Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Welcome to super duper internet how can i help you?

Cust : I can't Connect....

CSR : what happens when u try to connect?

Cust : I don't know....

CSR : Do you get any message or error?

Cust : no it says unable to connect

CSR : what version on windows do you use?

Cust : Win-98SE

CSR : can you please click on my computer.....

Dead air for sometime

Cust calls his grandson and tell hey johny can you see this guys computer here......

Maybe not really a "tech" story, but still... it sort of comes from one of them.

I recently saw a TV advertisement, in new zealand, for Noel Leaming's (an consumer electronics store) return policy. In the ad, a man buys a computer, opens the CD-ROM drive, and looks at the tray with a dissapointed look on his face. He returns the computer to the store, and exchanges it for another one...

He returns home, opens the CD-ROM drive, and places his cup on top of the tray

never thought i'd see the day...

Real log from a "printer" problem... "tickets" are picking forms used to ship packages....

Ahhh, the joys of support week, a collegue of mine had this taped outside his cube...

Problem:User needs a reprint of her 2PM rush tickets. Prints to : PNOF2 CMOS.

05/25 - 15:00 - xxxx - Respooled tickets to printer, but

queue keeps going down. Left message with user to try and

power cycle the printer. Waiting to hear back.

05/25 - 15:20 - xxxx - Left message for user.

05/25 - 15:40 - xxxx - Left message for user. Called

loss prevention and he could not help me with anyone

related to order filling. Said that every manger was at

or gone for the day. Had to track down Jerome

at LC and he directed me to speak with Joe. Called Joe at

PI, had him walk over to the PNOF2 ticket printer.

Found that the printer was not even plugged in and another

IBM printer was sitting on top of that. That printer was

powered on and had an error message to "PLEASE LOAD

PAPER!" Had Joe load some ticket stock into the printer

and what do you know.....TICKETS CAME OUT!!!

While I was out of town for Memorial Day weekend, my darling husband managed to turn his laptop into a very nice paperweight. First, he managed to screw up his Windows folder, then he listened to the very nice tech support rep who told him to just deltree his Windows folder, then reinstall.

After my two hour search for the product key to complete the reinstallation (after formatting, sysing, etc.), I finally had the laptop up and running again. With just one minor problem. An error at boot, trying to read drive A:. Hubby is, at this point, looking over my shoulder, and tells me, "Oh, just go disable it in the BIOS. I'll mess with it later." Ok, it's your laptop...

Hubby then spends a couple hours downloading new device drivers onto floppy disks, from my desktop computer. And then spends another hour or so trying to get his A: drive to work, before giving up and telling me to "play with it and see what you can do."

Went back into the BIOS, enabled the A: drive, and I'm loading the drivers now.

I had owned a Gateway computer for about two years when the system's motherboard spontaneously died. Since the machine was under warranty, I took it to the local Gateway Country store for a replacement. Note that I knew that the motherboard was the problem and I even told the tech at the store that the motherboard was the problem. The next day, I receive a phone call informing me that my problem is fixed. I retrieve my computer (they demanded that I take the monitor to them as well, the reasoning behind this remains a mystery to me) and plug it back at home to find... nothing. The problem is not fixed. I took the computer back to the store and asked the technician what he did to my system. He had formatted my hard drive in order to "fix the errors in Windows." It took another several days to actually get the motherboard replaced.

I was going to wait a while and post some of my past tales, after I read some more, and seeing as I'm no longer really in any sort of tech field, but this just happened, and I just had to post it. It's not really a support tale, just another example of people who really don't understand what is going on.

I'm temping for a company, basically doing data entry. The info I'm getting is ussually faxed in by the clients. In the E-mail lines I've been getting the usual stupid www.(username)@domain.com, but this just beat all. The client HANDWROTE his email address as "username2domain.net". I could understand a typo, but apperently the shift key on this guy's pen was broken. Or we've found those capital numbers everyone keeps posting about.

