Things They Say 4

I've got this new game for my PC, it's called Plug & Play Configuration Update....

The guy had assumed that restoring the computer involved opening the case removing the modem, soundcard etc, then running the recovery CD, before putting the cards back in again. Needless to say he'd totally shafted the computer.

This is an excerpt from a real E-Mail message sent round an (unnamed) Tech Support Department -

" Unless there has been some major revelation, the PB900x problem of "Keyboard Not Detected" is NOT resolved by advising the customer to buy a pot plant and place it next to their PC to reduce static buildup. Nor does buying a dehumidifier, or a rubber car mat to place their feet on."

I've just bought my computer and printer. I'm trying to set up my printer, and it's come up with the message "Please insert the printer driver disks, these should have been supplied by your computer manufacturer". I didn't get any printer disks with my computer, but I did get 2 with my printer, will they do ?

Recently had a call from someone who bought a 2 CD game, so he went out and bought another CD-ROM drive for his computer.

A customer was advised to run the Master CD and failing that to call for an engineer because MSWorks was deleting the text in front of his cursor whenever he pressed the space bar. Tech guy has obviously never heard of the insert key.....

I have just had a lady on the phone who was just a little upset that her Packard Bell was taking a long time to Remaster. When I asked her how long it had been going for she replied "for the past 5 days".

I informed her that this should only take just over an hour. She then told me that one of Packard Bell's technicians told her that it would take 5 days.

I'm not sure how true this story is, but it just goes to show some of the idiots tech support staff have to deal with.

This is the true repair procedure for a certain laptop computer sold in the UK. All names have been removed to protect the innocent.

"As of now, all X Laptops are to be repaired by X, at their repair centre in Holland. Below is the recommended procedure to follow for booking a call for the customer.

Customer calls Technical Support. If a fault is found on the X Laptop then a repair is logged and a cardboard box is posted out to the customer. Please note that this box contains all the paperwork needed to return the X Laptop to X.

The customer should be advised that when they receive the box they should fill in the paperwork following the detailed instructions provided. Once this paperwork is completed they then have to phone Technical Support once more and pass the information on the form to the Technical Support Staff, who will then fill in a collection form on the internet which X will then receive a copy of.

Within 24 hours the customer will be contacted by X to arrange the best time for collecting the customer's computer."

And remember this is only the procedure to pick the machine up, lord knows what happens when it comes to delivering it back (Or if anyone has ever managed to get that far).

Customer phones up panicking. She'd been playing around with her scanner, scanning some pictures in, and had decided to scan in a £50 note. At that point the program crashed with the message "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown".

When I started my computer up, it came up with the message "Invalid System Disk". So I put the Master CD floppy disk in and started the computer up using that. Well it asked me to put the Master CD in, so I did that. It then came to a menu with 3 options, so I wasn't sure which one to choose, so I selected number 3 "Restore System". Anyway that ran for 30 minutes or so, and then the computer restarted back into Windows 95. My only problem now is that all the games I put on the computer have now vanished. Can you help?

Whenever I try and run Encarta, it asks me to insert the CD, but I cannot find the Encarta CD. I spoke to one of your colleagues earlier, and he told me to run the Master CD. I've done that, but it still asks me for the CD when I run Encarta!

PUNTER : I've just bought Office 97 for my Packard Bell Executive Multimedia 905 computer. How do you install it?
TECH : Normally the CD should autorun. Have you got the CD in the drive ?
PUNTER : No. I'll just put it in the drive.
TECH : Have you got anything on the screen at the moment ?
PUNTER : Nothing, apart from this welcome to Office 97 box.
TECH : And is there a button called Install on there ?
PUNTER : Yes. Should I click on it?

I was working on a 5 page Word document when I managed to highlight all the text. I then stood up and accidently pressed the delete button, and all the text vanished. So I thought the best thing to do would be to close it all down and try it again. So I exited out of Word, and then clicked on Yes to Save the changes. I suppose there's no chance of getting the text back ?

Just to prove that the above is not a one off. A woman phones up in tears. She'd just added 2000 words to her essay and then gone to close Works down. It had asked her if she'd wanted to save the changes, and she'd clicked on NO. She wanted to know if there was anything we could do...

When I go to shut my computer down, I click on Start / Shutdown, and then click on yes. Then my screen goes blank, and the only way I can use my computer, is to use the power switch. Then I get a load of white writing on the screen, before it goes into Windows 95. I spoke to one of your colleagues earlier and he told me to run the Master CD, but that made no difference....

Punter phones up complaining that his computer won't start up, it just gives him loads of error messages. Managed to get to an MS-DOS prompt using the Master CD boot disk, and then got him to do a directory of what was on the Hard Disk Drive. Instead of the usual files, there were just 26 directories labelled A through to Z. When I asked him what he'd done, he admitted that he'd decided to sort all the files on his computer into alphabetical order. Needless to say he was left running the Master CD (apparently it had taken him hours to do!).

TECH: Do you get any error messages when the machine starts up ?
PUNTER: What's an error message ?

PUNTER: Can you confirm that I need a power cable for my printer ?

TECH: Can you press the rest button on the front of the computer.
PUNTER: Do you mean the crashland button?

PUNTER: My keyboard isn't working ?
TECH: Okay, if you can switch the computer off, reach round the back and unplug the keyboard. Then plug it back in.

PUNTER: I've just had a power cut. What happens when the power comes back on?
TECH: ????????????

It turned out to be a disk shaped order form for his recovery set.

Customer phones up from Liverpool. He was trying to setup IBM Voice Type software, and it was going fine until he got to the bit where you train the computer to understand your voice. No matter what he did he couldn't make it understand his accent. He wanted to know if there was a Scouse patch disk available....

