********************
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!"