's an operating system?"

Puzzled (I was not sure if she was looking into buying

a home computer) I look up slowly and say "....what?"

Nervously, she says "Everytime I turn on my laptop it says

operating system not found...."

Well, first the preliminaries. I'm the IT specialist at my company, and been doing computers for over 20 years. Started programming Binary on a T.I. Learning module. Run web and e-mail servers at home, qualified tech, you get the idea.

Well, here's a couple of stories for you (as well as a couple of oops-es that I did myself, just so you guys out there don't feel as bad....)

Got a call from a lady who said her printer was jammed up. Went up there, and she had put her purse on top of the printer where the paper comes out.

Got a call from my boss that said our Canon Multi-function unit (copier, fax, printer, etc) was broke. The display said "Add Paper".

A customer brought his computer into a local repair shop (where a friend of mine works) and complained that his computer was locking up. When we removed the case, we found a mouse nest built all over the top of the unit (evidently the mouse had snuck in through one of the slot covers on the back.)

... Now for some of the dumb things I've done in the past.

(For you Unix guys)... put a second hard drive into my Linux system, decided that /home should be there. Moved the /home directory over to the other drive (no problem) but wasn't paying attention as all the file permissions for all the users got changed to root as the owner. (took me about 3 hours of chown and chgrp-ing the files back again.)

Installed a tape drive for a lady once, and as I was putting on the cover, she said "You aren't going to test it first?" "M'am", I said, "I've done so many of these, there's no way I can mess it up." Of course, the cable was on upside down, and I had to open it back up and fix it. (Sigh) Smugness will getcha every time. :)

(Another unix one) Took me 15 minutes to figure out why I couldn't unmount my floppy and take it out of the system... turns out I was *IN* /mount/floppy so it said the device was busy. (DOH!)

Oh, hey ISP folks... how many times have you had to tell someone "It's plugged into the wrong jack on the modem". Don't you love it when they DON'T BELIEVE YOU? Or how many times have you given the answer, and they've asked you "So, what if that doesn't work? What next?"

Another boss did a cute one... got like a 4 meg PDF attachment, and thought that pretty much all the supervisors in the building should read it... so he forwarded it to his distribution list, filled up the hard drive on the mail server with copies of the attachment, and crashed a 2000+ user e-mail server? :)

Just thought I'd share.... :)

I work tech support for a large ISP covering half of the state I live in and through working here I have a question. How can the general public spend $500-$4000 on a piece of equipment and not have any idea how to use it? I mean, said people would not go out and buy a new car and have no idea how to drive it (well some do but that's a different case). Case in point, I'm at work right now and the customer that I just got off the phone with didn't understand why she needed to plug her modem into the phone jack in the wall. After 25 minutes of trying multiple angles of explaining why she needed to do so, she decided to give up and buy an IMAC, which she swears up and down doesn't need to be plugged into the phone line to use dialup.

Hello, Spiffy ISP, how can I help you?

Uhhhhhhh... it aint takin my uhhh... password.

Ok, I need to know your login name so I can bring up your account on my computer.

Its "customerx33".

Ok sir and are you sure you are putting the login name and password in with all lowercase letters?

Uhhhhh... yea, its all lowercase except for the numbers. The numbers are in uppercase.

(I try not to laugh) Ok sir, I’m showing here that you are trying to login with an incorrect login name. You are spelling your login wrong. Go ahead and spell it correctly and then you should be able to login. Oh and by the way, make sure you put your numbers in all lowercase.

This guy kept getting illegal operations in Internet Explorer. I check the case notes, and the previous tech noted that he'd done a scandisk and found four bad clusters. During the course of my troubleshooting, we had to reboot. Scandisk automatically ran, and he said this happened before, and one of the bad clusters was IE's history folder. He also said he'd been ignoring the error and continuing the scan.

Incredulous, I told him that the best thing to do was to fix the error, not ignore it. He protested that three of the bad clusters were empty. I of course retorted that his IE problem was directly due to the bad cluster, and he had to fix it, and better, all of them.

He decided to just fix the first three clusters located toward the beginning of the scan and fix the other one later, since he didn't have time right now. The good news is it did solve his short-term problem.

Ok, I take the call as an escalation. Eu is getting no dial tone on a laptop. Asked previous tech obvious questions, such as, is it connected properly to a phone line (laptop, only one port, so that helped), is there a dialtone, etc, tech said, 'yes, checked all that'. Started talking to the Eu, double checked settings, etc. Found out Eu's nephew had connected to the internet at his house, but it would not work now at the Eu's house. Then found out, Eu had wanted a laptop so she would not have to rely upon a telephone line to connect to the internet. Spent several minutes explaining 'just because the power supply is plugged in, does not mean you don't still need the telephone line' and no, I did not even mention cable modems or DSL, thank you. Talked to a fellow tech later, found out she had connected, called back about something else, but still did not seem to grasp the idea of why you need a telephone to connect to the internet.

I work at an internet help desk - I get this basic question a couple or three times a week.

"What is the status of my file?"

handle@email.addy

No complete name, no indication of mailing address, and none of the information I can actually run a computer search on (name, phone number, file number, social security number, address, etc.). I send a message to the e-mail address (and sometimes THAT isn't included - don't ask me how they did that!) asking for some more information so that I can identify the correct file. NO answer comes back.....

Then - two weeks later (sometimes) I get a real nasty-gram because no one ever got back to them with "the answer to their question". Still no name, mailing address, etc.......

Excuse me - I don't work at the Physic Hotline......who are you, again?????

I thank God that I was witness to the following scene in my campus computer lab a decade ago:

The lab had just changed over to PS/2 terminals, with Windows 3.x, and that confused many users. Two computer lab workers were assisting someone at the station next to me, a guy who was extremely technically-challenged. The workers patiently walked this fella from clicking the icon to getting to the login screen for the mainframe. At this point, they waited for him to log-in. He was just sitting there, hands on knees, waiting for the computer to do something. The two workers glanced at each other, then one said, "Well, you... uh... need to let the computer know who you are." So, the user promptly leaned forward, hands still on knees, and with his face just an inch or so from the monitor declared in a loud voice, "Hi! I'm Lloyd!"

I work tech support at a university. A professor phoned us to complain that his "Documents" folder had disappeared from the contents of his hard drive.

When I arrived, I found that he had double-clicked the hard drive icon to pop up a window containing its contents. The window was not large enough to hold all the items, so it had a scroll bar. I simply scrolled it up for him, and voila! there was his folder. He was amazed at my skill.

I went to college for this?

eu called in tonight in a VERY agitated state of mind,was complaining of possible electro-magnetic interference causing problems with his system.beleives the source of said interference could be secret government installation in S.florida.also has paranoid theories concerning possible conspiricy between certain government agencies and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates(whom eu believes is the Anti-Christ).mostly seemed to ramble about who or what might be responsible for a mysterious medical condition he beleives is caused by electro-magnetic energy he says he is being exposed to.after listening to twenty odd minutes of this inane babble,I told the eu that a squad of uniformed para-military types had burst into to the call center and began firing their weapons and as this required my immediate attention,I regretfully had to hang up.

This happened to my old boss who is now glad to have moved from a support role to a development role.

MB = My Boss

HB = His Boss

Scene a corridor.

HB : I can't get into server ***01.

MB : Yes our hardware guys are repairing it.

HB : Mr Smith says he can get into it via ***02.

MB : No he can't they have the side panels off and are replacing the RAID controller.

HB : But can we get in via NDS (The latest buzzword to penetrate and stick).

Thumping sound of head meeting wall.

Just a note to tech people out there!

Did you ever notice most computer illiterates usually happen to refer to the Internet as something that has physical existance?

For them, a software to access the web is "the Internet"

For them, an ISP is "the Internet"

For them, a browser is "the Internet"

As if it was something concrete!

Examples:

"Are you the Internet?"

"I need you to copy the Internet in this disk for me"

and such... it stinks!

I was the onsite hardware repair tech for a large retail stores head quarters for 6 years, this is my favorite story. I got a call from a nice older lady explaining that her floppy drive was having problems. I said okay, I will be right down to look at it. When I got there I took a quick look and immediately saw a small piece of plastic sticking out of the floppy drive. I said no problem, give me 5 minutes and I will have you fixed. I proceeded to remove the plastic bag and realized that it was the very thin type of plastic bag that 3.5 inch floppies used to come in. I asked the user how this got in there, and she blushed and said that she had heard that there were many viruses out and she was just trying to be safe!!! :O)

Following is a trouble call emailed from a customer, edited only enough to provide anonymity:

HI,

We have some questions about our server. Today we had an error in our

UPS telling us that the battery was low. We shut off the

supply to stop the beeping and the server went down. When we re-booted the

system, the following error occured:

{software-specific error message}

We went around this error and we are up and running again. Is this a

problem error? Also, should our server have gone down when we turned off

the UPS?

K, most tales on this site, (which is very cool by the way), come from tech support poeple, about End Users. Now although I am concidered by most to be a 'Technical Guru', I am in fact the End User in this tale. I am currently studying at a campus in Australia for an IT Diploma. On campus we have access to the net. (DUH!) Now, I used to have a Hotmail account, but on campus 'You can only visit you Hotmail before 9AM.' Fair enough, but we are aloud to access e-mail through Outlook any time of the day or night... WHICH SUPPORTS HOTMAIL ACCOUNTS!!! Explain to me how people can rise to the level of campus network adminsitrator, and yet not realise this fundamental flaw in thier logic.

Last night my department head called me in to fix an old green screen computer, which only had the job of printing labels.

The problem was that (after me warning him) he put a space

heater next to the computer and turned it on full blast...

This company is extremely tight, so i pried off the top to look at the system board to see if anything could be salvaged, of course it could not. I told him his system was fried and showed him how to hook his old dot matrix printer up to his desk machine (1.5 feet away) and wrote a small program using macros to print labels. as I was leaving to go home (again this company does not want to spend any more money than it think it can get away with), the head was planning to call in a technician ($800 at least) because he felt that since i did not have an official computer job (i am A+ and Net+ certified) that i did not know what i was talking about. (I cannot wait to finish school!!!!)

There was this woman calling me, because her PC crashed and won't boot anymore. So I went there to have a look at it, and really it didn't start. So, I've asked her some questions and she told me, that her harddrive was full and to free some space she deleted some files in c:\windows !?!

D'Oh

I was in charge of moving a Top Secret Mainframe from one building to another. This computer had coax and twisted pair running from it's router to others in other buildings. After completely disconnecting it completely it was physically moved across the street and the techs started hooking it back up.

HOWEVER!

The Chief Security Guard working with us KNEW that (affect with a southern drawl) "All of this here wire had Top Secret information on it... so, WE would have to 'dispose' of it in an approved fashion, or 'DE-MAGNETIZE' the cable to make sure all of those TOP SECRET BITS of information were eliminated." Yes! We had to walk through the crawl spaces with a handheld demagnetizer (the kind used for erasing magnetic video tapes) and de-magnetize the wires.

