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We once got a call from a woman who complained her computer just would'nt work. It took her an hour to narrow down the symptom to "it wont turn on." After checkin all cables and telling her to check the surge protector...ya know....all the basics, we got frustrated and just sent a field tech over. The power was out. The truth is sad.
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Duct tape is like the force, it has both a light side and a dark side, and it's what holds the universe together.
Just yesterday, I got a call from one of our cute admins just down the hall... her PC wouldn't boot. Poor thing left her floppy in the drive when she rebooted. https://forums.windrivers.com/ Being an opportunist, I wandered down there to take a look. I gave her a hug and told her that I was sorry about her brain, and then told her. https://forums.windrivers.com/
BTW, I'm now officially a brat. https://forums.windrivers.com/
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Thank you for calling the support desk! How may I disconnect you today?
[This message has been edited by Sparky625 (edited February 15, 2001).]
One of my personnel favorites was when one of our users rang the support desk to get a network installed into his new office. However this was one of the "I know all about IT" users, you know the ones I'm sure. Anyway he made it absolutely clear to the poor guy on the helpdesk that he wanted the call logged as..User requires the LAN moving into his office!!!. When we saw this is caused us know end of fun and I really wanted to deal with this one. So I rings him and says "so you want the LAN moving into your new office??", "Sure" he replies. "OK then I think the best bet is to go the whole hog and move the WAN in there why we are at it", "I'm sorry??". "Well if we are going to move the whole cabling infrastructue in your building into your office then I think that we may as well hire a fleet of JCB's too. Dig up the 700 miles of cabling as well that are connecting the other offices together and you can have that too." "ERR well.....I only wanted to get on the network" he replied rather sheepishly. "OK then a network point it will be then...Oh and in the future just tell our guys what it is that you want and leave the wording of the calls and the rest upto us!". I left him feeling rather dumb and myself feeling rather more cheerful....It certainly brightened up what was otherwise a quite boring day.
Some people eh??. I have plenty more of them from the very same guy!! believe it not but I better not go into them or I'll be here all day.
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Just because your paranoid don't mean there not after you.
Yesterday a lady called me and told me that her printer put little harts on every print. When I laughed and told her it was valentines day she hung up on me. Tomorrow I'll drive over there and see what the problem is... https://forums.windrivers.com/
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MONEY IS THE ROUTE TO ALL EVIL!
Send $9.95 for more info.
I'm sure I'm not alone on this......
User submits a Help Desk Request claiming his copy of Office 2000 is defective. It seems the spellchecker in Word doesn't catch every spelling error. When he goes back to proof read the document after running spellcheck, he still finds lots of spelling errors. He insists, with caplocks on, that his copy of Office be replaced with a new one.
For three days, I try to find out from him if he's pressing CTRL+HOME before launching spellcheck. No reply, so I pay him a visit and ask him the question face-to-face.
His reply: "Oh, I fixed it! My mouse was defective. Apparently, even though I placed the cursor at the beginning of the document with the mouse, and it was sitting there blinking away, that's not really where it was. I got a new mouse and the problem went away!"
User is a four letter word!
https://forums.windrivers.com/
I had a customer who purchased a custom machine from my shop flip out on the phone and threaten to sue me because I would not teach him how to burn CD's, Plus he had messed up the windows install pretty badly and had to re-install his programs and said he was going to take me to court because he could not re-install office because it was not his copy and he lost the cd-key !! This guy only puts his files on the desktop because if he puts them any where else he will not be able to find them again. After about 20 minutes of him screaming at me on the phone with no right I finally told him to go hell I will see him in court ( i also said a few other things but you get the point) that was about a month ago never heard from him again, But I did hear that he gave his computer away.
Some people dont deserve to breath my air !
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Be good, and if you cant be good wear a rubber
I had a customer who purchased a custom machine from my shop flip out on the phone and threaten to sue me because I would not teach him how to burn CD's, Plus he had messed up the windows install pretty badly and had to re-install his programs and said he was going to take me to court because he could not re-install office because it was not his copy and he lost the cd-key !! This guy only puts his files on the desktop because if he puts them any where else he will not be able to find them again. After about 20 minutes of him screaming at me on the phone with no right I finally told him to go hell I will see him in court ( i also said a few other things but you get the point) that was about a month ago never heard from him again, But I did hear that he gave his computer away.
Some people dont deserve to breath my air !
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Be good, and if you cant be good wear a rubber
I had a woman call me up yelling at me because i disconncted her internet access. After we had gone through the whole you had no right, it was not your dicision, and i am going to the CEO, i asked her if i should bring along a printed or digital copy of the 500 megs of porn her night shift people had downloaded from that system and should i catagorize it by male female, position, or just by the ammount of people that were in the pictures. It has been two weeks and i have not heard anything about it.
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How do you set a laser printer to stun?
"Floppy, Floppy, Floppy" - that rocks! I might try that some time.
I had a cute user one time ask me what to do when the printer says "low toner".
I am constantly getting calls from users who insist that our standard desktop apps are not installed on their machine (we build all new machines from the same image.) The image is NT based so the shortcuts cannot be created unit after the user account/profile has been set up on the machines. After 20 minutes of explaning that just because the shortcuts aren't there does not mean that the app has not been installed, I ususally end up having to pay them a visit and create the shortcuts for them. After that I make them feel like dumbasses for not doing it for themselves.
Of course if the user is cute enough, I am always game for a personal visit/training.
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"All my life all I ever wanted to be was a gangster" -Goodfellas
I'm lucky I no longer answer phones!!!! I do feel all of your pain though. Been there done that. Happy Birthday Driver Guy!
https://forums.windrivers.com/
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Relaxing in the corporate world!
