Tech Support Horror Stories

John Karr
Company: CHEER
Tech Support Horror Story: We typically fix employees' personal computers for free, and one day a gal asked me to take a look at her home computer because the CD-ROM drive wasn't working.
I set the computer up on the bench, hooked up a monitor, keyboard, etc., and turned the thing on, observing the CD-ROM drive. It lit up and did its POST thing with no observable problems.
I then proceeded with my diagnostics by inserting a CD with some files on it to see if it could read the disk. After closing the tray it started to make some funny noises and would not read the disk at all.
Assuming that there was something wrong with the internal mechanics (judging by the noises it made), I decided to replace the drive. I began by removing the CD from the tray in preparation for shutting it down when I noticed a strange green object protruding slightly from the tray opening. Taking a pair of pliers I gently pulled out a 3-1/2 floppy disk her four-year-old son had inserted into the drive in an apparent attempt to get the CD-ROM drive to read a floppy disk.
Needless to say, the computer worked "fine" after that.

Cliff Hungerford
Company: Monsanto
Tech Support Horror Story: My wife's aunt and uncle, when first dealing with e-mail, couldn't figure out why they could only see the first few lines in an e-mail message. After 20 frustrating minutes on the phone, I went to their house to show them how to use the down arrow to scroll through their e-mail messages!

Jeanne Lambrakos
Company: First State Bank
Tech Support Horror Story: My friend had asked me to come over to her house to fix her computer. She told me the hard drive crashed. She told me that the monitor comes on but the CPU does not. So I brought with me a power supply. Upon arriving my eye caught the outlet plug and only the monitor was plugged in not the CPU. I plugged it in and guess what it runs. The easiest fix I ever had.

Tom Keter
Company: Excel Computer Systems
Tech Support Horror Story: I use the term right click and left click and don't think twice about it. I have a left-handed friend and everything in our phone fix call went good until the right click and left click were doing the same thing on the screen. I had never encountered this before, so I presumed that the mouse was defective. After going through this a couple of times I figured out that he was not changing buttons but changing hands. Right click was right handed and left was left handed. I explain the action more clearly now.

Felix M. Gonzalez
Company: HuntonBrady Architects, P.A.
Tech Support Horror Story: I gave a new mouse to a friend. She called me all upset claiming the mouse was not working properly and she was in the middle of an important deadline and had no time for computer problems. I went over to see what the problem was, and asked her to show me. "You see! It goes totally in the opposite direction I want it to go. It's definitely damaged," she said. I turned the mouse 180 degrees and said: "Try it now." "Oops, that was it?" she asked surprised. Never grab a mouse by its tail or it may bite you!

John
Tech Support Horror Story: I had been given a computer from a friend whose sister had died mysteriously. The PC had been part of the mystery as it had sustained damage and would not boot. I determined it was just a broken case, which affected the power switch. Simple fix. I got busy for a week and, as I own a computer repair business, and it got mixed in with some unknown PCs that I was rebuilding and giving to churches and schools. I started wiping out the HD on it to load a generic operating system and got interrupted (I was seconds from wiping out any record of my friend's sister--pictures, documents, etc. About two days later I saw her at the store and she inquired about the PC. I was horrified to realize that I had almost wiped it out.

Ed Glasheen
Company: NYS DCJS
Tech Support Horror Story: In 1999, I received a frantic call from Aunt "Mary" that she was having pornography downloaded to her computer. The explanation? AOL updates being downloaded to her 90-MHz Packard Bell on exiting AOL. These often caused "Illegal Operation" errors in Windows 95. She associated "Illegal" with "download," thus her assumption that "bad things" were being downloaded to her struggling desktop.

Jenifer Aydelotte
Company: Active Voice, LLC
Tech Support Horror Story: When my mom purchased a new 486, she gave my sister (a stay-at-home mom at the time) her 386. I helped to reformat the hard drive, reinstall the OS and set up some basic software applications. A few weeks later, I got a phone call:
D: "Jen, I need your help. The menu thing you set up on the computer isn't working."

Me: "What menu thing? I don't remember setting up a menu. Maybe Mom did that?"
D: "No, you did!"
Me: (slowly) "I don't remember setting up a menu for you. Can you describe what was on it?"
D: "You know, the menu that was on the screen when you first turned it on. The one with all the pictures!"
This same sister is now a senior support technician for a software company and knows that Microsoft Windows is not a "menu."

