Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I'm not a tech support person, but I know the most about computers in my family. I share a computer (a PC with Windows 98) with my mom, my dad and my sister. My mom and dad often use the computer to get online.

Once upon a time, my computer was very slow because there was a lot of things I didn't need anymore on there, and it was taking up space. One day my mom got on the computer and afterwards she angrily shut it down and ranted at me about how slow the computer was. In fact, she wanted me to get rid of all the programs I had installed on there ("crap", she called them"). Among the list of programs were:

"Godzilla" (actually Go!Zilla)

"That Japanese/Chinese/Whatever crap" (a set of programs I use to view and type Japanese)

"My Yahoo" (uh, mom, Yahoo's a search engine, not a program, though they have made some programs)

"screensavers" (actually desktop themes)

as well as many others.

Mom also said to "download" the things I really needed on a floppy disk (Mom, you save things on a disk not download them).

So I set about cleaning my computer and got rid of all the stuff I didn't need anymore on there. I kept some stuff, such as the Japanese programs, desktop themes and Yahoo Messenger. Surprisingly, my computer was fast again even though I had not gotten rid of the "screensavers". I dumped Go!Zilla since I knew it was spyware.

After I was done I told mom, and showed her that my comp was faster now. She pointed to the C:\WINDOWS directory and told me to get rid of all the "crap" there. I soon explained most of the "crap" was beneficial for Windows.

Though recently I have been thinking that Windows is "crap"...

I'm a student, not a tech, but sadly I have already run across a few ID10Ts, particularly teachers at school. My English teacher isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. About a month ago, our class was in the computer lab doing research online for an essay. My teacher attempted to access a website, but was thwarted by the fact that "the Internet is broken!" The fact that 25 other people were successfully browsing meant nothing to her. I asked her what was wrong.

Me: What's wrong?

Her: The place to type in the site has disappeared. It must be broken.

I walk over and see that IE is in Full Screen mode. I reach to touch F11 to fix the "place to type in the site."

Me: Oh, that's no problem, here let me....

Her: Don't touch anything! I don't want to cause further damage to the Internet! I'm going to call John (unfortunate tech support guy).

She goes to the phone. When she's gone I press F11, "fixing" her computer. SHe comes back.

Her: Oh, the Internet got fixed!

Me: AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

And she's teaching me. *Sigh*

While in high school I worked for Toshiba Corporation as a technician. I was about to go to break when a customer called, I picked the phone and asked her how can I help you. She needed help with installing a third party software. which is very to do. Then I told her I need the SERIAL number of her pc before i can proceed the installation. She told me the computer didn't come with cereal onr corn flakes. I busted into laughter while muting her.

well then I explain all about the SERIAL number.

then i told her to place the cdd into the cd-rom drive. she no clue what is a cd-rom drive. after 15 minutes of explaining what is a cd-rom, she goes "oh the cup holder" it happens that the customer has a cup of coffee in the cd-rom tray......

I told her that would ruined the cd-rom drive and its not meant to hold coffee.

when the cd loaded up, i told her to press ANY KEY to continue....she replied "sir there is not an any key on my keyboard.

I finally let her know i was getting impatient with the "GRRRRRR sound " i told her then press enter, she told me there were two enter keys which of the two should she press?

then I put her on hold for two minutes just to see if she would pressed any of the two she didn't.

I told her the bigger Enter Key, she replied is it the one with the BLACK ARROW

I didn't say anything

finally i told YYYYYYYYYYYYYes the FAT ONE NOW LIVE ALONE!!!

My job is as computer systems support the US Navy's Fleet Training Center at Norfolk Naval Base. We have barber school, damage control school, electronics technician school, anti-submarine warfare school, firefighting school, and engineering school.

I went over to ET school to install some software for a Yeoman (like a secretary). Being lunchtime she was the only one in the office... The conversation went like this:

Me: Hi, I'm Will Taylor from ISO (information systems office) shop. I'm here to install Microsnap on your machine.

Her: Yes! I need Microsnap. But how are you going to install it if you haven't got any tools with you?

Me: Tools?

Her: We have SOME tools here, you might find a screwdriver that will fit...

Me: No, ma'am. I don't need a screwdriver. I just need access to your computer so I can get to the network to install the program.

Her: Network? Why do you need to get on the internet? Are you going to download it from their website?

Me: I don't think they even have a website. We have the program stored on one of our servers. I download it from there and then install it.

Her: Oh, I can do that.

Me: No, I'm afraid not. You haven't got the right permissions.

Her: I happen to have a SECRET clearance. I HAVE the proper permissions.

Me: Ma'am, the computer doesn't think you have the proper permissions. It's the computer's curiosity about such matters that you have to satisfy. It will tell you in so many words that you don't have the right permissions.

I am not making any of this up. The next part absolutely FLOORED me. She reached into her purse, pulled out her military ID, and held it up in front of the computer! I thought tales like this were urban legends! But here it was happening, RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!!!

Me: Ma'am, I need to run back to the shop. I forgot that this software is self installing. I just need to flip a switch on the server. I laughed all the way back to my shop (about 2 blocks). I then got on my computer, opened SMS (Systems Management Server, a powerful program whereby I could take control of her computer) and called her on the phone. This was irresistible....

Me: Hi, ma'am. This is Will Taylor. It's all set now, just log out of your machine. You're logged out? OK, now simply say "Install MICROSNAP."

As soon as she said it, I took control of her machine, and installed the program. All the while listening to her say, "This is simply amazing!" If you've never had your machine taken over by remote control, just imagine the arrow zooming around your desktop, opening and closing programs by itself. Really cool.

When I finished, I said, "As soon as the computer is finished rebooting, you may use the program."

I wish I had a tape recorder, then I could send this to America's Funniest People or Ripley's: Believe it or Not.

I know more about computers than any of my friends, so I end up being the free technical support for them. Has anyone figured out how the dump the techie hat and avoid the aggravation?

Friend had purchased a Dell P4 package with bundled software all based on XP. Dell was chosen because they advertise in-home service.

I wander over a few months after this purchase.

(F)riend: I can't get MS Word working. It was pre-loaded, but when I try to start it, it asks for a code. I've tried to contact Dell for the code and they aren't responding. The message says the code is on the case, but it's NOT there. I'm really frustrated. Dell promised in-home service and I'm not getting any help from them.

(M)e: Yeah, you need the license number. It should be with the documents that came with the computer.

(F) I didn't get any license. I've checked and checked the case. There's no number on the case.

(M) What did you get with the computer?

(F) (starts to recited list of bundled software)

(M) No. I mean - What did you physically get with your computer?

(F) (continues to recite list of bundled software)

(M) (Sigh) Where do you keep your software? eh... your CD's?

Locate the MS Office CD. Sure enough, there is nothing on the jewel case. No product code, no insert, nothing! Just a totally blank jewel case with the MS Office CD in it. Continue to flip through the storage box. Find the cardboard sleeve with the trademark Microsoft license emblazoned on the front and the note: DO NOT DISCARD!

As instructed, she did not discard the cardboard sleeve with the license. However, she had transferred the CD to a jewel case and was searching all over the jewel case for the CD key. This had been going on for months.

I typed in the CD key and voila - MS Office works. Her response? "What took you so long?"

I don't know if there's a usertales.com site somewhere but this is my little tale as a user what happened when I called tech support...

Against firm warnings from the ISP that they did *not* support linux for their cable modems, I did order a cable connection (I knwe it was working... my neighbour ran Linux too. THe only problem is Linux can't automagiccally find out the DNS ip's... I could have asked my friend but he was away for three days))

And from my prior experience I knew the normal helpdesk doesn't know *anything* more technical than clickin the "start" button before the put you trough to techsupport...

HelpDesk lady: Hi, this is Essent Helpdesk! How can I help you?

Me: Hi, can you put me trough to techsupport please?

HD: I'm sorry we can't do that. What is your problem?

Me: I need the DNS numbers when using a cable modem.

HD: I'm putting you trough to Tech Support

*music*

TechSupport guy (I thought) : Essent Helpdesk. How can I help you?

Me: Hi. I'm running Linux and I need to know the DNS numbers as (old dns'sed) don't deem to work anymore...

TS: I'm gonna put you trough to Tech Support

Me thinking: SayWhat???

Me: I thought this allready was techsupport...

TS: No, it isn't... I'll put you trough

*music*

Other Techsupport guy: How can I help you?

Me: I need the DNS'es ... (and explaining)

TS: I'm sorry, I don't know, I'll have to ask.

*music*

TS: Hello, I'm sorry, but I don't know. The people dealing with this are at lunch...

Me thinking: Aaarghh!!!

Me trying to stay polite: Well, isn't this tech support then?

TS: I'm so sorry, I'm new here and I should have it in this list somewhere, but I can't find it right now...

Me thinking: Aaarghh!!! Let's try something else...

Me: Do you have acces to a computer with cable connection now?

TS: Yes...

Me: And it's running Windows?

TS: Yes...

Me: I know what I'm looking for, just follow me... Go to Start, (and explaining how to reach the DNS tab) What numbers are there?

TS: ehmmm... (New IP's)

Me typing them in quickly and trying: It's working right now... Thank you

TS: You're welcome

Me: *click* beep beep beep

So I actually helped a tech support guy his way trough windows to see his options... Shouldn't it be the other way round?

Besides, the DNS numbers and the location where to find them is *trivial* knowledge.

A few months later, A friend of mine got a holiday job at the same support desk and told me it was absolute chaos there... I suspected something, but luckily I got the tech-support-per-direct number from them...

My story is from the other end of the spectrum.

I was brand new to computers. I had my system for around 3 months. I turned it on one day and it took over 5 minutes to start Windows. Not knowing what to do, I called the tech support people at the company where I purchased the computer. (G*****Y.. you know.. the cow people) The conversation went something like this...

Them.. *How may I help you*...

Me.... *My computer takes over 5 minutes to start Windows and runs so slow afterward that I can't operate it.*

Them.. *Turn it off and turn it back on and tell me when Windows is up and running.*

(I turn it off and back on.. and sit on the phone for over 5 minutes.. then inform him that Windows is finally up)

Them.. *Wow! That was slow..*

Me.... *Yes it was.*

Them.. *OK turn it off and back on again, You will see a number at the very top left corner of the screen.. tell me what that number is.*

(I turn it off and back on)

Me.... *8*

Them.. *OH! Your RAM card isn't working right.. it should be 64!*

After some arguing over me not wanting to send the whole thing back over a RAM card.. he finally agreed to send the card to me. Once it arrived I sheepishly removed the old card and installed the new card. It still didn't fix the problem. So I called tech support back.

After 20 minutes on hold I decided to call my brother and see what he thought of the problem. I told him what was going on with my system and what had been going on with tech support.

He had me install both cards and said *You now have 128 MB of RAM. Your VIDEO card is 8 and it's working fine too. Don't EVER call tech support for ANYTHING.*

He then walked me through safe mode and located the virus which had disabled a bunch of Windows files, one of which was emm386, slowing my system almost to a halt. I formatted and all has been well since.

I am not a tech support person, but I get plenty of questions. I work for a large chain store that sells everything, including computers. We get all levels of users, so it takes a great deal of patience to deal with some.

The first week I was there I had a wonderful phone call. And it was a wake up call to me that some people should not be on the computer.

Custormer: Can you help me? I just bought my computer there and the printer won't print.

Me: Are all the cables hooked up?

Customer: Yes.

