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YOU CAN'T BEAT USERS.
YOU'D LIKE TO SOMETIMES, BUT YOU CAN'T!
A collection of customer service stories submitted by Alan Crease
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)
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 colours would print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colours 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 coworkers 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?"
Sometimes the user can teach us a thing or two about tech support!!!
A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer.
The tech asked her if she was "running it under Windows."
The woman then responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his is working fine."
Tech Support: "OK, press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now 'P' to bring up the Program Manager."
Customer: "WHAT !!!!"
Tech Support: " 'P' "
Customer: "What do you mean?"
Tech Support: " 'P' on your keyboard."
Customer: "I'm not going to do that!!!"
Overheard in a computer shop:
Customer: "I'd like a mouse mat, please."
Salesperson: "Certainly sir, we've got a large variety."
Customer: "But will they be compatible with my computer?"
I once received a fax with a note on the bottom to fax the document back to the sender when I was finished with it, because he needed to keep it.
Customer: "Can you copy the Internet for me on this diskette?"
I work for a local ISP. Frequently we receive phone calls that start something like this:
Customer: "Hi. Is this the Internet?"
Some people pay for their online services with cheques made payable to "The Internet."
Customer: "So that'll get me connected to the Internet, right?"
Tech Support: "Yeah."
Customer: "And that's the latest version of the Internet, right?"
Tech Support: "Uhh...uh...uh...yeah."
And now one specially for Ian Paisley!:
Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager icon."
Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows - because of the icons - I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't believe it was meant to..."
Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'.I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of a filing cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?"
Customer: [click]
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.
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 beetroot 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.
I received this e-mail from a friend:
"HelpCanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"
One of my friends works in the customer service call centre of a national pager company. He deals with the usual complaints regarding poor pager operation, as well as the occasional crank caller demanding to be paged less often, more often, or by more interesting people.
The best call came from a man who repeatedly complained that he keeps being paged by "Lucille." He was instructed that he would have to call her and tell her to stop paging him.
"She don't never leave no number, so I can't call her back," he said.
After three such calls, someone thought to ask how he knew it was Lucille if she didn't leave a number. "She leaves her name" was the reply.
After establishing that the customer had a numeric-only pager, the light bulb came on. "How does she spell her name?" the service rep asked.
"L-O-W C-E-L-L"
(Ed: U.S. English for Low Battery)
