Least favorite support request?

I once went into a remote office, and noticed something "odd" about a printer...
It was a HP LaserJet 1200, and it came with one of those ethernet to USB Jetdirect boxes.
It was working fine, but on closer inspection, it turned out that the printer was connected to the user's parallel port. The Jetdirect box was hanging off the back of the printer, where one end of the USB cable was correctly plugged into the printer... but the other end had been rammed into the ethernet port on the box. The box was actually powered by the mains adaptor too! I don't know what the user thought they were doing, but they certainly had some strange ideas...

...then there was the chap who phoned DELL support because his laptop couldn't connect to the network...
Following DELL's guidance, he proceeded to take TWO laptops apart to swap the network cards, and STILL couldn't get anything to work.
About half an hour later, after he'd given up, he let me know about it...
The reason he couldn't connect?
We'd run out of IP addresses in our DHCP range, as I found out by quickly checking the server.
It hadn't occurred to this guy to check.

Oh, and this guy was the head of IT in the company...

(I wish I was making it up, but ALL of that is 100% true!)

'Nough said.

Thanks,
Chaz

Sorry to break up your little worker-bashing party here; but the tech support people put there pants on one leg at a time, too. (At least the ones whose moms don't dress them anymore) Even when you get past the abrasive personalities, there's not always a genius geek underneath.

Just once, I would like to call IT, explain the situation, and have them do something other than deminstrate that they didn't hear most of what I said. If I call and say "I was hoping that you could help me fix a corrupted Word doc. I already tried pasting the contents into a blank document and it is still corrupted"; they invariably will insist on walking me through the process of pasting the contents into a new document step by step.

I know your job is to give advice; but you should learn how to listen now and then. (Your husbands and wives might like it, too) Even if nine out of 10 people you deal with are stupid; give me a chance! Listen to what I say, absorb it, and go from there.

One IT person told me I could do one of two things and that "it's half of one and six dozen of the other". I chuckled and repeated it back to him. No laugh or correction from him.

I can sympathize with you on this because I feel the same way. I especially don't like it when I've done everything that I can possibly do and only call for help because I don't have the level of access necessary to go any further. However, we have to take a moment and look at this from the techs perspective. While it may seem to you (us) that they are treating us as if we're stupid, in reality they're just being thorough or following company policy or both. I'll bet every one of the techs that you think are not listening to you can give you a story where they accepted that the user did what they said they did and did it correctly. The tech started troubleshooting at the next logical stop only to find they could correct the problem based on the syptoms given. At some point a good tech will take a step back and restart the troubleshooting process from the beginning only to find that what they had been told was done, wasn't done or wasn't done correctly. Most techs learn early on to trust but verify. A good tech will always go through and verify each troubleshooting step themselves as opposed to accepting that it has already been accomplished. Some of us may think that we're more knowledgeable than tech support, but in the end we have to realize that we called them for help and not the other way around.

I'd like to develop a questionnaire for our Hiring Managers to use. We just got a request from a user asking for a manual for a piece of software that is CRITICAL to their chosen freakin' profession!

No joke...issue was reported like this
"Sound only plays when speakers are attached"

No, really?! Red Alert! We'll get right on that and make sure it doesn't happen again! So sorry for the inconvenience!

DOH!!

As much as we ALL hate to admit it, vltiii has a valid point. The ones at the top are paid for their decision-making and (hold onto your horses, cowboys) their PEOPLE skills.

So, yes, it's important to have people skills in what we do. You will undoubtedly one day impress the right person with your use of the right combination of people and technical skills then maybe become on of the "suits".

I'm a long way off myself, as I am jaded from doing this too long...but I have hope...

I have a similar deal when users call me to fix their problem and try to tell me how (but it only works with users you have extremely positive rapport with)

I won't do your job if you don't try to do mine.

After 7 years of desktop support I've heard every lame-brained, stoopid, weird, wtf question and issue come down the pipe.
The job stops being rewarding when you've answered the same problem for the same person for the nth month on a row. No matter how professional you may be, that is soul-killing. The other killer is when users always expect miracles, and stop even trying to improve themselves, their processes and procedures.
Personally, I'm really liking the little room.... I think they call it a server room :)

Sorry folx, but it looks like a bunch of us just want to vent; I will not apologized for it.
Most people who get into this industry want to help people. Unfortunately, some of those people are extremely frustrating to deal with.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I took this thread to be a venue for sharing funny and aggravting stories about the frustrating ones.

