Hot stuff
I work for a fairly large ISP
in the UK, and (as always) offer technical support for people who shouldn't
really own a PC in the first place.
A call was put through to me, and I gave
the regular greetings and asked what the problem was.
"My modem hasn't
worked since we reinstalled Windows 98"
Easy I thought, and asked them if
they had the driver disk for the modem.
They said yes and proceeded to take
their current CD out of the drive to put the driver disk in.
I heard them
make a comment about the CD being hot as it came out of the drive.
"That
doesn't sound too healthy"I commented, "Is the fan in the computer
working?"
They weren't too sure, so they proceeded to place their phone on
top of the PC to see if I could hear it. Trying not to laugh, I said that I
thought I heard some rattling.
"How long has it been like that?" I
asked,
"Oh ever since we were struck by lighning!!!"
Thanks to: Tim Knight
Say what?
I work for an ISP, as usual
we get funny call from people having trouble connecting. The most unusual call I
remember having is the one from the guy who had an error message that ressemble
this:
"Windows cannot find the type of application associated with
extension .EXE please specify the path for this application"
Something
like that, I would've love to have a screenshot of this ;)
Thanks to: Jotun
Technical Support
Representative
Tonight I had a call from a member of our online
services. The call was about how the caller was unable to connect to the server.
He was experiencing the same message over and over.."Your connection to *** has
been lost please sign on again." I tried several things, including changing his
modem string and access numbers. After everything failed, he asks "Our phone was
out all morning--could that have something to do with it?" ---DUH?!!
Thanks to: Valencia Smotherman
No Dial Tone????
Tech Support : Good
morning sir, Technical Support Speaking.
Customer : I have just bought your
package today, but can not use.
Tech Support : What is your
problem?
Customer : It always says No Dial Tone!
Tech Support : Please
check the phoneline put into your modem correctly on the socket line or
wall.
Customer : What do you mean by socket line or wall?
Tech Support :
Most of the modem will have two sockets that
you could put the phoneline
which are named PHONE and LINE.
Customer : Ok, I see a phoneline put on Line
socket of the modem.
Tech Support : (suspecting the line is loose)Ok, Take
the phoneline off the line socket, and put it back again, you should hear a
little noise 'glick'.
Customer : I do that, and I hear a 'glick'
noise.
Tech Support : Try to connect again.
Customer : (Try to connect.)
Same, No dial tone.
Tech Support : Take the phone line off from line socket,
and put it to telephone machine, do you hear any noise?
Customer : On the
telephone, do not have any socket I can put the phoneline!!
Tech Support :
ER...It should have a socket that you can put
a phoneline into. What kind of
telephone you use, not have a phone socket...?????
Customer : I'm using a
mobile talking with you, and I do not have a telephone at my home. Do we need
telephone to connect to your server?
Tech. support :????????? (thinking if I
meet another line like this, I will quit myself.
Thanks to: labysta
Your Manager Please..
I'm working in a
local isp. One day, I had a customer called
with the problem,
ME : Tech.
Support, can I help you?
Cust : Yes, I would llike to talk to your manager
with your
product.
ME : May I help you about your problem?
Cust : I
don't need any help!!. I just would like to talk to your manager!!! (sound
angry)
ME : Ok. Could you give me your name please?
Cust : No need, your
customer no me well...
ME : Ok.., I will transfer the line to
manger.
__________________________
A minute passed
...
__________________________
Manager came out, with laughing face.
I
asked him, what his problem is. Manager said No problem
with us. Customer
would like to complain another ISP not
our ISP. It meant that he called to
wrong company..:)
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Thanks
I'm not tech support really but
I am the resident HW person in my office and at home(ugh)
I found out
that we were getting ethernet connections installed at my dorm in college. Well
I was pleased and went looking at adapters in a few magazines. After a short
look I realized I needed to know what type we were going to have in oreder to
make a smart purchase.
Me] Yes hello. I was told we were going to have
ethernet now and was wondering whether we were going to have 10baseT or
100baseT? Also I'm assuming we will have the big phone type connectors(ie
RJ-45).
Her] um.. Yes we are going to have ethernet. You can buy an
adapter at your local computer store. Thank you.
The saddest thing was
when I arrived we had two connectors for a four person room. I charged the
school for the hub I had to buy.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Abandon Ship
This one's slightly
different. When I first started in electronics, I was service engineer in a
small television shop in south-east England. One very wet (and also very quiet)
Saturday afternoon I was sitting in the workshop watching a war film on one of
the tv's in for repair. It had just got to the exciting bit - torpedo in the
engine room, water everywhere, men rushing round screaming - when the telephone
rang. The conversation went something like this:-
me: Workshop, good
afternoon.
cust: You're not going to believe this, but I've got a weird
fault.
me: (thinks - help, another one) Yes, madam, and what is the
fault.
cust: Well (short pause) I was watching that war film (another short
pause) and the picture wasn't very good, but I thought I'd wait until after the
film to call you.
Me: So what happened?
cust: Well, this is the bit you're
not going to believe (slightly longer pause) - it had just got to the bit where
the torpedo crashes into the ship and water is everywhere (much longer pause)
and my tv went bang and water is dripping out of the back onto the
floor!
She's right - I didn't believe it, but I ventured out into the
storm and went to check. Sure enough, one dead tv and water now a steady stream
out of the back. It seems husband had DIY'd the aerial, and not covered the
terminations. Water had got into the coax (causing the bad picture) and run down
inside to the aerial socket ( at the top of the tv case) and run into the
works.
Still, the lady was relieved that the water wasn't actually coming out
of the sinking ship.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
The colour red
Testing a microphone
shipped with a system.
Tell customer to open sound recorder.
Tell
customer to select the red record button and talk into the mic.
Customer
asks what colour is Red.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
No Title
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Dodgy Diagnosis
Whilst working in the
service dept for a computer retail company in Australia, i received a call from
a frustrated customer. She needed my opinion on something... She had purchased
her system from another computer retailer and had had nothing but problems with
the CDROM drive. Having taken the system back to them several times, she was
constantly being fobbed off by their service department. They kept telling her
that the problem she was having was caused by software and that she should try
installing this driver and that, or try changing this other setting.... you get
the picture. She had tried demanding that they replace the drive, but kept on
being told that they could not replace the drive under warranty... By the time
she spoke to me, the problem had been going on for about 7 months. She described
the actual problem to me and asked if i agreed with their 'diagnosis'.... What
she told me defied belief!!!!!!!
THE PROBLEM: Whenever she pressed the
eject button on the CDROM, the entire CD tray flew out of the drive and landed
on the floor approximately 3 feet away from her system...
Thanks to: Derrick W
Tech Wannabes
Hello,
I work for
a big ISP and recently, we had calls from one of our competitor's customers.
They wanted to move with us when the other ISP told them to "put the modem in
the refrigirator to make it go faster"
What kind of tech would recomend
to cool off a modem that way!?!?!
Speaking of techs that don't know what
they're saying, I once heard a tech saying that "the k56flex technology was
faster, the X2 tech. used the best compression....and "they" mixed those up to
obtain the V.90..." Yeah, Right.
Thanks to: Jotun
TILT Returns
I read the story TILT and
it reminded me of something quite similar that once happened to me. I was at
computer camp, and we were having free time in the lab. We were all playing huge
networked games of Quake. I couple kids didn't get computers. There was one
computer that only worked when tilted on a 45 degree angle. One kid wanted to
play Quake so badly, he payed another kid to hold the computer while he played!
Thanks to: Brendan
Modem Not response.
I'm working in a
big ISP. Here is my story. This customer came to the office with her computer PC
desktop. I took care her.
Me : can I help you madam?
cust : Yes, you can.
My friend had borrowed my computer to do his presentation. Then I don't know why
my computer can not connect to internet anymore. it always says "not response
from modem"
Me, I knew from her that her modem was internal modem with
.... brand 56 k modem. (but strange one phone socket).
I spent a half of
day to install driver change irq, dma, etc. but not work. Before I gave up, I
decided to open her computer to see, what exactly her modem brand is. When I
look at the card which I thought it is a modem, and I do not found any modem in
her computer. That card is written "Ethernet II Card".
Thanks to: Lab
Which key?
After a year of working on
the Help Desk, I knew that saying
"Press 'any' key" didn't work. I was
usually asked something
like "Is the 'm' key OK?". It was late one night,
when the
call came in. I told the person on the other end of the
line to
press the space bar to continue. The silence was
deafening. Then came..."I'm
sorry, none of the keys are
labeled 'space bar', which one is it?"
Thanks to: Linda Watson
Arms just not long enough?
I do email
tech support for a major ISP and received a message that had us laughing for
quite a while. This excerpt has been copied directly from the email I
received:
"I have been unable to access my e-mail on my home computer
when I am away from home."
He wasn't talking networking either!
Thanks to: Keith
Virus
I was walking past this guys
office and he saw me and he
came running out shouting
"QUICK QUICK
come and look at my PC I think it has been
infected by a VIRUS I am running
word and all that I can
see is just dots appearing one after the other
nothing I do
on the key board registers such as space bar esc or any
of
the keys".
I went over and had a good look at the PC and the
keyboard
and established that he had been eating some peanuts and the
end
bIt of a peanut had dropped onto his keyboard whilst he
had pressed the
period KEY. This had stuck into the gap
between the keys holding the key
down, I resolved the
problem with a paper clip.
So beware users and
the PEANUT VIRUS
Thanks to: Ben Baskaran
Truly Free Internet Access
User wanted
to know how much it will cost to get Internet access for a new user in her
department. Informed user that anyone logging into the LAN has the ability to
access the Internet. User stated "Well... what if they don't have a PC?"
Resolution: Informed user that no amount of money will suffice if the user has
no PC. User will contact Desktop Coordinator to order a PC.
Thanks to: JoeM
Where's the photo sensor?
I would not
have believed this if i hadn't seen it with my own eyes. One of my techs brought
in a printer from a customer with a label stuck on the toner cartridge. at this
time i'm busy fixing a computer so i'm not really paying attention to what the
other tech is doing or where the photo sensetive drum is, so needless to say the
tech took the whole damn printer appart looking for the drum. about an hour of
disection later he is on the virge of tears and idly flipping the door on the
toner cartrigeand suddenly i hear a string of profanity and when i ask what
happened he shows me the photo drum on the toner cartrige with a large black
toner coated sticky label folded over it.
After laughing myself silly I told
him to put the printer back together and order a new toner cartrige. Ahh another
printer virgin deflowered.
peace.
Thanks to: Jason Kube
My Computer and Your computer?
I work
for an ISP. One day I got a call from customer, that
he could not play
internet. So I would like to check his configuration.. I tried to ask him to
open Dial-Up networking to see the properties of connection. But he didn't
understand how to do so I guide step by step.
Me.: Please double click on My
Computer (I skipped to say
icon, I believed that he could do,
but...)
Cust : Excuse Me, How can I double click on YOUR
COMPUTER????
I had spent 20 minutes to check his properties, and
found
out that he had specified IP Address, and put other ISP DNS.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
It's not always a difficult problem
I'm
not a computer technician but I used to help out guys with their computer
hassles in exchange for cappuccino.
This one time, a friend rang up and
told me that his computer was REALLY slow and took ages to do even the simplest
task. Intrigued, I drove over.
We both knew a bit about computers and sat
down to check out what was wrong. We worked for roughly 7 hours straight trying
to improve the performance. Eventually, at 3am, we had just about got it back to
top speed again.
As I leaned back watching the computer work reasonably
fast, I noticed that something was odd about the tower...I then leaned forward,
not believing what I was seeing...
A few seconds later, I pressed the
turbo button and the computer has NEVER ran soo fast in it's life!!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Broken Monitor
This is a true story
about a teacher I had last year in school. This particular teacher was a bit of
a fossil who had no business teaching kids in the 90's. Anyway, we put up with
her throughout the year, but what we most remembered her for was her distaste
for her computer.
The school had decided to equip each classroom
teacher's desk with a brand new Gateway PC. The district tech guys had unpacked
them and set them up, so even the dumbest teachers could switch them on and use
them without too much difficulty.
We had her class on the block where we
broke for lunch, so we would have half the class before lunch, eat, then finish
the class after lunch. Every day after lunch, we would hear her cursing about
that awful computer. She would come back from lunch, and jiggle the wires coming
out of her monitor, and then proceed to curse about how it never worked
right.
Being well known as a computer guru around the school, I decided
to come by after school and have a look at her computer. I found her in the
office after school, and after offering to try to fix her problem, she led me to
her desk. She said, "See, it's doing it right now. The monitor's 'busted. The
screen just goes blank whenever I leave it alone."
Immediately sensing
her "problem", I let her continue, asking the usual TS questions, pretending
that this was a big deal and was somehow difficult to diagnose. (Hey, a little
brown nosing never hurts). She then said, "The only way I can get to fix it is
by jiggling the wires back here." She proceeded to reach around behind the
monitor and shake the cords violently. Her screen returned to normal after a few
seconds.
It turned out that her "Blank Screen" screen saver was selected,
and by jiggling the wires knocked the mouse or it's cord just enough to turn the
screen saver off. I explained to her what a screen saver was, and that her
monitor was not really broken. After telling my friends, we couldn't even look
at her without laughing. What an idiot!
Thanks to: Pat
installing modem
I am working as a ppp
supporter in a big isp in israel
this event was before 2
years
customer: i today bought a brand new modem and i want to install it
, can you help ??
me: yea , sure . internal or external
?
customer: well...Hmmm... i don't know ?!?!
but i see the chips (me-
sure internal)
me: ok ,so first you need to insert the modem to your
computer and than we will connect .
customer: ok ,how ??
me: just
pull it out from the box and plug it to
the computer
customer: well
i try and but didn't success to insert it
me: Hmmm .. try harder
(sometimes ISA slots need strong)
customer: i try , i try i almost
successied to insert all
but chips & register are getting
broken
me : WHAT ?? WHERE THE HELL YOU TRYING TO INSERT THE
MODEM
customer: to the floppy 1.2Mb off course.
Thanks to: moty
No Title
I work for Voicenet, a
regional ISP. A particular lady had
called us 4 times in the last day or 2
complaining she was
never connected to the internet even though windows
said
that she was. Took her through all standard
troubleshooting
procedures.... still nothing. Finally I asked her how she
knew she was not connected. She told me that "MSN's web
site kept showing
the same stuff it had yesterday". I asked
her what date it said in the upper
left hand corner, and she
was bewildered by the fact that it had TODAY's date
on it.
Appearently because "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" hadn't been
changed
in 2 days, that meant she was not online, regardless
that the date had
changed.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Keyboard Error?
I work for tech support
for a large travel agency. I give thhe agents credit for knowing SABRE and the
job they do but if it goes outside that to windows or hardward they just don't
get it.
Last week one of the agents comes to my desk and tells me she
has gotten an error saying "keyboard not attached" and the terminal won't finish
booting.
So I walk over to her desk and check the back of the machine,
make sure the keyboard is attached and right before I get ready to hit the reset
button she looks at me and says "See the screen says hit ctl-atl-del or F1 to
continue and I did that and it didn't work."
I started laughing so hard I
could hardly get out the words, "Now, if your keyboard isn't attached did you
really think that was gonna work?"
*laughing continues as said agent
slaps herself in the forehead and laughs too*
Gotta love it!
Thanks to: Melissa Tedrow
The quick call support
hello, tech
support.
I'm trying to get on the internet, but nothing
happens.
O.K lets check it, do you have two phone lines ?
yes,
sure I have.
O.K. lets try to connect and see..............hello ? sir
???
Thanks to: shay dvir
Here's what's REALLY causing the "Year 2000
problem"
Here's an ironic techtale...
A got a call from someone
who said that something was screwing up the date/time on her computer. Every
day, the date on her computer advanced by three days and it was making the
program I support not work.
It turned out to be her Year 2000 checker
program.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Economies of Scale
Not really a tech
support tale, but still fairly relevant.
Our NZ based company was recently
purchased by a rather large US based PC builder and retailer.
This changeover
didn't really happen in one go; a lot of our systems were left in place for
transition later on.
This did cause some problems with purchase orders and
other things as data had to be manually copied from one system to the other.
There was one unexpected benefit though.
A few months after the takeover the
Melissa virus struck. For those not familiar with it it's a virus which uses
Outlook (not outlook express) to mail itself to the first 50 people on your
address book. As a lot of companies use outlook for internal mail and most
people also mailed outside the company this affected large numbers of people
throughout hundreds of companies all over the world.
Now the virus arrived at
our mailserver from the Dublin branch of our new parent company, and it rapidly
spread throughout our mail clients too. However, we do things differently than
our parent company and we had everything under control with all the virus
protection software updated on every system within 2 hours.
Microsoft and
our parent company and numerous other businesses took hours longer to get their
mailservers back up.
Just goes to show bigger is not always better, and
never underestimate the abilities of the smaller organisations.
Thanks to: Sebastian A.
A/C Problems??
User: I am not able to
dial into the modem lines. Is this because the Air Conditioning isn't working in
my building?
Me: Let me go check on that.
(put phone on mute,
went to make some popcorn, came back a few minutes later)
Me: You still
there?
User: Yeah, I am I going to be able to log on?
Me: I just
talked with the A/C guys and they will not be done working on it for atleast 2
hours. Sorry!
User: That bites I really wanted to get
online.
The sad thing was this guy was a Seinor Electronic Engineer,
but I was off in a hour and someone else would have to explain to him how the
A/C and his computer share no relations.
Thanks to: Jim
ohmigodohmigodohmigod
I work for a big
ol'd ISP over in the UK and a while back
I had to deal with a monster of a
customer.
Their complaint had been escalated from the phones, to 2nd
Lvl support and then to me to do a call back. (I was
holding the mucky
end of the stick that week).
So anyway, I call this bloke back and I get
him to fire
up his machine, a beautiful new *ackard *ell *gnnn*
machine.
We fight back and forth between him refusing to do what I
ask him and me refusing to yield that the problem lies with
us. After
about 20 minutes, I get this evil minded swine
to go into the Dial Up
Networking folder and ask him to
right click on the relevant
icon.
Easy.
You would have thought.
A brief transcript
follows:
Me: Okay - see the icon?
It: What, the little picture.
Me:
Yep, that's the feller! Right click on it and choose
"Properties"
It: How
do I do that, then?
Me: Well, point at it and click with the right mouse
button.
It: How do I do that?
Me: Well, point at it...
It: Yes, yes - I
understand that, I'm not stupid!
Me: .. and click the right mouse
button.
It: But how do I know which one is the right one!?
Me: *mute* Make
the pain stop...
Oh, just another quick one that leaps to mind - another
bloke who was having PEBKAC difficulties.
Me: Good - that's what we
wanted to see. Okay that and...
It: Sorry?
Me: Just click OK and
...
It: I don't have OK.
Me: (thinking he'd already cancelled and probably
started
a low level format) What do you have?
It: Two buttons - a "Cancel"
and an "OKEY"
Me: *I've fallen and I can't get up*
Anyway, cheers for
listening - off to do some more
productive ... stuff.
ATB,
Dave.
Thanks to: Dave Murray
Overreactors Anonymous
We operate a
sales and service computer business, and I personally
do the hardware support
for our contract and not-so-contract
customers. Anyway, I have one customer
who overreacts to
the littlest things, making mountains out of
molehills.
Call: The computer says windows files are damaged and it won't
boot
Actual Problem: I ask the customer to read me what it says. Customer
says "Scandisk has found so and so bytes of data..."
Call: The
computer doesn't work.
Actual Problem: I get to her system to find it off.
She won't
work on it because it doesn't print to one printer, therefore the
whole
computer is broken.
Call: Nobody's printing.
Actual Problem:
(After much time troubleshooting) "Oh, only Linda's not
printing.
Call: (reading messages during bootup on a laptop) Boot from floppy
FAILED!
Actual Problem: Duh, we're not loading from a
floppy
And now for the tidbits of terror:
The password you
gave me doesn't log in (turns out the last
time I used his Win 95 system I
logged in as supervisor. He didn't think
to change the name from supervisor
to his and that's why the password doesn't
work)
He couldn't dial in
over the weekend. (They use PCAnywhere to log
into the systems at the
office. Instead of shutting down his own laptop
he set the dial in system to
shut off!)
No one can connect and there's nothing on the screen (turns
out the server
crashed and the monitor died also. The funny part of this is
the 4 hours it
took me to try to walk these people through putting another
monitor on the
server while I'm on the phone with them. After all that, they
hooked the
monitor up to a system sitting next to the server, which was off,
then proceeded to tell me
it's just black.)
Why is this thing here?
(referring to taskbar that they keep dragging
all over their screens. When I
tell them how NOT to do it..."We never
touched that!")
There's plenty
more, much more than I can even remember. But the kicker is
that they
indirectly once called ME incompetent!
Thanks to: Dragon Li
I can't connect
I work for one of
the few ISP's in Canada wich offer's the both the Dial-Up connection(in majority
)and the Cable Modem, wich can be a real pain because you never know wich the
client is using till later in the call
Me: Tech Support JF speaking how
may i be of assistance
Cu: Um yes im Mr. Xyz and i cant connect to your
server, are you having problems again (ever notice its always our
fault)
Me: Not to my knowledge sir (trying to stay polite)
Cu:
Well why is this damn thing not working again.
Me: Is there an error
message that the system gives you
Cu: it says it cant connect, i already
told you that, now are you going to help me or what.
