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Worst cases of troubleshooting

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Yesterday while perfoming a check up on a printer, I dicovered a “scrunchie” inside the toner of a laserjet printer. What is the worst thing that has happenned to you?

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Computer would occasionally reboot

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

The customer called, saying that randomly his computer would re-boot. No rhyme or reason, and no logical or predictable path could be discovered over the phone.

Went out on site to physically check out the computer. Opened it up, and after causal inspection, found a Winchester .357 magnum casing wedged between the motherboard and the case.

There was an uncovered slot in the back of the case- my only guess as to how it might have gotten in there. The client had no reason (that he would tell me) as to what might have cased the casing to be inserted into his computer. I really didn’t want to persue it – this was an Auto Dealership in Eastern Kentucky – so I removed the casing, and closed the computer box.

Never did have the problem with random rebooting after that.

White on white

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I had a guy complain that his keyboard didn’t work after he changed the text color in Word to white.

Well, he didn’t do it, it just happened. 🙂

Bad floppy drive.

In reply to White on white

Company get a new computer, the user calls a says the floppy drive is no good. Work with her over the phone, able to format write and read. Next day, still has problems getting info from disk. Hmmm. Go to site, ask for Demo. User turns chair towards the file cabinet. Pulls a 5 1/4 disk from under a magnet stuck to the side of the cabinet and says “See!!!!!”

In the day

In reply to Bad floppy drive.

when CD-roms were out, but we didn’t have any yet, one user said the computer ate his CD. I told him he didn’t have a CD-rom on his computer and he said “Yes I do, come and see”. So I went over and sure enough, he had put a CD into the 5-1/4″ floppy drive, pulled down the lever and “crunch!”

XT 286

In reply to Bad floppy drive.

Used to have to din sockets at the back, one for a an IBM Tape drive which we didn’t have, one for the keyboard. Same plug completely different wiring. Finance guy moved desks , did his pc himself, plugged keyboard into tape socket, fired twelve volts through the mother board which it was most definitely not expecting.

Plugs are complicated things, though another fellow helpfully relocated his printer during an office move. Asked me to come and fix it and mentioned he’d had difficulty getting the plug in the socket. 25 pin D plug, he’d jammed it in upside down.

Bad CD-Rom drive

In reply to Bad floppy drive.

Sorry for my poor English. But here a nice story
On day I received a call from one of our editors. He was complaining about his CD-Rom drive. He said “I have an important CD and it is not working, I need it very argent because it contains critical information? Hmmm. Go to site, see what is wrong. I opened the CD-Rom drive and both of us feel surprised!!!! I asked him where is the CD?!!!! Imagine where he put that CD?!!! In the gap between the CD-Rom Drive and the plastic cover of the extra CD-Rom drive.

Same thing

In reply to White on white

Except the user claimed “All of my documents are empty”

“Give ’em a book, send ’em to school and what happens? They eat the book!”

Need a new computer

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I had one customer call me and said she needed a new computer, hers was not working.

Upon entering her office I noticed stacks and stacks of papers and magazines all around her office. One particular stack of papers, next to the keyboard, had fallen over and was depressing the esc key.

Can’t log on

In reply to Need a new computer

User caled to say she could not log on to the network. Checking out her account, everything looked fine. I stopped by her computer and log her in with her account.

It turns out that she couldn’t remember her password, which was her last name.

Blank pages at the end of a document

In reply to Need a new computer

This happend for the third time in the past month, with the same user. She created a Word document, using columns to track meeting minutes and action items. She would get a couple of blank pages at the end of the document. So I tell her to select everything from the last character down and hit delete. The pages are still there. I tell her to go to the end of the document and hit backspace. But the pages still won;t go away. I go up to her desk and see the document with the extra blank pages. I go to the end of the documnet and hit backspace. By some miracle the blank pages disappear.

I still have no idea what she was doing.

The MS bug er’ feature??

In reply to Blank pages at the end of a document

My partner uses Word for some of her work: it sometimes does weird formating stuff that defies understanding. I think she might hit some key combinations that were not intended to be known by mortal man. I have taught her to copy the useful bits and paste to a new doc, it works most of the time.

The user with the newest stuff

In reply to Need a new computer

Had a user one time who had gotten her job, desk location, PC, etc mostly as a result of being friends with the owner’s wife.

She had an early factory install of WinXP pro while the company standard was Win2000, and the program sent over from the company who did our document storage absolutely did NOT work on XP. Certified in writing not to. And it didn’t.

Every day, she would stomp down the hallway, bang open the metal door to the computer lab, and announce in a loud, arrogant New York City accent “It’s not working again!!!”

The best time tho was when the owner, ever the buzzword man, was in the lab, talking about interruptions to the workflow, why things weren’t getting done in an orderly way, 800-lb gorillas in the room, yadda … when she came stomping down the hall, and did her announcement.

Strange, we never heard about any of those topics from him ever again.

New Dumb terminal

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

in new office, RS232 comms, would n’t work.
Spend ages, changing line drivers, monitors, comms cards, tracing cables.
Turned out the ‘tricians who did the wiring, used a terminal faceplate in the dado rail. They have two connectors. For those a little more recent than I RS232 uses four wires in two pairs, one for send and one for recieve. They’d connected one pair to each terminal. Put loopback on either end you get a response, discovered the problem by accident when I got a loop back response when one end was disconnected.

Troubleshooting tip number one, don’t assume the guys who told you what the problem was knew what the problem was even if you’re still at gopher level and very damp behind the ears.

Hard life me

In reply to New Dumb terminal

terminal out on plant and every now and then the display would go completely haywire, outputting control chararers messing up the display so it had to be rebooted or reset. They’d layed in a temporary cable for it and conveniently wrapped it round a near by power cable. 450v lighting circuit for the fluorescents in the warehouse. Computer lost it everytime they turned the lights on.