Tech support gurus everywhere know that sometimes the on-site techs who go out to repair systems aren't always playing with a full deck. Admittedly, it doesn't take much intelligence to scoot around hardware, if all you do is install it... but I think the requirements for their jobs should go beyond, "Do you have a car?" and "Do you own a screwdriver?"

Let me show you what I mean:

Just got a call from a customer who had a hard drive replaced. The tech was nice enough to reinstall the OS for them, which they don't usually do. Once he's done, he tells her, "Oh, you'll have to call the company back, you have a bad video card."

The problem? They can't adjust resolution.

Did he install any drivers? No.

And he's CERTIFIED on our systems.

I really think they just hand these things out. That would explain some of our customers...

this female calls up saying she wanted her mouse pointer to be more visible...i enabled her mouse trailers and she's happy...,now, after every bout of troubleshooting we haveto assign a case number to the 'customer' and i give her the number 06703666..and this lady goes ,like:

female:whoa!that number has a lot of 6's in it!

me:er..yes maam.

female:u know what that means?its the number of the beast!!!(her voice takes on a hysterical tone here) can't u change it?

me:i'm sorry ma'am..i can't.every case# is unique.

female:well..in that case i'm gonna hang up and pray for my pc... goes the reciever

Had a call from one of our stores this morning, getting an error of a web page not being able to display, simple problem of configuration so asked him to reboot the pc to fix the issue. This was a task in itself as he had already confessed to not knowing anything about computers. While it was rebooting I made the mistake of making the joke "it looks like the mouse finally woke up" He seemed really concerned and asked what I meant, thinking he knew I was joking I said " the mouse inside the wheel inside your PC, how else do you think a computer works? you have to keep feeding it or it falls asleep" there was a stunned silence and he finally said " I.. I... I only use this to do my order on, someone else must have forgotten to feed it, sorry. I will check with my boss."

Thank god for mute buttons. I couldn't stop laughing for ages.

Used to work in an enviroment where usernames were created by using the fist 7 letters from the surname and then the 1st letter from their christian name. Butttttt if this mirrored an existing logon name it was changed to first 6 letters of surname and 2 from the christian name. This had an embarrasing outcome for Thomas Jackson because jacksont was already taken by Tania Jackson so his new logon name was jacksoth (jacks off). I can still remember him whispering his user name and purposely spelling it when a tech asked him for it.

Work doing IT support for several supermarkets chains and was wondering which citrix server the user was connected to. Made the mistake of asking what was on the desktop to which I got the reply " errrr umm a pencil and my coffee cup" "Wow does that affect it too?????"

Groaaaaannnnnnnnnn !!!!

I just got called early in the morning that woke me up from a nice slumber. This lady that I recently worked on her computer the day before was on the phone, trying to log in. She swears I did something.

Her description of the problem was puzzling at first: Everything was fine when she moved her PC to her office, but when she moved it back, every time she tries to log in (Windows XP Welcome screen), she said she can't! Windows keep poping up she says.

Now, it is at this point I can hear the robotic sounds of Narriator. I asked her what was on the screen (what was the robotic-sounding guy reading?). She says Utility Manager was on. It comes on every time she tries to punch in her password. She kept insisting that it wouldn't even let her type the first letter of her password in.

Now I'm thinking "virus" or "backdoor user". I was about to search on Google for more info, but nothing comes up but a exploit using these programs for Win2k only. XP is not effected.

I went to my own PC and opened up Utility Manager. It says something about activiating it by hitting "Windows KEY" + "U" instead of going thru the start menu. Then I also remembered she had a good stack (about 4-5) keyboards laying around. At the time, I didn't think about it because she had multiple old PCs she doesn't use anymore. But then, I remembered she just bought another set of keyboard/mouse (the cheap GE ones) at a store. Gee... why so many keyboards?

I had a hunch...

Me: "Madam, what is the first letter of your password?".

Madam: "N"

That made no sense... she said her first letter triggered it...

Me: "What's your second?"