Me: (mute alright,
another winner) can you be more specific please, i need the exact error message
that it gives you in order to diagnose the problem properly (utter bull**** of
course since i already know its a user problem)
Cu: #%@$ it sais it cant
find the url because it doesnt have a dms entry or something like that.
Me: ah, ok lets see (Going throught his IE5 config,dial up networking
properties, and checking his tcp/ip configuration, and generaly having a fun
time listening to him bitch about the service)
(after about 30 minutes
and a thurough search)
Me: Hmmm, everything seems to be in order i really
cant see why its not working, how about you try connection and we'll see if it
happens again. do y...
Cu: (Interrupting) is it normal for that cable
light to be off, its the first time i've seen it that way.
Me: (Mute:
Frantic Scream and thirst for blood) Well it would be why you cant connect. is
your tv working properly
Cu: (Slightly annoyed) What the $@#! does my tv
have to do with the damn internet, its a brand new tv, of course its working
properly.
Me: (doh!) Let me rephrase that, could you please turn on your
tv and tell me what you see
Cu: (sound of person waling away and comming
back a minute later) well all i see is snow, now can you fix my @#$! internet,
i'm tired of all this crappy service im getting.
Me: (Mute: there is a
god after all) well sir you see the cable modem works with the cable tv, so as
long as your tv isnt working you wont be able to connect to the internet
throught the CABLE modem
Cu: Oh, can you transfer me to your cable
service then so i can cat my cable fixed
Me: Of Course just a moment
(pressing hang-up button on my phone controler) oops wrong button *^-^*
Thanks to: JF
Crazy user PT 1
This is the log of one
of this many ISP's former users. I will submit 1 a month for the next few
months. Also I do not work for this ISP anymore.
4/21/99 7:52:56 PM CANX-
does wish to be charged for next month
4/21/99 7:50:36 PM *user* called/
Wants to close account. Transferred to CS./
4/18/99 9:07:39 PM *user*
called. / Wanted to cancel. / Told her to call cs in the morning. /
4/18/99
9:50:37 PM *user* called/ Having a problem with her computer/ Told her to
contact her computer manufacturer/
2/26/99 4:55:17 PM *Stupid User* ..// She
trashed her system and wanted me to help her install it again. I checked with
lead and confirmed with her we did not do this. We will help set up OUR software
settings and help with e-mail but we do not support 3rd party software or full
setup's there of. She hung up on me.
2/22/99 4:10:48 PM Needed mail
configuration for Netscape. Asked about a Hebrew Language pack and directed her
to Netscape.
2/22/99 3:53:34 PM *user* / her father didn't like what she
was
looking at so he had her trash netscape, freePPP, and macTCP. / walked
her through netscape setup - she had already installed macTCP and freePPP.
Verified settings for macTCP.
2/19/99 10:19:02 AM c/b and cust said that
problem cleared up by itself.--
2/17/99 7:14:39 AM *Stupid User* ,
authentication problems with freeppp.
Retyped un/pw did not want to test sac
number. Told her to keep trying as
everything is ok with her account -
2/15/99 10:30:17 AM *user* called/gets error server has no DNS entry/this is
an ongoing problem/cust.hung up/writing trouble ticket on this-/see notes for
details/.
2/8/99 6:31:13 PM *user* called because she had isptest in
username.
1/26/99 7:07:36 PM normal problems with ancient system;
applescipts not working so all the shortcuts are dead; put FreePPP connectoid on
the desktop and Netscape alias as well; she must connect via FreePPP, then open
Netscape after connected for connection to work; configured her email and
Confirmed it is woking; MacTCP is having problem remembering gateways; showed
her how to reset if she had DNS resolution problems; should be good to go but
old system will require lots of maintenence, so expect more calls from her.
1/26/99 3:52:25 PM c/b l/m -
1/25/99 9:50:52 PM *user* called / Added
e-mail account
"user/xxxxx" becuase it wasn't created. I told her that I
needed to reset it because it may not be working properly and that if it doesn't
work tonight it will by tomorrow for her. Also she was getting an error type of
3 when she opened up netscape. We removed netscape and netscapef from the
system\preferences and then reinstalled it. She still got the error
type
three, I told her it may be just because it was not connected and to try
to connect and see if when she opened up the browser if it would give her that
error. I also told her to try using webmail to see if that may help. Also I
wrote up a trouble ticket so that someone may call her tomorrow about the
issue..
1/25/99 3:34:26 PM *user* called. Netscape is freaking out. Was
working last night accroding to her. Brad will call her back ASAP. Ifyou can't
call her back by 4PM, please wait until tomorrow as she is leavingat 4PM and
will not be back until 10PM. Phone # above is correct.
1/22/99 7:54:05 PM
Cust was very well behaved this time. Had her trash ALL PPP files, MacTCP DNR
& MacTCP Prep. Configured MacTCP, installedFreePPP and rebuilt the desktop.
Her Mac gave a FreePPP extension error, so Ihad her put a space in front of the
MacTCP name and restart. This time it loaded it properly. We setup FreePPP, but
when we went to connect, it said that the modem was not responding properly. We
tried numerous init strings and auto detection, but nothing worked. I had her
try to install the
modem installation software again, and it still didn't
work. Did a custom removal
the software and reinstalled it, but that didn't
work either. Told her that the only people who could help her at this junction
was USR. If they manage to wake up the modem she should be able to get online
with no problems. If they c/b within the next few days, please refer them to
me
1/21/99 5:20:07 PM Customer claims that she was told that she would get a
call back in five minutes, talked to J who said that he specifically told E that
he would call her tomorrow and witnessed everett tell her the same. Told her
this, she started swearing at me and demanded to talk to a manager. Manager took
over, spoke to J and informed the customer that shewill get a call from a mac
tech between 6pm and 6:15 tomorrow.
1/21/99 4:43:41 PM Customer was
reactivated under the assumption that she has upgraded her system. In regards to
her verbal abuse to our staff and her rudeness… - If this occurs at any time
please transfer the call to CS(note in Hist what she is saying or doing to you)
and we will handle it on our end. -
1/21/99 3:54:51 PM *user* called / OS
7.1 / her computer was giving her all sorts of errors. I talked to J and he told
me to create a Mac trouble ticket and he will call her back.
1/20/99 3:09:38
PM *if there is any questions on the length of validity on this acct, see
assigned services date paid thru*
1/20/99 3:02:56 PM Mrs called -=)
reactivating, will give
info to to cancel refund -=)
1/12/99 3:33:35 PM
User called saying that they needed to speak to a Mac tech, looking at her
history her computer doesn't meet our system requirments. I told her "sorry
'bout that" and she said "I'm not". Then I told her that I was going to tranfer
her to customer service becuase of this and while in the process of transferring
she said "$%#@ing Idiot
1/12/99 3:57:44 PM Cancelling user's account. System
is not
compatible.
1/12/99 11:13:14 AM cancelled trouble ticket, contacted
CS and
having account cancelled due to hardware limitations and really foul
attitude;
have her speak with CS; she is cancelled -
1/11/99 8:38:14 PM
Customer is calling with mac problems. (
1/11/99 8:21:42 PM Still not quite
understanding the concept that
they need to wait to speak to a mac tech,
tried to explain. They wanted to
talk to a Mac Tech NOW. Transferred unhappy
customer to MANAGER so he could
tell them the same exact thing
1/11/99
7:33:27 PM *user* called - Having problems getting on
internet / also her
computer is giving other errors when shutting down / FreePPP
was uninstalled
/ had her rebuild the desktop and try again
1/11/99 6:19:52 PM computer only
has 4 megs built in ram, told her
that she sohould have 16 megs. Doesn't want
to buy anything else.
1/11/99 5:59:12 PM computer freezes when opens
browser, has mac
450 , has new modem, sent tot ech ..t
1/11/99 3:42:01 PM
Got new modem, setup freePPP for higher baud
rate and auto find init string.
1/10/99 5:07:42 PM *user* called, getting error "there is a
problem with
the finder" brad told me to have her redild the desktop she did not
want to
do that, reffered her to an A+tech or apple
1/9/99 12:18:10 PM called to
reactivate the acct
1/8/99 7:52:16 PM spoke to *user* who is 16 years old
and a lovely girl. She started by calling us a bunch of f***ing liars and that
it was a pile of s**t that was told to her in the first place. Wanted us to buy
her a new modem. Her dad got on the phone and ranted at me. Told him we were
doing a full refund and closing the account as it should not have been set up in
the first place.
1/8/99 7:06:54 PM tried 2 xpln prob w/cust & started
using foul
lang,xsfered over 2 CS
1/8/99 7:00:07 PM We do not support
customer's system. She is
not to be transferred back to Tech support.
1/8/99 6:46:56 PM sent to tech, told her she was going ot have problems with
what she has, still trying to make it work, i tried ..
1/8/99 5:15:10 PM
performa450; OS 7.1; installed 3 disk set; major psycho customer; probably
better off cancelling her but managed to get her setup; whether she connects now
is a whole other story; has 2400 baud modem and warned that the internet will be
incredibly slow with it; if she calls to complain or gripe I recommend
cancelling her account; this looney will be nothing but trouble -
1/8/99
4:15:21 PM *user* called / OS 7.1 / I told her that the
system requirements
were 7.5.3 and she got pissed and hung up on me. (Look at my
knees, they're
shaking)
1/5/99 6:08:07 PM I think she's only 16 her dad Mr father of the
BITCH was in the background shouting out usernames. Used father Credit Card.
1/5/99 6:03:15 PM Told about set-up fee. Needs MAC floppy. Has
performa
450 OS 7.1. Told to verify. Added email. Told
24hrs 2 BE active
Thanks to: formeremployee
No Title
I work for an ISP who bought
the Mississippi portion of another ISP. We chose the Missisippi travel bureau's
old number since they switched to a new number (big mistake on our part). We now
constantly get calls wanting travel information on Mississippi. Well, I got a
good one a few weeks ago. A lady called the number a few weeks ago and here's
how it went: (Me) Operator... (Lady) Yes I would like travel information about
Missouri please. (Me) Ma'am, this is an internet company, and why did you call
the Mississippi travel number for information on Missouri?? (lady) (something
garbled) then (CLICK)! :-)
Thanks to: Brian Clark
Open Your Eyes!
Older unexperienced
users of computers WILL NOT see what you want them to see!
tech: Close
out of that screen sir.
member: What screen?
tech: the screen right in
front of you, hit the x in the upper right corner; there's a dash, a box, and an
x, hit the x.
member: Well I just don't see what your talking about....I
don't have an x.
tech: ok, then go up to file, and exit.
member: where's
file?
tech: on the very very very very very upper left hand side of your
screen...(getting extremely irritated)
tech: Sir have you ever closed out of
a screen?
member: Yes
tech: Do you remember how?
member: no
tech:
*throwing up hands in despair*
Thanks to: Natasha
Where's my email?
Some people just
don't know what they're doing, common sense is slowly dwindling out of
existense.....
me: how can we help you today ma'am...
member: I can't
read my email, the computer won't let me!
me: ok, when you click on the
email, does it open, or does it just hang at an hourglass?
member: all it
says is when he sent it, the time and date, and it says receipt! it doesn't tell
me what he said!
me: ma'am, you hit the return receipt check box when you
sent the mail, you got a receipt in your mailbox that tells you when he read the
email.
member: well i've never got one of those before!
me: ma'am you have
to check the preference...
member: well why won't it tell me what he wrote to
me?
hmmmm.....
Thanks to: Natasha
Mom Can't Handle New Technology
I am
not in tech support, but I am majoring in Computer Science in college. This
means that I get to fix every problem anyone in my family has with their
computer. My mother has the most problems. She got a computer last year and
she's working on a book. First off, she hasn't used a computer since we got rid
of the Apple IIe about 12 years ago, so she's never seen Windows of any sort. It
took about three days just to teach her how to open Word in Windows95 and how to
simply type a page. Anyway, she calls me to get help with her computer almost
twice a week (it used to be more often). I can't stress how much I hate Word
because it seems to crash all of the time. On my mother's machine, it's even
more so.
One time she called me down to her writing room (it's in our
basement) and told me that the A: drive wouldn't read anything on her disk. (She
has a fear of writing to the hard drive, which when asked why replied, "I can't
hear it when it is saving, so I'm not sure that it's saving.") Apparently the
hard drive is too quiet. Anyway, I took the disk up to my machine and had no
trouble reading the document. I put it back in her computer and sure enough, it
wouldn't read it. I checked the drive and found a piece of masking tape that had
been attached to the disk! Apparently it had fallen off of the floppy and gotten
stuck in the drive. I told her that she needs to use the labels that the disk
came with and she said that she didn't want to waste space by writing on that
big label with such a short title.
Another time:
She was trying
to save the document to the floppy drive and the disk was full. She immediately
yelled at me (like it's my fault) asking why the hell they couldn't make the
floppies big enough to hold what she wanted. I then tried to get back to the
regular screen, so I could save to the hard drive, but I was met with an error.
(Damn Word!) I then clicked OK to get rid of it and the computer crashed. I then
had to sit in front of the machine trying to find the auto-backup for about 45
minutes, all the while being yelled at for losing all of her work from the last
three hours. (When I finally found the back-up, she had only lost ten minutes.)
When I tried to tell her to save more often and to the hard drive, she just
yelled more, asking why the stupid @&*%!$# computer wasn't easier to use and
why it always crashed when she was trying to use it.
I finally got to
talk with her later and asked what she would change about the computer and how
she would make it easier to use. She said she should just be able to type and
have it not screw up. I said maybe we should get you a word processor, instead
of the computer. She asked, "What's that?" I told her that it was basically like
a typewriter that had a screen and allowed you to save your work, she said,
"That's all I wanted in the FIRST place!"
So much for wasting $2000 on
the laptop!
Thanks to: Jonathan
Mr. Fortune 500
I recently worked for
an ISP doing tech support. Here is a call that came in one morning.
Me))
Hello this is tech support.
C)) I need to know what the hell is wrong
with your system today.
Me)) Nothing that I'm aware of. What kind of
problem are you having?
C)) I'm not able to establish a
connection.
Me)) Are you getting an error message?
C)) YES!
Dammit! it says the computer you are dialing is not answering.
Me)) What
number are dialing?
C)) Let me tell you something I live in North
Carolina and today I'm traveling in the state of New York. I have tried the
local access number here xxx-xxxx and I even attempted to dial a long distance
call at my expense to my local number xxx-xxx-xxxx in my home state. Same damn
problem everytime. Now are you gonna fix this RIGHT NOW!
Me)) (after
verifying the numbers were indeed correct and verifying that there were no known
issues in these areas) Sir lets check your dialing properties to make sure your
computer is dialing properly.
C)) For god's sake this is
ridiculous!
Me)) Well we just need to verify a few settings.
C))
OK but I've spent an hour this morning trying this and then I spent another ten
minutes on hold with you people on my cell phone. Now it sounds like you don't
even know how to help me. What the @#%^*@ is the big mystery here?
Me)) I
just need to verify a few things. (after looking into his dialing properties and
changing a couple tidbits to my satisfaction I instructed the customer to try
connecting again.)
C)) Same @*%#@**@ problem what is the big @#**#@
mystery?
Me)) Sir you stated you were traveling. Are you in a
motel?
C)) NO! I work for a Fortune 500 company and I'm in one of our
offices.
Me)) Do you need to dial a 9 for an outside line?
C))
@#@@*#@ NO! I didn't dial a 9 to call you.
Me)) You said you were calling
from a cell phone. Can you physically pick up an office phone and try dialing
the access number manually to see if a computer answers.
C)) That is
completely unnecessary. This is your problem and I want it fixed
NOW!
Me)) Can you ask someone in the building if you need to dial a
number for outside access?
C)) Why should I do that? I know how to make a
@#@@**@ phone call.(pause) All right I'll try it from this phone next to me just
to prove you wrong.
Me)) (hear numbers being pushed on phone)
C))
The call went through and I didn't dial a @#!!*@ 9 for an outside line. This
service is completely unnacceptable.
Me)) What buttons did you push on
the phone?
C)) I pushed the damn outgoing call button and then dialed the
number and I didn't dial no damn 9. If you can't fix this RIGHT NOW put someone
on the @!#*@ phone that can.
Me)) (after being verbally abused) Well sir
I think the big mystery is over. You needed to push the outgoing call button.
Now go ask someone what number to dial for an outside line and the problem is
solved!
C)) This is completely unnacceptable(click)
Me)) (after
being hung up on I logged in to the authentication server and noticed he was
connected within a couple minutes of terminating our call. What kind of Fortune
500 company would hire a moron like that. Would it be any mystery that corporate
downsizing is in their future?)
Thanks to: Dave
Print heads...
As the only person in
the family who understands computers, I get to do the tech support, training,
installation etc etc for all PCs at my mum's office (a charity).
Now she's
been getting quite good on PC's since I've been guiding her, so I was surprised
when she couldn't get the deskjet printer to work with new system I'd set up the
previous week. We'd had to wait for a new printer cartridge.She couldn't find
the shortcut to the printer help that lets you align printheads (HP make these
things idiot-proof...!). I was surprised, because its the same section you use
to clean the printer heads, and she had told me she and her secretary cleaned
the heads when needed, though the print quality was getting pretty bad these
days...
So down I go, locate the shortcut, go through the align process,
showing her each step. Printer starts working, and mum says, "Oh, thats how its
done, thats easy. The quality is still poor though, we should clean the heads".
"Yes, I'm surprised you couldn't do the align thing, its here in the same
menu as the clean thing".
Long pause, puzzled look.
"But you don't use
that, you just press that switch on the printer there..."
I look. Turns out
for the past 2 years she's been "cleaning" the print heads by pressing the test
page button...!!
Thanks to: Catnip
Test messages can be fun.....
Below is
an email I received from a user.... had a good laugh
)X-POP3-Rcpt:
user@where.com
)From: "Joe User" (User@techsupportfrequents.com)
)To:
"Tech Support" (techsuppport@werlaughingwithyou.com)
)Subject: Re:
test
)Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 20:22:19 -0500
)X-MSMail-Priority:
Normal
)X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.2106.4
)X-MimeOLE:
Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.2106.4
)
)Thanks for your help, I may
need some more. It appears that I cannot send mail. On the other hand if you get
this, then obviously I can. Signed User
)-----Original
Message-----
)From: "Tech Support"
(techsuppport@werlaughingwithyou.com)
)To: "Joe User"
(User@techsupportfrequents.com)
)Date: Sunday, January 24, 1999 7:34
PM
)Subject: test
) Just a test
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Lost File. . . .
One afternoon near the
end of the day, I get a call from a user who
is having PC problems. Here is
the text:
Me: Tech Support, Mike speaking.
User: I have been working
on a budget report since 6:00am that MUST go out today and my PC
has frozen.
Me: That is simple, just reboot the PC
User: Whew, I should be able to
keep working on the file?
Me: Yes, just reload the file and it will be at the
point when you last saved it.
User: I did not save the file.
Me: You have
not saved the file since this morning?
User: Yes, can you get the file back,
or is it gone for good?
At this point I had to suggest that he use the
Autosave feature to prevent this from
occurring in the future.
Thanks to: Michael G.
Well how do you expect it to turn
on?
This call was handled by both myself and a coworker. Basically,
the customer says he turns the system on it won't go on. No lights. No sounds.
Went through the whole cable check. Figured maybe it was a bad power supply. In
any case someone would have to go out to the site and bring the system
back.
So my coworker goes out to the site and I get him on the phone. The
reason it won't turn on...THERE'S NO COMPUTER THERE!!!
No, this isn't a
joke! It was an unopened store with some computer parts thrown between two
rooms. Seems they had it "in storage." So since the computer is in shambles,
they ask him to put one together with the parts laying around. Well, they don't
even have all the right parts for the thing! The keyboard won't fit, among other
things. I don't know whether we dealt with the customer any more on that
problem. It was just by far the strangest call I ever heard about!
Thanks to: Dragon Li
No Title
Our support center is handled
with an answering machine. Basically if you have an emergency, you leave a
message with this one extension and the pager goes off so someone can assist
you. A few of the funniest I've come across (that I can display here anyway)
went like this:
Message: The machine is in backup and it says to insert a
tape. What should I do?
(We didn't even bother calling back.)
Message:
There's a window that says backup. Call me back.
(Turns out a backup window
was open. Damn, that's a hell of an emergency!)
The one other funniest
message I've ever gotten really can't be told word for word. Let's just say the
woman was having a panic attack and crying her eyes out because she couldn't
figure out how to log in, despite the instructions on the table that say "Log in
with your own name"
Thanks to: Dragon Li
"You can't do that!"
About three years
ago, I worked in the R&D department of a modestly large photofininshing
firm. They had an windows-based network, as well as a large (UNIX) mainframe. It
was necessary to access both during the course of the job. There was a drop in
my office for a terminal, but they didn't have a spare terminal. I just asked
what terminals they used. "VT-100," I was told, "but we don't have
any."
"No problem, I replied, I'll just use my computer."
"You
can't do that," the IT manager said. He then proceeded to give me a very long
and detailed description of the difference between a computer and a terminal. I
managed not to doze off, and just answered "Ok, fine."
I just plugged the
UNIX port cable into a spare COM port, started Hyperterminal, configured it for
VT-100 emulation and did my work.
About three weeks later, a tech from
the IT department lugged a large, ancient (heavy) terminal with an
obviously-burned CRT into my office and said "we've got a terminal for
you."
