Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I work in a large call center for a large software firm we take the calls and route them to the correct support. One day the building security was testing the fire alarms, and the girl next to me was on a call and the guy asks what the noise in the background is, she says "Oh that's just the fire alarm" (not mentioning that it was a test) to which he reply's very concerned "do you need to get of the phone and get out of the building?"

First, this msg is going to be a bit long so feel free to break it up if you need to.

I'm telling you, the summer months bring out the lunatics. I have had more tech tales this month than I have had the entire time I have worked here (small ISP in the south). Prime examples:

Me: Tech support, this is Mooni

Them: Yeah, I am installing your disk and I am looking at a page that says Your Full Name, Username, and Password.

Me: Uh-huh (knowing already where this is going)

Them: Well, what do I put in as my full name?

Me: Well, what is your full name sir/ma'am? (I get these all the time).

Them: user@isp.com

Me: Are you sure? Is that what they put on your birth certificate??

It's so sad!

But you know I thought I had heard it all until I had this call:

Me: Tech support, this is Mooni, can I get your email address please? (gave up saying "username" the second day on the job)

Them: Uh, well...uhhhh...

Me: It would be something@isp.com sir.

Them: Oh well then I don't have one.

Me: Are you an MYISP customer sir?

Them: No

Me: (Thinking, then why are you calling me??) Ok, who is your internet provider sir?

Them: I don't know what you are talking about!

Me: (Still thinking they are one of our customers, just too daft to realize it) What exactly is your problem sir?

Them: Well when I try to get on, it says "invalid username or password"

Me: Ok, *where* does it say this sir?

Them: On this screen that says AOL

Me: Sir, are you an AOL customer?

Them: Yes

Me: Then you might want to call AOL and ask them that question. This is not AOL.

Them: Well can you just tell me why it's doing that?

Me: Cuz you aren't typing in your password correctly sir!!

Them: Oh ok thanks.

I worked for AOL once. I hated it. Damned if I am going to tech AOL calls anymore!! LOL

Second run-in with AOL...(yeah I said it hehe)

This lady calls up, tells me that her error msg is "an error has occurred, please try again". Well we don't have any errors that say that. So I asked her when she was getting that error. She tells me that it is every time she OPENS Internet Explorer. Ok, IE dosen't have that error either, that I know of. She is set to connect thru IE, so I set up a shortcut to her dialer and have her do that first, so that we can get a real error out of her. We hang up, I don't hear back. In the meantime, she gets another tech, tells him that she was able to dial in just fine, but then it gives her a "first run" msg, explaining how to manage her connection session, and she got spooked because apparently even tho she read it and it's pretty basic stuff, she needs us to hold her hand thru everything she does. So the tech tells her just to click "close" and go about her business. That's when I get her back, and FINALLY suss out the real problem. She installed AOL for the free trial, and had AOL.com set as her homepage. On that homepage, there is a place to enter the username and pass for "AOL Anywhere", their version of webmail. So she puts in her username and pass and it gives the error: "An error occurred, please try again". Did I mention that this lady has over 30 tickets in our system, and 17 of them are from July alone?? Damn this hot weather!!!

The ISP that I work for is a really decent, honest company. When we have problems that are our fault, we readily admit to them (unlike another ISP that starts with an A, has an O in the middle, and ends with L) and we put up phone messages explaining exactly what is going on, so that other customers can get through. What baffles me every time we have to put a message up is how many people flat out ignore it, and then when we answer the phone just innocently tell us the problem like they are the only ones having it. LISTEN people! Makes life a LOT easier! (And tech support people a lot nicer).

It's not a tech tale, but it does relate to ever story i have read here.

When it comes to stupid people, I think George Carlin put it best:

"Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stuider than that!"

>From the JokeMaster's Joke list...

Longest a customer ever spoke with no encouragement from me (I had

my phone on mute the entire time): 22 minutes.

Greatest number of four-letter words used by someone writing to me

for a job: 8.

Number of times a manager promised to fire me to get an irate

customer to go away: 5.

Worst thing to hear at the start of a call: "I'm an MCSE."

Fastest call to turn ugly without warning: "My ex-husband must have

finally figured out he's been paying my internet charges for the

last six months, because he cancelled the account. Good joke on him,

huh?

Now I'd like you to reactivate it for me."

Most surreal call: "I wrote DOS, Windows 3.1 and Linux before I

started your parent company. Now my account has been cancelled, but

I

really need it reopened because all the other ISPs in this city are

part of the homosexual conspiracy."

Most unsuccessful demand for a refund: "I got my ten year-old son

to click the accept button, so I haven't agreed to pay anything,

mister."

Biggest now-you-tell-me factor: "Wait, before you delete it all,

can you save my thesis research?"

Biggest what-has-this-got-to-do-with-it factor: A woman who wanted

to tell me how she'd been hospitalised with necrotizing faciitus

(flesh eating bacteria) at the beginning of 1999.

Second biggest what-has-this-got-to-do-with-it factor: "Listen, I'm

a surgeon. Don't try and tell me the internet can't go any faster."

Biggest I've-been-conned factor: The cancer victim debilitated by a

stroke who broke down and cried on the phone, leading me to bend the

rules and refund his charges -- just like the previous three

operators he spoke with...

User who missed the point by the widest margin: "I'm not asking you

about the internet, I want to know why my email is late. Where's the

postman?"

Mellowest user: Waited in the phone queue for over ten minutes just

to ask me what the date was.

Worst case of good intentions gone bad: the immigrant language

student who wouldn't rest until he received an apology from the

general manager for the blatant racism of an operator offering to

transfer him to someone fluent in his native language.

Clearest case of too much free time: the woman who complained of

the sexist attitude we displayed by using a photo montage to

illustrate a news story about a local politician, based on the logic

that by cutting up photos of a woman, we were symbolically cutting

up the woman herself, reducing her to the status of an object.

Biggest we-can't-match-that factor: "Well, your competition says

they can connect me at 56k on my 9600 baud modem, so what do you say

to that?"

I don't usually work in tech support being a programmer but about a month after starting my current job I was given the task of debugging a system the company had previously written. We had another big project starting up (turned into the project from hell but that's another story) and all people who had written the system were either busy or no longer with the company.

So anyway I started trying to work through the bug reports despite having no knowledge of the system. One of the first problems I looked at read along the lines of "This component isn't finding records that we expect it to". I noticed that the bug report had a history (they were in Word document format) and that our last response was to ask for screenshots to diagnose the problem. None had been provided so I wrote back to ask for them again.

Their response was along the lines of : "Three of us sat down together, discussed the matter, and decided that you don't need screenshots".

Our response : "Our warrenty agreement says you have to give us screenshots".

They responded by asking for a teleconference where they said that because it was a batch process they couldn't produce screenshots. We told them there should be a logfile. Finally they agreed to have some of their people to look at the logfile to try and work out what was happpening.

About month after that we hired another programmer to specifically look after these problems so I was dedicated full time to the aforementioned project from hell.

Jump forward about 4-5 months and the project from hell has died thanks to the clients from hell we were working for. I find myself with plenty of spare time so they put me back onto fixing the bugs in the old system with the other guy they hired. He starts allocating me bugs to fix, as I work through them one of them looks familiar. Yep, it's the old bug that they were going to look at themselves. Somehow it's been recycled back to us with no indication that they had ever looked at it or that they were ever going to look at it.

Rather than try and argue with them, and feeling a lot more confident with the system, I ask that they send me the logfile to look at.

A few days later the logfile arrives via e-mail and I begin to peruse it's contents comparing it to the applications source code. It takes me all of three minutes to notice one of the values the log file was reporting seemed a little out of whack. The value in question was a system variable that would exclude from the search anything that had been added to the system within a certain period of time. No problems, it worked perfectly. Except that the value was meant to represent months and someone had set it to 90, presumably thinking it meant days. As a result anything that had been added within the last 7 1/2 years would be excluded from the search, which basically meant everything since the system wasn't that old.

Not only did this 6 month old bug take me 3 minutes to solve I didn't even need to fix it. The system variables were the clients responsibility to maintain so I didn't even need to send a fix for the problem. All I had to do was note in the bug reports history that it seemed to be working fine but that they might like to decrease the exclusion value to something more reasonable.

..................................................

On the other hand I had even more amusing moments at my previous job. I'd been working on an old Apple Macintosh running Personal Oracle and I was told that for portability reasons I'd need to develop it on a NT box. They asked me what specs I'd need so I asked for a dual processor machine with a SCSI hard drive. However since they were getting their machines from HP what I got was a standard model Kayak with a single processor and an IDE hard drive. Only because I'd mentioned SCSI in my request they'd put in a high end Adaptec SCSI card. Well I shouldn't say that that's what I got because after a month it still hadn't arrived so my supervisor rang up the head of our IT department to ask where my computer was. I have nothing against women in IT but I really must object to this particular woman in IT. She told us that because my computer had a non-standard part in it (the SCSI card) it wouldn't be covered under the regular servicing agreement. So even though the computer was with them I wouldn't be getting it, they were just going to sell it to recoup costs. As a result I was very surprised when one of the IT staff (a contracter) turned up the following day with my new NT box with SCSI card installed and no idea about why my machine wouldn't be covered under the standard service agreement.

A few years ago when I was in school, I worked summers in a small computer store. Basically I answered phones and fixed easy computer problems for customers.

One day this guy comes in with a no-brainer problem, but I was working on something else at the time, so I told him to come back in two days for his comp.

Later that day I sat down with his PC to sort the problem out and was surprised by his Windows desktop background picture. Is was a naked guy with a huge, stiff c*ck! I burst into laugher and soon I've got the whole store looking over my shoulder and laughing. In addition the guy had 400+ MB of gay porn on his harddrive.

Anyway, I fixed his problem, but had BIG, BIG problems keeping a straight face when he came to pick up his PC. It didn't help at all having the boss making obscene gestures and supressing snickers behind the customers back.

Now I work in the computer department for a government institution, and have this to say about giving tech-support to (l)users:

"Never attribute anything to maliciousness or ill-will which can also be attributed to ignorance or stupidity"

/PG

This customer was having difficulty reaching our home page. He was an elderly gentleman, obviously not fluent with all this newfangled technology. I asked him the usual mumbo jumbo about his system, and then tried to walk him through getting from his AOL home page to ours.

tech: "Ok, now type in our address into the address bar."

cust: "What address bar?"

tech: "That white field that runs horizontally across the top of your page."

cust: "Oh. Type in your address in there?"

tech: "Yes."

After some typing I asked him what happened.

cust: "It says page cannot be displayed."

tech: "What address did you type in?"

No joke, honest to God truth, the guy starts reading our street address back to me!

The company I work for has a range of telecomms solutions. One of these is a dedicated server/client system that allows supervisors to monitor the utilisation of their call centre agents in real time. This is a completely dedicated system, with its own separate network, so the supervisors end up with two machines on their desktop.

On one particular site, we had a large number of issues, that we slowly managed to resolve (the customer was a cheapskate, and had bought our system, designed for a much smaller environment, because it was about 1/3 of the price of the system the should have bought. And they wonder why they have problems).

We'd managed to resolve all but one of their issues, over a period of some months, but the server kept on rebooting some time around midnight every weekday. The system was designed to write all the call information received during the day, at midnight, so most days the customer came in early morning to find out all theirs stats for the previous day were missing. Everyone got paid by the number of calls they took, so we were understandably not popular whenever we showed our faces.

Anyway, after a few weeks of this, we agree to hang about on site until early morning, for a few days.

The first day we were there nothing happened. We left around 3a.m. tired and pissed off.

The next day, coming up to midnight, my colleague and I are sitting around in the kitchen, having a cup of coffe and an illicit cigarette out the window, when we notice somebody walking past the door....keeping quiet, we follow two security guards as they amble into the main call centre, and look through the windows in the door as they walk over to the client pc's, install doom, start playing, until about 15mins later the server reboots, as its been going berserk trying to make sense of the network traffic.

Three weeks of grief down to two security guards...so my colleague and I decide to have a bit of fun....creeping up behind the guards "Oi, you, what the bloddy hell do you think you're doing!?!" two near heart attacks later, a rather unpleasant meeting in the morning with the customer apologising profusely to us and cursing the guards, three weeks worth of chargeable visits at £800 a day, and two sackings later, problem resolved.

Got a fair chunk of overtime out of it too.

After that, the customer starting using floppy drive locks.

I work for an mid sized ISP up in Canada and got a call the other day from a member of our armed forces. After giving me his username, ect, I asked him what the problem was. He told me that they haven't gotten any E-Mail for 3 years and wnated to know why. After hitting the mute button for a bit I asked why it's taken 3 years to call us up? He laughed and told me he saked the same question and got no answer. After both of us stopped chuckling I gave him the proper POP and SMTP servers, thanked him and hung up. The mail is flowing mightly through the base now!

Skyhacker007 here, During the Sirccam virus outbreak here I sent out a major email with highly detailed instructions on turning on your pc and logging in and how to map a drive. This cut down on the number of calls I got as to how to login and map drives. Heres on call i got.

Me- Helpdesk SkyHacker007 here

User- Yes hi..I got the email about the virus...

Me- Ok and did it work?

User- No I cant map the G: drive. ( Network Drive )

Me- ( I was a little confused as my instructions were very very detailed ) Ok lets look at some settings...

Me- ( did all the tech stuff for about 2 minites...then thought...)

Me- Are you at the University Now?

User- No I am at home.

Me- Ok well those drives are for inside people only here at work, I suggest you go to this website for a patch....

____________________________________________________________

Case Study.

1. Never think a user has done all the steps they say they have.

2. never try to map a network drive from outside the network

3. Never drink a bottle of Rye and do helpdesk, It slows you down! ( dont ask its a long weekend ) Party on Techtales

This is a story from the other side of the fence. We were having some problems with our mail server system. Every time we shut our computers down all the information would be deleted. We would have to manually type in the outgoing mail server, username, password...you get the point. At the end of the day we would shut down our computers and in the morning, all the information would be gone again. Funny thing is, this only happened to two of our computers. All the others were fine. We call up tech support.

Tech: Hello, how may I help you?

Me: We are having a problem with our mail server. (I explain, in detail, the problem of the disappearing information).

Tech: Hold on a second. (He puts me on hold for about two minutes, then comes back with this beauty) Well, I just shut down and rebooted my computer and all the information is still there.

Me: !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? Uh, that's great to know that YOUR computer is working, but what about ours?

Tech: Oh, I have no idea. You'll have to call XXXXXXX (gives other tech support help desk number)

Me: Thank you very much for being of absolutely no use to me. (Hang up)

It would have been nice if he had told me from the start he didn't know what the problem was.

About 6 years ago, I worked in a rad shop/garage. I had finally managed to talk the boss into springing for a computer (100mhz 486 with 8mb ram and no CD or sound). After a year or so of having this barely adequate beast, he comes back into the office and says that he was just at an auction, and he got a computer and software for $1000. He wanted me to look at it, and tell him if he got his moneys worth. (Love that after the fact stuff). Anyhoo, he got a 33mhz 386 with a 2X SCSI CD drive, a Soundblaster sound card, and an automotive repair program. If the program worked, it *might* have been worth it, so I said yeah (not wanting him to feel bad). I had upgraded my old 486 to 32MB of RAM and Win95, so I told the boss that the CD and sound would be of more use in my computer. :) He agreed. I managed to get the sound card and all the drivers installed, but I couldn't figure out the SCSI card, so I talked him into letting me buy a new one. Bought it, and got everything working, so my next step was getting the automotive software going. It turned out that it used a subscription method, they would send you a "key" that plugged into the printer port, letting the software operate. That was when I found out that a parallel port and external SCSI port are physically the same. When the computer locked up, and I saw smoke, I knew there was a problem.

I took the card back and said that "I just turned the computer on, and saw smoke! I need a new one." The person at the cust. service desk took the card back to the techie in back, they conferred for what seemed like a good 10 minutes. After a few dirty looks from the techie, they agreed to replace the burned card. WHEW! As for the software, it was already expired! So for the most part, the boss paid a grand for an old CD drive and soundcard. (He did manage trade the rest to an employee for $300 that he owed him).

I am a sys admin for an internet company and I had an interesting situation this week. Our web site went down at about 9:30. I called our serverfarm to see what was happening. I ran a few tracerouts on our subnet and I saw a few router loops. Thinking it was a router misconfiguration I talked them trough some things to check. After 4 hours and many calls from our CEO, CTO, ETC... I found that they thought we were a different company and so they discontinued our service. All of us involved began working our way up the command chain chewing people out as we went. It turns out that they didn't update their records of who was in which rack. Anyways, we had talk to everyone possible and they appologized and told us they were reconfiguring the routers to get us service again. Hmmm... OK, I thought. 2 hours later still no service. I finally talked to someone there and he asked me if the Sun E450 in the right rack was ours also. I thought this was strange being that all of our equipment was in one rack there. Well, it turns out that they UNRACKED our 5 Sun servers, Console server, 2 firewalls, 2 hubs, and all our back-up equipment!! Then they moved it to another room!! It turns out that all this time they had been trying to rebuild our server configuration from memory!! Needless to say I went ballistic that someone had fully dismantled our company because of a clerical error. 10 hours later our company was up and running again. Talk about a tech making a mistake, yeah, tell me about it!

I'm baaaack. Real hum-dinger this time, and providing the monthly quota of "The PEBCAK isn't necessarily on the user's end."

I recently purchased an HP printer and scanner, as they were having a "combo sale." Printer's fine, and is actually pretty speedy for an inkjet (as opposed to the laser printer I was used to that finally gave up the ghost.) The scanner, however, was malfunctioning. Somewhere during shipment, the "lock" switch (which, ironically, stops the internal mechanics from sliding around and getting damaged during shipment) was broken. I call up the tech support hotline, we confirm that yes it IS the hardware malfunctioning, and the guy gives me this other number to call up to have the replacement sent out. Swell!

.... Only problem is, that he didn't give me any other information, check warranty status or anything, and this secondary number is for sending out replacement PIECES (i.e. cables, the removable top, etc.) So, I get sent back to the main line, only have a 1 min. 13 second wait on hold (my cordless phone has a timer on it) and explain the situation to the new tech. I tell him the process of events, and he goes to check on my warranty info..... this wait was literally 3 times longer than my wait on hold. Fortunately enough, everything went through smoothly, I faxed them over the necessary information, and my replacement scanner was sent out the following Monday.

.... A good two days before my system went belly-up. My system had been Windows 95, upgraded to 98 SE, but I figured I may as well go ahead and get the plain Win98SE. Somehow, something got screwed up JUST RIGHT so that install/uninstall and certain programs that accessed the Temp directory just wouldn't work. Don't ask me how, I honestly don't know. Well, my scanner gets here, and I figure I may as well plug it in, and lo and behold it lights up and things move around properly! Unfortunately, the scanner's SOFTWARE is one of the things not working.

Long story short (too late,) I finally receive my Win98SE disk, back-up and reformat my main drive (fortunately the majority of my stuff was on my secondary drive) and *TADA* it all works! So, the shipping label having been messed up, I call HP up to find the shipping information.

..........

It took me more than 10 minutes to explain to the rep that I had already GOTTEN the replacement printer, it works like a charm, I only wanted to know where to send the MALFUNCTIONING one. Here's a paraphrasing:

Rep: Okay, sir, if we can just go into the control panel please.

Me: What for?

Rep: I just want to check to make sure that the system is recognizing the scanner.

Me: .... It IS recognizing the scanner. The scanner works, I just---

Rep: I thought you said it WASN'T working?

Me: The OLD one wasn't, I got a replacement that DOES.

Rep: Okay then, let's check the settings.

Me: .... But it works, I just need the shipping address to return the old one.

Rep: Well, let's just check the settings.

Me: Why?

Rep: So we can fix the problem.

Me: THE PROBLEM IS FIXED! JUST TELL ME WHERE TO MAIL THE OTHER ONE!!!

Rep: Can you just go into the control panel please?

