Well, in a computer lab I once watched an older guy try to stuff an Iomega Zip disk into a 3.5'' floppy drive. Took everything I had to hold back the laughter during those 5+ minutes.

1/8/2006 10:24:59 PM

My 6 year old desktop came with a 3 1/2" FDD by default.

Though I did end up unplugging it, cause I ran out of power connections from my PSU.



Anyway, my parents just got DSL for the first time, and they've provided me with a ton of stories. But I don't really want to rag on my immediate family.

But I am definitely the family tech support guy. Funny thing about being an engineering student of any kind: you're supposed to be able to fix anythign. My brother (a Civil Engineer, mind you) was asked by my aunt to take a look at her vacuum cleaner. "You're an engineer, you should be able to fix it."

1/8/2006 10:27:35 PM

hahaha !

At work last week i had a guy typing in the actual word 'space' when i said to space and 'dot' for dot.

It was a 45 minute call because of those antics


the first week I was there and we had a lady call in and saying her computer wasn't working and when she rebooted it got better. she compaired it to a tummy ache, and going to sleep and making it all better.

there was also a file too big and she compaired it to trying to swallow an apple whole, and downloading bits of it like cutting up the apple.

that was pretty cute

1/8/2006 10:46:57 PM

^^ In my family, if you are a male of 25 years or older, or if you have any college degree, you are expected to fixed everything that breaks and provide tech support for any appliance, and you are expected to have a good answer for all questions... boy, the questions that I have been asked, especially about PCs.

1/9/2006 2:11:31 PM

employee: how do i get the photos off of this camera?

me: plug it in the usb port with the cable.

employee: what cable?

me: the one that's undoubtedly right in front of you.

employee: ok, now what?

me: wait. it'll pop up a window and you can click open to view files.

employee: ok, now what?

me: drag them out of the window into a folder on your hard drive.

<snippet explaining that process in detail a monkey could understand>

employee: now how do i delete them?

me: select them and hit delete.

employee: ok...... wait i think i deleted the wrong ones.

<snippet of me beating myself with the phone>

this process took 45 minutes.

[Edited on January 9, 2006 at 2:20 PM. Reason : *]

1/9/2006 2:17:45 PM

Quote :

" Funny thing about being an engineering student of any kind: you're supposed to be able to fix anythign. "

You mean you can't?

1/9/2006 2:34:48 PM

I was telling one of my bosses that I added mozilla to the office computer. He was amazed, and asked how I did it. I told him its just a browser and you can download it off the internet. And I told him he should add it to his home computer too. He then said that he couldn't because he uses Road Runner. He thought browsers and internet service providers were the same thing. But I could see his problem because at one point he did use AOL and they do have their own browser.

1/9/2006 9:58:59 PM

you should stab him in the face with a curling iron

1/9/2006 10:00:10 PM

~My first day working the phones at ITECS provided me this call:

Me: Hi, ITECS Helpdesk, how may I help you?
Lady: MY MOUSE IS DEAD!
Me: ...your mouse...is dead?
Lady: I think I overworked him and he died.
Me: *laughter*

~Turns out it had just come unplugged. And, of course, anytime any of my friends called me at work, they prefaced it with 'MY MOUSE IS DEAD!'

~Hehehe. Silly users.~

1/9/2006 10:54:00 PM

i installed linux (fedora core 3), then i upgraded the kernel and sound no longer works. and i cant get NTFS to work

<--

1/9/2006 11:14:26 PM

As much as all of you are pointing and laughing at these people, I know plently who could care less. While some of it is amusing all of you were retarded at some point.

1/10/2006 6:44:18 AM

^^I installed SuSE linux and every time I would reboot, I had to reinstall the mouse for some reason. The trick is getting to the settings without a mouse, somehow I do it but I do not think it is worth doing that every time...

1/10/2006 9:16:29 AM

Today:

Guy walks in with his laptop angry that he can't view his email when he connected to the VPN.

"It doesn't give me a logon, or password or anything!"

"did you open outlook?"

"No.".

To give him some credit the systems up front where he checks his email open outlook by default and he selects his account from a list then types in a password.

1/10/2006 10:23:56 AM

^^^^ NTFS isn't supposed to work. You can read from it, but you can't write to it.

