Recounting the amazing antics of end users can be one of the best ways for support techs to let off a little steam and keep their sense of humour intact. Here are some member-submitted doozies.
Technology may be evolving at warp speed, but one thing about IT will never change: Techs love to swap stories about the deficiencies of their users. The dumber, the better. That's just the way it works. How else are you going to make it through the week if you don't get to shake your head in disbelief after hearing at least one tale of epic confusion, ignorance, or arrogance?
TechRepublic (A ZDNet Australia sister site) member zlito started a discussion thread last December asking everyone to share their best user stories for 2005. An incredible number of members seem to have encountered users who created mayhem with magnets, asked for help locating the "any" key, used the CD drive as a cup holder, or took the word "desktop" to mean furniture. Others showcased user thought processes so bizarre and convoluted, you couldn't track them with GPS equipment. I've pulled a handful of classics to share with you here; check out the entire thread for more.
1. I had one user, the sweetest lady, who was not very computer literate. After she got her new computer, she said, "Where are my programs?" I told her that I had made shortcuts on her desktop to the programs she used. She said, "When I click on the icon, that's not the right program." When I asked her which program she was referring to, she said, "The third icon down." I asked her which program that was. "Oh, I don't know the name of it. I just know on my old computer, it was the third icon down program."
This one took a while.
â€"nabess@
2. Client: I don't understand why that accounting software cost so much. It's only been used once.
Consultant: What do you mean, it's only been used once? You use it every day.
Client: No, I don't. You used it once when you put the program on my computer and it's been sitting in the
box ever since.
...Time to get my money up front....
â€"BWestly
3. One of the contractors in my office ordered a new computer through his company. Unfortunately, he ordered a NIC with an RJ45 connector and we were on a coax network at the time. This was back in the days of Win95. I informed him of the problem and said I had a spare NIC to give him if he would order the correct NIC to replace the one I provided.
He got on the phone with his company and complained about the NIC. This guy thinks he is a computer genius, but
really just thinks that bigger, better, and more are always the solution. So he ordered everything he could think of in
this computer. Not a single bay was open and most of the slots were filled. Needless to say he had an IRQ problem.
His company gave him the number of the computer company and told him to call their sales department. I was
happy to see him on the phone because then he wasn't bothering me while I set up his computer. I overheard him
say to the sales department, "My land guy says I'm out of IRQs. Can I buy some more of those?"
â€"ldbollert@
4. We currently have a great policy for keeping e-mail to a minimum. It's only kept 90 days, then it's deleted, so if you want to save it past the retention period, you have to put it into a file somehow.
This has been in effect for several years, but amazingly, we had a couple of executives in the legal dept who built
up 40,000 messages in their inboxes each, without having any deleted. I finally got the connection when the new
"retention policy" was published. The company lawyers who wrote it had a line in the document that excluded
themselves from the policy and made sure they could keep everything forever!
â€"msholtva@
5. One of our marketing managers complained that he couldn't make any sense of a telephone
management spreadsheet I'd sent him because he couldn't see when the calls were made. I explained
that each worksheet in the spreadsheet had a name and the name indicated the applicable month. Two minutes later, he arrived at my desk saying that he still couldn't make any sense of the spreadsheet because there were no
dates in the worksheets. I opened my copy and showed him that the dates and times were in column A. He then
tried to tell me that I had sent him the wrong file because his column A just had "stars" in it! Oh boy -- was his face
red when I showed him how to expand the column! Makes you think, huh?!
â€"PhatKatz
I remember the launch of my old company's new website. The CEO actally managed to misspell the name of his own company and was treated on an avalanche of porn popups in front of a large audience.