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10 stupid user stories: The madness persists

One of our branches experienced a utility power outage. After the outage was resolved and they had power restored, their branch manager sent a note to support requesting wireless network access, so that their employees could work through a power outage in the future. I had to call her and explain that wireless networking also uses electricity.

Our office is in an area which is undergoing major new construction, and we have had a large number of power interruptions over the last year.

We do have a number of UPSs in our computer lab, and our mail servers and internet connections are in another city. With my laptop, I've managed to work through power outages of over an hour, including using mail and surfing the net. Now most users here have desktops and they don't have a solution unless we provide each of them a UPS, but it is possible to keep some levels of service going during a power outage.

Was 8 hours. The battery backups were only for hour I believe. So that would not have mattered.

So the client decided that the server was taking up useful space. They sat it on a table on wheels, pulled the cables out of the walls and carpet and ran them across the floor, into their lunch room, and behind the fridge. They then pushed the fridge up against it.
Hopefully everyone here knows how hot it gets behind a fridge. The server actually lasted several months before the hard drive actually melted down.
To top it off, apparently they had stop doing backups because it was too difficult to move the fridge each time to access the tape drive.

just wow.

One day, I get a call from one of the training rooms at my office that the power in that room doesn't work and their laptops (there were around 15 people in that room) wouldn't charge. I rush over to discover a couple of my co-workers scratching their heads around some extension outlets on the floor, that were "daisy-chained" between them. Now, this was a fairly large room and all the power outlets were on the walls of the room; that being said, it was fairly obvious when i entered the room that all the extensions were in the middle of the room, with no cable going to the side of the wall where the outlets were... The extensions were connected between them, but nobody bothered to check whether one of them was actually plugged in

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Also , one of the best stories from this category is one i've heard a couple of years back, and i thought i'd share it, although it didn't happen to me:

So, there was this server that rebooted every morning at around 5 A.M, day after day. The IT admin checked for software errors, checked for hardware errors, scheduled tasks, processes that might cause this to hang at that specific hour, every morning at 5 A.M. He called the hardware guys who didn't find any problems with it. Frustrated, he decided to wake up one morning and drive to work, to be in front of the computer when the unexpected shutdown occurs. Needless to say, at 5 A.M the cleaning woman would come into that room and unplug the server to plug in the vacuum cleaner, after which she would plug the computer back in. :P

P.S: Lol at no.3 Cracked me up

I once had the cleaning people forget to bring their extension cord and use the only available outlet on the very large UPS that kept a retailers POS system server going. Loaned them a temporary in hopes it was just a blown fuse inside the unit but no such luck. Every electrolytic capacitor inside had exploded and numerous other components had actually melted beyond recognition. They bought a new UPS!

I support industrial robots, with computer control cabinets. Each has a 3 Amp outlet for plugging in a computer while programming. Its covered by a small swing door that is stickered with a warning not to use the outlet for anything else.

I get people plugging in things like reciprocating saws, drills and vacuums on a pretty regular basis. Blown outlet at least once every three months.

Why take that risk, and not simply put the outlet as a separate item next to the robot?

Its the only 120VAC outlet near because everything else but the computer runs on 480 3Phase VAC.

...To install several 120 outlets around the room, It seems no one wants to plug in their saws-all into a 480.

You must have a few robotic arms lying around that you could rig up with boxing gloves...

too much fun involves the police.

Reminds me of the B-st-rd Operator From Hell stories, where users were constantly being given a hard time by the jerk of a helpdesk tech. These stories did make me wonder about the flip side of the equation, where you had jackass or clueless users who are more trouble than they are worth and the techs and programmers get back at their tormentors.

Boxing gloves won't be as effective as spiked maces, swords, or electric pain fields. ]:->

Cardiac patients have been killed when a nurse inserted the ECG lead plugs into an auxiliary AC outlet on the ECG machine or some other handy device. (Nowadays, auxiliary AC outlets are pretty much banned on electromedical equipment.)

but do they use them there? No.
They only use those to stop consumers using the same plugs for all devices - i.e. only to inconvenience, never to prevent harm. *grumble*

Hey, one plug looks like the next. Does anyone really know how much 3amps is? Do you really? Sounds to me like you should get an industrial quality extension cord which can supply at least 15 amps and afix it to the case with a sign to use this. Then you can seal the 3 amp plug. Why is it only 3 amps when most equipment already has at least a 15 amp connection?

Yeah, I've had that happen plenty of times with cleaning people. To the point where I've said "I'll break your fingers if I find out". I've been lucky though, it's usually just tripped the breaker in the UPS at worst, and at best made it freak out for high current draw.

If I had 1c for every time I heard that story, I would have retired many years ago

back in the day I had a cleaning person unplug a system 34 IBM because they thought it had been left on by mistake. took two days to recover.

I had a nightly scheduled job that produced reports for all executives (including the CEO) in the company every morning. One morning, I discovered it had failed to run. After kicking off the long-running job, I performed a little investigation. It turned out that the power failed during the night, which normally wouldn't have been a problem, except the night security guard was disturbed by the beeping of the UPSes -- to shut them up, he shut them off.

I love the old stories like that. Mine was when I worked in a distribution facility for a textile manufacturer. They only received products during the day, but picked and shipped at least 2 shifts a day. Well the conveyor systems where all run by computers that were networked with a Token "Broken" ring network. Unfortunately, they would kill power to the receiving portion of the building by shutting off all of the breakers in the receiving office. Including the one that stated, DO NOT TURN Off, with tape and a metal cover over the breaker. Invariably, this would happen about 20 minutes after I left the building for the evening. Once you shut off the repeater, it would then take the entire network down, (even after bringing the repeater back up) because our Novell Servers would beacon like crazy until restarted.

I hope they hired a new security guard after that when they found out what happened.

Being there!! Suffered that!!!

We had a data center in the US where I worked that had the server consoles/control room separated from the network controller room that connected us to the home HQ in the UK, and for most US operations. The power door between the rooms was controlled by a big red push button, and a few inches away from that button was another big red push button ... for emergency power-off to the entire network room. So guess what happened one night when a new cleaning person wanted to go from one room to the next?

Hey, they were "clearly labeled"! The power button did get a cover that took several steps to open up after that.

Is that cleaning woman still working there?

I got a call one day from an office that is @ 2 hours drive away. They stated that their printer kept jamming. Having issues arise like this quite a bit, I asked the staff to check the printer to make sure there was nothing jammed in the printer. They could not find anything. I got in the car and drove the 2 hours. Walked to the printer and looked down in the slot where the paper comes out and there was a hugh paper clip just sitting jammed between the rollers. I removed the paper clip and the printer worked just fine for 3 more years.

i drove an hour to remove the transparent tape on a ink cartridge from a printer that was not printing. you know the packaging tape that covers the inkhead! i charged them travel time and everything.

to press the NumLock key when a user couldn't enter her password

WTG!

to press a monitor power button...

To plug in the power cord that had slightly come off the back of the monitor when the user pulled it closer....

When I worked in a S& L in the 90's DOS Era, We had IBM PC's with a cloth antiglare screen, that was attached to the "Green on Black" Monochrome Monitor. This was also in the early days, when copier's were expensive. Many of the Secretaries and Clerks used Mimeograph machines, that had Stencils that were created on typewriters. When the stencils had a an error they used a special blue correction fluid. You guessed it. I had to cut the anti-glare screen cloth off of the monitor, because there was no way to remove the correction fluid from the screen.

Many of these stories are crazy and have extreme consequences, but the user applying correction fluid to a monitor really takes the biscuit.

Makes me wonder what sort of adventures this person had with their television at home.

than CD readers, we had a user force a CD into the floppy drive, pull down the handle, and "CRUNCH!"

Many years ago (25+) we had a payroll clerk that would print out every report from her Payroll system and check the totals manually. One day she came to me with a problem, she'd found an error in the totals. I then spent most of the day trying to see how my code could possibly get the total wrong, with no success. Just before 5:00, she came back to tell me she'd checked and it was her error!

Some months later, she had a problem with another report. This time, she'd made a mistake the previous month and her report had n incorrect value. so, she'd covered the incorrect value with correction fluid and written in the correct one. Now she couldn't work out why the reports for the next month had the wrong balance! After all, she'd corrected it the previous month!

I lurvs me some magical thinking.

You know there's a horrible joke based on that kind of incident, right? ];->

Reading stories like this reminds me that my users aren't so bad after all.

this actually happened to a Dell PowerEdge server:

as the office environment expanded and OSes / workstations were upgraded
the company was moved to a Domain from a workgroup

a Dell PowerEdge Server was ordered with Server 2003 standard and the required CALs were purchased
and most of the workstations were pulled and new shiny XP -Pro boxes were deployed
with only a couple of the 2K boxes remaining

after all was said and done that nice shiny new PowerEdge server was stuffed into a non-ventilated, closed & locked cabinet (about the size of an average kitchen cabinet)
several months later after summer was in full swing with 30C + days the IT guy starts getting repeated "warning emails"

Lo and behold Drive 0 was cooked and seized

a new HDD was ordered and installed

when I arrived the day it was being changed out
the dead disk had been sitting on the repair table for a little over 30 min.
when I tried to pick it up it burned me

after the repair, the server was stuffed back into the same cabinet with the goal to find it a new home

about 6 months later it was moved into the phone closet (a much bigger space)
it's still running today as BDC for the Domain as a newer 2008 server was ordered a few years later

but it could have been a worse disaster,
both Drive 0 and 1 could have fried necessitating a full rebuild.

