Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

A guy walks into my modest one-man PC repair shop.

"Do you have 'City Sleeps'?

"Sorry, no." I reply, "What is that?"

He says "The envelopes you put CDs in."

"Ohhhh. CD SLEEVES! I have the paper ones with a

plastic window. Green, red or orange?"

I sell him 10 green ones for a dollar.

(I think Staples had a sale a few months ago,

so that's probably at-cost.)

How do I put this politely........if I call your support number and TELL you that I have rebooted my modem, my router, and my computer - but something is still not right, why am I told to reboot the modem, the router, and the computer only to be told that I'm not doing it in the right order and we are going to try it again..........but starting with a different machine THIS time?

Only to find out that it is (pick one) an issue with the signal from the ISP (after rebooting their modem five times, they finally checked for outage reports - or possibly had enough complaints that they pinpointed where an outage was happening) OR that it was something on my computer (replaced power supply once, mother board once, and BOTH on a third computer - no, I am not on my first computer - been on-line since 1997 and I have lost count......but it's more than ten or twelve by now).

My "worst" was the lady who kept telling me to reboot when I told her that I had a BLACK screen and nothing was showing but my reflection (I think that was the power supply AND the motherboard) because it wasn't powering up at all.

Second worst was the one where it took multiple calls to get through to someone who would send me a link on my working laptop to set up a diagnostic on a CD & flash drive to run on the desktop (optical drive wasn't letting me boot from the disk - which was what the person on the third call tried having me do). The first person had insisted that I wasn't rebooting it properly with the install disk in place.....or something.

I refused to release him & call back - that one was the motherboard & possibly the hard drive - it's been a while. I no longer have that computer....it is still working for its new owner after the factory rebuild, so I guess that it was fixed properly. But seriously, spending over two hours on the phone with multiple callbacks? Are you thinking that I will go out and BUY another one of your pieces of carp (my uncles threw those fish back when they caught them) to replace the one in front of me that quit working after about half a year? NOT happening.........

I wonder sometimes................

Our remote warehouse in a distant corner of the Empire had had a bit of a reshuffle in the office. They called us for a longer cable to connect the printer to the PC.

“How long do you want the cable to be?” we quite reasonably asked.

“About five metres should do it” came the reply, so we despatched a 5m cable to them straight away.

A couple of days later they were back on the phone – can we have a longer cable, say 12m?

"You’ve just had a 5m cable for that printer, what’s up?"

"It’s 5m from the computer to the printer, but that’s straight across the office, so it was like a washing line across the middle and we had to step over it."

A while back, my cousin decided to run a Minecraft server(Minecraft is a PC game with multiplayer support. A separate server is needed for multiplayer). Despite my pointing out that his PC used a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 and 1 GB RAM, and therefore could not run as an effective server for anything, he insisted. Not surprisingly, he shortly called me, asking for help. He uses Windows xp, and is using a different PC to play on his server.

Me: "What is the problem?"

Him: "I can't get on it."

Me: "What IP did you enter? It was the one (his sister, my other cousin) said to put in, right?"

Him: "Yes; (his server's LAN ip with the default port, 25565)."

Me: "Ok, what does the server window's active log say?"

Him: "What?"

Me: "The window that opened when you ran the server software; what does it say?"

Him: "Ummmmmm.... Just a sec."

*a few clicks*

Him: "Ok it says: 'Starting Minecraft Beta Server 1.8 on port *25565....(the rest of a normal ready server info log)'."

Me: "Ok, go have (his sister) try to log on and tell me what it says."

Him: "Wait.... I'd have to leave the window.. uuhh, thingy on."

Me: "Window thingy?"

Him: "that window that has the words on it."

Me: "The words that say 'Starting Minecraft Server Beta...'?"

Him: "Yes."

It turned out he was actually closing the server software and expecting it to work. Needless to say, after we got it working, the server yielded massive amounts of record-breaking lag. He decided to stick with playing Minecraft on my server from then on.

Well I am a tech intern at my school.

So some teachers grab me to help with their computers, obviously.

Today I got grabbed by a teacher who says she can't access her e-mail because Outlook was uninstalled. I went in and she showed me the desktop, pointing to where the shortcut is located. She says "See? It's gone!"

In my head I am laughing, and I go to All Programs, and create a new shortcut on her desktop to the program.

I am now a computer genius in her mind.

In high school I am regarded as the "tech guy" and at the beginning of an English lesson our teachers computer would not turn on, rendering her carefully prepared slide show useless. As per usual I was asked to take a look, ominously the post message read, "RAM initialization error: DIMM 0". Luckily the computers schools are modular Dells so I was able to open up the side and get to the ram slots without a screw driver. I was also lucky to find the 1 Gigabyte of RAM was made up of two 512Mb modules, taking a wild guess at which was the malfunctioning module I removed the one closest the CPU. Closing it back up, I switch back on the power, and voilà, the machine stirs to life. One of the not so tech savvy students, who had watched a computer case opened for the first time in her life, exclaimed "Your like some sort of Wizard." That moment only topped, by the stunned IT directors expression, when I strolled into the IT departments office and casually handed him the broken module.

I am the tier-2 tech support of our family (my dad is the tier-3 and 4 and so on, my brother is the tier 1)

My brother wanted to play a game with me that ran on steam. He thought that he could since he'd logged in as me and spent 7-8 hours downloading it.

When I sat down to help. the computer would simply not do what I told it. Turns out he'd decided anything he customized was better, so the mouse axis, buttons, taskbar, and keyboard buttons were ALL remapped.

Being in High School now, I can recall a time in Middle School where our class was supposed to make PowerPoint presentations as a class project.

It was amazing at how many people had never seen PowerPoint before. Being the class Guru, everyone asked me how to go about performing various tasks in the presentation.

Most of these people got it the first time, but some just didn't understand.

There was one person in particular who was trying to use Custom Animations to make the elements of each slide appear in the desired order. I showed her how to select the desired element, and click "add", then select the animation and click "OK".

I was subsequently asked the questions again for each slide in the show. It never dawned on her that each slide had the same options, and that it would still work the same for her even if I wasn't there, telling her which buttons to press.

On the second day, she seemed to get it, which was a relief, as I could now spend time working on MY project.

___________

However, when it came time to present the present the presentation, there was clearly something that she had not asked me the first day, and worked out for herself the second.

She must not have been satisfied with the animations she first chose, so rather that click the "change" button, she simply went through and added the new animations in again, in addition to the original ones.

During the presentation, most slides would re-animate themselves repeatedly, each time with different animation scheme. As these were resource-intensive animations, animating large chunks of text copied fro Wikipedia, running on an old computer, the computer froze several times during the presentation. The teacher persevered, and we got through it, though it took up a whole class block.

I suppose I should have told her how to change it, but I have to wonder, why didn't she notice the duplicate animations when she tested the show?