Is Tech support just Masochism?
I spent about 3 hours one day with an old lady on the phone trying to get her computer straightened out. I kept hearing the question, "Do I click once or twice?" I would reply, "If I want you to click twice, I will say double-click." She would reply, "Oh." Then she would ask the next time I said, "click on..."

At the end of that session I wasn't even sure which was Right-click, Left-click, or Double-click. Later I found out she had Alzheimers. Why didn't her husband tell me this before? I have no idea.
( CapnChkn I would rather be flying elephants., Tue 26 Sep 2006, 22:00, Reply)

And another one
Despite being a multinational company we seem to have a fabulous record of employing salesmen who could politely be called 'technologically retarded'. One of my favourite pastimes is when I give out new laptops with fingerprint readers. Some I tell them are fingerprint scanners, while others I inform are retinal scanners. Watching them discuss and demonstrate their new kit during sales launches is a joy in itself...
(titusyouclown, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 21:19, Reply)

Never Mind Oldies...
In the last ten minutes I've somehow fucked my printer settings up and it won't print an important letter I need to send to my boss...
(Rob Roy The Postie is looking for alternative employment, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 21:01, Reply)

Hoover Repair Shop
In the days before 'puters (so this is cheating but perhaps worth repeating), me and my mates had a small company in Nottingham. Everynow and again someone would sticky their digit in the wrong twirler and expect to get through to the Hoover Repair Shop, but come through to us instead.

On one such occasion I answered "Hello ****" giving out our company name in a 2-bit corporate fashion (a sad and silly name we had & went bust as a result), only to get asked "Is that Hoover?!" by a very impertinent and excitedly squeaky woman.

So I said Yes.

She then explained in tearful angry terms and in great detail, that she had a broken washing machine.

My answer was timed to a tiddle...
"Well" I said, "That's a jolly pity...".

As luck would have it we were all having a tea-break at the time and the cohorts of the company put down their steamy mugs in interest.

I raised the phone so they could hear.

They all could hear the slow puff of frustration on the other end.

"Well what about my Guarantee?" was her high-pitched reply.

My answer was a jobsworth clearing of the throat and then that we,

"Give them out but they're not worth a lot, it's all a bit of a fiddle."

At this point the dear lady became most very irate and said that when her husband got home we'd sure hear about it.

Mugs of tea went everwhere in the background and one lad sat on his biscuits.

Of course we never did hear, as she slammed the phone down in a stream of cussings and involuntary wind. But I've always wondered what happened when Hubby did get back from the Raleigh factory to give the lads at Hoover a piece of his mind.
(we are ovaltine I'm that annoying chap in Building 9, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 20:59, Reply)

One the other way
My first computer was the Commodore 64. For christmas I recieved the computer, a tapebox with 4 tapes inside them. American 3D Pool, Agent X and Rollerball. The other tape actually came with the computer and was entitled "Commodore 64 Utilities Tape". As well as this, it had "Toolbox" written on the tape. It wouldn't work, producing Syntax, Out Of Data and Load errors at regular intervals.

We had myself, my uncle Mike (who knew all about computers because he had an Amiga) and Tandy look into it, and none of us could get it to work.

In the end, it took the more technically inept mother to take out the tape, and put it into the Hi-fi. It was a help tape for the computer.
(rhyswynne - on every social network mullarkey known to man, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 20:00, Reply)

My idiot mother
When we first got the internet at home, many moons ago, i decided to change the screensaver. Me being the little scamp that I was, I changed it so that it said 'This computer is about to shut down due to corrupt files...please stand back'. Genius, I hear you shout!

Any hoo I later had my mum screaming down the phone that our brand new computer had broken and where was the yellow pages so she could get the repair man out....doh!

Bloody idiot she still doesn't undersand that even if you have wireless you have to plug the PC in!
(fillyfogg22, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 19:43, Reply)

dickhead me
on a few ocassions I have scoured the office looking for some blank paper then, not being able to locate any, have gone back to by desk and printed out a blank word document
(spike starski, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 19:12, Reply)

Elderly Guy using TV Internet
A new and profound technology, allowing people of all types who do not have a computer to get access to the net, and cause havoc via a new medium.

Well, it was new about 4 years ago when we first started supporting it.