1/10/2006 5:51:01 PM

^ That's not entirely true. 2.6 kernels can safely write to NTFS filesystems with severe limitations. From the kernel doc:

Quote :

"The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to so you may find that some very small files (<500 bytes or so) cannot be written to."

I'm not sure what this is useful for, but it is supported.

1/11/2006 4:28:46 PM

Quote :

"As much as all of you are pointing and laughing at these people, I know plently who could care less. While some of it is amusing all of you were retarded at some point."

The difference is, most of us put forth some effort into learning about our machines. The general public wants it spoon fed to them.

Nothing amuses me more than hearing from someone "My iPod is broken, and I know that it's not anything I'm doing wrong because I know how to use an iPod" and when I ask them if they've tried reseting the iPod they look at me in astonsihment and say they didn't know you could reset an iPod. This despite the fact that it's printed in the manual for the damn thing.

1/11/2006 5:31:52 PM

Quote :

"I dont know a single engineer who even owns a floppy disk drive , outside of a laptop"

damn right i dont have one in my desktop

1/11/2006 6:27:09 PM

my desktop has a floppy drive but its like 3 yrs old

1/12/2006 2:15:18 AM

i own a floppy drive. mind you, it's not connected to a computer. it's in a box somewhere.

1/12/2006 2:32:59 AM

I work in a lab in the microbiology dept.

One day a girl from the lab next to ours comes to me and says that the computer won't read her disk. She's not really a mac person, and most of the department's computers are macs, so this isn't a huge surprise. I tell her that she'll be looking for a disk to come up automatically on the desktop and she says she knows that. I follow her to the computer. She shows me the Zip drive on a tower that she has put her disk into, then points to this guy complaining the image doesn't come up:



It took five minutes, and a great deal of self-retraint, to sweetly explain to the small crowd of grad students gathered around that the tower was not in fact connected to this computer, or any other monitor at the moment, and that the white thing really was a whole computer all in one.

1/14/2006 1:31:42 AM

Quote :

"At work last week i had a guy typing in the actual word 'space' when i said to space and 'dot' for dot. "

This happened to me the other day. My grandmother is getting a new wiener dog, and I was on the phone helping direct her to the website to look at pictures of the dogs they have. ( http://www.dachshundrescue.org/ ) Like most of the old people I know, the only thing about the internet that she almost understands is email. But she's been online a year or so by now, so I figure it can't be that bad. ha!

It takes five minutes of instruction for her to locate the address bar. I tell her "type www dot," and I hear her typing over the phone, clicks with ridiculously long pauses in between. "W-W-W-D-O," she says. Wait grandma! Don't type "dot," that means a period. Type a period after www. It takes probably another ten minutes for her to successfully find the site. It's partly because dachshund is a difficult word to spell and she got it wrong a few times, in spite of my best efforts.

1/14/2006 2:12:56 AM

I'm going to post one story first before I post "The Chronicles of the Bloodninja" (a completely original Crispin Burke story possibly to appear in my book).

My sister got an MP3 player for Christmas. She takes it to college and she instantly complains back to mom because she doesn't know how to work it. Apparently she doesn't have any MP3s AT ALL (after 3 years of college), and is shocked to learn that she has to pay to download MP3s off of Napster. She kept telling mom that the "MP3 player didn't work" and my mom replied "This is why we told you that you needed to pick something that's easy to use".

1/14/2006 10:19:47 AM

It took me two hours on the phone to get my aunt to install adaware and spybot. TWO HOURS. Basically imagine having to tell a four year old what to do, step by step.

Oh wait, a four year old probably can do that already.

Quote :

"I dont know a single engineer who even owns a floppy disk drive , outside of a laptop"

I own a floppy drive, but it came already hooked up to the barebones kit I used.

[Edited on January 14, 2006 at 11:30 AM. Reason : zsed]

1/14/2006 11:28:14 AM

^^ this is why people get ipods

1/14/2006 11:53:12 AM

I've never owned or used an Ipod, but I can't imagine it being that much more simple than my little MP3 player. I can just drag and drop MP3 files like it's an external hard drive. Or, if it's something I got from Napster, I just drag it over to "mobile device" and it does copies it that way (sometimes for a small fee).

