Mad Mouse.

Call to the helldesk, user saying "My mouse has stopped working!". After some brief diagnostics one of our crew went downstairs to the floor and found the user in question.

Did the usual mouse-checking things. Ball moving OK. Two years of sandwich-crumbs removed from inside. Batteries changed. Still no-go.

While he's pondering the next step, he overhears someone in the next bay on the phone to the helldesk logging a call, saying "My mouse-cursor keeps moving by itself!"

The mice, of course, were wireless - and had somehow got interchanged.

I could also narrate the instance of a site that was off-net for over a week after Badgers tunneled through the fibre-duct and the telco had to build a new duct, avoiding the Badger-den.

I still remember talking to Indonesia support

Was working helldesk for EDS when my machine died mid call with a hiss and a waft of ozone.

Shucked the cover to see what was wrong, and found one of the chips quietly incinerating itself.

After poking it a bit and getting the colleagues to have a laugh the boss instructed me to stop turning the power on and log a ticket.

Internal support was offshore. Yes, the outsourcer outsourced itself.

Me: Hi guys, need a ticket logged to internal support in <location>, needs a new motherboard, electrical fault.

First question "What error message do you see in windows?"

Me: Um, no, you misunderstand. The machine has caught fire. It will not work.

"Have you tried turning it off and back on again and does the windows logo come up?"

Me: Ahh. Look, just log a ticket and I'll get my colleague to fill in the details when it comes through.

"I can't do that unless you can tell me the error reason."

Nevermind ...

<walk downstairs. Hi guys, my pc just fried itself. Got a spare?>

(Nuke icon for exaggerated effect)

One of our clients IT bods had a call 1st thing one Monday morning from a user to say that none of their PCs on the entire floor were working that morning. They would switch on etc, but could not access any of their documents.

The IT bod asked if anything had changed over the weekend, but the user said nothing had. Thinking the floor switch must be down, the IT bod sauntered across to investigate. Imagine their surprise when they got there to find the entire floor was empty.

Turns out everyone had moved up a floor in the build; but NOTHING had changed. Imagine everyone’s surprise, when they got told they had to move back because there was no network cabling yet on the floor they had moved to.

It's this big

My brother was trying to copy a file onto a floppy disk on my old Amiga, and came to me because it wouldn't work.

"Well, how big is the file?" I asked

"About this big" he replied in all seriousness, holding up thumb and forefinger.

Shark it

Surely everyone here knows about the Shark/pilot fish web site with hundreds of classic stories going back 30-40 years?

For years they've collected the best IT stories and give out free Shark T-Shirts to anyone who gets accepted for publication. I've had 5...

My personal favourite:

Gave customer the finished custom designed program (on 5 1/4" floppies)

Customer phones up next day. "Can't get the disks to work"

We personally go to his Work and ask to see the floppies he was given.

There they were, nicely ring bond, yes with 2 holes punched in them!

Gave him 2 new ones and told him to keep them safe and undamaged.

So he agreed and promptly folded them in front of me and stuffed them in his pocket!

When training an older, non computer literate process operator on how to use a PC. I told him that it he moved the mouse up then the arrow on the screen would move up. He the proceeded to lift the mouse vertically off the mouse mat.

Dumb boss story

In about 1993, my then boss took the installation floppies of our latest software with him on the train to try out on his laptop (as was his wont).

Cue the usual call for help (over a very bad mobile connection, not helped by train going through tunnels etc.):

Boss: "It doesn't recognise the disc! It says the label is wrong!"

Me:"Change the disc label [it should have been "INST#001 or something]."

(Short while later)

Boss:"It's still not working!"

[I described the correct use/syntax of the LABEL command in DOS]

Boss:"Oh! I'd only changed the writing on the disc label!"

If it had been me I'd have kept quiet about my stupidity, at least. No wonder all his previous companies had gone under...

A few stories:

Having spent 6 years in the trenches before moving on to better things, I have a few helldesk stories.

One happened to the guy in the next cubicle, it was short, sweet and over quick - The caller's cup holder was broken; he was referred to hardware support.

My personal worst was a fellow who bought a SCSI scanner (yeah, that long ago) because the sales guy told him that because it came with an ISA SCSI card it could work on any computer. He called because he could not save his scanned imaged to the floppy disk. I had him check the connection from the card to the scanner, it was in tight, the cable was in good shape. But the card...

Well, it turns out that the guy felt that if the scanner would work with any computer, it should work with no computer. He was putting the floppy disk in the static bag with the SCSI card, which was hooked to the scanner, then pushing the button on the scanner. He returned the scanner because he did not have a computer.

I still wonder how he was trying to read the floppy, with no computer.

Someone please shoot me now!

Spent a weekend upgrading users computers, only to get a call on Monday from two of them, saying that their computers weren't working.

