Discussion on:

10 classic clueless-user stories

Years ago, our helpdesk was installing Office on professors' home computers if requested (under the 80/20 plan). One professor arranged to drop her home machine off before anyone would be there, so she was asked to just leave it by the door. She dropped off the monitor; she had no idea that it was not the computer!

Another professor claimed she would work and save changes on an important Word doc, but every time she re-opened it, those changes had disappeared. Turns out that the original doc had been sent to her as an attachment. She would open the attachment directly from the email, work on it for a while and hit "Save." Then, next time she wanted to work on it, she would go back and open a new copy of the original attachment! Of course, she would not see her work from the day before. I quickly found the temp folder where these repeat copies were being stored, and realized that she had done this 17 times before calling anyone about it!

When I first started in IT I worked an entry level position at NCR. That had me doing contract warranty repair work for Dell, Cisco, Nortel and Gateway. The "lowly" jobs were the ones that required in home service for Dell and Gateway. I noticed I went to the same house on the same golf course three times. Each time the NIC was pulled out of the PCI slot, yet great effort was made to make it look as if it was plugged in from the back. The same thing happened with the PCI USB card that the web cam was plugged in to.

I finally figured out that the guy was unplugging the card. Seems his wife was having an affair. Her lurid IM's, emails and "cam sessions" with her secret lover were too much for him to bear, so he kept unplugging the equipment. I told him I felt bad for him and that I wouldn't note that in my call to avoid them billing him. I just simply replaced the cards with warranty provided units and went about my business.

BUT, I also talked with him and installed a key logger and a screen capture program. I told him it more than likely couldn't be used as evidence, but he could use the info to gather actual legal evidence if he so chose. I got a $1k tip that day! That was a huge amount of money to a new hire in the mid nineties.

One of my favourites is the mail the service desk in my previous company got one day about a disappearing screen saver.
When calling the user, he was explaining the events as followed:
???My girlfriend has given me this really nice screen saver, but every time I move my mouse, it keeps disappearing.???
It is still used up to this day, to make new Service desk engineers clear that they best start with the basics when trying to solve a problem with a user.

Best time that was made clear, when one of our Windows (!) support engineers asked if one of the others could unlock his account, because his PC told him it was locked.
When checking in the user-manager, the account was not locked. This was told to him, but he persisted. ???My account IS locked; it says so on my screen???
When taking a look on his screen, there was this box with stating: ???This computer is in use and has been locked. Only XX\YYY or an administrator can unlock this computer. Press CRTL-ALT-DEL to unlock this computer???
To his defence, it was on a Friday morning after a good night out. But we decided he was not allowed on production systems that day.

As I walked into the office early one morning, one of our UNIX admins stopped me to tell me that he couldn't connect to the network and as he had a major project working with short timelines, would I please prioritize him? I was quite early that day and said I would. Knowing that he had been on our help desk as recently as the month before, I asked him if he had gone through the standard trouble shooting chart. He assured me that he had.

I dropped my stuff at my desk and went back to my connectionless UNIX admin. Knowing that he had already followed the checklist didn't stop me from doing so. So I checked physical connections- Step One on the checklist. I glanced under his desk and verified that the RJ 45 was plugged in correctly and followed the cable up to the desk and discovered that it had been unplugged from the computer. So I plugged it in. Voila! Connectivity to the network!

My UNIX admin had the grace to blush furiously. Since there were few people in the office at that hour, he had no witnesses. I didn't even log it as a call.

Many moons ago, in the era of "Home Computers": Commodore Amiga, Atari ST etc ...

I installed a number of PCs at various railway stations, top of the range 386's! A few days later I got a call saying that there had been some break-ins at the stations, the theives must have been following us around, and that all the PCs had been stolen.

When I visited the stations I saw that all the PCs were still there! All the theives had stolen were the keyboards.

we had a break-in here at the office last January. The only things they took were a mac mini and a $30 radio.
Left the brand new server, 30+ computers, and all of the flat panel monitors...

For months I had been trying to locate a discontinued Hard Disk and Video Expansion Unit for my trusty old Tandy 100 laptop computer. Living as I did at the time in New Jersey, it was a bit of a schlep for me to drive to upstate Connecticut but I wanted the unit badly so that I could try writing some larger programs and use a monitor on the not yet completely obsolete platform. Still, it was a beautiful weekend and I enjoyed the drive in the country, taking the back way to the Radio Shack in some little town outside Hartford.

