• sweavo (unregistered) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    The real WTF is that these crusty old relics that have been hanging round the internet since /etc/hosts was all there was for name lookups have been dredged up and posted here.

    Rich

    Yes, Wireless laptops have been around WAAAY longer than bind.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Sorry - my mistake ! Completely missed the reference to the PC1640... So the real WTF was that my first post was a WTF...

    The real WTF is that you agree!

  • Jobsworth (unregistered)

    A supposedly true story I heard from an ex-cow-orker from $JOB-2: Same problem as the old lady in the article, a floppy with a bad sector. He asked to send the floppy back. 5 minutes later, the fax machine spews out a copy of the floppy! The guy keeps his cool and calls back to the customer: "can you send us a copy of the other side too? Because it is a double sided floppy." Then he quickly hangs up the phone before bursting out in laughter. And indeed, a few minutes later, the fax spews out the other side of the floppy...

    After half an hour, when he is done laughing, he calls back to the customer and arranges an on-site intervention by a field technician. He came back with yet another WTF-story...

    captcha: dolor Yeah I can really feel the pain.

  • nb (unregistered) in reply to Jobsworth
    Jobsworth:
    A supposedly true story I heard from The guy keeps his cool and calls back to the customer: "can you send us a copy of the other side too? Because it is a double sided floppy." Then he quickly hangs up the phone before bursting out in laughter. And indeed, a few minutes later, the fax spews out the other side of the floppy...

    I think I already heard this one too.

  • Spike (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    Call from secretary:

    My F1 Help key doesn't work. When I press it no-one comes.

  • (cs) in reply to sfasfiojjioji
    sfasfiojjioji:
    Joe:
    An oppressed mass:
    My cable modem has a small unlabelled black button moulded into the top of the black case. If you touch this button it goes into standby and turns all the leds off.

    I finally called tech support and after explaining that I was a network expert and knew what I was doing, so they wouldn't just tell me to reinstall windows - they said "is there a little black button on the top..."

    I'm staring at my Motorola SB5120 cable modem given to me by Comcast.

    Thanks to that undocumented "feature" my home network was down for no apparent reason for a week. Then when I was checking all my gear for the umpteenth time I accidentally pressed that button. Never even knew it existed. Suddenly, the cable modem came alive.

    They've removed these buttons from the latest version. Why in heaven's name it was even there to begin with was a giant WTF.

    I'd be worried that they were planning to start charging you per [insert time unit here] for your access, requiring you to hit that button when you weren't using the modem so that you wouldn't be charged...

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    For those that don't know it: plenty more at http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

  • Jobsworth (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    In a decade where every screen was either green or amber?

    Captcha: damnum Couldn't agree more.

  • (cs) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    The real WTF is that these crusty old relics that have been hanging round the internet since /etc/hosts was all there was for name lookups have been dredged up and posted here.

    I leave the site for a couple of months and come back to a crappy webcomic and stuff I was deleting from my inbox 15 years ago.

    No thanks

    Rich

    Bye bye now. Try us again in 15 years. Maybe you'll be able to find the stuff you're deleting from your mailbox now.

  • (cs) in reply to NaN
    NaN:
    Anonymous:
    Sorry - my mistake ! Completely missed the reference to the PC1640... So the real WTF was that my first post was a WTF...

    The real WTF is that you agree!

    That was my thought too. The real WTF is that Anonymous admitted that it was his/her fault!

  • (cs) in reply to nb
    nb:
    I think I already heard this one too.

    Who cares?

  • (cs)
    Jim wasn't quite sure how to take that and thought for a few seconds about how to proceed without sounding insulting.

    this is probably the hardest thing for techs to do ever.

    M.I.K.e:
    One customer called that he didn't see anything on his display. Tech support went through all the typical options (power, turned on, connected, etc.). In the end it turned out that the display was working fine, only the customer didn't see what he wanted to see.

    whoa... very 1984-ish...

  • Dale (unregistered) in reply to paratus

    It's just simply a colloquial name for the whole plastic box which contains the actual 8088 chip, RAM, motherboard, hard and floppy disk drives, power unit, power cords, etc. It's just a colloquial way to refer to it so that people know that you're not talking about the monitor.

