grinner
02-24-2004, 05:21 AM
REAL TECH SUPPORT STORIES
From Dave:I was in the Army as the developer of a prototype system with 3 sites. We filtered all calls from the end users (supply clerks), forwarding them to the hardware maintainer when appropriate. One day I got called that the computer was broken. I went through the "immediate action drill", starting with "Is it plugged in?". We went through the whole drill, with no joy. We called the hardware vendor, who showed up (charging us for the service call). Turns out someone threw the circuit breaker. In this case, the attention span of the computer system was much less than the length of its power cord.
From Esben:4-5 years ago the helpdesk, where I worked at the time, got this request from a user: Could he please have a copy of the internet on a 3.5" floppy disk because his PC at home did not have a modem...
From Lee:I was the manager of the IT department for an insurance company. One of my duties was to provide personal tech support for the owner who had a company computer at his "home office" in Hawaii. One day his wife calls needing help with the CDROM drive. She can eject the drive but she can not find a way to place the CD in it and get the drive fully closed. It appears that there is a raised plastic bar across the drive. I tell her that I am positive the drive worked as I had personally checked it before sending it out. I am totally stumped, and they flat out refuse to fly me out for an on-site visit. Well it turns out that they had the entire computer upside down! The placement of the system was such that the monitor cable would not reach. By turning it over there was enough slack. She was trying to put a CD into the bottom of the drive, and no... she is not a blonde. I imagine that poor CD took quite a beating after placing it on the underside of the tray and trying to close it repeatedly.
Greg This one happened when I was working in the PC Support Center at the University of Iowa.
A young woman walks in to the support area carrying her Mac extended keyboard and states that she wants to buy a new one. At that time these things were selling for like $114 so we start plugging the thing in and checking it out to see if we could simply replace a few of the keyswitches with some of our spares. We go back and forth with her trying to explain to her how expensive it will be, but she doesn't budge at all. By this point the tech standing next to me is holding the keyboard up overhead blowing out the accumulated whatever when our walk-in finally states that the real reason that she wants to replace it is that she dropped it into her toilet. Picture in your mind the following - our embarassed customer standing next to the tech who realizes that he's been handling a keyboard that has been in someone's toilet and immediately drops it to the floor, and then me trying to keep a straight face through it all while asking myself the obvious question. I was never able to ask her what really happened for fear I would hurt myself laughing so hard...
Joshua Strange day at work many years ago. I was working for a large Oil company at the time doing internal helpdesk support. We took calls on everything back then. Call came in.
Customer: Do you do support for phones?
Me: Sure what is the problem that you are having?
Customer: My phone smells funny.
Me: Is it a burning smell what is happening?
Customer: No not that... it kind of smells like old fish.
Me: Oh... ok I'll have someone come out and check your phone out.
Not too long later my manager forwarded this call to the entire center. Turns out we had a technician go on sight and after removing the mouth piece to the phone he found bits of tunafish. Aparrently the customer was eating tunafish and talking on the phone at the same time, and managed to spray bits of tunafish into the reciever holes.
ZaphodB: I was called to install a scanner in a nice-but-clueless lady's cubicle. The cubicle was so cluttered that the only flat spot was on top of an empty metal filing cabinet. I installed it, tested it, and went back to my office. About an hour later, I got a call saying, "Hi, it's me. I like the scanner a lot but people are complaining about the noise, and I can't find the volume control." I explained, "Scanners don't come with volume controls. What you could do, though, is bring in an old beach towel and put it under the scanner to muffle the sound."
After lunch, I was sitting peacefully at my desk, when the phone rang and a panicked voice shouted, "HELP! It's moving all over the place and making loud grinding noises! PLEASE!" I told her to unplug it from the wall and I hurried over to the other building. On the way up in the elevator, I found the lady's secretary in a foul mood. "It figures the one day I need a mouse pad from the supply cabinet they're all gone, and now I have to go get more from downstairs," she grumbled. A dark suspicion crossed my mind. Sure enough, when I got there, she had piled mousepads of different thicknesses under the scanner, making it lean slightly and rock on its feet. After I excused myself to go laugh myself sick, I arranged for the carpenters to make her a padding-lined case and we made room on her desk for it.
Jeff: a) after 15 minutes on the phone, you hear your tech expert say to the client on the phone, "Yes, you do need the keyboard plugged in."
b) you have been seriously abused down the phone by an elderly lady who just got home after her big purchase. You advise her that sending a tech support guy out right now good be very expensive if the problem is not warrenty related and yet they insist and will not explain what the problem is, just demand someone come now. The techy comes back 20 minutes later with a big cheque and says "I turned the mouse the right way round."
And this when I was a co-instructor in an online course for teachers teaching computers and technology in education;
c) a teacher calls up interested in your course and wants in. You explain the requirements and process and what will be provided to them and upon mentioning CD-ROM and Web Access they ask, "Do I need a computer for this?" to which I said "Well, yes. It's basically a course about computers and technology and it is done completely online."
"I don't want to use a computer. Can't you send it all to me in book format?" (Over 2000 pages in total)
"So you want to do a course about computers without using a computer, is that right?"
"Yes."