Me: What happens when you try to print?

Customer: It just won't . Look I want you to take this computer back.

Me: Well let's try one thing ok?

Customer: Ok

Me: Let's check the Printer Properties. Could you right click on your printer icon?

Customer: I can't find that.

Me: Ok do you see My computer?

Customer: Ahhhhh no.

Me: OK press the start button.

Customer: (long pause) I don't see a start button on the keyboard.

After she finally understood I meant what was on the screen and not her keyboard. WE got the printer set as default and it worked just fine.

Told me I could not be on hold for more than two minutes or the call would be terminated. Also, engineers?

CU:"Hi, I've got a question, when I was doing something the computer asked me if I'd like to shut it down, and now the screen is blank"

Me: "errr ok, what color is it" (Thinking it was a BSOD)

CU:"Black"

Me:"Is the computer on"

CU:"Well the orange light on the monitor is on"

Me:"Is the tower on?"

CU:"No, you mean that was my problem?"

I do get the occassional ???? reaction from clients when a woman's voice on the phone starts telling them "what's going on". But MOST of them react well.

Except for the few who have read the contract and decided to interpret it to mean what THEY want it to mean instead of what the dictionary says the words mean.......or the glossary on their contract.

"Replacement value" is interpreted to mean buying a new one that is "bigger and better" instead of one the same age as the one they had with the same features and in comparable condition BEFORE somebody broke it. And they don't care what the contract REALLY says - they need things fixed whether they bought the contract coverage to pay for it or not....... And since I work for the "Internet Help Desk - Psychic Hotline" - they don't have to tell me who they are, what state they are in, or what their contract number is. Obviously - they wouldn't get in touch with us if there wasn't some kind of a problem!!!!!

There is also the occassional co-worker who hasn't got a clue about using the English language.

I overheard a ten minute conversation where the co-worker was telling a customer that something was a very "timely" process. The customer spoke better English than the co-worker and was confused as heck because the "timely" word kept getting used in a circular conversation. Now if I could only track down whoever it was and explain that "timely" means "speedy" not "time consuming" - the way that she was trying to mis-use it.....

I may have submitted something similar before - but I got another of the "Excedrin Headache Messages" last week and have to share the "joy".

Customer sends a message asking for the status of the file on their contract. Their phone number is in there, but no area code (I only work in an office handling sixteen states) - how many area codes can THAT be???? Name is something like J. Smith. No number for the file......

No problem - I can go to a company access website and "search" for their e-mail addrss. Oh - goody - they've never registered their e-mail address with their contract number......too many J. Smiths to bother with.....

So - I send a message to the central home office for permission to send out an e-mail asking them "WHO THEY ARE?" (security issues and legal issues with WHO is really getting this information - it is covered by various privacy act provisions). Send it the next day due to a delay in getting the permission (I work part-time and the "reply" comes to my private mailbox instead of the general access mailbox. Part of this is to keep the number of confused people to a minimum.

Two weeks later - still no reply from "J. Smith" on their gripe about OUR service on their contract which would tell us what their contract number is........

Wonder if they have figured out WHY they haven't gotten an answer yet???

You guys are all aware of that commercial where the guy is surfing the web and a screen pops up that says he finished the internet, right?

Well this customer just tried to tell me that he got that screen the other day. He sounded totally serious. I then told him that screen doesn't exist and that is JUST a commercial. He laughed it off and then went quiet. I can't believe these people. If he was joking, he would have said that after I called him on it. Did he really think that a technician would fall for that??

This is a call that was placed exactly one minute ago by a customer to our ISP which i can't name(the second biggest in US, you do the math).

"I was cleaning up the registry to improve my system's performance".

Enough said.

My saga began in late December of 2001. While I was at school, I received a call from a distraught elderly woman who wanted someone to do computer repair for her - for free. When I arrived at her house, I found a myriad of older (1980's) style computers piled in the corner. I asked what was wrong and she gave me a heartwrenching spiel of how she purchased these "big" and "little" computers and they all "blew up" on her. Upon further inspection, I realized that this woman had tore the grounding prongs off of all her power cords because the outlet the was using was NOT a 3 prong outlet. Well, besides the obvious fire hazard I explained, she further asked me to install "microsoft 92" on her 286 era machine. When I asked for an installation disk, she proceeded to ask me to go buy her one because she didn't have anything of the matter. I further explained that she needed a new computer, as her pile of archaic ones were no longer functional and it would be in her best interest to buy a new one and to give me a call when she did.

WELL-

About 3 weeks later this woman calls me at 6:30 am and tells me she didn't get a new computer, but a friend gave her one. I am starting to become irate as she asks me to make the green and black screen color, AND FURTHER tells me that she got a beautiful christmas card and she wants me to contact the company who made it and buy her over 100 more. In my dreamlike state, I said "sure whatever" and went back to bed. For the past 3 weeks I've been getting letters that read like deranged manifesto's from this woman, and I tell ya, tech guys get no respect.

I work basic Tech Support, Network Admin, and all-around IT at a small hospital. Being a fairly small place, I tend to deal with support calls by heading over to the user's desk to try and solve the problem. Over the years, there is one type of call I've come to dread. The user that calls for help, then takes off immediately after hanging up, even though you tell them you'll be right there and to stick around. Most of the problems I see are pretty straightforward, and if the user is around, I can show them a quick fix. The problem being THEY HAVE TO BE THERE! So I coined a little term for these types of calls. I now log them as B&D calls, which stands for "Bitch and Ditch."

Hi, gang. You've heard from me before. I work Unix support for a large aerospace firm. One of the benefits our company's intranet provides is an employee's classified ads web page.

This is a direct quote from the header of a recent ad under 'Pets.' I swear, I'm not making this up!

"Free: Male American Eskimo"

The body of the ad went on to describe a dog. However, the way the headline was worded gave us all a good chuckle. I invite TechTale's readers to use their own imagination on this one. ;-)

I am employed at a university helpdesk. I have received many funny and frustrating calls in the past 15 monthes, but last night I received the following call which has to be one of the best.

Woman: (giggling)

HD: Help Desk, how can I help you?

Woman: (giggling)

HD: Hello, can I help you?

Woman: (composing herself) My mouse is heating up. (Laughing)

HD: Excuse me? Your mouse is heating up. (Giggling)

Woman: Yes. My mouse is heating up when I move it around. (Laughing)

HD: Okay, I am going to send this to my technicians. (Giggling)

Woman: I think my mouse is menopausal. (LAUGHTER)

HD: (LAUGHING)

Woman: (LAUGHING)

HD: (Giggling) I just need some information . . . here is you reference number. (Giggling)

Woman: (LAUGHING, Repeating reference number)

HD: I am just going to have someone replace your hot mouse as soon as possible. (Laughing)

Woman: (Laughing) Thank you.

HD: Have a good day.

Later I heard that she had a received a mouse from a shipment of Microsoft mice that literally heat-up for no reason.

Submitted 25 January 2002.

I don't get paid for tech support, I just do it for my family. My Dad's fairly new to computing, so when he has a problem, I get a call and go down and take care of it. His 'net provider is Qw**t (clever altering, eh?) and they're in the process of switching all their PC users over to the company with butterflies pasted all over everything.

He finally gets his install disk and every time the modem goes to call the 1-877 number to finish the install/registration process, he can hear an operator recording saying, "...if you're trying to make an operator assisted call, please hang up and dial again." Won't go through. He tries to un/reinstall...no luck. He then call the Redmond company's Help Desk.

The tech he talks to there has no idea what the problem is. "Have you tried reinstalling it? Yes. Well, then try again and call back if it doesn't work" (Dad's got a single phone line). He tries and, of course, it doesn't work. He calls tech support again. Same advice. Dad's a persistent little rascal so he tries it again. No go. He call support again. This

time they discover he's been using Nutscrape and it's "obviously interfering with our system so you'll need to remove it. You may need to format your hard drive (!!!) and reinstall 'Doze again because Nutscrape's probably corrupted the DLL's." Luckily, my Dad called me before doing any of that. I went down, started the process up again and listened as the modem dialed.

What was happening is he'd put in the "dial *70 first to disable call-waiting" and the dialer was starting before the dial tone started. All the phone company was getting was "0-1877-***-****" and that's why he was getting the recording about operator assisted calls. Just a little reminder (not that most of you need it) that (l)users are not the only bone-heads in the

immediate vicinity of a computer, that some of those bone-heads are getting paid for it, and that if you get the same sort of trouble report this might be a possible solution for you.

I lift my current payload of caffeine in your general direction!

BK

I have been doing Tech Support for a small organisation for couple of years only, but I already have some classic stories. I support in house products and also a major third party application.

One day I got a call come through from a lady saying “I can only see part of the application on my screen and I can’t get to the boxes I want, its broken!” I immediately suspected it was a screen resolution issue and checked the minimum screen resolution for the OCR software, which was 1024*768. I asked the client if she had recently changed her screen resolution. She informed me that she was the company’s graphic designer and that she always had the screen in a high resolution so this couldn’t be the problem. I started to consider other possibilities for the issue, considering she was a graphic designer, this surely couldn’t be the cause. However I decided to follow procedure and get her to check her graphics resolution. It took a while to get there but finally she said “it says 640*480” DOH! I don’t know what graphics she was designing…icons maybe? Hehe Anyway, obviously I got her to reset the screen resolution to 1024*768 and everything was fine. Despite now being able to view the application and everything else on the screen, she still was not happy “I don’t like that, its too small” lol

The End.

Chameleon

I work at an Internet Service Provider and provide support to customers over the phone. One afternoon I had a tech call and I asked the woman, "is your computer on now?", she replies, "no". Well I inform her that she needs the computer on for us to continue. The next thing I know the line hangs up and the call is gone. Well after a few moments she calls back upset about being disconnected. Once again her computer is not powered up so I request that she does that now and the line goes dead again. So she calls back, furious about us not fixing her problem. I explained that I'd love to help but she keeps hanging up on me. She says that she is just doing what's she told. I asked her what that was and she informs me that her computer needs the phone line to "get on", so each times I tell her to power the PC on she unplugs the line from the phone and into her PC and hits the power button. It never occured to her that the computer power can be on without having a phone line plugged in! I guess she figured that I was going to crawl through the phone line, into her PC, and fix the problem!

True story:

Customer on the phone, wants to register his product.

Not a problem I think, oh yes it was.

Me "Sir, can I have your registration ID?"

Cust "Haven't you got that?"

Me "No sir, it's on the back of your CD sleeve"

Cust "can't you get it from my system"

Me "No sir, I don't have access onto your server from my network and even if I did it wouldn't be stored there. It is on your CD sleeve".

Cust "Oh...right..."

(phone down).

What am I? Psychic with PC Anywhere access onto a computer without access to the web???? He did email us his registration IDs later.

As for shop attendants, many of them are quite dumb. Some only know how to make dumb people buy stuff. I spoke to one guy, who said that his stereo was so much better than all others because it had golden connectors (like most don't have that). So, I asked him, (well aware of Gold's superior conductivity to most other metals [save silver]. plus the fact that it does not corrode.) His answer? It is much better to lead sound waves through gold than any other metal... I asked if it was not electricity that ran through the wires. His reply; "No. This is not electrical. Some functions on the stereo are, but this is sound flowing through these wires. After all, the speakers don't plug into the wall, do they?"

Honestly! I very nearly bended over in hysterical laughter, but I managed to keep a cool, calm face when I said;

"Sir, I have studied electronics for soon two years. I have had stereos more expensive than this one on my desk to repair. Believe me, that signal IS electrical."

