Funny things heard by tech support people (laptop, hard drive, operating system)

[mensaguy]

OK, I'll start this off. Rule: Post your own observations, not ones you read on the Internet. The true ones are funnier anyway.

Customer: My printer won't print what I want it to print. When I click print, nothing happens until I push the green button on the printer. Then it prints a picture of my printer instead of what I want it to print.

(A previous job had caused a document to hang in the print queue. She was printing a test page every time.)

[Nomadicus]

I need a fast computer because I do mostly mainframe work....
Duh, the mainframe does the work. The pc just needs a monitor mainly...

This may classify as stupid and not funny............

[EscapeCalifornia]

"I've never had a problem with Norton"


"I don't have an email password"

[mensaguy]

Caller: Somebody better get this fixed. The Internet is down!

Help Desk: Don't worry about it. I'll call Al Gore and he'll haveit fixed right away.

[cflug]

This is actually a confession..... I had just gotten back from travelling for work and for the life of me I could not get my laptop to connect to wireless when I got back. Finally gave in, called IT and they walked me through the basics and couldn't find anything unusual in my wireless settings. As we were chatting about the next step he made an offhand comment - "You didn't click the wireless switch on your laptop did you?"

You know, the one on the front of my laptop..... the one I had clicked before getting on the plane so I wouldn't be the one to destroy the plane's navigation system..... and forgotten about.

I was dead silent for what seemed like an eternity and I think he heard me blushing on the phone.... he still gives me grief to this day.....

[Tek_Freek]

Originally Posted by cflug

This is actually a confession..... I had just gotten back from travelling for work and for the life of me I could not get my laptop to connect to wireless when I got back. Finally gave in, called IT and they walked me through the basics and couldn't find anything unusual in my wireless settings. As we were chatting about the next step he made an offhand comment - "You didn't click the wireless switch on your laptop did you?"

You know, the one on the front of my laptop..... the one I had clicked before getting on the plane so I wouldn't be the one to destroy the plane's navigation system..... and forgotten about.

I was dead silent for what seemed like an eternity and I think he heard me blushing on the phone.... he still gives me grief to this day.....

Have you noticed that when the subject is wireless the first question I ask is about that switch...

I had a call when I was the IT department for a company from someone who had lost their diskette. Seems they put it in the drive, tried to run it, and got an error. They opened the drive and the floppy wasn't there (5 1/4").

Turns out they had pushed it into the gap between the floppy drive and the blank faceplate below it and it was inside on top of the hard drive.

After that all those openings had two of the stickers used to protect floppies from writing across each of those gaps...

[mensaguy]

I once asked if a customer had a backup copy of their data on a floppy disk just in case something went wrong with the hard disk in the computer. Her reply was, "I never use those little disk things. I just type stuff in the computer."

[Tek_Freek]

A long story. Not so much about what users say or do, but what can cause problems with PC's.

Same place as above, where I was the IT department.

We had an office in Georgia where the manager was the son of the owner. The owner was not an overly nice person. This was a new office building and they had just moved in.

They had a system they brought from the old office and it had worked for a year or so. In the new building it was having problems. It would refuse to boot, giving the "Missing Operating System" error. When we fixed it and it booted they would consistently lose data files, then it would stop booting again. This went on for a while with me trying to trouble shoot long distance as they would never, ever spend money to let me actually spend time on site, and the boss was getting pretty pissed. I sat through a meeting during which I got royally chewed out.

During one of the phone calls I asked something about moving the table (we used corner tables for more room), I don't remember exactly what, and the response was that they couldn't do that because the corner where the PC sat had a "box" going up it and they had to cut a square out of the table to fit it in.

I asked what was in the "box".

The main wiring for the entire building.

I told them to move the table out of the corner because the wiring was the cause of the problem. I got a lot of argument because they had nowhere else to put it. It became pretty heated and I told the bosses son to "Move the damn thing". I then sat through another meeting being told, among other things, that I was an idiot for believing that moving the table would solve the problem. I told the owner in that meeting that I would make him a deal: If they moved the table and problem persisted I would resign.

I spent a few days listening to grief from everyone in the company, but stuck to my guns. The boss finally told his kid to move the table into a hallway so they could prove me wrong and get rid of me.

They moved the table and the problem disappeared. Engineers are Morons. Yeah this was a company full of engineers. Some guy (yours truly) with a high school diploma can't possibly know anything about electricity and computers.