Now am I missing something here? After a while, she becomes more insistant and agressive as I try to explain the flaw in her logic. Eventually, it reaches critical mass at which point I put her through to my boss who ultimately tells her she's an idiot (not quite as direct as that) and that we can't do anything for her.
Bobby says, "I have trained Tech support for both Dell and Gateway"; 1) I'm listening in on a call with my class and the tech answers and before she can get out the thank you for calling Dell, the customer is yelling in her ear "MY MONITOR IS ON FIRE" with his thick accent. The tech asks for him to repeat himself. He slows down and says, "fire goes up, water comes down, what do I do?" She tells him to unplug the monitor. He unplugs it, then in a few minutes asks the tech, "You want should I plug it in to troubleshoot?"
2) When I was a tech for Gateway, I had a customer who called in and told me his HDD was f***ed because of an error that he was getting "non system disk remove and strike any key." I asked him if he had a floppy in, he said No. I told him to press all the buttons on the front of his computer, he told me he only had the on and a big knob (he meant his monitor). I told him the tower, he said "my modem???" I said no and he tells me that is all he has, so I figure his modem is his tower cuz his computer is his monitor... (Brace yo self ya'll) So he pushes all the buttons on his "Modem" and he tells me his CD was empty and his Hard drive came out... Now is when I ask him to tell me what his hard drive looks like. He tells me it is flat and about 4 in square. I tell him it is a floppy. He tells me that it is not floppy, it is hard. I tell him to leave it out and boot. It worked, and he tells me that I still don't know what I'm talking about, that Micro$oft fixed itself. I told him to box it up and send it in. He asked why, and I told him 10 days no-computer-time for being dumb (thanks Illiad). The funny thing was, he did...
Ken: One of the users at our head office (nearby my desk, regrettably) discovers that a particular website is momentarily down. My monitoring software has not flagged me with any network issues all day Ð and I just happen to be surfing several other pages at the time this happens.
USER: (Whiny nasal tone) "Ken, Is the Internet down?"
ME: "What's your problem? Can you describe it to me?"
USER: (Impatient huff) "I can't get to a specific website."
ME: Have you tried any other websites recently?
USER: (Screaming) "I DON'T WANT ANY OTHER WEBSITES, I WANT THIS ONE!"
Mike: I used to work for a small commercial networking firm. We were setting up a three computer network for a construction company. After setting up the first and moving on, one of the owners came to me. "My keyboard is broken, all I get is funny characters". So I go sit down and type out a few sentences with no problems, so I shut down the system and unplug and plug the keyboard back in just to be sure it is seated properly. After no problems on reboot I move on to the second computer. A minute later he comes back Ð still funny characters. I sit down again Ð no problems. Finally, I have him sit down to show me. He starts typing and sure enough Ð funny characters in his word-processing software. Then I look down and notice he is resting the side of his palm on the CTRL key. D'oh!
Mark: Back in the early-ish days of the Multimedia industry, we got this tech support for one of the CD-ROMS that had been distributed to teachers across the state:
"Hi, the CD you sent me doesn't work."
"OK, what do you mean it doesn't work exactly? Do you get anything on your screen at all?"
"You mean the windscreen? There are just the usual bugs and stuff..."
Fortunately, it didn't take us too long to realise that she was attempting to play the CD-ROM in the Audio CD player of her car.
Paul: I was working technical support for a nationwide ISP, doing things like setup, configuration, troubleshooting, and billing issues. I received a call from a gentleman who was having trouble setting up a Windows 95 Dialup Networking connection for internet access. I started walking him through the setup, but was having some difficulty. I would tell him to go to a particular menu and click a particular option, but he was not finding the option to click on. To make matters worse, there was some sort of distracting noise in the background, like a radio show or someone talking close to the telephone. I was struggling, and the gentleman was starting to sound like he was losing hope - but then I heard the words in the background more clearly, and realized that his computer was telling him the contents of the menus as he reached them. The man was BLIND! I said nothing about this, didn't change my manner (except maybe to become more patient), and started listening to his computer instead of relying on his feedback to find the menus. That went much better, and I was able to get him all set up and tested.
Christopher: work in a service department for an independent computer reseller. Recently we had a customer bring in a slot-load iMac that wouldn't load CD's. As the customer was checking it in, he told us that it hadn't worked ever since he last tried to read an old floppy disk in it. We were a bit confused by that - since the iMac has no floppy drive - we asked if he had an external - and he says "no - you just have to open the case and put just the round part in." Sure enough - when we tore down the iMac - stuck in the CD drive was the innards of a 3.5 floppy... We can now bring the entire staff to laughing fits and tears of joy by saying "the round part..."
Andy: A friend called me over one day to help them with their e-mail. Firstly I discovered it was actually Hotmail -Êa bad omen, but the actual problem was simple - he'd forgotten his password.
Once owning an account with the great spam monster, I knew that you can reset passwords by filling in some user data and answering a secret question. Following my instructions he filled in the relevant form, and then up popped the secret question the genius had entered on registering:
"What is my password?"
