1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Online Folly

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Networks

3.1 Online Folly

Even people who understand computers by themselves can't grasp the concept of networks. Dazzled by the feats networked computers can accomplish, people are frequently deluded into believing they can perform miracles they can't. Other people don't understand the function of an online service provider. Still others "just don't get it."

A member of America Online called me (a member of the tech support staff for an Internet service provider with no affiliation with AOL) asking what her email address was. After figuring out she wasn't registered with us, I politely pointed out that we were not America Online and she might get a better answer to her problem if she called the American Online support number.

A lady called, claiming to be a new member. I looked under the screen name she gave...couldn't find her. I looked under her phone number...couldn't find her. I looked under her name...couldn't find her. I resorted to her credit card number...couldn't find her. Finally, I asked her if she was sure it was America Online that she signed up for.

Got a call today from a gentleman who was upset because ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley" show had run long, causing the first twenty minutes or so of a sporting event to be preempted, and he had seen AOL's blurb at the end of the show.

A lady bought a new computer from us. Two days later she called to say that her computer wasn't working. She said it wouldn't connect to the Internet. I asked her what happens after she double clicked on the globe, and she replied, "You mean I paid over two thousand dollars for this, and I still have to click on something to get on the net?" She was really, truly upset.

Once I had a woman call me saying she couldn't connect to her company's LAN remotely. It turned out she had taken her network cable (RJ45) and somehow jammed it into her phone line connection (RJ11).

On this call a customer was having problems with his fax modem. It took fifteen minutes for me to make the guy understand the concept that one must plug a phone line into the modem for it to work. At the moment he grasped this concept, all I got for a response was, "Oh, so I need to unplug my--" (click)

Email from a customer:

We are going to have a second phone line put in for our computer. What steps do we need to take in order to switch our account over to the new phone number? And do we have to pay to have the account switched?

I mailed her back saying just to move the computer to the new line and conduct business as usual. She mailed back:

But what about receiving my e-mail? I thought it came to the phone number.

I had been using the net for about nine months, and was spending a lot of time on it, so I decided to shift to a flat-rate provider, of which there was only one in our area. I headed on over to their site and spent half an hour trying to find a way to download the installation software. I got there in the end and tried to download the software.

Regrettably, it required a user name and password -- more specifically, a user name and password for this ISP. In other words, you had to be a member of the thing to be able to download the software to become a member.

So I phoned their tech support (no other way of getting a setup disk. After only 45 minutes, I was able to talk to someone and persuade them to send me a setup disk. I also informed them of the error regarding their FTP server.

Some three weeks later (!) the setup disk arrived -- it was an unformatted blank disk with a fancy sticker on it. So I tried again to download their software from their web site -- no such luck. Another phone call to tech support. This time I got a fancy CD and another promise that the web site would be fixed.

As of a month ago, when a friend of mine was joining, some two years after I signed up, they still had not fixed their web site.

One woman called a customer service number and said she always got a busy signal when her computer called the modem pool. She kept on calling and calling, complaining about busy signals. Finally, we decided to clue her in on an experimental phone number that pointed to a few new-at-the-time 14.4Kbps modems. But she insisted, "No, I can't put in that number; I have to put in my home number." No amount of reason could get her to understand that the computer at her home had to call the number of the modem at her service provider. Last we heard, she remained unconvinced, calling herself and complaining about the busy signals.

My friend was having trouble with her dial-up connection and was convinced that she needed to type her new home phone number into some property dialog to get her connection to work. I told her I didn't think that was important.

I work on the helpdesk of an oil company. One of our users, a very high level executive, is traveling throughout the United States and calls us, long distance, to ask a question about setting up his dial up networking connection: "Do I have to dial a '1' before the number if I'm calling long distance?"

Police? Ok, whatever.

I am sure the phone company would appreciate her calling so that they could hold all her calls. Yeah, right!

One day I was in the school's computer lab with my class, and one of the computers could not connect to the Internet. Since the lab attendant nowhere to be found, my teacher asked me to help with the problem.

When my teacher left the room, I checked under the terminal. The phone cord had been kicked out of it's socket. I put it back in. When my teacher came back into the room, he noticed it was working again.

I had given her my email address, and I got a letter from her the next day saying: "Thanks for the help, but I fixed it myself. It works fine now. Thanks for trying."

I work for an ISP. This one happens to me almost daily.

