Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Submitted Tales From Technical Support

Tales From Technical Support Content

Overkill - Adv.
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

So, today is December 1st. Fun with Verizon customer never ends.

Customer writes: HOW DO YOU THINK I'M OVER MY QUOTA , MY PHONE HASN'T WORKED FOR DAYS. THE E-MAIL BARELY WORKS AS IT IS. WHERE IS JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD,I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA ISN'T IT?????? UNHAPPILY YOURS JOHN E. P.S. THIS IS MY FIRST CHANCE TO SEND E-MAIL IN FOUR DAYS!!

Oddly enough, he had 285 messages, dating back to November 2nd in there. Yup, that might toss you over quota.

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Jaime
 

One of the techs from the local cable company came out to my house to setup up a cable modem. She tells me she needs to edit some of the network settings on my computer, so I show her my titanium powerbook. She sits down, and begins moving her finger around on the track pad. A minute passes, and I noticed she hasn't done a thing. I ask her "what's wrong?" She replies "I can't find 'My Computer.'"

Despite the bright blue apple in the upper left hand corner, and the hard drive icon clearly labeled "Macintosh HD," or (my personal favorite) the big, glowing apple on the back of the monitor, she never realized that it was a mac until I told her.

Huh?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

To put this in context, you need to know I've worked for Microsoft for several years; most of those years involved networks of one kind or another. My high-speed Internet connection at home simply stopped working one day, so I did a little troubleshooting with ipconfig, ping, and tracert. It indicated that I was unable to even ping the DNS servers, even though I had a valid IP address. I cycled the cable modem's power and rebooted my computer. No change. I then called the Hell Desk (not a typo) for support.

I explained what I had done so far and what I'd discovered. Here's the following:

Him: "What O/S are you using?"

Me: "Windows 2000 Advanced Server."

Him: "We don't have any information on any of MS's server products, because we don't support networks, but I'll do my best."

Me: "It has nothing to do with my home LAN. That works fine. I can't ping or tracert to any of your own servers."

Him: "Well, I can ping your modem, and it shows you have a valid IP, so it must be your settings."

Me: "My settings haven't changed."

Him: "Well, sometimes they can change on their own."

I know this is BS, but I humor him. We spend ten minutes looking at my NIC settings, which are just fine.

Me: "See, the settings are fine. That's not the problem."

Him: "Could you open IE and click on Options | Connections...."

Me: This has nothing to do with IE. Ping and Tracert have nothing to do with IE's settings."

Him: "Sir, I need you to follow my instructions or I can't help you."

I then humor him; what a huge surprise, IE's settings are normal.

Me: "can you do me a favor?"

Him: "What?"

Me: "My IP address is www.xxx.yyy.zzz. Please try to ping me."

Him: "I'm sorry, but I'm behind so many firewalls I can't ping anything that isn't on our internal network. Let me try something. Just a minute."

Suddenly, my modem makes a very distinctive tone. Just out of curiosity, I try the ping again. It works; I can also hit the Internet w/o problems.

Me: "What did you do?"

Him: "Nothing."

Me: "Well, something just happened. I can now access the Internet."

Him: "Well, I don't know what changed."

Me: "what were you going to try?"

Him: "It doesn't matter if you can access the Internet now. Are there any more technical issues I can help you with?"

Me: "I guess not, since the Internet Fairy seems to have waved her magic wand."

It's obvious to me that he did something, because the only times the cable modem has ever made that sound are when I cycled power or they did a remote reset, which I'm sure he tried. I just don't know why he wouldn't admit it. I also wonder why Internet techs can't ping something on their network. I think my biggest concern is that they "don't support networks." The Internet is one big network of smaller networks.

i stole the disk
Posted 12/01/2002 by bird
 

I work for a major isp and have a couple of stupid stories to tell you..

The first instance was when i spent almost an hour on the phone to this really old guy who had a real problem connecting. The usual questions were asked such as "is that left or right click?" when explaining how to get into "my computer"..

Eventually found my way in and tested his modem. The result was that it wasn't even installed. I asked if had the drivers for it (i really asked for the response) he answered that he had never needed any one to drive him around and that he had his own car.

I managed to explain what drivers were and he said that I (considering i am in a different part of the coutry) must have stolen the driver disk while i was on the phone to him. Explained again that this was not possible and proceeded to tell the poor guy that he will need to get somebody to download the drivers for him eg a knowledable mate or his local computer superstore. He then asked why he couldnt download them himself.

I then had to explain the whole scenario again to him and he still didn't get that he couldnt download then drivers as his modem was not installed. 1hr later he asked to speak to my supervisor...?

The second is only quick. A customer asked my advice on what modem to buy (she was advised by a friend that it what she needed). A week later she came back demanding a refund because i didn't advise her that she needed a pc aswell. This friend, she told me didnt have a pc either but it still worked??? I have no idea how....

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by L. Butler
 

I work for a small ISP in Iowa and you can no doubt guess that we get a LOT of really green users calling in. Now, most people that I talk to are reasonably smart, but they're just computer illiterate. (And I forgive them for that.)

One day, however, I took a call from a lady that was not only green, but appeared lack any and all common sense. Here's basically how it went down:

I answered the phone and gave her the usual "Thank you for calling blah blah blah" spiel.

She told me she was having problems receiving email. I asked her "Ok, so what email program are you using?" (She didn't really know, so I had to play the multiple choice game by listing a few of the most common apps.) After discovering that she had Outlook Express, I aksed her "Did it give you an error message?" She answered, "Yes". So then I asked, "Ok, so do you still have the error message on your screen, or did you write it down?" She answered, "No, I didn't write it down because I only have one phone line.".... At this point, I asked her to hold while I slammed my head on my desk a few times. I then commented to the other techs in the office "Oh my god, that has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard". I then went back to her and told her to try again and to write down the error message and call us back.

Out of all the dumb questions I answer every day, this one takes the cake.

What is you password?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Rick
 

While working on a clients' computer at their home. I had to reconfigure their ISP, certain information was needed so I called the client at their work.

Me: "Hello I'm reconfiguring your online service and I need your password"

Client: "What"

Me: "I'm reconfiguring your online service and I need your password"

Client: "What"

This goes back and forth a few times with a few variations until I discover that "What" is the actual password.

The client explained to me that when they originaly signed up with their ISP. They got to a box that said "what is your passord". Holding back my laughter, I explained that. "What is your password" was a Question not a Suggestion.

I changed their password for them

Install it all....now!
Posted 12/01/2002 by *scripter* sys_admin
 

I work for a large technical company that unfortunately seems to have way to many non-technical people, here is just a minute in my day.

So one of the people from sales call me up, tell me that they do not have the microsoft office package installed on laptop and are furious because they are unable to do anything, not that anyone knows what they do anyway. So they say "i'll be in the office in 10mins, this is an emergency and is now your top priority"....i'm quiet shocked that they don't have office installed so i actually agree to have a look even though my lunch break was about to start. (so selfish of me to think of food in a top priority crisis like this). so i wait for about 15mins, then wander over to lusers desk....to see where they are. they are eating lunch and are angry that i have kept them waiting. i apologise for not sensing that they had arrived in building and ask to look at laptop. They kindly point to laptop bag and and brilliantly mutter "it's in that" so i smile.....the smile of a crazy man... and get laptop out of bag plug it all in and start it up.

I connect back to one of the file servers and ask what they want installed....they say "everything, i need everything" which i stupidly should have known, i mean the sales team do alot of work with microsoft access and frontpage. So i check to see how much hard disk space this bafoon is wasting on a perfectly good laptop. they are low on space so i look in program files to see what junk they have installed and see that the entire office package is there.....hmmm, strange i think to myself. So i go start, programs and they are all there on the menu. i call luser over from water cooler where she is getting a drink after such a nice lunch and say "ummm, office IS already installed....???" she demands to know where on the "stupid" computer it is installed, i tell her to look under programs.....she cries out "but if there isn't an icon on the desktop it isn't installed!!!!!!" i just walk away, so many idiots.....everyday i am surrounded by idiots, and i know you my fellow sys admins will be able to sympathise.

CLOSE ALL WINDOWS
Posted 12/01/2002 by Adam Gillis
 

I am a tech agent for msn dial up access , I had a woman the other day call , I told her to close all the windows and shut her computer down... all of a sudden I heard a thud , then another , then another , then another etc..

After about 5 minutes she came back and said "ok dear , all the windows in my house are now closed...." After that I came up with a theory that you should need a license to own a computer...

Address Bar
Posted 12/01/2002 by Will
 

Our school's computer security is funny. The school uses N@vell to have us use the internet. In our computer programing class i told some kids how to use My Computer to get around logging in to novell to visit websites. Well one of the teachers found out and the solution? HIDE the address bar. Well I noticed this and just set it back to show. Anyways some kid had a problem with his computer so he had Mrs. Blahblah come over and look at it, This is what i heard.

Student:: "I can't open my file"

Teacher:: "Open My computer"

Student:: clickclick

Teacher:: "HOW'D YOU GET THE ADDRESS BAR THERE MR. WHATEVER

Deleted That Permenently"

Student:: "I don't know"

Teacher:: "Let me see this"

Student:: "ok"

Teacher:: hides address bar again

Student:: "Will you help me with my file"

Teacher:: *annoyed*"yes, where is it"

Student:: Blah blah

Teacher:: Blah Blah

well anyways after the teacher leaves we just un hid the address bar again

where do you put a cd?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Dagon2099
 

i used to work in the computer labs of a fairly large community college. and one day as i was sitting at my desk another tech walked into the room and just about fell down laughing. he was in the lab next door and apparently some lady wanted to put a cd in the computer. and she did this by actually PUTTING THE CD INSIDE THE COMPUTER. she managed to slip the cd through the crack between the cdrom drive and the face-plate on the front of her pc. none of us could stop laughing and we eventually had to get our supervisor to go get it out because he was the only one with a straight face.

Busy Lines
Posted 12/01/2002 by Javed baksh
 

Ok well i'm just this freelancer techie...so i get calls from people time to time with (obviously) pc problems. So i'm sitting at home when the phone rings:

M - me

H - him

M: hello

H: hey man what's up

M: the sky...problems?

H: yeah i'm trying to get online through [ISP] but a message comes up and says that the line is busy

M: just let it redial or try another number

H: well i don't understand why that's happening. It doesn't make sense

M: actually that's something that happens sometimes

H: you don't understand...the phone is not supposed to be busy

M: why not?

H: because i'm home alone right now and there's no one else using the phone...so how can it be busy?

The Truth Comes Out (Eventually)
Posted 12/01/2002 by Trase
 

I work for a medium-sized company where the Peter Principle is in full effect. Our Controller, "Mr. X.", is one of the best examples.

Yesterday, Mr X. sends his assistant over with a cart carrying his teenaged daughters home PC and instructions to rebuild it for him because he is having a wireless network installed the next day and the "wireless guy" said he should rebuild it due to ongoing issues. It's a Compaq Presario 5600. Attached is a note asking us to save his Quicken and TurboTax files, and the words "FLOPPY DRIVE" scribbled at the bottom. He provided his Win 98, TurboTax and Quicken software for reinstall. My manager is firm in saying we may not be able to have it ready on such short notice. We are asked if we can perhaps just get his data backed up and get a base 98 load done by the end of the day. We agreed to try, but made no promises.

I use a USB ZIP to pull off his data, then try to fdisk/format the drive using the 98 startup disk. It won't boot to the floppy. I find out that the floppy is not working in 98, so I guess that cryptic note he made meant that the drive is not working.

At this point I let my manager know, and we are torn because on one hand, we know this guy has not been forthright about possible causes of PC issues in the past, but on the other, he is very powerful and we have to keep the posterior anointment act up. So we decide to try a different floppy drive, different cable. Opening this case is a bitch, and I realize that it hasn't *ever* been opened since purchase because there is shag pile carpet inside in the form of dust bunnies. I ruin my previously clean outfit. Great.

So, I fire it up and the known-good floppy drive won't work, either booting or in 98. I mention that I think it's the floppy controller on the system board. We used canned air to clean the system out. Now it won't boot, won't POST, the fan won't even come on. Lovely.

After getting a second opinion from our LAN admin, we decide it's deadski and without hope. It's not under warranty, I mean, there's a Quantum Bigfoot drive in this thing. We let our manager know and she goes to break the bad news to the Controller.

He happens to mention that he knows there was something wrong with the floppy, because he got a disk stuck in there a few weeks ago, and used a knife to get it out.

"Was the PC *on* while you did this?" my horrified manager asked.

"Well, yeah!" Mr X. arrogantly asserts.

My manager explained that he had damaged the system when he did that and was lucky he didn't get electrocuted. She explained the cost of parts exceeds the cost of a new PC.

