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Your Favorite Support Anecdote
Most of us have had the unfortunate opportunity to have worked tech support at some point, whether it was for a paycheck or for a relative. The Register has offered up a vote for several of their favorite support stories but I'm sure there are many more out there to be had. My favorite horror story was while working a tech support call for a governmental employee, when asked to take her mouse and click on the "start" button all I could hear over the phone is what I later found out was the user banging her mouse against the monitor. What other horror stories have people seen from the trenches?
A half a year ago, I went home for the holidays and fixed my parent's windows machine for them.
... blast ... worm ... 32.exe or something" but when she clicked on it, the machine started acting funny.
Not more than two weeks later my mom called me up saying it had a blue screen of death whenever it tried to boot up. I asked her what the error said and she started reading to me the hex from the screen.
She said my older sister had been using the computer last so I told her to put her on the line and asked her what had happened. She told me her friend in college had sent her an attachment in an e-mail named "ms
My work here is dung.
I am getting status 41s with my backup and need help.
Okay, will you please email me your bp.conf, bpsched, bpcd logs?
No, I can't.
Okay, why not.
Well, we are having problems with our network. Nothing seems to be working.
What part of NETBACKUP don't you understand?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
This might be the longest /. thread ever.
When I worked Telephone Techinical Support for Fifth Generation Systems in the late 80s/early 90s, I had a legal secretary that could not restore her Fastback backups from the 5 1/4" disks she used. As a service, we would have customers in this situation send them in and we would restore the data, reback them up and send them back. We would want copies of the disks to be made and those sent to us. Well she did make copies. I received via overnight FedEx ten 8/12x11" photocopies of her really nicely labeled diskettes. I had a really hard time calling her back and explaining the process of how to copy a floppy.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Customer had been angry from the start. Don't know why. Just was that way. We fixed her computer up nice and new and sent her home. About 30min later she calls. Screaming and yelling. "you broke the computer..".. lots of profanity and swearing. After awhile I got her to say that it wasn't even "booting". I asked if the power LEDs were on. Took another few minutes to get the answer "no" through all the yelling and screaming. They weren't. I asked if she could confirm that it was plugged into the powerstrip, she said "no".. more screaming and yelling at me. At this point every customer in the store is listening on my side of the conversation as they were all hushed and no longer really shopping. I asked why she couldn't check the powerstrip... more swearing.. finally she said something like.."okay whatever..".. and set the phone down. She came back and I asked "was it plugged in okay"... "I don't know I had to get a flashlight.." more yelling and swearing. "Why did you need a flashlight?" "The power is out and I can't see under the desk" She immediatly realized her mistake and hung up. The call lasted about 20minutes and was the most difficult customer I've ever had to help out over the phone. Now we had another guy who was 6 foot 5 and had real anger issues -- threatened to beat me up when I refused to let him return DOS without all the disks. However that was in person, so it isn't on topic..
User: AOL Stole my credit card.
Tech: If you are having a problem cancelling your AOL account, you may need to call them...
User: No! AOL stole my credit card, and I want it back!
Tech: Wait... Tell me exactly what you did...
User: Well, I was installing AOL, and it asked for my credit card number. So I put my card in the ATM slot and now it won't give me my card back.
Yes, the user had stuck her Credit Card in her floppy drive. She had to send the machine back to the manufacturer, who then had to disassemble the floppy to get it out.
Me: Thanks for calling tech support. Him: Hi, I just purchased a CD Writer, and it says I need to open up my computer to install it. Me: Yes, and? Him: I don't have a computer, can I still use it? Me: Can I place you on hold for one moment? Him: Sure Me: Bahahahahahaha!!
1. Talking to a customer who is unable to get her DSL connection to work because she had inserted the network cable in the cd-rom drive. 2. Talking to another customer having the same problem as the one above, but this one has not been able to locate anyplace on his computer where a network cable might fit. When I asked him if he had a network card installed I got the answer (in a very annoyed tone of voice) "Of course I have a network card, do you think I'm an idiot?!? The card is right here in the box from the store." 3. Realizing that this will be a long and very painful day.
