Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

my first live call was such a boo...boo... i was so nervous that i felt i wanted to puke.... then suddenly... my first caller was on the line..

ME: thank you for calling.... my name is ...... how may i help you today?

CALLER: yes... im having problems connecting to the internet.

ME : Are there any specific error messages?

CALLER: no.. im just having a blank screen...

since i was still researching on my tools for the correct troubleshooting steps, i asked her:

ME : so how's the weather today?

CALLER : it's quite sunny in here.

then the caller asked me back.......

CALLER : so, where you at?

since we're not allowed to disclose where we really are, i answered a general response..

ME: Oh, we're located at the Southern part of the UNITED STATES OF AMERITECH... (yyyiiikkkeeesss)

mc

I worked at a company this last summer as in intern. The company was over 100 years old, and they acted like it. There was one lady who I always dreaded getting e-mail from because it was visually offensive. The messages came in at about 18pt font, all purple, and often times in all uppercase.

Well, one day I get a call from her asking about a weird e-mail she got. I had her forward it to me, and it turns out to be a bounce from our spam filtering software. (We had outbound spam filtering) I have another tech look it up, and it lists all of the reasons that this message got flagged as spam. Among the reasons were over 60% of it being HTML, non-standard font, and the priority flag set to high. I then looked through my log of all messages from her and all of them had a high priority flag.

I then went to her office and tried to explain to her exactly why this happened, and what she could do to fix it. Eventually I get to the priority flag and mention that if she sends every message as high priority, it's like the boy who cried wolf. She then turns to me and says straight-faced "That's to make sure it gets there faster". I literally had to choke back a laugh. I guess the 5-10 seconds that most e-mail takes is just too long for this woman.

This one is almost unbelievable,

My brother owns his own computer shop and does all his own tech support,

When working for him one weekend we had a vry odd call. One of his customers (who had built and maintained several pc's) called in to book his computer for repairs. The purpose for this was "an unidentified smell and it then stopped working all together"

so, the computer is dropped off, we look inside, and there is a lovely set of buckled, stretched and melted componants inside.

The daft feller had carried it into his house in the rain, then worrying about the water, carefully dried each componant...

in the oven.

This was filed as a ID.10.T fault.

I work for one of the largest college's in the UK, i got a call saying the printer was making noises when they printed and that there was no errors but still paper wasn't coming out, i went and had a look and some plonker had opened the tray at the back of the printer and the paper was falling out the back.

I received a call one day that a woman had come back from lunch, and her computer was completely dead. Sure enough, the monitor was in powersave mode, but the CPU would not power up.

I went for the obvious first. I checked the power strip in the cubicle wall. There was her power cord unplugged. Also, there were no available sockets. I immediately called to the one on the other side of the cubicle wall and asked him if he had unplugged anything recently.

His response was yes, he had to unplug something so he could plug in his radio.

I guess the actual productivity of his coworkers was a secondary concern to having his tunes.

Years ago, I worked phone support for a local start-up ISP. Because the company was in it's infancy, there was constant change to policy, procedures, and even management.

The tech support team was mostly self-running; we were all good friends with the NOC manager, and he'd just occasionally pop in to see that all was well with us. However, the owner of the ISP decided that it would be best to have someone in an official position to direct us.

From the resumes gathered, the techs were under the assumption that whomever was hired would be technical minded and able to understand the role of the techs under his command. It was not to be so.

While I have several examples of this man's ineptitude and general cluelessness, the following are the best...

ISP name & domain: *****highway (name edited to save face)

Email addresses with ISP: username@*****highway.net

*Manager's* email on his business card: *****@AOL.COM!!!

(The manager was ALSO the sales manager for the company!!)

Local newspaper interviews manager. BIG mistake. The article has quotes from this man stating that 1)he doesn't know much about the internet, 2)that he has "technogeeknoids" (his words) on his staff that do that "stuff" and 3)gives incorrect information about our office address and phone numbers!

He gains access to the user account database (also used for billing) and makes enough changes to mess it up royally. Then proceeds to backup the damaged data OVER the previous backup [didn't even use a different disk, as the instructions on the billing machine CLEARLY state]. Guess who gets to stay late, unpaid, to repair the damage? Not the manager, that's for sure!

GAH! Heaven save us from the technically inept in our midst. One last, favorite (painfully so) quote:

"I don't know all that technical crap. I don't need to know. That's what you guys are here for. Now, do [something completely impossible based on software and hardware of the time] for our cust

omer."

I was tech support for an Air Force Recruiting Squadron when we first went to PCs for our secretaries in the field.

I received all the brand new Zenith 248s, formatted the harddrives and set them up exactly the same. I then conducted a training seminar for the folks that would use them.