It should also be noted that this particular gentleman has previously killed his PC here at work not once, but twice, due to his placement of one of those magnetic abstract art sculpture things in front of his tower, right at hard drive level, because he insisted on the PC being on his desk, not under it. The damn sculpture was sitting on top of a stack of about 30 floppies.

He's out buying a new PC at lunchtime today and keeping his appointment with the "wireless guy" who, as it turns out, is some random stranger he met at an electronics superstore who saw him looking at Linksys routers and offered to come to his home and set up a network for him. The first time "wireless guy" was out at his home, Mr. X. left "wireless guy" home alone with M's 13 year old daughter. And yet, when my manager offered to have someone from the department come out and help him set up the new PC, he absolutely refused, saying it would be "highly inappropriate." But I guess it's OK for him to have me waste company time one afternoon trying to fix his filthhole of a PC? Whatever.

Stupid is as stupid does, eh? The scary part is that this man's DNA is now in the gene pool. I shudder at the thought.

Just Hit Enter
Posted 12/01/2002 by Jennifer
 

My boss finally got a new PC laptop. (He is an Apple user). The first day he calls me from his office (located at the opposite end of the building) for instructions for using our most popular software.

Me: (instructions)..... then just hit enter

My Boss (and owner of the company): enter... where does it say enter

Me: No, just press the enter key

My Boss: I don't have an enter key

Me: It is located just above the shift key on the right hand side of your key board

My Boss: (very angry) I DO NOT HAVE AN ENTER KEY!

At this point I walk down to his office and point out his enter.

My Boss: Well, It doesn't say enter.

Please Note: HP Omnibook XE3 the enter key just has a return symbol. But it's not like they moved it.

Mom
Posted 12/01/2002 by Xenon
 

One monday mornig (2001) at work my Mom called me and told me:

Mom: "Son, I need a computer... but I am short on cash."

Son: "No one just needs a Computer. For what do you need a computer ?"

Mom: "Emails and Word..."

Son: "O.k. I have some old spare parts. With them should be able to set up a box wich fits your needs... But I have a lot of work to do... there is no chance that I can do it before weekend.

Mom: "But I need it now!"

Son: "Mom, I can't imagine a single reason why you need a computer now - except that one of your girlfriends told you that you need a computer..."

My mom starts fussing around - but it was a fact that I had no time before the weekend.

Wendsday evening my mom called again:

Mom: "Son! I've got a computer. I got it from one of my friends for free. And I purchased a printer at [discount shop]"

Son: "Great mom. cu."

Mom: "Wait, Wait. I have a problem." [grrr... call your friend - not me!]

Son: "So what ?"

Mom: "I tried to install the printer-drivers. I inserted the CD - but nothing happend."

Son: [grrr...] "When did you inserted the CD before you turned power on or after ?"

Mom: "Befor."

Son: "Just eject the CD and insert it again."

Mom: "I tried. But the CD didn't came out."

Son: "Is the drive running ?"

Mom: "no."

Son: "So just press the eject button an hold it for a few seconds..."

Mom: "There is no eject-button on the drive."

Son: "Thats impossible. Every CD-ROM drive has one - or wait is it an apple computer ?"

Mom: "No, no its a normal PC."

Son: "Then there is an eject button! There is the same sign on it as on your CD-Player"

Mom: "No there is only a lever on it."

Son: "A what ? Anyway... move the mouse pointer over the my computer icon on the screen, left double-click it. A window opens. Look for an icon with a little CD-symbol on it. Click once right on it - a menue pops up. There select eject."

Mom: "There is no mouse pointer, and no my computer icon - just a text menue where i can select a programm with the cursor keys."

Son: "Don't move anything. Wait. I'll need a half hour."

Now it was cristal clear.

I got into my car and within a half hour I reached the house of my mom.

I said nothing, went straight to the computer, turned it upside down and shook the CD out of the 5 1/2" floppy-drive.

It was a good old 386-PC with 2MB Ram and 320MB Harddrive.

And the pain has just started.

Is that a problem?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

One day I took my wife into the Dentist's office for some dental surgery that would leave her too doped up to drive home. While I was waiting for her, the receptionist asked me: "You work with computers, don't you?" I admitted I did.

She said "Every time I try to print, it says "not enough memory to complete the operation." I agreed to look at it. It was an old Win9x machine, and the resources were at about 5%. I asked when it was last rebooted, and, at the blank looks, rebooted the machine. About 15 minutes later it had finally shut down, scandisk had fixed several orphaned clusters, and the system printed just fine. The receptionist asked me how often she should reboot, and I sugested they just turn it off on Fridays and on Mondays.

The Bad Command Or Filename Key
Posted 12/01/2002 by Random_C
 

I worked for 10 months doing extended-warranty tech support for a now non-existent (thanks to a merger) UK box-shifter. It was their policy to get callers off the phone as fast as possible, while trying to make sure that they didn't call back - and making sure they didn't get an engineer if it could possibly be avoided.

My pod were the best techs there and I really miss the lads. Anyway, because of this, we tended to get a lot of calls that other people just couldn't deal with. We all had our nicknames and was the Callback Queen - I was the person who dealt with the screamers, the liars, the idiots, the people who the less experienced (and patient) techs just couldn't deal with. Sometimes they were transferred to us, but if it was busy, I'd get a callback sheet.

My pod were more prepared than others to break policy to get things done - faxing out instructions to customers who needed extra help (have you ever tried giving support via talktype? The operators never seem to type what you say at the customers) or emailing drivers from a special hotmail account we'd set up (and which the IT dept didn't know we could access) for example, which meant that customers with unusual problems were a lot more likely to get help from us than any other pod.

One slow Tuesday morning, a callback sheet landed on my Team Leader's desk, with the dreaded words 'old person' on it. Now, we all had our prejudices - I hated dealing with single mothers (because they were always paying more attention to the child than to me, which was of course my fault) and people with parrots (because I have fairly sensitive hearing in the high frequencies). I didn't mind old people, because on the whole, they know they're stupid, and are prepared to go through whatever you want them to... you just have to know how to handle them.

So, I call up our old man's details and it seems he's got a laptop - this is really supposed to be dealt with by a specialist team, but in practice, they're a bunch of idiots so callers are only transferred to them to get a hardware repair.

So, I called him. It seems that his grandson tried to install 'a game called red hats' and now the machine won't work. Aha. I explained that his little darling had actually deleted everything from the machine, and that we'd have to use the restore pack.

He's perfectly happy with this (first one EVER!) and even has the thing right there. So, we boot up to the CD, and hit '3' to go to a DOS prompt. I checked that his windows partition really was gone, and as we weren't allowed fdisk on our restore packs, started on helping him use our partition remover app.

All he had to do was type 'zap_hdd'. Piece of cake, eh?

This call took me three and a half hours. The man couldn't type. He didn't know where any of the keys were. He couldn't cope with the idea of the lowest thing on the screen being the newest. He couldn't just tap a key, so he got multiple copies of every letter.

The conversation went something like this:

ME: Alright, Sir, what's the very bottom thing on your screen?

OAP: There's a big foot thing...

ME: On the actual display part, Sir...does it have a c:\?

OAP: Oh, yes.

ME: OK, can you tap the z key for me?

OAP: Done that.

ME: And what does it say on the screen now, Sir?

OAP: It's still got the c:\

ME: Is there anything after that?

OAP: Aye, five Zs.

ME: Alright, Sir, do you know where the backspace key is?

OAP: Erm...

ME: OK do you know where the enter key is?

OAP: Oh aye.

I hear a click.

ME: Did you just press the enter key, Sir?

OAP: Which one's that?

ME: What's the very bottom thing on the screen now?

OAP: Bad command or filename.

As things went on, it became very difficult to stop him pressing enter after every key. Eventually I called this the 'bad command or filename key' and he stopped.

I could not get him to press the backspace key, ever. He just couldn't find it. I had a photo of his keyboard in front of it, and described it in terms of what was to the right left of it, below it, what was written on it, no chance. Always he got the enter key.

By this point my team leader is waving madly at me to put him on hold, so I told him I needed to double check that I was looking at the right model of laptop, and he goes into piped classical land.

My TL said it had gone on long enough, and to send him an engineer. This would have spoiled my perfect record of no chargeables - engineers sent for the wrong hardware error, or a software error - so I wasn't going to do it. I knew I could do it, and anyway, there were no calls in the queue.

So, I carried on. I didn't manage to get him to use del or backspace, but I eventually managed to get a line with zap on it.

By this point, all the team leaders were listening in, and several techs were listening at their sides. A huge challenge - two keys at once. It took half an hour to get him to type in a _ rather than a - or a 0.

It took another 20 minutes to get another zap ready to get the _ after it.

After three hours, we evenually had zap_hdd at his c: prompt. I asked him to press enter - it said Bad Command or Filename. I asked him to start at what he typed and read out exactly what he'd typed. He'd managed to catch another key at the same time as pressing enter.

The text go, he got it right. In under a second, his partitions were removed. I had him restart the machine and this time select 1 to reinstall the OS, which I left going. Three and a half hours. My average call time was under 10 minutes.

He never called back.

Practical Parenting
Posted 12/01/2002 by Random_C
 

As I've mentioned before, one of my pet hate customers was single parents. Now, this is nothing to do with the people themselves, but they never called when their little darling was at school or staying with granny. Oh no, they had to call with the little brat right there.

The kid would of course either be screaming constantly, or distracting Mummy, who would see her lack of progress as *my* fault, and not anything to do with her lack of attention.

One woman I had wasn't as bad as some, and we were quite happily going through a hyperterminal test - for once she actually had two phone lines and so we didn't have to mess about with her calling back with the results. It'd just got ATX3DT typed in ready for the phone number, when she squealed 'got to go, Daniel's just set the sofa on fire' and hung up.

Great Firewall Admins.....
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I have a customer who came to me two weeks ago to get a file system mounted between 2 computers (using NFS). These networks are separated by a firewall cluster, so of course this needed to be checked to ensure that the ports were opened before this would all work.

Tried this on the first day - it wouldn't work. Did some testing and determined a firewall problem (it was dropping UDP trafic). As this is dealt with by a different department (we have dedicated Firewall Admins), sent the user off in that direction to get it sorted.

Couple of days later, the user comes back and I try again. Still not working. Go through testing again, and find that the firewall is still dropping the UDP traffic. We go through the cycle again..... and again...... and again. This has now dragged out over two weeks (for what should have been a 15 minute job).

The admins can't see any of my traffic hitting the firewall. They tell me that NFS isn't configured properly (???) and that I have a missing route ((sigh) The fact that I can ping the machine throws that out of the window, and the massive pile of diagnostics I'd gathered proved otherwise).

I arrange to get together with the Firewall Admins to see what they are up to... only to be told that as of that morning they no longer supported the Firewalls!

After finally finding out who had taken over support, we sat down and started to trace the problem..... only to find out that the original admins had been tracing traffic on the wrong firewall in the first place (DOH). Did I get the change made? - Nope, because the firewalls are now subject to a change freeze so no-one can make any modifications.

To cap it all, the user sent an email which suggested that I had not been giving the problem a high enough priority (there's only three of us supporting well over 100 machines in a very dynamic environment).

Had they listened to me in the first place we'd have got it working weeks ago. Even I gave up at that point!

My first IT job
Posted 12/01/2002 by Doctor Lars
 

Set your wayback machine to 1990. Remember DOS? And the dreaded C:) prompt?

I was working as a salesman for a label company and had made personal friends with one good client. The 2 partners who owned the company knew I was a computer hack so one day on a sales call they asked the dreaded question "Do you know anything about computers?" Their state-of-the-art (for 1990) 286-12 with a 40 meg hard drive was giving them 'Insuficient Disk Space' errors whenever Bedford Accounting tried to back up. Once I learned that they were doing their weekly backing up to the hard drive "because it's a lot faster than using floppies" a little thumb-rule math told me they shouldn't have eaten the 40 meg. Since a back-up would normally fit on a 360k floppy, sequential back-ups would have taken years to fill the HD and they had only started backing up the hard drive to the hard drive (ya, I know) recently. They were going to take it back to the place they bought it but asked me to look at it first.

Whoever sold it to them did a good job of goof-proofing it for them as a one trick pony accounting machine. DOS 4.01 and Bedford were installed on it for them and the autoexec.bat launched Bedford then shipdisk, so it 'booted' the accounting software then parked the hard drive when they exited. But it had also come with a software sampler that they had no idea was even on the hard drive; 15 meg of shareware and 15 meg of porn. That only left 10 meg for DOS, Bedford, and the back-up files.