"Don't need it," I said.
"You can't log in without one," he
said.
I maximized Hyperterminal, showed him the display, and said "this
works just fine."
"How'd you do that?" He asked. I explained and told him
what to do. He remarked "I asked ___ (IT manager) why we couldn't do that, and
he said it couldn't be done."
Within a week, the only people still using
the old terminals were on the lab floor, and they didn't have computers.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Dial-up networking?
At my job, there
are hundreds of servers throughoout the network, and it's not uncommon to have
connections to 6 or more just to access the data you need.
One morning, I
could not access a server which had some critical source code on it. I called
the owner of the server, who explained it had been off the network ever since
the techs had moved it.
That evening, he called back. He explained the
problem. They had moved everything into his new cubicle and tried to hook it up.
His new cubicle had something the old one didn't--an analog phone line for
dial-out. Our other telephones were ISDN.
Faced with a connector and
nothing to connect it to (his modem was still on order), these geniuses had
taken an RJ-11 to RJ-45 adapter, plugged it into the analog jack, and used a
standard network cable to hook it to the network card in his server. Since the
analog jack was on the floor under his desk, he had to get a flashlight and
crawl underneath to find the problem.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Paper Mouse Pad?
In the building where
I work, the only people with mouse pads are the ones who bring them from home. I
got a call the other week and here's how it went:
Me: Tech support for
XXXXXX, how may I help you?
Him: Yeah, my mouse won't work.
Me: Ok, what
seems to be the problem?
Him: Well, when I move it, the arrow doesn't go very
far
and it jumps when it moves.
I went through all of the usual
checks (plugged in all the way, drivers...) and nothing seemed to
work.
Me: How long has it been doing this?
Him: As soon as I got a
mouse pad.
Me: Is the mouse pad soft on top or hard? (I've had some
problems with older mice and those hard-topped mouse
pads)
Him:
Neither...................It's just a piece of paper.
Apparently he had
put a piece of printer paper under his mouse and was using it as a pad. The
paper moved along with the mouse and messed up the movement of the
pointer.
(He said he got the idea after a friend of his told him that a mouse
pad would improve performance, but he didn't feel like spending the money on
one.)
Thanks to: John
Don't let them take vacation !
I swear
this really happened. I support around 100 users in
a mixed environment. In
order to make it easier for them
we assign them passwords that are the same
for each of
the different systems they need to access. In order to
make it
real easy we use their given name as their login.
One user I have is kind
of a slow learner. Mind you she's
been using this computer and password for
over a year.
On Monday she called me up because she needed help with
her
computer. She coudn't log into the network. Seems she took
a vacation
and forgot her login id. Not her password,
her login id. I was a bit confused
at first. After all
her login id is her first name. I couldn't believe it, so
I walked to her office.
Sure enough she had her password correct but
forgot her
login id. I had to try real hard not to laugh when I said
to
her: "Hey Kay, your login name is K-A-Y."
Afterwards I looked at server
history. She last logged in
successfully 10 days earlier - on the last work
day before
her vacation started.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Out of Scope
I work at a TS company
that works mainly as a third party support desk for a lot of different
companies. Depending on the contract a certain company has, we coud be anything
from 1st level support on up. To make things more confusing, we have a call
center where calls are initially received then routed to various agents based on
category.
Recently I had a support call transferred to me from this desk.
The user was a Tech on-site. The problem? Lotus Notes would not print to the
network printer... JUST Lotus Notes. I went through basic troubleshooting with
him. Suggested some fixes (which he'd already tried), suggested a reinstall of
Notes (which he'd already done). When he goes to file/print in Notes, it lists
the proper printer and the correct network path. But when he tries to print he
gets a Printer Error. That is the error message in its entirety "Printer Error".
The strange thing is, he CAN print if he captures an LPT port.
So, after
going through all this and realizing that pretty much anything I could have done
for him on the phone has been done, I fessed up that I was stumped. I told him
that everything that I can try at this desk has been tried and that, at this
point, the only other thing I could suggest is wiping the drive and doing a
fresh install of everything. No response. A good 2 minutes or more of silence on
his end... I don't know if he was thinking about it, upset, dumbfounded... No
clue. Complete silence. Finally, (as a last ditch resort) suggested he call
Lotus directly. He says, "Why don't we call a tech from internal? They fixed a
similar problem last time."....
WHAM WHAM WHAM! CALL A TECH!?!? I THOUGHT
*YOU* WERE THE TECH!!!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY ANYTHING BEFORE!?!?!
I need
a vacation!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
iMAC Paradox
(me) Thank you for calling
**&* *****n*t service. My name is ***.
(caller) You guys have a sick
sense of humour.
(me) Why is that sir?
(caller) I called to get your
installation software, and they sent it out to me for my mac.
(me) Did they
send you PC software by mistake?
(caller) No. They sent me the software on
floppy disks, and I use an IMAC!! iMACS DON'T HAVE FLOPPY DRIVES!!! But, I went
out and bought a floppy drive for the iMAC.
(me) and?
(caller) The floppy
drive doesn't work. You and Apple must like tormenting me.
(me) Why would you
say that? Did you call Apple about the Floppy drive?
(caller) Yes, and they
said I had a defective install disk. And you know what they told me to
do?
(me) what?
(caller) THEY TOLD ME TO DOWNLOAD THE DRIVERS OFF THE
INTERNET!!!! I NEED THE FLOPPY DRIVE TO GO ON THE NET, AND I NEED TO GO ON THE
NET TO USE THE FLOPPY DRIVE!!!!! YOU GUYS ARE SADISTIC!!!!.......(customer hung
up)
Thanks to: Dragon Lord
But, I don't have an IBM computer
I am
one of the senior Mac techs for **&* W****n*t. When Customers call our tech
support 800# they have to go through a computer voice prompt system to get to
the proper dept. When you choose Tech support, the computer tells you to select
1 for IBM compatibles and 2 for Mac. Well here is a sample call which represents
sometimes over 50% of my calls for the day.
me) Thank you for (Blah blah
blah)...how may i help you?
him) I can't connect to the internet.
me) Do you here your modem dial at all?
him) I'm not sure if it
does or not?
me) Ok, go click on the apple menu.
him) What apple?
I only have a Start menu.
me) So you are using Win95/98?
him)
Yes
me) Ok, you've reached the Mac dept, i'm going to have to transfer
you to the IBM department.
him) Well, I don't have an IBM, I have a
Packard Bell, and there was no selection for Packard Bell in your menu.
Thanks to: Dragon Lord
SHUT WINDOWS
i was supporting a nice
woman in windows 98 abd she was very nice
we were waitting for a process to
finish
meanwhile said that its kinda cold today and then after she says well
the proccess is finished
i told her to close windows and tell me when she's
done
after about 5 minutes i aske her what is wrong why isn't windows up yet
and she says you didnt ask me to restart !!!
i said i did tell you to close
windows and she started laughing and told me that she thought i told her to
close the windows cause its cold and that what she did !!!!!!!
Thanks to: Victor Nicola
Wrath of the Tech
Recently at the
corporation where I work, an employee was getting
his own PC, and was
scheduled to receive it on a Monday. Unfortunately
something "popped up"
causing myself and the other tech to
have to travel to the edge of the state,
losing a day worth
of productivity.
On the Monday, the employee (AKA
the Monkey) shows up at my desk at 9:15am.
About this time, I was drinking my
coffee and eating my
breakfast...not a good time to disturb me.
I
told the Monkey that I would try to get the PC done by 2pm
that day, and
wandered off to the back room to begin building
all the PC's needed. A couple
hours later I was told by
the other tech that the Monkey had wandered by and
annoyed
him and the HelpDesk several times. Just before lunch I was stopped
by the
Monkey myself, and he rudely shouted "hey!" at me to get
my
attention. He then began harrassing me about his computer.
I told him we had
to build the PC, and he decided to be a
wiseguy and ask "What, you guy's have
to build the PC's from
parts?! You don't have any made up!?" I told him that
we had to format the PC's and install all the software and
I was told
"thats interesting" and the Monkey walked away
whispering comments under his
breath.."
Finally after I was officially gone for the day (around
5:45)
he stops again at my desk to give me a hard time again. OK
Fine. I
gave him a nice Pentium 133, with 2 meg video, ect
with all the toys
installed (Internet, Games, ect).
At the end of the next day (when he has
had 8 hours to get
used to the P133), I gave him his permanent PC...a P90
with
32 Megs, set at 16 colors, 640 x 480 screen, and the worst
mouse I
could find in the rack.
A day later, he seems to be MUCH friendlier....He
stopped me
and asked how I was doing, thanked me for fixing the
P90,
ect.....
Fat Monkey
Thanks to: Fat Monkey
Honey, I've shrunk the document
I do
outsourced desktop support for a large pharmaceuticals company.
Yesterday I got a call from an employee who wanted to know why her 18
page document would only print 8 pages. She said it just stopped printing after
page 8, and when she tried to start the job from page 9 nothing
happened.
Thank God for remote control. I took over her pc and examined
the document, which--lo and behold--was only 8 pages long. Never mind...
Thanks to: Lady_Isa
Hearts and Habits
I used to work for a
Circuit City store selling computers, but oddly enough most of the customers
were either knowledgable or smart enough not to question my almighty authority
(mu-hu-ha-ha-ha-hack-hack-hack!). Although I did have one particularly
irritating customer who was interested in an open-box 120 MHz Pentium HP
dinosaur that had come back from our service department. The original software
discs were gone, and we weren't planning on it leaving. He asked me to describe
it to him, and I told him about the 120 MHz Pentium processor, which was slow
condiering that we had 266 PII's at the time. I had to attend to another
customer, and he and his wife looked at some other computers. When I came back
he was playing "Hearts" on the HP. He was saying to his wife, "Look, that's as
fast as you'll need. This doesn't run any faster over on that top-of-the-line
thing over there." He was gauging the processor speed by how fast the machine
played Hearts! (Keeping in mind that "Hearts" plays quite quickly even on a
Pentium I.)
I tried to explain to him that this was not a good way to
measure the processing speed between the two machines, but he wanted me to show
him something better. Unfortunately, since the HP was pretty much devoid of
software, I didn't have much else to show him. He insisted on buying the
machine, and since it was past closing time, I decided not to argue about it. I
would have felt guilty about getting the unusually large commission on that
computer if the guy hadn't been so irritating and
arrogant.
---------------
During the span that I worked at Circuit
City, I was renting space in a friend's house. He was a software engineer, like
I am now. He had gotten a new computer, and had given his computer-illiterate
mother his old one. He was trying to teach her how to get started in Windows
(Name changed for privacy's sake):
Rob: Click on "Start".
Mother:
How do I do that?
Rob: Use the mouse.
Mother: What's
that?
Rob: That little thing next to the keyboard.
Mother (upon
moving the mouse): Oh! That's cool! I always thought that was just a nervous
habit of yours.
He and I both had to laugh at that
one...
--------------
BTW: I read a story about a guy laughing at
a user who was trying to rotate an equilateral triangle 60 degrees. Having a
degree in math, I can safely say that a 60 degree rotation would cause the
triangle to point in the other direction. Sorry to nit-pick, but we all have to
keep in mind that we aren't perfect, either.
Thanks to: Qatar
Bigger Cable Needed
More years ago than
I want to relate, Honeywell built a stand-alone
word processing machine. It
contained a monitor, processor and floppy
all in one case. There was also,
of course, a keyboard attached by a
cable.
While working in the
support center, we received this call one day:
Support: Hello,
welcome....(normal welcoming chit chat). How can I help you?
User: I need
a bigger cable for my keyboard.
Support: A bigger cable? The one you have
isn't long enough?
User: It's plenty long. I need a bigger
one.
Support: Okay, why do you need a bigger cable?
User: Well,
when I am typing letters stop going to the screen after I
type a "w". We've
analyzed the problem. The points on the "w" are getting
stuck in the cable
and then all the other letters pile up behind the "w".
We need a bigger cable
so the "w"s can get through without getting stuck.
Support: (long pause
to recover from laughter)
When I tell this story, I say that we told
the user to try twisting the
cable in the other direction. They say they
tried that but the "M"s started
getting stuck. We didn't really but it would
have been fun.
The lesson I take is that the user was able to perform
their job perfectly
well without understanding how the machine works. As easy
as it is to laugh
at unknowing users, they just use the machine as a tool and
not really need
to understand how it all works. But it is still a funny
story.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Infinite Email Programs
I work tech
support for a local isp, mainly on the weekends
because there's no boss and
hardly any calls at all. One
slight problem with this is you get some people
who have
nothing better to do on the weekend but play with their
computers. Every weekend for about a month this guy would
call up who is
about 65 years old with a new email problem.
Trick is every week he would
change email programs.
It was incredible, he could always find a new one,
everything
from eudora to outlook express to internet mail, you name it
he
would call about it.
He claimed to be experienced in eudora, but of course
forgets
to mention he had been using a eudora about 10 versions
behind,
and decides to upgrade and then call up when all the settings
are
different. If you're familiar with eudora, you'll know that most
of
the settings change in every version or two somewhat.
It's just like a
reoccuring nightmare, but this one you come
to know by the sound of their
voice every weekend about the
same time.
Thanks to: Bob Grimm
Cables? We dont need no stinking
cables
I work for Tech Support for a local isp, while still a senior
in high school.
So of course like everyone else in the world who does T/S
friends call me to fix
every kinda computer problem they have.
A friend of
mine who I occasionally bummed rides from calls me up and several
other
people complaining his floppy drove dont work.
Well eventually I
give up and go over there just to discover the cable was disconnected.
Plug
it in and wow it works! What do you know?
Who would have ever thought you
would need to plug in the damn cables?
This guy once shorted out the damn
thing by screwing the feet in on the case too far
and fried half the damn
system.
Last week his hard drive died, this is a 5 year old system and he
buys a 8.4 gig hd
just to make things difficult. Well he didn't like all of
those drive letters.
So some nice ez-bios tricks that his system didn't
like and eventually we got that working.
Although he does have a lovely
error on boot:
1790 - HD Size Error
Press F1 to continue
Now WTF
good does it do to do that everytime when it makes no difference?
Yes you
guessed it this was a POS compaq.
Have fun next time your friend calls
you to fix their system, I find it's helpfull
to own alot of old spare
parts.
And pray they we're smart enough to buy extended hardware
warranties,
you never know when they'll screw the feet on the machine :)
Thanks to: Bob Grimm
Bookmarks? Hrmm What are those?
I work
tech support for a local isp.
Lately I keep getting people calling up saying
they get ACCESS DENIED everytime they log on to the internet.
Yes these come
from the people who think the internet is internet explorer and made by
microsoft.
Then you tell the genius's to go to our homepage and what do u
know it loads up just fine?
So of course they bitch at me because they want
that page with all the search engines on it
so they can access the
interenet.
Lets see here, excite hrmm excite.com, altavista ...
altavista.com maybe?
Why cant people understand that search engines aren't
the internet and there's alot
more things to the internet then web pages, and
that internet explorer and netscape
are used to only access one part of the
internet and are not the internet.
I feel sorry for people who cant
figure out the basic concepts of things yet alone
have any clue how to use
them. Then of course these same people tell all their friends
they're
"internet savy." I bet they watch all those decorator shows on tv and
think
everything is savy.
Thanks to: Bob Grimm
Bad vibes
A user called the help desk
to say that her laser printer
was giving out "bad vibrations". We imagined
she meant
the fan was noisy and making the desk shake, or something
like
that.
The technician went round... printer seemed normal. The
user
said, "no, you don't understand, it's emitting bad
vibrations". She _really
meant_ that the printer was
putting the 'fluence on her.
In the end we
sent the technician back to pretend to
upgrade the firmware. We had to tell
the user that we'd
found a bug in the version she had and it was indeed
giving
out evil messages in that version. After the "upgrade"
she never
called again.
Thanks to: Nick Brown
Cdrom won't read the disc?
I work for a
small software company and make a do-it-yourself personal tax preparation
software. It's pretty easy to setup. Just run setup. However, we had one client
who we could not get it to work. He calls up and says everytime I try to run
D:\setup, it gives me "Can't find D:\Setup". We went to My Computer and there
was no cdrom drive there. We checked Autoexec and Config to see if there are any
DOS drivers, none. After about 10 minutes of pondering, the client says, I don't
know why your disk won't work, the ones I have here work. I said, which ones? He
says, the square black ones, the real fragile kind. He also complained that he
couldn't eject out disk like his others, he had to tip his computer frontwards
to eject ours.
We then realized he was using our cdrom in a 5.25 floppy
drive.
Thanks to: Tim Grys
Disk Drives
I once had a lady
installing our program off of 3.5 disks. there were two in the set. She began
the installation and when the 1st disk finished the install program asked for
the second disk. She then called us and was complaining about how she had to buy
a second 3.5 floppy drive for her computer because our program comes on two
disks. I guess she didn't know about the eject button on her 3.5 floppy drive
and how she was supposed to eject the first disk and put in the second one. She
felt real duh after that one.
Thanks to: Tim Grys
I want fishies!
I'm the IS guy at a
small business and get the basic "Why can't I do this"
calls...
[RING]
Me: Hello?
Operator:I want fishies on my
computer!
Me: Huh?
Op: [Coworker] has fishies on her computer, I want them
too!
[Assuming a screen saver]
Me: You can't have that on your computer,
it's too slow [reffering to a 486/50].
Op: But I have flying windows and can
get on the Internet, why can't I have fishies?! [clearly about to de-ball
me]
Me: [wanting to mention a grand conspiracy, I settled for] Because she
has Windows 98 and that won't run on your computer.
Op: Why not?!
Me: It
just won't install; I can't make it.
Op: OH FINE!
[click]
Isn't
life grand? This after her wanting to get a 800x600x24bit slide show with sound
running on the very same machine that chokes on WordPerfect. [We're slightly
low-budget...]
Thanks to: Hidden to protect the
innocent
You named it what???
I work for a
national I.S.P. and had a call from an older user one night who had formatted
and set everything up himself. To my surprise, he got the Phone number, DNS and
user/pass correct. He was complaining about an error when sending and checking
mail. Thinking the solution was simple, I took him into Outlook Express to see
what he put in there for incoming and outgoing mail servers. The user had
entered as the mail server name "wally" because he though this was a good name
and easy to remember. He did have the correct settings but thought "wally' would
work much better. Needless to say, I repeated this outload for the benifift of
nearby techs, and we all had a good laugh at the users expense.
Thanks to: Unknown
"You're listening to W-I-N 95
radio!"
The software I support has a little sound recording utility,
adequate for recording human voices. One day I get a call from a customer with a
lot of odd questions about it.
CALLER: Can your (sound recording program)
pick up something that's already in your computer?
ME: Uh,
no.
CALLER: Can it pick stuff up from down the hall?
ME: Well that
depends on your Windows sound settings, type of microphone
(unidirectional/omnidirectional), etc.
(I go into standard Windows sound
recording troubleshooting. Microphone plugged in/turned on, checked volume
levels, no feedback, correct sliders are muted, etc. Everything is
OK.)
ME: Can you ordinarily do sound recording?
CALLER: Yes, and
it's always fine. But today it's like I picked up something from inside the
computer or the next room.
ME: What kind of microphone are you
using?
CALLER: (el cheapo nine-dollar brand, which is usually sufficient
for our purposes)
ME: Where was the computer located?
CALLER: (In
the middle of the room, not against a wall or anything. Nowhere that should
cause any problems)
ME: (puzzled) So exactly what problems are you
having? (A question I should have asked a long time ago.)
CALLER: It's
like I picked something up else somehow. Here, listen.
She plays back
the sound recording. Through the phone, I hear a scratchy recording of some
voices, and then...
RECORDING: Take those old records off the shelf...
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself...
It's a static-filled recording
of "Old Time Rock And Roll", by Bob Seger.
ME: (explodes with laughter,
falls out of chair)
I put her on hold and laughed for two solid minutes.
After regaining my strength, I explained the situation to one of the other
techs, who is knowledgeable in electronics. He said that her cheap mic, or more
specifically the cable, had some frequency problems and was picking up an AM
radio broadcast.
This other tech suggested that she go to Radio Shack and
buy a little thingy that will shield the cable from external wavelengths (I
forget the name of the item).
After explaining all this to her, I asked
her to give me the street address where she was doing the sound recording. I
used to work in radio and still have access to some industry resources. So I did
a search and found that there was in fact a tower for an AM oldies station not
far from there.
Another day, another problem solved. :)
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Idiot!!
Ok, I dont work for any tech
suport line(some of you guys suck!), but for some reason im the ONLY person with
in a one mile radius that knows anything about computers. So when ever some
idiot's computer "breaks" they call me.
There's this one person, who just a
month ago bought a 100mhz computer 3 months ago for $500. They decided they
didnt have enough HD space and delted what ever they didnt always use. this
included various config files. Not olny did they not have a back up disk which
windows prompts you to make 10 times when you install windows, but they didnt
have there windows disk anymore. deciding this idiot didnt deserve a computer, I
told here she needed to give me her computer. I took it from her brought it over
to my house and screwed it up royaly. The next day i brought it back to her and
told her (like a doctor tell a mother her son died) "I couldnt save it".
Just
wanted to share this.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Special of the Day
I work for very
large Australian ISP on the helldesk. And these are my stories.
This is
devoted to one of our support staff - a 17 year old with a background in
Macintoshes.