Some elderly gent was having problems accessing his emails through the Tv-Internet device. apparently the email window wouldn't display, which normally means there's a corrupt email or attachment which is cocking up the display. The fix back then was to create a dummy account on Outlook Express on my computer, then IMAP the account with his details into this. A quick purge of the account and I could view what emails he had and thus remove the offending mail.

Aha, just the ticket, one of his emails has an attachment. I tell him this and he asks me what's in there. I open it up and am greeted with 4 jpegs, so I tell 'im. Rather boredly, I happen to click onto one of these jpegs and am introduced to a lovely pair of lads sucking each other off in varying positions, much to the "Holy FUCK!!!!" gasp I shout out in the office. This only makes everyone else (including the management) turn around and see what I'm backing away from....all while the customer is still on the phoneline. The dirty ol' cunt.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 19:06, Reply)

My Dad owns a small computer shop
When my Mum stood in for him once, she had to call me up to check that the man who had called her asking for a "male to female adapter" was a genuine customer and not a pervert.
( wangmaster2000, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 19:01, Reply)

"Which version of Windows are you using madam?"
I ask politely.

"Says on a sticker here....I've got Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP."

"Ah, you have all of them then" I reply smugly.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 18:57, Reply)

Take my mother in law....

works for the NHS (a common theme it appears) - she is given a shiny new PC for her word processing work. Amazingly she transitions instantly without a single problem.... months later we discover why:

She replaced her under-desk keyboard with her old typewriter, didn't even bother turning the monitor on and typed everything the old fashioned way.
( gp_guineapig, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 18:48, Reply)

Someone I knew once . . .
Asked me to help her check her email. Bearing in mind it was a webmail system, which some people were unused to, I agreed, only to find 6 windows of webmail already open on her machine. When I mentioned this, I was asked:

"What are windows?"

She used to be a hospital receptionist.
(Radio Free iPods "Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch!", Tue 26 Sep 2006, 17:57, Reply)

Managers..
Senior manager - insisted on talking to me rather than the 1st liners.

Problem? Password reset. *clickty-click* - it's done. 2 hours later he'd managed to lock his account again. He'd forgotten his password. *clickity-click* account unlocked, password reset to alan123. 1 hour later - he rang back again. Forgotten his password and locked his account - again! So this time I changed it to IAMTHICK! - he didn't forget that bugger.

He did complain to my boss and a few others but after we'd reviewed his call records to the helpdesk and found he'd called 73 times for password resets in the last year they reckoned I was justified in calling him thick....

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 17:53, Reply)

I didn't have a story..
until about 10 seconds ago..

when my boss asks me to help him download a large file. Fine. I get it going and saving to desktop & tell him to call me when it was at 100% and I'd come back and help him open it.

Fine, I thought.

I just get back to my desk and sit down to hear him say, "oh its taking too long to download I'm going to close it down and start again.."

Stand up, walk back to Boss's desk. Restart download. Make him promise not to close it down again until its finished.

Gah!
(Ariaxen, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 17:28, Reply)

Made me smile comment
A customer rung up from a house literally 2 minutes down the road from where I live, stating that her broadband has gone offline. After a quick bit of deduction I work out that her router has dropped offline, and most probs needs to be reconfigured.
"Are you sure?" she says.
"Pretty much so madam, how is that?" I ask.
"The guy who installed this works for microsoft, and he works with Bill Gates."
Oh, and he just so happens to live in Swansea too and install routers in women's houses. The company I work for has just merged with Virgin, that means I go for tea with the Branson every sunday you geriatric twat.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 17:15, Reply)

Oh dear....
I work on an IT Helpdesk for a hospital, so I get quite a few phone calls from nurses and members of staff who have no clue how to use PCs.

We get the usual mix of password problems, people who can't turn the PCs on etc etc, but every so often we get one that makes us stop and think "How the hell are you able to breathe without somebody to remind you?"

For example, every so often we have a consultant ring up with password issues. To make it nice and easy we set the password to "hospital", only for him to look confused and say "How do you spell that again?" My God, this person is responsible for major surgery and can't even spell "hospital"?

Other examples include the admin staff in medical records, one of whom our Desktop team caught using the mouse as a foot panel, and another who was pressing the mouse on the screen to get the cursor to move...

