User diagnosis: Wait what?

[iPwn]

So some of the members here work in IT, some in a support role. This thread is so you can post some of the most ridiculous things you've heard users say as to what they think the problem is.

First post:

Our graphics team was recently getting upgraded PC's. The department manager is a few bricks short but believes she knows the inner workings of a PC (our favorite kind of user!). One of the first team members to get a new PC was complaining that he had to reconfigure Photoshop. While a team member was retrieving the settings from the old PC, I got a call from the dept. manager.

Her: Hey, we're going to need our old video cards in these PC's.
Me: Why would you want the old video cards? They're extremely aged...
Her: Because the video card is where Photoshop saves all it's settings, so we need those installed back into the new PC's. Don't plug the monitors into the old video card, just put it in there so we can get the settings back.

 

[jmacavali]

While it didn't directly involve me, I was at a repair shop when this happened:

An old lady came in and she was carrying the cd tray out of her cd drive. Of course as she was walking in we were all trying to guess what happened mostly thinking the grandkids broke it or her cat jumped on it or something like that. So she gets it inside and sets it on the counter and the manager asked her what happened? She said, "when I put my coffee mug on the coffee holder, it broke right off". The manager turned around and looked at us sitting back at our work area and was barely holding in his laughter. And of course we were sitting there also trying not to laugh. And him seeing us holding it in and us seeing him holding it in and trying to talk to her at the same time only made things even funnier. He got it together enough to ask one of the other techs to help her out and then proceeded to all but sprint to the back room and broke out with laughter. The funniest part was the way she said it like she knew exactly what she was talking about, like there was no doubt that was a coffee mug holder and that it was a piece of crap for breaking on her.

 

[ssc456]

I recall being in PC world for some reason or another and listening to one of the sales guys explaining to this old couple that they needed "this model" as it had a bigger hard drive which will make it run faster than "that one".

 

[BikerEcho]

Good stories guys
ssc: what a dumb sales guy, taking advantage of users with no computer knowledge

I have also had some funny moments. Nothing so funny that i remember it, but 1 stands out.
I was passing by a girl who was working in Excel. She had made a list with some data.
She needed something to indicate "no value" (or something like that). So she asked me how to make a "cross" in excel.

I was kinda confused what she meant because it didn't seem to me like that "X" was good enough for her.
So i asked "Why not just use an X? then she started laughing. She had not thought of that. Apparently that was the advice she needed.

To her defense, i was passing by when she was thinking about it, so she rather wanted to ask instead of figuring it out her self now that i were just beside her.
I then showed her how to right align it so it matched with the data above. She didn't know how to do that ether.

 

[strollin]

While it didn't directly involve me, I was at a repair shop when this happened:

An old lady came in and she was carrying the cd tray out of her cd drive. Of course as she was walking in we were all trying to guess what happened mostly thinking the grandkids broke it or her cat jumped on it or something like that. So she gets it inside and sets it on the counter and the manager asked her what happened? She said, "when I put my coffee mug on the coffee holder, it broke right off". The manager turned around and looked at us sitting back at our work area and was barely holding in his laughter. And of course we were sitting there also trying not to laugh. And him seeing us holding it in and us seeing him holding it in and trying to talk to her at the same time only made things even funnier. He got it together enough to ask one of the other techs to help her out and then proceeded to all but sprint to the back room and broke out with laughter. The funniest part was the way she said it like she knew exactly what she was talking about, like there was no doubt that was a coffee mug holder and that it was a piece of crap for breaking on her.

I've heard this story in various forms for many years, ever since optical drives started being used in PCs. It's funny but I personally don't believe there was ever ANYONE who actually mistook the CD tray as a cup holder. Here's a link to an article from snopes.com that tends to back me up: snopes.com: Too Stupid to Own a Computer

 

[BikerEcho]

Strolling:
someone might have lied to her by telling her that it was also for cup holding due to convenience or something like that.

Some people are just simply dumb enough to believe something like that.

 

[strollin]

When I was a mainframe programmer many years ago, I had a user call and report a bug in one of my programs saying that she would get to the same point every time and it would just hang and would not continue. I worked with her over the phone for several days, trying this and that without being able to solve the issue. I finally went to her office to try and help her.

She proceeded to show me the problem. At one point she was being asked for a quantity of something that she had zero of so she entered the letter o in that field and hit ENTER. The terminal she was using beeped loudly and an error message in bright red appeared stating "You must enter a valid number in this field". She turned to me and said, "See, it just stops." After I showed her that she needed to enter the number zero instead of the letter o, I asked her why she had never once mentioned over the phone that she got an error message. She said, "I didn't know what it meant so I ignored it."

 

[BikerEcho]

Hahaha. You see Strollin, some people are just idiots.

 

[jmacavali]

I've heard this story in various forms for many years, ever since optical drives started being used in PCs. It's funny but I personally don't believe there was ever ANYONE who actually mistook the CD tray as a cup holder. Here's a link to an article from snopes.com that tends to back me up: snopes.com: Too Stupid to Own a Computer

Well, I don't know what else to tell you. That was her story. Maybe she was just pranking us...i don't know.

For what it's worth here's another that happened to me. A user said he couldn't login to his email becuase it wouldn't accept his password. After going back and forth a few times, I asked him if he could login to his computer (we have our Gmail accounts tied to Active Directory so they use the same password). He said...no. At this point, I reset his password and he was able to login to the computer and then his email....

 

[Celegorm]

I worked at the help desk of my college while I was in school. This one happened right when Call of Duty, World at War came out:

A random guy approached the help desk with his school-issued laptop and said he was having problems getting some software to run. So I had him set it down and show me. He then proceeds to set down the laptop and launch call of duty. He is instantly prompted by a box saying he needed to insert the game disk.

At this point light bulbs start going off so I ask him where his disk is to which he said "I don't have one, I download this from (some torrent site, don't recall which)". I'm shocked that he'd admit this but manage to not laugh and can only tell him the following: "Well there are two issues, first since we do not provide this game, and the video cards in these laptops are designed for engineering and not gaming we will not support it or help you. Second, did you really expect us to help you get a copy of a game you stole to work?" At this point he just walked out.