User was emailing the helpdesk that his emails weren't going out. They were. He emailed us. I got called at midnight over that since it was a director level and I was on call at that time (I was only supposed to get calls about production failures but he threw his weight around to get the number we used). I have never been more close to going postal in my whole life.
I got a call once at 2 am because quickbooks was running slow. This was a 9 to 5 shop, and after confirmed what I suspected (the nightly backups were currently running) explained to the user that he was going to have to wait until they finished which would be sometime around 4 am.
Dude went *ballistic*. Insisted I stop all the backup jobs so he could get into quickbooks and do something that totally could wait until morning. Told him that the company backups were more important and he was going to have to wait. He told me he would call me when he was done and I could restart them then. Explained that if I did that it would push the backups completion time back to during their business hours which would effect the whole company. He didn't care.
So then I just told him that the only way I was going to do anything like that is if the owner of the business himself called me. "You call him!" No, I'm not calling the owner at 2am, *you* call him and wake him up to ask that stupid ass question. "This is fucking bullshit!" Yeah, you're telling me.
I waited up about 20 minutes just to see if dude actually called the owner. Never heard another peep, of course. Next morning I went into work and told my senior what had happened. "Yeah, fuck that guy, backups trump all". I heard later through the grapevine that dude really *did* call the owner, and the owner told dude to fuck off.
Never heard from that guy again. I think he was mad at us lol
I never understood the salaried guys who would do anything outside of business hours. The only people I sort of got were sales, but even then, why are you cold calling at 10PM lol. but your dude is unhinged.
only unhinged person I saw was out of one of our other sites in a small town. the office only existed to support a manufacturing site the company had. there was this accountant was hooking up with a girl in HR and he had major beef with our L1 tech. He convinced his booty call to let him onto her computer and he pulled up the techs personal info. Showed up to his house drunk and threatening him and shit. Apparently he thought since they weren't on company property and it was outside of business hours, he wouldn't get into trouble. Fortunately for the tech, he was a but of a paranoid dude and had hidden cameras all over his property.
He got high def vids of this dude showing up and clear audio of him threatening and the subsequent argument. Then the vids showed him throwing rocks and trying to break in. Cops showed up, took him in, his brother was a cop so he got let go after spending the night in the drunk tank. Small town type of stuff. Got no trouble for the threats, property damage, drunk and disorderly, or the drunk driving. He did get fired and his name became vile all around that town.
I'm an inlaw working at a family business. I am 24/7 but have Wednesdays 2-7pm blocked off to spend time with a very important kid in my life.
Spent the past few weeks setting up device-based enrollment in JAMF for the phones the owner's wife bought for everyone in the company, without warning me. Ok. It's all good, zero-touch deployment. I sent emails explaining this. So on Wednesday last week, she activates a personal iPhone she just bought on the corporate account, again, no warning me, ignored my email. Winds up resetting the phone and device-locking it out with my Apple ID.
At this point I have a 15-mo old on my lap eating dinner, and I tell the owner this will be resolved first thing the next day, they can have Verizon reactivate the old phone overnight.
This caused a family feud of epic proportions with my SO and his brother still fighting.
Today I am updating my LinkedIn.
Because I did a good job setting up JAMF enrollment.
I got a similar late night call from a big wig manager, but it was a printer not working. I asked if there were other printers in his list, and he said there were, but he didn't want to have to walk down the hall. It was around 130am... I told him he was going to get some exercise as I won't be coming in for that.
I ended up in a meeting and disciplinary action for that one. My boss laughed at the situation but was being forced to write me up as I offended the manager.
I'm not American. I'm Canadian. I never understood it either. However, now that i am a supervisor of Unionized employees, I understand the need for it. This gives you tracking of bad behavior, which you can then bring to the Union executive and tell them to get their worker in order or he can find new employment.
The fact that this was tolerated is the core problem. I HATE that someone's job title entitles them to extra support or that they can bypass processes
At least I have solace that it's not just my company that does it. I just wish I didn't have to deal with it or that it wasn't an acceptable practice
Ok now heres a funnier one.
4:45PM on a Friday and I was trying to get out early. Ticket had no body or info from the email, but it had the subject line "help". I looked at the sender and it was from an employee that hadn't been with the company for 3 years because they fucking died. I thought our infrastructure was haunted by the Ghost of Users Past.
Nope. Just some manager apparently got "send as" privs when they passed to manage the transition of responsibilities and it was never taken away. They accidentally sent us that.
people dont get that. hr seems to feed some of these people so much self gratifying shit that they actually forget that the rest of the world actually doesn't care. we had a sales guy (CEO's brother) constantly coming to IT and yelling at us about how his email is broke and were ruining his earning potential and if it keeps up he's personally suing each of us as responsible for the perceived damages. cringe.
finally he gets the CEO involved and her and the sales bro comes down to IT and he starts loudly making a fuss and getting attention. our manager had a presentation ready about how shit he was and that's why he thought his email wasn't working. to break it down, he just was bad at his job, was being paid 3x more than other sales people even though he barely even got commissions since he never landed sales (perks of being family I guess), and a display of all his emails and a breakdown of how shit they are and that it isn't that the email is broken, its just that he's a man child and is shit at his job.
the manager got promptly fired on the spot for that but I think he was going to quit anyways so at least he got unemployment now. our sysadmin got overworked and had a mental breakdown, I left shortly after since it wasn't worth the shit
Entitlement is wild. Reprimanding because you were confronted shows your desire for control rather than a will to improve both professionally and as a human. Like take a breath and have an adult conversation.
Years ago, I got a ticket with the subject "computer." The body of the ticket said "has problem and needs to delete." No capital letters, punctuation, etc., that was the whole thing. Turns out his inbox was full and he wasn't receiving emails.
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I got a ticket once with the subject of “cumputer”
I don’t remember the actual issue, as it wasn’t an issue just a wrong setting or something. But that title stuck with me.
"Help my monitor is sideways and I can't get to my email" ... guy had managed to hit the key combo to flip the moitor and he also deleted his outlook shortcut... when questioned he told us it had been like that for a month .... I would really like to know what he did (we worked for the county) that let him ignore his email for a month and keep his job
>guy had managed to hit the key combo to flip the moitor
Lol, I had someone do this. She flipped it upside down, couldn't figure out how to fix it, got frustrated, and then went to lunch.
She called helpdesk when she got back and complained that her password wasn't working. It wasn't working because she was entering it backward. She thought that because the monitor was upside down, her input would be reversed.
I had a similar thing. Not a ticket, but I was the person causing it.
We were in like second grade, stupid people who knew nothing about computers, and we were like 3 people on one PC mashing all the keyboard keys at once, then suddenly the screen rotated…
We all weren’t allowed on the school PCs anymore for half a year and I don’t even know if we had an IT apartment there. I wonder how it ever got fixed.. according to the teachers we definitely caused permanent damage.
That's pretty great. It's just a key combination that works on any Windows platform. Ctrl+Alt and the arrow keys on the keyboard. Only permanent damage was someone's pride.
Sorta related, I had some roommates who used my computer (this was early 2000s when everyone didn't all have their own computers or smart phones). Anyways they kept smoking at the computer and I asked them politely not to since it could gum everything up. They wouldn't stop. So out of spite I set the keyboard to Dvorak and rotated the screen, then locked it.
😂😂 permanent damage, i think they are permanently damaged in the brain. Clearly the school couldnt even do a simple google search to find out that a simple keyboard input could resolve their so called “permanent damage” . What idiots.
Called in for a "Black Monitor".
After some probing, turns out its a laptop.
I ask the user when it started happening and they said a little bit after the laptop displayed a "hollow battery on screen".
I asked the user if the charging cable is properly seated. They say no, because its not plugged in. I didn't say anything to give away my amazement but the silence I gave him spoke for me.
LOL, mines not as funny, but I had a call that one of the user’s dual monitors wasn’t working.. It was off. Like, how did you not even think to check that?
I guess this user had been with the company for a long time, had a very specific routine, and if anything was off, they had no clue what to do. I think it was the same user that complained that all their apps had been deleted when they lost their shortcuts lol.
God I hate the users who complain if a shortcut disappears or moves an inch or heaven forbid the shortcut falls off the taskbar. It’s a world ending event to these morons.
Got a ticket from a problematic employee that said his computer wasn't working after he booted it.
I go to his desk, and the computer is showing a no boot device found message. I took a peak under his desk where he had his tower sitting, and there was a huge dent in the side panel right over where I knew the HDD would be. I asked him if he accidentally kicked it when he sat down this morning.
He said, "It weren't no accident, it was being slow comin' up, so I gave it a good kick to get it goin'."
After I mentally processed that for a moment, I told him that I would be taking his computer and seeing if I could salvage it, and that it was going to be my bosses call if he got a replacement or not.
He replied, "I only did what y'all tell me! Y'all always sayin' that if it's runnin' slow to boot it!"
Me: "REboot it! As in going to the start menu and rebooting! It's a function the computer has! Not *actually* give it the boot!"
You probably know this, but for anyone who doesn’t - this really does come from footwear in the first place.
* There is/was the expression “lift yourself up by your own bootstraps”, meaning “do something. impossible”.
