Geeks Rule

Geeks Rule!

Get a Life

Customer: "Your sound card is defective and I want a new one."
Tech Support: "What seems to be the problem?"
Customer: "The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming out of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the left. It's defective."
Tech Support: "You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker to the right side of the machine and vice versa."
Customer: (sputter) (click)
Tech Support: (snicker)

Customer: "I'd like to return this scanner."
Store Clerk: "Excuse me?"
Customer: "This scanner I bought. I paid eighty dollars for this scanner, and it doesn't work!"
Store Clerk: "Uh . . . sir, that's a trackball."
Customer: "No, it isn't. It says 600 dpi tracking resolution right here!"

Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having
problems: the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the basics, then came over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As the paper started coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me. I told her to WAIT until the paper came out on its own. Problem solved.

I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division for about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine. Every color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for help; they offered no new ideas.

After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly, "Should I try printing on a piece of white paper instead of this yellow construction paper?"

A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find it!

Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got the message, 'No Carrier,' on my screen.
What's wrong?"

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong. Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer." (Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.)
Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't initialized."
Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
Customer:(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it'?"
Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards. She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed look on her face.

She called the teacher over and explained that no matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced.

I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

They both jumped back, silenced. "What the . . . " the teacher said. I typed, "I said leave me alone!"

The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!" It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.

Me: "Don't touch me!"

Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."

Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!" Etc. Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair laughing.
After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red. Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.

I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program. My friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he kept getting the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to press only on the very top of the key. When I taught him about the shift key, he thought I was a genius.

This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied" message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his user name and password in capital letters.
Tech Support: "OK, let's try once more, but use lower case letters."
Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard

Translated from latin scroll dated 2BC

Dear Cassius:

Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven't much time left. I don't know how people will cope with working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it to us to sort it all out at this last minute.

I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius hadn't done something about it when he was sorting out the calendar. He said he could see why Brutus turned nasty. We called in Consultus, but he simply said that continuing downwards using minus BC won't work and as usual charged a fortune for doing nothing useful. Surely we will not have to throw out all our hardware and start again? Macrohard will make yet another fortune out of this I suppose.

The money lenders are paranoid of course! They have been told that all usury rates will invert and they will have to pay their clients to take out loans. Its an ill wind ......

As for myself, I just can't see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards. We have heard that there are three wise men in the East who have been working on the problem, but unfortunately they won't arrive until it's all over.

I have heard that there are plans to stable all horses at midnight at the turn of the year as there are fears that they will stop and try to run backwards, causing immense damage to chariots and possible loss of life.

Some say the world will cease to exist at the moment of transition. Anyway, we are still continuing to work on this blasted Y zero K problem. I will send a parchment to you if anything further develops.

If you have any ideas please let me know,

Plutonius
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The Top 15 Unforeseen Consequences of The "Millennium Bug"
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15. IRS demands a hundred years of interest from stunned taxpayers.

14. "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" song gets stuck in infinite loop.

13. At the stroke of midnight, Windows 99 turns back into DOS1.0, the Pentium V turns back into an 8088, and the Handsome User is left holding a beautiful glass mouse.

12. Internet Movie Database now lists "1901: A Space Odyssey"

11. Residents of Indiana have to figure out if they're off by 999 years, 364 days and 23 hours, or 1000 years and one hour.

10. Bob Dole's age erroneously listed with only 2 digits.

9. Mel Brooks's "2000 year old man" skit stops being funny....Oops, too late.

8. Sales of Coca Cola jumps drastically after original cocaine-laden formula becomes legal again.

7. Software engineers point out that since computers think it's almost 1900, we technically have to "Party like it's 1899," which, frankly, doesn't seem like much fun.

6. Microsoft declares the year 1900 to be the new standard of the "Gatesian" calendar.

5. Jesus shows up late for His second coming, blames it on COBOL programmers.

4. Computers temporarily fooled into thinking Strom Thurmond is only 103.

3. First Top 5 List of the year? "Reasons No One Would Ever Assassinate President McKinley"

2. Using a computerized adoption service, Michael Jackson mistakenly takes home some octogenarians.

...and the Number 1 Unforeseen Consequence of the "Millennium
Bug"...

1. Unexpected demand for COBOL programmers results in severe understaffing of fast-food restaurants.
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I saw a lady at work today putting a credit card into her floppy drive and pulling it out very quickly. I inquired as to what she was doing and she said she was shopping on the internet, and they asked for a credit card number, so she was using the ATM "thingy".
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I worked with an individual who plugged their power strip back into itself and for the life of them could not understand why their Computer would not turn on.
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1st Person "Do you know anything about this fax-machine?"
2nd Person "A little. What's wrong?"
1st Person "Well, I sent a fax, and the recipient called back to say all she received was a cover-sheet and a blank page. I tried it again, and the same thing happened."
2nd Person "How did you load the sheet?"
1st Person "It's a pretty sensitive memo, and I didn't want anyone else to read it by accident, so I folded it so only the recipient would open it and read it."
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I recently saw a distraught young lady weeping beside her car. "Do you need some help?" I asked.
She replied, "I knew I should have replaced the battery in this remote door unlocker. Now I can't get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to a distant convenience store) would have a battery for this?"
"Hmmm, I dunno. Do you have an alarm, too?" I asked.
"No, just this remote 'thingy,'" she answered, handing it and the car keys to me.
As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, "Why don't you drive over there and check about the batteries...it's a long walk."
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Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.
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One of our servers crashed. I was watching our new system administrator trying to restore it. He inserted a CD and needed to type a path name to a directory named "i386." He started to type it and paused, asking me "Where's the key for that line thing?" I asked what he was talking about, and he said, "You know, that one that looks like an upside-down exclamation mark." I replied, "You mean the letter "i"?" and he said, "Yeah, that's it!"
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I was in a car dealership a while ago when a large new motor home was towed into the garage. The front of the vehicle was in dire need of repair and the whole thing generally looked like an extra in "Twister." I asked the manager what had happened. He told me that the driver had set the cruise control, then went in back to make a sandwich.
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And, one addition from a friend: She's been doing temp work at various offices. At one place she became the resident expert on the photocopy machine. One day there was a big backup. She went over to help and found that no one knew how to stop the copier from "punching" three holes down the side of each copy. She opened the paper tray, removed the three-hole paper and solved the problem.