You know when I first got out of Computer school after years of being in the construction trade I still had some learning to do as far as computers go. I used to talk to my Uncle who had every computer related gadget on the market and I used to come to him for Q&A. After a few months in the industry I realised how little he did know. I at times probably sounded like an Idiot to the second level tech's at first but after a while once I got into the lingo and learned more about it I developed a respect from alot of people. I ended up moving up to second level of support faster than anyone had ever done it and still to this day I hold the record. I have stayed in touch with some people from there. Anyway our call center handled about 35,000 calls a week and we had to be customer service oriented. I can't believe some of the things that I am hearing here. I know that people are oblivious sometimes and you just want to kill them. I have had only one time where a clustomer was so beligerent that I had to hang up on him and just as I finished typing up the call, I was about to go see my supervisor about the call to tell what had happened I got a call again and it was the same guy. I couldn't believe that out of 700 some odd tech's I got the call routed to me again. When I finally had to raise my voice to him to get him to calm down for 10 seconds in order for me to get him under control and remote his system to fix it I was frazzled and my supervicor came over and asked what was going on. I told him I've got it under control now. Pull the tape on these last two calls and listen to what I had to go through with this guy. He understood why I got so excited. Now I am the guy that maintains approx. 400 PC & Laptops for a corporate office building I understand that these people don't care how it works as long as it does. When you make $250K/year you dont want to edit the system registry or know that the PC is not called a modem you want someone there to fix it when it isn't doing what it is supposed to. I hope one day when I am making that kind of money I wont have to be bothered with fixing anything on my own either. I can have some lowly tech, carpenter, roofer, plumber, landscaper, pool guy, electrician, etc..... come and fix it because that is what he/she does. That is all we are most of the time. Little peasants to these people. Grin and bear it, suck it up, bite your lip Etc......That is all we can do. We are supposed to be professionals here right??? We are paid to do our job as they are paid to do theirs. I don't know Marketing strategies or Financial things. They do. I go to them for things that I don't understand or have the time to learn about that they know. Just as they don't have the time to learn this either. When I am there I try to break down into terms that they can understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Educate the consumer or customer and they wont be back for the same problem again. Well most of the time. One of the things I did as a trainer for the same large company that I was in the call center for was I found out who the frequet callers were for HOW DO I? type calls and I visited their site and asked them what they wanted training on. I went over it with them a few times until they understood it and then went to the next client. We had 100% no call back from any of those people. Unless it was hardware related and we had to send a tech to the site to replace a printer or fried modem.Try a little more patience with these people. When they become beligerent then try to bring them "Below the Line" so to speak. If you can't then pass it off to a supervisor or tell them you don't care to be talked to in that manner and hang up. I am sorry if I didn't have a funny call for you but I just had to say my peace with this. The world would be a better place if people looked at it that way. Too many angry people around here. That is all... All Comments welcome.
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If you think I'm standig here as the world goes by. You're thinking like a fool 'cause it's a case of do or die. Out there is a fortune waiting to be had, if you think i'll let it go your mad You've Got Another Thing Coming
I 100% completely agree with u8drtsox
On occassion I have to deal with a screaming call. but where I work anyone can be your next boss.
only at a few times I lowered my voice to a firm take control level and said "Slow down, lets start with.."
on the other hand, the best and easiest call I got was
Me "CS can I help you"
them "My computer won't turn on"
Me "Explain, do you hear noise coming from the unit?"
them "Yes"
Me "Ok, try..."
them (half way through my sentence) "Ah S@#t I forgot to turn the monitor on."
Click
We try not to give too much support over the phone as it usually leads to the caller trying to re-configure their system over the phone for free. If we have recently worked on it and there is a problem then we try to help via phone. I recently had a lady pick up her tower and she assured us she could reconect all the cables. Next day she calls and the tower wont come on! She assures me it is plugged in. finally I get her to get down and follow the power cord by hand. Sure enough it was plugged in.........into the monitor that is. I ask her to look for another power cord. She starts to argue and tell me that it has always worked with just the one cord plugged in. I try to explain that the monitor runs through the PC. Finally she gives in and complains that she will have to crawl under the desk just to prove me wrong. Well guess what, she quietly tells me that there is another cord way under there. I tell her to plug it into the PC and see if it comes on. Bingo!!!Lights, action, PC then she insist that we must have changed her system cause she never had two power cords pluged in before. After she assured me that it had booted up and was running ok I told her to just leave it the way it was and it would be OK.
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If life is a bitch then what is death? I believe I will take the bitch!
i have one that stands out above all my other experiences. a customer brought their pc in for a printer install, no big deal and did it for free since they are financially restriced. about 1 hour after they get home the guy calls back and said he could not get on the internet? he was fairly mad about it and got even more so when i explained thaat we did nothing at the shop that would even affect his internet connection. finally i get it out of him what the exect nature of the problem was, to quote:
"when i type in my password in AOL, all it does is come up with '********'"
i calmly explaind that that is how a password is displayed on screen when you enter it for your protection, the stars are just a disguise...
after hanging up i calmly laughed myself into a frenzy and had a budweiser(TM). https://forums.windrivers.com/
This is nothing to surprise any of you with but I fealt I should throw in my 2 cents. had a customer call yesterday asking about DRAM Prices asked him what kind he wanted Etc. PC-100 64 Meg, he said he needed 64 Megs of RAM but he didn't need the PC-100 64 Meg RAM. Of course then he tells me well I need 100mhz speed ram... By then I wanted to bash his skull in with a rusty tire iron... What bothers me is everyone believes they are their own Junior Technician capable of working on computers when they don't even know what exactly they need in the first place.