Yeah I had a client that built homes so he made his office look like it was a home. Including desks with small little cabinets that they expected the computers to go into so they wouldn't be seen. Needless to say there was a higher than average failure rate of equipment there...

We had a server room about ten feet square holding 8 servers. One weekend the aircon failed and when I unlocked on Monday morning it was like an oven in there. The four Windows boxes had all failed but the four HP boxes were chugging along quite happily. That was in 1996. Wonder if HP quality is still at that standard.

Depends on what you buy. They've gotten into the tiered thing lately. The mid and high end proliants are still great machines. The low end ones, they're built like the Dells that they compete with, crap.

NO! Their quality went right down the plughole with their Pavilion series laptops when they used Nvidia integrated chips which they knew were a design fault and which was compounded by their very small heat sync plates and only one fan. When these burnt out they left their customers with no comeback as they refused to acknowledge that it was a design fault. So no, their quality is not at the same level and they are like all other corporations now, in the quest for the mighty dollar and ever more profits, they showed that they do not care about their customers!

What where the 4 Windows boxes? I never actually heard of Windows actually creating a PC, but 1996 I was young and I was using MACs and didn't get a HP with windows until 1998. This would be cool to have a case that actually says Windows or Microsoft on it.

I remember that 2 of the boxes were "Intel Inside," vendor I can't remember, as mirrored network servers. Also an internet server and a backup server.

My DBA who was German told me he'd been to the facility where they tested HP's by dropping them off the roof of a four-storey building after which they were still expected to work perfectly. Before the incident I related I thought he was talking through his shorts.

I once wrote CADD systems for the Navy - on DEC PDP-11 machines. The dev. machines were single-user 11/55's with a DECWriter console. One day the AC (installed by a contractor that had gone broke half-way through and finished by another!) decided to start blowing hot instead of cold! We thought it was getting hot, so interrogated the machine: "2+2=?" and got "4". OK so far. 30 sweaty mins later, tried again. The answer was now 5! Time to close down until the AC ran cold!!!

You were right when you called it "server room", that's what they are... servers.

The job market was relaxed around here in the early 2000's, and for some reason I couldn't seem to get into a 'real' IT job, so I worked at call centers. One of them was doing sales for hpshopping.com. There's a TON of stories, but this one you'll find the most amusing...

A potential client and I were going over his needs for a new laptop. He insisted that it have a discreet graphics card with it's own memory in order to run AutoCAD. After I pointed out that his work was in 2D, and an integrated card with shared memory would do just fine, he was persistent. "After all," he said, "I had to take my last one to *can't remember the store name* so they could upgrade the video card! It worked MUCH better after that!"

He had a good laugh after I pointed out that laptops of that era (and I checked his particular one) pretty much ALL had integrated video with shared memory, and that it was quite impossible to upgrade them. He even pulled out the receipt for the $180 they'd charged him...

All they most likely did was to increase the amount of memory that the on-board video card could access in the bios. A friend of mine had increased the amount of memory in his laptop back in the Windows 98 days with little improvement in some of the games and software he was using. A quick look at the BIOS setting and me changing the shared memory from just 2MB to the max of 32MB of shared video memory improved the speed of his games and a few other graphical programs he used quite a bit.
The company I used to work for installs fixed WiMax aerials for customers who don't want to have to get a phone-line just to be able to get broadband, preferring cellphones instead and I used to take some of the support calls. After Asking one customer twice in one call to check that the Power over Ethernet unit that supplies power to the radio unit on the roof is plugged in and turned on and being assured it was, we secluded a maintenance call to check on the problem of why the WiMax unit was not working. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find the customers kids had pulled the power cord out of the PoE unit that supplies the power to the radio unit on the roof to power the second had printer they had purchased that did not come with one. When I pointed out that it was not plugged in and I recognized the power-cord in the printer as one we supplied because of the company ID sticker on it, he admitted that the two times I had asked him if the unit was on and going he had just said yes as he did not want want to get off his chair and look under the desk where the unit was located mounted on the wall down by the skirting board. He also mentioned that he was wondering where the kids had found the extra power cable for the printer.

Way back in the late 1980's when the hard disk controller was a plug-in card, I joined a company that had an abnormally high rate of hard disk failures.

I asked the boss's secretary to call me first the next time a computer coughed.

I discovered that the hardware and on-site maintenance guy had supplied CPU boxes with the most rubbish controller cards he could find, probably failed QC. Then after a couple of months when disk access failed, he would claim that it was the hard drive, and replace THAT!

Then selling the perfectly good hard drive he'd removed to another victim, of course.

And on top of it he got himself a reputation as a wizard for recovering all the "lost" data from the "failed" drive...

Your tale reminds me of an old doggerel--

My sister sells rubbers to sailors/
my mom pokes the heads with a pin/
my father performs the abortions/
my God how the money rolls in!

Oooh, BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!

...But I love it!

MFM cards and drives... ah the slow memories !

Was his name Scott

I had to look to see where you were from, there is a Scott in my town too that has been around for close to 20 yrs that did that kind of stuff. Back in my consulting days if I was ever called in on a site where this Scott was still their IT support I would politely make an excuse to get out of there and then not go back. Anything that guy is involved in turns into a major production!

Don't think so, this was South Africa circa 1990.

He's trying to print a screen page, but every time he goes to the printer, he's not getting what he tries to print. After a few unsuccessful tries, he fiddles with the printer and it shoots out some ink on his clean white shirt and tie.

Now, what he does next is beyond stupidity

Being a big fellow, he actually yanks his monitor, puts it screen face down on the copier and hits the copy button....in an attempt to get his screen printout

There are fascinating worlds outside there, where the real users reside. But the monitor was no wifi device, wasn't it?

At one K-12 school that I worked at, we had installed an Voice over ATM phone system (at the time very high end). Well, on every Monday morning, there was no phone service in one of the middle school hallways. I'd go down to the closet that the phone switch was in (that was shared with the janitors) and noticed that the switch was unplugged. I plugged it in and everything was off and running. After this happening four weeks in a row, I decided to come in on Sunday and camped out beside the closet. Sure enough, the janitor that was assigned to clean up on Sunday evening, (who really disliked the assignment), reached into the closet and yanked out a mop. And in the process, you guessed it, pulled the power cord out of it's socket.

I used to work at a church and being low budget and such someone decided hack their old XBOX and made a linux server out of it. Well then they started using it for streaming media for kids/teen ministry services and put it in a corner in the server room and forgot about it.

Fast forward almost a year... So weekend services are starting up and they go to access their media that they had loaded up and got nothing. No one could remember which server was hosting the media, just that it was there.

After much investigating we found out that one of the senior pastors has found his way into the server room for whatever reason, saw the XBOX "just sitting there" and decided to take it home for his kid to play over the weekend! DOH!

Breaking the law for god!

Just because one can laugh at most of the stories, there is nothing here indicating that this is a humour column. I do, however, see the word "nightmare".

Posey clearly indicated his friend was a womanizer, which I consider to be him calling it like it is. He also refused to help his friend, finding out later that his friend took an action himself. He also stated that he hoped his friend was reading this, so he should take the hint if he is still operating with that male privilege mindset.

Yes, the stated reasons for refusal certainly could have included an ethical one. But I think you are stretching a bit to criticize Posey in this manner.

What his coworker did was bad but what is really "appalling" is your extreme politically correctness in trying to put the blame on him....IT'S A FREAKING STORY...sit back, relax and eat your smore's and stop interrupting story time.
Thank you.

I was about to post on this same story when I read your post. It's not funny nor a "stupid" user i.e. PEBKAC user type. This is about a womanizer trying to clean his acitons after committing a crime. This should have never made it to this list at all, IMHO.

On to a funny story of my own.

I currently work as an IT Analyst and my duties include PC Support. One of our users called to report that he wasn't able to log in and and asked if we could reset his password. So, I go to AD and reset his password and I informed the user. I go on to tell him that I had rest his password to xxxxxx all in lower case. A few minutes later he calls back and says he still can't log in. So I go to his office to find out that instead of typing his xxxxxx password he was typing "lowercase" LOL...he's a good friend so I went on to explain what PEBKAC is...to this day, we laugh about it.

"Cute anecdote"? I think Posey was owning up.

"It should have never been published."

They shouldn't let you post anywhere on the internet without being able to think.. Can you live with that? I bet you're one of those people who thinks getting rid of the "professional" personal classifieds on Craigslist eliminates prostitution. You know, instead of using the information to track and arrest people for violating the relevant laws, if those are the sorts of laws that you think need priority enforcement.

Did you see a film clip broadcast during the yeltsin era, where a uniformed Russian clerk (female) visibly starts as "Mr." Yeltsin passes behind her?
That booty grab was televised widely.
How is it different from this?
It was an account of sexual harassment. The culprit got away with it (of course, Karma got him). It was broadcast for commercial purposes (all those news channels got something out of broadcasting it), and yet, on some level, it served as part of the global communication that "this is wrong", even though nobody went out and said it.

