Tech support
Posted by: tz8cy5 <tz8cy5@...>
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 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!
*****************
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 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?!" 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?"