Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

As an internet tech support phone rep, you talk to all sorts of people ... sometimes twice in a day ...

This elderly lady calls in one day, nice enough and all that. She had moved her modem, router and pc to a new room and can't connect. So I look at the modem and it's online, but no router cpe assigned, So we check the connections and cycle the router, same thing occurs.

We check the ports on the router and discover she has the enet from the modem into port 2 on the router, so I explain why that won't work, and that we need to plug that cable into the internet port on that router. She informs me that for 2 years it has been this way and worked fine. Sigh.

Ten minutes later, she finally agrees to try. And magically, it works. So instead of her saying thank you and carrying on with her day, she proceeds to tell me that this is not correctly hooked up, her husband is a network tech apparently so she was going to put it back to where she thought he had it previously for two years. So I voice my opinion but she lays down the phone and does the deed.

She comes back on and complains that it isn't working again. Sigh.

So I again explain why that cable needs to be in that port and she flat out says that I am lying and hangs up on me, calling me all sorts of wonderful names - got to love the job :)

Roughly 2 hours later she calls back in and lucky me, I get her again. She stated that she cannot connect, and that the last tech had her do all sorts of things to the computer and that he had broken it. Sigh.

So we again go through the router speech, she interrupts me and says "my husband is home, talk to him and he will show you how to fix it"

So he comes on and asks what's going on cause she's just ranting in the background. I explain to him what the issue was, and he says "oh" and swaps the enet cable and voila, internet online. She screamed out something and jumped back on the phone, saying we we're all inept, my husband can do your job, you're useless etc ..

He grabs the phone back and asks me to hold, and then tells his wife that she had it plugged in wrong, and that we were doing the right thing to get it working. He comes back on and apologizes, to which I say it isn't necessary.

You can hear his wife ranting more in the background, complaining that she will never call again because her husband thinks she's stupid! LOL

At least the ending was good.

While working for Charter Communications doing Tech Support for thier high speed internet, we would sometimes take overflow calls from cable tv support.

Me: (script) how may I help you?

Cust: You guys messed up my screen!

Me: I'm sorry? Whats going on with the tv screen?

Cust: It's all messed up, fix it now!

Me: Well sure, i just need you to be a little more detailed in whats happening with the tv screen, is it all dark? snowy? staticy?

Cust: Yeah its messed up, its broken

Me: Oh ok, well I see you have a cable box, is this tv hooked up to it?

Cust: Send a tech out, its broken. I want to get credit for a month for this B***S***

Me: Hmm, well I have to try to fix it before sending a tech, do me a favor and can you get your TV remote and turn the tv to channel 3.

The cust then mumbles and I hear searching noises, etc

Then I hear the phone making the 'beeps' when you dial numbers

Cust: Yeah it wont change the tv, you guys broke it

Me: Sir, the telephone is not a remote control, please walk up to your TV and turn it to channel 3.

The customer then gets an attitude and does/says everything he can to get a tech out. It turned into a sup call and the sup told him we would not send out a tech unless he tried to turn his tv to channel 3. After a while the ignorant cust did end up changing the channel to the correct one on his TV then tells my manager, "Oh I fixed it, you guys are worthless, go get real jobs" Then hangs up.

Classic.

I am a security consultant, but I often get grabbed by people as I walk by for help. I'm usually pretty easy going about it, but they don't always make my job easy.

One day I was walking the cube farm when a lady who had just gotten upgraded to XP grabbed my arm.

Her: You're a tech guy right? I haven't had sound since the upgrade.

Well, I sat down at her desk and as soon as I clicked on a menu I heard the familiar "click" sound from the speakers, so she had sound.

Me: Well, it seems like your sound is working. What were you trying to do when it wasn't working.

Her: Well go to my bookmarks and go to the (radio station) website.

Me: Um, are you going to (radio statio) website for business purposes?

Her: Well, I get bad reception at my desk so, it's the only way I can listen to them.

Me: Ah, well we don't allow streaming audio. I don't know how you got around it before, but that's why it's not working now.

Her: I don't think you understand, I can't listen to my radio station!

Me: That's correct.

And then I walked away. She was very perplexed and called the help desk, who reported her to her manager.

This is the same lady who had gotten upgrade because her network speed was so slow. I wonder why?

A few weeks ago a client asked me to help her install a font. Not a big deal, should only take 5 minutes or so.

So i have her show me where the file she downloaded was. Apparently she had renamed the font file after she downloaded it. So the name of the file did not match the name of the purchased font. That doesn't stop us from installing it though. So i installed it and opened up word, then i stepped back and motioned for her to use the computer to make sure the font she wanted activated properly.

She sat down and gave me that blank look. and asked me how. our conversation follows.

Me: just open up the drop down list and see if your font is listed along with all the others.

Her: Which one is it?

Me: I'm not sure, what was it called

Her: I don't remember what its called, thats why your here.

Me: Well Im sorry but i don't know what its called.

Her: But your the computer guy, your supposed to know these things

Me: But you bought the font...I don't know which one you decided to buy...i wasn't even here.

Her: ...

Me: ... ... Do you still have the receipt or the order confirmation?

she did and was able to confirm what font she purchased from that, and we verified that it was working fine.

I just love when people expect me to magically have information about what they have done just because its on the computer. hey after all, im the "Computer guy" right?

This happened about 9 years ago. I was working as an on-site contractor for a certain government department. While I was working there, the director had allowed me to park my car in their flex parking stall. (The office was in the downtonw area, and this saved them the charges of paying for me to get a daily stall).

On senior manager decided he didn't like the idea of me parking there (he had previously been using the stall since it was closer to the door than his assigned stall). He complained to the director and as a result I lost the use of the stall. (This is part one of the Karma).

The next week (literally 2 days after I was kicked out of the stall) I installed a mjor upgrade to the application I was working on. Everything goes fine until this manager comes in.

He proceeds to rant and rave at me - in front of the entire office - challenging me as to why I locked specifically him out of the application. No one else had any problem using the new version - just him. Given that I was also on-site tech support for the application, I went to check the problem.

I immediately recognized the problem as soon as I saw his keyboard. I loudly pointed out to him that he would have no problem logging in if he simply turned off caps lock...

I had no further problems from him - especially after his closed door discussion with the director. :-)

Karma can be a sweet thing :-)

I recieved a call from a concerned subscriber today (minutes ago, in fact) in which he couldn't get passed his content filter for getting on the internet.

I asked him what had changed and he relagated this story to me:

"My little dog of 17 years, I know you don't know him but he was a great dog, is no longer with me. I used his name as my password, I know you don't know his name, young man, but since he died I need you to change the password on the content filter since it won't work anymore now."

"Ok, Sir, please navigate to Tools --> Internet Options --> Content --> and click on "Disable"."

"Its asking me for a password."

"Yes Sir, please put in your dog's name there."

"But my dog is dead. The password won't work anymore!"

I was finally able to convince him to try it and of course it worked... but I had to share.

I do computer tech work for an ISP, I had a Customer who told me she read through the 'windows for dummys" book multiple times. She took a bright yellow highliter to it and highlited everything she didnt understand and sent it back.

Today I came back from lunch to discover that a user had taken it upon himself to post three (3) full-color notices at each desk with the administrative login and password in bold, 28-point text. This was because the users were having trouble remembering the blanket admin password, which is extremely simple.

This user was bewildered as to why I removed the signs. I asked him what the point of having a password was if you were going to paste it on the wall. His response: "Well, because it makes you put in a password." Head -> desk