He was given the job after being recommended to position by our
real Mac Guru (who
makes you believe that Macs can actually be used for
something apart from oversized
paperweights). Apparently, our Mac Guru rues
the day he got this kid a job. They know
each other because Special used to
ring him up (he began as one of our customers - that's
always a bad sign)
with lame errors all the time. He has been dubbed 'Special' for all
the
'special' support he provides to his 'special' customers with his
'special' solutions...
I should point out I hold no grudges against him
however I believe that support staff should
know their stuff. They are paid
to know their stuff (then again so are sys admins and MCSE's :-)
Here are
just a few of his exploits.
Specials of the
Day
-------------------
- Thought Microsoft Office 97 was initially
designed on the Macintosh.
- Didn't understand how to play minesweeper
-
When presented with 3 login id's and 3 passwords, he could not
figure out how
many combinations exist to get in, even when
it was drawn on paper for
him.
- Believes Internet Explorer will hold the answer as to why a winbloze
95 machine
is having DialUp Networking problems.
- Burned a copy of a
game after borrowing the cd from it's owner. When the owner asked
for his CD
back, Special asked jokingly if he could keep the original and the owner
take
the (not working) burnt copy. Seemed genuinely suprised when the owner refused.
Persisted for five minutes.
- Could not play Flight Simulator despite the
fact it had tutorial videos come with the
game. Could steer and drive along
the runway real well though...
- We use an old 286 with DOS 6.22 for our
labelling machine. At the DOS prompted he saw a DIR
listing (whether he typed
in the command is highly questionable). In the C:\LABELS path he
saw three
files: LABELS.DOC, LABELS.FIL, LABELS.EXE. One of these would load the
labelling
program he needed to use. He could not figure out which one would
load the program. We asked
him which one is the executable. He did not
know.
- We also employ voice-over-ip technology, allowing us to use the
Internet for phone calls (you
can imagine the system is far from perfect).
But it works quite well internally, especially for
monitoring call queues.
This is a transcript of a conversation between Special (s) and one of
the
Team Support Leaders (a).
s: "Hey, does the ******* phones tell you how long
you have to wait on hold?"
a: "The ones in sydney do but not the ones
here."
s: "What do the ones here do?"
a: "Nothing."
s: "What do the
ones in sydney do?"
a: "They tell you how many minutes wait the queue is when
you dial in."
s: "Well what do they do?"
a: "They tell you how long you
have to wait on hold"
s: "Oh. so what do they do?"
a: "They tell you how
long you have to wait on hold."
s: "Yeah but what do they do?"
a: "Are you
f*cking stupid?"
Not ten minutes later, he follows it up with this:
-
Special is looking at a brochure of the same voice-over-ip phone service we
offer to
can imagine the system is far from perfect). But it works quite well
internally, especially for
monitoring call queues. This is a transcript of a
conversation between Special (s) and one of
the Team Support Leaders (a).
s: "Hey, does the ******* phones tell you how long you have to wait on
hold?"
a: "The ones in sydney do but not the ones here."
s: "What do the
ones here do?"
a: "Nothing."
s: "What do the ones in sydney do?"
a:
"They tell you how many minutes wait the queue is when you dial in."
s: "Well
what do they do?"
a: "They tell you how long you have to wait on hold"
s:
"Oh. so what do they do?"
a: "They tell you how long you have to wait on
hold."
s: "Yeah but what do they do?"
a: "Are you f*cking
stupid?"
Not ten minutes later, he follows it up with this:
- Special
is looking at a brochure of the same voice-over-ip phone service we offer
to
the public. After carefully examining the various rates for all the
different COUNTRIES
he makes the following comment;
s: "Aaaw they don't
have New York"
a: "Uuh.. it's got the USA"
s: "Yeah but they should have
New York too"
a: "Where exactly do you think New York is?"
s: "Yeah i know
that but they should have it"
a: "It's a listing by country"
s:
"So?"
But this is my personal favorite. I should note that the following
incident occured with a
Macintosh that is the same make and MODEL as his home
mac. So there is no justification for
this blatant act of stupidity. One of
our techies (b) was looking at the front panel of the
mac (this panel
detatches I should point out). He was looking at the hard drive LED up
close
to see through that small black plastic square (which suspiciously
resembles an infra red
remote control square...) - just to see if the hard
drive was firing up after messing about
with the hardware. Special witnesses
our techie staring at the LED and grabs him:
s: Don't look at that!
b:
Why?
s: You'll go blind!
b: *thinking* wtf?
s: It's infra red man!!!
Haven't you seen those printers without cables! It can detect
new
hardware!
b: ?????
After he picked himself up off the floor,
the techie told us the story. I made a note of taking
this detachable panel
off the front of the mac, aiming it at our printer and beating it against
the
table, crying "IT'S NOT WORRRKINGGGG!!!!....". It had the office in stitches.
For the rest of
the week the support staff were running around with this
detatchable panel and point it at
objects trying to get them to 'detect new
hardware'...
Oh yeah, he also at one point said he knows more about
computers than I do! I'm not one to blow
my own trumpet (I didn't even have
to leap to my defense when he said that, about three other
people did which
was quite funny) but he made this comment not long after the labelling
incident.
He had been on the helpdesk for two months (I had hit the 11 month
mark) and my first computer was
a TRS-80 back in '82 (if anyone can even
remember these things you know you've been in the
industry far too long). He
knows more than me? At least I know what an .EXE file is...
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
HelpLess Desk
Them: Thank you for
calling the Help Line. Please pick one of teh following 6 options:
Me:
(2)
Them: Please enter your employee number
Me: (123456)
Them: Please
pick one of the following 5 options....
Me: (4)
Them: All agents are
currently helping other customers. Please hold.
(7 minute wait)
Them:
Printer Support. Can I have your employee number please?"
Me: I just entered
it.
Them: I know sir, but I need it again
Me: 123456
Them: Thank you.
How can I help you?
Me: Will you please send someone to Room 235 to add toner
to printer XXX1234?
Them: Are you running Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows
NT?
Me: What difference does it make? The printer needs toner.
Them: Sir,
I need to know what operating system you are using so I can diagnose your
problem.
Me: Ok, fine. Windows 95.
Them: Have you tried rebooting?
Me:
There is nothing wrong with my PC. The problem is with a LAN attached
printer.
Them: Well sometimes rebooting will fix things.
Me: I am not
going to reboot my PC because a LAN attached printer needs toner. Would you
please just send someone over with a toner cartridge?
Them: Ok, can you
descibe exactly what problem you're having?
Me: In room 235 there is a
printer named XXX1234 that needs toner.
Them: What kind of file are you
trying to print?
Me: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? JUST SEND SOMEONE OVER
WITH A TONER CARTRIDGE!
Them: Sir, I am trying to help you. I need to know
what kind of file are you trying to print?
Me: It's a WordPro
document.
Them: Have you tried printing from other applications?
Me: Yes.
And I have the same problem.
Them: Can you describe the problem?
Me: I can
barely read the text on the page and there is a large white streak down the
middle of the page and the display on the printer says "Add Toner"
Them:
Hmmm. Sounds like the printer needs toner. We'll send someone right over. Thank
you for calling the Help Line.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
No Title
Me: Good Morning, Welcome to
Tech Support, how can I help you?
Cust: This bl**dy computer. It's a load
of ****! It doesn't work! You're all bl**dy ****. It was the biggest waste of
money I have spent!
Me: What's the problem?
Cust: It's not bl**dy
working! I should never have bought it!
Me: Could you tell me exactly
what is happening please?
Cust: I turned it on, and it seemed ok but the
screen went blank.
Me: Ok. Can you please reach around the rear of the
machine and turn the power switch off for 10 seconds, then turn it back on
again.
Cust: This isn't going to work.
A few seconds silence
ensure...
Cust: Ok, I've done it. Oh. My foot is wrapped around the power
cable.
Me: Please turn the machine off again, ensure all cables are
plugged in and turn it back on again.
A few seconds more
silence...
Cust: Yeah. It's working. Hey what's that noise? (high pitched
beeping) It's not bl**dy working! It's broken! It's a load of ****!
Me:
Look at your keyboard. Is there a key stuck down?
Cust: Oh. There's a
book sitting on the keyboard. Thank you (click)
Thanks to: Anoushka Haas
Oh, I get it now!
I work for a medium
sized ISP in the Seattle area and am in
charge of the tech support crew. One
fine Friday afternoon about a year ago, all my guys were busy so I picked up a
call to help out. Typical of my luck it was an elderly lady with a brand new P2
266.
Cust:"Can you help download the Internet?"
Me: "Ummm... I
can try, have you set up your computer to connect yet?"
Cust: "No that's
what I want you to help me with."
Me: "OK, no problem Ma'am is your
computer turned on?"
Cust: "Yes the guys from the store just hooked it
up."
Me: (mute) "Groan....." I knew I was in for a long call when I asked
the question...
Me: "OK do you see the big blue E on your
desktop?"
Cust: "Oh dear they didn't leave me one of those..."
Me:
"Umm how about on your screen, do you see one there?"
Cust: "Oh...I'm
terribly sorry, I see it now, I'm just a beginner so you'll have to go
slow..."
Me: "No Problem Ma'am, I was a beginner too once... Now I want
you to double click on the blue E."
Cust: "Ok it turned
green...."
Me: "ummm did you double click?"
Cust: "Yes I'll do it
again....(I hear a strange rustling sound)
click.............click....."
Me: "ok you need to click a little
faster.....click, click, not click.........click"
Cust: "Can I take this
plastic off? It sure is hard to move the little arrow with the mouse all covered
up..."
Me: (trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice) "Ummmm, yes
that would be just fine, you don't need that anymore."
What followed was
about 10 minutes more of explaining finer points of double clicking on an icon.
Then the bombshell hit....
Cust: "Now it says, 'Are you sure you want to
send Internet Explorer to the recycle bin?' click yes?"
Me: "NO! Click on
NO...."
By this time the rest of the helpdesk was off the phone... I put
the customer on hold to transfer her to a level one tech...since we work in a
small space they were pretty aware of the nature of my call. I never saw so many
men go to the bathroom together at once! In less time then it took me to ask the
customer to hold so I could transfer her to tech support, I was alone in the
room.
What followed was literally 30 minutes (no kidding) of the
following dialog...
Me: "OK now double click on the blue E...click, click
not click...........click....... NO! click no, we don't want to delete
it!"
I was completely baffled, in 4 years of internet tech support, I had
never had this problem, every time she double clicked on the Internet explorer
icon, it tried to send it to the recycle bin...I was about to give up entirely
and have her reinstall windows when she made the following
comment...
Cust: "OH! It works much better if you lay your hand on it and
then click...it doesn't move around so much that way!"
I was dumfounded
and no reply for a second or two...she had been trying to use the mouse without
touching it. The Explorer icon was directly above the recycle icon, and
everytime she tried to double click, the force of her attempt would drag the
Explorer icon into the recycle bin!
Now that we "fixed" that problem, it
only took me about another hour to go through the connection wizard and get her
set up to "download the Internet to her hard drive"
As we finished the call
she gave the following advice...
"You should tell all your other
customers this trick, (resting your hand on the mouse) it makes it so much
easier
to click on things....
Needless to say I had one loooonnnnnnng
coffee break after that one!
Thanks to: Ken Taylor
Why hasn't tech level two called
back?
I work for an internet service provider account, and
got a
call one night from a gentelmen (?) who proceeded to
chew me out because his
problem wasn't being resolved. He
reenacted every detail of the problem and
his ALL computer
settings, even as I told him that wasn't necessary.
I
checked his past ticket, and he had called in several
times in the last two
hours. We had been escalated his case
to the next level of support. They
didn't respond to the
conference call, so we issued a call directly to them
to call
the customer back.
After he slammed me, he asked for my
supervisor, and
slammed him too, re-reenacting every detail to my
supervisor.
He ended up taking up nearly an hour of our time on the phone.
We finally were able to get him to listen, and told him, that
the next
level COULDN'T call him back if he kept his phone line
tied up with calls to
us.
Thanks to: Daniel Biesheuvel
Aggressive technical support
A DOS
handheld application I wrote for my largest customer has some self-diagnostic
capabilities and will, in some critical cases, display a message to the user
along with the help desk's phone number and asking the user to call for help.
(These messages pop up not because the user did anything wrong but because my
program generated a hardware or software exception of some kind.) The messages
are also logged in a file that is uploaded at the end of the day, but without
the user telling the help desk exactly what they were doing at the point of
failure, the message alone is usually not enough for me to figure out why my
program failed.
Anyway, some users ignore these messages, reset their
handhelds, and carry on. One such user got the same message day after day and
repeated attempts to contact him failed (some of these users are in really
remote locations, others are barely literate, and still others regard any call
from head office with the same suspicion accorded to a contract that includes
the phrase "your soul for all eternity").
Because of this and other
difficulties with some users, I have introduced a new feature that I feel should
be standard in any application: the help desk can now lock the application by
remote without ever having to contact the user. The ONLY way to unlock the
handheld is to call the help desk (even resetting won't work).
If the
handheld is locked, the user can't sell. If the user can't sell, he doesn't get
paid. It's amazing how responsive and cooperative users get when their salaries
are threatened.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Follow along now...
I work for a
smallish ISP doing phone support. This is a call I did one day with a user who
needed a DNS update.
Me: Okay, are you at the computer now?
User:
Yes
Me: And are we at the desktop?
User: With all the icons on it you
mean?
Me: Yep. There should be an icon on there that says My Computer. Do
you see that?
User: Yes
Me: Go ahead and double-click on that icon. On
the next screen do you see one that
says Dial-up Networking?
User:
Yeah
Me: Okay, double click on that. Now you should see two or more icons.
What do you see there?
User: Huh?
Me: What do we have on the screen now?
User: What do you mean screen?
Me: What does it show on your monitor
right now?
User: Oh you mean I'm supposed to turn on my computer?
Thanks to: Schitzo Munkee
Beeping computer
I work in tech support
and my friend took the following phone call.
Cust. calls in and system
is beeping (sickly sounding every 10 seconds or so). System turned off and still
beeping. Started disconnected keyboard, mouse, etc... disconnected every
peripheral save speakers. Customer states it's coming out of the speakers,
disconnected speakers and the beep goes on. Had cust. open up cover and pull out
the cmos battery. After going nuts for about 10 minutes trying to figure this
one out, I again asked him what was around the computer. He opened a desk
drawer,turned off his beeper and sheepishly hung up.
Suzi
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Sometimes a little information
helps...
I work for a smallish ISP doing phone support. On the nights
and
weekends that means sitting around waiting for the phone to ring,
often I'll work 9 hours and take 2 calls. So when a lady calls
in with
severe connection troubles, I figure I'll go a little
beyond the call of duty
to get it fixed. All in all, I spend
4 hours on the phone with her, tweaking
with things.
When I have done everything I can possably do over
the
phone, I tell her that the problem is either a hardware issue
with the modem
or a problem with the phone lines, which was
likely considering that she was
12 miles down a dirt road and
35 miles from our POP. I suggested that she
call the phone company
to have them test the lines.
Her: Oh, yes,
the phone company has been here.
Me: Oh? What did they say?
Her:
They said my old buried lines were so old they were going
to replace them.
In fact, they're out there right now trenching
for the new lines. Gee, now
that I think about it, I started
having trouble about the time they started
digging this morning.
I suggested that she wait for them to hook up the
new lines and
try again.
Thanks to: Schitzo Munkee
Ignorance is bliss...
I have a
room-mate who is... not all there. As in she gets social security
and thinks
the police are always following her. I don't complain,
rent is cheap and I
see her maybe twice a week. One day after I'd
been living there for a month
she asks me "exactly what kind
of work do you do?"
"I configure
computers to connect to the Internet"
"Huh?"
"People call me on
the phone and I fix their computers."
"Oh," she paused, "how do you put
parts in over the phone?"
"I don't do hardware, I just configure them."
"Well if you don't need to replace the parts, what's wrong with
them?"
"They're set up wrong."
"No," she said, "YOU don't
understand. They're just like a TV:
it works or it doesn't!"
And to
think that I was considering letting her use my machine
for email...
Thanks to: Schitzo Munkee
Be Careful What You Say... it might be
repeated
I work for an International ISP Group, and recently, we had a
serious outage in Scotland that was really causing some problems. After a few
days of isolating what must have been 5 separate issues making one big problem,
we finally reduced the problems from a solid heavy flow to just a trickle. Some
of the issues left were to be dealt with as individual cases.
The last
one was a real stickler, and after a lot of headache, it turned out the user was
plugging his phone jack into an Ethernet card, and didn't even have a modem.
Doh! That should have been determined at the site, but it somehow got missed. It
was kind of a relief, and kind of a "well, damn all that for for nothing" kind
of moment, so I turned to the guy manning our main help desk, and told him as a
joke to put out a major bulletin that, "Users with no modems are having trouble
dialing into the service."
It was meant to be a joke. But he was
distracted, took is seriously on a subconscious level, and damn if he didn't put
out a major bulletin, reserved for major outage events and such. "Users without
modems cannot connect to service." When he told me he put it out as a major
bulletin, at first I didn't believe him, thinking he was playing along with my
tongue-in0cheek comment. Our internal computing people interpreted this as
meaning people connecting directly through TCP/IP could not connect, and they
called me for details. Luckily, one of the desks manning our direct customer
relations asked me if the guy at my help desk was on crack. I told him what had
happened, and they ragged this poor guy to no end, which made him say, "Oho... I
see... you want me to look like a fool, do you?"
Now... I nervously wait
for his revenge...
Thanks to: Grig Larson
Recycled paper
This story happened
about ten years ago.
We got a call from a user that his line printer
was
occasionally printing random garbage characters in the
middle of
reports. This problem had started (naturally)
after one of our FE people had
been to the customer's site
(of course, he hadn't been anywhere near the
machine in
question).
Went to the customer's office... sure enough,
lots of
reports with # and @ and whatever, but strangely, not in
exact
character positions (for people under 25: a line
printer typically only
prints a single fixed-width font
with a fixed line height, so the characters
are effectively
printed on a grid, and these random ones were
slightly
offset).
Now, this customer was about to place a BIG order,
so my
boss told me to put in "whatever it takes". We cleaned
the printer
and changed all the cables. We replaced the
entire printer. We reloaded the
operating system. No joy.
Then, one day at about 11pm, I dropped my pen
into the box
of fanfold paper which was in front of the line
printer.
Picking it up, I noticed random characters on the page. I
flipped
furiously through the rest of the paper. There was
a # or : or % on every
fifth page, approximately.
It turned out that one of the programmers at
this (very
cost-conscious) company, had printed a binary file which
had
taken up a whole jumbo box of paper. He had taken it
from the output basket
and put it back into the input box.
We billed them about 40 hours of
technician time and the
programmer was fired. Guess he should have owned up
and
bought a box of paper.
Thanks to: Nick Brown
Utilities, what are
utilities????
Hi,
(first a merely rhetorical question: does it
help against
nerds, to name utilities: "... Utilities"??)
Doing
software-support for suspicious German customers, can
be hell, esp. if they
withhold vital informations about
their system, not trusting a techie.
Last Friday, I received several calls from a "skilled" customer
()2.5 hours in total!), regarding a simple installation, also
involving
IE4 for accessing the new helpfiles. The customer
only did admit, running a
freshly installed Win95 and no
(no Sir, really NONE!!) utilities or other
programs, only
drivers. Thus, our program being the first to get installed.
Nevertheless, having some years of techie-experience, I asked
for
any background-tasks (e.g. M$-Office, Virus-Scanner, Utilities,
etc!). Nope,
no utilities for sure; the customer pretending the
Win95-tasklist being
empty, besides of Explorer and Systray!
Well, on the phone, I had to rely on
those informations!
Two hours (and some more calls) later, he even
couldn´t start
Win95 any more, because he fiddled around with the
installation,
but w/o calling me for assistance/advice!
Finally (me
also having experience in tech-inquisition), he
did admit, that he used a
copy of Norton-Utilities(!), and when
he tried to install IE4: he let
CrashGuard *repair* a possible
expected crash during IE-installation!!!! I
assume this was
making many unintended changes to several system-files,
which
just got installed. And I also assume several severe
user-
RTFM-errors, when using those utilities.
Now, trying to launch
Win95 resulted in a frozen system, because
CrashGuard always complained
about a possible crash, followed by
a totally crashing Explorer.exe!! Not
even starting in safe-mode
was possible any more.
Now for his
incredible reply (translated), when I mentioned
those withhold utilities,
while silently grinding my teeth:
"(him incredible/surprised)... oh, THAT is
what you meant
with UTILITIES???!"
When I then suggested FDISK and a
new Win95-installation, he
suddenly started to whail about losing all his
Corel-, Winword-
and other documents! Pretty strange files, concerning a
"naked" Win95 installation!
Imho, some PowerUser urgently need a
drivers-license for their
PC! Or much better, a weapons-license for using
utilities!
;-)
Nevertheless LOL!
Herbz
(Btw: being
techie, I myself appreciate such utilities! No
reproaches are intended
towards any manufacturer, besides
of possible user-RTFMs.)
Thanks to: Herbz
No Title
This doesn't really qualify as
a Tech Tale, but it's sort of
related, and I've been storing up this
particular rant for
years.
