Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Hello World!

So, my friend wanted to put his photo in his MSN Messenger avatar and in his Orkut profile.

But he doesn't have a scanner (neither do I).

So he tried to scan ... by putting the photo under his optical mouse! ("it is a Laser, so it will scan", said him).

I just thank heavens that he didn't try to scan using his printer!

Back in the mid-late 90's, working for a large Telco, we were rolling out a GIS system for dispatch and repair. The users were idiots...union fat asses more concerned with filing grievances for making them getting up off their fat asses to do their jobs as opposed to being concerned w/actually doing their jobs/being fat asses.

Flew down from Bham to New Orleans to install software, test, and stay on site for a couple of days for questions. Unfortunately, the two days were spent answering questions about how to use a mouse, not how to use the application. We actually had some bullshit software we'd paid for to teach these ppl how to use a mouse...one of those puzzles where u move the 8 chicklet size pieces around until it makes a picture in the 9 chicklet size board...except this was to teach them how to drag and drop.

Not only could they not figure out how to drag and drop, they couldn't fathom how to use a mouse. They were holding it up in the air and using it as though they were trying to cast a spell on their monitor...even muttering things like 'Come on God dammit' and 'Jeezus, why won't the "porter (aka, pointer)" move!' And to top it all off, the puzzle they were trying to arrange (although they never knew it because b4 they completed the exercise, they had either a) spit on their mouse and pronounced it the spawn of satan or b) mistaken it for a vibrator, put it to thir vagina, and started yelling 'come on bubba/earl/red/squirrel (insert red neck, new orleans name here)', punch the gas...the car battery ain't given me enuf juice!'.

Anyhoo, MOST of the previous paragraph is made up :^), but the truth is after we left we got a frantic call from one of the fat cajun cows telling us we had a big problem. That the compooter applicashun we put on her pooter didn't work. The X's and squares and minuses she had lurned last week weren't working any more. Not only that, they weren't even showing up on her screen anymore...if she moved here mouse up to where they used to be, well, they just weren't there anymore. We were using an XMotif toolset (ARC/INFO) on an IBM workstation so we weren't quite sure exactly HOW we could make the window manager suddenly dissappear. Tried to recreate in the "lab" (side note, I joined this group just as the most anal guy of the group had done a 'rm *' from root without confirmation turned on...nobody seemed upset...I knew I had just died and gone to heaven.) We couldn't recreate, so on the next trip down there in a month's time or so (like I said, I loved this job...user out of commission for a month and nobody gives a shit) and we checked her installation. Turns out she has a bumper sticker (can't remember what it said but wish I could...I remember it being priceless...something as funny as 'Fight Illiteracy Now' or a WWF sticker or such) taped so that it covered the top 3 inches of her moniter. Removed the bumper sticker and, viola, I got to mark an application bug 'Fixed'.

Still can't figure out if she was that dumb (my guess) or she was that smart (got out of a month's worth of work on a new compooter system she didn't want to learn.)

We've all heard of the BSOD (blue screen of death) but I got a user with the black screen of death.

"Hello sir, I've got the black screen of death. All the lights are on but there's nothing on my monitor."

I asked if he had received any error message before this and he said: "No but from time to time there is a check signal message that asks me to check the connections"

one of the things i learned as a tech is this Jesus Christ lives in Santamonica CA, and he can't opperate a computer.(THIS IS NOT A JOKE, the customer really changed his name to Jesus Christ)

T=me

jc=you guessed it

T- thank you for calling ---- tech support, may i have your dsl telephone number please?

jc- ---/----

T- is this Mr Christ? (keep in mind i'm trying not to laugh my ass off)

jc- yeah, just call me Jesus." well, Jesus go's on to tell me that his dsl had been running slow for the past 3-4 days.

T-alright Jesus,(still trying not to laugh) lets go to infospeed.-------.net" we ran the speed test, and his test was fine, so we checked out a few things on the holy ones pc. turns out he had tried to install more memory into his tower, and in doing so had knocked the other stick that was there loose. I told the son of god to call the geek squad and have a nice day, to wich he actually replied:

jc-I bless you my son." i stayed in wrap fro about ten minutes laughing myself out of my chair.

