By Dave Wallace
RIVER BENDER - September, 1999
Having your PC fail can be a very traumatic experience. Almost as upsetting as forgetting your wedding anniversary or spouse's birthday. Calling tech support can itself be a grueling experience, especially if you're a novice or worse yet if the technician on the other end of the line is one also. If you're paying for a long distance call or being charged by the minute for help, there's a bit of anxiety to get an answer as quick as possible. This often leads to misunderstandings and even hostility between the parties.
On the lighter side, however, are the many humorous stories that are told by tech support employees and callers. Some are probably embellished. One of my favorites is where a woman calls tech support when her office PC screen goes blank and is told to check the cables behind her PC. When she claims she can't see them because of the darkness the tech suggests she turn on the lights. She can't do that, she says, because they just had a power failure in the building.
While busy trouble shooting a problem on Windows 95 a tech says to the caller "Let's go to 'My Computer' icon." The user, quite irritated, replies "But the problem is in my computer!"
A woman calls the Canon help desk with a problem with her office printer. The tech asks her if she's "running it under Windows." The woman responds "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 printer is working fine."
The poor fellow couldn't get his new computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the tech asked what happens when he pushed the power button. His response: "I pushed and pushed on the foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be his mouse!
The customer was having great difficulty "inserting disk #2" into the floppy drive until the tech learned he was pushing it in on top disk #1. One customer actually thought the CD drive shelf came out to put a coffee cup on.
Some people never quite grasp what the Internet really is. Calling their service provider they start with "Hello, is this the Internet?" and sometimes even make out checks to the Internet. One customer wanted his service provider to put the latest edition of Internet on a disk and send it.
By no means is tech support immune to exhibiting computer stupidity. I like the one where the customer was never able to access his Internet Service Provider (ISP). In frustration he finally told the tech to cancel his account but was told that the only way he could cancel it was to send an e-mail message.
A fellow couldn't seem to get connected and the tech asked what version dialup software he had. Finally the tech concludes that the customer needed to update to the latest version by "FTPing" it from the ISP. Frustrated, the customer says "But I can't connect." Exasperated, the tech says "I told you just to FTP the file sir." The tech obviously didn't know much about FTP.
Recently I saw one of our local ISP's tech's e-mail answer to a problem (not mine) that was 167 words long. There were 29 words misspelled and practically every sentence was poorly constructed One might wonder if his technical advice was any better than his writing skills.