Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Every once in a while you get a call that reminds you there is at least a grain of truth to the old "coffee cup holder" tale.

I got a call from a user who was having trouble with her PC. This is not normally a call I would have gotten, as I am a network admninistrator, not helpdesk, but I figure, "what the heck, it's a user who needs help - lets build some goodwill".

Problem as described: "I can't move my mouse pointer to the left. It only goes about halfway across the screen and stops, no matter how fast I move the mouse".

After some head scratching and dialing in to remote control the mouse (I couldn't duplicate the problem remotely) I decided to grab a new mouse and head down to see the problem with my own eyes.

The user quickly shows me the problem: indeed she cannot move her mouse to the left - her keyboard is in the way!

Desperately and immediately stifling my urge to ROFL, I calmly explained that she could lift the mouse an inch, set the mouse down again to the right side and then she could move the cursor as she desired.

Now I remember why I stopped working helpdesk. Sheesh.

A lady in my neigborhood called to say she was typing a letter in MS Word and her text did not appear on the screen. Keep in mind this lady was a secretary for one of the Big Three car companies befor she retired.

A little checking disclosed she had set the default text color to WHITE on a WHITE background!

I don't know how you all feel about the reverse side of

this humor, but I'll tell my story anyhow.

I will start this out by saying I've had a computer since I was 5, and I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong and I still give all you techies the benefit of not knowing that and I follow step by step crap just to make your lives easier than I would trying to explain I know what your trying to do and I have done it already...It just didn't work. I lost somewhere between 4-8 hours per day, save weekends, either on hold or waiting for a call.

It was the year 2000 and I had just heard of this new thing called DSL and was really interested in getting it as I didn't have cable I didn't feel like paying for cable internet which is bundled in the cable package. However, I wanted a faster connection.

After 2 weeks I got a package in the mail, pretty simple setup. I log in and everything is fine for about 3 days when all of the sudden internet clunks out and I am left all alone with spurts of internet here and there. I did some research and found that I was within 2 miles of the DSL server (just outside of downtown minneapolis) so I figured that maybe they hadn't screwed me by giving me a DSL modem just a little too far out of range. I give up and call tech support, tell them my problem and I get bumped up to another tier and wait for hours, finally I talk to a tech who walks me through the whole ordeal again start to finish, still nothing. I am told I will receive a call the next day from yet another tier of tech support.

The next day arrives and I get a tier one tech on the line who sends me over to the phone company tech support, who in turn sends me back to the service techs, who send me back over..now this goes on for about a month. I get home from work and after a few hours I get another call from a tech

who eventually tells me that it is my computer and that there is nothing they can do. So i bring my whole desktop over to a friends house where his DSL has no problems and no crap my computer connects just fine. 2 more weeks go by while i wait for a new modem to arrive(as this was what they figured it was) and boom! Still nothing but bursts of internet followed by millions of bad packages.

One day an old man arrives at my house and tells me he is there to test my phone lines to see if they are the problem and while we are talking about what's going on he tells me that my line is fine and that while he knows nothing about this whole computer crap there was a guy who called about this same problem a few blocks over a month ago. Then he said something about going bad up in the poles...I asked him to note that on his work order and please pass it along

to a tech. I got a call the following day telling me that

one of the routers in the area was faulty and that my DSL should work now.

I logged in and never had a problem again.

I got two more phone calls that day each from someone in PR

in each of the two places they had me calling back and forth

about a credit they were going to put on my account, it totaled something about $850.

After forty some techs on the phone, one old man solved the problem because some poor chump like me had the same problem a few blocks away...and they hadn't even fixed his router yet.

Back in the days of DOS, I sspoke with a customer whose PC was crashing randomly. A smart guy, he'd correctly diagnosed the cause of his trouble. In a thick southern accent he informed me that he had too damned many background programs running sumultaneously. "It's this way see," he summarized, "The problem is that that software all wants to go TSR. Terminate and stay resistant!"

I began by suggesting she restart the PC. After a suitable interval passed, I asked, "So, are you back in Windows now?" "No," the customer replied "I'm actually in Miami. But I'll be in New York next week."

I work in a bus depot, and we recently got a cordless phone to replace the wired relic so that we could take the phone out to the yard and generally have more freedom...

The old phone only needed to be plugged in to the phone line of course, but the new model required AC Power. One of the driver's (Bryan) told me he'd fixed the problem by finding another phone socket with an AC outlet beside it.

When I told him I hadn't been able to find any free phone jacks he told me "Oh yeah I had to unplug this other cable, but it was just leading into the wall and all the phones seemed to work fine when I unplugged it."

On closer inspection I informed him he had unplugged the FIRE ALARM dialer! He then gave the best quote ever...

"Ufft how often do we actually use that anyway?"

i work dsl tech support. a very nice lady called me, saying she couldnt get to her email. here's a little snippet from our call (paraphrased)

me: "now type i-p-c-o-n-f-i-g and then press [enter.]"

them: "nothing happens"

me: "lets try it one more time. make sure you're typing in the big black window. type i-p-c-o-n-f-i-g and press [enter]."

them: "still nothing. what is this supposed to do?"

me: "it should give us information about your network setup. lets try this. type p-i-n-g, then put a space, then type yahoo, then put a period, then type c-o-m. then press enter."

them: "hm... its still not doing anything."

so eventually we figured out what was wrong. here's the end result:

ipconfigenteripconfigenterpingspaceyahoo.seeohmenter

only by the grace of god almighty did they manage to type an actual period.

A client of mine merged with another company who has its own IT staff.

One day during the week during the merger get moved their Windows 2003 server to their own domain. The merger and everything went ok.

The day after i received a call that their IT staff is stumped and the computers on the network don't receive a IP address when they start up. After a while of troubleshooting i discovered they FORGOT to properly setup DHCP after changing domain.

It makes you wonder.