Tech support

#1: So I was talking to this guy, and I'd been on the
phone about 20
minutes, and we were getting nowhere. Nothing was
working. I finally asked
him, "John, do you by any chance have Windows?"

"Sure," he said. "There's one right here over my desk.
Do you think THAT'S
the problem?"

#2: This nice lady and I were trying to figure why the
5.25-inch floppy
disk drive on her new PC wasn't reading disks. She was
new to PC's, new to
disks, new to the idea of phone support.

She had been trying to set up WordPerfect on the
machine's hard drive, and
she couldn't get it to read ANY of the disks in the
package. It was maybe
her third call to us. So I finally said, "Look, let's
just go back to
square one and start over from the very beginning.
Now, take the first disk
out of the sleeve and put it in the drive."

"I've already done that," she said, kind of peevishly.
"I trimmed right
inside the edge of that black sleeve and took this
little floppy thing out,
but you know, it's really hard to get it stiff enough
to slide into the
drive."

#3: We don't usually do software support, but he'd
gotten Works as a bundle
with our machine, so we had to help him get started.
But everything he
tried failed; the floppy disk drive just wouldn't read
the Install disk. I
figured he must have a bad disk, but he insisted it
worked fine on another
PC he'd tried, so he didn't think Microsoft was going
to replace his
program disks.

So I asked him to send me a copy of the disks, so I
could see if I could
read it on a machine here. He said he'd send it by
FedEx, so we could solve
this fast.

The next day, I get this FedEx overnight envelope from
him, and when I
opened it, a piece of paper with a black square on it
fell out. He'd put
the disk on his Xerox machine and made a paper copy of
the disk.

#4: This guy's system came up okay, but he kept saying
he was getting a
black screen. I couldn't tell whether he meant a BLANK
screen--which at
least meant the hardware was working--or a truly black
screen, like the
monitor wasn't coming on.

So I finally asked him to make sure the monitor was
plugged in. He said it
was: The cable ran right from the back of the monitor
to that funny jack on
the back of the CPU.

"And the power cable?" I asked.

"What power cable?" he said. "You mean I have to plug
this thing into the
wall, too?"

#5: The sales support people had passed this woman on
to me. She'd called
in to see if there was any way she could add three or
four more floppy disk
drives to her new PC, because she was running out of
storage space.

I told her there were technical problems with that,
and space problems,
too: There just wasn't enough room inside that chassis
for more than two
half-heights, plus the full-height hard drive my
screen showed we'd
installed in her machine when we shipped it.

"Well, I've got to do something," she said. "Every
night before I go home,
I copy all the files from my hard drive onto floppy
disks, and I've got
more files now than I can get onto one floppy."

I complemented her on her attention to back-up
procedures, but I suggested
she really didn't need to be quite that careful: hard
drives are pretty
reliable these days.

"But what's going to happen to those files when I turn
the PC off?" she
said. "Don't those files I copy onto the hard drive
every morning go away
when I turn the power off?"