5 boxes of floppies later I had freed up most of the hard drive by deleting almost all the shareware and moving the accounting back-ups and all of the porn to floppy and only leaving the choice smut and a few games. I then found a freeware menu program buried in the software sampler on their machine and set it up so they could not only access the accounting software, but the games and porn I had saved for them.

When I got laid off from the label company that year the partners hired me as their office manager, and I was with them for 12 years. I'm not sure if it was because I got the books running to Bruce's satisfaction or because I got the porn running to Kevin's satisfation ;-)

Potential Extra Credit??
Posted 12/01/2002 by Roy
 

This story is about 3 days old.

I was sitting my a college geology class. I'm an IS major graduating in about a week, but I needed another 3 credits to be full-time (insurance purposes), so I found an easy geo class that would fit in my schedule.

Its the last day of real class, and the teacher says that she's going to bring in pictures from a trip to Antarctica. She arrives about 15-20 minutes before class to set up a laptop and projector.

She proceeded to take the next 20-25 minutes to figure out why the projector isn't displaying anything off the laptop. She tried checking the settings on the projector, and who knows what on the laptop.

I wasn't really paying attention to all this, as I had my laptop, and was playing WindowsXP's Spider Solitare before class.

5 minutes into class, she announces that the laptop and projector just "don't want to communicate". She will still run the slideshow from the laptop's tiny screen, and she has no problem if anyone wants to just leave.

Someone asked about extra credit for staying.

I had only recently finished my game, and I spoke up, asking about extra credit for fixing it. I then walked to the front of the room, pressed FN+F3 (the typical combination for telling a laptop to switch from its own display to an external one), and after I'm sure its projecting properly, I walk back to my seat.

I'd say it took me no more than 20 seconds to setup.

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Ian
 

One day when I was a phone lackey for a large OEM, I got a call from a lady who was having difficulties starting her brand new computer, it was her first ever computer, she managed to connect the computer fine (amazingly), however when trying to start the computer it would come on for about 4 seconds then turn off. She'd see our splash screen come up on the screen, but 4-5 seconds later the computer would power off. So I go through the motions and try to determine whats going on, so I tell her to hit F1 when the splash screen comes up to enter the bios, it changed the screen and turned off after about 4 seconds... (I was just off a complex issue with a knowledgeable person so I wasn't in the right mindset to grasp the 4 seconds thing that eventually it was...)

So I asked her to plug a lamp in the power plug thinking maybe she had really bad power in that plug and that it was cutting out every so often, no steady light, no dimming etc... Getting frustrated at having done everything I was almost ready to set up a service considering it a possible faulty powersupply, when she asked, "Starting a computer's like starting a car right? you have to hold the button in til the windows comes up?" Yes, she was holding in the power button, and 4 seconds later the bios was turning it off again as is normal on an ATX system. So I told her politely, no, you just have put press the button like turning on a TV, And went on to explain that holding the power button in is an emergency way to turn off the computer, but not for everyday use, and that she should just use the computer normally.

She was the only person I ever had with that problem, I spent a half hour on that call, all because of a pebkac error. thankfully I've left that evil career behind me...

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Tech Support: Hello, welcome to cable Internet helpdesk. How may I help you?

Me: Yeah, I was wondering what was the monthly bandwidth on this package?

Tech Support: Sir, I've never heard anything about bandwidth before...

Me: :|

Council Cretin
Posted 12/01/2002 by Simon Dredge
 

This is a tale from when I was about 14...and doing some work experience for the tech support group who were contracted to the local council. They had recently fitted out all their members with new computers, modems etc, so they could keep in contact with the central database. Anyway, we had to go connect up and explain to this middle-aged councillor(around 40 years old) how to access it. We are sitting slightly behind her and she picks up the mouse in one hand, starts waving it around in the air.

Now...myself and the guy were just too shocked to laugh, she honestly thought it would work that way. We didnt say anything till she turned around and said "It doesnt seem to be working". Needless to say, I let the other guy explain what was wrong. Even at that age, I knew this was the life for me :)

What shocked me, was that the council had paid large amounts of cash, bought all this hardware for around 300 people, installed it. And not even checked if anyone had actually even SEEN a computer before.

Password...
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anon Tech
 

I got a call from a user awhile ago who needed to be registered. I asked what password she wanted and she starting getting a little antsy about it. I informed her to complete the registration she'd have to supply me with some sort of pw.

She wanted her pw to be 'ib6ub9'

Read that slowly...

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by jhormax
 

2 stories

story 1:

my sister asks me to format a diskette for her. I get the disk and proceed to format. afterwards, she complains to me that all her files disappeared.

story 2:

a friend calls up and asks me to help her create a new dial-up connection. I walk her through the process and set everything up. she tries to connect but can't seem to get through. I ask if the modem's connected to a phone line. she says yes. I ask how many lines she has. she says one: the one she's using to talk to me.

Techs
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Okay, first for a bit of history: I've been working with computers for better than 10 years, was an assistant sysadmin the last 2 years at my high school, (many fun stories) and have been CCNA trained. I'm currently a uc davis student, living in the dorms, and using thier lan internet service. Anyway, I recently had my acess suspended, for having "copyrighted materials" "shared on the internet." (Yes I did, but it was in order to transfer documents to my laptop, and was only accessable via ftp) After I got done with their slap on the wrist thing, and they renabled my access, but it wasn't working. I did some looking, and found out that I was not getting the default gateway set via dhcp. I had everything else, but not that. So I just manually configured it, but then I get kicked off everytime they reallocate ip's. So, I sent an e-mail to the it department, explaining that I have this problem on both my machines, have run ipconfig / renew, am getting dhcp ip, and ask them to check their server. So, I get this e-mail back asking what os I'm running, and requesting me to run ipconfig, and send them the results. Personally, I think the tech on the other end was either inept or incopitant, but still... Anyway, it started working, so something happened. This was also the departemnt that said that I was not qualified to work for them, so who knows..

Could you please plug the network cable in
Posted 12/01/2002 by Tommy
 

kind of long and nerve racking(for me anyway) but also funny now that I think of it

Me: Thank you for calling online tech support my name is tommy how may I help you

Him: Yes my internet service isn't working.

Me: ok sir, I can help you with that do you have a router hooked up or a firewall program.

Him: I have a router.

Me: Could you please unhook the router for me sir so that the modem is plugged directly into the computer.

Him: it won't work unless the router is hooked up.

Me: Unfortunately sir we do not support routers so you have to unhook it and it should work with or with out the router.

Him: No, I am telling you it won't work you F***in idiot. How long have you been doing this for a living? (here we go)

Me: 3 years and you have to unhook your router

Him: hahahaha 3 years huh do you know anything about routers?

Me: No thats why we don't support them. (although i do)

Him: You have a lot to learn son, you don't know what your talking about.

Me: ok, well since I don't know anything about routers could you please unhook it for me.

Him: Fine, (goes downstairs) now when I plug the network cable into the modem the pc light does not come on so it won't work unless the router is hooked up.

Me: are you sure you plugged the right one in.

Him: Yes! now when I plug the router in the pc light comes on, so the problem is on your side.

Me: so your saying that the modem is online (which it was becuase I was able to ping the modem), and the router is online right?

Him: Yes.

Me: but your computer isn't correct?

Him: yes

Me: so if your router is online, how do you figure it is on our end?

Him: becuase my computer isn't online. (ok maybe some backwoods hillbilly logic going on here)

Me: ok can you unhook the router for me sir, try all the network cables that go to the computers until that pc light comes on.

Him: why do I have to do that. the problem is on your end.

(banging my head on the desk) becuase the pc light doesn't work unless the router is hooked up.

Me: well then sir the problem can only be that 1) the network cable it self is damaged. 2) you have a bad network card. 3)the computer you are plugging in is not on or plugged in at the computer. so you need to try other cables and until that light comes on.

Him: ok it's on

Me: do you have the router hooked up

Him: Yes

Me:(AAAARRRGGGGGHHHH)

Me: Unhook the router and plug in a network cable that goes to the computer.

Him: Ok it's plugged in

Me: is the pc light on?

Him: yes (sounded kind of sarcastic)

Me: ok go to the computer.

Him: ok I'm here

Me: ok lets check your network card and make sure it is working ok (I had a feeling he didn't plug it in or that light didn't come on so I started here turned out it was fine)

Me: ok lets make sure your tcp/ip settings are ok (walked him through this)

Him: it says network cable unplugged so the problem is on your end.

Me: no it says that because the network cable is unplugged.

Him: yeah we unplugged it from my network.

Me: if your computer was plugged into the modem it wouldn't say that. are you sure the light was on.

Him: yes you dumb a$$ you don't know what your doing.

Me: ok lets try a different computer in your house.

Him: I can't believe this sh1t you are so imcompitant you have no idea hat your doing, and you call yourself tech support you have a lot to learn son. I know more about computers than you and I'm a plumber. (ok i know it's possible for a plumber to know about computers but I just can't help to luagh that this guy says he knows what he is doing and is just not making anysense. anyway he goes to the second computer same issue then he gets to the third and final computer. also the 2nd and 3rd computers weren't on so the pc light wasn't on as I suspected)

Me: ok your at the last computer in your house now

Him: Yes

Me: ok can you turn the computer on.

Him: ok now what mr I think I know everything about computers (which I in know way claim that i do, but either way I must know somethign cuase I'm starting to get replies to the continuous ping requests that have been running)

Me: ok open up your browser

Him: ok what did you do.

Me: had you remove the router and plug in a computer and and start it up. looks like you had the wrong computer plugged in. are you able to browse now on that computer.

Him: NO you a$$hole forget this. *click*

needless to say he was online and knew it and just probably felt stupid that someone that doesn't know anything about computers got him online(grin). I Guess the problem was with his router afterall.

I normally would have been nice and gave him some general advice on how to try and fix his router to do on his own, but since he was a prick and this should have been simple call took over 35 minutes I wouldn't have done that even if he didn't hang up on me.

Space mouse?
Posted 12/01/2002 by JeanNarH
 

I've been working for an ISP for about 4 years.

We've saw a lot of weird stuff. Here's one :

M (me)

C (Old Lady Customer)

M : ISP blablabla tech support how can i help you?

C : Hi, my mouse is clicking.

M : That's how it should do. You must click with a mouse.

C : No, mine is always clicking. Now i'm watching Santa Barbara and it's still clicking.

M : Hu..? You're still hearing your mouse clicking?

C : No, i see it. I'm watching Santa Barbara and i see my mouse on the screen going to the Trash Can and My Computer at the same time on my TV

M : huuuuuuuuuuuuu??? Heee...... This is more a TV issue than an ISP one. If it append again, call you cable provider.

Okay, it's bad to send the problem to the cable guy, but...what else could i have done.....she was mad or stone.

JeanNarH

$%!$ computer!
Posted 12/01/2002 by JeanNarH
 

M (me)

C (Customer)

M : ISP tech support how can i help you?

C : Hi, i got a computer problem.....

M : Ok m'am, what's the problem?

C : I cannot connect to internet and my computer's swearing.

M : Can i have more details please? Since when is that appening?

C : Well, i've tried connecting all day long yesterday, and since the night, the computer's swearing, and really bad!

M : Ok, let's see..Go to My Computer, Dial up networking and right click on the ISP connexion. What's the phone number?

C : It's XXX-ZXXZ

M : Ho m'am! It should be XXX-XZZX, and i think the man is sick of hearing you modem!

We all had a good laught, except the man that recieved about 40 calls during a night.....

JeanNarH

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Joshua Wark
 

I have been working corporate tech support for 5 months, it's my first time doing tech support but I like it for the most part. I have a story of 3 calls in succession, they're not really that funny it's just more of an unbelievable experience having 3 extremely mind boggling calls.

call 1. eu calls in and asks where his system is because he was supposed to recieve a system exchange. I pull up his info and find out the exchange was set up 3 years ago and we never shipped it. So I ask him why hasn't he called in and he says, "oh I'm a new employee and I just tried to turn it on and it didn't work", so he called in and found out he had a system exchange set up and was transferred to me. So I asked him why the last guy didn't and he said he was a procrastinator. So they're looking for the system now and I have to call him back if they find it or whatever.

call 2. eu calls in and has a known issue with hydravision/windows 2000/radeon ve video card/office 2000/and default email editor set as microsoft word. (yes such an issue actually exists, it pops up a blank window everytime you run outlook). So workaround is to uninstall hydravision or don't use word as your default. Cust actually needed hydravision for features they needed while running dual monitors and the company actually had a policy that made them use microsoft word as default. Unbelievable, so anyway I found a newer version of hydravision and asked if eu would install it and see if it fixed the problem. Eu says she won't because she will not risk crashing the system. I ask her why she thinks it will crash her system and she replies with nothing but, "I want something in writing from you that states you can not fix my problem". So I say you won't try the possible fix I have provided and then she asked to talk to a manager so I sent her packing. Unbelievable.

call3. Eu calls in with a system that can see all 40 systems on the network except one server. Systems are all from my company and all are the same (all workstation and all servers are exactly the same). One system can see every single machine except one server, can ping all machines except that one server. All other machines can see everything. all versions of drivers are same on every system. (completely and totally standardized, every single piece of hardware in the systems was the exact same build) customer even reimaged every single machine, including the servers!. Totally mindboggling. did an exchange on that one.