Likewise this story here says "What a slimeball", between the lines.
Same thing.

to demean people who are tired of accepting crap from the privileged. Then some on the political left decided to own the term and act just like the caricature the right created. It's a stupid phrase.

No, it's not just a freaking story. Guy has a point, he's just too far overboard. And so are you.

SOMEBODY ACTUALLY GETS IT!

The following is the 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.

This year's term: Political Correctness.

"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

Mark - try thinking for a change. The woman had already threatened a lawsuit and to tell the womanizer's wife. The guy who refused to delete the email was (effectively) sitting back and letting the even progress towards those two events. She should have made copies, etc., of the email message, and it would appear that nobody involved thought that the "perp" would have deleted the message. Your legal knowledge may be flawed - given that the woman had made known her intent to file a lawsuit and tell the wife, only a manager would be obligated to report the incident (and that might be company policy, not law) - knowing that intent, the IT had no reason to report it. Such reporting is usually required to help those without enough fortitude to combat such harassment - the victim had demonstrated that she did not need such assistance.

"She should have made copies"

That's just a little like victim blaming, but the rest of your post certainly doesn't carry that tone. Which is why I say "minor quibble".

I told the user on the phone to put the floppy disk in the drive.
- "Done", she replied.
- OK, now type "A:".
- "No media on volume A:" (or somethig like that).
- Are you sure that you entered the floppy and closed the door?
- Sure
- OK, let's try taking removing it and entering it again
- I can't remove it
- Why?
- I'ts no longer there
- What do you mean
- It has eaten it
- You entered it in the floppy drive right?
- Yes, but it's no longer there

I had to send a technician and they finally discovered that it was true: the floppy was inside the case of the computer: she had entered it in the gap that was between the floppy drive and an empty slot.

Had a similar experience to this when a friend of my sisters purchased a second hand computer and I was called in to find out why the computer was eating the floppy disks. It was one of those cases with the floppy drive bay cover molded into the case. The computer they purchased did not actually have a floppy drive behind that molded floppy bay cover just a spring loaded dust cover that made it look like it did.

I was told this story many years ago. The young son of the user of a desktop system discovered that graham crackers were the same size as a floppy. One guess where the graham cracker wound up.

are also about the same size as a PB&J sandwich.

Betcha can guess how i know that

I did exactly the same thing on the boss' brand new top-of-the-line 386-40 desktop a couple decades back. One doesn't have to be a technophobe to screw up once in a while.

Art

The senior Lady that was one of the secretaries/data entry clerk, inserted the floppy in between the gap between the A: and B: drives. After taking the PC apart to retrieve the floppy, I closed the gap with tape. I don't know if she tried it again, but at least I was not called again for that.
Another time she broke the lever of the drive because some of the floppy models had a lever to close the door of the floppy. However if the floppy was inserted wrong or not all the way in, the lever would NOT go down. She insisted and broke the lever. Had to order a new Floppy drive. Her boss was not amused.

Similar story here...only it was a customer with a hungry CD drive. They told me that their computer "definitely" had a virus on it because they put in a CD and it had been reading for hours without anything coming up on the screen. The PC apparently made horrible noises and then powered down. When I got there and opened up the computer, the inside was covered in dust and the fan was ground down to a nub. She had put the CD into a slit between the 5 1/4" covers, it hit the CPU fan, ground it down, and then the PC overheated. Of course I had to tell her that this happens all the time, with a straight face.

A good friend of mine was on-site in a lawyer's office working on systems and they had a brand new technician hard at work on a laptop. Remember - this is a lawyer. After an hour he walked to see how the new tech was doing. GREAT was the response, the hard drive is fine, clean, I ran FDISK and it is spinning .....what? You ran WHAT??? Yeap, the tech cleaned the drive totally, no backup, just WHAMMO and it was the Joker's Magic Pencil Trick. "TADA ... gone." So my friend got this idiot up .. showed him the door, told him to walk through it, close it, and keep walking till he found his home.

sounds like he might never have made it there... what without a blue line painted on the ground to follow.

From the lawyer's story above, this same fellow visited a customer on site. The woman said her system was eating floppy disks. They go in ... never come out. He asked her to demonstrate. She reached down, the system was to her side and rather out of view ... and put a floppy in. Then she hit the eject button. This drive was spring loaded like a Roman catapult and the floppy went flying out fast. So my friend looked behind a large plant that was behind the woman and there were about 50 disks all having been flown across her office space.

Another woman liked to hold her floppy disks to her office wall using magnets.

Classic... but the classic story that I was told when interning at an IT help desk in High School. Guy just got a new computer and was insisting none of his old files would come up with Office, and was quite angry. My boss went down to this guys office and found out he was folding his old 5 1/4 disks in half and shoving them in his new 3 1/2 inch disk drive.

Nice one! I had a customer try to fit a CD into the 3 1/2" floppy. Hmm, the disk doesn't fit. What to do? That's right, take a band saw to the CD and trim it down! Also, he told me that the CD had a virus because he had it in the floppy drive for half an hour and it wasn't reading. You just can't make this stuff up.

Our user used his laptop for two years without one complaint, he took the laptop home at the end of the day, worked from home and took it back to the office the next day, one day afternoon he called us ???the laptop went off by itself, I need help??? he said, ???ok we are coming to you??? the technician answered.
When the technician went to see him he realized that the user moved to a new office, he was able to work for about three hours on battery and over the wireless, for two years he didn???t know that the laptop needs a power supply to be charge, he just come to the office in the morning plug the round cable (the charger) and the two square ones (USB and Network).

Boss man always buys the best. When he wanted to show me the 5GB music he downloaded on the now-defunct BearShare, I warned him about viruses. He responded that anti-virus slowed down his computer too much. The one which got him ate the entire hard drive. The ISP now installs McAfee automatically, so he's safe.
He has given up file-sharing, but now has a nearly empty terabyte devoted to FreeCell, Zuma, and Facebook. Even after several malware infections, he has uninstalled every application of Spyware Doctor and Malwarebytes I've installed on his computer. He insists that Spyware Doctor's updates and the entire Malwarebytes app are rogues.

Just for fun--a story from a former Office Depot employee who had a customer with a recent fax machine purchase which, he claimed, wouldn't fax his attorney. After an extensive tech support conversation, he called the salesman, who made a house call on his way home. He wrote "This is a test" on a sheet of paper and had the customer load it. The customer folded it in half, loaded it, and when the salesman told him that he could not fax a folded sheet, the idiot responded, "I don't want just everyone to read what I'm sending."

Two AM, and my telephone rang, the woman on the other end was a police dispatcher, getting ready for the busy time after the local bars closed.
"My cursor is bouncing all over the screen and I can't do anything."
I heard a creaking sound.
"Oh, never mind. It just stopped."
The next night, 2:00 AM
"It's happening again, the cursor is all over the place." (The hardware was an IBM display terminal for an AIX system.)
"It's worse tonight, you have to come and see it."
"I'll be there in ten minutes."
When I arrived, she said "Oh, it stopped just a few minutes after I called. I tried to call you back but I guess you'd already left."
I handed her yet one more slip of paper with my pager number on it. Then I studied the terminal, all the connections and the keyboard. Everything was in order so I looked around her desk to see if maybe she'd spilled coffee or dropped something. No clues, everything was in order, including the heavy three ring binder the dispatchers used for shift change notes.
One more night -- 2:00. The pager and my phone ring at the same time.
"Hi ______________," I said. "Same problem?"
"Yeah, just more than before. It's really going crazy."
"You know the heavy three-ring binder you use for shift change notes?" I asked.
"Yeah?"
"If it's in your lap right now, you might make sure that the top of it isn't resting on your space bar."
Doh
B^)

I know one person that wanted to sell the computer they had purchased second hand from a dead mans estate as they thought it was haunted as it was always turning it self on and off again in the middle of the night. After the installed software and the BIOS settings where examined it was discovered the BIOS was set to turn itself on every day at 12:15 at night. A schedule was also in place on the computer to run a backup program about 12:30 and that program was set to shut the computer down on completion of the backup. After they where informed all their files where being backed up nice and safe on a tape drive in the computer and it was not haunted they decided to keep it but had it adjusted to a more friendly 7:00am morning schedule when they would normally have breakfast and a shower to avoid waking them.

Hello
a lady called me for plug usb modem in her computer to access internet, ,i told the lady that it's not possible since the computer is very old and there is no usb port inside ,the lady replay that she had internet in her computer in her first home using the same monitor ,after that i understand that she was using the monitor and another desktop .

I was working in a large law firm when I got a call from one of the legal secretaries complaining that her keyboard was acting erratically. I asked if she had spilled anything in it, so I could bring a replacement (her cube was 3 floors up and across the building). She assured me she hadn't, so I headed her way. When I got there, I checked the AT connection and verified the problem. Since keyboards are cheap, I was just going to swap it. When I picked the keyboard up, cola started running out the side. I looked at her & she just blurted out "I was off yesterday!"

Back in the Stoneage in about 1984 I worked for a company using an IBM Series 1 with 8" floppy disks for external storage.
We'd just taken on a new assistant in the IS Department and on one occasion the IT Manager asked her to copy the last week's data file - held on an 8" floppy - for backup purposes.
She took the disk and duly returned with a photocopy of the disk nicely and securely stapled to the floppy disk itself!
An entire week's data - orders, invoices, stock lists etc. - destroyed in 5 minutes!