He got quitre silent when I showed him my student's ID. This happened about two years ago, but I still remember it as if it was yesterday.

A friend of mine was walking with me that day, and he bended over in hysterical laughter as soon as we exited the store, and did not stop laughing for some time... Nor did I.

-Omega

I work for a Government agency,and though our tech support is generally pretty shaky, it was actually one of our smarter techs who blew it on this one.

When one of the more aggressive e-mail viruses was going around, we all got a message telling us (a) that we needed to use Norton Antivirus' LiveUpdate to get the newest virus definition files - and (b) that until everyone had updated, our Internet connection was cut off so we wouldn't get the virus.

I contacted the tech and pointed out that we couldn't very well use LiveUpdate with no Inernet connection. He responded along the lines of "oh, that's right, isn't it? Here, I've downloaded the self-extracting update file, I'll just e-mail it to everyone." Which he did.

But the self-extracting file is of course an .exe file and Norton was set up (centrally) not to let us receive any executables by e-mail. I got his message with a note saying this suspect file had been deleted. I called the tech and pointed this little problem out to him. For some reason he tried sending it again. Same result, obviously.

Finally I dialed out to my private ISP, using the modem connection I'm not supposed to need because we have a good Internet connection, downloaded the file myself, installed it, changed the file extension to .exf and sent it around to everyone with instructions what to do with it.

I work at a company that does misc. IT support and most of our customers are referred to us by a major ISP (when it turns out to be a problem with their computer and not a problem with the Internet -- its funny how many people can't tell the difference).. Anyhow,

Girl "Hi, uh is this the number I call to register my computer?"

Me: "No, we are a computer support company"

Girl: "Oh.. because X gave me your number and told me to call you because they said I have a problem with my registry"

The division VP asked me how big a CD is (meaning how much would it hold). I was already warned by his secretary that he had a 46 MB PowerPoint presentation he wanted on CD. I told him that any file he had should fit - a CD can hold about 600 MB. (I have a very old CD burner). He said he had a 46 million MB presentation he wanted on CD. I couldn't help it, I laughed. As he was walking away he said, "I must have said something wrong." I told him his file would fit and he'd have the CD in a little while.

I am IT manager at a medium sized private hospital. There have been many occasions when both staff and patients have had me bewildered but the more interesting stories always involve a bit of danger (either pervceived or actual).

1) About 6 months ago I got a call on my mobile from the main reception desk. "Hurry, there is smoke and burning plastic...". That was all I got before the receptionist hung up. I had no idea what was happening - and why did she call ME? (firefighting is hardly my speciality). I rush down to reception (which takes over a minute from 2 floors up) to find a group of people staring at a 12-volt transformer spewing acrid black smoke from under the desk. I quickly flick the power switch at the power outlet and the smoke immediately lessons - something that any of the bystanders could have done long before I arrived. Talk about useless! It probably could have burst into flames with no further reaction from the onlookers. It wasn't even an IT related power supply! I mean, do you call a mechanic if your car is on fire??

2) An elderly lady was booking into the hospital and was sitting at an interview desk with her husband. The rear of the computer was facing them as they sat across from the person entering the patients details. The husband suddenly shifted away from the PC and claimed he could see flames and feel heat. I was called in at this point (once again from a panicked staff member). After a quick inspection I had to explain that the "flames" were nothing more than a flashing orange network activity light and the "heat" was probably just from the fan on the power supply (or in the man's head!). Perhaps he should have been wearing his glasses.

I am a support tech for a large software company in the US (offices internationally).

I am running Office XP on my box.

If anyone has installed office XP and used Outlook for their mail client, they will have noticed that it (Outlook) blocks attachments like a chastity belt with a heavy-duty padlock. .Exe, .doc., .pif, .reg and others are its favorites to block.

Well, we ordered Dells for the company and they come standard with Office XP. So, we had no choice but to use it. Licenses are wonderful that way.

I let my IT guy (who actually IS very knowledgeable and is a great guy) know that we had a little problem. I can't receive any system files or files in office format (such as excel sheets, Word docs, etc.) and we send these to each other regularly, as well as from customers. If it isn't zipped up, Outlook will block it.

Well, I put up with this little PITA (you figure out) for a while until, one glorious day, he writes me and says he has a fix in the form of a reg file. These files make changes to your registry in Windows. This one, in particular, makes it so you can accept "level one" files that Outlook XP normally blocks.

He sent me the .reg file...

Outlook blocked access to it. LOL.

He brought it on floppy. It worked fine. Of course, I still can't open the ones that were blocked before I used the .reg file.

I wonder if Microsoft maybe took TOO MUCH of a shortcut to solving virus problems here. I wonder if they even take time to think about this stuff. I really do...especially when their security ends up being more comparable to Swiss cheese than to security.

I have a client who went off to Toronto to help with some family matters. She had bought (with my assistance) a laptop, and had asked me to provide her wih email support if she had any problems. So one day I recieve the following email:

"Hi JJ,

Got myself into safe mode, and now forget how to get back to normal. Have tried everything I can think of; there's nothing in 'help' except how to open in safe mode. A brief clue would be very much appreciated."

To which I responded:

"Dear Scot:

Hope all is well with you in T.O. To answer your question: Reboot.

Yours,

John"

Fast enough?

JJW

My ex-girlfrient is a sweet creature. A bit dim, at times, but really a lovely person. Her brother is a fairly bright fellow, but is quite computer illiterate. This should set some of the back ground for this story.

Cheryl calls me up at work:

Cheryl: You gotta come over. One of my brother's tenants skipped out on the rent and left a computer and i thought maybe you could use it.

Me: Okay, how is Tuesday?

Cheryl: Oh that's fine. See you then!

Tuesday rolls around, and I come over to Cheryl's family's condo (She and her brother both still live at home. Pathetic, but true).

CHeryl invites me in, and starts yakking to me about her various concerns, health, work, etc. I notiace monitor and keyboard sitting by the entrance to her bedroom, but no box.

After Cheryl talks to me for about twenty minutes, I interrupt her.

Me; Cheryl, I'm really sorry, but I have to cut this short. I have to go back home, because I have an early morning business meeting. Tell me. Where is the computer? Is it behind you?

I move over to the dining room table behind her and pick up what appears to be one of those black IBM desktop PC cases. But it's much too light, and upon being picked up, appears to be made of wood. I realize that it was a CD carrier case. I scan the room, but there is no PC to be seen.

Me: Cheryl, where did your brother put the computer?

Cheryl: Right behind you. (pointing to the monitor and keyboard).

Me: But Cheryl, that's a monitor and keyboard. There's no PC.

Cheryl: Bill! Where's the computer?

Bill (From another room): It's right near your bedroom!

Cheryl: Bill, that's only a monitor and keyboard. Where's the rest of it?

Bill: What rest of it? That's the computer.

Me: Sorry, bill, That's only a monitor and keyboard.

Bill: Oh, sorry. I thought that WAS the computer.

So I had left work early, schlepped over to her condo, only to find that her brother had made the classic user assumption: The glass thing and keyboard must be my PC. The box on the floor? Oh, that's my ___________ (modem/surge suppressor/hard drive/etc/etc/etc.) ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!

I am the most technical person in my family anymore these days having surpassed even dear old Dad who taught me everything I ever needed to know about DOS but even I have my moments where the obvious just doesn't sink in.

When I was perhaps 12 years old we had two computers, a 486 120mhz and a 486 66mhz networked under windows 3.11 and later 95. I was screwing around trying to get a game running under DOS and I for some reason I unplugged several cables from the back of the machine, including the monitor cable. Now all of us techies know that monitor cables don't have -all- the pins of say the average serial cable I was accustomed to at the time, and so in a panic thinking I had broken the connector I started looking for the lost pin somewhere on the hardwood floor. After almost a half an hour my Dad came home and fearing his wrath (and my probabl loss of computer priviliges) I shamefully confessed that I must have broken it. He got a laugh out of it but at the time I was too nervous to find it entertaining.

More recently I recieved a call from my mother at 11:15 PM. She tells me that she is not able to print. Now, just having rebuilt this computer and upgraded it to Win XP I know everything should be in working order as far as software. Now XP has built in drivers for older printers like the HP 820 CSE, and my brother had called me complaining that it wanted to install a driver for the printer so I immediately dismissed the idea that it could be a connection problem. Duh! They have an old parallel scanner that was daisy-chained in with the printer, during one of the times I had her check to make sure there was a parallel cable plugged to the back of the machine she said "this big cable just fell off the back of the desk!" Now being as familiar as I am with that setup I knew that there should not be any lose cables there. I asked where the cable from the port on the back of the computer lead to and she said inncoently "nowhere, it just ends." At this point the pizza I ordered right before she called has arrived and is already getting cold. I had her plug it in and try it again, bingo! Its working normally. And this after I had her use the dual-boot and try it under 98 and everything. Geez . . .

I work for a very new (to broadband), very large and very disliked ISP. A lot of customers are being switched to us from another provider. This particular story is about one of those "migrating" customers.

All we had to do originally for her is change the username and password in her DSL Network Adapter. While we were doing that, her NIC driver went corrupt. Yes, they went corrupt while we were on the phone, working one minute, not working the next minute. When I had done all the troubleshooting I could do for her, and had determined it was indeed the NIC drivers, I explained that she needed to call her OEM to un/reinstall her NIC drivers.

She flipped out!!!

"No it's not my NIC!!! Everything was working before I called you!! You messed it up!! It's all your fault!!"

I could not say anything to her to make her understand that it WAS her NIC drivers and not something I did.

So I went WAY out of my support boundaries. Took the bitch to Device Manager and updated her NIC drivers (luckily the updated drivers were on her hard drive)!! After we rebooted, guess what was working??? HER INTERNET. I couldn't resist, I HAD to say "Do you believe me now?"

.........silence........she has the audacity to "no, because I don't know what we did!" Un%&^$ing believable! I said "We updated your NIC drivers ma'm." .........more silence......Then she said "okay, well it's working now, so it doesn't matter." I gave her the case # and told her to have a nice day. I was right, she was wrong and we both knew it.

This happened before rogers@home became shaw@home.

While I am the end user in this story, I do work full time as IT support.

When I first signed up for rogers@home high speed internet, I chose the self-installation package to save a hundred bucks of installation fee. I received a peice of paper with all the information I need to set up my network on it.

A few months later, my HD went. Luckily I had backed up everything. Well, almost everything. I was missing that peice of paper with the network setup information. I had written down my IP, and from that I was able to figure out the gateway IP. SO the only thing mising was the IP's of the DNS servers. So I gave the rogers@home tech support a call.

I though it would have been a short call, for what I needed was very simple and something should be readily availible to them. Boy was I wrong.

They started by telling me that I should not have tried to set up my network statically since their DHCP server would assign all the information I need, and all I need was to name my computer using the special computer ID "they gave me at subscribtion".

I explain that I had no such thing, and I was instructed to set up my network statically.

"That's impossible, all our users are on dynamic IP's!" the tech claimed.

"Well, I was given a static IP when I signed up." I said.

After some lengthy debate, the tech finally concluded that I must have signed up before "the change" as he called it.

So I asked if I can get one of these computer ID's so I can switch to DHCP. "We don't have this information, it's supposed to be given to you when you signed up". I couldn't believe this, it was as if he had forgotten our discussion before. After a few more futile tries at getting that ID, I gave up and said "atleast give me the IP's of the DNS so I can keep using my static setup".

