"computer stupidities"

[otto-san]

here lies the greatest collection of dingus the internet has ever known

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

some gems:

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)

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.

Customer: "I had an important document that was password protected, and I can't get in it. I don't know the password."
Tech Support: "Ok, we do have a program the get passwords from Word documents. Can you email me the document?"
Customer: "No, it is very sensitive. That's why it was password protected. I won't even keep the file on the server. I keep it secure on a floppy."
Tech Support: "It would be much safer if you kept it on the server. Floppies are easily corrupted. At least on the server it would be backed up each night."
Customer: "That is exactly what I don't want to happen. For legal reasons, I don't want any copies of this file. I want you to come down here and get the password for me."
Tech Support: "I'm not in the same office as you are, so I'll need to send someone there to your desk to help you out."
Customer: "Have them call ahead first so I can get security here when they are work with the file."
Tech Support: "Security? Sir, We sign a non-disclosure agreement, so that won't be necessary."
Customer: "Yes, it will be necessary! This is a very important and sensitive document, and we don't want anyone touching it without some security."
Tech Support: "Ok, that's fine. I'll let them know to bring the password software so they can get the password you forgot."
Customer: "I didn't forget it!"
Tech Support: "Excuse me?"
Customer: "I didn't have to remember it."
Tech Support: "What do you mean?"
Customer: "The password was written on a yellow post-it note attached to the disk and must had fallen off. It has be somewhere on my desk, but there are so many papers here I can't find it!"
I had to mute the phone so they wouldn't hear me laughing.

Customer: "About time too. Are you a real person?"
Tech Support: "Yes sir, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I moved some stuff I don't use to the trash and deleted the trash, and now I'm getting all sorts of %&*#ing errors. What are you going to do about it? You've got an accent, haven't you?"
Tech Support: "Yes sir, I'm in Ireland."
It became apparent that the customer, in his wisdom, had destroyed the Windows registry and deleted just about everything he needed to run Windows.

Tech Support: "Sir, I believe we will have to reload your system with its original operating system, as you are presently unable to get into your system due to the necessary files being deleted. Unfortunately you will lose anything added since you purchased the system. Shall I walk you through the reload sir?"
Customer: "You mean I paid $2,000 dollars, and I have to reload this myself?" (rants for fifteen minutes, makes death threats and references to being supported by a third world country) "*&@$ing reload! I'll give you a reload!"
Bang! Bang!

Tech Support: "Sir, is everything all right?"
Customer: "Sure is. I just blew the $#%&ing thing to bits with my shotgun you *$@%ing &*%$er."
Tech Support: (taking a satisfying long breath) "Sir, I would like to advise you at this point that gunshot damage is not covered under the terms and conditions of your warranty. May I suggest a servicer in your locality to assist in the reassembly of your machine?"
Customer: "$%!# you."
I dissolved into fits of laughter.

Customer: "How many pins does a sixteen-pin cable have?"

I went to the post office to ship a package of software to a customer. Since the software was expensive, I decided to insure it. As the postal employee was filling out the insurance form, he asked me what I was shipping.

Me: "Software."
Him: "You mean, like, pajamas?"

this was posted here before ages ago but it deserves another topic here in 2015

[Ad Bot]

[ThatRandomGuy]

That first one, Oh my god I'm laughing just thinking about a voice over!

[Georges]

That last one, omg.

[otto-san]

most of these are pretty old stories so you have to kinda realise that people probly didn't understand computers nearly as much but jesus christ some of these things

I work for a large university in New England where we have a number of public computer labs that we must maintain. Every summer we do a number of upgrades to keep the machines somewhat current. Last summer, we added a number of zip drives to the forty or so Macs and PCs we had in a couple of our labs. Shortly after the installation was complete, we realized the problem we had just opened up for ourselves -- many users had never seen a zip drive before, and, of course, floppies fit quite well in that opening. Literally within hours, we had our first test case.

Apparently the user's diskette had gotten caught on the loading arm unit within the drive and was hopelessly stuck. By the time the call got to my level in the chain of command, two of our student techs had already been forced not only to dismantle the machine but also the zip drive to extract the ornery media.

As I walked in, one of our rather computer savvy student techs was handing the disk (without the metal slider -- it had been wrenched from the disk in the removal process) back to the user. He suggested to the user that he make a second copy of his disk. I agreed, assuming his logic was to salvage what data the user had on the disk. But our student tech said, matter-of-factly, "...because there's no metal protector anymore, your disk is more susceptible to viruses."

I almost died. He honestly thought they were airborne.

[ThatRandomGuy]

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

[#Ravencroft]

[Oasis]

/r/talesfromtechsupport/

Have fun.