At the end of the seminar, I packed them all up, loaded the units, and sent them on their way, with detailed instructions as to the installation. This was Friday afternoon in Bellevue, Nebraska.

Monday morning I get a call from Iowa City, Iowa: "My computer doesn't work"

My response was to go through all the lights (CPU, monitor, etc)

Iowa City: "Yes, all of them are on, but there is nothing on the screen!"

Me: "Let's check all the connections...."

Iowa City: "I'm sure they are all connected!"

Me: "Let's try anyway, since I don't need to waste the AF's money on a two day TDY (mileage limitations put it at a two day trip) for a cord that isn't connected."

We went through the cords, monitor primarily, but she seemed to have everything connected correctly.

So I filled out the paperwork for my trip and set out the next day to for Iowa City. I arrived and went to the office...and turned on the CPU. Amazingly, everything worked. So I asked about the lights. Her comment: "Well, I knew that they were all on, and I was in the other office when you asked, so I just said they were all on!"

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What is the weirdest thing I've found in a laser printer on a service call? The peel-off strip from a panty-liner.

There's no actual tech support involved in this one.

This happened to me in early September. I'd just gotten my shiny new G4 Mac laptop and a printer through my college, and I'd set it up okay (I grew up using both Mac and PC) so I thought everything was good. I had a paper due, but I hadn't used my printer yet so I decided to test it by printing a picture. The picture printed fine, but then the printer started printing a test sheet to make sure the colors and everything worked. I was unaware of this fact, having never set up a new printer before, and I kind of freaked out when this test sheet started to print on its own. I remember thinking that the printer was possessed! So I went into the printer setup and accidentally deleted my printer! Eventually I realized what I'd done and managed to fix it, but for about fifteen minutes I was totally stumped as to why my paper wouldn't print!

I worked for a local computer company for a few years, and have lots of funny stories... but here is one of my better ones:

A customer (who happened to be about 6'6" and 100% typical Georgian aka so bright... his mom calls him sun.) had just purchased a brand new PC with all the nice add-ons... 3 x 21" monitors... a perihelia video card (with 3 monitor support)... 1.5gb RAM 3GHz p4... just about anything you could want. He brought it home and hooked it up himself. (Surprisingly enough... he managed to read the manual) No problems there... but about a week or so later he came back in the store with a very worried look on his face.

He started trying to carry on a normal conversation for a while when he got really quiet... and began to ask in a hushed tone... " can someone watch what I'm doing and then come arrest me if I'm breakin' the law?"

... I replied "well... it's possible, but not very likely. Cyber police do exist, however they mostly concentrate on people who are trying to steal lots of money or hack into things. Why, what were you doing?"

He, being a very proper Suthern Boy, said... in even more hushed tones, looking even more nervous... "I don't like to say this, but I was on one of those porn sites, using my friends password, and a message came up saying that this is illegal. I went back to that site in a real hurry, and paid for a month, but I'm worried what my wife will think when she sees it on the credit card bill."

... at this point the cogs in my head started to turn... and I almost died trying to keep a straight face.

I then had to .. with great difficulty .. try and explain a very simple concept to an even simpler man with a straight face. To all those wonderful people out there... "This program has caused an illegal operation and will be shut down" does not mean that the police are watching you. You don't have to worry. But don't steal... that's wrong.

I look after a large contruction company's systems and infrastructure in the northwest of england. Had one of our MD's kicking off because his deskjet wouldnt print after fitting new carts. So after trying to be as polite as i could and offer help, he demanded that i drove 60 miles to his office with a new printer straight away and that he would be making a complaint to the IS director that all of the kit is rubbish (brand new Deskjet 1220c)

When i got there i simply removed the plastic strips from the new carts and refitted. On my way out i heard the words (if anyone else hears about this i will know where it came from and you will suffer for it)

Now not taking too kindly to idle threats from this guy, i made it my top priority to ensure that over the next few weeks he had the most problems with passwords, mailbox limits, suspect mail shots, and modified files (both tampered with and moved about) until he quit 3 months later.....

RESULT !!!

We're a small company in a large town in the Midwest, and we do just about any tech support a Small Office or Individual would need.

We got a call from a Laptop user about trouble with their wireless connection -- it only worked some of the time. After a bit of questioning, I determined that at home, the wireless worked fine, but when they used it anywhere else (the school, their mom's house, etc), it wouldn't connect to the Internet.

I spent 10 minutes trying to convince these folks that there had to be some kind of Wireless Router nearby (it was a Home PC User) in order for the Internet to work. If the school had wireless support, it would work. To use it at their mom's, they'd need a wireless router and internet connection there to.

