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Tales From the Support Crypt
An anonymous reader writes "Talking viruses, infected physical devices, and lights that go out are some of the 'problems' Panda Security's tech support service has had to face. Many of them were not a result of computer viruses, but of confused users. This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects." For anyone who's been on the receiving end of such questions, now's a good time to tell your cathartic tale.
Cases like this:
C: I got an error on my screen
S: What message text was displayed?
C: I don't know, I clicked it away
S: --explode--
Yes, it's made up, but it's one of the most funny tech support bits ever made! http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/
Yes, I had one of these. It's a real pain, because when something is broken, you expect to hear beep codes on the PC speaker. If the speakers are unplugged, as a result of disassembly before diagnostics, then no error messages are presented. The error would probably have been "[cp]U Fail", not "You fool" - though the latter interpretation isn't unreasonable in the context!
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The inverted axis comes from flight sims. When have you ever seen an FPS where you can mouse right in order to aim left?
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
I'm not working with support anymore (thank God!) but one case that I still remember was when the guy took a screen shot of an error message using *gasp* his camera.
I did that within the last month. Ever tried to jot down a FreeBSD kernel panic?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The funniest part about all of this, is IF your talking about *WINBLOWS* which you all seem to be then YOU DON'T NEED SCREENSHOTS!!!!
MS was kind enough to include a nice little function into all error dialogs so you can just make the error dialog the active window press [CTRL] + [c] and then PASTE THE TEXT INTO AN E-MAIL or NOTEPAD! no more writing down obscure 0x800000000000000000000 error codes!!! OMG how long have you been using/supporting winblows and you don't know this? (L)users!!!
There's a book I ran across, Fear and Loathing in Tech Support, that has lots of stories from Tech Support Hell. Funny, and well worth reading.
As long as you use a non-polar solvent (I use ethanol or isoproplyl alcohol) of high purity and allow for a hour or 2 of drying time, you should be all right.
Ive cleaned motherboards with 90% ethanol (everclear is only good for cleaning, not drinking) and powered them on in an hour with no problems whatsoever.
So I showed her how to play solitaire on the computer.
A week later she had mastered the mouse.
What do you think those games are for? Entertainment?
Freecell teaches basic positioning and clicking.
Solitaire teaches about dragging and dropping.
Minesweeper teaches about left click vs right click.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
An issue that I have with washing keyboards is calcium from hard water shorting out stuff in the keyboard, so that it doesn't matter how long I dry the keyboard for.
I had to take the keyboard apart and clean it with water run through a purifier.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you.
That's not necessarily true. Someone who makes $10/hour probably can't find someone to fix their car for $9/hour, that doesn't mean they can't get their car fixed. Tech support is no different.
--
ip address finding
Then that would be "informative".
And the brethren went away edified.
TopCod3r is a very sucesfull troll on the thedailywtf.com site. He make "border limit" comments that abuse the fact no one can read sacasm under the internet to troll hard some readers of that site. Today, only the nick is a warning for a troll post will follow.
-Woof woof woof!
No, SRAM is not "permanent"...it just doesn't require refreshing like DRAM. It does, however, require power, just like DRAM. This makes them both "volatile", as opposed to non-volatile flash memory.
The difference between the SRAM and DRAM is that every DRAM cell "leaks" a bit of the charge even when power is applied, so it would eventually result in errors.