Humorous Technical Stuff
By Customer: “Your sound card is defective and I want a new one.”
Tech Support: “What seems to be the problem?”
Customer: “The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming out of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the left. It’s defective.”
Tech Support: “You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker to the right side of the machine and vice versa.”
Customer: (sputter) (click)
Tech Support: (snicker)
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Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having problems: the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the basics, then came over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer.
As the paper started coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me. I told her to WAIT until the paper came out on its own. Problem solved.
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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 co-workers 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 construction paper?”
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Customer: “Hello? I’m trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got the message, ‘No Carrier,’ on my screen. What’s wrong?”
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I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a program by typing “A:” and then the name of the program. My friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn’t type the “dot over dot thingie” and that every time he tried to type the “dot over dot thingie” he kept getting the “dot over comma thingie” no matter how careful he was to press only on the very top of the key.
When I taught him about the shift key, he thought I was a genius.
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This guy calls in to complain that he gets an “Access Denied” message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his user name 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.”
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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 and 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 pushed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!”