Those 3 calls were in succession.

No Sound? No Brain
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Just a quick chuckle...

Had a user call in the other day, says I can't hear the new mail notifier. I try to call the user, but of course, they are gone for the day.

I decided to walk down and see. I already suspected the prob. It isn't enough to have a visual reminder for new mail, we must have sound. I get to the

computer and of course there aren't any speakers. Duh...

Why would you expect to hear sounds without speakers?????

Fun with browser add-ons
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

At work today I notice dozens of error emails getting sent from a CGI script which was being fed garbled arguments (including control codes in the URL when I checked the logs).

I track the user down by IP address and call him. I get him to clear his cache and fix his IE settings over the phone (he's at a different location than I and I don't have access for SMS or VNC). He does that but the problem persists.

I say he needs to find an Windows expert over there. He says he is the Windows expert.

Then he asks if it could be any of the browser add-ons he just installed!

Of course I told him to try removing them and then it worked fine. :)

Case sensitive
Posted 12/01/2002 by Stephanus Surjaputra
 

Our software allows mortgage brokers to order credit from a credit vendor. I get a call from a client who is also online with the credit vendor. The client is getting INVALID USERNAME OR PASSWORD. The vendor asks ME whether the password is case sensitive or not.

Ummm..excuse me? We just send the information over as the client types it. Isn't the credit vendor supposed to know whether the password is case sensitive????

"You broke it on purpose!"
Posted 12/01/2002 by Stephanie
 

ME:

"ISP tech support, how can I help you?"

Crying teenage girl:

"I can't get my email, it won't connect, I've been away at camp for a whole week and I'm leaving again soon, I have to get my email."

Soon I find out that her only local local dialup number is having problems today (The WAN card on the number's server suddenly failed, a new one was being Fed-Exed overnight, it would be fixed as soon as the part arrived the next day).

Me:

"Our engineers are working on it, miss, the server will be working tomorrow morning."

Girl, crying harder:

"But I need to get my email now! I'm leaving tomorrow for camp again!"

Me:

"I'm sorry miss, but there is noting we can do until the new part arrives tomorrow morning."

Girl, bawling:

"I'm going to sue you for this! I can't get my email! I'm leaving for camp again and I won't be able to get it for a week!"

Me:

"I'm really sorry, it will be back up in the morning."

Girl:

"How could you turn the server off right when I need it?!"

Me, getting a little bit annoyed:

"We didn't break it on purpose to make you sad miss."

Girl, screaming:

"Yes you did! *sob* Yes you did!! I'm going to bring a lawsuit against you!"

My finger barely made it to the mute button before I burst out laughing.

Girl, as she hung up:

"Daddy!!!"

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Me: "Hello, thank you for calling ISP support."

Her: "My computer connects, but can't bring up any web pages."

Me: "Ok, let's go to 'My Computer'..."

Her: "I don't want to change anything, I want to know what's wrong with your service"

Me: "We haven't had any browsing problems on our side today, problems like this are often caused by slightly incorrect settings or components that could be corrupted and might need to be reinstalled."

Her: *In an annoyed and condecending tone* "Is that the best answer you can come up with?"

Me: "Yes ma'am, and it's the correct answer over 95% of the time that I've come across people's computers who were having a similar problem to yours, and I've worked here for a year and a half"

Her: "I guess you can't help me then" *click*

Completely blind
Posted 12/01/2002 by Benny
 

Short one but my store manager and I were left in stitches for weeks about this one.

I was at that time working for a large electronics outlet. Durring one of my breaks from the tech bench my mgr. and I were back by the car-fi department in the back of the store talking about nothing in particular watching the customers stroll around the store. At this time a man that we had both noticed walking to us from the front of the store asked us where the cd's were. I looked at the manager with that "this man can't be serious" look, due to the fact he had just walked passed about 200 feet of them to get to where we were standing. I twirled my finger in the air and pointed over his shoulder to give the man the clue to look behind him and he laughed and said "ooh jese you must think I'm blind" You might say what does this have anything to do about being a tech. Well, about a half hour later back at my bench this same man came up to the window and asked me "is this where I drop my computor off to get it fixed?" While standing under a great big sign that sais Computor Tech.

Him?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Boss calls me one day: "I need you get get him off my computer".

Me (???? Is this something I want to see? Too many possibilities here). "Ok, be right there."

When I get to his office, he's pointing at an icon on his desktop. A Word file. "I want him off of there."

I dragged it to the recycle bin, knowing he just wanted it done, knowing an explanation would be too much to handle.

I guess it keeps me employed.

Can't Send Email
Posted 12/01/2002 by Carlos
 

I work on the escalations team for an ISP. One day I had a tech come up to me and ask if I've ever heard of a customer that can't send email to anybody they try. I asked if they were using Outlook or Webmail. He tells me "Webmail", I tell him "No, it can't be happening, probe a little bit better." He tells me he's already probed and that the customer is getting angry and wants to speak to a supervisor. So I tell him "probe better", and he gets mad and walks away. Fifteen minutes later he comes back and asks if he can escalate it. I tell him, "go ahead, but you're probably gonna feel stupid when I find an easy solution." He tells me, "I've determined it's a server issue and you won't be able to fix it anyways." And I'm thinking, "yeah, whatever".

So the next day I'm going through my bin and find that case I have to call back that he escalated. I login to the customer's webmail account and see there are a bunch of bounced messages in their inbox. I open one and it says "the recipients email address, "www.blabla@blabla.com", does not exists on the server "blabla.com". I check the "sent items" folder and sure enough the customer was putting "www" before every email address he/she was sending to. So I call the customer and let him know, and they're like "oh, ok, my bad."

So I send the tech a feedback email to let him know what an idiot he was, in a proffessional manner of course. He sends me one back later that day with "F.. you, get a real job!" Turns out he walked out after reading my email and never came back. Haven't seen him since, but incase he's reading this, "Hope you found yourself a real job, idiot."

All the pretty lights
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

This morning I was walking down by some printers when I came across one of my users frantically feeding one sheet of paper at a time into the manual feed tray (Tray 1) of a printer (a Laserjet 6mp). I watch him for a minute then ask what he thinks he's doing. Here's the conversation:

(Him) For some reason the stupid thing is demanding a manual feed.

(Me) Hmmmm, and how do you know that?

(H) By the light that's lit.

(M) {Looking at the control panel} "You mean the light that means that Tray 2 is out of paper?".

(H) "Ummm, yeah, I guess so". {pulls open Tray 2} "Doh!"

Now, this user has set up a network at home and considers himself something of a computer expert. Not to mention that he's a manager (not IT though). The funny thing is even if the printer needed a manual feed there's no reason to feed it one page at a time. There's enough space to manually feed several sheets at a time.

It really WAS plugged in
Posted 12/01/2002 by Eric Hoffman
 

I was woken up one saturday morning by a phone call from the accountant at one of the offices I provide IT Consulting servies to. She told me her computer wasn't working. Assuming she had a little common sence, I walked her through checking to see if the power cables, power strip, monitor, and other cables were plugged in properly. Knowing the computer worked fine, as I had been using it the day before, I was totally stumped. As a wild shot in the dark, I told her to push the power button, and was greeted by an excited "Oh! There it goes!" The next monday I told my boss to either give her some computer training and a lecture on basic troubleshooting (common sence) or fire her. She had training the following week, and I don't let my bosses give out my home number to employies under pain of death.

Forget to take your work home?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Eric Hoffman
 

A co-worker and close friend of mine was awaken by a phone call from co worker at an office where we both provide IT Consulting services. He was told by an employee who we thought would try to poke around a bit more then she did before calling us how the computer didn't work and displayed the error message "Non System Disk or Disk Error" He told her "Take the diskette out of the disk drive and press any key." Then just hung up and went back to sleep.

Piece Of Junk Computer
Posted 12/01/2002 by Dustin Fallon
 

I work for a large retail office supply chain. I occasionally work in the electronics department. I have had quite a few technological illeterate customers, but one guy stands out above all others. Here's how the conversation went.

M: Can I help you find anything today?

C: Yeah, I need a disk for my computer.

M: No problem, do you need an IBM of Mac formatted.

C: I don't know I'm not too computer smart. I need one to make my computer work.

M: OK, what kind of computer do you have?

C: I told you I'm not that computer smart. Let me tell you what I have. I got the TV part, and the typewriter part.

M: OK, but what does your computer look like. Is it a tall tower, or a wide "VCR" sized box.

C: Dammit, I told you I have the TV part and the typewriter part.

M: OK, where did you buy it.

C: Let me tell you about that. I was at the junkyard the other day, and the guy there had a whole pile of TV parts and typewriter parts. He said I could have any of them that I wanted, for free.

At that point I turned and walked away from the guy, and made my electronics supervisor help the guy before I said something to loose my job.

"You really messed them up!"
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Back when I was in high school, I would sometimes get asked by teachers to help them with problems that they had with their computers. One day, someone who was on the staff for the school newspaper came up to me and said that the printer they used was only working on one of the Macs in their lab, and the rest wouldn't print, and that "Jane" (not her real name - changed to protect the guilty), the teacher in charge of the paper, wanted me to figure out what was wrong and fix it so they could print from all their computers in the lab. I went over there and saw a simple reason for their problem - the network cables for most of the machines were disconnected. I connected the network back up, set up printer sharing on the Mac which the printer was connected to (it wasn't a networkable printer), tried printing from the other Macs in te lab - presto, works.

The next day, "Jane" came up to me and said, "I was wondering if you could undo whatever you did to our computers, because you really messed them up and now PageMaker isn't working anymore." Feeling very confused, I went over there to see what was the trouble. The people there demonstrated - they tried to launch PageMaker on one of the Macs. Sure enough, it popped up an alert saying that another copy of PageMaker with the same serial number was in use elsewhere on the network. I told "Jane" that they were using the software illegally and really should have a separate copy for each machine on the network. She claimed that they really did own a copy for each machine, but they used the same set of install disks to install on all the Macs, because that was more "convenient." I explained to her how copy protection works and told her that she would not be able to use more than one copy at a time if all the programs on the network had the same serial number and that she should get the install disks out again and install PageMaker with a different install disk on each Mac so that they would have unique serial numbers. She claimed that they didn't know where the install disks were anymore (yeah right, you only own one copy and we all know it).

To make things worse, she then said, "That's why we disconnected the network, to avoid that serial number message." Then why did you go ask me why your printer wasn't working for more than one of your machines?!

Argh. But of course it's my fault for "messing up" their machines. I went and disconnected the network again, and their illegal copies of PageMaker worked again. But of course, they could only print from one of the computers...

Screen name
Posted 12/01/2002 by Richard
 

I work in the UK for a major ISP and both of these very similar calls happened within half an hour of each other

me: .....

idiot: member

call 1:-

me: good afternoon this is *** technical support can i have your screen name please

idiot: S.A.M.S.U.N.G

me: no not the name of your monitor your screen name

call 2:-

me: good afternoon this is *** technical support can i have your screen name please

idiot: windows 98

I now ask them for there phone number to find there details, it takes longer but well at least i dont have people telling me who made there monitor or what there os is !!

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by NCODA
 

My parents brought themselves a computer, and after a while of using it, the mouse started to not respond. I knew it just needed to be cleaned, but didnt get round to it. Sometime later i walk past the room, and there is mum holding the mouse pad in the air moving it around... expecting something to happen. Quite a funny sight. So i finally cleaned the thing.

His ESP PC
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

We are the in-house tech support department for a two campus secondary school in southern Victoria, Australia. Last week we got an angry call from a teacher who wanted to know "why you blokes can never get the internet to work right." He said that he could not connect to the State Curriculum website, although the person next to him was able to do so. "Then the web access must be OK" I said.

A technician went down to check but returned with tears streaming down his face. When he could get his breath back, he explained that he had typed in the URL for the website and the teacher had blurted out, "You mean I have to do that every time I want to go to a website!!?"

I guess he thought the computer was clever enough to figure out where he wanted to go today.

TASKBAR
Posted 12/01/2002 by NCODA
 

Not that funny, but interesting enough. Since knowing alot about computers, i get alot of calls from friends and relatives. Once i get a call saying there is the big gray stuff filling half the screen, and it wont go away ... after much description, i realise that the person had resized the task bar to max.

