Usagichan's Helpdesk call of the week!Follow

I try to make sure I have at least 1 cup of coffee in me before I think about calling our techies.

I don't call our Helpdesk because I'm smarter than they are

Then she would have called back.
You said Twunt.

Edited, Nov 5th 2007 8:48am by Usagichan

One of my first jobs was tech support while I was in college. We supported the local community free of charge for work experience etc. So my second week in, I get the following customer. If I hadn't seen this firsthand, I wouldn't have believed it.

<me> Thanks for calling <college> technical support, how can I help you?
<user> Hi, I have a problem. My computer won't boot up.
<me> It won't boot up huh? When you power it on, nothing happens correct? No lights, no nothing?
<user> Yeah, it was fine this weekend but now it just won't start up. I don't know why.
<me> Have you experienced any blackouts, brownouts, power surges, anything odd this weekend? Or, has anyone else used the PC since you last did that you can think of?
<user> Nope, just me.
<me> Ok, what was the last thing you did on the PC? Did you see any odd behavior, error messages or anything like that?
<user> No, everything worked fine. I didn't get any errors or anything. And it shut down just fine.
<me> (thinking he is trying to use the monitor to turn on the PC) Ok, humor me for a second, it's the case itself and not the monitor you are trying to power on correct?
<user> (laughs) Yeah, I made sure of that.
<me> (laughs) Ok good, are you close to the office here? Bring it on down and I can take a look at it for you.
<user> Yeah, about 5 minutes away or so.
<me> Great, if you don't mind, bring it on down and we'll check it here in the shop.
<user> Sure thing, I'll be right down.

10 minutes later in comes the customer with his kid and PC in tow.

<me> Ok, let's fire this up and see what we get. Do you have a warranty or anything that might be affected if we open the case up?
<user> No, go ahead and do what you gotta do.

So I crack the case on his Gateway (ugh) and check to make sure the hardware hasn't had "chip creep", is all connected, hasn't had someone monkey with it etc when I all the sudden see the problem...

Just behind the back end of the CD-ROM, all over the back of it and on the motherboards' upper right side is a brown smear, like liquid hit the CD-ROM and motherboard or something then traveled down the board til it met the RAM sockets.

<me> umm, excuse me sir, has the PC had water or any other liquid on it recently? Like maybe someone spilled something?
<user> nope, I ALWAYS use the (and to this day, 10 years later, I STILL can't believe he said this) cup holder for my coffee cup but I did put my travel mug on top of the case for a minute cause I bumped it and it spilled a little.

(It turned out he had a 16 oz travel coffee mug, which fits perfectly in the tray of a CD-ROM drive, imagine that...)

<me> Ok well, here's the problem sir. When the coffee mug was in the tray and you jostled it, the liquid got in the CD-ROM tray and, when you closed the tray, that damaged the CD-ROM. It's actually not a cup holder. Then, when you moved the coffee cup to the top of the PC, there was still coffee on the bottom of the cup, it appears to have leaked into your case and onto your motherboard (I showed him the brown smear on the CD-ROM and MB at that point). Bottom line, the coffee appears to have shorted the mainboard or power supply out and there isn't anything really that I can do here for this PC.
<user> So you can't fix it?
<me> Ummm, well, we can replace the motherboard but since the liquid shorted it, you will probably need to replace the memory, video card, etc etc.
<user> How much would that cost?
<me> Frankly sir, a hell of a lot more than just buying a new one.
<user> Well ****. (laughs) I guess I learned the hard way huh?
<me> I'm afraid so sir, sorry I couldn't help more.

...

It's kind of scary how many ppl assume the CD-ROM is a friggin cup holder. Although now, I don't see that as much. I think I've had one of those in the last 5 yrs. Most of my stuff now is spyware, 3rd party shareware designed by a 4th grader that makes the PC turn bright pink, that kinda crap.

Gah. Got more of them then I can think of. Most weren't actually on the phone though, but usually in the field so to speak.

