Trials And Tribulations Of A Computer Technician

[kevjohn]

There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer.

When asked to define "great" he said, "I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!"

He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.

[warfie]

Last week I had a call from a woman who began her call by giving me a long listing of her credentials, beginning with her four years at MIT, covering her ten plus years of service in the tech support departments of various technology corporations, and ending with her forming a successful computer consulting and repair service. Then she asked her question:

"Do I have to plug in this new power supply to make it work?"

<deleted>?!?!

[kevjohn]

Last week I had a call from a woman who began her call by giving me a long listing of her credentials, beginning with her four years at MIT, covering her ten plus years of service in the tech support departments of various technology corporations, and ending with her forming a successful computer consulting and repair service. Then she asked her question:

"Do I have to plug in this new power supply to make it work?"

<deleted>?!?!

I'm glad you changed the gender.......I thought you were going to spill the beans on me, for a moment........

[warfie]

Customer: "My palmtop won't turn on."

Tech Support: "Did the battery run out, maybe?"

Customer: "No, it doesn't use batteries. It says it's powered by Windows."

[warfie]

A client called to report PC not working, I couldn't resolve the issue on the phone so I told her to

"Unplug it and bring it to me"

she asked "unplug the power cord?"

"yes"

"and bring it to you?"

"yes"

Later that day a smartly dressed young woman appeared in my office, holding a power cord...

I have to admit, it took a few moments to make the connection (if you'll excuse the pun).

Edited October 2, 2012 by warfie

[warfie]

Remember back when I started this thread, I said:

I would also LOVE to hear from some average users about stupid mistakes made by so-called-expert-technicians!

I am sure there must be plenty of those stories too!

Well I guess it's confession time... last week I spent 20 minutes trying to work-out why the screw holes in the DVD drive didn't align with the case I was trying to mount it in.

I had it upside-down...

[Crossy]

I had it upside-down...

Was that the drive or the case?

[kevjohn]

Remember back when I started this thread, I said:

I would also LOVE to hear from some average users about stupid mistakes made by so-called-expert-technicians!

I am sure there must be plenty of those stories too!

Well I guess it's confession time... last week I spent 20 minutes trying to work-out why the screw holes in the DVD drive didn't align with the case I was trying to mount it in.

I had it upside-down...

Man....yah know yeh spose to stand on yah head when yah do things like that.....sorry for the spellen..it's late...

[warfie]

I had it upside-down...

Was that the drive or the case?

Take your pick...

[kevjohn]

An instructor in the BASIC programming language was teaching his class how to write a simple program and execute it.

When each student had all their program steps keyed in, he told the class to type R-U-N and enter.

A lady in the back of the class said that it didn't work.

It turned out, when the instructor had said to type R-U-N, she had typed, "are you in."

[warfie]

I worked for a fairly large company in UNIX systems support. Over the the course of month or so, we'd been upgrading the memory in the older IBM workstations running AIX.

This is a simple process: Shut down the system, pop the cover off, stick in four SIMMs, button it up, and flip the power back on. The whole thing usually took less than five minutes per machine.

Many of our users seemed surprised that I had to open their CPU box to do the upgrade.

More than one said something along the lines of, "Oh, you mean you have to turn the box off to do that?" or, my personal favourite, "You mean upgrading the memory is a hardware thing?"

The scary part is that many of the users that were asking these questions were engineers.

[kevjohn]

I halve a spelling checker, It came with my pea see.

It plainly marks four my revue Mistakes I dew knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait aweigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the era rite Its rarely ever wrong.

I've scent this massage threw it, And I'm shore your pleased too no Its letter prefect in every weigh My checker tolled me sew.

[warfie]

A woman brought her Macintosh LC520 into my shop to have more memory added. This was all fine, but she said she the computer kept running out of memory at startup. I found this to be rather interesting and decided to fire it up at the counter while she watched.

After plugging in the computer to the wall and a keyboard and mouse I hit the power button. The computer sounded to life and the screen lit with the "Welcome to Macintosh" box on screen. This was immediately replaced by the Mac/OS picture and a status bar that was progressing as the extensions loaded. As the bar approached the end she said, "See the memory is all full." I looked at her rather confused and asked where she would have gotten that idea. Apparently one of the know-nothings at the local computer superstore had said that that was what the progress bar meant.

Needless to say she was rather angry at them for the erroneous information. She ending up not buying the RAM but was thankful for our good service.

[kevjohn]

For all you Computer Technicians, this is what you have to look forward too.

[warfie]

For all you Computer Technicians, this is what you have to look forward too.

Ah, so you have seen my website...

[kevjohn]

For all you Computer Technicians, this is what you have to look forward too.