More to come, but I try to block them out when I put the phone down...
(DrSoloMania Got rickrolled by a randomburner...., Tue 26 Sep 2006, 17:11, Reply)

Guess i've Done enough reading...
so i'll post my own little tale which infact happened today...

the guy in question is older than me so he's an oldie..

seems to think we can clone a SCSI HDD from a single cored computer about 5 years+ old and put that cloned image onto an IDE HDD which is brand new dual coreness, he says that hes done it at home and it moaned a few time and just worked...

guess this is me just moaning but meh

anyway i have many more due to being a technician in a school. some times you just want to get the cane out a slap them, but that would give the kids a bad example.
(Mister Ashley, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 16:54, Reply)

oh THAT desktop
Trying to talk an elderly woman through the impossibly complicated process of downloading an excel file for her ECDL course. To save the hassle of getting her to look for files on her hard drive, I'd asked her to download it to her desktop for easy access.

After 20 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing we finally manage to get the download complete, so I ask her the perfectly reasonable question 'What's on your desktop now?'

'Well, a cup of tea and a muffin - but I can't see what that's got to do with anything'
(nocturnal, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 16:52, Reply)

Rock n Roll
Boss learnt how to blat emails from one person to another. The fun we had with the new starter. Welshman (as he's welsh) starts his new techy job all very enthusiastic, to the point which he puts a notice on the company notice board asking if anyone would like to start a company rock band, he plays guitar you see. eagerness shall overflow.

Cue bossman sending an email to welshman from gorgeous sexy single co-worker (how she ended up with us i will not ask merely thank god for)saying that shes got a great singing voice and would be really interested in helping him out.

At this point welshman cant believe his luck. In fact, as he stands up, i think he even did a little collar fluff, beegees stylee. he trots over, so sexylady, understand you want to sing with me?.

Sexylady, being sexy and confident and what not looks at him, looks at me, looks at whole office (yes, open plan) and says i have no idea what you're talking about, why would i want to sing with you?!

welshman being new and younger than her by some margin proceeded to literally die from embarassment, squirm around in the middle of the office not knowing what to do and sat down quietly. all the while mine and a select few "knowledgable" coworker's faces have gone a nice red hue as we struggle not to explode with laughter. poor welshman.

not apologising to you until god apologises to me, the length hurts to walk.
(hatofjam built a friend out of lego on, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 16:14, Reply)

my lovely swedish boyfriend...
...was asking a mate where she got her desktop wallpaper from. I happened to walk past as he replied 'oh, what's tinternet, is it like an online shop or something?'

Bless his blue and yellow striped socks. He's actually a computer geeky by night so it was especially cute.
(chesty, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 15:31, Reply)

Email woes
My wife works for a woman who claims to have extensive computer knowledge, but has quite plainly lied through her back teeth. Point in question? When sending e-mails, she abbreviates elements to suit herself. Say for example, "[email protected]" will be appreviated to “[email protected]”

“Why don’t they arrive? The address is close enough”

I’m sure she thinks there’s an email lackey reading every email sent, working out the address and trying to decipher them. Despite the importance of filling the email address in as full, as she has it, being explained time and time again, she still refuses to concede.

Another was a person I used to work with. Job requirements, “must be proficient in Microsoft windows”

Me – “Create a new folder on the desktop”
Her – “how do I do that then?”

Cue my heart sinking, knowing it’s going to be a long, long, telephone conversation as we try to do one of the most complicated file copy / rename / fix’s in some of the most bug ridden software I knew.

Usual b3ta closing crap regarding length etc to close. Also, I'd like to point out to all people rushing for "first!!!111" I never read your names. parp!
(Pandaemonium, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 15:29, Reply)

My favourite incident of this situation
is when my old aunt asked me with awed surprise, "Is the internet open on weekends?"
( Fluffy elephants, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 15:25, Reply)

felgekarp
Copying and pasting between floppies does actually work on some OSes - it'll ask you to re-insert the original, will read the data, then ask for the target disk. Granted, not as convenient as moving it via the hard drive, but certainly possible; and a necessity back in the cave when you might not even have a hard disk.
(Vulpine or something, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 15:08, Reply)

I've got a few friends who my grandmother would own in a computer-knowledge quiz, so I guess this is relevant.

Long story short, I created a new hotmail (you'd think that would be the first freaking hint) account and sent a couple of very official looking emails to some of the aforementioned friends, regarding the copious amount of illegal porn that had been found on their PC's. Said email also mentioned that the police would be in contact with them soon. It was a harmless joke, not a very funny one, but when I get bored I get REALLY bored.

