lusers
 

"I need a _______ button on this [software]!" Okay buddy, I'll submit your request to the vendor, who will submit my request to their developers, and they will set right away to re-writing the whole shebang, releasing a new version, which we will lickety split have installed on every workstation in the whole place, and by, maybe the end of the day, you'll have your button that you wanted there. Imagine that, I can have the software completely changed at the drop of a hat. Just for you. Call me if your new button hasn't arrived by the morning.

Thanks. I'm glad we finally have some tech support people who understand how to do things properly. (Remember, down, not across.)

Let's see, what can I contribute? Hmmm. So many to choose from.

Him: "You know, there are so many problems with Windows these days.. and the Macs are really getting great. I sometimes wonder if we ought to consider switching to Macs.
Me: "No. Not gonna happen. We can't even consider it."
Him: "Why not?"
Me: "Because the big product your department uses, that you live and die by, and that you swear is so fabulous that you won't even admit alternatives to it exist (much less actually consider one), runs only on Windows, and the developer is completely in Microsoft's back pocket."
Him: "Oh."

Ohhh..were you in a meeting with my client? Make sure you add that they don't want to pay for this vastly scope item.

"I wanted a wireless laptop! Why do I have to plug it in?"

sorry, our fault......

we forgot to specify that our software was designed for peeps with brains...

this fault has been remedied by our revised EULA as below....

"I understand that anything I don't understand is due to genetically inherited imbalances between my perceived world view and the actual world view as described by the software vendor, and that unless I take the yellow pills it's all my fault"

I have this one manager who is usually pretty on top of technical things. But, somewhere, somehow, she got the idea that our high-resolution monitors have the video card "inside them" (that is, inside the monitor).

I think I understand where she went off track... somebody must have told her how these dual monitors ship as a package with the video card they are QC-tested with at the factory; the two monitors and the dual video card are a set, they go together.

I've explained this, but she always reverts to the old idea that the video card is "inside" some of our monitors. While working out a quote on some new hardware, we planned to order a new workstation and re-deploy some of our old monitors. In this case, off-the-shelf Dells, not the high-res ones. She asked the vendor "Do we need a video card?" as if she thought the Dell monitors might have a video card "inside" them.

Part Two: Totoku monitors slick sales flyer brags of an insutry-first LUT, in the monitor (their point, if I recall, was something like not needing an after-market video card to run color 2MP monitors, NONE OF WHICH need that, not even our crap Dell 2000FPs) ... anyway, this brought on a whole new round of the video card being inside the monitor confusion.

When i was doing tech support at my last company, i got a ticket in the queue opened by the oldest person in the company. The ticket was pretty vague and all it said was that her CDROM wasn't reading CD's. Because of her age, I didn't want to try and troubleshoot with her over the phone first, so I decided to just stop by. When I get there the first thing I notice is that she's got a SUPER-OLD pc, that dosen't even have a CDROM. I asked her to show me what she was doing exactly and sure enough she was taking the cd's and putting them into the air ventilation slits in the front of the case. After opening the case I found like 5 cd's just sitting directly on the motherboard. She was really embarrased when I told her that computer didn't have a CDROM but I told her EVERYONE made that mistake. She took her own life the very next day.

NO SHE DIDN'T!?

ha ha ha ... every support story should end like that!

When I was in college, the one School of Music course that was made up entirely of non-music majors was Music Appreciation. A certain number of students would always wait until exam week to actually listen to any of the music.

Soon after the music library got its first CDs and CD players (I want to say this was Spring 1988, but it could have been 1987), one of these students came in and didn't realize you had to open the drawer to put the CD in. They ended up sliding the CD in through the space between the drawer's front face and the outer case of the player. We had to get somebody to take it apart and remove the CD.

I'm sure I keep submitting this link, but I urge you to visit Computer Stupidities, and browse through the archive of user-submitted "stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users" ... at the top of the page is this quote:

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

"What do you meen that I need to click the start icon to shut down my pc ?? Just turning off the power strip works FINE !"
But TOTALY corupts the data bace you are trying to work with .
And also why I keep a copy of EVERy customer custom program on my lap top !!!

" No sir , just point and click , ,,,, just move the mouse pointer to the icon for the program you want to start and click ,,,, left click ,,,, no don't hold the button in , just click ,,,,, No don't double click it takes a sec for the program to start , now you have started the same program 3 times , , point and click the X in the top right of the window , now again , ,,,, there ya go"
This was me trying to instruct a customer that said he was Puter Literet . This Ain't the first time , or is it FAR from the last time I will have to have this conversation with a customer .

" Oh just go install this soft ware up date ."
What is it suposed to do ??
" Damn If I Know ! "
So how am I suposed to know if it worked ??
"Oh the customer will know "
The person who has requested the software update is NEVER there , and call back 3 days later asking if we did the update they requested , and then whay it doesn't work exactly as they wanted .

Welcome to MY Puter world !! ( Nite Mare !!! )

Darwin lives on. Well done.

Me: Yeah, I just installed patch # 735843 on Solaris 8 and I'm having a problem. [I actually explained the problem, but this was a dozen years ago so I don't remember what it was.]
Sun Tech Support: OK, let's just see what you have here... hey, you don't have patch # 654389.. that's odd...
Me: Yeah, we haven't installed it yet.
STS: But they're in the same cluster patch. [this is a group of a couple dozen patches that you install all at once.]
Me: Yeah, I know, but we don't install the cluster patches. We go one at a time.
STS: How come?
Me: Because the third time a cluster patch screwed up one of our systems and we had no way to tell which individual patch was causing the problem, we decided we weren't really saving any time by using the clusters.
STS: Well yeah that's true, they are kind of hard to troubleshoot....