This was a real support call I once did:
I work for a fairly large hosting company, and we deal with some fairly large customers...but on a daily basis I see them change their server ips to gateway ips, changing all their network interfaces to have an ip of 5 (ifconfig -a 5, if you ever want to), etc. Then they wonder why we are so hesitant to give them root access to these boxes again.
The best antecdote though, was working with a customer, who couldn't figure out why he couldn't reach his server, and was cursing a storm about it, wanting to talk to vps, etc. I can't hit the box either, and no response from the remote console, so I have the data center tech check the box, and it's powered down. I have him power the box back up, and lo and behold, connectivity restored. Customer is livid at the news that the box was down, and wants to know why. I start digging in, and notice that the user was on the box when it when down. I check his history, and sure enough, "shutdown -h now". I brought this information to him, and he hung up on me. I made sure that our trouble ticket was noted with the info, and by the next week, the customer had a new technical contact, who was much nicer.
How Jaded Are You?
You're using her as bait, Master!
I was working internal support for a bank about 10 years ago. One day I got a frantic call from one of the older Vice Prsidents.
"I can't login! I've tried and tried, but the ^%((* thing won't let me in."
No one else had reported a problem, so I went over to his office.
"OK, please restart your computer and login for me."
He dutifully restarted, typed in his login name, and proceeded to type in his all-numeric password on the phone next to his keyboard.
the no
My computer reboots. This is a true story that happened to a customer who lived in a rural area when I worked for a dialup ISP several years ago. Living in a rural area, the customer got their water from a well, and whenever the toilet would flush, their water reserve would suddenly drop low enough to kick on their water pump, and cause a temporary brown out.
In the late 90's, Packard Bell disappeared. Most people assumed they were finally taken down by their own incompetence, but what really happened was this:
Packard Bell was able to manufacture their systems so cheaply because they had rent-free facilities on a disused airbase in Sacramento, CA. NEC, wishing to enter the end-user/retail sector and covetous of this manufacturing facility, bought 49% of Packard Bell, re-named them to NEC Consumer Systems Division, and put a clause in the contract that allowed them to gain ownership of the other 2% if certain milestones were not reached. Then, NEC seeded the CSD division with internal executives, who made sure those milestones would never be reached. Mission accomplished, NEC now had their manufacturing facilities rent-free, and they shut down the consumer systems division, no longer willing to compete with Dell & Gateway.
I was one of the end-user technical support nerds for NEC-CSD, and wow did we get some crazies. Among my favorites were the black supremacist who refused to speak to me because I sounded white, so I put him on hold and then picked up a few minutes later with a badly faked "black" accent ("Yo what up? This is NEC, I'm Johnson. How can I help you?"). His issue? He'd set all of his Windows desktop color settings to black - backgrounds, borders, buttons, and text - and was calling to complain that his monitor was broken, because all he could see what his mouse cursor (which he was angry at for being white).
Also good was the hung-over stoner who'd woken up to find that he'd thrown up IN his monitor. No, sorry, that's not covered under warranty, but could you tell me how you did it?
But the best call didn't even happen to me, it happened to Chuck. One slow afternoon Chuck came around and motioned for everyone not currently on a call to follow him. We gathered around his cube and he muted the input on his phone, put on his headset, and then piped it to the speaker.
Chuck: "Hello sir, I have my supervisor here with us, could you please repeat for us what you told me?"
Cust: "Well, this laptop is junk, and I want a new one."
Chuck: "Okay, can you talk me through what's wrong?"
Cust: "My modem wouldn't connect, and I got really angry, so I pulled the card out and snapped it in half. Then I threw it across the room."
Chuck: "So your modem is no longer functional?"
Cust: "My computer's busted and I want a new one."
Chuck: "Okay, so how did we go from broken modem card to broken laptop?"
