» IT Support

Of course I did!
A few years ago I did tech support for a certain 3-letter ISP. Between having to deal with the complete idiocy of the customers, the other techs and the company itself I can safely say it was the worst job I will ever have in my life. However one positive that came from it was the many memorable stories I got from it. This was one of my favourites (although I'll probably tell it poorly):

So an old guy calls up, let's call him Fred, complaining about his email not working properly. Now Fred's a little upset, and after a quick glance at his ticket history it's not hard to understand why. He had called in no less than 50 times, spending well over an hour on the phone each time, always with the same problem, never anyone able to figure out the problem. It had been escalated up as high as it can go many times, no one had a clue. So Fred, being locked into a multi-year contract and thus didn't want to give up on it, decided for the umpteenth time to start over and deal with the lowly level 1 tech that just so happened to be me.

Fred's problem was an usual one. It seemed he was able to send email fine if he replied to someone else's message, but if he were to compose a new message from scratch, without fail he would always get a delivery status notification failure message back. Now me being, well, not retarded, immediately figured he's either got the wrong address he's typing in, he can't make the @ symbol, or doesn't know a period from a comma (all of which were remarkably common problems I had to put up with). So I walk him through sending an email. In order to make sure he has the right address I get him to send it to me, telling him character by character what to press. He's mad as hell through this whole ordeal, thinking he's being treated like a baby, but that is what it takes sometimes. So after being cursed at repeatedly, I was fairly confident I managed to get him to type my email address correctly and I had him spell out exactly what was in the 'To:' field several times just to make sure. Send. Not 2 seconds later, delivery status notification failure message came in for him. Fred had a good laugh at this; after all he was right. "You stupid cunt" (or something along those lines) "I told you it just doesn't work" he said. I had him read the message he got back to me. The address sounded good. I sent him an email. He replied. It came through. It was only when he composed an email from scratch the problem occurred.

Now I didn't have access to read his email, so all I knew of the message is what he was reading to me, and I still wasn't convinced he wasn't doing something stupid, so I walked him through copying the notification failure message to the clipboard and then pasting it to a reply to an email from me. A great feeling of satisfaction quickly came over me.

Me: Ok Fred I'm going to get you to try to send me an email one more time from scratch.
Fred: *grumble* Fuckin waste of time why can't you stupid fuckers fix this? grrr... ok FINE!!!
Me: Ok so in the "To:" field you have [email protected], right?
Fred: Yes
Me: And there's no extra letters or spaces and the @ sign is right and no accidental commas
Fred: God damn it we spelled this out ten times it is EXACTLY as you said to type it.
Me: Ok good. Now I want you to look especially carefully at it. At the start of my email address, did you remember to type www.?

Fred: I'm not an idiot of course I did! I always remember to put that in.

Me: Right. Don't do that.

And that made Fred a very happy man. Although he felt pretty stupid about it, as he should have.
(Sat 26th Sep 2009, 10:34, More)

» Ripped Off

Used car dealers are scum
A friend of mine bought a used car a couple of years ago from a dealer. They also sold him a 3-year, 90000km warranty for about $1500. Problem was, the 90000km wasn't 90000km from when he bought the thing, but the odometer reading, which incidently was over 92000 when he bought the car.
(Tue 20th Feb 2007, 13:36, More)