Hell worst I ever had still bugs me to this day

Was working as a remote tech agent for a company here in the states which bugged the hell out of me.

It started with me coming in to cover for someone who was off and this day lasted all of 4 hours also it was my first and only call of that day.

Lady was calling to see if she could get evidence of any sort of infidelity on her husbands part because she wanted to get a divorce. !0 minutes later I'm connected to her computer and I decide to open up file explorer on Windows and the first (and only folder I opened) was the upload folder for Limewire

Still don't know what made me check that first.

Anyway, I opened up some pictures (and I know I'm looking at voyeur pictures of a female after a couple of them). Flip to the next one and then the next one and next thing I hear is her sudden intake on breath and says, and I quote, "That's my 13 year old daughter!!!"

"HOLD PLEASE....."

To cut this short this call ended 4 hours later roughly, her freaking out on the phone, me in the conference room with the owner of the company, my boss, the corporate attorney and the Ohio state troopers giving a disposition. Needless to say I said fuck the rest of the day and told my boss I was going home and didn't care how busy it was. Opened a very large bottle of Skyy 75 vodka I had had for 5 years and go blasted.

Moral of this story for me was I don't want to work with consumers ever again and that it really really sucks. Sighs...I hate people like that.

Before ADSL

Customer on the 'phone, I'm the build manager for our company which was also a VISP. Being technical, I was also second-level support for the VISP arm.

Customer: Your <expletive> Internet is down again!

Me: I'm showing no outage at present. Do you mind checking a few things for me before I call our datacentre?

Customer: I need my e-mail for my business! I'm losing <expletive> money here!

At this point we launch into a diagnostic session where I find that her modem is connected to the fax line, the modem is responding nicely to AT commands and the PPP setup is correct as far as I can tell. Customer is getting increasingly vehement that our dial-up is mams vertical, although my console says it's fine.

Customer: <long trail of expletives randomly laced with other words that make no sense>

While she's swearing at me, I'm on the other line to BT checking her fax line. BT faults comes back with a very interesting cause. Back to line 1 where she's still expounding on my ancestry, habits and probable fate.

Customer: My business is suffering because of your <expletive> incompetence! You're a <expletive> and I'm going to sue you for loss of earnings!

Me: Have you tried paying the bill for your fax line recently?

Cue tumbleweeds. Sometimes you're the statue, occasionally you're the pigeon.

Wireless

Back when the volcano had created the ash cloud I had a call from a guy that started the conversation with

"Aliens have stolen my wifi"

after bit of questioning, he believed that aliens had created the ash cloud so create electro magnetic charge in the air to suck the wifi out of his house.

some more questioning

turns out that his wife had unplugged the router to plug in her hair straighteners.

Why won't it print

I used to work for ICL on a support Helldesk for a large company that put windows on every PC

I remember a user phoning up complaining that their printer wasn't working, the paper went through but her document never appeared on the paper.

Ink status showed fine, a test page would work but it was difficult to read.

After spending an hour on the phone with her I gave up and asked her to email the document in, which she did.

When I looked at the document she'd changed the text to white.

When I phoned her back to tell her this she explained that she was using green paper so it should work ok....

The US Navy

Not really a dumb user story, more about creative problem solving.

Couple of decades back we had a S/390 sitting in Portsmouth running half the business. Every couple of months or so it would crap itself, sometimes rebooting spontaneously, sometimes just generating gibberish. After having the engineers in blue round a few times (by which time it was invariably behaving itself again), the client was about ready to nuke the whole thing.

Coincidentally one of the engineers happened to be in attendance the next time this happened, and whilst studying the recently silent 390 to see what could have gone wrong, he happened to glance out of the window and see the US aircraft carrier Enterprise steaming into the Solent. Working on a hunch, he asked the client to look out the window the next time the mainframe crapped itself, and sure enough there was the aircraft carrier again.

Bit of aluminium foil around the server room and the problem went away. Turned out the radar installation on the Enterprise was causing havoc with the sensitive electronics in the 390, which shut down as a precaution every time the US Navy came to town.

No helldesk duty for me

but I had my share of helldeskers I'd love to have LARTed back into the cave they had just managed to crawl out of.

By far the worst was some bimbo whose sole contribution to the call solving process was to mangle the (usually) Dutch problem statement from the actual user into something almost entirely, but not quite unlike English, then punting the call to second line as quick as possible.

"User wrote a file yesterday. Today there stand only Oestriol. Dhr Coert know there more from"

Note 1: No username, no department (although that could be determined from the "Dhr Coert", the department coordinator), no location (knowing the department still left several options), no file name.

Note 2: Giving the name of another file (it was, actually, just part of the name) doesn't magically reveal the name of the missing file.

Note 3: Both the second and the third sentence couldn't have turned out worse had they been machine-translated from Dutch into English using word-for-word look-up without grammar checking.

