A wonderful way to waste some time:
This hilarious NSFW entry would be wonderful as just a short movie. This one proves that a language barrier is as nothing compared to a stupid barrier.
When I worked at the Apple helpdesk, I got a call transferred to me by Customer Service. Lady was pissed off because her brand new Mac wouldn’t work.
Me: “What happens when you power it on? Do you hear the start up chime?”
Customer: “Power it on? I haven’t done that.”
Me: “Okay. Is it plugged in?”
Customer: “Plugged in?”
Came to find out that she hadn’t even opened the box! And Customer Service was ready to issue her a full RMA.
I walked her through taking out the cpu, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and cables. I had her put it together, and plug it in, and when she turned it on, she got the lovely Mac chimes.
And she seemed surprised.
I had the “he said, she said” happen to me with a few older coworkers (all immigrants from places that aren’t particularly famous for their women’s libs). External customers aren’t the only ones who fail their perception rolls…
More often than I’m comfortable with I have people ask me to fax them their settlement drafts since I can’t do direct deposit. I giggled the first time it happened only to find out that the customer was serious.
I bet the customer in this case is a politician or a reporter:
And, just so everyone knows, there are even worse things than getting medical advice from a message board thread. (Bagel-dog-free and quite SFW, sadly enough.)
I don’t get too many customer calls (we deal mainly with dealers and service centers), but I had one woman call me up and say, “Hi, yes. I’m looking for parts for my husband.”
More an amusing slip of the tongue than stupid, but I did get one severely dense customer. He called up asking for parts for his 20 horsepower motor. When I asked him for model and spec he just repeated the brand. I explained that we needed a model and spec in order to determine what configuration it was and what parts it used. he was convinced he didn’t need any of that crap, it’s all the same! Try as I might I could not convince him that there are literally hundreds of specifications within any given engine model and they all have at least a few, and more likely dozens of parts that are different from one another because they’re all designed to an exact specification supplied by the OEM.
Then he got pissed off, shouted, and hung up, saying he’d never buy another [brand] again. I’d say we came out ahead on that one.
Actually, I tend to run into stupid tech support more often. Well, probably not actually stupid, but ignorant and following rote instructions. Like the level 1 “tech support” at SBC. These people have no idea what is going on, and are simply following a script. And you have to follow their script to the fricken letter before they will let you talk to somebody who actually has any idea what is going on.
A customer had just survived a flood, but had to tear everything out of the office. I had to put their who computer network together again. The internet connection was DSL. I had their username and password, and these are normally set up as PPPoE. But it was not making a connection. I was getting an error message that it had plenty of signal, but could not find an ATM connection. I told the “support tech” the error message. The MeatBot (a creature that looks and sounds like a human, but is actually a robot) insisted that we had to repeat every single step I had already done - reboot the modem, reboot the computer, reset the modem to factory defaults - and this pig-headed creature would not accept that yes, I had already DONE ALL THIS CRAP! (I had).
30 minutes of following the script, we were back where we were, with the same damn error message I had told him about ten seconds into the first conversation. Only then would he put me into the queue to talk to a “level 2 technician” - aka “someone with a clue”. Another 10 minutes waiting. Got the level 2 tech on the phone. He looked at it and pointed out “did you know this is a static IP?” The customer had changed from a dynamic IP to a static since I had set the system up. So it couldn’t answer a PPPoE request. The tech gave me the IPs, subnet mask, gateway and DNS servers and I was up and running in a minute.
ARGH!
Why couldn’t the MeatBot have transferred me to someone who knew what he was talking about without spending an hour (between the time waiting to talk to useless in the first place, talking to useless and waiting to talk to someone with a clue) and the blood pressure raising experience of talking to someone who had no idea what the problem, couldn’t help, and served only as a gatekeeper to prevent access to his opposite.
You want stupid tech support? Consider this (note second sentence):
The button she referred to was a simple javascript that set the MSIE home page. The fix was just to change the default home page to whatever you wanted.
I gave her instructions (and commented on how incompetent the tech support people were – a user might not remember how to do this, but any technician should). Her reply:
More memory!!! :rolleyes:
Why? See post #2. Most people that the gatekeeper deals with in any one day are stupid and/or lying when they say “they did that already”. It’s cheaper for the company to hire 10 Meatbots at minimum wage and 2 Level 2 Technicians at a living wage than to hire 12 Level 2 Technicians.
