Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

Back in high school (early 70's), I took vocational electronics. Once of the seniors insisted that people wasted money on amplifiers when transformers could do all the work. I tried to explain that a microphone which generates an output in the microwatts cannot possibly drive a speaker to useful output. I tried to explain the Law Of Conservation of Energy, but he refused to listen. Later, I talked to the teacher who covered the Senior Class, and he said: "That guy? He's a nut. If he doesn't pull his grades up, he won't be here after the Christmas break."

He wasn't.

A few years ago, my son was visiting and was updating the stored numbers in our telephone. He asked me "What's the PIN?"

Me: "Why?"

Him: "It's asking for the PIN to delete this number."

Me: "No--you only need the PIN if you want to delete the entire directory."

Him: "I know what I'm doing!"

Me: "OK; show me what you're doing."

He walked through the steps, and I stopped him right before he pressed the "next" button.

Me: "Read the step you're on."

Him: "Delete phone directory.... Oh."

Me: "You need to page down to the selected number and THEN select delete."

It worked.

Sometimes, when I call a client, I need them to go to the server, so I can reset a software component that resides on the server. It never fails to surprise me that when I tell them to go to the server, they just stay at their computer.

Sometimes I'm lucky and I can remote in, but a a lot of times I'll get the clerk asking me "Which one is the server?" or "I don't know the password to get into the server."

Back in the early days of personal computing (early 80's), I had a TRS-80 Model III computer and subscribed to 80 Micro, a magazine for users of TRS-80 computers.

I always read the "Technical Questions" column, and saw one which made me howl.

Q: I bought an 8 MHz chip for my TRS-80 and plugged it into the socket. It's not running any faster. Is the chip bad?"

A: No. The speed rating on the Z-80 chip shows the maximum clock rate. You'll need to replace the 3.58 MHz clock crystal with a faster one.

Sometimes I dread calling a computer company technical support because they sometimes give me an answer that has me shaking my head.

I put Windows 8.1 on my Dell computer (Core Duo) that originally came with Windows 7. One day, for some reason, it went through the BIOS checkup but wouldn't boot into the hard drive. I suspected something was wrong with the boot sector, but I thought I'd see if Dell tech support can help me even though the machine is out of warranty.

After asking them a few questions, the tech finally said to me that it was because the machine wasn't designed to take Windows 8.x so I have to reformat my machine and put Windows 7 back(WTF?) Minimum system requirements for Windows 8 is 1 GHz (mine is 3 GHz).

I said ok and hung up.

I took my machine to my IT where I worked to see if they can find out what's going on. They confirmed that the boot sector was bad, relegated my HD to a secondary drive and gave me a new faster drive.