Silliest Answers from Tech Support

to inform the helpdesk that ALL of the printers were down in the building. only to be walked through a single printer problem checklist. I had insisted that they send this to the print server team, but I kept being asked "do you have an example printer" I named off 30, and they still did not get it. In the meantime while arguing with this person and the supervisor, I had emailed an urgent request to the print server team, and they looked at it right away (although policy is that a helpdesk ticket is routed). So I was on the phone with the helpdesk for 40 minutes AFTER the problem was fixed still trying to explain JUST SEND THE TICKET TO....

Or how about this, I called for an email issue. I thought it was an outage, but soon realized that I was the only one affected. But since it happened on 3 systems, I doubted that the system was at fault, and it was an account issue on the server. The agent kept asking me to send them a test email message, not understanding that my email WOULD NOT OPEN unless offline...... This took more than 10 minutes for this person to understand

Or one of the best of all, My port on the switch died (my assumption/assessment at least). I had tried 2 computers and could not get a connection. I replaced the cable and tried again, same thing, link light only, no data. I called it in and the agent asked me "Sir, can you open Netmeeting"..... I chuckeled thinking he must surely be jesting. Until...he repeated himself. Then I ealized I was on the phone with a moron. So I said "Sure, but I doubt that it will do anything, because I have no connection to the LAN....
He then understood, apologized, and sent the ticket to networks, which changed my port on the switch and I was up and running again.

Came from the Old DOS Days where on a new Build I was promptly shown an error message telling me that [b]Device 6[/b] wasn't installed and that until I installed this device I couldn't get the system to load.

Well back in those days we had to actually learn the Systems and all of M$ error messages failed to make any mention of what Device 6 actually was so my very first phone call to M$ Technical support was to find out what this missing device actually was.

Needless to say what should have been a simple question & answer turned into a 95 minute explanation of me insisting that I was looking at a monitor with this error message on it that to the lower tier Help Desk Staff didn't exist. Eventually I was told that [b]Device 6[/b] was the CPU and I had forgotten to install one when I built this machine to which I asked just how they expected a Display to be on the monitor if there was no CPU fitted.

Needless to say a wipe & reload cured the problem and a very valuable lesson was learnt then don't ring M$ technical Support if you want an answer to one of their error messages. :^0

Col

that my wife has to print from occasionally.

Their only Tech Support/IT guru removed CCleaner and said that was the problem. Of course it still didn't print but he is sure that CCleaner messed it up.

His solution before leaving? Boot that computer into basic Safe Mode and print from there!

There's another printer issue in the same office. The printer in question is ancient. It will only print half a dozen or so pages before it turns itself off, restarts and then tries to reprint the entire document again, then the process repeats itself.

His solution?

Go to Staples and buy an UPS, even though the printer was plugged directly into a working wall socket.

The first UPS he bought didn't resolve the problem. (?) It just beeped continuously. :0 He said that was because it was too small, so he went back to Staples and bought a larger UPS.

That was late last Friday afternoon. I'm looking forward to what happens on Monday.

Some years back I was working on a high security gateway, on of the junior admins on the gateway. I was designated as the level 2 and level 3 tech for all help desk tickets relating to the gateway. My job was to investigate the issue, and fix if I can. If not get one of the senior admins to fix. 95% of problems I was able to resolve.

Well, one day we got this ticket that had already been around the world, every single tech section in the company had dealt with it at one point, still unfixed. Someone had decides it was a gateway issue, and sent it to me.

The problem: Intermittently mails would arrive (both inward and outgoing) scrambled. Dozens of people were affected, but only the odd mail.

I checked everything and all looked good. Sent out an alert to all the people who used our gateway, if you get a scrambled email, contact me immediately. I reset the mail servers to keep a copy of all mail, they would, but only for a short time.

Over the coming weeks, I got five reports and checked them out. I had the evidence the scrambled incoming mail was good when it went through the gateway, thus scrambled later, and the scrambled outgoing was scrambled before reaching us. It wasn't a gateway problem.

However, every other section had done checks and proved it wasn't theirs. After getting clearance from my manager, I spent time looking into it. After some time, I was able to say it wasn't a problem with the hardware, this was a software problem.

I mapped where all the affected individual clients were physically, all over the country, from one end of Australia to the other. I mapped where they were on the logical network, they were in various different branches and divisions.

Finally, in desperation, I sent emails to each reported client using a trace route program. When I got all the reports back from the 80 clients, I found the only thing they had in common was the gateway mail server. The network had some dozen mail servers throughout it. Closer examination showed all affected clients were behind one of three regional mail servers. Call all the servers MS01 to MS12, all the scrambled messages went through MS03, MS04, or MS08.

More research, every mail server within the network, except the gateway(we used Sendmail) was using the same mail server software. However, MS02, MS04, and MS08 were using version 4 and the rest were using version 5. I checked, vs 4 used uucp as default, while vs 5 used smtp as default. Hmmm. Vs 4 can be set to use smtp and they were.

I checked the date stamps the mails went through the servers, and the date stamps of when the servers were reset for maintenance. each faulty mail was the very first following a reset. Hmmm.

I sent the mail server help desk team the ticket with the details of my research and a note saying the problems was due to the mail servers expecting uucp messages and they dealt with the first after a reset as uucp, this was a protocol handshake issue with the vs 4 of the software.

