1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Listen Already

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Tech Support

5.3 Listen Already

In the frustrating calls department are the people who insist they know more about computers than the tech support personnel and calls from people who refuse to do what they are told.

clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka..clicka

Repeated taps of the spacebar resound. Tap, tap, tap goes the spacebar.

From all I could tell, everything went fine from then on. The configuration was right, and everything seemed to be working. But on a visit to the client's site later, we discovered multiple shortcuts all over the desktop and quicklaunch bar, files placed wherever, and general disarray.

My co-worker once downloaded a small program off the Internet, to her PC. She wanted me to copy it to a floppy so she could install it on her computer at home. That was fine, but she insisted I copy it from the icon she used to open the program, right off the desktop. No amount of explaining the concept of "shortcuts" would deter her from having it done that way. So I copied the icon to a fresh floppy disk.

She took it home, couldn't understand why it wouldn't work, came in the next day, and asked me about it. "Maybe I need a higher density disk?" she asked.

Repeat for another ten minutes.

Two friends and I were standing around one day. One of them was fiddling around with his computer, playing a game. He recommended the game to us. But my other friend said that he couldn't install it, because installing it would take up all of his memory, and he'd need to get a new computer.

Several hours later, I overheard him having a conversation with his roommate. This conversation contained the phrase, "I'd get it, but if I installed it it would take up all of my memory, and I'd have to get a new computer." I just closed my eyes and sighed.

One day a girl came to me and complained that she couldn't install Macintosh's OS 8.5. When I got to her room I discovered she had a system running Windows 3.1.

Last I heard she was still searching for someone to help her.

A customer called to order a copy of Windows 3.11. I looked up her record our our files and discovered her computer was an old 8086 system with a single floppy drive. Our general policy is not to sell products to customers we know won't work, so I advised her that Windows would not run on her system.

A few days later, I got a call from the lady. She had purchased Windows 95 on a CD and wanted me to help her install it.

This was a few weeks ago. Since then, he bought the Windows 98 upgrade and wanted to know if I could help them install it. He was still convinced that that was all he needed.

I work for a major computer company as part of their direct sales phone line. Occasionally, customers will call to find local retailers that sell our products in their area. We can do that easily. Unfortunately, someone called me and wanted to take it a step further.

The conversation continued for another five minutes.

I work for an ISP. One day a woman called up with problems getting Netscape to locate any sites. After a couple questions it was obvious that she wasn't getting connected. So after a few minutes I got her to the 'connect' window.

I have no idea why she thought she needed to print this screen. Even after I explained that she didn't need to print the screen, she still wanted to know how to print it.

A automated inventory program, recently added to the network had confused the hell out of many of our users. Each PC at our site has a large white sticker next to the power switch with a simple four digit asset number on it. When the audit program runs for the very first time, the user is asked to enter the asset number and told that this is the number on the sticker beside the power switch on their PC.

So far, we've had, "WIN" from the Win3X users who are used to entering 'win' at the keyboard after logging in to the network. We've had "STICKER" entered, several times. A number of people have entered their initials. And one poor fool entered "Intel Inside."

I work for an accounting software company doing telephone support. A user called in, obviously confused, and asked me:

About two hours later I got a call from the same guy.

Uggh!

I work in the tech support department of an ISP.

A friend of mine called me up in the afternoon, complaining that his Windows 95 won't start. After half an hour of futile attempts to correct the problem via the phone, I came over to his house. The first thing I did was boot from a bootable disk and do a DIR C:. I saw nothing except directories in C:, no command.com, no io.sys, etc. As it turned out, my friend decided to get "top notch" performance out of his computer, so he started removing all excessive "junk." Unfortunately for him, he considered all files in the root dir of C: useless and erased them all.

Having no other better solution, I reinstalled Windows 95. Afterward, I told him not to erase any files from the root directory of C:. I went back home. Twenty minutes later I received a call from him complaining that Windows 95 broke again. Despite my warnings, he cleaned up all the files in C:\ again.

I received a phone call from a woman on the fifth floor saying the software I wrote for her was broken. (How does software break?) I knew I had never written software for her or anyone else on the fifth floor. But I went up to investigate.