Charles: I was doing contract tech support for a rather large company (of which I will not say the name) and I got a phone call from the head of accounting. He said he was having problems with his computer. I asked him to right click on "My Computer". He said he did not see anything like that. I walked him through, I made sure he had the computer turned on and made sure that he had minimized or closed all applications so he could see the desk top. I asked him to "look in the upper left corner of his desk top and see if you see an icon labeled My Computer" He said no. I then said "You see the start button in the lower left corner of your monitor, correct?" "Yes." "Now look at the upper left corner of your desk top. Do you see My Computer?" "No." "You don't see My Computer anywhere on your monitor?" "I see it on my monitor, but my MONITOR is on the upper RIGHT corner of my desk top!"
William: One day, one of our more ignorant users called up complaining that he couldn't find "my computer". I assumed that he was referring to the icon in the corner of the desktop, and also explained to him that in the newer microsoft operating systems, it could be removed from the desktop. Then he said, "No, you don't understand. I can't find my computer. It's not on my desk."
We told him to call the police.
Paul: A couple of years ago my team was troubleshooting a DSL connection problem in one of our branch offices in another state. One of the things we have the user do is power-cycle the router. Since this particular model didn't have a power switch, we had her unplug the power cable and plug it back in - which she couldn't do. She asked me what she should do if she couldn't plug the cable back in and I told her "Try real hard, because if you can't do it then I have to drive for four hours to do it for you". She said okay, paused, and then said "There's smoke coming out". She interpreted 'try real hard' as 'push real hard', and jammed the power cord in so hard that it shorted the contacts and fried the router. Where do these people come from?
John: I work at the helpdesk at a Hospital and actually LIVE a lot of the fodder I see in the Userfriendly strip. I have a little something that you may find interesting:
The Powers that be have decided to no longer support WordPerfect after the first of the year and that Microsoft Word is going to be used instead. We are getting the obligatory calls on how to convert the documents from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, which is normally a simple process. The most common problems we are having is where the new "converted" documents wind up. Some of the users feel that once the files have been converted successfully they can delete the Folder containing the WordPerfect documents. The problem is that the converted documents are also in the same folder as the originals. It's a good thing we have backups!
Scott: I work in the IT dept. of a local hospital. I got a call from an end-user at one of our MAN locations. She asked if there was a problem with the internet access at the building since she couldn't get out to the internet. I dialed in and checked the router. Everything was fine. I had her close everything, and start from scratch, describing everything she was doing and what she was seeing on the screen. Her reply was the standard "Unable to connect" message when launching her browser. I then had her type another url in the address bar, and what do you know, success. When I explained to her that the internet access had been and was up and that the problem was probably with her home page's web site, she informed me that prior to calling me, she had called the support line of the home page web site. They had informed her that their site was down and that it would be off-line for about 3 hours while they upgraded their web server. She had logged a support call on our end just to make sure that they were telling her the truth, that their web server being down was the reason she could not access the web site.
And people wonder why 'techies' are stressed out all the time.
Poppy Co-worker of mine spoke with a customer who wanted to set his dialer up so he could use the computer as a speakerphone. After half an hour trying to understand why his computer wasn't finding the phone line, they finally checked the plugs. Somehow, the user had run the phone cord from the wall to the phone through the case to his computer. He then wanted to know why we couldn't just patch into the side of the cord.
John We had the schools first HP laser printer installed in the PC lab for less than 24 hours when we received the only the first complaint on it. One of the users came down to tell us that the laser printer wasn't printing and had eaten his report. We tried to explain to him that the printer can't eat your report, and he said, yes it truly had and that there was smoke coming from the printer along with strange grinding noises. Upon investigation we discovered that he had taken his 5 1/4" floppy and had somehow crammed it into the envelope feed and hit printscreen, whereupon it promptly fused into a mess. The printer had less than 50 total pages through it.
Christian Recently I had the following experience while giving support via the phone:
"Hello, I called in to tell you that my unit needs a new fan, the old one is noisy"
After checking, warranty, address, etc. I started the usual troubleshooting inquiry. "Sir, do you have any more information regarding the source of the noise?"
(very determined) "Yes, it is the CPU-fan"
"Well, you sound very confident about it, there are two fans in your computer, how did you find out it was the CPU-fan and not the one located in the power supply?"
"I took a pair of scissors, put it in the back of the power supply, thus holding the fan, and switched the unit on."
Marvin This one is actually quite embarrassing. I recently had to travel out of state on business for my ISP. While gone, I decided to remote-login to my PC at home. After finding out that I couldn't I called my wife and asked her if the PC was on. She told me that it wasn't and she wasn't sure how to get it on (It was hanging on a reboot and just needed to be powered down first) and she then proceeded to ask me why I didn't just log in to it over the internet to start it up, apparently assuming that you can log into PC's that are off. And I've tried SO hard to teach her the basics too....
Joe A few days after installing a new hard drive for a customer I got a call and she told me that ever since I had worked on the computer her monitor was making a strange noise. I told her that nothing I did could have affected her monitor, but she insisted that since I had worked on her computer right before this problem popped up that it had to be related. I told her that I was more than willing to come by, but that if what I found was not caused by me that I would need to charge her for the visit. Boy did that go ever well. So I get there, and while I am standing across the room she turns on her monitor, and this aweful whining noise starts up. "That's weird", I thought to myself. I walk up to monitor and lean in close to investigate, and as I do the noise moves to coming from the monitor to coming from right above it, where she has old clock radio. At some point the radio had been turned on and it was tuned off channel on the AM band.