Ah, so you have seen my website...

You bet, still have lots to look at, but I took that gif from an email.

Windows decided to update, so none of my gif worked, until I closed down and restarted....

Edited October 10, 2012 by kevjohn

[warfie]

Customer: "The install fails half way through. I tried several times, and it always fails at the same point."

Tech Support: "Did you see any kind of error message?"

Customer: "Yes."

Tech Support: "What did the error message say?"

Customer: "It said, 'Please insert Disk 2.'"

Tech Support: "Have you got another disk there?"

Customer: "Yes."

Tech Support: "Is it labelled 'Disk 2'?"

Customer: "Yes, it is."

Tech Support: "Insert that disk into the drive, and click 'OK'."

Customer: "Wow, thanks! That's fixed it. It's installing now. What was it, a faulty disk or something?"

[kevjohn]

Customer: "The install fails half way through. I tried several times, and it always fails at the same point."

Tech Support: "Did you see any kind of error message?"

Customer: "Yes."

Tech Support: "What did the error message say?"

Customer: "It said, 'Please insert Disk 2.'"

Tech Support: "Have you got another disk there?"

Customer: "Yes."

Tech Support: "Is it labelled 'Disk 2'?"

Customer: "Yes, it is."

Tech Support: "Insert that disk into the drive, and click 'OK'."

Customer: "Wow, thanks! That's fixed it. It's installing now. What was it, a faulty disk or something?"

Or something......

[kevjohn]

click

Edited October 12, 2012 by kevjohn

[warfie]

Caption 1) Finally! a practical use for a tablet PC.

Alternatively,

Caption 2) This will not be covered by warranty.

[warfie]

I once got an unexpectedly helpful reply to a question I asked on Microsoft's on-line tech support service. I wrote back to thank them for a complete and concise reply and said how much I appreciated it.

The next day I had a response:

"We are looking in to the problem and will contact you with a solution as soon as possible."

[ravip]

A Mouse Problem

The User

Hullo!

Dunno if my "mouse" is angry with me (she might have good reasons…) or else. but lately she moves randomly or stops "hic et ubique" for no reasonable purpose: since I cant see a pussy around.

Mind you to give her a check-up?

Thanks

Pat

Reply from IT

Dear Pat,

We trust your mouse is behaving today.

We confirm that a pussy wandering about the office generally has a disruptive effect and, although our Tech and I checked your office and did not see a pussy, that does not change the possibility that there may have been one hiding there somewhere.

We think the reason your mouse may have been upset is that you have referred to it as "she". We wish to respectfully point out that the mice used by our Organisation are males… as you can tell by the fact that they all have balls.

Best regards from your IT Department.

Edited October 18, 2012 by ravip

[warfie]

A very Australian computer problem: (from many years ago).

A user called to say that when he turned on his computer last night it "hissed" at him, worked for a few minutes, then stopped.

I arranged an on-site call, and decided to take this one personally.

This is what I found...

<-- At least the CD-ROM is the right way up -->

[kevjohn]

[kevjohn]

When the office printer's type began to grow faint, the office manager called a local repair shop where a

friendly service agent told him that the printer probably only needed a thorough cleaning.

Because the store charged $50 for such cleanings, he said, the manager might try reading the printer's manual and doing the job himself.

Pleasantly surprised by the man's candor, the office manager asked, "Does your boss know that you discourage business!?"

"Actually it's my boss's idea," the employee replied. "We usually make more money on repairs if we let people try to fix things themselves first."

[warfie]

Just got back from a call-out, one of the problems was that the customer had replaced the cartridge in his printer and it still didn't work.

He figured that he'd made some mistake installing it.

I took it out and it looked dry, as if empty (the case was opaque so I couldn't see if it had ink or not).

He handed me the box it came in, with the 'old' cartridge inside, asking "did I get the wrong one?"

I looked at it and asked if he had removed the protective tape from new one and put it on the old one.

He said "no... OH! I didn't did I?!"

He had taken the old cartridge out, opened the new box and somehow mixed them and put the old one back in again...

Poor guy was so embarrassed...

[warfie]

Years ago, I built a computer for a client, it included a CD burner.

It tested OK, but after delivery, the client complained that the burner was not working.

I had him bring the machine back and I tested it, it seemed fine.

He collected it but next day complained again that the CDs he burned were no good.

He brought it back again, and again, it tested OK.

We were all baffled!

I asked him to bring in one of the failed CDs, he did.

After burning, he had labelled it with a ball-point pen, thereby destroying the data layer... DOH!

[warfie]

[warfie]

[warfie]

I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.

edit to add credit: http://xkcd.com/1168/

Edited February 1, 2013 by warfie