I was working on a printer in one of our offices and it involved getting down noto the floor so I put my DECT phone on the side.

After fixing the printer I went back to my office but forgot my phone.

I realised what I had done so rushed back to get it, I had already had a voice message left.

So on my way back to my office I played back the message. It was from the woman who sat next to the printer I was working on kindly letting me know I had left my phone next to the printer.

I have no idea how she imagined i would get the message considering she was ringing the phone that was next to her.

I have many other stories about this user but this one has to be one of the most stupid things i have ever come accross.

But can't you check your voice mail by some other means than just your cell phone? If not, change carriers or get a Google Voice number and start using that.

In early 90s, the head of my region of the insurance company for which I worked was a twit - technologically and otherwise. One of my operators was working on a PC (8085, anyone remember those things without even a hard-disk?). The chap was doing me a favour by completing a crucial task in-spite of suffering from cold and fever. In walks the regional manager and sees my chap with a dripping nose. He gets back to his desk and dashes off a telex (again, does anyone remember these electromagnetic contraptions which represented a major advance in communications technology?) to the HR sitting in faraway Bangalore complaining that this operator was callously spreading viruses to the machines in the comp lab (yup, those days they were called comp labs!). The gentleman (and I use the term guardedly) even recommended that the operator be reprimanded and penalised. I spent the rest of the week convincing the HR (again made of tech neandarthals) that there indeed was no need to do good the recommendations. Whew!

I walked into a clients office one day. She was up on a ladder shining a torch into the ceiling through one of the downlighter holes. I asked what was up. She said there was a cat in the roof)for 3 days already) and she got the gardener from next door(promised him a 100 bucks) to climb into the roof to get the cat out. She was afraid it was going to die of hunger. I could hear the cat meowing away every few seconds. I carried on with my work and suddenly turned around to her new secretary's PC(she started working there 3 days ago). Lo and behold, the Office 97 animated helper(the cat) was sitting on the desktop, meowing away because the PC wasn't in use. Lots of red faces around when I told them.

But it's little helper...

When I was working for my State Government's Computer Centre, we were responsible for network support of many systems across many different WAN's over a huge geographical region - early 90's.
My colleague at the time told the story about how staff from a department on a remote island had called in with a fault ticket along the lines of "Can't connect to IBM mainframe". As part of the troubleshooting, the question was asked, "What's the error code on your communications server?"
"Where's that?"
"It's in the communications room. Look for something which has 'IBM' written on it ..." etc. etc.
"Well I'd better find a torch."
"Why? Is something wrong with the light in the comms room?"
"No. We've got a blackout up here." (Power Outage.)

A few years ago an engineer called me and asked for a new set of multimedia speakers for a user.
I said something like "Guess they blew the old ones up".
He said no...
Apparently the user called the Helpdesk and said there was no audio coming from the PC.
Helpdesk went through all the usual fault finding - no joy.
The helpdesk guy then had a brainwave and said "are the speakers swithed on?".
The user replied "Speakers?"

Am I the only user experiencing difficulty reading the posts? The contrast is so poor I have to highlight the text to make it legible. Who decided the low contrast and pale font?

David (WSM - UK)

Very subtle - you beat me to it!

No problems on my side. On most browsers if you hold down Ctrl and scroll up with the mouse wheel, the screen zooms in (larger). I use that to read my fave cartoon, Monty; the Sunday strip is usually too small to read.

Similar experience to earlier where a user complained that they could not get any life out of their PC. As it was only in the next office, a personal visit was in order, and sure enough, all the supply to the unit and monitor was dead. Both were fed from a trailing 4-way power strip on the floor, under the desk which was "dead". I discovered a rocker switch on the hidden side of the strip, pushed against the skirting board, causing it to be swiched off. What had happened was that the rather enthusiastic cleaner had pusehd the vacuum cleaner under the desk, pushing the strip against the wall and isolating the power! Always start with the obvious! Doh!

25 years ago I worked on the BBC Domesday project. We used to send software out to schools to run on BBC B computers. We had a help desk to help teachers & students with questions & problems relating to the software

One afternoon, JD & I got back from lunch to find the girl on the help desk absolutely frantic because she had a problem she couldn't solve. She passed the call through to us saying that it was a headmaster at a school having a problem with his computer.

The conversation went something like this (and I'm sure he said all this without taking a breath)

"I'm the headmaster of x school and we have had out BBC B for a couple of years but this it the first time we've used it and the picture on the screen is upside down, I've tried adjusting all the knobs on top but nothing happens can you help?"

JD and I looked at each other and JD said "Hang on, we'll get back to you" and hit the secrecy button on the phone. Once we had stopped laughing, I got back on to the phone and said "OK, I think we have a solution. Can you try turning the monitor up-side-down?" After a few minutes which ended with a thump, the head master said "It's working now, thanks" and humg up

I once worked for a UK government department that processed the payrolls for the Prison Service. They had an old C\CPM system, hooked up to a modem, that received files of overtime payment information from each prison, which were fed into the payroll system. I was the only person left in the whole department who knew anything about CPM systems, so I was the support main (and only) contact in case of problems. I got a call one day from the data centre to say the system had gone haywire and all of the menus had vanished. The payroll was due to be run later in the day, and if the screws didn't get their overtime payments they could go on strike, leading to riots in the prison!

After trying the usual "switch it off, then back on again" support, I had to jump in a taxi to travel the 10 miles to the data centre to get access to the kit. I walked up to the machine (old ICL kit, green screen etc), examined it for about 30 seconds, turned up the brightness on the monitor, then walked out to hail another taxi.

We had unexpected power outage on one of our remote locations. It lasted so long that the UPS in server/printer room was depleted and did automatic server shutdown.
Next morning no one could log on to network.
After standard set of questions, I asked secretary to go to server room and check the power lights on the equipment. After we agreed that all power lights are on, except on switch, I loaded replacement switch in car and drove for 2 and half hours to there only to find that UPS is not working for some reason.
I pressed ON button on UPS and SHAZAM! switch come alive...
Secretary thought that UPS is just a part of telephone switchboard and that UPS's power light doesn't need to be lit... although I have asked specifically, checking equipment on the picture of rack I had...
So 5 hours drive for a 30 sec work...

I was once called in by my boss, who was in a real panic. She had been working all week on a very large, and very important, report when the office power failed. She told me that her document had "gone away" and that I had to find it for her. When I asked her when she had last saved it, and whereabouts on the hard drive, she replied, "But I haven't saved it yet - it isn't finished." It probably took me an hour after that to explain to her how it would be impossible to get her report back again.

Actually, documents and files are usually cached in temp folders (or in Office's case, in autorecovery files saved automatically every 10 minutes). There are several ways to retrieve closed documents but you must act very fast and not allow journalled file-system to overwrite these files.

Of course, you leave out a lot of details, so I may be wrong about your particular situation. But usually there's at least a couple of ways to retrieve the data.

Unfortunately when they first introduced auto-save, they only worked once you made an initial save. While I used to try, conscientiously, to save a document immediately, it was the times that I "got enthusiastic" and worked for a couple of hours without a single save that you were guaranteed to have a crash

A brand new shiny Acer laptop has an encounter with a cup of coffee across it's keyboard. The user advises that he had cleaned it off immediately and the laptop worked fine however disappointingly the keyboard was misbehaving in the area of the coffee spill. Attending to the device took a 2 hour drive, fixing it 30 seconds. In the process of cleaning our new and very embarrassed user had pushed the num-lock key. Good advert for Acer keyboards.

Back in the 1990's I was tech support manager for a major international company. The IT manager in Zaire (now Congo) called to ask if I was able to provide a new disk for the AS400. "Why do you need that, Pierre?". "Because the old one has a bullet hole in it"

I used to do in home tech support. One day, I got a frantic phone call from D. The mouse for her Win 95 computer wouldn't go all the way to the top of the screen, and nothing she did would make it go to the top of the screen.

I packed up my laptop, a mouse driver, and a new mouse, and head on over. I asked her to show me what the problem was. She proceeded to move the mouse to show me what the problem was. I just looked at the screen, and then put my hand over hers on the mouse, picked it and her hand up and placed it back on the bottom part of the mouse pad.

While your story is funny, there might still have been a problem here that caused the user to react; in Windows 95 and 98 sometimes the mouse settings would get lost (viruses could be the cause) which meant sensitivity changed. It is important to try to interpret what the user is conveying. As far as I can tell, you didn't fix her problem.

I had the exact same thing happen, except the user called and requested a bigger mouse pad because he couldn't get to the edges of his screen. I did the same thing - simple lifted his hand up and set it back down in the middle of the mouse pad. "Uh, thanks" was the users response.

Back in those days I had several users mostly late middle aged that simply couldn't grasp the concept of the mouse. I found that they did better with trackballs. Logitech sold several at time that was popular in that age group. At the time most mice were as ergonomic as a bar of soap. I think that they painful to use. Most mice now have a curve to them and don't give that problem.