I do internet tech support for one of the more dominant ISP's in Canada. Most of my calls are pretty basic stuff-- setting up broadband connections and resetting passwords or whatnot. But every now and again we get those who are completely clueless-- the infamous "rightclick? leftclick? doubleclick-ers", or those who are trying to weasel some non-supported support out of us... or a cross between the two...? I can't figure this one out.

Her: Hi! So, I came home from work today, and noticed that my mouse has turned red, which I thought was a bit odd (?!?), but I ignored it. So tonight I sat down to check my email, and turned on the power. I have a Dell, by the way. And nothing happened... So I turned on my monitor, and still nothing!

Me: Ma'am, do you have power in the rest of your house?

(I swear, I actually said that. Coming from anyone else, it may sound rude, but I have the smallest, sweetest voice ever, I couldn't possibly be interpreted as rude, even if I was trying to be).

Her: Yes.

Me: Okay. So you're going to have to see a tech.

(I realize I could've at least made sure it was PLUGGED IN, but I wasn't confident that this lady knew which cord was which, and I was off in 20 minutes, not 2 hours).

Her: You mean this has nothing to do with my internet service?

Me: No..... no, it certainly does not.

Was she serious? I *think* so.... Who knows?

ok maybe not strictly like most on the site, sinc there's no tech involved, just me and my own patent stupidity.

I had an SuSE Linux install, and I had just bought a new (second-hand) 20GB hard drive.

So I booted into Knoppix and copied the files from the old hard drive to the new one with cp -a /mnt/hdb1/* /mnt/hda5 or something

(Booting into Knoppix avoids problems with dev and proc)

Then I sorted Grub out with SuSE's own tools

Then I attempted to boot the system on the new disk.

The boot failed, with an error message, I forget what, but it put me into maintenence boot.

I spent several hours running fsck checks and rebuilding the tree (it was ReiserFS), and generally wondering what was going on. What was the problem?

FSTAB!

I hadn't updated it! (with the new mount points and so on)

I still cringe when I think of how shockingly long it took me to work that out.

A short time ago I was the Technical Support Manager for a Las Vegas based corporation. We supported all of the offices and franchise stores across the US and Canada.

One day, while my department was busy, I decided to take a few calls to try to lighten the work load.

When I took this on particular call, I really had no idea it would lead to such amusement.

One of our franchisees decided to call us up for help with her own home computer; the internet was being slow. I begin diagnosing the problem with the usual techniques and discover that the system isn't being assigned an IP Address from her ISP. I take her through some trouble shooting and I am continually getting baffled to as why I can't make this work. Now she can't even connect to the internet. After about 15 minutes of getting nowhere, and of her complaining about her phone bill, I ask her what type of connection she has. She says "Dial-Up". "And what are you using to talk to me?" "My home phone." she says.

While maintaining my composure, I politely ask her to hang up the phone and try connecting again. If she is able to connect and is still experiencing a slow connection, that is normal. I also recommended that she sign up for high-speed, the same connection that she uses in her store. Then, completely in shock, she said she had no idea that dial-up would be that much slower.

I feel sorry for the ISP Rep that had to deal with her afterwards.

I'm a sysadmin for a 70-workstation network with more than its fair share of not-so-bright users.

One day I get a call from "Lucy" saying that her "computer is acting funny." Considering that Lucy can barely turn on a computer, I decided against troubleshooting over the phone and just went over.

Me: What seems to be the trouble?

Lucy: Well it just started acting up! The mouse just stops moving for no reason. I've already rebooted it 3 times.

Me: Hmm.. well, what were you doing just before the problems started?

Lucy: Just normal stuff... registering patients and making appointments.

*Sure enough, the PC completely froze as I was clicking around. I reached down and pressed the power button only to feel moisture on my finger. I look down and see some sort of liquid dripping out of the front of the case!

Me: What's that?!

Lucy: Oh, I thought I cleaned all that up..

Me: Cleaned all What up?

Lucy: Oh, I spilled my iced tea on that box.

Yeah.. she neglected to mention that part. I then took the poor computer away and spent 2 solid hours soaking up and cleaning iced tea from out of the case. The lockups were due to the tea shorting out the front panel USB ports.

Some people should just use a pen and paper.

Right I'm a Fresher at Cambridge University, my girlfriend's at De Montfort, also Fresher.

