[plug] [OT] More funnies, totally <G>

[Leon Brooks]

Customer: (angrily) "You said I would get 98 windows with this computer. 
Where are they?" 



One day I got a call toward the end of the day from a sales rep in Chicago 
who couldn't get his computer to boot up. We went round and round for about 
two hours -- nothing worked. I was ready to pull my hair out, but I don't 
like losing. To lighten the tension of the moment, I started chitchatting 
with him as we're waiting to see if the machine will restart. He has an IBM 
ThinkPad, and I told him how much I like mine.

Him: "Yeah, they're ok, but I travel a lot, and I got tired of the darn thing 
being so heavy, so I installed Windows CE to make it lighter."



A customer called in with modem problems.

Tech Support: "Ok, we're going to check your modem settings. First thing
              we need to do is make sure all programs are closed." 
Customer:     "How do I know if everything is closed?" 
TS:           "Make sure all windows are closed." 
Cust:         "But...I'm in the basement. I don't have any windows here." 

Lucky me, I made it to the the mute button in time!



I was calling to sign up with a new DSL provider. When the guy asked what 
operating system I was using, I said, "Linux." I was put on hold for five 
minutes, and then a supervisor came back and told me, "You can't use Linux to 
connect to the Internet. It's a hacker tool, anyway."



Cust: "I installed Windows 98 on my computer, and it doesn't work." 
TS:   "Ok, what happens when you turn on your computer?" 
Cust: "Boy, are you listening? I said it doesn't work." 
TS:   "Well, what happens when you TRY to turn it on?" 
Cust: "Look, I'm not a computer person. Talk regular English, not this
      computer talk, ok?" 
TS:   "Ok, let's assume your computer is turned off, and you just sat
      down in front of it, and want to use it. What do you do?" 
Cust: "Don't talk like I'm stupid, boy. I turn it on." 
TS:   "And then what happens?" 
Cust: "What do you mean?" 
TS:   "Does anything appear on your monitor? I mean, the TV part." 
Cust: "The same thing I saw last time I tried." 
TS:   "And that is what?" 
Cust: "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" 
TS:   "Yes, sir. What is on your screen?" 
Cust: "A bunch of little pictures." 
TS:   "Ok, in the upper left corner, do you see 'My Computer'." 
Cust: "No, all I see is that little red circle thing with the chunk
      out of it." 
TS:   "You mean an apple?" 
Cust: "I guess it kind of looks like an apple." 

Then it took me fifteen minutes to convince him that he had a Mac. Even after 
showing him "About this Macintosh." I spent another fifteen minutes trying to 
convince him that Windows 98 wouldn't work on his Mac. He said it should work 
because Windows 98 is for PCs, and he had a PowerPC. I think he's still 
trying to get it to read that CD, because I never could convince him.



A friend called me one day to help her because her computer will no longer 
run Windows. Past experience had taught me most of her computer problems were 
self-inflicted, so I asked her what she had done to the computer recently.

Her: "Well, I needed more space from the hard drive so I could get more
     JPGs and WAVs from my friends on mIRC." 
Me:  "Ok, so what did you do?" 
Her: "I just deleted all the blank files from my computer." 
Me:  "Blank files?" 
Her: "Yes, blank files. I deleted tham all." 
Me:  "What exactly is a blank file?" 
Her: "When you run File Manager, every file shows a picture. I just
     deleted all the ones with the blank page picture."



One user -- a regular caller of ours -- got herself into some serious 
computer trouble when she set about cleaning up her system. She had been 
exploring the hard drive in the file manager and discovered hundreds of files 
in the Windows directory with all different file extensions. Being of an 
orderly mind, and with several hours of free time, she had created a TXT 
folder, a COM folder, a DLL folder, and so forth, and moved all the files 
into these subdirectories.



