Me: Here’s the URL for the web service I’ve just deployed. I’ve set up users and permissions so just copy it into your browser and you should see a very similar system to what you’ve been trained on with all your data in there.
Customer: All I’m getting is a blank screen.
Much panicking and headscratching later…
Me: Waaaiiiiittt, did you press Return/Go after copying the URL?
Customer: That was not in the instructions.
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
I guess not everybody’s that much into tennis :)
Tennis? I thought they were talking about the other sportsball, the one where old dudes hit a ball with sticks into a hole
Many years ago I worked for a small company who’d just hired a new CEO - and the guy hated me for some reason. He used every chance to make inappropriate remarks, and at times he’d just get angry and start yelling at me because his MacBook wasn’t doing something the way he wanted it. Keeping in mind, I didn’t do support for endpoints, my specialty was servers and network. I’d just let him go off because he wasn’t local, and would only come to the office for a day about once a month.
One day he called into the office and asked for me (again there are other support people who could easily help him with his macbook issues). He states he’s on a train, and can’t send or receive e-mails. Assuming he’s done basic troubleshooting, and not wanting to piss him off further, I go through normal troubleshooting steps. After several minutes he gets angry again, and starts yelling at me, so did what anyone would do - I put him on speaker phone so everyone else in the office could hear his rant. We all had a good chuckle.
Once he’d gotten it out of his system, I suggested he give me his remote access info (we’d installed remote access software on his macbook for this very reason) so I could remote into his system and see for myself what was going on. He states the software won’t display the one-time access code…so I asked him if he was connected to the WiFi, there was a pause, and then and the phone went dead, he just hung up on me. Magically his email started working after that
“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”
“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Can you print green?”
“Green works fine!”
“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”
Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…
“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”
“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”
Once upon a time before there were smartphones…
The internet existed already, e-mail as well.
We got a letter on real paper.
The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his PC screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉
It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…
I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂
no link to pic?
What’s your address they’ll mail it to you ;p
lol
Was working the counter at a repair shop. This really old guy had come in for a data backup and a wipe/restore. We performed said service, and reloaded the data from the backup back on, and his outlook data was encrypted with a password he couldn’t remember.
This infuriated him, he specifically asked me if I wanted HIM to “Shove the desktop tower up his ass, stick his head in after it, and give it a sniff.”
People are wild.
Well but it makes sense you would’ve wanted to him to do that if the guy was being that much of a prick
Years ago I was working in a sales / support call center. One day in between calls someone posed the question of if you had to sleep with someone of the same sex who would it be. Obvuois answers were things like George Clooney Brad Pitt etc. one of our team was extremely introverted so it was normal for him not to participate.
3 weeks later he pipes up, “I’ve given this a lot of thought and If I had to sleep with a man it would be Jesus Christ” 3 weeks later. Blows my mind he was in deep contemplation for so long. I still am taken a bit back.
The reason? “Jesus seems like he’d be a considerate lover with strong hands.” Beautiful.
He was a carpenter after all
IIRC, a more literal translation of his profession would have been ‘home builder,’ and since most homes in the area at the time would have been stone, he would have been a stonemason. Jesus would have been ripped.
people that use their recycle bin as storage. there have been multiple. once I was at their desk, looked at their trashcan next to their desk and asked if it would be smart to store stuff in there. they got the point after that.
or the new user I setup, went to lunch, came back and needed his password reset because he forgot it already.
The “store things in the recycle bin” people are the victims of a Lotus Notes-ism. The Trash folder in Notes was (is?) excluded from storage quotas, so some people started storing anything they wanted to keep there. Those people told other people to do the same without explaining why and it took on a life of its own as a technological fairy tale.
Had a colleague who did this regularly, till I put his new pw on a postit, and that in his coat pocket. Worked as long as the weather stayed same… It escalated away, until he let his gf call me for his password, because he did not dare to anymore. We finally gave up and set his pw fixed to “123456”. He was really good at the job, only not with his pw.
Should have given him a USB with write protected password in text file. Tell him to keep it on his person
Ok, I’m at my computer and plugged in my USB. Now what do I do?
A long time ago had an attorney call in looking for help dialing internationally. I said “sure we can help you call abroad” and he said, “well first I’d have to get her number.”
…I think about that shit all the time and its been like 12 years.
I don’t know if that’s a great or terrible dad joke.
Once had to explain to an old lady (in full-time employment in a job that requires use of a computer) that the mouse moves around on the desk surface. She was trying to move the cursor by putting the mouse on the screen.
When trying to teach my grandpa how to use a computer, he kept lifting it into the air to make it go up on the screen. We never got past that. Also double clicking was click…1.5second…click. Couldn’t get him going any faster.
Not me, but I recall a story from a while back. ISP tech answers call from an irate customer who isn’t able to get online. After basic troubleshooting, the tech advises the customer to power cycle the cable modem and router…the customer scoffs, how can I do that when my power is out? 😂
Industrial but guess it counts.
Giant motor is supposed to kick on, run for a moment in reverse, wind down, and then go forward. What is happening instead is it kicks on then the whole system goes into stopped state. Two days on the phone and I can’t figure it out, pouring over the code, trying everything.
Suddenly the guy in the field coughs and says “sorry it’s really dusty here”.
It clicks in my head. I tell him to manually push down on the contactor. He says he feels resistance I tell him that’s good and push harder. It give in and I tell him to start again. Works perfectly.
The dust had combined with the internal oil of the contactor making a sludge. The contactor has two coils, a high torque high current one for starting and a low torque low current one to hold. Not much different than a starter in a car. The sludge has stopped the second coil from engaging keeping it locked in high current. Since it was DC the coil kept drawing more and more amps until the power supply couldn’t keep the voltage high enough. Which made the PLC halt. When the PLC halted it erased all the temporary bits including the one that said it was running. The PLC stopped telling the contactor to engage and the power went back to normal.
The sequence was maybe a tenth of a second.
Loved how you broke it down even though I didn’t understand much
Thanks. Here maybe this
This is a small contactor. When that blue center part goes in 1L1 becomes connected to the 2T1 and the same things happens to the other two. Basically I am using a little bit of electricity to flip a switch on or off. Turning on or off the motor.
The blue center part is what I asked him to push in by hand.
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Years ago I worked for a healthcare IT company that had its developers, IT administrators, and help desk all reporting to the CTO. The CTO was an MD with a computer science degree from a prestigious university.
I was in a different department entirely but I was invited to a presentation he was giving and came to the conference room a bit early. I walked in to him in a full panic trying to connect his laptop to the projector. I plugged in the HMDI and hit Win + P and he reacted like I had just defused a bomb. Really made it hard to take seriously his five year strategic plan for all of our IT projects.
A year later he took extended leave to travel internationally and came back to work with a full perm and added the word “tree” to his last name. He lasted about 6 more weeks before he announced he was leaving. He is now the CIO of a large university.