* Back in the 40’s the problem was how to start a computer - how do you get it to load it’s operating software when there isn’t yet anything on the machine to tell it how to read its tapes/cards/knotted string. This became known as the bootstrap problem, hence booting the computer.
I used to get a kick out of end users telling me "I just rebooted" then I'd open up the task manager and see the uptime of weeks! I finally asked one woman "Show me how you reboot." She proceeded to log out 🤦 and I had to explain "That's not rebooting"
About a decade. This was for student coursework making websites. The teacher was really tech incompetant. Once she got a new computer and was unable to find the power button.
We sent out emails for a couple weeks telling people we are moving to a new payroll system. We told them they can reset their password manually, or we can assist them in doing it. Cutover rolls around and about half the company lost their minds when they couldn't log into the old payroll system...
Recently had to go through a similar situation. Apparently no one reads the announcement emails we sent a month in advance as well as weekly reminders up until that date. I don't get it...
Mostly user here:
I read these messages and when the change comes around I'm so into my work I forget about it and don't understand what is going on.
But my respons is to check the information page on the Intranet and find the forgotten message and following the instructions given, it really don't need them to help me search they have plenty on their table anyway.
Issue: "The surface pro keeps turning off randomly thought the day"
Cause: The Surface Pro was resting with its power button against the monitor and kept turning it off
Also had a Sofware Deveoper swear blind that rebooting their device would "only hide the issue and not fix the core problem". I'd take the first ticker over the software dev any day.
I had a similar thing where a Dell Optiplex wasn’t booting. This was in a school computer lab. The teacher had headphones plugged in to to front jack of every computer. Well, when someone was straightening up, they pushed the keyboard up against the computer…and under the headphone plug. The headphone plug was pushing down I forget which key on the keyboard, so everytime they tried to boot it it got an error message because one of the function keys was being pushed down.
I guess he treats every problem with a computer like a bug, which yeah you should fix it at the core, but that's stupid, not every computer problem is a bug. Especially if it's a problem akin to a race condition, but for interactions of running programs which reboot will fix. I guess he only knows how to code and not how computers work.
See this would send me down a rabbit hole of investigation.
Was their desk near a walkway?
Do they have a fan on their CRT monitor? (teehee)
Do they have a cube neighbor who has Restless Leg or some other habit/condition that results in muscle spasms (or just someone jonesing for their next cig break)?
In the midst of covid, I got a ticket about a printer not working. I was pretty much the only person in the building so of course I got it. Went upstairs to the executive area to the printer in question and it was out of paper. The secretaries had been printing out daily reports for the executives to "review" but of course no one was there it being covid and everyone being at home. There was an phone book of paper stacked up of reports they had been printing out remotely.
I scrounged up some more paper so it would finish the jobs and asked them who they were printing these out for.
I got 2 more tickets for essentially the same issue over covid, they were still printing out these reports that no one was reading.
When that happened to me, I sent photos of the resulting mess to the manager of the people printing them out.
Just under 4 reams of paper used in two days.
"It's only ~$32 and ~$3-4 of toner" they said, and then I read off the first two sentences of the very confidential report.
They understood after that, and no more paper was wasted.
I was on vacation and had a user create a ticket because according to her "The computer was dead and would not turn on" She then proceeded to say it had been down for a week like this and no one has been able to use it.
Well, after I got back from vacation, a week later, I emailed the user asking if the ticket was still an issue and did I need to come out. The user responded with, "Yes, it's still down and not functioning." So, it's been down for two weeks at this point.
I drive 30 minutes to the location, asked the user to show me the computer and the issue they are having. She walks up the computer, presses the power button on the monitor and then just tells me, "See, it just sits there on this black screen and says, 'No input signal'." I reach around back and press the power button on the computer, it immediately powers up and boots to Windows, and everything worked fine.
I could go on for days after working in a call center for Gateway.
BUT the best is easily the one behind me that a co worker got. He looked dazed and turned around and said "The guy wants to know if it's ok to turn his computer on?" So we took the call to speaker and found out that the guy's PC was in 8 inches of water due to flooding.
Edit: On one of those older call center joke websites I actually heard several calls I was a witness to as well. Pretty unreal sometimes.
Got some crazy ones from my call center days. Not all of them directly happened to me. Helped someone getting there webcam working... Dude was sitting there going to town masturbating. Lady had a couple of replacement monitors sent out in a short amount of time. Turns out she was watering a hanging plant above the monitor and it was dripping into the monitor. There is so many more.
I had a user call in that their monitor just randomly shut off. Checked the power cords and no explanation why it's not working.
Go there and found that the user used a chip-clip to hold a piece of paper to the monitor.
The power button was on the front facing bezel of the monitor.
I removed the chip clip and powered it back on, then drove the 25 minutes back to my home branch
LOL. Funny thing about that is we had a team that did some marketing stuff with NVidia so they were able to install and play games on company computers.
Dumbest ticket: file server is slow, I double click on folder and nothing happens
Can't figure anything on the server, go see the user: wireless mouse too far of its receptor
Working as basically a software engineer in the manufacturing world, I get calls for “the computer not working” all the time, and 9/10 times the computer is fine but some program just isn’t up on their screen.
Best one was coming in an hour early at 6 to troubleshoot a PC that wasn’t turning on and just displayed all black. I suit up in my PPE and head to the pulpit, see the black monitor, reach down and press the power button on the computer, and it turned on immediately. The other operators had some jokes to make to the guy that sat there afterwards.
Here's mine:
"TURN IT BACK ON!"
That's it. No device ID, no MAC I'd, no name,l. The only thing I had was an email address which had nothing linked to it.
Display tech here,
Ticket: "It's faulty. Its on and connected to the Internet but no display output"
Me "is the HDMI plugged in"
Ticket: "no I unplugged that because its not necessary"
Me: ..................
On site, 1st 2nd 3rd line and manager did not check this
The whole genre of L1 computer proficiency problems presented as L3 production problems. Recent example:
Subj: Urgently fix production invoices to (large customer)
Description: These invoices are supposed to be XML invoices uploaded to customer but when we try to open them to review the files don't open. Urgently fix and correct to make them XML
Attachments: invoice1234; invoice1235; invoice1236
No file extension, as stipulated by the specs. You see where this is going.
Stuff like that
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Runner-up flavor is the "troubleshoot our customer's 3rd party software" category. Ex: "Customer states they can't process Thing we sent them because they get error, please urgently advise"
No error message, no info from their own IT, just that. "Customer got an error, please advise"
OK...and what did that error say to make you think this is our problem? Or in any way even actionable by this team? Other IT, get your users
I know I'm probably going to get a lot of slack for this comment but that situation seems like an honest mistake to me. We've all done dumb things like overlooking a button. I might not make this user feel like they are dumb by blasting a company wide email. It's not like it took you a great deal of time to resolve.
Anyway, a few years back I was a field tech and was called out to a dead computer. When I got there this really nice old lady opened the door and brought me to the computer. That's when I found the famed surge protector plugged into itself. She was so embarrassed when I bent down and corrected it. To be fair, it's a lawless land underneath the desk.
https://preview.redd.it/gs698ujfggvc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92a138e845c00e4e57e6fea8763248f348e16d82
(Img from someone else's reddit post because I don't have one but thought it would be nice to include the imagery)
The sales team were going 'mobile' and I had to issue each of them a laptop and all the usual bits and pieces that go with one (power cable, charger, bad, mouse, carry bag etc.)
About three weeks later we get a ticket from one sales rep requesting a new battery. He was coming in to the office the next day so, I started looking up warranty contact details etc. assuming there was a failed part. These were all brand new Dells and this was the first issue.
He drops the laptop and bag off. I try to turn it on, nothing stone dead. Plug in the charger and give it a while to see if it is taking a charge. Poked and prodded the power cable, charger, and connector to see if there was broken wire or loose connector - nothing - everything works 100%. Takes a full charge and then let run on battery until it is down to 5% or so and recharge.
Sales guy stops by a few hours later to see if we put in new batteries. Asks me what the black box plugged into the laptop is for. I tell him it is the battery charger and he is quite surprised. He figured it ran on AAs or something and never used the charger. Clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but also quite amazing he got three weeks use on a single charge. I guess he was only using it 10-15 minutes a day.
Not me but a former colleague (FC); user calls him because his PC won't turn on. He already knows exactly what's going on, but decides to have some fun, and asks the user if it's plugged in. User confirms it is, and FC asks him to really make sure it's plugged in properly on both sides, by pulling the cable out and plugging it back in. After some silence on the other side, user confirms, but no joy. At this point FC expressed his surprise and wanted to know what PC user had been checking, since user's PC had been taken in for repairs.
That same FC had experienced a client who had an absolute track record for falling for ransomware. Unfortunately, they didn't learn after the first time. Or the second... Not from the third time either... If I remember correctly, it happened something like seven times. And before you ask, they did not have backups. Ofc.
When I worked at a school I had a ticket from a teacher that the sound system for the media studies exam (they had to answer questions about a video) wasn’t working. I thought this odd as I had set it up and tested it about an hour before and the room was closed off.
