Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Not any one particular story, just a collection of observances. I have a unique mixture of German genetics and American culture to have the optimal mix of efficiency and laziness to let me find the quickest, easiest and most effective way possible to do things. Which is why the following kinds of things drive me nuts:

Sales people that hit F6 (Customer maintenance) and look up a bill-to name, then scroll through 20 pages of orders to find the number I gave them... Instead of hitting F5 (Order maintenance) and just typing it in.

Having our shipping stations set up with 2 active windows, one to process orders as shipped and one to print out extra labels.. Then watching my boss back all the way out of one program to get to the other, instead of hitting alt+tab.

Same boss, using the DHL international shipper, that will take the 2-4 minute load time of the shipment history window (512k of RAM running winXP and software coded so horribly it routinely maxes out the 2.4 ghz processer as well as the RAM) in order to copy the last shipment over and change the numbers, instead of making a new shipment and using the same address which takes literally half the time.

Watching someone with 10 empty sub-folders in their Outlook mailbox scrolling through page after page of their full-to-capacity inbox.

Seeing them call in a service tech 2-4 times a week, EVERY week, for 2 months straight, until virtually every piece of the color printer (that can only be used by the marketting/catalog people) has been replaced twice, since it's still under service contract and it would be too expensive and inefficient (?!?!?) to just get a new one.

And finally, watching the IT guys huddled around a computer for 25 minutes trying to find a work-around for a problem nobody else knew existed, only to finally come up with a solution... That was the exact procedure we had been using all along.

Forget getting paid as a tech anymore, I need hazard pay due to risks to my mental health!

A year without updates? A *year*? What's wrong? Hm, must need more stories..

Well, this one happened last night. Was talking to a friend I'd not chatted with in quite a while, and as we are both techies, we inevitably started talking about how we've each suped-up our PC's, and all the cool things that we can do now. When mentioning a particular game, I get from him "You know, I tried to play that but just couldn't?"

Me: Really, why's that?

Friend: Well it turns out there's a glitch with (whichever series of video cards he has, it slips my mind) that it doesn't recognize your resolution setting, you have to force it in the command line of the shortcut.

A simple procedure, usually something like -640 for 640x480, or -800 for 800x600, etc. Well, he had been talking to this gentleman from the developer's tech support, and said the command was "slash lowres."

Now, I freely admit that I'm a forgetful sod. There's people in my office that i've known for over a year and forget their name. And to be topical, I can never remember which is "back slash" and which is "forward slash." But as the briefest of checks for the internet gave the proper command, I at least felt reassured in the fact that I knew a - (a.k.a. a hyphen, or DASH) is neither back nor forward slash!

What really gets me is the fact that he was on the line with this guy for ten minutes, and neither one of them thought to actually try and describe the little thing.

I used to work on the level 1 helpdesk of a fairly large pharmaceutical company. I dealt with some of the brightest minds medicine has to offer. But when it comes to electronics, these people are clueless.

Me: Hello, thank you for calling the Service Desk. How many I help you?

User: Uhh yeah, I'd like to cancel a ticket.

Me: No problem. What's your ticket number?

User: [insert ticket number here].

Me: Ok, I've got it right here. It says your printer won't print in color and you wanted someone to come take a look. You would like to cancel this, correct?

User: Yes.

Me: Ok. For what reason would you like to cancel it? I need this information for the closure notes.

User: I feel kinda dumb, but I just relized that my printer isn't a color printer at all.

Me: Well, that could be why. I'll close the ticket.

At least she admitted to her stupidity.

I had to "counsel" one of the customer service crew today because of the way he had responded to a customer complaint call.

The man had rung our help desk both distressed and angry, and declared "Your technician was booked to come and do an installation today. Except he found something else to do. He had sex with my wife and then left, and the job's not even finished!!!"

Our understandably flustered tech (trying to take comfort from sort of following normal script) then uttered exactly the wrong words....

"Ummm, Which job did he leave unfinished?"

Things went screaming downhill from there.

They played me the tape from the incident on a different floor of the building because they knew it would take several minutes for me to pick myself up off the floor where I was convulsing with laughter. They figured that might effect how the tech viewed my attempting to talk to him about the "problem".

Poor kid, I know what he meant,and he was just not ready for where the conversation with the customer went...But thank god he did not get any further in the Unfinished Install script...Like the bit where they ask the customer if they would like to specify the same tech returning if possible.

Sasha

P.S Yes, he still is very much employed, and I basically chose to "discipline" him by making a hero of him. Short chat, lots of reassurance...and then I got a bunch of people to take him out for drinks this evening and retell the story with all its comedy. It will get retold a lot. He is getting lots of applause and requests for his telling of the tale...But I bet he thinks before he speaks next time. In fact, I would bet a lot on it.

Its September 2008

I work for a LARGE ICT company

We get an email from.... well lets call it a projects group...

It says "is about to embark onto a comprehensive study into the benefits of the new technology: "

Guess what the "New Technology" is..... "Thin clients"

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD My super visior has been working in computers since the days of dumb terminals... I am talking like 30 or so years

/sigh and ppl wonder why I have lost faith in this place....