Okay Geek Farm
Reddit users share their enraging "tech support" horror stories
Brandon Davenport
We have all had those moments, sitting downstairs in our aunt’s basement fixing her computer (aka fighting your way through toolbars, and FunCardGame.exe installed 92 times) or staying late at work because your boss can’t send email (he jammed a USB cable into the ethernet port, breaking it). Now, days later you hear them say “Ever since you messed with my computer, everything is messed up… FIX IT!” — We don’t know why people think their printer issues are caused by “that FoxFire program”, but they do. Here’s Reddit’s 9000+ comment thread telling stories of enraging tech support — Read them all here…
The C: Drive incident - drakanwolf
End User: “I had a Word document on my C: Drive that I’ve been working on for the past week. I accidentally deleted it & emptied the recycle bin. I need the file for a meeting I have in 20 minutes. Get it back.”
Me: “I’m sorry, but there’s really no way for us to recover that file.”
End User: “But I thought you said the servers were backed up nightly. Go to one of the backups and get it back.”
Me: “That’s true, but you didn’t save it to the server. You saved it locally.”
End User: “Well, yeah! I needed it on the C: Drive in case I needed to work on it from home.”
Me: “But… you have a desktop PC, not a laptop. How do you work on it from home?”
End User: Getting very antagonistic “What do you mean ‘How’!? I e-mail it to myself, work on it on my home computer, and then e-mail it back!”
Me: Still keeping calm and professional “And you did this last night?”
End User: Makes exasperated noise “YES!”
Me: Very happy because I realize that I can help the person after all “Great! Then there should be a copy of the file in your inbox. You can just re-download the attachment you sent yourself last night.”
End User: “You mean I have to do it myself? Fine! God forbid you IT guys actually do anything useful. I don’t know why we even pay you!” Slams the phone down to hang up
A disc of Internet - DeliciousMeatz
“I know you folks at Best Buy are always trying to confuse people like me. I dont wan’t to hear any bullshit, just show me where the discs of internet are”
“Discs… Ma’am I don’t quite understand, do you already have a provider? or…”
“CUT THE BULLSHIT, just show me where I can get a disc of internet!”
“In the aisle next to car stereos ma’am.”
Everything is in Word - TheRaven7
Where are your files?
In Word
Okay but where are they?
In WORD!
But in what folder are they in, My Documents?
NO THEY’RE IN WORD DAMMIT
Chkdsk panic attack - ninevoltbattery
I was running a chkdsk /r on a PC for someone who was out on vacation. I step out for a few minutes to work on another nearby PC. I come back to that office and some lady was sitting in the chair trying to use the computer. I didn’t know who this lady was, but she told me, “There were a lot of words and stuff on the screen so I turned the computer off.” In the middle of a chkdsk /r, on a computer that wasn’t her’s.
The entire web is gobbledygook — Chasmosaur
About 10 years ago, I briefly worked at a non-profit that used Dreamweaver for their massive website. I was hired to help clean up and reorganize the site, which was slow and not well organized.
Since the rank and file had been using the WYSIWYG interface for years, the content was filled with all sorts of deprecated and/or incomplete and inappropriate elements (like “blink”). So I would bring individual documents into my favorite text editor, use regular expressions to strip out all the HTML, and then reformat the content with well-validated HTML that could easily be dropped back into the templates and work with the new CSS.
My boss was a VP laterally moved from a non-technical department to oversee the web development team. She could barely use her computer to surf the web, let alone code anything. She just knew Dreamweaver was our development tool, and tried to use buzzwords to justify her micromanagement style. (Technical people were not fooled, non-technical people thought she was brilliant and “techy.”)
So she came into my office one day, and rather obviously worked her way behind my desk to see what I was doing. (If we had done the same, we would have seen her IMing her friends all day.) I ignored her, since it was obvious she was checking up on the new girl - with the piles of content I’d plowed my way through, I had nothing to hide and much to be proud of. However, upon seeing the text-editor up with content she recognized, she literally shrieked:
“This is gobbledygook! It’s not Dreamweaver! The entire web is written in Dreamweaver - everyone knows that! Why did we hire you?”