Cust: "So I calm down and I figure I can fix this modem. I got the pieces, and I figured out how they were supposed to go. Then I superglued them together and put them in a vice clamp overnight."
Chuck: "Okay. What happened next?"
Cust: "Well, I put it in my computer and tried to dial out to the internet again, but it still didn't work. Then I tried to pull out the card, but it got stuck. I had to use needle-nose pliers to pull the damn thing out, and I only got half of it. The other half's stuck in there, and now my computer's ruined! Your computer is junk, and I want a new laptop!"
At this point, the twenty or so people gathered around Chuck's cube were in hysterics. Chuck reached over, released the mute so that the man on the other end of the phone could hear us, left it open for a few seconds, and hung up on him.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
I used to work for the local Telescom company here in Western Canada doing support for the ADSL help desk. We had just rolled out 2.5 high speed. A customer called into my queue and was complaining about slow speeds. One of the first question we have to ask is "Is the ADSL modem hooked up directly into the computer, or is there a router in between?" Of course, the customer said no, he did not have a router. I saw he was on the new 2.5 program and so we went through about 40 minutes of speed testing. Download rates, TRACRT, Pinging... all of those tests came back with speed equivilant to the 1.5 package. so I excalated to our network support team. Well after about an hours worth of testing, NS asked again if he had a router, he said no again. Finally we were about to dispatch a tech when he said these exact words :Well, let me try bypassing my router and see if that works...." Which of course it did.
So moral of the story? Even though tech support has to aks dumb questions, they would not be there if there was not a reason somewhere down the line.... :)
"Gentlemen, You cannot fight in here, this is the War Room...." - Dr Strangelove
I worked phone support for a software company for a while. We get all kinds of calls - anything from how do I login to the app to I don't believe the data your app is showing me to it's just broken. One day, my coworker gets a call from someone who obviously is facing some problem and wants it to be taken care of. After about a 2 minute session of standard Question and Answer, my coworker goes silent, puts the guy on hold for a short time, then continues. When he finally hangs up, I ask him what happened. Here's apparently how the conversation went:
Coworker: tell me what's happening.
Caller: It's broken, I need it fixed.
Coworker: ok, so what is the problem.
Caller: It doesn't matter, just open the ticket.
Coworker: I need to know what's wrong before I can open the ticket.
Caller (screaming now): Do you know what your purpose in life is????
Coworker: Ummmmmmm.....
Caller: Your purpose in life is to open this ticket for me!!
And they say there is no such thing as workplace abuse.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A few years ago, I had a combined programmer/support job. One day, a colleague called and said that he had an application on his computer he could not close.
;-)
So I went over and indeed, one of our programs was in the middle of his screen and did not react to anything. On a hunch, I checked the dektop settings. Lo and behold:
Somehow the guy had made a screenshot while running the application and used that screenshot as Windows wallpaper. Changing the wallpaper got rid of the phantom application
C - the footgun of programming languages
Me: Seems like your computer is having problems, lets reboot the computer and see if that will fix the problem.
User: Am I allowed to do that?
Me: Sure.
User: Ok then.
Bang, Bang heard in the background on the phone
Me: STOP!!! STOP DOING THAT!!! (Me screaming into phone)
User: Whats wrong, I'm booting the computer. (User was kicking the computer tower that was under the desk.)
The sad part of this story is that it's true.
Back when I was assembling i386 PCs for a small reseller, one of our regular clients walked in the door carrying a machine we had recently sold to his company. He said that it had "just stopped working", and implied that it should be covered under warranty.
When I opened up the machine, I discovered that every screw and stand-off holding the motherboard had been sheared off, and the board was shorting against the case. There was no obvious damage to the case itself. I figured the guy must have dropped the machine and it landed flat on the bottom. Amazingly, after the board was re-mounted, everything seemed to work perfectly.
