I’ve been enjoying, and contributing to, the tech support fail stories in that thread, but I didn’t want to hijack it too much more, and I thought this would make a good thread of its own. So here’s the place to share your tech support horror stories, either as a tech support person dealing with clueless users, or as a user dealing with clueless level one tech support. I have plenty stories from both sides…
To get things started, I mentioned in that thread being a sysadmin / desktop support long ago. This story goes back to the Great East Coast / Midwest Power Outage of 2003. Among many duties I had in this smallish company, I maintained the company server. It was plugged into a UPC battery backup unit that had maybe half a dozen plugs, of which only the server and its monitor were plugged in. The UPC backup unit was plugged into a power strip that was plugged into a wall outlet.
When the power went out I went around unplugging anything that could be damaged from a possible power surge when the power came back on, including the power strip that the server UPC was plugged into (which probably wasn’t necessary since the UPC would have protected the server, but I was thorough). When we realized this was no short blip, that much of the east coast and Midwest was out, we all went home.
When the power came back on a few days later, I was somewhere or doing something that prevented me from coming back into the office right away. The Accounting Manager was appointed as my second, even though he was a moron when it came to anything electronic. He called me in a panic— “I plugged the server back in, but it’s not coming back up”. The company was dead in the water without a running server. I tried to troubleshoot over the phone, but got nowhere. So I got into the office as soon as I could, and what did I find?
He had plugged the power strip not back into the wall outlet, but into the UPC backup- which was plugged into the power strip.
Not sure if this countsj, but it is indeed tomfoolery in tech support.
My ex g/f had a mother with whom I did not get on at all. But, being the nerd closest to her, I was often on tech support for her old laptop. It was Windows XP, massively underpowered and full of crap. She only used it to save more crap, email and very rare ventures into the scary internet.
Anyway. She was absolutely clueless. In every way. So she was amazed when I more than doubled her machine response time and overall performance.
The secret?
I found a skin for some Linux (can’t recall which, I think Ubuntu) that mimiced XP in every way. Stole Internet Explorer and Outlook icons and used them for Firefox and Thunderbird, and just explained away the minor differences as “obviously an update”.
It fucking worked. She got a few years more use out of the machine.
I assume the next tech support guy stiffled a giggle when she brought her machine in after I had left…
Heh, that reminds me of another ‘slow computer’ story from back in my sysadmin days. Our small company had the big 3 auto companies as our main clients, so our fortunes were tied to theirs. During one of several recessions we went through in my time there that severely reduced our auto business, I was keeping our aging and breaking down desktop computers patched up as best I could, since money was too tight to buy new computers.
One day the owner brings in a computer that used to belong to his son. It was a decent, newer model. He said for some reason the computer became so slow it was almost unusable, so they just bought their son a brand new one. But maybe I could get the old one working better and use it as a company computer.
Hmm, newer model computer, previously owned by a teenage boy, that was inexplicably very slow? I had a pretty good idea what the problem was. I fired it up (air gapped, of course) to find, with no surprise at all, that the HD was absolutely stuffed to the gills with downloaded porn and bootlegged music, probably off Napster or LimeWire. Just for giggles, since it obviously needed a HD reformatting, I ran an antivirus program off of a thumb drive and it literally found 70-something separate viruses.
I did download the music before I reformatted, and made sure it was well sanitized before enjoying it myself on my own computer. Even though he was a fair bit younger than me, we had similar tastes in music, and he had some really good, rare bootleg live performances.
Here’s some support tomfoolery. Or maybe it’s fuckery. I don’t know?
Part one: my company was expanded through organic growth and mergers faster than we could finish the buildout of our new campus. So we leased a shiny new underutilized building from a local expanding tech giant. It was a hell of a move, consolidating servers from across multiple buildings and floors into one new server room, but it was done to my outsider’s view efficiently and well.
But then some facilities consultant decided that our energy use figures were out of whack with the kind of work we did. They identified that we had the building air-conditioned all weekend as one of the sources of the problem. They set up the air conditioning to shut off at 5 PM on Friday and kick back on something like 6 AM Monday.
