Tales From Technical Support Content
I work as the front end leaders for a major electronics retailer, and this job has made me very patient, very dulled to stressful, convoluted situations with little hope of peaceful resolution, but about 3 months ago I had a customer come in with a laptop to return. Because most of the people working at the customer service counter are new (they dont last long) I just happened to be up there helping the day 1 on the counter alone associate get the growing line down. I called next in line and a 16-17 year old was returning a laptop. As I started my standard line of questions i was told this was the 4th laptop, of the same exact model, that had been defective in the period of a week. As i began to pull up his receipt information i soon learned this was in fact his 9th laptop in 2 weeks, all of the same model! This immmediately seemed suspicious, but i moved on to figuring out what was wrong with the laptop. (Slight paraphrasing, but very close to the actual description that was given to me) "I dont know man its weird, they've all kinda moved when you typed on them" This again raised suspicion and i moved on to having him show me. The customer proceeded to start slamming on ESC key with 2 fingers until i stopped him out of alarm. I told him calmly that there didnt seem to be anything wrong with the laptop, that any movement caused in a situation like that was your physical force your applying on the computer moving the laptop. He immediately grew defensive to any further questions i had and demanded to know why he had never been questioned in 8 other exchanges to the extend that i had. I actually acknowledged his point in that I had failed as a leader to properly train the apparent 7 people that had unquestioningly exchanged a laptop previous to me, but that I was not going to waste another laptop on this. (Once certain laptop are opened, including this one, they went into a return to manufacturer status that we get pennies on the dollar for compared to what we bought them at) He immediately demanded to speak to a manager, who came over, heard both sides of what was going on from me and the customer and informed the customer that we would not be exchanging the laptop a 9th time for a defect that was not real. The customer increased his use of profanity and raised his voice, at which time my manager told him he would leave the store if he didnt calm himself. The customer did lower his voice and profanity, but demanded to talk to someone higher. The manager refered the customer to our corporate hotline, as that would be the only way for him to reach someone higher than a store manager. After an hour on the phone, my corporate office called demanding to speak with me. I picked up the call to find the customer had claimed i had cursed at him and called him a liar in front of a crowd of people , all while offering him no help with his defective laptop. I told the corporate customer service rep i had done no such thing and explained the stores perspective and asked her if i had broken an SOP guidelines, to which she said no, but that we would need to exchange the laptop for the customer for the sake of getting him out of the store. I tried to explain that he would just come back again with the same fictional story of defect. She told me to let me speak with my manager. After 10 minutes on the phone with him he came back and said we were going to do one more exchange for the customer. I processed it and made sure the customer understood he could not come and exchange it again if there was something defective with it.
customer: My iphone is not working.
me: Well, what seems to be the problem with it?
customer: Its Broken!
me: Hmmm, do you get an error message?
customer: uhh, yeah.
me: What does the error say?
customer: it says um let me see... "Please insert your SIM card"
me: Did you remove the SIM card?
customer: Yeah.
me: Well, can you put it back in?
customer: Should I do that?
me: yes.
customer: (after long pause) Oh My GOD ! YOU FIXED IT! YOU ACTUALLY FIXED IT!!
me:...
Sometimes I wondered how many calls I got were pranks?
Me: Thank you for calling helpdesk support
U: Hi can you help me how to get to 6th st?
Me: Uhmmm, helpdesk support only handles computer issues...
Doing a rollout of a new billing system at a uni which has a site at one of those off-site high technology parks that have massive tech resources they can book out and rent out to tech incubators for a usgae fee. I go see the big suit at the site as a courtesy, and he says he heard new system is rubbish, too slow, doesn't work, and if need be he will go outside for accounting services etc. I say thanks and will check and report back. I go and see end user and she reports network system is slow and won't be able to do the job. I say lets check the network. I do a ping and traceroute and I get better results than I get from my own office. User also says system is not compatible with their online booking system. I ask for their head tech. Head tech and I have a quick discussion and realise that their online system could interface direct to new billing system. Problem solved. Turns out the end user was trying to get the accounts function outsourced with some slimey service company bloke. Three months later the end user gets made redundant and tries to get a job with the service company. The service company says it has no job unless she brings the client with her.
Moral of the story: don't f*** with tech people who know what they are doing!!
Now this was a few years back when cell phones 1st came out i had an elder couple bring the bag phone back into the store saying that it makes calls no problem but will not recive any. i tested the phone on the bench and it worked great both directions. after walking to the car with the customer i asked him how he used the phone after a few minuites i realized he had the phone turned off and expected the call to turn on the phone automaticly he thought the air time was any time the phone was on.
The background:
I work for a company that hosts full desktop environments on Windows terminal servers, which our clients connect to over the internet via the Remote Desktop Client application on their PCs. Even though we regularly instruct all users that they need to log off of their sessions (click Start > Log Off) when they're done working, more often than not they just click the X on the connection bar for the remote desktop window, which leaves the remote session active on the server, even though they think it's closed and gone. Also, even when they do log off properly, on occasion something causes the logoff process to hang, and the next time they log onto the server, they get reconnected to that hung session where all they see is a blank blue or gray screen, with no taskbar or icons or anything, because explorer.exe has already terminated.
