A few years ago, a woman called to complain that she bought a computer, and after only a couple months, Windows didn’t run anymore. She further explained that her son had installed a game on the computer and that that was the only thing the computer would run.
I went to her home and found that the son had created a boot diskette for the game and never popped it out of the drive.
I’ve done my time in tech support and have managed to live through some very weird calls, but this one was the best. An older lady bought a brand new desktop system with all the extras and had been using it for about a month when she got an error about an “illegal function.” She took apart the whole system down to the hard drive and hid it in different parts of her house, called us, and wanted to know how much longer she had until the police were going to come get her. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time on the phone putting the system back together.
I worked as a technician for a company that sold computers. One time a woman was having trouble turning on her computer. I stopped by her house and quickly discovered the problem. She had gotten into the habit of turning the computer on by first pressing the power switch on the computer, then the power switch on the monitor. But somehow, they had gotten out of sync, so when the computer was on, the monitor was off, or vice versa. So no matter how many times she flipped both switches, the computer just wouldn’t seem to work.
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 username 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.”