They never did believe me. They told me they ordered the laptop with the wireless modem, and it worked fine. They never ordered or installed any other peice (including the ISP account). They were considering returning it for service.

Apparently, they were using a nearby neighbor's wireless router and Internet connection when at home ...

I work for the St. Louis Science Center, and in our Cyberville Gallery, we have about 12 computers that are hooked up to a T1 line for our visitors (lusers) to (ab)use. Due to a bomb threat having been sent from one of our computers, we now have filtering and monitoring software on all of out computers, and a volunteer usually watches over the comps from a position in the back. We also give visitors breaking the rules one warning, then we ask them to leave and call Security to escort them out of the building. I was assigned to monitoring duty one day, and i notice that one person (who frequently stays for 6 hours at a time...) is running a chat window, which is not allowed. I get up and look over her shoulder, and yup, she has a chat window open. I say, "I'm sorry, but we don't allow chat...please close that window." Walk away, and start monitoring the other comps again. 5 min later, i check on her comp again. Still has the chat window up. I go and say, "Sorry, but since you did not close the chat window as directed, and that's against the rules, I'm going to have to ask you to leave." I then pick up the phone and call Security. I go back to my normal duties. 30 mins. later... I get a call from a buddy who works at our front desk. Apparently the woman went into a rage, screaming for 20 minutes at everyone in our front lobby, simply because we asked her to behave according to our rules. Weird....

One of my job functions is restoring files that customers accidentally delete.

On one occasion I updated the ticket regarding communication with a "user". Later on, the customer looked up her ticket to check the status and became so enraged that she called my manager.

Apparently she took offense to being referred to as a "user". I believe the conversation went something like, "How dare she imply that I use drugs!"

My manager tried to explain the term but eventually gave up and told the woman she would take appropriate action. We are now no longer allowed to use the term user in trouble tickets.

So i get a call one night from a very unimpressed lady who " just bought this thing " and now its not working . For the next 15 minutes she called me n the company I worked for down to the lowest . Her problem was when she bought the computer , she looked at the box and the moniter was all nice n sharp lookin .... right , anyway she said she took it out of the box and it looked like something from outer space . Now the company put out a line of moniters around this time that were shaped really trendy with alot of acrutements , not youre normal loking squar white box . So I figure this is the problem and I attempt to explain to the woman that her moniters fine its just the way we design them . To this she says but I can't see anything , its shaped like a bell . A bell I say ?. Yes a bell B E L L a bell don't ya know what a bell looks like . So at this point I have nooo idea what shes talking about , until totally exasperated , I stand up at my desk , look down at my moniter , and realize from the top , it does kind of look like a bell . I put her on mute and laugh my arse off for about 2 minutes , then finally compse myself enough to say ...in my most professional voice "Ma'am ... ummm I think youre moniter may be face down ". To this I hear some rustling on her end , and then "Well son, I think that did it , thank you" , and hung up . Like I said before ... wow

I was typing a letter into word and saved it. Coincidentelly, the first few words were "Whats up" and the document was saved as Whats up.doc

I can't believe this. The Asst. Director of ICT has come over to me in my lunchbreak - (Hey! I'm only eating food, drinking and browsing sports websites - maybe I should hang a 'piss off I'm at lunch' sign around my neck, too? Incase it isn't obvious enough?) - and told me to log a call.

Fair enough, maybe another director is having a hissy fit because his computer has gone on standby mode, or the local village idiot needs his water topped up - But no! It's a computer, and the screensaver is showing 7771-XXXX instead of 7717-XXXX. IT MUST BE CHANGED!

Note that this computer is 6 feet away from the helpdesk area, facing it, and the person who works on it is a DBA, not exactly someone who needs help. Again, fair enough.

I saunter over, a big ol' shit eating grin on my face , and go to the display properties. "OH NO!" a booming voice behind me shouts, "You can't do it without the user's permission first. Find her manager or send her an email"

That woman hurts my brain.

I work for a small company with about 40 local users and six remote sites with a couple of people at each site.

A local user wanted to send some pictures of a company function to the "All Email Users" distribution list. This person already has a long history of sending "stuff" to everyone in the address book but I can't really say anything to him because: He's the owner's HUSBAND!

Now, sending pictures of the annual company party is not necessarily a bad thing in my mind, but only if you've adjusted the file sizes and are aware of the total email message size that you're going to send out. You can always send the proposed message to yourself to see exactly how big it is.

Well, thirty-some pictures wound up being over 35 MEG in size in the email message. Hmm, let's see, 55 users, 35 meg to each user, they're only allowed 75 meg in TOTAL mailbox size above which they can't send new email... Oh, and sixteen of the users are at the remote sites connected via DSL where we have a maximum upload speed of 256k. (35 meg times 16 users at 256k =... you get the idea.)

