Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I suppose it was done in the name of security, but if you lose the recipe, do you throw out the kitchen?

A few days ago, I was helping out a friend with a nice 2Wire DSL Modem/router/Wireless access point. A wonderful model that did indeed function well. Somehow the DSL provider (AT&T in this case) wanted to change the credentials needed to connect the DSL modem to their network (like account and password). To do this simple function, one needs to have the password to access the innards of the DSL modem. At the time I was lacking this information, so I needed to do a simple 'password reset'. Now normally if this was 'nromal' hardware there would be a reset switch and some combination of power and switch depression would revert to a factory issued set of values. Ah, but this is wishful thinking. For this particular unit (a 2Wire 1000HW) there are NO switches. So I try the password, and it has a link 'forgot password', which issues a 'hint' (when you first put in the password). The friend was nowhere in the vicinity, so the clue was useless to me. Not to worry, as in the page displayed there was a 'still forgot password'. Such luck I thought. I clicked the link, and a page came up with a 20 digit number (the first 12 were the serial number) and instructions to call 'customer service' to get a temporary password that would work for 15 minutes (sounds good for me!).

Now the fun begins. I call customer service service for the DSL provider, and quote the page. Sorry, they said, you have an older unit (it was from 2003 according to the serial number), and we don't support it any more. So what is the solution? Buy another unit? I remind then that this is like locking your keys in the car and needing to buy a new car (i.e. stupid). I attempted to contact 2Wire, after all they were the OEM vendor. No, 2Wire wanted NOTHING to do with me. I was at the end of my rope! I tried another stab at AT&T customer service, but to no avail.

But this story has a good ending. I was able to contact the owner, and with proper prompting, was able to supply the correct password. Less than 30 minutes later I had the unit up and functional, after being up all night chasing through phone trees and customer support people who didn't have access to a simple program that could be run in about 1 minute to provide a password from the 20 digit magic number. Yes, this was lost forever between 2Wire and AT&T.

My recent conversation with HP:

"I have a desktop, model XXXXX, serial number xxxxxx. If I boot the first time for the day, it hangs just before the Ctrl-Alt-Del login. Second time through, it works fine. I move the drive to another computer, same symptoms. I have updated the BIOS and freshly installed the OS with our standard package."

Response: "Well, sir, it sounds as if you have done all the troubleshooting. I will issue an RMA."

Boy, I love automatic level-2 support!

User was--is--one of my biggest complainers, and was going on about security measures that he found onerous.

Soon afterwards, user's wife's personal account was compromised, had to change passwords, purchase identity protection, and so on.

User now sings a different tune about account security!

I now read out URLs as follows: "http, then a colon--that's the one with the two dots, not the dot-comma, you have to use the shift key. Then two slashes, the one on the question mark key, not the other one--they are drunk and leaning to the right...[etc.]"

Forward slashes vs. backslashes: I can understand that people are confused about those... but colons? Those are pretty basic--4th or 5th grade English.

This happened a while ago, back when a certain company with a cow logo was in business and computers had 3.5" floppy drives. I was the user.

Our hi-tech university department had finally caved in to user pressure and ordered some Windows PCs to complement our large stock of Unix machines. I got one of two machines that arrived from a company well known for the ... ummm .... variety of components that it sourced. It worked fine for a while, but then begain to display some really strange behaviour. A line of static would draw itself across the monitor from left to right; once it got 3 or 4 lines down the monitor, the PC would auto-reboot. And I discovered my floppy disk drive claimed to have formatted a 3.5" disk with 1Gb of disk space, which was pretty impressive even among all our hi-tech researchers.

I called in the IT department (all 2 of them), but they had been hired for their Unix expertise, and didn't like PCs much. Eventually I was told the machine had been fixed by disabling the sound card. I couldn't figure out why the sound card might have caused video and floppy drive errors, but anyway ...

A couple of weeks later, it started acting up again. This time, I called in the resident researcher who built his own PCs in his spare time. "Yeah", he said as he looked over my shoulder, "might take a little while".

So I went out for lunch. I returned; he was still working on it.

I found something that I could do on a Unix machine for the afternoon. At 5pm, he was still working on it. I went home.

Next morning, he arrived for work late and bleary-eyed. "I fixed it," he said. "It took ten hours. You have a faulty bus ... so if you have too many Windows devices running, one of them will break." And he duly demonstrated: the floppy drive worked fine if the PC was running 16-colour video, but not of it was running the usual 8 million colours.

Guess what? The other PC that arrived in the same batch had a similar problem. I reported the issue, dutifully rebooted the video into 16 colours every time I needed to use the floppy drive, kept the sound card disabled, and waited until the departmental budget could get around to buying me a new machine. (Which was a laptop with docking station, and when the Dell engineer arrived to set it up, he had to restart the machine 42 times during the set-up process ... ah, the bad old days).

I tell the story as a 'lessons learned' for anyone who encounters similar strange behaviour when diagnosing a PC, and to praise my co-worker for managing to diagnose a fault with a component of the computer that could not be tested directly in any way.

Call from user I THOUGHT was knowledgeable: "OK, I put in the video card."

"That was pretty quick. Did you shut down the computer?"

"You mean I'm supposed to do that?"

We've been buying HP business-class computers for a couple of years. The desktops feature a black on-button in the middle of a dead-black black front. Um, what sense does that make?

When showing the user his (her) new machine, I always have to point it out, and tell the user--jokingly--that we do that to keep its location a secret.

One of my users kept everything he'd created--well over 5000 documents--on his desktop. He knew barely enough to use an office program to save files there, or scroll through them to find the one he wanted.

Wow.