Computer Ignorance

[BobThePumpkin]

I stumbled upon a site that has a huge collection of tech support mishaps and the like.

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

My favorite:

I had this conversation recently with a lady who swore she had been using computers since forever.


Tech Support: "All right. Now click 'OK'."
Customer: "Click 'OK'?"
Tech Support: "Yes, click 'OK'."
Customer: "Click 'OK'?"
Tech Support: "That's right. Click 'OK'."
Customer: "So I click 'OK', right?"
Tech Support: "Right. Click 'OK'."
Pause.

Customer: "I clicked 'Cancel'."
Tech Support: "YOU CLICKED 'CANCEL'???"
Customer: "That's what I was supposed to do, right?"
Tech Support: "No, you were supposed to click 'OK'."
Customer: "I thought you said to click 'Cancel'."
Tech Support: "NO. I said to click 'OK'."
Customer: "Oh."
Tech Support: "Now we have to start over."
Customer: "Why?"
Tech Support: "Because you clicked 'Cancel'."
Customer: "Wasn't I supposed to click 'Cancel'?"
Tech Support: "No. Forget that. Let's start from the top."
Customer: "Ok."
I spent the next fifteen minutes re-constructing the carefully crafted setup for this lady's unique computer.


Tech Support: "All right. Now, are you ready to click 'OK'?"
Customer: "Yes."
Tech Support: "Great. Now click 'OK'."
Pause.


Customer: "I clicked 'Cancel'."
And people wonder why my mouse pad has a target on it labeled "BANG HEAD HERE."

[WarBlade]

Yeah, it's a great time waster, that site. I was linked to it about 2 or 3 years ago and still visit once in a while for a giggle.

Customer: "I have MS Office, but whenever I try to make a backup of the disks, my machine says it's not able to. Can you give me Microsoft's telephone number so I can call them and complain?"
Tech Support: (grinning ecstatically) "OF COURSE I CAN!!!!!!"

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 teacher over and explained that no matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced. I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

They both jumped back, silenced. "What the..." the teacher 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.

An email:
"CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"

[BobThePumpkin]

Oh my goodness, those are great! :lol:

[yangman]

Haha, I love this place.

My favorite:

I was giving instructions to a caller once, but his son was the one physically sitting at the computer, so all my instructions had to be relayed. Here's a snippet of the conversation:


Me: "Click on 'start', then select 'shut down', then select 'restart in MS-DOS mode'."
Customer: (to his son) "Ok, press 'start', 'shut up', and 'sit down'!"
The really scary part was what his son said then:


Customer's Son: "Ok, I'm at the C: prompt!"
Do we really want to know what goes on at that house?

[Artega]

Tech Support: "Can I help you?"
Customer: "Let's get something straight right away. I'm a Mac tech, so I know what the hell I'm doing."
Tech Support: "Ok."
This caller needed to reinstall fonts; we started the install, and a couple of minutes later...
Customer: "Uh...it's telling me I have to insert disk 2. What do I do?"
Tech Support: "Um...insert disk 2?"
Customer: "Ok."

Now we know why Macs suck so much <_<

Tech Support: "Sir, are you familiar with computers?"
Customer: "Of course! I am the main tech at ACER Africa!!"
Tech Support: "Ok. Have you loaded the display drivers for Windows 95?"
Customer: "Where is it?"
Tech Support: "It's on one of the black disks which you've received with your PC."
Customer: "Oh! I see it. There's three of them. On one is written OS/2, the other is Windows 3.11, and the last one has Windows 95 written on it. Which one do I use?"

That answers so many of the questions I had about my computer (my computer is an Acer, the worst company in the world - it's positively worse than eMachines!)...

Tech Support: "I need you to boot the computer."
Customer: (THUMP! Pause.) "No, that didn't help."

I love that one.

One day a friend of mine called me up to tell me he was thinking of buying a computer. This guy is particularly sensitive to criticism and not to exactly in the upper eschelon of the IQ range, and personally I don't think he should own a programmable VCR much less a computer, but he's a good guy, so I said "good for you." The following conversation ensued:


Him: "Well I have a couple questions though, that I thought I should ask you, cause you know about those things, right?"
Me: "Yeah, ok, what do you want to know?"
Him: "Well...what one should I buy?"
Me: "What do you want to do with it mostly? Play games, word processsing (blah blah blah)...?"
Twenty minutes later....


Him: "Well, I think probably I should get a real fast one, you know, cause I want it to go fast so I don't have to wait for the Internet."
I proceed to explain, SLOWLY, about the difference between megahertz and modem speed, which takes another twenty minutes.


Him: "So how much is this going to cost me anyway?"
Me: "It all depends on what you want. Some stuff costs more.
(Now, let me say here that at the very begining of all this I had stated that neither a monitor nor a printer would come with a computer itself, unless you went for a package deal. He was, at this point saying that he wanted to spend about $500 and that everything had to be from the same manufacturer. This was when the 550 P3 had just come out, so prices were still higher than $500 for any system you could go buy in a Circuit City, which he said he HAD to do.)