James I received a frantic call from a secretary who said that her computer has mysteriously stopped working. She was absolutely adamant that she hadn't done anything out of the ordinary...she was just cleaning up some files and tidying up her hard drive. When I got there, I found nothing but 4 nicely organized directories on her Windows 3.1 machine. They were COM, EXE, BAT, and OTHER. She had organized her hard drive alright...
Mattias One day a student came to the support team with a floppy disk in his hands, grumbling and complaining about the bloody computers. We asekd him what the problem was and he replied that he could not boot the computer in the computer room from the floppy. He added that he tried it now for several times with out success and he wants us to fix that now. Well the only thing we could do is holding the chief sysadmin back from torturing this guy - the computers were sun sparc stations....
Corby ISP Tech Support. Older retired man calls, obviously on speaker phone, says he was a computer engineer back in the old school days of punch cards, etc. Having trouble setting up new ISP software. Determined we needed to reinstall some Windows software, then we needed to reinstall ISP software. I asked where his Windows 98 install disk was. He said, "In the drive". After going through that I asked where the ISP CD was. He said, "In the drive stacked on top of the Windows CD." I promptly put the man on hold, laughed my chair off, explained to my cube mates what happened, then they laughed they chairs off. Got back on the line (his wife is now in the room on the speaker phone). I explained, "Sir, CDs are kind of like records. With records you could stack them up, but only the one the needle was on was usable. Same with CDs, only you shouldn't stack them up in your drive, you could damage it." Man and wife, "Ooooooh." Wife, "I like this guys, he's a smart one." Thank you for calling.
Ivan This one seems minor compared to all of the others I have read on here recently, but: Yesterday, I get a call from a lady who is stuck in safe mode (win98, unfortunately) and she really needs to know why things aren't working on her machine. When I arrive to resolve the issue, one of her coworkers informs me that she asked if it was a special day and if everyone was computing in safe mode today. ((Nothing like practicing safe computing)).
Daryl Okay I work a sales support line but often we field some quasi-technical questions like the one featured in the conversation below:
Customer: How much do the Travan tapes cost?
Rep: $37.99 each or $103.00 for a three pack.
Customer: Oh? And how many tapes come in a three-pack?
Rep: (Pausing to be sure she heard the question correctly) Um, Three.
Customer: (Light dawning dimly over her head) Oh yeah, huh? I guess that would make sense.
We couldn't stop laughing after the phone call was ended.
Chad Just interested in sharing the fun we have here, supporting the field sales staff for one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies. Somehow, somewhere, our main 800 number must be VERY similar to an AOL tech support number. ÊWe CONSTANTLY receive calls from people trying to get ahold of AOL for support. ÊThey consistently manage to navigate through menu options that have NOTHING to do with AOL or dialup support, hear the phone greeting by our techs (again identifying the company, and asking for their NAME and SALES DIVISION), and then somehow feel the need to get ticked off when we cannot help with their AOL issues or provide them with the correct support number. It's not always the customer who plays the fool, too. ÊWe have a large asset tracking project that records all of our field tech equipment and to whom it has been assigned. ÊAs equipment is RTD for repair, EOL, or being sent to a user, the status is constantly updated. ÊRarely is this status change made by the same person, so any changes are logged in our call tracking system for input later. ÊThese are generally recorded quickly, so we consistently see stuff like "Sent out Asset# xxxxxxx", or "AT# xxxxxxx". ÊWe all got a good laugh one day when we came across a ticket the read simply "SENT OUT ASS". ÊThat's it... no # sign, no numbers, no punctuation, all caps..... SENT OUT ASS. ÊOur Director was in town this week, and he called up the Project Manager right away to make sure he got a shipment for his birthday later that week.
Greg This one happened when I was working in the PC Support Center at the University of Iowa.
A young woman walks in to the support area carrying her Mac extended keyboard and states that she wants to buy a new one. At that time these things were selling for like $114 so we start plugging the thing in and checking it out to see if we could simply replace a few of the keyswitches with some of our spares. We go back and forth with her trying to explain to her how expensive it will be, but she doesn't budge at all. By this point the tech standing next to me is holding the keyboard up overhead blowing out the accumulated whatever when our walk-in finally states that the real reason that she wants to replace it is that she dropped it into her toilet. Picture in your mind the following - our embarassed customer standing next to the tech who realizes that he's been handling a keyboard that has been in someone's toilet and immediately drops it to the floor, and then me trying to keep a straight face through it all while asking myself the obvious question. I was never able to ask her what really happened for fear I would hurt myself laughing so hard...
Joshua Strange day at work many years ago. I was working for a large Oil company at the time doing internal helpdesk support. We took calls on everything back then. Call came in.
Customer: Do you do support for phones?
Me: Sure what is the problem that you are having?
Customer: My phone smells funny.
Me: Is it a burning smell what is happening?
Customer: No not that... it kind of smells like old fish.
Me: Oh... ok I'll have someone come out and check your phone out.
Not too long later my manager forwarded this call to the entire center. Turns out we had a technician go on sight and after removing the mouth piece to the phone he found bits of tunafish. Aparrently the customer was eating tunafish and talking on the phone at the same time, and managed to spray bits of tunafish into the reciever holes.