On my way back I decided to stop in and say "Hi" to my sister living in Manhattan. I parked in a pay lot in Midtown directly across the street from her building, and not wanting to leave the computer too exposed, threw an old, ripped pair of jeans over the cardboard box.

An hour or so later I came out to find my hatchback window smashed in, and the jeans and the "computer" stolen. Of course, the parking lot morons just pointed to their "Not Responsible for a damn thing...." sign and even told me that unless I removed the vehicle from the lot they would charge me for an extra hour or more while I waited for the NYPD to show up and take a complaint from me! THEN the cops yelled at me when they finally arrived, that I had moved the vehicle from the crime scene....

As I thought of how a "beautiful" weekend had turned into such a nightmare of a day for me, it occurred to me that some poor schmuck of a crook was going to feel just as bad when his local fence told him that it wasn't really a computer that he'd stolen and, being rare as it was, and therefor mostly unsaleable, probably wasn't even worth the price of a single hit of crack.

I almost felt sorry for him.

Reminds me of a story I heard in the UK. A large computer manufacturer (No names...begins with a D I think.)had a heldesk support call that went a little something like this:

User: My cmoputer isn't working.
Heldesk: what seems to be the problem.
User: I can't get onto the internet.
Heldesk: Right, lets try a ping. Please go to Start, Run, type CMD. Are you with us.
User: No. I can't see Start.
(Pause)
Heldesk: What is on your screen?
User: Nothing. Its blank.
Heldesk: Right. Is your computer turned on?
User: I don't know.
Heldesk. Are there any lights showing? Is it plugged in?
User: I don't know. I can't see anything. Its dark here. We are having a power failure.
Heldesk: Right. I know exactly what you need to do. Unplug everything. Do you still have the box the computer came in?
User: Yes.
Heldesk: Right. Pack the computer back up into the box. Take the box back to the shop you bought it from and tell them the following. Got a pen?
User: Yes.
Helpdesk: Right. Tell them you are returning your computer because you are too Bl***y stupid to own a computer!

http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperfect.asp

Still funny, though!

there was this time when i was on the phone with one of our customers. she had problems with her password so i helped her with her concern. after resetting the password, I told her that the new default password is "1". She then typed in her keyb "1" but she said its not 1 that's she's seeing. She told me she just sees * (asterisk). I almost burst out into laughter.

I worked at an ISP call centre and while helping a very friendly farmer connect to the internet, I asked if he had any Windows open. He replied yes and so I said that he should close them. He said hold on and put the phone down and went to close the open windows in the room! He then asked if the cold can have an effect on the computer and I did not have the heart to tell him what I really meant and just agreed with his comment...

Don't forget the well known:

"I can't find the any key"

I own a web dev company which builds fairly large custom content management systems. The first lesson I teach my support people is that the world is covered wall to wall in stupid people. One day when training a client on the control panel for her property manager she looked at the screen and totally horrified asked: But who's going to translate the Latin? ??? she was referring to the Lorem ipsum we put on the home page as placeholder for the actual content. I knew then that she will become our support nightmare and she didn???t disappoint. And 90% of the support calls are about login problems. It???s just two fields but she still gets it wrong 4 years later.

SAUSAGE!

I have got the same kinda story.
I am working as a Software Engineer. Our company developed a MIS for some company X and we deployed the software on one of department's local Server. Head of the department was a computer illiterate person, and some how he had attended some workshop about computer networks or stuff like that and he remembered only one thing from that workshop " Data between computer is shared through wires ". His departmental data was very confidential. We deployed the system and he insisted that it should be placed in his office in front of his desk, we did that and after we installed the software there and told him that every thing is installed and working then he ordered his subordinates to plug out all the cables from the machine (literally every cable) he plugged out power cables / mouse / keyboard / display. giving reasons that in my service of 25 years no data has leaked out from my office and your machine will share my data using these cables, and it took us more then a week to convince that no data travels through power cables.

One of my friend worked at DELL and he told me a story about some Complaint.

They had supplied some laptops to one of their client.

After a couple of month he received a call from his client
Client: The laptop they provided is working fine but the coffee tray of that laptop is stuck. "Coffee Tray!!! "

Customer Care: There is no Coffee tray in the laptops that you have been provided.

Client: No there is on the side when you push a button a coffee tray opens.

He was referring "The DVD ROM" as a "Coffee Tray"

I once spent an hour showing a music teacher how to cut and paste text in Word. At the end of the hour his response was: "thats far to complicated. You will have to show me again next time."

