Back when I worked for a hosting company, we were moving between data center buildings. They were doing this via box truck, and there were about 4,000 servers to move. So, it was more than one evening of work. One of the nights we were in the middle of the transfer but weren’t actively moving servers, the CTO bravely volunteered to be the overnight NOC tech at the new location. I was the overnight sysadmin+NOC tech at the old location, and if she had any problems, she knew to call me.
So, around 2AM she called to tell me that one of our more important customer’s servers was down, and she couldn’t figure out why. She’d known enough to connect a crash cart ( portable monitor, keyboard and mouse) to the machine, but couldn’t get any response from it. I asked if she could get response from the num lock key, and she replied that she couldn’t.
“Is it powered on?” I asked. A moment later, she answered “Nope”. She pressed the power button, the server came up, and it was good for the next two days. That night it did the same thing, but I was on shift at that location. I diagnosed that the power supply was failing and replaced it.
When I was working dial-up support around the release of Windows 98, the provider I supported didn’t yet support Windows 98. It generally worked, but we weren’t allowed to support it. Everyone on the floor had gotten more than one call from a customer asking us to support their Windows 98 problem, and the customers generally took it gracefully.
I had a friend who got a call where the person on the other end opened the call with “Look, I have a Windows 98 system, and I know you don’t support Windows 98, but we know it’s still the same system. Can we pretend?”
My friend responded. “Yes, we can pretend. Can you go ahead and click on the apple in the upper left hand corner and click on ‘About this Macintosh’?”
“What? Wait, this isn’t an Apple machine, this is a Windows machine!”
“Yes, I understand that, but let’s pretend.”
“Oh. I understand. Thank you.”
I don’t remember the exact details, but my wife was attempting to help a fellow graphic designer with a bizarre display issue on her Mac. After walking over to watch her co-worker reproduce the problem, she observed that her co-worker’s boob was mashing the Apple command key. Repositioning the keyboard resolved the issue.