Madam: (sounding skeptical like I was trying to get to her password) "U"

Me: "There is a possibiity that your Windows Key is stuck. Can you try another one?"

Madam: "Okay, let me turn the PC off and plug another one back in. I'll call you back".

Me: "Okay".

At this point, I was playing around with Utility Manager, turning on some of the accessability features while waiting for the phone. It rings 5 minutes later.

Madam: "It's fine"

Me: "Is it the keyboard?"

Madam: "Yep. Sorry to wake you."

Moral of story? It could be the simpliest problem, so please try to do some basic diagnostic before you wake an irrate tech up.

PS: She didn't pay this time around. :( Oh well... got another PC for her that I am fixing up. :) She better pays for THAT or I'm keeping it!

I do tech support for a large internet service provider. I recently received a call from a member who couldn't connect to the internet. "I don't know what's wrong with this thing, I think it's broken. The salesperson over the phone assured me that setting up my DSL would be as easy as connecting a phone, but it's not true." I asked him if his hardware was connected. He said yes. Then I asked him to tell me what color the lights on his modem were. "They're all off, that's why I'm calling." I politely asked him to look on the back of his modem and make sure that the power switch was on. After about 30 seconds trying to find the back of the modem he says, "It's off!"

<<True Story>>

While working desktop support for our local telco, I recieved a call from a rather obese end user. She complained that every time she pressed the space bar that the letter "B" would appear instead. After checking her keyboard mapping and finding nothing wrong, it was discovered that after many months of eating snak foods directly over the keyboard that an accumulation of potatoe chips had gathered in the space between the space bar and the letter "B" keys forcing both keys down at the same time. Talk about a space cadet.

I've heard a few support tales and was sure I'd end up with a couple of my own to tell but to be honest I'm really amazed at how little time I had to spend on the lines before they started coming in.

The phone rang, I launched into an enthusiatic 'could I start by asking have you called any lines before?'.

'uh... helllooooooo?' came the slurred response.

I tried in vain to make some kind of sense of anything he said and after a good 10 minutes of trying managed to get enough out of him to find some details about who I was dealing with.

A glaswegian gentleman - makes the accent hard to understand.

somehow he'd managed to flip his display upside-down, and his first remedy was to try turning the screen to compensate, but this made it impossible to stand up.

'okay sir, could you click on the start icon for me?'

'what i mfffmfmfmffffffmff....' - it was like talking to Rab C Nesbitt on valium.

as the call went on the caller confessed to 'having a couple of drinks', although to be more truthful 'completely smashed' might be a more apt description.

20 mins passed... still trying to guide a plastered scotsman to *1* icon...

'what can you see on screen now sir?'

'uhh mfmfm.. colours and mfff box mfmfm...'

by this point most of the team were listening in and laughing. i had to put him on hold twice because i couldn't contain myself any longer.

then came the best part. as i heard it:

'uh.. okay... let me... oh dear.......

zzzzzzzz

ZZZZzzzZZZZZzzzZ'

Not being content with drunk in charge of a PC, he then gave up and fell asleep mid-call, provoking another barrage of laughter.

Laughing, and somewhat relieved i entered 'call terminated due to customer falling asleep' in his notes and was just about to disconnect when unfortunately he woke up again...

another 10 minute attempt to guide an alcoholically-imparied northerner to the same damn icon ensued and I gave up, unsure of where he was in windows (in his state he could be anywhere) and decided i was going to try and start from scratch.

at which point without thinking I really put my foot in my mouth.

customer: 'sorry.. i'm having trouble mfmfmfmffff.... I've got double vision'

me: oh okay sir... could you tell me how many windows you can see on screen at the moment?'

At this point most of my team had tears in their eyes.

