Can You Please Tighten My Modem

Just one of those funny things I thought I'd share.

An older HP tower was sitting on my table this afternoon when I managed to drag my butt out of bed. It had a note tacked to it that said "Can you please tighten my modem".
There was a message on my answering service that only said, "I dropped my tower off, please fix the modem for me, thanks..... I'll call ya Monday."

I looked at the back of the tower just to see if the card was loose, then I opened the box to see if the modem had fallen inside.
To my surprise, there was no modem anywhere.

I tried to call her on the phone, but ended up talking to her son. ( This guy is 22 years old)
He said it was his computer, but every time he plugs in the phone line he gets an error message when he tries to dial his ISP.

I guess a network card could fool some people, but it broke his heart when I told him he couldn't plug his phone line into it, and I actually had to explain that there was no way to tighten it. He didn't see why he needed to spend a few bucks on a 56k modem for dial-up because he already had a plug-in that just needed to be made smaller.


Oh well, all the mechanics of this world would be out of work if everyone could fix their own cars.

I'm upping the price of modem installation for this one.



Edit: editing



[edit on 25/3/2007 by anxietydisorder]

That's classic.

I remember hearing a complaint about a printer that was ejaculating too much paper once.

Sometimes things like this are funny, and I think anyone that works on computers could relate a story about a baffled client.
Sometimes it's just sad.......

I've actually had someone express concern about their family catching a virus after I cleaned their machine. She wanted me to reassure her that I got everything, and there was nothing that her kids would catch.

These people are out there, all you can do is be nice and try to help them.
Just don't try to explain it. :bnghd:


I'm sure others have personal stories.

LoL: Talking about funny technical help stories, have a listen to the guy trying to cancel his AOL account.

Link

a friend of mine worked at microsoft tech support a few years back and he gave me a link to some frightening tech support stories.

one of the funniest was the person who called to find out how you go about replacing the cup holder. seems this genius put her drink in the cd tray and it snapped off.

I wish I had that link.

The cup holder story is OLD...

I had a guy purposely drive over his HP iPAQ, then called in and freaked at me when he found out that malicious damage isnt covered under warranty.

After that he figured he'd just call back and not tell us he had driven over it.

We still don't cover the cost of replacing the screen... the only way the screen is going to break is if you did it to it... screens don't magically shatter.

Anyhow... the guy was pretty pissed... I thought about asking him WHY he drove over his iPAQ, but I feared the answer would only broaden my distaste of being called human.

As a computer tech myself, I feel your pain. There needs to be a license in order to purchase a computer; not anything in depth, just a few things that should be known by every computer user. The most common frustration for me are users seemingly attempting to be as vague as possible when explaining problems.

This phone call happens three times a week, the conversation being exactly the same every week.

Me: "Hello."
User: "Hello. My computer is acting funny."
Me: "What's it doing?"
User: "It's not working right."
Me: "What's it saying?"
User: "It's not saying anything."
Me: "What are you trying to do?"
User: "Print."
Me: "Restart your computer and call me back if it's not working."

Basically every time this lady calls I want to be a prick and just hang up on her because she never remembers what I suggest the previous instance of conversating. She forgets her password once a week and has tried printing a corrupted document over 500 times in the same day (I have no idea how or why she did it, her computer locked up at this point) which consisted of 12000 pages of garbled mess.

I've had a user replace an inkjet cartridge without removing the protective tape over the sensors. The electric current trying to be sent to the sensors ended up melting the tape. While it's no where near a fun job. (ATS helps.) At least I know as long as people with single digit IQ's use computers, I'll continue to have a job..