More tech jokes

Skorzeny · 05-05-2001 12:33am #1

Customer: "I can't read my fonts anymore."
Tech Support: "Pardon?"
Customer: "My fonts have all disappeared from the screen."
Tech Support: "Really. Uhhh... have you changed anything recently?"
Customer: "No. It happened this morning."
Tech Support: "Ok, I'll log a call and be there in a few minutes."

I trudged down to her cubicle (she had gone out for coffee) and looked at her Windows 3.11 workstation. She had changed her background window colour to mauve, and her text colour to mauve. I switched her text colour to black and left a post-it note saying the problem was fixed.

Fifteen minutes later:
Customer: "The fonts are gone again."
Tech Support: "Really? Did you change anything?"
Customer: "Well, they had been black, but that was hard to read, so I tried changing the colours, and they disappeared again!"
Tech Support: "Hold on, I'll be down."

Again, she had gone for coffee while I was there (she drank a lot of coffee). Now her background colour was blue, and her text colour was blue.

Sick of this, I selected "Windows Default" for the colour scheme. Then I changed the permissions on her DESKTOP.INI file to read-only. I left the post-it note and went back to my game of solitaire.
Customer: "Hi! My colours won't work."
Tech Support: "Yes, last time I was down I discovered an error in your Windows setup which I then was able to link back to a small hardware bug in your CPU. It seems that the ALU is interfering with your video accelerator."
Customer: "What does all this mean?"
Tech Support: "You can't switch Windows colours from default anymore. Nothing can be done. Sorry."
Customer: "Oh, all right, thanks."

I once went on site to fix a problem a customer had. Apparently nothing would come up on the screen. I asked if he cycled the power, and he said he did. I asked him to show me exactly what he had done. He turned the monitor off and on again. I reached down under the desk, hit the reset button, and everything was fine. He asked what the problem was. I said, "Don't worry about it sir, it's an eye-dee-ten-tee error - takes too long to explain -- have a nice day."

Write down 'I,' 'D', '10', and 'T' together, and you'll see what I meant!

Tech Support: "Sir, something has burned within your power supply."
Customer: "I bet that there is some command that I can put into the AUTOEXEC.BAT that will take care of this."
Tech Support: "There is nothing that software can do to help you with this problem."
Customer: "I know that there is something that I could put in... some command... maybe it should go into the CONFIG.SYS."

Minutes later...
Tech Support: "Ok, I am not supposed to tell anyone this but there is a hidden command in some versions of DOS that you can use. I want you to edit your AUTOEXEC.BAT and add the last line as C:\DOS\NOSMOKE and reboot your computer."

Pause.
Customer: "It's still smoking."
Tech Support: "I guess you'll need to call Microsoft and ask them for a patch for the NOSMOKE.EXE."

Four hours later, he calls back.
Tech Support: "Hello sir, how is your computer?"
Customer: "I called Microsoft and they said that my power supply is incompatible with their NOSMOKE.EXE and that I need to get a new one. I was wondering when I can have that done?"

A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. The tech asked her if she was "running it under Windows." The woman responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that's a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his is working fine."

Tech Support: "OK Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter 'P' to bring up the Program Manager."
Customer: "I don't have a 'P'"
Tech Support: "On your keyboard, Bob."
Customer: "What do you mean?"
Tech Support: "'P' on your keyboard, Bob."
Customer: "I'm not going to do that!"

Overheard in a computer shop:
Customer: "I'd like a mouse mat, please."
Salesperson: "Certainly sir, we've got a large variety."
Customer: "But will they be compatible with my computer?"

I once received a fax with a note on the bottom to fax the document back to the sender when I was finished with it, because he needed to keep it.

Customer in computer shop: "Can you copy the Internet onto this disk for me?"

I work for a local ISP. Frequently we receive phone calls that start something like this:
Customer: "Hi. Is this the Internet?"

Customer: "So that'll get me connected to the Internet, right?"
Tech Support: "Yeah."
Customer: "And that's the latest version of the Internet, right?"
Tech Support: "Uhh...uh...uh...yeah."

Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager icon."
Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows - because of the icons - I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't believe it was meant to-"
Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well... why don't you click on the 'little picture' of a filing cabinet... is 'little picture' OK?"
Customer: [click]

Customer: "My computer crashed!"
Tech Support: "It crashed?"
Customer: "Yeah, it won't let me play my game."
Tech Support: "All right, hit Control-Alt-Delete to reboot."
Customer: "No, it didn't crash-it crashed."
Tech Support: "Huh?"
Customer: "I crashed my game. That's what I said before. I crashed my spaceship and now it doesn't work."
Tech Support: "Click on 'File,' then 'New Game.'"
Customer: [pause] "Wow! How'd you learn how to do that?"

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 went 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 colours would print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colours are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine. Every colour 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 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.

And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away from her.

Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and it dialled 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 Software 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 initialised."
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 initialise it?'"
Tech Support: "Err, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialised, 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?"

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 username 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."

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, 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 pressed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!"

Email from a friend: "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"