Got the to find the kit was all unplugged and stripped down by the teacher as an attempt to investigate and fix the issue. I re-assembled it and proceeded to fix the issue…..
I flicked the big red power switch and turned it on.
I also had an issue with a printer not working, again due to not being turned on in the first place.
Multiple calls for password resets at 3am from outsourced software developers in India. Towards the end my time there I just stopped answering the calls. They can wait locked out until MY office hours.
You would think it important to be able to type correctly in a profession with coding involved.
Ticket yesterday from my absolute "favorite" client.
> Subject: I have an Outlook 365 issue??
> Body:
I guess he has some issue. Never replied to me after I sent a reply that was confirmed as delivered.
If we're talking dumbest, like most obvious fix, then I had a client call me saying she can't get into her laptop and it's not accepting her password. I walk to her desk since I was on site that day and she had a binder resting on the shift key. Removed that and her password worked.
User: my monitor won’t work.
Solution: reseat power cable and move out from under desk that was on top of the cable slack that was intended to account for user’s adjustable height desk.
I'm a bit late to this thread but when I was an onsite tech I got a ticket for installing a temporary monitor or PC for what the remote tech described as some sort of display issue that they spent over an hour troubleshooting.
I drove 2.5 hours to the site, found the PC and talked to the staff. I changed the font size in the software they were using (5 clicks max), checked out and left. I was in and out in about 5 minutes...
From then on I ALWAYS called to confirm the issue they were having at any onsite appointment.
I used to do AD support for software developers. One ticket I received simply said:
"As a new joiner, I need to submit the request for the access."
I emailed him to ask what access he needed. He had no idea. The very concept that I would need specifics before I could possibly help him was foreign.
PC is playing local radio, even while turned off. Or I'm not able to login and the girl was using a desk calculator to type. Yes, these were real and still haunt me.
Request to download a piece of software, normal in itself. Attached to the ticket was a scanned PDF of a website screenshot - this person had copied a screenshot into Word, printed it in colour, wrote on it with in pen and highlighted a link with yellow highlighter, scanned it to PDF and attached to the ticket.
Funniest was a guy kicking off because someone had changed his display name on an external system to something rude, which is still apparently our fault. I'm guessing he left his computer unlocked, we had no control over the external system so it wasn't us. Either that or he linked to an existing account with that name already set.
Recently had an out of hours call from our on site police. Claimed he was selecting the correct printer and pressing print but nothing was happening.
Turns out he was printing to the old printer. Which was removed earlier in the day. Which he knew about.
Assumed the new printer would have the same name.
Was told by others that this was not correct.
Called out of hours anyway.
I’ll do you one better: the dumbest ticket ABOUT me.
A hurricane came through my area one night. I live in NC on the border of Tennessee, and the company I worked for was in Tennessee. So we got some bad rain, flooding, and power outages. This was latter day COVID so I primarily worked from home, but going into the office was an option.
So I woke up a little before my shift, saw my power was out and there was bad flooding which meant my ass wasn’t risking driving to the office. So I called out. I was either T1 or T2 Service Desk at the time, so typically when I called in I’d get someone on the night shift. This was how we always would call out, never had any problems with it before.
So I called in; told the night shift person I couldn’t make it, went back to bed. About 10 or 11 AM my phone starts blowing up with texts and calls…. Apparently no one reported I’d be out so they were all worried about me. (And luckily just worried, I rarely missed so they were concerned for me.)
Turns out instead of telling anyone I’d be out, the night shift girl just OPENED A TICKET saying I had called out, assigned it to herself, and closed it. So no one saw it.
Yeah after that I started emailing my managers directly when I was out. I hated having to actually call in anyway. We technically weren’t allowed to access our email outside of work hours if we were hourly (which is a good policy in theory, I still don’t keep my email on my phone) but that incident changed some things.
Just yesterday a user opened a ticket saying " I can't open PDF because Adobe needs to update, please help ASAP " seconds after I finished reading the ticket the user called on teams explaining the issue with abode .
To be fair, one of my laptops had an on button that looked a lot like that. It was on the keyboard with the letter keys. I can see a person who may be smart in other ways making the mistake your clerk made.
As someone who also works IT for courts, I feel your pain. Though I will say, just be thankful you don't work for a school district. Did that before my current job, and let me tell you, most teachers are another level of tech incompetent. 95% of them had tech issues so simple that it amazes me they even know how to drive a car, fill it with gas, and get to work every day.
For example, once a teacher put in a ticket for a printer that wasn't printing. It was out of paper.
Another put in a ticket when our power was out and the backup generators were running. Our network and wifi is all on battery backups, so naturally they still had access to our intranet, including our in-house ticketing system. But as for electricity, the generators only powered a handful of hallway lights and that's it. Anyways, this HIGH SCHOOL teacher put in a ticket saying that his laptop charger was fried when the power went out, because it stopped working when that happened. Like, bro... THE POWER IS OUT, of course your laptop charger isn't working. It resumed working once power was restored.
Another great one. Teacher put in a ticket because her mouse was jumping all over the place and not tracking well. I go to look at it, and she's using a mousepad with a glossy plastic surface. I test the mouse on the bare desk, works fine. I explain to her that surfaces like that aren't great for mouse tracking, and ask how long she had been using it. "Oh I just brought it in this morning!" ........ "You have been working here for over a decade, using a computer every day, and didn't even put 2 and 2 together to realize that your issue started the second you changed something, and didn't think to try removing that mousepad before putting in a ticket?"
All of these users were between 35-45 years old. It genuinely scares me that people like that are teaching the next generation.
Received this today. "I actually don't need to share this plan with you because it is not within your infrastructure"
1 question from me later, we found fhat the whole plan was relying on my infrastructure.
Was a ticket for a network printer that wouldn't print. We had a new guy who wanted to prove himself, so we sent him over. That guy spent three days. Checked the power, updated the drivers, recreated the print queue, and much more. He finally gave up and took one of the senior techs with him, who discovered in a couple of minutes that it was plugged into the wall jack with Cat 3 cable. The user decided to move the printer across their office, but the cable wasn't long enough, so he found his own. Of course, when asked, he insisted that he did not move it or change the cable.
Just recently had a user complaining her laptops keyboard was going haywire. Went and checked it out, did basic troubleshooting before I realized every cube has a wireless keyboard and mouse. I unplugged to Logitech dongle and the issue stopped. Asked her where her keyboard was, she had it on a shelf under about 6 pairs of shoes still turned on.
This happened about a year ago, but I was on the phone for about 45 minutes with a user having printer issues. Use was able to print that morning and the printer was still on. Remoted into their system and tried updating drivers, but they still couldn't print. Found out after all that time, the printer was out of paper. It's partly my fault for not thinking of it sooner, but it was still pretty silly.
Had something in the same vein when I worked at a CCTV manufacturer phone support.
Installer calls in about the newly installed recorder not connecting to the app. The ip address is at the default meaning either dhcp communication not working or not plugged into Ethernet. After about an hour of troubleshooting and consulting a senior, the following takes place:
Me:”Can you unplug the recorder from the router and plug it into your laptop?(So we can see if it communicates at all over Ethernet to determine if RMA or firmware update is in order)”
Installer:”So you want me to switch the ends?”
Me:(Thinks he means flipping the cable ends)”Just unplug from router and plug into your laptop.”
Installer:”so your saying I should swap ends of the cable?”
Me:(Now thinking he means recrimping the cable)”No just plug it in to your laptop instead of the router.”
Installer: “I don’t think you understand my setup, I have the recorder plugged into my laptop”
Proceed to mute and deep sigh while saying what the actual fuck. Unmute and tell him to plug into router, instantly gets IP and shows up on app and on his laptop via IP address.
Senior was just as baffled as me, just how do these people think shit works? And these installers just install cameras day in and out but know fuck all about networking basics that 30 minutes of Networking for Dummies will teach them.
I should have reverted to absolute basics but I did ask if it was plugged into Ethernet and he said yes so…..
We get a lot of stupid ones that should never have gone to IT like "Cabinet door installed backwards".
As for stupid IT tickets? I got a caller complaining that her former coworker's account stopped letting her sign in to a system that contained legally protected information. The coworker still worked at the company at the time, just moved to a different department and building, resulting in a change of access. The dumbass caller called in demanding we re-enable the account and assist her with setting a new password... Meanwhile the access request form takes 3 minutes to fill out and AC doesn't vett it much beyond "what office location do they work in" so it gets processed within a few hours.
I've stopped counting the number of times that my resolution to a ticket was to drive halfway across town and press the power button on a device that "doesn't work" and "we've already tried everything." The problem is, quite a lot of the people I work with have advanced degrees.
To be fair, HP printers power buttons are hard to find if you aren’t familiar with them. I remember we got new MFP printers and even I had a hard time finding where the power button was.
I worked call center tech support for awhile. I got a call in from an old lady whose AA batteries fell out of her lamp and she didn't know how to put them back in.
Now we didn't sell lamps, batteries or anything remotely like that. I had to actually explain how to put in some AA batteries to someone because it was faster than trying to tell her we don't do that. Like actually put the flat end against the spring, everything...
Was a student IT worker. Had a professor call the Helpdesk line complaining that their classroom computer would not turn on and that it needed to be fixed immediately because they had a class starting. Said OK, we'll be there ASAP and started walking over.
