Friday, December 19, 2008

True tales from the help desk

Helpdesk: "What kind of computer do you have?" "A white one."
Helpdesk: "Click on the 'My Computer' icon on to the left of the screen." Customer: "Your left or my left?"
User says: "My monitor did not pass the drop test during our department move. I would like to get another one."
Customer: "My keyboard is not working anymore." Helpdesk: "Are you sure it's plugged into the computer?" Customer: "No. I can't get behind the computer." Helpdesk: "Pick up your keyboard and walk 10 paces back." Customer: "Okay." Helpdesk: "Did the keyboard come with you?" Customer: "Yes." Helpdesk: "That means the keyboard is not plugged in. Is there another keyboard?" Customer: "Yes, there's another one here. Ah, that one works!"
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.
Systems Admin is browsing among the digital cameras at a big discount store when he overhears another customer complaining about the cost of the digital film for her camera. "She said it was too expensive to keep buying memory cards because she filled them up so quickly." He explains to her that she can copy her pictures from the cards onto a computer, then erase the cards and reuse them. The customer is delighted for a moment, then she frowns and asks, "Now what am I going to do with those 25 extra cards?"
New employee complains to help desk that there's something wrong with her password. No, it's not CAPS lock. "The problem is that whenever I type the password, it just shows stars," says user. Those asterisks are to protect you, tech explains, so if someone were standing behind you, they wouldn't be able to read your password. "Yeah," user says, "but they show up even when there is no one standing behind me."
Customer: "I have problems printing in red." Helpdesk: "Do you have a color printer?" Customer: "Ah. Thank you."
Customer: "I have a huge problem. A friend has put a screensaver on my computer, but every time I move the mouse, it disappears!"
Helpdesk: "How may I help you?" Customer: "I'm writing my first e-mail." Helpdesk: "Okay, and what seems to be the problem?" Customer: "Well, I have the letter 'a' in the address, but how do I get the circle around it?"
"I know you'll think I'm crazy, but Elvis keeps crashing my computer," this user tells help desk. And she's right - when she takes a CD-ROM out of the drive, Elvis starts singing. It was finally figured out: Apparently, she put an Elvis CD in the drive on top of another CD, and it got stuck on the plunger of the CD-ROM drive. When she took out a CD, Auto-run would start the audio CD (stuck on the plunger), and Elvis started singing!
A lady was 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."
"Everything on my laptop is turning blue," user complains. Support rep hustles to the scene and finds user has attached the laptop to a video projector. The wall you're using as a projection screen is painted light blue, support rep patiently points out. "I know that!" user snaps. "I'm not stupid. Just fix the thing so it projects white!"
A distraught young lady weeping beside her car. "Do you need some help?" 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 don't know. Do you have an alarm, too?" I asked. "No, just the 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 as it's a long walk."
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."
A Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the tech discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.
User has got her third replacement monitor in as many months, so support tech checks it out - and finds water under the monitor, but no source of a leak. The next day, he's walking by and catches the user's new secretary in action. "I explained to her that watering a plant on top of any electronic equipment is a bad idea, and that maybe watering an artificial plant wasn't the best use of her time either." True story from a Novell NetWire SysOp: Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?" Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?" Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?" Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?" Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer." Tech: "Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotion, at a trade show?" Caller: "It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotional. It just has '4X' on it." At this point the Tech Rep had to mute the caller, because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off the drive!

Time-saving keyboard shortcuts

A colleague of mine once lost one and a half hours of work when his computer froze because he forgot to save the Word document he was working on. Because he had not even done a first-time save, the program could not recover anything. Sadly, this is an all-too-common experience. I've got into the habit of saving my work every five minutes of so, which has saved my skin more times than I can recall. (The habit is so ingrained that one time I even wrote something by hand on a piece of paper, and then tried to save that!) I think one of the reasons people don't save more regularly is they don't like making a special trip to the menu bar at the top of the screen. This is where keyboard shortcuts are invaluable. It's easy to type an extra letter without breaking your flow of work. Control-S (on the Mac, Command-S) saves in every program I know. Here are a few more universal shortcuts that I hope will become second nature to you:
Ctrl-C : Copy
Ctrl-V : Paste
Ctrl-P : Print
Ctrl-W : Closes the document window
Ctrl-N : Opens a new document
Ctrl-O : Opens an existing document (via a popup dialogue box)
And here are a few common shortcuts for text selected in most word-processing programs:
Ctrl-i : italic
Ctrl-b : bold
Ctrl-u : underline
Ctrl-a : selects all text in the document
Another useful one: Pressing the Tab key when filling in forms or fields jumps you to the next field or part of the form.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

It's not your fault, Part II

"All these labels -- 'geek' and 'nerd' and 'mild Asperger's -- are all getting at the same thing. ... The Asperger's brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you're working on right now." (Temple Grandin, an associate professor at Colorado State University, on the connection between people with a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome and IT professionals.)

Using a camera as evidence

Writing in The Box (The Press's weekly technology section), Will Harvie has a good tip when you are returning hired or leased goods (in his case, a storage locker). He took pics of the locker just before surrendering it, to prove it was in good condition after he had finished. He had learned his lesson from a previous rental car hire, as the agency claimed he had damaged the vehicle, when he was positive he had not but could not prove his claim. All digital cameras can add the time and date to the photograph, so you have good evidence to back up your side of the story, if it should ever come to a dispute.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Trumping telemarketers

The lady of the house answered the phone, to a heavily accented voice at the other end. "Good day, madam," he said. "How are you today?"
"Actually, I'm not feeling very well at the moment," she replied (which was true). "Can I tell you about it?"
CLICK!
Guess the telemarketer's script didn't cover that.