User problem stories

As a network admin i get a lot of my users who come to me with their pc troubles.
I thought i would be fun to put up some stories about these troubles and what caused them (especially the funny and dumb ones)

A nice one was for example a laptop user who came to me complaining his laptop was booting soooo slow and kept Bsoding well after a brief inspection i found the cause of his problem (pretty hard to mis)
the dear man had 2 virusscanners installed wich started at boot but that's not all after the scans he loaded about 15 programs in the taskbar icq aim realplayer msn and some more i cant remember this was all too much for his celeron cpu wich died a honorfull dead and presented a nice last BSOD
:D :D

another nice one was a user of mine who had a broken modem (so he said) i come down there inspect the pc and find the phone cord connected to the ethernet adapter being held there by a huge bunch of tape he point out to me that the tape was there because the cable kept falling out (Duuuh):eek: i point 2 pci slot's down to the modem wich reads Phone at the side take the tape of the cable plug it in and start his dail-up problem fixed i just wished him a happy day and walked off because i knew i wouldn't be able to keep myself from laughing any longer

Aonther good one is when the have desk fans to close the monitor and you get the call for flickering screens.

Also, I had on where he was using windows 98. Turned off the monitor and after lunch called me complaing his computer would not turn on.

Another nice one: a customer couldn't get connected to the network so the local administrator called us (a firm where I did a studentjob as technician) to help, they tought the cable was corrupted: so we went there with cables and stuff... the domain name was wrong typed.

---------------"Gotta love the Caps Lock"---------------------

It is always funny when you work on a users p.c. and you tell them to re-enter their own user i.d. and they call you back saying that they can't log in... but they never listened when you asked them to relogin. Even then, they say that they did when they didn't. The biggest challenge that arrises every day is being able to accurately evaluate what the user did when they don't tell you the entire truth about what went wrong with the pc.

I have a couple that are worth sharing.



At my work, we have a lot of salesmen working from home that we have to support. About 2 summers ago, there was one that called us up because he had just bought a new printer and couldn't hook it up. We began to give him the usual instructions on how to hook up a printer, but he reported that there was no printer port on his computer. We looked up his computer model in our database, and found that he did indeed have a printer port on his motherboard. We fought with him for hours...."Look on the back of your computer for the big pink port."...to which he always replied, "There isn't one." Finally, on a hunch, another tech instructed him to turn his computer off and back on. Not ten seconds later, he reports that everything was the same. He was looking on his monitor! We had to let him go and call him back the next day so he wouldn't hear us laughing at him. So the next day comes, and we call him up and begin to instruct him where to look of the printer port. In the middle of the explanation he says, "Oh, the modem.....why would I plug my printer into my modem?"
We had to wait until next week before we could call him back without laughing.


Another random act of user stupidity I had the pleasure to experience happened my first summer on the job. In those days, we used to send out zip disks to our salesmen with certain updates and upgrades, as our frame relay was sooooo slow. One of the salesmen called us up asking for help on installing one of the updates. Here's how it went:

Me: Just go to the update directory, and click on the file named "update".
Him: Um, yea.....where's that?
Me: Did you get the disk we sent you?
Him: Yes.
Me: Did you put in the drive?
Him: No.
Me: Put it in the drive, please.
*pause*
Him: Um....do I have to insert this disk in all the way?
Me: *snicker* Hey, just got *snicker* another call. Can you hold?

*RTFM*