If the Helpdesk gave Darwin Awards......

[StoneChucker]

Read it again, slooooowwwllyyyyy.....

User sent in an email.....

Maybe they mean she composed an e-mail, printed the e-mail (without sending it) and wanted the fax number to fax the e-mail printout. That would be daft.

[TwoSeven]

I thought this might be interesting.

An adult points at an object on a wall and asks another adult what it is.

"Well", says the second person, "its round, got numbers and there is a long arm and short arm that point to two of the numbers. But I have no idea what it is".

The first person takes the object off the wall and hands it to the second person.

"Oh - its a clock" says the second person as soon as they touch it.

Turns out that some of the mental disorders people suffer can be rather odd. The above is from a person that suffered a stroke in their visual cortex. While their eyes work normally they are unable to associate names to things they see - hence they could describe it, but not recognise it. As soon as another sense was used - in this case touch, they could immediately recognise and give it a name.

Regarding the printing email and sending it via fax. Its actually quite common both in people that are computer illiterate and people that dont have email accounts or modems.

[Gremlin]

Try the opposite. When we were first setting up internet etc here, we had problems with our email. Couldn't connect, send etc.

Phoned xtra (I think, maybe clear) and explained everything. They said they would get onto it, and then tell us what was going on.

Days later we phoned back to say we had heard nothing. Helpful person on the other end says the solution to our email woes had been emailed out to us...


And a more modern case. I have been messing around with a lot of bluetooth products lately, but being a new technology, products are in their infancy and have teething problems. I was trying to sync my PDA and outlook via bluetooth. Had worked, now didn't.

Bloody woman goes through all the obvious that I had already told her, and repeated as well. Then, the brilliant solution she comes up with:

- Do a selective startup and only choose active sync. OK.
- Can you sync? No, my laptop doesn't have bluetooth enabled anymore.
- Why? Coz you told me to only start sync.
- Can you start bluetooth? Only by rebooting. Ok, do it.
- Now can you sync? Yes.
- Me: Great, what about all the other programs you have stopped running? Oh, you don't need those.

No, of course you want to manually start nortons antivirus. Even after I got everything starting again, nortons was always defaulting to auto-protect = off. Took me a loong time to fix that problem...

Help Desk are not always innocent. I think out of 20 odd problems put to help desk, 1 has been solved by them. Then again, usually I know what I am doing, so if I am phoning a help desk, its usually a big problem...

Oh, then there was a guy who instantly blamed my bluetooth dongle for all the problems between it and a bluetooth accesspoint. No, it was your stupid site that wouldn't give the firmware upgrades to the accesspoint. They got a nasty email in reply...



weeee...... 200 posts

[gav]

And who's to say she was sending the email from the same machine she had the error message on?

[Lou Girardin]

Don't start me on computer geeks. Why do they write manuals that only other geeks understand? MANUALS ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO DO.
And there must be a special corner of hell reserved for help desk staff/operators.
3 separate calls, 3 diferent 'solutions'. None work.

[TwoSeven]

He he .. Welcome to the wonderful world of 'Usability'.

Otherwise known as 'Why bright people do dumb things'

[Wolf]

Don't start me on computer geeks. Why do they write manuals that only other geeks understand? MANUALS ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO DO.

Correct. Geeks don't need the manuals - if the system is too obfuscated for a geek to figure out solely by logical guesses and experience, it is "brain damaged" and not fit for use - only Marketroids would like it and only Room-temperature-IQ "Suits" would buy it. Ergo, any manual is for the end users to read.

And there must be a special corner of hell reserved for help desk staff/operators.

There is and I'm sittng at it. It has fluorescent lighting and a device that makes a noise occasionally to herald that someone wants to tell me "it don't go" or they "can't login to Word" or "the power light on the modem is going but there's no picture on the computer". All of them were presumeably able to convince a panel of interviewers that they possessed sufficient skills to perform a job that requires extensive use of a computer despite the fact they don't even know how to turn one on or even the basic nomenclature. Most of them share their passwords with everyone within a thirty mile radius and slavishly click on attachments to emails that say "Hear are sum pitcures of David Beckam fcuking a spanish hooker. Clik on teh attached file to see them." or send their banking and credit card details off to random sites because they got a letter claiming that, somehow, their bank can't remember them...

Compared to where I am now, an eternity of flames and being shafted up the arse by demons in some kind of Dantean dystopia looks like a blessed relief.

[MOTOXXX]

Correct. Geeks don't need the manuals - if the system is too obfuscated for a geek to figure out solely by logical guesses and experience, it is "brain damaged" and not fit for use - only Marketroids would like it and only Room-temperature-IQ "Suits" would buy it. Ergo, any manual is for the end users to read.

