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
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?
“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?”
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.
One monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
Apocryphal: user reports laptop frequently crashing. Tech is putting it through paces, can’t make it crash. Tech slides it over and asks user to show them what they do differently. User touches the laptop (before they can do anything with it) and it crashes. I was told about this, I didn’t see it happen.
I’ve heard that some laptops with magnetic closures register their lid as closed when someone with a magnetic wristwatch puts their hands near the keyboard!
Nonono it’s electromagic energy being emitted…source am in IT
Tru tho …
I firmly believe some people emit some sort of electromagnetic interference that we don’t have a reliable way to measure yet that makes technology buggy in their hands. My spouse is one such person. I’ve watched them from across the room do exactly the right steps and not have it work. Then hand it to me and it works instantly. There’s no logical reason for this. Their mere presence near by can make some things error it seems. It’s given me a lot more patience when people describe problems that should be impossible.
Of all the tech related professions IT people are by far the most supersticious. There is a reason we put bags of ramen on top of server racks and do other weird things when preforming high risk tasks.
A college advisor gave me the nickname of Morris Virus. Computers would go haywire, even crash (at least one death), if I was near them (and sometimes when I was about to arrive). I got kicked out of the Computer Center dozens of times. I got in trouble in other places, like at the local ISP, and got banned from touching some computers.
Streetlights would turn off as I approached and come back on after I passed them. A friend used that to find me.
A great aunt and a brother would meet up from time to time to exchange watches since watches would run faster for one and slower for the other.
hada user like this, we joked she was allergic to laptops. we could never replicate the issue until she touched it
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.
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.
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.
The best dad jokes are both.
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.
I worked at a global internal helpdesk, my company had offices all over the world.
One day I get in to the office for night shift and the day shift was laughing.
Aparantly a guy in the main office, located on a different continent, called the global helpdesk for help with their computer, can’t remember the actual reason, they were rude and dismissive, and while the tech was trying to help them they found games installed of the computer.
This is not allowed, so they told the guy, who said that he had admin access so it was fine.
The tech kept pushing that this was not allowed, but the guy would not accept it and even told us that his team mates also had these games installed on their laptops, so while talking with the guy the tech reached out to the global head of IT on Lync and explained the situation.
The global head of IT was pissed and briefed the head of the local IT team at the main office to collect the computer and completely reinstall it.
The tech was still on the line with the guy, and was told to tell him that the local IT team would help him, and to expect them shortly.
I don’t know the exact exchange in the main office, but the next day we got word that the entire team was required to have all of their computers reinstalled, this was a global team across mutiple continents, even some in our own office, who sheepishly came down to us to have us reinstall their computers a day or so later.
The guy who got caught can’t have been popular…
I worked for a different company a few years after the above incident, this was smaller, much smaller, but it was a fantastic place to work.
Anyway, I got the task of being the VIP technician for our partners in addition to my normal duties.
This wasn’t that bad, it mainly consisted in helping partners with remoting in and giving them higher priority.
Now, at the start of the pandemic, the main VIP wanted to make sure that his dedicated office computer at one of his holiday homes was updated and ready for the summer.
So I had to get up there, I was given a preinstalled desktop computer and had to fly to the town where the holiday home was located.
This was in May 2020, right when the pandemic shock was at it’s absolute peak.
The flight was domestic, but what I didn’t expect when I got to the airport was how completely empty it was.
In the departure hall that would be packed normally, it was just… empty…
Well, five other passengers was milling around, and maybe two or three staff that I could see.
I get checked in, and walk to the gate, there sre about 8 passengers there, my flight is called and I get down to the transfer bus and the doors close, and… I am alone…
The bus starts heading out across the tarmac and stops at an unmarked plane, a completely white Fokker F50, no branding or anything.
There is a cute stewardess who tells me that I am the only passenger on the flight and that I can just pick any seat.
I do so and we take off, and throughout the flight I can’t just stop thinking about how I am the only passenger and how odd it felt.
So I get to the airport, collect my bag and my taxi is waiting for me, and after and hour or so we have arrived, the holiday home is a farm, and the farm hands greet us, I get let into the office and start doing my work.
After hours of setting up every little detail, testing and testing and testing again then documenting everything, I am ready to leave and get driven to a nice hotel, that is completely empty.
I stay the night, and the same taxi that collected me from the airport the day before pick me up again.
We get to the airport and this time there is a 100% increase in the number of passengers on the flight, that’s right, we had one more passenger!
The flight back is uneventful, I get back home, remote into the office and upload my notes and debrief my manager.
This was a nice read.
Thank you!
Even at this time, this was an old computer. I remember the sticker on the front said it was built for Windows ME or one of the OSes from that era before Windows XP.
User complained that the computer was running very slow, slower than it realistically should.
I opened it up to clean it since I figured that was a good place to start.
The bottom of the chassis was disgusting. The dust had accumulated so much that it became a mound of dirt. And seated on top of the mound of dirt dust was a dead roach on its back.
Found literal bugs in the computer.
