Haha no, that never worked out. (Stupid PayPal.) Thanks for the vote of confidence, though. ;)

Well I had this user bring me in her tangerince imac a few days ago. She had shipped it out for repair and just received it back from fed ex or whoever shipped it. The box had been dropped, there was a huge dent and cracks in the plastic chasis and the CRT had imploded. I am still waiting for the claims adjuster to call me about pricing it out for repair. So I get to fix this rig now because the shipping company dropped it. I wonder if some loaders were playing catch with it? I have had some friends work in that business and believe me, stuff gets broken. So buy the insurance when they ask you if you want it.

So I get this flat panel imac in the shop today. Problem description simply says "permission problems" on the work order. I don't know how the end user did this, but they made their whole HD read only. They had logged in as root and were trying to change permissions for some reason and ended up changing the whole HD to read only. If the whole HD itself was not read only then almost all the directories were.

Then like 15 minutes later some lady comes to me and wants me to tell her how much ram she has in her macintosh computer. She then hauls in this CRT iMac. It was the cd/dvd model. I told her that upgrading the ram from 64megs would help her computer run faster. She asks if its hard to install and I tell her no, you just access the ram slots from the bottom and pretty much pop it in. I then tell her I can install it for a resonable price (ran install special for august was only 12.95 plus tax) she decides not have us do it. She told me she would buy the ram and try to install it herself. So I put her computer back on the service counter and hand her the ram she needs. Next thing I know she is in our support diagnostics room (its a seperate room from the shop that has a back up station and some static free work benches) trying to install the ram herself, and not doing a good job at it. I very politely tell her that only employees can be back here and that those work benches were for company use only and not available to the public. This lady flips out and starts yelling at me and the other techs and then starts yelling at my boss. Calling us jerks, telling us that we are rude for not letting her use our equipment for her own personal use. Needless to say she was not very computer savy. I ended up installing the ram for her so she wouldn't break her machine on our porperty with our equipment and I did not charge her. She just yelled and screamed and was difficult so she could save a whole whomping 13 dollars. This is why I hate people and their computers.

Tonight = drinking whisky after work

some testers at a company I worked at had another April Fool's joke but since most of them were fairly computer literated it didn't work, but I bet it could work on some others out there (as I promote torture of innocent (or not so innocent) users.)

Take a screen shot of the desktop then make that the background and hide all icons and dock/start menu bars... then see how long it takes the user to open something up.


As for worst repairs, someone in my firm returned an older (PC) laptop on which the system was corrupted (since they had deleted, not uninstalled, various program files they no longer felt were necessary on the firm-owned machine, you know, simple things like Norton Anti-virus.) They had done that so that they could install games. Well they also lost the floppy drive and the bios was too old to recognize the cd-rom at boot, and they expected the machine back to them relativly quickly. My boss and I were dying, we were stuck in a floppy drive syndrome.

Otherwise, when the most important man in our office spilled coffee into his laptop and I had to dismantle it and clean it with q-tips and alcohol. At least if i couldn't have cleaned it I knew that another machine would just get purchased.

Kal

this thread is too good to let die
 

I can't believe no one brought up the classics. There was the time a guy called his IT person and complained that his coffee cup holder wouldn't come out anymore.

I also remember hearing a recording from Compaqs help line like six years ago. Some college student did his entire thesis on his laptop and never backed up once. From his fury I take it compaq just replaced the machine. It went something like, "Hi, this is so and so and I just got my laptop back and my master thesis that I was working on for (changes to screaming) FOUR *****ING YEARS, IS GONE. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU *****S DID BUT I WANT MY FILES BACK (really screaming) R-I-G-H-T-F-*-C-K-I-N-G-N-O-W.." He went on a for about a min more and it was equally hillarious.

As for things that actually happened to me heres two quickies:

I come home about 1am on a Friday after a bit o drinkin to see my answering machine lit up. Theres about 5 messages on it from my co-workers and bosses.
First Message:
"Uh, hey Joel, I was tring to print so posters and cant get the server (win2k machine running a poster plotter) to come on. Call me back if you get this."

mind you this an office full of mac users
Message 2:
"Uh, hey Joel it's Jerremy again, just wondering if you were home yet."