And even though I’d been there less than a month, that was the day I started looking for a new job…
The box thing was off again - levind
Mom “levind, the computer isn’t working! come over here!
Me “before I drive over, what’s it doing?
Mom “there’s a boxey thing on the screen and it wont do anything!… its red, green and blue and it’s bouncing around!”
Me “That means the monitor is on, but the computer isn’t”
Mom “what do you mean! it’s on!”
ME “See the box on the floor? is the button on the front of it lit up green?
Mom “Oh, it wasn’t but I pushed it and the computer is working again!”
Me “it was never broken, you just didn’t have the computer on in the first place…”
Mom “oh! I always wondered what that boxey thing on the floor was!
Me Atomic FacePalm
Rage on both ends - skintigh
Here’s my favorite story. I fixed my in-laws computer — removed hundreds of viruses, plus spyware, plus malware, plus fixed thousands of entries in the registry. Even asked them if they wanted me to fix the resolution as they had it at 640x480 or something.
Well, obviously, first they complained that I made their fonts small, so I unfixed the resolution and colors.
A while later the dad calls and demands we drive 3 hours each way on a week night to fix his computer. The printer isn’t working, the home phone is dead, he was in a rage, his wife locked herself in the bedroom, the sis-in-law was crying, yada yada. We tell him to call the phone company and maybe we can help on the weekend.
2 days later they phone guy shows up, unplugs the printer’s USB cable from the phone jack and everything works.
Words cannot explain - razzliox
I was in a class, and this teacher goes to the google bar and right clicks on accident. He then says, “Derp (me), will you fix this for me?” I go up to the computer, click on the google bar, and walk off, sighing. He then types “www.google.com” and hits enter. Then, he clicks on google. THEN he googles www.youtube.com, and moves his mouse to hover over the link to youtube. He highlights it (http and all), and CALLS ME UP TO SHOW HIM HOW TO COPY IT. I just fucking copied it, and then said “and then press ctrl-v to paste.” He goes up to the URL, which was very long (google “youtube” and you’ll see), and HOLDS DOWN BACKSPACE instead on select all and delete. He then pastes it into the bar, scrolls down his history, and hit enter.
Almost fired for stealing emails - zerobeat
Working as an intern many years ago in tech support, I was tasked with building my boss’s new laptop. Once I was done, I handed it off to him and he was gracious enough to give me his old one to use in return. I got back to my desk, cabled it up and turned it on. Being in an office where everyone had static IPs and I had configured his new system exactly the same as his old one, I received the Windows 95 popup that someone had the IP I was trying to use and I couldn’t have it. My boss, meanwhile, got a popup that said someone was trying to use his IP address, but it would not be permitted. No big deal — I switched the IP address on my side and dropped by the boss’s office to tell him to click “OK” and just ignore the mistake.
Three days pass. I am called into my boss’s office. He asks me to take a seat and just stares for what seemed like a full minute. I finally spoke up.
“Is something th—”
“I know what you’ve been doing.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you confess, I won’t fire you.”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been stealing my email.”
“I…what? I haven’t been—”
“You took my address and you’ve been stealing my email! Your ass is fired for this.”
I got him to calm down long enough to explain that, no, the IP conflict would not permit me to steal his email, password required, mail identity and client, etc, etc. Being the dumb intern I was, I figured the technical explanation would suffice and the misunderstanding would be happily resolved and life at the office would continue. My boss stood up, knocked over a mug of pencils, and screamed at the top of his lungs, “You’re a goddamn liar! I’m an important person, dammit, and I haven’t gotten an email from the outside world in three days because you have been stealing them.”
So, I did what I thought made perfect sense and sent him an email from my personal email account that resided outside the office. It showed up in his inbox a minute later.
“You rigged it to do that on purpose! You made it let your email through while you are still stealing all my important messages!”
That ended up being a really long day. And, yeah, he just hadn’t had anyone send him email from outside the company in a few days.