Two girls walked into the University's Linux cluster one time. They were 
obviously unfamiliar with computers and chatted with each other trying to 
figure everything out. I was doing my own work and had tuned out a lot of the 
conversation, but at one point one of them turned to me and asked how to get 
into Windows. "Type startx," I replied, for the Linux machines booted to a 
shell prompt, and you had to type "startx" to get into X-Windows. I never did 
find out if that worked for them or not, but they spent quite some time 
trying to correlate the instructions they had on paper (presumably given out 
in one of their classes) with what they were seeing on the screen. A full 
hour and a half passed, and finally one of them turned to me again and asked 
if this was the Microsoft Windows cluster. "No," I replied, "that's 
downstairs." It was hard to stifle the laughter until they were gone. An hour 
and a half before they realized they weren't even using the right operating 
system. Wow.



A lab technician (legendary, where I work) deleted a large and seemingly 
useless file named /vmunix from a Sun workstation. (This file is the UNIX 
operating system image.) The machine worked fine until I tried to reboot it.



Customer: "My terminal is smoking and shooting sparks. Should I unplug it?"



Tech Support: "Hello, tech support, may I help you?" 
Customer:     (in a thick Russian accent) "Yes. Monitor is working fine but
              has sparks and smoke flying out back. Is ok?" 
Tech Support: (blink)



Customer:     "There are smoke and flames coming from my computer." 
Tech Support: "Uh, hang up, unplug the computer from the wall, and call
              the local fire department." 
Customer:     "That's not the problem. I need to know how to do a
              backup. Fastest possible method."



Cust: "Hi, um, my printer smells funny, and it's smoking." 
TS:   "Did you turn it off?" 
Cust: "Well, no, I was told never to turn it off without running it
      through shutdown, and it won't go through shutdown."



A user phoned me and complained that her monitor was smoking, smelled of 
burning, the display had gone wrong, and the monitor was too hot to touch. I 
suggested that she switch the monitor off until an engineer could look at it. 

Customer: "How do I do that?"



[-: FireWire interface? :-]

A few years ago, my daughter took over my computer sales and service 
business. Although she is probably "techier" than I am now, at the time she 
was pretty inexperienced, particularly when it came to hardware. As part of 
her training, she assisted me while I did various repairs. I remember 
stressing to her, "When diagnosing and repairing problems, it's important to 
stay calm. If you panic, you'll make mistakes."

We were installing a hard drive in one particular machine. The workbench was 
cluttered, so she had the case, and I had the keyboard and monitor a few feet 
away. After plugging everything in, I told her to hit the power switch while 
I got ready to access the CMOS from the keyboard. I was looking at the 
monitor when I heard her calmly say, "Ok, now the drive's on fire. Is that 
normal?"

I had certainly never seen a drive actually burst into flames before 
(obviously it was VERY faulty), and I immediately shouted in a panicked voice 
"Turn it off! Turn it off!" My daughter, however, was completely calm.



TS:   "Hello, tech support, can I help you?" 
Cust: (slowly) "Oohh." (pause) "I think I did a bad thing." 
TS:   "Ok, so tell me what's up." 
Cust: "Well, my computer was running great. Everything was working fine,
      I had no problems whatsoever." 
TS:   "Ok..." 
Cust: "So I decided to open it up and have a look inside. I saw all these
      wires dangling all over the place. There were grey flat ones, and
      small red, black, and yellow ones, and it seemed like they weren't
      connected to anything. So I decided to plug them all in." 
TS:   "Um, you mean you plugged them all in? What did you plug them into?"
Cust: "Well, whatever I could get them to connect to. I saw pins sticking
      off of some of the boards that didn't have anything on them, so I
      plugged all the loose wires in to make it run better." 
TS:   "And then you..." 
Cust: "And so I plugged them all in, and I hit the power button, and
      there was this loud bang and a flash and a puff of smoke. Now it
      doesn't work at all." 
TS:   (suppressing all emotion and turning deep crimson) "Can you hold
      for a minute, please?"