Had a user who's computer was crashing regularly. After looking at the logs, it was getting some sort of memory errors. I decided to grab his computer and take it back to the lab to see what was wrong with it. When I was unhooking it, I noticed a strong smell like orange under his desk. Also, one side of the case was a bit "sticky" and also smelled of oranges. When I got the computer back to the lab and opened it up, I figured out the problem. One whole side of the interior was literally coated with dead gnats. Apparently, enough of them had slipped into the memory slots and were conductive enough to cause the memory errors. After blowing out the case with compressed air (that was fun) and making sure all the dead gnats were out of the memory slots, I reseated the memory fired the system back up and it worked like a charm. Only thing I can figure is that for some reason he set an orange or bag of oranges on the system and left them there, attracting the bugs and ultimately causing his problems. You just never know what folks will set on top of their computers.


Had another user once who absolutely insisted that his external hard drive was in fact a "network router box". Nevermind that the only network cable running from his system went directly from it to the wall, and never mind that the only cables running into the supposed "router box" consisted of a power cable (which also went to the wall) and a ultra-wide scsi cable (which went to the scsi connector on the back of the system). No amount of pointing this out to him would sway him. Eventually, we just gave up and said that the reason his system wasn't booting was because his router box was broken and it needed to be replace. At which time we replaced the external disk (as we'd planned to from the beginning) and went on about our business.


One I didn't see first hand but heard about from a coworker was similar to the oranges thing. Except in this case it was a keyboard that wasn't working. He asked the user if he'd spilled anything on it or had anything happen that could have caused it to stop working. The user absolutely assured him that nothing unusual had happened. So my friend unplugs the keyboard, plugs in the replacement and verifies that it works properly. Then, he gets ready to head out, picks up the keyboard and tucks it up under his arm to carry it out of the office. Sploosh! His entire side is drenched with water. Not a little bit, but basically enough that the entire keyboard must have been filled with it. No way that the user didn't notice spilling this much water, and he obviously must have dried off the outside of the keyboard before calling for someone to replace his "mysteriously broken" keyboard. Dunno why the guy lied about it. It's not like we charge folks for keyboards. They're off the books RMAs (basically free). Although according to my coworker the look on the guys face was priceless as he realized that it was pretty obvious he'd lied.


The best ones were not from my engineer customers though. Well, "best" in that they shouldn't have happened because it was one of our own IT guys who kept doing them. Basically, he was someone who simply should never have been hired to work in IT at any level. Complete technical incompetent. I had to repeatedly follow behind his work whenever he was assigned to hook up new or moved computers to fix his mistakes. I eventually refused to allow him to touch my user's systems because I spent more time fixing bent pins and hooking up the components correctly after he'd screwed them up then if I just did them all myself. Now admittedly some of those older scsi connectors could be tricky, but he managed to mangle the pins on them every single time. The absolutely most amazing one was the time he called me in to help him figure out why one of the moves hadn't come back up. Turned out that he'd bent a pin on the three prong power plug. Not one of the narrow ones, but the center prong! On an inset plug connector (so a "male" set of connectors recessed into the power supply which should be virtually impossible to bend). To this day, I still don't know how he managed to do that.

We could literally write a box about this one guy's antics. The greatest was when a group of people were heading out to lunch on a Friday. One of them was his bosses boss (senior manager type guy). He was working on getting some computer running. They asked him if he wanted to join them for lunch and he declined insisting that he really needed to fix this system. Ok. So they head out to lunch. Turns out it's a long lunch (like 3+ hours), cause it's a slow friday and the boss is there with them, and why not? So, they all arrive back and the boss guy notices the same fellow sitting there "working" on the same system. He asks what the problem is and is told that it just wont come up for some reason. Note, he's been working at this for at least 3 and a half hours. Who knows how long before they walked by heading to lunch. The boss takes a quick look over at the system, hits the button on the monitor and magically it works. Apparently, he'd been powering on and off the system for hours trying to figure out why it wasn't working and it had never occurred to him that the monitor was off. Needless to say, he didn't stick around for too long after that...

For all you Tech Support people here is a wallpaper I think is appropriate.

Help Desk Cat

Sorry it doesn't come in any larger resolutions.

Only so many users could have been that stupid....
Was it someone that actually works on the HD contract in a support function?
Gimme a floor, that might help too.
I have a few initials in mind, but nothing concrete. Perhaps KL....

...something like that yeah....yeah that's the ticket.
Don't tell me it's safety witch...or someone affiliated with her. Lotsa ppls on the 2nd. hmmm

Holy Crap. That is a different kind of insanity. He should be fired immediatly regardless of tenure or unions. (i imagine it's hard to fire someone with that kind of job xp but really, wow)