Eventually he decided he was going to call back when he'd sobered up or had help present - but I don't think I'll live down that cockup any time soon.

six months ago, i worked as a technical support engineer in one of the centers that offer phone support for an internet service provider.

one day, i received a call from an irate member who will cancel her service if i would not be able to fix her problem in 5 minutes.

she cannot connect to the internet. she receives an error message, (port is already open)or error 629 when she tries to connect to the internet.

i did checked on the settings of her dialer and that of her modem.i would like her to restart her computer so i told her to "close out all the open windows in her computer". that would mean, exit out or close the running applications.

"one moment"she said ..after 5 minutes of dead air, i heard clattering in the background.confuse as i was at that time, i asked the member what she was doing.

she told me that she went around the house closing out all the open windows "but i do not know if this would help solve my computer problem".

i had to put the phones on mute for another 3 minutes because i can't help but laugh...

hehehe!!!

i was working as a TSE for a company that offers phone support for an ISP.

one day, a member calls in

"i cannot receive email. it says that my inbox is full..."

i then told the caller to connect to the internet and open her mail box.

i told here to click on empty my bulk folder and then go ahead and "empty her trash bin"

she told me that she had to put on hold for 5 minutes because the step i want her to do may take awhile.

i thought that she was having a hard time clicking on the button.

it turns out that it would take while because she had to go outside to throw her the trash bin under her computer table...

oh my! i had a good laugh after that call...

I work for a local ISP, and the then company VP was very good at hiring under-qualified people. Anyhow, he hired this guy who, according to his resume, was supposed to be really tech-savvy. As it turned out, he was as technically challenged as some of our clients.

One day, this guy was fielding a call from a customer who had connection problems. Keep in mind that this client used dial-up with dynamically assigned IPs. There I was, sitting behind my mornoic co-worker and listening to him working his magic.

Mornoic co-worker: "Sir, put a dot next to the option called 'specify an IP address' and put in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxxx".

As it turned out, he asked the customer to put in our primary DNS server address! What a flaming idiot! First of all, as I have mentioned, the IP was supposed to be dynamic, NOT static; second, why in the blue blazes would he want to put in our DNS server address as the IP?!

After overhearing this conversation, I reported this incident to the VP, and needless to say, this idiotic co-worker was asked not to report back to work.

This happened to a co-worker of mine. We work for a local ISP, and once in a while, some funny call would come along and amaze us with the caller's total lack in intelligence.

Here is how it went:

The aforementioned co-worker received a call from a female. She explained that she had just sent an email but regretted doing so soon after. She wanted for us to stop the delivery. My co-worker explained that once a message was sent, there would be no way of intercepting it. The caller would not give up and insisted on a solution. Finally, my co-worker got fed up and just wanted to get her off the phone. He "promised" her to look into the matter and give her a call back. My co-worker asked for her username, to which the caller answered, "I don't have a username. I don't have service with you". Stunned, my co-worker asked her why she decided to call us for help. The caller explained that she located us in the phonebook and thought that since our company had something to do with the Internet, we would be able to help her.

My co-worker hung up the phone. The lady never called back.

Ahhhh, sometimes I just love my job because I get to hear all these interesting stories.

A few years ago I worked for a computer rental company. One day we got a call from the IT manager at XYZ hotel requesting 10 desktop workstations with network cards for a training session.

I got the workstations configured placed a courtesy called the IT manager and asked if he needed network cables and a hub. He said that he had everything else and that there was not need for them. Just as a precaution I packed a hub and some cables with the order.

About 15 minutes after the delivery we got a call from the IT manager demanding to know why the network cards were not properly configured. I had configured the workstations and knew that the cards worked, so I proceeded to ask the standard questions (is the network cable plugged in, etc.) to no avail and told him that we would send a technician to see what was happening. I called the technician that made the delivery (thankfully he was still near the hotel) and explained what was going on and to see what we could do to remedy the situation.

Ten minutes later I got a call from the technician stating we had a UBF (user brain failure) problem. Apparently the IT manager used telephone cables to connect the computers to the network. Good thing I sent the network gear with the order!

Two examples: a friend of mine can't distinguish a screensaver from wallpaper - I can't count how many times he's come visiting and, upon viewing my desktop image, said 'Wow, I love your screensaver!'