So, about FOUR hours after I first discovered what had happened I begin getting irate calls from the remote sites about how slow their access to the core application is. Plus, even users in the LOCAL network are complaining that it's taking 2 to 5 minutes to open ANY email message in Outlook.

So, I finally wind up killing all the DSL connections (taking the remotes off-line, of course) and purge ALL messages over 15 meg in the Exchange database to get things back to normal.

BUT, I did then take care of this problem for the future by restricting the maximum message size for ALL the distribution lists to one meg, AND limited this person's maximum outgoing message size to 10 meg. I may even restrict his even further - just to get even.

*** 14-11-2003 09:20:08 Chris XXXX ***

Users PC has powered itself off and will not power on.

*** 14-11-2003 10:27:54 Will XXXX ***

Plugged in PC.

*** CALL CLOSED ***

A coworker of mine just got this call:

Customer calls in, concerned that when she takes a picture with her digital camera, and looks on the back, the picture is really small. But, when she prints the image on her printer, it comes out huge! What can she do, she asks, to fix this problem???

When asked what she uses, software wise, to print the picture, she doesn't know. "But I have a digital camera!" she wails.

And this is a problem, how? She got transfered to a department of the company that works with digital cameras and photo printers. (She called the laser printer department)

Internet security is one of the most important jobs of an IT department. Thanks to Mickeysofts holey security, script kiddies with a few tools and too much time on their hands can easily reek havoc on any internet company, causing huge income losses.

Our IT department is right on top of this issue. Their newest tool: Internet filtering software. Yes, thanks to our peerless IT department, pages like SinFest (http://www.sinfest.net/) a cartoon enjoyed by many techs for many years, with no complaints, is now considered an adult site and has been blocked for our own good. The Darwin Awards page, also a staple of employee amusement for many years, has also been labeled an adult site and has been blocked for our own good.

Too bad they didn't think to lock down the company backup server as well. While browsing the network, a fellow employee was not only able to access the backup server but found he could copy, edit, rename and delete files at will. I guess they are too busy trying to catch employees who might be looking at offensive or pornographic to notice that they have left the companies assests out in the breeze where any one can destroy them.

Our IT

This is just a small thing that always bugs me. When you are trying to help set a client up with their email account and it asks for the incoming (POP) mail server name and outgoing (SMTP) mail server name, it seems like 1 out of 4 will infinitely try to change the spelling from SMTP to SMPT.

WHY?!?

Not only does it say SMTP right next to the text box that you type into, but I have repeated S-M-T-P over and over. Is it just dyslexia or is it an issue of P comes before T in the alphabet, so people assume that it sounds better?

I don't get it and it frustrates me to no end. I'd say about 20-30% of the email issues I get have to do with those two server names being entered incorrectly. The other 60-70% are username and password issues. I only attribute about 10% of calls to actual connection problems.

I work for a large retail chain in the Tech Center. We're not set up to do phone support through the store though we do get the occaisional phone call from the terminally clueless.

Call #1

Me: Good morning , how may I help you?

Lady: How many Pentiums are in my computer?

(Ummm, one?)

Call #2

Me: Good afternoon , how may I help you?

Man: How many RAMs can my computer hold?

(And how many acres is your computer in size, sir?)

Strangely enough, being a SysAdmin of my own personal company, I have a Webserver that's still running on dial-up service. Now this Webserver is supposed to be used as a backup server, and not a primary. If I ran this server on Cable, it could crash the system.

Recently, I wanted to test how the backup server was doing by pinging it from my personal computer. I waited for about 4 seconds, nothing. The ping finally came back within a period of 6 seconds. Now this webserver isn't supposed to do that. Provided that the webserver is an old computer that is pumping out the text-only version of my company's website.

I get on my webserver and do a traceroute over to my other computer's IP. It came back as a 30 hopper, having gone half-way across the US, just to get to a computer that was sitting right next to me.

My dad just switched from AOL to Yahoo! DSL (good man!). Yahoo! DSL also provides dial-up for those who travel a lot. I have an accound with the Dial-up section. So I called Yahoo! SBC Dial-up support to see if there were problems. After following the instructions within the answering system, it hung up on me!

I called back. I performed the same instructions. It hung up on me again. Very aggrivated now, I called Customer Support to Order Dial-Up and asked that I be transferred to Tech Support. The lady responded, "Well, you should dial back and follow the instructions next time." GAHHHHHHH!!!

So after about 2 minutes of more waiting and cheezy elevator music, I got to talk to this Indian guy (no offense to those who are) who couldn't find my username anywhere, including the owner of the account. I got transferred AGAIN! This time to Yahoo! DSL Tech Support.