After one particular episode in which said bimbo repeatedly tried to use my brain to do her thinking, I notified my team leader that I would not work on calls she had entered. His (quick and simple) solution was then to separate the bimbo and her workstation by a distance of 300 meter minimum (the distance from Building 14 to the main entrance).

One liner...

So a customer walks up to my desk and asks me for an Ethernet cable. Me, holding up a 6-foot cable and a longer cable: "How long do you need it?" Customer: "Forever." (okay, I could have phrased the question better)

Our L1 Helpdesk managed to turn a simple request to change an email setting on a healthy machine into a situation that required a customer's mail file needing to be restored from backup tape. Our department also enjoyed it immensely when they called all of us in sequence at 3AM local time to replace a speakerphone in a conference room. (no one was even there) The best part is them leaving me a message on my desk phone first, as if I was sitting in my office at 3AM to answer the phone.

Tech Support stories go back a long way...

My Granddad was a TV technician when they were still a new technology.

Just before the coronation of EQ2 in '52 he had a lot of support calls. One call was from a person who had an intermittent problem with their TV, my Granddad said they would need to bring it in so he could do a soak test on it. They declined saying it was going to be too expensive. A couple of weeks later he gets a call from them to say that the TV was now green, so he decided to pop around and have a look. He found the TV had mould on it, it turned out they had decided to soak test it themselves in the bath.

"My computer is possessed by the Devil"

About ten years ago I had a frantic phone call from a woman saying that her computer had been "possessed by the Devil". Could I come round immediately, preferably with a priest?

The machine was running Red Hat linux. When I got there (alone - where are priests when you need them in a hurry?), the computer was sitting on its own in a darkened room - the woman was too frightened to go near it. I started it up and waited. After about ten minutes, the screen went blank and then slowly filled with an image of flames. A large grinning head slowly rose up out of the flames - it was smoking a pipe, but I didn't notice at the time. It gave me quite a start in that darkened room.

It was, of course, the Xflame screensaver in its default configuration. I removed Xflame and several other "problematic" screensavers, and assured her that the computer had been thoroughly exorcised. I decided not to mention anything about the daemons and zombies that were still infesting the machine.

Service desk Number

When I first started level 2 support at a new site I had a number of walkups with odd questions. The most basic being Password resets.

Client: Hi I have just got back from leave and I need to reset my password.

Me: No worries that's all handled in the city , Please call 8887 and the service desk will reset it for you.

Client: So if I type 8887 in it will reset my password?

Me : sigh

This happened twice on the same day

I was the dumb user...

Okay, so not a helpdesk call but I remember doing this myself about 25-30 years ago... My dad had bought a new Amstrad (be nice to my dad please) 1512 (dual 5 1/4" drives) and I was busy naking myself the home expert on it. It came with GEM Desktop in it and I loved it, especially the word processor (I think it was WordPerfect) as I decided I was a budding author in the making.

After a few months though I started having problems finding my files in the GEM windows as some of them seemed to be disappearing off the bottom of the screen. I discovered that by deleting files I could see that I didn't want, my "lost" ones would reappear at the bottom. From memory I think this lasted for a few months before I discovered that you could scroll up and down within the windows.....

To this day I still believe that my Lord of the Rings beating work would have shocked the world if I hadn't deleted it by mistake...

Not quite IT, but...

...same vein for certain.

So, here I am, one of the few engineers in a graduate dormitory at a prestigious university. It gets out I know something about computers, and so I help a few people here and there, as I've done all my life for friends and family. I'm not too bad about fixing things more generally, so eventually folks start coming to me with various problems.

One day, I'm sitting in my room, when an (East) Indian girl (not FOB by the way, well-Westernized and with significant experience living in Japan as well, and pursuing an advanced degree in international relations or language studies or somesuch) who lives around the way stops by with her lamp, tells me it doesn't work and asks if I can have a look just to see if something can be done before she throws it away. Nice girl, no problem, how hard can this be, so I say yes.

Take a look - no obvious damage to any wiring. open things up to where I can get at the switch - looks fine as well. Check with my multimeter - great. What could be wrong? Weirdest thing I'd ever seen.

Then, I think to myself, "wait a minute, really?", and I check the bulb.

I call the owner of the lamp to my room, indicate that I've looked it over and have an idea of what's wrong, and ask her what exactly happened to the lamp that caused it to break in the first place. She indicates that she accidentally knocked it off her desk, and after that, "it just stopped working". Indeed. I explain that, if anything like that should happen again, it's probably a good idea to try a new bulb before pitching the lamp.

"I don't understand it - the car just stopped, and I'd not even driven it 500 km. Time to get a new car, I guess..."

Arc_Light

We had a phone call in from one of our re-sellers not too long ago. We manage a hosted-VoIP setup and have tiers of re-sellers below us. Usually they would have to log issues using a CRM site, but unfortunately one particular client curries alot of favor so they can get away with phoning engineers directly.

On a quiet day, we see an "Urgent" issue raised and instantly everyones phone rings. I answer, hearing a panic'd client saying "Someone just told me our phones are down!".

