Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

This was back in high school. I'd gotten a few people interested in programming, so the school threw together a programming elective. First, we had C programming, and now Java. I'll spare you the details of this -- suffice to say that when I actually added flat file support to one of our sample C programs (an address book -- kind of helps if it can have a persistent "database"), everyone thought I was a genius.

So, my expectations were not high, but this still caught me a bit by surprise.

It was the first day of our Java class, and no one (including the teacher) knew where the compiler was. We did know it was supposedly installed on these computers, so I started digging around in Program Files, looking for it. Our network admin, who had also been a fourth-grade teacher (I think), walked into the room while I was doing this.

His reaction was: "Stop. I don't care what you're doing, just stop." He was just short of "Step away from the computer!"

So, not wanting this to get physical, I stepped aside and let him do whatever it was he had to do to get us working. At the time, I wanted to laugh at how pathetically out of touch you have to be to think that browsing a hard drive with the Windows Explorer is "Hacking"... I mean, if that's enough to crack your security, you can't have very good security, right?

Right!

Turns out, as I found out quite a bit later, despite being an NT 4.0 machine on a reasonably secure NT domain (by this I mean, secure until you watch this admin accidentally type his password in the username field -- but that's another story!) ... anyway, while the permissions were fine on the network share (the one fileserver for the entire high school), they were a bit wrong on the local machine. Wrong as in, nonexistent. I think they were actually using NTFS, at least, but anyone logged into the machine, from the admin to a teacher to any student in the building, had write access to the entire hard drive, except maybe other users' profiles.

So, he was right to be paranoid, though I doubt he knew exactly why. One curious student deleting user.exe and that workstation is hosed! (Oh wait, that might be in use, but you get my point -- plenty of things to rip out, rename, or trample on...)

I mean, there are other stories -- about how we all started carrying USB keychain drives (flash dongles) to school, and the main restriction in their use was having runnable .exe's limited to a short whitelist, so everyone had five or six programs on that drive called "notepad.exe", usually things like portable VLC, or doom, or something. In fact, legacy Doom, not school, was the killer app for these things.

And that's not even getting started about our use of proxies -- just like any other school, I imagine, except the teachers taught us how, as there were entirely too many websites we needed to get to which were blocked.

However, some of those are kind of unavoidable. Give a smart kid a computer, he'll make Doom run on it... It's the "Hacking with Windows explorer" that's the truly forehead-slapping moment.

Alright, I know school budgets can be tight, but as far as I can tell, this guy doesn't do anything but admin anymore. He wasn't a bad guy, either -- once we got over my "hacking" attempt (which my classmates wouldn't let me live down), I was the one giving him support! So, while I don't really wish anything bad to happen to the guy, I do wish that if they're going to have a full-time admin anyway, make it a good one. Check local recommendations, buy him an "NT Domains for Dummies" book, even check for MSCE or A+ or SOMETHING...

Brilliant stories, mine is a nice simple one but makes it clear as to the quality of some level one call centre operators.

I had a problem with my broadband connection, with the ever glorious AOL, which I was told they were able to fix in the close time of 24 working days. After suggesting that this was a rather long time they agreed to kindly give me a dial-up connection which would work fine.

Proceeding with setting up the dial-up connection I was informed that the account was not working. So calling the call-centre and describing the situation their helpful advice was:

Them - ok I can understand your problem and I will do my best to sort this out for you. Now can you go to the following website ...

Me - ummmm.... not really

Them - I need you to go to this website in order to activate your login details

Me - But the problem is that I can t get connected to the internet

Them - o.k. I understand your problem (clearly not!) but I need you to go to this website

...........this went on for a while before I gave up. But not before asking if he could activate the account or if I could do this on another computer (both No), and was greeted to the somewhat inappropriate

Them - thank you for calling I hope we have been helpful and is there anything else you would like me to help with?

April 1st, predictably enough, brings out a number of bogus call-ins where I am currently positioned. No point in relating the calls themselves as they are the same ones that float from email to email tray and at least 8 contributors to this site are claiming as their own :-P

I have developed a good response though, that usually goes like this:

Me: Very droll sir*, probably would be funnier if it hadn't been circulating on the 'net longer than I have. I will of course be passing your name and address to the next genuine caller from your area you have kept in the call que all this time.

Joker: Oh Hell! No! You can't do that can you?!?

Me: Sadly, no I can't. But... APRIL FOOL!

;-D

* I haven't had a ma'am try this... yet.

I've been working in tech-support for a company that manufactures LCD TVs and monitors for almost a year now. Now, I understand that many people are intimidated by technology and therefore, do not have the best understanding of it. I've spoken to a lot of dumb people, but this one customer stands out as quite possibly the best call I've ever dealt with.

A gentleman, who will be refered to as Joe, called about a problem with his monitor. His complaint was that the monitor has a blurry image. I informed Joe that a blurry image is normally a result of having the screen resolution too low. Joe was running Windows XP, so I asked him to adjust the resolution by openning the Display Properties window and clicking on the settings tab. When he asked how to open the Display Properties window, I instructed him to right-click on the desktop then left click on properties. Here is how the conversation went:

Me: I'll just need you to right click on the desktop then left click on properties.

Joe: (long pause) There's no place to do that.

Me: Right-click on the center of the screen, not on any icons or anything.

Joe: (long pause) But there's no place to do that!

Me: On the center of the screen.

Joe: I can't do that there, there is no place to do that!

Me: Yeah, just in the center of the screen, right in the center!

The conversation went on like this for about 20 minutes and we were both very frustrated, but after a while, I understood that while I said "Right-click", Joe interpreted that as "Write click" so he was looking for a location on the screen to write the word "Click" on his screen.

Joe was actually a very nice man, and unfortunately was too embarrassed to continue on the call. Joe, if you happen to read this, it happens to the best of us...

Warning: This post does contain adult language included soley representing the facts as they happened. Basically, the user started cussing at me.

As a programmer, I was hoping my days of holding the hands of technically disabled people were over. It was not to be. At least there is some satisfaction in knowing that my job now needs me more then I need my job.

Me: Hello, Imaging Development, this is Troy.

User: I forgot how to scan a page and save it to the P drive.

Me: Have you already scanned the document?

User: Yes

Me: Ok, select T-Special Scan and just pick where you want to save it.

User: Ok, got it thanks.

Me: No problem. You have good day.

User: Wait, I have a question about