From Dave:I was in the Army as the developer of a prototype system with 3 sites. We filtered all calls from the end users (supply clerks), forwarding them to the hardware maintainer when appropriate. One day I got called that the computer was broken. I went through the "immediate action drill", starting with "Is it plugged in?". We went through the whole drill, with no joy. We called the hardware vendor, who showed up (charging us for the service call). Turns out someone threw the circuit breaker. In this case, the attention span of the computer system was much less than the length of its power cord.
From Esben:4-5 years ago the helpdesk, where I worked at the time, got this request from a user: Could he please have a copy of the internet on a 3.5" floppy disk because his PC at home did not have a modem...
From Lee:I was the manager of the IT department for an insurance company. One of my duties was to provide personal tech support for the owner who had a company computer at his "home office" in Hawaii. One day his wife calls needing help with the CDROM drive. She can eject the drive but she can not find a way to place the CD in it and get the drive fully closed. It appears that there is a raised plastic bar across the drive. I tell her that I am positive the drive worked as I had personally checked it before sending it out. I am totally stumped, and they flat out refuse to fly me out for an on-site visit. Well it turns out that they had the entire computer upside down! The placement of the system was such that the monitor cable would not reach. By turning it over there was enough slack. She was trying to put a CD into the bottom of the drive, and no... she is not a blonde. I imagine that poor CD took quite a beating after placing it on the underside of the tray and trying to close it repeatedly.
Greg This one happened when I was working in the PC Support Center at the University of Iowa.
A young woman walks in to the support area carrying her Mac extended keyboard and states that she wants to buy a new one. At that time these things were selling for like $114 so we start plugging the thing in and checking it out to see if we could simply replace a few of the keyswitches with some of our spares. We go back and forth with her trying to explain to her how expensive it will be, but she doesn't budge at all. By this point the tech standing next to me is holding the keyboard up overhead blowing out the accumulated whatever when our walk-in finally states that the real reason that she wants to replace it is that she dropped it into her toilet. Picture in your mind the following - our embarassed customer standing next to the tech who realizes that he's been handling a keyboard that has been in someone's toilet and immediately drops it to the floor, and then me trying to keep a straight face through it all while asking myself the obvious question. I was never able to ask her what really happened for fear I would hurt myself laughing so hard...
Joshua Strange day at work many years ago. I was working for a large Oil company at the time doing internal helpdesk support. We took calls on everything back then. Call came in.
Customer: Do you do support for phones?
Me: Sure what is the problem that you are having?
Customer: My phone smells funny.
Me: Is it a burning smell what is happening?
Customer: No not that... it kind of smells like old fish.
Me: Oh... ok I'll have someone come out and check your phone out.
Not too long later my manager forwarded this call to the entire center. Turns out we had a technician go on sight and after removing the mouth piece to the phone he found bits of tunafish. Aparrently the customer was eating tunafish and talking on the phone at the same time, and managed to spray bits of tunafish into the reciever holes.
ZaphodB: I was called to install a scanner in a nice-but-clueless lady's cubicle. The cubicle was so cluttered that the only flat spot was on top of an empty metal filing cabinet. I installed it, tested it, and went back to my office. About an hour later, I got a call saying, "Hi, it's me. I like the scanner a lot but people are complaining about the noise, and I can't find the volume control." I explained, "Scanners don't come with volume controls. What you could do, though, is bring in an old beach towel and put it under the scanner to muffle the sound."
After lunch, I was sitting peacefully at my desk, when the phone rang and a panicked voice shouted, "HELP! It's moving all over the place and making loud grinding noises! PLEASE!" I told her to unplug it from the wall and I hurried over to the other building. On the way up in the elevator, I found the lady's secretary in a foul mood. "It figures the one day I need a mouse pad from the supply cabinet they're all gone, and now I have to go get more from downstairs," she grumbled. A dark suspicion crossed my mind. Sure enough, when I got there, she had piled mousepads of different thicknesses under the scanner, making it lean slightly and rock on its feet. After I excused myself to go laugh myself sick, I arranged for the carpenters to make her a padding-lined case and we made room on her desk for it.
Jeff: a) after 15 minutes on the phone, you hear your tech expert say to the client on the phone, "Yes, you do need the keyboard plugged in."
b) you have been seriously abused down the phone by an elderly lady who just got home after her big purchase. You advise her that sending a tech support guy out right now good be very expensive if the problem is not warrenty related and yet they insist and will not explain what the problem is, just demand someone come now. The techy comes back 20 minutes later with a big cheque and says "I turned the mouse the right way round."
And this when I was a co-instructor in an online course for teachers teaching computers and technology in education;
c) a teacher calls up interested in your course and wants in. You explain the requirements and process and what will be provided to them and upon mentioning CD-ROM and Web Access they ask, "Do I need a computer for this?" to which I said "Well, yes. It's basically a course about computers and technology and it is done completely online."
"I don't want to use a computer. Can't you send it all to me in book format?" (Over 2000 pages in total)
"So you want to do a course about computers without using a computer, is that right?"
"Yes."
Now am I missing something here? After a while, she becomes more insistant and agressive as I try to explain the flaw in her logic. Eventually, it reaches critical mass at which point I put her through to my boss who ultimately tells her she's an idiot (not quite as direct as that) and that we can't do anything for her.