The problem:
A user starts calling frequently, complaining that when she logs in, she just gets a blank screen. The first time I personally heard from this user, I thought it to be a hung user session (as explained above), and simply forced a logoff from my end, after which she logged back in and was up and running again. I believe this is likely what all the previous techs who took her calls did as well, as it's a common enough issue that we're all familiar with it.
The next time I took her call, I looked closer at the processes running in her session, and saw that it appeared to be a properly working session with explorer.exe running and everything, but she maintained that it was a blank screen. I then decided to have her launch a utility from our website on her local PC that allowed me to remotely control the PC. Once connected, I watched as she logged into the server, and guess what? There's a full desktop, complete with icons and taskbar. Her response? "See, that's all I get, just a blank screen."
*hit mute and bang head several times here*
The revelation:
This particular client has their servers rigged so that their primary application automatically launches whenever a user logs into a new session. The problem here is that this user would just close the application and then disconnect the session, instead of logging off. The next time she logged in, she got back to the old session that was still running, a scenario in which the application will not automatically launch.
The solution:
Explained the difference between disconnecting and logging off, and which of those methods she should and shouldn't do, and showed her how to manually relaunch the application in case she ever failed to log off properly again. And to think of all the time that could have been saved if the user had not insisted she had a blank screen when she CLEARLY did not.....*sigh*
After removing Malware from some guys' PC, he asks my price for a
USB keyboard.
$27.50 plus tax. That's $30.
"I can buy one for $7" he says.
"Well, go and buy it then." I say. (I hope I phrased it more politely!)
20 days later, I know it's 20 days as it's been 20 days since the
anti-malware has been updated, he brings in his PC and a generic USB keyboard.
He can't type his password.
My keyboard works, the $7 one bad or somehow incompatible.
My bench charge for diagnosis: $27.50 plus tax. That's $30.
PS:
While the PC is working WITH MY KEYBOARD he orders a replacement from Amazon.
$10 + $9 shipping.
I am working in IT and sometimes I am helping friends and family with their IT problems.
One day, a friend of mine called because he couldn’t log into his email account anymore. This friend has two computers in his house, one in the basement and one on the first floor. On the first floor he logs into his emails via a browser, in the basement he uses Outlook Express. I asked him what Outlook Express tells him when he tries to login. Obviously, his saved password wasn’t correct anymore. So I asked him if he had changed his password recently. No, he told me, he was still using the same password. As I know that he is not really capable of changing the settings in his Outlook Express, I asked again if he was sure that he hadn’t changed his password. No, he assured me, he never did that. He always just logged in, but that wasn’t working anymore. I was almost on my way to him to see what the problem might be when I had an idea. This time I asked if he had changed the password on the computer on the first floor, the one where he’s using his browser to access his emails. And really, he had done that. But he never touched the password on the basement’s computer. It took me quite some time to explain to him why both computers need the same password.
I worked DSL tech support at a call center to pay my way through college. One particular caller said that the power light on his laptop was blinking. Of course this is not within my scope of support because it had nothing to do with his DSL service, but I figure I'll go ahead and just tell him to try plugging it in so that the battery can recharge. That's when it got interesting. "I do have the cord plugged into the modem." I explain that I'm asking him to plug in the power cord. "But it's plugged into the modem." After a couple more of these, I tell him that he's describing a network cable and that he'd need to look for a power cord to attach to his laptop. "I'm not very computer savvy. What does the power cord look like?" I honestly couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Sir, it looks like a power cord."
"What does a power cord look like? I'm not a trained computer tech." I'm thinking: Yeah, but you're not Amish, either.
"Okay, let's forget for a minute that this is a computer you are holding. Let's pretend it's a hair dryer or any other electrical device. Look for the cord you would use to plug your hair dryer into the wall outlet."
"But this is a computer..."
At that point I just told him to take it to the store where he bought it so that the sales clerk could show him how to plug it in.
I had a co-worker approach me with a computer issue. "My home computer isn't starting up."
Further questioning "Do the fans spin? Do any lights come on?" revealed it wasn't powering on at all. So when did it stop working?
"The other night, my husband was fiddling with it and he found this switch on the back near the power cable and he was wondering what it did..."
"The one that says 110V / 230V?"
It turns out that changing it to 110V in a 240V country makes a loud BANG and allows the magic smoke to escape. There were a number of fragments rattling around inside the PSU where a component had exploded.
I'm told that several beers may have been involved.
Beancounter Control had to recruit someone at short notice to cover extended sickness. They grabbed the first person they could get hold of.
She has Excel on her machine, but has been seen to enter a column of figures into it, switch to the calculator on her desk, add up the figures from the spreadsheet on the calculator and then enter the total carefully at the bottom of the column on the spreadsheet.
Tales From Technical Support Index
