Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I work as a site tech for a large elementary school. One day I get a call that this teacher's assistant is having trouble with the computer mouse. I needed to head to that part o the campus anyway, so I threw a new mouse in my service bag - thinking of course that maybe the one that wasn't working had died - and headed over to the trouble.

When I walk in the door of the classroom it's all I can do to "stay professional". The user has her back to me, sitting at the computer in perfect form, waving the mouse around ABOVE the mouse pad....After a few minutes of attempting to gain my composure, I walk over to the user with tears in my eyes and explain proper mousing procedures.

..and I can prove it.....

I'd been a techie for a number of years before I decided to build my first desktop for the kids at home. The net was full of information on what to do so I figured I had a decent template and plan of action. Not only that, I wasn't in a rush. I ordered the parts on sale and finally one Friday when everything was in I decided to spread out on the living room floor and get started.

Things went very smoothly overall, that is until the ultimate moment of truth came. I punched the power button on the cool-looking alien-head case I'd purchased. Nothing. Through the equally cool clear side panel I could see a red power LED glowing. But nothing else. What did that mean exactly? No fans gloriously spinning up. No wonderful hums from the hard drive. Not even any beep codes. Great. I could also see the jumble of jumpers and immediately thought I was going to have to sort through that viper's nest to figure out which one of those might be connected improperly. Or maybe the motherboard itself was bad? The power supply? Who knew? I quickly realized that putting together a computer was one thing - but figuring out what might be wrong if the damn thing didn't work was a whole different animal. I was just about ready to disassemble everything and start from scratch when, thank God, the light bulb went off above my head.

I'd forgot to flip the power switch on the back of the computer....

A user sent an email about a problem she was having. I responded asking her to send me a screen shot so that I could better understand what was going on. I assumed that if she did not know to use the "Print Screen" button on her keyboard that she would ask.

Boy was I wrong. As it ends up, she found a digital camera, took a snapshot of her monitor, and uploaded the picture to her computer and emailed it to me. Well, I guess that worked...

I work for the IT department in my company, I've been here for almost two years now. I'm still considered the rookie nonetheless.

I get all sorts of odd situations every day which I just can't allow myself to laugh at, because the stupidest of them are done by the higher-ups.

There's this one guy in accounting who uses his laptop computer to store some of his pictures. One day, he calls at my desk and the conversation is as follows:

"I'm trying to open my image files but something weird happens every single time."

Me: "Okay, what's that and how long has it been doing it?"

"Just started doing it. I open up the image and it shows up a bunch of algorithms..."

Me: "Can you try closing that image and then opening it up again by double left-clicking on it?"

"Okay... Still showing up all those crazy numbers and symbols."

So I figure, it's early in the morning, what the heck. I'll just get over there and see what I can do.

I stood next to him and once I saw his procedure for opening up images: Which consisted of opening up Excel - voluntarily - then clicking "File", "Open" and going all the way to his My Images document and single-handedly opening the image.

"See? Does that every time."

I smirked, before telling them Excel is a calculating sheet, not an image viewer. I then told them that they should open it using Windows' built-in Preview software.

Walked back to my office wondering how come the company pays 1.5k$ laptops for those people, while the IT department's stuck with 8 year-old hardware.

I used to work in a consumer electronics store, and I think it was a not-so-busy Sunday, until this guy showed up. He was carrying a very large iMac G3 (slot loading) and asked us to remove a disk that had gotten stuck in the drive. So, we removed the DVD drive from his iMac and hooked it up to a power supply we use for testing IDE peripherals. It was whirring, and nothing was happening.

(Before you read the next part, you should probably know that most cd/dvd drives have a little hole you can use to eject the disk from, and the hole is just the right size for a paperclip.) So I pushed a paperclip into the hole, heard a click, and the disk ejected itself. By now I was trying hard not to laugh, because the poor guy had almost ruined his slot-loading DVD drive by trying to get his Mac to read his Nintendo GameCube disk.

Postscript: We put a new DVD drive in the guy's iMac and he left without any further complaints.