Heh
"You asked for bizarre computer problem stories. This one's true; I saw it happen. My secretary's
printer was printing reams of Wingdings. She called tech support. The guy came down and rebooted
her Mac. Still Wingdings. Deleted her printer and reinstalled. Still Wingdings. Deleted printer and
reinstalled using drivers from network server. Still Wingdings. Turned printer off, waited, turned back
on. Still Wingdings. Elevated to level two support who did something remotely to her Mac.
Rebooted. Still Wingdings.
After about an hour of this, my secretary (in total oblivious innocence) said, "I didn't want to waste
all that paper that printed garbage, so I put it back in the paper input tray upside down."
I will never forget the look on that tech's face when he pulled out the paper tray and saw it full of
paper already printed with Wingdings (her LaserJet prints off the bottom of the sheet). Priceless,
and she did it completely innocently."
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Des relates a few stories: "I used to do desktop support and was called back to one of my users
whose problem I had just fixed. I sat down and immediately maximized the open window - just a
personal preference. She then exclaimed, "Oh! You've fixed it! How did you do that?"
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On another occasion, I was called back by another user who was quite annoyed with a problem I'd
left her with. The problem turned out to be that the radio button in the Windows shutdown dialogue
box was on Restart and she wanted it set back to Shutdown but had no idea how to do it.
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Dave on color coordinating: "I recently got a call to a company I originally set up with a network of
30 PCs. The call was that none would connect to the Internet and none of the phones would dial
out. After going through the usual gremlins, I had to admit defeat and make a journey to the office.
On arrival I noticed they had employed a new office junior who had just come out of the
stationary/patch room. She was complaining that she had been asked to tidy the room and that the
cabinet with the cables had been a real mess. At that point I needed a chair and stiff drink. You
guessed it - she had unplugged all 400 cables from the patch board and put them back in a neat
rainbow fashion back into the board! That took 3 hours to unravel. They are less one office junior,
too."
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Richard talks about helping his dad: "I was trying to help my dad get his CD-ROM to read over the
phone 2,000 miles away. I told him to put the CD in and it should auto start, but it didn't. Then I told
him to go to My Computer and gave him the info to access the drive. Nothing showed up. I was
thinking it had to be a hardware problem with his CD-ROM. I told him to open the CD-ROM drawer
and remove the CD. His response was, "Are there supposed to be two CDs in the drawer?" There
went a whole hour out of my life with my patience wearing thin."
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Shawn Henrichs on the joys of faxing: "I had a secretary that called me to her office to tell me her
new fax machine that I installed did not work. I went there, placed a paper in the feed tray, dialed
the number, and she said, "See! The paper came right back out the other side!"
Linear Mode
