Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I was just (re)reading the tech tale about cockroaches in the computer from March 2001. It reminded me of a couple of tales of my own. I'm a software engineer by profession, but that doesn't make them any less interesting.

1. Get the hammer, Henry!

A friend of mine who for many years was a hardware tech in a shop here in Switzerland told me this one.

He had just received an IBM AT (shows how old this story is!) for repair, which would crash intermittently, for no apparent reason. It had also started smelling strange when turned on.

He took it out back into the service area, followed closely by the customer. After loosening the screws and turning it on, the small appeared. It was one that was familiar to him. The customer was shocked when my friend grabbed a large hammer before opening the case. He needed it! The computer was infested with cockroaches, and he spent a good 5 minutes mashing them with the hammer. Only then could he start looking for the damage they had caused.

2. Strange Tastes

This story is my own.

Back in the early 80s, I was attending an evening class in Spanish. One of the other students, on discovering that I was already bilingual (English / German), asked me to translate an English document into German for her husband, who owned an electronics company.

The document was concerned with the rules that companies had to follow when exporting electronic equipment to Saudi Arabia. I'm not talking about restrictions on hi-tech, but rather a low-tech problem that occurs out there.

Electronic equipment has to have all components covered with a special plastic coating, because cockroaches are attracted to the plastics used to embed the chips. The plastic coating stops the smell from oozing out of the chips and attracting the insects. They eat their way through the plastic, biting through wires and even the silicon chips themselves while doing so.

Even if humanity were to disappear tomorrow, the cockroaches could survive on all the electronics we would leave behind us...

I have a friend who has a sister who is a bit... challenged where technology is concerned. An excerpt from a chat I had with him on AIM:

[22:04:52] Chris: so

[22:05:05] Chris: my sister wanted to pry the sim card out of my phone and put it in her friends

[22:05:21] Chris: so she could connect to the wireless B/G router in out house on her friend's phone

[22:05:26] Chris: i explained to her why this would not work

[22:05:32] Chris: and she insisted it would

[22:05:41] Chris: because she had done "research" on the subject

..i work as a call center agent supporting a telecommunication company...one time.,a customer called in very upset because she was expecting a picture mail message from her friend...expressing her frustrations., we did troubleshooting on her phone.,there was no known network outage by the time...it took us almost 30 minutes but still couldn't fix the error..through thorough probing., customer did finally realized that the picture mail was sent to her other phone line...

I was just reading "The Black Wyse" (Tech Tales September 2001), which reminded me of a couple of stories.

1. Dirty Monitor

My ex-hardware support friend, whose name by the way is Urs, told me once about a monitor he had to repair, because the screen was getting dark. When it arrived, it was a lovely dark brown colour. When he turned it on, the display was amber on brown (anyone remember them?).

However, the surface was sticky, so he turned it off and sprayed on some screen cleaner. It vanished, as though it had been absorbed. He sprayed on some more; it too vanished. He then grabbed a handful of paper tissues and began to rub...

Long story short: it was actually a black and white monitor in a light grey case, whose owner was a chain smoker! He used two cans of cleaner to get the outside clean, and refused to tell us how he got the insides clean.

2. The Pipe Smoker

I had a boss who was a pipe smoker. He's no longer my boss, but he still smokes that damned pipe. Just remember, he had a doctorare in electrical engineering.

Whenever he worked, he blew the smoke at the slots of the two 5¼ inch floppy drives on his machine. I don't know why he did it; maybe he liked the way the smoke swirled. He could never understand why his computer had to go in for repair every three months, because it was throwing CRC-parity errors. The real joke was that the rest of us were also smokers (cigarettes mainly), but we blew our smoke elsewhere...

BTW, that doctorate? I discovered that he daisy-chained a powerstrip onto a second powerstrip, which was daisy-chained onto a third, which was... Anyhow, he didn't understand why the wiring in his office had to be replaced when he left the company, because the walls had these strange brown lines along them...