Okay.... Now, I can understand someone refusing to believe the problem is at their end, but techies? If the person is saying that THERE IS NO MORE PROBLEM, please believe them. At least it's an 800 number I called....

I called my DSL company after finding that the service did not work and that the modem was showing its "No Connection" light. I called their support and they walked me through the config of the software (already setup) and checking comp setup etc. I told him that the modem did not appear to connect at all and that the other Mac on the network also failed to connect. He walked me through the settings on my computer some more. Finnaly, he said:

"I just had an idea (gee, was it your idea) that the modem isn't getting a signal and that it is not your computer."

I told him that I thought that he was right and than it was a quick jump from there to figure out that it was just low quality wiring to the jack and that any other phone jack would work fine!

I'm a call center technician for Can*n. I support printers, scanners, multipasses, fax machines, copiers, cameras, and the like.

Older gentleman with a heavy country accent calls in one afternoon with printer troubles.

[Gathered customer info.)

Me: "How can I help you with your printer today, Sir?" (You have to specify with which trauma you're willing to help them, otherwise you hear "the life story.")

Customer: "It don't print." (Well, no kidding, I guess he called the right place.)

Me: "Well, what happens when you try to print?"

[We recreate the error, since of course he didn't have it on his screen and had no recollection of anything specific. Error in Status Monitor: Printer Not Responding. Usually just reset the printer and reboot the PC and all is well. I tell him to restart his computer.)

Customer: "But the computer is started . . ."

Me: "Great! Now turn it off, and then back on." (Explaining the concept of restarting from the start menu would have been too complicated for this type. He's obviously never done it before.)

He does so, sort of.

Customer: "Everything is still the same. Nothing has changed."

Me: "Are you pressing the button on the monitor or on the computer?"

Customer: "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm pressing the button on the computer."

Me: "Okay, let's try it again."

[Same result]

Customer: "Nope, still the same. You sure you know what you're doing?"

Me: "Yes, Sir, that's why I work here. Now, describe to me which button you're pushing."

Customer: "I told you, the one on the computer!"

Me: "The one by the corner of your screen?"

Customer: "Yes, the one on the computer!!!"

Me: "Sir, that's actually your monitor. Your computer is the big plasic case with the lights and buttons on it."

Customer: "I don't know what you're talking about, I have no such thing here."

Me: "You know, the thing you put your CDs in . . ."

Customer: "I don't have that!"

Me: (Light bulb goes off!) "Sir, what kind of computer desk do you have?"

Customer: "I don't know, my grandson built it when he brought the computer over and set it up for me. Big ugly desk, if ya ask me."

Me: "Sir, does this desk have any cabinets in it?"

Customer: "Yeah, there's this one here by my feet, but my grandson told me not to open that."

Me: "Sir, I'd like you to go ahead and open that cabinet."

Customer: "But I'm not supposed to . . ."

Me: "Sir, if you want your printer to work, you'll have to open that cabinet."

[Sound of shuffling around, cabinet opening]

Customer: "OH MY GOD, WHAT THE H*LL IS THAT?!?"

[Mute button, I'm laughing hysterically. Breathe, girl, breathe . . .]

Me: "Sir, that is your computer."

[end]

Actual Usenet post on 24hoursupport.helpdesk:

when i go to my web site on btinternet

www.btinternet.com/nameremoved

it wont work........

why do i have to use a ~

as in

www.btinternet.com/~nameremoved

My reply:

Um, pretty much for the same reason why a letter sent to "5830 Holland Street" doesn't get to me on "5830 *ALMA* Street"...

Sometimes I wonder how a tech can be hired without basic computer knowledge. It's amazing to me. One day, I'm sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when the tech near me has a call come in. Mbr is receiving an error message when trying to install a program. I knew immediately what to do, but I didn't want to butt in the call. So this alleged tech has no clue (big surprise) and has to go ask a lead what to do. Me, being nosy and not having a call, listen in to what the supervisor tells him to do. He tells him to look on the disc and see if a certain file is present (not what I would have done, but whatever). So the tech comes all the way back to his desk and tells the mbr to open up his cd rom drive and take out the disc and look at it! I almost fell out of my chair when I heard him tell the person on the phone that! I started laughing and the tech supervisor came over to make sure that he was following directions. He saw me laughing and asked the other so called "tech" if the file was present. Dummy Tech told him that he had the mbr take the disc out and they couldn't see the file. I could feel a serious case of the giggles coming on and the tech supervisor had to tell him just how to "explore" files on a disc. LOL. What a freaking idiot.

C=Customer, M=Me

M: Good morning, Tech Support - how can I help you?

C: Hi - I'm trying to print something in duplex but whatever I do it doesn't work.

I get her to check the printer driver - duplex is enabled - I check the spec of the printer - duplex cartridge is installed. This all takes a few minutes, so, thinking that we may have fixed it 'by accident (!)' I get her to try again.

C: Nope - it's still only printing on one side.

Eventually I get her to send me the document. It's only got one page.

M: Why are you trying to print a one-paged document in duplex mode - don't you realise that you'll never see anything on the back of the page?

C: I thought duplexing meant the same thing on both sides...

Today I got this call from the IT administrator of a hospital and he told me another tech had sent him instructions how to do something on a UNIX server. I don't know much about UNIX so I mentally prepared to transfer his call, but it turned out that he couldn't find a certain character on his keyboard, a character he described as "a line". It took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant, assuming he knew where to find the minus. After asking a couple of questions to get a mental image of what he was looking for ("is it a vertical or horizontal line?"), it turned out he was looking for the pipe ("|").

Who died and made this guy a tech, let alone the administrator of the whole system?!?

Before I moved I use to do tech support for the all famouse AOL. Before then I had no clue how many people were clueless about computers and evedently how hard it was for people to listen to us, and insist that they know what the problem is but they call for help from me. This one I have never forgotten about, in my 2 years for working for aol I thought I had run across everything and I could stop myself from laughing them, but this one I NEVER expected. I got this call right after Christmas last year. It was an old lady that of course just gotten her first computer and wanted to get online with it. Her son had done everything for her, installed it and created her an account all she had to do was to sign on and have fun. The call went something like this:

Me: *Opening script that we say for every call*

Cus: I can't get online, I think I damaged my computer

Me: Damaged your computer? What makes you think that? Did you drop/spill/ break something on your computer?

Cus: No it just keeps makeing this horrible noise comeing out of my computer. It sounds like its destroying the insides

Me: Is there any pattern to it? Do you click on something or try to do something, or does it just start makeing the sound randomly?(At this moment I was thinking that it could be her hard drive clicking)

Cust: No it does it when I do this...

I then hear what the problem is... absuletly nothing was wrong she was signing on and was hearing the modem sounds.

Me: AAhh ok yea I know what that is, its fine its not hurting your computer in anyway, thats just the normal modem sounds you will hear when you try to connect.

Cust: But it sounds so horrible!!

Me: Yea I know but its not hurting your computer at all(At this moment I thought that I had the problem licked)(by the way I wasn't laughing yet)

Me: Lets go ahead and sign on to make sure everything is running ok. Go ahead and click the sign on button. (by this time she had clicked on cancle from when she was showing me the sound)

Cust: Um are you sure its ok? It sounds really bad

Me: Yes, its perfectly normal

Cust: Um, I don't want to

Me: (totally suprised) How come? Its not going to hurt your computer, I promise

Cust: Um ok..( I hear the modem dial and then the noise then it stops short)

Me: Um what happend?

Cust: uh I don't know. The noise stoped

Me: Did it give you an error message

Cust: No, I cancelled it

Me: How come, its not going to hurt your computer

Cust: I don't know it just sounds so horrible

Me: Its ok its not going to hurt your computer, try it again.

Cust: Ok

The sound cuts off short again

Me: Did you cancel again?

Cust: Yea, I don't want to damage my computer

Me: Its not going to hurt your computer, I've already told you that, its perfectly normal

Cust: Ok

I hear the modem noise again and of course its cut short again

Me: Ma'm, In order to get on the internet your going to have to let that go though, you can't keep clicking on the cancle button (I was trying very hard to keep from laughing)

Cust: Ok

Modem noise again and its cut short one more time

Me: Like I said you won't get online if you don't let that complete, if you want to you could call your son back over, he should be able to help you.

Cust: Ok I'll call him over when he gets off work

When I got off the phone I couldn't help but laugh till I had tears, it was just one of those things that you would have to be there for it to be that funny

Steal8toe

Although all of us techs would like there to be a competancy test for people to buy computers, so that we don't have ulsers (I dinno if that is spelled right) with the names of the products or services that we support. The comptuer industry would never go for such a test.... how could they unload their crappy products, the ones that anyone with a brain would unload?

I've got a ton of quotes and things I find funny that you may get a kick out of.

"You mean you can't see what's on my screen"

"I dont' have anything illegal on it or anything"

"I know that you are safe from lightning in your car because your tires ground you (Actually they insulate you) but I was driving with my windows open today is it possible that lightning came in my windows and struck the unit and shorted it out?"

"I'm having an affair with a police officers sister, my wife is ok with it and all...."

"I'm getting a buffer overrun" (When dealing with a CD Burner)

"BUS" "SUB" (When trying to talk about USB

"Windows 97" (I swear some texan is making millions on windows 97 pirated coppies)

"Windows 2001" (Customer thinks that the version of office is also the version of windows)

"10 mega" "omega" (iomega)

"V 10" (Vio)

"What I wanna do is"

"I'm MCSE certified"

"Is this walmart?"

"I'm gonna do the nasty with my machine"

"Say that again for retards"

"i'm not retarded, but i sure feel like it"

"191MHz of RAM"

I could go on and on and on.. but I figure that's enough.

Some of the most annoying things is to deal with users that cannot read properly (or at least cannot say what they read) and people who cannot follow instructions. I had one user add a couple of IP addresses in a list over the phone:

M: Click 'add'.

U: Shall I click add?

M: yes.

M: Then type: ten dot one (10.1)

U: ten dot one

M: dot two dot two

U: two dot no... dot two dot two

M: what does it say now?

U: ten dot one dot two... dot two dot two

M: No, it shall be ten dot one dot two dot two (10.1.2.2)

U: It is.

(It was. But apparently it was too hard to say it properly...)

Another one: I had to reset one user's novell assword (happens all the time after vacations). Told user to leave password blank and click OK, then she would be asked if she wanted a new password, click yes there, and type your new password in the password fileds and click OK.

Quite simple instructions, but after a minute she calls back:

U: I tried to type my old password bot it diedn't work.

M: What do you have on the screen now?

U: Password.

M: Do you have the screen with two fields for password? (that is the 'make new pwd'-screen)

U: No, just 'password'.

M: (lightbulb in head) Is it the Novell client-screen?

U: Yes!

M: Is the password field blank?

U: It is empty?

M: Click OK.

(silence)

M: What do you have on the screen now?

U: Password.

M: No, click OK.

U: (clicks OK) the password has expla... eh..

Someone in the background: Click yes.

U: (silence)

M: Did you click yes?

U: No.

M: Click yes.

U: (Clicks yes)

entering a new password actually went OK, i think she got some help from the mysterious someone.

Ok. I provide tech support for an ISP. Anyway, one of the main things we do is, after making major changes, we have the users restart the computer. Well, one day, I was speaking with a guy, and had him restart the computer. First I was asked how to restart the computer, after telling him to click Start, then Shutdown, then select Restart, we hang up. Ten minutes later I get a call back from the guy, he tells me something like this: There must be something wrong with my computer, when you had me restart the computer, the blue screen with that says ScanDisk didn't come up. I silently groaned, wondering how much damage this man has caused by not shutting down properly for YEARS. (He said he's owned the computer since 1998 and he insisted that if the blue screen didnt come up, there must be something wrong)

duh!

This actually happened to a colleague.

The tech support is on the 3rd floor of a 4 storey building. The following ensued:

Tech support answers the phone: Hello, tech support (TS).

User:My machine is making this funny noise continuously.

TS: Since when?

User: For the past 5mins.

TS: What are you trying to do?

User: I'm not even working on it at all.

TS: Is the PC itself on?

User: Yes, it is. I think you should come down quickly.

TS: Ok. I'll be there.

TS dashes down only to discover that the user's arm was resting on the keyboard. So, he removed the arm from the keyboard & the noise stopped.

TS logged the support call in the register thus:

Assisted "user" to remove his arm from the keyboard.

Hello, tech support.

The user insisted that the

I was be-all, end-all tech guru for a small company of approximately 50 users. One of my responsibilities included helpdesk support. I knew my day was not going to be a good one when I got this call from the VP early one Monday morning.

me: Good morning, Liz speaking.

VP: What have you done to my computer?

me: Pardon me.....

VP: What have you done to my computer? It's got your name on it.

me: My name? Can you give me more information?

VP: It's got your name on it.....on the screen....user name...

me: Oh, now I understand. That's OK, just select my name and type your user id and then put in your password on the next line and press Enter and you can login to Novell.

VP: Novell??? I have never logged into Novell. I have NEVER seen this screen before.

me: ***Stunned into silence, the company has used Novell networking for 5 years....the VP has been with the company longer than that*** Oh sure you have, just type in your username and password and press Enter to login.

VP: **vehemently** I have NEVER seen this screen before, I have NEVER logged into Novell.

me: ***VP name***, Yes you have. All you have to do is type in your username and password.

VP: I don't have a username and password. I have never logged into Novell before.

**This goes on back and forth for a minute or two, both of us getting frustrated.**

me: OK, **VP name**, then you have never printed anything before, and you have never got email before, because you have to be logged into Novell to do either of them!!! ***I'm practically screaming by now!*** I have to go now and help someone else.

I hang up the phone and go downstairs to the Prez's office (my direct report) and told him the story, and advised him that he would probably be getting a call from VP complaining about my lack of assistance. Sure enougth, as we talked the phone rang and it was VP. I left after hearing the beginnings of the conversation. It took the Prez 1 1/2 hours to convince the VP he had indeed been logging into Novell for a very long time. It turns out the VP was just back after 3 weeks vacation, and had forgotten his password!!!! I couldn't believe it, a forgotten password is no problem, I do that myself sometimes, but VP was just too proud to have to admit it to me!

Email 1:

«Dear Tech Support,

my key is broken and does not work. Please come fix it.

(user)

»

Well, here we could just go up with a new keyboard, but we decided that would be too logical.

Response:

«Your Key appears to be working fine. Perhaps your monitor is not displaying the character correctly. Alternatively, perhaps you should clarify which key is causing issues for you as it appears a crucial letter/character in your message did not come through for some reason.

-Tech Support

(quoted message)

»

Mail 2.

«Dear Tech Support,

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz (--- see the problem? Please come fix it.

»

OK, so it was a long day...

This happened a couple of months ago so I geuss it's safe to spit out the story. It involved some charges made to my account by my ISP for something I don't have. I have a DSL connection and when I put this system together, I didn't bother getting a modem, because I knew I wouldn't need one. Here's the story...

Me: Hi! I got my monthly bill for the service, but there seems to be $140 of extra charges. I'm wondering what this is all about.

Support: Well, I'll need your account# and user id#.

(I give the required info, and hear typing in the background)

Support: Yes sir, that would be your dial up charges.

Me: My WHAT?!?!

Suppport: When you connect to the internet, we charge by time...

Me: Ummm....I signed up for the unlimited acsess package...I've never had this problem in the year I've been using the service.

Support: Could you hold for a second?

(More typing)

Support: Ahhh! Yes, you have the dsl unlimited acsess. The charges are for your dial-up use during the month.

Me: My WHAT?!?!

Support: When you connect to the internet through a modem. We give you 10 hours of free "roam-time", but anything past that has to be charged.

Me: But, I don't have a modem.

Support: You don't have a modem?

Me: No, I don't have a modem.

Support: Are you at your computer right now?

(at this point I'm thinking to myself here we go with the "let's just check your system settings...", I should also mention that I'm a tech so I use the regular speil on clients to kinda figure out how much they know about computers)

Me: yes I'm at my computer.

Support: Can I have you right click on "my computer"?

Me: ok, done. But, I don't really see the point. The problem is on your side of things I'm being billed for something I don't have.

Support: I understand sir, but we want to just check out all possibilities...Can I have you select "device manager"?

Me: Fine...Done...

Suport: Good! Now where it has a little picture of a phone with "Modems" written next to it, can I have you double click the icon?

Me: No, you can't, because I don't have a modem.

Suport: There's no little picture of a phone?

Me: No, I don't have a modem so there won't be a little picture of a phone.

Support: Can I have you hit the refresh button located at the bottom of the window?

(At this point I'm beating my head against the desk, but I'm also unwilling to get charged an extra $140 on top of my monthly bill for something I KNOW I don't have)

Me: Fine... Nothing...

Support: There's no icon of a phone showing up?

Me: No, and that's because I have no modem.

Support: What operating system are you using?

Me: Win2K, Windows millenium, and Windows 98.

Support: Ahhhh, I see the problem now! You've been charged when you login with your other computers.

Me: Ummm...no, I don't have any other computers, this is my only one...

Support: Excuse me?

(This is the part where I completely lose him)

Me: I have a triple boot system. I work with 3 operating systems, on the same hard drive.

Support: Huh?

Me: Don't ask, could you just check the phone# to see where my dial up acsess has been, has been made from? It should be logged on your end.

Support: Can you hold for a second?

(pause of about 15 mins, I have a earpiece phone so I really didn't care how long I was on the phone)

Support: Sorry for the wait sir, what we're going to do is have you go to your control panel and manually search for your modem. Click on the "add new hardware" icon.

Me:(getting a little irrate at this point) No we're not, because you're going to have me look for a modem I don't have, never bought, and simply isn't there. Can I speak to your supervisor please?

Support: Can you hold for a minute?

(A few minutes later, his supervisor comes on the line)

Support: Hello mr.****, what seems to be the problem?

Me: I have $140 worth of charges made to my account, for a dial-up connection that I can't possibly make, seeing as I have no modem. Other than the DSL modem you sent me.

Supervisor: Can you hold for a minute?

(Another pause)

Supervisor: Well Mr.****, it seems there was a problem with billing, and charged you as a 56K client. We'll remove the extra charges right away. Sorry for the inconvience.

Me: Thank you...*Click*

The charges were remove within a day of my ordeal, but the whole incident left me wondering, "Why are these guys getting paid twice as much as I am, when they have no qualifications whatsoever?" It's also the same in reverse, some people shouldn't even be allowed within 10' of a computer.

There are only three of us in our office, the IT manager who's knowledge is oozing out of his brains(true techi', smart ass guru you know the type!!), myself (who will admit to being slightly thick),and our 'not so competent' IT support, who, given a brain would probably be dangerous.

When the manager was on holiday recently, lavishing his time at home with his computer(sad guru's don't need sun!!), our 'external' email and internet server decided it no longer wanted to work, and as I was in a meeting at the time, our 'not so competent' support, sent him an email to ask him how to fix it??

Sad though we are, we hadn't got the heart to tell!!

Monday morning, everyone is still half assleep when the first call comes in; "Help someone stole my screen".

me: Then you should call the police mem.

she: I did, and when they came they said I should call my helpdesk as the computer is still here, and then they left smiling...

me: (scratching my head..) Not knowing what to say, start to do the normal Q&A (he!, it was mondaymorning ok!)

she: after ten minutes, she cries we are not getting anywhere, I will never have my laptop back up and running..

me: LAPTOP!????????

turns out that the cleaner closed the lit of her laptop on friday to clean around it...

boehooee...

I worked at the phone-based support department for a national chain that sounds like "Fears". Apparently, they decided that selling most items is not enough, and they wanted to sell computers too.

My "Team Leader" (God I hated those) told us about a call he got earlier in the week.

An older gentleman called up demanding that we replace his computer because the monitor would not work. Our policy, of course, was to try to troubleshoot the problem to see if it could be fixed without having to replace the equipment.

After about 20 minutes of talking, it's made clear that the gentleman had been cleaning his shotgun, and it accidentally discharged, destroying the monitor.

The gentleman was upset. "But, I bought the monitor at [chain name] and got the extended warranty. You HAVE to replace it."