This, unfortunately, wasn't the only "Bright Idea" This guy had...

One of the techs made a joke about the "bit bucket" in the presence of a guard.

(A bit bucket is a mythical place where all of the extra bits of data go, kinda like the extra dimensional space socks escape to from the dryer.)

Well, you know security guards...

I went to the Hardware store, bought a stainless steel bucket, snuck it into the building, placed it in a 8' tall rack. I then took a 128 wire trunk cable and put the sheared off, bare end into the bucket. I showed this to the guard. This Security Guard put the bucket into a cardboard box, closed the box, and double taped it shut. He had us "sign" across the seams. He put this box into another box and again double taped it and sign again we did. This box was put into an armored car for Top Secret Disposal.

---SIGH---

And to think that this guy couldn't make it through the police academy!

I used to work for a website developer company that offered simple to complex e-commerce solutions, among other services. One day we had a call from a prospect who wanted to know how much it cost to develop an e-commerce website. The conversation went on somewhat like this:

- Hi. I own a cosmetics company and I want to make a webpage. (I "love" this: not a website, just one page?) I want to sell my products through the internet, but I´d like to start with the shampoos to see how it goes, then if I feel it´s selling well, I´ll include other products.

(I was supposed to ask some initial questions and then try to set a meeting to get further datails and show him the best alternatives).

- Ok, how many products are you starting with?

- 8.

- What payment methods are you considering?

- I´m not sure. What are my options?

(At this point, I went on explaining all payment methods available, how they work and what the requirements were).

- Oh, that´s interesting. How about the hosting?

(I explained his hosting options and asked:)

- Do you already have the domain?

- What?

- The domain, have you already registered?

- Yes, I think so. (sounding like he had no idea what I was talking about).

- Ok, then, would you like to set a meeting... (bla, bla. bla...)

- Oh, that would be great! I have just one more question.

- Yes.

- Do you take care of the delivery too?

- No, Sir, we develop the website and implement the solution, you´ll be able to acess your incoming orders and sales reports, as well as track orders status individually through an administrative module, but you´ll have to manage the delivery. We can suggest some options if you´re considering outsourcing.

- I don´t get it. If you develop the solution, how come you don´t deliver?

(right there I had a huge question mark in my head).

- I´m sorry, Sir, I´m not sure I understand your question.

- Well, once an item is sold, you deliver it.

- That´s what I was telling you, we get your website up and running, but you´ll need a delivery structure of you own or you can outsource to have another company to deliver for you. We don´t have a delivery structure.

- Oh, but this is a lot of work. Why can´t you just email the product? Isn´t this the whole point of selling online???

No need the say the only thing I was able to do was to say "Hold on a second, please" and have someone else talk to him, whyle I decided weather to laugh or cry for the rest of the day.

I've done support for 10 years and a degree in Comp Sci,

so it was only natural for a computer illiterate friend

to aks for help when buying a computer. I spend the entire

day helping him pick one out. When we got back to his place,

he took off for work and I said I would set it up and

have it ready for him when he got home.

Later that night, he calls me up:

Friend: You broke my computer. It doesn't work.

Me: What doesn't work.

Friend: Everything, I don't see anything.

Me: Is the computer power light on?

Friend: Yes

Me:Is the monitor power light on?

Friend: Yes

ME: Are ALL the cabels secure?

Friend: Yes

ME: Okay I'll drive over. (30 Miles I might add).

He had such a small computer tabe that when I got there

I would put the keyboard on my lab and work. All was OKAY,

and I showed him. He kept insisting it wasn't working. He

said okay all looks good and that I could go. So I set the

keyboard back and started to leave in my car.

He cam running out to my car to stop me again, and exclaimed,

"What are you doing to me, you keep breaking my computer,

it isn't working againg!". So I went back in again to take a

look.

It turned out whenever I put the keyboard on the table

it would scrape the bottom of the monitor and turn the

the brightness off. When I put the keyboard on my lap, the

keyboard would hit the brightness knob again and turn the

brightness up.

This one isn't so much a user mess-up, as I couldn't solve it too quickly either, as a question of, Why?

Now, this *just* happened. Not many techs around know anything about, or *remember* much about windows 3.1. So, when a customer calls in, they're kinda lost.

Anyway. This customer was mostly knowledgeable, but wanted something odd.

You know those host files that will loop all ad sites to the localhost therefore effectively blocking them?

He had done that, but thought that it was too slow. So, he wanted to set up a web server on his machine, to serve up a blank page instead of having the hosts file give up errors to the advertisements.

But it couldn't find his protocol stack.

Couldn't force it that I found, either, and I've used the same web server.

At this point I have to ask: WHEN ARE YOU CONSIDERING UPGRADING???

Win95 may have its faults, but, as it goes, "It's got more stuff."

I run the helpdesk at an independent SOHO/SMB support company. The following call was passed to me from 1st line. She had the kak worm virus - easy fix, or so I thought.

Me:Good afternoon, you're through to Danny.

Her:Your colleague told me you could help me.

Me:That's right.

Time to have a look at the autoexec file to find the bit that messes with the startup folder.

Me:Could you click on Start for me please and choose Run...

Her:Yes. What now?

Me:In the box that appears could you type as follows please... C, colon ...

Her:What's "colon"? I don't know anything about computers alright! Don't you use technical terms with me!

Jesus H Christ. This woman's a legal secretary.

Me:It's a common punctuation mark in the english language. It's not a technical term.

Her:(huffily)Well, what does it look like?

Me:(exasperated)It looks like two dots, one on top of the other.

Her:There's no such thing.

Me:Madam, I assure you there is. If you look at your keyboard you'll find it just to the right of the "L" key.

Her:"K" is to the right of the "L" key.

God almighty, she doesn't know left from right either. At this point I gave up and used our remote access software to fix the problem. Took me five minutes.

I wonder how she managed to get dressed by herself, let alone get the job she has...

I am a Web Developer. I am taking an Electronic Publishing class so I can learn to use QuarkXPress and Photoshop. Needless to say, I am the only person in the class that has a clue about using computers.

A few weeks ago, the discussion in class was about Web pages and how they should be designed, etc. A woman in the class raises her hand and says,

"You know what makes me mad? When I print out a Web page and the last page that prints just has one line of text on it. It wastes paper! Why don't people design the pages so they print on one page, and not run over a little onto the second page."

I restrained myself from commenting, but what I wanted to say was: Do you hear what you're saying? These Web pages are designed to be presented electronically! If they were designed to be printed out, then they wouldn't be put on the Web in the first place!

Ignorance just annoys me. Thanks for letting me use this site to get my frustrations out!

This story happened when I was working tech support for a national ISP, before I left for a Web Designer job, around a 1 year ago.

A strange occurence happened to us one night I was working. Everything seemed to work well in *ISP* Land when little by little, we had users complaining that they couldn't connect. The strange thing is it didn't affect one city (we supported over 30 cities) in particular. We checked the users account, everything seemed OK. We would check their settings. Seemed OK, so we would log password resets.

After a while we noticed that username starting with the letter "a", wouldn't be able to connect anymore. Then after a while, users starting with the letter "b". This continued until the letter "t", before our ISP found the problem. But It took a while for our ISP to come to the conclusion that something was wrong, even when the callers on queue jumped from 10 to 100 users in a matter of minutes. We never had the explanation to what happened, but one theory was a disgruntled tech ran a deadly script that would eventually wipe out every users' profile and information on our servers. If this was true, then that tech almost did a good job. The worst is the calls from the users.

User: I can't connect

Me: What is your username

User: *username*

Me: Sorry, but customers with usernames between "a" and "t", won't be able to connect.

User: Why?

Me: Our authentication servers are down...

User: How much time will it take.

Me: No ETA, but our techs are working on the problem...

Now imagine repeating this 100 times for about 5 hours. This doesn't include the irate customers saying that our service sucks, etc.. Even with a message in queue, they kept calling in. That night was one of the worst nights ever.

Anyways, our ISP had to recover from backup the users' profile and it took a whole night before everything was back to normal...Until the next day, when it was the turn of two of our mail servers to go down...

Oh well, I sympatize with all of you still working tech support.

I explained to a customer that he'd need to call Compaq

directly for warranty coverage on one of his workstations,

and gave him the number: 1-800-GO-COMPAq. He called back

5 minutes later to tell me that that WASN'T the kind of

service he wanted to receive... I checked the number again,

and realized that I should have told him the number was

1-800-OK-COMPAq. He was pretty good-natured about my mistake,

but he told me I might want to be more careful in the future.

Of course I dialed the "wrong" number to see where I'd sent

him, and of course it was a porn line! I've made it a point

since then when giving out that number to remember that I'm

OK as long as I don't GO there... I'd hate to give some stuffy

old librarian a heart attack.

At the $ISP i work for, we have an IRC support room. There was a customer coming into the room all day today complaining that we were kicking him off. This is the second time this customer was told to check his outlook settings this guy didn't beleive that his outlook was the problem

[21:16] (jim7) your still kicking me off after I recieve or send email

[21:16] (Tech_Zach) I'm not kicking you off i swear. it's outlook

[21:17] (jim7) well what do I need to do

[21:17] (Tech_Zach) check again, in outlook go to tools -) options

[21:17] (Tech_Zach) make sure you check in outlook, not in internet explorer

[21:18] (Tech_Zach) connection -) hang up after sending and receiving

[21:18] (Tech_Zach) go ahead and open outlook now

[21:18] *** jim7 (JAVGUEST@***.$ISP.net) Quit (Connection reset by peer)

hmmm....i guess his outlook _was_ disconnecting him after all.............

My mom recently contracted a virus on her computer (less than two weeks after I warned her about attachments), so my dad decided to format the drive and install Win98 SE, wiping out Win95.

Mom later complained she received an odd error in Netscape. While it was loading (it's a Pentium 200, 24 megs RAM, and 350 megs hard disc space), she said she thought dad installed an old version.

Now, you have to work pretty hard to download an old version of Netscape, so I didn't think it very likely. But, when the window finally appeared, the first thing I saw wasn't the JavaScript error message she complained about, but the ancient style of the buttons! To my surprise, it was Netscape 2.0!

The best I can figure is that my dad installed it from the GTE CD-ROM (diskettes, maybe) that he got when he opened his ISP account...many years ago; I don't even know how long. At least 4, probably more like 5 or 6.

I was amazed that he didn't realize it wouldn't work, since he's relatively knowledgable about computers.

(helping Cu through setup)

Me: Great, now hit Next to continue.

*loud crashing sound*

Me: What on earth happened over there??

Cu: Uh, the monitor fell off the desk and shattered...

Me: (think, think... uh-oh) Did you actually HIT the screen

with your hand?

Cu: Well that's what you told me!