1/14/2006 12:57:00 PM

I have two friends that live across the street from eachother back home. One day a couple years ago , friend #1 calls friend #2 nearly crying, extremely pissed, saying that his computer has a virus and is deleting everything he types. He was typing an essay for english class and said it kept doing this for the past hour or so. Friend #2 walks over to the house and asks friend #1 exactly what's happening. Friend #1 proceeds to place the cursor in the middle of a sentence he was revising and types, erasing all of the characters ahead of the cursor. Friend #2 hits the insert key and walks away back to his house without saying a word.


As for just general stupidity, still related to the internet I present the following conversation which happened today actually:

Lovely*****: hey
jehol*****: yo
Lovely*****: how is my strawberry pickin sight on your live journal?
Lovely*****: did you put it there? because . . . its really rather boring
jehol*****: it is on my blog, so yes i put it there
Lovely*****: where is it on your blog?
jehol*****: what?
Lovely*****: is it from me looking at your blog?
Lovely*****: i'm trying to figure out if it just shows who looked
Lovely*****: or if you actually put it there
Lovely*****: haha
jehol*****: what the hell?
jehol*****: i just said i put it there
Lovely*****: oh
Lovely*****: just trying to figure out how all this works


[Edited on January 14, 2006 at 1:42 PM. Reason : this just in]

1/14/2006 1:38:51 PM

the insert problem is pretty common. i mean if you dont know how to fix it it can be pretty problematic. crying over it instead of just asking someone is pretty bad though.

1/14/2006 4:09:48 PM

you can't fault someone for not knowing about the insert key... its not an intuitive thing at all unless you already know about it.

1/14/2006 4:16:00 PM

you can always tell where one of my developer friends has been - he rips off the insert key on any keyboard he touches...heh.

1/14/2006 4:17:06 PM

That and filter keys (or sticky keys) . . .

[Edited on January 14, 2006 at 5:27 PM. Reason : sticky keys]

1/14/2006 5:19:27 PM

Quote :

"^ That's not entirely true. 2.6 kernels can safely write to NTFS filesystems with severe limitations. From the kernel doc: Quote : "The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to so you may find that some very small files (<500 bytes or so) cannot be written to." I'm not sure what this is useful for, but it is supported. "

Totally tangential, but there's a good way to get full write support as well (though it isn't exactly fast to mount) Captive NTFS.

My family is actually fairly decent when it comes to technical matters - they can't really fix hardware problems but they don't browse like idiots so there isn't a spyware mess to clean up as well. I've seen some great stuff as an Eos Op, though - folks who didn't understand that Linux wasn't Windows, etc.

1/16/2006 11:05:46 AM

Quote :

"you can always tell where one of my developer friends has been - he rips off the insert key on any keyboard he touches"

that and the CAPS LOCK key

1/16/2006 11:40:42 AM

my gf turned off the touchpad on her laptop and told me it was broken.

1/16/2006 12:04:24 PM

Everyone in this thread has had a DURKA? moment.

1/16/2006 12:43:14 PM

the insert key is common, that shit throws me off sometimes. im pretty dumb though so YMMV

1/16/2006 12:56:59 PM

Perhaps all of us here take technology for granted - we grew up with it and so we're used to it. Our parents' generation didn't and hence a lot of this post.

I still remember my mom telling me not to send so many emails to my sister in New Zealand because the 'email bill' would be tremendously high.

But by far the worst kind of people who call into a Helpdesk are the kind that genuinely believe that they know what they're talking about and that they've discovered a brand new glitch in Windoze.

There was this one guy who wouldn't even let me touch his computer - he was like if I don't do it I won't learn - so I had to sit on a chair and say things like "Look for an icon that looks like a gear embedded in a folder"

It was a long night.

1/17/2006 12:21:19 AM

^ hey at least he was trying to learn - and its also impossible for me to learn how to use a software program by just watching someone else use it.

all this shit seems like second nature to you guys so you don't realize how fast you're actually cycling through windows and clicking through shit.

you should be thanking that guy for caring enough to try to learn the shit... unless you really would rather deal with the same problem over and over again.