To my supprise, he replied "sorry, we cannot release that information for security reasons". I mean, common, how the heck do you provide internet services and keep your DNS servers' IP's a secret?

I hang up after this figuring that this was going nowhere. I setup my computer with a public DNS server that I was able to find, and did a "nslookup ns.home.ca".

So much for their "security".

In IE there is a tick box in the window when you download files which says something like 'always ask with this file type'.

So I get a call from this guy who is trying to download some software from our site.

Me: Tech support, how can I help?

(P)rick: When I try and download a file from your website it just opens it and doesn't ask me to save it.

Me: That's because you unchecked the box and it defaults to just open it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to turn it back on (and it's not our problem to support either).

(P)rick: Well I don't know either and I'm an IT Consultant

!! Wicked! I've read about these guys but never had the pleasure of one calling me. They do exist! Thing is he almost sounded proud of this fact(?)

I did try to help him and called our second level guys. Trouble is we all knew there's an option to make it ask, but couldn't remember where the hell it was. He hung up whilst waiting for us to look through IE settings. Turns out it's a windows setting in folder options.

Well, at least I know where it is now. Does that make me more qualified than him?

Have fun!

I just love when people call in and you have them restart the computer for whatever reason and they ask you every restart afterwards if they need to enter their password.

No, Sir, lets try to troubleshoot Windows right here at the password screen. Yes, thats right we do not need to go any further to figure out your problem.

This isn't a tech tale, but it applies. I am a programmer who programs in Delphi, if you haven't heard of it think of it as advanced Pascal.

Anyway, I'm taking a Visual Basic class which my programming job is paying for. The instructor proceeds to 'enlighten' the class with her view that no one programs in Pascal anymore!

I wonder....

I've been reading this site for over a year now, and I'm convinced that if we got all the clueless computer users together and asked them to come up with a list of common computer-term definitions, this is what we would get:

CD-ROM Drive: Useful for holding coffee cups. Also used to read a "Hard Disk" (see below).

Computer: A machine that looks like a TV screen except you can't watch shows on it. Also comes with a Keyboard and a "Hard Drive" (see below).

CPU: See "Hard Drive".

Desktop: The surface of the piece of office furniture on which your Computer sits. Files frequently appear there while you're using the Computer.

E-Mail: A kind of computery electronic mail that gets delivered to the mailbox outside your house, so you'd better check it often. If you can't send e-mail, the best thing to do is e-mail someone and tell them.

File: A thing stored on computers. It's a good idea to free up Memory by deleting Files you never use, especially if they are in the "Windows" directory and you have no idea what they are for.

Floppy Disk: A large, flat, flexible disk measuring approximately 5.25 inches across. Floppy Disks are very old, nowadays people use "Hard Disks".

Hard Disk: A removable storage device with a cover made of hard (hence the name) plastic, measuring approximately 3.5 inches across. Hard disks can store up to 1.44 megabits of RAM.

Hard Drive: A big boxy thing that comes with the Computer. Also called a "Modem", or sometimes a "CPU". The "Hard Drive" serves absolutely no purpose, and does not even need to be connected to the rest of the Computer.

Internet: A thing you click on to surf the Information Superhighway (also known as the World Wide Webiverse). There are two versions of the Internet: Microsoft Internet, and Netscape Explorer. Microsoft Internet is also called "Windows Explorer". The Internet can be downloaded and will fit comfortably on a single "Hard Disk".

Keyboard: Useful for typing, but only when it's not plugged in. Also used to catch spilled coffee, soft drinks, and other beverages. Easily cleaned in the dishwasher. Supposedly contains the "any" key, but only tech support can tell you where it is.

Memory: A measure of how much disk space the Computer has. Measured in megahertz.

Modem: See "Hard Drive". You never need a modem to access the Internet.

Mouse: This is a term technical types use for the Computer's foot-pedal. The Mouse should be positioned with the "tail" pointing toward the user because that makes the most sense. Some varieties can be held and clicked like a remote control, tapped against the screen, or placed against the screen and moved, although this makes it hard to see what's going on so it's not clear why they designed it that way.

Surge Suppresor: (also "Surge Protector", "Power Strip") A device that protects the Computer against harmful electrical spikes, when plugged into itself.

Windows: Transparent glass things in the walls of your house that sometimes need to be closed because they affect how your Computer functions. Also refers to a really technical thing that comes on all Computers, but most people never use it so it's safe to delete. The most popular version of Windows is Windows 97.

Thank you, and good night.

While working for a community college in Washington State, I was assigned to the Computer Science department. Why do they need a tech when they are supposed to teach this stuff...???

I received a call from the Network Admin about an NT box broadcasting that it was the Network Browsemaster. It was coming from my subnet, so it had to be one of my people.

Well, knowing that there was only one computer in my department that is running NT, I knew exactly who it was.

Me: Hey there Mr. X, it looks like your computer is trying to be the browsemaster. Can you turn that off?

Him: Uh...sure. Wonder how that happened?

after about 5 minutes of fumbling around...

Him: Uh...how do you do that again?

While looking at the genius, I was thinking the whole time, don't you teach this stuff???

So I gave him instructions on how to do it and left. Just does to show that the old addage is true:

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

I used to work for a national office supplies store (Yeah, we've got that) as a computer technician. I had the pleasure of dealing with (l)users of all kinds, usually those who should have their computers forcibly removed from their desks.

One day a lady comes up to me and is complaining about her HP printer/scanner/copier/fax, saying that it's fine except that the fax function didn't work. I was surprised because the model she owned was known to be very sturdy and rarely defective. So I asked her to explain the problem. She said that none of the faxing functions would work, not in nor out. She then went on to tell her story...

She was trying to fax her home from her office (the machine in question was at home). Apparently the fax never picked up. Through a series of questions I determined that her answering machine was set to pick up on 3 rings and the fax waited until 5. The fax machine never even received the call. She claimed that HP support told her to do this. Unless they've totally changed how fax machines work and forgot to tell me, I think she got it backwards.

But wait... there's more...

She then said that she couldn't fax from it either. She was at home and tried to fax her computer. As it turned out, the two machines were on THE SAME PHONE LINE. She couldn't understand why that would matter since they were different machines. I had to explain the concept of a phone line. "You can't dial your kitchen phone from your bedroom phone."

Also, if you're interested. The story about the tech support guy being fired because he told the customer she was "too stupid to own a computer" (remember the power outage?) isn't quite true. Turns out it's a half-urban legend. Snopes has the true story here:

http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperf.htm

I work for one of the community colleges in Washington State. I do tech support for the Computer Sciences department. I know, I know, why would they need their own tech if they should know this stuff...Just take my word for it, they do. Anyway, one of my jobs is assist the students who man the Student Help Desk which is supposed to help other students with their computer problems. It is also ran by people who are about to get their two year degree in computers. Enough build up, here's what happened...

I was called to the Student Help Desk to assist a student in doing a project for one of the instructors. She was supposed to make a floppy disk that would automatically run a disk imaging software from the server. While looking over her shoulder (I make them do the work) I asked her to exlplore the floppy and edit the Autoexec.bat file. She opened My Computer, the A:\ drive then double-clicked the Autoexec.bat file that was there. Needless to say, her machine was suddenly taken over and the hard drive was being imaged. Hmmm...wonder how that happened. Can't you edit files by double-clicking them? Needless to say, I just walked away. Told her to call me back when she had the machine rebuilt.

You would think that someone who is about to graduate would know that double-clicking an executable file would run it. But then again, I know who the teachers are...

Whilst working in the IT department at a naval base in the UK, I got a call from one of the ship repair goups advising that their computers running NT would no longer boot up.

On investigating, it transpired that they had been ordered to go through their computer records and delete any old files.

They had found a directory under winnt\system32 called Drivers. These bright sparks thought " Ah! we don't have any lorry drivers in our department, so we don't need this". and deleted the whole directory.

Doh!!

I work in a call center

thats has nothing to do with PC tech support but i work fo a big company that has a division that is an ISP

one quiet night a caller keeps ringing up and getting different ops trying to be a smart arse and demanding we get his cable modem running the ops cant help and tell him to ring his isp tech support hes about 15y trying to talkin a grown up voice.

His reply is no you should sort it as you my phone provider

and inter net is over the phone line

we are quiet that night so not many ops on duty

and i end up getting him

me: can i help

him: yes my cable modem is down and i want you to fix it

me: I'm sorry sir it appears you have rung the wrong number we dont have tech support here and we dont have cable modem tech support in this company as we do not have cable

him "goes of his head at me i'm waiting for him to swear so i can cut him off" he then gives me his ip address, username ,passwordand demands that i look into his account so see why his modem is not on line "he did not even give me chance to speak

me :" i reconise his ip as its close to my own home ip as Im a cable modem user.Its the same one thants been trying to hack me and a few of my mates locally he,s been at our machines for about 4 days constant trying to find a way in using sub7 'i decide to turn tables i alread have his phonenumbe and address on screen. Thing is i know the network is down as mine at home is down cos of an outage

bit i tell him :

Sir i know what the problem is "my manager is stood next to me laughing " its your ip address are you using a programm called "7 subs"

him: its called sub7 you idiot

me: thank you sir thats why your account has been deleted as you have been trying to hack people and I'm one of the people youve been trying to hack i have your phone mumber ,your address and the phone is in your mums name

the police are aware of you hacking we now have an address for the arrest warrent

"line went dead"

we never had a problem with him again at home or work I had already reported him to the isp and were looking in to it

I rung the correct tech support that night and spoke to a tech manager i'd been dealing with about the problem told him what had happened we had a good laugh turns out he had over 100 complants about his activities and they were acting on it. Think they did kill his account

2nd story

I had a young lady ring up worried about phone bill as it was very high.She said it was all theses premium rats calls on her 2nd line .but i dont have a phone plugged it on the 2nd line . and never uses it al all i only have one phone and its on the 1st line

I ask does she have a pc yes was the reply but i only use the inter net i dont make calls on it

i ask is there and 0800 numbers dialed in the 2nd line showing on the bill yes was the reply

she did not relise that the pc used the phone for the intr net and did not bother about the bill normall cos the was no charge

i asked her who else uses the pc

no one i live alone

i confirm no one else used it ie friends or partner

no was the reply have liven on own for a long while and no partnerfor long time "goes a bit sheepish here"

so the pc must have dialed these numbers i think

I'm in a good mood and its quiet tonite

i ask her is she next to her pc and is it on

yes it is i ask her to look in dial up networking i tell her how to find it and tell me how many icons there are

i say the is poss 2 icons somtimes 3

she tells me there are over 20 icons with names like big and black ect "you get the drift"

i explain how to find the dial up number and check it against the bill we have matches

she asks what are these for i tell her that they are premium rate dial up numbers for adult websites

she get embarased

i tell her i can't help her get rid of the accounts she will have to talk to her isp tech support

now she knows about the bill says she will pay but to embarresed to ring tech up can i help ?

i can t i tell he as not my field and i would take ages

i know shes in leeds area and a mate of mine is a tecky in leeds i ask her if wants to give my mate a ring hes does pc tech for a living he will be discreet he can come round and help her sort out the pc for the cost of a pint.

she aggrees i ask her for her email so i can check with my mate and put them in contact with each other.she's trying to give me excuses about these site and only digging herself in deeper needed to relive stress!

my mates sorts out pc for her she has no need for them sites any more

shes moved it with my mate been together over a year now

we still laff about it.