And my dad, whose favourite thing to say is 'I just want to write a letter', keeps calling the internet 'e-net', and he consistently calls floppy disks 'tapes'.

It therefore can be confusing to help him with a task because we're talking about a few separate items. I tried, for example, explaining visually the difference between files and programs, so I pointed to a desk drawer and said 'there's your folder. Inside are files. Your arm is the program that needs the files.' ... he looked at me blankly and said 'I just want to write a letter.'

The company I work for uses identification stickers on the front of our systems. They're not particularly hard to locate.. but you get the occasional vapid human wasteland who can't find it.

Me: Can I get your system's ID number please?

Dummy: Where do I find that?

Me: It's located on a sticker on the front of your computer, down in the left hand corner.

Dummy: Well, there's NOTHING on my computer.

Me: Yes, it's there, just take a look.

Dummy: I'm telling you, there's NOTHING on my computer!It's turned off!

"Mute" must be a divine gift.

The old days were the good days for things going wrong.

(1)

A local business had invested in computers and trained their girl to always backup every night. The were generous -they gave her one 5.25 inch floppy. Well in those days that was enough. Almost. Because one day she had a message pop up on screen that the disk was full and she had to insert another one. Puzzled she took it out and then put it back. The computer obligingly backed up. You can probably guess the rest. She told the other staff that was all they needed to do - take the disk out and put it back. It was when the backup needed at least 3 disks that the inevitable happened. We live and learn.

(2)

Another firm had a staff member who had all the disks she neded and was instructed to back up every night. She did a few calculations and correctly decided that the money the firm paid her for the time backing up every night was not productive. It was suffiucient to back up each alternate night. Porbably was too. Except for the fact that the two nights extended to more and eventually she backed up only once a month. The crash came when she was a month behind.

(3)

I was rung up by a firm who had that day been talked to by a computer expert who had told them about the dangers of not backing up. They rang me at 9pm and asked if I could go out and back up their data that night. I refused - they had been running computers for 2 years or so. But the folllowing day was amazed at the mass of "stuff" this firm -

a financial consultant had on his hard drive with no backup. All his customer lists etc. And you know what? It still goes on with some companies.

I work as a Hardware Specialist in a large Media Company, as part of my daily tasks I install all the new equipment around the building.

On one particular day I was installing 10 new Compaq PCs into our online division, specifically the Linux support teams area.

Now linux is a bit of Voodoo as far as I see it and I have a deal of respect for these people or should I say HAD respect.

The Pcs in question had some very nice 19inch flatscreens attached, all were in place for 9 AM as the staff came in and the first few people in the door where very happy, so I left them to it.

A few hours later I get a call

' User has New Flatscren and would like it tilted straight'

Odd, I think, perhaps the mounting isn't quite horizontal. So armed with a screwdriver I troll off down the road to adjust it.

Only to find the Pleb couldn't work out how to tilt it backward and forward.

I showed him how by grabbing both sides firmly you could adjust it backwards and forwards quite easily. and this Guy's a 40k a year programmer!

Oh how I wish it was his neck.

Yet another "computer problem" that's really just a lack of attention to detail.

We have two backup systems. One simply copies everything pertinent and necessary to another high-capacity machine on the network so we can do a quick restore if a drive dies or someone deletes something they shouldn't have. Our other is a pair of two high-capacity external hard drives that get swapped out every night.

When the accountants go to the bank every day they're supposed to switch the drives, except on Monday when we back up on the same drive as Friday (MoWeFr drive, TuTh drive). The drives are each clearly labelled and state which days, fully spelled out, they should be attached before the accountants leave for the day. I'm not always here, but one of them is bound to be, so they do this, otherwise I'd do it all the time.

This being a fairly self-sustaining system, I didn't really look at it too closely until today, when I noticed that it would back up properly one week but not the next. Immediately I assumed (correctly) that they were just switching the drives each day, even though I had instructed them otherwise and even gone so far as to label the drives appropriately.