Bobby says, "I have trained Tech support for both Dell and Gateway"; 1) I'm listening in on a call with my class and the tech answers and before she can get out the thank you for calling Dell, the customer is yelling in her ear "MY MONITOR IS ON FIRE" with his thick accent. The tech asks for him to repeat himself. He slows down and says, "fire goes up, water comes down, what do I do?" She tells him to unplug the monitor. He unplugs it, then in a few minutes asks the tech, "You want should I plug it in to troubleshoot?"
2) When I was a tech for Gateway, I had a customer who called in and told me his HDD was f***ed because of an error that he was getting "non system disk remove and strike any key." I asked him if he had a floppy in, he said No. I told him to press all the buttons on the front of his computer, he told me he only had the on and a big knob (he meant his monitor). I told him the tower, he said "my modem???" I said no and he tells me that is all he has, so I figure his modem is his tower cuz his computer is his monitor... (Brace yo self ya'll) So he pushes all the buttons on his "Modem" and he tells me his CD was empty and his Hard drive came out... Now is when I ask him to tell me what his hard drive looks like. He tells me it is flat and about 4 in square. I tell him it is a floppy. He tells me that it is not floppy, it is hard. I tell him to leave it out and boot. It worked, and he tells me that I still don't know what I'm talking about, that Micro$oft fixed itself. I told him to box it up and send it in. He asked why, and I told him 10 days no-computer-time for being dumb (thanks Illiad). The funny thing was, he did...
Ken: One of the users at our head office (nearby my desk, regrettably) discovers that a particular website is momentarily down. My monitoring software has not flagged me with any network issues all day Ð and I just happen to be surfing several other pages at the time this happens.
USER: (Whiny nasal tone) "Ken, Is the Internet down?"
ME: "What's your problem? Can you describe it to me?"
USER: (Impatient huff) "I can't get to a specific website."
ME: Have you tried any other websites recently?
USER: (Screaming) "I DON'T WANT ANY OTHER WEBSITES, I WANT THIS ONE!"
Mike: I used to work for a small commercial networking firm. We were setting up a three computer network for a construction company. After setting up the first and moving on, one of the owners came to me. "My keyboard is broken, all I get is funny characters". So I go sit down and type out a few sentences with no problems, so I shut down the system and unplug and plug the keyboard back in just to be sure it is seated properly. After no problems on reboot I move on to the second computer. A minute later he comes back Ð still funny characters. I sit down again Ð no problems. Finally, I have him sit down to show me. He starts typing and sure enough Ð funny characters in his word-processing software. Then I look down and notice he is resting the side of his palm on the CTRL key. D'oh!
Mark: Back in the early-ish days of the Multimedia industry, we got this tech support for one of the CD-ROMS that had been distributed to teachers across the state:
"Hi, the CD you sent me doesn't work."
"OK, what do you mean it doesn't work exactly? Do you get anything on your screen at all?"
"You mean the windscreen? There are just the usual bugs and stuff..."
Fortunately, it didn't take us too long to realise that she was attempting to play the CD-ROM in the Audio CD player of her car.
Paul: I was working technical support for a nationwide ISP, doing things like setup, configuration, troubleshooting, and billing issues. I received a call from a gentleman who was having trouble setting up a Windows 95 Dialup Networking connection for internet access. I started walking him through the setup, but was having some difficulty. I would tell him to go to a particular menu and click a particular option, but he was not finding the option to click on. To make matters worse, there was some sort of distracting noise in the background, like a radio show or someone talking close to the telephone. I was struggling, and the gentleman was starting to sound like he was losing hope - but then I heard the words in the background more clearly, and realized that his computer was telling him the contents of the menus as he reached them. The man was BLIND! I said nothing about this, didn't change my manner (except maybe to become more patient), and started listening to his computer instead of relying on his feedback to find the menus. That went much better, and I was able to get him all set up and tested.
Christopher: work in a service department for an independent computer reseller. Recently we had a customer bring in a slot-load iMac that wouldn't load CD's. As the customer was checking it in, he told us that it hadn't worked ever since he last tried to read an old floppy disk in it. We were a bit confused by that - since the iMac has no floppy drive - we asked if he had an external - and he says "no - you just have to open the case and put just the round part in." Sure enough - when we tore down the iMac - stuck in the CD drive was the innards of a 3.5 floppy... We can now bring the entire staff to laughing fits and tears of joy by saying "the round part..."
Andy: A friend called me over one day to help them with their e-mail. Firstly I discovered it was actually Hotmail -Êa bad omen, but the actual problem was simple - he'd forgotten his password.
Once owning an account with the great spam monster, I knew that you can reset passwords by filling in some user data and answering a secret question. Following my instructions he filled in the relevant form, and then up popped the secret question the genius had entered on registering:
"What is my password?"
