In his Circuits column this week, David Pogue shares some of the most absurd calls he listened to when he toured a tech support center.
I learned that when they say, “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones.
The agents gave him a CD of their favorite calls, and he transcribes a few of them in his column. We like this one:
A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…
Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?
Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.
Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.
Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?
Caller: Yes, I sure do.
Agent: OK, now press Control-A.
Caller: I am, but nothing happens.
Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?
Caller: No, there’s no change at all.
Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.
Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?
“Tech Support Gets a Reprieve While Users Take a Hit “ [New York Times]
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i think i worked with that canadian
Phone Losers of America does better tech support calls that make us pee our pants with laughter.
The one about the mouse and the keyboard is hilarious.
Someone seriously used a computer for six weeks by plugging and unplugging the keyboard and mouse? Wow.
Has any other IT tech support guys in an office run into people stacking up their mousepads like 4 at a time? I asked one person why they did that and they said because they heard that the “laser beams” can burn through their desk if they don’t stack the mousepads.
That’s probably my most “wtf” moment in the IT industry so far.
well just the other day, one of the teachers at the school i work for called me in because a screw fell out of the side of her computer case, and it broke her internet.
true story =P
damn canucks
only bad one I personally heard was someone walking into a store and asking for the windows compatible mouse pads….
@Crrusher: Oh, now I love the Canadians I support, better than almost any other country. I’ll never forget the time a spitfire redheaded French-Canadian engineer got tired of me telling her, “I can’t do that anymore because of this new Sarbanes-Oxley law.” She accused me of making it up so I wouldn’t have to do work, and demanded me to provide her with the parts of the law that affected my ability to provide her with “proper service.” So I faxed her all hundred-odd pages of the statute in question. After that I had her grudging respect (nobody else would stand up to her but me).
@Moosehawk: lolwut? That might be as good as the legendary cupholder gag.
@speedwell: Spitfire redheaded French-Canadian woman engineer (and since she’s canadian, I’ll assume she likes the sticky-icky). Did you get her number? Is she cute? Tell me you atleast tried! Lie if you must!
If only I had the time and energy to type out every call I get at my tech support job. They’re ALL like that. My coworker had someone bitching for 10 minutes about how their computer wouldn’t turn on. They only revealed after that amount of time that by “not turning on” they meant “sitting at the login screen”.
Hahaha, classic!
That was actually from http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
My worst user ever? Now, I want you to know my dad was an engineer and I have tremendous respect for every gray hair on an experienced engineer’s head, but there was this one old cowboy who drove me crazy for three years before he retired.
I was part of the team that wrote the documentation for and implemented our particular engineering software companywide (we have about 35,000 employees in more than a hundred countries). I live, breathe, eat, sleep, talk, support, and push this engineering software. I am the trainer for the US and South America. You can imagine how I felt when this fellow wrote me an e-mail saying he was just not going to use it. At all, period. We were going to have to make allowances for the way he “always did it.” His boss finally threatened him enough that he came to one of my training classes, in which he sat there glaring at me like a gang enforcer in an interpretive Elizabethan poetry reading.
When he got back to his desk, he started having strange problems with his installation. We figured out pretty quick he was partially disabling the program. Then after another talk with his manager, he agreed to take it on trial. Next he printed out all his daily work in hard copy, thousands of pages a day. That didn’t last too long either because other people occasionally needed the printer, gee. After that, he started to “forget” how to do everything as soon as it was explained to him. They moved my cubicle next to his so I could keep an eye on him. For months I basically got nothing done but holding his hand and walking him through how to do everything, every damn time he did it.
So finally they let me go do my other work, figuring he couldn’t get us into too much trouble. Wrong-oh. We’re still finding crap in the system he did wrong on purpose.
@cde: Try? (blush) Well, some woman are a good argument for making a straight chick bend a bit, but my fiancé would have killed me.
@mgy: I should also mention that I work the night shift at a big state University, so we get a lot of students and professors who call just to “chat”. I had one girl open up to me about her ordeals with domestic abuse. Asked me things like “Do you think your life can change in a second?” and “If your sister beats the shit out of you, can she get in trouble?”. My job goes WAY beyond the bounds of stupid computer questions.
@speedwell: Or he might have encouraged it
Wishful thinking on my part. Spitfire, redheaded, and french all trigger thoughts in my head alone. Together, omfg.
Wow. Can these be real? Especially the one about control-A. Hilarious
@evslin: I swear like 75% of the office had at least 3 mousepads stacked on top of each other. One started doing it and the others followed because they figure they didn’t want to be the only person to get in trouble if there was a gaping hole in their desk from an optical laser lol. It was bizarre.
@Moosehawk: I would pick one out and drill a hole through one or two mouse pads and then sit back and watch the panic set in.