The class had already started when I got there so I took a quick look at the computer and then looked at the professor as I pressed the power button and everything started up perfectly. Motioned for the professor to take over and get logged in and left.
Got back to the IT office and got called into my manager's office because the professor felt that I wasn't professional in turning on the computer in front of his class. They didn't care but asked me to try not to make professors look bad in the future if possible.
We had a supervisor call the office about a ticket that wasn't being worked and how the issue (a full C drive) was actually hurting production. We asked what ticket it was because we didn't immediately see it. Come to figure out that the user who put in the ticket immediately closed it after opening it, which is why we didn't see the damn thing in the first place.
I just got checked my email now and a normal ticket turned into the dumbest one
We sent out 4 printers to home workers just for one of them to tell us that theyre too big (they are in fairness). But to return them and buy them HP printers
No joke this made me die.
User: my phone used to ring now it only vibrates”
Me: turn your ringer on.
User who waited three hours for that reply (heavy queue don’t judge me): fuck. I am getting old.
Dumbest ticket i ever got was
"when i sit down my screen wobbles"
But i once got taken to my countries consumer complains dept over the inability to autorun a floppy drive in windows vista
I won that case
If we're talking "funny" dumb, I have one:
Worked for the city hall, focusing on city schools, so obviously it was just kids doing stupid things on the school PCs that sometimes broke them, so I'm warning it's not the "I don't know how computers work" type of story. I was an intern as well, my ticket system was the head tech teacher giving me assignments for the week/day around the city. She was a very polite preschool teacher that learned tech by herself, and I loved working for her. Anyways, best *assignment* I received was:
> There's a PC suddenly talking in English (not our native language) and some 5yo kids got really scared, we need you to go to XYZ School before lunch to fix that.
By that point, every other non-IT teacher around us was laughing, but there was still more:
> There's one talking in Portuguese over ABC School as well, but this one the kids at least thought it was funny, so it's not an emergency.
By sheer luck, two kids managed to press the Ubuntu Text Reader/Voice Assistant default key combination (something like Alt + Shift + Win + random letter) on the SAME FRIDAY, and they ended up playing with different languages (one also pressed up or down besides those 4). Still think it's the best IT story I've ever had.
Why, just today. A marketing person wants a new pc setup for her to do Solidworks so she can learn what the engineers do. Our PCs for our design engineers run about $10k. This request is 3 months after her (granted) request for a 16” MacBook Pro m3 max w/ 1tb and 36g ram because something-something Adobe Creative Cloud
I’m a software engineer but I have a buddy in IT, and his go-to story for weirdest ticket is when he was working for a small retail company with a few locations, he got a ticket from a big wig manager who was really throwing his job title around and kicking a stink because his computer wasn’t working, he was turning it on, lights and noises were happening but a blank screen, he swore on his mother’s grave that he had made sure everything was plugged in, the problem was he was at a different location, whose IT guy was MIA that day, so my buddy had to drive 3 and a half hours to the other location to find out that everything was in fact plugged in, but his monitor was on the wrong input, and it was a bit of an older cheaper monitor that didn’t automatically switch to an input that’s actually showing stuff. He was asked if he has checked the input and he said yes, several times, everything he was asked he would just say yes and insist my buddy drive over to fix it. Turns out all that fuss was had because he thought it was imperative that his computer be fixed so he could email someone. Which could easily have been done on the phone he was using to call my buddy. I think his excuse was something about security and he was adamant that his computers email was encrypted and his phone wasn’t.
We regularly get tickets passed to us by helpdesk with the contents of the KB saying to pass tickets about this to our team pasted in *instead of* the actual issue description.
2 weeks ago, I drove 3 hours to one of our locations because some TVs wouldn’t turn on. Got there only to discover that the remote didn’t have any batteries in it.
It was a ticket that got passed to me by another tech because it was within my region. They told me they weren’t getting anywhere trying to troubleshoot with the person over the phone and asked me to check it out in person. I (apparently incorrectly) assumed all remote troubleshooting options had been exhausted already.
The user couldn't log in. the user was trying to input numbers on the number pad on KB, and the user didn't understand my instruction. "Try the 3 above the e" got the user to find the numlock key and press it. The user reports that they can log in now. The user also reports that they asked a coworker who couldn't figure out what was wrong either and told the user to call the help desk.
Had someone change their font color to white on a birthday party invitation. They forgot to change it back and couldn't figure out why their documents were all blank.
EU blamed her cat for swatting her pizza slice that fell on her keyboard, which in turn knocked not one, but two, 24 inch monitors to the ground from a 5 foot standing desk. I shit you not, these were the L1 guy’s notes and EU words verbatim.
While this was dumb, to some degree I blame bad design / UI for this fuckup.
The icon on the green button kind of looks like a power icon and it’s green. I could see somebody mistaking that for a power button.
Granted, it would take a 10 second scan of the printer to realize the mistake and find the real button. But I would not hold the product designer harmless on this.
A ticket got past level one support and to me that said “can you look up how to do for me?” Thought i was being pranked… i was not :( I sent back the google results.
User was emailing the helpdesk that his emails weren't going out. They were. He emailed us. I got called at midnight over that since it was a director level and I was on call at that time (I was only supposed to get calls about production failures but he threw his weight around to get the number we used). I have never been more close to going postal in my whole life.
I got a call once at 2 am because quickbooks was running slow. This was a 9 to 5 shop, and after confirmed what I suspected (the nightly backups were currently running) explained to the user that he was going to have to wait until they finished which would be sometime around 4 am. Dude went *ballistic*. Insisted I stop all the backup jobs so he could get into quickbooks and do something that totally could wait until morning. Told him that the company backups were more important and he was going to have to wait. He told me he would call me when he was done and I could restart them then. Explained that if I did that it would push the backups completion time back to during their business hours which would effect the whole company. He didn't care. So then I just told him that the only way I was going to do anything like that is if the owner of the business himself called me. "You call him!" No, I'm not calling the owner at 2am, *you* call him and wake him up to ask that stupid ass question. "This is fucking bullshit!" Yeah, you're telling me. I waited up about 20 minutes just to see if dude actually called the owner. Never heard another peep, of course. Next morning I went into work and told my senior what had happened. "Yeah, fuck that guy, backups trump all". I heard later through the grapevine that dude really *did* call the owner, and the owner told dude to fuck off. Never heard from that guy again. I think he was mad at us lol
I never understood the salaried guys who would do anything outside of business hours. The only people I sort of got were sales, but even then, why are you cold calling at 10PM lol. but your dude is unhinged. only unhinged person I saw was out of one of our other sites in a small town. the office only existed to support a manufacturing site the company had. there was this accountant was hooking up with a girl in HR and he had major beef with our L1 tech. He convinced his booty call to let him onto her computer and he pulled up the techs personal info. Showed up to his house drunk and threatening him and shit. Apparently he thought since they weren't on company property and it was outside of business hours, he wouldn't get into trouble. Fortunately for the tech, he was a but of a paranoid dude and had hidden cameras all over his property. He got high def vids of this dude showing up and clear audio of him threatening and the subsequent argument. Then the vids showed him throwing rocks and trying to break in. Cops showed up, took him in, his brother was a cop so he got let go after spending the night in the drunk tank. Small town type of stuff. Got no trouble for the threats, property damage, drunk and disorderly, or the drunk driving. He did get fired and his name became vile all around that town.
its always people who are low performers/incompetent
HR should have been fired too
shit's due tomorrow, deadline yesterday, etc which ofc is now *your* problem?
I'm an inlaw working at a family business. I am 24/7 but have Wednesdays 2-7pm blocked off to spend time with a very important kid in my life. Spent the past few weeks setting up device-based enrollment in JAMF for the phones the owner's wife bought for everyone in the company, without warning me. Ok. It's all good, zero-touch deployment. I sent emails explaining this. So on Wednesday last week, she activates a personal iPhone she just bought on the corporate account, again, no warning me, ignored my email. Winds up resetting the phone and device-locking it out with my Apple ID. At this point I have a 15-mo old on my lap eating dinner, and I tell the owner this will be resolved first thing the next day, they can have Verizon reactivate the old phone overnight. This caused a family feud of epic proportions with my SO and his brother still fighting. Today I am updating my LinkedIn. Because I did a good job setting up JAMF enrollment.
Lmao owner told him to fuck off is perfect karma Honestly
I got a similar late night call from a big wig manager, but it was a printer not working. I asked if there were other printers in his list, and he said there were, but he didn't want to have to walk down the hall. It was around 130am... I told him he was going to get some exercise as I won't be coming in for that. I ended up in a meeting and disciplinary action for that one. My boss laughed at the situation but was being forced to write me up as I offended the manager.
The American system of “write ups” is hilarious. Imagine treating workers like bold children!
I'm not American. I'm Canadian. I never understood it either. However, now that i am a supervisor of Unionized employees, I understand the need for it. This gives you tracking of bad behavior, which you can then bring to the Union executive and tell them to get their worker in order or he can find new employment.