I used to work on the order desk for a
company that would
provide drugstores with all their merchandise - drugs,
cigarettes, candy, you name it. The managers of the stores
would call in
and place their order. Most of the calls were
quite straightforward - "I want
3 cases of Snickers, 1 box
of Tylenol Extra-Strength" ... you get the
picture. But
every now and again I'd get a call like the
following:
Customer: I want some cigarettes.
Me: Yes, sir. What
kind?
C: The kind with the blue label.
M: Um, do you have a brand
name, sir?
C: (getting testy)I said the kind with the blue
label!
M: I'm afraid that doesn't help - I need a name.
C:
(patronizingly) Just go look at the cigarette shelf,
honey. Find the ones
with the blue label. That's the one
I want.
(Let me interject here
that I did not work around the
merchandise. For security reasons (since a
lot of the stuff
we provided to drugstores was drug-related and/or
expensive),
only warehouse staff were allowed in the warehouse where
the
merchandise was kept. I worked in the main office. But
I COULD NOT convince
customers of this!)
M: I don't work in the warehouse, sir, so I can't go
look
at the cigarettes. (Aside: even if I COULD go look at the
cigarettes,
do you have any idea how many brands, types and
sizes there are? It would've
taken me an hour!)
C: (suspiciously) Are you new there?
M: (trying
to be calm) No, sir, I've worked here for over
a year.
C: Well, all I
want is the ones with the blue label! I've
never had any problem like this
before! I want to talk to
Terry! (My supervisor.)
Whereupon I'd get
Terry to talk to the guy, she'd
miraculously know which cigarettes he
wanted, and he'd go
away happy - convinced that I was an idiot who was
too
stupid or too stubborn to just go look at the damn
cigarette shelf and
find the ones with the blue label.
And don't even get me started on the
customers who'd call
the answering machine, leave a huge order, omit a
couple
of tiny unimportant details like WHAT COMPANY THEY
REPRESENTED, and
then call and complain the next day when
they didn't get their order
...
Or the customers who'd call asking for lightbulbs and would
be
confused when we asked what wattage they required.
"What do you mean?
Lightbulbs! You know, the things that
go into lights!". "Yes, ma'am, but do
you need 40 watt,
60 watt, 100 watt ...?". "Oh. I don't know."
Phew,
thanks! That's been building for a long time!
Thanks to: Vicky Sharman-Finlayson
Beep Beep - Means Post error
This one
isn't humerous, it is intended to set some info straight. And to show that thing
can go both ways. Some questions may appear a little "off the wall" until you
stop to think about them.
So here goes the reason for writing...
I
have to pitty the person who got the tech. who told them that the (post) beeps
don't mean anything.(story:"Beep Beep") I am here to tell you that they do. and
that there is a list that will tell what that mean, if you can get your hand on
a service techs. repair guide.
There are a series of long and short beep
in this code.
Usually a short beep means everything is OK.(I would include
the rest of the list if I were at home to get it)
Signed: Been there
- Done that!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
What's he waiting for ?
I work for a
company that has users around US, either working at home or small office
complex. IT Support is managed out of Corporate HQ, using using an outside
vendor as National Support.
This story has been five months in the
making.
It involves a small office user who happens to be a bit 'thick' to do
what IT support asks him to do and what he wants done.
The user has a
problem with the network config of his machine.
He is unable to duplicate
his problem to a tech and has turned down suggestions to return his machine to
HQ, to get it repaired.
Tired of the endless communication with the user,
the IT support director decided that he will get a new machine and send it to
him from corporate distribution.
Telling the user that he will get a new
machine to get rid of the problems, the user agrees that he will handle its
installation and data transfer.
A month after the user receives his new
machine, the user calls up IT support and talks to the director.
This is
a transcript of what happened in the conversation -
User: (Describes an
"Out of Memory" error).
IT Sup: Okay. Is there anymore problems
?
User: Yes. (And he describes the problems he had for months with his
old PC)
IT Sup: So the problems that you have had with your old PC - you
are now experiencing them again on your new PC ?
User: I did not install
the new PC. I'm still using the old one.
IT Sup: Did you receive the new
PC ?
User: Yes. It just been sitting here doing nothing. When is someone
coming out here to install it?
IT Sup: I'll get back to
you.
-
Suffice it to say that we will send a tech to the user but
I could've swore the IT director was chocking the phone before he hung
up.
Thanks to: Ned
Just "undelete" it from RAM...
I work
in the printing industry and had been the "Mac guru" at our shop.
Many times
I would be called upon to answer questions for customers.
Enter the case of
the "misinformed customer":
One fine day, our shop was called upon to
scan a picture in high
resolution (300 ppi) for the designer. No problem.
However her disk
was Windows format and we were a Mac shop. Still no problem
since
the Macs could read and write to the Win format. The problem
came
when our scan was 45mb (not unusual) and the remaining
space on her disk was
30mb. Thsi wouldn't do, so I called her
and explained the situation. "Oh,
just delete everything on the
disk" she instructed. "Sure thing", I said,
"but before I do,
you have a complete backup of the contents of this disk,
right?"
"Of course I do" she exclaimed, "Don't you think I would",
this
time more terse. I sensed here exaspitation with this experience,
but I had to know these things. She also informed me that I
shouldn't
need to delete in the first place since her Syqyest
88mb removable disk had
300mb of space and I should have plenty.
Hmmmmm, now something doesn't jive.
88 - 300 = -212mb. Doesn't
add up!
Instead of deleting as she said, I
went to our Production
Manager and explained all the above. He called her and
she came
over.
To make this long story shorter, after her insistance
that we
delete the contents of the disk, and copy her scan, AND
repeatedly insisting that she had a backup (keep fact this
in mind--I
asked her repeatedly if she had a backup), we
deleted, reformatted (some i/o
errors) and copied the requested
scan. No problem. I had my butt covered
;-)
Later that day, dummm dummm dummmmmm, she calls and wants
the
original contents back on her disk. "What" I exclaimed! "How
in the
world are we to do that? We deleted and reformatted
her disk!" She didn't
like that and came over immediately (and
in a huff). "Please, put the
original stuff BACK on..." she
demanded! "Sorry, we deleted, as you
insisted, and it's gone"
I said. A great discussion on how we couldn't
retrieve the
information insued and finally she said "Just copy the
stuff
onto the disk from RAM." RAM? What was she thinking? I asked
and she
said "I have it under good authority that you can
retrieve deleted files
from RAM". Oh yeah. And pigs fly.
I instructed her that THAT was completely
incorrect and showed
her and said "In any case, you have your backup,
right?"
She innocently replied "That WAS my backup." I couldn't resist.
Thanks to: Wes Yates
No Title
I'm reading through this, and
can't help but remeber the first time I used the net.
I was so pround of
myself, because I had managed to doubleclick & open the browser window. What
I couldn't figure out, however, was how to go anywhere. So after looking at the
college home page, the bookmarked pages, and the history, I decided the net was
pretty small, and pointless. I knew there had to be more to this whole net thing
than what I could find, but I was too shy to ask a tech person, because I knew
it would look stupid: "Uhm, yeah? How do I find the net?" Anyway, guys go easy
on the new people! I was doing full time tech support 6 months later.
Thanks to: -L
16.7 million colors?
I work for a
(H)igly (P)opular company (you can figure out wich one), and we get a plethora
of irate callers. Just one of the joys of working on an 800 number.
One call
everybody eventually gets is about print cartridges.
The caller begins by
immeadetly asking for a supervisor (which ain't gonna happen on my call) because
he wants to register a complaint. It turns out they decided to read everything
written on their new ink cartridge, and are upset because it says, in plain
spanish, negro.
Usually we have to explain for ten minuets that the same
cartidge is sold in Mexico, and not everybody would understand the word 'black'
if they spoke spanish. Eventually the caller (whom isn't always an African
American) says those magical words "LAW SUIT" and we get to give them to the
legal department and cut off the call.
It just goes to show that it
doesn't take all kinds, but we do get all kinds.
Thanks to: The Great Del Monte
A thousand miles for a colon
Around
1985, I worked at second-level technical support
for a CAD vendor. We got a
call from Denmark (I was based
in Holland. USA readers: get the map out). Our
guy there
had been trying to get our system to work over the phone
with a
customer for several weeks. Nothing worked. The
plotter would not plot
anything.
I got on a plane, flew to Copenhagen, hotel overnight.
Next
day, off to Billund airport, 50 kilometre drive.
Arrived at the customer's
building - it was a public
holiday there, so there was just me, the guy from
our
Danish company, and the janitor to let us in.
Up to the VAX, log
on, read the plotter command file.
Expected:
$ ASSIGN TXA7:
PLOTTER
Found:
$ ASSIGN TXA7 PLOTTER
That means that plot jobs went
to a fiel TXA7.DAT instead
to serial port 7. I inserted the colon, ran the
file,
plotter whirred away, got back in the car, went home.
800 kilometres
each way (a thousand miles round trip) for
a single colon in a command file.
Beat that.
Thanks to: Nick Brown
How to follow directions
Sometimes it's
amazing how the light's on, but there's really nobody home:
Customer:
"I'm getting an error message 'You are working in Offline Mode. To connect,
click on file, then uncheck Work Offline.' What do I do?
I almost
replied,
"I'm sorry sir, I usually can think for other people, but I have
gone over quota today."
Josh
Thanks to: Joshua Rigrod
Tech Talk
This is not really a problem,
but more of a funny
(and common) occurance.
Me:"Hello, thank you for
calling ****, my name is Sai, may I
have your registration number
please?"
Cust:"---"(silence).
The customer hangs up.
Phone rings
again.
Me:"Hello, thank you for calling ****, my name is Sai, may I
have
your registration number please?"
Cust:"---"(silence).
The customer hangs
up again.
Phone rings again, and i begin to feel frustrated.
Me:"Hello,
thank you for calling ****, my name is Sai, may I
have your registration
number please?"
Cust:"---"(silence).
Me:"Hello?You are speaking with
Sai!....hello?"
Cust(tentitively):"....hello?"
Me:"Yes,
hello?"
Cust:"Oh thank god, I keep getting this automated message!
Am I
talking to a real person?"
No....
Thanks to: Sai
What?
Not all customers are stupid. I
find that mostlt it is a
case of snoobby or superior agents, who are just
taking
advantage of the customer. Here is one such
incedent.
Me:"Hello, thank you for calling****.You are speaking to
Sai"
Cust:"Hi, I'm having problems with the internet. I can't
connect."
Me:"Who is your ISP, sir?"
Cust:"World access."
Me:"And
have you called them yet?"
Cust:"Yes, but they had no idea where the problem
lay. They
refered me to my dealer, who refered me to you."
Me:"And have
you added any hardware or software?"
Cust:"No."
Me:"Okay.Please click on
start, settings, control panel. Now
double click on the system icon, and
device manager. Now
could you please click on the plus next to
modems?"
SHOCK HORROR!!
The customer turned out to have an ISDN card which
he had
been told by the dealer was sold with the computor, as
standard.
Not only had they charged him for this addition,
but he had an analogue line!
And when the cust finally came
back to me, after having bought an ISDN line,
the modem
wasn't working....they had installed a faulty modem!
When the
customer called back, he was told that they did
not support this problem,
and to call us.
As you can imagine, I was furious for the customer, and
called the dealer, to whom I complained to so much that he
put me through
to customer service.
I explained to customer service about the
problem.
Me:"And you are supposed to deliver it in working
order?"
CS:"Yes."
Me:"So why was this customer sent to me?"
CS:"WHAT?
Who told you that?"
Finally, we sorted it out, and I could help the
customer.
You see, the blame over stupid mistakes usually lies on the
agent, who either doesn't check something simple, or is too
vague or
supeirior to the client, or doesn't listen,
assuming that he can psychically
determine the problem!
Thanks to: Humble
shaky monitor
I do on-site support for
about 75 people. Every once and awhile I'll get some no brainers...
Lady
came up to my desk saying that her monitor was shaking. "Hmmmm... what could
this be" I thought. I smiled and walked over to her desk to check out the
problem. As soon as I walked up I noticed the left side of the monitor was
flickering exaclty in synch as the fan she had plugged into the same outlet and
resting within a finger of the monitor - DUH!
Thanks to: annonymous
Some Steamy Tasks Goin' On
I received a
call from a user who was clocking in her
current application and couldn't
proceed any further. I had
her go into her Task List to see what her computer
was up
to behind the scenes. I asked her if there were any tasks
in the
list that were "Not Responding" and she said "No,
They all say 'Running'". I
then had her start to read off
her Tasks to me. About the 2nd one down was a
Firewall
message from Netscape, so I had her read the following
tasks to
see what might have triggered the Firewall, which
turned out to be pretty
funny. The user proceeded to read,
"Women who like women", "Long lucious
dildoes", and so on
and so forth with about 8 tasks running on a wide
variety of
porn sites. Needless to say, I didn't ask any questions
and
proceeded to have her highlight the 'undesired' tasks and
End them
all.
Thanks to: Jason R Getter
Duhhh!
I work as a tech support agent
for a huge computor company.
When customers call us, we ask for their
surname, and then
for their initials. The dutch customers are the worst, as
when I repeat the letter to make sure that I have heard it
they always
give rediculous answers.
Me:"R as in Richard?"
Cust:"No, R as in
Ralph."
"G as in Gary?"
"Can't you tell that I'm female!!!"
"A
as in ****"(computor model of cust)
"No, that's my computor. I thought you
asked for my
initials"
"Y as in York?"
"No, Manchester!"
"W
as in william?"
"No, just one U"
"S as in Simon?"
"No, S."
"F
for Fred?"
"NO I SAID S!!!AS IN SIMON!!" (???)
It is always amusing,
and I have not yet tired of it, even
after 6 months!
Thanks to: Sai
Umm...
I do night support for a
smallish ISP. One customer had an interesting series of calls.
Me: Tech
Support, this is JT
User: Hi, I'm ready to get setup here.
(gather info,
see that he's a new user. The account lists the OS as
Win95)
Me: Okay, did
you get the CD from us when you signed up?
U: Yeah, I did... but there's a
problem
Me: yes?
U: Well, this is an old Mac powerbook with no CD
Drive
Me: Hmmm. Well our CD doesn't have Mac software on it anyway.
Lets
take a look here...
I check to see if his system has FreePPP on it already,
and it doesn't. Note that to do this I had him navigate through the
Mac
system, so I'm CERTAIN it was a Mac.
I send him in to the local office to get
software on floppies
1 week later
Me: Tech support, this is
JT
User: Me again
Me: Good! Did we get the disks?
User: Yeah, but
there's a problem
Me: Yes?
User: I have Windows 95, and this is for
Macintosh
Apparently this guy has multiple personalities. Anyway I set up the
Win95 and get everything going nicely.
Of course he called back a week
later... this time he managed to remove dialup networking and didn't have a 95
CD.
He calls for SOMETHING about once a week.
Thanks to: Schitzo Munkee
Now What?
I work in the IT business ,
so among my freinds , i`m the computer genius and the tech support man . Anybody
who is going to by a new PC takes me along , anybody who already has one asks me
to come and "see how its doing"
One day , last month , a very dear freind of
mine decided he will finally join the PC age and purchase himself a PC.
I
went through all the procedures with him and started giving him some lessons on
how to start using this machine.
After we got the PC installed at his home
and worked on it for 3 hours , i decided to call it a day and go home.
As
soon as i entered the house , my phone rang and ofcourse it was him.
Me : Hi
, is everything OK?
Him : well , i think i have a problem...
Me : OK what
happened?
Him : there is a black screen on my monitor whith the words " It is
now safe to turn off your computer" on....what do i do now??????
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
System Unavailable
Several years ago I
was lead developer on an inventory system for a large aerospace company. It was
all mainframe and dumb terminal stuff. The beta testing all went fine so we
rolled it into production for live use. Every day just before lunch we'd get a
call from a user (not always the same user, but from the same location) that
they couldn't use the system. We'd frantically check that the transactions were
up, and the database was healthy, and everything was fine, but the calls kept
coming in. Finally decided to go over to the users area and watch them in
action. It turns out that the offending terminal was one used during beta
testing when we would refresh the software every lunchtime. I pulled off the
post-it that said 'Don't use between 11:30 - 12:30' and the problem went away!
Thanks to: Kent Ferry
Whats YOUR fax number?
One early
morning I received a call from one of our users
complaining that a local
computer company installed some new hardware on his system and it "erased
everything on his computer". At first impression I thought that I would need to
reconfigure Dial-up Networking and set up a new connection for him. It became
clear as the call progressed that he just needed his mail set back up in Outlook
Express. We send out instructions to help customers do this so I asked him if he
had a fax machine. He said yes he did and was happy that I could fax the
information to him right away. I then asked for his fax number and he gave me
the number to dial in to our equipment! He didn't even realize what number he
had given me until I pointed it out to him. This is a classic case of the 1D10T
error in full force! :)
Thanks to: KjD
Tsr
I work for a fairly large broadband
ISP in Michigan. Occasionally The techs log into sales on slower days. This
computer savvy lady call up. The brief conversation follows:
me: Tech support
can I help you.
Her: Hi I just received a flyer advertising your Internet
service through the cable.
me: thats correct maam.
her: can you still
watch tv while using the internet?
me: yes thats correct. The broadband
signal is transmitted at 6hz which is well below the television signal
frequency. There is no interference.
her: wow thats great. The price is a
little higher than most internet, (I'm not making this up) does it come with the
keyboard and screen and everything.
me: (on mute while I bust a gut
laughing), no maam it does not.
her: ok then thank you.
I
seriously hope that this lady was thinking web tv or something. If not perhaps I
could call her back and tell her that yes, it comes with the keyboard, monitor
and cpu. There will however be a one time fee of $1200.00 and you get to keep
the "keyboard and everything".
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
They all look alike
Several months
before I began working at my current place of employment, they replaced whatever
color printer they had been using in my department with a massive color laser
printer. (Said very expensive printer does not do labels or legal sized paper in
color & is very slow, but that's a whole other story.)
This was not done
by or requested by my predecessor. It was just something that the top guys at
the company decided to do.
A couple of months ago, one of the head guys
involved with the purchase (who is usually a fairly computer literate person)
walked into my office & said -- I need color copies made of these sheets of
paper (in his hand).
I said -- oh, you want me to scan them into the computer
& print them.
Him -- NO, I want you to make color copies!
Me -- I'm
confused. We only have a B&W copier. One of the independent contractors who
shares our facilities has a color copier, but that's the only one in the
office.
Him -- Can't you just run the sheets through your machine?
Me --
Um, that's a color PRINTER, not a color COPIER.
Him -- stomps off in a
huff.
Sigh.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Mr. Smooth
Several years ago I worked
for a company that handled insurance.
Most of the peasants worked on
terminals that would interact with our LAN.
Because of the nature of my
particular job with said company (aka Doofus, NM), I was one of the first to get
a stand-alone PC, that was also hooked up to the network.
Now keep in
mind our IT dept had egos the size of national parks & the arrogance to
match. They made it a point to let us lesser mortals know what a trial it was to
work with anything/anyone not in the IT dept. (At one point, one member of the
IT dept. stood in the middle of Underwriting & in a voice clearly audible to
everyone in the dept, informed some poor peasant that IT had MUCH better things
to do than answer questions from the peasants. Oh, really? How about getting a
personality transplant?)
Anyway, at some point in the 2 1/2 years of hell
I spent with Doofus, NM -- the decision was made to switch from whatever
antiquated software they had been using to something a little closer to the
latter half of the 20th century. To this end -- they were going to schedule
"training" classes. Said classes turned out to be class (singular) of about an
hour, less if they could swing it. (God forbid they should actually TEACH people
how to use this fancy new system. Which, like everything else that our IT dept.
put together, didn't work properly for the first several months of
implementation.)
During the session that I was in, one of the peasants
innocently asked why Solitaire had been taken off the network. (Since I was on a
stand-alone, I hadn't noticed.)
Mr. Smooth replied -- we found that some
peasants had been playing Solitaire for 2-4 hours at a time. When asked why
everyone on the network had been punished & not just the guilty parties, he
said -- well, in the Army, when one person screws up, the entire platoon is
punished.
He was NOT amused when I pointed out that none of us had signed
up for military service. And that most of the peasants I worked with responded
much better to courtesy & respect instead of scorn &
disrespect.
I found out a couple of days later that Solitaire had been
put back on the network.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
All play and no work?
I love my
fiancee, but she can be a little dense at times. She sees no difference between
playing games or surfing the web at home, and logging problem calls or
troubleshooting software at work. Since the only computer frame of reference she
has is chatting on IRC, I'd get nagged for "playing" all day.
That is, of
course, until she broke my computer.
me: Tech Support (blahblahblah) how
can I help you?
her: honey?
me: Um...I hope this isn't the boss *laugh*
What's wrong, angel.
her: I can't chat.
me: Ok...I need a little more
inormation.
her: The chat program won't connect.
me: (getting frustrated)
I still need more info, hon. Are there any error messages?
her: Yes.
me:
(wait)
me: (wait some more)
me: (really irritated) Well, are you gonna
tell me what it said?
her: I already closed it.
me: *groan*
So I
proceed to walk her back through logging on to the chat program to generate the
error message. She reads it to me, and I learn that the system is infected with
a chat macro virus called DMSETUP.
me: Sweetie, did you download anything
earlier today?
her: Well, yeah. Someone sent me a bunch of pictures and some
other file.
me: I thought I asked you to let me check files you downloaded
before you open them.
her: It was only one file!
me: (sigh) And it was
only one virus. Ok, can you go to (webpage) and download (file).
her: How do
I do that?
me: *groan*
So I walk her through downloading the fix for
the virus, running it, and restarting the system. I finally get her back up and
running, happily chatting with God knows who. 45 minutes after picking up the
phone, I finally let her go so I could get back to work.
