Technical Support Laughs

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wulfsburg

wulfsburg

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I know there are probably a few people who work tech support for some kind of company as a front line representative. (like in a cube farm with a headset?)

I work for a telecommunications company supporting Tv, Phone, and Internet....

What funny things crack you up?

My favorite is when people cannot properly read. Our equipment has the word Atlanta on it, and people say it America all the time.

Here is a short list of the funny things I have heard (most of which I hear on almost a daily basis)

“32 oz tv , or something like that” = 32 inch tv
Link Skii’s = Linksys (router manufacturer)
Setup = set top
Chuck = Trent (my name, usually mistaken by old folk)
Mc fee = Mcafee
Eathen allen = Ethernet
Apect Radio = Aspect Ratio

I have heard all kinds of silly stories from other agents, like the old man with Alzheimers trying to troubleshoot why his microwave didnt have a picture on it.


What you got?
 
my buddy could one up you.

he had a job where he would be "translator" for deaf phone calls; he would have to type what was said and speak what was written. he said no matter what was said/typed, you had to repeat it word for word, and you couldn't laugh/giggle/edit.

some wild stuff man.
 
My name is wrong all the time
Our company name get's mispronounced constantly
People call in for help and when I ask what kind of system they have they replay "****, I new you were going to ask that". Well no ****! Why didn't you look before calling?
After an hour troubleshooting a light bulb in my head goes off. Sir, did you check the power cord. "D'oh". I try and remember to never give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to working on equipment. Just because you are operating or attempting to repair a complicated machine, doesn't mean you have half the brain required to plug in a microwave.
 
True Story..When I was doing help desk a women called and said her computer was frozen. After realizing that the mouse and keyboard were not responding at all I told her to turn the power off of the PC and back on. After 1 minute I asked Can you see the computer booting up. She told me its still on the same screen. When I asked what she did she said she turned off the thing in front of her and turned it back on (Read I restarted the monitor!) I told her to please turn off the PC that was under her desk and not the PC on top of the desk!
 
IrregularPulse said:
My name is wrong all the time
Our company name get's mispronounced constantly
People call in for help and when I ask what kind of system they have they replay "****, I new you were going to ask that". Well no ****! Why didn't you look before calling?
After an hour troubleshooting a light bulb in my head goes off. Sir, did you check the power cord. "D'oh". I try and remember to never give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to working on equipment. Just because you are operating or attempting to repair a complicated machine, doesn't mean you have half the brain required to plug in a microwave.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it sucks for the guy who actually knows what he is doing, but you have to treat everyone of them like an idiot because you never know.

What floors me is TV technical support and connecting equipment to it. Seriously.... you are how old? Probably in your 40's? And you have had and been using tv's for how many years? And you STILL can't put a Yellow , Red, and White plugs from A to B and change your tv to the corresponding input? You fail at life then.

But on the other hand I talked to a doctor who can perform surgeries on people and insisted we send a tech to program his remote because he didn't get it. I understand not everyone is good with technology, and there are always exceptions , but most people are just dumb.
 
I work the parts counter for outdoor power equipment at a Husqvarna dealership. You wouldn't believe the stuff I get asked.

"Do you have the drive belt for a Yardman mower?"

"Did you write down the model number?" (me)

"No, it's the green one with the Briggs and Stratton engine. I think they're all the same."
 
IrregularPulse said:
After an hour troubleshooting a light bulb in my head goes off. Sir, did you check the power cord. "D'oh". I try and remember to never give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to working on equipment. Just because you are operating or attempting to repair a complicated machine, doesn't mean you have half the brain required to plug in a microwave.
Click to expand...

I heard from one IT friend that forgetting to plug something in happens so often that they are in the habit of asking the customer to "check that the power cord polarity is correct" The customer looks, and then realizes that it's not plugged in. This way they don't offend as many people as asking them directly if it's plugged in.

I heard another story of a woman who called into a computer tech line complaining that her mouse cursor was in the top, left corner of the screen, yet the mouse was in the extreme lower, right corner of the mouse pad and she couldn't move it anymore.:drunk:
 
I can top all of it. I had to instruct a customer how to turn off her hose before we left because her pool was 2" low. She was in her 40s and had never used a hose before.....
 
