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?

Comments

Best support stories page

[cyrax256]

You should check Computer Stupidities for even more funny stories: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid

Re:Best support stories page

[mrpotato]

There's a good reason why you want to be able to support more than 16,384 local variables in a C function. Some compilers for functional languages (say Scheme) can compile a whole Scheme module to a single C function. The idea is that Scheme features tail-calls optimization, so it allows you to implement some function calls as a C goto (which is very efficient).

Such machine-generated code can get quite big. It would really sucks to have a silly hard-fixed limit for the number of variables in a function.

Now I understand that in the case of the anecdote the programmer might really have had more than 16,384 variables in a function for hand-written code. That would be /very/ scary.

Re:A day at work

[CuriHP]

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.