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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?
You should check Computer Stupidities for even more funny stories: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid
Broadcast has channels 2-13 on VHF and channles 14 and up on UHF. This is because TV does not own the entire spectrum. In between channels 13 and 14 you will find a couple of HAM bands, military aircraft radio, public service bands, business bands, FRS and FMRS radio, government bands, etc.
Cable does not have this restriction, so 14 begins just after 13.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The support guy was telling him to do this, apparently. I can't fault the user -- I'd never heard of it until now, and would have thought he was asking me to open a ticket.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You know, that's exactly right.
Back in high school, when I was still living with my parents, my mother would constantly pester me with questions about how to do inane little things in Word or AppleWorks or how to change settings. Finally one day I told her, "You don't need to keep asking me for this stuff. You know how I found out how to do it? I opened the menus, looked for somthing that sounded close and clicked on it. If it's a setting, just make sure you remember what it was set to before you start messing around. You won't break anything." Haven't had a single question since then and she's far more computer literate.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
And I call bullshit on them. If anyone has gotten one of those calls, especially within the last 10 years, it was almost certainly a prank.
...
No Pranks here. This happened to one of my coworkers last year - I kid you not, we laugh our asses off about it to this day:
Relatively new manager type [who had already made friends with the support folks by simultaneously demanding service NOW and always being to 'busy' for it to take place] calls the Help Desk complaining that her printer is jammed and they kick the call to us.
First, she only has the printer on her desk in the first place because she played the 'I neeeeeed it, I reaaalllly neeeeed it' card when she arrived a few weeks earlier. The result being that she, the special manager, now has an HP laserjet sitting on her desk that normally would service her entire department [mind you that it is network ready, but slaved to her PC...]. I'll spare you the drama involved in getting it installed but it involves the installation not happening instantly when she demanded, I mean, ordered the printer and then nearly calling the police because some tech had touched her PC before hours without her permission
Anyway, her printer is now jammed. Desktop tech goes to take a peak. The manager gives the standard 'it just stopped working' line and turns back to her work. Well, to shorten the tale a bit, the tech removes a blank CD-R from the guts of the printer [apparently, she had fed it into the envelope feeder...] and when he showed it to her with a puzzled look on his face she snatched it out of his hands and curtly informed him that he could go now.
We still do not know if she was trying to print a label on the CD or if she was trying to save a file...
So, people regularly do incredibly stupid things with CDs. Sometimes they even recognize that it was stupid enough not to tell anyone about, not even the guy that is there to fix it for them.
A non-CD one that happened to me:
I was dispatched to a remote site to check out a VAX terminal [yes, we still use them...] that the user said 'just stopped working'. One large drive-thru coffee later I arrive at the scene and am led to the offending device. I ask one more time before rolling up the sleeves what had happened and am told again that It Just Stopped Working {tm}.
Screen is dark so I flip the switch a few times - no change. I look over the top to check the power cable in the back - it is firmly inserted. I trace the power cable over a few feet and into a hole in the counter. I then look under the counter and locate the cord. I, now on hands and knees under the counter, only inches from three or four pair of smelly shoes, trace the power cord around and into a power strip whose red power lamp is off. "A-ha!", I exclaim triumphantly, and eagerly poke the switch on the power strip. The light remained dark.
Not to be beaten, I locate the end of the power strip and follow its cord to the next likely source of trouble. The cord looped around a large purse, behind a box and then right back into itself! Thats right folks, the power cord on the power strip had come unplugged all by itself while she was working and plugged itself into one of its own outlets!
This stuff really does happen.
With great frequency.