Stupid Customers

Investment bankers usually do quite a bit of work from home and outside normal hours, so the majority of calls we took were nightmarish dial-up issues. My personal favorite was when one older gentleman called because he was unable to dial-in to the network. I made several attempts to walk him through some simple instructions to no avail. Each time he would botch the password or just not listen to me and then power the notebook off without shutting down. I warned him not to do that, because he could corrupt the OS or cause a hardware failure, then tried again. Yet again, he botched the password, instead of re-entering it, he shut off the notebook again. Then he said, “Damn it! Now look what you have done to my laptop. It won’t even power up!” The person I was training over the phone was laughing so hard while I was on mute that he was crying.

Stupid Customers

Customer: “Hi, I was wondering if you could fix my laptop. It’s under warranty.”

Tech Support: “What seems to be the trouble with it?”

Customer: “My wife got mad and threw it in the pool.”

Stupid Customers

A man purchased a laptop from me. He called about a week later and said that it would no longer boot up. He brought it in, and I discovered that sixteen nicely drilled holes were in the bottom of the case. I asked him about it, and he said the machine was too hot sitting on his lap, so he had drilled these “air holes.”

“Could that be the problem?” he asked.

Stupid CoWorkers

My school district decided to require us school psychologists to do all our reports on laptops and print from a single printer. After a few months the laptop they provided me ceased to work with the printer. I spoke with the IT Manager.

IT Manager: “I don’t know if the problem is a hardware problem or a software problem.”

Me: “Ok.”

IT Manager: “So I can’t solve the problem now.”

Me: “When can you solve it?”

IT Manager: “I told you: I don’t know if it is a hardware problem or a software problem. I can’t fix it until I know.”

Me: “Ok. I need to print my reports. When will I be able to?”

IT Manager: (angrily) “Look, if it’s a hardware problem I can’t fix it! I don’t know if it is a hardware or a software problem.”

I made several more attempts to communicate with the IT manager about this problem over the next few weeks, only to find myself in the same conversation. Finally, I sent a memo to my boss, explaining that I was having difficulty getting tech support and could not print out my reports. My boss wrote back:

Boss: “Please do not harass the IT Manager anymore. He has already explained to you that he doesn’t know whether it is a software problem or a hardware problem.”

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