Customer: "Your sound card is defective and I want a new one."
  Tech Support: "What seems to be the problem?"
  Customer: "The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming
  out of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the
  left. It's defective."
  Tech Support: "You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker
  to the right side of the machine and vice versa."
  Customer: (sputter) (click)
  Tech Support: (snicker)

                         ********************
  Customer: "I'd like to return this scanner."
  Store Clerk: "Excuse me?"
  Customer: "This scanner I bought. I paid eighty dollars for this
  scanner, and it doesn't work!"
  Store Clerk: "Uh . . . sir, that's a trackball."
  Customer: "No, it isn't. It says 600 dpi tracking resolution right
  here!"
                         ********************

  Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having
problems:
  the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed
  strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I
walked her
  through the basics, then came over and printed out a test sheet. It
  printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the
  printer. As the paper started
  coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me. I told her to
  WAIT until the paper came out on its own. Problem solved.

                         ********************

  I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet
  division for about a month when I had a customer call with a
  problem I just couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All
the other
  colors would print fine, which truly baffled me because the
  only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance,
  green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed
fine. Every
  color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had
  the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and
  reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for
  help; they offered no new ideas.

  After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the
  customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she
asked quietly,
  "Should I try printing on a piece of white paper instead
  of this yellow construction paper?"

                          *******************

  A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's
  tech support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't
  find the printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the
  printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find
  it!

                           *****************

  Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay,
  and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the
  two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I
  picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got
  the message, 'No Carrier,' on my screen. What's wrong?"

                          *****************

  An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows
  installation that had gone terribly wrong.
  Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on
  my home computer."  (Training stresses that we are "not the Soft-
  ware Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.)
  Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
  Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't
initialized."
  Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
  Customer:(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk.
  Would you like to initialize it'?"
  Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
  Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to
  be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read
  them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only
  set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

                              ******************

  For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from
  someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few
  minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between
  our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards.
  She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed
  look on her face.

  She called the teacher over and explained that no matter what
she typed,
  nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was
  hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced.

  I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

  They both jumped back, silenced. "What the . . . " the teacher
  said.

  I typed, "I said leave me alone!"

  The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!" It
  was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation
  between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.

  Me: "Don't touch me!"

  Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."

  Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!" Etc. Finally, I
couldn't contain
  myself any longer and fell out of my chair laughing.

  After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red.
  Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.

                             ***************

  I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to
  load a program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program. My
  friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good.
  He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time
  he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he kept getting
  the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to press only
  on the very top of the key. When I taught him about the shift key, he
  thought I was a genius.

                             *****************
  This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied"
  message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his
  user name and password in capital letters.
  Tech Support: "OK, let's try once more, but use lower case
  letters."
  Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."

                             ****************

  "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"

                             ****************

  My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He
  noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations
  with her arms crossed across her chest and staring at the screen. After
  about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same
position only
  now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help
  and she replied, "It's about time! I pushed the F1 button over twenty
  minutes ago!"