The TL responded with "Sorry sir, we support hardware problems, but not damage that is caused by the consumer"

Old man: "But, I bought the computer at [chain name] and I bought the shotgun at [chain name]!"

The TL thought for a few seconds, and then responded with "Where did you buy the bullets?"

The old man admitted defeat and hung up.

For printing problems, my favourite was the day I was called to look at a printer with "a flashing red light.".

Sadly we didn't have remote access to the printer so having checked the few obvious things (paper loaded etc) I went to visit them.

When I got there the printer looked fine. The customer explained the problem was intermittent. Then the light started flashing when somebody sent a print job. "Look" cried the customer, "it's doing it again.".

Somehow I managed to keep a straight face and point out the word under the indicator light - "Busy"...

It's not always the users who are clueless.

I get this feeling that the "tech support" my cable ISP has is completely clueless, and only get the job because they know how to spell their own names...

I was doing a couple of things (surfing, mudding etc) when all of a sudden the connections stopped.

So I switched consoles and checked with ping/traceroute etc what was wrong. Turned out that their routers went belly up.

So I call tech support, to tell them what happened (and ask them if they were working on it already).

This tech then starts his list:

- powercycle the modem (There's nothing wrong there)

- reset the computer (Linux firewall with long uptime)

- physically remove the network card, remove all traces of

it in windows (Did I mention I use Linux?) and reinstall

everything.

"Oh, you run Linux... We don't give support to Linux"

I /DID/ tell them I didn't want support, I just wanted to tell them there was a problem in their network.

"No, there's no problem reported for your area."

(been out for 30 minutes by now)

He then goes to ask someone else (or go for a piss or whatever)

When he comes back he informs me that he just got told by his superior that there was a problem with their routers.

[sound of me repeatedly hitting the table with my head]

I gave up on their "tech support", it costs 22 c/m and you're in hold for an average of 10-15 minutes (hearing a jingle play over and over and over again. (and again))

Now if only someone would configure their Cleanfeed filter that currently thinks I'm a usenet spammer because I wanted to post something once....

I am the network admin and only computer support for a company office of about 60 people. Because of the architecture of our building, our server/network room has to share space with a records room. I had only been there for about 3 months when the following occurred:

I had run out to grab something to eat, and when I returned, I was stopped by one of my users in the hallway. "I don't know if anyone's called you yet, but I figured you ought to know that our network has been down for about 15 minutes," she said.

I was incensed that no one had thought to call me, but I figured that there could have been all kinds of reasons for it, so I just focused on the task at hand: figuring out what happened and getting it fixed. I went into the server room and there was no power at all, so I tried not to freak out while I unplugged everything, just in case it should suddenly come back online. I checked the UPSes and opened up the doors to the circuit breakers. Suddenly the same user appeared at the doorway. "I think someone hit that button," she said, and pointed at the great red kill button on the wall by the door.

"Really?" I asked. Trying to figure out why someone would do this and what they were trying to do, I followed up with "Who?"

She swallowed, and blinked. "I can't tell you," she said.

I couldn't believe my ears. I laughed. "I'm sorry. For a second there it sounded like you said you couldn't tell me."

"I just wouldn't feel comfortable telling you," she said.

I took a deep breath. "OK. How would you feel if I went to your supervisor with this? Do you think he would have an answer for me?"

"Hey, do what you have to do," she said, and then she turned and ran away.

I examined the button for a few minutes to no avail, and I was getting tired of all this nonsense. So I placed a call to the corporate headquarters to let them know what was happening, and I went directly to the division president.

"Sir," I said, "you should know that our entire network has been down for about 25 minutes. I am doing all I can to bring it back up. Corporate has been informed."

"How did this happen?" he asked. He seemed unfazed by this.

"Well, one of our users, I'm not sure who, hit the bright-red button that kills the power in that room. I was hoping you might be able to give me the number of the landlord so I can..."

"...Oh yeah," he interrupted me, "I'm really sorry about that. I was just goofing around. The Director of Finance told me that it didn't do anything!"

Woman calls me because her ADSL connection doesn't work. I as her to give me the connection error code. It was Error 645. I went trough the entire config with her and nothing was wrong. I tell her: "In the box next to "user name" please type your login in lower case letters with next to that an @ and next to that the name of her ISP (skynet) in caps"

She does that, then clicks "connect" and still there was error 645. I went through the config again, in case I had overlooked something last time, but still I couldn't find anything wrong. She then tells me her husband just arrived and since he knows more about computers, she was going to let me talk to him now. After going through the config once more (still finding nothing wrong) I ask him to try to make a connection. When the dial up window pops up, he laughs and tells me it won't work this way. I ask him what's wrong and he tells me that in the box next to username, he sees that his wife typed "your login@SKYNET".

He then changed "your login" into the correct login and got connected. Needless to say it took me about 5 minutes to stop laughing.

Ok, it's time for another round of odd tech happenings from where I work. We're an isp located in the south which supports a lot of providers with service to their customers for internet access. As a company, you always strive for improving customer service. This is one of our main objectives in the tech support dept. i'm in.

Anyhow, as part of our increased customer service, we now offer a LIVE chat site where customers can log onto from our website. This chat will inform us when someone has a simple question or advice quicker than calling directly.

I've rarely gotten actual problems a customer is having while chatting through this program.. Its always something like, "Yes, i'm trying to find more information on Dollywood." or "How do i search for yahoo games?" Stuff that never is technical in nature. And of course it was no different on this one i got a week ago, but it was really odd.

This individual enters the chat and asks (in VERY broken written english) what to do. I spent the first 5 minutes finally decrypting this conversation that they want to know how to "learn english on the net". I told them to go to a search engine and find info on how to learn english. Hoping this makes sense to this individual. (SIGH) It gets worse, i spent another 30 minutes trying to figure out weather they needed to pay for this service(its free to our customers), etc..blah blah blah..

I notice their IP address and ask co-worker to do a trace on it since this can't be real convo..its getting WAY out of hand. Come to find out this person is located in Bejing, China!! (I'm thinking, 'WTF! CHINA?! No way this is any customer of ours). I start asking this person how they got to our chat site, and who their provider is and so forth. I still didn't get much info..So i told them i'm ending the conversation and that they needed to contact their own isp for further help. Then logged outta of the chat.

I'm still thinking 1 of 2 things. 1: It was one hell of a spoof from someone in our services playing a big joke or 2: this person really was from China and somehow found their way onto the site.

Sometimes i'm way too friendly for this job. Sorry for the long story.

I work as a secretary for a labor union. Admittedly, knowing technology is not our top priority, but you'd think someone hired to do Data Entry - who knows computers - would have the sense to read directions, wouldn't you?

I went to make some copies, only to find said DE person struggling with the copier's paper tray. With this tray, you press a button and the tray lowers to be refilled. You open the door, refill the paper, close the door, and the tray rises back up to the feeder.

Well, DE couldn't figure out why the tray wasn't rising when she added paper. I finally took a look, only to discover the tray had never lowered - she was placing the paper at the bottom of the tray's track, which is CLEARY MARKED that you're not supposed to put paper there. And if she'd just looked up a little, she'd have seen the paper-full tray just sitting there.

I work for one of the largest ISPs in Australia, and we get a lot of people signing up that obviously have no idea how to turn a computer on, much less use the internet.

A recent example:

Me: Good morning, xxxxxx Internet, how may I help you?

Cust: Hello, I'm trying to install your setup CD, and I'm having some problems.

Me: (thinking, okay, the disc installs IE 5 - some installs of Windows are so broken that this can fail) Okay, what exactly is the problem?

Cust: I'm looking at this screen - 'Software Agreement'

Me: Yes...?

Cust: Do I click 'I accept the agreement'?

Me: ..........

I work for a company that support America's largest fast food resturants.

Caller calls in.

I get the routine info. and look up her site.

M. What seems to be the problem?

c. I can not open my safe.

M. Well, did you call you general manager.

C. I am the Genral Manager.

M. We do not have your safe code.

C. Ecsalate the call where some one can dial in and open my safe.

M. We can not see you safe over the computer.

C. What the h*** are you good for.

I work for a small college and we have several PhD's here

who think they are better than everyone else just because

they have that degree. You know the type; PhD in basket

weaving makes them smarter than you.

The most arrogant one here likes to make obvious statements

about technological topics and grin like he has just blown

you away. I don't like him.

One day he has a problem with his password to the main

database and sends in a problem ticket. It is our policy

to expire passwords at regular intervals and his had

expired the previous day. He changed it and forgot it.

On the problem ticket he wrote that the system of expiring

passwords should not be in place and that if the system

were set up to better handle password security and process

password changes it would not have messed up his password.

OK. I let it set on my desk the rest of the day (it was

Friday). I grabbed the ticket as the last item of the day

and fixed the problem. I made his new password "changed"

and wrote on the ticket, "Passowrd is changed," and left

to go on my week long vacation.

When I returned guess who was waiting for me, Mr. arrogant,

himself. He was very upset that I did not tell him what

his password was changed to and no one else seemed to be

able to help him. I told him it was printed on the ticket

plain as day. He just looked at it read it aloud, "Password

is changed." I asked him why he didn't use it.

A "Who's on First?" routine ensued.

When it finally dawned on him what was going on, he furrowed

his brow and looked at me over the top of his glasses and

stomped out.

I love messing with arrogant users! Score one for the

admins!

This is a great site you have here.

This one is a few years old when the big mainframe companies were outsourcing their computer support departments. The majority of our clientelle were gas and oil companies with remote locations over North America.

One night during the graveyard shift, we get this call from a guy down Texas way...

me:**** Computer Support, can I help you?

Texan: (in a southern drawl of course) I got a problem here and I'm not sure what to do.

me: What seems to be the problem?

Texan: A guy is washing out one of the gas tankers and is smoking!

me: I'm sorry? Do you have a computer problem?

Texan: No, but the guy could cause an explosion!

me: Sir, you've reached **** computer support. We're in Canada and no where near you. I'm not sure what you expect us to do for you.

Texan: Well what do I do?

me: Well, tell the person to get out of the tanker and not smoke in them. If there is an explosion, I'd say call 911.

Texan: Right. Ok. How'd you know our emergency line is 911? Nevermind. Bye.

*** I wonder if there were any fire works down in Texas that night?

Rollie

I work for an Aio printer company and I receved a lady who called to ask the question: "How do I get the person on the other end of the fax line to stop answering the phone?".

That there is a good question eh?

I work for a very large corp doing tech support for computers. Coming into work this day I never though this would happen. On my second call of the day.

me: thank you for calling _____.....

lady: *crying* Yes, I let my son use the computer for about 20 minutes. Now my computer is possesed.

me: possesed? Im afraid I dont Understand what you are saying. Could you please explain more?

lady: you dont understand! when I turned it on it booted up with ghosts flying everywhere! I have to have a virus. You gotta help me!

me:could I please put you on hold while I research this?

lady: sure just please hurry!

After putting this lady on hold for 2 or 3 minutes of severe laughing I decided to go back and change the theme off of Mystery so this lady wouldnt continue to think it was possesed. lol

I provide hardware support for portables for a large computer company. In this situation, the customer called and told me that whenever she tried to connect to the internet, she got a message "Cannot connect to server"

Her model computer can ship either with an internal modem or pcmcia card. My first step was to be sure that she had not removed the plug from the dead internal modem port and was using the pcmcia card we had provided. She was - A+ there.

I checked device manager and ran modem diagnostics - everything came up fine. At this point, I told the customer that we would run a hyperterminal test and if it passed she would have to call her ISP.

Customer: I don't have an ISP.

Me: Then how do you connect to the internet?

Customer: I just open up Internet Explorer and I am connected.

Me: And you didn't connect a telephone cord or dial into an internet service provider first?

Customer: No - I didn't connect any cables at all. I just opened Internet Explorer and started surfing.

Me: No cables? At all?

Customer: No cables.

Me: When was the last time this worked?

Customer: At college.

Light dawns - I check the system configuration - the customer has an internal wireless network card.

Me: Well, at the college you connected to the internet through a wireless network. Since you are no longer at school, you will have to install a dial-up service and connect through the modem.

Customer: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

me: Thank you for calling blah blah blah

lady: this program won't work

me: did you install the program

lady: yes, and it did not place an icon on the computer

we went to the start menu and she swares the program is not there.

me:mam not to be rude are you sure you installed the software, you put in the cd and ran the install program!!??

lady: yes!!

me:is your start menu so large that you need to scrool down

lady:no

me: are you sure? is there an arrow at the bottom of this menu

lady: yes

me: click on that arrow

she had over 20 programs that she had been returning to us there

I attended a small high school in the rural southern United States, so we didn't have much in the way of technology classes. I took the two "Computer Applications" courses we had as excuses to stay in FBLA. In Computer Applications II, I had two memorable run-ins with a certain "technician" whom I'll refer to as O'Brien.

O'Brien was something of a legend in our county, saddled with the reputation of being a man who took an hour to find a solution that lasted five minutes. He was also the man who got the county middle school's BBS shut down for putting porn on it. For some bizarre reason, my high school hired him as a "computing consultant" and paid him large amounts of money to do basically nothing.

In class one day, O'Brien was "working" on a PC next to me. I had finished my assignment and was playing a simple DOS game called Letter Attack, which was designed to help develop the player's typing speed. The game featured a "high score" table, which turned out to be read from a simple text file. I showed the classmate on my other side that I could edit the scores, and O'Brien warned me that doing that could "seriously mess up the system." I was editing a text file that a stupid DOS game used! A TEXT FILE!

My other experience with O'Brien was the truly memorable one. A lot of my classmates were having problems opening their assignments after saving them. We were using Microsoft Word, and I quickly noticed that the files were being saved as templates. I figured this was a run-of-the-mill macro virus, and I was right. I quickly isolated the code, printed a copy of it, and fixed the problem on every PC on our network before the class period ended. I was justifiably proud of my efforts...until O'Brien made a comment to the teacher that my actions could be "dangerous." I salvaged my classmates' work and fixed the REAL problem, and what thanks did I get? A meeting with the principal in which I was suspended from using the school's systems ever again.

Sigh.

I do tech support for Gateway. One night on the late shift a lady called in screaming that her computer was possesed with the devil. She went on and on yelling and insisted that her computer was a evel portal to hell.

I really didn't feel like dealing with it to I told her that possesions and demonic activity were considered 3rd party software and I couldn't support that.

I'm a domain admin for over 800 computers, and I get EVERY type of idiot calling in. I think most brainless person to date was a "forgotten password" call.

Idiot: I forgot my password.

Me: OK, I'll reset it for you. Next time you log in, your password will just be blank.

Idiot: OK, thank you. (CLICK)

5 minutes later...

Idiot: I still can't log in. It says the password is wrong.

Me: Well, what exactly does it say on the screen right now?

Idiot: ______ for my login name, the domain is _______ and I typed 'blank' for the password.

Me: No!!! Don't type the word blank!!! There is no password.

Idiot: Well what do I put in the password spot then?

Me: JUST HIT THE ENTER BUTTON!!!!

Idiot: So there isn't a password?

Me: No! There is not password! Just hit the enter button. And it will ask you what you want your password to be.

Idiot: (hitting enter) Oh...... Ok...... There we go. Thanks man.

About two years ago I had to install a program on clients machines that would allow their computers to communicate to our servers via the clients modem. Before going to each of the clients' businesses they were mailed the criteria in order to get the program installed. One of the criteria being "You must have a modem on your computer."

I went to this one clients place adn sat down at the machine. I assumed everything was ready and started to install the software. I got to the point where I needed to check the communication link. I tried to dial out and it said it couldn't find a modem. I went into the system hardware and it didn't show a modem either. I then asked the user if this machine had a modem or if it was another machine. The user looked at me and told me that was the only machine in the office and that the modem is rightr there. He pointed to the fax machine.

I unistalled the program and then had to explain the difference between a fax machine and a modem.

My first computer was a dinosaur "186" that used 5 1/4" floppies. In 1995, my brother upgraded me to a 286 that had been discarded by his company, which also used the same size disks.

At the time of the upgrade, I was living with a guy who was fairly certain he had to know more than me about everything, and his testicles were his proof: he had them; I didn't. 'Nuf said.

One day we were discussing backup methods, and he said "I usually backup my files on hard disks."

I boggled and asked, "What good does that do? It just puts two copies fo the file in the same place."

He siad, "No, I have one on the computer and one on the hard disk."

Me: "But the hard disk is part of the computer."

He: "No, you can take it out."

Me: (Imagining the ridiculous concept of taking the hard drive out) "Well, yeah, but it's hardly convenient."

He: "No, you just pull it out."

Me: (Now imaginign a hard drive that removes like car stereos used to) "Really? I've never seen one like that. Anyway, I'd think it would be much easier to use floppies for back up. Most people I know do."

(We go back and forth for a bit, then I get him to describe, in detail, what he means by "hard disk")

He: "Little hard disks." He held his hands out to indicate the size.

It suddenly dawned on me he meant 3.5" floppy disks, at which point I gently explained that if it was square and inserted into a slot on the front of a computer, it was still a floppy.

I was afraid to let him near my computer after that...

Hi I myself work for a local ISP as tech support but not everyone in my family knows a lot about computers so I'm thier tech support to. It just so happens that my grandparents had AOL and were having trouble accessing a game on a website. After emailing AOL tech support which gave them a 3 page list of things to try such as deleting temp. files, defraging, scan disk, hard drive cleanup, etc. Nothing they said worked. So when all else failed they called me. I then proceded to look at the page they we're trying to access it seems that when you play this game a new window opens up. Instantly I realized the problem. AOL doesn't understand javascript or java very well so the simple fix is to minimize AOL and open up IE so it can read the page. I guess AOL needs to constantly be running or thier spam and advertising wouldn't reach the public. Some tech support huh.

I was working out in what is called "the pit" (an area of cubicles with low walls where everyone can see each other). I was working on a client computer, when the girl directly across from me called my attention to ask me how to spell "delete". My eyes dropped to the keyboard that I was using, and I proceeded to dictate the spelling of "delete" directly off of my keyboard. I was using the same keyboard that she was using.

This was not as bad as another time at the water cooler that the "new" supervisor of accounting asked which was the nozzle for hot, the red or the blue...

Hi guys,

I swear on my dead grandmother's grave that this is true. I worked at a local electronics store chain, whose name rhymes with Adio Hack. While working one night a lady called us with an electrical problem, her power strip would not work. We went through every possible scenario we could think of as to why it wouldn't work. We checkd to make sure it was on, we checked to make sure that the fuse was good, we checked to see if it was plugged in. To the last question she answered yes. After about an hour and a half of asking her about her power strip we found the problem... Are you ready... we never thought that any one could possibly be this stupid. She had the power strip plugged into itself! Anyway, we had a good laugh at her expense after that one. Now that is the first question we ask people now.

Rich

OK, I figure ten years is long enough. Let the tale be told.

I'd installed an accounting system (client/server model) at a client site and was providing support. Every evening after closing out the day's transactions, the systems administrator was to quit the accounting system and initiate the tape backup. This particular week, the regular staffer was out of office and their "more experienced" boss was handling the end-of-day procedures. Procedures which had been carefully documented by myself in a manner I considered to be idiot-proof.

I get a call from the site - can't quit the application. Yes, he's getting the prompt "Press 'q' to quit". No, the application doesn't respond when he presses it. We went at it from every direction until I asked him to "push only the key to the right of the TAB key on the keyboard". His response was "key?"

Turns out he'd been using the mouse to position the cursor over the letter "q" in the onscreen instruction, then clicking! And this before the advent of the web where you HAVE gotten accustomed to clicking an onscreen link! Perhaps he was just ahead of his time...

One of our sales people came out with a classic request. She was asking for a hard disk that a customer had sent full of data, to be read and copied to her network directory.

My co-workers and I were thinking "A hard disk full of data - how much have they sent?"

We asked the saleswoman to come over with the disk and we started to dig out a bare chassis to put the hard disk into to extract the data.

