t3m3st

Just wondering what you might have faced, if you work in Tech Support, or just dealing with friends and family?

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I do it for the rare drops

DKAvenger

working tech support for an ISP and had an irate customer calling complaining how he could not connect to the internet and how he was paying 19.95/month for a service he could not use..... I steped him thru all of his software settings and everything was correct so my next questios to him was "is your modem turned on?" to which he replied "Modem...... What's a Modem"

Here's your Sign

tinfoil

I am an admin at a predominantly Unix location. Every server is a variant of Unix, primarily AIX and OS X, with a dusting of Linux.

YOu have NO idea how many times I have had to remind people about caps-lock.

It drives me insane. I have a nice supply of LARTs for that reason alone.

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Speed_Gibson

worked in a call centre for 19 months supporting HP laser printers/Multifunction units - trying to forget the stories that I can recall.

egorey

I have actually answered the cup holder question three times... and foot pedal once. I had a user complain that the mouse moved left when she moved right and down when she moved up... I had to explain that the cord went on top.

Philipr

I am my mother's tech support. That'll learn me to buy her a computer for Christmas (and giving her my old lap top when I upgraded).

One brother bought her a digital camera as a thank you for looking after their dog (for 2 years) while he was overseas. A kodak Easy share. Maybe not the best, but not a bad camera, either.

I get a phone call one day:
Mum: I dropped the camera and the docking station. Could I have broken it.

Me: (silent at first - thinking optics and sudden stops may not be good. Let alone some of the electronics). Ummmm... yea.

Mum: How can I tell??

Me: (Not sure if I had heard correctly) Ummm... Try and use it?

Mum: How do I do that?

Me: (giving up) I'm at work. Can I call you tonight??

It was ok, if anyone cares.


Another one:

Mum calls me. Can't get something working. Now, I don't know about others, but trying to talk someone through a GUI is nearly impossible. Wich is why I miss DOS sometimes. But I'm not a complete twit, I had bought PC Anywhere just for this sort of thing. I had installed it on her box when she came to see me on a holiday. Yah me.

Me: ok... I'm going to have to dial in. Don't answer the phone if you hear it ring.

Mum: ok

Me: <dial> <ring> <ring> <ring> <ring> <ring> (getting concerned) <ring> <ring> <ring>. <hang up>

Called back. Mum answers this time: Should the phone be plugged into the computer?

Me: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh well. I do love her.

heyal256

I work on the help desk for my company and here are a few stories that come to mind.

User calls and says "my mouse doesn't work, can you send someone over". Since this person was the admin for our CFO, we sent someone over. The problem was that she kicked the mouse cable off the back of her computer (note: her computer was on the floor). So the person drops by and plugs the mouse back in and everything is good right?
Well We aren't so lucky for about the next 2 months, usually about once a week, she calls with the some problem (yes we even ask her to plug the mouse cable back in but she "doesn't know how"). We finally solved it by moving the computer in such a way that she couldn't "accidentally" kick out the cable.

One other idiot at my company (high level exec no less) refuses to archive his e-mail (we have a server side limit). We have trained all of our other users (including the rest of our high level execs and HR) on how to archive their e-mail, but this guy refuses (he even refused to let us setup a rule to autoarchive his e-mail. so this results in us getting a call from his admin (once a week, sometimes more) that "he needs his e-mail archived", and because our boss refuses to tell him that that's not our job, we have to do it for him. (Note: that this has been going on for 1-1/2 years already)

egorey

Ah.. e-mail is always fun... I had a manger once who "couldn't read his e-mail for weeks because his printer was out for repairs..."

It turns out he had his secretary come in every morning and print out his e-mail for him and without the printer he just couldn't get it.

Pragma

We have a corp exec at our facility who (justifiably) needs to have archives of tons of old e-mails, for contracts and that sort of thing.

He has a 1.8GB Outlook PST file. It scares us a great deal, but thankfully the backups go through successfully. And, of course, we can't archive parts of it to slim it down, as he never knows when he might need an old e-mail.

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Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

Cynthetiq

BHAHAHAHAHHAHAH heaven help you if it's a problem... MS support says nothing over 500Mb...

anyways... my addition.. not only users are stupid...
Chronicles of George

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Pragma

Well, actually the limit on PST files is (was? used to be?) 2GB. There was a MS Knowledgebase article about it that I have bookmarked on my work computer. Every week or so, I (with much trepidation) check his PST file and make sure it's not getting too large.

It used to be, back in the days of Outlook 97 and so on, that when it hit 2GB, *wham*. Instant corrupt and unrecoverable PST. We had someone do that a few years back, had to yank the two-day-old backup, nuke the 2.something GB file, and they only lost a little e-mail.

Then we made them clean their shit up. It wasn't much fun, but at that point, who in the hell needs to have 2GB of saved e-mail available AT ALL TIMES? Archiving is your friend.

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Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

heyal256

I work tech support for a financial firm and because of the SEC, e-mails need to be archived for legal reasons.

That said, the limit on pst files is 2GB (or around 1.8Gb if you do a file size on the pst in outlook). Once it hits that limit, usually you will either get errors in outlook (the pst getting corrupted) OR you get an error when trying to add/delete e-mails in the archive. At this point usually we wind up creating a new archive for the user (they still need access to the old one (s)).

I can say that i have one user who has around 15 GB of archived e-mails (something like 10 psts that are over 1Gb and closer to the 2 Gb limit), and if he can't access the pst when he needs it boy do we need to fix that for him (yes he is a high level exec, not the same one that can't archive his e-mails though). So I can say that there are plenty of people that i support that need to have access to over 2GB of archived e-mails consistently.

I should make a mention that what usually kills the limit is the sheer amount of attachments (word docs, pdf's, powerpoint presentations, and excel files) that most of my users get.

Pragma

Agreed. The ex-manager of all of the technical writers was required, by company policy, to keep all of the e-mails that the tech writers sent, including attachments.

He had over 8GB of PSTs total, but thankfully he broke them up into 500MB or so chunks. I think our file server would just about die with 15GB of PSTs for a single user, as we've only got 100GB storage for 150 users.

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Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

shadrock

We issue laptops to all our attorneys at the firm I work at. Can't tell you how many times I've gotten a call asking why the computer doesn't show a picture. Turns out they left their laptop somewhere and thinking they could just turn on the monitor and get busy. These are great lawyers, but they look of confusion on their face when you try to explain what a docking station is compared to a laptop...

And yeah, run into the 2gb problem with pst's and ost's in outlook all the time. Ususally becomes an issue before that though because attorneys never defrag, and we can't set their computer to do it autmatically becasue then they complain about it being slow while it runs. Thank god for scanost and scanpst. We are going to a DMS soon so at least our internal attachments will be minimized.