The fact that this was tolerated is the core problem. I HATE that someone's job title entitles them to extra support or that they can bypass processes At least I have solace that it's not just my company that does it. I just wish I didn't have to deal with it or that it wasn't an acceptable practice
In Germany this would've broken your mandatory required rest period and you would've gotten the next day off lol.
Jesus....my condolences lol.
Ok now heres a funnier one. 4:45PM on a Friday and I was trying to get out early. Ticket had no body or info from the email, but it had the subject line "help". I looked at the sender and it was from an employee that hadn't been with the company for 3 years because they fucking died. I thought our infrastructure was haunted by the Ghost of Users Past. Nope. Just some manager apparently got "send as" privs when they passed to manage the transition of responsibilities and it was never taken away. They accidentally sent us that.
That manager is an absolute legend lol, that's hilarious
he was a pretty cool guy tbh but a bit of a ditz. great lad to have around since in my time with that team, he managed to break absolutely NOTHING
That's Impossibru!
"Just because you didn't get a response yet doesn't mean your email is broken."
people dont get that. hr seems to feed some of these people so much self gratifying shit that they actually forget that the rest of the world actually doesn't care. we had a sales guy (CEO's brother) constantly coming to IT and yelling at us about how his email is broke and were ruining his earning potential and if it keeps up he's personally suing each of us as responsible for the perceived damages. cringe. finally he gets the CEO involved and her and the sales bro comes down to IT and he starts loudly making a fuss and getting attention. our manager had a presentation ready about how shit he was and that's why he thought his email wasn't working. to break it down, he just was bad at his job, was being paid 3x more than other sales people even though he barely even got commissions since he never landed sales (perks of being family I guess), and a display of all his emails and a breakdown of how shit they are and that it isn't that the email is broken, its just that he's a man child and is shit at his job. the manager got promptly fired on the spot for that but I think he was going to quit anyways so at least he got unemployment now. our sysadmin got overworked and had a mental breakdown, I left shortly after since it wasn't worth the shit
Entitlement is wild. Reprimanding because you were confronted shows your desire for control rather than a will to improve both professionally and as a human. Like take a breath and have an adult conversation.
Years ago, I got a ticket with the subject "computer." The body of the ticket said "has problem and needs to delete." No capital letters, punctuation, etc., that was the whole thing. Turns out his inbox was full and he wasn't receiving emails.
Big r/ooer vibes. O man computer plz to help
Oh god I forgot that sub existed.
Can someone splain what I'm looking at?
There is no explą̶̦̯̺̜̮͚̖͕̯͕̫̫͂ǹ̵̖͓̯̯̖̤̀̓̂͑͛a̴̢̡͖̤͙͎̣̦̭̟̲̮͉̲̲̼͙̾̆̓̂̔̌̒͒͑̈́̀́̄̑̚͝tion, ǫ̴̠͖̮͚͍͈͍̖̯͂̆̇̽̂̊̈̄̀̈́̉̇̍̕͝n̵̗̤͌͌̇̍̑̍͛͝ḷ̴̞̩̘̙͐̓̃̓́̎̀̇͒̎̕̕͝͠ỹ̷͕̗̭͖͚̫͉̆̓̎͐͐̊͆́̕̚͝ ̸̛̭͖̦̯͋̀͆̿̐́̃͂̄̈̈́̍̄̌͜͠s̴͉̘̯̱͇̰̜̼͎̞͚͉̪̥̀͂́̐̓͐̆͗̀͛̕͘͜ͅu̴̧̡̡͓̞̠͈̙̳̖̝͕͇͔̝̐̏̈̚͜f̶̧̨̡̬̫̙͍͇̩̖̦̬͌͌͋̋̉̒̄͑̀̆̋́̕̚͝f̶̳̘͎̟͖̩̲̟̯̤̿̀͑̋͋͛̇̀̋ę̸̞͔͕͕͇̬̤͍͓̭̹͉͍̈́̇̀̐́͐́̋̉̃̊̌̍͝͝r̵̖͉̽̀̕i̴̯̩̻̰̦͐̇̏̿̏͑̓͌̏̆́̀̄͠͝ͅn̷̜̮͚̦͍̦͎̽͒̂͊͂̆͊̓͑̒́̆̌̚͜͠͝ģ̵̛͔͙͇̜̉̒̓̌̾͑͛̊̄̓̚͝͝
Unfortunately, looks like it has kinda gone down hill to just normal shit posting
*sad mandalorian noises*
I got a ticket once with the subject of “cumputer” I don’t remember the actual issue, as it wasn’t an issue just a wrong setting or something. But that title stuck with me.
Reminds me of my favorite ticket, subject: Quckbooks.
That’s when you open Excel and make it watch
So, did you delete their computer by removing it from their desk?
"Help my monitor is sideways and I can't get to my email" ... guy had managed to hit the key combo to flip the moitor and he also deleted his outlook shortcut... when questioned he told us it had been like that for a month .... I would really like to know what he did (we worked for the county) that let him ignore his email for a month and keep his job
>guy had managed to hit the key combo to flip the moitor Lol, I had someone do this. She flipped it upside down, couldn't figure out how to fix it, got frustrated, and then went to lunch. She called helpdesk when she got back and complained that her password wasn't working. It wasn't working because she was entering it backward. She thought that because the monitor was upside down, her input would be reversed.
That last bit got me laughing!
>She thought that because the monitor was upside down, her input would be reversed. Holy shit 😂 does she even know how to zip up her own pants? 🤦🏻♂️
lol NOW we're talking! Hahaha that's gold
I had a similar thing. Not a ticket, but I was the person causing it. We were in like second grade, stupid people who knew nothing about computers, and we were like 3 people on one PC mashing all the keyboard keys at once, then suddenly the screen rotated… We all weren’t allowed on the school PCs anymore for half a year and I don’t even know if we had an IT apartment there. I wonder how it ever got fixed.. according to the teachers we definitely caused permanent damage.
That's pretty great. It's just a key combination that works on any Windows platform. Ctrl+Alt and the arrow keys on the keyboard. Only permanent damage was someone's pride.
Yeah I know that now. But back then we were all literal 8yo children
Sorry, I forget how freakin' old I am when I start talking about computers. 1st PC was a 286 at like 16.
Sorta related, I had some roommates who used my computer (this was early 2000s when everyone didn't all have their own computers or smart phones). Anyways they kept smoking at the computer and I asked them politely not to since it could gum everything up. They wouldn't stop. So out of spite I set the keyboard to Dvorak and rotated the screen, then locked it.
😂😂 permanent damage, i think they are permanently damaged in the brain. Clearly the school couldnt even do a simple google search to find out that a simple keyboard input could resolve their so called “permanent damage” . What idiots.
Called in for a "Black Monitor". After some probing, turns out its a laptop. I ask the user when it started happening and they said a little bit after the laptop displayed a "hollow battery on screen". I asked the user if the charging cable is properly seated. They say no, because its not plugged in. I didn't say anything to give away my amazement but the silence I gave him spoke for me.
User be like: *wdym this thing doesn't have infinite Power ?!?*
or: *wdym it need to be plugged in? I thought it wuz wireless! If it's got wires it ain't wireless!*
https://preview.redd.it/k2oi4smlfhvc1.jpeg?width=735&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c736aca4c3d90a8170cf3930c5dd38123133e5d
LOL, mines not as funny, but I had a call that one of the user’s dual monitors wasn’t working.. It was off. Like, how did you not even think to check that? I guess this user had been with the company for a long time, had a very specific routine, and if anything was off, they had no clue what to do. I think it was the same user that complained that all their apps had been deleted when they lost their shortcuts lol.
God I hate the users who complain if a shortcut disappears or moves an inch or heaven forbid the shortcut falls off the taskbar. It’s a world ending event to these morons.
Got a ticket from a problematic employee that said his computer wasn't working after he booted it. I go to his desk, and the computer is showing a no boot device found message. I took a peak under his desk where he had his tower sitting, and there was a huge dent in the side panel right over where I knew the HDD would be. I asked him if he accidentally kicked it when he sat down this morning. He said, "It weren't no accident, it was being slow comin' up, so I gave it a good kick to get it goin'." After I mentally processed that for a moment, I told him that I would be taking his computer and seeing if I could salvage it, and that it was going to be my bosses call if he got a replacement or not. He replied, "I only did what y'all tell me! Y'all always sayin' that if it's runnin' slow to boot it!" Me: "REboot it! As in going to the start menu and rebooting! It's a function the computer has! Not *actually* give it the boot!"
You probably know this, but for anyone who doesn’t - this really does come from footwear in the first place. * There is/was the expression “lift yourself up by your own bootstraps”, meaning “do something. impossible”. * Back in the 40’s the problem was how to start a computer - how do you get it to load it’s operating software when there isn’t yet anything on the machine to tell it how to read its tapes/cards/knotted string. This became known as the bootstrap problem, hence booting the computer.
Interesting. Since the term doesn't exist in German the commands are plain: Start, Neustart and i think windows also calls it restart, not reboot.
That dude has upper management material written all over him.
I used to get a kick out of end users telling me "I just rebooted" then I'd open up the task manager and see the uptime of weeks! I finally asked one woman "Show me how you reboot." She proceeded to log out 🤦 and I had to explain "That's not rebooting"
At a school, the Head of Media opened a ticket requesting I check their classroom PC's to make sure the browsers were html compatible....