When she turns up, she shows us the "hard" disk, yup, it was a 3 1/2 inch floppy; "Well the case is hard" was her reply to our looks of disbelief.

At least I know my job is safe. (For now!!!)

It's not just the users who do dumb things, sometimes even the most learned of collegues make silly mistakes. As was the case a few months back when our Senior Tech (or Alpha Geek) did the following.

I was sitting at my desk adding several new pages to the company intranet when I see out Alpha Geek (AG) walk into the tech area carrying a PC.

Me: (looking up) Whatcha go there?

AG: I'm installing a memory upgrade for one of the developers upstairs.

Me: Oh. (back to the intranet)

A few minutes later he's pulled off the cover, installed the RAM, and replaced the cover. Time to switch it on and test.

AG: DAMNIT!!!!!

Me: (looking up again, this could get interesting) What's wrong?

AG: Damn thing won't boot now!

Me: You sure that was the right type of RAM?

AG: Yeah, positive.

Me: Hmmm. (back to the intranet, he knows what he's doing)

AG: Oh wait, maybe if I flip the power reset switch.

Me: (ALARM BELLS!!! That's not what that switch is!) No! Wait! That's the *BANG* voltage selection switch.

AG: Huh?

Me: You just set the power supply to 110v and ran 240v through it.

AG: That can't be good

Me: (handing him a warranty claim form) I'll look up the part number for a new power supply.

Needless to say, we never let him forget the little "power reset switch" on the back of the PC for the rest of my time there.

... An Operations Control person (Our in-house helpdesk of sorts) came up to me yesterday and said that an agents taskbar was at the top of the screen, and wanted to know how to put it back on the bottom. I told him, just drag it around, you can put it on any edge. He said all that does is make it bigger (he was grabbing the edge). I told him to drag it from the middle. Haven't heard back, must've figured it out.

I work for a cable ISP and sometimes the calls I get infuritate me! Case in point: customer calls griping and whining about her connection to the interent, how she can't get e-mail, how some dude down the street keyed her car...whatever...what she DOESN'T do is check her modem to see if it's connected to the computer..maybe the modem is off, maybe it's UNPLUGGED...we con't check this.

Does ANYONE EVER READ THE MANUAL ANYMORE?????!?!?!?

When I ask who makes her modem she says "you supplied it to me...you should know."

There are multiple modem manufactures and I didn't give her the modem....this is equivelent of calling who owns your home mortgage and telling them they should know the color of your house or your wife/husband know what you're thinking when they can't see it.

What I mean is, people, help us out to help you...go with us on things and remember we're trying to help, but help yourself too if you can.

I work for a large state university, doing technical support for two executive-level offices. I got a call a few moments ago from my boss, asking, "When you make a trip down the hall here, could you please stop in? Whenever you get a chance."

Now, her office is not quite in my regular route to anywhere of importance, so she's never "down the hall" per se. So, I decided to wait a minute or two and head down there. I should have waited longer...

When I arrive, she's got Eudora open. "I've got a problem. Every time I go to print something, the print window shows up here and I can't click the little box to print." (Basically, the print window's lower third was extending under the taskbar, hiding the important "Print" and "Cancel" buttons.) She then said, "I can't move the window either, and I don't know what to do."

I looked at it for 10 milliseconds or so, and asked, "What happens when you drag the title bar up?"

"Oh... I see. Well, there had always been a little arrow. Sh!t, I feel stupid now!"

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone...!"

I worked tech support back when a laptop weighed more than your luggage. I got a call from an older man who identified himself as a "Consultant to the Computer Industry" who was irate that he couldn't get his new computer to work.

After several questions, he indicated that no, he hadn't plugged in the power cord--what power cord, and why should it need one?!

If this person is a consultant to the computer industry, he SHOULD quit his day job!!

The university I go to is fairly good in terms of its technology, and I really enjoy coming here.

Yesterday, however, I went to borrow a CD from the library so that I could install some software at home (they don't let you borrow the magazine that the CD came with, for some inexplicable reason, but mine is not to question why.)

The library has fairly good security which relies on magnetic strips to detect whether or not a person is trying to take an unborrowed item from the library. In order to stop the magnetic strips setting off the detector, the librarians must run the book through a small machine which performs some magic etc.

So anyway, I borrow the CD and make for the door, and am totally surprised to find alarms blaring and lights flashing. I walk back to the desk and ask them what the problem is and they tell me that I can't walk through the detector with the CDs because they haven't been put through the little demagnetiser. Ok, I think, so they'll run them through and I'll go. However, the librarian had a different idea. She got me to walk through the detector and went about constructing an elaborate system involving broomhandles (I'll spare you the details) in order to pass me the CDs OVER THE TOP OF THE DETECTOR.

When I asked her why she didn't just demagnetize them, she replied in a matter-of-fact tone that she wasn't going to put them through the machine because doing so would cause them to lose all their data and become useless.

It took me more than half an hour to prove to her that demagnetizing the little strips on CDs wasn't going to corrupt them or destroy the machine or cause space/time to rip apart.

I haven't really had any other techtale moments here, but I did when I was going to high-school last year, and the tales again involve librarians, this time two ancient scottish hags that intensely dislike students and have a penchant for harming computers.

For some utterly inexplicable reason, the librarians are in charge of ordering software for the school to use and lend. For instance, it was their decision to stock the library shelves with such wonders as 'The Field Guide to Poland' and 'The Magic School Bus'. To be fair, they tried their best, and were only doing what they thought was right when they ordered Microsoft Encarta, but I can't see how they thought ordering the MACINTOSH version was going to help much considering every computer in the school with a CDROM drive was a PC.

In the 5 years I spent at that highschool, I saw the librarians do the following:

· fit cds in a macintosh 3 1/4" drive (NO SHIT)

· turn off the monitor and claim to have shut down windows

· order students to stop using notepad on the grounds that it is capable of utterly decimating the network

· demand that our network administrator remove internet explorer from every computer on the network

· delete a host of critical files in order to 'conserve space' (note: when queried about this they claimed that one of the students was obviously the one to have caused all the problems because he was playing solitaire)

· put sticky tape over 3 1/4" floppy drives in order to stop students from using their 'filthy disks'

· use a mouse upside down

· attempt to use the light pen (used for scanning book barcodes, and nothing more) to control the cursor on their tiny database machine (green screen, running DOS 5 and an ancient cataloging system) and then demand an explanation from the tech guy when this failed to work

· YELLING SCRIPTURE FROM THE BIBLE at a computer which had crashed and was reporting an illegal operation error.

I shit you not, these librarians were evil made human. Not to mention stupid made human.

Here's a fun one for you guys...

Me: *blah blah blah* notebook support *blah blah blah* How may I help you?

Cust: I think someone put something in my computer so they can control it over the internet.

Me: *silent scream* You mean you think someone has installed a program so they can control your computer?

Cust: No, I mean I think someone put something _inside_ my computer. I think somebody broke into my house and put something in my computer so they can control it.

Me: Does you computer casing look like it's been tampered with?

Cust: No.

Me: *not believing what I'm hearing* So you mean that you think someone broke into your house, opened your _laptop_ computer, installed a piece of hardware that allows them to control your computer via the internet, reassembled your computer without a trace that any modifcations had been made, and left your house without taking anything?

Cust: Yes.

Me: Why would someone do something like that?

Cust: Well, I have very valuable information *blah blah blah*

Me: To be honest, I don't find that to be very likely. A device like that would be very, very difficult to design and make, and even more difficult to install inside a notebook computer that has hardly any extra space in it.

Cust: Well, they figured out how to do it. I think they can even turn my computer on when it's off.

Me: So they aren't even just controlling it through the internet? They are able to control it even when it's not connected? *trying to imagine what kind of device could do such a thing*

Cust: Right.

Me: Ma'am, no offense, but that is pretty much impossible.

Cust: I know it can be done, they did it to me. I really need someone to look at my computer and figure out what they did.

Me: I promise you, noone put anything in your computer. If anything, a virus-type program might have been put on your computer that would allow someone access to your computer via the internet. To be sure that's taken out, the only efficient way to be certain it's completely gone is to run a system recovery, that will erase all the data on your HDD.

Cust: I can't do that! *rants about valuable data* I just want your people to fix my computer! It's covered under warranty!

Me: Ma'am, we can't fix something like you're describing under warranty. We can't guarantee against tampering such as that.

Cust: But I'm covered under warranty! Can't you make an exception???

Me: *tired, wanting to go home* *sigh* Sure, I guess I can see what I can do. We can have FedEx pick up your computer tomorrow afternoon to go in for service, if that's okay.

Cust: FedEx won't pick up where I am.

Me: Why is that?

Cust: They've got something about government housing--

Me: *CLICK*

In the current edition of Tales:

) He replied with, "Yeah, when that happens, I always shake

) the mouse, and it makes the computer think faster." He

) was sincere in his reply.

We've run across some weird software where I work that

instead of spawning threads (presuming an OS that has them)

performs lengthy tasks by doing them in chunks between

events. This was more prevalent under Win 3.x, but still

pops up from time to time. Given a design like that,

shaking the mouse can actually help, because you'll get

events more frequently than you would otherwise and thus

get more between-time in which to process.

G

At work, we're an NT shop, and we format our drives NTFS for security purposes. A few systems formatted FAT16 slipped out, but we had a project about a year ago to go back and convert all those systems to NTFS. Well, today, we were doing an Office 2000 upgrade on a system and it lacked sufficient free space. So I went up to have a look. I found 50 megs here, 50 megs there that I could clear out, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get the drive up over 300 megs free. So, out of desperation, I went to look for some data I could compress, and I found compression wasn't enabled. Huh? So I checked the drive. It was formatted FAT16.

So I ran back to my office to ask one of my coworkers if he still had the batch files we used way back when to convert FAT to NTFS. I walked into his cube.

"Sharon's still FAT," I said.

He gave me a funny look. "Well, I know she just got off maternity leave," he said.

I turned red. "No, no, Sharon looks fine," I said. (Yes, she just got off maternity leave but you wouldn't be able to tell from looking.)

"Oh, you mean her computer's not NTFS," he said as everyone else in the office got a good laugh.

"Yeah," I said.

The moral of the story ought to be really obvious. I got the batch files, scurried back up to her cube, converted her drive to NTFS--freeing up about 600 megs due to NTFS' much smaller cluster size--and got out of there. I didn't tell her the story.

http://dfarq.homeip.net

I am a jack of all trades at a local ISP, and one of the tech support guys (best iv'e ever seen with difficult customers)left to finish his computer science degree. This is his tale but funny nonetheless.

Scott arrives at school in different city, orders cable service from @home. 3-4 weeks later the delivery guy shows up to deliver the modem. As he showed during school hours, Scott was not home to recieve the modem, they dont leave a missed delivery message, and just return the modem to @home.

Scott calls to find out why he hasn't recieved his modem, and gives the person at @home 3 kinds of ehll regarding poor customer service. They are mistified, and promise to have him a modem in 48 hours. Scott recieves his modem. *YIPEE* let the bandwidth begin.

Nope

Scott calls @ home explaining that his cable modem is not finding anything, nor is it recieving an IP address from @home. Their clueless tech tries to talk a really smart guy into doing everything on their scripted tech support page except performing a naked OS exorcism while wearing an indian headdress. Keep in mind that Scott had asked at the beginning of the call what they showed for a MAC address for his modem, and had asked several times during the call. They refused to tell him, citing "security" reasons.

After being elevated 4 times to different supervisors, it came down to the simple fact that the first modems MAC was in the DHCP program for @home, and his new one wasn't.

Rule #1 for tech support: If the customer offers a VALID problem, look into it before discounting him. They aren't all stupid users.

Howedy, I work for a local ISP and I get some rather strange calls about dang near everything. This is one kinda funny it made me laugh for a while anyways.

On the night shift at work it was pretty quite. The the phone rigns and I pickup.

Me: Hello ISP how can I help you?

Him: Yeah hy my name is *** and username is ****. I'm having some trouble with email and some webpages.

Me: Ok sir lets start with your email (figuring all I'd have to do was setup Outllok for him)

Him: OK

Me: now sir under tools and accounts i want you to open up your account with us and look under the server tab for me.

Him:..........Ok

Me: Now sir read to me what it says in the incoming and Outgoing mail servers

Him:POP3

Me: no not the server type sir what it says in the two fields.

Him: That is what it says in the two fields.

Me: um. well ok lets set that up corectly. Now type in mail.####.com in both fields

Him: Oh, ok. Hey I got anther question for you is that .com thing really important?

Me: How so?

Him: Well when im online like some websites i goto like yahoo i just type in yahoo and it works but a lot of sites dont do i need that .com?

Me: Yes sir you do that rather important along with www. before everything

Him: Yeah see now it makes sense I was wondering why all these people are like www and thier .com's I had never seen them and wondered how people associated the internet with them. Ok thanks a bunch (click)

This happened to me last month, but I just thought about posting it to TechTales.

First a little essential background. I'm a software engineer who designs software for high-speed internet routers. My home network includes systems running everything from Windoze 95 to OpenVMS to FreeBSD. It all connects to the 'net via a cable modem and a Linux box doing address translation duties.

Earlier in the week I got email from @Home announcing "routine maintenance" to the network overnight thursday night/friday morning. No big deal, except the "brief" service interruption was still going on at 11am friday. I called tech support and was told "Oh, yes, there's a county-wide outage. I don't have any additional information, but it's pretty wide-spread."

The weekend was a busy one for me, so I didn't really pay much attention to the outage, but by monda I was really pissed off. I called tech support again to ask when they thought the outage would end. The conversation went something like this:

@home: This is (name), how may I help you?

me: I need to check on the status of the outage in (area)

@home: What outage is that?

me: The outage I was told about friday morning. I've been down all weekend.

@home: There have been no outages. Everything is working just fine.

me: I can't connect to the internet, and haven't been able to since the "maintenance" friday morning.

@home: Let's just check your network settings... double-click on...

me: I'm running Linux, and my settings haven't changed.

@home: Well, let me check your cable modem... yes, I can reach the cable modem so it must something wrong in your computer.

me: Have any of the network settings changed? IP address? Default gateway?

@home: No, nothing's changed.

me: Let me verify... my computer name is supposed to be xxxxxx?

@home: Yes, that's correct.

me: And my IP address is supposed to be 1.2.3.4?

@home: No, your IP address is 1.2.5.6

me: So you changed my IP address?

@home: No, your IP address has always been 1.2.5.6

me: That's a change from what I was assigned.

@home: Nothing has changed on our end... your system must have become misconfigured.

me: So the three places I have this number recorded, in three different computers, have all become identically misconfigured at the same time?

@home: Nothing has changed on our end.

me: Uh huh.

I forgot to ask how my (printed) copy of the installation paperwork also became "misconfigured".

Why I have an RTFM coffee mug at work:

This one is about a co-worker whose "brilliance" we haven't recognized yet.

He takes a call, and wants the user to bounce their pc. The user's system is busy (hourglass), so instead of 3 finger salute to task manager, he just tells them to press the power button.

Okay, screen is black, so he has user press power button again; 5 seconds or so and the user has the same screen w/hourglass.

The kid goes through this a couple more times, tells the user there's no way the box could boot in 5 seconds, and finally puts them on hold, turns to me, and asks me to take the call because "You've got more experience dealing with idiots".

I get on the line, determine that he's got a Compaq, try the 3 finger salute, find out that he's got 95 (driver and license deal) so hosed that doesn't work, have him cycle the power with the plug, and he's working fine. Users deserve answers, and I told him that when the Tech Support department set up the boxes the enabled Power Management, so all he was doing by pressing the power switch was putting the box to sleep.

Punch line on this one is that the kid in the Computer Room hoses up 2k at least once a week on the same kind of box, and has to crawl under the desk to unplug it.

I'm a teenager who is working at a major chain of grocery stores over the summer to pay for car insurance. My job is basically a slave, i do whatever i'm told. I've talked a little bit about computers to my co-workers there in the past.

One day when I arrived the computers were down and registers were locking up because we couldn't do a pickup (registers keep track of how much cash they have, and demand to be emptied occasionally). The managers were on the phone with tech support trying to solve the problem. They were doing fine until they were asked to locate their ethernet hub. They had no idea what that was.

I was sweeping the floors at that time, when I heard "Tux to the office please." When I arrive they shove the phone at me and stare as i locate their hubs (there were 2) and do what tech support asked. The problem was eventually traced to a bad hard drive, so they had me back up the data to their network and wait for the tech to arrive.

The best part came at the end...

Support: Our tech will be there about 5:00, will you still be there then?

Me: Yep, I'm here until 6 today.

Support: Will another manager be coming in after you leave?

Me: (stifling urge to laugh) Oh, I'm not a manager.

I later found out that an early tech hung up on us because our person couldn't find the power button. The power switch is in the back room so a stray elbow can't knock out all the registers. It was fun hearing the store manager yell at them for that.

My firm uses a search engine called ISYS to locate documents on our network. This exchange occured by e-mail:

Q: I tried to find a document using the desktop query and it located the document (powerpoint/estate planning/grat.wpd), However, when I look in Powerpoint I can't find the document. Any ideas?

A: That's becuase it is a WordPerfect extension, therefore you need to open it in WordPerfect.

Q: Okay, but how do I find/access the document?

A: Open it through WordPerfect.

That's my humor for the week!!!

I NEVER expected to take this phone call, famous as it is. I work for an ISP, so this isn't even close to something I can help with.

Customer: "My computer won't turn on."

Me: Regular spiel about how we're an ISP and that is obviously a hardware problem.

Cust: "Well, I bought the computer from someone affilated with you and now they're bankrupt, so here's what happened.."

Me: Resigning myself to hearing the story. This is not the first time clients from this place have called. We realized it's better to let them rant and then tell them they need a hardware tech.

Cust: "We hardly ever use our computer but last week we where using it and it made a loud bang and started to smoke. Nothing seemed wrong, so we kept using it. Then it made another big bang and there was more smoke. We eventually turned it off and now it won't turn back on."

(All this is being pretty much screamed at me in french)

Me: "Excuse me, sir, you conitnued using the maching after you started to see smoke?!"

Cust: "Of course, it was still working (now I doubt that but...)"

Me: "I'm sorry sir, you need a hardware tech."

Call ends with client ranting about how they shouldn't sell computers to stupid people (his words, not mine), who didn't know how to use them (like him). Now it's going to cost him to get it fixed, etc...

Now I'm sorry, but even before I knew much about computers...SMOKE=BAD!

Just got this from a customer.

Me: Hi you've reached (large cable company) How can I help you today?

Cust: I seem to be getting a slow connection to the internet.

Me: Ok let's check a few things.

(Run through the list of various settings and problems that could be the cause)

Me: Huh, no everything seems to be ok here from what I can see. (Then I remember)

Me: Oh you know what, it's probably being caused by the Code Red Virus (you all know about it) that's been going around on the internet and has been causing it to be a bit sluggish lately.

Cust: (suddenly irate) That's just a sorry excuse for a crappy service. Do you think I'm dumb or something? I happen to know that computers don't get sick!!

And they believed it too?? WTF!!

This actually comes from my husband who swears he is not pulling my leg. He sells amateur radio equipment and accessories, and some of those accessories include software. This one guy purchased a CD with listings of frequencies. He calls back a few days later to tell them it is not working. The first thing they determine is that the guy is running Windows 3.11 (the CD was for 95/98). They tell him that he can't run the CD and suggest he bring it back for a refund. He tells them that it is stuck. They ask if the CD door will not open and he says there is no door. He then complains that it took him quite some time even to get the CD to fit in there because "it was too big". Come to find out, he didn't have a CD drive and had filed the CD down to a nice, approximately 3.5 inch square shape... They referred him to the software vendor, not really expecting them to give him anything, they just wanted to let the vendor have a good laugh too.

We have one customer (a rather major hotel) that has done major business with our small-time repair shop, so we dont hesitate for their needs.