OK so just recently I went over to my girlfriend's place, then she asked if I wanted to use the comp. I did, hoping to go online and then make sure her comp was OK, get AdAware etc.

She makes some remark like "and don't look at my files". Well that's _asking_ for me to look at her files, she should've kept it quiet.

So Windows XP (Home) boots, and when the GUI loads, I notice the taskbar is on the right, not the bottom like the default is.

I ask her about this and get a vague response that makes it clear it's not intended.

So I click-and-drag the taskbar to the bottom edge.

She's like "How did you do that!?" I tell her

Then "It's been like that [i.e. on the right] for about a year now and I haven't been able to fix it"

!

Well I was kind of shocked. Of course I didn't dare laugh in her face, that would've been mean.

I lock the taskbar.

Then she goes to make tea, and I try to connect. No luck, there're 4 connections listed, none work.

I look over her files. It seems to be all work files, no photos or suchlike she might have even been BOTHERED if I saw.

So when she comes back, I ask her "I can't connect, how do I"

She tells me it doesn't have the net.

---

Well I don't know who was more stupid here. Her for telling me not to look at her files, me for ignoring her, her for not knowing how to fix the taskbar, me for not considering that she might actually NOT have net access.

Just had the following conversation with a user:

User: My wireless driver won't install.

Me: Ok, which one are you trying to install? (the drivers disk for our company's systems lists a couple of different ones)

User: It says "Wireless Driver for all countries except US and Japan."

Me: ...You do realize you are IN the US, correct?

User: ...

Me: Install the one that says "Wireless Driver for US"

User: Oh, that works, thanks..

Honestly, how did that go into his brain and then out his mouth before he caught himself?!

Apparantly, figuring out what country he lived in was too much of a task...

First story.

I work for a small software company. I mostly do tech support for business (which means I usually speak with IT guys) but every once in awhile, I get a Ma and Pa business. A customer calls and tells me his problem. I determine he needs to uninstall and reinstall his program. He asks me to walk him through it. As I'm walking him through the steps to uninstall the program, he asks, "Should I put the CD back in so all the files go back to the CD?"

Second story.

I had a woman who needed to install a patch. Unfortunately her machine wasn't connected to the internet. I asked her if she had any machines in her office with internet access, to which she said yes. I asked if she had a flopp drive (not many PC's come with them these days). She yells at me, "IT'S NOT A FLOPPY, ITS A LAPTOP!"

I had just gotten Network+ certified and hired on with a local tech company. Most of my job was fixing PCs that were brought in, but I was training to be a network tech. My second week at work I get my first network call. A local food business had lost Internet access and their LAN wasn't working either. There had been a storm the night before, so it was possible their equipment had been fried.

I drove to their location and asked the woman in charge of the shift what had happened. "We just came in this morning and nothing worked," she told me with a straight face.

So she showed me to the telco closet and left. They had a DSL router and two hubs with about 10 network cables branching out to the offices. I checked the DSL router, it had power but no sync. The hubs were powered on as well, but I noticed that some of the ports with cables plugged in had no link lights. Hmm.

A quick check revealed that a cable coming from one of the hubs was plugged right back into the hub! Then I tried tracing the DSL phone wire from where it came into the closet. It went straight into the hub! They had put the RJ-11 plug into the RJ-45 socket...

So I plugged the DSL line back into the router, reset it and rewired the hubs correctly. Lo, and behold! It worked just fine.

It looked to me like the storm had caused the DSL router to crash; when the geniuses had come in and had discovered their Internet access was down, rather than reset the DSL, they decided to creatively rewire it. Before I left, I took the shift supervisor aside and reported that someone had messed with the cables. She swore that she didn't know how that could have happened. I suspected that she was the guilty party, so I demonstrated to her how to reset the DSL router in case it happened again.

I've read dumb stories like this before, but you really have to experience it to understand the depths of ID10CY that some people strive to reach!

People from management in my company, not all who are from IT were discussing which company to choose for the new set of laptops that were to be used for the next few years. We have had IBM laptops for some time. One person was vehement in his opposition of Dell. He was saying that he has Dell at home and felt that it was very flashy and that he hates all those blue icons and the number of buttons that pop up him as soon as he presses START, and so he wants to go with IBM.