1.Shortly after the German democratic republic folded (East Germany) 1989, I was sent to fault find an installation of a couple of large (old) line printers at a site near to Dresden. The company concerned wanted to save money and install the big double IBM cables themselves and everything themselves. They had put one cable on one channel and the other on another......They must both run to the same channel!! Simple.
2.I built my first home PC in around 1977-78, which ran CPM. I was at the supplier picking up the parts and a guy was complaining that his CPM master diskette did not work, he had it in a binder, with two neat holes through it to hold it securely!
3. A customer in Greece kept blowing control PCBs in a complex drive unit. When I went there eventually, they could not understand why having the door open was upsetting the cooling air flow and the PCB was simply overheating. They were simply too lazy to close the door.
4. I went to a company complaining of multiple CPU and other errors on disks and printers (big stuff!), when I got there all the operators were wearing swimming trunks because the computer room as at around 40??C ! I told them they were stuck with the problems till they repaired the AC and ran a few weeks to let things calm down again. Unhappy customer....
5. Big tape reels were unreadable, I examined the storage and the tape and found that the tape concerned was on the inside of a steel cupboard wall, and large magnets were stuck on the outside holding paper notices......
6. In the early 60's (not quite an IT problem!) a friend of mine was installing/replacing mechanical typewriters, with modern electric ones. One pretty typist had problems of many extra letters mixed in with her typing. The fix was to raise her chair 2 inches to get her **** off the keyboard!!!

Back in the days of modems in every PC, I was working as a phone tech for an ISP. A older lady had just bought a brand new PC and wanted to hook up to our ISP and the Internet, but it wasn't working. I asked her if her modem was connected to a phone line. She had no clue what I was talking about. I was reduced to asking, "Oh, you want to connect your computer to our computer. Great! How do you want to do that, by using a wire to connect your computer to our computer?" (true story). She refused to answer my question, and finally said, "I'll just call back and get someone else."

More than once, users have called and reported that they cannot connect to the wireless network. After a quick look, it turns out that they turned off the wireless card using the FN key by accident, or they flicked the hardware switch for the card without knowing what they were doing! One of the easiest repairs i have ever done.

To be fair to your boss, some laptop manufacturers seem to take pride in making the wifi switch or fn key one or more of: invisible, inaccessible, too stiff, too loose, right next to a key we all use 50 times a day, and particularly with fn keys giving no kind of on/off status indicator. It takes quite a hunt for us to find it on unfamiliar models sometimes, so I have some sympathy for non-techy users.

I get this all the time, and the solution was to write a new policy that informed the user of links to manuals of his/her specific computer (we use Dell so that's easily accomplished) and require new personnel to "Get to know your computer" the first week of employment.
Otherwise users will request USB devices from you that they didn't know they've had for the last two years because they have never looked at their computer's devices..

a costumer called her wifi was not working on her laptop i tried to explain over the phone she just could not follow she asked me to come over (about forty miles away) i walked in flipped the wifi switch right where i told her it was everything worked seventy dollars for seven seconds work (would that i could get ten dollars a second on all my jobs)

I had a client that wanted to get away from being on Ethernet cable and wanted to connect through wireless. I told them that I could purchase the wireless router and could make the changes to connect them(they had DSL). Either they did not want to pay me or decided that they could do it themselves. I did not hear back from them. After about two years they called me to come over, since now they had moved to another part of town and their wireless was not working. When I got there I discover that they had purchased a regular router because it was cheaper than the wireless one. They had installed it themselves and were not aware all this time that they were connecting to the neighbors wi-fi. It took them a few minutes to absorb the simple terms explanation that I gave them. Unfortunately they could not return the router. I never hard back from them again(yet .

My son is the user in this one. One day I arrived home to hear that he couldn't get anything to work any more on his computer. It was running, but I couldn't find anything recognizable in any applications or even most of the OS. I remember not being able to find Control Panel. He had found out that most folders and icons could be renamed, and had had a fun afternoon in a renaming frenzy of all the ones with boring names, including many of the Windows folders and icons.

Suspecting that for every minute he had spent on this game would take 10 or 20 or 30 minutes to understand and repair, I almost threw in the towel. I don't remember quite what I did, but I managed to copy enough from another machine onto his to get it mostly functional again. But it was never quite the same again. Fortunately, the printer worked and he could do his homework. That was enough for me. I suppose he reinstalled some games but I did not inqiure.

Years later, he's through grad school, is happily married, and has a good job. And hasn't needed to ask for help with his machine in ages.

One company I worked for, a user decided to download some porn and store it on the server. He decided to name the directories to describe exactly what the various pictures where about. Talk about a red flag to a system administrator. The administrator saw the directory names, checked the contents, and the user was dismissed.

My son worked tech support for a major hospital in southeast Texas. In the process of upgrading a VP's desktop, he came across a collection of child porn. He reported it to his supervisor; guess who got fired?

....while at a mid-sized corporation that had been taken over by a Wall $treet private equity firm, one of my duties was to keep an eye on the web content filter/monitor. One day I discovered that the acting company President was regularly surfing porn during the day which I notified my boss in a "Can you believe this?" type of way. Turns out that he went to his boss, who had a beef with the president went to the in-house lawyer who then tried to leverage this porn surfing activity to their advantage. Long story short....the equity firm used this opportunity to remove all the executives. My manager and myself were laid off a month later.

Do not be inadvertently useful!

Phone dialogue between support and receptionist.
Receptionist: I am having trouble accessing my email in Outlook
Support: What do you have on the screen?
Receptionist: Nothing
Support: Not even a desktop?
Receptionist: Oh - yes, that is there.
Support: What is on the desktop?
Receptionist: Nothing
Support: Not even icons?
Receptionist: Oh yes, they are there
Support: Do you see an Outlook icon in the bottom right corner?
Receptionist: No but i can see one in the bottom left corner
Support: Hmmm....in all my years i have never seen it in the bottom left corner
Receptionist: It is definitely in the bottom left corner (ever-so-slight-pause) when your back is to the screen

Back in the days of Windows 3.11 I was tasked to reinstall a program for a user. After looking at the user's workstation I found the program was there, but the launching icon was missing. I choose an appropriate icon (to me) from the several icons available in Windows 3.11 for the PIF. I asked the user to verify the program was correct by launching the program from the icon. The user replied, "that can't be the same program, the picture is different."

One of the department's Deputy Managers got his first laptop (EVER!). He thought the charger was too heafty and asked me if it necessary to be taken home. Once I finished convincing him to take the hardware home, he asked me whether the company was gonna pay him for the electricity consumptions that the the new laptop will incur.

Hi!
I work for IT Outsorcing company.
Well, listen (read) my story.
One day user called saying she had a problem with Adobe if I remember corectly. So I decide to conect remotely to her machine.
I advice her this could take few moments and ask her to close or hide all sensitive and confidental data's because I shuoldn't watch is.
My bigest supprise was when she said:"ok give me a second".. and I hear she grab some papers, botles and mugs to a drawers... that was awsome she was cleaning her desk

My section was moved out of the main data centre into a small office about 10 miles away due to space restrictions. We took our server with us, and got it a UPS. We used to test the UPS monthly, seeing how long the batteries would last (usually about 30 mins) before it shut down the server gracefully. We never had any problems with it.
A year or so later we all moved into a new office building, and we put our server and UPS in the server room (actually a small vacant office) in the new building.
When it came to next test our UPS, we pulled the plug as usual. Within 5 minutes the building was full of curses as at least four other servers went down simultaneously! One of the guys who looked after the other servers had noticed there were some unused outlets on our UPS and had plugged his servers into it without letting us know. Unfortunately, he had not installed the UPS monitor software, nor plugged in the serial cables which allowed the UPS to communicate with the servers. Our server shut down gracefully as usual, but the batteries only lasted about 5 minutes. His servers just went down in a heap and it took nearly the whole day for him to get them back up again, though lots of work was lost.

We had a customer who decided to save some money on their installation and decided to get their own guys to run the coaxial cables between the server and other units, as some of these were quite a distance and they wanted a "neat" job, now all went smoothly until the time came with the brand new and tested machine to be connected to the network, result, on powering up the server it went off with an almighty bang and a blinding flash of light, we were bewidered as there is nothing with that amount of power on the machine, end result, their installation guys had run the co-ax and tied it to an underground 380V cable, resulting in us getting close to that on the data cable back at the machine, giving all a bright flash of inspiration that woke up a lot of people as to what the equipment cost.

My first job in "real" IT was for a company that made CP/M based wordprocessors -- and other office equipment.

My last day -- the company had decided that the computer market was getting too busy and they were going to backtrack and concentrate on selling electronic typewriters, so I got made redundant -- was spent painstakingly rebuilding a 360K floppy that contained the only existing copy of a customer's research into a new pharmaceutical. (Yes, worth millions. Don't ask.) The rebuilding consisted of cutting the mylar disk out of the -- warped and distorted -- case, putting it into another, then using a sector editor to rebuild the directory entry for the file. The sales manager that had brought the disk to me was effusive in his gratitude... didn't save my job, though.

The disk? It had been used as a coaster, under a hot mug of coffee.

The company? Lasted about another five years, before they discovered that nobody wanted typewriters any more.

Much later, another organisation, another job... a user called to say her mouse had stopped working. "Okay, what happened to it?" "Well," she said, "I spilled orange juice on it." "Oh, well, that'll teach you to be more careful," I said. "No," she said, "it still worked after that. But it was sticky, so I ran it under the tap {faucet}. /Then/ it stopped working."