Later the same person, they say they have a virus cause their computer racked up alot of phone bills from the modem dialing all the time... cause they never switch the computer off. If only they turned off auto-connect in the internet connection.

On the DARK side
Posted 12/01/2002 by Johny
 

While working as the sole repair tech for a low-voltage intercom company, I happened across a typo created by a well-meaning secretarial type that claimed the audio amplifier (now on my bench) had been damaged by lighting.

Given my personality type, I took full advantage of this & after repairing the item, scribbled that "This unit was only certified for use in darkness" on the repair ticket.

Normally, this repair ticket is filed & never goes to the customer. But someone (possibly this same well-meaning secretarial type) decided this tidbit of wisdom should be relayed- for the good of all parties concerned.

Several months down the road- the same unit reappeared on my bench- this time, with the words BOLDLY written across the box, " OPERATE IN SUBDUED LIGHTING PER MFG "

I've long-since been promoted to the engineering department, but still keep that same box in one of my desk.

Parents, eh?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I don't actually do tech support as a job, but do seem to have been landed with holding my parents hands every time anything vaguely more exciting than opening Word is to be done.

A couple of years ago my father donated me his old computer which he didn't want any more (should have seen the warning signs there!) and as I didn't have the money to buy anything better myself I happily accepted. The monster arrived, I fired it up - and it crashed. And again. When I started looking into what the computer actually contained I found that it had 16Megs of RAM and a 1Gig hard-drive - can't remember what the processor was, but it certainly wasn't anything to shout hurrah about. My mother, thinking she was being really helpful, had installed Win98...

'But 98 is much better than 95, isn't it?'

Er... Took some time explaining what minimum requirements meant!

Problem User
Posted 12/01/2002 by Roland
 

I've been using computers for more than fifteen years, but I can still remember how much trouble I had when I was just starting out. So I try to remain calm and friendly with users, no matter how abusive or clueless they are. But then there's always the constant problem users, the ones who refuse to learn anything no matter how many times you tell them.

Case in point: I was contracted to support the Desktop Support department for a Securities Services company. I got a call from one of our key problem users indicating that his computer didn't work. I went to his desk to find that he had placed the call with the Helpdesk, then left for lunch. Annoyed, I logged into the network on my account using his system, checked that various necessary applications were working properly, and left to handle another call.

An hour and a half later, I was at the Helpdesk when he called back, so I sat in while the Helpdesk employee fielded the call (as a contractor, I didn't want to step on anyone's toes). The user said that no one had fixed his computer. I mentioned that I'd been there and everything had worked. He said, "No, I meant that I can't get into my account." So, while the Helpdesk tech started up a new trouble ticket (for a network, not desktop, problem) I chatted with the user to find the source of the problem; after all, I'd gotten in with no problem. It turns out that it looked like he was using the wrong password. However, despite the Helpdesk tech changing it multiple times, he still got the same error. Eventually, I made the long trek back to his desk.

Turns out he didn't know how to change the "User" field of the Logon dialog box. After the last tech installed some new software onto his computer, he just kept trying to log in with his password and somebody else's account. He ended up locking both my account and the tech who'd done the install. How can you be that ignorant about something you have to do every morning?

Just A Phone Call Away....
Posted 12/01/2002 by Mary Jones
 

I work for a major ISP. This is a call I recently took.

Me) Thank you for calling #####, this is Mary, how may I help you.

Customer) I can't get online. No matter what I do, it won't go. I was online last night just fine.

Me) Okay, let's take a look at your modem and see what's going on there.

Customer) Wait I will get a screw driver....

Me) Sir, no, we won't be needing a screwdriver, we can do this right here on your computer.

Customer) How u goona do that? (I hear a faint chuckle)

Me) Click on Start, Settings, then on Control Panel. (And I wait for him to accomplish thease feats.)

Customer) OK, now what?

Me) Now click on MODEM. OK, what kind of modem does it say you have.

Customer) Rockwell HSP, is that it.

Me) Yes, that would be it.

After putting the modem thru it's paces and he was getting an error that said there was no dialtone, I asked him to

make sure the lines from the phone were correctly plugged in.

Customer) Don't you think I know where to plug the phone cord in? I haven't removed it so that can't possibly be the problem.

Me) Sir, I am just trying.....

Customer) WAIT!!!! Does it make any difference that my phone was cut off this morning, I am on my cell phone right now!

The imprints of my forehead are still on my monitor!

Can't Connect
Posted 12/01/2002 by Mary Jones
 

Customers always call up to tech suuport when they can't connect.

Me) Thnaks for calling #####, How can I help you today?

Customer) I am having a problem connecting and staying online.

Me) Ok, how long are you able to stay online at any one time?

Customer) Just a few seconds and I get booted. It is really aggravating.

AT this point I have the customers account pulled up and I am reviewing their login/out history.

Me) Well, Ma'am after looking at your account, I see that this morning you were on for 3 hours straight, and yesterday you were on at lest 4 times with at least 3-4 hours each time you connected, I don't see that there is any kind of connection problem here....

Customer) Are you calling me a liar?!

Me) No ma'am, I am just stating that I do not see on your account where you would be connecting and getting disconnected repeatedly. Your account activity shows you HAVE ben able to connect and STAY online for hours.

Customer) I don't care what your records say, I am telling you, I have problems getting connected and staying connected, and I want credit, I was some free months service!!!

Now at this point, I know the drill, the customer is just wanting free service.

Me) I am very sorry ma'am, but with your account activity, I am not allowed to give credit in this instance.

And by looking at yor account, you have received 4 free months of service in the past 6 months. We cannot continue to provide you with fre service.

Customer) What, you people think you corner the market on providing internet service?? I'll just go to another company, I will just cancel my account.... (at this point she started cussing me out)

Me) Well, ma'am I am sorry you feel that way, but I can help you with that request. (At this time, I pull the plug on her account, and all you can hear in the background is "Goodbye".

Customer) Wait!! I am sorry, just let me....

Me) Thank you calling #####, and you have a great day!

click!

Payment in Kind
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

A few years ago my wife and I updated our wills and contracted with a local lawyer to do the paperwork. After reading through the new will and finishing the rest of the legal work he started asking us about our work. I told him that I was a computer consultant and he stated that a week or so ago that all the programs had disappeared off his machine -- if I could help him get them back he wouldn't charge us for the legal work. This sounded too good to be true (the bill would have been around $250), so I told him he had a deal.

He walked me into the next room to his PC. It was running Windows 3.1, as I could see immediately. He gestures at the screen and says "see -- everything is gone". I noticed that he was looking at the Windows Program Manager and that one of the MDI windows for a program group was maximized -- obscuring all the other windows. I clicked the minimize button on the maximized window to reveal the rest of the icons, asked him if those were the programs he was looking for (they were!) and left with our free wills.

Dont press that button
Posted 12/01/2002 by Rayven
 

Not so much a tech support, but a technophobe story.

Many years ago whilst trying to pass some time and get bits of paper to prove that I did have the knowledge I possessed, I joined a local college. They quickly realised I already knew what they were teaching me, and asked if I could give them a hand when their staff strated falling like flies with flu. It sounded fun, so I agreed.

One student was a complete technophobe. It took us best part of a week before she would even turn the computer on in case she broke it.

By the end of the first term she was doing superbly, but always stayed away from one key on the keyboard. It was in those days when this key was in RED.

One day she asked me what would happen if she pressed it. "Nothing!" I told her, and explained that some programs used it to give the user a means of stopping the program. You could see the torment on her face. She was so proud of getting used to the computer and learning about it, but petrified in case I was wrong.

Several "Go on, press it, nothing will happen." soothing statements later and she decided to press it.

THAT was when the idiots decided to test the fire alarm without the usual warning over the speakers.

The chair went one way, she went another the and keyboard headed off at a completely different tangent. It took 2 of the lads a good half hour to find her, bring her back, and calm her down with several cups of tea. We never saw he again.

In one breath I could have killed the engineers, and I know that in the next life I will be punished for saying this, but just seeing the expression of abject terror on her face made it all the more worthwhile.

Workspace Woes
Posted 12/01/2002 by Roland
 

Although I work for one company, they typically subcontract my services out to other companies' IT departments when they need the extra help. Some of these support jobs turn into relatively long-term things.

In one job, we moved from four techs in a nice office to just me on a table in the lunchroom. It was bad enough with people microwaving food right next to all the equipment I had to store securely (by keeping it in cardboard boxes on my table). What really got me sore was when people would use my PC, thinking that it was for general use, and I'd find all this crap on it from the Internet with no idea how it got there (I was using Windows 95, on a PC so old I couldn't run any of the security apps I like). Nothing more disconcerting than working on your paperwork when someone comes over to ask if you're done since he wants to surf the Web!

Anyway, the capper on this was when I had to keep some nice PCs (much better than the Pentium 90 I had to use; I think they were P4s) in storage. I mentioned that I had no locking cabinets or any other kind of security since the EU made me use a table in the lunchroom. I was labeled a "troublemaker" and told to just keep the PCs in their boxes under my table. "Write something else on the boxes and noone will check."

Several months later, they want the PCs to replace the disaster recovery PCs that have become production units after 9/11. Take out the first one, boot it up... nothing. Just a series of beeps. I checked them all, and came up with the same result for each one: someone had swiped all the RAM!

What did they expect, keeping expensive PCs in the lunchroom? From that point on, they "found" space in a locking closet for all the equipment I had to service.

Of course, I never qualified to get a key for the closet, but that's another story...

Windows 98?
Posted 12/01/2002 by David
 

Me "What operating system are you running"

Customer "Windows 98"

Me "Okay, right click My Computer - go to properties"

Customer "I don't see My Computer"

(After about 1 minute of trying to explain where the icon is/looks like)

Me "Okay, never mind - click on start, settings, control panel"

Customer "Okay"

Me "Double click system"

Customer "I don't see system"

Me "You don't see system?? Windows 98?"

Customer "Yes, Windows 98 Second Edition"

Me "Okay, what do you see in Control Panel?"

Customer names a few things...

Me "Ohhhhh, ok - you have a Macintosh. That makes alot more sense."

Customer "No, I definitly have Windows 98"

Me "When I said to go to start, settigns control panel - were you clicking on an apple in the upper left hand side of your screen, then going to control panel?"

Customer "Yes"

Me "Yeah, thats a Macintosh"

Customer "No, I'm posotive this is Windows 98 - I just installed it"

Me "Oh, ok"

*Groan*

*Proceeds to help him install his modem on his Macintosh*

1 lump or 2?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Im an IT Manager (the only member of IT staff which makes me the "IT Dept") at a small company that decided to expand.

As we are small and short of resources it was decided that the best thing to do is bring in a consultant to manage the expansion so we can all forget about it and concentrate on day to day running. They way it works is he sorts everything out, pays for it all and then we pay him. We choose the guy who helped set the place up as that seems like the obvious best choice.

So this guy decides that our single processor server isnt good enough, it has dual capabilities so we should use them.

I agreed with him, but I said we do have 2 processors.

He said listen, I was here when we set all this up before you where hired, there is only one processor. I've tried arguing with him before but he's one of those who are to stupid to argue with so I forget about it and let him deal with it.

He orders the part and it takes 3 days for our hardware company to source it, with them caling us checking the model and make, calling back to make sure. Eventually they find it and their guy comes this morning to fit the processor.

him: I dont know how to tell you mate but you already have 2 processors

me: Yep!

him: well why order another one??

me: stupidity!

him: your stupidity?

me: nope, the consultants fault

him: so what now?

me: leave it here till after christmas and let him sort it when he gets back

him: you do know we cant take it back to our supllier if its working ok

me: Yep, so does the consultant and he signed the purchase order

him: hes #$%^ed!

me: he most certainly is.

Moral of the story, A network admin always knows best about whats on "his" network. If your a consultant reading this, remember when you "consult" part of that is listening

hahahahahahahahahahaha.

Merry Christmas Everyone

BTW I hate this site it has cost me countless productive hours. ;-P

Credit Card Blues
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

A customer calls up and gets the usual welcome:

"Good afternoon, you're through to *****. Can you confirm the name of the account holder, and answer the following security question. *****."

Customer gives the account holders name, but fails to answer the security question.

Because he hasn't answer the security question I can't give him much information concerning his account, and tell him this. He then proceeds to tell me that his connection has been cut off, and he can't understand why?

He then informs me that his account was set up to be paid by Direct debit, but that he'd had his credit card stolen, and reported that to the bank.

The bank had then in turn closed down that card and account!