I received a call from them on a Monday that they were getting lots and lots of errors, from not being able to find documents they've entered into their database to problems logging on to the main server. Now keep in mind that they have only one main server that over 100 workstations in the hotel log into to do everything in the hotel. I walk into mission control to chat with the resident onsite server admin and was informed by him the server is loosing documents and the users were, at times, not even able to access the database or log on for that matter. We pour through each problem one by one until the network is up and running at 100%. This took us about 5 and a half hours! The admin was happy and I returned to our shop.

The next morning I get another call from the admin that the system is doing the same thing as it did the day before.

And like the day before, I returned to the hotel, sat with the admin and did pretty much the same thing as the day before. luckly, it only took 4 hours this time. I left and return to our shop.

The following day, I got yet another call from him and it has occured again! But this time the call was just before closing time. Still, being a the customer that they were, I went back after we closed and helped fix the problems again. I would say that it was about 9:30 that night when we where on the 15th floor working on a terminal and just about done. As I went to access the database for the second time on that machine..... whoa! I get and error saying the database cannot be found! It just worked a second ago so I try a simple restart of the machine to let it reconnect to the server to try again but when I get to the sign-on screen and attempt to sign-on, it tells me the domain server cannot be found. I was pretty sure then that the server just went down. We immediately go back down to the control room only to find the night cleaning crew doing their routine of that office. I walk over to the server and sure enough, It was down....completly.....no screen, no lights, no nothing. I press the power button on the front of the server and I get nothing.

I reach behing the server and check all the cable only to find the main power cord as BEEN UNPLUGED?????

I turn to the cleaning lady and ask:

"did you unplug this cord?"

and she kindly said, "yea! I found out that outlet was back their a couple of days ago and it was just easier for me to plug my vacume cleaner in there instead of using the drop cord out the the van".

I nearly passed out.

Hi again folks. I work for a local ISP and I get some intresting calls. Like this one i got recently

Me: Hello ISP.

Him: Yeah hi I was wondering on your webserver machine how would I Telnet in and delete stuff.

Me: uummm no.

Him: No i mean i have an account with you guys and i have a websites www.website.com my username is ######

Me: (checks for user) Ok sir, well we dont let people Telnet into our servers we only allow FrontPage extensions and ftp. Do you mean ftp?

Him: um i guess it must have been ftp is frontpage some program? Cuase i know i didnt use any program like that.

Me: yeah its a WYSISYG editor so it must've been ftp.

Him: Ok then thanks a bunch.

WTF who would outright ask to Telnet into thier ISP's server to delete stuff? I'm concerned for the future of technology.

A week ago, there was a man who bought a computer from the store at which I work. This man happened to be the local fire chief. He took his computer, all enthused that he now has a 1GHz Athlon machine, and plugged it in. The next day, he drove up in his flashy red Suburban and dropped off his computer, complaining in a very bitter tone that his sound doesn't work. He left the computer there with the trouble ticket on it, and I took it to the bench to test it out. The sound worked right off the bat. Turns out he probably didn't know what SPK IN meant, and he plugged it into the voice input on his modem.

Two hours later, I get a call from another guy who has problems with his CD-ROM drive; he always gets a "Drive Not Ready" error. He knows his way around the operating system, so I get him to open up Windows Explorer and the Device Manager. His CD-ROM drive appears in both. Then he says "OK, now let me try with the CD in the CD-ROM drive." He does so, and it works right off the bat.

Oh yeah ... one more.

Me: *name of company*, this is me, how can I help you?

Customer: Hi. I was wondering if I could get a CD Read-Write drive installed in my modem?

Me: Well, we can't install a CD Burner in your modem, but we can install it in your computer.

Customer: Whatever. Can you do it?

Me: Yes, we sure can.

Customer: Great. How much does it cost?

Me: *names price plus labor*

Customer: That's it?

Me: Yeah.

Customer: So what do I need to bring you? My modem and my TV-thingie?

Me: No, you need to bring your computer.

Customer: That's the modem, right?

Me: No, that's the box that sits on the floor.

Customer: OK, I'll bring my modem. *click*

Several weeks ago, one of the managers I support and I were both getting error messages whenever we tried to open anything in his Lotus Notes database. He had to run to a meeting, so he left his laptop and passwords with me, his secretary, and asked me if I'd mind calling the help desk. After I got through and described the problem, here's what the tech said:

"His database is probably corrupt. Just replace it - I'm not going to wait on the line because it'll take too long. Call us back if you have a problem." *CLICK*

Actually, that was the problem (which I had suspected) and a "Replace Design" fixed it, but it would have been nice if the tech had stayed on the line in case it wasn't. It also takes about a minute to do that when you're on the LAN, which he knew I was. (Not to mention that it was a good thing I just happened to know what he meant...)

In 1997, I worked for a company that did PC and network Support on an off-site and on-site basis. The company was run by two guys, david, (the technical side) and Mark, the finance/marketing side. Unfortunately not too long after the company started, Mark took over all the functions oif the company. this wou;ldn't have been so bad, had Mark known what he was doing. But he was, essentially, a competent end-user, not a technical type in any sense of the word. As a result, he made the techies lives hellish, to put it mildly. Some examples:

Mark got frustrated with me during many of our innumberable debreifing sessions. He was frustrated primarily because he would ask me questions that could not be answered with a simple yes or no, and then wondered why it took me so long to answer his questions.

This wouldn't have been so difficult at all in fact, except for the fact that although Mark, David, I and the other tech all spoke english fluently (we're Canadians, all), mark needed David to translate the technospeak into marketspeak, so that he could understand what the techies were saying to him. The debriefings thus worked this way: I would say something. David would explain it in language that MArk could understand. Mark would ask a clarifying question. I would respond. David would "translate". And on and on. E.G.:

Mark: So what happened when you went to install that drive on the client's computer.

Me: Well, it went fine. I loaded the drivers into her computer, and then attached the zip drive to her computer.

Mark: What do you mean, "drivers"?

David: That's the software that allows the computer to access the drive and put files onto it.

Mark: Why does it need drivers? I mean, isn't that a waste of the client's time? Can't you just put the drive onto the computer?

Me: Well, no, the computer needs drivers in order to recognize the drive and to assign it a drive letter, so that data can be transferred to and from it.

Mark (angrily): I wasn't asking you! Well, David?

David: the computer needs the software to be able to access the ZIP drive, Otherwise you can't put any data onto it.

Me: But that's what _I_ just said!

Mark: You speak in techno language that I can't understand. Just be quiet. So, John, you said you attached the drive to Marilyn's computer. How did you do that?

Me: May I speak?

Mark: Of course!

Me: Well, I attached the special parallel cable to the ZIP drive, unplugged her printer cable, attached that to the output port on the ZIP drive, and attached the ZIP's special parallel cable to the printer port. Then I installed the driver software.

Mark: Why did you unplug her printer. Now she can't print!

Me: Mark, of course she can print. The PC is attached to the ZIP drive, and the printer is attached to the ZIP's printer port.

Mark: I don't understand.

Me: The ZIP drive has a special cable that you attach between the ZIP drive's input port and the printer port of the PC.

Mark: What? I don't get it. Be quiet John.

David: The printer is attached to the ZIp Drive. the ZIP drive is connected to the PC. The printing data passes through the ZIP drive to get to the printer.

Mark: Oh! so the data passes through the ZIP drive to get to the printer?

Me: that's right!

Mark: Quiet! I wasn't asking you!

David: that's right. The data passes through the ZIP drive to get to the printer.

Mark: Is taht the best way to do it? Can't you hook up the ZIP drive directly to the PC?

Me: the ZIP drive _is_ conected directly to the PC.

Mark: Quiet! I wasn't asking you!

David: the ZIP drive _is_ conected directly to the PC.

MarK: I understand. The ZIP drive is connected to the printer, and the printer is connected to the ZIP drive. Like a Daisy-chain.

Me: Exactly! In fact, that's what it's called --a daisy-chain.

Mark: Look! Stop using fancy technical terms!

(Hadn't the idiot noticed that HE was the one who first used the term "daisy chain"? The problem was that Mark was strongly prejudiced against techs and believed that what we were out to do was to ruin the company, adn BS him with techno-bafflegab. That's why he needed his partner to "translate" for him. Ah, but it gets WORSE from here).

Mark: Now look, you said something about a special cable. Did that cost the customer more?

Me; No, it came with the ZIp drive.

Mark: What do you mean, it came "with" the drive?

David: the box had the parallel cable in it.

Mark: I'm confused. John said it's a "special" cable. Now you're saying it's a parallel cable. Which is it?

Me: Actually, it's a special parallel cable.

Mark: What? Be quiet. I don't understand!

David: It's a special type of parallel cable specifiacally designed for the ZIP drive.

Mark: so couldn't the customer have used a regular parallel cable? Why did she need the special parallel cable?

Me: 'Cause otherwise the ZIP drive wouldn't have worked.

Mark: David, what's he mean?

Me: Look, Mark, the ZIP drive needs a special short paralell cable because otherwise data transfer wouldn't occur.

Mark: What do you mean it wouldn't do data transfer?

david: files wouldn't be copied.

Mark: Oh, so she needs the special parallel cable.

Me: (exasperatedly): Yes!

David: yes, that's right.

Mark (referring to his notes): You also said you attached the ZIP drive, then you installed the drivers. why did you do it that way?

Me: well actually it really doesn't matter if you install the drivers first and then attach the drive to the computer, or attach the drive to the computer and then install the drivers.

Mark: What's the book say?

Me: What?

Mark: What's the book say?

Me: I'm sorry, what book?

Mark: The BOOK! The goddamn book!

Me: Do you mean my "Upgrading and repairng PCs" book?

Mark: No, The BOOK! The damn book!

Me; Oh! The isntructions. right?

Mark: Yes!

Me: Well, mark, I've installed external ZIP drives lots of times. it really doesn't matter.

(And now the true idiocy begins. You must remember that the client herself HATED computers, adn told me, "I don;t want to know the details, just get the thing installed please").

Mark: Oh, but it DOES matter! I know that it matters, because if it matters to ME, I know it will matter to the clients. What do the instructions tell you to do?

Me: They say to install the drivers first, attach the drive, and then reboot the computer.

Mark: Why do you reboot the computer, David?

Me: To load the drivers into memory.

Mark: Quiet! I wasn't asking you! Why, David, do you reboot?

David: To load the drivers into memory.

Mark: Oh, So waht happens if you don't reboot?

Me: the ZIP drive won't work.

Mark: Quiet! I wasn't asking you!

David: the ZIP drive won't work.

Mark: So, John, did you reboot?

Me: Yes.

Mark: And did you reboot the best way?

Me: excuse me?

Mark: David, what's the best way to reboot a computer to load drivers into memory?

David: Well, I guess, ideally, you should shut down athe computer completely, leave it off for thirty seconds, and then boot up again.

Mark: So did you do that?

Me (beginning to feel the noose tighten around my neck): Um, no, but, but, but, it really doesn't matter how you reboot. It only matters that you reboot.

Mark: So you did the install wrong.

Me: Excuse me?

Mark: You heard me! You installed it wrong, and now it doesn't work.

Me: Excuse me?

MarK: Look. You attached the ZIP to the PC first, then you installed the drivers, and then you didn't reboot properly. So now it doesn't work, does it David?

David: Well, yes, actually it should work.

Mark: WHAT! Listen to me! If you din't do it the way the book says, then the client will know and she'll get mad at us.

Me: Look mark, clients don't really care how the job gets done, they just want it done so it works.

Mark: But you didn't follow the instructions, so something might go wrong. And if something goes wrong the client will be upset, adn then she'll sue us., and that means I'll sue YOU! So we have to presume that it didn't go right.

Me: But the ZIP drive works! I did the backup!

Mark: Is that true, David/ Did the Zip drive get installed okay?

Me: but david wasn't even there! how can he say?

Mark: Look, Quiet! I wasn't asking you!

David: Well, theoreticlaly, it worked, although I would have to test it to be certain.

me: But damnit! I DID the backup! Look, let's load it onto our ZIP drive, here. If the backup didn't work, we'll know immediately!

mark (ignoring me): So theoretically it worked, but we can't be sure, right David?

David (muttering more to himself); Well, i dunno, I'd have to schedule a time to go onsite to test it myself.

Me: Listen you two! I DID THE BACKUP SUCCESFULLY! I KNOW IT WORKS! YOU CAN TEST IT IF YOU WANT! (I had already tested it and knew that the data was backed up). If it isn't there you can fire me!

Mark: (still ignoring me): Well I suppose we can send John out to the site, but we won't pay him, and you or I could supervise him to see that he didn't bugger it up.

Me: LOOK! I have the backup disks right here! let's put them into our zip drive and look and see if there are data files there! (puulling the disks out of my workbag and almost slamming them on Mark's desk).

David: Look, I have an idea, Mark. John, were you able to do a successful backup?

Me: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David: And do you have the backup disks with you?

Me: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David: Let's look at a few of them, Mark, to see that the data was uploaded. If it is, then we know that John installed the ZIP drive correctly.

We do so, and, no surprise, the data was on the ZIP disks.

MArk: Well, John we have no way of knowing if you backed up all the data.

me: Of course I did!

Mark: But we can't be sure.

David: John did you go into My Computer and select the "show hidden files" setting?

me: Of course, i did. i alway so that on every machine I backup.

MarK: did he, david?

me: Look! DAVID WASN'T THERE! HOW COULD HE POSSIBLY KNOW?

Mark: Because, John, David's management, so I trust his opinion over yours!

Me: BUT HE WASN'T THERE!

MarK: But he's management. So, Davdid?

David, Well, theoretically.

Mark: Okay, well, since John had done such a bad jjob of installing the ZIP drive, We can't be sure that the data was backed up properly. So as far as I'm concerned, this was an unsuccessful installation of the ZIP drive and also, backup of the cl;ient's computer.

Me (almost shrieking): LISTEN: THe ZIP DRIVE WORKS! AND THE DATA IS BACKED UP!

Mark: No, John, I'm afraid that's not true. You see, clients are always right, and they take great care as to how the hardware and software is installed. These peolpe care deeply about the technical details of computer support. So it's very important that we get not only the ends but the how-to's perfectly right. See, I envision computer support to be like selling reasl estate, or shoes, or boats or something. 90% of the battle is impressing the customer with the excellence of the process. And I know they care, because i care deeply about the process. So if the process doesn't go perfectly, the customer will get upset. And what's the lifeblood of this company?

Me: the customers.

Mark: Exactly! Do you see, it doesn't matter if the ZIP drive works. What the customer cares about is the way in which the job was done.

me: But, Mark, in my experience customers only care about results, and timeliness. They do't care about process, because that's why they called me in thee first place.

MarK: Tsk, tsk, tsk! Don't you see john? I'm going to make you into a far better tech, because my job will be to show you how to "sell" computer support to the client. and that's why everything has to go perfeclty. And if it doesn't the customer isn't impresed. I know that 's true of our clients, because that's how I feel.

Me: so you want me to become a salesman?

marK; I wasnt you to learn the fine art and science of selling this company to the customer, by providing flawless process-oriented support. Let's forget about this results-orientation you techs have. The customer has to be wowed by the process. And if they aren't impressed then I'm not impressed. and If I'm not impressed, then you don't get paid. and if you don't get paid, it's becasue you screwed up. and that can only mean a disciplinary action.

me: So let me see if I understand this correctly. Not only am I not getting paid, despite the fact that I installed the zip drive and backed up the data, but I'm being written up for discipline?

Mark: that's right. I'm jsut trying to make you inot a better tech, john!

More to tollow.

John

I used to work at O--ic- De--t, a big box retailer, in the business machines dept. I hear dome of the most hilarious terms for computer components. For example:

For Computers:

* CPU

* Boxy thingy

* modem

* hard drive

* hard disk

* surge suppressor

and the winners are:

* "engine", and

* "stacker-thing"

For Modems:

* CPU

* Dialer thingy

* Internet thing

For the CPU: (Yes, the CHIP INside the computer):

* UPS

* UPC

* CUP

* the "brains"

* the "guts"

* the "computer's mind"

* Modem

* hard drive

* calculator thing

For the hard drive:

* Memory

* CPU

* computer

* (while waggling a 3.5" floppy in my face) "These things!"

For RAM:

* Read Access Memory

* ROM

* BIOS

* CMOS

* Hard drive

* Virtual memory

For the Internet:

* voicemail

* the world web-wide

* email

* the BBS

* Compuserve

* AOL

For a surge suppressor:

* power bar

* heat protector

* power strip

* power cord

* extension cord

* UPC

* UPS

For a monitor:

* screen

* CPU

* computer

* CTR

* Tube

Operating systems (Oh, but we've heard these before!)

* Windows 99

* Windows ME2000

* Windows 3000

* Windows 2001

* Windows 97

* Windows 91

* Windows 200

* Windows any

* Windows XT (instead of XP)

* Windows XP 2000

* Windows DOS 3.1

* Red Heart Linux

* Linups (Pronounced "linnups")

* Red Heat linux

* Red Hat Unix

* Caldera Red Hat

* OS/4

* SCO Beverly Unix

* Office 200

* Office 2000

* Office Microsoft for the Applemacintosh PC for windows

* MAC OS/2 WARP

* WordPerfect

* Dos sixty two

* DOS Operatin System

* AOL

* It's a dell

* It's an HP

* "My computer doesn't have one of those. I only use OFFICE"

For Applications:

Wordprocessing category:

* WorldPerfect

* Windows 98/99/2000/Me/DOS6.2

* MS Windows for Word

* MS Office for the Apple IBM-PC

* Excel

* Outlook Express

* Explorer

For Web Browsers:

* Internet

* The Internet

* Look Communications (A local ISP)

* Office

* Outlook Express

* Endora

* Windows 98

* e-mail

For Personal Information Management software:

* "My daytimer"

* Windows

* Maximize

* Excel

* Outlook Excess

* Outport

* "My printer"

* Outhose (What was the guy on?)

For Email clients:

* The Web

* The Internet

* "Email client? I just click on the thing and I get my email!"

* Netscape Navigator

* Internet Explorer

* Telus (a local telco)

* Sprint

* Fido (A local cellular service provider company)

* "Oh, don't I get that over my phone [she meant voicemail]"

Printer terminology from some (l)users:

* Inkjet paper laser toner printer ink cartidge

* Toner ink for a laserinkjet printer

* "What type of printer? Oh, its a thermal laser inkjet printer"

* Do you have ink for a Thermal fax machine? (Note; They don't USE ink).

* "I need ink for my laser drum"

* "Do you refill the toner powder for inkjets?"

* "I need laser paper for my drum" (huh?)

More to follow when I can think of more.

John

I have been involved in computers for over nine years, Five professionally. I also did a stint at O--i-e D----t,as a business machines associate. Here are just a few of the truly majestic moments of brilliance from some of my customers/clients:

"does this scanner come with ink?"

"Do I have to plug in this computer to the power bar that's attached to the wall?"

Does this printer print on paper?

"Will this software (holding a copy of scanning software) also browse the 'net?"

"Do you sell laser printers that print on laser paper?"

"Do you sell laser printers that print on inkjet paper?"

"Do you sell inkjet printers that print on laser paper?"

"Do you sell inkjet printers that print on inkjet paper?"

"do I need paper to print with this printer?" (She was,at the time, pointing to a computer).

"Does this monitor work on photons?"

"Is this computer electronic in nature?"

"Do you sell digital analog modems?"

"will this scanner scan images to my computer?"

"Do I need a computer to use this printer?"

"Do you have any computers that don't have an operating system?" Initially I thought he meant one you could install your own choice of OS to. Nope, he meant that he didn't want a PC with an operating system becasue he hated windows.

"Does this fax machine send out faxes?"

"Can this fax machine receive faxes?"

"Can this fax machine receive faxes over the internet?"

"do you sell the digital modem for ADSL for [analog] dialup?"

"Do I need a network to install a network card?"

"Will Telus bill me extra if I don't send internet stuff?"

"I don't need a network card for ADSL because I don't have a network". The guy wou;dn't beleive me when I told hime that if he was on ADSL he was _ON_ a network!

"Can I save some money and put a PCI NIC into my laptop?"

"Can this laptop be a printer?" and "can this pc..."

