Genital Syncing (from Erik Trent)
I work for a company that makes software for the high-speed video and data industry. Recently, we've started to include the ability for playback of data as audio for clients in the medical field that needed that, and have had a few support emails crop up as a result.

I recently received the following message.

Hi ya .
first its a great product...
I have bought sound files (2) ...they seem to play 
ok ......and I see them load ...BUT  the left hand 
panel which should show the details is blank ..

probably me being thick ...your advice please

SL name and purchaser of the x4 plus bits and the 
2 sound moduals  "Chant Juran"

Thanks Chant

I should note that at no time does it name any of our products, nor does the description sound like anything we have. But always wanting to be helpful for a customer, I replied with a request for more information.

Chant Juran

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking in this 
mail. Which Product are you using, and is it possible 
for you to send me a screenshot that illustrates the 
problem you are having?

Sincerely

Erik Trent

After a bit of confusing back-and-forth, he sent me a screenshot and a logfile. When I opened up the screenshot, I immediately realized that it wasn't our sotware, as our software doesn't look anything like that. But the logfile (mildly NSFW) really drove home the point.

It took me a while to figure out, but I finally figured out what the guy had. Look at the logfile and see if you can figure it out... or just highlight the following text ==>the Xcite! Touch, a USB-powered adult toy that syncs with a virtual toy in Second Life<==. Ever since that exchange, our first response to any techical issue has been, have you synced your genitals?

 

Accentricity (from Kay Kyser)
I worked for a small web development company based in the UK, and one of the websites I worked on was for an Irish client. One Friday afternoon, I took a call from the client just as I was about to leave the office. He sounded aggravated.

"Why are there trees all over my website?" he asked.

"Trees?" I was a bit confused, "what do you mean, trees?"

"Trees!" he insited, "they're all over the place!"

I quickly loaded up his site, "I'm not seeing any trees on the site... where are you looking?"

"They're right there," he argued, "on the home page. They're everywhere, on all of the prices."

"Oooooh, you mean threes," I said, "I see now... $7.333333333333."

I spent the next couple hours fixing the "holiday discount" bug; served me right for using floating-point numbers to represent prices.

 

The Screenshot (from Jon Gentsch)
A user at our company had an issue with a web app she was using. So she took a screenshot, printed it out, scanned it as a PDF, and emailed it to me.

 

Backup Instructions(from Philipp Grawe)
A while back, I was a support analyst for a company that had one head office and about fifty branch offices. They had a built a customer information system using Microsoft Access 2.0 (did I mention this was a while ago?), and each branch office had a copy.

One of the processes we rolled out was the twice-daily backup. It was a manual process — mostly, a DOS script that re-named a file and kept a week's worth of copies of the database — that was run by the "local" tech support (usually a secretary who'd been given a new job title and no training).

As you'd expect with Access 2.0, the database at one of the branch offices crashed, and I needed to help them with a restore. As I was talking the onsite technical support through the restore process, I asked "did you back up the data like the work instruction says?"

"Yes," she said, "I backed it up as soon as the system crashed."

 

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