Wouldn’t say it was the worst, but my favourite was.
I got a report that a terminal had stopped working, swapped it out for a spare, booked a call into the maintenance contractors.
He takes the case off and there was half a litre of dried emulsion over the power supply. Silly buggers who were painting the office, slopped some on top of it, which went through the vents. They simply cleaned the top and said nowt.

I aren’t even going to explain ten keyboards breaking down in the same morning or the time I got called out for a vacuum cleaner.

Ah the good old days of support.

Vacuum Cleaner???

In reply to Hard life me

That’s even worse than the copier that we all get called to fix!!!

I once created a help desk call by swaping the “A” and “E” covers on a guy’s keyboard. He was a two finger typer and never caught on. Helpdesk had him change keyboards after a while which got him going only because I failed to get to the next keyboard before he did. Even after getting going again, he never compared the keyboards to get to the root of the problem. 😀

Good job my old boss doesn’t post here

In reply to Vacuum Cleaner???

The two-to-ten guy played a joke on the technophobe on the night shift. Reversed his numeric key pad. My boss was on call, had to come out at 2 in the morning. He got really stroppy because everyone else thought it was funny. Still looking for the cuplrit.
What shift were you on ?

It’s no good, Tony

In reply to Hard life me

I’ve tried not to post this for the past two hours, but you’ve got the better of me…

You’re going to have to explain the vacuum cleaner at the very least, and I’d love the explanation to the ten keyboards, too….

Stop leaving me in suspenders!

😀

GG

Vacuum Cleaners & Keyboards

In reply to It’s no good, Tony

Approx 1:30 in the am I get a call from a guy in the planning office. His terminal had just stopped working. He’d been using it earlier.All the usual tricks didn’t work including the ubiquitous Off and On. So cycled the two miles in to work, checked in with security, Walked to the other end of plant, Cleaner was still there, now had the buffer plugged in in the socket for the line driver power supply !

Some weeks later, I was on the early moring stint, separating print-outs, neatening fanfold and doing other highly technical tasks. Sales start ambling in around nine-ish, get a phone call, keyboard not working. Get a spare out of the rack to take up with the prints. Another phone call, and another, and another. That’s all my spares, so I get two more phone calls. Suspecting a practical joke, I decided to go investigate. Keyboards were suspiciously clean
and dripped when you picked them up , smelt of lemon too. New cleaner had decided to give all the keyboards in the office a thorough wash. Had to open them all up, empty the water out of them and then dry them out on radiators. I was reasonably practiced at this as the sales types were occasionally careless with mugs of coffee after a dinner time ale. Though ten at once did exhaust my radiator capacity.

United parcel service UPS

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I was a field service tech for them in 1999 and 2000. They loan computer to good shipping customers. Almost all calls were bad, on one the help desk walked the user through all the trouble shooting steps. The computer and printer would not work, oh they are also given a scale. I get to the site two and half hours from office and find that they put the package on scale and nothing happens. Well there was a power outage and nothing was working! What can you do but say wait until the power comes back on and get back to the car and laugh your but off.

Can’t print

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

Users call us from time to time telling us their printer doesn’t work, and they need a new one. Funny how they have to be plugged into the AC outlet to work….

Paper?

In reply to Can’t print

I was working for a newspaper company. The paper was a morning edition so all of the news and layout was done on the evening prior. I got a page on a Saturday night at around 11PM. They stated that they could not get the printer to work and they needed to print out proofs before the paper could go to the printers. The papers was going to be late and they would be charged $400 an hour for being late.

After making sure the power was on and that it was seen on the network, they still could not print. So at 11:20, I jumped in my car and went to the office. Once I got there, I opened the paper tray and lo and behold, no paper! We don’t need new equipment, we need new users!

Power, I don’t need no stinking power

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

In my early days as a hardware developer, I received an early morning call from one of the software developers saying the hardware was not working.

At the time, we were developing network hardware in the pre-Ethernet days. We had a stand-alone Network Interface Unit (NIU) that did what is now done by a single chip on a NIC card. My first suggestion was to verify the power was turned on, and the developer assured me the NIU was running but locking up.

I hurried down to the development lab where the software developer was in a tizzy. He was going into great detail about how his program operated and why it was the hardware that was malfunctioning. Meanwhile, I looked at the front panel of the unit ond noticed the power switch was not lit. I reached behind the unit and found the power cord unplugged. For the next five minutes I listened to the developer’s diatribe without comment, all the while holding up the unplugged power cable.

The root cause was the quiescent state of the BIU status register (what the computer saw when the unit was unplugged) happened to be the same as what we expected after the computer sent a reset command. As a result, we implemented a slightly more complex handshake at initialization.

I still get a chuckle when I recall this software developer who could not see beyond his computer code and notice an unlit LED less than 3 feet away.

Not IT but…..

In reply to Power, I don’t need no stinking power

This is one that I had many years ago inmy incarnation as telecoms manager.
A new PBX, 6 months old. Complaint was that outside lines were getting very hard to get.
At that time only the Telco was allowed to service PBXs, so logged a fault.They had two techs spending nearly weeks over the management PC trying to find something wrong. They called in the linies who plugged their test box into the line and declared that all was OK with the lines.
Eventually got the manufacturer, the PBX service techs and the linies on site all together so that something could be resolved.
After a few minutes the manufacturer said that the problem was burnt relay contacts that seized they line, caused by faulty testing methods. Level two (national) service of the Telco was totally aware of this problem, but the local techs didn’ escalate like they should have.

why I hate end users

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

When I was going to tech school, I worked part time at a store and one of the managers asked me if I could take a look at his computer. Apparently his CD-rom drive was not working, he said he would put it in and flip the latch and it would not work. (did you notice the part about the latch?) Sure enough, he was putting his CDs in a 5 1/4 floppy (floppy) drive. He then asked if I could burn his CD onto 3.5 floppies (hmm….700MB game on …how many floppies?) End Users!