"do you sell the internet?"

"do I need ink cartridges to run this inkjet? I had heard that there was a way not to use ink on these."

"I don't want a cord [sic] for my printer. It already HAS a cord!" (Pointing to the pwoer cable). No amount of convincing would get the (l)user to believe that he needed both a power cord AND a data cable.

"Is this hub a switch?"

"Is a software firewall the same as a hardware firewall?"

Cust: "This printer won't print in DOS!"

Me: "what sort of computer do you have?"

Cust: "A Mac G4"

Cust; "...so I just put the floppy into the CD-ROM to format it?"

Cust: "Will my computer run Office nt2000?"

Me: "Do you mean office 2000?"

Cust: "Yeah."

Me: "what sort of computer do you have?"

Cust: "An apple."

"Yeah, I'd like one o' them CD real-only ROMs please."

"I want to get into networking. Do I need two computers. or just one?"

Cust; Do you carry Mac's?

Me: Unfortunately, not, sir.

Cust: So you don't have any Mac's anywhere?

Cust: "Do you have any CD-ROMs that record?"

Me: "You mean CD-burners?"

Cust: "no, just CD drives that record."

Cust: (Standing AND LOOKING AT a computer): "Excuse me, but do you sell computers here?"

Cust: (Standing AND LOOKING AT a computer monitor): "Excuse me, but do you sell computer screens here?"

Cust: (Standing AND LOOKING AT a printer): "Excuse me, but do you sell printers here?"

More when I think of them.

John

Not very funny, but still goes to show ya that people have a hard time with superordinate and subordinate categories.

Cust: Do you work here?

me (wearing a distinctive O.D. red shirt, nametag, and carrying a box marked "Of--- De---". What I wanted to say: "What ever made you think that? You're a GENIUS!"]): Yes, ma'am.

Cust; Do you work in business machines? I overheard you say that to another clerk.

Me: Yes ma'am.

Cust: Do you work in the faxes department?

Me: Yes ma'am.

Cust; Oh, good) needed a business machine for my business. Is a fax machine a business machines thing?

I was in a super electronics store looking at computers. I asked the sales person when the new Windows XP would be on the new computers. His reply:

"Most of the computers sold here use the Windows ME Operating System, except for this one which uses Word 2000."

Guess it's not just users who can be dumb!

Hi all,

I'm currently working for a bank, providing support for internet banking (I'm a techie of a few years experience), so we range from basic banking functions (setting up bill payments, configuring account lists etc) to connection help. The problem is the app we support is a bit of a dog. OK, a lot of a odg. It's slow, paranoid (kicks you out if it has the slightest loss of connection), and java based. Plus it only runs on Windows PC's, the bunny rabbits of the computer world, suitable for stews and shotguns :-)

But I digress, as part of registration, customers have to put in their telephone banking PIN. As in a number. The bit that confuses them is a keyboard pops up on screen (funky java & encypted) and they type with the mouse. The number of people who type in a word, and are surprised that it won't accept it. (Sigh) explaining what PIN means for the 23rd time in a day does get a little depressing :-)

the other thing is the ap is a bit of a memory hog, so running other programs at the same time doesn't work to well, so you often ask customers if they are running other software. Anti virus and instant messanger services are particrly bad as they also interfere with the communication.

One time, an a Saturday afternoon, after about 10 minutes trouble shooting with this one guy who had come on all huffy about how he was a computer consultant and how we had such a cruddily designed site and app, plus a "I must do some transfers tonight but I refuse to pay the 50c fee to do them over phone banking" attitude. I had checked several times as to what other programs he was running, I managed to persuade him that Eudora "was" a program, and after getting him to read me out what in his task manager, we carried on getting the same problems. Eventually he asked me to hang on as he had to grab a disk (re-installing ie as he was using netscape), he put the phone down, and guess what I hear. Yup, a little "uh-oh" from the speaker, ICQ up and running.

I lost it a little at that point, and told him in no uncertain terms (my coworker had jacked in to hear this by this point)that if he was going to not listen to my instructions, lie to me, and still take a shitty attitude with me, then I wasn't going to help him.

He then very quietly said he would, I went through again and found he was running the following:

ICQ

MSN IM

AOL IM

Nortans AV

And he had a firewall, which I had asked him about.

After getting the firewall settings it took about 2 minutes (of a 50 minute call) to sort him out.

Thanks for letting me vent my spleen, keep up the good work

I used to work at Off--- D-p--, a Big Box Retailer With Really Small Wages. I worked in the alligator tank --oops, sorry, I meant the business machines dept.

Really dumb Cust: Hi! Do you work here? [first danger sign]

me (standing there in my distinctive O.D. red shirt, O.D. name tag, and looking very O.D.'d): yes ma'am, how can I help you?

RDC: Do you work with Computers?

Me; I work in business machines, which _includes_ computers, Yes ma'am.

RDC: So you don't know about printers?

Me: Well, no ma'am, I work with both Computers AND printers, as well as a variety of other business related machines.

RDC [second danger sign]: Oh, but I'm not in business. So I don't think you can help me.

Me: Well. ma'am, I can help you with computers and printers and such, whether or not you're in business. Are you looking for a printer?

RDC: yes I am.

--Insert usual sales banter about a variety of printers --

Me: SO In conclusion, Ma'am, I think the BJC2100 is the ideal printer for you.

RDC: So how does it print?

Me: Excuse me? Actually, all you have to do is attach a cable between the printer and your computer.

RDC: Well I'm not that computer literate. How does it print?

Me: Well, you just press Ctrl-P and then "ok"

RDC: No, but how does the computer know how to print?

[at tis point I almost said, "well don't you worry your pretty little head about it",but I didn't, not wanting to get fired and all]

Me: Well, ma'am, that's really a rather detailed process [and something YOU'D never understand]. Suffice it to say that the application tells the operating system, in this case Windows, what it wants to have printed, and then Windows tells the printer how to print it.

RDC (starting to whine): But how does it priiiiiiint?

Me (getting thoroughly fed up and frustrated with this bitch-customer from hell): Well ma'am, I can recommend a series of books on how computers work. Or alternatively, you could take some courses in software programming at {a nearby technical institute} to learn how to set up pritner drivers. But it really isn't anything that you need concern yourself with.

RDC: So I don't need to learn to program a computer to get it to print? That's what I remember form my college days.

Me: No, ma'am, you don't need to program the computer to get it to print, That's already built into the computer. All you need to do is to install the drivers and --

RDC: Oh, that's too complex for me [Gee, can we tell?].

Me (wanting to get rid of the customer ASAP, sale or no sale): Don't worry, madame, the instructions are so simple anybody can follow it, even an eight-year-old.

RDC (whining): But all my children are grooowwwwwwwn!

[You mean they survived? Was Darwin wrong, after all?]

Me: Well don't worry about it, madame. It;s extremely easy. Would you like to buy one today?

RDC: I have to think about it.

--Insert closing banter for unsuccessful sales--

me: well, Bye now, and don't forget to come here to buy your printer.

RDC (weakly): Thank you.

Me (under my breath) thank you and good riddance you she-devil from hell!

John

I received this call 15 minutes ago in a large industrial client support system. The client said her PC smelled bad. So I sent a third party company to check it as usual procedure says... Here is the answer and solution I received:

"042.08/16/01 10:08 6225 Found dead mouse inside PC w/ tonnes of excrement

043.08/16/01 10:08 6225 all over inside PC. Provided optional PC and all

044.08/16/01 10:08 6225 tested OK..CC.."

Looks loge bugs are getting quite furry :)

I once worked for the Australian museum as a computer technitian and so was often asked by staff members to help them with their PC problems. One such request was quite unusual.

Ed = Educational Staff Member

Me = hmmm... well me.

Ed: Could you please come and have a look at my keyboard, it has a green LED in it and all of a suden it has turned on and I do not know what it means.

Me: Huh? IN your keyboard??? don't you mean on the side of your keyboard??

Ed: No no, in between the keys!

Me: This I have to see, and so we walk over to her desk. And she shows me. And sure enough there is a green glow eminating from the gap between the T,Y,G and H keys. What the???

So I look real close and noticed that the light went out. Upon even closer inspection it turned out to be a piece of green tinsel that fell between the keys as she was putting up the office Christmas decorations. It was perfectly alighned to reflect the lights and really looked liked a glowing LED.

We both had a good laugh about it.

A while back, I was helping a tech friend build his first machine from the ground up. When I showed up, he already had the machine up and running, and was working on installing drivers for Win95. Everything was working pretty well until the machine stopped dead. Completely stopped - no mouse, no keyboard lights, no nothing. We waited a minute (you know how new drivers are sometimes) and then powered it off. When we powered it back on, still nothing happened! Black screen, no beeps. So we disassembled the machine a little at a time. Eventually, we had a mainboard, power supply, and video card on a table all by themselves. Still nothing. So I remove the brand-new (expensive) AMD K6-2 processor to make sure the voltage is set correctly, and the top of the processor is *covered* in crusty black crud!

I ask him what the heck the stuff is. He says, he didn't have any silicone heatsink compound, so he tried Elmer's Glue!

Back when I was in school, I generally helped out a lot with the daily running of the computer network.

One day I received a forwarded e-mail from a (l)user at school, who had mistakenly mixed up my e-mail address with her friend's (a relatively easy mistake to make, because our addresses went by code, not name, and the codes were one number apart.) I had access to user lists and things (the privlidges for helping out!) and I replied to the e-mail, explaining that she had made a mistake, and I even looked up her friend's e-mail address and told her the correct one.

A week or so later, I had forgotten all about the message when I recieved a reply.

She wrote an entire e-mail yelling at me for "hacking her friend's account" and using it to send e-mail!

Some people! Why don't they just LISTEN??

Yahoo! Messenger log between Techsupport guy number one and another techie with some other company.

Techie1: (12:48 PM) so wassup, still looking up your gf with the excuse your provider is down?

Techie1: (12:50 PM) You know, 'grounds for a relations' usually means you need to have common intrests... just both liking to fuckaround mostly does not qualify for a relation. ):)

Techie1: (12:50 PM) Alltough you can strech it a lot for a long time...

Techie1: (12:50 PM) What do you mean I am talking to myself... ofcourse I am!

Techie1: (12:51 PM) I am sitting in a 200 square meters office in the middle of CITYNAME in the midst of summer while noone is there, getting one phonecall per day and one order per week.... I am either bored or stressed...

Techie1: (12:51 PM) So I spam you... which is not boring and reduces my stress...

Techie1: (12:51 PM) oke, I am bored again... It was not nice talking to you :))

Techie2: (12:52 PM) ROFLMAO !!! :P was taking a dump :P and it just so happens that my GF has the internet for a hobby as much as i do :P we just dont live togheter nomore but we still share the computer.

Techie1: (12:53 PM) Internet is no hobby... it's the same like saying 'we both have the hobby to eat, shit and sleep..' those are not hobbies but lifestyle..

woah, you roused my attention and I think I can last this one a long time...

Techie1: (12:53 PM) nope, sorry, bored again

Techie2: (12:54 PM) ROFLMAO :P only fools are bored :P any intelligent person has the power to never be bored, USE THE FORCE TECHIE1 !! USE THE FORCE :P

Techie1: (12:55 PM) I am wanking the damn thing but 'da force' all dripped out of it and its getting soar... any other suggestions are welcome

Techie1: (12:58 PM) I am going to hit the carpet... later

Techie1: (12:58 PM) BONK...ZZzzzzzz..

Techie2: (12:59 PM) Yoh!?

Techie2: (13:14 PM) WAKE UP!

Techie2: (14:25 PM) Geesh....

Techie2: (15:37 PM) BUZZZ!! (screenbuzz)

Techie2: (15:37 PM) WAKE UP MAN!

Techie2: (17:25 PM) BUZZZ!! (screenbuzz)

Techie2: (17:26 PM) TIME TO GO HOME!!

Techie2: (17:26 PM) BUZZZ!! (screenbuzz)

Ring.. ring; (Techie1) uuh.. Techsupport blah blah, how may I help you?

(Techie2) Yoh man, it's a quarter to six, go home!

(Techie1) Oh.. duh, thanks man, I guess I fall asleep..

(Techie2) No shit Sherlock!

I have a office for my private media-bussiness, in a small building with a lot of creative start-up-companys.

-I'm not a pinball-wizard, but know my way around computers, opposite the major part of the young creative people in my building.

One day one of them asked me for help, because his new 550 mhz computer running nt, stalled.

No problem I thought, it should be fixed in a matter of minutes...-but noooo.

The computer had plainly crashed, stalling, and not responding, and the classic ctrl-alt-del was promptly pressed, and voila, the screen wnet dark, the harddrive spinned for a second, and then stalled, no bootup...

Did the ctrl-alt-del again, with the same result, the harddisk spinned to action for a few seconds, then stalled...

Strange i though, and gave it the hard-boot.

THe computer turned of, booted up, and got the classic dos-scandiskpage. -i cancelled, just to get to windows and fix the problem as fast as possible, and voila, the harddisk stalled.

Hard boot again, scandisk again, select ok to scan the harddisk this time, and voila: the harddisk stalled...

Getting desparate, I tried oncemore, taking my time, not pres any keys too fast, f8, safeboot, scandisk, ok, and the harddisk stalled, freezing the screen.

THis time I didnt gave it the boot, but tried some keys, just to see if I could get i to work, but no, no reaction, until all of a sudden, I heard a strange clicking sound, the harddisk made a single spin, the "checking cluster-something" text started showwing, and counted some clusters, and then the harddisk stalled again, freezing the scandiskprogram...

This time I was really out of my head, what had made the harddisk spring to life all of a sudden?

-And the my eyes fell on the mouse, not having used it in the dos, I had forgot about it, but apparantly I had pushed it by coincidence.

-SO of we go, wiggle the mouse, and: voila, the harddisk started spinning, the clusters was counting, all working again, until I stopped moving the mouse!!!!

-And that was that, I placed the user at the table, ordered him to sit and move the mouse for the next 10 minutes, until scandisk was done, and windows nt booted normally.

I newer found the problem, It never did it again, and I have never heard it before.

-I guess the truth is out there...

I work for an ISP in Montreal, and got this call from a lady who needed help to reconfigure her e-mail client. But she seemed to take things a little too... let's say... litteraly.

Me: Okay, now tell me what you see.

Lady (reading): My incoming mail server is a POP3.

Me: Okay, and just below that, it should ask for the actual mail server adress.

Lady: What should I type in there?

Me: You will need to type the server name. Type, in lower case...

Lady (cutting me off, typing): i.n. l.o.w.e.r...

Me: I didn't mean that litteraly, ma'am...

I once asked why couldn't we issue computer-operating licenses, but if they ever invent that, don't issue them to those who haven't finished high-school in order to avoid such calls :p

After being in telephone support during 1987-94 the following

calls are some of the ones that I had personally happen to me.

Granted, If I was a little more experience, I would not have been

so suckered into some of the issues - however that's what makes

them so unforgettable.

I have emailed some of those out before, told stories, and

some are just similar (same problem, different idiot on phone)

So if you think you have seen it before - you probably have.

David A.

Tech: "Ok, just send me a copy of the disk and

I will look at it to see what is wrong".

Customer: "Ok, I'll do it right away".

-a few moments later -

Tech #2 "Say, is anyone expecting a fax showing

a copy of a disk?"

---

Tech: "Mmm, that did not work… Lets put your

Computer under Windows"

Customer: "Ok, just a sec… [Phone is put on counter]

[noise on phone: scrap, rattle, bump, scrap]

Customer: "Ok, its under the Windows"

Tech: "What was all that noise?"

Customer: "Oh, I moved the computer desk so the computer

is now under my window."

---

Customer: "Where is the 'Any key'?"

Tech: "It's the big long one on the bottom of the keyboard

they ran out of letters to spell 'any key' so they left it

blank. [smirk]"

Customer: "Oh, Okay, thanks."

---

Customer: "The install program stops working after I enter

the 2nd disk."

Tech: "Tell me the exact steps you took - Please include

every thing and every key you pressed."

Customer: "I start the install program and it tells me to

insert disk 1 and then press the return key. I put in the disk

and I pressed the return key. Then it will say to insert disk

2 and press the return key, so I put in disk 2 and press the

return key, and then I get the error - sorry cant read disk."

Tech: "Did you remove disk 1 before you put in disk 2?"

Customer: "No, it did not say too."

[After this happened hundreds of times, and customer

service sent out hundreds of Disk 2's thinking they were bad.

The software team decided to add the line "Please remove

disk …" - there were no more Disk 2's sent out. However

Customer Service had ordered thousands more disk 2's to

be prepared for something that never happened.]

---

Customer: "I installed the sound board, but I can't hear

anything!"

Tech: "Do you have speakers or headphones?"

Customer: "What for?"

---

Customer: "This mouse is so hard to use, when I move it

up, the little arrow goes down, and when I move to the right

the arrow goes left.'

Tech: "Your mouse is upside down, the 'tail' faces away

from you."

Customer: "How dumb, it does not look right with the tail

the other way."

---

Customer: "How do I make this memory card work?"

Tech: "Just plug it in and run the install disk, it will do

everything for you. Just read page 3 of the install manual."

Customer: Where is the install manual?"

Tech: "Its in the box with the memory card."

Customer: Oh, I need to open the box?"

[Because of those types of calls, marketing redesign the

box so the phone number is in the manual.]

---

Customer: "All my files keep disappearing."

Tech: "Where do you save them?"

Customer "In the cute little can."

---

Tech: "Thank you for calling, how may I help you?"

Customer: "Wow, I though I would never get through!"

Tech: "Sorry about that Monday's are the worst day to

call."

Customer: "I did not have any choice. My monitor is

smoking and I need a new one."

Tech: Ok, I will set up a service call and a tech will show

up in the next day and fix the problem. [typed in all the

info]

Customer: [...Cough…Cough] "Cant they get here sooner?

it puts out a lot of smoke."

Tech: "It's still smoking?"

Customer: "Ya."

Tech: "Just unplug it and take it outside until it stops

smoking."

Customer: "Do I need to turn it off first?"

---

Customer: "Your computer is eating my disks!"

Tech: "Eating.. like when you run a program you hear the

disk making a crunch crunch noise?"

Customer "No."

Tech: "Is it more of a grind grind noise?"

Customer "No."

Tech: "How about swoosh swoosh? Because drives make

noise all the time."

Customer "No."

Tech: "Can you run a program?"

Customer "No."

Tech: [deciding to let the customer do the talking] "Okay,

what noise is it making"?

Customer "No noise."

Tech: "If you run a program, what happens?"

Customer "Error reading drive A"

Tech: [based on the last experience of customers putting in

multiple disks in the drive] "How many disks have you

putting in the drive?"

Customer "Close to 10."

Tech: "Ten? Can you still see them were you put them in

at?"

Customer "No."

Tech: "You mean they just disappear?"

Customer "Ya, they are gone, the computer is eating them."

Tech: "Describe to me were you are putting the disks."

Customer "In the slot in the front of the computer."

Tech: "Okay, this is the slot just above the eject lever?"

Customer "Well, no, it's the slot just below the eject lever."

)))[remember 1/2 height drives & 5.25 floppies and the lever?]

Tech: "2nd slot??, Do you have 2 floppy drives in the

computer?"

Customer "No, just one drive."

Tech: "What do you have below the floppy drive?"

Customer "Nothing, just those plastic inserts."

Tech: [duh] "What you are doing, is putting the disks in

UNDER the floppy dive, and they are dropping into the

computer case. If you open the case, you will find all your

disks.

First off, I've been reading the stories for several months now, and I have to say, the ISP support guys probably have it the worst. At least the people I deal with have to be hired and go through some sort of a screening process.. ISP support people are forced to deal with any idiot that gets an @0L CD-ROM in the mail and manages to get the packaging off without suffocating himself...

That being said...

Several years ago, a user in one of our Southern offices called because her PC had been "beeping" at her all day long, once about every minute or so.

