Proof positive that albeit more people use computers these days, not all
of them are computer literate. Some of these are funny, but very sad.
A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. The
tech asked her if she was "running it under Windows." The
woman responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that's a good
point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and
his is working fine."
| Tech Support: |
"OK Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same
time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen.
Now type the letter 'P' to bring up the Program Manager." |
| Customer: |
"I don't have a 'P'." |
| Tech Support: |
"On your keyboard, Bob." |
| Customer: |
"What do you mean?" |
| Tech Support: |
"'P' on your keyboard, Bob." |
| Customer: |
"I'm not going to do that!" |
Overheard in a computer shop:
| Customer: |
"I'd like a mouse mat, please." |
| Salesperson: |
"Certainly sir, we've got a large variety." |
| Customer: |
"But will they be compatible with my computer?" |
I once received a fax with a note on the bottom to fax the document
back to the sender when I was finished with it, because he needed to keep
it.
Customer in computer shop: "Can you copy the Internet onto this
disk for me?"
| Customer: |
"So that'll get me connected to the Internet,
right?" |
| Tech Support: |
"Yeah." |
| Customer: |
"And that's the latest version of the Internet,
right?" |
| Tech Support: |
"Uhh...uh...uh...yeah." |
| Tech Support: |
"All right...now double-click on the File Manager
icon." |
| Customer: |
"That's why I hate this Windows - because of the icons,
I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons." |
| Tech Support: |
"Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't
believe it was meant to-" |
| Customer: |
"I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't
believe in icons." |
| Tech Support: |
"Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of
a filing cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?" |
| Customer: |
[click] |
| Customer: |
"My computer crashed!" |
| Tech Support: |
"It crashed?" |
| Customer: |
"Yeah, it won't let me play my game." |
| Tech Support: |
"All right, hit Control-Alt-Delete to reboot." |
| Customer: |
"No, it didn't crash-it crashed." |
| Tech Support: |
"Huh?" |
| Customer: |
"I crashed my game. That's what I said before. I
crashed my spaceship and now it doesn't work." |
| Tech Support: |
"Click on 'File,' then 'New Game.'" |
| Customer: |
[pause] "Wow! How'd you learn how to do that?" |
A Tech Support Guy Once Said:
I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division
for about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just
couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All the other colors would
print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colors are
cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan
and yellow, but green printed fine. Every color of the rainbow printed
fine except for yellow. I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had
the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing
worked.
I asked my coworkers for help; they offered no new ideas. After over
two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send
the printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly, "Should I
try printing on a piece of white paper instead of this yellow
paper?"
A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech
support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the
printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the printer
up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find it.
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in
the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also
complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very
embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away
from her.
|
An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows
installation that had gone terribly wrong. |
| Customer: |
"I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my
home computer." |
|
Training stresses that we are "not the Software
Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide. |
| Tech Support: |
"Umm-hmm. What happened?" |
| Customer: |
"As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't
initialized." |
| Tech Support: |
"Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?" |
| Customer: |
(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk.
Would you like to initialize it?'" |
| Tech Support: |
"Er, what happened next?" |
| Customer: |
"After they were initialized, all the disks appeared to be
blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them
in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only
set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something
wrong?" |
| This guy calls in to complain
that he gets an "Access Denied" message everytime he
logs in. It turned out he was typing his username and password in
capital letters. |
| Tech Support: |
"Ok, let's try once more, but use lower case
letters." |
| Customer: |
"Uh, I only have capital letters on my
keyboard." |
Email from a friend: "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"
My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He
noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her
arms crossed across her chest, staring at the screen. After about 15
minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position, only now she
was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she
replied, "It's about time! I pressed the F1 button over twenty
minutes ago!"
| After experiencing difficulties
with his computer, a poor, incognizant user called the system
maker's technical support line for assistance... |
| Technician: |
Hello. How can I help you today? |
| Customer: |
There's smoke coming from the power supply on my computer... |
| Technician: |
Looks like you need a new power supply... |
| Customer: |
No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files... |
| Technician: |
Sir, what you described is a faulty power supply. You need to
replace it... |
| Customer: |
No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system
startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me
the right command... |
| For the next ten minutes, in
spite of the technician's efforts to explain the problem and its
solution, the customer adamantly insisted that he was right. So,
in frustration, the technician responded... |
| Technician: |
I'm sorry. We don't normally tell our customers this, but
there's an undocumented DOS command that will fix the problem... |
| Customer: |
I knew it! |
| Technician: |
Just add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of the
CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine. Let me know how
it goes... |
| About ten minutes later, the
technician received a call back from the customer... |
| Customer: |
It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking... |
| Technician: |
Well, what version of DOS are you using? |
| Customer: |
MS-DOS 6.22... |
| Technician: |
Well, that's your problem. That version of DOS doesn't include
NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a
patch. Let me know how it all works out... |
| When nearly an hour had passed,
the phone rang again... |
| Customer: |
I need a new power supply... |
| Technician: |
How did you come to that conclusion? |
| Customer: |
Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said,
and he started asking me questions about the make of the power
supply... |
| Technician: |
What did he tell you? |
| Customer: |
He said my power supply isn't compatible with NOSMOKE... |
|
