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Tech Support Trials and Tribulations
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)
*
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 a piece of white paper instead of
this "yellow" construction paper?"
****
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!
(YEE-HAW!)
**
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 installation 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
Soft-ware 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?!" Etc. 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
user name 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."
*
Email from a friend: "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"
*
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!"