Fortunately, we have proxy software, so I dialed in to her system and checked the soundcard settings, had her check the speakers, the whole gamut. I worked for about 1/2 hour to figure out what was going on and finally told her to reboot her PC and tell me if she heard the sound again.

The user thought I asked her to shut it down, so we sat and chatted for a few minutes. Suddenly she said, "There is is again! That sound!"

I asked her what was on the screen (figuring it was just the POST, or maybe Windows was going into ScanDisk or something).

"Nothing is on the screen; it's turned off! I can't believe it's still beeping at me!" She sounded as if she was going to start crying any second.

Logic dictates that it is absolutely impossible for a hard drive to beep at you if it is truly powered off. I had her double-check that there were no power lights or indicators on, and then told her to hold the handset down by the PC for a full minute so that I could try to hear the sound for myself.

10 seconds later, I hear it for myself!

She puts the phone back up to her ear and says, excitedly, "Did you hear that?! See, I'm *not* crazy!"

Suddenly I have an epiphany, and ask her, "Do you have a cell phone?"

"Yes, why?"

"Where is it right now?"

"In the drawer in my desk..."

Right next to her PC.

Turns out, her cell phone is dying and she'd been hearing the low-battery signal going off all morning, thinking it was her PC "beeping" at her.

She begged me to never tell this story to anyone... of course not.

Working in tech support for a computer company, you learn to hate dealing with people AFTER an ISP has sworn that the problem is with the computer...not the ISP. And if it's DSL or CABLe, it sure ain't the modem.

I get a lady who's cable company knows for a fact that the modem is fine....it has to be the nic....so we go through running diags, installing the modem...the usual BS to try and resolve the issue.

Finally I say screw standard operating procedure and let's try resetting the cable modem, something the ISP should have done...so we disconnect ALL cables from the modem. Except the customer forgets to disconnect the power. So for fun I ask which lights are on.

Customer "Just the power and cable light...hey wait a minute, the modem thinks my television cable is still plugged in! You don't think that's the problem do you???"

This is completely true; it's a copy/paste from a Service Call in my queue.

"Tuesday, August 21, 2001 10:20:13 AM PABLO ******

User states that she understand that there is always going to be cases when people are put on hold or have to hold due to call volume. User is complaining about the music that she has to hear while in hold. She states that it is one of the worst selections ever and all that it accomplishes is anger the people that are waiting. She adds that she is not the only one that feels this way."

Is that funny or what?

I was reading through a tech help forum, and came across this message that had me laughing myself sore:

(This is a cut and paste, NOTHING has been changed)

Hi all, I hope you guys can help me with this as I am at a loss, over 12hrs and 2 reinstalls.

I will give all nfo that I can so if any of this looks familiar please share anything that may help. It is infected at least 2 of my friends machines and I believe may be possible to transmit itself from my machine to others over the net..

1st iv tried all the top household AV software and others, on line AV checkers also, but none will detect that I have a virus let alone remove it for me. Iv scanned in dos and windows .

I know I have a virus because I found the following files in my c:windows dir:

WININIT config 1kbyte

WININIT.BAK 51bytes

WININIT.exe 45.2kbytes

WININIT.SAV 2.7kbytes

wininitlog.old 78bytes

WININIT.log in the form of a notepad @ 51.7kbytes contents I will put at the end of this post.

(HE ACTUALLY POSTED THE ENTIRE LOG AT THE BOTTOM!)

Also the 1st clue that I had something was after rebooting, tmp files where also writing to my c:windows dir:

fffe2561_{A8A1ACDF-3139-43F3-88A5-3109BB3CB789}.tmp 0bytes generally 2 would be written per reboot.

Other suspect files:

USER.DAT 1.256kbytes

SYSTEM.DAT 2.845kbytes

Which as im looking at now where written 6mins ago.??

I have a swp file in c:windows WIN386.SWP 28.672kbytes

********.PWL file that I keep looking at could be nothing, the size is the weird thing 1kb [******** the name of my comp]

All indications point to the Bymer Trojan. But when I go through the motions of removing this Trojan none of the files expected to be removed are found.

(WELL DUH!)

These are files and reg entries I should find:

wininit.exe

ms???.exe

ms????.exe

dnetc.exe

dnetc.ini

msclient.exe

info.dll

load=c:windowssystemmsi216.exe

distributed.net.client "C:WindowsSystemdnetc.exe"

internat "C:Windowsinternat.exe" -hide"

msinit "C:WindowsSystemms***.exe"

Apart from the fact that I seem to have a Trojan that is undetectable by any AV software I have tried, the damn thing has re appeared after 2 a reinstalls.

I believe it may be a memory resident from different articles iv read , but not being an expert I cant be sure.

If you know of any software that can help/remove or if you can positively id the virus for me that would ideal.

Thanks in advance if any more info is required post or email me.

I think he has a pretty bad virus... it's called WINDOWS 98 :)

How do I respond to this???

Subject: Re: Internet Test Message

From: Jane Doe (jane@somewhere.net)

Date: 11:37 PM

To: Tech Support (support@somewhere.net)

I'm sorry, but I am having trouble getting into the internet today.

I have a family full of morons. Unfortunately, I am the only person who knows computers(I'm a programmer), I get stuck doing all their support, by the way, they live 30,000 miles away.

Anyway, I have this older sister of me who thinks that she is smarter than anything else in the world. So, here's the story:

At 7am a weekend(I was still asleep), my mom called me (international long distance) and scream in my answering machine : "this is URGENT! call home NOW!" Thinking something terrible had happened, I called back. Here's the conversation:

Mom : "My CD-Rom won't play music!" (thats URGENT? You have to wake me up on a weekend morning for that?)

Me : "Does it recognize other CDs? Like software CDs?"

Mom : "I better give it to your sister, she knows what she is doing." (danger... danger...)

Sister : "The CD-Rom does not play music!"

Me : "Did you try updating the drivers?"

Sister : "That won't fix it."

Me : "How would you know?"

Sister : "LOOK. Do you KNOW ANYTHING? This is Windows 2000, it does NOT need drivers!"

Me : "Oh, yeah... well then I can't help you. Bye Bye." (Click).

The same kind of events happens EVERY WEEK.

Comedy video clip of a typical ISP helpdesk session: http://homepage.mac.com/deadtroll/

I work on the HelpDesk of a large international corporation, with the usual assortment of Managers, Seniors, Directors & Vee-Pees.

One call I took was from a manager who got the "Insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font" message in Outlook. I asked the user to reboot, because that will clear the problem (this being from a user who just locks the PC at night, doesn't even log off, never mind reboot)...

At first she argued that it wouldn't fix the problem and it ALWAYS happens - about once every other week or so.

After getting tired of having my suggestions shot-down, I asked her to please reboot.

Very frustrated, she said "I don't have TIME for that, can you just send over a tech?!?"

*sigh*

The previous ISP I worked for only took payment by credit card. We had a customer who had a cancelled credit card and she wanted to pay by check, so we made an exception. Two weeks or so went by and she called back upset that her account was cancelled, she wondered why we never received payment. She said "well I slid it into the slot between the cd rom and where the case meets." God bless the mute button.

My wish is, Why don't companies cut down on obvious warning labels. It just makes stuff cost more money. I have a BBQ Factory SupaGrill BBQ, and on the handle of the cover it says "Remove Cover Before use". Geez, Its like putting a label that says "Guns can Kill. Do not point this gun at a human" on a gun

We are sitting around waiting for the day to get started good, and we have an e-mail come in saying:

"My e-mail is not working, could you please take a look at it?" from that user's POP account.

This just goes to show, once again, how slow the end luser can be.

Friend at work here got this guy...

He was a new account signup, passed off to tech to help him connect. Note: We aren't supposed to sign up new customers on Windows 3.1, even.

Well, he came off this call laughing. I won't bother with much details apart from the system specs:

386, 2MB RAM, DOS 4.5, PC Anywhere trying to connect using a 9600 baud modem.

There's gotta be limits somewhere, nowadays...

I own a small computer company. My Father has been bugging me for awhile for a computer. I finally got around to building him one for his birthday this year (he is in his seventies). I set it up, helped him pick out a "theme" (he chose the fish one).

A couple of days later he calls that his fish have suddenly disapeared. He sounded heart broken, he leaves his computer on so he can watch the fish & now they are gone. I asked him when were they last seen before they disappeared & he said a couple of minutes before I called you. I asked him what had happened, he said he had accidently dropped a book (AOL for Dummies) on the keyboard & thats when they disappeared. I told him to sit quietly & not touch the computer for a few more minutes & they would return.

He's also called when he received a BSOD. It took a while to explain that turning the monitor off & on did not restart the computer.

He also got himself into CMOS after typing a search word in yahoo(he still can't explain how he did that).

Called about a "little yellow" box that kept popping up whenever he went to change the volume on the taskbar.

He calls about once a week with a question of some kind. It's a good thing I love the big guy, or I would have already taken the pc back.

I do tech support for a major national ISP (three letters make up their name, two being vowels...) Needless to say they are a little too easy for people to connect to.

Person calls me up one day near the end of my shift and wants to know how to get some information. She tells me that she can get information at the library, and wants to know how to get it at home (I think she wants to dial into the library's system and retrive information off of their local servers. She does not.) After questioning her, I figure out she wants to find stuff online. I tell her she needs to go to a search engine. "A what?" Since she was signed online, I told her to type in www.yahoo.com. Once she was there, I told her to type in what she was looking for. There were several hundered results.

To make a long story short, she was looking for information on a particular supreme court case. I told her she would need to find the supreme court's webpage herself, and had to navigate around herself, as all I could do was make sure she can get online, not tell her how to use the internet. (I finally figured out that the friendly librarian was helping her find information out, and expected me to do the same) of course I couldn't and I told her that. She got angry, begged, pleaded, shouted, all to no avail. She finally said. "Are you tech support." "Yes I am." "Well I'll call back and talk to someone else then." Then she hungup.

Steve

My boss was late for a meeting, and was quickly running off copies of a document she needed to hand out. After a moment, she called me over to the copier in a panic, saying the paper was "coming out yellow". Since she was a) stressing out; and b) The Boss, I decided not to mention that all she had to do was take the yellow paper out of the feed tray.

My mother was reading a medical article and decided to get more information online from an address provided in the article. She called me in to figure out why the URL she'd typed in didn't work. I had to explain to her that addresses with an @ symbol are not URLs...

I work in Reservations for a major airline whose name you can figure out for yourself. I recently took a call that went like this...

Me: Thank you for calling ******** Airlines, this is ****** how can I help you?

C: Um... yeah, I have an account with yall that I'd like to close today.

Me: *draws a blank* ... um, what exactly do you mean by 'account'?

C: My AOL accout.

Me: *punches mute button, smacks head on desk, turns mute off* Sir, this is ********* Airlines, NOT American Online.

C: Oh... *pause* ...thanks.

Me: *trying not to laugh* And thanks for calling *********.

*click*

Now it was 3am, but he still had to listen thru our automated system to get to me which says something like, "thanks for calling ********* Airlines. For flight information press 1, for new reservations press 2,..."

And I can't help but wonder when AOL started offering flights. *wink*

-mag

magician_murphy@hotmail.com

This story was related to me by my brother-in-law SEVERAL years ago, when the instrumentation company where he worked initiated computer-based inventory control in their warehouses. The company installing the hard/software had several techs onsite to set up and to train the users. The warehouse terminals were designed to allow up to three erroneous entries by a tech searching for inventory. Each error would produce a 'error: re-enter' notice, and the third failed attempt would also send a message requesting assistance to the warehouse supervisor's terminal. Nice, simple setup, and everyone understood the plan. Now to the warehouse to demonstrate the system and deal with questions.

The techs setting up the system had a sense of humor (as you know, manditory job requirement), and had replaced the error messages for the trial period. When they got to a terminal in the warehouse, one of the employees was instructed to deliberately enter an invalid part number into the search fields.

Instead of 'Invalid entry: re-enter' he got this series of messages.

(first try): "Nice try but no cigar ... do it again"

(2nd): "WRONG-O, STUPID ... One more time"

(3rd and final error): Message pops up on supervisor monitor "Go get the monkey away from terminal #3"

and the message at the terminal: "STOP ... STEP AWAY FROM THE TERMINAL ... PUT HANDS IN POCKETS ... SIT ... STAY."

The guys LOVED it; BEGGED them to leave the messages like this; but the techs said they couldn't.

I was the Network Administrator for a startup ISP a while back and after sifting through the mountains of funny stories I accumulated in my tenure there, I decided that this one was probably the best...not the most funny, but a good example of corporate life.

I am firmly convinced now more than ever that executives are grown in vats somewhere...here's the story.

The elevator doors opened up into the office, and lo and be hold there was the executive vice president in charge of marketing, wringing his hands in dismay "We have a SERIOUS problem!" he tells me. (I of course am still trying to convince my body that it IS sane to be breathing at 8:00 in the morning.) I ask him if I can get my coat off and put my briefcase down in my office before I help him, which he reluctantly allows.

So I walk over to his office and there he is at his desk, looking in panic at his computer. "I can't get on the internet at all!" He says. "I think our network must be down!" So I poke my head out of the office and look around at all his marketing cronies, and they all seem to be just fine. I excuse myself, jog over to the server room...no problem, all systems nominal. I come back and check out his machine. No 'net. Interesting...so I ask him what has he tried. He answers:

"Well this morning when I got in I installed AOL so that I could check my home email at work, but now nothing seems to work. I think the LAN is broken!"

I mentally reach for a baseball bat....

..and tried very calmly to explain to him that the internet is NOT AOL and that our corporate LAN and AOL are wholly different, and that installing AOL on his machine will mess up all kinds of things.

NO clue. He actually gave me that blank look that executives seem to practice in front of the mirror.

Him : "But I always use the internet at home."

Me: "Aol is not the internet. AOL is an ISP like we are. WE have a global network. WE have our own routing structure. You have no reason to use AOL at all."

Him: "well how am I supposed to get on the internet without using AOL"

Me: "Because WE are an ISP! Because WE provide a LAN for your use here, and connectivity for your home..."

Him: "but why doesn't my internet work?"

I actually had to go get MY director to explain to him how things worked, because apparently the Network Admin knows less about 'the internet' than a director...

Anyway, hat's my two cents.

End users aren't the only ones capable of being boneheaded or just plain illogical. Techies have their share of stupid moments as well. Two examples from my own life:

I was in Staples the other day adn had spotted an antivisur software for a Mac. Now, I'm definitely no Mac expert, and when I get requests to service Mac's, I quietly refuse, because i simply can't service Apple/Mac computers. But even so, that's no excuse.

Me: do you work in business machines?

Salesman: And computers. How can I help you, sir?

Me: Excuse me, do you know much about macintoshes?

Salesman: Not really, but maybe I can answer your question.

me: I have a Mac; I don't remember what model it si or how old it is...(first mistake: I hated customers when I worked at O---c- D-p-- who said that to me. Like I'm supposed to read your mind?)...Oh, I think it's a Mac LCII. Does that model ring a bell with you?

SM: Kinda, yeah. so what's your question?

me: Does an LCII use a powerPC chip?

SM: A PowerPC is a distinct type of Mac, it's not a chip, and no, an LCII is not a PowerPC.

Me (now the box said, 48MB RAM, 10GB HD space, PowerPC, Mac OS8 as minimum requirements): so this won;t work on my Mac?

(DUH!)

SM: Uh, no. It won't.

Me: Geez, I don't think my Mac has 48MB of RAM

SM: How much does it have?

Me (about to look truly stupid): 24 MB.

SM: Well, then no, sir, it definitely won't work. What OS are you using?

Me; I think it uses OS7 point something. Now this says OS8. Is it backward compatible? (D.U.M.B. DUMB! If that's a minimum, then NO!)!

SM: Well, the minimum _is_ OS8

Me: Oh. SO it cerrtainly won't work unless I upgrade the OS.

SM: That's correct, sir.

Me: Okay, thanks. I'm sorry. It's just I really don't know a lot about Mac's (Gee, could we tell?)

SM: that's alright sir, neither do I [said with BIIIIG smile, like, look at which one of us is the idiot --and it ain't me!]

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

Case #2 of the stupids:

In 1998, I was helping a friend of mine with his computer which wouldn't boot beyond the POST. My diagnosis, after trying a few things including looking INSIDE the case? (and this becomes important later) Bad HDD controller (on a 486DX). What was the actual problem? I'll get there:

I told the guy the machine wasn't worth repairing, seeing as how difficult it was to get ahold of an HDD controller card. So he went out and spent $1500 for new components to upgrade his machine. But, just to be sure, he brought his 486 into his friend's shop, and the tech there had the PC fixed in five minutes.

Why, and what was the actual cause of the problem?

A loose cable between the HDD and the controller.

That's something which I should have spotted easily at the initial diagnostic stage earlier. Fortunately, Doppler gave back the money for my friend's $1500 in components. But, quite rightly, he never trusted me to look at his copmputer again.

I provide a LOT of tech support fo my aging parents. I talked the into getting a computer (and after much grumbling, they actually like using it). But they can be trying, at times. examples:

With Mom:

#1)

Me: So this is the keyboard, this is the mouse, this is the monitor, or screen, if you prefer, and this is teh computer itself.

mom: Plese, don't use such technical terms, John! You know you have to remember your audience, We're not as sophisticated on computers as you are.

me: But mom, these are the simplest terms I can use, I couldn't get any _less_ technical if I tried!

Mom: But son, we just don't understand all these technical terms!

#2)

me: okay, Mom, now double click the mouse.

mom: Okay. (click...5 seconds later..click)

Me: No, mom, you have to be faster than that.

mom: Okay. (click...5 seconds later..click)

Me: No, Mom, like this (--bang, bang-- hitting my finger on the desktop really fast)

mom: Okay, dear. (click...5 seconds later..click)

Me: Mom, you've got to do it as fast as you can. remember it's "double" click!

mom: Right, I get it. (click...3 seconds later..click). Why does the little pciture keep moving?

Me (to my self: ARRRRRRGHHHH!) Well, mom, that's because you're not double clicking. You're doing two single clicks close together.

Mom: But isn't that the same thing?

Me: No, mom, it isn't. And the computer thinks you're making two single clicks. So the second time, you're simply dragging the icon to wherever your hand happens to move.

Even after I reset the accessibility mouse feature in Windows to maximize the delay between clicks, she STILL couldn't click fast enough, adn needs my dad to double click for her. And she is still convinces that two single clicks equals one double.

#3)

When she was first learning about windows, when asked to click the icon, my mom picked up the mouse adn ran it over the computer screen.

3) Just after dialing into their ISP, my mom yells into the computer room, "Are you on the internet? can I use the phone?". Thing is, she does this CONSTANTLY, even after I've explained to her dozens of times, :When the modem is suing the phone, you can't". SHe has a Master's degree, by the way.

4) Asked me once (but ONLY once): "Are you going to download the internet tonight?" "Mom, the internet is composed of billions of gigabytes of data, adn I have to leave by eight tongiht." "Oh. So yopu don't download the internet?" "No mom, only the pages you surf to". "oh."

My Dad:

Now my dad is a LOT better, but still ahs a lot of wierd moments He is a very bright man, a PhD in Botany, but you'd never know it from some of the mistakes he makes on his computer:

1) thought emails were lost from his sent items folder, until I had him scroll to the bottom of the Outhouse express dialog box.

2) When presented with a dialog box that says "Click Okay to continue", asks me if he should click "okay". Same thing if it says "next" or "finish".

3) Takes him about two minutes to find the "esc", "backspace" and "enter" keys on the keyboard. even longer if he's looking at the monitor at the time ("I can't find those keys on the desktop, John!" "That's because they're on the keyboard, dad.")

4) Insists on being taught only one way of doing anything on the computer. Even if I have a more efficient way, he wants to use only those techniques I originally taught him.

5) When wordPerfect prompts him to overwrite the original file, when using the "save as" feature (much safer, by the way), he invariably clicks "no". Why? "I don't want to destroy the original!". This happens almost every time he writes a file, uses "save as" and then can't understand why most of his work is lost. Only now, two years later, is he SLOWLY coming to understand taht the correct respose is "yes".