I work Unix support for a large aerospace firm. I've seen some pretty weird symptoms come over our trouble ticketing system, but this is the first time I've heard of the cops getting involved. Note this quote:

"Unable log into exchange the local police of this does not allow you to log on interactive..."

I had no idea our local PD was so bored that they had nothing better to do than disallow people from logging into Exchange. ;-)

I just got this one in. Hot off the press...

Customer is calling in to update her software. She's running the install prog and not using the updater (after all - the updater icon is right next to the executable in the start - progs - etc, but hey - she must be icon blind)

Me: You know there's an update program you can use

Her: No. (defensive) My IT dept installed it and they told us to do it this way.

Me: Well it's their fault and they should know. After all its right next to the executable and blatantly obvious.

Her: Okay well thank you and in future it would be nice if you weren't so rude and making me look stupid!

??? WHAT!! I couldn't beleive what I'd just heard. I was defending her by saying it was her IT depts fault. She thought I was talking about her.

Guess I made her look stupid twice (ha ha). I tried to explain to her but I don't think she got it. Christ - if people are this dumb I think I'll go into fraud...

KUTGW techtales!

Cheers!

I work at a medium-sized university in Wisconsin for ResNet (Residence Hall Networking). As one of the two lead network consultants, I always get to tell the newbies some of the great support calls we have had in the past. Here are a couple of my favorites:

First off, one has to understand our campus network is flat, meaning every computer is on the same network, from the cashier's office to students' computers. Because of this antiquated architecture, we only allow certain brands of NICS on our network. This greatly limits the support we have to perform (it is much easier to support 4-5 different network card brands than 40-50). One of the brands we do support and allow are Intel cards. We rigorously advertise this fact to prospective students to keep them from making a costly mistake by purchasing a network card or computer with a built-in network card that we don't allow. Every year, however, it never fails: Someone gives us their registration card (complete with ethernet address) and we punch it up to verify the brand of card. Invariably it comes up as an unsupported card. The student's response: "But the computer has a sticker on it that says Intel Inside..."

* * *

We also do some onsite checks of computers if all else fails.

A couple of weeks ago, this girl called our support line. She says every 5 or ten minutes she gets a blue screen of death and has to restart.

Me: "What kind of computer do you have?"

Her: "A purple one."

Me: *sigh* "Does it have any lettering on the outside? Like maybe what brand it is?"

Her: "Oh, yeah...it's a 'pav-uhh-lon'."

Me: "A Pavillion?"

Her: "Oh...yeah...Pavillion."

Me: *sigh*

After a few minutes of troubleshooting, I determine that a room visit is necessary. I walk over to her room, introduce myself. She tells me the computer is under her desk...

...and it is, buried beneath enough Post-It notes, pictures, printouts, various small, plastic dinosaurs, and paper plates to completely cover it. I move the stuff off to the side, take the cover off, and power up the machine. CPU fan doesn't spin. I tell her that her problem is a bad CPU fan. No big deal; a generic one runs anywhere from $5-10. She goes ballistic. I ruined her computer. I'm gonna get fired. She needs the computer tonight. I tell her the fan is relatively cheap (again) and that it is fairly easy to replace on one's own (this comes back to haunt me later). She still is yelling. Eventually we worked out a temporary solution by having her direct her oscillating fan at the processor/heatsink for the time being.

She comes in two weeks later.

Changed the fan...by herself...computer doesn't work.

Three of us prod and poke for a while, checking wires, connections, making sure everything is seated correctly.

We can't find /anything/.

Then, it hits me.

I take the heatsink off and discover that the processor is missing.

Apparently the paste that helps the haetsink cool off the processor held onto the processor and, well, let's just say that a $5-10 fix is now going to be at least $100.

A couple of short favorites:

We have a LAN; therefore every student room has two data jacks, two phone jacks, and two video jacks. Every year, we get calls about how their connection isn't working. And when we go to investigate, there is always a four-pin phone line jammed into an 8 pin jack and card.

* * *

C: "My connection isn't working."

Me: "Do you have a network cable?" (Got smart about that phone line thing :) )

C: "Yeah, I got it from you guys."

Me: "Ok, well, do you have lights on the back of your computer?" (referring to the connection and speed LEDs that most NICs have).

C: "No"

Me: "Well, is the cable pugged into the back of the computer and into the data jack in the wall?"

C: "Yeah, but..."

Me: "Yes?"

C: "Does it matter any if I accidentally ran it over with a vaccuum and some of the wires are cut?"

Me: *sigh*

I recently got a call from one of our field techs who was having problems with a recently upgraded windows 2000 workstation. She told me she was having trouble with the mouse, could this be a windows 2000 related issue?

Me: Well, what exactly is the problem?

Her: There's no pointer.

Me: That's not a 2000 issue. Try something else.

Her: But I logged in as administrator and it still doesn't work.

Me (louder): THAT'S NOT A 2000 ISSUE.

Her: What could it be? the cables? (duh)

Me (completely frustrated): DO YA THINK?

Got into work at 8am to find the boss in a blind panic - she had lost all of her email. I was half expecting it as I set her up on a different computer the previous afternoon.

When I looked at her main computer, she only had 2 items in her box. I looked in everywhere and could not see any signs of email. I went onto the server and found that she had 7,000 emails in her folder so I was curious. After 3 hours of head scratching and caffine, and a phone call to our helpdesk we were none the wiser.

I had another look at the laptop after reinstalling Outlook and her profile, I noticed that there were filters on the deleted items folder. I removed them and found 7,000 messages! I told her and she said "yes, thats right. there are only a few in my inbox". *sighs* she had only stored all her emails in Deleted items so that there was no chance ever of her messages replicating across the network.

And all this was acheived on a laptop by battery which supposedly doesn;t work?!

A recent call to Prodigy tech support yielded frustrating, yet funny, results. I called to complain about their server disconnecting my modem connection within about 2 minutes of gaining access, even AFTER switching to one of Prodigy's recommended new access numbers. After 20 minutes on hold, I explained the problem to the technician, who suggested that I "wait until the access number is totally dead" and "then switch to a new number". I explained that the advice was unacceptable since I already told him that I was having problems with one of the NEW numbers as well. I demanded he find a number that was currently working, NOW, while I was on hold.

After several minutes on hold, he gave me a new access number, adding "if that number doesn't work, then call back and we'll check your DNS numbers". "DNS numbers?" I asked. "Yea, sometimes the old numbers cause this problem" he said. "Why didn't you say that in the first place?" I asked. "Because you called about your access number" he replied. "Just give me the proper numbers now" I demanded. "After all, why not check the numbers while I'm on the phone?" I thought. Sure enough, the DNS numbers were outdated, and the connection problem was solved.

"How would you rate this support call" the technician asked, "Excellent, Fair, or Poor?" "I don't know" I responded, "since I did all the work, why don't YOU rate ME!" After a long pause, he simply hung up.

I am a high-speed cable internet tech. One day, I answered a call from a woman who was very irrate. She started her explination with the description of "fire" coming out the back of her cable modem and laptop. Somewhat confused, I allowed her to continue. She said that it was a week ago from this *originally* happening.

She continued that today she had come home (with her brand new laptop/modem) to find the cable box, which so happened to be on her front lawn, opened and the cabling unplugged. It turned out the cable guy needed certain diagnostic equipment to fix the problem and was going to fetch them. But appearantly not fast enough for the woman's husband, who proceded to replug-in the connection to their house. Since the cable had yet to be buried, it was easy to distinguish their cable line. It is enough to say that the husband recieved quite a severe shock doing so.

Now, most people would use this as an indication that it would be BAD to plug-in the new laptop and modem at this point. Not for these people. She was calling in because she had just blown out her second laptop and second modem in a week.

Now vibrating with need to express my feelings about her "situation", I told her I would transfer her to someone who would schedule a tech to come over. Putting her on hold, I talked to said person explaining what had happened. I heard a thump, I believe it to be the persons head hitting their desk, and their uttering "Oh, God..." then I transfered the call. Needless to say, I had to take a five to now laugh myself silly.

One evening several years ago I was sitting real comfortable in my room reading a book while my sister had occupied the computer since she was writing a paper due at school a couple of days later. Suddenly I heard the panicked voice of my sister saying that the computer wasn't doing anithing.

I went to her and since the whole thing was frozen I told her to reboot. When she noticed she had lost a part of her work she blamed me (it had been about an hour since she had last saved anything, my fault, yea right).

These days she saves whatever she is writing a lot more frequently...

A couple of years back I informed my mum that we were running out of space on the hard-drive in our computer and that it might be time to get a new one. Her reply to me?

"Why don't you save all the things you write on floppies?"

Had to explain to her that moving a few essays from the HD wouldn't make that much of a difference :-)

Apart from doing my studies in school, I do freelance tech support for my friends, or really anyone who has my phone number and is polite.

This is a transcript from a phone call i just got.

Me= me

CAUB= Complete and Useless B*****d.

Me: This Chris, hi, what can i help u with?

CAUB:Dont you spin me no crap, boy, I was told you could help me, if you dont, ill punch your lights out!

Me: Oooookaaayyy. Well,(Thinking this guy uses cats for knife practise) what seems to be the problem?

CAUB:My b****y pc doesnt turn on!

Me: well, has anything happened recently, new programs, moved house?

CAUB:hmm, nope. Why would that matter?

Me: well, some programs need to restart or you to close down the computer and reboot to work, and moving, you may have forgotten to plug in a cable or two.

CAUB:well, let me check round the back...

At this point I heard a shattering glass and fizzing.

Me:what in the name of god was that?!

CAUB: erm, that was the sound of a glass of coke falling into the inside of the box thingie.(pause)Is that good?

ME (losing it ): NO ITS NOT!, you're too bloody stupid to own a computer!take it back to the bloody shop, and make them promise you theyll never let you buy anything electrical again!

CAUB: Would putting it in the dishwasher help?

Me:NOOO!!!!!

Needless to say, after I had taken this call, I had to go on the net and retell it to everyone i could.

Keep going, Techs, the war against stupidity is a long and hard one. Without these people, you woulnt have jobs!

A fellow tech told me this story.

A user asked him why the floppy drive made that noise while formatting a new disk and he answered :

"There's a very small dwarf in the case, and he's engraving the information on the floppy"

The user looked baffled and said "Oh my !!"

My friend ran out and died laughing.

Wow, I never thought I'd hear this one.

Tech : "What's on your desktop"

User : "Pencil, keyboard, mouse, ..."

Most of my work is in setting up and maintaining Apple Airport wireless networks.

Usually the job is done over the phone with the occasional trip on-site to help configure the

network. My clients range from the plaintive " but I am the network admin " newbie who

got the job by default because he/she has a clue but is over their head to the belligerent

jerk who won't listen to anything you say.

Anyway, one guy who is pretty good and who I rarely have to help out called one day.

H= him

M=me

H: I've got a new Base Station that won't work.

M: OK, whats wrong?

H: I can see and associate with the Base Station but can't connect to the internet through it.

This particular site has active roaming which means that you can move any where in the building

and as one Base Station's connection become weaker the computer, usually a PowerBook or iBook, then

switches to a different, stronger Base Station connection. This requires that All Base Stations have the same Network name.

M: Does the new Base Station have the same Network name?

H: Yeah I've checked, it's the same. But interestingly enough when I associate with this Base station the Admin Utility

won't see the other Base Stations.