The other day I was called down from 6 floors up to come and hurry because the president of the company had a printer that wouldn’t print (nevermind the fact that he has 3 other printers to choose from). So I go and look at the printer on his desk and ask him if he can show me how it is not working. He printed a word document and you could hear the rollers trying to pick up. Unfortunately there was NO PAPER. I wonder why it wouldn’t print?

end users are just blind

In reply to why I hate end users

Just today even, I had a guy come to me and say when I try to open a file all the folders are empty. I immediately knew what was wrong before I got to the computer. He was trying to open up an Excel file,

But was he was in Word.

Yup

In reply to end users are just blind

I was just about to add this too. I’ve seen it several times.

girli, this is pretty old…

In reply to why I hate end users

This file is a collection that a friend of mine sent me a long time ago (He ran a help desk in the late 80’s)… It shows there is nothing idiot proof :-)…

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A secretary in our office (years ago 🙂 was trying to save her data on a floppy. She kept complaining that the (single sided) 5 & 1/4 was losing her data. Well, I was asked to investigate. I unwilling approached the gallows.

I asked her to show me what she did when she saved her data. She took out a new disk, inserted it into the drive, formatted it, saved her data, and removed the diskette without a hitch. She then proceeded to peel off a new label, and carefully applied it to the disk.

No problems so far.

She then took the disk, inserted it into the typwriter, scrolled it through the roller, and neatly typed her label.

I found the problem on the first try.
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I was trying to teach this sales person (for automated entrance system [they made gates]) how to enter his letters into Word Perfect. I told him to select Word Perfect from his menu and when he did it gave him the opening screen which said, “Press any key to continue…” He looked at the keyboard for awhile then asked me, “Where is the ‘any’ key?”.
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There is the classic one (which may be an urban myth) of the secretary working in an accounting firm who is told to make back up copies of the discs every night. So every night she carfully collected together all the discs and took them away to copy them. After six months the hard disc crashed but no-one was worried because they had backups, until the secretary brought in the huge pile of paper with a nice photocopied disc on each!
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A user called the PC Support line of the university having trouble with her Mac. It was handed off to one of the Mac guys…

“What seems to be the problem?”
“It’s not working.”
Eyes roll. “What’s not working?”
“My Mac.”
[- Five minutes of drawing the problem out of the woman deleted -]
“Okay, to access the files on the disk click the mouse on the picture of the disk.”
Pause. “Nothing happened. I told you, I’ve already tried this.”
Support guy makes as if he is strangling the phone.
“Okay, do it again. Is the mouse moving?”
“Yep.”
“On the screen?”
“Yep.”
“Now click twice on the picture of the disk.”
Pause and the consultant hears the two clicks again. “Nothing.”
“Maam, double-click once more for me.”
Clink-clink.
“Maam, are you hitting the screen with your mouse?”
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A secretary who had gotten a PC for word processing had periodic failures. The disks would work for days, but after a couple of weeks would fail. They would be recovered by IBM (to an extent) but after a couple of weeks the cycle would repeat.

At one point a service tech came out to the site to repair it, suspecting damage in transit.

He recovered what he could, cleaned and aligned the drive (for the 400th time) and gave it a clean bill of health at about 5:00… and the secretary in question put the disk in the envelope, stuck it to her wall with her magnet, and went home.
Of course this sounds stupid to us, but how many secretaries are familiar with mass storage techniques? A friend of mine fixed his mother’s TV by connecting the antenna. After explaining the problem, she asked:
“How far away is the TV station?”
“From here? About 20 miles.”
“You mean that picture can travel 20 miles to get to the antenna, but it can’t go another 3 inches to get to the TV?”
How do you explain that (in less than four years)?
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These remind me of another story I heard (or probably read on rec.humor. It was told by an instructor who taught programming in BASIC language.
He had given them step-by-step instructions on how to write a short program that would let you enter two numbers and the computer would return the sum of the two numbers.
When each student had all their program steps keyed in, he told the class to type RUN and enter. A lady in the back of the class said, “It didn’t work.” The instructor once again told her to simply type RUN and enter. Still didn’t work. So the instructor walked back to see what the problem was. It was obvious. He had been spelling out “R” “U” “N”….she had typed “are you in”.
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A user came up and wanted to know why their 3.5″ disk wouldn’t go into the Mac’s floppy drive. I check out the disk, noted that it was okay, and then walked over to the offending machine, suspecting a hardware problem with the disk mechanism.

As I moved to insert the disk into the drive to test things out, the user interrupted me:

“No! Not that drive…*this* one.”
“This” drive, of course, turned out to be a CD-ROM.
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Every now and then, when users work on documents on multiple disks, the Mac’s will tell them to insert their other disk. And sometimes, you get to catch people trying to put two disks in the same drive at the same time. 🙂
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I was at the local computer shop and I happened to be in the tech area talking to one of my friends there and I overheard this woman say to another technician the following:

“I am running WinFax to receive my faxes. I want to know if I have to leave the computer running in order to do this.”
It was all I could do to from bursting out loud and rolling on the floor laughing.
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At my first real world programming position, we sent out updates on 8″ floppy disks. To save time/energy, we put the following on the disk labels:
1) Insert disk in drive [A]
2) Press ^C (control-C)
3) type A:INSTALL [RETURN]
We got a call from one of our users (um, “customers”). She said “I don’t know what to do. I inserted the disk in the drive, but then I forgot what the next step was.”

This was the turning point for me. I finally realized just how foolproof things needed to be. (We sent out paper copies with instructions after that.)
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While I was working in a placement office at the University, we helped students write their resumes on the computer. A student came up to me and said he had problems reading the disk. I asked him to show it to me so I could see if I could recover the files, “sure.” he said, an took the disk (5 1/4″ floppy) out of his pocket and unfolded it.
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Another time, while working at a computer store, somebody who bought his computer from us was having trouble with one of his disks. The man was living in another city, so I asked him to send me a copy of the disk, and I would take a look at it. A few days later, an envelope arrived for me, it contained a “photocopy” of the front and back side of the disk.
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I overheard a nice conversation one day in a computer shop:

customer: I’d like a mouse mat please.
assistant: certainly sir,we’ve got a large variety.
customer while looking at said mats then asked:
“But will they be compatible with my computer?”
All i could do to keep a straight face was walk out of the shop.
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A friend of mine works at Word Perfect in Orem UT. He had a lady call up and tell him she couldn’t figure out how to install the program.