Unfortunately, 2 of my friends absolutely started shitting it, were really scared and were apparently not sleeping. I felt terrible. But not terrible enough to own up and earn myself a black eye.

I'm just curious as to what kind of porn they must have both owned to have them so panicked. Then again I doubt I want to REALLY know.

They never did realise it was me.
( Pineapplez, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 15:04, Reply)

My Mum, 75, Online 2 years, bless.
Everything is called "the Thing" as in "I pushed the thing and the thing popped up and said" or "the thing won't go in the thing"

Her OS GUI is unique as far as Gold RTM versions go, her's is missing buttons, drop down menus, entire applications, email
clients etc. and she gets unique pages of the Internet.

Doesn't matter if we're on the same web page or in the same application, whatever I tell her to look at or click it isn't there "I swear on my life,
I'm not lying, why would I ... oh there it is" (average 1 min of that, PER step, of a ten step instructional)

All email adresses are still email numbers. after two years.

She calls MSN "S n M" ... I haven't corrected her.

She learned that severe anal injuries like that in the barrymore case can be caused by "something called fisting" :-(

Just remembered this most recent one: One of Mums friends got sent an unwelcome and highly pornographic image by some woman
she'd recently met and it popped up on screen when Mum and her friend were at the friends computer. They were both horrified.

Apparently it was a picture of a man "helping himself into a ladies mouth"

That's how a polite person like my mum would best describe it, I suppose. I laughed almost as much as when I heard her say fisting.
(sham-il-eer-tak-tak noes better but still can't give a fuck at, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 14:40, Reply)

Problem with floppies
I once watched my boss at work put a floppy disk in the drive, copy the contents of it, take the disk out, put another one in and try and paste the contents of the previous disk onto it and this is a guy that runs his own computer business.
(felgekarp, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 14:26, Reply)

Old-ish
Years ago i worked for an isp. We had one client with a few servers which always had problems. So he paid us to sort them out, so we did.
The servers worked like a dream, we told him everything was setup and he didnt need to touch anything.

A few days later we get a nasty call, "The f**king thing is not working again!"

So again we check the servers, but everything had changed. When we asked him about this he simply said
"Yeah i changed them all, coz they didnt look right.."
Our reply "please take your business elsewhere sir"

muppet.
(Fishbone-didi, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 14:13, Reply)

grandad we love you
my grandad has come into posesion of a laptop, hes got the hang of it quite well considering his age, but he thinks you can find an adaptor plug for any purpouse, ie getting his printed documents displayed on his telly instead of coming out of the printer, "to make it bigger and easier to read".
(furey, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 14:06, Reply)

Good with computers? My arse.
A bloke I used to work beside, who we'll call X to protect me from libel (I'm not giving a toss about concealing his identity!), was renowned for being a bit of a computer whiz. So my boss called him up one day to fix a minor problem, and X then sent a rather uncomplimentary e-mail to our IT service telling them what he'd done and that my boss was "a nice enough chap but a bit thick with computers". But he copied the e-mail to my boss, who to his credit took it well, but sent an e-mail to X informing him of the error. That embarrassed him, but I subsequently found out another example of his lack of competence in the PC department.

I had got hold of a work laptop which I needed to do some data logging. X had been using it previously, and so naturally (knowing what he's like) we did a quick check for "*.jpg" to see what would appear. Lo and behold, hundreds of porn pics of blokes putting condoms on, ladies in positions which left nothing to the imagination etc. So when one of our mates came upstairs, we said, "Hey, you'll need to have a look at what we found on this computer that X has been using".

So I fired it up, did the search and picked a few images at random. Only what appeared this time was not an internet download of some anonymous girl - it was X's cock, seemingly fully engorged (although not too impressive...), taken using a webcam. Now before you ask, no we didn't recognise him by his distended member - we recognised the office in the background and his fat belly at the top of the picture.

In order to check if it was indeed his work, we checked the creation date and time, which was about 11pm, and checked the sign-in book. Indeed, X was there at that time on the correct date.

We never yet told him about this, but it's something we're keeping in reserve!

Sorry about the lack of X's length.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 26 Sep 2006, 13:54, Reply)

Proof...
..that the younger you get - the better you are with technology. Simple.
uk.news.yahoo.com/26092006/325/3-year-old-buys-pink-convertible-internet.html
(gingerclaire I wanna go out bouncin', Tue 26 Sep 2006, 13:45, Reply)