M: ( thinking) What the h@#!*#

H: And when I associate with the Network I can surf the web and connect to our file servers BUT admin Utility

won't list the new Base Station.

This is very odd.

We tried both soft re-setting the Base Station and re-uploading the Base Station firmware, no go.

At this point we're both really bewildered and I'm about to pack up and drive over there ( 90 miles round trip).

When......

H: Oh Sh~*%@ ( then starts giggling)

M: What??

H: You're gonna kill me..... ( then starts laughing out loud).

M: ( it's contagious... I start laughing).. WHAT????

H: Well gee, do you think it might help if I plug the ethernet cable into the Base Station??

We are both in hysterics at this point.

M:( In my best mad scientist voice) I don't know, it's just crazy enough that it just might work...

and of course it worked perfectly...

Moral of the story:

2 SUPPOSED experts can screw it up as well as the next guy.

One of our web sites is a database of legal information. Its main page is an interface to its search function and has several data entry points. The first one is a drop-down list of types of searches to perform - multi-cite, definitions, criticisms, etc. On more than one occasion recently our rep has been to a customer's site for user training. Some of these customers have been happy users of the system for months or years. When she gets to this page, selects something other than the default search type and looks at the audience, she see stunned faces and hears people say things like 'how did you do that?' and 'where did that come from?'. So now we're going to have to redesign the page, probably either making it a radio-button select instead of a drop-down, or removing the default and forcing the user to select something, because so many lusers don't know what a drop-down select box is!!!

Every few months we make changes to the web site which certain clients need to be told about, by email. This time there's about 250 of these clients - I think that's about normal. You'd think it would be a simple matter to do this - type up a mesage, go to the address book, add the group to the BCC line, and send it off. But nooooo, they don't have an email group for these addresses. They don't have a listing of any kind for these people. The secretary has to refer to a paper list of companies, go to her Contacts folder in Outlook, search for the company name, and pick up email addresses one at a time. I got the word to upload the changed files about 3:00 pm. She was told to have the emails out before the end of the day. Timing isn't always this tight, but this happens about every 3 months. Every time someone suggests setting up an email group and it never happens. One of the phbs seems to be against the mailing-list idea, for no discernable reason. There are three separate types of messages which need to go out to this type of group (not the same group), done by three different people under this same boss. The other two have lists set up and send theirs out in a matter of minutes. This one takes hours at best. Last I heard, one of the others was going to help set up a list for this one without asking the boss. Don't know if it's happened yet.

As any tech person knows, each program has a set of minimum requirements. You would thinks this would be easy to understand. But apparently not this lady

A lady called in asking about a particular screen that comes up during the installation. This particular screen has information of the business in it with an ok button. That button will not appear if the display resolution is

at 640x480. So naturally I have her exit the install, and increase the resolution to 800x600. I warn her that it is going to make things smaller. And after the computer resizes the display, I ask her if it looks ok and that she can read it. She replies: "Yes". So with that we reinstall the program and see if it goes through. Then a message comes up stating that the program needs x amount of space to install. After explaining to the lady what that meant, she then promptly replies: " But I thought that thing we just did made everything smaller..." I calmly explain to the lady what that means. After hanging up, I could not stop laughing. If it was that easy to get space back on anyone's hard drive, we wouldn't need to have all these huge hard drives. Oh well...

Keep up the good work people! This site helps me understand that I'm not the only one having to work with people who give a whole new meaning to the term

computer illiterate!

this happened quite a while ago, and it taught me a valuable lesson in asking the right questions!

A customer called us, and was having trouble connecting her PC to the internet via her modem. I went through every thing I could think of - checking the network settings/Username/password etc. nothing worked.

In the end, I offered to drop round and check it in person. I walked in, sat down, looked at the PC, got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, Turned off Caps Lock, entered the password, .... and VOILA - internet access.

If only I'd thought to ask .....

Recently I was setting up a new Win 2000 server. When trying to set it up I received numerous errors from DHCP service, caused by the old server. To avoid these problems I decided to use an old hub to test the installation; I plugged my workstation into the hub and tested everything. When I had finished I tried to connect my machine back to the existing domain but had no luck - almost 45 minutes later I realised it couldn't see the domain because I was still physically connected to the old hub!!

The moral of this story... follow your own advice; had a customer told me they couldn't connect to the domain one of the first things I would check is the network cable is properly connected.

DOH!

As a telcom support engineer in the IT departments I get a lot of really weird user problems.

We once had an old number for the employment office that was (XXX) 4XX-3825. It also had a toll free 800 number pointed to it with the same last 7 digits.

The lady in employment started complaining that she was getting obscene phone calls after hours so we had the number disconnected and gave up the 800 number because we were no longer advertising those numbers.

About 6 months later I get an irate call from my boss wanting to know what kind of pornographic business I was running using company facilities?

Duh, say what????

Turns out that the local and 800 number spells something pornographic and after we gave up the 800 number it was picked up by one of the phone sex services!

But here's the good part, the HR department had never taken the 800 number off their mailers and had just sent out 5,000 brouchures nation wide for an employment drive!

Wonder what all those folks thought they were applying for when they called and got the sex line? ;-)

A bit of background. I'm a Network Manager in a school in the UK, we have 7 ICT Suites, and several other clusters scattered around the site. To make fault reporting easier, I've created a helpdesk website for staff to log and trace faults.

Item A

A typical report from 1 memeber of staff.

"The left most computer is stuck on the Windows screen"

... Which left most one is that? Am I in the room with you, and which room is it? The only thing that gave us a clue was the user's name!

Item B

On the last day of term, the RCD in 1 of the ICT Suites was playing up. As soon as the 13th Computer was switched on at the mains, the whole ring would trip.

The electrican reported a faulty RCD during the holidays, and to prevent damage to the LCD projector, I had unplugged it from the mains.

4 days into the new term, Support call saying that the projector is not working. (This time a room was mentioned)

I wanted a laugh, so I walked up to the next floor, (where the room is) and in front of the teacher and class, proceeded to plug the Projector back into the mains. Look of shock on the teachers face was a picture when I left.

Needless to say, I'm amending the support page to ask if they have checked that the item is Plugged in and working!

If they are ment to be teachers, what are they teaching the kids!

Bored

Not really a tale but I'm sure everyone feels my pain on this one.

I'm in the Air Force and whenever I'm deployed to places like the Middle East or Southeast Asia, people in my career field (3C0X1 for those of you who know what I'm talking about) are usually known as the "computer guy". We work with permanent people stationed there to do things like set up network and e-mail accounts for the people we work with. Most of these individuals only use their accounts for e-mail which is understanding since they're all away form their families. What does a jet engine mechanic need with space on a file server, right?

Anyways, I'm expected to be able to fix anything and everything computer related. Usually, it is stuff I can do but not because of my job or any training I've received. I just like doing it. It never fails though that I'll received question after question about stuff like copiers and fax machines. I've even been asked to look at telephones before. I'm not sure if a lot of people in the "computer world" get that a lot but to me it seems like I'm expected to be a guru on everything electronic. I'm still waiting for someone to come ask me to look at a broken lamp since it has a cord that plugs into the wall.

j0e_k0o1

www.geocities.com/joe2478

I work for a major internet provider. I just got off a call from a very frustrated customer. Initially her daughter was on the phone and as always I ask for a email address or account number so I can locate their account in order to assist them. The daughter gave me an email address that pulled up nothing. I found something close to what she stated, so I attempted to verify the account to see if indeed I had the correct one. No information that she gave me matched anything on the account I had up, so I knew I had the wrong one up. I asked to speak to her mother. The mother came on and I introduced myself and asked her for the email username. She gave me the same one the daughter did. I told her I was unable to locate anything on that name and asked her if she knew her customer account number. She did not, so I asked her if her account was paid on a credit card so I could search by that number. She said it should be set up for monthly invoice payment by mail, so I asked her for her address and home phone number. None of this information pulled up any existing account. I asked her when she set up her account and if she had actually connected to her service. She told me that she got a letter from us one month ago that had the username she gave me and that she spoke to someone here in Tech Support who created her account and who helped her set up her connection. At this point I knew it was going to be a lost cause. The only department who can create accounts is Sales, not Tech. I explained this to her and keeping a somewhat postitve outlook, I asked her to go and get the letter she received and read me character for character what the username was. Her only reply was, "The letter SAID"(notice the use of past tense)and repeated the original username. I told her that this pulled up nothing, (again) and asked her to go get the letter. Again she only replied in the past tense, which told me she had no letter to get. She then got even more irate and accused me of deleting her account without her consen

t. I politely explained that I had yet to even pull up an account for her let alone delete one for her. This went on and on for 20 minutes before she demanded to speak to a supervisor. Trying to avoid escalating this issue, I calmly (and still politely believe it or not) attempted to explain to her that a supervisor would not have any additional ways to locate her account. I tried one last time to search and still came up with no account. She accused me again of deleting her account. She kept saying that she refused to pay for the service because it did not work. (Well obviously it wouldn't, she has no account) I asked her if she has an invoice, she said no and was wondering where it was, its been over a month since she set up her account and has yet to get a bill for it.( Well duh, she has NO account). She again demanded a supervisor. When I asked her why she would need a supervisor, due to the simple fact that a supervisor would not be able to find an account either. Her reply for wanting a supervisor........................"I just want to cancel my account!!!"

I have been working tech support for about three years and some change. At my old company we had onlyt about 40 computers, most which I built and supported. The company I work for now has about 500+ users thru out the country.

My tale goes some like this

Sup: Me

Cus: End User

Sup: Helpdesk how can I help you?

Cus: My thingy isnot working!

Sup: Thingy? Could you please be more specific

Cus: (long pause)You know the thingy....

Sup: Sir, I have no clue what you are talking about.

Cus: I turned on my computer and the thingy is not working.

Sup: Your monitor?

Cus: Not the monitor.... I am not stupid!

Sup: Sir I didn't say you where I am just trying to he..

Cus: Look just send someone down here and fix my thingy!

Sup: can you describe this thingy? Like what shape and size it is?

Cus: Yes

Sup: Okay can you tell me what does it look like?

Cus: Why did you just ask before calling me stupid?

Sup: Sir I never said you where, now what does it look like?

Cus: well it is about this big.

Sup: Sir how big? I cannot see your hands.

Cus: Sorry, well do you know what I am talking about now?

Sup: Sir no I don't... can you tell me does it say anything on it?

Cus: No I don't! I just want to get working, now is someone going to come down here and fix this?

Sup: Before I can send anyone down I need some information, I need your name and what city you are calling from?

Cus: My Name is***** and I am in *****,Wa

Sup: Sir what company do you work for?

Cus: I work for ***** who the F*** do you work for?

Sup: Sir What number did you dial, because you are calling *****, NY and this is ****.

Cus: Sorry wrong number(hangs up).

I have not heard from that user or the user's company again... to this day I wonder what the thingy was.

I am the IT department at a company of about 50 users in 6 locations. The building the main servers are in was built in the 1950's, so electrical outlets are at a premium. In the "server room" there is only one outlet with two jacks. There is one large UPS and the two servers are plugged into one, with an outlet strip that modems and such plug into coming from the UPS. The other jack has the printer plugged into it.

The printer is a large dot-matrix that invoices are printed on. I have been trying for the year and a half I have been here to get a proper printer table for this, as the way the paper is routed, it frequently jams. My pleas have so far fallen on deaf ears. As a result, the woman that prints invoices has to babysit this printer while 500-600 invoices print out each month.