They rang me told me I was wrong, nothing was wrong with their servers. They insisted it was a gateway issue. That what i said was happening was impossible. they refused to spend $8,000 upgrading the hardware and software on the three servers mentioned.

I got some severe abuse from them over it, yet not one checked my work - these guys were supposed to be very senior help desk techs, paid more than double what I was.

I stood my ground, and ended up standing in the unemployment queue.

Seven months later, I got told by a friend who still worked there, the company spent $25,000 getting experts from the USA out, and they couldn't find the problem. My friend showed them my reports and work, they checked it, ran tests then wrote up a new FAQ for their software reporting this new, previously unknown problem with the vs 4 software.

Since then I was asked to go back to work for that company - now way, not unless they sack the fools who refused to believe me because I didn't have the same quals as they.

But was I mad at those 'Help Desk level 3' idiots. They had the special training and knew nothing about it, so it couldn't possibly be the problem.

I had a director freaking out because all his personal files were on the internet! When in fact his connection was off so internet explorer defaulted to his c drive. ROTFLMFAO!

We have one of those main office / subsidiary set ups and at the subsidiary we continually find we are denied access to the main office network. Two days ago, I was again requesting access to a part of the network and all went well. Within an hour, however, I received an e-mail requesting me to fill out an online user satisfaction survey on my helpdesk call. As you might guess, upon clicking on the link I was rewarded with a message saying I did not have access permissions to the survey!

My boyfriend (now husband) decided our computer needed formatting, everything was backed up so I let him get on with it, he re installed everything and then tryed to get online, no luck.

So he asked me what our username and password were I gave them to him and it started signing in and then failed, so I confessed that although I knew the username I couldnt remember for sure the password, so after multiple failed attempts I called up our ISP to ask for a password reset, as the only other way to do it was to recieve an email to the account which we didnt have the password for.

I got in touch with someone who asked me if my modem was turned on, I said yes, I just need a password reset, she then asked me again are you sure your modem is on, I said yes, she said is there two green lights (which means is it switched on) again I said yes I just need a password reset. She then asked me to check the cables on the modem to make sure it was connected to the computer, by this stage I just wanted to scream at her. This went on for almost half an hour when she said to me, I dont know what your problem is I'll have to pass you onto someone else, I said I do know what my problem is, I need a password reset, but it was too late I was on hold listening to greensleves (or something to that effect).

15 minutes of Greensleves later and I was passed on to someone else who proceded to ask me.....

....yes you guessed it is your modem switched on! I said yes I know whats wrong I need a password reset. Thankfully this time they listened reset my password and stayed on the line while I tried it (as they still werent convinced this was the problem) I admit I gloated when I said ner ner ne ner ner it was a password reset I needed so there :p

Since I recently moved out of IT, I have to let people know to use the proper channels often. But in extreme cases, or where the proper channels fail, I will often take over to resolve an issue. Anyway, I received a call yesterday from someone with VPN problems. As normal, I instructed her to call the helpdesk, and was told that she had been working with the helpdesk all day (it was in the afternoon when I received the call).
So I asked what the problem was, and she stated that it would not connect to the VPN server. I asked what the helpdesk has already done, and this is what she told me
the first agent, said that since they could not do a netmeeting, that he could not help.
the second agent told her that because she was using wireless, that they could not help. When she said that she would plug in the LAN line, but had the same problem, the agent hung up.
The third agent said that the VPN servers were working properly, and that she has mis-configured something, tried a few things, and decided to send it to level 2. She was also told that since L2 was busy, it would take up to 4 hours to be called back, and maybe a day before they worked on it.

Hmm, so I asked a simple question, Do you have an Internet Connection. She said she was connected, so I said, do web pages show up? Try google.com.
No, she replies. I then walked her through changing the proxy setting in IE to all blanks. All of a sudden everything worked fine.

About 5 yrs ago I was wandering down the hall and a VP stopped me. "I'm having problems getting to the internet. Can you download it to my laptop?" Ok, NOW I understand how she got that job....via another type of "job"

I set up the network at my parents house a few years back and finally got them onto off of dial-up and onto DSL. Granted it's not digital cable but it was a step in the right direction. So, the other day my mom calls me and says she's lost her internet connectivity and asked if I could come over and take a look at it. After doing some troubleshooting I found that the DSL modem wasn't talking to the wireless router. I tried plugging directly into the modem and found that it wouldn't respond to a DHCP request. So, I call the company that my mom has her phone service through and we begin the long and arduous task of going through their trouble shooting decision tree. Now, I personally have no problem speaking to Indian people but why do they have to pretend that their not in India? The guy obviously has an accent and tells me his name is Steve or Bob or some such thing. I mean why can't they just tell me their real name and be done with it? Anyway, we go through his decision tree step by step and we come to the part where the DSL modem is suppose to cough up an IP address and the renew hangs... and hangs. So, he has me reboot the computer. Grrr! By this time I start to explain what I think the problem is. No dice. Back to the decision tree. Do you know what the definition of insanity is? Well we get to the renew part again and it fails for the third time. So, he then asks me to unplug the CAT-5e cable from the back of the computer and from the back of the cable modem and switch them around. That was it! I asked him why and got silence. We went around and around for a few minutes and we eventually found that the phone company had come out and done some work on Mom's phone lines and didn't reconnect a phone properly which caused huge packet loss. Anyway, the next time someone asks you to unplug a CAT-5e cable and switch it around tell them to bugger off.