I was going to add this to aceman’s thread about the ringing in his ears, but I didn’t want to go off-topic.
I used to work as technical support for a well known mobile phone company (beginning with M), and would get a lot of amusing calls. This one actually happened to my workmate though. Really makes you wonder.
This guy phoned up complaining that his phone kept beeping, no matter what he did. It had been doing this for like 3 days already.
The tech support guy asked him to change a few settings, press a few buttons, etc, but it just kept on beeping. He asked the guy to switch the phone off, but the guy said even that didn’t stop it. He said that even removing the battery had no effect :s . Of course this made no sense at all, but you can’t really tell the customer they’re talking out of their arse.
Standard policy was to send the phone in and get it repaired for free under the warranty, so the tech support guy asked the customer to write down some details. The guy says that he doesn’t have a pen and that he needs to go to another room to get it (he’s using his mobile phone at the time, BTW). He walks out of the room and suddenly the beeping stops.
The guy actually starts complaining about how typical it is that something starts working again once you phone up technical support.
He goes back into his living room and FINALLY notices that a little red light is flashing beside where it says “LOW BATTERY” on his smoke detector.
Got a story, too: back in the days when I was an apprentice we went out to install a new PABX at a small attorney’s office, and one phone was a new, stylish cordless one with an integrated antenna.
Just after we did the switch-over from the old system to the new one the phone range and the boss himself picked up the handset of the cordless phone and talked to the caller for a while.
After he finished he looked at me and said: “It’s a very nice phone but I can barely hear the other party”, at which point I looked at him and started laughing - he held the handset upside-down.
Working for the university computer center as a help-desk guy, back when the popularlization of personal computers was just taking off, had occasional perks, such as gifts from users whose asses we’d saved. One of the best, though, was the story of a call one of my friends got from a girl with a strong Indian (as in the subcontinent) accent.
She asked: “Wot is dee difference between a hard deek and a floppy deek?”
Had a guy on the phone once. My main job was to help customers connect their mobile phone to their computer (with USB cable or whatever).
Anyhoo, we were supposed to get these calls over and done with in 3 minutes or less. Obviously this was often impossible, but we tried our best.
So after almost an hour with this one particular customer, and having tried to uninstall/re-install the software, drivers, etc. Switch the phone off and on again and again, restart the computer like 5 times, unplug the phone from the cable, etc. etc. etc., I finally asked him if he had any other USB ports on his computer, since the computer seemed to be completely unaware that the phone even existed.
He was reluctant to look as the ports were at the back of the computer and were very inaccessible.
Anyway, I finally persuaded him to crawl under his desk and have a look. I heard some fumbling around and then him saying “Oh, it’s installing now. No problem. There is it. Great…”
Then he kinda apologetically says “Sorry, it seems I plugged the USB cable into an air vent on the back of the computer.”
There was this one guy that called in (in my tech support days), that was really drunk and really didn’t have any idea what was going on. I only remember him mumbling something about a slow speed (on his modem) and that he was finishing his 6th beer.
The best part was I had to leave notes on the account and every tech that had left notes (there were about 6) said something about him being drunk, or that he was on his Nth beer, but there was never any real problem reported.
Working in the tech support department, I had a customer trying to install a sound card. He had a hell of a time installing it; couldn’t even get it to fit into the slot until he whittled it down.
The guy working next to me was a total jackass, always told customers all kinds of BS. “The hackers are doing this and that to you” etc… One time he was troubleshooting some guy’s keyboard. Spent nearly 30 minutes on the thing, tried everything. Nothing worked. Finally “sir, please raise the keyboard above your head, and bash it on the table three times” “hey, that did it! it’s fixed! thank you so much!” We were laughing our asses off, but you know what, that atually became a company approved method after the third time it happened.
[quote=“MrFantastic”]
The guy working next to me was a total jackass, always told customers all kinds of BS. “The hackers are doing this and that to you” etc… One time he was troubleshooting some guy’s keyboard. Spent nearly 30 minutes on the thing, tried everything. Nothing worked. Finally “sir, please raise the keyboard above your head, and bash it on the table three times” “hey, that did it! it’s fixed! thank you so much!” We were laughing our asses off, but you know what, that atually became a company approved method after the third time it happened.[/quote]
I once had a laptop that wouldn’t start unless I hit its bottom against my knee. I had my father (who’s a computer engineer) fix it but still the only thing that could make it work was my karate-kick.