A couple of days ago when I got back from lunch everyone was screaming that the server was down and there was no power in the server room. I went in and looked around. Sure enough, the servers were dead. Took a quick look around and saw that the UPS was off. The two people that followed me into the room, one of them was Invoice Printer, were asking what happened. I told them that I didn't know yet, let me take a look. The man that followed me in, one of the owners, then said that he had hit the reset button on the back of the UPS.

I reached down and hit the power button on the UPS, expecting the worst. Magically, it powered on normally. One at a time I turned on the monitors, then the servers, slowly so that I could see if something had shorted out and popped the UPS breaker. Everything seemed normal. Invoice Printer asked if it was possible that she bumped it and shut it off. I explained that it would be impossible, as the off switch is recessed, and must be a deliberate act. She then asked if the heater would have blown a breaker. I told her no, everything is powering up normally.

Then it hits me what she just said. Heater.

Turns out that as she was printing invoices she got cold (the temp must have dropped below 75F!) and got her space heater. She then proceeded to plug it in to the only available outlet, which was connected to the UPS, which didn't appreciate a 12 amp heater running from it and shut everything down. If this had been told to me up front, it would not have taken me 20 minutes to get things working again, as I would not have been so paranoid at powering things up.

Ah, lusers, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.

When AT&T@Home finally came back up in my area, I got a voicemail telling me to "log onto your browser and you will get a message telling you how to connect." Huh? I thought. Don't I have to be connected before I can get to my browser. Well, what do I know? Sure enough, though; I was right!

So, I called AT&T@Home's customer service number. Eventually I got a real person, and explained the above to her.

"I don't know what to tell you," she said.

"But . . . it's your job to know what to tell me!" I offered.

"No, ma'am. They're getting so many calls, that they've pulled anyone they can find out of offices to answer calls."

Right. "Well, now that you've answered my call, what are you going to do for me?" I asked.

"If your question was on my list of questions, I could read you the answer," she said. "But it's not. So you need to call Customer Service."

"But . . . that's how I got YOU!"

Eventually she gave me a different number. Eventually I got a trained person, who had no trouble explaining how I could get reconnected. But . . . . Oh, well.

My boss is a complete computer illiterate, but to his credit he knows it and is embarrassed about it. He asked me to save a file onto a floppy so that he could take it to a presentation he was giving.

So I went through the process and showed him how to do it and when this chore was accomplished I said something along the lines of "Take that with you and don't lose it".

He looked sheepishly at the computer for a little bit and at the disk still in the drive. He turned to me and said "So to get it out, do I just press this little button?"

I am not an official tech, but seeing as I am the only person in my office who knows anything about computers or has a PC that they use at home, all the basic troubleshooting comes to me.

For one reason or another I needed to have a file emailed from work to my home email account before I left for work one morning.

Unfortunately the first person in in the morning is a complete loss when it comes to computers. I spent half an hour trying to walk her through creating a new email message, entering my email address (she had never sent an external email and relied on the address book) and the steps required to attach a file.

But trying to get her to find the file that I wanted her to attach was just too difficult. What's a drop-down menu? There is no drive by that name (YES THERE IS!!! THAT IS WHERE THE FILE IS SAVED). She got into the local drive and I started to explain to her how to find a file which was saved on the desktop and her panic stations shut down. It seems that the first couple of files in the directory (wherever she had got to) were miscellaneous junk and/or backups named with the usual junk names. All she could see were the various punctuation marks in the file names and she decided that the computer was broken.

I begged her to scroll down to find another directory, but scrolling was beyond her. So in resignation, I hung up and waited for another half an hour before someone who could actually follow instructions and had half a brain came in so I could run through the process.

A long time ago, in a company far far away and now defunct, and infact before I even went to work there...

The production manager spent hours setting up a new PC, (this was a real IBM XT, the AT was still a twinkle in IBM's eye,) putting our software on it and so forth for a foreign customer. There was nothing like installation scripts in those days, and floppies were 320K. As the last thing he had to do before packing it up and sending it off he was heard to say, "Now what voltage do they want? Ah yes 110V." (click) (BANG)

I went to help out my mother's friend with her newly aquired computer...she realy had no idea what it was. When we went over to her home to help her she was a mess! She believed that if she turned off the computer it would "wipe out everything" and she thought if she kept it turned on then her phone line would stay busy...well lost is not even the beginning of it! To top it all off...

She was holding the mouse in the air like a television remote control, and aiming it at the computer screen! I don't think she even knew what the mouse pad was! I really had to hold back the laughter! Not to mention she didn't know where the enter key was on her keyboard...needless to say she is a long way from sending out any e-mail! What's the "WEB"???

I had a lady call in one night that wanted to set up a connection and her email on her computer. So I decided to take her through the internet connection wizard to make things easier for her (**read: me**). Well, we got through the connection part without any problems, then we got to the email part and where it asks for the email servers:

Me: Ok, in the incoming mail server box, type this in, in all lowercase letters: pop, as in popcorn, or pop the balloon. period, ispname, period, com.

Cust: ok, got that

After getting her outgoing mail server in I suddenly had this nagging feeling to check what she had ACTUALLY typed in there.

Me: Ok, ma,am. Would you please read to me what you have in the incoming mail server box.

Cust: ok, I have tot.ispname.com

Me: Excuse me? can you spell out what you have in there?

Cust: t-o-t.ispname.com

Me: Tot? like T as in thomas, o, T as in thomas?

Cust: yes. Is that not right?

Me: actually no. It needs to be pop.ispname.com, Like popcorn or pop the balloon.

Cust: ok, got it now.

Again, the nagging feeling came back.

Me: Ok now what do you have in there.

Cust: pot.ispname.com

Me: **trying not to scream out loud, but making sure I was sharing everything this lady said with the techs around me** Ok, that's not right either. It's POP as in POPcorn or POP the balloon.

Cust: ok, pop.ispname.com

Finally!!!! No I don't know where this lady learned english from, but who has ever heard of totcorn, potcorn, and who wants to know how to tot a balloon, or pot a balloon??!!

I work for a company that provides high speed internet service, DSL, T1, fractional T1's and T3's. My job is 1st level customer support, when their line goes down or they want to make any changes to the router settings they call me to get the ball rolling. I had a call form an Irate owner telling me that his network was down and that he wants it fixed right now. I asked him if he powercycled his router yet and he said "I'll let you talk to my networking administrator, he knows everything about this stuff". I get this "NA" on the line and he asks me to try and pin the router, I am able to ping both sides of his router with no problem, he then tells me to try it again and of course I can still ping his router. When I tell him I can still ping, he blows up and says "how the hell can you ping it when I just unplugged it?" Of course that suprises me, so I ask him what "router" has he unplugged. He tells me the name of some type of switch. I ask him if they have a cisco**** at the site and he tells me no. I proceed to instruct him to follow the cable he unplugged to where ever it ends up. About five minutes later he comes back and low and behold, there is a cisco**** router there. I then have the pleasure of telling him that this is a LAN issue and we are responsible only up to the router.

The sad thing about this story is that this "NA" probably makes about 3 times what I do. I wish I could have been there to here this guru explain to his boss that he doesn't know the difference between a router and a switch.....

I heard this from a Sprint tech we have:

He was called on site because a Cisco 7100 stopped responding (a large blue router about the size of an average milk crate). When he got there, he saw that it was not mounted, and leaning on the floor. Further investigation showed the brackets holding it in were sheared off. He described the router as "blunt trauma" and therefore the customer had to pay for the repairs.

Long story short, the customer made such a fuss that Sprint said they'd replace it. So he did. A month later, same story. The tech said on the conference call that *something* heavy was being placed on the box, which the customer abjectly denied. Now it was getting into serious legal territory (these things are expensive). Back and forth, back and forth. Finally, Sprint caved in and put a third one on site. Wimps.

Guess what? Same thing a month later. But this time the customer would pay for it because the reason was discovered: two employees were caught having sex on it. They liked it because it was "warm."

Like, ew.

One of my temp jobs involved working for a company that did machine upgrades. One job involved changing some Win 3.5.1 workstations for the "new" NT 4.0 Workstations (new at the time). Everything was going well, and everyone was happy to get new systems because their older ones were very slow (like 386s or something just as hideous). But then there was one guy who refused to let us take his old machine. I mean, he was some 50 year old man who had a tantrum like a small child. It was like:

us - We're going to replace your old machine with this new one.

him - [smugly] No.

us - Uh... we were told to install this new...

him - No. Go away.

us - Is this the office of Jim Smith?

him - Yes, I am Jim Smith. You go away now.

us - Uh... okay.

He was being really smarmy about it. So we spoke to the on-site tech lead, and he sighed and said, "Force him." We should have refused, but we were temps out of college so we did as we were told.

us - Tom, your tech lead said we are to...

him - I hear you talking, but not listening. Go away. My computer!

He actually was hugging the monitor. Finally, we got his boss to intercede on our part. They talked and talked. The boss talked to him like you would punish a small child, which made this guy get angrier and angrier. Finally, he exploded in a tantrum and starting kicking stuff around in his office, when the boss demanded he stop behaving this way, the guy ran out into the hallway, screaming. That left us alone in the room, so we quickly changed his computer, and finished some stuff elsewhere in the building, and fled before the guy found out.

Man, that is so weird! What was up with him?

I'm a programmer by trade, and I used to work in tech support, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable and often field calls from friends and family. Earlier today, I got an email from a relative of mine who is always arguing with me about computers, despite the fact that he knows nothing... he wrote me to ask if his virus protection (Norton) would protect him against somebody emailing him Anthrax. When I tried to explain to him that computer viruses are not actual physical germs like anthrax, he began to argue with me, at one point he said "if computer viruses aren't real viruses, they wouldn't be able to make me sick! and the last time I opened a virus email I had a cold for three days!" turns out he had happened to catch a cold at about the same time that he got an email virus, and I COULD NOT convince him that they were not the same. Sigh.

I happen to work as tech support for AOL and I have heard some oddball phone calls. I was taking calls one day and received a call from a woman who needed help installing AOL. I asked her well what is it doing when you try to install. The woman tells me nothing I put the disk in and it doesn't install. So I told her to put her AOL disk in and I would walk her thru the installation. She tells me your spose to put the colored side down correct. I said no ma'am that is proable why it won't install. So she puts it in correctly and it installs. The modem starts making the handshakes and I hear this strange sound coming from the woman. I asked her what she was doing she said well I was told the noise the computer is making is its mating call and that I need to make the noises back. I said I am sorry ma'am but you don't need to be making mating calls to the modem its just getting you online. She tells me well you mean all this time I haven't had to make these noises so that it will go online. I had to get her off the phone quickly because I was laughing so hard. Everyone around me was trying to figure out what I was laughing at. When I got done with the story I had everyone laughing pretty hard.

I was working as a desktop computer technician, and received a call from a user who said that her computer was making some noise. I asked her to describe the noise, and she said that it sounded like a vibrating noise or clicking noise. Since she was at a remote site, I had to drive out there to diagnose the problem further. So I let her know that it would take me about an hour to drive to her location.

When I got there, discovered that her computer was on her desk, and in her middle desk drawer was a Motorola pager set to vibrate mode going off every 10 mins or so because someone had paged her. Needless to say she was slightly red faced.

Hope you find this to be a humorous tale, but its true.