Dings and dongs sound from error messages popping up on the customer's screen.

I do some unofficial tech support for friends around campus. One day, a couple of my female friends asked me to look at their computers. The symptom: "They're broken."

After much tinkering and safe-mode booting, I saw that many, many weird (and obsolete) network drivers and protocols have been loaded, causing the computers to freeze at the Windows login screen while they looked for a whole mess of NICs that weren't there. I fixed it and asked how so many of these things had been loaded.

Heard from a customer, while I was setting up his new T1 line:

I work for a prominent online service and was talking with a fellow employee. He asked me where he could find QuickTime for Windows. I told him to try apple.com. He had a puzzled look on his face for several seconds. Then he meekly said, "You do mean the net site, right?" I said, "What else could I mean?" He replied, "I thought you meant like command.com -- the DOS file."

A man called, and he was EXTREMELY upset. He was yelling and carrying on, very angry with his last ISP. He wanted to know our prices and services, so as always I told him what we offer and what we could do for him.

It was really painful to repress my laughter.

At the time, I was a junior in high school sitting in our recently built (and still to this day broken) Novell network. After about ten minutes of the first day I began playing with the instant message features built into Netware 4. It didn't take long for everyone else to start using this constantly.

Later in the week, our clueless sysadmin (who was a welding instructor before he was promoted to district wide technology head) had botched up several student accounts, rendering them unusable. When the student raised her hand to complain about the login window rejecting her password, the teacher blaimed all of the "instance messaging" flying around, "bogging the network," and that our messages "had too many misspellings which were confusing Netware."

I work on an ISP help desk and got this call once. This is my work log, with the names edited out and clarifications made:

August 1998:
   User cannot connect.
   User has MAC.
   User is getting: "Failed" when trying to connect.
   I can connect with this ID.
   User is running 8.0, 8.1, and 8.5 beta OS.
   User says he cannot connect now with any OS.
   User reports connection problems throughout the past week.
   Frequently he tries to connect, and it says he is connected, then he
       gets disconnected.
   He says it takes a couple of retries and reboots to connect for sure.
   User says he cannot get into email.
   User opened his browser, and he is not connecting.
   User says information occasionally disappears from his configurations.
   User reports: "His website is private. And the Government has scanners
       on the Internet that scan people's computers. He can always tell
       when he is being scanned, because his computer starts running
       really slow." He would not confirm if, when this happened, he just
       pulled the plug. After that, he seems to lose information in his
       Interner/Browser configurations.

A user who is attempting to dial in from home calls in for help. Nothing works. No matter what communications port he tries, no matter how he sets up his software, nothing works. This goes on for most of a day, as the user calls, is given something to try, tries it, calls back, is given something else to try, etc.

Finally, on about the eleventh call, our intrepid support person hears some odd noises, and asks out of simple curiosity what they are.

Modems and pay phones don't mix. I hotwired my laptop in to the mouthpiece of a payphone and proceeded to do system maintenance on a customer's machine. The sheriff arrived shortly afterward and proceeded to interrogate me. Someone had called complaining that I was using a computer to steal money from the pay phone.

A customer had a problem logging in.

I'm an audio/video technician for an educational medical school in Philadelphia. One day a professor wanted to use Power Point for a presentation. We were able to borrow a laptop from the Information Tech Department. I brought it in, set it up, booted it, and it came up with a password screen. I explained to the professor that I had to call up the Information Tech Department to find out the password, but the professor told me not to bother.

He tried his own name and password. And he kept trying it, repeatedly, for the next hour. I explained to him that this would not work, but he was insistent and kept trying. So I just sat back and laughed to myself.

I caught the end of one of those cable TV Internet programs. In the last five minutes, the host said, "Every week we get thousands of pieces of email asking 'How do I get online?'" Neat trick.

One employee couldn't log in to her new computer account and asked me for help. I asked all the routine questions, including, "Are you sure this is the right password?"

A gentleman called tech support, as he was having problems uploading his newly-made web page to his shell access. He told me the error message he was receiving: "User anonymous access denied." I explained to him that in order to log in to his shell account he needed to supply his username and password. He got very upset, claiming to be a "network administrator" and that he knew what he was doing, and obviously the problem was on our end.

I tried explaining the situation to him several different ways, but he was insistent. Finally, I asked for his password and told him to hold on for a moment. I logged into his shell access and told him (more irately than I should have to a customer), "I'm on your shell account right now. If I wanted to, I could have a web page up in your account in 15 seconds."