He told her “Insert Disk1 into the disk drive and type “INSTALL WP”. He then proceeded to have her insert disk 2 through 4 in sequential order. She then stop him to ask if it would be alright to remove the previous four disks because the fifth wouldn’t fit.
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] The best protection against computer viruses is to keep the cover on the ] floppy disk when you insert it into the drive 🙂

Don’t laugh. At the store in which I used to work we actually had people come in with disks stuck in their Macs and on the disks the plastic disk cover. One of the downsides of being “easiest to use” is that you do get a lot of bonehead customers. To paraphrase John Dvorak, the only interfaces which are truly intuitive are rocks and mud.
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Someone complained he couldn’t get his disk out. I said, “Type Command-E (Eject) when you’re in the Finder.” He came back. It didn’t work. I said, “Type Command-Shift-1.” He came back. It didn’t work. I then said, “Reboot the Mac while holding the mouse button pressed until the disk ejects.” He came back. It didn’t work. So I decided I’d have a look at it myself. He had succeeded in cramming 2 disks in the same disk drive. Any guess what…. they were stuck!!!! ………… computers!!!!!
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Man comes in, in a panic. He had typed a document the day before, and now it was all gone. “Have you saved it properly?” was of course my first question. Yes, he said, it was saved properly. But all the text had mysteriously disappeared. On his disk, I found a completely empty document. Indeed it was saved, apparently, and indeed it did not contain text. Of course, he had saved the document right BEFORE he started typing. When it was finished, he took out his disk and shut down the computer. And now all that text was gone, even though he had SAVED!!! ……. To top it all off, he got mad at ME when I told him the only thing he could do was retype the whole thing. Was I fucking nuts or something???
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Someone comes in and asks me how to print a document. I explain about the Page Setup (making sure the user selected “A4 Letter” as his document size, the one for our LaserWriter) and then selecting the Print command in the File menu. Happy, the user walks away. Comes back in two minutes. Still no document with his name on our spooler. “Make sure you have selected the Info-Groep Laser Spooler, I said. He had checked. It WAS selected. “Have you issued the Print command yet?” Of course, what did I think he was, a fucking dummy? So I went over to have a look. The “Print” dialog box was still on his screen. I clicked on the “Print” button…. “Oooooooh, you have to click on Print!!!”
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Our computer center has both PCs and Macs, and the most frequent stupid error is people who create a file on a Mac, and try to edit it later on a PC. When I tell them that they have to use a Mac to edit their Mac files, they look at me and say, “But all the Macs are being used.” Most of them eventually accept that they have to stick with one type of computer, but I have gotten into some extended arguments with a couple of stubborn users.
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Of course, there are people that try to retrieve a file from the A: drive, when their disk is in the B: drive. The first time I can see, but after the little light comes on in the wrong drive, you’d think they’d figure it out……. ————————————————————————
Here where I work (research clinic) one of the secretaries recently complained to me that she just saved a file on a disk but now it wouldn’t read it. Apparently, she had put the 5.25″ floppy sideways (with the slot on one side) into the drive.
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Another incident I remember froma a few years ago when I worked at the computer center of the University: a student came in a complained that she saved a file (Mac) earlier that day, but now she can’t find it.
Computer assistant: And which Mac did you use earlier when you saved it?

Student: Oh, this same one.
Computer assistant: Perhaps it’s on the harddrive…
Student: No, some other assistant saved it on my disk for me.
Computer assistant: (Looks for disk icon, looks in drive, can’t find the disk) Where’s the disk?
Student: In my bag…
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I personally love the reaction of some people to the screen savers on the Macintoshes in our computer lab. I was sitting next to a blonde (at that point I didn’t place any significance on this fact) who was typing a paper, and by the way she was doing it, it was clear that this was just about her first time. Well, a friend of hers sat at the computer across from hers, and they started chatting… and yup, the screensaver kicked in.

The scream was heard, I was told, around two corners in the hallway.

But there’s more… after she’d nearly passed out, her friend just told her to move the mouse to get back to what she was doing, that she didn’t lose anything, in fact.

She didn’t count on the fact that when her friend jumped up in hysteria she’d bumped the keyboard/mouse connector out of the socket…
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I also heard a story of a guy doing tech support for a small company. A lady called in telling him the company’s software wouldn’t work. He went through a bunch of questions about how the software was acting, and came to discover that the lady was having troubles getting her computer to turn on.

He asked her, “What happens when you turn the computer on?”.
She replied, “The screen just stays black”.
He then asked, “Is the computer plugged in?”.
She replied, “I took it to a repair shop last week and they apparently fixed it so it doesn’t need a power cord anymore.”
He asked, “Is the computer a laptop computer?”.
She replied, “No, but they never gave me back the power cord so they must have fixed it so it didn’t need it.”
He said, “Go back to the repair store and get back your power cord. They just forgot to give it to you.”
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cartoon seen in an old computer magazine:

little boy sitting in a pile of diskettes, he’s holding a horseshoe magnet. Father is in the adjoining room doing some take-home work.
“Dad, you’ve been jipped. None of these are magnetic”
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A salesperson hoping to demonstrate to a skeptical corp. how easy it is to use windows.

Just point and click” he says. “Just point to the application you want and click on the mouse button.”