    The bank where I worked at the time had two separate options on the help desk line: one for PC and one for mainframe support. Many users didn't know whether they were using a mainframe terminal or a PC, and pressed the wrong option. Some who were obviously using mainframe terminals and mainframe systems nevertheless stubbornly insisted that they were using a PC and accessing mainframe systems locally, because simply they could see the display output in front of them. Even after I confirmed that there was nowhere they could insert a disk there were several that still insisted that they were on a PC. I finally had to cut them off and personally transfer them to the mainframe help option.

  • Dale (unregistered) in reply to Dale

    Forgot to add: I was replying to this earlier post in reply to my earlier post.

    ender:
    IBM:
    Dale:
    Finally, I got him to press the On button on the CPU after he pressed the On button on the monitor. His next words were, "Well, I'll be . . ."
    I know XTs were a bit different from the modern PC, but...a power switch on the CPU?
    Some people refer to the tower as CPU. Still better than calling it modem or hard drive.
  • (cs)

    In the late 90's I worked tech support for an ISP (all dial-up back then). One call, in particular, stands out:

    This dad calls up yelling and raving mad that his kid can't connect to the Internet and we better get this working and fast or else! He hands me off to the kid and we started going through the process...touchtone? check... plugged in? check ... etc, etc.

    I spent hours going back and forth with this kid and having his father come on the line and yell at me for not being able to get his kid's Internet working. That kid learned more about the inner workings of modems and communications protocols in 4 hours (it was a slow Saturday and I had nothing better to do) than he would have learned in a term at college.

    We were still nowhere, however, and dad comes on and starts yelling at me again and in the course of his rant I learned that they were on a PULSE line (in 1999!). Well, now the fix becomes very easy and I explain to the dad that it wouldn't have taken 5 hours to solve this problem if I hadn't been LIED to at the very beginning and continuously misled throughout the subsequent calls. I had re-asked the question several times because all the described problems screamed "pulse" line but I was continuously told it was touchtone.

    The dad, who obviously had major anger issues, was so pissed at my commitment to get the problem fixed in the face of being LIED to that he actually complained to the BBB! Fortunately, I had kept a detailed ticket showing exactly what had gone on. The BBB refused to even deal with it when they read our submission.

    God, I'm glad I haven't taken a tech support call since 2001!

  • (cs) in reply to webhamster
    webhamster:
    In the late 90's I worked tech support for an ISP (all dial-up back then). One call, in particular, stands out:

    I admire your persistence to solve the problem, but ... not once in 5 hours of the call did you ever think to try ATDP instead of ATDT?

  • (cs) in reply to GavinO

    I tried taking your advice, but I think I broke my stapler and there's no staple in the DVD now :(

  • (cs) in reply to GavinO

    Ok, hit the wrong button the first time. Try this again:

    GavinO:
    I think the stapling one might actually be a good policy when sending in defective media. If the disk was already bad, there's the perfect way to make sure they actually send you a new one back.

    I tried your idea, but I broke my stapler and the staple didn't go through the DVD :-(

  • wthc (unregistered)

    Tech Support Heck: in section "Not Too Bright from Tony": Tech Support Heck:17: error: syntax error before "." token

  • Ryan (unregistered) in reply to ender

    Yes, and those people are wrong!

  • Dale (unregistered) in reply to webhamster

    Webhamster wrote: "This dad calls up yelling and raving mad that his kid can't connect to the Internet and we better get this working and fast or else! . . . I explain to the dad that it wouldn't have taken 5 hours to solve this problem if I hadn't been LIED to at the very beginning and continuously misled throughout the subsequent calls."

    It really amazes me that these kinds of characters expect to be helped when they are so obnoxious and untruthful. One of our helpdesk supervisors would let the managers of some of the worst callers (after all, we worked for the same company) know how they had conducted themselves. Sometimes the problems solved themselves, though; when some of the most regular and most obnoxious callers stopped calling, we usually found their names on the list of corporate terminations.

    Another I tried: when someone would act snotty as if he knew more than me when he called in, I would say something like, "Oh, it sounds like you know what you're doing," and give him the directions so fast he would need to ask me to slow down, and usually he would be more cooperative.

  • GetOutMuch? (unregistered) in reply to TakeASeatOverThere
    TakeASeatOverThere:
    The last one is a typical case of women and computers.

    Clearly posted by the Comic Book Guy.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    I wish MY users had a "Brightness" knob.

