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The joys of working on a help desk.......
Comments from a Technical Support Desk
A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer.
The technician asked her if she was "running it under Windows."
The woman responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that's a
good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a
window, and his is working fine."
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Tech Support: "OK Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at
the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the
screen. Now type the letter 'P' to bring up the Program Manager."
Customer: "I don't have a 'P'."
Tech Support: "On your keyboard, Bob."
Customer: "What do you mean?"
Tech Support: "'P' on your keyboard, Bob."
Customer: "I'm not going to do that!"
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Overheard in a computer shop:
Customer: "I'd like a mouse mat, please."
Salesperson: "Certainly sir, we've got a large variety."
Customer: "But will they be compatible with my computer?
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Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager
icon."
Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows - because of the icons -
I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't
believe it was meant to-"
Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't believe
in icons."
Tech Support: "Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of
a filing cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?"
Customer: [click]
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Customer: "My computer crashed!"
Tech Support: "It crashed?"
Customer: "Yeah, it won't let me play my game."
Tech Support: "All right, hit Control-Alt-Delete to reboot."
Customer: "No, it didn't crash-it crashed."
Tech Support: "Huh?"
Customer: "I crashed my game. That's what I said before. I crashed
my spaceship and now it doesn't work."
Tech Support: "Click on 'File,' then 'New Game.'"
Customer: [pause] "Wow! How'd you learn how to do that?"
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Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having
problems:
The bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It
seemed strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I
walked her through the basics, then went over and printed out a test
sheet. It printed fine.
I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As
the paper started coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me.
I told her to wait until the paper came out on its own. Problem
solved.
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I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division
for about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just
couldn't solve.
She could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine,
which truly baffled me because the only true colors are cyan,
magenta, and yellow.
For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green
printed fine. Every color of the rainbow printed fine except for
yellow.
I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete
and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my coworkers for
help; they offered no new ideas. After over two hours of
troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send the
printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly, "Should I try
printing on a piece of white paper instead of this yellow paper?"
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A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech
support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the
printer."
On the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of
the screen, but the computer still couldn't find it.
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved
in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also
complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very
embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail
pointed away from her.
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Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software
okay, and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the
two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I
picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got
the message, 'No carrier,' on my screen. What's wrong?"
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An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows
installation that had gone terribly wrong.
Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on
my home computer."
Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let
the little act of piracy slide.
Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't
initialized."
Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
Customer: (proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk.
Would you like to initialize it?'"
Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialized, all the disks appeared to be
blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in
the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set
of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"
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For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from
someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few
minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached
between our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards.
She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed
look on her face. She called the tutor over and explained that no
matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The tutor tried
everything. By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking
red-faced.
I typed, "Leave me alone!" They both jumped back as this appeared on
their screen. "What the..." the tutor said. I typed, "I said leave
me alone!" The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I
swear!" It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The
conversation between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five
minutes.
Me: "Don't touch me!"
Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."
Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!" Etc.
Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer, and fell out of my
chair laughing. After they had realized what I had done, they both
turned beet red. Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.
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A customer got an error message every time he logs in. It turned out
he was typing his username and password in capital letters.
Tech Support: "Ok, let's try once more, but use lower case letters."
Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."
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Email from a friend: "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"