Somehow I really feel guilty for this one.

I work as a computer specialist for the Air Force and a few years ago I was the database administrator for a large mainframe system. The system was old and had a habit of locking out the user terminals. The users had to call us and provide the terminal number in order for us to restore access.

One day I had a user call up complaining that he couldn't access his system. After running down the usual gamut of questions, I determined that his system had been locked out. I asked him which terminal, expecting the number, and all I got was "the one near the bathroom".

I had to explain to him that my mainframe was responsible for terminals in 6 different countries, and that I was sure a few of them were located near bathrooms!

I work for a national DSL direct provider. I work as an upper tier customer support technician, and as such I take over calls from our other technicians when they can't solve the problem or the caller is irate and immidiately wants to speak to someone higher. I assure you right off, that I do not work for AOL.

A technician waves me down and says that this caller won't accept his answer that we don't support him. I take over

M = Me

C = Caller

M: Sir, I understand your having some problems connecting over your DSL line?

C: Yeah

M: Okay, what kind of problems are you having?

C: I can't get my AOL to work over it.

M: Okay, sir, I apologize but we can't directly support AOL here. We provide support for (ISP) Internet Service and Client based e-mail

C: Well, AOL said I can use my own ISP. I use ya'll and it's saying something about Network Settings.

M: Sir, as I said before, we do not directly support AOL software. You'll have to call AOL at this point and get them to assist you in connecting.

C: Well, why wasn't I told this?

M: I beg your pardon?

C: Well, people get this DSL expecting that their AOL will work. I mean, how are you going to connect if AOL doesn't work. You need to write that down somewhere

M: Quite honestly, sir, you are the first person to ask.

C: Well.....

M: Have a nice day, your technician will be back on to give you your reference number.

==========================================================

As a lead technician, I also field our upper-level e-mails some as well. This is one of my all time favorites:

Here is the first message sent in:

) From: rxxxxx.wxxxxxx@yyyyyyyyy.ca

) To: (Invalid Address)

) Subject: Per: Deleted Account rxxxxxx@(ISP).net

) Date: 02/05/01 17:23:39

)

) Dear Sir(s) or Madame(s):

)

) Per: Deleted Account rxxxxxx@(ISP).net

)

) In light of my inability to access the (ISP) Account due to technical

) Challenges and PErsonal limitations - and in light of your failure to

) seek non-email means to contact me, to the best of my knowledge, it

) seems that my account and all information placed on it have been deleted

) due to a billing discrepancy.

)

) I am requesting that you communicate with me and advise me when the

) backup tapes containing my account data, personal space and ALL

) unretrieved eMails will be restored - and when I will be allowed access

) for 24 - 48 hours to retrieve all such files to my computer and be given

) the chance to correct - if needed - the billing on file information in

) light of the fact that the account was closed on January 27, 2001.

)

) I feel that the simple fact that I received no phone call or regular

) mail from (ISP), nothing identified URGENT, or such, is sufficient

) cause to indicated that normal means to contact me were never made, and

) as such, it is not I, but (ISP), that needs to make reparations and

) allowances to avoid having stolen, or potentially stolen highly valued

) data of great value and worth. Such theft could also be alleviated if

) all such data were transcribed to machine readable files in agreeable

) format, and burned to CD-ROM, and mailed to me.

)

) I thank you for your decisive and supportive solution to this

) unfortunate error and oversight of communication, and for you interest

) in customer support and maintaining satisfied customers throughout the

) (ISP)/(ISP Parent Company) System! I expect to hear from you within 24 hours,

) giving me a future date of expected solution to these challenges!

)

) Thanks you in advance for your prompt reply and solution oriented

) approach to this challenge.

)

) Sincerely,

)

) Rxxxxx-Bxxxx: Wxxxxxx

) rxxxxx1@(ISP).net (Account in Question)

) rxxxxx.wxxxxxx@yyyyyyyyy.ca (This account - Active - ready for you

) reply)

Reviewing this e-mailer's account, I found that it had been in "Bill Notice" status about ten times. A support tech e-mailed him back with his account status history, showing the dates and the program that completed the status changes name. The tech's e-mail basically said that "Sir, since you did not pay, we terminated your account"

This is the irate gentleman's response

)Hello!

)Please Explain: "(Program Name)" - What it is - Who )Created it, By what authority, and by what Law!?

)Please Explain: "BILLNOTICE #X" (Which I never Received, )since the account was not currently accessible by me!)

)Please Explain: "I Do Apologize..." in terms of The Law

)for Keeping Records, - In terms of the BILL GATES / )MICROSOFT Trials wherin Server Backup copies of Emails )were required to be entered into court

)dockets, and - in Technical Terms - in the sence that at )no time was I informed directly prior to the closing of )this account that it was in danger of being closed - that )this was never ACTUALY

)COMMUNICATED TO ME - you never did your DUE DILIGENCE )either, in the closing process, as best as I can see!

This person drew a parallel between the Microsoft trials and his non-paid account.

Here is my response, and also the last one since then !

"(Program Name) is the "name" of the module in the accounting software that handles the billing aspect. We use a software application to handle the billing if the account.

"I do apologize" simply means that I am sorry to inform you.

As for the bill notices: An account goes to temporary "Notice" status, when a bill does not successfully get paid via auto draft or credit card payment. The first notice is Bill Notice 1. An attempt is then made bill you within three days, if it is successful then the account returns to active status, if not successful then goes to Bill Notice 2. A third attempt to bill occurs within 5 more days and if successful then the account returns to active, if not successful then the account is placed into Bill Notice 3 and will attempt to bill again in 3 more days and if successful then it goes back to active, if not then the account is suspended. This is an automated billing program. This account is not longer active and you will need to create a new account if you wish to continue service with (ISP).net ISP. "

Do you think I was a bit harsh when I explained 'I Do Apologize..."?

-R

As a veteran of the tech support pits, I have two cardnal rules: Always be nice to the caller, no matter how rude they may be, and never hang up on a caller. I broke the second rule last night... for good reason.

Me: Thank you for call Nonesuch Internet, my name is Z'Loth, howcani help you?

Caller: (Very loud harmonica over phone)

Me: (thinking maybe the calling didn't hear me) Thank you for call Nonesuch Internet, my name is Z'Loth, how can I help you?

Caller: I got your name (Starts playing the harmonica loudly again).

I then push the call release button. But, five minutes later, the same call arrives! ARRRGGGHHH!

I'm only 18, but I work in the computer lab for a small university in Florida. It was a Sunday afternoon, and this older couple comes into the lab wanting to check their e-mail accounts. I don't realize that they're having a problem for a few minutes until I look over at their screens (they sat down right next to me) and see that they're doing a search on e-mail accounts. I ask the man what seems to be the problem and he says that they can't get to their e-mail accounts. I ask him where his account's at, and he says that he doesn't know. I then tell him that he needs to have an account before he can check his e-mail, and that I can show him how to set one up, and give him the names of a few places online where he can do that.

He says that he's been sending e-mail all week with no problem. It occurs to me (Thank God!) to ask if the college set him up with an e-mail account (they did), at which point he says yes. (WTF- why didn't he say this in the first place!) I tell him to click on the Home button which takes him the college homepage, and then show him where to click to check his e-mail. At this point I thought that he would be fine, but ten minutes later, he still can't get into his e-mail because he can't remember his password, but is too embarrassed to ask! Needless to say, I couldn't help but laugh!

Have just been to a user that had problems unzipping from a spanned zip set.

Took me a couple of minutes to realise that he'd been adding "-2" to the second disk of the set "So he knew which disk was which.

I showed him the disks and the fact that there was a "1" and a "2" on the disks!

Duh!

Today I was (along with another colleague of mine) wondering why our Windows 2000 RIS server was not able to deploy an automated install on connected computers (a lan bootup, simply press F12 a few times and type in all necessary data to have the computer auto-install)

Anyway, we were presented with an error message, roughly stating that Setup could not be created.

Great we thought. I had to leave it at that tho', so my colleague looked at it further (3 hour meetings sure are a bore...).

As I was coming back, my colleague looked at me smiling, and told me that it must be cause the drive with the RIS packages on it was full (possibly why a log file etc could not be created), however, to my horror I realised he was on the way to move HUNDREDS of megabytes of packages to ANOTHER disk on the network !

I freaked out, Automated installation files SHOULD NOT BE MOVED, Windows 2000 active directory REQUIRES their paths to stay as-is.

After several hours of trying to recover from the damage (copying files back and forth... the drive was constantly over-flowing due to an error from our data replicator admin to all other local sites) we did get all the files back on track... Active Directory is still at the time of writing throwing up error messages (no doh, my colleague didn't even shut down the services on the server... I wonder what went through his mind when he began moving files with UNC paths that should not be modified)

This is really not a tale but more like some gen info for

ISP people that really cannot fix a prob and dump them back to the manufacture.

1. Windows like to control irq's. This is called irq steering and it likes to have power. So changing an irq will not help with a password or user name.

2. No hardware Id on a "software" modem is normal.

3. No, formating and reinstalling will not make me connect faster. There are to many outher factures that control this.

4. Resources below 90% is normal for todays pc's.

5. Uarts, Strings and drivers. Come on.

I could go on. Just be a tech and Fix them not push them off to someone else that is going to tell them how dumb you are.

Kevin

One day,almost first thing in the morning, I took a call from a guy who got a new hard drive and needed help installing it.

He wanted to add it to the PC as C: with the old drive as D:

OK, no problem. But he, in his infinite wisdom, thought that all he needed to do to load the operating system was to move the C:\WINDOWS directory to the new drive.

He called me to fix the mess. About 5 hours into it, he got hungry and wanted me to wait on hold while he got lunch. I told him, no. (you know, we techs aren't Borg, we need to eat, too, and it was past my lunch time) So instead of him going off to eat lunch, since I was unwilling to wait on hold, he fixed a sandwich and munched in my ear while I was getting hungrier and hungrier. I tried everything I could to get rid of him. He was the type that not only wanted you to babysit his reinstall of Windows 95, but wouldn't listen to your instructions. I had to walk him through a reinstall of WIN95 three times.

Finally, I successfully got rid of him by pawning him off on someone else.

No lunch and they wouldn't let me leave early.

I was doing repair in home, for a few users. I received a call from a woman that had been out of the country for 2 months, missionary work. When she got back to town, she couldn't get her computer to bootup. I ran through steps on the phone, and saw that I was getting no where. Setup appt, went over the following day.

I pulled up, bag/tools in hand, ready to roll up my sleeves. I see this nice system 1 year+ old. (Naturally, just out of C* warranty). As I bootup, all I could get to was C: ... saw DOS code-looked like a deck of cards.

I thought, oh fun, could see virus written all over this call, No AV software installed, or updated, etc.