[-: more firewire? :-]

A lady's power supply was smoking, so she rang tech support and asked, "Is 
there a fire in the file server room? Because it's smoking at my end."



Cust: "Hi, I think I've got a problem with my monitor." 
TS:   "Ah. Do you still have an image?" 
Cust: "Yes, best image ever. Thing is, when I look at it from the side, I
      see red hot components." 
TS:   "Uh, when you look at it from the SIDE? How can you see any
      components?" 
Cust: "Well, through that big smoking hole."



[never do anything you wouldn't be caught dead doing!]

Back when I was in high school, I was in my first programming class. I had 
downloaded a DOS program. It presents a fake C:\> prompt and prints mildly 
rude messages instead of executing commands. After showing it to a few 
classmates, I ran it on the teacher's computer when he wasn't looking. After 
a few messages, he figured it out. Someone said, "Heh-heh, he did it," and 
revealed the culprit to be me. Fine.

This particular program, after being rude for about a screen or so, starts 
getting apologetic, and finally ends with "Wait! Please don't turn me off! 
Noooooooooooo!" and gives you the real DOS prompt. Right when that message 
printed, the screen started wavering and dimming. Then smoke began to pour 
out of the back of the monitor. The screen went completely dead and smoke and 
big nasty flames were pouring out of the back of the monitor. The teacher had 
to hit it with the fire extinguisher.

Luckily, he was smart enough to realize that this would be a very hard thing 
to do in software. It turned out the monitor was so dusty that the power 
supply had caught on fire. But for a moment I was terrified that I would be 
held responsible. It was a pretty amazing coincidence of timing.



Once in school I was bringing some document on a diskette to our principal. 
She was on the phone. While waiting I began playing with the sliding metal 
shutter on the diskette. She looked at me sternly and told me to stop it or 
viruses would get in.



I received a call from a woman. She had been told in a previous call that her 
computer was infected by a trojan virus and wanted to know where to begin 
disinfecting the computer. I asked her what software she was using, but she 
sounded a little confused. After a few minutes, I learned that she had 
dismantled her computer and was preparing to wipe everything down with Lysol, 
a disinfecting cleaner.



TS:   "Tell me, is the cursor still there?" 
Cust: "No, I'm alone right now."



Cust: "Hi, I was wondering if you could fix my laptop. It's under warranty." 
TS:   "What seems to be the trouble with it?" 
Cust: "My wife got mad and threw it in the pool."


Cust: "Can it damage a mouse to be thrown at a wall?"
[Ts:  No. :-]



I once had a customer whose cdrom drive wasn't working -- I suspect the 
reason was old or missing drivers, but the customer had tried to fix the 
problem himself. He thought the problem was that the CD had to sit tightly in 
the tray, so she took a paper clip, put it through the center hole of the CD, 
and fastened it to the drive tray. When he tried to use the drive that way, 
he was greeted with grinding noises caused by the disintegrating drive 
mechanism.



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.

TS:   "Why has this card been filed?" 
Cust: "The modem didn't fit in the slot, so I had to file it till it
      would fit."



Ten years ago, I was working for a company selling computerized cash 
registers. A customer called in to help me with a cash register that didn't 
connect to the back office computer.

Me:   "So, can you tell me the settings of the DIP switches on the
      cash register?" 
Cust: "DIP switch?" 
Me:   "Oh, sorry, the small switches located on the backside." 
Cust: "Eeeerrr...there are no switches there." 
Me:   "Oh, yes, there are. Right next to the power cord." 
Cust: "No. There are no switches. Not any more!" 
Me:   (puzzled) "Huh? Not any more? What do you mean?" 
Cust: "Well, you know, my collegue told me that these switches might
      actually be what caused the problem, so I removed them." 
Me:   "REMOVED THEM??" 
Cust: "Yeah, you know, removed them. With a chisel."


Cheers; Leon