Once upon a time before there were smartphones…

The internet existed already, e-mail as well.

We got a letter on real paper.

The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his PC screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉

It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…

I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂

I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.

The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.

I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”

She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.

Many years ago I worked for a small company who’d just hired a new CEO - and the guy hated me for some reason. He used every chance to make inappropriate remarks, and at times he’d just get angry and start yelling at me because his MacBook wasn’t doing something the way he wanted it. Keeping in mind, I didn’t do support for endpoints, my specialty was servers and network. I’d just let him go off because he wasn’t local, and would only come to the office for a day about once a month.

One day he called into the office and asked for me (again there are other support people who could easily help him with his macbook issues). He states he’s on a train, and can’t send or receive e-mails. Assuming he’s done basic troubleshooting, and not wanting to piss him off further, I go through normal troubleshooting steps. After several minutes he gets angry again, and starts yelling at me, so did what anyone would do - I put him on speaker phone so everyone else in the office could hear his rant. We all had a good chuckle.

Once he’d gotten it out of his system, I suggested he give me his remote access info (we’d installed remote access software on his macbook for this very reason) so I could remote into his system and see for myself what was going on. He states the software won’t display the one-time access code…so I asked him if he was connected to the WiFi, there was a pause, and then and the phone went dead, he just hung up on me. Magically his email started working after that

Me: Here’s the URL for the web service I’ve just deployed. I’ve set up users and permissions so just copy it into your browser and you should see a very similar system to what you’ve been trained on with all your data in there.

Customer: All I’m getting is a blank screen.

Much panicking and headscratching later…

Me: Waaaiiiiittt, did you press Return/Go after copying the URL?

Customer: That was not in the instructions.

Was working the counter at a repair shop. This really old guy had come in for a data backup and a wipe/restore. We performed said service, and reloaded the data from the backup back on, and his outlook data was encrypted with a password he couldn’t remember.

This infuriated him, he specifically asked me if I wanted HIM to “Shove the desktop tower up his ass, stick his head in after it, and give it a sniff.”

People are wild.

I was on a call once where some guy initially wanted to like block channels or something. After like 2 minutes it turned into some crazy Trump-esque rant about basically nothing. Some of my favorite quotes:

• These people out here talking like they no what’s what. They don’t know shit. But big daddy… he knows.

• I see these fools running around here playing games. I don’t play games. I play real life.

people that use their recycle bin as storage. there have been multiple. once I was at their desk, looked at their trashcan next to their desk and asked if it would be smart to store stuff in there. they got the point after that.

or the new user I setup, went to lunch, came back and needed his password reset because he forgot it already.

I had changed into scrubs, booties and hair cover to go into an operating theatre and repair a printer. I didn’t want to have to come out and do all that again if someone had forgotten to charge the electric screwdriver, so I revved it a couple of times while standing in the charge room, which was fully visible from the hallway. A passer-by glanced my way at the noise, did a double take at what might have been a surgeon testing off-the-shelf power tools before starting a procedure, and walked into a trash can. 😁

“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”

“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Can you print green?”

“Green works fine!”

“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”

Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…

“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”

“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”

Before I was officially in tech support but I was the unofficial helper in my office. I don’t recall the exact issue this person was having on their desktop but I went over to help and said “have you tried restarting?” This person, a millennial, probably younger or the same age as me, then pressed the power button on the monitor to “restart”. I’m still reeling.

My favorite stories almost all involve other coworkers helping out the old ladies who were employed by a dry cleaners. They ranged from simple things like wildly mispronunciations of equipment that they saw and just heard how to pronounce, to borderline unbelievable like the day a coworker spent >45 minutes helping a lady get her computer working only to find out that the store only had emergency lighting because there was some power issue.

Though, the CEO/owner of that company gave me a few too. My favorite was the day he walked into our office, looked at a shithead coworker’s empty chair, then said to my manager (at full volume while a couple of us were on calls) “Hey fuck face, where’s porn boy?”

I accidentally wiped a column in a police department’s evidence database 😁😅

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I did support for inexpensive, but commercial grade network equipment. I’d just been promoted to a senior support engineer 2 days earlier. My boss came to me and said “we have a customer who just deployed a over $250k of equipment and it doesn’t work. The customer, sales person and account rep are on the call, we need you to figure it out”. After an hour or so going over their setup we found out our new switch connects to a 3com switch over a fiber line. 3com was out of business at this point, but I managed to find documentation on the product online. It’s fiber ports were FDDI. Our switch only supported Ethernet (No one really supported FDDI at this time.) At which point the sales person said “we’ll just have to replace the rest of the hardware” and the customer agreed.

I had a user ask us to solve her problems slower because it made her feel stupid when we solved them immediately.