Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

New one for y'all.

Boss recently asked me to look at his system (long story) as he's not very tach savvy. So he brings it in for me to look at it. I take it hopen, start working on it, and what do I see but a layer of dust completely covering everything...talk about dust bunnies...WOW. It was amazing it even worked at all. Said he got it from a garage sale, so I guess whoever had it last didn't properly care for it. So I told him I'd have to work on it a couple days (working on it at home, I'm sure you know that is). Get it all cleaned out and running nice and smooth, and get Windows and all wanted software installed. Works like a charm, just needs a RAM upgrade. But it makes me wonder about people sometimes, having such dirty computers.

Who arranges to pick up a FREE computer that they've been told is five years old, originally had XP on it, has 512mb of RAM (upgradeable to 2gb to use for email and light surfing, not heavy gaming) and then asks in the parking lot if it is Windows 8 & has a touch screen with it? THEN throws a hissy fit because I'm giving away "old junk" - apparently the "for someone who NEEDS a working computer to fix up for a class project" wasn't understood.

Fortunately - the next person in line was the recycler who picked up computers, refurbished them (or used them for parts), and donated them to various groups - he took everything that I had left as the parts could probably be used on something already in his workshop.

But being yelled at that I should give them MY "new" computer (when it is NOT a Windows 8 with a touchscreen - but a three year old laptop that originally came with Vista) made me wonder what they thought was going on. It was September, not December!

Just remembered this one from a while back. So I've got a PS3, an older 80GB model with PS2 compatibility (yes, it still works just fine). And I used to go on a PS3 forum helping to answer questions. One of the questions was about the HDD access indicator light, just like that on a computer. The (l)user asked if that flashing light was normal or not. Informed (l)user of course it's normal, as it's just the HDD access indicator light, just like that on a computer. (L)User felt relived afterward. I just thought it was hilarious.

This was a few years ago. I had bought an old used car, still with a cassette player stereo. As I exchanged it with a cheap CD player, llo and behold - behind it I found two CD disks. Previous owner actually had managed to press them into the tight slot between the cassette player and the dashboard, figuring if he/she just got it in, they would play(!).

I'm not easily surprised, but this really hit me.

A relative of mine somehow got a hold of a SIX-HOUR MP3 FILE -- and wanted to burn regular music CDs from it.

As this person was adamant about me doing something with it, I tried almost a dozen different programs to split it into chunks short enough to burn to audio CDs. Each one choked on it: Either it would crash, or behave erratically.

From what I could make out, my guess is the file was so long in duration, that it caused some variable inside these audio cutting programs to wrap around.

I'd had enough, and said it was hopeless.

This guy holds grudges, so I might keep hearing about it for months --

Got to love those with unrealistic expectations.

I'm just full 'em, aren't I? So here's another little tale of mine. This one involves another DI (thrift store) computer, which, as it turns out, is quite the little number: P4 Dual Core 3 GHz ea with 1.5 GB RAM. Anyway, on with it!

Started working on the system, turns out it didn't have a HDD. No problem, just use my test drive for now. So I open it up, and what do I find but a tangled mess of cords...jeeze Louise...I've never seen such a mess in my life. I'm sure there's been worse, but it's the worst I've personally seen. Plus the video card fan is extremely noisy. So I just mull over it a bit, and slowly start untangling things. Three case fans, a Zip drive, 2 optical drives, and a front USB / IEEE 1394 connector. The 1394 connector didn't have anywhere to plug into, so the cord was just sitting loose in the case. The USB / 1394 board was loose as well, unsecured. I also took out the video card fan to clean it out and hopefully stop the noise. Eventually I get everything properly sorted and seated, remove the 1394 cord (can't connect it), swap out one of the optical drives for a DVD-RW DL, take out the Zip drive (not needed), and connect my spare test drive. Finally I got it all together and everything connected properly, turn it on, and nada. Get POST but doesn't recognize any drives, or the keyboard, and the video card fan is still noisy -- which eventually finally stops, just needed to be run for a while apparently. So I take it all apart again, unplug IDE and power cords, and reconnect it all. Voila! It works! But boy what a mess it was! Whoever put it together before sure did a doozey on that one! Glad it works, though!

I was giving away an older desktop with a 10gb hard drive and 256mb of RAM. Original license had been for Windows ME or 2000 or the like (pre-XP). Hard drive had been formatted and the original recovery disks were over 12 years old - they would not install (Microsoft reasons, apparently).

Person who wanted it met me at local electronics store (it could be updated to 2gb of RAM and this place had the RAM in stock) and asked me one simple question.

"So, where can I get the upgrade disk to take this up to Windows 8?"

CP/M's version of DOS's assembler editor DEBUG had a much cooler name: Dynamic Debugging Tool, or DDT.