[Edited on January 17, 2006 at 12:34 AM. Reason : s]

1/17/2006 12:32:33 AM

these were funny please continue.

2/23/2006 11:36:09 PM

Since i no longer work for this company I have no qualms laughing about their problems

A recent one for me. The company i worked for hired a new warehouse guy and he did the evening shift (12-8pm). Not very busy so he would install those fucking pop cap games and various other items. I'd remove it and sure enough the next day it would be back.

Day 2
Usually you just restrict a user right? Did that. Next day... it was back. So I turn one of the cameras at the computer and watch the tape the next day. He logged in as another user and was installing that. So I restrict that computer to certain websites that are defined by me. That should solve the problem right?

Day 3
Friggin genious this guy. Well i should say genious's here. Someone let him know the administrator password that's used on the local machines. At this point I'm having fun doing this and not even considered talking to him. I want to beat him at his own game.

Day 4
So I change the local adminstrator account to have restricted access and create a new administrator. I save the popcapgames icon, remove the problem and create a new shortcut using the icon but in the target I add a few more programs to open each which take like 5 minutes to open because of the computer. Filemaker, Adobe Photoshop, ALL of the Microsoft Products, Outlook, UPS tracking, FedEx TRacking, winamp, realplayer, and a text document that said

"If you are reading this... you may now play your popcap games. It probably took 30 minutes for this to load. You deserve to play. However if you look behind you you'll see a camera pointed at this computer. If I see you install popcap games, play any games, or do anything that isn't your job I'll be glad to show *** (Company owner) how you spend your time."

Never had an issue again.

2/24/2006 12:15:45 AM

jesus raige, you're a fuckin asshole

Quote :

"Not very busy so he would install those fucking pop cap games"

yea so if he didn't have much to do, wtf is so wrong with him playing a goddamn simple game. its no fucking skin off your back

College boy got a new job and thinks he's hot shit but really he's just on a power trip. the lowest of the low. get a fuckin life.

[Edited on February 24, 2006 at 12:44 AM. Reason : s]

2/24/2006 12:22:16 AM

^ I agree. You went to extreme lengths to be an asshole.

2/24/2006 12:27:00 AM

i think its funny continue.

2/24/2006 12:38:11 AM

Quote :

"Turns out they had plugged the usb printer into the NIC... diagonally... with wiggle room to spare. I'm not sure why they thought that would work."

I did the exact reverse of this about a week ago. Installing a new LaserJet 4250n for a user who only needed the usb connection, since she was the sole user. Ran through the printer installer 3 times, scanned for new hardware, getting very frustrated when a terrifying idea hits me. I tilt the printer upwards so I can see the back (had been doing this by touch), and sure enough, I've got the USB cable plugged into the network port.

I've been in tech support for almost 6 years, almost four of them full-time.

2/24/2006 12:49:19 AM

why the hell would anyone take a job in tech support.

and then why would you stay in it for 6 yrs? that shit is for ITT grads, not ncsu grads

2/24/2006 1:03:39 AM

A) I'm not Tier I. The previous occurrence happened when I got tagged to help on the short-staffed help desk.

B) Going for my master's part-time. University pays for one class every semester, and it's extremely convenient to already be here.

C) I actually enjoy what I do (most of the time).

2/24/2006 1:14:40 AM

popcap games had loads of spyware. Causes popups on browser's etc. It's a work computer and he wasn't getting all of his work done. It slowed down the computer as well.

If it wasn't causing a problem in on parts of the business... I wouldn't have even found out about it.

2/24/2006 7:55:24 AM

if i was that guy and you asked me to stop i would have
but if you did that i would have found some way to really fuck with you and give you a hard time

but i guess it doesn't surprise me that someone in tech support is afraid of personal confrontation

2/24/2006 8:47:41 AM

hahaha that was the one thing he prided himself on; it was his distinguishing feature from the rest of the tech talk geeks and nerds...

2/24/2006 8:52:14 AM

give the fucker a break, he said he was just having fun doing it

2/24/2006 8:53:19 AM

he's allowed to have fun but the guy with some extra time that wanted to play a flash game isnt allowed

you tech support people are all a bunch of arrogant fuckers


oh by the way, you're welcome

2/24/2006 1:06:58 PM