Well, the IBM laptops we had were on Windows 2000 and his home laptop was on XP.

hi,

I never thought i'll write any techtale but this one just happened:

me: do you have windows xp?

cust: (silence)

me: ok, can you click on start and then on programms? (wanted the cust to open ie)

cust: (after a while) i don't have windows xp here.

me:(sigh)

Hi,

I'm helping my dad (he's an engineer) over the phone to receive emails. After 10 minutes of guiding him through finding and recognising desktop icons for dial-up, e-mail client etc he finally receives emails, start reading them and he wants to add an e-mail address in the address book. He typed First and Last name (that darn caps can be really annoying to handle) and we moved to the email address.

Me: Ok, type name dot surname without special characters then monkey company dot com.

This is what he typed: name.drabisec@sum.com :-))

I love my dad :-)

P.S. I changed mentioned email. Sorry about grammar, english is not my native language.

Just had an email from a client. You've got to give them credit for persevering with typing it. It made me chuckle, and they sorted it themselves (they're good like that), but I thought I'd share it ....

"Hqve q proble, zith ,y keyboqrd: So,e letters hqve szqpped qbout:"

I'm the IT manager of a company and I don't normally do direct support, but I was alone in the department one day and this lady comes in...........

Just to clarify this, the lady is from a training contractor and she is teaching our staff the basics of computing in our training room facilities.

Anyway, she pops in and tells me one of the training room PCs has suddenly stopped working. Not my job, but what the hell. Not wanting to come across all high and mighty, I offer my services.......

I get to the training room and check the "dead" PC.

Drawing on all my years of IT experience and utilising all of the knowledge from my Masters degree, I deduce that someone has moved the monitor and the power lead has fallen out of the back of it.

I plug it back in and as if by magic, the computer rises from the grave.

Now, I've met lots of people who struggle with computers, but this from a qualified trainer teaching the basics of computing? Er, here's some useful basics for you, first check that it's plugged in................

One day a lady comes into the computer store that I am managing. She says her husband is cheating on her, because he has put a password on some of his accounts. I tell her there is always a backdoor.

So she hires me, to come to her house when her husband is not home and check it out for her. I arrive and procede to look at what her husband is blocking, and it appears to me he is locking his kids out to keep them from deleting his work files.

But, to finish it off for her, I show her every picture on her computer. Finally, I come accros a jpeg file of a woman laying on the bed, butt naked, with her legs spread wide open. I look at her, look at the picture and tell her they must of been having a wild night with the digital camera, BECAUSE, it was her.

Paid well, but no evidence found, so I told her about a key stroke recorder she could download.

I work for Dell technical support, and I like my job. It has its good days and bad days. Usually, since we primarily deal with large businesses and government, we tend to get "IT know-it-alls" that don't know how to plug up an ethernet cord, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, we get 200-year-old ladies that don't know why their "moh-dee-uhm" (desktop tower) does not work. Well... I believe that the strangest call that I have EVER received was that of a high school teacher that wanted to know how much LATEX was in our MOUSEPADS. And if it was a synthetic mix, what percent of the mix was latex.

Hell... I only troubleshoot computers... I don't mix the shit for the mousepads!

I was just now privy to this stunning example of human brilliance:

Me: All right, this is just going to load files here for a few minutes.

User: Ok, can I ask you a question while it does that?

Me: Sure!

User: Did you know if you block that vent on the bottom of the laptop, it gets quite hot after a while?

Me (stunned): ...yeah, you probably shouldn't do that. It needs to have proper ventilation.

User: Really?

Me: ...yes.

Apparantly the vent on the bottom of the computer is just for decoration.. nevermind that there's a mobile P4 processor in there gasping for air...

I do IT work for the government. One time I get a call from someone in our engineering branch. He told me he wanted to lay back and work on a paper on his laptop. So he said he took the laptop off of the docking station and was using it on his lap.

So he was apparently working on this paper for a while when all of a sudden he had the bright idea that he wanted to find out what everything was on his laptop. In his discoveries, he ended up taking out the battery. Yeah...he lost everything.

Apparently autosave had been turned off, so that was a legit problem, but it still doesn't explain the common sense issue. If a laptop has no power source, it's not going to turn on or stay on. He tried to blame us in the IT department but that didn't go very far.

