Words fail me
This is a great thread for somebody who has been working in tech support for as long as I have. The hardest thing is keeping it short. Anyway, this little tale is about another electron microscope customer.

I had to visit an Irish customer who had bought an old machine and carried out the move and re-install themselves. They had also paid about 3 times too much for the tool. They called us up to check whether it was OK to turn on the machine following a minor flood in the room. That led to the visit.

When I went into the room the first thing I noticed was the smell. The "minor flood" had happened in the adjoining animal house, resulting in a wave of waste products soaking into the microscope room. The blast of ammonia as you opened the door was indescribable.

I started to work on the machine, stopping for fresh air breaks every 20 minutes. Normally a machine like this will easily image at 100,000 times plus; this one couldn't manage 2,000 times. I won't bore you with the details of all the most basic cock-ups they had done (eg things installed upside down) but it took hours of graft to get close to working properly.
I then touched the gun assembly (where the beam comes from, lots of high voltage) and received an electric shock. Not normal! When I checked all of the cables I found every single earth lead disconnected (there are lots). When I asked the customer about it the reply was
"There's an awful lot of them, and we weren't sure where they went, so we left them off"!

Excited by their now properly performing machine, the customer stayed late into the night putting labels on the rack of little plastic drawers containing all of the spares. It took them hours to complete. When I tried to open one of the drawers I couldn't. They had stuck the labels on the backs of the drawers then faced the entire rack towards the wall!
(ianisme, Thu 1 Jan 2004, 17:00, Reply)