Less than an hour
later I get another call.
me: (blahblah - you know the drill)
her:
(angrily) I can't chat again.
me: What's happening now?
her: The same
thing. I though we fixed it!
me: We did! Did someone send you another
file?
her: NO! I'm not stupid! I learn from my mistakes!
me: Ok, just tell
me what's happened in the last hour.
her: I've just been chatting and looking
at the pictures people send me.
me: (uhoh) While you were looking at the
picture, did you look at that file again?
her: Well, yeah! I wanted to see if
it had any pictures in it.
me: *groan*
So, I walked her through
cleaning and restarting the system, again. I explain that that file is what's
causing all of her problems, again. I tell her not to open anything that isn't a
.jpg or a .gif, again. This time I take the added precaution of having her
delete the infected file.
That night when I got home, something very
strange was going on.
Dinner was ready when I walked in the door (I usually
cook).
She apologized for giving me a hard time at work (she never
apologizes...If she's wrong, she'll forgive me).
I got on the computer to
play quake for an hour and she didn't complain once the whole time! (will
miracles never cease)
Thanks to: Dan Collins
3 Baby Racoon
I worked for an ISP back
in Maine last summer. In the evenings, customers would have to call and leave
their name and phone number on our voice mail and the techs would call them back
in the order they were received. On this night I pulled the voice mail calls and
put them into the "Q" and started calling.
I called this one customer,
stated my name and the company I worked for (which has the word INTERNET in it).
A sheepish voice states, "I have these 3 baby racoons in my garage and I'm not
sure what to do with them...." I again said who I was and the company I worked
for, making sure to add in that we were an ISP. The guy, again, told me about
his racoons. I then asked him if he had the Internet and he said he wasn't sure
but "probabley did... I don't use it my kids do." So after that statement I
once, again, stated all of the above and that I did technical suport for people
having problems to getting onto the Internet. I suggested that he try calling
Animal Control. "Oh, I never thought of that." was his responce.
Thanks to: Brian
No Title
i'm a it student and one day
one of my friends asked me what is a computer?
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Tech Managers (?)
10 years ago I was
doing Desktop and LAN support for the (Australian) Federal Government. These are
two tales of managers of the IT group:
1 - Early morning, manager sticks his
head into my cubicle and asks if I can figure out what's wrong with his PC, it
makes all the right noises but nothing else happens. Enter office. Switch
monitor on. Leave office trying to leave him with some dignity.
2 - New
manager decides that 16MB RAM was too much for our desktop machines and decides
to remove some. Opens case, removes SIMMs with screwdriver (insert screwdriver
between SIMM and socket and lever until it pops out - dead SIMM time). Sent
formal complaint to CEO, she didn't last.
Thanks to: Mykl Carlton
Windows ?
I work for a local ISP and
had a strange client the other night. I asked her to close all the windows on
her screen, she rushed off, came back about 5 minutes later saying that she had
closed every single window in her house, now what ??
Thanks to: Andre
Point and Click only goes so far
The
user stated that she had a problem logging in one day last week after another
user had been on her computer and had logged in as "guest". The username "guest"
appeared in the login window in place of her own ID, and the user did not
remember what the Helpdesk technician told her to do in order to change it to
her own ID. Another user was using her PC yesterday, and the name "guest" is
appearing in the login window again. Resolution: Suggested the user replace the
word "guest" with her login ID by typing it in. The user was able to log in!
Thanks to: JoeM
Go ahead, blame the PC
Caller's PC is
making a repetitive beeping noise. Resolution: Another user looked in the
desk... and shut off the caller's alarm clock.
Thanks to: JoeM
Language Barrier
The user called to ask
how long she had to wait. The conversation was approximately the
following:
"How long must I wait"
"Excuse me?"
"How long must I wait
for the system to work?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Wait for what system
to work?"
"My computer."
"I don't understand. Is something wrong with your
computer? If you explain the problem perhaps we can help you."
Resolution:
The user got frustrated and hung up.
Thanks to: JoeM
Trust Me, It Just Knows...
User called
to complain that his name no longer appears in the TAO (mainframe email)
directory. Explained to user several times that his mainframe account (which he
states he has not used in years) is being deleted, and it will take about a day
for his name to reappear in the email directory with his Lotus Notes email
address. User was not satisfied with the explanation given; he wants someone "in
charge" to call him and explain the entire process, how the mainframe will
"know" that he is still with the company, and how he can get his name back in
the mainframe address book. Resolution: transferred call to [my manager].
Thanks to: JoeM
Working Backwards
User wants his PC
reconfigured to have his name appear in the Novell login screen. Informed user
the login screen will retain the last ID that successfully logged in; all he has
to do is log in and his ID will appear from then on. User stated that he does
not know his password, so he cannot log in. Asked user if he needs his password
reset. User stated that he does not have an ID, so I cannot reset his password.
Resolution: The user will contact his manager to get an ID created.
Thanks to: JoeM
What Part Did You Not Understand?
User
called to find out why her boss is unable to access applications on server
3PP_NJ_SRV1 when she was able to do so yesterday. Explained to the user that the
server is down. User stated that she was able to access the files yesterday.
Explained to the user that the server is down. User asked why she could access
the applications yesterday but not today. Patiently explained to the user that
the server was not down yesterday.
Thanks to: JoeM
How's that again?
I've been in tech
support for about four years now, but one call I got after about a month, really
takes the cake. This gentleman called up, after having purchased a new computer.
He had just hooked it up and was calling because he wanted to know how to find
out what his computer's fax number was.
I don't even remember how I
answered that, because I was too busy trying to keep from laughing.
Thanks to: Unicorn
TS
I work at a very large ISP in
Norway, daily we
get calls from our (l)users, and help them to get
a
connection and we answer other relevant questions about
the internet and
what we supply.
Once i got a call from a real luser, and believe it or
not,
this is what happened:
Me: "***, you're speaking to ***"
C:
"Hello is this the Tech support?"
Me: "Yes, what may i help you with?"
C:
"I can't get on the internet."
Me: "Ok, could you be a little more
descriptive please?"
C: "When i try to connect it says 'No dial tone'"
Me:
"Are you sure the phone lines is plugged into your PC?" | C: "Yes, I haven't
changed anything since we got the internet" Me: Ok. Do you know if you have a
ISDN or regular analog modem?" C: "I think it's a ordinary modem.." Me: OK, can
you just check that all cables are plugged in please?" C: "Sure, the cable goes
from the computer to the box with 2 lights on the wall." Me: "Box with lights..?
Do you have ISDN phone lines at home?" "C: Yeah, if that's what it's called.."
Me: "Sir, you cannot connect your regular modem to a ISDN lines, you will have
to purchase a ISDN modem." C: "I can't??" Sigh..
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
The mouse don't work!
I was told this
story from a friend of mine, and thought I'd share it with you ;)
My friend
was called to help someone with their computer. She could not get her mouse to
work in Windows. My friend checked the drivers etc. and decided to check if the
cord was plugged in firmly. He crawled under the table where the computer was
stationed, and discovered that the mouse-cord was firmly shoved into the outlet
of the networkcard!
He changed the port and the mouse worked fine
(ofcourse)!
He asked how she got the mouse-cord into the networkcard.
She
responded, that when she tried to connect the mouse, she just reached under the
table and back of the computer and felt her way, and when she felt something
that resembled a hole, she just pressed the cord into it!
Amazing what people
do.. !!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Am I speaking English ??
I work for a
large manufacturer help desk....
One night I had to register a new user, we
have a three
key code to access the serial number on the system while
the
sytsem is on.....anyway....
Me: Is system on ?
User: Yes
Me: Could
I get you to press CTRL + Alt + S all at
the same time please. The serial
number will then
be displayed in a window for you.
User: Sorry, I can't do
that my system isn't on right now.
Such is life, I was actually able to
resolve this users
issue....
Thanks to: Wayne
Write Click
I work for a local ISP.
This is pretty funny.
Last fall, a newer customer called in for tech support.
One of our more disgruntled techs (who has since left our organization) took the
call. It was Windows 95 and he told the customer to right-click on his desktop.
It seemed to be taking longer than normal. Turns out the customer took out a pen
and wrote the word "click" on the top of his desk. Needless to say, we were all
chuckling over that one.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
help to install window ???
I have a
friend that is new on computers and he had ask someone at work that called
himself "Pc expert" to how to install windows 3.1.
He had told him to do a
format C: and all should be OK.
When my friend did this and still didn't get
his computer to work he turned to me and we fixed it. But he called this so
called "PC expert" and he still told him that the format c: should work.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
What are you on?
I do telephone
technical support, and I was trying to determine what operating system my
customer was using.
I asked, "Are you on Windows 95?"
In an
annoyed tone of voice she said,
"No, I'm on a cell phone!"
Thanks to: Alyssa
No Title
my first day on the job for at
a computer store in town and sort of as a joke all the veterans have the newbies
do tech support...
*usually greeting*
cust: ever time i try to start
netscape it asks me to make a new profile
me: have you made a
profile?
cust: what is a profile?
me: tell me about you self
*she
rattles on about herself*
me: well thats a profile now just type that in when
it asks for a profile
cust: ok so will i need to plug in my keyboard to type
this in?
*i was really close to razor knife*
me: yes
cust: ok i got i
pluged in but now my mouse doesnt work
me: did you unplug you mouse?
cust:
yes it looked like the only place it would fit
me: there should be another
place to plug it into right next to where your mouse plugs into
cust: i dont
see one...
me: do you still have the manuals and boxes from when you got your
computer?
cust: yes
me: box everthing back up and bring it over to our
office
me: since we forgot to give you a place to plug in your keyboard we
will give you a full refund
cust: really? you people are so nice! ill
recommend you to all my friends!
*i screamed*
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
No Title
I'm installing a modem and
memory for this guy at work, and as soon as I insert the driver CD in the
cd-rom, and before I pushed the trayback in, I swear to GOD the man looks me
dead in the eye and says,
"you know you can press that button again to make
that thing go back in," with a very enthusiastic yet informative tone in his
voice.
i just nodded-its all i could do
Thanks to: johnny
Tales From ComputerWare
At ComputerWare
well sell all Apple Macintosh products. We have set the precedent that customers
may call us for tech support issues. These are the quotes that come in to our
main phone center that handles all the phone calls for our 10 stores. We have
been gathering quotes we believe to be funny from callers. Remember, we sell
Macintosh only products.
5-8-99:
"…less hard drive?"
"What kind
of *&^% is this?!" (In regards to the floppy-less
PowerBooks)
5-15-99:
"Will I have to get an adapter to use Microsoft
files to download onto my iMac?"
"Is my iMac a powermac?"
"Do you sell
IBM?"
"I have a printer on top of my hard drive."
"I need a screen and a
printing for my apple Macintosh."
5-22-99:
"Do you have the floppy
drive for the MG? 3G? Oh I’m sorry...the G3?
"Well, you’ve been helpful but
in a not helpful way, thank you."
(Wondering when exactly we will get the new
PowerBooks)
"I’ve been stuck on the idiotic installer thing all day."
"I
have a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 19,000 ram and I need Netscape. Do
you have
it?" (Can’t tell what version she would need) "Is there any way
you can tell
if it will work?" (No) "Oh! I meant to call CompUSA,
not
ComputerWare."
"Do you have any word processors? I’m looking for just
an inkjet based engine."
5-29-99:
"Is this G-M-A-C?"
"Do you guys
have the thirty-three hundred iMac?"
"It works when I hold down the shift
knob..."
"I thought that was for ether stuff"
"The software is called
Toast, how cute"
6-5-99:
"Hello?...Is this iMac?...can you tell me
what’s wrong with my mouse?"
6-17-99:
"I heard something about how I
need a certain amount of ND to install programs?"
"I just got a Powebook G3
and I just realized that I can’t print out of this thing."
"Back in 1973 I
bought a Powerbook 145..."
6-19-99:
"Well that lady is a useless as
tits on a bull."
"Hi, do you carry the Panasonic fax machine paper
role?"
"I need a laptop that can do email so I can check my email."
"The
iMac people told me to bring my iMac to you guys."
"My keyboard is
frozen."
"Hello, have you found my stuffed piglete that I left
there?"
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
No Title
A couple of years ago there
was a woman who bouht a computer from us, who was havin problems. She was
renovating her home, room by room. And in the process, she was movin her
computer between rooms as well. Any time she would plug a computer in a room,
then move it, that wall socket would become non-functional. It had to do with
the prongs being badly bent on the computer's plug. The funny thing is that the
lady was -convinced- that the computer, being so large, was sucking -all- of the
electricity from the walls, leaving none behind for the lamps etc. she tried to
plug in after. She had even gone so far as to call the power company before
calling us.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Tech Support
I work for an E-mail
company that provides Free internet based E-mail to the public.
Here is a
conversation I had last week!
Me: Hello Thank you for calling
******mail!
Them: Yes I'm having trouble getting into my E-mail
account!
Me: Are you calling from home or work?
Them: From
Work
Me: Are you behind a firewall (Companies set up firewalls to protect
their computer systems from hackers
and to keep employees from accessing
certain web sites)
Them: (From Mississippi in a drawl) Well I'm at school
and we do have a big brick wall and i think its thick enough to keep a fire out.
But I never really gave it much thought!
Me: (Diving for the mute
button and spewing coffee out of my mouth laughing)
(After a long pause to
compose myself)
Please hold Mame I'm having a little cough!
Them:
ok
Well needless to say the whole office was rolling on the floor for a
few minutes.
We fixed the problem and I explained to her what a firewall
was and we all had a
chuckle!!!
Thanks to: Eric
the fax noises
i got a very angry
costumer on the phone accusing the dum girl who gave him the FAX number instead
of the internet number.....
understanding the guy has never seen a computer
in his life i explained him the "fax noises" are the way the computers
communicate with each other.
after he finally agreed to listen to me and
believe me that is the case, i checked his settings and asked him to get
connected.
and again he shouts that the noises don't stop and the
computer gives him a "no dial tone" error
at that moment i started to get
suspicious and asked him to explain step by step what he was doing.
and
this is an exact quote: " i pick up the phone, dial the number, the fax answers
and nothing happens on the computer...."
...guess what...... he was
dialing from the telephone manually and listenung to the beeps!!!! can u top
that? :)
have fun :)
Thanks to: amirtidhar
Double-Paned
A customer called in
recently with the following story:
Tech: "Thanks for calling tech support,
how can I help you."
Customer: "Yeah, I just bought the 56k modem and I am
trying to get signed on with your internet service"
Tech: "Great! Are you
getting any sort of error messages?"
Customer: "Uh... No, not
really."
Tech: "Well, what version of windows are you using,
please?"
Customer: "Double-Paned... the person at the computer store said all
I needed was a modem and a nice set of windows. This here is a nice set... I can
see the mountains and everything."
Tech: "I am really sorry, but you need a
computer to run the software."
Customer: "Oh... Well I am gonna get my money
back for this darn modem... (click)"
Thanks to: Anonymous
The stupi cellphoneuser!
I work fore an
isp that is cellphonebased. This means that we only supports cellphone
connectilons and the other day one of mu coworkers got this call from an anoyed
Swede that had problems connecting to our service. After chekking and correcting
most of his settings on his computer he asked if he was talking on his cellphone
at the moment. And if not kould he svitch the phone off and on again so that the
cellphone was reset aswell. The Swede repyed ok, an shut off the phone he was
talking to my kollege wiht.......
We never heard from him again.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Right next to the 'any' key
A typical
day for an ISP tech agent...
tech: thank you for calling tech support, how
can I help you
client: every time I dial in I get disconnected
tech: is
this windows 95, 98, Mac?
client: windows 98 i think
tech: okay, can you
double click on your my computer icon for me?
client: i don't have one of
those
tech: it's in the top right corner of your screen
client: it's not
there
tech: what does the icon say in the top right corner?
client:
Rome
(every tech's favorite...desktop themes)
tech: ok, can you click on
rome then please?
client: ok...it didn't do anything
tech: did you double
click on it?
client: oh, double click...ok...nothing happened
tech: you
double clicked on it and nothing happened?
client: ya
tech: can you try it
again for me please?
client: ok...here we go...it says cancel or create
shortcut
tech: hit cancel please and double click on rome without draging
your cursor
client: ok...nothing happened
tech: are you double clicking
with the left hand mouse buttong
client: i have 3 mouse buttons...i'm using
the middle one
tech: can you double click with the one on the far
left?
client: ok...it says cancel or create shortcut
tech: ok...is rome
highlighted or selected?
client: yes
tech: can you hit enter on your
keyboard?
client: ok...it opened a box
tech: do you see where it says
'dial up networking'
client: yes
tech: can you double click on it for me
please?
(again we go through the same double clicking process for another 5
minutes.)
After finally getting into the properties of her connection, I
have to have her type
an init string into her advanced modem
settings.
tech: at the top right corner where it says use flow
control
client: yes
tech: is there a check beside hardware or
software
client: hardware
tech: down at the bottom where it says extra
settings, is there anything there?
client: no
tech: ok, can you click in
the space and I'll have you type in the following
client: ok
tech: is
there a flashing bar in there now?
client: yes
tech: ok...can type in the
astericks key
client: the what?
tech: hold the shift key, and hit the
number 8
client: ok
tech: then, keep holding the shift key and hit the
letter 'M'
client: ok
tech: then hit the letter 'M' again
client:
ok
tech: and then the number 12
client: but, I don't have a '12' key
Thanks to: Marcus Joseph
No Title
This is from the comments
field from one of our customer's accounts:
this lady is very easily flustered
and is good at flustering me. she insists that instant
messaging is the sole
purpose of the internet and that *ISP* should either support AIM
and ICQ
extensively or write our own software for Instant Messaging.
a real pain in
the ass. 8/16/98[tech1]
can't remember how to connect to the Internet.
**HUGE** communication problem. Put IE 4.0 on
computer and it trashed AIM.
Had her go to AOL and re download AIM. It was a **GIANT**
production and
took about 25 minutes. [tech2] 8/17/98
This woman should not own a computer.
In fact, she should not be allowed to own a coffee maker.
Spent about 25
minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with her e-mail. Nothing was wrong
with her e-mail, she was just foolish. She couldn't remember how to get into
the e-mail
application. She didn't read me the error messages that were
coming up on the screen, she
would try to anticipate what I was going to
tell her. And she would click on things even when
I told her not to. This
woman gets flustered very easily and makes you very flustered also.
In my
opinion, it would not be unfortunate if she was to cancel her account [tech2]
9/14/98
Well, today *customer* half installed compuserve win IE 4 and then
cancelled. totally screwed Windows
and her browser. Had her call Compuserve
to uninstall everything. Then she called and talked
to *tech3* without a
browser. she had no copy of IE or Netscape except for on her Win 98 CD(which
she refused to install). *tech3* asked if she wanted us to mail disks. she
said "no, i'll try to
get it off of the cd i have". She then put her Packard
Bell auto restore disc in and wiped her
hard drive and everything was like
new, again. IE setup fine. I wonder what she'll do when she
realizes AIM is
gone. 10/04/98[tech1]
*Today Rita decided to somehow delete her *ispname*
setting again. I spent a 45 min tring to
get her setup AGAIN. When I told
her to type in http://www.ispname.com . She typed
httpcollon\\www.ispname.com. Luckily she still didn't notice that her AIM
was gone. 12/16/98 [tech4]
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Sigh
My company just opened another
office in a city about an hour's drive away.
I have just found out, via a
series of phone calls from the new office, that at least 2 of the 4 members of
the new office are what could be termed as semi-computer literate. (They know
how to turn the machines on & use Word a little, but are foggy on some of
the "higher" levels of computer usage.)
Example: I've been trying to email
them copies of the company's logo so they can get them to a graphic designer who
will make signs for the exterior of their building.
Person #1 received the
logos OK. Tried to open the "tif" files direct, couldn't & so assumed they
were "faulty."
Person #2 is having problems receiving email.
I suggested
she copy the ones her coworker received & transfer to her PC. OK.
Not
OK.
She's only mildly aware of how to do this, so I have to walk her through
the procedure. While I'm doing this I explain that you cannot open a "tif" file.
You have to import it as graphics. (Sound of whooshing noise as this info goes
in one ear & out the other.)
She gets the files transferred & goes to
her PC. Complains because she can't open the "tif" files. I sigh & explain
again. I start to walk her through the procedure. This is a problem because she
listens to me but makes no notes & stops me halfway to tell me she hasn't
been following the steps with me on the computer. I sigh again & say --
physically do what I tell you to do. Oh, OK. Guess she thought I was just doing
it for my health.
Needless to say, I've spent about 45 minutes this afternoon
receiving numerous phone calls from her. Makes me glad I'm not the "official" IT
person here at work. I can see where this new office is going to be high
maintenance for awhile.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Mouseboard
We get some dumb ones but
this one stands out.
me: Thank you for calling ** customer care how may I
help you
eu: Yeah, when I turn on my computer it makes an alarm sound
me:
Ok lets turn it on. (repeated beeps)
me: Do you see any keys stuck down or is
the keyboard not completly plugged in?
eu: Well, the mouse is setting on it.
