Funny and Humorous Technical Support Tales and Stories

When we call our clients to help them with their problems, one of the things that gets me is when they answer and they automatically say "Please hold!" instead of saying "We are with other patients, can you please hold?" What if it were an emergency?

Most of my friends and colleagues know that I work on old computers for fun. While many of them don't really understand this, it is handy for them, because whenever they've got an old computer they're not using, they know I'll take it off their hands. Usually these are dead, worthless, or dying, but I can often scrounge parts this way. Anyway...

My latest arrival was a nice-looking 17" Apple PowerBook G4, which has a dead keyboard, and although it would boot up, had regular kernel panics. In the process of opening it up, I discovered that somebody had clearly "worked on it" before me. Numerous missing screws, broken RAM slot, one ribbon cable still in place, but the latch that holds it in was missing...

So I decided to put it back together, and donate it. As I was doing so, I found two of the missing internal screws. They were shoe-horned into the screw mounts for the external DVI monitor connection!