It took a few seconds of calm breathing before we could let him know that;

a, His company uses our system.

b, We use our system.

c, We were currently on the phone to each other.

To make matters worse we ended up being asked for a root cause analysis about a service outage that never happened.

The damned thing won't stop beeping!

Back when I was a Junior software developer we had to speak directly to the customers of our software. One day a gent came on the phone asking why his computer keeps making intermittent beeping noises. After discounting POST error messages (the PC was working fine) or anything from the internal speaker (It was turned down - Some Amstrad PCs had volume knobs back then IIRC) I was at a loss.

"Can you turn the PC off and leave it off for about 5 minutes before turning it back on?"

About 3 minutes later I get a call from the chap,"It's doing it when it's turned off!"

"Sir, could it be anything else in your office that is making the beeping?"

"Well the only other thing that's near the desk is this smoke alarm that... oh, sorry to have bothered you."

Power supply *has* been integrated at source...

Probably my favourite of quite a number of classics from a year or two of working on a helpdesk when a student:

User: (on phone) My PC won't turn on.

Me: Ok, have you checked that it's plugged in?

User: Yep, it's definitely plugged in - and I checked both ends of the cable.

Me: Hmm... Right then - are you pressing the correct button - the one on the box under the desk?

User: Yes, I've pressed it. I shut my PC down every night so I know which one it is because I have to turn it back on every morning.

Me: Ok, and there are no lights on the box when you press the button?

User: Nope, no lights.

Me: How about the monitor? Any lights there?

User: Nope, none at all.

Me: Ah, this is starting to make sense. Which floor are you on, exactly?

User: The third.

Me: The one with the power cut, then.

User: ....

user: my computer says "Check Video Cable" what do I do?

Me: Well you can check that your video cable is connected at both ends, but the computer might simply be turned off.

User: how do i check if the computers off?

Me: should be a green light above the power button if its not on the computers off.

user: there is now power button the computer doesn't have one.

Me: *pause* Um yes it does, every computer has one its on the front somewhere. (few different models floating around wasnt sure which one this guy had)

user: no im telling you it doesnt have a power button.

I insist it does. end up walking down to his desk, lift the posted not turn it on and walk out without a word.

Printers confuse me!

I used to be the network manager for a college, and when our technician was absent I covered the support desk in the IT Suite. In those days, we had a Laserjet 4 printer with a 500 sheet tray for the students to print to in the open access area. One student approached asking for paper as the printer had run out. I handed him a wrapped pack of paper and told him that it will all fit in the bottom tray.

He proceeded to put the entire pack of paper, still wrapped, in the tray and wondered why it still said there was no paper

Windows has Crashed!

Our service desk was often inundated with calls that should have gone to Facilities Service Desk. Despite the number being different, and the greeting stating ICT Service Desk. The best of these was when the receptionist rang at once centre. The answerphone message went like this:

Hi, it's Jean at ... centre. The glass in the door that leads out to the childrens play area is broken.

ICP

I used to be the Deputy IT Manager at a large manufacturing company, with a typing pool full of young (and some not so young) ladies to type up the notes from our various managers' dictaphones (remember them?) and hand written notes. One young lady, who was rather short and fairly round, was forever complaining that her Wang word processor kept inserting random spaces into her text, but whenever we tested it in our departmental lab, we could never get it to display the fault. One day, in desperation, I went down into the typing pool (at great personal risk) to observe how these spaces were happening. I observed that she was sitting on a wooden chair, and the top of the desk was about three inches below her bust. Every time she leaned over to read the next sentence of the script, her right boob pressed the spacebar, resulting in a string of spaces. Problem solved, nip down to the pattern shop for a set of four three inch cubes of deal and some four inch nails, invert the chair and attach one cube to each leg, and, voila! no more rogue spaces.

Those were the days!

Help Desk Hell

When I went out in the field as a software support tech at a gov't agency, had a user in the Director's office call frantically stating her mac was typing random numbers all on its own! We had just upgraded to OS X and all I could think was somehow she'd gotten into the Darwin kernel. I spent two hours and could not reproduce the problem. Let her a note to call me when/if if happens again.

I come in next day to her equally frantic message from 9 pm night before. "It's doing it again!!!" I go up to the office, and as soon as I walk in the door, I know the problem. She has a mac laptop plugged into an external monitor, but the laptop is open and she's using that keyboard. HOWEVER, she also has an external keyboard plugged in, and on the FLOOR upside down under her desk!! I sit down, and without touching a thing, tap the keyboard with my shoe. "Is this the problem?" She starts laughing. I unplug the external keyboard.

Problem solved.

Help Desk Hell

Again, working in the field doing software support for a gov't agency....

User calls that her scanner is not working. I go to the site and she has both a pc and a mac on her desk. I ask her about the scanner and she says, well, it's not working from my mac.

I look at the set up, and then at her, and cannot help myself. I laugh. The scanner is hooked up to the pc.