3rd message and still no appology for calling me at home.
"Hey Joel, this is Marc (my boss). Jeremy is tring to get out of here and really needs your help, could you please call us back." (like I'm just sitting there screening calls or something)

4th message (accusitory):
"Hey Joel, we're really in a bind here. You need to call us back!"

by this point I'm drunk and pissed
5th message:
"I don't appreciate you leaving us hanging like this Joel, wtf did you do to this machine!?"

livid, I call back.
office: "Hello?"
me: "Jerremy?"
jerremy: "Yah?"
me: "What the hell is going on down there!?"
jerremy: "Well Marc isnt here anymore but he thinks you sabbatoged us and left town."
me: "WHAT? Whered he get that idea!?"
jerremy: "We were standing here waiting for you to call back and I sorta joked about it and he ran with it."
me: "Thanks a *****ing lot dude, what is the problem anyway?"
jerremy: "We cant log into the print server, we tried every password we could think of."
me "DID YOU TRY JUST HITTING ENTER!?"
jerremy: "oh, uh I never tried that."

I didnt get in trouble but it marred my rep and probably helped get me fired when I really did screw up.

Well, I am not a computer tech, but I do work as a product specialist for a major musical instrument manufacturer in thier hard disk recording group. These machines are dedicted all-in-one DAW's using a proprietary OS. Keep in mind that the sole use of these machines is the recording and manipulation of audio.

Probably the winner of all calls was the fella that couldn't understand why he couldn't install Photshop on his machine.

Even if you could, what would you do with it?

Priceless

I agree that spiders are good, and Daddy Long Legs are fun to watch. But my 4 year old daughter is recovering from a Black Widow bite, so for right now, I am with larkin on this.

Ouch I hope your daughter will be okay. My little brother got bitten by a brown recluse once when he was in middle school, ironically he was in the computer lab when it happened. Luckily for him the hospital was 1/2 a block from his school, so he got the anti-venom shot fairly quickly.

Hmm…

I work at AppleCare, and we get a fair share of calls from less-than-experienced users.

Calls I have taken:

A person insisting that Apple help configure his Windows computer to hook up to an AirPort base station, and getting completely and utterly irate when I explained that I can't do that…

User: "Hi, my computer won't do $FEATURE."
Me: "Did you reboot?"
User: "No."
Me: "Please reboot your computer"
User: "Hey, it works now…"

User: "My $PORTABLE went off and won't go on."
Me: "Is the sleep light flashing?"
User: "Yes."
Me: "Is it plugged in?"
User: "Umm…Nevermind"

I had one user who was unable to grasp any of the normal methods for booting to a CD…Startup manager, holding down "C". I had to manually select the CD in Startup Disk and then reboot…40 minutes to reset the password.

I overheard one tech explaining to a user that Bill Gates does not own Apple…

One person tried to convince me that an iMac (Summer 2001) came pre-installed with the iMac (Flat Panel) software bundle, including Otto-Matic…

User: "I've been using a Mac for 35 years…"

From other people:

One user called in and started ranting about how David Pogue was:

• Her husband
• Cheating
• A paedophile
• Had lots of confidential info about Apple mainframes
• Had helped develop the Finder
• He had access to Apple internal docs
• Did I mention paedophilia?

I found out a few years ago that sony calls that imaging. That wasn't cool. i didn't lose anything important, but it kinda sucked.

Okay,

You ever have that experience that just puts you into denial? You think to yourself, there is no possible way this just really happened, did it? You are in denail so bad you don't know whether to laugh, or cringe at how stupid the situation is. Well, this story I am about to tell you did just that to me. Infact this peticular client put me in denial a few times all within a two day period.

So, I am working with this client. She has HP desktop. Its like maybe two years old. It was one of the first WinXP, P4 series that ever came out. It only has 128mb of RAM installed in it, which is the minimum requirement to run win XP. So I clean a ton of spyware, and viruses off her system and then proceed to recomend my client a RAM upgrade. She okays the RAM upgrade, and she okays for me to wipe out her HD and reload the OS clean to get rid of the viruses/malware/spyware/etc. When she comes to pick up her system she tells me she does not want the RAM because her daughter told her it would not make her internet connection any faster. This was because she had dial up. I told her, thats correct it does not speed up the internet connection, it actually...... Before I could finish she said, my daughter is an egineer at (some local large corporation, which I will not name) and she told me it would not speed up my internet connection and that I did not need it. So I tried to explain to her that she was running the bare minimum amount of memory to run win xp but she just would not listen. So I uninstall it, and give it back to her.