I explained to the 18-or-somthing-year-old-kid that I was a SysAdmin who ran a traceroute to see where my data was going and found it going halfway across the US just to get to a computer that was sitting right next to me.

The kid's response: "What's a traceroute?" GAHHHHHHH!!

!!

I got transferred to the ACTUAL SYSADMIN for Yahoo! DSL service and told him my problems, the traceroute, the crappy service, the connection speed. After about 30 seconds, I got the answer: "Yes, sir, we're having problems with the sbcglobal.net dial-up server. It's been going haywire, and we're fixing to restart the server. Your traceroute suspicions were right."

FINALLY! The answer to my question! "Was there a problem with the sbcglobal.net service?" That's all I asked!

Phbbbttt... Morons.

If I had not witnessed with my own eyes, I might not have believed it.

I just saw a patron here where I work pull up Google, to find Ask Jeeves.

What makes it slightly more strange, is the fact that the homepage on our computers has a link to Ask Jeeves on it.

Does it kill people to have some common sense and read?

I was working as Tech Support for an ISP based in a small city, surrounded by rural areas. We covered the rural areas with dial-up, tho we had DSL. Techs took both dial-up and DSL calls.

I took one call that seemed fairly simple, such that I didn't even lookup the guy's account after he told me his problem. He was having laggy connections, and an occasional disconnect. A very annoying problem and I gave him some leeway as he seemed fairly intelligent, and that's bleeding annoying. But, leeway only goes so far.

After hearing his problem, I looked at his hardware. He was running a soft Modem, of a brand that was at the time constantly updating its drivers. So I informed him that he needed to update his drivers, as he had an old version. He didn't like this explanation, and proceeded to rant and rail at me, that it worked just fine when he lived in Maryland, and couldn't the bumpkins down here do anything right? Trying to salvage the call, and my temper, I again explained that the drivers are constantly being updated, and we also updated our servers to get the best performance out of lines which were, to say the least, obsolete.

He continued to yell, growing more and more upset. "I never had any problems in Maryland! Why should I have to change my software because you Hillbillies messed things up?!"

I tried explaining again, knowing he wasn't going to listen, but what else could I do? I also tried to transfer him to my boss, but I don't think he was listening at all at that point. Finally he ran out of breath, or just finished venting his bad day, and left with the parting shot of "Thank you for nothing, you Redneck A**hole!"

The kicker to this: I have no accent, am from SoCal, and have been stuck in traffic jams bigger than his (former) State.

I had to go get a double shot of espresso to calm down.

*New voice mail message from ext. 301 : Please fix our laser printer, it's squealing like a stuck pig.

*Please visit office 201 : We have checked our email and it has wrecked our printer, all we get is smiley faces and hearts, we have gone through five reams of paper please come as soon as possible as we are running out of paper.

*But...if I get virus updates won't I get a virus?

*Why does *unnamed company* make software you have to update? Can't they make it right the first time?

---yeah well... heh...

*New voice mail message from unspecified dept. : Hurry! our computer is messing up it says cannot connect to main something or other, cannot work! cannot do anything help is immediately needed!!!!

---and you are???

---There you go, network fax machine volume muted, you can work in peace now.

later on

*Message from extension 280 : fax machine not working please fix asap

arrived, faxed something

---It works fine, not sure what happened, the records show that you sent 10 faxes to this number and they all went through fine.

*But it didn't make any screeching noises

---yeah I muted the sound so everyone in the office didn't have to hear it

*But it's not working

---Um yeah that was the point, so it would be quiet, it still sends the faxes with the sound muted.

*But how do I know it actually is sending them?

:o

---Uh yeah, see this display here? It shows you what number it is dialing then says Transmission Status OK really big when it is sent.

*But if I can't hear it dialing how do I know it is going through?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ever have one of those days?

---For security reasons I have changed your admin account username to GSmith. Your password is the same though and you still have the same rights. Just remember to log on with the initial of your first name and your full last name with the same password. Got it?

*Hold on... let me write that down...

:o

Announcement over pa system: "Please log off of all workstations until further notice."

ten minutes later

Announcement over pa system: "You may now log onto all workstations, if you experience problems please restart your workstation."

---Hello?

*I can't print be..

---Did you restart your workstation?

*No but..

---Did you hear the announcement?

*Yes but...

---Please restart your workstation first

*But..

---Please restart your workstation and you will be able to print. Trust me.

*Ok But I tried that already.

---Humor me.

restarts, logs on. prints.

---There ya go, you restarted before the announcement was made that the server was back up that is why it didn't work before.