Since it's a C*, easiest thing to do is quick restore, and get her up and running with the least money, or effort. (Lazy, yeah, cheaper though) I tell her that we have to have her software. She asks what that is. I asked if she bought it new or did someone hand it down. She explains that after her husband died, she took part of insurance money, and bought the sys new...but guesses she threw all of that away since it was all installed. (woman only 45 yrs old)

Great :::said with enthusiasm:::

I call C*, they are nice enough (warranty is at 14 months and ticking, she had coverage for 12) to send the quick restore no charge. Next I talked them into a new mouse and keyboard, since the woman had never called them, nor had registered her system. I used the old, "The lady has never cost you a penny in support, recent widow, help her out!" (worked like a charm)

On the phone day before: I remember trying to solve a couple of issues with her on the phone, I kept telling her to hit escape key. She said she didn't have one. I explained that it's a standard key, located in the upper left corner of the keyboard. Hit that. She still insisted that she had none, just the pen holder was there.

I thought, pen holder? What pen holder? (never seen a keyboard with that feature, maybe something new?) Ok, will look when I get there tomorrow.

When she unpacked her new system long ago, she was missing the key cap for Escape and thought that it was "nice" of C* to provide a place for her to put her pen.

Geez, (should've known that this would be a rough call, should have run out the door then)

Before I left that day, we went over some basics, seems now I have a 2nd job to do, teach her how to use her system.

I asked her to describe how she shuts the sys down after use. She says you have to click off the black switch on the back.

I asked What... What black switch? ...power button on front of case... I can see it.

I asked her to show me how she does this. She demonstrates by walking around her computer (it was setup between the kitchen and living room, you could walk to the back of the desk) and she points to this plug, (surge protector which rests on the floor), she says, "That Black plug!"

I asked who told her to shut her computer off this way. She says her sister and other family members. I left many cards, told them to call me when they need help.

She was corrupting windows by just cutting power to it.

I went back 1 more time to her house, restored all and encouraged her to take a college course on Computers 101.

I work at the IT department of a school. In the computer lab, there is one single computer equipped with a SCSI card, so the lab scanner can be plugged into it.

Last week, I had to take this computer out to do some hardware adjust. When I´ve taken it back to it´s place, the next day, I found out someone has plugged the scanner cable in the parallel port of the adjacent computer...

Sometimes it´s just too fun... :)

It's just one of those days I guess.

It's back when the ever popular 5 1/4 floppy's were in circulation.

This guy calls up and says he's new with this computer business. He asks me how to format a diskette. He said he took a small course, but needed some tips to refresh his memory. He said he would like to format his "hard disk".

I asked him if he was sure since this was a "no-return" procedure. He said yes, that his disk was all messed up and he wanted to install other programs on it. I told him what command to type in and followed him through.

The next day I get a phone call from the same guy telling me that nothing worked on his computer.

I asked him if he did exactly as I told him. He said yes and continued explaining what he had done at what point he mentionned that at the end he pulled out the formatted disk to put it in a plastic box he just bought.

"You pulled it out?" I said. "Yes, I pushed on the little button and it came out". After my questioning he explained to me how a "floppy" was the big thin disk and the other one was the "hard" disk.

I just explained to him what had just happened and he told me that he had just erased the last 3 years of his documented finances....I think he knows the difference now between "floppy" and "hard"...

Poor guy.

I had a lady call in for some tech support. SHe was asking me about her credit card for online shopping. It appears she was on ebay and it asked her for her credit card number. She opened the CD-rom and stuck her credit card in and closed it. She called me wanting to know how to get the credit card out or would she have to go to the bank and have her issue a new card because e-bay was using her card. She didnt realize that her card was stuck in the CD-rom.

My best firend, Will and I used to work as tech supporters at a software company (whose software was, frankly, a piece of s***, and we hated the whole company as it was), but later we moved to Sweden. So there we were, on our very last day of work... and we decided that it's about time WE had a little fun. Thus we entitled that day Revenge Day!

It was like this. Will and I were to take calls in turns, and if the caller appeared to have a PEBCAK (problem existing between chair and keyboard -- 95% of the callers), the techie on turn had to think up a creative way of annoying the heck outta him/her. Here are some samples.

1 - Will took the first call at about 8:30. Surely the caller was a real dumb@$$, so Will grabbed a tuna sandwich and started eating it as loudly as possible, staing that it was still breakfast time.

2 - As for me, I wasn't hungry when I took the call. I was just bored, so I had a little fun with the mic's volume control.

3 - Will wanted to know if he could handle a call whilst playing Quake ("Okay, now put the CD in the drive, and - die, bastards! - yeah, so click on My Computer" ...etc).

He could.

4 - I love crossword puzzles. Don't you?

Cu: Okay, what do I do now?

Me: Hm, a six-letter word for... huh? Oh yeah, now

...etc

5 - Poor Will appeared to had drunk too much coke so he ended up burping at random intervals throughout the call.

6 - Then I tried something different. After each sentence I mumbled something like "Damn, how I hate this job" or "Where's the mute button on this piece of s***?"

By about 16:00 we (and the whole office) were having so much fun that we quit competing and started co-operating...

7 - First Will moved to the other end of the room, and aww, I seemed to forget everything about the software our company makes, so I had to ask him about everything:

Cu: Which is the latest version of your product?

Me: Um, I'll have to ask my colleague about that... HEY, WILL!

He: YEAH?

Me: WHAT'S THE LASTEST VERSION OF OUR SOFTWARE?

He: I THINK IT'S 4.3 BETA!

Me: IS THAT ALREADY OUT?

He: YEAH, FOR A WEEK NOW.

Me: OKAY, THANKS! ...Ahem, so it's 4.3 beta.

Cu: ...uh, thanks, and where can I get it?

Me: You can download it from our website.

Cu: What's the URL for your website?

Me: ...HEY, WILL, WHAT'S THE URL TO OUR WEBSITE?

..and so on.

Those were the ones worth mentioning, but there were a lot more... I think I'll never forget Revenge Day!

I'm a Unix systems admin, and budding electronics engineer in the Pacific Northwest (south of Seattle). The Boeing Company (yes, the folks that make the passenger jets) has a company surplus store that is open to the public, and that manages to turn up all kinds of neat widgets.

Visiting BoeSurplus, as the locals have dubbed it, is like visiting an archaeological dig: You never know what you're going to uncover from day to day.

I went in one day just to see what I could find. At the end of one aisle, there was a huge metal tub full of standard power cords. I don't normally give it more than a passing glance, since I already have enough of those ubiquitous IEC-style cords to choke a goat. Today, however, I had reason to do a double-take. Why? Well, there was another customer there, obviously Asian in descent, trying futilely to fit the mismatched ends of two of the cords together, as if trying to make an extension cord.

This is not, of course, the way IEC connectors work. Being in a charitable mood, I leaned over and gently explained that the cords did not fit together that way. I doubt he spoke any english, because all I got was a smile and nod.

I went on my way, found some small goodies, and headed back to the checkout line about ten minutes later. On my way there, I passed the bin again. The same fellow was still there, still trying to fit two mismatched power cord ends together.

Boeing doesn't permit cameras on company property, and this is one rule I truly regret: A shot of this fellow would have been priceless.

Last week, we got a message from one of our users. She went out of her way to give us a complete description - just like we always ask.

"sme keys n my keybard are stuck"

"and its the etter that cmes after N and and the etter that cmes after K and the fu stp, thanks"

Needless to say, we got a replacement to her immediately....

A customer called with much attitude about accessing her e-mail. "I haven't been able to access my e-mail which I desperately need". Oh brother I thought to myself. Okay m'am, what happends when you go to access your mail I asked? "I keep getting this error message". Of course she wasn't at her computer so I told her to call me back when she's next to her computer. Five hours later she calls me back, attitude still intact. What's the error message your getting I asked? "When I go to receive mail, this login box pops up". What happends when you put in the username and password I asked? She paused for a moment then spoke "you mean I have to put in my password"? YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS, I said hitting the mute button. Needless to say it worked...

I work second shift and sometimes it's a blessing but when there's snow on the ground or when schools out, I receive some of the worst calls. One day this woman calls becuase she can't connect to the internet. "I'm a new subscriber and this isn't a good start" she admits. When she told me the error message. I immediately asked her the access number she was using. "It's 372-xxxx" she says. Okay, lets go through your dial up settings. Finally I had her check what number she actually put in her dial up settings. "I have...(pause)111-1111! "You know what, I think I have the wrong access number in my setup" she confesses. Ya think!

My local supermarket has recently installed "U-Scan" checkout lanes. These little machines allow you to check yourself out by scanning the UPC codes on the bottom. You are then supposed to put the thing you scanned in the bag... it's a weight thing, I think the system monitors how much each item weighs so that it can ensure you pay for everything you take out of the store.

I always enjoy using these because it's a lot of fun watching people who cannot seem to follow basic instructions...

Newbie: (Scans item and puts it back in their cart.)

Machine: "Please place the item in the bag."

(It announces this in a sort of feminine radio-announcer voice, and there is also a red popup on the screen that says the same thing.)

Newbie: (Attempts to scan next item and is surprised to find out that it will not allow them to scan it.)

Machine: "Please place the item in the bag."

Newbie: "What? I can't get this thing to work."

Machine: "Please place the item in the bag."

Me: "You have to put the thing in the bag."

Newbie: "Oh....!"

please forgive this entry, but I have to speek in defence of some aol techs.... I worked for them for a year and learned that 9 out of 10 time when you call in to aol you do not get there in house tech support but some third party out sorcer... and i had to fix the problems caused by the outsorced techs more often then not... reading a tale in the database prompted this entry....

Working for a medium sized ISP as tech support can be frustrating at times as you all would know. Quite often you feel like abusing the customer for simply not listening to you, but i've found a much easier way to help them realise their own ignorance

ME: Welcome to the helpdesk, this is luke

customer: hi, is your server down?

me: which server are you referring to?

customer: your server

me: we have many servers, which are you having problems with

customer: the server you have the internet saved on

me: uhmm, we dont have the internet 'saved'

customer: no wonder i cant f*cking get online, i pay you $X a month to use your internet and you dont even supply it !!

anyway to cut a long story short, it turns out the $X she clamis she pays per month, haddn't been paid for 4 months, and she was on the list of people to send to the debt collecter :)

I've got a call from a user that had very strange colors on her monitor. Almost pshycadelic. Well I ran over and , yes lots of lots of strange colors. Almost like there som magnetic field or somthing...

I ask what she had done, and the woman ,with a very red face, told me the she had drawn on the screen with whiteboard pens (the sometimes do that), and she had used the whiteboard cleaner to whipe it off.

There is off course a reason why it sticks to the whiteboard.. can you say magnetic??

Thank god for degauss.

I was working on a helpdesk for NASA and a recieved a phone call from a user who stated that she came into work that morning and found that her office had been flooded by a recent storm.