Used to do support for a large jewelry company.
One of the security guys had a laptop that was struck by lightning. Well, his house was, and the laptop got fried.
We gave him a new one. And about every 2 months, he kept having to send it back because of problems. And he’d get mad when we’d delete AOL from the machine.
Well, after a year, he called and said he had another lightning strike. So, he sent it in. I had it sent to me personally, because I was sick of this guy.
Got the box, and carried it into the DIT’s (IT Director) office. Opened the box. It looked like it had been dropped down a flight of stairs. Screen cracked, hinge broken, etc.
He got fired that day.
That is amazing. Goodness a horrible day and there’s a ray of sunshine from Canada. Goodness. Thank you Consumerist.
I want that CD. I need a good laugh. I wonder if there are any broken cupholder questions.
@Ghede: Or people who can’t find the Any key.
@cde: Haha I could only imagine the sheer panic that would have ensued.
My personal favorite caller from my hitch as a CSR for Ameritech(obviously, this was a number of years ago)was a Chicagoan who was trying to get some charges on her bill explained and manage her apparently pretty wild household at the same time. She split her time between yelling at me and yelling at her kids. I can still hear her voice to this day.
“Girl, what are you wearing? No, those ain’t shorts, that’s a #%@!’in thong!”
The two that stick in my mind from my days at a college helpdesk:
A student calls that she can’t get online. I ask her what version of Windows she’s running. She starts naming dorms near her bulding. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about for a while – then I realized and had to tell her that I needed to know what version of the Windows operating system she was running, not what she could see out her dorm-room window.
I also had an employee call up and say that CD-ROMS kept falling out of her drive. Kept telling her that there should be an inset that it rests in, ect. Finally put in a ticket. She called back a few minutes later and informed us that she had figured out the problem – her PC was upside down. She had a small form factor that was set up on it’s side and she had decided to lay it flat – with the wrong side down.
I love the “this call may be recorded” message. I make sure to take advantage of the privilege it grants me.
/non-USian.
that was a lame joke
Sadly, the stories mentioned in the article are way tamer than most of them I got working for a dial-up tech support call center.
“I can’t get the internet to work.”
-”You can’t get online at all? Okay, when you attempt to connect, do you see an error message?”
“Whaddya mean?”
(Here we go)
-”What happens when you try to connect to the internet?”
“Huh? Nothing, I put the CD in and nothing happened.”
-”Oh, okay, so you’re having trouble installing the *redacted* software? The installation won’t start?”
“uhhhh…..”
-”That’s okay, I’ll walk you through it. Are you sitting at the computer now?”
“I don’t have a computer.”
*tink*
-”You don’t have computer?”
“No, do I need one?”
-”uuhh… yes. You do.”
“I can’t afford a computer. A friend gave me the CD so I could get on the internet.”
-”What were you… ummm… ‘playing’ the CD on?”
“In my car. I have a CD player.”
And it went downhill from there. Honestly. Swear on my gramma’s grave.
I worked tech support at one point. I think the weirdest I had was lady who was trying to use three keyboards at the same time. I was trying to get her into the BIOS, and her keyboard wasn’t working.
By the way she was describing the situation, I become suspicious. I asked her outright how many keyboards were hooked up to the computer. It was a total of three – one PS/2, and two USB. She had had keyboard problems at first, and the tech asked her to try *another* keyboard. She didn’t realize this meant disconnecting the first.
These sound like those ridiculously fake chain letters that end up in your inbox from time to time.
I’ve been working internet tech support for 2 years (In America. A rare occurrance, I know). My favorite is when the installer is just as incompetent as the customer.
“Ma’am what are the lights on your modem doing?”
“Hold on, let me get a ladder.”
“…What?”
“The modem is on the roof with the satellite.”
“uh…uh…hold please.”
*Put customer on hold, asked my manager if this is even possible, he freaks and says don’t let her go on the roof because of liability issues*
“Ma’am are you still there?”
“Yes, the power light is on but the rest are off. Is that bad?”
“……..yes, that’s bad. Get off the roof.”
Sadly, this is pretty accurate:
+ Watch video
clientcopia.com
Good site for stories like these.
Take off, eh? Ya hosers.
I think this post is the 2008 equivalent of the “which one is the any key?” bit.
@TinkishDelight:
These sound like those ridiculously fake chain letters that end up in your inbox from time to time.
Yeah … that was exactly my feeling. And then I went back and re-read the story and noticed this:
They actually gave me one of those “Best Of” disks at the end of my day in the call center. Herewith: a few actual calls from that disk or that I heard about from the agents themselves.
The NY Times is now reprinting chain letters. Great …
That was hilarious! I work tech support 9-5 and it can be HELL!