So the exec take the mouse, lifts it, hefts it like a tv.remote points at the screen and clicks the button.
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A foreign gentleman came in needing help using a word processor to write a letter. I took him over to a Mac and gave him a brief overview of its capabilities and commands and left him at a point where he could just start typing. He looked at me, puzzled. See, he didn’t know how to type. Not just that he didn’t know how to type well, but it was like he didn’t understand the concept of typing (the ‘s’ key puts an s on the screen). Eventually I ended up typing it for him bacause it was easier than arguing with him.

Another gentleman came to us frantic. The day before he had saved a very important document on the hard drive of one of our Macs and he could not find it. He was yelling at me that our lab employees must have deleted it and we need to have more respect for users, etc. (We have a policy of allowing documents to remain in the hard drives for 7 days before being erased by the staff.) I helped him look for his paper, but when I couldn’t find it, I explained our policy and the fact that we can’t control what other users might do with a document left on a computer. He was *not* happy. Then in a sudden flash of genius I asked him, “You were using *this* particular Mac, weren’t you?” to which he responded, “No, I was using one in the other room.”
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We once had an elderly female end user (the type that technology passed by) who would get very angry with the machine, generally when it would do EXACTLY what she had instructed it to do. Her usual response was to bang the mouse down on the desk. Obviously, it didn’t take long for the mouse to break. We analysts knew what she was doing, but she always denied it when the tech came to replace the mouse. Finally, one of the techs, took a mouse apart on her desk as part of the replacement process. Says he, “You hit this mouse pretty hard.” The reply, “Oh, no. I never did anything. It just broke.” To which the tech said, “Well Ma’am, as you can see by the value on the impact capacitor here, this mouse has been subjected to a very bad force. Probably caused when someone picked up the mouse and dropped it or banged it on the desk.”
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In another case, I had gone to a customer site with one of the hardware guys to install a machine. The new sysop, a true novice, asked a number of questions about the care and feeding of the machine. At one point, being funny, I told her that for best performance she should dust and wax the boards occasionally to keep them clean. She looked at me a bit askance, as we knew each other previously and she knew of my penchant for practical jokes. At that point the hardware tech looks up and says, “Be sure to get a good polish like Pledge or something. And don’t get anything with lemon scent. It messes up the contacts.” She believed.

We later called her boss to gently suggest that her leg might have been pulled.
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There was an big, athletic-looking guy fooling with one of our brother (IBM) printers. He was opening it up, shaking it a little, and trying to jam a paper into the manual paper feed. When I asked him what the problem was, he said, “Your copier isn’t working.”
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meet the man who asked which was the laser printer. i asked him which machine he was printing on; we have different laser printers. he gives me this nice sarcastic response, ”this is a *mac* lab, right?”

so i pointed him to the mac laser printer.

the trouble is, (1) maclab is the *old* name; and (2) he was on an ibm pc. of course, this didn’t occur to him for the (i swear to bill) 35 minutes he stood at the wrong printer waiting for his printout, until he asked me how long the print queue was (it was empty, had been for most of the 35 minutes.)

very patient man, if nothing else…

i mean, come on, even *i* know that an empty queue doesn’t take 35 minutes to print, except when my assignment is due.
————————————————————————
– Hey, can you help me? my program doesn’t work…
– What is the problem, are you using Turbo Pascal??
– Yes, the program just blocks the machine…
– Well, does it compile?
– I don’t know, it just doesn’t run…

I went to his computer and he told me:

– You see? there’s the .EXE file, if you run it it blocks the machine…
– And where is your source, the .PAS file???
– I wrote it and renamed it to .EXE so it could run…
————————————————————————
“Remove the sleve, and insert the floppy disk into the drive.”

[hours of technical support later]

“You know — these vinyl covers they put on disks are really hard to get off…”
————————————————————————
[45 minutues of trying to fix a terminal — including a process kill and a full shutdown (UNIX)] “Oh — wait a second….. Oops, the intensity was just down. I have a login prompt now.”
————————————————————————
A bank clerk friend told me this the other day:

An elderly customer came into the bank complaining the ATM wasn’t working. She had been waiting for half an hour after “requesting a new cheque book” and it still hadn’t come out yet!
————————————————————————
A customer (wife of an obnoxious history professor, none the less) comes into the store with a Macintosh which I had just replaced a bad drive in a few days previously. She complained that it wasn’t working again, implying that I didn’t fix it right the first time. So, I get out the diagnotic tools, but can’t find a thing wrong with it. I then checked some of the diskettes she brought in with it, and find that they are loaded with viruses. After cleaning up the diskettes, I explained to her that her computer probably got the virus by trading diskettes with someone whose computer was also infected. She then got a very sullen expression on her face and asked me, “Can a person catch this virus from their computer?”
————————————————————————
On another occasion, a lady came into the store, apparently interested in buying a home computer. After surveying the models on display, she walks over to one and points the the monitor and keyboard saying, “I think I need one of these, and one of those, …” She then points to the CPU and continues, “… but I don’t think I need one of those.
————————————————————————
This one just happened.

User walks into the office. “This disk doesn’t work.”

