[2629] in Humor
More fun with tech support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Thu Jan 21 17:41:14 1999
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Date: 21 Jan 1999 17:38:28 -0500
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 08:05:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Nev Dull <nev@bostic.com>
Message-Id: <199901211305.IAA24610@abyssinian.sleepycat.com>
To: nev@bostic.com (/dev/null)
Subject: Daddy was in the war.
Forwarded-by: Adam Shand <larry@alaska.net>
Forwarded-by: rebecca <rebecca@wetafx.co.nz>
___________________________________________________________________________
Customer: "Your sound card is defective and I want a new one."
Tech Support: "What seems to be the problem?"
Customer: "The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming out
of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the
left. It's defective.
Tech Support: "You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker to the
right side of the machine and vice versa."
Customer: (sputter) (click)
Tech Support: (snicker)
___________________________________________________________________________
Customer: "I'd like to return this scanner."
Store Clerk: "Excuse me?"
Customer: "This scanner I bought. I paid eighty dollars for this
scanner, and it doesn't work!"
Store Clerk: "Uh...sir, that's a trackball."
Customer: "No, it isn't. It says 600 dpi tracking resolution right
here!"
___________________________________________________________________________
Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having problems: the
bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange
that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the
basics, then came over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I
asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As the paper
started coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me. I told her to
wait until the paper came out on its own. Problem solved.
___________________________________________________________________________
I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division for
about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just couldn't
solve. She could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine,
which truly baffled me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and
yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green
printed fine. Every color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I
had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and
reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for help; they
offered no new ideas. After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about
to tell the customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she asked
quietly, "Should I try printing on piece of white paper instead of this
yellow construction paper?" Sometimes the user can teach us a thing or two
about tech support.
___________________________________________________________________________
A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech support
number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the printer." On
the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of the screen,
but the computer still couldn't find it.
___________________________________________________________________________
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the
opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also complained about
how hard it was to hit the buttons. She was quite embarrassed when we asked
her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away from her.
___________________________________________________________________________
Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and
it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the two computers
connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I picked up the phone to see
if they were still connected, and I got the message, 'No Carrier,' on my
screen. What's wrong?"
___________________________________________________________________________
An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows that had
gone terribly wrong.
Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them
on my home computer."
Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little
act of piracy slide.
Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't
initialized."
Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
Customer: (proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk.
Would you like to initialize it?'"
Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to
be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't
read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them.
And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole
office. Did I do something wrong?"
___________________________________________________________________________
For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from someone, and
our computers were facing away from each other. A few minutes into the
class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between our computers and
switched the inputs for the keyboards. She came back and started typing and
immediately got a distressed look on her face. She called the teacher over
and explained that no matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The
teacher tried everything.
By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced. I started
to type, "Leave me alone!" They both jumped back, silenced.
"What the..." the teacher said.
I typed, "I said leave me alone!"
The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!"
It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation
between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.
Me: "Don't touch me!"
Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."
Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!"
Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair
laughing. After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet
red. Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.
___________________________________________________________________________
I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a
program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program. My friend told me
it would not work because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn't
type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time he tried to type the
"dot over dot thingie" he kept getting the "dot over comma thingie" no
matter how careful he was to press only on the very top of the key. When I
taught him about the shift key, he thought I was a genius.
___________________________________________________________________________
This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied" message every
time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his username and password in
capital letters. Tech Support: "Ok, let's try once more, but use lower case
letters." Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."
___________________________________________________________________________
My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He noticed a
young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her arms
crossed across her chest and staring at the screen. After about 15 minutes
he noticed that she was still in the same position only now she was
impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she replied,
"It's about time! I pushed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!"