The same guy after I spent half an hour demonstrating and then making him print from Word, phoned me to complain that his printer was rubbish and would not work. He said that the little numbers were changing very slowly but nothing was printed. The document would not print because of the virus in the file he had brought from his home computer . The Little numbers he was watching turned out to be the clock in the task bar. I should have asked him to wait till it read 10:00 and then call me back.

I had to make a service call to an irate user once because his computer would not turn on. Upon my arrival I found that he had his computer plugged into a power strip. The power strip was plugged into itself. I told the guy if he ever gets this working he needs to get it patented. He responded with, "wha?" I said sure if this ever works you'll have invented an infinite power source.

I used to work helpdesk as a contractor for a "C" computer company, and they had a call management system with several amusing incidents.
One went something like this:

User: My monitor is fuzzy!
Tech: Fuzzy?
User: Yeah, it's hard to read the screen.
Tech: Was it ok last time you used it?
User: Uh, Yeah.
Tech: Did anything happen to the monitor since you last used it?
User: Well, I had some friends over and they poured beer in it.
Tech: Sir, please turn the monitor off and unplug the power immediately!

I work as an IT Technician for a small city. One day I get a phone call from one of my users. She states "All my files are gone. I just saved them and now they are all gone!". So I walked over to her desk and asked her to try and open the files she had saved. First, she opened MS Word, navigated some folders, then proceeded to open a folder called EXCEL. "See" she said "All gone".

Many years ago, in the days of 8 inch floppy disks, I'd often have them sent to me by mail - but sometimes the postman would fold them to fit in the mailbox -- destroying them.

To counteract this, I instructed the sender to write in big letters: "FLOPPY DISKS -- DO NOT BEND" on the outside of the package.

Much to my annoyance and surprise, I received the package again folded to fit in the mailbox -- neatly written on the package next to "FLOPPY DISKS -- DO NOT BEND" the postman had neatly written: "YES THEY DO!"

I recall working in a tax department in the early 80s when one of the deputies heard I was good at recovering data from damaged floppies (5-1/4 at the time). He said he had a disk with some important information on it that his machine wouldn't read.

I told him if he brought in the disk, I'd give it a shot. What he brought in was one his dog had gotten ahold of, apparently mistaking for a frisbee.

He had actually put the thing in his home machine and promptly tore the heads of his drive.

I was having a really bad morning until I read this!
Thanks so much for making me laugh!
Clare

You cannot make this stuff up.

The story that sticks out in my mind is when a user who called up to say that their was a problem with her monitor.

"Don't worry, I come down in a few minutes and replace it with a new one" I told her.

Her response to that was "But what about my programs? How will I get all my programs back on my desktop?"

At corporate HQ, help desk calls come pouring in that about 30 people have no LAN connectivity. All the PCs had the wrong IP address (192.168.0.x).

After much searching, we found a software vendor doing a demo in a conference room.

He had plugged his personal linksys router into the network so he had two LAN ports to use. Duh!

Closer to home: never, repeat never, leave a disk-wipe utility CD where a child can get to it.

One five year old I know managed to get a hold of the Maxtor MaxBlast CD and performed the secure disk wipe process on a 40 gig drive. Thankfully there was a fresh backup.

40,000? Lightweights! I have 33,290, and that's at home! If you were to add work and home combined, it would be easily 70,000!

This is not my story, but I'll tell it anyway...

A man I know was managing a data center for a multi-million dollar pension organization. The precautions against server outages and data loss were extensive. Every outage would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Seemingly at random, the entire data center was going down for a period of time every night. This went on for weeks. The support staff was frantic trying to find the problem. Jobs were on the line and nerves were on edge.

Finally it was discovered that one of the late-night cleaning crew was unplugging the main power supply unit so they could plug in a vacuum cleaner.

We had recently remodeled parts of our company's front office, and part of this envolved moving our servers to a new secure room. All was well, but one of the rooms adjacent to this room was still under construction. Early one morning I got a call that the servers had mysteriously stopped working the previous night, no one bothered to call me and let me know, they just went home, but now the morning shift was in and needed to work but no email, no MIS, no internet nada. I walked back to my office which is where all the servers were, I have to pass through two rooms to get here, I exited the first room (with lights on) and entered the second room and flipped the light switch, nothing happened, I reach my office and sure enough no servers are powered on and the battery backups are all drained. I go into the next room the one still under construction and discover that the construction crews instead of unplugging the exhast fans they setup decided to just throw the main switch for the entire back half of the building!