  • RC (unregistered)

    I had one similar to the 3rd one myself. We had a software engineer where I worked that had a laptop. Every few weeks he would come to us in IT support saying, "I'm not getting the broadcast email messages." Upon further investigation every few weeks we would find that he did not have his ethernet cable plugged in. Each time we would instruct him that it needs to be plugged in to receive emails and each time he'd argue that he'd never needed to plug it in before. Repeat two to three weeks later.

  • SpamBot (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    the screens back then didn't have colour.

    there seem to be a number of comments like this.

    I feel old.

  • anonymoose (unregistered) in reply to Justice
    Justice:
    Here's one for you: I'd been at my last job about three months. One fun thing they hadn't mentioned before I signed on was that every developer had to do at least one support ticket per month, due to the massive backlog of tickets (several thousand). They already had about four or five full-time support developers.

    Most of the tickets were generated from one big in-house application that all the sales and operations people used. Must have been a total pile of garbage, right? Well...yes, but it worked ok, and that wasn't the real cause of all the tickets.

    So I get my first support ticket: there's a problem with some transaction data not showing up in search results. I couldn't find anything in the software, so I took a look at our production database, and sure enough the data doesn't exist. These were transaction records from a year and a half before I even started there. Furthermore, I didn't have direct contact with anyone who was even in charge of this sort of thing (the company's IT org structure was a WTF in itself), and the only people I could contact were the "never return phone calls or emails" brand of programmer.

    I called up the lady who filed the report and told her "Yeah, the reason they're not being displayed is because they either weren't recorded or have been deleted. It's not a software problem; the data you want isn't in the database."

    I will never forget her response: "Well, where is it?! That's what I need to know!"

    Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.

    And you don't consider the data not being recorded to be a software problem???

  • Annoyed (unregistered)

    A modern version of the first case involves using a marker on CD that dissolves the silvery coating... That I can see some manifest of "dark matter" from the bottom of the discs.

  • ping floyd (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    You must not be a web accessibility person - due to color blindness, you should never rely on only color to impart meaning....

  • tinkerghost (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    Color is a pathetic way to differentiate fields from one another on the green or amber screen of a mid 80's dumb terminal. Funny no matter how red you make the green, it's still green.

  • whawk640 (unregistered)

    I used to do tech support for a restaurant chain. I got this call usually around 3:00 AM when a manager just has to punch the day's totals into Excel so he/she can go home.

    MGR: "Excel is broken" ME: "What do you mean broken?" MGR: "I don't know, it just moves all over the place." ME: "When does it do that?" MGR: "When I try to type numbers!" ME: "Do you see a button on the right side of your keyboard that says 'Num Lock'?" MGR: "Yeah, so?" ME: "Is there a light over it?" MGR: "Yeah" ME: "Is the light on?" MGR: "No" ME: "Push the 'Num Lock' button." MGR: "Hey, that fixed it... thanks!"

    This was all fine until I got the SAME call from the SAME manager the next night.

  • SimonTeW (unregistered)

    I'm not in tech support but being in IT I get asked to help by all sorts of friends and relatives. You know the story.

    Anyway, one day my flatmate, who was a sales and marketing manager and totally technologically illiterate, asked for help with the PC she had at home. It was an ancient green screen beast that she had inherited from someone else who was throwing it away.

    Something terrible had happened, she said. She turned on the PC and all she got was a blank screen. Had she turned on the monitor, I asked. Yes, the monitor was on. It was glowing bright green. No text, the whole screen was green. Strange, given that it should have been green text on a black background.

    Wandered over to have a look and found the problem in about 30 seconds. Sure enough the monitor was on but she had forgotten to turn on the PC!

  • Arancaytar (unregistered)

    "...all neatly stapled to the disk."

    That came out of nowhere. Wonderful punchline.

  • (cs)

    "...all neatly stapled to the disk."

    That came out of nowhere. Wonderful punchline.

    Edit: Except that the disk was being sent back for a sector failure and was irreparable anyway. You might have reformatted it, but magnetic disks aren't notoriously expensive.

  • Amorya (unregistered) in reply to tinkerghost
    tinkerghost:
    Color is a pathetic way to differentiate fields from one another on the green or amber screen of a mid 80's dumb terminal. Funny no matter how red you make the green, it's still green.

    After many years of programming on a BBC micro with green monitor, I can mentally assemble a colour image based on the varying shades of green present.

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