About an hour rolls by

<phone rings>

Me: Service dept, how can i help you?
User: Yes this is ______ and I just picked up my system about an hour ago or so and well its fixed, but its not fixed. I can't get on the internet with this thing.
Me: Okay, well since we did a wipe and reload of the OS you will have to reinput those settings for your dial up account.
User: Yeah well I am trying to but its not working.
Me: Okay, okay, who is your provider?
User: Earthlink
Me: Okay, great they should have sent you an earthlink CD, that should set everything up for you.
User: Yeah, I tried that and it doesn't work.
Me: Thats weird your dvdrom drive worked fine an hour ago. Okay, so did you place the cd in the drive?
User: Yes
Me: Okay, well auto play is just probably disabled... Open up my computer and try double clicking on the cdrom drive icon
User: It says not accessable...
Me: Ummm....<straching head>....well, can you just describe to me how you are trying to do this and perhaps I can figure it out.
User: Well I grabbed the cd and lifted up the lid and put the cdrom in the drive, and it doesn't work?
Me: Lifted the lid? Wait.....Your system is an HP right?
User: Yes
Me: Oh, well you see that lid just opens up a cdrom holding tray, its not actually the drive. You have to hit the drive button on the top front of the machine and the tray will open. Place the cdrom in the tray and hit the button again and it will close. Then wait for it to auto play and follow the instructions.
User: Oh, wow it works now, thanks

<hangs up phone>

Okay, seriously? I can't believe this was a real call. This same client was back in the next day for more problems. They installed a firewall, told the firewall to block all internet access to all applications and then wondered why they could not browse the internet. Of course I got yelled at a few times.

This put me in denial.....I mean can someone really do this?

Thought I would share.

It is amazing sometimes just how fast you can go from being the most amazing person in the world to just "the hired help" in a few minutes in some clients eyes.

I had a client ring me after a routine job to berate me for "making his computer worse" - every time he tried to move his mouse in a left direction the arrow on the screen would go right, and every time he would move the mouse up, the arrow would go down, I am somewhat proud to say that I was able to ask him quite quickly which direction the cord on his mouse was facing, yep it was down - the mouse was upside down.

I've also had (male) clients point out invisible objects under the computer desk that I'm sure they know can only fit one person and then have the "helpful" client squeeze in next to me to show me how mistaken he is...I think most people know that accidental brushing up against someone is OK but a hand creeping up your leg is unmistakenly "not job related".

dosser

Hey.. that's a 'perk'!

It's not a Mac-based one, but I thought it was pretty good - although I'm not sure how absolutely true it is...

I work in print, and once one of my staff came to me and told me that a client had asked if we could fax a paper sample to them...

...

On a more techy note, I also teach in the Art department of a University, and because I used computers in my own work, it seems that I'm called on whenever there a problem with any machine that uses electricity. Chances are, 9 times out of 10 the problem is that the machine just hasn't been turned on, but even though it's a pain to be called away from what you're doing to answer a simple techy question, isn't it a glorious feeling to be able to walk away having fixed a problem with a whole room of people thinking you're some kind of magician?

Case in point: A few weeks ago, I was sat in my office doing very important things (reading Megatokyo.com) when one of the students came running in claiming that one of our TVs wasn't working. I walked into the studio to find a group of 30 people hovering round the TV, all discussing what was wrong, went up to it, pushed the ON button and walked out.

Not a major thing I know, but I felt good about myself for the rest of the day :)

This is my favourite thread so far!

Don't have any stories myself, but I was wondering if there were any amusing tales where hard-core UNIX geeks (like the people who haven't used a GUI since the day they bought their computer) have done something utterly silly to their machine because they're lacking a little in the commonsense department? I bet there are a few.......

Why do people who know UNIX have to be geeks? And why must they lack common sense? :(

What Yellow said.

I'd say making blanket assumptions about other people's skills is where a lack of good sense (apparently not so common after all :p ) is being displayed. :rolleyes:

I knew you'd say that ;) It was meant in a totally harmless and affectionate way - I have great respect for all the guys here, and can only aspire to the level of generosity, skill and patience you all display.

My own experience of one or two computer scientists (my dad especially) tells me that although they may be perfectly comfortable doing mind-boggling things from the command line, when it comes to adding RAM, opening hardware cases, wiring a plug, etc, etc, they occasionally need to be looked after!

This is a light-hearted comment - please don't take it the wrong way. People who know UNIX certainly don't have to be geeks, and the same people almost certainly know more about their hardware than I do. I love this forum, and would hate to cause a flame war!

In trepidation...

No worries.. no flaming.. just call me a wet blanket.

Yellow, you're a wet blanket. :D