6) Has "lost" the semicolon, colon, enter, "L", "Ctrl", adn "Alt" keys at various times. He always finds them again, though.

6) Actually said to me, when I told hime to type the number "1", "Is that the number one, or the spelled number?" "No dad, the digit".

More to follow later.

My parents aske me to look at their email because they wanted me to print out some pictures from an emial they had recieved from Russia. I was very suspicious of this, becuase the last time we tried to print out a picture it took their little CAnon BJC 250 20 minutes to print it --in black! They swore they'd never print pictures again, at that point, hence my suspicion. All names have been changed to protenct their identities. Comments are in brackets.

Me: So why do you want to print these pictures?

Mom: SO we can look at them. we tried to send them to Mary (my mom's friend) but she has a macintosh, so she couldn't open up the images (HUH?)

Me: well no problem, but why print them out?

Mom: well, they were sent to us by the Smirnoffs in Russia, adn they thought we might like to publish them in one of the -----ish Community newspapers.

Me: Well, that's a good, idea, but who would publish them?

Mom: well, Mrs. Golightly would publish them, she's the editor of the Phrinphran weekly times.

Me: Does Mrs. Golightly have an email address?

Mom: yes, why?

me: well, couldn't we just forward them to her?

Dad: Yes, but mom just wanted to look at them first.

Me: so why don't you just open up the attachments in your imaging software?

Mom: Can we do that?

Me: Well, how do you think you've been looking at (granddaughter, my niece) Delilah's emailed pictures from McGill (university)?

Mom: Really? I didn't know that!

So, we open them up, but since their vidoe card sucks big time, the pictures came out badly too.

Dad: So can we forward the pictures to you? You have a colour printer.

Me: Yes, I do, but why to me?

Mom: So you can print them out.

Me: But what would I do if I did print them out? Bring them back to you? (I live twenty minutes away, each way, for a round trip of 40 minutes)

Mom: well, no, not today, but we just wanted to see what they looked like so we can decide which ones to send to Mrs. Golightly.

Me: But you just saw them!

Dad: I think what your mother means is that we wanted to see what they'd look like printed out.

Me: But why go through all of this, when you could simply forward them to Mrs. Golightly?

Mom: But which ones will she publish? We should really help her decide.

Me: Mom, she's a professional newspaper editor. Maybe we should let _HER_ decide.

Dad: SO how should we do this? Would it be best to forward the email to you?

Me: Why me? _I_ don't have Mrs. Golightly's email address.

Dad: well, we can always give it to you.

Me: For what? So I can then forward them to Mrs. Golightly? Why don't _YOU_ forward them to her?

Dad: but we always forward stuff to you or Mike (my brother).

Me: so what? I don't need to see the files, I just saw them. You should send them on to Mrs. Golightly.

Mom: How do we do that? Should we print them out and deliver the pictures to her?

me (to myself: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!)

Me: Why don't you try forwarding the email you got from the Smirnoffs to Mrs. Golightly.

Dad: so we should send them directly to Mrs. Golightly?

Me: Yes.

Dad: and we don't need to print them out so we can look at them?

Me (To myself --aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggghhhhhhh!!!)

Me: No, we don't.

Dad: and we don't have to send them to you?

Me (To myself --aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggghhhhhhh!!!)

Me: no, you don't.

Mom: So why don't we need to print them out first? because we just saw them, right?

Me: Yeeeeeeessssss! (Don't these people LISTEN!)

Dad (to me): So what's Mrs. Golgihtly's email address?

me: How should _I_ know? She's _your_ friend.

Mom: Don't worry, I have her email number.

Me: You mean her phone number?

Mom: No, I mean her internet email.

Me; (Huh?) what?

Mom: You know, her phone address --I, I, mean, her internet number.

Me: WHAAAAAAAT? Do you mean her email address?

Mom: yes.

So they forwarded the emailed pictures to Mrs. Golightly. But not before I had to re-teach my father FOR THE FIFTEENTH TIME how to forward an email!

I work as a tech at a fairly large company and we´ve got this policy saying no PC should be older than 3 years, just to keep the HW fairly up-to-date and avoid SW-problems.

Well, one day I got this phonecall:

EU: Hi, we have a very old PC in our department that we would like to have replaced.

Me: OK, can I have the serialno. and id-tagno., please, so that I can determine its age.

EU: I don´t know where to find the serialno. and what is an id-tagno.? Never mind about that, anyway, because it says right here that it is a -95.

*See where this goes?*

Me: Excuse me, but I don´t understand, where does it say -95?

EU: Everytime I boot it, it says 95!

Me: Yeah, well, that would be the OS....

EU: OS? What are you talking about?

It pretty much went downhill from there....

I was asked by a coworker to look at his computer that

didn't work. Upon entering his apartment, I booted up

his PC and found nothing on the harddrive. Of course

Windows wouldn't pull up. I asked him what happened?

He said that his computer was acting wierd so he pulled

out a computer manual and entered in the text on the

page. I guess that was all he read because he typed

in the command format c: /s without even knowing what

it does. Consquently, he lost all his data and I couldn't

do a thing to help him.

Another time, when I was working as a PC tech at a

small mom and pop computer store. I had just built,

installed OS and software for a new computer system

the day before when I get a tech call complaining about

the system that I sent out. The boss was furious at

me for sending out a bad system. Anyways I speak to

the guy and he said that nothings works. So I asked

him what he did to the system when he got it home. He

told me that he removed the partition and tried to

install Unix on it. Okay, the catch was he didn't

have Unix software and expected it to be somewhere

in the computer. Needless to say, I couldn't help him

either.

Computer illiterate people, I can handle. I don't know

squat about hockey but it is cool because I don't claim

to the a hockey expert. It is those people who think

they know computers but don't that drives me up the wall.

Our organization recently hired several new staff, and I set up the basic stuff on the computers for them, email, login etc. I give them their login and password, and usually they are off and running. The most recent even talked with me about his computer at home, and all the stuff he does so I'm thinking "cool, won't have to worry about this one as much", and I proceed to set up the computer in the adjoining office. Ten minutes later I hear "how do I get the internet?" from his office. We are on a network....... so I'm like "open Internet Explorer". a pause........ "what?". I'm starting to become distracted from the computer I am trying to set up. "the blue E on the desktop, double click that." I hear an "OK" and I return to the task at hand. not five seconds later I am pulled away by "How do I get to the internet though?". OOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKK I'm thinking our Web Management software somehow picked up his machine and is demanding a login. I tell him to log into the screen. "What?" So I get up and go into the office expecting to see the login screen for the web management software. I turn the corner and find myself starring at the MSN start page. Still in disbelief I ask him what the problem is. "I want to get on the internet." ????????????

ummmmmmmmm Your ON the internet. "Ok.... how do I make it go?"

MAKE IT GO????? make it go....... I answer with "click on one of the links." and return to the adjoing office crestfallen and dreading the emails I am sure to recieve.

++++++++++++++++\

A phone call......... out of the blue......... someone I barely know, and met once or twice.

"the computer is broken, it has an error starting up and can't get on the internet.... the modem is broke."

Ok......... well what does the error message say? several attempts to remember...... and then..... "here, let me boot it up." nice of you to do as long as you are sitting there..........

"it says xyz error" with a red circle and X."

Ok, that is a program it is trying to load, what OS you running?

"what?"

You have a windows machine?

"yes"

What version?

"Dunno......."

Ok, right click on my computer, and click on properties (ten minute conversation directing to my computer and explaining the window.....explaining properties and clicking ON IT)

"windows 98"

OK :) click on the tab that says device manager. (add another ten minutes here to get to device manager) Do you see a splat? a yellow circle with a exclamation mark in it?

"No"

No? ok......look down the list.....does it say modem?

(insert listing to me everyting on list........ interrupting to ask for modem) "yes"

double click that........does it have your modem type listed there?

"ummmmmm yeah"

and no yellow circles on anything?

"nope"

ok......

"it's broken, the machine gives the error at the start when I turn it on"

No, that is something else. (detour into the start up folder and point out that most likely one of these fifteen things are causing that error)

"but I can't get online"

Ok...... lets check the dial up ( twenty minutes to discover the ISP used and getting to the actual dial up folder which reveals three connections to the ISP have been created.) Ok, which is the most recent? right click that....... (check over all numbers and they are correct.)

Ok what happens when you double click on the dial up?

"when I do What???"

(wondering if a keyboard would leave imprints in my forehead from banging head) Ok, click on the dial up icon, and drag it to the desktop

"where?"

just click on the icon and drag it outside the window it's in, it will complain and want to create a shortcut, agree with it.

"OK done"

Ok, now hang up and then double click that shortcut you made.

Three days later, see the kid in the local store and he says the internet works great now. %) go figure

guess you can't blame them when they only experience the internet in their local schools network and all you have to do is open IE :) of course that doesn't stop them from trying to delete the modem drivers of such machines when teachers are looking I hear......

++++++++++++++++++++++

favorite calls........ "the computer refuses to start up" reason? the non system boot disk in the a: drive...... please REMOVE and try booting system again......

++++++++++++++++++++++

Best turn around on a surprise attack:

me innocently turning a corner.......

user jumps from the side "THE computer doesn't work!!!!!" in loud accusing tones that read "you did something didn't you?!?!?!" Why is it the tone and attitude is always that the tech is purposely trying to sabatoge the machine??? like we are so hard up for stuff to do we go about trying to create more?????

me..... "HUH?"

user...... "the computer won't work, nothing is there. I NEED that computer to work today!!!!!"

me.......swallow it....move slowly past line of fire and beeline for office....... find computer..... push on button.

"ok, it's working"

part most hated: "What did you do?"

do you tell them you turned it on????

"Well..... it must of shut down, power must of blinked, I pushed this button."

user......."what is that button?"

me......softer voice......"the on button"

user........ "oh......this machine looks way different than my old one."

please........can I just be on my way now????? :)

+++++++++++++++++

Great way to start the year........

User email........ "I can't get on the internet. I wants me to log on constantly"

my email........."that is our web manager, you have to log on to access the internet."

user email........ "it wants me to log on again"

My email..........."it has a default time limit, if you don't use it you must log in again"

user email........"so I have to keep loggin into it???"

My email........Yes

User emai.........all caps....."what was wrong with our security last year???? and several other accusations since it seems my life goal is to annoy everyone with rules, login's passwords and programs"

My email......."this is the same program we have been using for three years."

+++++++++++++++++++++

Most Memorable:

First week on the job, was walking down a hallway when a young lady went running by with a high pitched babble "I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I didn't know" considering this was just after a notice to staff to not open email such and such with attatchment this and that because it is a hidden virus I started to worry a bit...... sprinting down the hall in the opposite direction from which she had came I found her office and computer, with the email sitting in her box, thankfully not opened but sitting there all the same :) causing her to think she had gotten the virus and infected us all ......... :)

+++++++++

Thought....... Why do people NEVER notice the little yellow strips featuring directions for removal on the ink BEFORE they put them in? "My printer needs cleaned... it isn't printing right" 9 times out of 10 = "I installed ink all by myself"

Thanks for the vent :) glad I am not alone :)

Quick one. I'm sitting here in the Cornell University computer lab, and I am having to listen to the lab babysitter explain the concept of a "blank carbon copy", which leaves the email address blank so that people can't email you back. It's amusing.

I recieved a phone call one day from a guy insisting that the Network card in a system I support was bad and needed to be replaced.

His argument was that he had two computers connected through a crossover cable, but couldn't ping one from the other. Since he could ping the other system from his laptop through the same cable, it must have been my machine that had the problem.

I wasn't about to send out a tech to replace the NIC without doing some basic troubleshooting myself.

Me: "What's the system's IP address please?"

Caller: "Look, I've checked the IP addresses on both machines already. They're both valid Class B IP addresses. (Insert more "I'm right don't waste my time" blathering here)"

Me: "Thank-you sir. What is the IP address and subnet mask of the system please."

Caller: (Finally decides to humour me) "192.168.0.3, subnet is 255.255.255.0"

Me: "Thank-you. Now, what's the IP for the other system please?"

Caller: (Has a hint of frusturation in his voice, he's still sure it's a bad NIC) "192.197.0.2"

Me: "Same subnet mask?"

Caller: "Yes." I can hear that lightbulb starting to glow a little bit.. Just going to take a little push yet.

Me: "That's your problem right there. It's not the NIC."

Caller: (Suddenly sounding like he feels like the biggest fool there is) "They're on different subnets. (@#$%)!"

Me: (feeling vindicated. _Nobody_ talks to me like I'm some dummy) "Yep, and since there's no router there, there's no way they'll communicate. change the IP on one of the machines and your problem is gone".

Caller: Uhh... right. Thanks. (Click)

Never argue with tech support. If you don't like the answer you've recieved, call back and get a different tech.

While doing time at a Radio Shack after high school, a middle aged man and his son walk in asking for software for a computer he had just bought. After I found out that he had purchased on old Apple and knew very, very little about computers, I told him we didn't have software for it and he went on asking more computer questions. A friend of his walks in and they start chatting. His friend asks what he is shopping for and the man replies, "just some software, maybe some games for this old computer i had just bought." "Really, how bigs your hard drive?" his friend asks. The guy holds his hands up like he's showing us how big a fish he had caught. "Oh, it's about yay big."

Thank you for calling XYZ, how may I assist you?" says I

"My XYZ is broken, I'm mad, and I want it fixed." asys the little old lady.

Me: "What seems to be the problem?"

LOL: "Every time I sign on to XYZ, it says 'You've got mail.'."

Me: "Yes?"

LOL: "I've been out to the mailbox, in the rain, three times today, and

there's not a damn thing in it!"

Forty minutes later (20 of it on mute, laughing) I, my supervisor, and his supervisor, finally manged to get the concept of email through to her.

Me: "Thank you for calling XYZ, how may I assist you."

LOL: "I need some help with my computer."

Me: "Are you having problems with your XYZ?"

LOL: "No, that's working fine."

Me: "Well, ma'am, there's not much else I can help you with, but perhaps I can tell you who can, if you tell me what the problem is."

LOL: "I need to get all this Microsoft stuff off my computer."

Me: "What stuff is that?" Thinking that she had something like MS Office

installed and didn't want it.

LOL: "Everything except XYZ. My minister says Microsoft and the Internet is for perverts, and Bill Gates is in league with the devil!"

Stunned silence on my part...thought of suggesting she take the computer back to the store and get a Mac?

Me: 'Thank you for calling XYZ, how may I assist you?'

Bubba: I caint git ma XYZ installed on ma MAchine.' (the call traces back to a small town in Arkansas)

Me: Are you installing from CDROM or floppy?

Bubba: Huh?

Me: Is the disk your using to install about 5¼ inches across and shiny with printing on one side, or is it about 3½ inches across, about an eighth of an inch thick, and made of white plastic?

Bubba: It's a big shiny CD thing...

Me: OK, and you put it in the CDROM drive with the printed side up?

Bubba: Yas..whatcha think, I'm a dummy?

Me: No, sir, just going step by step. The installation doesn't come up on the screen automatically?

Bubba: Na.

Me: Can you open my computer, and double click on the CDROM drive for me, please?

Bubba: 'K, I dun tha-ut.

Me: The installation didn't start?

Bubba: Na.

Me: Does it say anything on the screen about an error on the drive, or disk?

Bubba: Yassur, it says it aint no auto CD...

Me: Let me clarify things..Does it say it can't run the autostart, or does it say that this disk is not an audio CD?

Bubba: Says it aint no auto CD! (getting aggrivated)

Me: And you tried to launch the CD from My Computer?

Bubba: Yas.

Me: OK, sir, I'm sorry to say, you must have recieved a defective disk...just give me a minute, let me take a little information, and I'll see to it that we send you a new one in the mail.

Bubba: 'K

Me: What kind of computer are we deaing with here, sir?

Bubba: I's a Panaso-o-onic/Takeniks Cee sebun tousand, it's a real nice set, got dis tirtyfive ainch screen, vidyo casit plyer, CD plyer, stairio...

Me: This is a home entertainment center, with on screen controls of all the equipment?

Bubba: Yas....

I broke down at this point...my manager had to take over the call...I was, literally ROTFLMAO.

I love my job - I get to browse the web 8 hours a day, and do soem calls in between. I'm starting to seriously hate people in general.

working in a large cable company as a tech support, every now and then we come across little tid-bits that we can talk about on our smoke breaks. Here are some I can remember.

_________________________________________________________

C- caller

T- tech

T: (20 minutes into a usually 5-minute call)Ok, lets try this, put this into your incoming mail box(settings up user's email)v..as in victor...t as in tango...i and in..

C: wait, wait..T as in mango? what the..?!

_________________________________________

T: Can I have your adress?

C: yeah, its 1547 Blumburgh Ave...(fake)

T: Can you spell that for me please?

C: the numbers or the letters(dead serious)?

___________________________________________

C:Yeah,Im a tech myself, im settings this guy's computer, I just need his computer name.

T: Sure(info asking speil,etc,stallingpulling up info)

Ok, its cc56900....

C:Is that a number 0 or a letter 0

(meanwhile I clearly said 'five,six,nine,zero,zero..)

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C:Yeah, im a networking specialist at Such&Such MegaCorporation,and Ive been working in this field for over 20 years, so don't give me any Mickeymouse excuses and tell me whats wrong with my system here, I cant get online!!!

T:(waiting patiently for C to take a breath).Ok, ill be happy to see if i can help you.

(Doing regular check - their cable is completely out)

T: Well, it seems that your cable is out, blah blah, did requisite powercycling the modem, etc.

C: so, what are you gonna do about it?

T: well, seeing how its actualy problem with signal coming to your modem, its not online, we'll need to get a tech out there.

C: waht are you talking about? Ping my computer! Can you ping it?

T: Sir, I cannot ping your computer, your modem is not connecting to the line.

C: Just try it, see if you can ping it.

I 'pinged it'.

T: Nope, nothing.

C: Ok, I though maybe you could ping my computer.

I guess he just liked that word.PING!

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C:(Hysterical, female) Im always on chatrooms and tonight I can't get into any chatrooms, its telling me im not connected, and my user name is wrong.

T: (did checks,some settings are messing from tcpip section, however sub swears she did not touch anything there, however the computer name is Mommy's Toy, go figure)

Please type int he following..(give correct computer name)

C: wait i mistyped it!!(panicky)

T: no problem, jsut back out of it, retype it again.

C: how do I do that?

T: hit backspace on your keyboard.

C: huh?

T: backspace key

C: where is that?

T: (5 minutes search for backspace button)

Im not sure what chatrooms those were, but int he process of the call I found out she had no idea where 'enter' key was, or what shift+letter means.

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C:I spilled wine in my modem, do you think it will work?

T: just out of curiousity, how much wine did you spill on it?

C: oh i think enough, when I turned it over, few drops rolled out.

T: yeah, i think its safe to say that you might need a new one.

C: should i plug it in and try?

T: NO!

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C: Whenever I turn my machine on, my modem is making ambulance sound.Why is that?

T: (older type of modems we had did not make any noise at all, in fact it coudnt)Are you sure noise is coming from the modem?

C:Well, not quite sure, but somewhere form around there...

T: (thinking there is something else making noise)

After chekcing we determine the sound supposedly coming from the printer.Im confused at that point, since sub still trying to assue me that it sounds like a tiny ambulance going around.

C: well, let me start my Pc, and ill show you.

T: ok

C: (reboots her Pc) here, listen(brings receiver tot he printer)

Sure enough it sounded like a tiny ambulance.

T:Maam, i relaly don't know what this is, Contact your Pc provider.

C: Ok, i though maybe the modem needs help.

___________________________________________________

C: yeah, i cannot..HAHAHAH..connct,sorry..HAHAHA

cannot get online..Hehe..HAHAH..

(TV blaring in the background)

T: ok, i can help you...

C: HAHAHA, sorry this is just a funny movie....

Needless to say it took us a while to get her back online. I wasn't sure if i could tell her to call us after the movie.

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