Took me and my coworkers a lot of effort to keep a straight face while talking with him. I don't think he's going to experiment with his laptop anymore.

I work tech support right now, but it's for print servers and my customers are usually pretty savvy. One of my funniest memories actually comes from junior high school, during a compulsory dumb-ass computer skills class. We're all at ours computers "working," and I discover the Win Popup utility. I can send messages that will pop up on other people's computers. GENIUS! So I target a victim, and type "hello." I can see her from where I'm sitting, and she gets a little confused when my message pops up, but closes it and continues working. I send another one, asking "how's it going?" Same confused response. A while later she prints a document and goes to get it, stopping to talk to her friend on the way. When she gets back to her computer, she's shocked when a message pops up asking her if she had a good trip to the printer, how her friend is doing, and whether her document looks ok. At this point she's freaking and runs to the teacher to whine that her computer is talking to her! In junior high, this was the funniest thing I'd ever done.

Here's an actual log from a call I took just now:

Cust states that he has the network driver and it still does not work. After some extensive (and creative) questioning, I find that he has not, in fact, installed the driver, although he claims he has. He states that his sister put it on a CD for him and he put in the CD and "let it go." Knowing that this is a self-extracting file and the CD will have no auto-run feature because it's just a data CD, I try to convince him that this is impossible. He insists that this is how it happened. Eventually I got him into the folder on the CD where the file is stored (with some difficulty, as it appears someone has switched his left and right mouse buttons, and he is at a loss when I try to have him switch them back so I just decided to forget it), and run the self-extracting file.. at which point it asks for two floppy disks please, to extract onto. He doesn't have any floppies. Informed him at this point that he DEFINITELY had not installed the driver, then, and to please call us back when he has two floppies he can use to install the driver.

Why couldn't he have just told me "no, I didn't install anything" or "I don't know if I installed anything" instead of getting all argumentative? That would have saved me fifteen minutes of trying to figure out what he did.. ARGHHHHH!

I work at a decent sized electornics chain. I Had a customer who aparenlty was stuck in 1987. After I gave him my sales pitch involving a computer pakage, I reminded him that he was ready to go with using his CD Writer. He turns to his wife and says "I'll just take out the CD Writer so I can have room for my 5 1/4" floppy Drive"

I swear, if I'd been drinking anything at that time, it'd gone right out my nose!

I did it! I finally really did it!

Our local Luser-From-Hell is THAT GUY. You know the one. The "Honey, I want to talk to a technician, not a secretary. Would you put a man on?" guy. He's put his drink in his CD-ROM tray. He's deleted all the files he "doesn't ever use" that are in C:\WINDOWS. When his disk wouldn't go in upside down, he hit it with a hammer until it did. When it wouldn't come back out, he got a chisel. When he spilled coffee in his keyboard, he tried to dry it out in the microwave. Once I swear there was white-out on his monitor. Yeah, that guy. He's done it all.

So today, as always, I groaned on seeing his number in the caller ID window. But today, he started his rant with "Your #$*$@!& computer *&##@&$@@&#^$ sucks! And don't tell me I broke it, because I know &#@@*@!# everything there is to know about computers!"

I knew then what I had to say. I had to force myself to breathe evenly as I replied as cheerfully as I could (and believe me, I was feeling MIGHTY cheerful!) "Oh good! If you know everything about computers then you don't need MY help!" *click*.

Then I checked the queue. 86-minute wait. Sweeeeeeet.

I bet this woman's ISP is still scratching their collective head on this one (I work for the manufacturer of her computer).

She can't connect to a dialup ISP she just signed up for this morning. She gets dial tone, it dials out, gets past the handshake, and then errors out and drops the connection. Her ISP tells her there is something wrong with her modem without trying anything really (don't they always).

First thing, I have her run a diagnostic on the modem. All checks out fine, including the driver, but I still can't get her connected, even through hyperterminal. So I have her reinstall the modem driver, no dice. (I start to smell a rat when, as I have her dial, I can hear bits and pieces of the handshake process in my headset, as well as in the background, even though she promises she's on a different phone line and not the one used for the modem.)