He changed all of his other direct debits to another account but didn't change his internet account payment to direct debit on another account, he'd left it on the card that the bank had shut down so that account ended up being closed (and so did his internet account).

Whoops.

So obvious, it has to be missed
Posted 12/01/2002 by Paul
 

My mom came home today, and one of her coworkers, let's call her Molly, recently purchased an HP Jornada. Molly became so frustrated with the Jornanda after it failed to even so much as turn on, she gave it to my mom with instructions to do with it as I pleased, even (in Molly's words) destroy it. I managed to fix the problem in about 5 seconds. Turns out the battery requires charging before you can use it for the first time :) I did so, and it works flawlessly :)

Bad Timing...
Posted 12/01/2002 by Roland
 

So at one point I was assigned to help the Desktop Support department of a Brokerage Services company. They had me setting up these Gateway desktops they bought to give to key employees so that, in the event of a disaster, they could work from home. Each PC was to have Windows 98, Office 97, pcAnywhere 7 and an ISDN modem to connect to the office network. (Why you want to have people be dependent on an office network that might no longer be there didn't seem to occur to any of the people who designed the Disaster Recovery plan.)

Anyway, I had a little difficulty getting the SPIDs to work for the ISDN modems, but eventually the people with the right info told me what I needed to know and I got a couple of the PCs set up by Friday. I configured the PC of one of the future recipients (my favorite user) to run pcAnywhere in default Receive Mode, changing only the password. I called him up at his desk when he came back from lunch, and had him confirm for me that everything worked correctly; when I started pcAnywhere on the Disaster Recovery PC, I took control of his system. No problems.

Now, the people who made the plan were very interested to see their plan in action, so after I let my supervisor know that I had it working, the VIPs made a visit to the lab about two hours later. There was a lot of talking and sightseeing, but I ignored it since I was already working on the next Disaster Recovery PC.

Over my shoulder, I hear, "So, let's try it out, then." Before I could even turn around, they double-click the pcAnywhere Remote Session. I bite my lip as they check it out. Then one of the VIPs gets a call on his cell phone.

It seems that pcAnywhere in default settings will log out the current user when activated by Remote. The poor guy was an hour and a half into a seriously important data entry bit that he had to do on a proprietary application that didn't allow you to save until the entire things was entered. When the VIPs took over his PC, they logged him out and an hour and a half of work was lost. I did mention that this was several hours after lunch on a Friday, right? I felt really bad for that poor guy; he ended up staying at work until 8:00 PM to finish the job. Wasn't too friendly after that, no sir...

Not always clueless...
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I’m not a tech or anything, and I’ve certainly played the (l)user on any number of occasions. I have been reading the archives here and LMAO. Great site!! :)

I have a couple of tales of my own to add. The first was from my very early days, when I *was* pretty darn clueless, but not as clueless as my co-worker seemed to think I was. I was an AutoCAD user, back in the days when pen plotters were the state-of-the-art. We literally had to use this big honking beast of a plotter for everything, even 8 1/2x11 stuff. Well, finally the company got us an HP laserjet printer. Oh joy! Well, back then, we used to set up our AutoCAD drawings so that certain screen colors were assigned certain plotter pens in the plotter configuration, so that if I wanted a thicker or thinner line, I simply assigned the object or layer a particular color within the program. So naturally I wanted to know if we could do the same thing with the new printer, i.e. set up a config file to specify line widths based on the AutoCAD screen colors. Simple question, right? Apparently not. The conversation went something like this:

(Me) So can this plotter recognize the colors and assign a line width based on that?

(Him) (Incredulously) It’s not a color printer.

(Me) I’m aware of that! My question was this: Can we set up a configuration file so that it can recognize and print various line widths assigned to the AutoCAD colors?

(Him) This printer only does black and white. It doesn’t do color.

(Me) *taking deep breath* I know that. You aren’t understanding my question. (I again attempt to ask the question, using smaller words)

(Him) Get it through your head! THIS ISN’T A COLOR PRINTER!!!

(Me) *SIGH*

I gave up at that point. To this day, I still have no idea why this was such a difficult question to understand. The thing is, he’s probably told people about the ninny who couldn’t get it through her skull that the printer wouldn’t do color. We aren’t *always* as clueless as you might think!

__________________________

I had this online acquaintance, we never met, but we would sometimes talk on the phone. One day we were on the phone, and she was looking for a file. I’m listening to her talk to herself as she searches, complaining that she’s having a hard time finding it because “there’s so many files to look through”. I commented that maybe she needed to create some more subfolders in order to keep things better organized. My jaw dropped as she said, “Folders? You can create new folders?” You got it---she literally had ALL her files in the root C:\ directory--word docs, mp3s, jpgs, you name it. Not to mention she was really big on downloading stuff. I can only imagine the horror that was her hard drive.

This same person also complained that her computer took forever to boot up. I asked her what she had running on startup. Of course she had no idea, so I asked her how many little pictures she had down in the corner by her clock. “Nineteen,” she says. Gee---think that might have had anything to do with it? :P

She also shut down her computer completely every time she got offline, even if she’d be coming back in a half hour or so, so she was rebooting god knows how many times a day. Kind of the opposite problem to those people who never reboot.

This girl also was big on doing voice chat with her friends. I tried it with her once or twice, but since she also liked to write emails and stuff while chatting, the sound of her keyboard was enough to keep the mic open on her end. Since she also liked to talk to herself while typing, needless to say I never was able to get a word in edgewise.

__________________________

This last story was a fairly recent one. Now, while I’m pretty comfortable messing with system settings and installing software and that sort of thing, I’m still a newbie when it comes to opening the case *listens to laughter from the techies*. (Yeah, yeah---so I’m still learning. ;) ) My experience there was pretty much reduced to blowing out dust occasionally, or looking over my geek bro-in-law’s shoulder while he added memory or something.

So one day, the power supply fan starts making a lot of noise. No problem, I blow everything out good, and it seems OK---for a while. Then it starts again. This goes on for a week or so, and finally I call the cow people, tell them the problem and they send me a new power supply. I gulp at the sight of all the various cables, and after studying the diagrams on the support site, as well as the printed and illustrated instructions, I begin.

Being a newbie, of course I’ve never messed with connections like this. Also, I’m erring on the side of caution, not wanting to break anything. After a few tries, I’m not sure if these connections are just *really* tight and I need to apply a bit more force, or if there’s some sort of locking mechanism or lever that I need to squeeze or something (newbie, remember?). So I get on the phone with the cow people again:

(Me) I’ve just got a quick question. I’m replacing my power supply and the connections are really tight, and I don’t want to break anything. Is there anything that locks the connection, or does it just snap in there super tight and I just need to pull a bit harder?

(Tech) *with thick foreign accent* May I have your email? I’ll send you a link to the instructions on our website.

(Me) I have the instructions, and I’m fairly clear on what I need to do. It’s just that the connections seem hard to get apart, and I don’t want to pull too hard in case there’s something locking it into place.

(Tech) Can I have your email?

(Me) *resigned* It’s blah@yahoo.com, but I already have the instructions!

(Tech) yadayada@yahoo.com?

(Me) No! blah! But there’s no need for you to send me anything---I just have one simple question!

(Tech) blahdablahda@yahoo.com?

(Me) NO! It’s BLAH! (I should add that my email name was two simple words in English. I repeated them slowly, and spelled it out) B-L-A-H!

(Tech) yahblah? (completely clueless)

(Me) *ripping fistfuls of hair out* NO!!!

We go around like this a few more times. Me spelling and enunciating slowly, while he garbles it further.

(Me) I don’t need you to email me anything! Just tell me if the connections have any sort of lock on them, or if they just pull apart!!

(Tech) They just pull apart. Now I’ll send these instructions, and you should have them in a few minutes.

(Me) *FINALLY!* Thanks. Bye.

I had the new power supply installed in five minutes, and was back in business. I was rather proud of myself too! (newbie, remember?)

Oh, and I never did get that email. ;)

Are you sure it's the modem that's flatlined???
Posted 12/01/2002 by Lisa
 

Just this second got off a call with a man having dial up problesm. Trying to troubleshoot I asked him what kind of modem he is using. His response is a classic, 'No I don't use a modem, I just use a flat line'. ?????

Turns out he meant he used a modem card that slotted into his laptop, but because he didn't have a large box labelled MODEM he assumed that he didn't use one.

Foreign Email
Posted 12/01/2002 by Jeremy
 

Supp: Tech Support, this is Jeremy.

Cust: Hi, what is my email address once I leave the country?

....awkward silence....

Supp: Sir, your email address stays the same.

Cust: Ohhohoho! Really! There's no extra charge?!

Supp: Nope.

Cust: Thank-you!

*Click*

Supp: Oh my god.

What's that for?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Here are my entire troubleshooting notes for hooking this guy's laptop on to a cable modem...

- #1 : Put Ethernet card in laptop

- Works now.

I mean, seriously....

Ho boy...
Posted 12/01/2002 by Chazz
 

Alright, after having searched unsuccessfully for a tech job for a year and a half, I finally conceded and got a job working at a local Target Superstore. The job would be so much better, if it weren't for the people....

Well, I wasn't thinking that I'd be able to supply any tech stories. Then, it happened. The fella running the electronics booth went on break and asked me to cover for him. No problem. Only, he forgot to tell me we were running a special, buy a PS2, get a set of speakers. This in and of itself doesn't cause a problem, as the coupons are in a great big stack in a box right next to the register. So, a couple folks get them, I help some random feebs getting games out of the big plexiglass locked cabinet, yadda yadda yadda. And then, he shows up.....

He was your typical know it all (or at least, that's what he'd want you to think.) That was smashed when it took him 10 minutes (during which time he did nothing but spout off to anyone who would listen what a marvel he is) to find the speakers which are filling an endcap and an entire push-flat right across the aisle from the video game wall. Didn't help any when he said "Are these the ones that go with the PS2?" when there's a big-@$$ sign hanging in front of them specifically showing the sale, and to come to the booth for the coupon. Plus, anyone so all-knowing KNOWS that you can just read the back of the box to see what systems it works with, right? Yeah, sure.

Here's the kicker tho. After all this, he FINALLY rings up the PS2 and the speakers. Using the last of the coupons. Apparently he was shopping with his brother, because when I say this, he interrupts me. I don't get to say "I'm just waiting for the LOD to bring some more back here," he immediately spits out "WELL WHAT GOOD IS GETTING A PS2 WITHOUT THE SPEAKERS?!?!?" ..... Um, to have a Playstation 2 that plays through your TV's speakers, maybe? Sheesh...

Zone Alarm
Posted 12/01/2002 by John W
 

Remember in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where the lord of Swamp Castle was trying to instruct the two guards on what to do? Maybe that's where they got the idea for Zone Alarm.

Please can I have...
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I work for large ISP for muppets. I got a call from a really nice old man who was wondering if there was a shortcut we could place on his desktop to tell him that he had email waiting so he would know if he needed to connect to the internet to get it.

I love working in customer services......
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

As second line tech support for a major ISP I recently took over a complaint from one of our agents:

Fact: Customer is running Mac OS9 with IE 9.01.

Fact: Customer is trying to use awellknown.com but is getting an error message saying that she needs to upgrade her browser.

Fact: Help section on awellknown.com states that the minimum requirement is IE 9.2, and the customer has seen this.

The customer has been getting that error message for 3 weeks and refuses to believe that the problem was at her end. After many futile attempts to explain what the issue is she hung up!

2 + 2 = 5

Foreign Internet Access
Posted 12/01/2002 by hugo rune
 

Just had an excellent call. 'If I set up an internet account in Spain, won't the internet be in Spanish'

Erm ..... no

Short and sweet on a Monday morning
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I love the easy ones. Here's my first call this morning.

Me: Hello, blah, blah. Can I help you?

Him: Yeah, I tried calling (my counterpart in other office) but he's not answering.

M: He's off this week for Christmas (it says this in his voicemail).

H: Oh, anyway, I'm trying to boot my computer and it won't work.

M: Is it giving you an error message?

H: Yeah, something about not finding NTLDR.

M: Hit Eject on your floppy drive and try again.

H: Oh yeah, now it's working.

At least it's a short week :)

Lower case numbers?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Geoff
 

In Novenmber, Andrew George had a Tale about fun with passwords, where he said "ME: OK, your new password is Password01 thats with a capital P, a capital zero, and a small one."

Funny, but when the customer comes back with the exact same thing, and does not understand what they have said...

It is to weep.

Geoff
Posted 12/01/2002 by Tales that ought be retired
 

Had I not heard this, I would not believe. Hell, sometimes I still don't....

ME = , er me

EL = End luser

ME: Thank you for calling V***zon, my name is Geoff, what can I do for you?