CP/M's floppies had to be specifically mounted: forgetting to do so would allow the user to read--start the text editor, for instance--but not write, Wrote an entire paper, then found I'd forgotten to mount the disk, could not save my paper to it. Oopsie. Solution? Start DDT, locate the paper in my 64K of RAM, then dump the memory range contents to disk. Recovered the majority. Whee!

So I get a call from a user who is panicking. She says, "OMG! My computer is broken! I can't do anything! I can't log in, I can't open things, it's completely locked up!" My intuition kicks in as she keeps going and and I begin to suspect it's a case of typical user exaggeration, and I won't get any useful information over the phone. So I manage to get a word in and say I'll come take a look at it.

I get to the computer, and it appears to be functioning normally. She's log into Windows, the mouse is moving fine, programs are opening and closing. So I ask, did it start working while I was walking out here? It's been known to happen. She says, "Oh, it's still broke. See, I can't log into SAP!" She opens SAP and tries to log in, which fails. I see the message that says too many invalid login attempts. So I'm like, ok, I'll just unlock the account, and it should be good to go. I get it unlocked, and ask her to try again.

She starts typing her password, and I do notice some odd behavior. Immediately as she starts typing, it tries to log in. I'm like, that's not right. So I try to log in myself, and have no problems. I have her try again, and it it tries to log in as soon as her hands touch the keyboard. I ask if she's maybe touching a key when she puts her hands down, and she says, "No, just the shift key since my password starts with a capital letter." I press the shift key, and nothing seems to happen. So I ask her to try again, and watch closely. Turned out that when she pressed the shift key, her long fingernail pressed the Enter key above it as well. So exaggeration nullified, real problem discovered, mystery solved.

So my tale, isn't the greatest but it solidifies my point that people need to start taking a test to use their equipment :D

I started working for a major cable(broadband) company in the UK within the last few months as part of their tech support (have you tried turning it off and on again?) and I've come across some weird stories and situations but this one still gets me to this day.

So the female user who called up told me that she wasn't able to her wireless and this had been for 3 days now, her daughter had been over and couldn't get connected with her phone and basically she needed answers.

So naturally, as you do, I set about looking at the equipment from our end, a basic modem with no wireless capabilities (unlike all these "hubs" that have the modem and router built in) so I asked her if she had a router as well. She says no, she doesn't. Now I'm puzzled, what wireless has she been connecting to then? She said that they had a pc which was directly connected to the modem just now and that they wanted to connect the laptop with the wireless but she has been unable to find it. I explained to her that with the equipment she had, she would not be able to connect to the wireless and now she was perplexed as she was paying for wireless, I explained that she isn't paying for wireless but more likely, she has received a wireless router from ourselves, to which she told me that she hadn't received anything else from us.....hmmmmmm.

Anyway, I explained this to her again and proposed that the wireless signal she had most, likely came from a neighbours house and she argued that it wasn't from a neighbours wireless. After getting frustrated with her, I eventually used the words "with the setup you have, by the LAWS OF PHYSICS, it is not possible for you to be using YOUR internet that YOU'RE paying for!"

After accepting that piece of information, she asked about her options, I told her about our more advanced "hub", to which she then tells me that she has this "hub" thing that she received from us 2 months prior -_- derp.

I then told her that in order to get wireless, all she had to do was take the cable out of the old modem and plug it in to that "hub" thing, to which she replied that she was not "confident" enough to perform this task. It's just two simple wires for crying out loud, it ain't rocket science.

Anyway, in the end I had to book an engineer to go and do the simple task for her, which re-instills my point about needing a license to use a computer, you need one for a car, you should need one for a computer ^^

Another one that just happened I just had to share.

So the tower I'm now using as my main system was purchased from the DI. It's an awesome system and works great. It even came with a 3.5" floppy drive! (Yes, I still use floppies, though rarely, but they do come in handy at times!) Little did I know, the drive itself was bad. I found this out when I tried to check the few remaining floppies I do have. Then I pulled out some of the drives I acquired from other systems I tore apart, and one of them was the exact same model - what are the chances of that! So, swapped 'em out, tested, and it works! The disks are still perfectly good, too!

A friend of mine asked me over to set up her "new(er)" desktop (Windows XP with 2GB of RAM) because it was faster than her "old(er)" desktop (also Windows XP with 2GB of RAM, as I found out when I went into the specifications window).

But it crawled at less than half the speed, even though the specs were coming up the same...

Until I went to Crucial.com to get a scan done on the "old(er)" desktop - turns out that it was a custom build and was supposed to have been maxed out at 1gb of RAM, not 2GB. The "new(er)" desktop was an eMachine that maxed out at 2GB of RAM, so it was able to use all the memory that it had.

I'm still wondering why the "teacher" who sold her the RAM & installed it for her didn't run a check on the specs of her motherboard...guess it was easier to do it than explain that it wouldn't help.