This thread is for fun and jokes, no one needs to take it seriously. It is just to talk about our experiences. Speaking of which, a user called me up and said the scanner wasn't working, so I went up there and found out that the scanner wasn't plugged in. I found it hmorous and so did the user. I don't hate them and I'm sure I speak for most of you as well, it is fun to see what responses they give to us, and some do get pretty stupid, but I look as so what if they don't know. It is my job to help them do their job, not do it for them. I know I know more then them about computers, they know more then me with their programs, it is not a big deal, do I get a power trip being a network admin? Yes, do I abuse it? no. As for who said that its our job to just walk in and figure out what was wrong, its like going to a car shop and taking the car there and say, its broken, fix it. We try our best and there are alot of endless users and techs out there. There is alot of inteligent people in both, so stop flaming and enjoy the thread for what its made for.
I firmly stand by the fact that computers are just like cars.

I have heard this more times than you can imagine. Throw a PC on a network and there are a million reasons why their PC is slow. The one I love is when a user is getting realy slow access to the LAN and you sit at theor desk and discover they have a dozen or so services constantly accessing the net, i.e. weather services, IM's, sports scores.

You're in the wrong business. Customer service is the name of the game. It's what keeps your boss happy, which means it keeps you happy.

VLT,

This is supposed to be a fun exercise, not fodder for you to criticize. Go to epinions.com

This is a community devoted to IT. Since you admit you have to call tech support when you haven't the rights to repair a problem, then you aren't a tech. What are you doing here?

The worst call I ever have rather than had is this one client who always manages to screw up her internet connection via a dsl router.

Her office is the size of a bathroom.It has at least 5 desktops running in it..about 500 miles of Alive/Dead cat5 & telephone wire..

You get the picture..

use fake/self-inflicted problems to get new equipment

Ex 1: A receptionist who, upon seeing the new monitor of the design department, decided that her monitor is not good enough so she changed the resolution to 640 x 800 and start to complain that her monitor is "too small" and demanded a replacement.

Ex 2: A newly hired sales manager received a new laptop and I am flooded with calls from sales rep (laptop users) ranting about their computer being "slow" ever since they have seen the new laptop. One actually got his way and received a new laptop by littering his old one with spyware - he talked the non-tech savvy sales manager into buying him one before I have a chance to fix it.

Ex 3. (thread from Ex 2.) The above management decision encourage others to follow suit, so more "fake calls" from sales reps in the hope of getting "new toy"...

I'm the sole desktop support in the company and these fake calls are serious distractions to real issues (ex. web server problems)

I recently had a customer on the phone complaining that she couldn't backup her accounting with the Genie Backup Manager I recently set-up for her.
If you haven't used this software ... when you create a backup job it places a nice little icon on the desktop to perform a backup. CDR/RW in drive, double-click, walk away ...
After 10 minutes on the phone I had her describe every mouse-click she was making. It seems that when the little box to backup pops up it gives you 10 seconds to 'Abort' .... she thought Abort was a Yes/No confirmation and was clicking it.
It's really hard to sound pleasant with somebody like this when you really want to whack 105 keys upside their head.

Need a good laugh though ... best one is The Internet Help Desk on Three Dead Trolls ...
http://www.deadtroll.com/index2.html?/video/helldeskcable.html~content

Or the one where they come to you and say "I've been getting this error message for a while now..." "What does it say?" "I don't know, I just click OK, and it goes away."

Or the user who sends attachments, and they get to some people and not to others. I make sure all the upgrades are current to Outlook, etc., but it still happens. "Who is not getting the attachments," I ask. "Oh, I don't know, but people keep telling me they didn't get it." I ask her to keep a log of who is getting the attachment and who does not, so I can see if they might be blocked at the other end. Two weeks later she comes back with "You know, I still can't send attachments to some people." OK, can I see the log you've been keeping? "Oh, I didn't do that. Can't you just fix it?" Still waiting for her to do a log, still coming every 2 wks to a month to complain about the same problem. IN the meantime, I continue to try things on this side, but I'm pretty sure someone has their security set to block attachments to an Outlook message. Arghhhh!