I used to work for a computer support company, and we had a lady customer who worked for a Catholic charity in our city. About every couple of months, she would bring in her computer and report that the hard drive had failed. After testing in our workshop, it turned out she was correct, so a new hard disk was installed under warranty and her software restored from a backup (which she did religiously, fortunately, as it had failed so many times before!). Finally, after the umpteenth failed hard drive, our boss decided it would be better to send a technician out to her, to see the computer in situ and try and find out what was going on. After the technician returned, the mystery was solved; her PC case, when on her desk, was totally covered in fridge magnets, which she, of course, removed whenever she brought the machine in to us (not realising they were the cause of the problem)! Go figure?!

now she'll have to buy a minifridge to have a place to store all those decorative magnets

So many of these anecdotes are related to equipment not plugged in. In my country the state-owned Electricity Supply Commission is a monopoly. Thus when I was doing support the first thing I'd ask is, "Are you connected to ESCOM?"

The day my new boss started in the job (and a VERY bright lady too) I handed over her desktop and laptop. Five minutes later she called me saying that the mouse wasn't working. When I got there she'd been trying to use the mouse connected to the desktop to control the laptop...

Always try to get the user to laugh at the joke with you. Get snarky and as you walk away they'll be calling YOU the L-user.

had to deal with real users, eh?

Got a user calling me in a panic he has to work and he cant access his documents on the server told him to restart and try again called me a few minutes later telling me still cant access it went down and tiped in his password and see it cant connect and then saw that he tiped his own name wrong in and that's why he cant access it

I find a lot of these stories amusing, and I'm a regular reader of sites that cover these stories, but it's important to be a good listener in order to really solve the problem. Some previous colleagues I have worked with in IT have not been good communicators (or not communicating at all). They are usually less able to solve a problem, because they don't understand why the user is complaining. They may then contribute to rather than solve the situation. Instead of explaining the situation at bird's view, they confuse the user with micro details (which is of no interest to the users but great interest to a geek).

Usually, users will not report problems when things go their way. They will keep doing the same thing (that works) even if it's not the correct way of doing things. They will keep it up for years until one day when, by chance often, it does not work. Before you go all judgemental, try wielding a new tool to get a job done in a field outside your expertise.

I recently asked a user to show me how she was not able to open a portable document file (PDF), and she fired up word, and poked around the file system with word's file-open dialogue.
Trying to tell her that it doesn't work like that and that she has to open it in a PDF reader is not addressing the issue. The issue is that she does not understand the difference between an application running in the operating system and a file manager displaying the files in the operating system. She does not, indeed, understand how files are stored but believes everything is stored inside MS Word. She has written several extensive publications for the last 20 years.
We solved the problem by setting up a course for her, and she was very happy to learn how it really worked "from the ground up".

Heck, even quite a few (non-experienced) "techies" have no idea that e-mails are actually files, or have the least understanding for how underlying technology works. They just scratch the surface, studying their functions. I bet a lot of techrepublic readers are like that too. Keep that in mind.

Some users treat computers as being aware of their physical surroundings, for instance. In their eyes it's the computer's fault, for instance, if it cannot detect a mouse not being plugged in. Also, all connectors are treated as USB connectors. The computer should know when something's not connected right. This is what they learn from Hollywood movies where messages on the monitor tells them what's happening in the real world (outside the computer's "physical sensory periphery"). This is also completely normal behaviour, because most things in nature will sense their surroundings, even plants and trees.

Understanding computing and computers requires the right attitude, an investigational attitude, to make inquiries and test things out for yourself. This is natural behavior for anyone interested in a given subject, and it will take me about a minute to learn the dynamics of a new cellphone OS for example. This may not be the case for your users who do not have the same attitude (they don't want to explore or go on adventure, they want to "make some damn calls" etc.) especially if the GUI isn't well laid out.
Keep Terry Pratchett's words of wisdom in mind: "It's completely intuitive; it just takes a few days to learn, but then it's completely intuitive."

At last it should be said that the phrase "You'll spend 80% of your time working for 20% of your users" is completely true. I have realized some people are truly incapable of doing things on their own (they may be insecure and need other people's go-ahead) or use support services to get attention. You'll have to be extra patient with these guys and gals, because they will usually shout or complain publicly if you don't provide them with what they need. But inform of company policies so that the work stays relevant. There are limits to what one should do, and if you bend over too willingly or too easily, you only tell people it's okay to screw you over.

Definitely a classic....

Had a service call at a stereo shop that had a Radio Shack model III, with two 5 1/4" floppy drives.. they said their boot disk didn't work anymore, and they needed one fast to do their books. I checked the disk and sure enough, nothing happened, like it was blank. I was just out there the day before and had made a copy for them, and asked them to pop that one in. It worked fine, and I was packing up my tools when I heard a thump behind me... the woman had put the disk up against the filing cabinet and stuck a 3" speaker magnet to hold it there... It took a long time to explain how disks store information.

One common thread throughout this post is the I.T. person apologizing or taking blame for other workers mistakes or stupidity. This is pretty normal and also why we get no respect in the workplace. When a user makes a mistake, tell them it's their mistake. Say it nicely, make it a learning opportunity but be firm. Treat people like adults and they'll act like adults.

For instance, when a user's developed a computer problem that's been caused by his surfing being dictated by his upper trouser area, it's undoubtedly NOT better to tell him how those trojans got there. Not in detail, anyway. Chances are, once he's watched you clearing out stuff with "suggestive" names while muttering about viruses and trojans, and listened to your suggestions about computer security, safe surfing and the like, he's going to understand without having the embarrassment of being confronted with the issue quite that directly.

Another common user explanation for things is "the computer did it all on its own." When it's completely clear exactly what DID happen to cause the problem and the computer did what the user had asked it to do, the avoidance of the user doing the same thing again can be a diplomatic minefield. I find the twin phrases "we've all done that" and "it's a common problem" can be useful, even when the user's "problem" has resulted from a complete failure to understand that clicking "Yes" on a dialog that explains that all their files will be irretrievably lost if they click "yes". (Actually, I bet most of us have deleted things we didn't mean to. Hands up? Be honest? Right. Now keep your hands up if you didn't have a decent backup. Mm. Still most of you. )

I may have had second thoughts later but I fully intended to delete it when I did so.

Me too.
For entire nanoseconds after pressing...

All of us have had "Oh Sh**" moments, particularily while learning.

Had a user complain that the "are you sure" dialog, needed to have another one behind it "are you REALLY sure?"

A user once called me to say that it took three tries to open his email every morning. Then after it finally opened, he got two error messages. This was before remote control was available, but I was in the same building, so I visited him and asked him to duplicate the problem for me. WAY faster than you can read this, he double-clicked the icon once-twice-three times I smiled and told him I could fix it VERY quickly but that we would have to wait for it to open so I could show him the solution. When I read the error messages aloud to him, he had a glimmer of a smile, but waited for me to explain. (He had never bothered to read them, just got annoyed at seeing errors.) The messages basically said that he couldn't open another instance of email because one was already open. I explained that the FIRST double-click opened it and then the other two complained. He was laughing as he said, "So, I'm factually aster than the PC and I need to be patient!"

recently got a ticket asking that i go load a guys email account to an another PC went transfer the pst. file and enable the email account again not a few minutes after i left the guys called me and accused me of deleting his email he cant access any of his email went back and explain i just looked at the email after i replaced them and they where all their so he said come look need less to say the inbox as just minimized

I was interested to note one thing about this apparently "stupid user" story. The apparent genius of a tech didn't actually check with the employees supervisor about the unusual request. Seriously the person is asking for equipment that is unusual and what you just accept that without follow up? I personally think the user, a temp, was smart, or at least smart enough to manipulate the stupid tech into giving them a high end system.

All right, I'll tell you another one.. I've done TS for Intuit, AOL, and M$, and a bit of on site for another company, so I have quite a few of these. This is my second best one.

I was working at M$ as a tele tech support CSE for win 95 at the time... This guy calls in and says he is having problems with his faxmodem... so we go through the paces, and check for settings, driver dates, connections, and such.. All the while he is bragging about how many years he has worked in IT, and has this degree and that degree.. fantastic job as the computer manager of a fortune 500 company... knows EVERYTHING about computers... huge income.. has a boat... dating the prettiest secretaries .. blah blah... and I drop him out of windows to change some settings in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files...

He starts having a cow and yells, MY SCREEN WENT DARK!!!! What happened to windows??? I asked, "Do you see anything on your dark screen?" "I don't know, a capital C and a colon.. and some other characters.. What happened to windows???"

"Uhh, sir, have you ever worked with DOS before?" "What's DOS??" (long silence.....) "Please, could you tell me who you work for?" "Why?" "Because I want your job..." I fixed his issue, then told him I was kidding about his job, which was a blatant lie... heheheh

Whilst working for a major American tech company in to 90's I was given the task of rebuilding the CTO's laptop. I spent a fair amount of time making 100% sure everything was spot on before handing it over to him. As he sat checking his programs and data, he asked, 'have you loaded the latest version of the internet on here?'... I told him I had.