*No it wasn't, I just fixed it.

---Oh yeah? How did you do that?

*I don't know but I know you didn't.

nice :x

*Voice Message from extension 2500 : Vendor tech support says you did not install all database upgrades please do that asap.

---Right, hi, I installed all the database upgrades the vendor sent. Please tell them this and confirm what we are supposed to have.

*They said they sent you these three updates and you didn't install one.

---They sent me two updates and I installed them both, let them know we only received two and to send the other one.

*They say you have it.

---Erm.. well I don't so have them resend it.

*They say you have it and you have to install it.

---Look, if I had it I would install it, they did not send it... trust me, I certainly would install it if I had it, I do not have it tell them to send another one.

*Well you don't have to get all huffy,

they say they can walk you through installing it if you aren't sure how.

---I know how to install their updates but I have to have them first.

*They want to talk to you.

sigh

Just one of those days

I have about six years of Tech Support under my belt(for various companies, and different products), but few stories, as I have successfully blocked most of those memories. But one I just can't forget. I got the infamous Cupholder bit. Magnified when the guy next to me got the same call, later that day.

So, being the twisted people we were, we procured an ancient 2x tray-fed CD-ROM. We then dissassembled it, taking out all the CD-rom bits, installng a power converter, reinforcing the tray, and adding a heating element; all to make a cup holder that would also keep the drinks warm.

Now, if only we could have figured out how to get it to *cool* the drinks as well....

A few years back i worked at a government office. We all received a mail from the IT department, telling us to shut down our pc´s as they needed to run some updates. They would send us an email when there were done. I´m not sure how they expected us to see that email.

So my mum decides she wants an AOL upgrade. After she refuses to let me use the sledgehammer, as would only have been proper for AOL, I settle down to the task.

First I uninstall the current version, wiping out the proprietary software that for some reason is the only way of connecting to their servers. Once that's sorted out, I wander back over to mother dearest and ask her for the install CD for the latest version.

"Oh, don't worry about that dear," she says. "I'm going to get it online."

...uh oh

Many years ago I was working in a word processing group for a small company. We had a graphic artist in the group that only knew how to use the graphic program and nothing else. One day he got bored and starting fooling around (no one noticed). A little while later he turns around in his chair and almost broke his arm patting himself on the back and declaring "Well, I've just made a whole lot of space on my computer now!" Yes, I dared to ask how he did it...he replied "I deleted all the EXE files because they were taking up so much space!"

When I realized he wasn't kidding, I immediately went to our computer guy and told him what this idiot had done (I couldn't look him in the eye, it was embarassing just to repeat it) and then went outside and laughed myself sick.

(aka The Great Boss and the Timesaver Script)

As Lord High Techie of one office of a government department, I was the guy who got to do all the jobs remotely associated with electricity. Unless, of course, they were assigned to someone else higher up the food chain first.

This was the state of affairs when some happy little clever people in our national HQ decided that the legions of data entry clerks were being slowed down by the amount of time (almost a quarter of a second) that it took to switch between assorted data entry screens in the mainframe they all used for eight hours a day. While the Department had been running off Wang terminals, nothing could be done. Now. of course, we all had brand spanking new Windows 3.1 machines with terminal emulators, so of COURSE we needed a scripting language that could speed up simple multi-screen tasks.

So it was written, and so it was done.

Each office in the nation had a Scripting Officer, a person who was supposed to know something about the scripting language. In most offices, that person was the person doing the job I was assigned to. However, our office was larger than most, and our Admin Officer (the guy who handled all the paperwork that kept the office ticking over) decided he would take on this Brave New Role.

Me? I kept schtumm. After all, the A.O. ranked two levels higher than me in the great hierarchy that was the Department, and so he could deal with the joys of supporting a newly developed, newly rolled-out scripting language that changed every second week, and all the scripts that were written in it. If anyone came to me, I adopted a blank look and pointed a finger in the A.O.'s direction.

So, sooner or later, no-one thought of me as the Script Guy.

Excellent.

Phase Two of my plan went into action. I started looking at the scripts, and learned the language (what there was of it). Then, I wrote a script. Just a minor one. Nothing important. Only... suddenly the office sub-section I wa

s an unofficial part of started landing the best stats in the entire state. Funnily enough, the data that the national mainframe used to feed them randomly was now ordered in such a fashion as to let them do three times the work with half the stress.

But why, you ask?

Well, it seemed that I had been very lucky indeed some months previously. Although my position really had no affiliation with any of the data processing areas of the office, it had been assigned to one of the DP Managers' domains. Just to keep things tidy, you see. Making sure that all low-level peons (i.e. me) reported to a mid-level peon (the DP managers), and not someone important. It just so happened that the DP Manager to whose demesne I had been assigned was that rare breed - the Great Boss. She knew nothing about how I did what I did, and as long as I kept the computers in the office running, she was happy to let me have free reign.