She told me that she took off her shoes and socks and rolled up her pants. She then stated that when she pushed in the power button on the tower of her PC nothing powered on but water squirted out of it. She then proceeded to ask me if she could retrieve her email on that computer for "just for a few minutes?"

male cust phoned up in tears

I asked what had gone wrong

cust said his pc had said it had preformed and illegal operation and would be shut down

said to cust it is a problem with the program

cust stopped sobbing and said he thought the police had shut down his pc and he would be arrested for what he had done ....

we both had a good laugh

Yesterday, I had a call from someone who just got their computer back after being repaired. The reason for it being repaired was all taken care of. Now, the user had no sound... I'm thinking he has the speakers plugged in to the wrong jack, no problem. All I should need to do is have him start playing a music CD, make sure all the volume controls are up high, then have him check the wires at the back. It doesn't get quite that far though. I have him start the CD playing, then have him double click the speaker icon on the taskbar, and I hear "Oh my gad! I am such an idiot!", then I hear the music start. Apparently, the volume was all the way to the bottom.

We both laughed after this. I then suggested that the next time he goes online, that he checks out this website. He asked if it was for simple solutions for such problems. Yea, something like that.

I work for a large aerospace firm supporting Unix workstations, mostly IBM RS/6000's running AIX. The company tries to keep usable systems in service as long as possible, so we did a whole bunch of memory upgrades to the older 42T series boxes last Christmas.

To put this story in proper context, bear in mind that the vast majority of these systems are used by engineers, both mechanical and electrical, who are required to hold 4-year degrees before they can do their work.

While I was out on my rounds one morning, busily dissecting machines and adding SIMMs, I came across one engineer who provided the following conversation.

(Me): "Hi. I'm here to upgrade your machine's memory. Can I get you to log off for about ten minutes?"

(Eng): "Oh, great! Sure thing, just give me a moment..."

(He finishes what he's doing in CATIA, and then logs out. I thank him, sit down, log in as root, and start a shutdown sequence. At this point, the engineer is looking a little puzzled).

(Eng): "How much memory is in there now?"

(Me): "The machines have 128 megs by default, and we're doubling that to 256. It should help with CATIA, and anything else that's really CPU-intensive."

(Eng): "Oh... Ok..." (As he's watching me yank the cover off and install SIMMs, still with a puzzled look).

(Finally, I get this little gem...)

(Eng): "Say... did you really have to pull the machine all apart? Can't you add memory just by changing the software..."

(Boggle!)

Which just goes to prove that not even an engineering degree confers any given level of computing savvy.

Got a screaming call the other day. The user was very upset that her mouse wasn't working!! When I got there she was laughing histerically seems she had put her cordless phone down next to her mouse and had been frantically moving and clicking the cordless phone instead of the mouse! (grin)

I am an engineer and work in a major ISP, and I was a little bit

pissed that people were reacting negatively to a new web-based

e-mail client we installed. I think (and thousands of users agree)

that the new client is wonderfull. This call moved up the levels

to me:

USER: My @($&*#^^%%! e-mail doesn't work!

USED: Are you getting some sort of error messages?

USER: @%*$#! NO! THEY'RE JUST NOT THERE!!!!

USED: Hmmmmm...Then how do you know it doesn't work?

USER: It always had before!!!

By now I had db punched her record and saw (what I thought)

was a record number of tickets. Some 30 records ranging from

"oh dear" to "horrible bitch." Level "9" means you have to

listen to crap.

USED: (remembering front-line days) How do you access your mail?

USER: When?

USED: Ummmmmmm.... Whenever you get it?

USER: Are you a #)$&%)#! idiot?

USED: (silence is golden)................................

USER: Are you listening?!!!

USED: Yes................................................

USER: What are you go'in to do about my @()*^%$&*! problem?!!

USED: (grand pause) You haven't answered my question.....

USER: OK.... It depends.

USED: Depends on what?

USER: (sheepishly) on whether I'm at work or home.

USED: Are you at work now?

USER: That's none of your (#*$%^&*#$! business!

USED: OK. How do you get your mail at home?

USER: Eudora!

USED: Well.... why don't you use Eudora at work too? And

synchonize them?

USER: I don't know what the (#&%$(@! you mean.

USED: Ummm.....How do you get your mail at work?

USER: Your #*$&@#%! web mail!

USED: That doesn't make sense......

USER: You're calling me a @&#%$%^%@$! liar, shame on you!

USED: No, not that at all. I see from your record that your

account is hosted via our local school district. I know the

administrator there personally, and all employees have an email

client on their machine from the district. We have hosted that

domain for many years..... They use Eudora.

USER: I don't have it.

USED: That's an oversight. Call XXXX XXXXXXXX, and he'll install

it right away, I'm sure!

USER: It takes months for them to do anything!

USED: Naw, c'mon now, they could install a client for you right

over the network in 30 seconds.

USER: They never answer me.

HMMMMM. Got an ADMIN who does not want people screwing off on

the internet, a USER who is insufferable, probably promoted out

of the classroom to protect our children, with no mail client

and (hee hee, the crapiest machine in the school!).....

USED: I think you should make nice to your ADMIN.......

USER: That's the best you can &@^#%$! do?!!

USED: Well, no. The best source for web mail is probably

the computer lab.

USER: I don't want @^#%%$^#! kids watching me!!!

---------GRAND PAUSE-------------

USED: Ma'am, did you know abuse of resources is actually a crime.......

USER: ...................................................

USED: I guess we're all set then?

USER: Yep!

USED: Good day Ma'am!

In the mid-80s, the company I was then working for had bought 20 systems (PDP 11/73s) from Digital Equipment Corporation, to be delivered in pairs over ten months. We also got a tape with the operating system and other software with the first pair of systems. Unbeknownst to us, halfway through the period, there was a hardware upgrade in this particular model of computer, which was subtly incompatible with the version of the OS we had.

After we had been running for well over a year, I was able to track down some errors that we were having on some machines to this incompatibility. The old hardware was no longer available, and we were told that we would need to get ten new circuit boards and a new software tape to make all the hardware the same and to have a good version of the OS. The kicker was that DEC insisted that we pay $8000 for each board, and $2500 for the software upgrade, for a total of $82,500. We maintained that since the problem was because of something they had done, they should eat the cost. We probably could have come to some arrangement for splitting the cost, but they were adamant. We had to pay it all. They would not come down even on the price of the OS tape, which probably cost them less than $100 to produce.

Since even the properly working systems were slow and the application software difficult to maintain -- the reasons this particular combination of hardware and software were chosen is another story, one you might also be interested in (they were adequate for a considerably smaller company,

but not for us) -- we determined that we would start over again on this application, using a proper DBMS (the old one used ISAM files), C (the old one used BASIC), and UNIX (the old one used RSTS/E) and faster hardware. However, at the conclusion of the meeting where this was decided, the CIO

stated "Digital Equipment Corporation will NOT be invited to bid on this contract." Thus, DEC lost out on a contract worth nearly $750,000 because they insisted that we pay $82,500 for a problem that was really their fault.

I work on a helpdesk for a large financial company. Most users are quite technical and know about their network drives and backups etc. One day I got a call from a user requesting a backup of his file. The conversation went like this.

User: I want to get my Excell file backed up because I dont seem to be able to find it on my network drive.

Me: Do you know what server the drive is on?

User: Yep its the Finance server.

Me: Ok so can you tell me where this file should be on the network drive?

User: What do mean?

Me: When you created the file where did you save it?

User: No you dont understand that is why I need it backed up. Its not on my network drive.

Me: Was it ever on the drive?

User: No, my PC crashed before I saved it so thats why I need it backed up.

Me: Well if you didnt save it we cant restore it for you.

User: Look I've done this before I know it can be done. Are you new here?

Me: No sir I am not. The reason we cant back it up is because it was never stored on your PC. When your PC crashed and you shut it down the file dissapeared.

User: The file cant dissapear it has to be somewhere it must be on the server. Can you check?

Me: Sir can I put you on to me Supervisor?

After this my supervisor told him what I had tried to tell him, and he wasnt impressed. He got his manager to call us who was much nicer but it seemed that this guy had spent all day doing his file and never saved it. Poor luser.

I make a phone call to gateway technical support because my CD burner isn't working and I have no sound coming from CD rom drive. After recieving no help from technical support,I get off the phone and start checking into the matter myself. I look into the system information, click on the plus sign for multimedia and there's no E drive (the CD-RW drive) isn't listed.So I call technical support back and tell the man I have no CD-RW drive listed. He gives me this long story about how you are supposed to burn CD's at a slower speed so you don't get errors, how there is no standard for CD-RW drives and alot of useless information. Also he told me he wasn't buying a burner because there were just too many problems with them. Anyway I keep telling him isn't the drive supposed to be listed in the system information and he keeps telling me yes it is. I'm getting madder and madder, I keep asking him how am I supposed to burn a CD if my computer doesn't know I have a CD-RW drive. Finally I just hung up the phone.

I've been working tech support for a large Canadian ISP for about 6 months. One day, a few weeks ago I got a call from a man that was getting no dial tone errors. He told me that the telco had just been there and had put in a new phone line. His fax machine was plugged into the line, and it was working perfectly. So I asked him, "Is there a line between the jack in the wall and your computer?"

"Not directly, no," he says, "I've got a phone line coming from the computer to this hub, and there's another line coming out of there, but I don't know where it goes to."

So I ask, confused, because he wasn't on a network, our ISP doesn't support networking, "What else is plugged into this hub?"

He says, "Well, there's the computer, the monitor, the printer and the fax that are all plugged into it, and it plugs into the wall."

A light goes on in my head. "So, you've got everything plugged into your surge protector?"

"Yeah," he says, "that's what that thing is called." My eyes roll.

"So, there is no phone line between your computer and the jack in the wall?"

"No," he says, "but there never was. I'm sure that the reason I can't connect is because you guys don't know my new phone number." Okay, I'm at head banging stage now.

"Okay Sir, what I'd like you to do is unplug your fax machine from the phone jack, plug your computer into that, and then plug the fax machine into the computer. Should work fine."

And I ended the call

I was setting up a DUN connecton for an older guy with his first computer...let me mention I loathe family members who buy an elderly relative their first computer, then leave without teaching them how to do the basics...like set it up and turn it on! Anyhoo...

"...okay sir, now I need you to right click on *ISP*'s icon and..."

"Is that write or right?"

*stunned silence...maybe he's kidding?*

"Uh...no, um, with the right hand mouse button, click once on *ISP*'s icon and..."

"I know, I got that, but is it 'write' or 'right'??"

*more stunned silence.......he's not kidding!!*

"Sir, it has nothing to do with your keyboard. You have two mouse buttons, click the one on the right hand side of the mouse."

"OH!! There we go!!"

>From there it went pretty smoothly. I'm not sure what he was intending to do...