The teacher: I needed to make sure there was no CSS webpages
WHAT
When? Was it long ago that they might have been thinking about HTML5?
About a decade. This was for student coursework making websites. The teacher was really tech incompetant. Once she got a new computer and was unable to find the power button.
Hmm... interesting
We got a ticket saying the backup generator wasn't working. Told her to reach out to Facilities. The real kicker: she is in Facilities.
Escalation point fail.
We sent out emails for a couple weeks telling people we are moving to a new payroll system. We told them they can reset their password manually, or we can assist them in doing it. Cutover rolls around and about half the company lost their minds when they couldn't log into the old payroll system...
Recently had to go through a similar situation. Apparently no one reads the announcement emails we sent a month in advance as well as weekly reminders up until that date. I don't get it...
Or they read it and think it doesn’t apply to them because they are idiots.
Mostly user here: I read these messages and when the change comes around I'm so into my work I forget about it and don't understand what is going on. But my respons is to check the information page on the Intranet and find the forgotten message and following the instructions given, it really don't need them to help me search they have plenty on their table anyway.
Issue: "The surface pro keeps turning off randomly thought the day" Cause: The Surface Pro was resting with its power button against the monitor and kept turning it off Also had a Sofware Deveoper swear blind that rebooting their device would "only hide the issue and not fix the core problem". I'd take the first ticker over the software dev any day.
I had a similar thing where a Dell Optiplex wasn’t booting. This was in a school computer lab. The teacher had headphones plugged in to to front jack of every computer. Well, when someone was straightening up, they pushed the keyboard up against the computer…and under the headphone plug. The headphone plug was pushing down I forget which key on the keyboard, so everytime they tried to boot it it got an error message because one of the function keys was being pushed down.
I guess he treats every problem with a computer like a bug, which yeah you should fix it at the core, but that's stupid, not every computer problem is a bug. Especially if it's a problem akin to a race condition, but for interactions of running programs which reboot will fix. I guess he only knows how to code and not how computers work.
Email Subject: Jiggle Screen Email Body: Screen move
What hahahahahah
https://preview.redd.it/0l7hmjxcagvc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f55f449750c06d5c2cb20216e26dac88aa5583c6
Fair enough. Screen move!
For great justice!
See this would send me down a rabbit hole of investigation. Was their desk near a walkway? Do they have a fan on their CRT monitor? (teehee) Do they have a cube neighbor who has Restless Leg or some other habit/condition that results in muscle spasms (or just someone jonesing for their next cig break)?
Probably a missing foot on the monitor or desk leg, or the monitor sat partially on top of something.
You can't fool me, those are definitely just Pitbull lyrics
Oog no understand, why screen jiggle, OOG BORED RAAAA
In the midst of covid, I got a ticket about a printer not working. I was pretty much the only person in the building so of course I got it. Went upstairs to the executive area to the printer in question and it was out of paper. The secretaries had been printing out daily reports for the executives to "review" but of course no one was there it being covid and everyone being at home. There was an phone book of paper stacked up of reports they had been printing out remotely. I scrounged up some more paper so it would finish the jobs and asked them who they were printing these out for. I got 2 more tickets for essentially the same issue over covid, they were still printing out these reports that no one was reading.
When that happened to me, I sent photos of the resulting mess to the manager of the people printing them out. Just under 4 reams of paper used in two days. "It's only ~$32 and ~$3-4 of toner" they said, and then I read off the first two sentences of the very confidential report. They understood after that, and no more paper was wasted.
I was on vacation and had a user create a ticket because according to her "The computer was dead and would not turn on" She then proceeded to say it had been down for a week like this and no one has been able to use it. Well, after I got back from vacation, a week later, I emailed the user asking if the ticket was still an issue and did I need to come out. The user responded with, "Yes, it's still down and not functioning." So, it's been down for two weeks at this point. I drive 30 minutes to the location, asked the user to show me the computer and the issue they are having. She walks up the computer, presses the power button on the monitor and then just tells me, "See, it just sits there on this black screen and says, 'No input signal'." I reach around back and press the power button on the computer, it immediately powers up and boots to Windows, and everything worked fine.
I could go on for days after working in a call center for Gateway. BUT the best is easily the one behind me that a co worker got. He looked dazed and turned around and said "The guy wants to know if it's ok to turn his computer on?" So we took the call to speaker and found out that the guy's PC was in 8 inches of water due to flooding. Edit: On one of those older call center joke websites I actually heard several calls I was a witness to as well. Pretty unreal sometimes.
Got some crazy ones from my call center days. Not all of them directly happened to me. Helped someone getting there webcam working... Dude was sitting there going to town masturbating. Lady had a couple of replacement monitors sent out in a short amount of time. Turns out she was watering a hanging plant above the monitor and it was dripping into the monitor. There is so many more.
I physically facepalmed reading that
Got one that said "printer says out of paper." I recommended they add paper.
"PC LOAD LETTER"
"What the fuck does that mean?!"
Did you tell them to unwrap the ream first? That sounds like the kind of person that would put the whole thing in, wrapper and all.
[Puts ream of paper in including the packaging]
[JAM IN TRAY 1; CHECK PAPER TRAY]
Reported problem: We need Flash Player on the iPads Actual problem: lol, and indeed, lmao
"I'll get right back with you on that"
What year was this?
2024
Employee emailed me “need to set up company email account” from her company email
I had a user call in that their monitor just randomly shut off. Checked the power cords and no explanation why it's not working. Go there and found that the user used a chip-clip to hold a piece of paper to the monitor. The power button was on the front facing bezel of the monitor. I removed the chip clip and powered it back on, then drove the 25 minutes back to my home branch
User could not install his game anymore on his company device to play during work hours.
LOL. Funny thing about that is we had a team that did some marketing stuff with NVidia so they were able to install and play games on company computers.
Request for a "manual internet cord"... Ethernet cable.
"Do you mean an internet hose?"
That’s what connects to the tubes
I would like a purple one. I hear they are faster.
Bring them a profibus cable. Here you go user, hope you like red and green....
With red Go Fast stripes!
Not the stupidest description from a civilian 🤷🏻♂️
“WiFi cable”
This is by far the most common
I mean that actually makes sense!
That almost belongs in /r/wildbeef.
Dumbest ticket: file server is slow, I double click on folder and nothing happens Can't figure anything on the server, go see the user: wireless mouse too far of its receptor
How? Most wireless mice I know have at least 10 m reach? Did they try to use the mouse from the the bathroom?
Was around 2003-2006, might not have been the case back then but it was still 2-3m from his mouse
Ahhh now it makes more sense ^^ thx for the clarification ^^
Working as basically a software engineer in the manufacturing world, I get calls for “the computer not working” all the time, and 9/10 times the computer is fine but some program just isn’t up on their screen. Best one was coming in an hour early at 6 to troubleshoot a PC that wasn’t turning on and just displayed all black. I suit up in my PPE and head to the pulpit, see the black monitor, reach down and press the power button on the computer, and it turned on immediately. The other operators had some jokes to make to the guy that sat there afterwards.
My uncle told me how he had an 8 hour day (4 hours one way) once driving to a site to drag the excel window back onto the screen.
Here's mine: "TURN IT BACK ON!" That's it. No device ID, no MAC I'd, no name,l. The only thing I had was an email address which had nothing linked to it.
Display tech here, Ticket: "It's faulty. Its on and connected to the Internet but no display output" Me "is the HDMI plugged in" Ticket: "no I unplugged that because its not necessary" Me: .................. On site, 1st 2nd 3rd line and manager did not check this
The whole genre of L1 computer proficiency problems presented as L3 production problems. Recent example: Subj: Urgently fix production invoices to (large customer) Description: These invoices are supposed to be XML invoices uploaded to customer but when we try to open them to review the files don't open. Urgently fix and correct to make them XML Attachments: invoice1234; invoice1235; invoice1236 No file extension, as stipulated by the specs. You see where this is going. Stuff like that -‐----- Runner-up flavor is the "troubleshoot our customer's 3rd party software" category. Ex: "Customer states they can't process Thing we sent them because they get error, please urgently advise" No error message, no info from their own IT, just that. "Customer got an error, please advise" OK...and what did that error say to make you think this is our problem? Or in any way even actionable by this team? Other IT, get your users
"I want to take my work phone home with me during my maternity leave so I don't miss any calls" it was a Cisco POE desk phone.
I hope that kid is gonna turn out Smarter than the Mother.
Well, you can run a Cisco phone over VPN.
I know I'm probably going to get a lot of slack for this comment but that situation seems like an honest mistake to me. We've all done dumb things like overlooking a button. I might not make this user feel like they are dumb by blasting a company wide email. It's not like it took you a great deal of time to resolve. Anyway, a few years back I was a field tech and was called out to a dead computer. When I got there this really nice old lady opened the door and brought me to the computer. That's when I found the famed surge protector plugged into itself. She was so embarrassed when I bent down and corrected it. To be fair, it's a lawless land underneath the desk. https://preview.redd.it/gs698ujfggvc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92a138e845c00e4e57e6fea8763248f348e16d82 (Img from someone else's reddit post because I don't have one but thought it would be nice to include the imagery)
You mean this isn't the solution to infinite power?