Charles: I was doing contract tech support for a rather large company (of which I will not say the name) and I got a phone call from the head of accounting. He said he was having problems with his computer. I asked him to right click on "My Computer". He said he did not see anything like that. I walked him through, I made sure he had the computer turned on and made sure that he had minimized or closed all applications so he could see the desk top. I asked him to "look in the upper left corner of his desk top and see if you see an icon labeled My Computer" He said no. I then said "You see the start button in the lower left corner of your monitor, correct?" "Yes." "Now look at the upper left corner of your desk top. Do you see My Computer?" "No." "You don't see My Computer anywhere on your monitor?" "I see it on my monitor, but my MONITOR is on the upper RIGHT corner of my desk top!"
William: One day, one of our more ignorant users called up complaining that he couldn't find "my computer". I assumed that he was referring to the icon in the corner of the desktop, and also explained to him that in the newer microsoft operating systems, it could be removed from the desktop. Then he said, "No, you don't understand. I can't find my computer. It's not on my desk."
We told him to call the police.
Paul: A couple of years ago my team was troubleshooting a DSL connection problem in one of our branch offices in another state. One of the things we have the user do is power-cycle the router. Since this particular model didn't have a power switch, we had her unplug the power cable and plug it back in - which she couldn't do. She asked me what she should do if she couldn't plug the cable back in and I told her "Try real hard, because if you can't do it then I have to drive for four hours to do it for you". She said okay, paused, and then said "There's smoke coming out". She interpreted 'try real hard' as 'push real hard', and jammed the power cord in so hard that it shorted the contacts and fried the router. Where do these people come from?
John: I work at the helpdesk at a Hospital and actually LIVE a lot of the fodder I see in the Userfriendly strip. I have a little something that you may find interesting:
The Powers that be have decided to no longer support WordPerfect after the first of the year and that Microsoft Word is going to be used instead. We are getting the obligatory calls on how to convert the documents from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, which is normally a simple process. The most common problems we are having is where the new "converted" documents wind up. Some of the users feel that once the files have been converted successfully they can delete the Folder containing the WordPerfect documents. The problem is that the converted documents are also in the same folder as the originals. It's a good thing we have backups!
Scott: I work in the IT dept. of a local hospital. I got a call from an end-user at one of our MAN locations. She asked if there was a problem with the internet access at the building since she couldn't get out to the internet. I dialed in and checked the router. Everything was fine. I had her close everything, and start from scratch, describing everything she was doing and what she was seeing on the screen. Her reply was the standard "Unable to connect" message when launching her browser. I then had her type another url in the address bar, and what do you know, success. When I explained to her that the internet access had been and was up and that the problem was probably with her home page's web site, she informed me that prior to calling me, she had called the support line of the home page web site. They had informed her that their site was down and that it would be off-line for about 3 hours while they upgraded their web server. She had logged a support call on our end just to make sure that they were telling her the truth, that their web server being down was the reason she could not access the web site.
And people wonder why 'techies' are stressed out all the time.
Poppy Co-worker of mine spoke with a customer who wanted to set his dialer up so he could use the computer as a speakerphone. After half an hour trying to understand why his computer wasn't finding the phone line, they finally checked the plugs. Somehow, the user had run the phone cord from the wall to the phone through the case to his computer. He then wanted to know why we couldn't just patch into the side of the cord.
John We had the schools first HP laser printer installed in the PC lab for less than 24 hours when we received the only the first complaint on it. One of the users came down to tell us that the laser printer wasn't printing and had eaten his report. We tried to explain to him that the printer can't eat your report, and he said, yes it truly had and that there was smoke coming from the printer along with strange grinding noises. Upon investigation we discovered that he had taken his 5 1/4" floppy and had somehow crammed it into the envelope feed and hit printscreen, whereupon it promptly fused into a mess. The printer had less than 50 total pages through it.
Christian Recently I had the following experience while giving support via the phone:
"Hello, I called in to tell you that my unit needs a new fan, the old one is noisy"
After checking, warranty, address, etc. I started the usual troubleshooting inquiry. "Sir, do you have any more information regarding the source of the noise?"
(very determined) "Yes, it is the CPU-fan"
"Well, you sound very confident about it, there are two fans in your computer, how did you find out it was the CPU-fan and not the one located in the power supply?"
"I took a pair of scissors, put it in the back of the power supply, thus holding the fan, and switched the unit on."
Marvin This one is actually quite embarrassing. I recently had to travel out of state on business for my ISP. While gone, I decided to remote-login to my PC at home. After finding out that I couldn't I called my wife and asked her if the PC was on. She told me that it wasn't and she wasn't sure how to get it on (It was hanging on a reboot and just needed to be powered down first) and she then proceeded to ask me why I didn't just log in to it over the internet to start it up, apparently assuming that you can log into PC's that are off. And I've tried SO hard to teach her the basics too....
Joe A few days after installing a new hard drive for a customer I got a call and she told me that ever since I had worked on the computer her monitor was making a strange noise. I told her that nothing I did could have affected her monitor, but she insisted that since I had worked on her computer right before this problem popped up that it had to be related. I told her that I was more than willing to come by, but that if what I found was not caused by me that I would need to charge her for the visit. Boy did that go ever well. So I get there, and while I am standing across the room she turns on her monitor, and this aweful whining noise starts up. "That's weird", I thought to myself. I walk up to monitor and lean in close to investigate, and as I do the noise moves to coming from the monitor to coming from right above it, where she has old clock radio. At some point the radio had been turned on and it was tuned off channel on the AM band.