I had a man from one of our Southern sites call up, nightmarish...it went something like this:

C: "I done want ta set up..ah, ah, I done talked to some laaady at, ah, the, ah, office yestah'day, and she done tol' me that I gots ta do steps that she done tell me ta do and I done can't get ma' email!"

Me: *translating from redneck to English on the fly...we have a lot of customers in backwoods places in the South* "Okay, did you sign up with a new account yesterday, or did you sign up for an extra email address?"

C: "I done don't know what yew mean...I done talk to this laaady at that office there and she done set me up and I done can't get ma' email! I done follow the steps she give me over tha' phone and I done can't get ma' email!"

Me: "Okay, do you remember any of what she had you do?"

C: "No, I sure don't, I done can't get ma' email, she had me doin' all these steps and I done don't remembah' what she have me do, an' I can't get ma' email!"

Me: "Did you have an internet account with us before yesterday?"

C: "I sure did, ma' wife she done have an account with you all, and this laaady she sign me up with *username/password* and I done can't get ma' email."

Me: *SUCCESS! We just need to set up an identity in OE* "Okay, sir does your wife use Outlook Express for her email?"

C: *yelling across the house to his wife* "She do."

Me: "Okay, open up Outlook Express."

C: "I done can't! It don't do nothin'!!"

Me: "Did you double click on the little picture that looks like an envelope with two blue arrows?"

C: "I done did but it don't work, it just this screen with ma' wife's email, it don't done do nothin!"

Me: "Okay, does it say Outlook Express at the top?"

C: "It don't say nothin'! It just got her email, it don't done do nothin'! It just this screen with nothin'!

....edited for length, we went in circles like this for 10 minutes...finally...

Me: "Okay sir, is there a File menu?"

C: "There sure is."

Me: "Okay, click on it, then click on manage identities."

C: "I done did that, do I click on Add Identity now?"

Me: "Yes, then enter your name, and..."

C: "It done ask me for a password, do I done put one there?"

Me: "If you want a password, you can enter one, but if you forget it we can't help you get it back."

C: "Okay, I done want one, I type one in..does it matter what it be?"

Me: "Nope, just make sure you remember what it is.

C: "There done be two fields, what do I done do with the second one?"

Me: "You have to enter the same password twice, it's to make sure you didn't mistype something the first time."

C: "Oh, okay." So he miskeys and it asks him to type it again...."It done didn't work, it done ask me for the password again!"

Me: "Okay, that means you accidently miskeyed something, just type the password in EXACTLY THE SAME in both fields again."

C: "I don't done have anyplace ta' type it, it done not work, I can't type nothin'! It just ask for password in them done two spaces."

So, I tell him again to retype the password...and he says:

C: "Y'all better talk to ma' wife..." THEN he starts yelling, like I can't hear him, "Honey, you done come talk to them, they don't know what the hell they're doing, they done better hire some peoples that knows what they's doing, 'cause this one don't know a damn thing, she done don't know nothing and she done confusin' me. They got damn stupid people workin' there."

By this point I'm pissed, this guy is a MORON!!! And the morning tech is laughing because he's been listening in...so I say:

Me: "Sir, you can't even manage to follow steps a 7 year old child could follow and create something as SIMPLE as an identity in Outlook Express, and I'M the stupid one?!" and hung up.

He didn't call back.

I recently had a caller phone in with a simple computer problem. He was running Windows ME. Anybody who works tech support knows that Bill Gates didn't have his team write Windows ME, he bribed Satan for his spawn and converted it to binary format, then threw in Windows Media Player just to make fire and brimstone for eternity seem enjoyable. Suffice it to say, the computer was locking up randomly, producing errors, and generally misbehaving. The customer had bought the computer for his daughter for when she goes away for college. I tell him that we have been having quite a few problems with ME and that we had workarounds for most of them. Well, history procedes as such:

Me: I can help you no problem sir. What I'd like you to do

Cust: I don't want to hear it. I want a new system without Windows ME. I have Windows 98 on all my other computers and they hardly ever crash. Not like this stupid (insert obscene remarks here) ME!

Me: Unfortunately, Windows 98 is 3 years old and our company tries to end of life operating systems that are more than 3 years old. We can't ship you a new computer with Windows 98 on it. But we can help you get Windows ME up and running.

Cust: If (censored) ME is so (censored) good then why (censored) does it crash all the time? If I can't fix the problem then its no good to me!

Me: *mildly perplexed* Well you have telephone support for life to fix any errors. That's what we're here for.

Cust: No! I should be able to fix the computer myself. If I can't then I don't want it.

Me: You're right sir. If you can't fix the computer yourself, you shouldn't have it.

Cust: I'm glad you agree with me! Now can I get a new computer now?

Me: Unfortunately you're out of your return period. You cannot return your computer. And even if you did your new computer would ship with Windows ME.

Cust: Why the (censored) are you selling this garbage! I know Microsoft has you all in their pocket, but come on! If there's a problem with the computer I should be able to fix it!

Me: *praying that this call isn't monitored* Sir, computers have problems. We know that, and you know that. What you don't know is that we're here to fix the problems that you can't fix yourself. That's why you paid for a warrenty, that's why we have jobs here. Do you want your computer fixed or not?

Cust: I want it fixed by putting Windows 98 on it!

Well, it's long enough already. But the end came to him illegally installing Windows 98 on the computer from another CD he had bought from us, then calling customer support to demand Windows 98 be resold. I wished him good luck, and told him the power of one can change the universe. He thanked me for my confidence in him, then demanded to speak to my supervisor to tell her how much help I was to him.

I had just pulled my first stint of serious overtime. Not much, 12 hours extra, but that was in the course of 2 days. I wasn't feeling that great to begin with, and the lack of sleep was really getting on my nerves. I had arranged to call a customer back after I had made a part order arrangement for replacing a bad CPU. Her name was Mary I believe and she had a southern accent. I looked at my sheet and dialed the number.

Me: Hi Mary. It's Micheal calling back from tech support. We're going to replace your CPU.

Mary: Oh. Okay.

Me: Your warrenty covers a tech coming out to replace it. What address do you want the tech to come to?

Mary: Um. This one I guess.

Me: Okay. So that's *blah blah blah*

Mary: Um. No. It's *bleh bleh bleh*

Me: *bleh bleh bleh*? You want the processor delivered to another state?

Mary: No, I've always lived here.

I looked at my log sheet. There had been two Mary's that phoned back to back, both from the south, both with accents. I had dialed the wrong Mary. She thanked me for offering her a tech and a new CPU, but was more interested in the modem driver that she needed to get back on the internet.

Not to be outshadowed, my roomate who is also a coworker, got stuck working New Years eve. Not too many calls, but two gems. The first was that question that solidifies that people should take an IQ test before buying a computer.

Roomie: How can I help you?

Cust: Yeah, we were playing pinball on my computer, and I'm wondering how long it takes for a beer spilled on a keyboard to dry so we can play it again?

The second call comes from a tech wannabie who had gotten a new motherboard and installed it himself. He had unplugged everything, swapped boards, and plugged it all back in but was not getting a post. He took the customer through the troubleshooting steps while they joked. The customer had stated he had parts left over, but any tech will tell you that parts left over is allright provided it's just a screw or spare cable. Well, it turns out the spare part was his Pentium III processor which he forgot to put in. Maybe someday people will learn that if there's an open slot, try to stick something into it.

Love the site, great calls.

Last call I took today for my ISP helpdesk:

Me: Ma'am, Do you see where it says address?

EU: Yes ...

Me: In that bar, I'd like you to type www.cnn.com so we can see if the connection's working properly.

EU: you want me to type?

The rest of the call gets worse ... My dentist is going to be a really rich man by the time I move on ...

Ok, here is my story... I am a fairly puter literate person, as in i have had a puter for years, and learned right from the begining (Commodore 64 ring a bell?)

Anyway, this is kinda embarrasing, but its funny. The first PC i ever bought was a machine that i put together myself. Dual celerons Win2k... the works. Well the first time i installed the OS, i was gonna set up a dual boot with windows 98 and linux AND Win2k (i know its 3 oses, but i dont know any tri boot systems.) Soi get my OS'es installed and up and running, but my video drivers are outdated so i have to get them online. No problem i figured, im on cable, and i have a hub to run my E-net with.

Once i got my NIC installed, i couldnt connect for some reason. I didnt have a clue as to why. My roomate could get online just fine. It must be my drivers, so i uninstall them. Nope. Maybe my NIC itself is defective? Nope.

After about a week of uninstalling and reinstalling everything from the NIC to the OS itself, i ask a freind over to fix it. He is my guru, but to no avail. Finally, one of my other guru freinds comes over this is more or less the conversation:

Freind: "Dude youre gonna hate me for this, but did you check the cable?"

Me: (frustrated as hell) "Man shut the hell up, its a brand new cable!"

F: "Ok but you should check it, its always something simple like that"

M: "Allright, ill check it, but its not gonna work."

Needless to say, i am connected to the internet now, and he still laughs at me for reinstalling my os'es and everything else in my puter for more than a week.

I'm a high school student, who is on the school's fencing team...

So I'm at fencing practice one day, and a gym teacher comes running in like and asks for a computer expert like his computer is about to explode. Everyone points to me, so I go with him.

I look at his comp and he's telling me something about how his screen isn't filled. So I go ahead and adjust his monitor settings so that it's the display is filled, but he continues on that that's not what he wants. Then it hits me, he wanted to maximise the word window.

Me and my fencing friends had a good laugh when I got back to practice.

I do video technical support for Sony electronics. A lady bought one of our high end Cybershot Cameras. She called me up and said she was having trouble installing the software. I asked her to go to her windows desktop and then put the CD in the CD drive. First she asked me what the CD was, and I told her it was the shiny disc shaped object. She then told me that she didn't have a drive that fit it exactly so she made it fit into a smaller drive. Come to find out she had bent it or had broken up the CD and put it into the floppy drive. I speak to at least 20 people a day who will spend $2,000 on a digital camera or digital camcorder and have never used a computer before. Amazing.

Doing video technical support for Sony electronics I got a call from a digital camera user who said he was having a problem with MGI Photosuite that we bundle with our cameras. We don't really support the product, but will answer questions once the camera is working. He told me he didn't want to have to click so much to get to his pictures. I said to go into My computer, click on the camera and then the image and it would open by itself. He told me it was still too many clciks of the mouse. I bet this guy didn't even want to get out of bed in the morning. Clicking is just so darn difficult.

When I first started out in the tech realm I worked in a Helpdesk for a paper

recycling company (I still work here).

