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Help Desk stories
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(chosen from some jokes site url of I don't remember, I
hope they wont sue me :) - I publish it only for entertainment of
people)
Heard in a University store:
a.. Customer: "Can you copy the Internet for me on this
diskette?"
a.. Customer: "I would like an Internet please."
a.. Customer: "When I sign up, do I need to be home so you
can come out
and install the Internet to my house?"
a.. Customer: "I just got your Internet in the mail
today..."
a.. Customer: "I just downloaded the Internet. How do I use
it?"
a.. Customer: "I don't have a computer at home. Is the
Internet available
in book form?"
a.. Customer: "Will the Internet be open on Memorial Day
tomorrow?"
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a.. Customer: "The Internet is running too slow. Could you
reboot it
please?"
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--
a.. From a discussion on IRC:
a.. "I have a problem with my Internet. Anyone
know how to get the
screens smaller?"
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--
I work for a local ISP. Frequently we receive phone calls that go
something
like this:
a.. Customer: "Hi. Is this the Internet?"
a.. Friend: "I'm going to leave AOL. I think I'll switch to
Netscape."
b.. Me: "Um, Netscape isn't a way to get on the Internet.
It's what lets
you look at the Internet. You need an Internet Service Provider like
AOL,
CompuServe, or AT&T Worldnet."
c.. Friend: "Oh. I guess I'll get Internet Explorer."
a.. Customer: "The Internet site's giving me a busy
signal!"
(Usually due to the customer dialing his own phone number with his
modem.)
Call to Tech support:
a.. Customer: "Every time I call you I get disconnected from the
Internet!"
-------------------------
a.. Customer: "Am I supposed to hear those people on the IRC?"
I wondered if he was calling because he couldn't hear them, or because
he
could.
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One tech support person told a lady to insert a clean disk into the
drive.
She washed it first.
a.. Customer: "You've got to fix my computer. I urgently
need to print a
document, but the computer won't boot properly."
b.. Tech Support: "What does it say?"
c.. Customer: "Something about an error and non-system
disk."
d.. Tech Support: "Look at your machine. Is there a floppy
inside?"
e.. Customer: "No, but there's a sticker saying there's an
Intel inside."
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An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows
installation that had gone terribly wrong.
a.. 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.
a.. Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
b.. Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they
weren't
initialized."
c.. Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly,
ma'am?"
d.. Customer: (proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a
Macintosh disk.
Would you like to initialize it?'"
e.. Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
f.. 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?"
a.. Customer: "Can I use this disk here in the lab? It's
blue."
I said that she could, but I wanted to say, "Yes, we are an equal
opportunity computer lab."
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A friend of mine purchased "colored" floppy disks so she could
save email
attachments to disks. The attachments were color GIF files, and all she
had
around the house were black floppies.
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I was on duty one night at my university's computing centre. A woman
came in
with a disk that she wanted to retrieve some files from. The disk was in
really bad shape; the metal door was missing, a boot print was on it,
and
the label had been treated with white-out several times. I suggested she
go
buy another disk at the vending machine down the hall while I tried to
read
the data off her disk.
When she returned, I told her that I was able to get most of the
information
off the old disk. I asked for the new disk so I could save the
information.
"Ok," she said, and started to hand the disk to me. Then she
paused and
said, "Oh, wait. I forgot to format it."
With that, she took the disk in both hands and ripped the metal door
off.
"There," she said, pleased with herself.
It took all the self-control I could possibly muster to retain my
composure
and suggest she buy another disk.
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a.. Customer: "I've been signed up with your service for
over a week, and
have not been able to connect even once because of busy signals. If I
can't
get any better service than that, I'm going to switch to another
ISP."
b.. Tech Support: "Hmmm...that shouldn't be happening. We're
no where near
maxing out our dial up lines. Are you sure you're dialing the right
number?"
c.. Customer: "I'm not stupid! I know my own phone
number!"
a.. Tech Support: "What web browser are you using?"
b.. Customer: "Aren't you my browser?"
This conversation occurred in our tech support chat area:
a.. User: "My modem is broken, and I can't get online with
it!!! HELP!!!"
b.. Me: "Does the computer you are using now have the same
type of modem
as the other computer you tried using before?"
c.. User: "No, I only have one computer. Do I need to have
two to get
online?"
d.. Me: "No, you're online now."
e.. User: "Wrong. I told you. My modem is broken."
f.. Me: "If you weren't online, you wouldn't be able to talk
to me. How
did you get online if your modem isn't working?"
g.. User: "I used the CD player, but I'm not getting the
sound."
Further discussion revealed that he had bought a CD from us but thought
his
modem was broken because he was unable to connect without installing the
client software. He believed that in an emergency, you could use the
cdrom
drive instead of the modem because, "They're about the same
size." He also
thought he ought to be hearing the words he typed, since his computer
came
with speakers, and the salesman who had sold him the cdrom drive had
told
him it would play music.
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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.
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a.. Tech Support: "May I ask the reason you are cancelling
our service?"
b.. Customer: "Yeah, I just moved, and the phone jack in my
new house is
too far away from the computer."
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a.. Customer: "I've been sitting here for over twenty
minutes with it
saying I'm connected. When will it do something?"
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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.
a.. My friend: "Joan and I got bored, so we went into the
network settings
and added a bunch of things we didn't really understand."
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An man purchased a laptop from me. He called about a week later and said
that it would no longer boot up. He brought it in, and I discovered that
sixteen nicely drilled holes were in the bottom of the case. I asked him
about it, and he said the machine was too hot sitting on his lap, so he
had
drilled these "air holes."
"Could that be the problem?" he asked.
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A customer came into the store one day to return an internal
modem, which
he had purchased a few days earlier. He complained that it would not
work. I
took the modem out of the package and could scarcely believe my eyes.
The card had been filed down to about half its original size.
a.. Tech Support: "Why has this card been filed?"
b.. Customer: "The modem didn't fit in the slot, so I had to
file it till
it would fit."
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