Which is why it was her subsection that suddenly shot to the top of the efficiency charts.

And which is why, some weeks later, when I saw her grimacing over a set of mainframe screens, I made some polite enquiries. And learned that for her, every Friday was taken up with punching sets of statistical data into the mainframe, jotting down the responses, and then painstakingly doing a set of manual calculations. To arrive, by the end of the afternoon, at a single boiled-down number. This was sent to somewhere in upper management and presumably ignored.

Tut, I said. Three hundred and thirty-six screens of data to type in every Friday. Using information which was available elsewhere on the same mainframe. A pity the scripting language we are using has no mathematical functions, nor loop logic, for then it would become but a simple recursive process.

Ah, the back of my brain treacherously whispered. But it does have an increment and decrement function, and primitive flow control. And thanks to Great Boss, you have a large amount of free time on your hands that Upper

Management knows not of.

Thus, it was not many Fridays later that Great Boss logged into the mainframe and ran a new script which had been meticulously polished and presented with appropriate humility and discretion. And lo, the script did run. And lo, it did simulate mathematical functions and spreadsheet logic and loops in the flow logic. And fifteen minutes later, it printed out, very neatly, all the derived numbers from all the intermediate calculations. Plus the final number for Upper Management. In a beautifully readable and self-formatting grid that had made me sweat blood to coax out of the atomic text functions of the language.

And I looked at Great Boss. And Great Boss looked at me. And I said "I won't tell if you won't."

And to this day, no-one in that office knows what I had wrought in that free time that Upper Management knew not of. For Great Boss was later promoted, and her replacement was Not So Great Boss, who was always on my back.

Not So Great Boss's Fridays were a lot more stressful than Great Boss's.

Must have been all that data entry.

Next time: the Tuesday Boot Sessions, aka Waiting for Windot (NT, that is).

This isn't a computer tech tale, but it's similar.

Background: I work as a checkout operator/supervisor at Australia's version of Walmart (Big W), with a drinks vending machine at the front which has been acting up a bit lately.

So the service manager organised for a service tech to come look at it and fix it up. I didn't know about all of this until I saw the charge sheet the tech left behind:

Problem: Machine taking money, not dispensing drinks.

Work Done: Drink columns empty, advised to refill. Rest appears normal.

Time: 45mins (min. callout)

It was refilled 2 nights later...

One of the things that I hate (and most painful) about tech support is walking someone through creating a pipeline report in our software because we literally have to walk them through adding the fields, giving the report a name, and walking through restricting the report and making sure the report will fit on the paper. A lot of times I also have to repeat myself over and over. They also ask a lot of stupid questions also.

They can save themselves a call (and our aggravation) by READING THE F***ING MANUAL!

I pulled a stupid today.

I was in the computer lab at my university and after getting my printouts, I went to the table to staple and punch holes in them to go in my binders.

They had removed the regular "manual" three-hole punch and there was this new electric hole punch there with buttons to select number of holes, etc. It has a single slot where to stick the paper in (just like the manual one).

I slowly stapled a few of my packets watching other people go to this thing and use it, so that I wouldn't have to ask questions. But sure enough, I get to the machine, hit "3" for three holes, made sure it was set to "8 1/2in. paper" and then go to put my papers in, and my brain shuts down. I turned to the girl who had just finished punching her holes and asked her "Which way do I put the paper in to punch the holes down this side?" "Um, that side" She answers me without snickering, but I got the hell out of there as fast as I could. I guess when faced with multiple buttons, anyone can become a 1user.

This happened to a co-worker, he was called out to a client's home several years ago when a 33.6 modem was the best you could get. The client's computer was next to their pet parrot's bird cage. Whenever my co-worker turned on the computer, the parrot would do a perfect modem "handshake".

During one of our "ICT" classes, one of my friends was playing with the back of his computer pulling out the sound cord, playing with the monitor and stuff... suddenly *POOOOOOOF*!

He had switched the "magic red switch" on his power supply used for European electricity, he switched it to the American standard.

The teacher didn't like _that_ :)

Ok, check this out. This happened to me around June this year (2003).

I'm a Tech agent for a large software company, who's logo is a big "A". I'm based in Scotland and I usualy talk to german customers, but this one day took a english call as the english team were swamped. The call went like this:

M = Me

C = Customer

M: Good Morning ***** Technical support, your through to Sandy, may I have a customer Service number please

C: (In an abrupt voice) No you can't

M: Okay sir, are you registered with us?