After a bit, I ask her to try a different phone line, even though she swears this one is brand new. That's when the mouse apparantly wakes up from its nap and starts running on the little wheel in her brain, and she asks, "Does it matter that I'm not connected to a phone line?"

I think, I just heard this thing get a dial tone, dial out, get a handshake... wtf? "What do you mean?" I ask.

"This is Voice Over IP," she says.

Yep. She had the line going out from her modem into the RJ11 jack on her VOIP box, for the handset.

And she wouldn't believe me at all when I tried to explain why that couldn't possibly work, and why she needed an actual phone line.

What gets me is, if she had broadband the whole time, what was she trying to get a dialup account set up for?

I'm sure she's probably gone off to harass her ISP some more, and I also expect this won't be the last our company hears from her about this, either.

I was visiting my in-laws one day, and they had a friend over who had bought a PC a few years ago. He was complaining about how it's tricky to press the CAPS key whenever he wants capital letters - such as at the beginning of sentences. I calmly told him about the nifty little feature called the SHIFT key, and he said "oh, I have that on my typewriter. I saw that key on the computer, and you know, I wondered if that would work on the computer too."

Never did find out why he didn't just try it...

Recently, the phone company changed all the numbers in my city, so they started with '3'.

This was widely advertised on TV, radio, newspapers and on phone bills.

Yet, a luser (L) calls me (M):

L: - I CAN'T GET MY INTERNET TO DIAL! (yes, he said DIAL)

M: - What is the phone number you're using?

L: - 456-7890 (fake, you get the idea)

M: - Change this to 3456-7890.

L: - No, I don't need to do this.

M: - Yes, you need, the phone number has changed.

[...]

M: - So, try to dial again, and turn on the speakers this time.

(coming from the speakers)

"This phone number has changed. Please add a 3 before the number".

M: - See?

L: - O.K. Thanks.

Someone shoot me. I'm in hell.

I recently saw a programmer type "win" at the "MS-DOS" (YES, HE CALLED THE CONSOLE "MS-DOS") of a Linux workstation to start "the graphics mode".

When I told him that he should type 'startx' (this is the command on most distros), he started to blame me "I AM A PROGRAMMER, I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING".

I wish that I had created a shell script named 'win' that actually does 'rm -rf /'...

Hello,

2 ATM tales:

1.

While using an ATM from the biggest Brazilian bank, I was starting to get annoyed by the faint screen. Then I could barely see the words "insert card ..."

After checking, turns out the machine stayed almost 24x7x365 on the same screen, telling "insert card or press any key to begin". Thus, the screen was burnt!

The same happens at the "terminals" at the bank. Their LCD screens suffer from painful "burns" - the "screensaver" is a STATIC bank' logo.

By God! Have they never heard of screensavers? At least moving text would have done it.

2.

As I walked thru a store, I saw another ATM (from another bank) that was booting ... WINDOWS 95 ... on some SLOW hardware.

I wonder what happens Windows 95 gives a BSOD when you're using the ATM?

...

Just to show you the dimensions of the stupidity of software developers (and they develop complex software - Brazilian laws are extremely complex - that deal with YOUR MONEY).

At the risk of sounding like a bit of a heretic: I got burned out on IT as a career some years ago, and headed back into electronics (notably land/mobile radio, telecomm, and microwave systems). I currently work for my state's government as an engineering tech.

Since my current workplace is about 30 miles from home, I split my commute between driving (twice a week) and public transit (the bus, three times a week). Said buses are fairly comfortable, but they do have a feature that may confuse some riders. Specifically, instead of an overhead pull-cord to signal the driver for a stop, they have these bright-yellow 'TapeSwitch' devices mounted at intervals along the walls.

These are, essentially, nothing more than extra-large linear doorbell buttons. Applying pressure at any point along their length produces a contact closure, which triggers the 'Stop Request' chime and lighted sign. Mounted on the wall, just below each strip, is a very solid metal plaque, engraved with the legend 'PRESS TO SIGNAL' in large raised letters.

One afternoon, as I was riding home, I noticed a young lady trying to signal for her stop by pressing frantically on the engraved plaque. This, of course, accomplished nothing other than to put a nice dent in her thumb. I took pity on her, and gently pointed out the error. Watching the metaphorical light bulb come on over her head made the entire ride that day worth the effort...