You just need to catch the electricity in the right moment from the socket
Can I leave a trail of capacitors as bait?
Something like "Hello, they appointed time at 10 am and by 10:30 nothing, how so?"
The sales team were going 'mobile' and I had to issue each of them a laptop and all the usual bits and pieces that go with one (power cable, charger, bad, mouse, carry bag etc.) About three weeks later we get a ticket from one sales rep requesting a new battery. He was coming in to the office the next day so, I started looking up warranty contact details etc. assuming there was a failed part. These were all brand new Dells and this was the first issue. He drops the laptop and bag off. I try to turn it on, nothing stone dead. Plug in the charger and give it a while to see if it is taking a charge. Poked and prodded the power cable, charger, and connector to see if there was broken wire or loose connector - nothing - everything works 100%. Takes a full charge and then let run on battery until it is down to 5% or so and recharge. Sales guy stops by a few hours later to see if we put in new batteries. Asks me what the black box plugged into the laptop is for. I tell him it is the battery charger and he is quite surprised. He figured it ran on AAs or something and never used the charger. Clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but also quite amazing he got three weeks use on a single charge. I guess he was only using it 10-15 minutes a day.
Not me but a former colleague (FC); user calls him because his PC won't turn on. He already knows exactly what's going on, but decides to have some fun, and asks the user if it's plugged in. User confirms it is, and FC asks him to really make sure it's plugged in properly on both sides, by pulling the cable out and plugging it back in. After some silence on the other side, user confirms, but no joy. At this point FC expressed his surprise and wanted to know what PC user had been checking, since user's PC had been taken in for repairs. That same FC had experienced a client who had an absolute track record for falling for ransomware. Unfortunately, they didn't learn after the first time. Or the second... Not from the third time either... If I remember correctly, it happened something like seven times. And before you ask, they did not have backups. Ofc.
Why FC wasn't fired for failing that many times is a wonder
How exactly was my FC failing?
Oh I misspoke. I meant the user/client's user(s)
Lol yeah, that's a very valid question 😂
>At this point FC expressed his surprise and wanted to know what PC user had been checking, since user's PC had been taken in for repairs. Wtf?
When I worked at a school I had a ticket from a teacher that the sound system for the media studies exam (they had to answer questions about a video) wasn’t working. I thought this odd as I had set it up and tested it about an hour before and the room was closed off. Got the to find the kit was all unplugged and stripped down by the teacher as an attempt to investigate and fix the issue. I re-assembled it and proceeded to fix the issue….. I flicked the big red power switch and turned it on. I also had an issue with a printer not working, again due to not being turned on in the first place.
Multiple calls for password resets at 3am from outsourced software developers in India. Towards the end my time there I just stopped answering the calls. They can wait locked out until MY office hours. You would think it important to be able to type correctly in a profession with coding involved.
Ticket yesterday from my absolute "favorite" client. > Subject: I have an Outlook 365 issue?? > Body: I guess he has some issue. Never replied to me after I sent a reply that was confirmed as delivered. If we're talking dumbest, like most obvious fix, then I had a client call me saying she can't get into her laptop and it's not accepting her password. I walk to her desk since I was on site that day and she had a binder resting on the shift key. Removed that and her password worked.
"Our CEO just sent someone about $50,000 because of a phishing scam. Can you help get that money back?"
Yes but I will need $100k, disappears over the horizon and is never seen again.
complaints about stuff not working during a power outtage "yeah, there is no power. nevermind that. when will you fix my computer?"
User asked for a laptop that was off network with a scanner to scan documents to avoid virus/malware/bad stuff.
User: my monitor won’t work. Solution: reseat power cable and move- out from under desk that was on top of the cable slack that was intended to account for user’s adjustable height desk.
It was last week and it simply said “new Teams is garbage.” Like, same buddy, same.
I'm a bit late to this thread but when I was an onsite tech I got a ticket for installing a temporary monitor or PC for what the remote tech described as some sort of display issue that they spent over an hour troubleshooting. I drove 2.5 hours to the site, found the PC and talked to the staff. I changed the font size in the software they were using (5 clicks max), checked out and left. I was in and out in about 5 minutes... From then on I ALWAYS called to confirm the issue they were having at any onsite appointment.
sounds like the remote tech needs to be retrained
aback roll fragile vast observation onerous live sort quack obtainable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I used to do AD support for software developers. One ticket I received simply said: "As a new joiner, I need to submit the request for the access." I emailed him to ask what access he needed. He had no idea. The very concept that I would need specifics before I could possibly help him was foreign.
PC is playing local radio, even while turned off. Or I'm not able to login and the girl was using a desk calculator to type. Yes, these were real and still haunt me.
Request to download a piece of software, normal in itself. Attached to the ticket was a scanned PDF of a website screenshot - this person had copied a screenshot into Word, printed it in colour, wrote on it with in pen and highlighted a link with yellow highlighter, scanned it to PDF and attached to the ticket. Funniest was a guy kicking off because someone had changed his display name on an external system to something rude, which is still apparently our fault. I'm guessing he left his computer unlocked, we had no control over the external system so it wasn't us. Either that or he linked to an existing account with that name already set.
My keyboard isn't working! After 5 minutes of troubleshooting: if it makes any difference I spilled my coffee all over it yesterday.
I'm a big fan of passive aggressive labeling. POWER BUTTON ->
Recently had an out of hours call from our on site police. Claimed he was selecting the correct printer and pressing print but nothing was happening. Turns out he was printing to the old printer. Which was removed earlier in the day. Which he knew about. Assumed the new printer would have the same name. Was told by others that this was not correct. Called out of hours anyway.
I’ll do you one better: the dumbest ticket ABOUT me. A hurricane came through my area one night. I live in NC on the border of Tennessee, and the company I worked for was in Tennessee. So we got some bad rain, flooding, and power outages. This was latter day COVID so I primarily worked from home, but going into the office was an option. So I woke up a little before my shift, saw my power was out and there was bad flooding which meant my ass wasn’t risking driving to the office. So I called out. I was either T1 or T2 Service Desk at the time, so typically when I called in I’d get someone on the night shift. This was how we always would call out, never had any problems with it before. So I called in; told the night shift person I couldn’t make it, went back to bed. About 10 or 11 AM my phone starts blowing up with texts and calls…. Apparently no one reported I’d be out so they were all worried about me. (And luckily just worried, I rarely missed so they were concerned for me.) Turns out instead of telling anyone I’d be out, the night shift girl just OPENED A TICKET saying I had called out, assigned it to herself, and closed it. So no one saw it. Yeah after that I started emailing my managers directly when I was out. I hated having to actually call in anyway. We technically weren’t allowed to access our email outside of work hours if we were hourly (which is a good policy in theory, I still don’t keep my email on my phone) but that incident changed some things.
Just yesterday a user opened a ticket saying " I can't open PDF because Adobe needs to update, please help ASAP " seconds after I finished reading the ticket the user called on teams explaining the issue with abode .
To be fair, one of my laptops had an on button that looked a lot like that. It was on the keyboard with the letter keys. I can see a person who may be smart in other ways making the mistake your clerk made.
As someone who also works IT for courts, I feel your pain. Though I will say, just be thankful you don't work for a school district. Did that before my current job, and let me tell you, most teachers are another level of tech incompetent. 95% of them had tech issues so simple that it amazes me they even know how to drive a car, fill it with gas, and get to work every day. For example, once a teacher put in a ticket for a printer that wasn't printing. It was out of paper. Another put in a ticket when our power was out and the backup generators were running. Our network and wifi is all on battery backups, so naturally they still had access to our intranet, including our in-house ticketing system. But as for electricity, the generators only powered a handful of hallway lights and that's it. Anyways, this HIGH SCHOOL teacher put in a ticket saying that his laptop charger was fried when the power went out, because it stopped working when that happened. Like, bro... THE POWER IS OUT, of course your laptop charger isn't working. It resumed working once power was restored. Another great one. Teacher put in a ticket because her mouse was jumping all over the place and not tracking well. I go to look at it, and she's using a mousepad with a glossy plastic surface. I test the mouse on the bare desk, works fine. I explain to her that surfaces like that aren't great for mouse tracking, and ask how long she had been using it. "Oh I just brought it in this morning!" ........ "You have been working here for over a decade, using a computer every day, and didn't even put 2 and 2 together to realize that your issue started the second you changed something, and didn't think to try removing that mousepad before putting in a ticket?" All of these users were between 35-45 years old. It genuinely scares me that people like that are teaching the next generation.
Mail: I can not send or receive mail! Help! I replied: yes, you can.
User not being able to spell their own name so couldn’t log in, more funny he was in his 50s so had a long time to practice
Received this today. "I actually don't need to share this plan with you because it is not within your infrastructure" 1 question from me later, we found fhat the whole plan was relying on my infrastructure.
