Mike’s Blog

I just have to share with you todays classic.

A home user customer brought their PC in with a long list of problems.
He brought along his expert friend who proceeded to educate us on
various PC problems and how to fix them. 99% of the problems were down
to the user and not the machine. However, one problem baffled us and
that was the reported intermittent failure of his modem to dial up. OK
so he only brought the modem in, no power supply, no telephone cable, no
serial cable but no matter, we sold it to him and keep spares so we try
and try and try but cannot reproduce the problem.

Later customer + friend pick up the machine and within 10 minutes of him
getting it home reports the same problem so we send an engineer. The
engineer discovers two telephone cables plugged into the back of the
modem and into the same wall socket. Removing one of the cables restores
normal operation.

The reason he had done this was his “helpful” friend had suggested that
two connections would double his connection speed.

Next time I won’t feed the dog before they visit and I’ll slip a dog
biscuit in the friends pocket.

Later………

The same customer:
Cust: My email is not working
Us: What is your email address
Cust: I don’t know. Give me a clue.
Us: Its got an @ in it….

Todays collection of priceless quotes and cock-ups from our lovely customers.

Absence makes the mail go slower:
Cust: I can’t send any emails at the moment. I wondered wether it was anything to do with the new firewall?
Us: We haven’t installed your new firewall yet!
Cust: Yes I know but I just wondered wether that might have something to do with it.

Perpetual power:
(Earlier this customer had called to ask us to shut down the server while their sparks did PAT tests)
Cust: The UPS just made a noise and everything went off.
Us: Can you check that the UPS has been plugged back in to the mains socket?
Cust: Yes its plugged into the 4 way power block.
Us: The only 4 way power block there is the output from the UPS!
Cust: Oh!

What number:
Callout to a customer who is still on dialup and cannot dial out. The techie picks up the phone to check for dial tone and immediately hears interrupted dial tone.
Techie: You have a message waiting on 1571
Cust: I never use 1571. What number do I dial?

Looks familiar:
Customer comes in to pick up swap out monitor
Cust: Are you sure its the replacement? It looks exactly like the old one!
Us: Err… Yes, but this one works.

Get a call from a client today strangely from a mobile. “Our phones have stopped working!” Turns out they plugged their hoover into the UPS for the phone system..

Cust: My RAID array started beeping and I found that a drive had failed.
Me: OK no problem we just need to get a replacement drive to you.
Cust: Thats great. Can you help me with another problem?
Me: Of course.
Cust: Because of the noise of the alarm, I went into the raid configuration, removed the faulty drive and rebuilt the array. The alarm has stopped but the server won’t start up. What should I do?
Me: [sound of jaw hitting floor]
Cust: Hello?

Bugger me if I haven’t had another complaint about the float music! What is it with people this year? Look, we are towing Santa who is a commercial creation spawned from a pagan festival. I’m buggered if I am going to start playing nothing but Christmas carols. The kids love the popular tunes and like to see Santa bopping around. Lets keep it fun and I’ll see you all at the carol concert.