more tech support tales...
Back when I was starting out in the world of work, I was a tech support phonemonkey for a large (and now defunct) PC company. We specialised in selling PCs to utter fucking morons.

To pass the time between calls, we devised the "Moron of the Month" competition and the winner would be voted for by the senior techies and bought a congratulatory beer.

Winners included:
1) The man who wrote in to say he was going to protest about how crap our company was because we wouldn't fix his digital camera. He included a photo of himself in full protest regalia. It was taken on the camera he said was broken and printed on the printer he said didn't work. His wife obviously knew how to use them.

2) The woman who rang up to ask for a new laptop because she had a) spilled red wine on hers, then b) washed it in a bath of soapy water. She thought it was unfair we wouldn't replace it because it didn't turn on anymore.

3) The man who waited in a queue for 35 minutes with messages saying "Thank you for calling **** Computers, your call is in a queue and will be answered shortly", only to be stumped when asked for his order number or the serial number of his PC so we could look up his record. His response was "PC? I'm rining about my 3-piece suite" - he had waited over half an hour to get through to DFS. He then ranted for 10 minutes when we couldn't put him straight through...

4) The woman who rang up because her PC wouldn't turn on. When asked to change the power lead with that for the monitor, my colleague heard a loud thump and a lot of swearing - it turned out she had banged her head on the desk, as she couldn't see much during the power cut...

Other than that, other activities included unscrewing the wheels on peoples' chairs, powering down their PC when they were on a call and watching them try to solve the problem, whilst wrestling with the power lead under the desk - all whilst trying to sound like they weren't straining for a crap over the phone. Oh, and my personal favourite was seeing a colleague sit under his desk with a waste bin on his head, rustling paper into his headset mike to that everyone who rang up with a "modem problem" (usually hadn't paid for an ISP back in those days, or had forgotten the dial-in details) could be told it was a "line fault" and that they should call BT instead...

Oh, and getting the guy in the wheelchair to escort people out of the building when they were fired was always amusing - he'd loudly declare he was making sure they didn't cause trouble while we all wet ourselves...

Other than that, it was pretty dull, really.
(Chad, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:59, 5 replies)

*Click*
You worked for "Time" at Altham AICMFP?
(AMadDayYes, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 17:06, closed)

Ha
I pressed Reply to post 'Time or Tiny?'
(Son of Sam-i-am We're all as mad as hatters here, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 9:35, closed)

For my sins...
I was a techie at Tiny many moons ago. In fact, to be blunt, the PCs weren't bad - they weren't brilliant, but the actual failure rate was no worse than Dell...it was mainly down to the morons buying a PC and not knowing how to use one. That and thinking that paying £800 for a PC, scanner, monitor, camera, printer, desk, joystick and 45 pieces of software meant that the PC itself was equivalent to a built-to-order £800 Dell with nothing else supplied. You get what you pays for, as with most things... and Tiny were courting the Primark end of the market with their offers.

Actually, if you could deal with the pressure-cooker environment of a tech call centre, they were pretty good employers - good holiday, reasonable wages, fair promotion routes and good attempts to keep up morale (like putting the corporate card behind the bar at the local pub on the last friday of the month, etc)...

fun times!
(Chad, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 11:32, closed)

Yeah
Tiny were actually fairly decent when they started out, agreed. Went seriously downhill once Time bought them out of administration though, they became Time computers. Which looked like they were put together by poorly trained monkeys. Cables everywhere, hard drives held in with one screw, stuff just not connected at all.

(I used to work in an independent computer shop and fix PCs freelance out of the Yellow Pages, so I've supported more than my fair share of retards' Time/Tiny machines, they brought them in once they'd managed to completely shaft them, usually within two weeks of purchase)

Dell are the same though, they started out being decent but now they just use the cheapest components they can possibly buy to beat the retail price down whilst retaining margin... I build all my own machines myself, but am in charge of buying a fair few for work and I wouldn't touch Dells, despite the fact they seem to have nearly every corporate contract going.
(Son of Sam-i-am We're all as mad as hatters here, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 11:36, closed)

then again...
I have had calls from customers at the time complaining that they had found screwdrivers inside their "custom-built" PCs - the engineers at head office were less than brilliant.

That and the fact that the Warehouse staff used to regularly drop PCs off the forklift in the car park and still send them out... Then again, most of our woes came from the couriers - we had machines that had been run over and re-boxed - there were tyre marks on the case and they still thought they'd get away with it - as well as the monitor they had re-boxed in a TV box as they'd put a forklift blade through the screen...

Oh and the 1,100 PCs we failed to deliver one Christmas week because their driver had got bored with work and abandoned an articulated lorry full of PCs somewhere in the midlands in order to get the bus home. We couldn't send out replacements as the insurance wouldn't cover the cost until the machines were located...cue us having to call a thousand people to tell them their kid won't have a computer for Christmas, but there will be a desk to put it on arriving on time....

I guess, the one thing I can say is that there was never a dull day!
(Chad, Wed 14 Jan 2009, 12:43, closed)