Stories from Tech Support

I have messed around with computers for a long time. For three years I worked for Dell tech support and over that time heard numerous strange things from customers. It got to a point that Dell compiled a bunch of stories for a computer magazine article. I was remembering some of them and decided to throw into a blog. You may have heard some of these before or variants. I am sure some of these have happened multiple times with people. So if you got a few minutes or more of life to waste you can read about my geeky tech support stories.

In the defense of non computer people we have all done stupid things on computers. When I was a teenager my oldest brother bought a PC clone and it had a hard drive full of software. He asked me to analyze it and then teach him how to use it since I had worked with computers before. I was happily going through running utilities on it to see what they do. I ran one called “F” and suddenly nothing worked anymore. I realized that I had wiped out the entire hard drive in an instant. At that moment my brother asked how it was going, I replied no problem. I called the guy that sold the computer to my brother and told him I ran the “F” program. He chastised me for about ten minutes on how stupid I was and why would I run that program. After he qualified my lack of brains, he then asked if I had enough synapses to have run the backup as per instructions that came with the computer. I told him I did that the first thing. He saved the day as I reloaded all forty floppy disks and putting the system back to normal.

When I hired on with Dell they put me through a two week training course. They told us trainees a story of a tech that did whatever it took to take care of a customer. This tech had walked a customer into reseating all the cables inside the computer and for some reason the hard drive would no longer function. The tech felt so bad for the hard drive failure that he went to factory, picked up another drive, then drove from Austin to Dallas and personally fixed this customer computer that evening. That was inspirational but I thought to myself, I aint drivin’ four hours to fix someone’s computer. However after training was over and we were paired with experienced techs, I had to ask about that tech driving to the customer’s house. The mentor tech I was with laughed and said, “Let me tell the reality behind that story. The tech did screw up the hard drive of the customer and did go out there to replace it. But it was for fear of losing his job he did it, not some customer service mission. The customer was Michael Dell’s father. I don’t know why they keep using that lame story like it was a noble thing that happened.”

A customer called me and stated he had an application error. So he tried to solve it himself. His solution was to erase the hard drive and when nothing ran, he went into computer’s bios and set a password that he now cannot remember. Nothing like asking.

One of the things that a tech support person hated was when a customer’s neighbor or relative come over to help because they are an “expert”. The experts always argue with tech support and never want to troubleshoot anything. These usually end up the longest calls and least productive.

A lady called a tech and stated that random characters kept appearing her documents. The tech trouble-shooted keyboard errors and since the woman was in Austin he asked if he could just drop by and look at it. He came back to work telling us he solved the problem. The lady had poor eyesight and kept leaning over to see the screen closer while her breasts kept hitting the keyboard.

One lady called me up complaining that her new system would not work. I walked through the cables and she had the keyboard, mouse and monitor attached but no power cable. She complained that the computer was not able to power itself and would use her electricity. I had to ask if she was serious and she was. It took about fifteen minutes to explain why that computer must be plugged into her wall outlet.

A guy called me stating he paid for a 120mb second hard drive and his computer says it is 115mb drive. He wants the 5mb difference paid back to him. I told him lets just partition and format the drive anyway and see about his 5mbs. What he didn’t know is that after you prepare a hard for use the space is bigger than the “logical” size. So when it formatted I asked him to check the size then. It was 127mb available. I then told him he owed us money for the 7mbs. He told me that he owed nothing and the extra 7mbs are his. I had to laugh for five minutes after the call was over.

One lady called up and could not get her mouse to work properly. After a little bit it was discovered that she had the mouse on the floor trying to use it with her foot. She had mistaken it for a sewing machine like pedal.

A guy called up and said his computer is eating his 5.25 floppy disks. He kept inserting one after another and it wont eject them out. I asked how was able to get another one in the drive without the previous coming out. He said they just disappear in the drive. I asked him to take the cover off and there were all the floppies inside his computer laying on the motherboard. He was inserting them in a small crack between his floppy drives.

