Funnyist IT Support Issue Raised.

Back in the days of 3.5" disks my mother-in-law was absolutely convinced that leaving a disk on a shelf/desk/wherever would cause it to 'pick up a virus' from 'the dust in the air' :confused:


Ah the good old days of 3.5 inch floppys, where a format would take an age lol

And took me a whole lesson to Copy a dirty picture of Scully off the X Files and putting it as a wallpaper on all the PC's in my Schools IT suite on good old Windows 95 RM Nubus Machines - got me a weeks detention.

Ah the good old days, I was used as an example for 5 years in that school of what not to do on school computers..... I was a Legend.

The boy who hacked the schools computers and put a porn pic as the wall paper LOL, What I actually did was scam the IT Teacher access password which allowed changes to settings etc hardly hacking the thing is that password never changed so the the next few years I could do just about anything I wanted, remember accessing teachers meetings notes once that proved interesting reading, LOL
 
Probably too busy off earning too much money :p (assuming we're thinking of the same person :p)
 
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Some people just shouldnt be alowed to use a computer.

agreed. My worst 1st line support experience went as follows:

Computer had seemingly crashed, was unresponsive and she was reporting she couldn't get it to work.

Me: Ok I'd like you to press and hold the power button on your computer for me.

Her: OK

Me: ok the screen should have gone blank now is that correct ?

Her: Yes that's right

Me: Ok can you turn it back on for me now ... *pause* ok you should be seeing a black screen with some white writing on, or maybe a windows logo

Her: No, it looks exactly the same

Me: what do you mean "the same"

Her: well all my things are still there

Me: *realises she's only turned the monitor off and not the computer" Ok you've only turned the monitor off, i need you to turn the actual computer off

Her: that is the computer

Me: *ponders how to explain this nicely* Ok let's walk through what you do on a morning. You come, sit down on your desk and turn on the computer. What button do you press to do that ? i need you to press that one for me.

Her: i don't switch the computer on

Me: *really confused now* what do you mean, you leave it on all night ?

Her: no we have somebody who comes in at 6am especially for us who turns the computer on. I've no idea how to do that

Me:

double-facepalm.jpg
 
Me: *realises she's only turned the monitor off and not the computer" Ok you've only turned the monitor off, i need you to turn the actual computer off

I get this all the time too, the users that think the screen is the computer.
 
One I remember from back in my 2nd line support days was a woman who kept complaining that Outlook was sending her emails all by itself, before she had finished typing them. I thought it might be a dodgy laptop keyboard so I gave her a desktop one just to rule that out but same thing happened. I tried her on another laptop, still no good.

It turns out she was pressing Ctrl + Enter which is the keyboard shortcut for Send :rolleyes:
 
Something is not right with my internet now, earlier on i read the OP's post and it was fine but now at the bottom of his post it says-

Last edited by MuttsNutts; 5th Jul 2011 at 14:37

I don't like that and i think the internet is broke as it wasn't there earlier :D
 
People expect to use these tools, they say they don't no how to use them so why apply for a job if they can't friggin use one!

a lot of the time it's ignorance as they don't even want to understand they just want it done for them.

Even worse is majority of jobs now state in the ad or the like that you should be literate with basic things like office. And I bet 90% of these people in an interview say yeah I'm fine with it as they've sent an email from home, once, or something :p

Yet these are the same people who moan about it at work saying they don't know how to do anything.
 
I had a lady the other day that said her computer was doing something "strange". Walked over and it was the xp screen saver....she hadnt logged in yet so wasnt her normal puppy screensaver.........

Had a similar incident, regarding a the default XP screen saver. The woman who's PC it was, was petrified to do anything with the computer so didn't touch it :rolleyes:
 
My mother has no computer knowledge at all. I get a few phone calls from her every week. Anyways her pc currently has a freezing issue I have not yet found the cause of (I suspect driver issue). Basically the freeze happened and I told her to turn the pc off via the holding the power button in for a few seconds (she kept unplugging the mains). Then turn it back on. Well 2 days after telling her this I get a phone call. Saying the pc wont come on so I drive to her house to inspect. 40 min drive.

I turn on the pc works fine apart from the windows recovery option poping up when you have forced shut down.

When seeing this I hear my mother shout excitedly that's it that's it. It just keeps doing that so I turn of the pc and try again but it wont come on.

So I selected boot windows normally and the pc comes on as normal. Took me about 30 mins to explain that the pc is not broken and it only did that for safety reasons if she had waited a min the pc would have come on like normal.

As you can imagine I did a lot of swearing on the way home.
 
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Wow, fancied reading about some funny IT-related stories and ending up just looking at people getting carried away with binary :(
 
You never know though, some of the descriptions you can get from a telephone conversation can miss the mark by some distance.

Someone could have drawn a long black line over her monitor and she'd probably have said the internet was different.

Thats why you listen to what they say and think of possible issues. If she was mis-representing the issue then fair enough but she gave a pretty good description that would make you think "new google bar" then one or two questions later you would have confirmed it.

I did support as a large part of my job for a year or so and its not the trickiest thing in the world. Some things you cannot fix without seeing the issue but most are pretty easily solved if you don't have too much trouble talking to people.

Most issues with support come from the support side in my experience. Putting nerds in charge of customer related jobs is a bad idea. Sometimes it feels like they choose not to bother interpreting the customers issue in favour of making themselves feel smart and the customer small.
 
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Even worse is majority of jobs now state in the ad or the like that you should be literate with basic things like office. And I bet 90% of these people in an interview say yeah I'm fine with it as they've sent an email from home, once, or something :p

Yet these are the same people who moan about it at work saying they don't know how to do anything.

Correct. Makes me angry. What I do now is point them to the new 'ICT Trainers'. I love it.
 
One of the directors called up recently because he could nothing on his PC, literally could do nothing in that he would double click the excel icon and nothing. Likewise with anything else he double clicked.

Out of habit I always check how long people's PC have been running via CPU time in task manager. The director had not turned off or rebooted his PC for 4346 hours!!

When I told him I'm going to reboot he started ranting and raving about that being IT's answer to everything. I let him do that while I reboot and lo and behold everything works fine oh and it pulls down all the updates which allow him to work smoother and more secure.

I walked away feeling very smug :D
 
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