Gene S.
Tech Support Horror Story: Visiting with ex-inlaws, I was asked to help remove an annoying popup program from a Windows 98 system. Just a quick registry fix, right? I removed the program from the startup run commands and, upon reboot, the system would just not startup, complaining of registry problems. Naturally, the restore disk wanted to reformat the entire drive, so I ended up chasing around town and retail purchasing Windows 98 Second Edition. I did the "upgrade" and got the system up and running again, but that two-hour lunch ended up taking two days of a four-day vacation. I back up the registries now. We learn best from the mistakes we make.

David Steinberg
Tech Support Horror Story: I was talking on the phone to my father one evening, and he mentioned that he'd found this big file on his hard drive and didn't know what it was, so he tried to open it. (Dad's always been curious about how his PC worked, having worked on minis and Unix systems before he retired.) When he did, it was a bunch of random characters, but ever since then, the PC (running Windows 95 or 98) hadn't been working right.
I asked him what the name of the file was, and he told me "win386.swp," to which I said, "Oh. Dad, you remember virtual memory from your Unix workstation days? Well, that's the virtual memory on your PC. I'll come over and fix it for you." I did. And I got a promise from Dad not to touch that file again.

Tom Camp
Tech Support Horror Story: It was a beautiful August weekend when my friend asked me to help him install a wireless network in his home. Connecting several laptops and a desktop, along with figuring out why his desktop was running so slow, were top priorities. After a quick tour of the house to check the systems and their OSs, we made a trip to a local reseller to buy our equipment.
The first roadblock was getting his network to work. Although they had their cable modem installed, they had never been able to use it. After an hour with the local service provider, we determined that his laptop (from his work) needed to have the restrictions taken off it to allow network settings to be changed.
Finally, we found a laptop that allowed us to connect to the Internet and got the cable modem up and running (now three hours into the job).
Next we connected the wireless router, loaded its drivers and began to install the wireless cards. Upgrading to 802.11g, we chose to use the latest security features instead of simple WEP. Within another hour or so we had the laptops running great and turned our focus to the desktop, which was located upstairs. Using a USB wireless adapter, this system refused to connect to the network.
After another three hours of trying, installing XP updates, etc., I finally decided that I needed some support, so I went to the wireless hardware provider's Web site to see if there was a new driver, etc. Wow, it turned out that the USB adapter didn't support the new security options of the router, despite the fact that it was a 908.11g device from the same company.
Now six hours into the job, we reconfigured all the devices to use 64-bit WEP as suggested on the vendor's Web site. Eight hours and we were done!
So, next day I returned to set up antivirus, firewall, etc., on the desktop. After two hours of installing Norton Internet Security, including downloading many updates, I started the virus scan. On the slow Dell machine, this only took two hours, found over 100 problems and began the fix. I then discovered that Adaware was on the system and decided to run it to see what it found, as the system was ripe with popups before the scan. Woops! Running Adaware destroyed Norton Internet Security--no notice, just wiped out several modules as possible popup software! Now Norton refused to run at all.
No knowing that it was Adaware that caused the problem, I reinstalled Norton (two more hours). Ran Adware again! OHHH NOOOO. Again it destroyed Norton.

Six hours into the job, I gave up for the day and returned the next weekend and removed Adaware and installed Norton Internet Security again (another four hours with a final scan).
I can't wait for XP SP2!

Mark Woodhouse
Company: Emmaus Bible College
Tech Support Horror Story: This was a number of years ago, as you will see. I was helping a friend via phone with a backup problem he was having. Every night, he would back up his data onto a 5-1/4 inch floppy. But when he checked the floppy in the morning to confirm his backup, it was corrupted. After several frustrating calls, I drove over to his business to observe his end-of-day backup procedure. He did everything correctly, and when he removed the floppy from the drive he said, "Now, this floppy has a good backup on it, right?" "Yes, it does." I replied. "Well, it won't in the morning!" he said, as he reached over and hung it on a magnetic hook on the wall of his cubicle.

Jim Koelkebeck

Company: NGMS
Tech Support Horror Story: I asked my girlfriend to call our DSL provider to open a trouble ticket--DSL had been working and then abruptly stopped. I got a call from her later, and she was looking for the original phone line cable that was delivered with the DSL modem (I made my own cable from Cat 5e to span the 25 feet from the modem to the wall jack). I asked why, and she told me that tech support told her the cable I made was too long and the wires had overheated, melted together and shorted out the connection.