Of course, we were rather curious about what had happened, so my boss asked the client when he returned. The client sheepishly admitted that they had planned to use the machine for tracking wildlife, running off a generator in the middle of the forest. They flew it to the intended location, and dropped it from the aircraft with a parachute. I turned around and headed back into the shop stifling my laughter while my boss told the client he couldn't justify covering the incident under warranty.
Did you say "insightful" or "inciteful"?
A Congressman from my government's House of Representatives was having issues with the Internet just last week. His problem? The "tubes" that made up the internet were "filled."
$ touch
That's odd, I've actually been recommending that people shove their mouse into various body openings (or use it to create new ones). I guess I learn something new every single day.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I had a remote user sitting in front of an NT3.5 machine, needing to do some work in a FoxPro app. We were having some library problems, etc... but lacking remote desktop tools for that session, I was relying on the user to tell me what she was seeing as she clicked on what I told her to click on. After tracking down the right icon, I asked her to run the app. "Yep," she said, "it's running! Now, how long before I see the program?"
This went on for a long, long time. Finally I asked her how she knew it was running, when, well... it obviously wasn't running. She said, "Well, obviously I can see its legs moving."
Never heard that one before. Long pause.
Ah... remember the animated pointer sets that NT came with? You know, the one where the "busy" mouse pointer (hourglass) could be replaced with an animation of... a running horse? Gaaah!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
While working in notebook support at an Large Computer Manufacturer a few years back, I took a call one night. We handled education accounts at the time and a call came in from one of the large unviversites concerning a notebook belonging to a professor. She opened the call with, "I'm going to need to send in my laptop for servicing." So I proceed to ask the standard opening question, "What seems to be the problem with it? Is it not starting up?" She replies, "I peed in it." My brain tells me that I did not just hear that and I say, "I'm sorry?" She says "I peed in it. If you look at the history on this thing, you'll see that I've had nothing but problems with it over the past several months. I got fed up. I opened it up, I put it in the floor and peed in it. So of course it doesn't work now and I know I'm going to have to send it in to get it fixed." "You do realize this is not going to be covered by your warranty, right?" "Oh I don't care, I feel a lot better. I'll just bill it to my credit card." So I go through all of the process to set it up for depot repair and get her off the line after telling her to seal it in plastic and put biohazard stickers on it. Then there was the process of letting the repair depot know what was coming in. In the end the computer she sent in was junked without ever being touched by the depot and she was charged for a new maachine which was roughly the same cost as the pissed one..
Years ago, back a few jobs, I handled internal user support plus the occational escallation from external clients. Such an escallation comes in but not from a client but from our vendor support people. That's strange, I think, I never get calls from them. Anyway, I'm told that the vendor is having problems logging into our web site and checking his payment status. No big deal, really, since most vendors prefered to get that information by phone from the very person who was transfering the call to me. I just assume that he hasn't been set up for on-line access to his account.
... shit. Stop fucking with my stuff." Then he hung up.
I pick up the line while at the same time checking the database for his information. At the very second I find out that he has been set up for on-line access I get an earfull about how "you guys" are fucking everything up and nothing works. "Total fuckups who can't do anything right. This worked before but then you changed something and now nothing fucking works you ass-hole."
Yep, he is swearing. A lot. This goes on with every sentence and he accuses me personally of screwing it up with some mysterious changes to the web site. Never mind that the site had never been updated since the vendor logon was implimented, I was not the one to make those changes.
I sigh, take the abuse, and lead him through the logon "process". "Yes, I have the fucking right page." "I know my fucking ID number." The ID number was four digits long and I checked that he was using the right one. "My fucking password is my last name, goddamnit!" I look that up in the database (nice security, huh?) and that is true. On my machine I log in just fine and he is still complaining that it isn't "fucking working".
I check the web logs. Bad password. He is connecting fine but typing in the wrong password. I try to find some way polite way to ask if he knows his own last name. He does. It was Johnson. OK. I keep having him try the user ID and password. I lead him through the numbers one at a time, although I could see from the web logs that he was getting that right. I finally lead him, letter by letter, through the spelling of his own last name (not case-sensitve). That worked.