Let me tell you, the machines in the server room did not like it leadership support folks all had a busy weekend responding to temperature emergency pages. I recall the temperatures in that room got to something like 120°, with localized temperatures in the server racks probably higher than that. So of course after they got it cooled back down and fired everything back up the main server that supported my team had cooked its hard drives and didn’t come back.
So that’s Fuckery item number one. But that’s really a facilities problem.
Problem number two came when the tech team installed new drives in my server and attempted to restore from backup. Note the keyword ‘attempted’. Something that we found alarming in the moment was that the restore ran and completed in 30 seconds. Umm, what?
So the tech-support guy in charge of all the backups pulled the logs and realized he had been dutifully swapping tapes on a machine that had been failing to actually make a backup for months. Every backup run took less than 30 seconds for what should’ve been gigabytes to a terabyte of data but you know checking your work, that’s not a thing. Swapping the tapes was the only thing in the job description.
Not sure that this fits the theme but I have been having problems where a a saved PDF of a doc - eg, a quote I need to turn into a PO - would be missing all the details. It would look like the quote template with the vendor logos and whatnot, just missing the items, quantity and prices.
The thing was, the issue only had started recently, and seemed to depend on HOW I saved it (right click from original mail, to downloads vs to desktop from the opened version in Preview, etc.) So I could eventually get it to work, but it was really annoying.
So I called our tech support to see if anyone else had reported a similar issue. The tech asked me if I could try using another format to PDF, though unsurprisingly wasn’t able to suggest an alternative.
The thing is, I work for Apple, and was dealing with our internal support.
Not a specific story, but just some general experiences from a lifetime of providing tech support. There is the XKCD (I’m not going to bother to link) of Googling the error message, but this is the actual path that tech support usually goes.
Calm down the user enough that they can actually tell you what is wrong.
Listen to the user’s long ass story about how important it is that you fix the problem.
Calm down the user again, as they’ve worked themselves up telling you how important it is the problem be fixed.
Get a vague description of what is not working.
Ask leading questions to break through the user’s lies about the problem without actually accusing them of lying.
Ask them to show you what is happening.
Go fetch the user after they’ve wandered off.
Determine if the problem is actually related to a technical issue, or if it is the user thinking their action will have a different outcome than you know it will have.
More leading questions (and debugging user lies) to figure out what the user is actually trying to accomplish.
Attempt to convince user there is a better (aka functional) way to accomplish what they are trying to do.
Calm user down again as they have become threatened and defensive when told their method won’t work.
More leading questions about why the user is attempting to do whatever weird thing they’re doing.
Finally discover the actual technical problem which the user is trying to work around.
If unfamiliar, Google the problem.
Implement solution.
Calm user down again, with reassurance that you like problems that are easy to solve.
Do not call user out on lie that it “worked yesterday” when the user didn’t even have an account on the system they were trying to access.
Ok, here’s my best story. I was working for a company as a programmer, but we also did IT service for other companies, and sometimes I did software and hardware support on the side. One of our clients was a former employer of mine, that’s why I was always sent there when they had an issue. The company had their own sysadmin (whom I knew), but sometimes they needed external help.
So one I day I got a call from one of their offices “Please help! We can’t access our data!”. I asked “What do you mean, you can’t access your data?” “All our files are gone!” “Where do you store your files?” “I have no idea.”
So I got in the car and drove to the office, which had about 4 or 5 desktops running. I went through the rooms to look for any server or NAS, but all I could find, in an otherwise unused room, was a normal desktop with an external HDD attached, totally unprotected. When I asked, someone told me “Yes, that’s where all our files are stored.”