I'll be short. One day guy from Govrement Pension Fund called me to report problem on network, his computers were unable to see eachother and server also. I tried every approach imaginable (over phone) and after 20 minutes i become suspicous, everything looked ok, eather i was not on the top of the problem or the guy was doing something wrong. Soon enough he told me next thing: 'I don't know what to do anymore, i am ponging server host all day and can't get pong reply!....dig dat!
Similar happend when guy was entering commands in cmd of his PC instead of server, i realize that after half an hour when it become obvious that neither command is actually working..

For those not familiar with punch cards - these were the method used for program/data input. They are "typed" using a keypunch machine that punched the coded holes in the field, and typed the corresponding character at the top of the card. The card reader reads the holes.

I had a student job working the help desk at the computer center and a woman came to me with a problem - her card deck was not being recognized when she ran her program, it read her "job card", but nothing else. I tried several things, but could not get it to run either. Her program looked fun (fanning the cards to read the top of each). I suspected the holes were bad and held one card and saw that the keypunch had not punched any holes her cards.

I asked her which keypunch she used so I could have it repaired. She replied that the line was too long for the keypunches so she typed them on her typewriter at home.

I got a call from a woman who had retired from one of the "Big Three" automakers where she had been a secretary. She said she could not see the text she was typing. It took a moment to determine she set the font to white on a white background!

IBM punch cards? Now that goes back a ways. Does anyone have any ancient stories about running programs off of cassette tape or reel-to-reel tape, before there were floppies? (Wasn't there a Radio Shack computer that used cassette tape for data storage? Or was that a Tandy?)

I had a TI-99 that used a standard cassette recorder/player to store programs. My very first "Hello World" program was stored on cassette.

My TRS80 had cassette tape

We had a Texas Instruments TI99 that ran stuff off of cassette tape.
It has cartridges that you could put in, like a game console, but if you wanted to you could also run programs from tape. just plug in the tape recorder, type the command, wait a couple minutes for everything to be loaded in while the tape recorder made squealing sounds. Only did it a couple times, as the programs we had on tape weren't that good.

In about 1970 someone made a cassette reader that connected via an RS-232 interface. I put together a Raytheon 704 minicomputer for testing hugh engine driven natural gas coompressors. In those days, teletypes were the common method of both programming and printing results. The vibration of the engine room floors made the teletype linkages unreliable so purchased the cassette reader for program loading and data storage and TI's Silent 700 for printout. Big problem was constant readjustment of reader head sensitivity.

I came along after the days of actually running programs off tapes, but in the 90s I worked at a place that used a tape backup program. And my manager insisted on us backing up every day - not just the work we had done that day but our entire system as well. It took about two hours to do this, and we couldn't do anything else on the computer at the same time. I went through a LOT of books when I worked there.

Just about every early home PC used cassettes for storage.
They are still used today for data storage, but with digital data in a modern bit format, instead of tones as on the older machines....

This is an old way back when story... in 1980, I had just done a course at high school in computer programming and we had learnt how to write code on punch cards and I found that I liked it. Unfortunately, my family was really poor, so I used to go into the local Tandy story with a cassette and the latest computer magazine I had managed to buy, and I would ask the sales guys if I could use one of the computers. And these guys would graciously let me stand around in the shop for hours writing code on their computers. And people would come into the store, walk up behind me and ask me what I was doing and I would tell them that I was writing a game for the computer and these people, who quite possibly had access to a lot more money than I had, would then wander off and come back later and buy themselves a computer. Just because they had to be smarter than the kid writing a program on a computer he didnt own... and you know what... those sales guys at Tandy didnt even bother to offer to buy me a coke to reward me for all the computers I helped them sell in that store.

Radio Scraps IS Tandy. RS got that nickname when they were still owned by Allied. Allied used to go to government auctions, buy all the used electronics equipment they could get, then pay people to carefully disassemble the old junk. They had another team of people who straightened resistor and other components' leads, then they'd bundle them up in "grab bag" packages of, say, ten quarter-watt resistors of varying values and sell them in their stores. You needed a 370 ohm resistor in 1/4 watt for your project? You'd better know how to read the color code (and hope they were still bright enough to distinguish) through the plastic packaging! Fun days - long gone, now.

Tandy bought out Allied Radio Scraps and tried to bring some level of professionalism to the name. They also decided that selling you TEN 370 ohm, 1/4 watt resistors, even though you only needed one, was a lot more profitable than paying folks to put grab bags together. Unfortunately, their parts racks now take up less than 10% of their stores' floor space/shelving as they have again made a move to pander to the need for consumer electronics, rather than to those who repair. I seem to be living in a world of dying arts (sigh)!

I worked for a company that was acquired. Previous ownership was technically inept. New ownership hands me a $1M budget and says we need a full LAN, PBX and two new broadcast studios in 90 days. Fortunately I was able to outsource the premises wiring and corporate handled the initial training of the desktop issues. With military precision, corporate delivered 50+ new computers, all preconfigured, and the resources to deploy them and scrap the old ones. First problem...Admin Asst to GM has been doing her church newsletter on company PC for past 5 years...she goes home, we replace PC overnight,,,and she is not a happy girl. But my favorite was the General Sales Mgr. who was the wife of a Navy admiral. As the corporate trainer explains how to log in and check email, she pipes up, "I hope you don't think you are going to show me that. My husband is an Admiral, you need to hire me a houseboy for that task". The next day, first time she boots up the PC..and the splash screen shows for anti-virus run,,,she comes screaming into my office, arms flailing, " I have a virus, I have a virus, protect me". I calmly walked with her back to the machine, explained to her what the screen was, and then decided to make my life simple. As the net admin, I had all her emails copied to her assistant. Assistant would print out the necessary, let her review and comment, then reply. I don't think the GSM ever turned on her computer again and I was able to deal with real issues.

In the good old days of mainframe users had "dumb" terminals. With an upgrade to use PC that replaced the "dumb" terminal, the PC software started with a "press key to continue" message; after multiple calls to customer service(before it was called Help desk) asking where was the " " key. Engineering then made little labels the had "" on then and placed them on the space bar. That stopped the calls to customer service. Remember those people may be on the road with you everyday!

Back in my early tech support days I was called to look at a lady's PC in my building. I cannot recall the problem she was having but I do recall it was something simple that involved opening her computer. This lady was very nice, always well dressed, and very well groomed. She wore beautiful jewelry, had perfect hair, and always had very nice nails. She was sweet, wonderful, and was a joy to help. I told her it would take me a couple minutes to get her up and running so she decided to take a break. When I opened her computer I could not believe what I found!! Eight big, red, perfectly shaped FAKE FINGERNAILS! They were not causing the problem, they were just there in the bottom of the computer. To this day I'm perplexed as to how those fingernails got there. I never did tell her I found them. She was way too sweet to embarrass.

I would want neither to work for you, nor to have you working for me. You seem to be proud of what is clearly unethical behavior.

I was working the forerunner of help desks when we called them information centers. It was all new, so I also got to write application code on PCs. Dept had just got the new IBM PS/2. I wrote a application in Paradox. It would work fine on my PC and my colleagues. But put it on the new PC and it would constantly bomb. It was the only thing they needed the PC for and it wasn't working. After about 3 days of calls and some snide comments about my programming abilities, I asked my colleague to check it out. He comes back and tells me that he found the problem. What?? They had a copy holder next to it that was metal, the paper was held in place by a strong magnet. Whenever the girl flipped the page, she pulled off the magnet and put in on the PC - right were the new design PS/2 with the vertical mount hard drive was. Instant "application error".

I was managing a technical operations team. We had mainframe connections using old 3274 with a gateway program running on multiple PCs. There ws a limit to number of sessions, so we had 8 neatly lined up on a rack with KVM etc. So I'm out at lunch and a get a 911 page. All the MF connections dead. When I get back, I saw that the 3274 was not communicating. Hit IML, all came back to life. Well, the girl who called me, was setting up another gateway PC. And she was very pretty, but did have a very large butt, that apparently was attracted to IML buttons. Next week, we installed guards over all the sensitive buttons on the equipment.

Many years ago..circa 1980, I was called into the IT directors office who explained that the Honeywell DPS6 was failing and that he thought that the implementation of the communications protocols were at fault. Trying to explain to him that these systems were in operation all over the world and that the communications were well tested and proved so I had very serious doubts that this was the problem.

No he said the failure happens around 11:30 every night during our data uploads from there country wide network.

Ok says I, so I went to the meeting where a gaggle of consultants met me and proceeded to pour over dumps of the communications between each server, and commincations processor. Did I mention each dump (paper stack) was about a foot thick on fan fold paper. All very interesting stuff but non-the-less, not the problem that I could see.

11:30 at night sounded very suspicous so I started an investigation as to what was going on. Nothing of consequence showed up except a little old cleaning lady came in around that time and proceeded to mop the raised floor in the computer room; to keep the dust down.

She was very systematic and started at the same spot in the computer room every night and about 11:30 she would end up besides the communications equipment mop in hand pushing it back and forth..

Well to my surprise there were two telephone wires on the support post which were the primary communications link between their servers (prior Ethernet guys). These wires that ran down the post and eventually connecting the communications server to the outsider world were loose on their binding posts and every time she swung the mop back and forth she would hit the wires which would open the connections and when the mop came back, it would close the connections. Of course any job in tranmission during the mop process would abort.

