Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

I just read a story about someone attempting to use a DVD in a CD drive and reminded me of another one that happened to be a good long while back. I had a, at the time, fairly decent laptop. It had a DVD/CD-RW drive. Well, I tried using a DL (Dual Layer) disc to install a set of programs I had burned from another system. Unfortunately, it wouldn't read it. So, not knowing much about such things at the time, I e-mailed tech support and asked if it could be upgraded to be made to read DL discs. The response I got back was instructions on what to do before upgrading. So I e-mailed them back, again asking if it can be upgraded, and NOT to give me this long detailed list of instructions before upgrading, since ALL I want to know is IF it can be upgraded. Their answer, pure and simple, short and sweet, a straight NO! That's all you had to say in the first place, not a long-winded list of instructions!

Received a report on why a call centre had lost two floors. The UPS output and bypass breakers had tripped due to overload and need resetting.

Recommendations from the UPS Vendor....

1.Don't connect any kind of mobile charger and spike arrester connected extension box at the ups out put circuits.

2.Don't connect any floor fan and vacuum cleaner at the ups out put circuits.

I work with computers since old Commodore PET and even earn my money with computers. So I usually know what I do. But I still remember my first major incident.

I was working part time during college and had to port an application to a small unix machine. I backed up my code on the floppy drive to be save.

But the the drive died and a new one will take a few weeks to arrive. Because no one else used this special machine i thought I was save.

But then I was one week on leave and during that week the replacement drive arrived and was installed.

After i came back from leave they told me that the machine was dead. Apparently the colleague who installed the new drive tried to test it but mistyped /dev/fd0 to /dev/hd0 and wiped the drive.

Problem one: We got that machine preinstalled and need to get the OS install disks.

Problem two: As you have read above the latest code was not backed up because the drive was bad.

It took almost two weeks to get the machine back running, installing the last backup and reimplementing all changes.

The most embarrassing part for me?

The machine was hooked up on the local network and i could have backed up my software on the mainframe. But i simply forgot that.

I'm employed as a support engineer for high availability management systems for telecommunications products - but this is a story against myself.

A couple of days ago we had arranged for a tradesman to come and do a few hours work at home, so I told my wife that I'd work from home that day. She heads off to work and I set up my company laptop in the home office, opening the door out onto the deck so I can watch out for the guy coming to do the work.

I turn on the laptop, go and get a cup of coffee and come back to the desk - just as I sit down a loud, intermittent, rasping sound begins - I immediately assume it's at the very least something in the fan, or maybe a serious hard drive failure in the lappy, so I power it off before any more damage is done.

But the noise continues - what the???

Eventually I turn around, trying to locate the exact source of the noise, only to see our young cat standing immediately behind my chair - very proud of the large cicada she has in her mouth!

I just got off a LONG internet chat session about a device not connecting to my home network.

After performing a hard reset (and factory image recovery) - I still couldn't get a working connection to the network. Note - I set up the network - I know the password, I've entered it, confirmed it against the password on my desktop, and tried again (and again, and again, and.....).

Still not working.

The tech had the bright idea that I needed to restart my router.

Which knocked out our chat session.......

I wonder if I was dragging down her statistics too much?

Alright, another one just popped into my head. (Man, reading these stories can really jog the memory sometimes.) So many several years ago, can't remember exactly how long...(has it been that long already??)...living with roomies, one of whom was a great tech hobbyist, and one who claimed to know about computers. Well, the self-proclaimed tech decided he wanted to build a computer. So we get all the parts and start putting things together. The CD drive would only go in one way, from the front, but he was adamant and determined it would fit going in from the back, inside the case. After several attempts, he FINALLY decided to try the front, and guess what...IT FIT and slid straight in! I swear he was a few <insert item(s) here> short of <insert term here>. Then one day, I moved out and going back and forth to get my stuff, I found MY CD drive in HIS computer, "Oh, I don't know how that got there..." A'hem, B...S... I called him on that one and he had nothing to say. Yeah, self-proclaimed tech, sure. More like self-righteous pompous idiotic moron.

Just now had this happen. Boss called me over to help a co-worker with a login problem. Had the person restart, and all was well. A 5 min trip across the center (not really that far, just across the hall, really), that could have been solved in 30 seconds if only he had just told her to restart. Fresh login, fresh network settings, all set. No skin off my teeth, had a 5 min reprieve. *shrug*

Another I just remembered, very short one this time. Recently a co-worker couldn't figure out why the system they wanted to sit at wouldn't work. So going over, I check it all over to make sure everything is plugged in right. Then before I really do much of anything, I ask the most basic question of all: Is it turned on? Co-worker was embarassed to say the least.