Computer literate non-staff: “You have covered the disk slot with the label.”
————————————————————————
One of our lusers called me about a problem she was having with her PC, she was using a vt220 emulator to connect to one of our UNIX-boxes, and “half of her prompts were missing”. Two days earlier I had set up the emulation software for her, and had checked that everything was ok, so I tried to get her to be a bit more specific (fat chance!). Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turned out that the screen on this particular PC was one of those fancy things where you can adjust the height, width vertical and horisontal placement of the screen image……she had accidentally shifted the whole image to the left, so the first half of her prompts were off-screen. 🙂
———————————————————————–
A tech support guy once told me that he got a call from someone saying that the computer screen just went black and the computer wouldn’t respond at all. The tech guy (starting with the obvious) asked the guy if the computer was still plugged in that maybe his foot had knocked the plug out of the socket. The guy on the other end of the phone said to hold on that he would be back in a minute with a flashlight because the electricity had just gone out in his building and he couldn’t see under the desk without the lights….
———————————————————————–
I guess it’s my turn to contribute to this thread, so here goes: One of our lusers called me about a problem she was having with her PC, she was using a vt220 emulator to connect to one of our UNIX-boxes, and “half of her prompts were missing”. Two days earlier I had set up the emulation software for her, and had checked that everything was ok, so I tried to get her to be a bit more specific (fat chance!). Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turned out that the screen on this particular PC was one of those fancy things where you can adjust the height, width vertical and horisontal placement of the screen image……she had accidentally shifted the whole image to the left, so the first half of her prompts were off-screen. 🙂
———————————————————————–
On my previous job a user needed a program but didn’t have a modem, so I told him I’d overnight him a diskette. He then asked me if i could *fax* the diskette to him! If I didn’t need my job I would have told him I would, but dominos was faxing me a pizza and he’d have to wait a bit. 🙂
———————————————————————–
Customer: Where can I get a BIOS upgrade for by 286 computer?
Tech: The unit should have been shipped with the latest bios.
Customer: Well I upgraded the processor myself, and my computer doesn’t seem to work.
Tech: What did you upgrade the processor to?
Customer: I upgraded it to a 486DX-50.
Tech: Sir… The 286 chip is soldered on the motherboard!
Customer: I know, I took out my handy soldering iron and took it out and put the 486 on myself.
Tech: Sir, the 486 is bigger than the 286.
Customer: I know, I had to use quite a bit of solder to solder the extra pins together.
Tech: Sir I have to put you on hold for a second. the Tech laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.
————————————————————————
In my first *real* job, I was not only responsible for programming but I also did customer support and training. Our company used to sell time on our computers so very small companies that couldn’t afford computers at the time could do their bookkeeping, etc. One day, a new woman came in to use the trash-… i mean TRS-80 (boy I’m really dating myself 😉 She fumbled about for about 10 minutes but I paid no attention to her. Finally she came out & grumbled something about how the computer wouldn’t turn on. I grilled her with the usual obvious questions: Did you turn the switch on? Did you plug it in? Did you turn on the switch on the power strip? She was sure she had done everything right. I was sure she neglected to plug one of the power cords into the power strip.

So, I went to investigate and she was *RIGHT*, she *HAD* plugged everything in to the power strip… including the power strip’s own power cord – talk about a ground loop!
————————————————————————
A woman called the shop where she had bought a PC and complained that it didn’t work properly: Every time she switched it on the screen was filled with characters. Two technicians were sent out and were met by a woman with tits about twice the size of Dolly Parton’s and glasses about two centimeters thick. They asked her to switch on the computer. This she did, and then leaned over the keyboard to read what was on the screen… The problem was quickly solved.
————————————————————————
Or, there was the customer who couldn’t get her disk to go into the drive once she had formatted it. After a long conversation, the tech finally went onsite, only to discover that, like a well organized person, she was putting a label on each formatted diskette – completely over the shutter as well.
————————————————————————
We had a customer call us once, saying that they were having problems getting their new disks to work in the machine. It turned out that the customer thought they had to TRIM THE 5.25″ DISKS DOWN to fit in their 3.5″ drive… fortunately the 3.5 drive wasn’t damaged…
————————————————————————
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved int he diretion oposite the movement of the mouse (when she moved her mouse left, the cursor went right, etc.) She also complained about how hard it was to hit the buttons. She was quite embarased when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed AWAY from her…
————————————————————————
I remember when my new Amiga arrived (way back in 86!). I had a class to go to, but my roommate was kind enough to set it all up for me. When I got back from class, he was having a great time playing with it. His only problem was using the mouse. Turns out he was holding it in his hand and rolling the ball with his fingers! I don’t even remember how he was coping with the mouse buttons.
————————————————————————
I was working for a computer retailer in Denver when my supervisor received a phone call from a very irate customer. According to this man, he had purchased his computer two days before, had read the instructions, and had performed a backup of the hard drive exactly as instructed. The problems started the moment he reformatted his hard drive to test his backup.
————————————————————————
]First revision of user manual includes :

] Insert disk A
] Press ENTER
] Wait for reply LOADING EXECUTED
] Insert disk B
] .
] .

]Following a complaint by a user, the second revision reads :

] Insert disk A
] Press ENTER
] Wait for reply LOADING EXECUTED
] Remove disk A
] Insert disk B
] .
] .

When I worked for Reuters, I saw some truly idiot proof user manuals along these lines. Reuters has a lot of rack-mounted PCs all over the world in places where the local tech-level is zilch. The field service guides for these things explain how there are 7 wrong ways but only one right way to insert a 5 1/4 inch disk into the right slot (let’s not talk about the wrong slots!).

They also explained techno-babble such as ‘disk-drive door’ so that people wouldn’t interpret instructions such as ‘Insert disk A into drive and close door’ as an instruction to close the door of the room they were in.
————————————————————————

No paper

In reply to why I hate end users

Welcome to the paperless office!

The ‘no paper’, ’empty cartridge, ‘no power’ and ‘not logged in’ syndromes frequently afflict my users too (usually the same people).

Bad user

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I’ve told this one before, but had a user whose department was switching from PCs to Macs. He wanted to know if he could use his HP laserjet on his Mac – I told him no, he has to use the shared laser just 10 feet away. Our policy was to leave the old equipment in place alongside the new for a week.

I get a call the next day. User’s Mac will not boot – making funny startup chime.
Show up to see the dead Mac symbol.

A closer inspection found that the user had tried to use the laserjet on the Mac. He had taken the parrallel cable and plugged it into a likely looking connection on the back of the Mac – the SCSI connector. The user had shorted out the SCSI circuit on the MB.

Needless to say he went to the back of the line for new computers in his department. And I was probably less than polite about ignoring my advice. At that time it was my department that paid for all computers.