A lady called complaining that her 3.5 floppy drive holder was full and she had no other place to put another floppy disk. I asked her were the holder was and she said it was built into the computer. I looked at her order and explained she was putting floppies in the tape drive.

We had a guy that legitimately had a lemon system. It had been repaired twice already and I got a call from our onsite repairman there for the third time. The customer was drunk and I could hear him in the background screaming F%$# Dell repeatedly. While I was trouble-shooting the problem with the onsite tech I heard a yell. The tech said he had to let me go because the customer just fell down the stairs.

One tragic call came when a new guy I was training proceeded to tell a guy that his computer was freezing up on a program called PCTools. The customer sat the phone down and started beating on his wife for installing the program. The new tech was obviously very disturbed and wanting to quit. I talked to him for a while and explained he did nothing wrong. We will just report the call to management and move on. After a few days when the new tech trainee was in good spirits I made a picture that looked like a product label. It had a picture of a real domestic violence situation and had the PCTools logo and listed features about this tech. He thanked me for lightening him up and this tech eventually became a manager at Dell.

I got a call back from a customer that said he followed the tech’s instructions the previous night and know wants to know what to do. I asked him what did he do so far. He told me he took the computer memory out and sat it on the kitchen table overnight to let the viruses leak out of it. I was perplexed. I looked up the call log and sure enough the tech wrote that he advised the customer to pull the memory out and set it overnight on a table to let the viruses leak out. I had the customer put it back in and fixed the real problem. I then had a nice talk to the tech.

I had trouble with a customer that really was not a technical issue. I had called an internal help group called the pros group. They were there to help unusual situations when all else fails. I had proposed a solution and the lady in the pros group told me to do it as I suggested. Well later a manager that really did not like me much, found out about what I did when the customer called back to thank me. He chewed on me for violating policies in numerous ways. I explained I had got the ok from the lady in the pros group. He told me to call this lady up and get her on the phone because he is going to chew both of us out. I called her and explained the manager wanted to discuss it and she said she would come over and talk about it personally. Now everyone wore badges and your badge number reflected what number hire you were. I was like number 5860 and the manager was like 4789 something. The pros lady came up and asked the manager what the problem was. The manager kept staring at the lady’s badge and stuttering. The lady explained that she did not see a problem and the manager very politely agreed with her. I looked down and her badge number and it was 3. She just smiled at me and told me “good job Mike.”

I have many more stories but these last two are the pinnacle ones I can think of.

This one I know is true because the letter was scanned and sent to all the techs, it was a classic. A vice president of a company had a Dell notebook. This notebook had a trackball mouse on top behind the keyboard. His complaint in the letter was that he had to pull this mouse ball out and clean it fairly often. He would clean it by putting it in his mouth and orally cleaning it. One day while cleaning it he started chocking on it and a fellow employee hit him in the back causing him to swallow it. After he passed the ball, he put it back as it seemed ok. However he refused to clean it in the same manner. Dell sent him a regular mouse to plug in but no one forgot the story.

The last one was one that happened with me. I got a call from a customer that was a church. They had a server computer whose motherboard had failed. They were under warrantee and should be fixed the next day. However the system flagged me that the motherboards for that system were out of stock for three months. Of course the customer was irate and that was not acceptable. I asked them to let me see what I could do. I called around from department to department and no one had a spare motherboard. I was told they would have to wait and no replacing their system with another. However one manager advised I call a certain vice president and ask him. This VP sometimes keeps a motherboard of each system just in case a major customer needs one and this scenario happens. I called him and was trying to talk fast to convince him of my plight. What I did not know till half way talking with him that out of habit I always said my name and company like I was talking to a customer. I greeted myself as Mike at Dell. This VP heard “Michael Dell” and I realized this when he was very cordial and said he would take care of this customer right away. I was embarrassed but laughing inside myself. I responded to the VP; “See that you get it done!” He responded with a yes sir! The customer called me back the next day and said their server was fixed.