[AutoBahn]

TV channel 11 in Atlanta has just advised us to turn off "and unplug" our home computers to keep them from being vandalized by web site hackers.

This is the same station that told us our cars weren't going to start on the morning of January 1, 2000, because of the Y2K problem.

I've just written to them to try to clue them in that most web sites aren't hosted on home computers. But the "and unplug" was the amusing part.

This is straight from a call log of a major computer company that happens to have technical support technicians in India and other points outside of the United States.

Problem Description: Client wants to know the MAC address for the computer. Advise client that I have no way of knowing or obtaining that information. Advise client that she would more than likely need to call Apple to see if they could point her in the direction of obtaining that. Client says that the MAC address is not a macintosh address. Client says that the MAC address can be obtained by doing an ipconfig /all. Client ended up disconnecting the call. During the call I believe I could hear someone else listening. Just before the call was ended by the client there was a something faintly said but I could not make it out.

Resolution: Advise client to contact Apple.

[Satan From Wreck-It-Ralph]

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

Once when I was brousing through a flea market, I came across an unusually large display of random pieces of junk that were for sale. The guy had a few computer parts lying in bins filled with brown water. His excuse was "The water will help it slip in better." I tried to tell him that the parts were all dead, but he insisted that they were fine and asked me to leave.

I run a small computer repair business out of my home. A kid from one of my classes in high school stopped over to see if I could fix his computer. The entire front of the computer was melted, with a huge burn mark where the floppy drive should have been. He said he couldn't find a place for his incense that he was burning so he stuck it in the floppy drive. Then he fell asleep.

My most interesting day ever working as a contract support technician back in the mid-90s for a large banking instituion in north Texas began with me riding the express escalator from the lobby up to the third floor, all the while watching the building's highest maintentence IT trouble ticket generator, a 60+ year old beehive-haired executive administrative assistant, dressed in a sparkly green pantsuit and skillfully wielding a clear plastic picnic knife and fork in order to fill a floppy drive with peanut butter "to stop the squeaky noises."

I didn't know it at the time, but this was also to be my last day with said large banking institution. Later, as I was getting stitches in the hospital, I was fired by phone call for being "involved in a negative physical altercation with a fellow employee or executive."

I was asked to service the laptop of a VIP executive who had a chemical dependency issue in a bad way. He had attempted ot install a NIC into his laptop docking station, which already had a NIC onboard, so of course the addressing conflicted. It appeared that he'd been up all night tweaking the thing and "working on the problem," because the docking station looked beat all to hell. Midway through my third reboot of his docked laptop, he suddenly became very irritated and abusive, and he stabbed me in the spine with a large bowie knife. You read that right. It stuck into one of my spine bones. I still have the scar. Don't ask me why I stupidly turned my back to him.

[lightbox]

this thread belongs on the site

[The Resonte!]

[Harm94]

This one guy my dad's office in the 90's thought a cd tray was a cup holder.

[Quote Story]

this thread belongs on the site

nah man it wasn't that bad
i mean
how would you feel if your laptop started beeping
like holy stuff is there a bomb in here brb calling swat

[lightbox]

nah man it wasn't that bad
i mean
how would you feel if your laptop started beeping
like holy stuff is there a bomb in here brb calling swat

Well considering my computer does that I wouldn't feel scared at all


Also this is a ycyl subthread

[AutoBahn]

Well considering my computer does that I wouldn't feel scared at all

'my computer does it and I know about it; the fact someone else might not means they're handicapped!!!!'
Please be quiet.
My dad used to work as a computer technician for Motorola/Freescale in the late 90's - late 2000's, and apparently their entire system was a mess. All the computers were connected in a giant 'share' system, and you could view anyone's files unless they password protected it themselves - 1 out of every 5 workers there did, so basically anyone could view pretty much anyone else's stuff. At one point there was also  a system migration done when they changed web servers from Motorola to Freescale in 2004, and whoever did it didn't bother deleting the old things on there - my dad used to dig through the files and found folders and files made by people who left years before and suchlike, untouched; the old webserver files and frame still existed, just unused.
Slightly different subject, similar problems: My dad also had trouble because he wasn't mainly working on computers, he was working on parts - specifically, the ones Motorola/Freescale made, to test them and fix whatever might be wrong. He used to tell stories about how he'd get processing chips back that had been used where he'd run through the diagnostic and the chips would set on fire because of how it was set up, or it would give an Error Code 0 (Power was put in, the chip didn't do anything in response - it's fried to bits), etc.
I don't know how the people who made those chips/The people that used them managed to screw them up that badly.