Would that make a difference?
me: Take the mouse off and turn it on.
eu:
Wow it works!!
me: Thank you for calling ** customer care.
Thanks to: Gabriel Tomlinson
You know you're a (hopeless) tech when
...
...when the only entry under Entertainment and Lifestyles in
your bookmarks is ... TechTales ...
And, even though I do not do tech
support -- I write books
on computer programming -- I do get calls from
people needing
assistance ... some more than other.
Like this evening
when I was innocently reading TechTales
(while watching Crusade on the TV and
writing a CD in the
background, of course) the phone rang with one of those
calls
In this case it was a young man (who seemed to know who I
was but didn't immediately introduce himself and my
telepathy was on the
blink) who needed to know why, when he
ran the RamDrive.sys utility (under
\Windows) it caused his
CD to disappear? And how could he get rid of Internet
Explorer? He'd been told that his system would run faster
without it.
And what was the point of having a swap file?
Wasn't using the disk slower
than memory? And ...
Well, you do get the idea, don't you?
And
prehaps I'm too patient for my own good but the final
question was whether I
thought he should switch to Linux
since he'd heard how much faster and
better it was ... yeah!
So, for all of you out there who man the phones
for pay ...
My sincerest sympathies ...
Thanks to: Ben Ezzell
Making haste slowly
Some years ago, a
friend brought his newest computer over to
show me how much faster a 486/66
ran ...
And it was a very nice machine ... with the LED
numerical
readouts on the front -- a nice clear '66' ...
There was
just one small problem. The financial software my
friend was using --
financial analysis -- seemed to be
rather slow ... slower, he thought, than
on his old '386 ...
and did I have any idea why?
Well, my first
thought (since my '486 was just fine and a
lot faster than a '386) was to run
a benchmark program and
try to get some idea of what was
happening.
And, sure enough, the benchmark was slow ...
... until
I reached out with my toe and nudged the Turbo
switch ... and the LEDs
changed from '66' to '33' ... but
the benchmark suddenly jumped up to a
reasonable performance
level ...
That dear old Turbo switch
...
And, after he finished blushing ... and I quit laughing ...
I
showed him how to disable the turbo switch entirely ...
and how to set the
LEDs to read '999' ...
Thanks to: Ben Ezzell
No Title
A Co-Worker of mine had just
purchased an upgrade for his computer. Actually it was a 2nd hand "Pentium 75"
and he wanted me to install the CD-ROM drive and Hard driver from his old
486.
The first thing I noticed was that his NEW Pentium 75 was really an
Overdrive for a 486. I informed the guy and he said "But that's the same thing
as a Pentium". Knowing this guy and that it would be easier to explain the
difference to a tree; I shrugged my shoulders and continued to do the
shuffle.
He also pulled out a bag (an actual static bag, thank god), of
SIMMs. He asked "Can you put in some of these? I don't think there are any bad
sectors on them." Bad sectors on RAM?!? Hmmm
At one point I was having
difficulty connecting the IDE cable to his CD-ROM drive in the NEW PC (Desktop
cases ugh!), and his head was actually about 2 inches from mine. I guess he
thought that this would help. I finally couldn't contain myself and told him,
"Look, this is going to take some time, because I'll have to re-initiate the
system and re-align all of your data once I finish here. You might as well head
home and I'll call you when I'm finished." (I knew that he wouldn't know that I
was blowing smoke up his butt.)
When he left I could finally get on with it
and I finished in about 15 minutes. His PC worked fine and I had a shower and a
beer and then gave him a phone call so he could drive through the Saturday
traffic to my place and pick up his machine.
Thanks to: Mark Starratt
How clumsy can helpdesk operators be?
I
work for a service company who do on-site repair services
for vairous
companies. Most of them have an own helpdesk
which screen the problem for
us.
Here are some experiences i ran into when being on the
job:
###################################################
I got this
call at a customer and the complaint noted:
Network card doesn't work,
helpdesk employee checked cable
and switched the card, no response.
I
arrived, diagnosed the network card:okay.
I checked the cable:no network
connection.
I disconnected the pc from all cables and hooked it up on
a
spot where another pc was working.
This was how i reported the end of my
on-site session:
Pc attached to a good network socket, user installed
behind
the new
desk.
###################################################
Another
call:
Pc doesn't start-up, helpdesk employee went to look,
inspected the
pc, tried several jumper-settings on the PC-
board without result:pc does not
initialise anything.
When i came i expected to change the mainboard since
this
is most obvious a PC-board problem.
I opened up the machine,
closed it again and closed the call
with this:
What the PC got and the
helpdesk emp. lacks:brains
What the PC is missing and the helpdesk emp. is
too stupid
to
use:memory
###################################################
Another
network problem, again networkcard doesn't work,
no connection.
Helpdesk
employee checked if everything is alright but no
relevant
changes.
When coming over i checked the network
card:ok
Cable:ok
Network:sure there is connection.
I turn on
another PC to check it's configuration i notice
a small difference:no network
domain.
I copied the configuration from the working pc and fixed
the
"broken" pc.
I end the call with this line:
There is nohting
wrong with the pc, order a network-teacher
for the helpdesk employee
instead.
Sometimes i have to sit inside to screen calls
myself.
Ironicly it happens that i also have to treat calls on-site
which
i screened earlier
myself.
###################################################
Complaint:
"White/bright
areas on screen."
As undetailed as most complaints look like above i call
up
the customer to get more details:
me:hello, i am calling according
to a complaint about a
monitor?
user:yes that's correct, i have some
bright areas on my
screen and they won't go away.
me:have you tried
the configuration on your monitor itself?
like brightness, colour
etc?
user:i pressed and turned every knob on that thing but
nothing
changes, pressing on/off neither.
me:have you tried screen configuration
settings in your
operating system?
user:what is that?
I was
busy for one hour trying to exclude any possibility.
user:there is one
strange thing:these white areas are slowly
moving outside my screen to it's
plastic frame.
me:what? i will sent over an engineer right
now.
Engineer went by and called back within one hour:
I just closed
the flex-curtains and it solved the
problem.
###################################################
Here's
another complaint:
"Computer doesn't work anymore after inserting
key."
I call up the user and ask her what exactly
happened.
user:Well, when i turned on the computer it asked for a
login and after that it said:
"Insert key and press enter"
I did
that too but than it said:
"incorrect key, insert key and press
enter"
me:Madam, i'm terribly sorry but i'm not authorised to help
you with access matters, you should call your internal help-
desk
department and ask them what to do.
user:I already did but when they came
over to look they said
it was hardware and they would put it through the
extended
hardware support provider.
me:can you supply me the number of
your internal helpdesk?
i'm curious why they call it a hardware malfunction
while it
sounds like an authorisation problem.
i got the number and
started dialing, i got a helpdesk
engineer, gave their callnumber and
started asking about this
matter:
me:why do you call an
authorisationproblem a "hardware" error?
Cust.Helpdesk:Well, we thought
it was an authorisation error
too, spent two hours on trying helping the user
throuhg the
phone but when we went over to start looking everything
became
clear:she inserted her key but it became stuck.
me:the key became stuck?
or the machine hang? you know what?
i just advice a new PC-board and i will
let an engineer look
at it.
This engineer happened to be
me.
on-site:
user:hi, this is the pc and this is the problem.
me:i see,
why didn't you told me that you did that?
user:i told you so, as i told
the internal helpdesk but
every technical engineer i spoke seem to be too
stupid to
find out what i have done and just have to come down so that
i
have to show them the problem myself. sooner or later i
can probably also
solve it myself because you guys don't
know that either right?
I
apologised myself instantly for my stupid behaviour,
opened the pc, removed
her keycard out of the floppy drive
and then advised her a training company
who IS capable of
teaching her how to use her machine.
(because we
engineers aren't, are we?)
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Wheel of Fortune BLues
I was working
the late shift and feeling pretty bored when one of my co-workers and I decided
to play a game of Wheel of Fortune online. We tried for about 15 minutes to get
onto the Wheel site to no avail. During all of this, my phone began to ring at
which point I informed my colleague that all fun was out the window and it was
time to go back to work. I answered the phone and attempted to find out what the
problem was. The caller on the phone tells me that "his wife has been trying to
get onto the Wheel of Fortune site all day and he wondered what was wrong with
his computer"!! After barely controlling my laughter I informed them that I was
experiencing the same problem with the same site and that there was no problem
with their computer. After they finished laughing they hung up the phone and
went about their merry way!!! Who says that playing games at work can't solve
your problems! Another satisfied customer!!!!!
Thanks to: Darrell Pritchard
Keyboard Trouble
As a Help Desk Manager
I saw a puzzling problem report from a user.
PROBLEM: When he typed the
letter on the screen was different from the key that they pressed. A few
examples only confussed matters as there seemed to be no relation between those
typed and the results. Couldn't be coffee, no eating or drinking at the
desks.
SOLUTION: Dispatch the hardware engineer.
He returned about
ten minutes later to get a spare keyboard and chucked to himself. When he
returned from the call we got the full story and a look at the keyboard he had
replaced.
CAUSE: The user, being new to computers, had difficulty
locating the keys on the keyboard. His solution to this was not to learn to
type, he prised all of the letters from the keyboard and rearranged them in
alphabetical order to make them easier to find!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Network connections
I support a
software package that accesses a rather large
database over a LAN. We have a
message that is generated
when there is a problem connecting to our server
where the
DB is stored. Is says something to the effect of "check
network
connections and call the helpdesk". Most network
savy people would realize
these "network connections" refer
to "software" type connections. Well, one
time when a user
(Pres. and CEO of the company)encountered this message he
calls in and says "I've been crawling around on the floor
for half and
hour checking the network connections and can't
find the problem so I
called." He was rather annoyed that a
"stupid machine" would make him get his
suit all dirty.
It turns out he wasn't logging in correctly (the old
"Caps
Lock" error in the password). I filed it under the PEBKAC
error
(Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair).
Thanks to: Alasdair Gillespie
Where's my FTP ???
I work for an ISP in
South Africa and deal with all types of people - the mentally challanged up to
the brain surgeons.
One day I get a call put throught to me. On the other
end is this dear lady who sounds middle aged and really new to this whole
computer world.
Me: Steven speaking, how may I help ?
Cu: How do I
find my File Transfer Protocol? I believe I'm meant to have one but I can't find
it, do you provide me with one?
Me: (considering the implications of shelling
to DOS and telling her to use the command line FTP) Ummmmm, why don't you tell
me what you want to do and I'll see how I can help...
Turns out this lady
had decided to take an Internet class and the manual she had told her they need
to FTP some files off of the institute's server and that if her service provider
would give her FTP.
After pointing her to our local Tucows mirror for a
FTP client she was very happy. At least she's trying ;-)
Thanks to: Steven
cant get through
a friend of mine
called me and said he could get coonected to the internet.
him[its been like
this for two days it wont connect ive even tried your test setup.
me[ok
lets check out your modem go to control panal and click on modem
him[ok
me[goto diagnostics and more info what does that say
him[ it says
its work ok ill stop by to see whats up
i got their and checked out the
system everything was fine
so i decide to remove the call waiting diabling
code off of dailing properties
and try it. it connected right up.
his
roommates disconnect call waiting and dint tell him.
Thanks to: kelvin
call from a computer store
i have a
small network setup at home for me and friends to
play games and stuff and a
freind of mine wanted to be able
to bring his system over and connect it i
told him sure youll
need a nic card to do it. so he went to the local new and
used computer store and talk to the clerk. I got a call from
my friend
asking what type of card i told him to get one
thats has a cat5 twisted pair
cable with rj45 connections
on in he told the clerk. The clerk got on the
phone
and ask a ethernet card?
me)yes i said with rj45
connection
)what he said
me)an rj45 connection
)is that an ethernet
card
me)yes
)is that the one that look like a big phone cord
me)yes
Thanks to: kinder
No Title
A woman called cuz she had
trouble getting on the internet, here's how it happened.
Hello tech
support.
I have a problem getting on the internet with the instruction
you gave me.
No problem we'll verify a few things, so take the mouse
and...
Ah! a mouse!
Click.
She hanged up!
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Cache files 101
Sold an old 200Mhz
Pentium to my girlfriends brother for his
kid to use. Kid was thrilled. Games
and Internet access kept
him happy for weeks...until one day the system would
not boot up. I get called to "fix it". 1.5 hour drive later, I'm sitting in
front of the PC in hysterics...27 full screens (dir/w/o/p listings) of .TMP and
.CHK files in the root directory. When asked how he exited Windows and other
apps, he says "I just hit the power off button". This probably also explains why
he kept running out of room trying to install new games...Ok - clean up those
files, then we get to his C:\windows\temp internet folder - 37.4 MB of files in
there with 100's of "cookies" no less. Explained miracles of cache files and
need to keep them cleaned up. System boots and runs like a cheetah. They think I
am God now! LOL
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Of Course it's a Microsoft Issue!
I
support Windows NT and Internet Explorer on Windows NT. This morning a customer
came through for Internet Explorer, saying that he was stuck on something he had
never seen before, and the AOL support person to whom he had been speaking
previously didn't know how to solve the problem.
The other technician
took this man into his BIOS, had him change something, then reboot the machine.
When it came up, it was on a BIOS setup screen, and he didn't know how to get
out of it. AOL tech gave him the Microsoft Support number, saying he didn't know
what to do next and MS would have to help him.
When he got to me, he
didn't even know what OS he was using. I had him read me the menu at the bottom
of the screen, which indicated ESC was the proper key, and voila, the machine
booted properly -- and the splash screen said Windows 95, so I don't even get
credit for the call!
What a life!
Thanks to: Faye Rodda
No Title
The owner of the Co. I worked
for noticed a small insect on the top of his scanner (which was on a table),
while in a meeting with me.
Obviously annoyed by the bug, he slammed the heel
of his hand on it. Hard! Hard enough to jiggle the monitor on his desk. The next
day
he complained to me that the scanner didn't work, all images came out in
triplicate. He tried to get me to return the scanner as faulty.
I wouldn't do
it, so he got someone else to take it back for credit.
This same individual
(while on the road) unplugged his laptop because he didn't want to wait for his
AOL update to finish. I got a long-
distance call from him, requesting me to
call AOL to get him back on-line. He could not longer access AOL, or anyone else
for that matter
from his modem.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
BrainLock
A few years back I worked for
a restaurant company that would rush to the trailing edge of technology (it
still does). We used old 486's with an old dos version of lotus. I want to say
that I was NOT the tech support person, I was a restaurant manager. Well, since
I was the only manager in the company that had any computer knowledge, everyone
depended on me for support. I had two consecutive days off(rare for rest.
managers) and went out of town. when I got back everyone rushed to me to come
"fix the computer". It seemed that they couldn't navigate around on the lotus
spresdsheet because the arrow buttons didn't "work" any more. All of them.
When I asked them to show me what they were talking about, they brought
up lotus and started navigating around on the spreadsheet. The arrow keys were
"Broken" because they had inadvertantly hit the 'scroll lock' key. They had
stopped using the computer for two days and did all of the paperwork by hand,
adding a couple of hours to their day.
Thanks to: JC
A week at the Computer HELP DESK
A Week
at the Computer Help desk, the REAL story...
From: Pete
Gilbride
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday
8:05am
User
called to say they forgot password. Told them to use password
retrieval
utility called FDISK. Blissfully ignorant, they thank me and hang
up. Wow, we
let the people vote and drive, too?
8:12am
Accounting called to
say they couldn't access expense reports database.
Gave them Standard Sys
Admin Answer #112, Well, it works for me. Let them
rant and rave while I
unplugged my coffee maker from the UPS and plugged
their server back in.
Suggested they try it again. One more happy
customer...
8:14am
User
from 8:05 call said they received error message Error accessing Drive
0. Told
them it was an OS problem. Transferred them to micro
support.
11:00am
Relatively quiet for last few hours. Decide to plug
support phone back in
so I can call my girlfriend. Says parents are coming
into town this weekend.
Put her on hold and transferred her to janitorial
closet down in basement.
What is she thinking? The Myst and Doom nationals
are this weekend!
11:34am
Another user calls (do they ever learn?).
Says they want ACL changed on HR
performance review database so that nobody
but HR can access database. Tell
them no problem. Hang up. Change ACL. Add
@MailSend so performance reviews
are sent to
*/US.
12:00pm
Lunch
3:30pm
Return from
lunch.
3:55pm
Wake up from nap. Bad dream makes me cranky. Bounce
servers for no reason.
Return to napping.
4:23pm
Yet another user
calls. Wants to know how to change fonts on form. Ask them
what chip set
they're using. Tell them to call back when they find
out.
4:55pm
Decide to run "Create Save/Replication Conflicts" macro so
next shift has
something to do.
Tuesday
8:30am
Finish reading
support log from last night. Sounded busy. Terrible time
with
Save/Replication conflicts.
9:00am
Support manager arrives. Wants to
discuss my attitude. Click on PhoneNotes
Smart Icon. Love to, but kinda busy.
Put something in the calendar database!
I yell as I grab for the support
lines, which have (mysteriously) lit up.
Walks away
grumbling.
9:35pm
Team leader from R&D needs ID for new employee.
Tell them they need form
J-19R=9C9\\DARR\K1. Say they never heard of such a
form. Tell them it's in
the SPECIAL FORMS database. Say they never heard of
such a database.
Transfer them to janitorial closet in
basement.
10:00am
Perky sounding intern from R&D calls and says
she needs new ID. Tell her I
need employee number, department name, manager
name, and marital status. Run
@DbLookup against state parole board database,
Centers for Disease Control
database, and my Oprah Winfrey database. No hits.
Tell her ID will be ready
tonight. Drawing from the lessons learned in last
week's Reengineering for
Customer Partnership I offer to personally deliver
ID to her apartment.
10:07am
Janitor stops by to say he keeps getting
strange calls in basement. Offer
to train him on Notes. Begin now. Let him
watch console while I grab a
smoke.
1:00pm
Return from smoking
break. Janitor says phones kept ringing, so he
transferred them to cafeteria
lady. I like this guy.
1:05pm
Big commotion! Support manager falls in
hole left where I pulled floor
tiles outside his office door. Stress to him
importance of not running in
computer room, even if I do yell Omigod --
Fire!
1:15pm
Development Standards Committee calls and complains about
umlauts
in form names. Apologizing for the inconvenience, I tell them I will
fix
it. Hang up and run global search/replace using
gaks.
1:20pm
Mary Hairnet from cafeteria calls. Says she keeps getting
calls for Notice
Loads or NoLoad Goats, she's not sure, couldn't hear over
industrial-grade
blender. Tell her it was probably Lettuce Nodes. Maybe the
food distributor
with a new product? She thinks about it and hangs
up.
2:00pm
Legal secretary calls and says she lost password. Ask her
to check
in her purse, floor of car, and on bathroom counter. Tell her it
probably
fell out of back of machine. Suggest she put duct tape over all the
airvents
she can find on the PC. Grudgingly offer to create new ID for her
while she
does that.
2:49pm
Janitor comes back. Wants more lessons.
I take off rest of day. Wednesday
8:30am Irate user calls to say chipset has
nothing to do with fonts on form.
Tell them of course, they should have been
checking Bitset, not chipset.
Sheepish user apologizes and hangs
up.
9:10am
Support manager, with foot in cast, returns to office.
Schedules 10:00am
meeting with me. User calls and wants to talk to support
manager about
terrible help at support desk. Tell them manager about to go
into meeting.
Sometimes life hands you material...
10:00am
Call
Louie in janitorial services to cover for me. Go to support manager's
office.
He says he can't dismiss me but can suggest several lateral career
moves.
Most involve farm implements in third-world countries with moderate
to heavy
political turmoil. By and by, I ask if he's aware of new bug which
takes
full-text indexed random e-mail databases and puts all references to
furry
handcuffs and Bambi Boomer in Marketing on the corporate Web page.
Meeting is
adjourned as he reaches for keyboard, Web browser, and
Tums.
10:30am
Tell Louie he's doing great job. Offer to show him
mainframe corporate PBX
system
sometime.
11:00am
Lunch.
4:55pm
Return from
lunch.
5:00pm
Shift change; Going
home.
Thursday
8:00am
New guy (Marvin) started today. "Nice plaids"
I offer. Show him Server
room, wiring closet, and technical library. Set him
up with IBM PC-XT. Tell
him to quit whining, Notes runs the same in both
monochrome and color.
8:45am
New guy's PC finishes booting up. Tell
him I'll create new ID for him. Set
minimum password length to 64. Go grab
smoke.
9:30am
Introduce Louie the custodian to Marvin. Nice plaids
Louie
comments. Is this guy great or what?!
11:00am
Beat Louie in
dominos game. Louie leaves. Fish spare dominos out of sleeves
(Always have
backups). User calls, says Accounting server is down. Untie
ethernet cable
from radio antenna (better reception) and plug back into hub.
Tell user to
try again. Another happy customer!
11:55am
Brief Marvin on Corporate
Policy 98.022.01: Whereas all new employees
beginning on days ending in 'Y'
shall enjoy all proper aspects with said
corporation, said employee is
obligated to provide substance and relief to
senior technical analyst on
shift. Marvin doubts. I point to Corporate
Policy database (a fine piece of
work, if I say so myself!). Remember,
that's DOUBLE pepperoni and NO peppers!
I yell to Marvin as he steps over
open floor tile to get to exit
door.