Him: "Well, you know, I just want the basic stuff, a monitor, and a printer and a scanner, and maybe a camera, plus the stuff to make cards and print photos and all that, and the stuff to take care of paying my bills, and online."
Me: "Ok, well, you need to get a system first, then think about the extras. You really need to learn the basics first. A computer with a monitor and a printer is probably going to be a minimum of $800 to $1000, if you really want them all to be from the same company."
Him: "REALLY?! Well, ok, but I probably will need two printers, so it'll be more then, huh?"
Me: "What?"
Him: "Yeah, you can do that, right, hook up two of the same printer to one computer?"
Me: "Well...NO, you can't."
Him: "But I'll need to do that!"
Me: "No, really, you won't. Why do you think that?"
Him: "Ok, wait, I know, what about two computers? Can you do that? Can you hook two computers together?"
Me: "But...why? No."
Him: "But I am going to NEED that! You can't do that for me?!"
Me: "Ok, ya know what, what the hell are you talking about?!? No one ever NEEDS to do what you are talking about doing so why do you think you need to do this?!?"
Him: "Well, when I go to print out that manuscript I'm going to write, it'll probably be like 800 pages or so, so how am I ever going to get one printer to print that much, and one computer probably can't even hold that much in one thing right?"
Inside I was going ballistic at this point, and it did boil over, especially since there is NO WAY there is 800 pages worth of anything in this guy's head, but I explained that (a) one computer can in fact "hold" that much and a whole lot more, and (B) one printer (unless it is a huge Xerox or other office type industrial machine) CAN'T hold that much paper in one shot.

I hope that none of you nice tech support people never EVER get a call from this guy, because I guarantee you it will be the worst call you ever get in your life. You guys may all have to get together and dedicate a page to him, posting only his calls, just to vent your anger. He is the cupholder guy, the NOSMOKE.EXE guy, the guy who insists he "hasn't changed anything" when he really edited his AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to include lines like "and don't say I'm bad and an invalid," and the guy who has everything plugged in but nothing where it is supposed to be plugged in. He WILL have his powerstrip plugged into itself and will insist that it is NOT. May the force be with you all; you'll need it.

Um, yeah. I'm glad I'm not a techie.

One thing that many will run into in the computer industry, is employers who are rather clueless and yet don't necessarily realize this. In 1996, a friend told me about a boss he had that needed a C program written for him. After a week, the boss complained that the program wasn't done, and he asked my friend what was taking so long.


Friend: "The program is written, and I'm debugging it."
Boss: "What's wrong with you people? You make programming more difficult than it needs to be. I have Frontpage Express to write web pages with, and when I write code with it, I never need to debug it. If you were as good of a programmer as me, you'd never need to debug either."

[Quark]

I work at the Help Desk at my college. We give laptops to all incoming freshman, so the idiot ratio is much higher than normal.

My personal favorite was when the tech next to me answered the phone. He listens for a minute, puts the caller on hold:
"He wants to know how to play a CD."

Yes, these are W2k laptops with Autoplay enabled ...

One frequent, annoying call:
"The printer in *whatever lab* is out of paper."
"It's not showing empty from here, what does it say?"
"Tray 1 Empty."
"There's three trays in the printer."

One night someone came in:
"Internet Explorer won't work for me, it gives me this wierd message."
I check the computer and it's for some file like qubar.dll (can't remember the exact name).
I try control panel to get to Add/Remove (just to check) and it gives me the same message.
I tell the tech next to me to search for the file on her computer:
"It's not there."
"Google it."
First result on google page? A forum which detailed how this file was a poorly written browser hijack that installed itself after downloading certain porn off of Kazaa.

And one way you can tell how these people use these computers:
We've got a local NetWare server running and an ftp that only people on the lan can get to. The only software that's on both the server and the ftp?
Ad-Aware and McAfee Virus Scanner.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Dave, a friend of mine started his digital career on the help desk of a CAD company. One day he got a call from an architect who freely admitted he was ignorant of all things computer. He'd bought a computer specifically to take advantage of CAD. It seemed that he could not get the program to install. Now, this was in the DOS 3.x and floppy disk days. Well, Dave tried to walk the guy through an installation, but nothing was working. "dir a:" gave "file not found". More conversation followed, and finally it was established that the architect had reformatted all the distribution floppies. Seems that this conscientious individual had indeed RTFM, and in the DOS 3.x manual it specifically said that floppies needed to be formatted before they could be used. The guy got screwed because he followed instructions. Dave FedExed him a new distribution with new instructions: "Call me before you open the package."