* And of course it connected perfectly, but then again, you wouldn't expect Compuserve to know their own phone number would you? *

People think that computer technical support is a recent invention. But recently discovered in the archives at UK Technical Support , is what is reported to be the first ever Technical Support call. Let me set the scene ...

It is a cold night in the City of London. Snow is thick upon the ground. A little match-girl lays dying on a street corner. The Marconigraph rings..

My computer is a Pentium 120, which I've just had upgraded to 64 kilobytes of memory...

I've just installed your internet software, and I've searched the whole CD but I cannot find my 5MB of free Webspace anywhere...

Apparently the guy was trying to learn Arabic, and he thought that it would help by installing the Arabic version of Windows. You work it out...

This one was emailed to me by David Wickens :

A travel agent called today to say her monitor wasn't powering up when the base unit was re-booted up. She confirmed she had checked that everything was connected properly etc and it was passed to the hardware support desk. They diagnosed that it was a possible faulty motherboard and a replacement was courier'd over. An engineer arrived later this morning and found the following :

Keyboard connected to the mouse socket.
Mouse connected to the keyboard socket.
Monitor connected to the Network Card socket !!!

All the agent claimed she had done was re-boot her set as it froze on her. Poltergeist's perhaps !!!

Customer phones up technical support after having problems with the colours not looking quite right when printing with certain packages (Mainly MS Paint or Corel Draw) on a Canon Bubblejet printer. The technician informed the customer that the fault was with the Computer's printer port, and sent an engineer out with a new Motherboard and Power Supply for the computer. Surprisingly this didn't solve the problem.

This one was emailed to me by Anita Luckett :

I work as an IT & Communications Specialist within a reasonably large company and some of the users that we get to talk to are interesting to say the least.

One of the ones that sticks in my mind from this job was a call that I got from one of our sales representatives who happened to be stationed in the office for a few months. We had just upgraded her laptop to a sleek black DELL which she had had for about a week. She rang the HelpDesk requesting a new desk phone. I ran through the usual questions of what was wrong with it and was told that the phone was fine, but it was a grey colour and this did not match her new laptop. Please could she have a black one.

This is taken from the signup page for Flexnet, an internet providor in Hawaii

Notice to current America Online Users

If you are currently with America Online, please don't bother to sign up! You have been warned...

This advice will save both you and us needless frustration. We are incompatible with your computer system as screwed-up by AOL configuration software and You. In fact, a lawsuit is in the works against AOL. So be warned, NO REFUNDS or CREDITS will be given.

As a general rule, America Online users are not computer savvy or it seems, capable of the level of technical sophistication necessary to operate a computer outside of an AOL environment.

Notice to Everyone Else

If you sign up for a FlexNet account, you will only have three things to work with: Username, Password and Modem phone number. If you have questions after this such as: "Huh? ...What's the next step? ...Where's the Internet Menu, Anyhow? ...I just got my computer last week! Can I call you, and have you walk me thru the setup?", then PLEASE DON'T SIGN UP.

Remember, FlexNet does not have a technical support department. We don't have the time to baby or pamper you. We won't let you bring your computer down, for us to "work on it." No Ways. You have to be able to configure your own computer, or find a friend that can do that for you and have that friend explain what the Internet is all about and how to do stuffs.

If you are this friend, please just don't setup the user's computer, and split. What will eventually happen is this user will start calling us up, asking how to read email, or other silly things like that. There will be a lota hard feelings on both sides when we tell them to go sign up with a full-service ISP like PixiNet or Hawaii Online or LavaNet.

If fact, if we get a whiff when a user calls up that they are newbies, we automatically suggest they go sign up with someone else. While this may seem hard and cruel to you, please, PLEASE know that newbies calling for tech support, and if FlexNet relents and gives such requested tech support, will definitely "broke da shop" and cause FlexNet to go out of business.

We don't offer tech support. So please don't ask for any. We are targeting the ever-growing market of experienced Internet users.

This is why our monthly fees are half-priced what other ISPs wanna charge you. This is the string. That's the catch. No Joke.

Taken from page 39 of the PC100 M741LMRT motherboard manual -

Using the PCI Sound Application

1. Before you install the PCI sound drivers, make sure your Operating System has been installed, otherwise the PCI sound might be detected as "Other device" by the device manager of your OS.

Compaq FAQ: Where is the ANY Key? (FAQ2859)

This is not a key. When you are instructed to press any key, this means you can press any of the keys on the keyboard (such as the Enter key, the R key, or the space bar).

This one was sent in by Luke Wetherall -

PUNTER: ..so Ive put in the Restore CD in my eMachine and its crashed completely!
TECH: Ok... what error message has come up on the screen that indicates that?
PUNTER: *pauses* ....well i cant move my mouse to select Restore on the menu
TECH: Right then, what options do you have in front of you?
PUNTER: Restore and Cancel....
TECH: Ok, all you have to do is Push R on your keyboard to start off the recovery
PUNTER: *longer pause*.... theres an "R" on the KEYBOARD???

One of my former colleagues recently got this reply from Dell E-Mail Support, nice to see that they are honest about the power of their machines..

Thank you for choosing Dell e-Support for your Dell system.

We appreciate this opportunity to assist you. I have gone through your mail & understood the problem with your computer.

Unplug the power cable from the back of the system and push the power button for 15 seconds to discharge power & see of the computer starts. This is mainly due to the fact that of there is flea power in the machine, the computer won't start normally. So when ever your computer Jams or hanges, try doing the above step. That will surely solve the issue.