Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I'm half the IT department at a small custom robotics company. Pretty nice job most of the time, since our engineers usually solve their own problems and the admins are all really awesome people (and I get to play with robots sometimes). But this week she happened.

I received a transfer from reception, not a normal internal call, which was odd. The woman on the other end was complaining that she couldn't connect to our WLAN on her laptop. Now, we'd just upgraded all our WAPs, and this wasn't the first problem we'd had with connections, so no big deal. I run through some basic troubleshooting with her, but we still can't get her connected. Just to make sure, I clarify that it's not a personal laptop, it's one of the company's. She says it is so I ask her to try a wired connection if possible so I can try to remote into the laptop. "You mean the wall internet?" Yes, the wall internet. After some help from someone else, she gets connected.

At this point in the conversation I'm definitely thinking something isn't right. She was transferred from reception, she doesn't sound like any of our employees (there are only 68 of us and I certainly didn't remember her) and nothing I did could get any connection to the laptop. Finally I ask her to just bring it to me in my office and so I take a look at it.

Ten minutes go by and I get another call from reception, this time telling me there is a woman here to see me. Confused? I sure was. So I trek across the building to reception where I find a woman with a laptop in her hands waiting for me. I instantly noticed two things:

First, her Dell Latitude was definitely not one of our ThinkPads and second, her ID badge was from the shipping company who have a building across the street.

Yes, you read that correctly. She, an employee of another company, could not access our WLAN, called us, asked to be transferred to IT, went through all the troubleshooting with me, and then WALKED ACROSS THE STREET so I could look at her laptop with the expectation she would be able to connect to our network.

My mom isn't the most computer literate person out there, but she knows how to use a mouse and other such things that most users should know. One day, her computer just died without explanation, and would not turn back on. Fearing major hardware failure, she called. He arrived a week later, examined the computer, and hit a switch on the back. He then pushed the power button, and the computer sprang to life without any problems.

I still don't know what purpose that switch was supposed to serve, or how my mom hit it in the first place...

I spent many years working for Microsoft in the Developer Support organization. We provided free support for bugs with the development tools, and paid support for other problems. One day, while working on the Networking team, I received a very interesting Problem Description: "UDP packet transmission is unreliable." For those of you who are not network savvy, UDP stands for Universal Datagram Protocol, and one of its characteristics is that there is no guarantee that it will be received. Its cousin, TCP, Transmission Control Protocol, will be received, or the sender will be notified and know the reason why. TCP is reliable, but slower; UDP is fast, but unreliable. That's the way they are designed. I called up the customer and verified the complaint; he agreed that was his problem. I then pointed out that he couldn't use a free incident for this, because it wasn't a problem in Windows--UDP is supposed to act like that. If he wanted Reliable UDP delivery, then he needed to wrap UDP in a handshake protocol that guaranteed delivery notification. When he asked how to do that, I pointed him to a similar utility, DirectPlay, which used UDP, and had a reliable and unreliable version of the UDP protocol. He was satisifed with this. Still, I have to wonder about somebody who calls tech support to "fix" one of the specified characteristics of a basic protocol. That's like calling up a shoe store and complaining that the black shoes you ordered are black, and you wanted brown ones.