She was using Crosstalk (a modem communications package) and for some reason it wasn't dialing into a computer downtown. I checked the settings in the software; everything looked normal. Just for fun, I removed the cord from the modem and plugged it into a phone. No dial tone. The cord was disconnected from the wall. So I crawled under her desk and plugged it back in. I assumed the cleaning people knocked it loose.

A few days later I got another call about "my" software being broken again. Once again, the phone cord was yanked out of the wall. I tucked the phone cord away so there was no way a vacuum cleaner could knock it loose. But this continued to happen.

Then I noticed something. This woman would sit with her legs crossed, and one of her legs was kicking back and forth faster than a hummingbird's wings. I told her she was kicking the phone cord loose. I went back to my cubicle to get tie wraps and a shorter phone cord.

No sooner had I collected these items than my boss' boss and his boss were standing there. Apparently this woman called and told them I had written Crosstalk, and it wasn't working, and I had blamed her for the problem. I tried in vain to explain to them that I had not written Crosstalk, that it was a commercial piece of software, etc. They didn't care. All they knew was I had better debug my Crosstalk program and make sure she didn't have any more problems.

After I secured the phone cord, she didn't have any more problems.

I went into a shell and sent email to the customer, watching it as it passed through our servers and was accepted by the other domain.

Click. Hysterical laughter.

The problem was that her DNS numbers had mysteriously disappeared. I helped her restore her settings.

Oh well. It wasn't new software, was it?

(Skip twenty minutes of troubleshooting.)

Email from a customer with the shareware version of a software product:

As I mentioned, we are able to transfer the files with no major problem, but there seems to be one problem that creeps up after we have transferred five files. After five files, we have to re-initialize the program to be able to transfer again. I want to register the software but need to know if this problem has been addressed in the registered version. If it has, I'll immediately send a payment out so we can get it.

I emailed the user back and asked him if he had read the text of the error message given after the five files were transferred, which reads:

One user was very angry with me, because the documentation that I had written did not work for him at all. So I walked him through the document step by step. As I went along, I asked him what had happened on screen as he completed each step. When I got to step 5, I got total silence as a response. When I asked him again what happened when he did step 5, he said, "Oh, I didn't understand what that step was for, so I skipped it."

[sounds of furious clicking and typing]

I once had to deal with a user who was upset because she could not edit her document. I asked her what application she was using, and she said WordPerfect for Windows. I asked her what the problem was, and she said she had loaded the document into the computer, was able to see and read the words but could not edit the text. I was puzzled until she told me she had scanned in the document; we do not have any OCR (optical character recognition) software, and she had inserted the bitmap image of what she had scanned in into the file. I tried to explain, but she didn't listen. I could only shake my head as she scanned it in again and kept on trying.

One woman called Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install the batteries in her laptop. When told that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith, Dell's director of technical support, the woman replied angrily, "I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I'm not going to read the book."

I received a call from a customer who was having some permissions problems...grantpt wasn't working, so he couldn't get shells open, etc, etc.

So, I started going through the permissions on his machine. A ls -ld / command showed 775. This was fine. A ls -ld /usr command showed 777. This was not.

I told him this was probably not directly the problem, but that we should change it anyway...so I asked him to change it to 775. I even told him the command he could use: chmod 775 /usr. He said ok. Then I asked him to cd into /usr, do an ls -l there, and tell me what he saw. He said he was still waiting. I asked "For what? The cd? The ls?" His response, "The chmod." EEK!

I didn't even let him finish before I told him to type control-C.

I ended up suggesting he re-install from scratch, because he apparently didn't have very much user data, and what little he did have, he had backups that he could restore from if need be. The original problem, in fact, had been that he had done a chmod -f -R 777 /usr, which will completely hose any setuid permissions on any file in /usr.

Most people eventually figure out that you have to press return after your login ID and after your password or Windows will gripe at you and become generally unpleasant and sullen. Not one couple, who called all of nine times and still hasn't quite managed to get the hang of it.

"Ok, tell me again; what do I do after I enter my password?" he keeps asking.

A customer called in and stated that his system locked up in a spreadsheet application. He then told me, "You techs don't care about our data that we work on. I knew that you would have me turn the computer off and reseat the video card, so in order to save my data, I reseated the video card with the system on." I finally convinced him that we needed to turn the computer off and then back on. Guess what? When we turned the computer back on, all we heard was a series of long and short beeps, which, by the way, weren't even correct beep codes.

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Listen Already