Never did get a thank you or an apology.

[castufari]

With 10 years in I could write a book on this stuff. I'm so used to odd questions that they rarely phase me now. Some good ones:

1) People who call and say Microsoft/Abobe/Novell aren't working. "Which product?" "I told you, Microsoft". *beats head on desk*

2) My favorite to this day. I'm off one day, the LNF (my SO) and I are headed out of town for a couple of days. The phone rings. "Rick, the internet is down". I ask her how long, she replies "all morning". I tell her that I'll look at it as soon as I can get to a wireless point and VPN in. Her boss calls minutes later and says "it's down, we can't wait". I ask her to check something for me. While she's doing that my phone starts ringing off the hook. "Internet is down". "I know, give me a few minutes". The supervisor comes back online. I ask her to try and visit some websites, she does and they work. I tell her thanks but the net isn't down. She says "but ____ had ____ email everyone and let them know that it's down". I call the original caller back and have her try a few things. "It's not working.". Once she turns her PC on (that would help) she says that yes she can get into websites, just not email. She thought that the internet was down since her email wasn't working. Turns out her password expired and the "your password expired" message was being ignored. The 2nd time this happened I did a reply all to her and said "just because your email is down doesn't mean the entire facility is down". The 3rd time it happened she was written up. No more calls like that since.

3) Printers that are out of paper. "Don't you have a way of letting us know if they're out of paper?" Like I'm driving 4 hours one way to load paper. This was a huge issue with some of the secretaries who hate me. After I mentioned to them that I could have them written up they no longer call about this.

4) Folks who have home PC problems and ask me in front of other staff "why isn't my computer working, this is getting old, I'm tired of it". After talking to them in private they tell me it's their home PC. *sigh* Now I ask them "home or work?". Home I can help with for 60.00/hr. That kills the requests for help. For some reason they think that I sit around the house 24/7 working on this stuff.

5) Folks who don't change their passwords when the system tells them to. They get 10 warnings in plain English. I have a few who ignore the messages because "they don't know what they mean". I'm sorry but "Your password is set to expire in 10 days, please change it" is pretty simple. Please don't call and whine to me if you forgot to change it and I do not want to hear "I'm too busy". If you're so busy you'd be working and not screwing around on youtube.

6) Folks who get advise from family. One especially bright user saved nothing to the network. All of our servers are rather robust and are backed up daily and the backups are tested weekly too. She had 4 years of documents on her laptop when the drive failed. Called me crying. I gave her a new laptop but the drive was dead. She called later and said "my stuff is gone". I opened her network share, there were only a few things there. Checked the purge, nothing. Checked 8 weeks of tapes, nothing. I asked her were she saved it at. "in My Documents". I pulled out her signed form from class saying to save everything to her h: drive. "My husband said that servers fail too often". I can see how a truck driver for a logging company would know more than me. :P At least she quit quoting Kim Komando.

You guys have to read the original BOFH, it's good stuff.

[Tek_Freek]

Originally Posted by castufari

5) Folks who don't change their passwords when the system tells them to. They get 10 warnings in plain English. I have a few who ignore the messages because "they don't know what they mean". I'm sorry but "Your password is set to expire in 10 days, please change it" is pretty simple. Please don't call and whine to me if you forgot to change it and I do not want to hear "I'm too busy". If you're so busy you'd be working and not screwing around on youtube.

I love this user. I've been through this conversation so many times. My standard response is. "If you have the time to call me with the problem, you have the time to read the message and change your password."

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To those of you who have to change passwords on a regular basis: Here is a quick way to get a large number of passwords and track them.

Take a piece of grid paper and outline a 12x12 grid. Place a character in each of the top 12 squares.

Z 4 r t 9 0 ~ % G t O )

Second row move everything one to the left (or right)

4 r t 9 0 ~ % G t O ) Z

Repeat 11 times so you now have a 12x12 grid full of characters.

first password is line 1. Second is line 2, etc. 13th is line 1 backwards through line 12 backwards for a total of 24 passwords.

Now do the same vertically. 12 lines top to bottom and 12 bottom to top. for a total of 24 more. 48 in all.

If you have to change PWs once a month you have 2 years of passwords in this grid.

If your company requires a length of 8 or 9 adjust the size of the grid to 8x8 or 9x9, etc, but always keep it as a square.

Tape this to your monitor so you won't forget.