C: (Even more abruptly) No, I don't want to be registered

M: (getting a litte annoyed with his attitude, but maintaining my cool composure) Well Sir, we require you to register your product with us in order to receive Technical suppport

C: (now raising voice) I DON'T WANT technical support, I WAN'T my problem solved.

M: (Now unwilling to bend the rules due to his attitude) Ok sir, but in order to solve your problem, you WILL need support. for which I required a serial number

C: (Sounding very ticked off) Look, I've got a problem with my Program here, the f**king thing isn't working. This is 's fault and I want YOU to fix it. For that I need to bloody serial number or support!

M: (resisting the temptation to release the call due to his language) Calm down sir, let me explain the situation here. You have an issue with your program, quite possibly one which we can solve straight away. But we cannot do so without having the product registered first.

C: I told you I don't want SUPPORT!

M: Whatever you want to call it, you need us to solve your issue, which we cannot do without a customer service number, which you received when you register your product with us.

This went on like this for 10 minutes. The guy just wouldn't listen. Eventually he started going on about how much this call was costing him (not much as its what we call "local rate" here in the UK, which basically me

ans its not costing him any more than a phone call to his next door neighbour)

I finally convinced him by blurting this out:

M: Listen, in the 10 minutes we have been debating this issue, I could have had you registered and probably solved your problem

C: (Snorts, sighs heavily) Fine, register me!

The rest went like any other call. It turns out he did have an easily solved. Complicated only by his arrogance.

Oh well, one born every minute

Sandy

I gather from reading this site that Compaq tech support doesn't have the most stellar reputation in the industry. After this call, I could see why.

First, a disclaimer: I am just as big an idiot as the support person in this story. One day my computer would not boot. Instead it showed a strange error code, a search of which on the web yielded no hits except for a few intended for Windows NT, and I'm using 98. So I called Compaq tech support, got a nice but not terribly knowledgeable operator who took me through the usual tests. When nothing worked, operator asked me if I had two partitions. I said yes, for two logical drives. She suggested I remove the partition. I say, um, won't that delete everything in my D drive? [I honestly didn't know. I'd never used a drive with more than one partition] She said no, it won't erase any data, it will just "tear down the wall" between my C and D drives, effectively moving eveyrything onto C:. So, dummy that I am, I started to do this. Only when I got a dire looking warning that said I was about to delete data did I get wise, thank the operator for helping, and hung up without following her advice.

Later I discovered a blank 3.5" disk in the drive was causing the error. It escaped my notice because it was NOT the "Non-system disk or disk error" message I was used to.

At the school where I work, we have a powerful internet filter, this can block access to sites and files on URL, keywords, and extension. You can also add sites to a white list, and this will let you see the site even if there is a banned word or phrase in it.

I was recently asked to put a site into the white list, I checked the address first to see what it was. The page just redirected me to another page so I thought there was no point putting it in and email the teacher back saying this. This is how it went. The theachers name has been removed to protect the guilty.

Email 1

Rob

Could I please have access to the following site:

www.bennett.karoo.net

Thanks

Name removed to protect the guilty

Email 2

Name removed to protect the guilty,

I have just had a look at this site and the address that you gave me sends you to another page.

http://www.geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/

Let me know if this blocks you and I will put it in the white list.

Rob

Email 3

I can access this site but there is also another one called Bennett Karoo which I cannot access

Name removed to protect the guilty

These are the people teaching our children? There is no hope for us.

Trying to guide over the phone a completely lost user having to interrupt a process he just started, I remembered that simply saying "Press Ctrl-Pause" wouldn't cut it; the (l)user had a laptop and that function is available only in combination with a "[Fn]" key. I said: "At bottom left at your keyboard you'll find a key with 'Fn' written in green text; press that keyboard and find a key on the top right which has written "Pause" in the same color". The user didn't find the key, but he didn't say so.

He said: "The keys have nothing written on them".

For five complete seconds I pictured a laptop with keys completely black, without any information whatsoever written on them. Only then the real situation sink in for me.

I should have known better, but that isn't the way to report the situation! :-)

I'm a sales rep for HP. I drift around various retailers such as CompUSA, Best Buy, and Circuit City and work in conjunction with their own reps to help sell HP products.

One day, a customer came into CompUSA. Apparently he had ordered an HP laptop by phone, and told the phone rep that he wanted to hook the laptop up to his cell phone to get wireless internet. The rep told him that would be no problem. However, it turned out that his cell phone company, Sprint, didn't offer GPRS in his area. So, he walked into the store, came up to the first HP rep he could find (me), screamed at me for five minutes about how HP misrepresents its products, then walked out.

Now what exactly was he hoping to accomplish?