Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I was setting up a dialup connection for this lady,

Me "In the phone number, enter in 0867..."

Lady "Big zero or small zero?"

Me "umm there's only one zero"

Lady "What's the difference?"

Me "....."

Obviously she had major problems with the @ symbol and pretty much everything else to do with typing.

Fun times!

Normally I don't correct customers who slaughter brand names, but...

Customer: Hi, I'm looking for an ANUS motherboard? An ANUS model K--

Me: *choke* Uh, sir? Do you mean ASUS?

Customer: ......oh. Heh. Yeah.

If I'd had to hear this guy ask about the Asshole Motherboard one more time, I would have lost it.

I work at .com customer service for a large retail store. I am a tech by trade and have various certifications including my A+ and various Microsoft certs. I lost my job at a small tech firm when it went out of business, and needed a job to meet ends fast, so here I am. When a tech job opened up I was encouraged to apply so I did. I thought the interview went great when anytime they asked if I knew a system, I said yes. When I found out 2 other men got the job, 2 other men mind you who don t know what safe mode is, I was a bit sadden. Today I walked in to work past the man that was hiring me, the guy who was supposed to be able to judge the ability of the applicants he was having trouble with his computer, I walked over to him and asked him what was wrong. He told me he did ever thing he knew but just couldn t make it work, nothing would come one the screen. I took one look at it, and plugged in the monitor cable. Promptly the login screen appeared.

M:ME

C:Caller

M: Who is your Internet service provider?

C: My father

M: LOL!

A few months ago I finished installing several network printers on several floors in my building. Now that a bit of time has passed since the install, and I've had the chance to iron out the usual new hardware problems.... one would think that everything is functional, right? Wrong!

Frequently, some random person in the hallway will stop me and say "Hey, this guy I know says he can't print" or my boss will tell me that "a bunch of grad students are having issues". Naturally, the specifics of the person having the problem (name, telephone #, room #) are almost never mentioned, and the nature of the problem never is- its always "the printer must be broken". I can see the status of every printer in realtime from my office. They don't break. Unlike the pathetic Pentium 2s and 3s having heart attacks trying to run XP that get foisted off onto grad students. Come to think of it, thats another thing I hate to fix.

Well, I got sick of trying to track down all the anonymous people and vague rumors, and told my boss and everyone else this: I am not going to help anyone with a printer problem unless they email me directly. So given that there has been so much user whining about the printers, how many emails did I get last month? Zero. Zip. Nada. Either there are no real people with real problems, or the users are too spineless or embarassed to admit to needing technical problems.

I support ***** LCD monitors, notebooks, and other business equipment (SOHO copiers, organizers, projectors etc.)

I had a caller state her email is not working.

I begin by finding her model number to possibly pull up

her case file (required for all product calls).

She cannot find a model number for me. So I ask what

brand the PC is. She says "Oh, it's a HP." And you have a ***** monitor? "Yes." Are you having any problems with your monitor? "No." I would then recommend to contact your ISP or HP Tech support. Thank you for calling *****.

I heard something said in annoyance and the caller disconnected.

This all started when service pack 2 for windows xp came out. I was over at my friend s house and I had already updated my computer, and it ran fine, so I thought we should update his. So we downloaded and installed the update, but as soon as it installed, none of his programs would run, explorer would crash and his cd drives would open and close on their own. So, we logged on to another computer and found tech support for SP2. By this time it was 2AM, and they were open until 3. So we call him up, we get right through, and the guy starts walking us through the basic steps to fixing the problem. f course, this idiot didn t know what he was talking about, so he kept telling us to open this and that and change this and that, he somehow came to the conclusion that the registry was screwed up and that all of the data on the hard drive was erased and that we should call back tomorrow because he didn t know what to do next. We try messing with it some more, and by following his steps managed to make things worse and the computer wouldn t boot. at all. So when this first started, all of the hard drive was fine, but after he walked us through the steps, the hard drive was wiped, he was such a bonehead. We called again; well apparently he is the only SP2 support at 2:30AM. We were talking to him again telling him what had happened, and he just said I don t know. So we asked to speak to a knowledgeable tech support man, and that we and help, and he replied by saying this: "sorry, but people in hell need ice water, and I want to go to sleep, so call back later", and all we heard was a click, and then the phone died. We filed a complaint, and the head tech supervisor at Microsoft called us and said that he acted inappropriately and they fired him. He actually got $100 of Microsoft product credit, and got a hard drive for free. So bad tech support isn t always that bad, if you know what I mean.

We've all had them. The ones who insist on telling you "I'm a tech/consultant/engineer/holder of various certificatons that have nothing to do with hardware" the minute you pick up the phone.

If you're one of these people, and you're wondering why tech support doesn't always give you the bowing and scraping you believe you deserve when you impart this knowledge to them, here's why:

(the following is a transcript of a live chat support session, names changed to protect the stupid)

Me: Would you please try swapping the DC connector that goes into the CD-ROM drive with a different one?

Dummy: i did not try that yet. the only other nearby available power adaptor seems to come from the same "branch" as the current one so i didn't think it would help.

Me:

Try that anyway, please.

Dummy: ok. hang on. I'm currently typing from that machine. What should i do if it disconnects/shutsdown for some reason? as far as getting back in touch with you?

(insert several minutes of stunned non-response)

Me: Please don't attempt this with the machine powered on.

Dummy: Oh, ok.

This company pays him. To almost ruin their machines, until stopped by someone who knows what electricity is. He probably makes four times what I do.

I'm in the wrong business.