The other happened to me. When I went to work for Boeing (late '85), they were just getting PCs for the engineers. Since I had a lot more experience with personal computers, many of the engineers used me as tech support even for their home machine. One day I was at home with my wife and daughter (both of whom are pretty darn computer savvy) when I got a call from an especially clueless (but nice) acquaintance. Seems that he had just bought a mouse but couldn't get it to work with his machine. Everything seemed to be OK, but when he went into Windows, the cursor just sat there in the middle of the screen. There followed a long conversation, during which he read me his autoexec.bat, his config.sys, and his win.ini. All seemed to be OK, but we tried some variations just to check things out. Played a bunch of other games, still no joy. After about a half hour of this, he interrupted me and said, "Wait a second while I get this out of the box. It's getting in the way." Then, about ten seconds later he said, "Hey, it's working now!" Seems he had been moving the mouse around, all right, but the mouse was still in the box and he was moving box and all. He thanked me for my help and we said good-by. After I hung up, all three of us laughed so hard we cried. :)

--Pete

[kandrathe]

Reminds me of an experience I had in the mid 80's...

The installation instructions asked for the user to insert disk 1, then when prompted to insert disk 2. It took me 3 hours to get the two floppies unwedged from the inside of that drive. The user had used a pliers to get them both in there. Needless to say, the floppies were destroyed, but the drive still worked.

[[wcip]Angel]

I read the whole 'calls from hell' section. I'm actually sweating, I laughed so hard.. I'm not all that familiar with computers myself. (meaning I can't program c++ or html yet, but these people were cataclysmically moronic.)

[--Pete]

Hi,

The floppies on the early Macs were especially susceptible to that. People were forever putting in a second disk, it just took a pretty firm push. Usually the drive survived. We had a guy at the radiation effects lab that could get them unstuck in about ten minutes flat (lots of practice) and usually could save the diskettes, too.

What's that they say about making things foolproof? ;)

--Pete

[Quark]

http://www.shelleyphoto.com/stupid/index.html

Has a nice group of pictures of tech support nightmares.

My personal favorite:
http://sct.staghosting.com/sct003.html


Also, one of the Help Desk problems that happened last semester at my school (I just learned about this one last week):

This girl brought in her laptop once complaining that the keyboard and the monitor were broken.
Apparently one of her keys had broken off by itself (normal wear-and-tear, we replace that all the time). No big deal so far. Unfortunately, upon the advice of her friend, she decided to glue (super glue!) the key back into place. After doing said gesture, she immediately closed the case :wacko: When Dell (our laptop vendor) found out about this, they weren't exactly happy. The girl ended up needing a new LCD, new keyboard, new motherboard (the glue had leaked through) and a new palm rest. The only things not replaced were the bottom plastics and hard drive. The girl then proceeded to get ticked off when told that her adventure did not count as "accidental damage" and she had to pay for the replacements.

My boss still has the LCD hanging in his office.

[Striker]

Customer: "I received the software update you sent, but I am still getting the same error message."
Tech Support: "Did you install the update?"
Customer: "No. Oh, am I supposed to install it to get it to work?"

Hope this doesn't happen when 1.10 gets here :lol:

[Skandranon]

Care for a baked Apple?

[Obi2Kenobi]

Act of Gord

[ShadowHM]

Thank you :D

I used to have that link in Favourites and lost it when my hard drive died.

[Omega]

Gord is an asshole, and 99% of his stories are fake.

On another forum I frequent, he was bought an account because a couple of people thought his website was cool. He proceeded to be an absolute troll and jackass. He constantly talked about how good he was at starcraft, so one of the members challenged him to a 10 round match, the loser had to leave the forums forever. Gord lost 10-0, utterly humilated every game.

(/derail)

[Obi2Kenobi]

They are still funny. ;)

Although if what you say is true (and he isn't just some Gord impersonator) then that isn't funny. :(

[ShadowHM]

The stories on the website are hilarious. :D

Farley Mowat is a great writer, but he is an obnoxious asshole when you meet him in real life. I could point to a lot of other examples, but I am sure you get the point. :rolleyes:

[Occhidiangela]

Omega, as in our long lost friend from the DSF, the banningest OPS :blink: in the history of the DSF channel, a stalwart here in the early Lounge days, is pillorying someone both for being an arse and for being less uber at Starcraft than said person immodestly professed.

Q for you: He was bought an account. There may be a typo there that confuses me, or I may be confusing myself. Did some one buy him an account, did someone bring him an account, or was he brought to account for being a blowhard? As I read it, the site you refer to requires a pay in, and some folks who thought he was neat and funny paid for his account. Did I get that right? Or is my guess something awful and awry? ;)

On the first point, while I am not familiar with what went on there, I'd have to ask why the pot calls the kettle black. :)

On the second point, many is the braggart at PC games whose come uppance has arrived in the shape of a "walk quietly and be better at it" challenger. That only proves that his mouth wrote checks that his connection, strategy, game savvy, and twitching could not back up. He won't be the first or last in that category, to be sure.

Hey, nice to see you resurface, Merry Christmas. :D

[Omega]

B) Psst, no one is supposed to remember the DSF channel. ;)

Your supposition is right, it costs $$$ to sign up, and someone paid for an account, and gave it to him, to use.

Now, if my post about Gord had been made 3 years ago, I would have indeed been the pot. But that was 3 years ago, give me a little credit. B)