I work doing inventory control for an office supply store and I try to stay as far away as possible from tech questions...most people really have no idea what they're talking about.

Last week I had to show a guy wearing a suit how to load staples into a handheld electric stapler (he was simply placing them into the battery tray designed to hold 4 AAs...)

Probably the best one was when a guy asked me if we had rulers with millimeters on them. I say "Sure, I think most of our rulers have metric" He replies "not METRIC! MILLIMETERS!" .....I cooly reply back "Well millimeters ARE metric" and he just says "Oh, well yeah, of course" like nothing happened. I then had to show him how to count up the centimeters and add the "little lines in between" so that he could use the ruler. THIS WAS A FULL GROWN MAN!

Working retail will slowly make you lose your faith in humanity
 
I do tech support for internal employees at a large bank. I've heard a million crazy stories about beer drenched laptops, keys magically falling off in the middle of typing, all sorts of wacky stuff. What makes me laugh is the big shot bankers that can't perform simple tasks or pronounce simple words. "My screen says user auth-authentimications failed."
 
I work in a NOC and we do IT for a lot of companies. We had one client that was 2.5 hours away. We went up there at least 5 times to change a printer cartridge or plug in a USB cable. My favorite is the time they called us in a panic. They had the Blue Screen of Death. They insisted that I send someone up there imediately. I obliged. We get $1000 per call from them to cover travel time. When one of my Engineers got up there, he found out that the someone had changed the wallpaper to blue. The thing was working perfectly. Unbelievable.
 
I work for a government entity and for a while I did 1st and 2nd level support for both internal and external users as well as managing the Helpdesk for a time (which nearly put me in the grave), so I've seen quite a bit from both angles. My favorite was when a woman (chronic problem user) called me to complain about one of my techs because in a conversation he sent her an email which contained the following:



That picture has been around a while and I thought it was great considering the person who it was sent to. However, she was really offended and my boss made me reprimand the tech who did it... but she stopped calling and started doing her job (instead of calling us to do it for her), so the tech said the reprimand was worth it.

I guess no one has a sense of humor any more...
 
I'm an engineer at a large firm with dedicated (and totally incompetent) IT staff. We moved to a new office and had some network problems to start with. After a few weeks things were normal, until one day our computers were moving at a crawl. When we asked the IT guy what was up, he said:

Well, there are some guys working on the A/C system, which is in the server room. They are stepping all over the cables, but once they are done everything should be back up to speed.

I wish he was joking, but after seeing his work I can't put that much faith in him.
 
I just posted this in the TR, then saw this thread. Figured it fit.

People are really ate up sometimes. A customer who bought a gaming computer told me it had a motherboard issue. I do a full burn in on all computers before shipping so I was doubtful, but hey stuff happens so no problem. The customer says, this should be covered under the warranty right? Sure it is. Just send it back and I'll take care of it.

I get the PC back in about a dozen pieces. It looks like he took a hammer to the inside of it and then threw it down a flight of stairs, landing in a pile of dirt. WTF? I ask him, is this the condition you received the computer? Yep. Uhhh, why did you say it just had a motherboard issue? And if you received it like this why did you wait 8 days to tell me there was an issue and neglect to tell me it was completely effing smashed?

This was a brand new machine. The case is destroyed, scratched/dented inside & out, the front cover has had the wires/led's pulled out. The motherboard is fried. The video card is snapped off in the motherboard. And that's just from a visual inspection.

I hate people sometimes.
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KCBrewer said:
This was a brand new machine. The case is destroyed, scratched/dented inside & out, the front cover has had the wires/led's pulled out. The motherboard is fried. The video card is snapped off in the motherboard. And that's just from a visual inspection.


<!-- / message --><!-- sig -->
Click to expand...

You would think he would remember to include those details? What a tool.
 
We had a call come in where the user's CD-Rom wasn't working. It was making a ton of noise and he complained the the disk wasn't reading. Sent a vendor onsite to take a look. The installer put the PC upside down. So when the drive opened the disc would just fall out. No wonder it was making noise...
 
wulfsburg said:
I know there are probably a few people who work tech support for some kind of company as a front line representative. (like in a cube farm with a headset?)

I work for a telecommunications company supporting Tv, Phone, and Internet....

What funny things crack you up?