Go to http://www.techcomedy.com for lots of hilarity!
The Pogue will be at the Wilton Library in Wilton, CT on March 27th. Any Connecticois who want to attend, register online. I’ll be in the front row!
I used to do tech support for an ISP years ago. I think my favorite call to this date was some woman who called and absolutely screamed her head off at me about my company imposing our religious beliefs on her — our zealotry was not welcome, we were not getting paid to proselytize, et cetera, on and on and on.
It took me several minutes to calm her down and figure out what she was upset about. We had named our servers after late-night infomercials, like the Flowbee or the Psychic Friends Network, and so on. The one she was angry about was named after Suzanne Somers’ product: “thymaster.”
True story :
My friend calls me up asking if i have an old computer she can use, i tell her i dont have an extra thats working and she tells me that she doesnt need the whole computer , just the monitor and keyboard cause she just needs to practice some typing !!!
For entertainment purposes, I’ve been signing up my rarely used fax line on mailing lists under the names Harry Bagina, Moe Schitt, and A. Nalinvader. If I need a good laugh, I’ll just plug in a phone and let the fun begin!
My favorite one comes from a couple years ago when I working internal tech support for a very large pharma company. A lot of users had docking stations for their laptops, a coworker was on the phone with someone and I heard his part of the conversation.
-OK, now I just need you to try turning the computer on again.
*abnormally long pause*
-Didn’t work? Ok. Well try *instructuctions*. Now try to turn it on again.
*abnormally long pause*
-Still not working? Huh… Ok, well we’ll try one last thing. Try doing *instructions*. Ok? Now try turning it on again.
*abnormally long pause*
-Still not working? If I may ask, what is taking you so long to try and turn on your laptop? …. And where is the docking station? …. Down the hall? …. Are you taking the laptop with you when you do this? …. Ma’am that’s your problem. The power button on the docking station is not going to turn on the laptop if they’re 100 feet away from each other.
yes, the lady was using her laptop in one office, and trying to turn it on by leaving her laptop in the office and walking down the hall to her docking station and trying to turn it on from there.
I own a software company; here are the favorite calls we have received:
1. Customer: Do you need a computer to use this program?
2. Customer: I’m having problems. Support: Are you using Windows or Macintosh? Customer: Neither. I use a Dell (or HP or Acer or whatever)
3. Customer: This software won’t run on my computer. Support: What is your OS? Customer: What’s an OS? Support: What version of Windows are you running? Support: Windows 95 (note call was taken in 2008).
These may not seem so weird but our software runs upwards of $700. It’s not $30 cheapo software. It’s amazing to me we get customers spending $700 and don’t know what OS they’re running.
We also got a call from someone. She said it took her computer almost 10 minutes to turn on. So one of our tech guys had her type in MSCONFIG and look at her startup items. She had over 100 items in her startup menu.
@rabiddachshund: That video is the best. When I got my first tech support job, on day one the trainer comes in and says… ok, everyone pay attention to this video, because this is what your job is going to be like.
He sure wasn’t kidding.
i got a call from someone who’s PC was frozen. I instructed her to hold down the power button on the PC for 5 seconds and then turn the pc back on. She did so but said she’s back at the frozen screen. i asked her what button she pressed and she replied ‘the one on the tv’
i also had another lady frantic because she couldn’t get on the internet at home. I start helping her and she replied that i didn’t understand…she left her docking station at work. turns out that she was bringing not only her laptop but her entire docking station home each night.
@cwheatley: I work with people who complain that their internet doesn’t work because the default IE7 home page does not come up when they open the browser. They call before they even try a different page. Worst part of this? Repeat offenders.
@Geekybiker: That is not as uncommon as you would think.
The worst I ever saw was nothing compared to some of these stories. He was a guy in the office who knew he was an inexperienced user and was honest about that. He was most definitely not an idiot, so the incident turned out to be a good laugh for both of us, not an insult to him.
It was back in 1991, and I was doing computer support in the office, as well as other things. A new system written in dBase IV had come in and the user asked me for help. He had managed to figure out the menus via the manuals and produced a report screen, a summary of the data he was working on. The problem?
“How do you print this report? There’s no menu option for it.”
The authors of the manuals neglected to tell users to hit the “Print Screen” button. The user and I both had a laugh when he saw the simple solution.
- – – – -
The funniest I heard about was in the mid-1990s (remember that). Whether it’s true or apocryphal, I don’t know, but it certainly sounds believable:
A lUser called into tech support and said, “The computer is working great, but the coffee holder broke.” (“luser” is slang for a user that is a loser.)
The tech support guy said, “Excuse me, what broke?”
Again, the lUser said, “You know, the coffee holder that pops out of the computer.”
The tech support guy couldn’t finish the call for laughing so hard.