I tightened up the binding post screws, and informed the IT manager of what I thougt the problem was to which he replied, "I doubt that this was the problem and that I had a very unorthodox way of troubleshooting and that I did not even look at the dumps and all of the work that his consultants prepared, which cost him about $125,000 to produce.

Well I said, let's start with the binding posts first since it was an obvious problem and see if this happens again. If this problem happens again, then please give me a call.

I never received a call back from this IT manager.. Problem solved.

This story that i am about to tell you is 100% true. About 10 years ago I was working for a major computer dealer doing tech support. We get a call one day when this guy says he had bought a game and every time he put it into 'his pc' there would be a terrible almost scratching like sound coming form the speakers. So I go to his house and the idiot had for some reason tried to 'play' the game through his HIFI!

Sometimes it is difficult for us, we who work in the industry, to appreciate that some of the paradigms we take for granted are not immediately obvious to the uninitiated.

I remember trying to debug a router at a remote site, where the only person available was a garage mechanic. He clearly had never used a scrolling Command Line Interface before. I would ask him to type a certain command, and tell me what response he got. But none of the responses he got seemed to be related to the command he had just typed in.

After several frustrating minutes I relised that we were living through a surreal version of the film "Deja Vu". He was typing the commands, and then reading from the _top_ of the scrolling window, i.e. the responses to the commands he had typed in 24 lines ago.

(I bet he has a collection of equally interesting stories about stupid car users

I ran the help desk at a large oil refinery with 1500 employees and an ever-changing number of contractors. Everybody was required to have and use an email account. One of the biggest problems was people forgetting their network passwords. I could change the passwords, but most people simply thanked me and went on about their business. One person called me and said he forgot his password. The network passwords were encrypted, but we had another program for keeping track of overtime which also required a login password, and since all passwords expired on the same day each month, most people used the same password for both. I looked it up, told him, and then he replied "I better change it, as now you know what it is." to which I could not agree more.

I used to work in a data processing facility. The UPS they had installed in the room with the operators wasnt powerful enough so it only managed the PC's not the lights...After a short blackout a user called to tell me that the 5 1/4 Floppy disk she inserted is no longer there..it had somehow disappeared...when the power returned all the disk drive latches were properly closed but there was no disk in them..it took us 5 minutes of brainstorming before deciding to disassemble the PC and there was the floppy!.Maybe because of the darkness of the room she managed to insert the disk in the space between disk drives (A: and B:) and closed the latch......From that day on we gave that user this nickname: Houdini.

I responded to a "dead" computer call, upon arrival, sure enough there was no power to the system unit. I started my trouble shooting by removing the cover. The user said did you find the problem? I responded "it's your mouse sir", he said "but I don't have a mouse. I held up a dead rat that had managed to crawl into the system to get warm and sure enought he did. He ended up shorting out the mother board.

I've got a friend who had a similar thing happen, twice!

only it was a gecko, and they crawled into the powersupply... nothing like a small moist reptile to liven up the whole computing experience

Back in the days when the first CD-ROM units were installed on computers and Windows 3.11 was just making its appearence into the world, a certain institution purchased for its employees computers that not only had floppy disk drives and hard discs like all did in those times, but also had CD-ROM units (Mitsumi 2x) if I well remember. Naturally, this doubled the costs of the PC's. One morning, my friend, who was chief tech support at the selling company receives a "distress" call from a department manager in the customer company. The woman in question (for it was a woman!) said, and I quote: "The nice little coffee tray didn't come out this morning when I pushed the button". Turns out that, since CD's were virtually inexistent as a data support, most of the employees could not imagine what the CD-ROM units should be used for. They employed the CD-ROM trays as coffee mug holders. A nice handy coffee mug holder, in washable plastic that would come out of the PC at the push of a button. Handy, isn't it?!?

I was helping a user purchase a laptop. This user (at the time) had a personal issue with wine and would become sufficiently incapacitated that reasonable would could not happen. This user wanted a laptop, so I took the requirements and acquired a Win7 laptop that could do everything requested. I stopped by the user's domicile one evening to make sure things were working for the user.

The user was already incapacitated and complaining (loudly) the new Win7 would not work as wanted. I replied the laptop meets all the user's requirements. The used replied angrily to me the laptop "doesn't meet the stupid requirement."

I decided it was a good time to leave.

An employee deciding what techs need to spend time doing?
Plants on top of equipment?
Departments redistributing computers? They don't have an inventory? And using hours of IT time to do it?
A department head that disconnects a server?
Allowing a child to dismantle company equipment?

Where do these people work that they still have jobs? And no management.

I believe it's called the "Peter Principle"..."in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently.

I did telephone support for MSDOS. One of the "utilities" that came with DOS 6.x was called DoubleSpace or DoubleSpace, can't remember. Through compression it would make a 50 MB HD look like a 100MB drive. Anyway a guy called in complaining that he was not getting the 2:1 results as advertised. I explained that depening on the type of files he had on his HD the results would vary, some files compressed better then others. He keep it up and would not take my explaination as and answer. He told me that other guys in his office had 50MB drives and after using the utility DOS reported that they had 100MB drive. Sarcastically I asked, "Are they teasing you becuase their drives are bigger then yours?". There was total silence on the other end of the phone line.

I worked for a company that had spent a small fortune upgrading its ERP server because of the Y2K threat, but didn't see the need to secure one of the (wheeled) $70k servers in an enclosure, and instead ordered IT to " stop wasting our money and use the table to put the computers on". So IT did, putting the IBM server, some DAT drives and disk arrays on one of those heavy duty wooden school tables, in a highly secured server room, where it was fine for a couple of weeks undisturbed. Then we needed to upgrade the disk SSA array cards in the server, and called an IBM tech to install them. We carefully, and slowly pulled out the table away from the wall, the tech went to work pulling out the cards from the back. When he had trouble sliding one of the new cards in, he gave it an extra push for good measure and......whoooosh! the whole server slide forward and off the table and onto the floor! Of course, the server repairs cost 10x more than the new enclosure for the server!

Many years ago in a polytechnic in the North East of England an IBM engineer was installing a link to the nearby University's 360. A Card Reader and a Line Printer - yes it was many years ago! The card reader needed a boot program loaded which was held on a well worn pack of cards the engineer kept for the purpose.

The engineer loaded them in to the hopper of the newly installed card (high speed)reader and pressed the button. The machine then spat cards out all over the room. The engineer had forgotten to fit a small flap on the back of the card output tray to catch the cards as they came out of the machine.

Everyone else in the room though it was very funny. I believe the engineer spent many happy hours trying to sort is pach of cards in to the correct order.

Years ago, in the days of the 5 1/4" floppy disk drives, a woman who worked with a friend of mine was having problems with her computer. She'd work all day, save her work routinely, but the next day, her disk would be empty. Finally my friend was assigned to sit in this woman's work area and observe her all day. Nothing seemed to go wrong until the very end of the day. When it was time to leave, the woman put on her coat, took out the floppy disk and then did what she always did -- attached it to her filing cabinet with a magnet.

1. The secretary who said her word processor was "erasing all her documents". She opened them up and sure enough, no text...or at least it seemed that way. She had changed the foreground and background both to white.
2. The maintenance department where I worked had to hang a new wall rack to hold some monitoring equiptment. They did an expert job of hanging it. Directly in front of the building's fire exit.
3. One of the facility electricians lopped 18" off the top of a server rack sho he could hang a new light fixture.
4. The nonprofit I did work for who couldn't find their last old Novell file server. After tracing all the connections we found it; in the wall of an office that had been remodeled the year before.
Anyone who doesn't believe these hasn't worked in IT long enough.

Issue #1

I had a user complain that her CD ROM was not working. When I started troubleshooting over the phone, I got very curious when she had told me that she had entered 5 CD's into the machine and they don't come back.So I went on site to investigate. She was pushing them into the slit between the CD drive and the empty bay below. I took the case off, retrieved the missing CD's, and then showed her what she was doing wrong. She was red and embarressed, but I made her feel better when I told her that I have done that also. (White lies go a long way)

Issue #2.

I sent an email out to all of our administrative staff informing them of some important things they could not forget. I took the time to bold and change the color on certain words to stress the importance of those items. I took a 10 minute phone chewing from one of the admins who was just irate because I would send something in color. She was irate because her building had not yet been approved for a color printer and thus they could not print and post my email because it was in color. I explained to her that a B&W printer will still print regardless of the color on the screen, it will just have a grey tone to it. She continued to chew me into a new one because I was wrong. Color will not print on B&W. I politely apologized for my error and promised her that I would be more sensitive to the buildings that have not been approved color printers yet.

You win some, you lose some, but knowing which fights to fight and which to just politely walk away from is the key to an IT Professional.

At one of the companies I worked for we had a power outtage when a some workmen digging up a local road cut through the power cables to our estate. As we were using IP phones, this also meant that deskphones in the building were out of action. Whilst we were in busy trying to assertain how long the outtage was likely to last so we could start planning if we needed to shut down non-critical servers to maximise UPS time, the Managing Director of the company phoned FROM HIS MOBILE to the mobile phone of the IT Director to demand that we implement a solution for the "phone issue" immediately to avoid violating health and safety as "how will we be able to phone the emergency services if the deskphones aren't working? What if there was a fire!".

Apparently the wonders of modern communication technology hadn't quite filtered through the masses at the point.