"What the fuck did you change! Well
His heartfelt thanks fills me with warming joy to this very day.
Case 1: Man calls up, angry that his CD burner isn't working (it's an external drive USB). After going through the normal troubleshooting steps (including asking him if it was connected to the computer), we're finally about to throw in the towel and chalk it up to bad hardware. We try one last thing; have him disconnect everything, turn off the drive, turn it back on and reconnect everything. We then here a box opening, plastic crinkling, etc...turns out the guy hadn't take the drive out of the box yet. How he thought that the drive was connected, when the box was still sealed, I don't know.
Case 2: Woman calls up, with a external CD burner (it's a firewire drive). I hear the words "doesn't show up", "cable didn't fit" and "pliers" and I cringed. Of course, she didn't have any firewire ports on her computer, but she did have USB ports...well, at least she used to have USB ports, before Mr. Pliers got involved. The cable "fit", but I wonder why the drive didn't work?
Case 3: Man calls up, irate that his computer reboots everytime he goes to burn some files. After calming him down a bit, we attempt to troubleshoot it. Sure enough, every time we instruct him to click on the "Record" button (in the software, there's a button that says "Record", his computer immediately reboots. We try everything. We even turn off the auto-reboot feature in XP (so that it would, hopefully, blue screen), but that doesn't change a thing. Lucky for us, the man's brother was nearby, as my colleague heard him in the background. What was heard was, "[customer's name], what are you doing, you stupid [some expletive]? Why are you pressing the reset button on the computer?" Why he thought that was the "record" button, I'll never know...maybe I don't want to.
I was working at IBM in their Thinkpad support group when Win95 was rolled out. We had a special group created to handle Win95 support calls of techs who had taken training on Win95 on the IBM machines. I remember my first call after getting put on the Win95 support que. At this point in time, IBM had approximately 30 minute wait times to get to a Win95 support rep. After I pick up the phone, a guy tells me hae is having problems with Win95 on his new laptop that he bought. After confirming his serial number I asked him what the problem was. His exact answer:
"Solitaire is dealing me the wrong cards."
The mute button was my friend that day.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
When I first started working at a local computer store in the "lab" we got one irate lady whose son had really destroyed Windows 95. She had something against my boss, and kept making a big stink about the computer being defective and demanding that we build her a brand new machine, and claiming that I didn't know what I was talking about. She eventually cornered the sales manager and yelled at him for an hour or so, and as soon as she left the store I got called into his office.
The sales manager was upset of course, and started chewing me out, but after about 5 mins he asked me what I had to say about it all.
"There's a difference between bending over backwards for the customer and bending over forwards."
He turned beet red, pointed at the door and I left. I never heard another word about the incident.
"OK, so does the mouse still move?"
"Yes."
"OK, so it can't be completely frozen. Let's go over to the lab and I'll take a look."
footstep footstep footstep Well, it looks to be completely locked. I thought you said the mouse still moved?"
She grabs the mouse and swings it all over the desk, looking at me like, "SEE?"
"Look, if the computer ever locks up so hard that you can't move the mouse on the desk, RUN."
Not really related, except that your mention of IP address reminded me of this one - it's kind of a cute story:
I had a cable modem, probably close to 10 years ago when they were very new, and phoned to ask about how I could get a static IP address (I think Rogers cable in Canada may have been offering them for a few $ a month extra or something like that).
Anyway, after a confusing conversation I was told that I was probably best to just go the the nearest Radio Shack and see if I could pick up a static IP address there.
Here's another e-mail related incident that I experienced a few years ago.
... er ... "repeat customers", screaming that his e-mail wasn't working and that the Commissioner had sent him very important e-mails that he absolutely needed. So, she - me manager - came over, rolling her eyes, and said, "Will you see what he's doing wrong?"