I recieved a help call about an hour before end of day. The user on the other

end says she can't get her printer to print any checks out. I ask what some

of the symptoms are. SHe gives me an error code and says the LED on the printer

says it's out of paper. Sure enough when I look up the error code it means the

printer is out of paper. I ask her if she had checked to see if there was any

paper in the printer (obvious question right?). She says she had just put the

check stock in and everything else like she does every other typical Friday

(Funny how this sentence makes it into every helpdesk call). Well anyways I

ask her to power cycle the printer with a 20 sec interval between. So she turns

it off and then waits the 20 secs and turns it back on. Sure enough the error

code comes back. I again ask her to if she has paper. She absolutely assures

me there is paper in it. Well I start up my remote control application for

the printer and log into it (We have the coolest toys). I run some diagnostics

and do a remote power cycle on it. All to the same answer. By this time I am

working on overtime so I walk down the hall and get my boss to come over and

see if she know something to check that I didn't. Well she's one of those I gotta

see people... So we have to start all over again.. Finally my boss is just pulling

things out of the air. And she says sometimes the paper detector (which is just a

piece of wire) gets bent or broke. It's on the left side of the paperdrawer so your

going to have to pull out the drawer. We hear her pull it out and a lot of moving

noises in the background. Finally she says I can't see it. I tell her to take the paper

out of the drawer so she could get a better view. She says there's no paper in the drawer.

At this point i've pretty much figured out what's going on and tell her I'm going to be her

superhero. I ask her if she would just trust me and we're going to do a little experiment.

I ask her to go get some paperstock, but not to put the drawer down under any circumstances.

When she comes back I ask her if she still has the drawer. She says yes. I said good, now

put the paper you have in your right hand into the drawer in your left. She does. I said now

put the drawer (carefully) back into the printer. She does. The printer spins up and error

code disapears.

3 hours after original call was placed.

I'm not to sure what she was talking about because I know she didn't go through that every friday.

Ive been in Tech support for 5 years now... as much as we like to bitch and complain about the EU's we have to deal with.. I just have to say that I think most ISP's Suc like a hoover jazzed up on 50 cups of exspresso... here a perfect Example

PROBLEM

Ms. Cohen has been with out her dsl since june.

SOLUTION

I Escalted the ticket info as well as invoice # and the most recent outrageous billing that she recived.. she was billed $250 in june as a transfer fee to have the dsl moved from her old home in Califoina, to her new place in Newyork, she paid this.. they never showed to setup the dsl.... she has been charged to her credit card a monthly fee of $49 ever since june as well, although she has had no service, and no one returns any messages that she leaves with the department ext 202 which is KELLY, only once did they call her back and informed her that kelly is SHIRLEY'S assitance and that she would call her back.. NEVER happened.. Her most recent bill was charges to her credit card for $649... charges for back payment apperently ????????? I escalted this with the link we have, but im afraid as there is no xxxxxxpoint email address [[they never gave it to her, not even from when before june while she lived in californa]], An IP address,[[never had it]] or Customer ACCOUNT # [[never been sent any billing info about her account, just the non descript billings to her creditcard]] that they will just ignore this escaltion... ever feel useless?? i know i do right now.

The above was an abrivation of the accual log i posted to the company, minus any account, or billing info.

XXXXXpoint has been Concealed to Hide the guilty of poor services offered and Lack of giving a damm for us hard working smoes... Im Disgusted to have to support thier lame ass service.

A very true story

I'm a tech for a major computer company.

One day a EU (end user) calls up and says "Can you get me a plumer" I say to EU "Ahh..Sir I don't understand"

EU responds "The pipes in my computer are going to burst and I need a plumer!!!!!"

"OK, OK, sir do you have a error message on the screen?"

EU reponds "512K pipe burst!!!"

I saw an earlier post about "L-Users" thinking that fixing the monitor is a matter of putting a light bulb in it or refilling a printer with "H's".

Friday, our copier went "down". Blannk, black pages..... The tech showed up today - and replaced ......the light bulb!

He wondered why I started snorting with laughter when he opened up the long, white cardboard tube.......

Gotta laugh when you can.

I work as a tech at a medical department at our local college and I get a lot of calls day in and day out, the only thing different about these calls is that the users generally know what they are doing, being college educated and cooperative (I know this isnt usually the case, but up here in SD everyone is nice). However one day I got a call in to the student computer lab.

Now instructors are not supposed to use this lab, but they do from time to time, and do crazy things to the laser printers.

Anywho, one day found that this printer would not work. Some background, this is a printer that does not have a nice LCD display to tell you whats wrong, just 3 lights, and the manual was conveniently lost.

My first idea was: Paper jam. I opened it up, no paper jammed inside.

Next idea: toner problem, toner was fine, no problems.

Next idea: rerout printer usage to another one in the same lab through the network and take it up to my office to take a look at it.

What I found:

1 transparency melted onto an internal roller. Now anyone who has ever used a laser printer know that it uses heat to bond the toner to the paper, I mean just by picking up the paper as it exits the printer you can tell its warm. I removed the transparency from the printer, buttoned it up and checked it out, everything seemed fine, green lights. Try to print something.

A grinding noise the likes of which I hope to never hear again came from the case of the printer and smoke wafted up out of the vents. I pulled the plug quickly and let it cool down before I opened it up.

I found a piece of blackened transparency wedged into a gear on the main roller. The reason I had not seen it was because it looked like it belonged there, being black in a black environment it eluded my search. This was the front part of the transparency, the part that had gotten the toner on it before it melted down. Never before had I seen such complete destruction of a printer, the gear came loose and started tearing up the insides of the printer while the toner covered piece of plastic melted onto a circuitboard, efectively destroying it. We ended up having to replace the printer, all because of a single transparency sheet.

Thats my worst tale, for some reason I have not had anything like what I have read on your site, keep your heads up though, things are bound to pick up

The following conversation just took place over ICQ between me and a friend of mine from a website that I administer. She was one of the first members of the site, has over 4200 posts to her credit, and apparently had never used the signature feature before. Here's the exchange:

friend: (12:00 AM) Please show me how to put my sig. on my posts.

Raichu: (12:04 AM) You don't remember how to add your sig to your posts?

friend: (12:04 AM) No I don't, it never works.

Raichu: (12:05 AM) Did you set a signature in your profile?

friend: (12:05 AM) Yeah but it never shows. I don't know how to use the codes or whatever to make it appear.

Raichu: (12:06 AM) Did you check the Show Signature box below the text box?

friend: (12:06 AM) There isn't a box for that.

Raichu: (12:07 AM) Pick a topic, any topic. Click Post Reply.

friend: (12:07 AM) k

Raichu: (12:07 AM) In the Options section (beneath Your Reply), read the two checkboxes. [The second one is Show Signature.]

friend: (12:08 AM) OH! I have to click that everytime I post?

Raichu: (12:08 AM) Yes.

This was funny enough, but the next line provoked laughter on my end:

friend: (12:08 AM) I am blonde sometimes, do remember that.

I was a new tech in a small computer company that literally ran out of the basement. Being the smartest computer guy around, I got hired to do all the hardware and software tech stuff. One day my boss asked for a second printer port in her computer. She had the new card and I was putting it in when I suddenly got a shock in my hand. I looked at the power cable and it was unplugged. Perplexed, I counted it towards buildup in the power supply. Again I tried to insert the card and was shocked. Angered, I put the card in while recieving a shock. Hurt like hell but it went in. It wasn't until I finally looked at what was shocking me that I figured out what happened and laughed. The modem was plugged into the wall with the phone plugged into the second jack. It was carrying a 25V current and my hand was rubbing against it.

Knowing this knowledge, it makes my second tale seem even more stoopid. In our house there are only two telephone wall jacks. I needed the phone in another room so, using my previous expertise learned from the modem, I used the modem as an extender. Worked great! I then sat down on the floor and put the modem on my leg. It was rather hot and I was just wearing a pair of thin boxer shorts. Well, the modem slipped, fell onto what guys have referred to as the crown jewels and, well, I never learned I could scream that loud or that the flesh on a mans scrotum could recieve that kind of electrical burn.

I work techsupport for a certain large OEM based in Houston. We all get the boneheaded calls once in a while, but I've got a few that really take the cake:

First: This one is the source of the title here, and happened to a friend of mine.

A customer called up. Screen blank. Computer won't start. Fearing the urban legend call from WordPerfect ("I can't turn the lights on, the power's out!") he proceeded to troubleshoot the computer. Nope, power's good, so much for the easy answer. No software's been recently installed. They've recently had a tech. by from a high speed internet provider, let's call them "Simp-atico", to install the service. That was about when the problems started.

It seems the "tech" openned the system to install their network card. On seeing the existing NIC sold with this model, he told the customer matter-of-factly that it was a "Virtual Network Card", and proceeded to hot-pull it. He then inserted his own card amidst sparks and clouds of ozone, and unplugged the computer. When the computer failed to reboot, he turned to the customer, and said "It's your video card, call [the OEM]." Naturally, the customer was none-too-pleased at this turn of events (I should note, this client was smarter than the average bear...) and brought the system to the store. As she reported it, the store owner rolled his eyes, and asked: "Do you know, that's the third one today?"

You'd think this "A+ Certified" technician would learn after 1 or 2, no?

----- What follows are actual case notes for the other one. (Sufficiently modified so as to not get me fired.)

Customer calls up, wanting that I send him a power cord. No big deal, except...

No serial number. Customer claimed that he tore off the S/N sticker from both INSIDE the case, and from the back of the computer. When asked why, he said he wanted it to "look nice" when people came to look at his computer.

Spent 10 minutes telling him I could not send a replacement power cord without a serial number. He was incredulous, claiming that it was unfair to people who remove this sticker. He did admit that the sticker was marked "DO NOT REMOVE", but he "really wanted it to look nice."

At one point, he asked me to wait, then called for his father, and then came back -same voice, slightly deeper- and attempted to continue the conversation as though I was talking to a different person.

I tried to convince him that I cannot send anything without a serial number, and suggested that he try to get one from a computer store, at which point he claimed that there was no computer store near him. (Customer was listed as living in Calgary, AB.)

He then asked if I could send him a Monitor, instead.

In all, it took about 20 minutes to convince customer that I can send him NOTHING without a serial number, and from the tone of his voice at the end, I still don't think I convinced him.

-- And one thing that didn't make it into the notes (I had a hard time wording it without sounding fecetious): At one point, he asked me to send him a Serial number.

I have been Techsupporting for a large national ISP

for about 2 years now, and I thought we were past

the classic "Is your modem on Sir?" types.. but nooooh.

This day a customer in all seriousness asked me :

Could you please tell me, what is the price for sending

emails to Spain ?.

I wished I could have replied "Special Offer, only for you,

same price as for Greenland, and San Diego"

Instead I explained how the mail system works..

And this customer by the way was a 'pro' client.

The type with own domain name, and a mailhotel at

our facilities, costing quite a penny..