James I received a frantic call from a secretary who said that her computer has mysteriously stopped working. She was absolutely adamant that she hadn't done anything out of the ordinary...she was just cleaning up some files and tidying up her hard drive. When I got there, I found nothing but 4 nicely organized directories on her Windows 3.1 machine. They were COM, EXE, BAT, and OTHER. She had organized her hard drive alright...
Mattias One day a student came to the support team with a floppy disk in his hands, grumbling and complaining about the bloody computers. We asekd him what the problem was and he replied that he could not boot the computer in the computer room from the floppy. He added that he tried it now for several times with out success and he wants us to fix that now. Well the only thing we could do is holding the chief sysadmin back from torturing this guy - the computers were sun sparc stations....
Corby ISP Tech Support. Older retired man calls, obviously on speaker phone, says he was a computer engineer back in the old school days of punch cards, etc. Having trouble setting up new ISP software. Determined we needed to reinstall some Windows software, then we needed to reinstall ISP software. I asked where his Windows 98 install disk was. He said, "In the drive". After going through that I asked where the ISP CD was. He said, "In the drive stacked on top of the Windows CD." I promptly put the man on hold, laughed my chair off, explained to my cube mates what happened, then they laughed they chairs off. Got back on the line (his wife is now in the room on the speaker phone). I explained, "Sir, CDs are kind of like records. With records you could stack them up, but only the one the needle was on was usable. Same with CDs, only you shouldn't stack them up in your drive, you could damage it." Man and wife, "Ooooooh." Wife, "I like this guys, he's a smart one." Thank you for calling.
Ivan This one seems minor compared to all of the others I have read on here recently, but: Yesterday, I get a call from a lady who is stuck in safe mode (win98, unfortunately) and she really needs to know why things aren't working on her machine. When I arrive to resolve the issue, one of her coworkers informs me that she asked if it was a special day and if everyone was computing in safe mode today. ((Nothing like practicing safe computing)).
Daryl Okay I work a sales support line but often we field some quasi-technical questions like the one featured in the conversation below:
Customer: How much do the Travan tapes cost?
Rep: $37.99 each or $103.00 for a three pack.
Customer: Oh? And how many tapes come in a three-pack?
Rep: (Pausing to be sure she heard the question correctly) Um, Three.
Customer: (Light dawning dimly over her head) Oh yeah, huh? I guess that would make sense.
We couldn't stop laughing after the phone call was ended.
Chad Just interested in sharing the fun we have here, supporting the field sales staff for one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies. Somehow, somewhere, our main 800 number must be VERY similar to an AOL tech support number. ÊWe CONSTANTLY receive calls from people trying to get ahold of AOL for support. ÊThey consistently manage to navigate through menu options that have NOTHING to do with AOL or dialup support, hear the phone greeting by our techs (again identifying the company, and asking for their NAME and SALES DIVISION), and then somehow feel the need to get ticked off when we cannot help with their AOL issues or provide them with the correct support number. It's not always the customer who plays the fool, too. ÊWe have a large asset tracking project that records all of our field tech equipment and to whom it has been assigned. ÊAs equipment is RTD for repair, EOL, or being sent to a user, the status is constantly updated. ÊRarely is this status change made by the same person, so any changes are logged in our call tracking system for input later. ÊThese are generally recorded quickly, so we consistently see stuff like "Sent out Asset# xxxxxxx", or "AT# xxxxxxx". ÊWe all got a good laugh one day when we came across a ticket the read simply "SENT OUT ASS". ÊThat's it... no # sign, no numbers, no punctuation, all caps..... SENT OUT ASS. ÊOur Director was in town this week, and he called up the Project Manager right away to make sure he got a shipment for his birthday later that week.
Greg This one happened when I was working in the PC Support Center at the University of Iowa.
A young woman walks in to the support area carrying her Mac extended keyboard and states that she wants to buy a new one. At that time these things were selling for like $114 so we start plugging the thing in and checking it out to see if we could simply replace a few of the keyswitches with some of our spares. We go back and forth with her trying to explain to her how expensive it will be, but she doesn't budge at all. By this point the tech standing next to me is holding the keyboard up overhead blowing out the accumulated whatever when our walk-in finally states that the real reason that she wants to replace it is that she dropped it into her toilet. Picture in your mind the following - our embarassed customer standing next to the tech who realizes that he's been handling a keyboard that has been in someone's toilet and immediately drops it to the floor, and then me trying to keep a straight face through it all while asking myself the obvious question. I was never able to ask her what really happened for fear I would hurt myself laughing so hard...
Joshua Strange day at work many years ago. I was working for a large Oil company at the time doing internal helpdesk support. We took calls on everything back then. Call came in.
Customer: Do you do support for phones?
Me: Sure what is the problem that you are having?
Customer: My phone smells funny.
Me: Is it a burning smell what is happening?
Customer: No not that... it kind of smells like old fish.
Me: Oh... ok I'll have someone come out and check your phone out.
Not too long later my manager forwarded this call to the entire center. Turns out we had a technician go on sight and after removing the mouth piece to the phone he found bits of tunafish. Aparrently the customer was eating tunafish and talking on the phone at the same time, and managed to spray bits of tunafish into the reciever holes.