Back in the days of Windows 3.1, I installed a small Microsoft Mail post office for our department, a state government agency. My manager got a call one morning from one of our
I went over to his office where he was with some other employee. As soon as he saw me, he started up. "This e-mail sucks! The Commissioner sent me several important e-mails yesterday and I never got them! This is ridiculous! What the hell is wrong with tis thing?!" I calmly wlaked over and stated, "Let me look at it."
After about two seconds of looking at the screen, I calmly stated, "You're not in your Inbox." { click on Inbox }
{ dramatic pause as his stupidity sinks in while the wind howls and a tumbleweed blows by }
"I am so sorry. I can't believe I didn't see it."
"Not a problem. Let me know if you have any other issue with it." as I walked out with no indication of the "You moron!" attitude on my face.
I even had the gratification of hearing, "I feel so stupid" as I walked out the door. Well, who am I to argue with management?
Some years ago a colleague told me about the strangest support problem he had ever run into: one of their developers could only log in sitting down.
He had recently noticed that if he tried to log in in any other position (eg, still standing and just quickly checking his mail while walking past his desk), his password was always rejected. But as soon as he sat down, he had no problems getting in.
My colleague at first laughed it off, but it was demonstrated to be the case. He spent a long time looking into cabling problems with the keyboard or network, thinking that perhaps there was a loose connection that only worked reliably with the guy's foot on it or similar longshots. Nothing panned out, and they eventually gave up on it as not important enough to dig into further.
Finally, months later, the developer came back to him, doubled over in laughter, having figured out what the problem was. At some point in the process of cleaning his keyboard, he had reassembled it with a couple of keys juxtaposed. Which never cause him problems, because he touch-typed... when he was sitting in a normal position. When he was standing awkwardly, he looked at the keycaps, and typed his password wrong every time.
Their name was "Customer"? That *is* weird!
Back in the old days I had to pay my dues running the tech support centre of a local computer store.
A guy came in with an ink-jet printer that was six months out of warranty, and purchased from one of our competitors.
He argued that it should be fixed by us for free. I said that unfortunately it was going to cost $x and we could not assist him with a free repair.
He paused for a couple of seconds, then he picked up the printer and threw it at me. I dodged and it hit the wall and more or less exploded. He then walked calmly out of the store and we never saw him again.
Sounds like an easy call. Just open a ticket: "Customer wants a ticket opened." Resolution: "I opened this ticket". Close the ticket.
Living in a rural area,
;)
Speaking of rural... (Bellsouth country) We had an interesting DSL tech story.
One of customers bought our DSL package, but for some strange reason it would stop working as soon it got dark out. We troubleshooted to see if anything happened at that time such as him turning on 900mhz phones, tvs, halogen lamps, lived near AM radio station etc, but none appeared to be the case.
So one day my supervisor was helping him out since the guy wanted to keep the service because it worked fine during the day and had blazing speeds. So my supervisor is sitting there and asks him to kind of watch what is going on around sundown and not just in the house... The guy looks out his window and sees one of those street lamps turning on near his road and says he noticed lights going on and it turns out his phone line ran directly under that line.
My sup advised him to call the powercompany if they could do something about it
The guy sad... "Hold on...." And about 5 minutes of silence my supervisor hears a loud bang and the guy comes back and says his DSL is working fine now.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Working for a small ISP back in '96 or '97... User calls in, has the typical "I can't connect" problem. Go through the paces with him to make sure the software's installed (Windows 3.1 I think), etc. etc. Nothing working. Finally ask the guy, "Is your modem plugged into the phone jack?"
User: "Modem? What the hell is a modem? I don't need one of those. The Internet is supposed to be on these two floppy disks you mailed me."
Good times.