He was so upset at my "refusal" to help him, that he said he'd call back when a "more qualified" techie was working.

A customer called our PC tech support line. She had problems getting her modem connection to work correctly.

I work for an ISP. One day a woman called, furious.

Silence.

I've worked closely with the sysops of a local BBS, who are always amazed at the users that download a file from the system, decide that it's not what they expected, and return it by re-uploading it.

I had a customer who called to get our BBS number. I gave him the information and told him about setting up his modem. The caller said impatiently, "Yeah, yeah, I got it," and hung up. Later that day he called back, saying he had been trying all day but could not get through to our lousy BBS. I checked but the system had plenty of lines free. I asked him about his modem settings. He didn't have a modem. He had spent the day calling the BBS from his telephone.

[some rustling sounds]

Sure just STUFF IT in there!

Cut from our support log -- note that this is the entirety of the message:

This is the 1ST time on america online. I''m as clueless as a pole right now, & I would be so happy if You could heLP me a little with my cluelessness Maybe a hint or two.

We were having problems with one of our workstations -- it wasn't communicating well over the LAN, and we kept getting ethernet timeouts. We tried replacing the transceiver, but that didn't help, and we tried shortening the network between that workstation and the next (we were on the old thinnet lines then) but that didn't work either. We'd even recently installed a repeater to help with some of our LAN problems, and that didn't work. I knew what the problem was -- we'd had it before with one of out other workstations. It was a bad network chip in the workstation, and all we had to do was call the DG Field Engineer, and he'd come replace the system board and that would be that. But my boss wouldn't do it. It's not like it was going to cost us anything, we had a flat fee maintenance contract, but the guy just wouldn't call the FE and get it fixed, swearing that it was something else and that we'd find it if we just kept looking. So I was sitting at my workstation, with my usual Incredible Hulk GIF background, and we were working on the problem. We tried something (I don't remember what it was, now) and then tried to transfer a big file from that workstation to the server. And we started getting the usual network timeouts.

I gave him the most incredulous look ever, and he just said, "Just humor me, will you?" and insisted I try it. So I did. And of course, it didn't work.

Here's a silly incident which happened to me when I was trying to renew my account in a local ISP in Malaysia. I was trying to renew my account, and after consulting my computer dealer, I had to do it through the bank. Two days after I sent the money, I checked if my account was rebalanced and renewed. It wasn't. My account had been terminated once last year -- I was not even informed, and I only knew this after a ten minute session with technical support. I wasn't enthusiastic about seeing another reoccurence, so I sent a message to the ISP, stating, "I reviewed my account but it seemed that it had not been updated yet. Please do it so as it may be an inconvenience if my account is terminated without notice again like the last time."

It may apparently be a simple request, but the ISP botched it. They thought I was asking them to terminate my account -- and send a notice about it. I was given a notice politely telling me that my account would be terminated within three days.

I work at an ISP, primarily in tech support, but I do sales sometimes. A woman called to sign up for Internet access a few weeks ago. After taking some information, I asked her what she wanted as her login name. She supplied me a name, which I checked in the system, and replied, "I'm sorry, but that name has been taken. Try something else."

The woman became very upset, insisting that she needed to use that name and no other. I was curious enough to ask why, and the story came out. It seems this lady had just purchased her computer, and it booted into Windows 95 where it asked for a password to go with the login she had supplied me.

After having tried numerous passwords, she finally decided that she needed to sign up for Internet access so that we could supply her with a password to login to her own computer!

Struggling to contain myself, I suggested that she tried pressing 'Cancel', which would pop her right into Windows 95. Once she realized she didn't need a password after all, she hung up on me.

I was once discussing computers at a party with a very snooty girl. She was quite intoxicated and decided it was time for a game of "I'm more intelligent than anyone else in the room." She started going off on a rant on how Microsoft Network was much better than any other Internet provider. Naturally, I asked why. Her reply was (my paraphrasing):

And furthermore,

As soon as the urge to ram her drink up her nose subsided, I excused myself and kept at least ten people between us for the rest of the evening.

Some poor old lady called up because she was trying to answer the questions in order to register with our service.

Draw circle. Bang head here.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Someone here at work once asked, eyeing the blinking lights on the transceiver next to him, "Do I have to wait until the Ethernet is free before I can hit return to send my email?"

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Online Folly