EL: My DSL is down, and I need to access (toned him out here, who cares what he needs to access)

ME: Ok, (massive bout of troubleshooting to cover every possibility on his end, then preparing a line issue ticket)

ME: I have 555-555-1234 as a contact number, is that correct?

EL: No, I have DSL, so I canceled my phone service earlier today. You don't need a phone line with DSL, right?

ME: ...

Urban legends do come true.

Magic Outlook Express
Posted 12/01/2002 by Chris
 

A friend of mine uses his mums internet account, he was telling me how it annoys him that he has to use her username to send e-mails. I told to him that it was possible to get new e-mail addresses with his ISP.

Then he rings me up the next day saying that he tried that and it didn't work. I tried to hold back laughter when I realised he'd just changed the username in Outlook Express to one he liked and expected it to work fine.

I since explained to him that he'd actually have to request a new name from his ISP.

...And What Exactly Did You Want It For????
Posted 12/01/2002 by Mr. E. S. Tranger
 

Sorry, this is a bit of a long one.

I'm the one-man IT department for a small healthcare facility. A new employee (been there all of 48 hours) comes in one day demanding that I set up a network account for her immediately. I don't exactly appreciate her tone, but all right, it's my job, so I set it up, and give her the introductory spiel about our network do's and don'ts. The most important one is to log off the network every night. Our desktop antivirus software is automatically updated from our server at logon, so a simple logout every night ensures everyone's antivirus signatures are current. (You see where I'm going with this, don't you?)

Six months down the road, I get a call from this person. Their Significant Other has been working on the computer, and opened an email that popped up a small window with some Spanish-looking text. Being a prudent user (Ha!), he promptly reboots the system, and now every time he tries to open a file or run an app, he gets an error message to the effect of 'program "" not found. "" is necessary to open files of type application.' I go down to check it out, and sure enough, it's the Navidad virus.

Fortunately, this was easy to clean up and a full scan ensured the system was once again virus-free. Before scanning, I checked the version number of the antivirus signature. It was unchanged from the date the employee started! I checked the network logs, and confirmed that she had never logged on to our network. So, after finishing up, in addition to admonishing this employee about letting her boyfriend use a company computer, I again stressed the importance of logging on and off of the network regularly.

A year goes by, and the employee is leaving. Out of curiosity, I check the user log before deleting her account, and discover that not once in 18 months has she ever logged on to our network!

By the way, this person was the Chief of Staff for our doctors.

You Think Maybe I'm Psychic?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

At the company I worked for, I was an Executive Assistant before they opened up an IT position for me. One of my final duties at my old post was to transfer my position-related files to my successor. I was explaining the way I had organized my files, and the naming conventions I used, when she brushed the whole thing off by saying, "All this is so inefficient. How can you find anything?" Well, as the weeks went on, she became my number one support caller, and all of her calls pretty much ran the same: "Where's this file I saved a few minutes/hours/days ago?" I should note that she never had a problem finding any of my old files, "inefficiently" organized they may be. But wait, it gets better...

One day I get a call that just tops them all. She calls me up, asking for the usual help to find a file.

Me: Do you remember what you called it?

Her: Ummmmmmm, no.

Me: (OK, let's try a date search) Do you know how long ago you worked on it?

Her: No

Me: (Well, how about a keyword search?) Do you remember what it's about?

Her: Uh-uh.

Me: (...And that's when I shot her, Your Honor.) So let me get this straight: you want me to find a file, you don't remember what it's called, what it's about, or when you last worked on it?

Her: Yeah, could you?

You know, I don't remember anything else that happened that day...

email conundrum
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

A customer calls because their email aliases aren't working.

They said that their ISP, Southwestern Bell indicated that we hold the domain name, and thus we host their mail. So they pipe the caller back to us.

I tell the caller, "We do not host mail. we forward it. We set up aliases that go to a (b)real(/b) email address."

The caller is not impressed. I test the email. I recieve successful delivery notifications. I tell the customer this, knowing that it will not help, but at least, it makes me feel better. I say, "I think it's time for a three-way call between you me and your isp." I will let them know that we do not host mail.

First Call

The settings on the client pc are checked. The tech confidently says that the problem is on our end. I tell the tech that he is unequivically wrong. Tech says that he is first tier support, that he only works with settings. I tell the tech to move us up the ladder.

Second tier says that he understands what the problem is, but that we need to be transfered to a different department. XXX from the different department says that he needs to open up a trouble ticket.

Second call

A tech at the customer's ISP leaves me a voice message saying that we must remove all of the "A" records and leave only the MX record. Then the email will work.

I call the customer - time for another tete a tete. I tell the tech at the ISP that we have (b)1(/b) A record. And that connects the name to the web site. I reread the MX record. All is fine. Isp tech says that he will look into it. I leave for the day.

The next morning I find a message in my voice mail. It is the customer. Her mail is working.

The problem? Her mailbox was over quota.

Computer won't turn on
Posted 12/01/2002 by Andy
 

Working as a help desk analyst for one of the larger financial institutions in the country is never a dull job. One particular morning, as soon as our call center opened at 7am, I recieved a call from a user who stated that her pc would not turn on. I asked her to check and see if possibly a cleaning person had possibly knocked a line cord out of the wall with a vacum or something. After a few grumbles about having to get under her desk to check the plugs she finally did. She came back to the phone, perhaps a bit more disgruntled than before, and stated that everything was plugged in properly. I then asked if anyone else in the office was having any issues, to which she replied that she was the only one in so far. Next I asked her to try another machine in the department. She came back and stated that the other pc wouldn't boot either. The best is that when I asked her if any adjoining offices were having issues, I was told that she wasn't going to go blindly around the building in the dark looking for other users having issues. You guessed it, her area was experiencing a power outage. Hmmmm..... maybe she was too!

Laptops are fun
Posted 12/01/2002 by ThePerfectCore
 

It's TPC with another few stories for you.

First one comes from a few years back, when my dad brought home a huge box of old 286 and 386 laptops that his workplace was planning to throw out. At the time, I'd never had the chance to play with a laptop for more than five minutes (I was 12), so I was naturally delighted with the gift. I set to work repairing and reformatting them.

After several hours, all had gone well. I had several machines running DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.1, enough to let me do a little word processing and card games. There were three machines left to work on, so I dug them out of the box. The last machine, an old NEC Ultralite 286 sx model, had a sticky note adhered to the top.

"This laptop may have a virus."

I didn't care, I was going to format the thing anyway. I booted it up, and sure enough, there was virus-like activity everywhere I went, even after the reformat. Random keys on the keyboard were replaced with numbers and symbols. It was difficult to just get the "dir" command in.

After a few minutes of typing, I began to notice that the random symbols weren't so random. Certain keys put certain symbols on the screen. I inspected the "Fn" key, dislodged the huge chunk of crust holding it down, and continued working with 0 problems. :)

---

A few years later, my dad brought home yet another piece of obsolete equipment - an old Compaq Armada 4131t laptop, completely upgraded. The RAM was maxed out (48MB), and the HDD had been upgraded from an 812MB to a 1.33GB. There was a 2.5 hour battery included, along with the detachable CD-ROM assembly. The only thing that was missing was the modem.

It was a great machine nonetheless. I spent about an hour picking through the previous user's files, formatted, and installed Windows 95, which helped to ease the strain on the 133mhz Intel processor. It played Chexquest and all of my other older DOS games, so I was happy.

One day I needed to do some homework in MS Word, and my other PC was in the shop with a dead HDD. I placed the Office 97 disc in the tray and closed it. I waited for the autoplay to appear. And waited. And waited. I finally opened My Computer, and was met with the generic CD-ROM icon with the "E:" under it. To the machine, nothing was in the drive.

I opened the drive, and much to my amazment, the disc was gone.

It took me 3 hours to figure out where it had gone. When I popped it in, the edge of the disc caught on the housing just above the CD-ROM drive itself, so when I reinserted the tray, the disc was popped off the spindle and crammed into the "crawlspace" above the drive.

Just when you think you know everything... sigh.

TPC

This is what I have to work with ...
Posted 12/01/2002 by CollegeCop
 

I work for a small police department, and as the only computer-literate person working the night shift, I have been designated as the computer guru. Although this tale does not have to do with computers, it does tell you the kind of mind-set I have to work with on a daily basis.

Our department has a hodge-podge of different radios in use. Most of these radios have a specific charger that they have to be put in in order to charge. Although some of the radios look the same, the chargers will not work for a different model number of radio. Realizing that this might be a problem, someone in the past had taken the time to number each radio and charger, making it simple to drop the radio in it's numbered charger. Simple, idiot proof design, right? Wrong.

The other day I was in the dispatch center when I noticed that, although there were six of a certain model of radio, there was only one charger on the shelf. Looking around, I found the other five chargers in a box, labeled as "defective". I pulled the chargers out, plugged them in and inserted the CLEARLY NUMBERED radios into the CLEARLY NUMBERED chargers, and lo and behold, they began charging. I then inspected the rest of the radios, only to find that almost none of them were in the correct chargers.

When the dispatcher returned, I pointed out the numbering system that insured the radios got recharged. She looked at me like I had just tried to explain particle physics to her and said "I never made the connection between the radio numbers and the charger numbers. Is that why the batteries have been dying so often?" And she has worked here for almost two years!

Don't even get me started on what these people have done to the computers in the building.

can't...run...XP....(gasp)
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Our university support office has a number of graduate students working on various projects. One particular student was hired to be a trainer for the faculty, specializing in computers and audiovisual equipment. One day at a meeting she mentioned to our computer ops manager that her desktop machine was 'too slow'. He was busy with other projects so I told her I'd take a look.

Now, I'm a big fan of Win2K myself, but the office was using a database that preferred to run in an XP environment. We'd updated several of the older office machines to that OS and found that they were extremely slow. This was especially true for her machine, which had a good 700Mhz processor but only 128MB of RAM.

The solution was to disable the 'eye candy' features of XP, simply by optimizing it for best performance rather than visual imagery. A few system settings later, the machine would be running fast again.

I went to do some system tweaks and found

-7 open programs, including Access, Excel, Word, Outlook (on an Exchange server)

-5 open emails

-Multiple IE windows

-at least two filesharing programs

-AIM or some other program

This was all running with several seconds of delay time and warnings about virtual memory low, etc.

I'm surprised the 128MB of RAM was even able to have all those things open! After increasing the virtual memory, turning off the crap interface, resetting the menus to classic mode and killing all the startup files and filesharing, it ran like a champ.

After telling her what I did, she says that her laptop n'ever had a problem' running all those files. Of course, it had double the processing power and triple the RAM. She had never even considered it.

Let's hope we get some better applicants next semester!

Dial tone?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Wolver13
 

I am the computer “expert” in my three person home (me and my parents). My computer and theirs are networked to share our wonderful dial-up connection. One day I was home sick and my dad was having trouble connecting, the conversation went as follows:

Dad (while coming down steps): do you have your computer set to not let us use the connection? (I occasionally do this so they don’t senselessly lag me out with automatic updates).

Me (waking up): my computer isn’t even on

Dad: well it’s saying there is no dial tone

Me: get my phone out of my room (it’s on the same line as the computers)

Dad: ~gets phone~

Me:~turns on phone, turns up the volume, and holds it out~ what’s that? (Hint: it’s a dial tone)

Dad: ok... ~goes upstairs~

A few minutes pass and he comes back

Dad: helps if the modem is plugged in

Me: yup that’ll do it ~goes back to sleep~

Note: he has a reputation of unplugging the modem if there are dark clouds out of fear of frying it, even though it is through a $5 surge protector that would be so horrible to have to replace

Non Computer Related but funny
Posted 12/01/2002 by MichaelP
 

I'm a Technician for a small networking company and I'm sure I have a few technical related tales if I could think of them. But this one is not associated but still funny.

I just got off the phone with my girlfriend and she asked me if there was a quicker way to my house from her work. She normally comes from her house, takes the highway to a road called Route 298 and gets to my house that way (some side streets but those are un-important). However this time she is coming from her work and I find it odd she hasn't done this yet but for whatever reason she has not. So I say to her why don't you just get on Route 298 right by your work(it is about one mile away from her work parkinglot). She is like REALLY? (all excited) That 298 and the one I take to your house connect? And at this point I'm doing all I can to hold in my laughter. So I say...sweetie...they are the same road. And in complete disbeleive she says...no way..I would have never thought that. What is worse, she didn't say that jokingly either.

Just a little funny my girlfriend did. So I told her she couldn't pick on her blond friends at work anymore (she is Brunette).

Enjoy!

I need a live chicke, a bottle of rum and a voodoo doll, stat!
Posted 12/01/2002 by Paul
 

Several months back, I received a call from a Jamaican woman who sounded strikingly similar to Miss Cleo. The first word out of her mouth to me were, "My computah be cursed!"