James

Most annoying

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

Not particularly funny, just annoying…
A fairly Epson inkjet printer suddenly stopped working one day. I did all the usual troubleshooting, and no results. I finally took the whole thing apart and found…
a single loose connection. Pushed it down snug, spent another half hour maneuvering the pieces back together and voila! Worked like new again.
Most annoying tho. Those covers were not meant to be taken off and put back on again EASILY.

Not a scrunchie

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

There was an HP Laserjet 5L in Accounting. One day they got a paper jam. And of course it wasn’t the typical ordinary paper jam you could easily remove if you knew what you were doing, but a paper completely crunched up and wedged all in the fuser unit. Which on the 5L is not particularly easy to open up. After about an hour of picking, poking, pulling and unscrewing this or that, I finally got it out.
Needless to say I was extremely perturbed when they did it all over again, an hour later.

Paper is easy

In reply to Not a scrunchie

Wait ’til some twit puts a photo-copier transparency in one.

‘We bought photo-copier ones because they are much cheaper’. Prinetrs are cheaper than photo-copiers as well, tad more expensive than a box of transparencies though.

along the lines of “hot rollers”

In reply to Paper is easy

My current boss decided to try some laminating, by himself.

First he tried to feed the doc from the wrong direction and w/o a carrier. Needless to say he forced it in far enough so the rollers that normally push it out, pulled it in and wrapped the laminate around themselves. I had to take the laminator completely apart to get the laminate off of the rollers.

He warned me that he had another laminating job to do a few minutes later. I quickly placed a label on the laminator with an arrow pointing the correct feed side and direction! Figured this would prevent problems right?

This time he used a carrier but approx. 1/4 inch of leftover laminate stuck out of the carrier. Needless to say this small bit was once again grabbed by the rollers at the end and wrapped around. The poor laminator had to be taken apart again!

I think I’ll do all the laminating from now on.
=-)

Transparencies

In reply to Not a scrunchie

One of the worst fuser jams I had was in a colour copier. The user had fed standard transparencies throught the copier which had melted and wrapped aroung the fixing rollers. I had to explain to the user that there were special transparencies for this purpose and the copier needed to be set so that the fixing unit would run cooler and slower.

The there was the stapled document incident…..

I also had repeated problems with the same user feeding regular label sheets through a Laserjet. When heated, the labels detach themselves from the sheet and re-attach themselves to the rollers.

EMF

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

After several months of trying find out why a customers download (2400 baud modem and 3 hour downloads)would blow up only sometimes. We caught a huge surge of noise coming down the line. It turns out that the line ran behind a small series of shops, and one of them had a very powerful MIG welder. When they turned that on it put out a very strong RF pulse that scrambled the signal on the Telco line. We rerouted his line to the Central Office.

But it worked on Friday

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

Monday, 5 am California time, my client in Toronto calls to say their 3/4 million $$(US)software isn’t working. I check our knowledge base for their complaint: nothing. I check with the head of Programming, she whacks at her keyboard for a while and says “send them this script and have them run it.” No luck. The head of Customer Support says to have them change this, this and this setting. Still no luck. All this time customer is getting IRATE, swearing our software is crap and I’m an idiot. Oh, and swearing NOTHING has changed on their end. After 3 days of this, they finally deign to allow me to dial in. Whereup I immediately discover that their IS department remapped the drive where our program resided. But apparently since q and g look so much alike, that was supposed to qualify as nothing being changed. It took another two days to unscrew the undocumented “fixes” applied by my head of programming and customer support.

Yeah, sure it is

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

Back a few years ago I was working for a defense contractor. PCs were just coming in to use there and only a select number of folks had them. One very bright engineer (just ask him, he’ll tell you just how smart he is) had a machine that just would not run one day. He insisted on calling in an outside vendor to troubleshoot the problem. So in comes the tech, and the area has to close down all it’s classified work while the uncleared tech is there. Everyone stands around watching as the engineer shows the tech just how broken the PC is. Tech reaches around the back of the PC, plugs in the keyboard, reboots the PC and hands the engineer a bill for $125.00.

jdg

bad users

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

found a slab of processed cheese inside a cd drive a couple of months ago. also found some old dried up gum inside a floppy drive. Why do we support these goons?

My favorite incident

In reply to bad users

Years ago, I was supporting a laboratory information system running on a Prime 6150. I got a frantic call from a nurse in day surgery that she’d hit a wrong button on a data entry screen and now the lab printer in her area was now spewing forth forms. I told her to turn off the printer and I would be down there to take care of it when I had time. A minute later she called back more frantic saying that the printer wouldn’t turn off (this was an 1980’s Data South 9-pin dot matrix printer with a push button on/off which sometimes suffered a control board short the would render the system uncontrollable until you did a hard reset). I told her to unplug the printer from the outlet. Not a minute later she called back even more frantic. She’d pulled the plug on the printer but it was still printing. I went down immediately to determine what was going on only to discover that, yes, the lab printer was printing unending forms, however, what she’d unplugged was a fax machine sitting next to the lab printer. YOu can imagine that fun I’ve had with that one for years now.

sdalek…

Life as a computer retail repair tech

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I used to work as a tech at the local Computer Renassaince. I saw all kinds of things.
There was one computer that a woman brought in that as soon as I took the cover off, cockroaches scattered EVERYWHERE! We had to have the place fumigated to get rid of them. Bug parts were burnt and stuck to the motherboard, HDD, everywhere there was circuitry they could get to. I closed it up, gave it back to her and sold her a new computer.
Another computer I looked at had a mouse next inside it and mouse urine all over the motherboard.
Probably the worst thing that every happened though was my fault. A customer said her computer rebooted everytime she was in Word. So I tested it for a week without any errors. One day I was in Word and decided to be creative so I wrote a poem about “Defective End Users”. About then she walked in and asked for her computer so I shut it down real quick. Appearantly I either saved the doc in my haste, or Word recovered it because she came in the next day and yelled at my boss for an hour. Luckily I was at lunch. 😉

On line please

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

This happen about 10 years ago with a HP4 printer. It was late in the evening and i was working overtime because they were moving desks around and i needed to move the PCs

Right in the middle of the move, the controler of the company comes and sees me because she cannot print her report. I tell her that i’m right in the middle of something, i will get to her as soon as i can (with a 15″ screen in my hands. Back then they were pretty heavy) She insists this is urgent and she needs her document right away.