1:00pm
Oooooh! Pizza makes me so sleepy...
4:30pm
Wake
from refreshing nap. Catch Marvin scanning want ads.
5:00pm
Shift
change. Flick HR's server off and on several times (just testing the
On/Off
button...). See ya tomorrow.
Friday
8:00am
Night shift still trying
to replace power supply in HR server. Told them it
worked fine before I
left.
9:00am
Marvin still not here. Decide I might start answering
these calls
myself. Unforward phones from Mailroom.
9:02am
Yep. A
user call. Users in Des Moines can't replicate. Me and the Oiuji
board
determine it's sunspots. Tell them to call
telecommunications.
9:30am
Good God, another user! They're like ants.
Says he's in San Diego and can't
replicate with Des Moines. Tell him it's
sunspots, but with a two-hour
difference. Suggest he reset the time on the
server back two hours.
10:17am
Pensacola calls. Says they can't route
mail to San Diego. Tell them to set
server ahead three
hours.
11:00am
E-mail from corporate says for everybody to quit
resetting the time on
their servers. I change the date stamp and forward it
to Milwaukee.
11:20am
Finish @CoffeeMake macro. Put phone back on
hook.
11:23am
Milwaukee calls, asks what day it
is.
11:25am
Support manager stops by to say Marvin called in to quit.
So hard
to get good help... I respond. Support manager says he has
appointment with
orthopedic doctor this afternoon, and asks if I mind sitting
in on the
weekly department head meeting for him. No
problem!
11:30am
Call Louie and tell him opportunity knocks and he's
invited to a meeting
this afternoon. Yeah, sure. You can bring your snuff I
tell him.
12:00am
Lunch.
1:00pm
Start full backups on UNIX
server. Route them to device NULL to make them
fast.
1:03pm
Full
weekly backups done. Man, I love modern technology!
2:30pm
Look in
support manager's contact management database. Cancel 2:45pm
appointment for
him. He really should be at home resting, you know.
2:39pm
New user
calls. Says want to learn how to create a connection document.
Tell them to
run connection document utility CTRL-ALT- DEL. Says PC
re-booted. Tell them
to call micro-support.
2:50pm
Support manager calls to say mixup at
doctor's office means appointment
cancelled. Says he's just going to go on
home. Ask him if he's seen
corporate Web page
lately.
3:00pm
Another (novice) user calls. Says periodic macro not
working. Suggest they
place @DeleteDocument at end of formula. Promise to
send them document
addendum which says so.
4:00pm
Finish changing
foreground color in all documents to white. Also set point
size to 2 in help
databases.
4:30pm
User calls to say they can't see anything in
documents. Tell them
to go to view, do a Edit -- Select All, hit delete key,
and then refresh.
Promise to send them document addendum which says
so.
4:45pm
Another user calls. Says they can't read help documents.
Tell them I'll fix
it. Hang up. Change font to
Wingdings.
4:58pm
Plug coffee maker into Ethernet hub to see what
happens. Not (too) much.
5:00pm
Night shift shows up. Tell that the
hub is acting funny and to have a good
Weekend. Cheers
Thanks to: Pete Gilbride
When Wallpaper Goes Bad
Me and several
friends were in a high school class that was basically tech support for the
school's 800+ workstations. It was a great way to get credit for screwing around
retrieving passwords for those who forgot them.
Story 1: One day, to
relieve the monotony, one of my friends played a prank on the sysadmin. The
admin had left the room, and my friend took a complete screenshot of the desktop
and saved it to a bmp file. He then replaced the wallpaper with the file, and
moved every icon that could be moved into a safe folder off the desktop. I think
only My Computer and the Recycle Bin were left. The result was that it looked as
if every icon except for those 2 had stopped responding to mouse clicks at all.
When the admin came back, he was totally baffled! He could get to the start menu
and browse, and everything looked fine, but he couldn't figure it out. After 10
minutes when the bell signified the end of the period, we all busted up laughing
and my friend told him the truth. I was the last to leave, and when I turned to
ago, it seemed the admin had already forgotten about what had been done. "Tell
your friend I logged him out", he said, because the wallpaper copied his
username from Novell and made it look as if he was still logged on. "Wait,
nevermind," he added. "Tell him I'm getting rid of his stupid
wallpaper."
Story 2: This same friend had managed to smuggle quake2 into
the class so we could have some entertainment when there was nothing to do. Our
network used this program called "Ghost" which would basically restore a disk
image to a workstation from a pristine computer's disk image in the lab. It was
very easy because we just threw in the disk, booted, and Ghost would pull all
the files it needed over the network. One time my friend installed quake2 on the
model computer, and buried way deep in the windows folder to make it hard to
find. The result was that ghost then started installing quake2 on any
workstation whenever it was ghosted! Soon over half the computers in the school
had quake2 on them. After a long long time, the admin eventually found quake and
removed it from the model system. Needless to say, he wasn't very happy!
Thanks to: Nathan Clow
Recycle Bin
Reading from the archives
about people storing documents and mail messages in the recycle bin reminds me
of this true story:
Once while I was an acting supervisor for a national
ISP, I had to take a supervisor call. Seems like the guy can't send his e-mail,
telling him he ran out of resources.
We check a few things and found out
that he was running out of disk space. He is using Netscape Messenger.
We
go in and find out that he has over a hundred messages in his Messenger Trash
Bin.
We start to empty it, when he blurts out that he keeps his important
messages in there.
Of course, by then, it was too late to stop it. But
the real kicker is that he told me earlier that he used to work for JPL or NASA
(I forget which).
I'm wondering whether he was a rocket scientist (G)
(i.e., "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out....")
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
The Line's Busy
I work for a large ISP
in the US. As part of our service, we
have some software that a new customer
can use to help install
their software and configure everything. It would
dial into
a server using the customer's dialer and get a local phone
nuber to dial into. This customer got our software and wanted to use our
software to upgrade her version
of Netscape.
Customer: I am using your
software and it keeps telling me
that it can't initilize my
modem.
After 10 minutes of listening how badly her Internet
Explorer
is terrible and her Netscape Navigator doesn't have an email
program.
Me: Lets go and check a couple of things.
5 minutes
of checking all of her settings. It shows in her
dialer that she's still
connected to the Internet.
Me: Ma'am you are still connected to the
Internet.
Customer: Do you think that could be the problem. I quit out
of Internet Explorer.
Me: (on mute) Good for you. (to customer):
Ma'am quitting out
of Explorer doesn't disconnect you.
Cust.: Oh. Is
that my problem.
Thanks to: Eric
Not as apparent as it seems
I must
admit, that I do class myself as a fairly competent techie, but one particular
story that I'd like to relate shows that even I am not infallible! :^)
In
my old job, I worked as a Database Administrator and due to the nature of the
work, ran a lot of speed and memory dependant programmes. As I felt that my PC
was too slow, I kept on pestering the IT techie (a mate of mine) to give me
either a faster PC or stick some more memory in, just to help me do the job
faster.
One morning, I came back to find a brand new PC stuck on the
desk, bearing that ever reassuring logo, "Pentium II". As happy as Larry, I
worked away, thinking that the PC ran smoother and faster. Oblivious to all the
world, I was content. At the end of the day, I popped into the IT room to see
the IT techie rolling around in laughter. Eventually, he calmed down and let me
know that he'd only changed the case of my PC and in fact the bit's inside were
all the same…….
Thanks to: Neil Lombardo
They can see you...
This is an actual
tech log from a call I just did...
user got an email from someone and
when he opened it he got an illegal operation. He experienced the usual
misconceptions on this "Would that be if the message had pornography"?
I
proceded to explain how an illegal operation works. I finished with "Usually
this happens when the message is corrupted." "You mean pollitically corrupted?"
Mute. Laugh. "No, sir, I mean when the message gets cut off in the middle of
being downloaded, especially if it has an attachment, like an image or
something". "So, it didn't like that illegal transmission, huh?"
Sometimes they just don't get it. I mean usually, they just don't get
it.
Thanks to: Psycho Munkee
Yes, sir, there is a sticker on there
I
work as a technician in a small computer store here in Canada. My duties include
building new systems, troubleshooting service jobs, AND answering the phone
calls of clueless customers.
The other day, a man called in. He had just
purchased a new computer (PII-400, 64SD, 10.2Gb HD, etc) which had included in
the deal a Lexmark 1100 printer. Nothing special, but its a printer, after all.
:)
Anyways, this customer calls up, and says "My printer won't print
anything on the page". OK, that's fine - lets check to see if its:
a) Powered
on
b) Connected to the computer
c) Cartridge is setup
correctly
Well, I do that, and everything appears to be OK. He says that
the paper feeds just fine, but no ink is appearing on the page. I ask the man if
he installed this cartridge himself (usually, we install a colour cartridge that
comes included in the box before we ship the systems). Yes, he installed a new
black cartridge.
Me: "Did you take off the protective wrapper on the
bottom?" (on there to keep the ink from drying before use)
Him: "Yep, I did
that"
Me: "OK, we've exausted all possibilities. Bring in the printer at your
convenience, and we'll do some tests on it." (a.k.a. fix stupid user
problems)
Him: "OK, sure thing."
... 2 minutes later ...
Ring -
ring - ring
Me: "Hello, XXXXX, how may I help you?"
Him: "Hi there. You
know that sticker thingy ... it was still on the cartridge. Guess I forgot to
take it off!"
Me: "That's great sir, have a nice day."
IDIOT! After 20
minutes of wasting my time, he DID have the protective wrapper on there! Ugh -
users!
Thanks to: Wesley
E-mail adresses
I work for a large
telecom company,tech support for Gsmdata.
Here the other day I had a woman
that wanted to have the email adress to a person in USA. When I told her that I
couldnt possibly help her she went angry and screamed BUT I GOT TO HAVE IT!! I
then asked her if she knew what company this person was using just to help her
on her way. Guess what she didnt know..
Thanks to: Kyrre Franck
Pin codes
ME: Good morning your
speaking with XXXX
CUST: Good morning I Need to Know my Pinup code.
Thanks to: Kyrre Franck
If you can't read this...
Our Exchange
server occasionally needed to be taken down for maintenance etc., and our
administarator very thoughtfully sent out email notices to tell us he was going
to be taking the server down in the next 5-10 minutes or so and when to expect
it to be back up and so on.
This was a good plan, except that the exchange
server is our source for email. Nothing quite like finally getting back on the
server after three hours mysterious downtime to see as your first email "hello
this is xxxxx letting you know we will be taking down the exchange
server in
five minutes, and will be down for 2-3 hours while we pack the databases. Call
if you have questions." After the third round of this I finally emailed him to
point out the worthlessness of his messages. Now we get annoncements at least
several hours in advance
of pending downtime.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Squatting Anal Dog Porn?
One night
about a year ago we had a customer calling who was absolutly livid because he
was seeing pornography on his web browser. After we calmed him down we got the
full story.
It seems that his dog was having trouble performing some of
his necessary bodily functions. He was squatting a lot and acting like he was
trying to go but he couldn't. So he took him to the vet and was told that the
dog had distended anal muscles.
That night he wanted to look up some more
information on this particular problem and he typed in "dog", "squatting" and
"anal" into his search engine. He was not pleased with the result. We had to put
this guy on hold for about 5 minutes while we laughed our heads off.
He
eventually calmed down once we explained that we had no control over the search
engines.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Everything is relative
I would like to
share with you a story from Israel.
I am working in a computer company as
an on site service technition.
On one of my voyages I went to a customer
with a screen problem.
Here screen was damaged (it was a 17" screen) and
I ofered to replace it with a temporary screen I had in my car until here screen
will be fixed.
After 5 Minuete I came back with a temporary replacment
,
a 15" screen.
Me: where do you want me to put the
screen?
Customer: right here.
Me: OK
Customer: WAIT!!!
Me: Whats
wrong?
Customer: How will my documents fit into the small screen?!?
I
got to tell you falks , the screen almost fell of my hand.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Dodgy CD
Technofear strikes in the
oddest ways -
T) Hi and welcome to **** how can we help
C) My CD
you sent me for signing up doesn't work
T) what happens when you place
the CD in the player
C) all I hear is a scrathy niose (!)
Seems
the cust din't realise that her brand new top of the
line computer could play
CD Roms and seriously thought
that she was supposed to insert the CD in her
Hi-Fi and
follow verbal instructions
When we had finished laughing we
explained how to open
the tray , ( i kid you not ), cust seriously
belived
this was a can holder !!
Thanks to: charleyr
Area Codes
Before i start, just let me
tell you guys, that i feel for you. The story i'm about to tell, is peanuts
compared to some of the stories that i've heard on this site, and i feel really
sorry for you guys. There are some people who just do not deserve computers for
the good of mankind.
Any way, I'm not a tech, but i am the resident
computer guru for my family and all our friends. Once my mums friend just got a
new computer. They got it all set up with help from the companie that they got
it from. Then they decided to connect to the internet. So they saw me and asked
of i could help. I said yes, (What was i thinking?!) and went there on
afternoon. The computer was set up on a tiny table, with a mass of cords going
everywhere. I checked all the leads and they were all right. Then i made sure
they had a phjone line and it was properlty connected. Then i checked the
harware. (It was an internal modem). Everything was seated right, and everything
was installed properly. So i sat down to get them connected. I sat there for
over an hour trying to figure out why irt wouildn't connect. All the
phinenumbers were correct, and i checked with the company to make sure. Then i
found the problem. When it came to the section when it asked for an area code
for the phone line, they had put in there postal code. i almost screamed. Why
can't people think?!! It turns out she had her friend over 2 days before me and
she tried to connect and you can guess what happened. Another serious case of
PEBKAC if you ask me.
Then to cap it all off, 2 weeks later, another friend
had the same problem. When i asked what had happened, it tiurned out the same
friend had come over and tried to help. Yup, you guessed, same problem. With the
last experience fresh in my mind, i fixed it quickly, and it worked perfectly
first boot. God i hate it when people think they know everything whenthey don't
know jack.
Oh well.
**sigh**
Thanks to: coopa
Reverse mouse
I was at the computer
room of my school when one of my friends calls up the
teacher:
Jerome:"Hey Mister! My mouse is silly! When I take it to the
bottom of the screen, the cursor go up! What's up"
The teacher had not
the time to come as the neigthbour of Jerome says to
him.
Stephane:"You're not taking you're mouse to the right way. You
reversed it"
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Of Monitors and Internet
I work for a
rural ISP in Southern Oklahoma and as with all ISP's we handle many tech support
calls daily. Sometimes we have to have to customer bring in their CPU to set it
up for them. We have found that this can save time and money for the
business.
One particular day a gentleman was asked to bring in his computer,
and the following morning he comes in the front door carrying a monitor. In a
very polite tone I asked if I could help him and he tells me that he needs his
monitor setup for our internet service. He could not understand that he needed
to bring in the CPU instead. He was sure that I could set up his monitor for
him.
Thanks to: Jody Dunsworth
No Title
I attend devry and live with 3
other devry students in an apartment. The cable provider out here offers cable
modem, but with 1 IP address so i take it upon myself to become the net tech and
get 5 computers and 2 printers and a web cam all working without
problems..(proxy print servers etc etc)
now one of my roomates, who is taking
TCOM, moved out (we had lived together for 5 months, and he has helped me solve
some of the hell of Win98 networking).
the thing was though, all the network
cards where mine.. and when he left, i took my network card.
so he proceded
to reformat the computer, install win98, and a modem.
He calls me and asks
me (remember, there is no network card in his PC), why the network Neighborhood
icon isnt on the desktop. i told him its because he didnt have a network card
anymore, and wasnt connected to the network..
he then asked me..
"well,
why not ?"
i actually hung up on him..
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
Fire!
I used to work as a techie (but
I'm better now)
Anyway one day I got a call from one of the sales
secretaries saying could I come up immediately as she had a bit of a
problem.
I cantered along to her office to find that her PC screen was blank
and a thin stream of blue smoke was coming out of the top of the monitor.
She
pointed at it "Is it supposed to do that?" she asked.
!!!??
Aytee
Thanks to: Aytee
Broken phone line
I work for an ISP and
sometimes get some really funny calls.
I got on the phone with a customer who
complained that our service broke her phone line. Turned out she was getting
connected and then picking up the line, hearing the modem tones and thinking
that it was broken. It took me a few minutes to explain to her that she couldn't
use the phone line to make calls as her computer used it.
Another time, I
got a caller who couldn't connect. She got a voice message when she tried to
connect. I had her plug the line going from her computer to the wall into an
actual phone and pick it up and dial a non-Internet related number, suprise,
suprise, turned out her line was disconnected by the phone company so she wasn't
able to call anywhere.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
None
I've had some good calls in my
time, but this one was a lulu:
eu: My computer tells me the CD-ROM
failed and to make sure media is present in the drive. How do I know if there is
media in the drive?
me: Pop open the drive and see if there's a CD in
the drive.
eu: How do I do that? What does the media look
like?
me: It's round and shiny on one side, with a label on the other
side.
eu: I bougtht something, of course, that I know nothing about.
(O -- K).
And then there was the guy who wanted to
know if his Brother word processor was Y2K compliant.
Thanks to: Suzan Lee
help, I'm killing myself...
This is a
genuine email to an ISP support desk not a million miles away from me.
Anything that might identify the sender has been deleted.
To whom
it may consern
I AM WRITEING TO ASK IF ANYTHINK CAN BE DONE AS I HAVE SOMEONE
HACKING
IN TO MY COMP EVERY DAY ABOUT 5 TO 8 TIMES I KNOW HIS IP NUMBER AND
NAME
IF YOU WANT IT I WILL PUT ON END OF THIS LETTER IF NOTHING CAN BE DONE
COULD I HAVE MY IP NUMBER CHANGE SO HE DONT KNOW IT
HOPE TO HERE FROM YOU
SOON
YOURS THANK YOU
HIS IP NUMBER IS:--127.0.0.1 AND NAME IS
localhost AND IT IS
LOCATED NEAR [deleted]
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
The Full Hard Drive
A friend calls up
and tells me his hard drive is full, and
could I come over and help him
delete stuff to free up some
space on his machine. This is actually an
improvement for
him, as a month ago I had to reinstall windows for him
after
he went on a hard-drive cleaning rampage that left his system
in
such a pitiful state that I had to reformat his hard drive
and reinstall
windows from scratch. I also wondered how he
had managed to fill up his hard
drive in a month, as I knew
that there was over 2GB of free space when I was
finished
fixing it the last time.
When I reformatted his drive, I had
changed it from having 2
FAT16 partitions to a single FAT32 partition, as he
was
having dificulties grasping the concept of installing
programs to
non-default locations. So he went from having
both C: and D: as hard drives,
and E: as his CD-ROM,
to C: as his hard drive and D: as his CD-ROM. I
explained
all this to him before I went, and it seemed to have
sunken
in.
His problem? You guessed it... he was trying to save
things
to his D: drive (now a CD-ROM). Windoze, being as helpful
as ever,
was telling him that the CD-ROM was full (which,
technically, is true) rather
than a more helpful error
message.
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
No power required!
I was hosting a
management meeting where the topic was Microsoft
Outlook. While I was
describing the feature that Outlook has
when used with Exchange Server to
automatically notify the user
when a new mail message has arrived I received
this question
from a meeting member "will it display a notification even
when my computer is not on?" It took great composer on my
part not to
burst into laughter.....
Thanks to: Lisa Gray
back it all up!
I work for a company
that designs medical software. Some of our current clients still use our old DOS
program, and must be converted over the our new windows one before 2000. One of
these DOS clients was asked to send a copy of their database to us, for us to
convert into the new windows system for them. So, a few days later we get a big
box in the mail from them....well, a backup tape fits into a fairly small
envelope, so we wondered what this was. Well, it turns out they backed up their
ENTIRE 100 meg hard drive (yes, 100 meg, its a very old system) onto DOUBLE
DENSITY floppy disks, and didnt even compress it! So, one of our techs had to
stand their swapping _140_ disks in and out to get their data onto one of our
computers. When he got done we had the database alright, along with their
Prodigy files, windows files, etc. etc. *sigh*
Thanks to: Erod
Hit enter
Thanks for calling tech
support my name is core how may I help you?
Oh good, I have a
problems.
Ok and what is that?
When I boot my computer up all I
see is a black screen with a C:\ and a flashing cursor
Ok you do have
windows correct?
Yes I have windows 95
Ok we'll do a little test i
want you to type in W I N and press enter
Win and
enter?
Yes
OK... click click clcik clickidyclick clcik, ok
nothing's happening.
Nothing?
yes nothing.
Okback space and
try it agian.
CLCIK CLICK CLIK clickady click
click
Nothing
Ok ma'am what are you typing.
Just what you
told me W I N E N T E R
Thanks to: Corey G.
What's my name?
Hi, I work for a rather
large Office Supply store Chain. A hint for you all
"Ya We've Got That" We
got a new printer for our store. (Don't ask what
happened to the old one) But
the next day I tried to print a file,
Guess what, it didn't work. (Not a big
suprise) I consider myself
fairly computer literate, I do alot of IS at my
HS, maintaing our Fiber/NT4sp4
network) I figured no big problem just a
stupid error. Now I was not prepared
to handle what it said it's problem
was,
"What's my Nickname?"
Sorry, but I've had alot of wierd errors, but a
printer asking what it's
nickname is was a first for me!!
Keep up the
stories, there great reading at 2AM
Thanks to: Anonymous Tech Supporter