Cheri Bradbury
Company: Webincome.net
Tech Support Horror Story: Most of my stories are not funny; they are annoying. It seems everyone thinks they are computer experts just because they own one, yet so many are clueless about file structure, what a browser is and how to do anything if it does not come from AOL (yech). One friend loses her files constantly because when she downloads a file, she has no idea where it goes or how to find it. The latest incident is from Rita (not her real name). She has a business Web site with a new e-mail address. She is using AOL as her ISP. I tried to set up Mozilla's Thunderbird as her e-mail application and had some problems because AOL makes it tough to access the server her site is on. The next time we got on the phone, she said she couldn't make anything work except AOL, so she is going to buy a new computer. Hey, that works for me. :-)

Tim Osborn

Company: NWS Technology Services
Tech Support Horror Story: I kept getting a call from my friend, let's call her Jean, to fix a floppy disk that was leaking data. I would sit down with her, format the floppy, write data to it and read it. Everything was fine until I would leave. I would go back to her office, insert the floppy and it would be blank. I could not figure out what was going on. Finally, one day, out of frustration, she called me. I went over, reformatted the floppy and started to leave. As I was walking out the door, I looked behind me and saw her using a VERY large magnet to stick the floppy to the metal filing cabinet! I couldn't believe it! I told her, "I think I finally know what your problem is...the Magnetic Field of Death."

Robert Watson
Company: DeNuzzio Studios
Tech Support Horror Story: I built a new PC for my father and installed burning software for his DVD/CD burner. I shipped him the machine, and he got it in fine shape. The next day he called me to tell me that his burner was NOT working whatsoever. He said he had tried everything--rebooting, downloading trials versions of other software, reinserting the disk--he had even gone so far as to take the drive out of the machine, put ANOTHER drive in that he KNEW had worked, and it still wouldn't burn. I asked him to state exactly the steps he had taken for the first burn (keeping in mind that I had used the machine myself to burn a 4-GB DVD as a tester before I shipped it to him). He said he bought a brand new case of 100 CDs. He opened the case, unwrapped the plastic and put a disk in. Well, as we all know, the first CD in the ream of CDs is the clear plastic insert. I told him there's not a burner in the world that would burn to that CD.

Dustin

Company: Washburn University
Tech Support Horror Story: A few years ago, I worked at an Internet Service Provider with a couple of my friends. On the weekends, things were usually uneventful. While we were engaged in a game of Quake deathmatch, the only other person working that day, Bob, got a call. We worked in an open office environment, so it was easy to hear what was going on around the office. In between rounds, my friend and I were waiting for the next Quake map to load, when we hear questionably from Bob, "The sparks are coming from where??" We looked at each other and burst out loud with laughter. Even Bob had the mute button on, laughing away. Next we hear Bob say, "No, I don't think it's safe to kick it anymore. I'd back away and turn off the computer until that gets fixed, then we can look into the modem line." Turns out this person had a loose electrical socket and was kicking cords out of the way to reach the modem line behind his desk. My friend and I still laugh about it to this day.

Gary Crum
Company: Sunrise Data Products
Tech Support Horror Story: I had a friend who installed a new Internet connection at his place of work. The new line was a T3 (45 MB), but they were only seeing max throughput of about 6 MB, even when they added more firewalls (they had six total). I took a look and discovered they were using 10base2 (Coax) in a bus configuration. The max throughput of the cable was only 6 MB. We replaced the cable infrastructure with 100-baseT, and all was OK.

Tony

Company: Luicas Exhibits
Tech Support Horror Story: My good friend and ex-college roommate asked me to set up his new Gateway for him. I installed all new software (Windows 98 at the time), and he took it home to use. After a few hours, he called to tell me the fax wouldn't work. He's tried everything (I wondered what that meant) and proceeded to troubleshoot. I asked him if he had plugged in the phone line. His response (I think you guessed it) was, "Oh, you mean it actually has to have a phone line?"
Last freebie.

Nightwl -- changing my name to protect my boss! ;-)
Tech Support Horror Story: My boss' daughter put a Fisher-Price record into the floppy drive of his home computer last year. This year, the same daughter fried a CD-RW drive in the same computer with a dime.
My neighbor's brand new PC was infected with no less than 39 bugs in less than a week of usage. He's thrown out several PCs in the past, not knowing what has slowed down his machines or brought them to a crawl.