There is and I'm sittng at it. It has fluorescent lighting and a device that makes a noise occasionally to herald that someone wants to tell me "it don't go" or they "can't login to Word" or "the power light on the modem is going but there's no picture on the computer". All of them were presumeably able to convince a panel of interviewers that they possessed sufficient skills to perform a job that requires extensive use of a computer despite the fact they don't even know how to turn one on or even the basic nomenclature. Most of them share their passwords with everyone within a thirty mile radius and slavishly click on attachments to emails that say "Hear are sum pitcures of David Beckam fcuking a spanish hooker. Clik on teh attached file to see them." or send their banking and credit card details off to random sites because they got a letter claiming that, somehow, their bank can't remember them...

Compared to where I am now, an eternity of flames and being shafted up the arse by demons in some kind of Dantean dystopia looks like a blessed relief.

yep
its always helpdesk vs the user.
and the helpdesk is trying to help fix the prolbem that most of the time the user has created.
but computers are complicated things and sometimes shit happens that ya cant explain.

chin up son

[Storm]

Swede..? Y'mean 'neep', don't you?
Which, funnily enough, colloquially means 'idiot' or 'fool' where I'm from...
Hey!

Swede means head as far as I've heard it

[pommie girl]

yeah, well everyone knows 99.9% of computer problems are situated between the chair and the keyboard!

[ricksta]

These guys would surely win.

User sent in an email to say she had an error on her screen, so she printed it off and wanted to know our fax number so she could send it to us.

It gets worse…..

A while back when we changed from CRT to TFT monitors, a user emailed us to ask if he would loose his desktop shortcuts. The stupidity of this is compounded by the fact that it was our supposed Webmaster who asked us!

Andy
IS Support, Purgatory

cant keep my eyes off of your avatar...

[idb]

Correct. Geeks don't need the manuals - if the system is too obfuscated for a geek to figure out solely by logical guesses and experience, it is "brain damaged" and not fit for use - only Marketroids would like it and only Room-temperature-IQ "Suits" would buy it. Ergo, any manual is for the end users to read.

There is and I'm sittng at it. It has fluorescent lighting and a device that makes a noise occasionally to herald that someone wants to tell me "it don't go" or they "can't login to Word" or "the power light on the modem is going but there's no picture on the computer". All of them were presumeably able to convince a panel of interviewers that they possessed sufficient skills to perform a job that requires extensive use of a computer despite the fact they don't even know how to turn one on or even the basic nomenclature. Most of them share their passwords with everyone within a thirty mile radius and slavishly click on attachments to emails that say "Hear are sum pitcures of David Beckam fcuking a spanish hooker. Clik on teh attached file to see them." or send their banking and credit card details off to random sites because they got a letter claiming that, somehow, their bank can't remember them...

Compared to where I am now, an eternity of flames and being shafted up the arse by demons in some kind of Dantean dystopia looks like a blessed relief.

Of course though, 'home' computers are sold as a piece of piss to operate.
Unfortunately the promoted ideal of computers being so easy to use that anybody can pick one up off the shelf, plug it in and enter the wonderful world of the 'net etc is a long way off.

[Wolf]

Of course though, 'home' computers are sold as a piece of piss to operate.
Unfortunately the promoted ideal of computers being so easy to use that anybody can pick one up off the shelf, plug it in and enter the wonderful world of the 'net etc is a long way off.

If I were marketing home computers they would be sold preconfigured with firewalling/anti-virus/antispam etc that the DoD would accept. The problem is that most systems are hyped as "fool-proof" and the average home user has absolutely no idea of the risks. The sales people don't tell them, because that would run counter to the sales pitch. So they shell out $1700 or whatever and within a week are pissed off because the machine runs like shit (174 pieces of spyware, a remote-control service running periodic Denial of Service attacks and three viruses all competing for the same processor's attention), they're being bombarded with advertising for penis enlargers, weight-loss programmes and "generic viagra" (really appropriate for a 55kg widow who only wants a computer to keep in touch with her daughter) and they discover that computer service people charge like wounded bulls.

[Lias]

they discover that computer service people charge like wounded bulls

Have you had to hire a plumber, electrician, or *shudder* a lawyer lately?
We dont really charge like wounded bulls.. or if we do, so does every other bugger.

$250 an hour for a lawyer, now thats charging like a wounded bull.
Or works $2688 a day consultant ay wolf.

[idb]

The sales people don't tell them, because that would run counter to the sales pitch.

Or, just as likely, the sales person has absolutely no idea themselves.