My favorite is when people cannot properly read. Our equipment has the word Atlanta on it, and people say it America all the time.

Here is a short list of the funny things I have heard (most of which I hear on almost a daily basis)

“32 oz tv , or something like that” = 32 inch tv
Link Skii’s = Linksys (router manufacturer)
Setup = set top
Chuck = Trent (my name, usually mistaken by old folk)
Mc fee = Mcafee
Eathen allen = Ethernet
Apect Radio = Aspect Ratio

I have heard all kinds of silly stories from other agents, like the old man with Alzheimers trying to troubleshoot why his microwave didnt have a picture on it.


What you got?
Click to expand...

I think I've had to call you more than once Chuck.
 
CoalCracker said:
We had a call come in where the user's CD-Rom wasn't working. It was making a ton of noise and he complained the the disk wasn't reading. Sent a vendor onsite to take a look. The installer put the PC upside down. So when the drive opened the disc would just fall out. No wonder it was making noise...
Click to expand...

Ha! This reminded me of a user a few years ago that called and told me that she could not burn a dvd... I checked her PC out remotely and couldn't find anything wrong, but she swore that she put a disk in and now the door wouldn't open. So I head over to her office and take a look at the drive and I couldn't even get the door open, even with the manual release. I went ahead and replaced the drive and took the old one back to my office where I proceeded to take it apart as I wanted to know what happened to it. Upon finishing the dissection of the drive I found that she had somehow managed to stuff a mini cd and 2 full size disks into the drive. She had to have forced the drive closed with the last disk because all the gear teeth were stripped... she was forever branded with the ID10T code after that day.
 
I work for a business telecommunications company supplying voice and data, I always like to get the.

"I'm getting a Damien (daemon) error?"

No, sir, I assure you, the kid from The Omen is not the reason your emails are not being sent.
 
I worked for IT for my college for a couple years while attending. We once had a kid whittle his CAT5 cable down with a knife so it could fit in the phone jack. For some reason, he wasn't getting a strong connection...
 
BargainMugs said:
I worked for IT for my college for a couple years while attending. We once had a kid hack his CAT5 cable down with a knife so it could fit in the phone jack. For some reason, he wasn't getting a strong connection...
Click to expand...

There I fix0rd that for you ;)


I used to work with Zip drives and they used to make a click when they were packing in and would start to chew the disks up, so my standard TS technique was to have the customer put the telephone handset on top of the drive and put a disk in, I'd hear if it was already causing problems and replace it straight away.
I asked a lady one time if there was a lot of noise when it was working...the brilliant answer: " Well I do live beside a printing works and it can get noisy when they have a job on.........." eh no..."I meant the drive".......
 
I've done IT/Support/Software for a long time and thought I've heard everything, until one person called in because they couldn't use our software.

Problem...Power was out in the building because someone hit a pole outside. Not much tech support can do there.

I sent a tech into work one night at midnight because of a "cant print" issue...he put paper in the printer and went back to sleep.

I've seen cat-5 cables completely fried...due to an idiot with a space heater under the desk.

Or people who just assume that a laptop that has "wireless" means they can just connect anywhere the laptop happens to be because it's wireless.

Or a manager who had me on the phone trying to dial into our vpn (back in the old days). Too bad his laptop was connected to the SAME LINE he was using to talk...and wondering why he couldn't connect.

And the people who'd complain because I didn't send an email out that the mail server was down...
 
jezter6 said:
.Power was out in the building because someone hit a pole outside.
Click to expand...


Ha ha! that reminds me of an incident - installing a system in a hospital. 9th floor calls down to the basement, where I'm prepping the next one... It's all black - your machine is down!

When I get off the elevator, the entire floor is pitch black - not even emergency power.

I think the problem was bigger than my computer.
 
I bet you guys wish you could give old Nintendo advice and give up.

"Did you blow in the cartridge? Did you pop it up and down? Have you tried smacking it, no sir, not hitting it, we advice you not hit it, only smack it.".
 
motobrewer said:
my buddy could one up you.

he had a job where he would be "translator" for deaf phone calls; he would have to type what was said and speak what was written. he said no matter what was said/typed, you had to repeat it word for word, and you couldn't laugh/giggle/edit.

some wild stuff man.
Click to expand...

Some people would use those to prank others.
 

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