It took all of us around the office a while to piece together the full story, but it turned out, it went something like this... The customer called up one day copmlaining their computer had stoped working. In fact, they noted a sizzling sound had eminated from it at the moment of failure and the smell of something burnt was in the air. The phone tech did just what they should have done and told the customer to box the unit up and send it in for repairs. I worked a few cubicles down from the room where the techs opened these boxes. It was a fairly booring day until I heard the bloodcurdling scream. Half the office jumps up and runs over to see what's the matter, and I'll never forget the sight. Coachroaches. The tech, once he'd removed the side of the unit, had exposed them to the light and they were trying to find a new place to hide. There must have been a hundred in there. Craziest thing I ever saw.
If he can't check his email while the nation is under attack... then the terrorists have won...
This is my favourite even though I didn't actually handle the call. My old boss, Mr. E, calls and my eleven year old daughter answers.
E "Is your dad there?"
D "No, he'a at work."
E "Well I needed his help with a computer problem. Maybe you can help."
Mr E. goes on to describe the problem to my little girl who he knows is eleven.
D "Did you try rebooting?"
E "No. I'll try that. Hey, it works. Thanks sweety."
He he, you said boobies.
MacBook Pro. Worst name since the Bicycle
This happened just a couple of years ago, when one of those email viruses was plaguing the Windows world.
.doc.exe something, ... do .. you .. think .. I ..
He: Good afternoon, I seem to have a problem with my home computer. I think I've got a virus.
Me: Well, we don't support home computers, but I guess you've heard about the new virus on the news.
He: Yes I have, but I don't think I have that one. I'm very careful about this. I always read my mail by ssh'ing to work and read the mail using pine.
Me: OK, that seems good to me. Why do you think you have a virus ?
He: Well, today I got mail from a colleague of mine, whom I'm sure would never send me anything nasty, so I had pine
to save his attachment on the disk at work. Then I fetched it to my home computer using F-secure SSH, and double-clicked
on the icon.
Me: Ah-ha! You didn't by any chance notice the name of the attachment?
He: I don't know exactly, but I remember it had a peculiar extension,
Me: Ahem, as I said, we don't support home computers. I guess you'll have a nice evening reinstalling your machine...
I was about 5 or 6 when I asked my father (an electrician) what he meant by "male" & "female" connectors.
I was so scarred by his explanation that I'm now 39 and still posting on Slashdot...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
O.K. I will top you all except "MY" Tech Support were guys on IRC back in 97 ( I think.) Someone else had delivered, set up, done the install and taught me enough to use Usenet, mIRC, play musical C.D.'s while we chatted and DCC'd back and forth to one another. I had in a dot matrix printer, speakers and even could fax. I could send jpegs and gifs and thought I was HOT STUFF! I was also slipping up on 60 and perhaps a smidgen of senility as quietly as possible.
The setup was on a special desk I had built out of the dinette ( which I had found useless except for eating and vastly more useful for a tiny home office in my 35' fifth wheel which I used for a mobile snowbird business.
After a prolonged stay in Washington State, it was time to hit the road and after notifying the phone Co to disconnect my wiring to the rig and unplugging the phone jack inside the trailer, I took one look at the snake pit wires running out of cpu, apc, printer, speakers etc, I went directly into a panic attack! Besides all those CONNECTORS.. x pins xxx pins, long skinny one short fat ones OMG!!!!!!
Soooooo...I hooked up my 35' fifth wheel to my F350 Ford pickup, got out my girlie pink tool kit and a brand new roll of Duct Tape! Miles of duct tape, over the top of the monitor in all four directions and under the table top. Same with the CPU, the APC, the keyboard, the track ball and the fax/ speakers/modem and etc. ALL DUCK TAPED in their exact position.
Several hours later upon arrival after unhooking the rig, hooking up the power, finding the exterior phone connection I had ordered in advance and peeling off foot after foot of Duct tape, I plugged in my phone, dialed in to warped.net via my favorite MIT server and with great expectation of being praised for my ingenuity described in my usual graphic fashion my brilliant solution.
They had a wonderful time telling one another for days and days earning me the Duct Tape Queen title for many a many dull evening on IRC.
I DID NOT however ruin a weary techs day. But I am sure the story still gives one or more a chuckle.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"