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 went 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 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 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.
**********
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved
in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also
complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very
embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away
from her.
**********
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?"
**********
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 username 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."
**********
Email from a friend: "CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"
**********
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 responded,
"No, my desk is next to the door. But that's a good point. The man sitting
in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his is working fine."
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