These threads are incomplete without The Vinegar Boy Saga, wherein a hapless clerk sells malt liter to a dumbass kid, who proceeds to drink it and get sick. He sics his mother on the clerk and, well, I don’t want to spoil it.
It is epic and brain-breaking.
Certainly is - though the stupid customer was only the start of it (and not necessarily the dumbest ass in the story). :eek:
We had the same sort of thing happen. We had a CD-ROM product in the early 1990’s when most people didn’t even have computers. We actually had to sell external CD-ROM drives with the product, and they were like $500.
A gentleman called us up with his new computer and CD-ROM drive still in boxes and said “Ok, what do I do now?”
I have one that is horribly stupid & sad.
Last week I had a patient say to me: “My daughter is pregnant. We’re really hoping for a preemie, since they are just so cute! Cross your fingers!”
WHAT? Children aren’t puppies!
Dark cold February night. Guy calls:
Me: XXX Realty.
Guy: Yes, I’d like to know the price of the house at XXX 2nd Street
Me: $239,000
Guy: No, the one on 2nd Street
I’m puzzled. 2nd St is only two blocks long and we only have one house listed.
Me: The price is $239,000.
Guy: I kinow that house and the price couldn’t be $239,000. I’m coming to your office to talk to you about it.
The guy goes to our old office. He calls me asking for our new address. We are located about 1/2 mile down the road and around the corner. It takes him two phone calls to get here.
When he arrives, my Boss is downstairs. She listed the property.
Boss: Can I help you?
Guy: Yes, I called about the house at XXX 2nd Street. The person on the phone would not give me the right price.
Boss: I listed the property. It’s $239,000.
Guy: I know that house and it would not sell for that amount.
Boss: Actually, we are getting a full price offer on it tomorrow.
The Guy left. Talk about making an ass of yourself.
I’d like to share a staff one if I may.
Here in England there’s a disappointing trend where branch offices of banks and building societies* simply ask Head Office when a decision is required. They don’t use any local knowledge, even if you’ve been a branch customer for decades.
So I’m expecting a pension payout today of £20,000 ($40,000). 
But the pension company tells me it will be paid next month. 
OK, then I need some money to tide me over. The quickest and cheapest is to extend my overdraft (from £3,000 to £5,000).
I make an appointment with a personal adviser in the bank branch where my account has been for nearly 20 years. (In all that time, I have only used my overdraft for 7 months.)
The adviser is a woman in her early twenties. She doesn’t know me, so looks up my account on her computer.
I tell her about the pension payment and show her the documentation. Then I ask for the overdraft extension.
She types laboriously into her terminal, asking questions like how much I earn. I work part-time now (I could retire immediately, but I like teaching!). I add that I own my own house, have no debt apart from the overdraft and also have investments with the bank of over £100,000. She doesn’t type any of that in (presumably the software doesn’t allow for it. :rolleyes: )
While waiting for the Head Office program to give approval, she states that I will need payment protection insurance. :smack: **I ask her why I need to insure a loan when I have ten times the loan amount arriving in one month’s time. She says that’s what she has to say because the computer says so, and won’t look at me.**The extension is refused. 
I ask her why, but she says she doesn’t know. She says she can appeal, but I will have to fill in forms and answer questions about my health etc.
I walk over to the Post Office, cash in £5,000 worth of Premium Bonds and send the money to my bank.
(*they do most of the mortgages in this country)
Not really stupid but moderately hilarious to me:
I asked a customer (engine engineer with a plant) to send me a screenshot of our control software with the error messages in question showing on the log screen.
What I got was a digital photograph of the screen, with the error log readable, but also, as it was a dark background, a good mirror image of the customer with a camera before his face. This still hangs on the wall at the side to my desk.
Damn you,** Derleth**. I’m on page 28 of that link and I can’t see me stopping anytime soon.
I used to work with a guy who had his own software company for a while. When they sent out a package, it would be on multiple floppies, and disk one would always be in a yellow case, I guess so it would be easily identifiable.
One particular customer had problems installing the software. No matter how many copies of the disks they got, it would never install right.
Long story short, “Oh, we threw out the yellow disks. We thought they had gone bad.”
I don’t deny the necessity of MeatBots, just that they should be trained to get the hell out of the way when they are dealing with someone with a clue.