Tales From Technical Support Content
I work in the support department for a large company in Georgia. Being a tech for over 15 years now i always thought that I had seen and hear it all until recently. I had a temporary contractor (I will call him Bill) that had been given a rented laptop to use while he was on a 6 month contract assignment. At the end of his term the company decided to bring him on full time and provide him with a standard 'Mell' notebook like all full time employee's. I pulled all his data off the old system and created his profile (etc) on the new one.
I then met with 'Bill' to give him a tour of his new notebook since they were different brands and models. After I gave him the standard spiel showing him the accessories, bag, ports etc i booted the notebook up to get him logged in. While we were waiting, just to make some small talk, I told him that he had a "60GB hard drive, but dont put to many files on it or it will be too heavy to carry through the airport". He looked up at me, very seriously, and replied "Ohhh...OK". I was flustered by this incredible lack of intelligence but carried on with getting him setup and even managed to not laugh and call him stupid (at least to his face).
A few days later he came down the hall to my office. He was holding the second battery that we provide with new Mell notebooks. He proceeded to tell me that the the "battery wouldn't charge". Since I had a few of this series have a similar problem I went to take a look at his notebook. We get there and he inserts the second battery, opens the battery meter, and says "see, it just says discharging". I looked around at the back of the notebook to see NO A/C adapter plugged in. When I mentioned that it wouldn't charge without power he said "no...it charges fine when I plug it in. But when its not plugged in and one battery has a full charge, it wont charge the other battery".
I could no longer keep a straight face in light of this revelation on his part. I asked him if he owned a flashlight to which he replied (a little puzzled) "yeah, I have one...". So I asked him 'if he were to put one good battery and one dead battery in the flashlight, would the good one charge the bad one?' To which he replied "Ohhh...so these work like batteries..."
As my mother is always so eager to have news from me on Messenger, I bought a microphone so I wouldn't have to let her wait for my replies. I'm quite a fast typist (Heh, that's my job), but that wasn't enough for her. Mothers... Anyway, I got it plugged in, talked to her, everything was going fine, it wasn't the first time I was using a mic.
And here I am, waiting for her reply after I said hello.
Me: Uh, hello? Can you hear me?
**nothing shows on scrren, she's not typing**
Me: Mommy? Hello?
**nothing**
Me: Uh... you know I can't hear you, do you? You don't have a microphone.
Mother: Oh, I was yelling in the speakers, wondering why you couldn't hear me. I was angry, I thought you had your speakers turned off.
My bad. Never assume one knows anything about computers. They usually don't have a clue, nevermind their IQ or education.
User calls up and says her delete key is sticky and always has been since she got the machine. She has the laptop, so the thought that runs through my head is she spilled something on it and mucked up the keyboard. Of course the warranty ran out several months ago. If it really is a manufacturing defect, I m going to be ticked off that it wasn t brought to my attention earlier.
I grab a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a few Q tips and head on down. She demonstrates the problem for me by pulling up Word and typing in a little sentence. Then she hits the delete key and nothing happens. Only She s at the end of the sentence. Backspace works to the left of the cursor and delete works to the right. Being at the end of the sentence, there is nothing to the right of the cursor!
I point this out to her and go on my merry way. Normally I only have one shaker of martinis in an evening, but tonight I think I need two. Either that or they have to be a LOT stronger.
I work as one of the few tech people at a place and handle all things computer related.
User hits me up last night to see if I know anything about the stapler in the copy room. It s a larger than normal stapler and can punch through 30 pages at a time. And it s out of staples. He tells me he had been through all the boxes of staples in the room and none of them will fit this particular stapler. Sure enough, there are 7 boxes, all the same and all for a regular stapler. Except this eighth box right next to them that has these larger than normal staples... Could this be what you re looking for?
He originally hit me up because you seem adept at all things technical. It s a *(&#$^ stapler, for god's sake! How hard is it to look at a couple of boxes while singing to yourself "one of these things is not like the others..."
One of the managers is hovering in the hallway outside our office, holding an ice pack to her face and sporting a very sore mouth as she had just got back from the dentist. We all make sympathetic noises and say "Gee, you should just go home." If I was in that much pain I wouldn t stick around work for two minutes! Well, she fully intended to go home, but first she had to make some copies and she had never used the new copier, so she was waiting for one of her employees to come in so he could copy the documents for her. We've only had the copier for six months, so it's not that new anymore. And never mind that there are instructions all over the copy room on how to enter your code and use the machine's basic features.
The boss took pitty on her and made the copies so she could get out the door.
As I am the one in my family with the most sense of computers, I often get asked to help do or fix things.
One thing that I find a bit awkward, is that I see stories about 'right-clicking' being mis-interpreted on a regular basis. People writing 'click' on their monitors and such.
Also, if someone is left-handed and has set up their mouse accordingly, would actually have to left-click instead.
That's why I have adopted the use of 'wrong-clicking'. You will often hear me say: "Now, click this or that icon with the wrong mouse-button". Strangely enough, everybody I've met so far has understood me immediately, even though I may have had to endure an odd face or two... ;)
I just got an e-mail from a user who listed his e-mail address as "www.hisusername@aol.com"
Not that I'm really surprised.