When I asked them why they hadn't done what it says on the drives they responded that, "We didn't think it would make a difference."

Hmm. Do you honestly think I make this stuff up to amuse myself? Trust me, there are things I'd rather be doing than creating labels and instructions that don't matter, not to mention bothering with training you're going to ignore.

Grr.

Just had a user call to ask if I could go down to her desk to see if she left her coffee warmer on.

A funny thing happened at work today. But first a disclaimer, its geek. There are two kinds of computer mice nowadays that being the optical and the regular. The regular ones are the ones that have been around forever that have a ball in them and that always get gummed up and need cleaning. So to the story. On my last corporate purchase I had like 5 optical mice on the list and as always they were brought to my desk. Upon their arrival my manager pokes his nose into the box and says, " Optical mice? Aren't those more expensive? Why did you get these?" To which my immediate reply was, "Cause I don't get paid enough to go around once a year and clean people's balls"

I think he learnt his lesson.

Please folks, learn from me.... NEVER SELL a COMPUTER TO A FRIEND, OR FAMILY!!!! ... They will expect you to fix it, to maintain it, and if anything goes wrong, you'll hear about it.

I was doing some work on a computer that I sold to a friend of mine's dad.

Problem 1: It was an AMD K6-2/500, 256 mb mem, and A 32 mb SiS video card. 10 gig.. total hd space.

Problem 2: He wanted XP.

Ok.. So, this is month 1, we've made it this far...

Now, Suddenly I begin getting calls, "Ummmmm. JERMY??"... My Name's Jim, he calls me Jimmy. However, you can see from how I type, how he sounds... "The XP is starting to run slow. Can you come over and ... *gross noise*... fix the xp?"

Please feel for me... please feel.

Ok.. So I ignore that call.. I don't want to deal with him right now.. I'm having a bad week.

"The XP dosent load up now jermy, can *gross noise* you come and firrx it?"

Ok, again I ignore.

"Jermy.. GERMY, I would like to know why the xp is slow, and didnt work yesterday."

Finally, after getting 3 calls that day, I go.

I explain why xp gets slow, and I cant figure out why it didnt work a few days ago..

"Well... Can you install the ME? on this computer?"

...... I told him I had to get home.

Please send me mail, or other assorted gift baskets.

Yahoo: Computerdude10

AIM: Jvman23

E-Mail: Computerdude10@yahoo.com

He Lives near me.... He Knows my number. He KNOWS where I live... HE IS THE ANNOYING USER!!!!!!

Well :) I just had to share my hell!

I've been working for about five years building and fixing computers.

One of yhe most hair-ripping problems I've had was like this:

One day a guy comes with his computer, complaining that there was no text in M$ Word, Notepad, a.s.o.

At first I suspected the video board. It was a Trio 3D/2X with some lousy memory chips that gave up living after several months. So I went through wbout three boards and several driver versions.

After about a half an hour, brosing in Desktop settings, it hit me: window text -> white on white. f%#k

And his only reply was: Well I have a little boy that sometimes plays with the computer.

I work in a UK secondary school - that's kids between 11 and 18 - unfortunately not all, hell, hardly any of them are that bright.

Student comes into the office and pesters me because she closed Word and can't find the coursework document she was working on to edit for resubmission. Can I recover it for her?

Figuring she's deleted it from her work area, or moved it someplace else with an accidental "click-drag-oops" moment, I fire up Explorer and head into the Student file space.

Nope. Can't see the file. It looks like it has gone.

So I reach for last nights backup tapes which I've just changed. "What's the file called? I'll have to restore it off the tape"

She tells me, and I search for it on the tape. Time passes. Nope. Not a sausage in either her personal work area or the tutor group shared area. On the tape or the physical drive.

"Are you sure you called it that when you saved it?"

"Oh I didn't save it" She replies somewhat brightly, oblivious to my head hitting the console desk in frustration. "Can you still recover it?"

For the love of Pete - these people are our future!