I needed to call my credit card company to report a misplaced card. The company had installed a "voice recognition" system. Every time I spoke my choice, the system responded with "I don't understand," or "I think you said <wrong option>." The only word it seemed to recognize was "no." After my tenth failed attempt, I finally lost it and said "Let me talk to a human being you f*****g machine!" The system responded with "Dialing the operator." Everything went smoothly with the human being. My thanks go out to the designer of the "profanity recognition system."

My new wife tells me of her grandma who after getting a computer wanted to look up the nearest "Dicks Sporting Store". She went to a well known search engine to find the location of the nearest store. The search term she used was "dicks".

Apparently she was suprised at the results.

Back in high school, during 8th grade (15, 16 years old), my parents

had a cable i-net connection from ***cast. (The cable people, you know.)

We had an old Linksys router connected to 2 computers and a laptop. My parents

weren't home yet, and there was an internet connection problem.

I checked, it wasn't the router, everything was fine. I disconnected the computer

from the router, plugged it directly into the cable modem. No go. I finally gave up

and called tech support. It went like this:

(T= tech, M= me as a highschooler)

T: Welcome to ***cast support, I am Bob. (blah blah blah)

M: Yes, my internet connection isn't working.

T: What is your phone number?

M: xxx-xxx-xxxx

T: Wait a second... are your parents home?

M: No, why?

T: Please call back later

*almost hung up*

M: Why??

T: This is too technical.

M: (thinking, WTF?. Excuse me?

T: This is too technical for you. Please get your parents to call

Now in shock by his blunt rudeness, I say...

M: If you say this is "too technical", answer this: "What is DNS?"

T: *silence*

M: Quick explination about DHCP.

My parents come in the door. I tell them what happened, they burst out laughing. I'm known as a techie

in my family, so... My dad gets on the phone, talks to the "tech" support, speak to the supervisor. Turns out

they're redoing their cable in our area. One of the lines was damaged by our recent snowstorm

As one (out of a bunch in my school) geek, I was very excited to hear about my High School's

"tech fest". As a technology lover, I just had to go, and guess what? I could skip 3 periods of school!

Wahoo! The announcement said "If you have a laptop/PDA/iPod/cellphone" bring it to school. This made a lot

of students (including me) happy. Those were normally banned from school. So, the day rolls around, I bring my

laptop (A Dell Latitude), and arrive in the auditorium. A guy from the school district, and a local tech company

(employed by my laptop's maker) gave a speech. We had 30 minutes at the end, and we were all invited to go try out some

new computer and use our laptops...

I ended up doing some schoolwork, and when I was done, I was about to ssh a copy to my home comp, but...

my comp. sci teacher yelled something to the effect of "OMG HAXORZ!" to me. She thought I was hacking into

the school network. One: I had no access whatsoever. Two: This was my *home* laptop.

How do these people stay in their jobs.

We just migrated our mail server so there where some accounts that needed to be re-configured...One of these user called me and told me that she had configurating her Outl**k.

So I send her a neatly done manual (that somebody else took the time to make) with pictures and detailed explanation on how to do it.

A few hours later the same user called again making a fuzz and telling us that maybe there was something wrong with our server because she followed the instructions step by step and still she had problems, so I had the server checked just in case (and everything was ok).

So I had to take a cab to her house to check what was wrong.

The configuration was like follows:

pop server: mail.yourdomain.com

username: yourusername

And I'm guessing she typed "yourpassword" in the password field.

I had to bit my tongue hard so I didn't laugh.

When I told her about this error, she said : "But, that is what the manual says"

--I know that some people usually don't follow directions correctly, but what to do when they actually follow them?--

Next time a customer calls in about a broken cup holder, tell them you'll gladly replace it with this fully functional beauty:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SIL-CIGCUP-BAY

I received the following request from a customer via email. It pretty much speaks for itself....

"What can you tell me about the German Bible that has a skeleton key in it??

You ask the key a question and it turns one way for yes and the other way for no.

I cannot find any info on the internet about this and it does exist.

I heard that there are only two of these in the world and the legend goes that if these two keys come together that you could rule the world.

Thank you for your assistance."

Since when do Help Desk personnel facilitate customer plans for world domination?

I bought a Sony digital camera, and a 256MB Memory Stick to go with it. (This holds ~150 photos at medium quality).

Since the obvious advantage of the digital camera is that photos are virtually endless, I started taking photos of pretty much everything.

That was until someone asked me why I wasn't running out of film.

Even after explaining the concept of memory devices, computers and USB connections, the person would not get it.

He apparently thought it was some sort of "magic"!

For about a year I was doing tech support at a big research facility with about 300 NT workstations. Part of it was a psychiatric clinic with 100 beds, many doctors and research groups, so there was a good amount of receptionists, assistants and other people who were absolutely clueless about computers in general but at least knew their way around the programs they were supposed to use. (It was back then that I learned an important lesson: If somebody complains he can't login, the first thing to do is to make sure caps lock is turned off :)

I received a call from an elderly accountant telling me her monitor was broken. On my way to her office I ran into one of the sysadmins. He told me not to bother to go there but to just replace the monitor. (People often accidently called the network guys when having hardware problems.)

Since he was coming from the direction of her office, I naturally assumed he had been there to take a look. (Turned out he wasn't.) I went straight back to the storage, put a spare monitor on one of the wheel carts we're supposed to use and went through half the building to the elevator, up to ground level and way back to her office.

Her system was off, so I replaced the monitor, turned both on and took the old monitor back the same route to the storage.

I had just stepped through the door of my office when the telephone rang again.

She actually told me the brand new monitor was broken, too!

I went back there only to find out that the old monitor hadn't been bad at all, it had just been showing the blue memory dump screen WinNT displayed because some system files were screwed up.

ARG!

When my boss found out about it, he made me give her back the old monitor, of course involving me rolling it again through half the huge building...