TThis one sounds like and urban legend and if it hadn't cost me about 2 weeks of hair pulling I wouldnt have believed it possible.

The story starts in Darwin, NT, Australia and I'm going to offer some minor background details to help fill out the "Comedy of Errors" that cuased this problem. Darwin is a laid back place, short cuts get taken money gets saved and the job gets done. Most people are happy with their lot and as long as it doesn't effect them too much they dont care. In other words blissful ignorance is rife.

I posted up to Darwin with the army and one night got a phone call from my old boss at computer company X, now normally I did hardware repair but thanks to microsoft I'd had to learn about software just to be able to find half the faults I had to fix. But back to the story.... anyway this phone call was asking me if i wanted to do some moonlighting for the boss, not one to shy away from money for jam (i was already doing some ad hoc tech support for friends/co-workers) I said yes... my mistake.

Turns out a semi-major client was having problems with their server, for the past week or so it would disapear for about 20minutes after 5 oclock in the afternoon then come back online as though nothing had happened. It wasnt really causing any major hassles as they had knocked off by 4 oclock and it just meant that they guys who worked from home had to take an impromtu smoko. The guys at the main support desk back in Perth couldn't find any reason for the server to be crashing and were just as perplexed and could find no reason for the problem... I took the job on expecing it to be a missed the blindingly obvious situation.

So I log in and sure enough bang server dies, server comes back. Next day same thing, without physically going and visiting the company I check the logs for errors viruses anything to give me a clue, nothing so was the routine for about a week me checking every faucet of the software and server possible online (the hair pulling week). I start asking questions about the gear they've got and if they've got anyone who knows anything on deck, by and by I find out that they've bot ups so it cant be power besides if the power was going out they'd know cause the cleaner would have said something, he was good like that. so I get back to checking the logs again just out of curiosity looking for ups warnings no joy, not even the ups's Im ok hourly marks... hmmmm odd. I ring the boss back and get "oh yeah the interface cable was busted in the move I never bothered to get a new one." Now I believe in fix em as you find em so I head on over after (army) work to replace the cable. So at about 4:30 I head on over, do the intro thing get ushered into the server room.

Now the new building is a ex bank and the server room was once a strong room... no windows, no power points nothing, all the cabling for the sever is run under 2 piecies of conduit sliced in half taped to the carpet and running out under the hasitly modified door. Well what ever works after all its Darwin and I've seen wierder. So I'm in there making up the cable when in the backround I can here bip bip every thirty seconds or so. Crawing out from behind the rack I can see that the UPS is running on batteries. There was no power outage cause the lights are still on so I head out to find out what gives, the boss is perplexed, Im confused and on the way back from checking the circuit breakers I'm asked by the cleaner what I m doing there, I explain. Back in the server room I get right down to basics, rip up the conduit covering the power lines and check the cables follow the cables all the way back to the ONLY 15 amp socket in the place only to find its unplugged and the cleaners got his gear plugged in. Problem solved.

The skinny version of what was happening

Some time ago when the company moved the ups interface cable had been killed and at a later date the company changed cleaners. The cleaning company then had a major profit chasing shake up and started using mechanical floor cleaners to cut back on labour costs. The guy who operated the floor cleaner wasn't told and so far hadnt been busted for unpluging the whatever it was in the 15 amp socket he needed.

By my reckoning theres a couple of points to this story

1. Fix it as you find it, the problem would have been solved 3 weeks prior if the interface cable to the ups was doing its bit.

2. People may hate you for telling them pointless things that they'll never use but tell everyone everything, if the cleaner knew about the server plug or the bosses were told about the cleaner using new floor cleaning gear the problem would have been solved without helpdesk support.

3. Ask before you change it.

Mr Murphy works in some wonderous ways.....

This is a short one. I am usually a dry, humorless person (or so my wife says) but this one made me mute and laugh long and hard. I support an MS made home picture editing program and we get a lot of calls where people's digital camera's are not TWAIN compliant and will not work directly with our software. It is amzingly difficult to explain to someone that pictures that are downloaded using one program can in fact (hold on to your seats folks!) be opened by other software and are NOT A PART OF THE PROGRAM!! This funny call is as follows, this is a reconstruction but the "punchline remains 100% accurate:

Me: Well, sir, it seems that this camera is not TWAIN compliant and we will not be able to directly download your pictures into (software). Do you have any software that came with your camera that you can use to save the pictures to a folder on your hard drive so we can open them in (software)?

C: Yes, the software that came with it works fine with it. -10 minutes of complaining about why our program can't access his camera blah blah-

Me: What software is that?

C: Chlamydia.

Me: (almost losing it) Excuse me, but what did you say that was?

C: Chlamydia.

Me: (completely losing control at this point and muting the phone laughing for a minute) Ok, could you read me what it says when you open the program?

C: Camedia.

Me: Ok, so we're working with Camedia?

C: Yes.

At this point he tells me what he is doing and I help him save his pictures in Camedia.

Me: (confirming that he has this down) So you know how to use Camedia to to your pictures now?

C: Yeah, I guess I'll just use chlamydia then.

Me: (Trying to hold back) Alright then, thanks for calling MS and have a great day. (hang up and promptly start laughing again and telling all my nearby coworkers about this hilarious story)

This customer just got a pop-up message saying "the office file optimiser is optimising office files."

Okay, I admit, many kids are good with computers, but if my story about my classmate trying to flip a guy on a picture on his back made it, you will see where I'm going...

When I first went to my school, when it first opened, the Media Center was filled with Pentium 75MHz computers w/ turbo buttons that made no difference when pressed except the mysterious 8 on the case's LCD would chand to 75 and back. These puppies were running Win 3.1, and for networking, using Winsock and Novell for DOS. And trust me, those computers were not pretty. Around 3rd Grade, Program Manager would mysteriously dissapear, Only needing to be maximised (which the User in front of the computer had NO clue.), And some students (did I mention this was 3rd grade) wouldn't call for help when they minimized Program Manager, and trying to get back would end up working around the write protection, and delete program manager off of that account on the server( these had no hard drives, and the floppy drives were the 5" kind, even though 3 1/4 were popular at the time. Oh JEEZ)

Finally the school installed Hard Drives, Win95 on the student comps, Win98 on the Teacher comps, "upgraded" the 75 Mhz Pentiums to the overheating wonder, AMD Athlon 133 mhz, and put in the 3" floppy drives. Big mistake. These things were still the same ancient MicroQ's as before. Students were, of course impatient, and would double-click on a program, then immediatly double-click it, and again, and again, and again. Then a few minutes later they complain that their computer is to slow.(What were they expecting with the school's budget? The then Brand new Pentium 2 300mhz?) I walk over and close 19 of 20 netscape windows he was using. Problem Solved.

Few years Later...

Still using '95. Kid Tries the ALT+F4 ShutDown trick, but still has windows open, so a window merely closes, but he only notices that the "What do you want to do?" screen isn't up and says," This D*** thing is frozen again and presses the Power Button.

The school removed the Reset buttons because student's kept accidently pressing them. Only on most of the computers. One time a computer really did freeze, so the user was told to restart (meaning power button twice) but the L-User never knew and was pressing where the reset button used to be... Thats right, he was pressing the little hole in the case! I pointed out to the student that they took out the reset button, and get a, "So?" and the user kept pressing the imaginary button, until finally the teacher rolls her eyes and presses the power button twice. The student looks at her in awe and says, " How did you do that?"

Then we started working on HTML pages. This person named her file Something.Com, forgetting to add .htm. When she tried to get to it through Netscape Composer, She was hit with a "Invalid HTML file," so she goes to it through Windows Explorer, and clicks on her page, with the pretty program icon next to it, and gets an "Invalid Executable". She was sad to hear from the teacher that she had to start over.

I saw this all happen and still do not believe that it happened!!!

I work at a large Cable copany that will remain nameless, but it rhymes with dodgers.

I work second level tech support taking care if in house wireless problems. Simple job, rather slow and boring. My friend Jeff next to my cubicle does end user wireless support. Jeff likes to listen to the radio but is not allowed to have a radio in the office, so he buys a tv tuner card that has radio support. He hooks the coaxial cable to the card and strings it out of the window and ties it around the eave fixture on the side of the building. (the co-ax is supposed to be plugged into the cable outlet but i assume he should will figure it out later.)

The next day we come in to work to find out that the entire network is down on our floor and the floor below us. Me being an uppidy employee i go to the server room to see what is up. What i see is beyond belief. scorch marks all over the stack of cisco routers and the dell servers. (strange the smoke detector did not Go Off?)

By the end of the day the techS found out the problem, there had been a terrible electrical Storm, and somehow it had killed the seven routers, two switches, nine hubs, five servers, and one workstation. What was strange was that the entire electrical system had triple redundancy against surges and no other floors besides the two were affected.

The dead workstation was of course Jeff's, and the cause was the tv tuner card with the coaxial cord wrapped around the eave pipe. Jeff decided to use the outage to return the card to the store because it didn't work. He was mad that they would not refund it because it was totally scorched but when he got back i let him in on the secret and he counted himself lucky that he still had his job.

The techs traced the electrical surge to his workstation but found no reason how lightining could have go to it. Now the window beside jeff's computer is a special copper grounded pane that costs $2000 all because of a stupid pci tv tuner card.

Despite excellent insurance coverage it cost the company roughly $15,000 for the new equipment and the special window.

p.s. love your site.

I was working as temporary technical support for a well known foundation back in the days when WANG pretty much ruled the enduser world. I received the following call:

Me: Technical Support, how can I help you?

Extremely Irate Caller: Where are you?!

Me: I am at the technical support desk

Extremely Irate Caller: Why aren't you up here?!?!?!

Me: I'm sorry, did you call earlier and request assistance?

Extremely Irate Caller: I keep pressing the Help button and no one has shown up yet! I'm on a deadline and you're ignoring me!

Me: No, noone's ignoring you, the Help button doesn't summon assistance it launches a help screen on your computer if the the Help software is loaded, that software has not been loaded at this firm. I only know you need help if you phone me.

Extremely Irate Caller: That's not right! If I press the Help button, you should come help me! I shouldn't have to call you!

This caller refused to believe that the Help button was not like an attendant call button in an airplane and gave me SERIOUS attitude when I went to her desk.

This caller's problem was also that she had put the text that she wanted in the 'Note' screen into the 'Header' screen by accident and her notes were printing out at the top of the document, much to her consternation -- she also refused to believe that she had put her notes into the wrong page.

I remember back in the day, I had this one call I whilst doing tech support for a [H]uge [P]rinter company....

M is me, C is Clueless Customer.

M:"thank you for calling HP technical support, what product are you calling about?"

C:"A Pitney Bowes XL41256."

M:(WTF?) "Is it attached to an HP product?"

C:(In a snotty tone)"NO, why would I do that?"

M:"Do you own an HP product?"

C:"Yes, I own an OfficeJet 600, but that's not what I'm calling about."

M:"Do you need technical assistance with your Pitney Bowes machine?"

C:"Yes, I do, I need to get it to work."

M:"Is your OfficeJet working alright?"

C:"Yes, it's working fine."

M:"In that case, you would need to call Pitney Bowes"

C:"Really?"

M:"Yes. Hewlett Packard has no connection with Pitney Bowes whatsoever, and you would need to contact PItney Bowes for any assistance with their product."

M:"Do you have their number?"

C:"I'm sorry, I don't. Try looking in the user's manual, and thank you for calling HP."