A guy who serviced VAX servers back in the day got a call about a 11/725 that would turn itself off over night, and on random days as well. The thing was checked over extensively, the power point was tested, everything was gone over and the thing was perfect, yet the problem still happened. So they sent someone in to watch the computer over night, and what they discovered was that the cleaning crew would leave the bag of paper clippings from the shredder in front of the 11/725's air intake, it would suck it in, and the temperature sensors would trip, turning the machine off.

There's also another story of a company who let their security personnel go because it was 12 hours before they realised that the security server was down because a janitor unplugged it to run the vacuum cleaner.

Source: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_power.shtml

Never been in a data center, have you?

So this company my buddy works for hires this completely clueless, former PC salesman to be their IT admin. Their network is a mess, very slow at times. One user asks the clueless IT admin why it takes so long to log on to his PC and the admin responds: "Well, you are on one side of the building and the server is on the other so it takes a while." Once you stop laughing you realize how pathetically useless he really is! By the way, not that it matters, but the building is all of a few hundred feet wide and network runs on Cat 5.

So I received the following from a user who works in 2 different production areas, both of which are locked down by various GPOs. She is now working in a new location, the restrictions for which she helped determine. One of those restrictions being that at no point would any of the users need access to Windows Explorer nor would they ever need to get to a network share. Everything they will be doing will be web-based apps etc..

Naturally on day 1 of working in the new location we get complaints about not being able to get to \\server\share and not being able to use Explorer to get to files. Massive GPO tweaking ensues.

Most of the issues are worked out but then I get this one in email: The problem here is we can't copy/paste or do anything in Location2 to create the needed files. We have very limited rights. I have to open the files from excel and it's just too time consuming and frustrating to try to do anything like this down here. If I open from \\server\share, it's read only.

Naturally that translates as they can't right click to use any of the Edit context commands, so they can't copy/paste. The other item is a file association problem, if they access the file from the \\server\share location it opens up with the Word or Excel Viewer software instead of the full version. If they launch Word or Excel then use the File>Open method they can open anything they need but that's just too time-consuming.

My story actually involves the admin at a company I used to work for.

The "admin" knew absolutely nothing about technology. He had a degree in IT management from a two year college, but they didnt teach the tech side of things, only the management. The CEO of the company was absolutely fed up with him but refused to fire him, so my job was to come in under him and fix some stuff up, then when they could move him to another position I would be the Director of IT.

These are the things I found when I got there:

The router was a Netgear they had bought at Best Buy, which was plugged in to a second Linksys router so they could have wireless, which had a 24 port Linksys switch plugged in to it.

The "File/Print Server" was an XP computer and everything was configured in a workgroup

The LAN IP address was set to 8.6.6.65

When trying to configure the VPN, he went home to test it and entered the LAN IP as the address he was trying to connect to.

On the "server" he shared out the My Documents folder and gave everyone full control permissions, so even the receptionist had full control to HR and accounting info.

He couldnt access a share through a UNC path, and didnt know how to map a network drive. Anytime someone needed to access the file on the server he had them go to My Network Places>Entire Network>etc

Didnt know how to configure share permissions properly so that a contractor could have permission to print on our network printer, but not have access to the data stored on that same server.

Argued that a SonicWALL was a software firewall

Started playing with the router during business hours, he changed the IP of the router 4 times in 30 minutes. Each time he did this I had to refresh everyones IP lease so the default gateway address was updated. He refused to explain to me what he was doing.

Didnt know how to use remote desktop to log in to the server from his workstation, so each time he wanted to log in to it he went to the back room and logged on locally.

Im sure there is more but thats all I can think of now. Needless to say I didnt last long there, the guy was far to sensitive and moody and thought he knew what he was doing so we butted heads alot. After three months the company practically folded and I was laid off. They are still around but barely limping along, when they finally do go out of business Id be surprised if hes able to find another job at the level he thinks he deserves.

A while back, while on a support call to a customer, I asked her to double click on My Computer. She replied, "Your Computer?"

Had the same thing when doing support for a company that made USB hard drives. I had users who couldnt find the My Computer icon, couldnt find the start menu, couldnt install a 2.5" IDE drive properly in to the case (If you can still see the pins its not installed), had to walk people though how to copy/paste files on to the USB drive, amongst many other horrors.

At my last job we had several locations. One day I recieved a phone call from one of the managers and he asked me if I could come to the location and fix the Green Thing out back because it is smoking. I responded yes that I could I just had to hop in my peco truck and I would be right up. Peco is our electric company in my area. The transformer for the building blew. Needless to say I did not call this user back I led him to belive that I was on my way. I am suprised sometimes how these people even make it into work sometimes.