Help-desks Love You

[prathapml]

1. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

2. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. It's nothing for us to remember 3,000 screen saver passwords.

3. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and Popsicle art. We don't have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your mail because your computer won't power on at all.

5. Don't put your phone extension in your e-mails to the helpdesk. We need to keep an eye on the address book performance.

6. When I.T. support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at once. We're just testing the public groups.

7. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

8. When an I.T. person is having a smoke outside, ask him a computer question. The only reason why we smoke at all is to ferret out those clients who don't have e-mail or a telephone line.

9. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

10. When you call an I.T. person's direct line, press 5 to skip the bilingual greeting that says he's out of town for a week, record your message and wait exactly hours before you send an email straight to the director because no one ever returned your call. You're entitled to common courtesy.

11. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's electronics in it.

12. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your line from here.

13. When you have a dozen CGA monitors to get rid of, call computer support. We're collectors.

14. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person's chair with no name, no phone number and no of the problem. We love a puzzle.

15. If you hate your mouse, get some other pointing device and discard the manual. We know all the keyboard accelerators.

16. When an I.T. person tells you that computer monitors don't have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

17. When you get a message about insufficient disk space, delete everything in the Windows directory. It's nothing but trouble anyway. When you have an I.T. person on the phone walking you through changing a setting, read the paper. We don't actually mean for you to do anything; we just love to hear ourselves talk.

18. When an I.T. person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?" That'll get us going.

19. If you have a 14-inch monitor that says VGA on it, set the display to true colour, 1024 x 768. You'll never again have to worry about people reading confidential files over your shoulder.

20. When we offer training on the upcoming OS upgrade, don't bother. We'll be there to hold your hand after it's done.

21. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

22. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the branch. One of them is bound to work.

23. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by "my thingy's outta whack". Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

24. If you're taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go around and update the network drivers for your all your co-workers. We're grateful for the overtime money.

25. When an I.T. person makes popcorn, help yourself while he's checking out your access rights. And we keep chocolate in the top drawer, too.

26. When you have an I.T. person fixing your computer at a quarter past noon, eat your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly dizzy.

27. Don't ever thank us. We're getting paid for this.

28. If you're an intern, feel free to bring in all your friends from college and have your Daddy complain to our boss when we won't let them use the scanner.

29. We had no friends when we were in college; that's why we're such a bunch of tight-assed little twerps.

30. When an I.T. person asks you whether you've installed any new software on this computer, lie. It's nobody's business what you've got on your computer.

31. If you have NT, feel free to change the local administrator's password to "biteme" and promptly forget it. We like installing NT.

32. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 33.lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.

33. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.

34. When you receive the new Yanni CD for your birthday, shove it into any slot on the front of your computer. We like getting physical with 5.25 floppy drives.

35. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?

36. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don't have any money to speak of anyway.

37. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

38. When you need to change the toner cartridge, call I.T. support. nt in computer science, have him come in on the weekends and do his projects on your office computer. We'll be there for you when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access 95 database flip out.

39. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We'll find the jumper settings on the Internet.

40. The correct location to store important files is the Recycle Bin. It's just like a real office, where you keep your tax receipts in the blue can under your desk.

41. If you miss Windows 3.1, find the line that goes shell explorer.exe in your SYSTEM.INI file and replace it with shell=progman.exe. It makes troubleshooting infinitely easier when we ask you whether you have a Start button at the bottom of your screen and you truthfully answer us that you don't.

42. If you hate PC's, get on the Internet and download one of those desktop enhancements that make your computer look just like a Mac, down to the sad faces replacing verbose error messages. We find it refreshing to troubleshoot the nuances in that sad little face instead of some cold forbidding hexadecimal integer.

43. When you detect a French accent in a an I.T. person's voice, switch to French. We don't mind that your level of fluency is that of a mildly retarded 4-year- old; you don't make a whole lot of sense in your own mother tongue either.

44. We don't really believe that you're a bunch of ungrateful twits. It hurts our feelings that you could even think such a thing. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of clueless losers portrayed herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.

[/sarcasm]

[Ge0ph]

WOW,

I'm the IT Director and that is my life. Thank you for the third person perspective of my average day.

[Spyder2k]

I object, Technical Support is nothing but fun

Fun, Fun, Fun

[lvlolvlo]

oh man i had baaad flashbacks on 12, 13 and 28....

[tarquel]

on just 12, 13, and 28??

Come and see what I have to put up with lol

Regards,

N.

[un4given1]

We should turn this thread into an IT story thread...

I got a call from a user once. She said that her computer was doing "weird" things. OK, so I go all the way across the building and yeah, it's doing weird things. So, I get to looking at the keyboard and I notice it looks like it's wet. So I ask her, "Did you spill something on this?" And she says "Yeah... But I unplugged it and took it to the bathroom and rinsed it off." I was like "You what!?" She said "That's what my father used to do, and he's a "tech guy" just like you."

Just like me? Except he's probably unemployed

People are stupid.

[Cartoonite]

Oh man, this too good. And, sadly, so true.

Haven't been in the industry long, so I don't really have much of a story to add of my own. Closest thing I've got is from when I was still in training and shadowing (listening in with) another agent. We had a client call in and we're trying to troubleshoot her system. The error message we're getting leads us to believe that some cables just need to be reseated. This somehow turns into a 30-minute endeavor as the client is insisting that there is nothing plugged into the port where the keyboard should be. Twenty minutes later she adds "...except for this cable that goes to the keyboard."

I'm totally beside Jeff Foxworthy on this one: "Here's your sign."

[enquvist]

I forwarded that to our IT guys as reading through it I could see them relating to it perfectly!!!

[godan]

We should turn this thread into an IT story thread... 

I got a call from a user once.  She said that her computer was doing "weird" things.  OK, so I go all the way across the building and yeah, it's doing weird things.  So, I get to looking at the keyboard and I notice it looks like it's wet.  So I ask her, "Did you spill something on this?"  And she says "Yeah...  But I unplugged it and took it to the bathroom and rinsed it off."  I was like "You what!?"  She said "That's what my father used to do, and he's a "tech guy" just like you." 

Just like me?  Except he's probably unemployed

People are stupid.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

acctually if its a standard ps/2 or usb keyboard that pulls all its power off the port its plugged into and you spill something like soda coffe juice or what have you on it IS a better idea to unplugg it and run warm/hot water over it, provided you gently shake out the extra water and let it fully dry before plugging it back in. this is because if you dont you get dried sticky sugar based liquid all over and inside your keyboard as opposed to regular water. and the only way to fix the sticky keyboard is taking it apart swabing it with q-tips and rubbing alcohol