"My screen is all black, and it won't respond."

Walked into their respective offices, and turned their monitors ON! Problem fixed.

Tidying up

I'm only tech support to friends and family (*sobs*), but..

Years ago, in the days of Windows XP, an anally-retentive friend of mine phoned up in a fluster, complaining that his new computer had stopped working. Working through what the start up sequence was doing over the phone didn't really highlight anything and was simply confused matters, so I enquired what (if anything) had happened before he turned it off last time. “Nothing — I'd just tided a load of files away and then turned it off - nothing was wrong” was the reply.

“What do you mean you ‘tidied a load of files away?’”

Turns out the overly-fastidious numpty had decided he didn't like how his C:\ drive was organised, so made his own file system, moving around Windows folders and such 'til it looked neat.

A little knowledge is a terrifying thing.

> Help-desk: “Please go to 'My PC'.”

Well that's really more like a "support" fail right there.

If support people insist on talking b*llocks and expecting their customers to be psychic then they should expect everything they get....

Oooeerrr Missus!

It's 17.25, we're about to make our way home, and the phone goes, it's one of our smaller customers and they're concerned that someone has hacked into their systems as the mouse is moving on it's own.

Hoping for a quick resolution, one of the younger girls on staff logs in and makes a note of the remote access user, so they can phone them up and ask if they're genuinely using the system. Whilst she's doing this, she's told that suddenly a gay porn website has opened up and is playing videos.

Anyway, between her and myself we trace back the user ID, it's the MD of our client, so we quickly phone his mobile, and hear a brief couple of seconds of audio from the same website. We innocently ask him if he's working from home tonight, and he replies yes.

Trying desperately not to laugh, my colleague says to him that he should be careful as we've had his office on the line saying someone's accessed the internet on the server and it's visible on the monitor. The MD apparently swears, and hangs up on her, leaving us in fits of laughter.

We phone back to the office and say that the situation is resolved, and we'd speak to the MD in the morning for them to give a full report.

The nicer the customer, the better the shemale pr0nz

One night, at the server farm I work at, a call comes in. Customer is irate because she cannot access her server, and she's about to get on a plane for vacation. There is a note on her account that her firewall had been giving fits earlier, and I cannot SSH in, so I ask our monitoring team to check it at console.

The person on that night in monitoring is new.

So, while I have her on the phone getting more and more irate, the monitoring goes to the server, finds it up, and reports back that it's running. They've also turned off iptables.

Okay, if it's a firewall issue, I should be able to get in.

No dice.

By now, this customer is quite peeved, and I'm getting frustrated too. Because I couldn't go to the server and check it myself, I ask the monitoring technician to check it again, see if they can get out of the machine.

The answer to that is "no".

I ask them to check for errors on the network card. They don't do that. Rather, they wait for networking to go physically check the server.

Customer at this point tells me to pull my finger out of my ass and get her site up.

Those errors I asked the monitoring tech to check for?

Present.

So, off to our hardware replacement team the server goes, to get a new NIC.

The main site? Shemale porn. The person who called in? The main star of the site...

I got told by a shemale porn star to pull my finger out of my ass.

We have another shemale porn site that the customer calls in semi-regularly for. They are as sweet as pie. The porn stars on this site are also much higher quality.

There is now a saying at work:

"The nicer the customer, the better the shemale porn."

5.25 inch floppy

Many years ago, a lady in a large financial house I was working in was having issues restoring files from a 5.25 floppy disc. Apparently, she 'Couldn't get the disk in the drive'. The reason being, that her backup procedure was as follows:

Back up to disc (ok so far)

Roll disc in to typewriter and type the date on the label (Dubious at best)

Hole punch the disc (ahhh...) and store in an A4 folder

I thought I'd been sent on a wind up when she produced files full of these discs, all u shaped and with two holes in and severe impact damage to the surface. I asked if she'd made copies of the discs not expecting much. She had, on the photocopier, and produced several other files from the other side of the room with sheets of A4 and a lovely monochrome impression of a floppy disc which could only inducate additional damage to the discs through heat.

Suffice to say, I was unable to assist.

Business Idiots more like..

The following conversation took place between myself (Networking) and two members of the 'Business Intelligence' department.

Them: Can you open port 3306 on this server (lets call it Server-A)

Me: You need to specify a source and destination for me to open a port on the firewall. What's the source?

Them: (Confused looks to each other) ..Server-A...

Me: Ok, and the destination?

Them: (Confused chatting among themselves, that went on for quite some time) ...localhost...

Me: (stunned silence, then): So it's connecting to itself?

Them: Yes, can you open the ports on it?...

I proceeded to explain that it was nothing to do with the network, complete with an explanation on what a network is (using two cups and string as an example), and then asked them for the 10 minutes of my life they'd wasted back.