She is basically ordering me to drop what i’m doing and go and help her. Finally i do. I get there, start checking for a source of the problem, I assume it was not the obvious, which was my mistake, but anyway. After a good 4 or 5 minutes, i find nothing wrong with the printer. Finally i realise the printer was “offline” Pressed the online button and poof, the documents printed. I gave her a look that basically said “You came and bothered me because you don’t know the printer is offline?!?!?”

Funny, she never came to see me again about anything after that…..ever! 😉

Clumsiness will be the death of peripherals!

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

Once I had to rescue a keyboard… from a full glass of water.

The woman had the water next to her keyboard and accidentally knocked it over, of course, onto her keyboard. Thankfully I was close by and rushed in to perform emergency surgery to dry off the inside before it caused any permanent damage. Whew!

Water Ha!

In reply to Clumsiness will be the death of peripherals!

In the mide 80s I worked in sales for a few Mac dealers, and back then Mac Keyboards were only available from Apple, and cost a bloody fortune – $140 Cdn each if I recall correctly.

So I wasn’t suprised when our tech was away and the call for help came from a customer. Some coke had spilled onto a keyboard and the guilty party did neither confess right away nor attempt to drain it out. Evaporation did its work, and what was left in the keyboard was a sweet sticky mess.

We were charging $50 an hour for any labour, and I think I used up a $14 can of contact cleaner (great stuff – can be found at radio shack) to dislodge the crud off all the internals. After one hour on the bench it worked like new – Apple built great keyboards. But getting there was maddening work with contact cleaner, swanbs, paper towel and elbow grease.

James

good one!

In reply to Water Ha!

alright, your coke is one up on my water. but now that i think of it I do recall having one employee who always ate lunch over his keyboard and believe you me it was full of crumbs, and dots of this or that of dry sticky liquid. I believe he went thru a cpl of keyboards during my time there. (he was the father of the pres so no fuss was ever made).

Nothing !

In reply to good one!

A colleague, just persuaded mangement to upgrade his portable to a new state of the art beastie. He’d spent all day showing us how good it was compared to ours, came in the following day with a sheepish expression. That night he was reading some documents while entertaining his young child who was feeling a bit poorly. The story ends well as his kid felt much better after it had chucked up the excess partially digested milk. Good aim too. Took them two weeks to fix the machine.

More water

In reply to Clumsiness will be the death of peripherals!

I had a user over-water her plant that was strategically placed on a shelf over the monitor. The water dripped down into the back of the monitor and zapped it.

Troubleshooting

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

1)Years ago when I was a copier engineer I was called to a copier which was constantly jamming. The obstruction turned out to be a pack of cheese & tomato sandwiches which someone had decided to store on the paper feed bed.

2)Received a call from a user who had accidently kicked the PS/2 mouse connector from her PC. She informed me that everyone in the office had tried to reconnect it but they just couldn’t screw it back in………

3) As a bench engineer I was called to assist our IT guy who was having problems inserting (and ejecting) a CD from a new iMac. On closer inspection I discovered that he’d managed to force
two CDs, back to back into the loader.

Copier engineer

In reply to Troubleshooting

I once watched an ‘experienced’ engineer spend 2 hours gutting a colour copier to try to fix a fault where A3 images were marked. Despite my insistence that this was a reader ‘fault’ the engineer proceeded to take out the feed assemblies , drum, devs, fuser etc. When he went for a break I looked into the problem myself and discovered that the problem was caused by a correction fluid mark on the copyglass. I left him to figure it out for himself………….

You name it I’ve seen it

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

From the usual not having the monitor plugged in and the keycap swapping bit, some of the funniest
episodes involved pests. One mouse at a petro-
chemical plant that made pesticides had collected
torn off edges of pin feed paper and stuffed it around the power supply on a dot matrix printer
and resulted in a small fire. One mose crawled
inside a large HP plotter and his eliminations
ate the printed circuit traces right of the board. One user who had placed his printer on
top of his monitor caused the monitor to fail
and the case on the printer to melt. A large
pharmacy chain had all their front counters
set up the same and experienced major numbers
of failures on printers (TI dot matrix mounted
under the counter with the printed page coming
out onto the counter) Seems all were different
failures from no carriage motion, no paper
motion and poor print quality and caused by
users loosing paper clips thru the slot unto
the platten, 68 failures in one day at 47
locations in one state.

ctrl+alt+delete

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I dont know this new secretary was hired but anyway ,one day she called our help desk & told us that sher can’t login to her PC. So I ask one of my guys to check her out & after a minute my techsupport guy called me laghing very hard & told me that the secretary told her that ” id been pressing ctrl+alt+delete as you have intructed me yesterday but still my pc wont boot”. =p

Soldered memory

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

I worked for a company configuring hardware in new PC’s prior to shipping them out to customers. We had a guy call one day, stating that his NEW PC wasn’t working. It seemed as though he wanted to upgrade the memory. My co-worker, who took the phone call, suggested that perhaps when he installed the new memory module, it didn’t seat properly. The customer insisted that it was installed very tightly – he knew this because he “used a lighted magnifying glass when he soldered it in”.

Just a top one

In reply to Worst cases of troubleshooting

User complained that the CD in a machine was making funny noises. Had a look and what was there? A processed cheese slice – not just normal cheese which would have toasted but a piece of industrial plastic which had melted and completely screwed up the drive. Working in a school, the kids do have a wicked sense of humour, the little dolls. The frequently put gum inside the mouse ball housing and when we changed to opticals, they used liquid paper to cover the lighting. And the other one was where they prised off the keys from the keyboard and rearranged them to spell rude words across the top line.

[Author]

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