I went through all the standard stuff, like checking her settings, making sure her modem was still OK, and yet, she still got no dial tone. After about 20 minutes of trying everything I could think of, I put her on hold, and asked if anyone had a live chicken, some rum and a voodoo doll. When I came back, she said to me, "Does it mattah if I tripped ovah de wire and broke it?" I asked, "What do you mean?", to which she replied, "I ripped de cord, mon, clear outta de wall, and it also be ripped in half!"

I groaned and then told her it does matter, and to get a new phone cord. She thanked me, and blessed me with good fortune.

The computer is not her friend
Posted 12/01/2002 by John W
 

Me: “I just sent you a test email. Did you get it?”

Her: “No. It says ‘no new messages.’”

Me: “Ok, let me give you my email address so you can send me a test message.”

Her: “Let me get a pen.”

3 minutes later...

Me: “I just got your test message and replied to it. Did you get any new messages?”

Her: “No.”

Me: “Go ahead and send yourself a test message.”

Her: “How do I do that?”

the little black button.
Posted 12/01/2002 by Tim Davison
 

I work for a major isp in their dsl tech support dept. One day, I was having a really lousy day. You know, one of those days when each cust gripes a little more than the last, and everything is YOUR fault. Not the major internet provider you work for, but YOURS. Well, I answered the phone with my opening spiel, and a very irate female cust went into a tirade immediately. After several moments of "Uh huh, yes, you dont say, and thats terribles", I finally got her to calm down enough to tell me what was wrong.

"Each time I try to log on, my computer gives me an error that it timed out." she says. "Alright ma'am, one moment while I pull up a walkthrough, and we will get you going again" I say. Foolish me. An hour later, we are still working on the issue. After having riped and reinstalled software, and then onto my favorite, the tcp/ip settings, I had a brilliant idea."Ma'am, what are the lights on your modem doing at this time?" and she answers with, there are no lights on, on the modem. We check to make sure all the cables are attached, the modem is plugged into a power source, so, as a last result(hehe) i advise her to look at the back of the modem. She does"Do you see the little black button?" "Yes, she says" Push it. she asks me what that little button is for..."Its called a power button ma'am"....Enough said right there.

It's not always the customers....
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Ok, short and sweet... you'll have to know at least the basics of UNIX to appreciate this, but.

The company I work at is pretty small, All of our servers are Sun/Solaris (UNIX); we all have root access... Which probably shouldn't happen. And we have about 25k webhosting customers...

Anyway, I'm sitting here checking out my website hosted on our servers... when I refresh, it disappears.... I tried to login via SSH to see if one of my programs went wonky; "No home directory".

After a stunned moment I logged in as root, checked /etc/password to make sure it hadn't been truncated or otherwise tampered with; Checked my home directory /home/username - it existed, was properly Chowned and Chmoded .... so I checked /home itself... Permissions set to 700; Owned of course by root .

Apparently one of the other staff members was disabling a customers website (But allowing FTP access) and typed in:

cd /home/username

chmod 700 www cd ..

Forgot a semi colon...

UNIX Said "Ok, let's set permissions to 700 for 'www' 'cd' and '..' " ... ".." being the /home/ directory...

Easy fix but all of our websites were down for 5 minutes since our webserver (of course) doesn't run as root and so couldn't access the web pages.

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

I was working for an IT department for a major business. One day we got a phone call from a worker complaining that she was getting alert boxes as she was 'broadcasting and IP address' the person recieving the call was rather puzzled and ask the rest of us about it. Most of us fell about laughing at the thought that those cheap internet adverts actually got someone worried, i think in the end they we just hung up.

Sometimes its just best to ignore what happened

Wrong Number
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

When my mother built her home, she had a second phone line installed for the computer. I put a phone on it to monitor the line or make a call if 1 was busy, but we gave no one that number. The phone would occasionally ring with the occasional wrong number or sales call, but my mom thought it was AOL calling her with her e-mail. She would then dial in and log on. With the amount of spam she got, there was always e-mail waiting for her, so she truely believed it was them calling to give her the mail.

Harddrive emits EMP pulse.
Posted 12/01/2002 by jose
 

This happend back in september of '97. I was a newbie techie in my first tech job when my cherry was popped as far as dealing with totally idiotic people. This girl called in and she was obviosly a blonde. A college girl working on some term paper or stuff. Her computer had some issues so we had to format the HD and then reinstall Windows. I made sure she had her restore CD and a bootdisk. I asked her if she needed to back any of her work. She was still able to recover most of her work.

She asked why.

So I explained to her that once we format the HD that anything on the harddrive will be erased.

She asked me to give her a few minutes and while I waited I could tell she was moving stuff around then get up and walk away come back close the door to her room then she comes back on the phone and says she is ready.

I asked her to insert her boot disk in the drive and she says to give her a minute while she goes gets it.

I asked her what happend to it. (she had told me she had it on top of the computer with several CDs and floppy disks.)

She told me she put all her "magnetic media" stuff in the other room.

I asked her why.

She said, "well you said that everything that was on my HD will be erased once we format the computer. Wouldnt that create an EMP field and erase everything around"?

I quickly caught myself just in time. I was about to say

DOH! and start laughing.

I did my best to not laugh and asked her to give me a minute while I checked on something. I was rolling on the ground laughing.

Talk about ID10T error!!!!

Math Teacher ?
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

Me : Me

EU: Customer

ME:Thanks for calling bla bla part of two letters , my name is brian etc

EU : Rallies off info 200 words per minute..

ME: Can you repeat that ?

EU: Repeats

ME : Ok how can I help you

EU : Um yah I just have a quick question, how many bytes are in a kilobyte ?

ME : Um , a thousand ? (DUH)

EU : Oh really are you sure ?

ME : Yes

EU : Oh well im a math teacher but i wasnt sure

ME : Yes kilo meaning a thousand

EU : Oh I thought computers were diffrent

ME : No computers use the metric system just like the rest of us

Duh....
Posted 12/01/2002 by Chazz
 

Here's a classic I was reminded of a little while ago that I don't think I've shared.... Or if I have, you'be probably forgotten already ^_~

Anyway, a while back I suffered the Great Crash. My hard drive died. I don't mean that there was some sort of minor glitch in the software, I mean that my computer would power on, work for.... 4 seconds, then everything would go black and the hard drive made a sound like a CD player getting the power yanked while the disc's still spinning, and it whirrs down. Not good.

I contact the good people at Western Digital. Explain the situation, don't even have to run a check, it's bad. Allllright. Get the new drive sent Advanced, I box up the old one and send it out, 3 days later *ding dong* it's here! I gleefully unbox it, plug it all in, pop in my Windows disc.... Drive not found. What the f.... okay, so being used to installing drives from my job as a comp assembly person, I start doing every format, reformat, low-level, high-level format I can think of short of taking a magnet to the blasted thing. Triple checked all the cables, did this that and the other thing, NOTHING.

So, another call to WD. Get a different tech, who starts walking me through everything. Yes, checked everything, yes did this, yes set up the BIOS, yes I fdisked, yes I.... Wait what? Format? Yes, of course I form----

.....

format C:\

*insert Format screen and me bashing my head off the desk here*

After thanking the guy profusely for pointing out my DAO (Dumb @$$ Omission) and him actually insisting on sitting on the phone with me until the format was done, I stick in the Windows disk, start it up, thank him one last time and hang up.

So you see folks? When both sides (more or less) know what they're doing and carry on in a civil tone of voice, things CAN be accomplished!!!

No Title
Posted 12/01/2002 by Random AOL guy
 

"So how can you use your telelphone at the same time as you are connected with broadband?"

"It's complicated, are you sure you want me to explain?"

"Yep. Don't worry, I'll understand."

"Do you know what multiplexing is?"

"Isn't that a type of maths?"

It's your fault I'm an idiot
Posted 12/01/2002 by Tobe
 

I work for a UK broadband company working in Billing both residential and business.

The classic we had was this one guy who had a failed payment, he had been through analyst after analyst, two product specialists, a manager and finally the Big Boss. It turned out that he had been down for 1 - count them, 1 day, and it was his own fault as he had neglected to tell us he had changed his credit card details...but this was still OUR fault!

The other one is the business user (and this happened a LOT), who was cut off for non-payment, calls us and claims that they never received the bill but got the reminder(funny - they go to the same address). One guy called up and claimed the Postal worker stole his mail! Who would steal a bill?

Day after Christmas
Posted 12/01/2002 by Anonymous Tech Supporter
 

The days that follow Christmas are quite painful for any tech support people. I work for a financial institution and took several calls from people who just got a computer for Christmas and now they wanted to use it to access their accounts on line. I was walking one fellow through the registration process when he complained that he was typing, but nothing was populating the field he was attempting to complete. He said, "when I move my cursor to the field, a letter "I" shows up and flashes, that's all. I didn't even type an "i". He didn't realize he had to actually click to make the cursor active in the field so he could type.

But at least that guy was on the web. I got a call later that day from a woman who hadn't even signed up with an ISP yet. She thought that since there was no charge to use our web site that she would be able to just go to our website and it wouldn't cost her anything. I explained that she needed a way to get on line, and THEN she could access our site. I had to walk her through the sign up process for MSN, which she chose based on the pretty butterfly icon on her desk top. This is way outside of what my job should be, but I helped her anyway. But she was still confused when it asked her for her credit card number. Again, she didn't understand that using our website didn't cost our customers anything, but she would still be responsible for paying for access to the web in general. She accused us of false advertising and made a deal with me. "Your company pays for my on line access or I'll just continue to call everyday wasting your rep's time instead of checking my accounts on line." I'm not sure if she kept her end of the bargain, but I haven't heard from her since.

Address bar
Posted 12/01/2002 by John W
 

I made a site for those of you who have seen people mistake the search bar for the address bar. http://www.anythingbutthat.com/google

Have fun!

Tales From Technical Support Index

Tales from the Techs
December 2002
  1. Overkill - Adv.

  2. No Title

  3. Huh?

  4. i stole the disk

  5. No Title

  6. What is you password?

  7. Install it all....now!

  8. CLOSE ALL WINDOWS

  9. Address Bar

  10. where do you put a cd?

  11. Busy Lines

  12. The Truth Comes Out (Eventually)

  13. Just Hit Enter

  14. Mom

  15. Is that a problem?

  16. The Bad Command Or Filename Key

  17. Practical Parenting

  18. Great Firewall Admins.....

  19. My first IT job

  20. Potential Extra Credit??

  21. No Title

  22. No Title

  23. Council Cretin

  24. Password...

  25. No Title

  26. Techs

  27. Could you please plug the network cable in

  28. Space mouse?

  29. $%!$ computer!

  30. No Title

  31. No Sound? No Brain

  32. Fun with browser add-ons

  33. Case sensitive

  34. "You broke it on purpose!"

  35. No Title

  36. Completely blind

  37. Him?

  38. Can't Send Email

  39. All the pretty lights

  40. It really WAS plugged in

  41. Forget to take your work home?

  42. Piece Of Junk Computer

  43. "You really messed them up!"

  44. Screen name

  45. No Title

  46. His ESP PC

  47. TASKBAR

  48. On the DARK side

  49. Parents, eh?

  50. Problem User

  51. Just A Phone Call Away....

  52. Can't Connect

  53. Payment in Kind

  54. Dont press that button

  55. Workspace Woes

  56. Windows 98?

  57. 1 lump or 2?

  58. Credit Card Blues

  59. So obvious, it has to be missed

  60. Bad Timing...

  61. Not always clueless...

  62. Are you sure it's the modem that's flatlined???

  63. Foreign Email

  64. What's that for?

  65. Ho boy...

  66. Zone Alarm

  67. Please can I have...

  68. I love working in customer services......

  69. Foreign Internet Access

  70. Short and sweet on a Monday morning

  71. Lower case numbers?

  72. Geoff

  73. Magic Outlook Express

  74. ...And What Exactly Did You Want It For????

  75. You Think Maybe I'm Psychic?

  76. email conundrum

  77. Computer won't turn on

  78. Laptops are fun

  79. This is what I have to work with ...

  80. can't...run...XP....(gasp)

  81. Dial tone?

  82. Non Computer Related but funny

  83. I need a live chicke, a bottle of rum and a voodoo doll, stat!

  84. The computer is not her friend

  85. the little black button.

  86. It's not always the customers....

  87. No Title

  88. Wrong Number

  89. Harddrive emits EMP pulse.

  90. Math Teacher ?

  91. Duh....

  92. No Title

  93. It's your fault I'm an idiot

  94. Day after Christmas

  95. Address bar

Past Tales from the Techs:
go back