Tips on dealing with tech support
Its a little long, but good!
Tips for Dealing with Tech Support
1. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error
messages from here.
2. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. It's
nothing for us to remember 3,000 screen saver passwords.
3. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it
buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals,
dried flowers, bowling trophies and Popsicle art. We don't have a life
and find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping
you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your
mail because your computer won't power on at all.
5. Don't put your phone extension in your e-mails to the help desk. We
need to keep an eye on the address book performance.
6. When I.T. support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it
at once. We're just testing the public groups.
7. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and
spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.
8. When an I.T. person is having a smoke outside, ask him a computer
question. The only reason why we smoke at all is to ferret out those
clients who don't have e-mail or a telephone line.
9. Send urgent e-mail all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and
flags it as a rush delivery.
10. When you call an I.T. person's direct line, press 5 to skip the
bilingual greeting that says he's out of town for a week, record your
message and wait exactly 24 hours before you send an e-mail straight to
the director because no one ever returned your call. You're entitled to
common courtesy.
11. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's
electronics in it.
12. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer
support. We can fix your line from here.
13. When you have a dozen CGA monitors to get rid of, call computer
support. We're collectors.
14. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T.
person's chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the
problem. We love a puzzle.
15. If you hate your mouse, get some other pointing device and discard
the manual. We know all the keyboard accelerators.
16. When an I.T. person tells you that computer monitors don't have
cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.
17. When you get a message about insufficient disk space, delete
everything in your Windows directory. It's nothing but trouble anyway.
18. When you have an I.T. person on the phone walking you through
changing a setting, read the paper. We don't actually mean for you to
do anything; we just love to hear ourselves talk.
19. When an I.T. person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in
a scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by
shortly?"
That'll get us going.
20. If you have a 14-inch monitor that says VGA on it, set the display
to true color, 1024 x 768. You'll never again have to worry about
people reading confidential files over your shoulder.
21. When we offer training on the upcoming OS upgrade, don't bother.
We'll be there to hold your hand after it's done.
22. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times.
Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
23. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to
all 68 printers in the branch. One of them is bound to work.
24. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly
what you mean by "my thingys outta whack".
25. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.
26. If you're taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go
around and update the network drivers for you and all your co-workers.
We're grateful for the overtime money.
27. When an I.T. person makes popcorn, help yourself while he's checking
out your access rights. And we keep chocolate in the top drawer, too.
28. When you have an I.T. person fixing your computer at a quarter past
noon, eat your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly
dizzy.
29. Don't ever thank us. We're getting paid for this.
30. If you're an intern, feel free to bring in all your friends from
college and have your Daddy complain to our boss when we won't let them
use the scanner. We had no friends when we were in college; that's why
we're such a bunch of tight- assed little twerps.
31. When an I.T. person asks you whether you've installed any new
software of this computer, lie. It's nobody's business what you've got
on your computer.
32. When an I.T. person finds the AOL shortcuts in your Recycle Bin,
tell them you've never seen those before. We couldn't tell bullshit if
it kicked us in the face.
33. If you have NT, feel free to change the local administrator's
password to "biteme" and promptly forget it. We like installing NT.
34. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your
dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were
designed to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.
35. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail
upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin
crumbs and nail clippings in them.
36. When you receive the new Yanni CD for your birthday, shove it into
any slot on the front of your computer. We like getting physical with
5.25 floppy drives.
37. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes
button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be
doing it, would you?
38. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit
uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up.
We don't have any money to speak of anyway.
39. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about
that computer crap". We don't mind at all haring our area of
professional expertise referred to as crap.
40. When you need to change the toner cartridge, call I.T. support.
Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and
Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional
engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.
41. When you can't find someone in the government directory, call I.T.
support. Due to budget restrictions, we double as 1904.
42. When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call I.T.
support. We love to hack.
43. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary
to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a
third party who doesn't know jack **** about the problem.
44. When you receive a 30-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a mail
attachment. We gots lots of disk space on that mail server.
45. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller
chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the
queue.
46. When your eyes fall on the family pictures on an I.T. person's desk,
exclaim in a flabbergasted tone of voice: "YOU have a child?!?!?" We
need to be reminded of how lucky we were to ever have got laid.
47. When an I.T. person gets on the elevator pushing $15,000 worth of
computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: "Good grief, you
take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?!?" That's another one that
cracks us up to no end.
48. When the Finance folks are printing a 100-page spreadsheet on the
LaserJet, send your black and white print job to the color printer. We
get the black toner for free.
49. When you loose your car keys, send an e-mail to the entire
department. People out in Wagga Wagga like to keep abreast of what's
going on.
50. When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a
Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.
51. When you see an I.T. person having a beer with a member of the
opposite sex on a Friday night, walk right up to them and ask a computer
question. We don't do dating; the reason why we have that horny look on
our faces is because we're discussing the new Intel processor.
52. Don't bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own.
Computer names are just a cosmetic feature in NT 4.0; they won't be
doing anything useful until the next major release.
53. When you can't access some shared directory on your boss's machine,
just tell us you've lost your X: drive. We know all that **** by heart.
54. If you need to buy a computer for your daughter in college, feel
free to pick our brains while we're taking a leak. We're good at
talking shop with our dicks in our hands.
55. If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on
the weekends and do his projects on your office computer. We'll be
there for you when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your
Access 95 database flip out.
56. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office,
leave the documentation at home. We'll find the jumper settings on the
Internet.
57. We're aware of the problem with computers just sitting there and not
doing anything. We're confident that with the next service pack they'll
be able to dance the jig.
58. The correct location to store important files is the Recycle Bin.
It's just like a real office, where you keep your tax receipts in the
blue can under your desk.
59. If you miss Windows 3.1, find the line that goes shell=explorer.exe
in your SYSTEM.INI file and replace it with shell=progman.exe. It makes
troubleshooting infinitely easier when we ask you whether you have a
Start button at the bottom of your screen and you truthfully answer us
that you don't.
60. If you curse every morning when you start to type your password and
the Virus Shield splash screen pops up in your face, disable the Virus
Shield. Again, this is just like real life: if you don't like condoms,
just don't use them, that's all.
61. If you hate PC's, get on the Internet and download one of those
desktop enhancements that make your computer look just like a Mac, down
to the sad faces replacing verbose error messages. We find it
refreshing to troubleshoot the nuances in that sad little face instead
of some cold forbidding hexadecimal integer.
62. When you detect a French accent in an I.T. person's voice, switch to
French. We don't mind that your level of fluency is that of a mildly
retarded 4-year-old; you don't make a whole lot of sense in your mother
tongue either.
63. We don't really believe that you're a bunch of ungrateful twits. It
hurts our feelings that you could even think such a thing. We wish to
express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of clueless losers
portrayed herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely
possible.
64. Keep it crashing!