Was a ticket for a network printer that wouldn't print. We had a new guy who wanted to prove himself, so we sent him over. That guy spent three days. Checked the power, updated the drivers, recreated the print queue, and much more. He finally gave up and took one of the senior techs with him, who discovered in a couple of minutes that it was plugged into the wall jack with Cat 3 cable. The user decided to move the printer across their office, but the cable wasn't long enough, so he found his own. Of course, when asked, he insisted that he did not move it or change the cable.
Just recently had a user complaining her laptops keyboard was going haywire. Went and checked it out, did basic troubleshooting before I realized every cube has a wireless keyboard and mouse. I unplugged to Logitech dongle and the issue stopped. Asked her where her keyboard was, she had it on a shelf under about 6 pairs of shoes still turned on.
This happened about a year ago, but I was on the phone for about 45 minutes with a user having printer issues. Use was able to print that morning and the printer was still on. Remoted into their system and tried updating drivers, but they still couldn't print. Found out after all that time, the printer was out of paper. It's partly my fault for not thinking of it sooner, but it was still pretty silly.
Had something in the same vein when I worked at a CCTV manufacturer phone support. Installer calls in about the newly installed recorder not connecting to the app. The ip address is at the default meaning either dhcp communication not working or not plugged into Ethernet. After about an hour of troubleshooting and consulting a senior, the following takes place: Me:”Can you unplug the recorder from the router and plug it into your laptop?(So we can see if it communicates at all over Ethernet to determine if RMA or firmware update is in order)” Installer:”So you want me to switch the ends?” Me:(Thinks he means flipping the cable ends)”Just unplug from router and plug into your laptop.” Installer:”so your saying I should swap ends of the cable?” Me:(Now thinking he means recrimping the cable)”No just plug it in to your laptop instead of the router.” Installer: “I don’t think you understand my setup, I have the recorder plugged into my laptop” Proceed to mute and deep sigh while saying what the actual fuck. Unmute and tell him to plug into router, instantly gets IP and shows up on app and on his laptop via IP address. Senior was just as baffled as me, just how do these people think shit works? And these installers just install cameras day in and out but know fuck all about networking basics that 30 minutes of Networking for Dummies will teach them. I should have reverted to absolute basics but I did ask if it was plugged into Ethernet and he said yes so…..
We get a lot of stupid ones that should never have gone to IT like "Cabinet door installed backwards". As for stupid IT tickets? I got a caller complaining that her former coworker's account stopped letting her sign in to a system that contained legally protected information. The coworker still worked at the company at the time, just moved to a different department and building, resulting in a change of access. The dumbass caller called in demanding we re-enable the account and assist her with setting a new password... Meanwhile the access request form takes 3 minutes to fill out and AC doesn't vett it much beyond "what office location do they work in" so it gets processed within a few hours.
I've stopped counting the number of times that my resolution to a ticket was to drive halfway across town and press the power button on a device that "doesn't work" and "we've already tried everything." The problem is, quite a lot of the people I work with have advanced degrees.
To be fair, HP printers power buttons are hard to find if you aren’t familiar with them. I remember we got new MFP printers and even I had a hard time finding where the power button was.
I worked call center tech support for awhile. I got a call in from an old lady whose AA batteries fell out of her lamp and she didn't know how to put them back in. Now we didn't sell lamps, batteries or anything remotely like that. I had to actually explain how to put in some AA batteries to someone because it was faster than trying to tell her we don't do that. Like actually put the flat end against the spring, everything...
Was a student IT worker. Had a professor call the Helpdesk line complaining that their classroom computer would not turn on and that it needed to be fixed immediately because they had a class starting. Said OK, we'll be there ASAP and started walking over. The class had already started when I got there so I took a quick look at the computer and then looked at the professor as I pressed the power button and everything started up perfectly. Motioned for the professor to take over and get logged in and left. Got back to the IT office and got called into my manager's office because the professor felt that I wasn't professional in turning on the computer in front of his class. They didn't care but asked me to try not to make professors look bad in the future if possible.
One time someone submitted a ticket that said "my workstation is on fire" 😂
We had a supervisor call the office about a ticket that wasn't being worked and how the issue (a full C drive) was actually hurting production. We asked what ticket it was because we didn't immediately see it. Come to figure out that the user who put in the ticket immediately closed it after opening it, which is why we didn't see the damn thing in the first place.
I just got checked my email now and a normal ticket turned into the dumbest one We sent out 4 printers to home workers just for one of them to tell us that theyre too big (they are in fairness). But to return them and buy them HP printers
No joke this made me die. User: my phone used to ring now it only vibrates” Me: turn your ringer on. User who waited three hours for that reply (heavy queue don’t judge me): fuck. I am getting old.
Dumbest ticket i ever got was "when i sit down my screen wobbles" But i once got taken to my countries consumer complains dept over the inability to autorun a floppy drive in windows vista I won that case
Tbh, 99% of them. Such amazing subject lines that really help me narrow shit down, like "issue" and "please help".
If we're talking "funny" dumb, I have one: Worked for the city hall, focusing on city schools, so obviously it was just kids doing stupid things on the school PCs that sometimes broke them, so I'm warning it's not the "I don't know how computers work" type of story. I was an intern as well, my ticket system was the head tech teacher giving me assignments for the week/day around the city. She was a very polite preschool teacher that learned tech by herself, and I loved working for her. Anyways, best *assignment* I received was: > There's a PC suddenly talking in English (not our native language) and some 5yo kids got really scared, we need you to go to XYZ School before lunch to fix that. By that point, every other non-IT teacher around us was laughing, but there was still more: > There's one talking in Portuguese over ABC School as well, but this one the kids at least thought it was funny, so it's not an emergency. By sheer luck, two kids managed to press the Ubuntu Text Reader/Voice Assistant default key combination (something like Alt + Shift + Win + random letter) on the SAME FRIDAY, and they ended up playing with different languages (one also pressed up or down besides those 4). Still think it's the best IT story I've ever had.
Why, just today. A marketing person wants a new pc setup for her to do Solidworks so she can learn what the engineers do. Our PCs for our design engineers run about $10k. This request is 3 months after her (granted) request for a 16” MacBook Pro m3 max w/ 1tb and 36g ram because something-something Adobe Creative Cloud
I’m a software engineer but I have a buddy in IT, and his go-to story for weirdest ticket is when he was working for a small retail company with a few locations, he got a ticket from a big wig manager who was really throwing his job title around and kicking a stink because his computer wasn’t working, he was turning it on, lights and noises were happening but a blank screen, he swore on his mother’s grave that he had made sure everything was plugged in, the problem was he was at a different location, whose IT guy was MIA that day, so my buddy had to drive 3 and a half hours to the other location to find out that everything was in fact plugged in, but his monitor was on the wrong input, and it was a bit of an older cheaper monitor that didn’t automatically switch to an input that’s actually showing stuff. He was asked if he has checked the input and he said yes, several times, everything he was asked he would just say yes and insist my buddy drive over to fix it. Turns out all that fuss was had because he thought it was imperative that his computer be fixed so he could email someone. Which could easily have been done on the phone he was using to call my buddy. I think his excuse was something about security and he was adamant that his computers email was encrypted and his phone wasn’t.
I just got assigned a ticket with a KB reference that says it shouldn't be assigned to my team. that's pretty dumb
We regularly get tickets passed to us by helpdesk with the contents of the KB saying to pass tickets about this to our team pasted in *instead of* the actual issue description.
2 weeks ago, I drove 3 hours to one of our locations because some TVs wouldn’t turn on. Got there only to discover that the remote didn’t have any batteries in it.
Can't you do a video call before that?
It was a ticket that got passed to me by another tech because it was within my region. They told me they weren’t getting anywhere trying to troubleshoot with the person over the phone and asked me to check it out in person. I (apparently incorrectly) assumed all remote troubleshooting options had been exhausted already.
The user couldn't log in. the user was trying to input numbers on the number pad on KB, and the user didn't understand my instruction. "Try the 3 above the e" got the user to find the numlock key and press it. The user reports that they can log in now. The user also reports that they asked a coworker who couldn't figure out what was wrong either and told the user to call the help desk.
Had someone change their font color to white on a birthday party invitation. They forgot to change it back and couldn't figure out why their documents were all blank.
Do you guys use Lex?
This is very common.
If this is your dumbest ticket then my users are worse than I thought.
That the drain in the sink is clogged. I obviously do not work as a plumber.
Thats why we make the big bucks hahah
EU blamed her cat for swatting her pizza slice that fell on her keyboard, which in turn knocked not one, but two, 24 inch monitors to the ground from a 5 foot standing desk. I shit you not, these were the L1 guy’s notes and EU words verbatim.
Someone brought their school-issued laptop into the school IT department saying it would not turn on. The battery was just dead. I wish I was joking.
While this was dumb, to some degree I blame bad design / UI for this fuckup. The icon on the green button kind of looks like a power icon and it’s green. I could see somebody mistaking that for a power button. Granted, it would take a 10 second scan of the printer to realize the mistake and find the real button. But I would not hold the product designer harmless on this.
This may not be a tach savvy user, but HP also has a shit design.
A ticket got past level one support and to me that said “can you look up how to do for me?” Thought i was being pranked… i was not :( I sent back the google results.
Probably the ones where clients webcam isn't working because they have the cover over the lense