So I fired up that machine, went to the external HDD and saw that there was nothing on it. Nada. Zero files. Someone had deleted all the files. At least it wasn’t reformatted, but just empty. So I asked for backups. “We don’t do backups.”…What could I do? Good old Recuva to the rescue, a very fine tool you can restore deleted Windows files with, very reliable, especially when there wasn’t any write activities between deletion and restoring.It found hundreds of thousand files, several hundreds GB, and I was able to restore almost ANYTHING, with the exception of one file! This was the office’s whole workbase for four or five employees, and they would have been totally fucked if this hadn’t worked out. Or if the HDD had later failed, like they’re wont to do.
ETA: I later had a talk with their admin. The storage and backup strategy got improved…
I never did tech support as a formal job role. But I was the extended family’s pet nerd. Most of my tech support issues came from my aged MIL. Who did pretty well for somebody who bought her first PC, a 2-floppy used Dell, in about 1995 at the age of 70 and worked her way up from there to eventually Windows 7.
As she got older of course stuff got harder. She remembered what she’d learned years ago, even if it was no longer applicable to her current PC or OS. But she could not remember what she had done yesterday with her precious file(s) for one project or another.
Then she pretty well lost feeling in her hands. That makes typing and mousing kinda hard. And that’s when a new sort of tech support call started coming in.
“Help, my Gmail is frozen!” Some more Q&A and I get that the mouse pointer moves, but seconds after you move the mouse. And the keyboard seemingly doesn’t work. So I drive over (15 minutes) to see what’s what. There’s GMail in an Internet Explorer window maximized on her screen. So far so ordinary. But …
Yep, the thing is so sluggish it takes many seconds to respond to Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Some careful examination of IE’s chrome says she has about a jillion tabs open. On my phone I Google up the keystrokes for “display tab list”, key them in them blind and wait 5 minutes. Yep. 1 jillion tabs, each displaying GMail.
Reboot and all is well. Until next week when the same thing happens. Lather rinse repeat for a month or two. I finally caught her at it one day while we were doing something else on her computer. Turns out she was laying her left hand unnoticed on the keyboard in such a way that the “Open duplicate tab” chord was being played on autorepeat. She couldn’t feel a thing. Poor dear. She was still emailing and whatnot at age 96-1/2.
In my IT career I was a dev. And was often the goto guy for the “impossible” to debug problems.
My big learning was it was nearly impossible for many people, even devs, to distinguish between what they’ve observed or proven to be so, and what they’re guessing is so, or believe ought to be so.
It’s not just carelessness, it’s a blindness. Start by assuming nothing and prove everything step by step. Then you’ll get to your problem.
Sadly, I don’t remember, but I also remember to see nothing shady on that drive. But in general, I have the principle to never care for or even examine the data of my clients, may they be customers, friends or acquaintances. That’s none of my business as a support guy.
Without confirming nor denying that I was ever a consumer of porn, I will say that the porn on his HD was nothing that, even back in the 20-aughts, couldn’t be found anywhere on the internet. I was surprised he bothered to download it, and didn’t bother to delete it when he gave it to his dad to hand off to his dad’s IT guy.
I was a manufacturing engineer on assembly and test lines. Part of my job was keeping equipment running so they’d rely on me when things broke down or appeared to break down. On occasion I’d be very busy with other stuff and I would tell the techs to not bother me for the next few hours unless it was extremely critical. One particular tech who I liked very much was a bit of a worrywort and would ask for help for things that weren’t that big of a deal.
Not fifteen minutes after my speech he called my name and waved me over. I was completely exasperated and was like, “this better fucking be important”. He walked me over to the service bay and there was smoke pouring out of a UPS. All I had to do was unplug it but I was laughing my ass off. Something was literally on fire so I guess that counted as important. He wanted to quietly call me over to not cause panic.
It became a running joke between us. “I’m busy right now, something better be on fire.”
“I’m trying to install your product and its not working! I can’t get past disk 1!”
So I go over there and notice empty disk sleeves on the desk. I open up the computer and yep! There are (IIRC) three 5.25" floppy disks stuffed into the drive somehow. I replace the drive and watch the user start installing again … y’know she had a point? The install process did say “insert disk 1” “Insert disk 2” … it never said to remove disk 1.