I do video technical support for a large electronics company. As soon as you get a caller who tells you up front that they are college educated you know you are in trouble. I always respond by saying so am I. Anyway, I had this lady call up who just bought one of our TV's. The remote for the TV is programmable so you can use it on another manufacturers VCR. This lady had another manufacturers VCR and wanted to use this remote. The instructions are in the manual and are very simple, but since her college education was getting in the way she had to call us and wait on hold for 30 minutes so I could read out of the manual to her. We went through the steps of programming the remote and to test it I told her to hit the VCR power button to see if it would turn off the VCR. She said no, that it turned off the TV. We tried another code and I told her to hit the VCR power button again and she said it turned off the TV. Every code we tried turned the TV off. I then asked her, are you sure you are hitting the VCR power button and not the TV power button, and she screamed at me, "I'm college educated and certianly can follow simple instructions!" I then asked her if she was hitting the big green button in the upper right corner of the remote and she said yes. I asked her to tell me what the button was labled, she said "TV power". I rest my case.

I am the tech of my family, and get called for the various tasks of fixing and working on PCs. My aunt is the vice-principal of a daycare type center. Sometimes I would go over there to fix the pcs, and get payed. There is alot of kids there, and the PCs get messed up alot.

One day, my aunt called me and said that some computers were broken. I went over and found 3 computers in a corner. 2 were working fine, and one had a floppy drive and a cdrom drive, and both were not working. They showed up in explorer, but wouldn't read any disks. I tried the usual things, and nothing worked. I suspected I would need to open the case, but my aunt and I had to get home so I saved it for a later day.

A couple days later, I got another call. The pc wouldn't boot up, and it made wierd noises. I grabbed a 1GB hd (all the pcs were a pentium 133) and went over there.

I found it was the same pc with the broken cdrom and floppy, although it was in a different room. I checked it out, and decided that the hard drive needed to be replaced. opened the case up to replace it, and saw that the sound card was partially out of its slot, and the cdrom drive and floppy drive data cables were partially unplugged.

I asked if anyone opened it up, and was told no.

I replaced the cables, pushed the sound card in, and replaced the HD. Confirmed everything to be working, and then asked a teacher at the school where the computer went. She told me it goes in the room down the hall. I asked her what they use to transport it, and she went to get a pushcart type thing with wheels. I told her to put it on the cart while I pack up my supplies, and I'll push it down to the room.

So, I start packing up my stuff, and I hear a huge bang, like the PC fell! I look up, and see here adjusting the PC on the cart! I ask what that noise was, and she says that to get it on the cart, she had to push it off the table!!! I told her never to do that, and she said why does it matter!!

I am part of the MIS department where I work. My boss asked

me to look at a laptop that someone left for us to take a

look at. The interesting thing is that when I set it up,

there was no power cord in the bag.... Fortunately, there

are a couple of spare cords at the site I was working at...

When I plugged it in and got it turned on, the battery level

read 1%. I guess the computer works better when the battery

is charged and the computer is plugged in. I am NOT returning

the computer with a power cord. (It came from another computer.)

A customer calls up saying she is receiving a dr watson from our Citrix server (for remote application). In order for me to resolve this issue I need to find out which of our load balanced servers she is logged in on.

Me: "Are you logged in right now?"

Her: "Logged in? I'm not familiar with your terminology."

Me: "..."

I do second level tech support for a proprietary computer based upon the Unix operating system. Most of my tech support calls are referrals from our help desk, but a few people have direct access.

Me: Good Morning *****, this is Will

Caller: Will, good you're there (Its V from Administration. She's good people.)

Me: What's going on?

Caller: Remember that disk that you put that label on this morning?

Me: Yeah

Caller: We went to play it on R's PC, but we don't hear any sound.

Me: (switching to tech mode) Are the speakers attached?

Caller: Speakers? What do we need speakers for? We wanted to play it on R's computer because she is the only one who has a sound card.

Me: (ten seconds of silence, then ever so slowly) Are the speakers attached?

Caller: (Daylight breaks) Oh my God, you're right. We don't have speakers. Sorry…..

Me: Kool

I love this site.

I do second level tech support for a proprietary computer based upon the Unix operating system. Most of my tech support calls are referrals from our help desk, but a few people have direct access.

Me: Good Morning *****, this is Will

Caller: You're going to have to buy me a new monitor.

Me: (geez, it's the wife!) Really? What happened?

Caller: You know how you moved the cable Box?

Me: Yeah (Do I ever. The cat used to sleep on the old cable box because it was warm. When we got the new TV and the new broadband cable box, the cable box was too big for the new TV. When the cat tried to sleep on the broadband cable box, he would knock it off the TV. I moved the broadband cable box to an area below the TV. The cat didn't like that because he could not longer get to it.)

Caller: And you know where he moved to?

Me: Yeah (The cat discovered that the top of my wife's 17 inch monitor was almost as warm as the old cable box.)

Caller: Well, he looked funny today when he looked at me. Then I heard him gag.

Me: (I know where this is going)

Caller: Before I could do anything, he barffed all over the inside of my monitor.

Me: Not the 17! (17 inch monitors were not common until recently)

Caller: Sparks were flying and then it went dead.

Me: Yeah, you're right, you need a new monitor. More importantly, are you alright?

Caller: (sigh) I'll live.

Later, we bought a replacement 17 inch, but it took a month to build up the funds. The cat still sleeps on the monitor, but my wife keeps a real close tab on his activities.

While browsing the computer section at the local CompUSA, I overheard the salesman helping a woman with a computer she had just bought. One of her questions was how she could get rid of the annoying "Set Up The Microsoft Network" icon off her desktop. He told her with full certainty that if she deleted the icon, her computer would instantly slow down to half the normal operating speed. He even went into great details about Microsoft doing that to make sure people would use MSN all the time.

I've often wondered if the salesman beleived what he told the woman.

someone: (5:52 PM) can u send me URL to yahoo?

Raichu: (5:53 PM) http://www.yahoo.com

[no reply from this person]

I have been building and maintaning computers for a long time, so when my uncle approched me and asked if I would build his next computer, I said, "hey, no problem".

He had a 486dx2/66 with AOL as his ISP and was hell bent on not losing his favorite places and email, so I backed it up for him. I built him a nice PIII500 and used all the good stuff to go with it at the time, (ASUS, WD, micron, nVidia, SB live,ect...)And he wanted AOL installed and was quite insistant that I do what he asked. So, I put AOL 4 on his HD, booted up, configed it, rebooted about 20 times due to aol software upgrades and finally got it going. I told him about some cool web sites that he should goto so he can learn nore about the computer and get weened off of aol and get a real ISP. He was getting nervous as I entered the WWW and told me not to go there for to long as it would cost extra to browse the WWW that was not part of aol. After about 3 hours explaining to him that it was free, he finnally let himself go into the WWW zone and opened up a whole new world for himself. Now he has a PIII866eb and cable internet connection. He learned alot.

Our company sent out a CD-ROM to our remote sites that contained a number of updates with very detailed instructions as to how to set everything up. At the end of the instructions, it said to either email or call us if they had any problems installing it. About 2 weeks after we had sent them out, there were still a few sites that hadn't called back, naturally. I called one of them, and an older lady answered the phone. I asked her if she had received the update CD that we sent out. She replied, "The what?"

"A compact disc that says 'Update CD' on the top of it."

She said, "Um... Oh! Is that one of those things that you put on a record player?"

I had to hold back a laugh and responded, "Well, it sort of looks like a record without the grooves, ma'am."

She looked around for a while, then finally found it sitting on top of the computer. Apparently someone put it there for her, and she never saw it. She said, "Now what do I do with it?"

"Now, you put it in the computer."

She sighs, "How do I do that?"

So, I go on to explain where to find the button that opens the CD-ROM drive, and I hear the most excited "Ooooh!!" in my life as the drive opens to her amazement. Keep in mind that this all took place in late 2000, so CD's had been around for quite some time.

After reading every direction to this woman step-by-step and verbatim with what was on the paper, I was finally able to hang up the phone, and I didn't stop laughing for the next hour with my co-worker. Part-way through the conversation, I put her on speaker phone so he could hear the whole thing. He had to leave the room about 10 times in order to not laugh at her. People are amazing, sometimes.

we had just hired a new "certified" AIX sysadmin and had given her a desktop PC to use while we waited for her laptop to arrive. During the wait (a few days) we showed her how to connect to our network drives to file her status reports, trouble tickets, etc...

Her Laptop finally arrived, and we gave her the base setup and told her if she needed anything to let us know. 2 hours later, I walked by her cube, and she had a stack of over 100 floppies on her desk and was patiently copying the network drive from the desktop so that she could put it on her laptop in order to continue filing her reports...

Sometimes it's not just the users who are clueless

The president's wife is back...

PW: When I try to save to a floppy, it says the disk is full. What does that mean?

Me: Um... the disk is full?

I was doing Tech Support for a Major Canadian ISP with customers all across Canada, and one night I get a call from a very sweet, very polite, very non-english speaking Chinese girl who couldn't get connected. The call went as follows. (when reading CX: imagine a cute, heavily Chinese accected female voice)

Me: Thank you for calling ***** Canada Technical Support. My name is Jason, how can I help you.

CX: No Internet.

Me: (Realizing it's time to use small words) Your not able to get on the net?

CX: No. No Internet

Me: Okay, what is on your screen right now.

CX: Sceen?

Me: Yes, screen.

CX: Sorry, don't undestand. What is sceen

Me: The monitor

CX: ......

Me: The monitor, the TV? What you look at when you use the computer.

CX: ... Hehe, Sorry, don't undestand.

Me: The picture you look at on the computer.

CX: Yes! Picture, yes.

I now raise my head from my desk in excitement. Finally!

Me: Yes, picture. What do you see on the picture?

CX: I don't undestand.

My head drops back to the desk with a meaty thud.

Me: Do you see any words in the picture?

Cx: Words?

Me: Yes, words. Like My Computer, or Internet.

Cx: No, no internet. That why I call.

Me: What do you click on when you try to go on the internet?

Cx: Yes, I click.

Me: You click what, what do you click?

Cx: I don't undestand.

Me: Do you have a pen?

Cx: Yes I have pen

Me: Write down this number. * *** *** ****

Me: Call that number and they will help you with Internet.

Cx: Oh! Thank You, thank you very much. (click)

Let Customer Service deal with her. They actually have some Chinese speaking reps.

>From our trouble report database:

User is tired of the rain and would like sunshine tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I was fixing my ex-girlfriends computer. She had an older model Compaq. Obviously, we all know compaq has its downfalls. Every once in a while, she would get illegal operations involving vital dll's for Win98, including our friend, the kernel. Hence, the computer won't boot into windows...

So, being the dear that I am, I decided to go to her house to fix the computer. Trying numerous ideas went no where. So, after about 3 hours of toying with different methods, I became lost.

All of a sudden, her computer-illiterate father came into the room, and noticed that after several hours, I was still slaving over the computer. My ex was telling him why the computer wouldn't work (because the kernel was loading illegal ops), and he got all mad and said, "Well, if your computer would stop using so many d*** (internet) servers, it would work!" ... I had to refrain from laughing in front of him...