A customer, attempting to show that he's knowledgeable about computers...

• Customer: "Do you know about MIDI?"
• Tech Support: (slightly puzzled) "Yes..."
• Customer: "I was THERE."

We have a customer here who recently bought his own domain. His catch phrase everytime he has a problem is, "Do you think I could add a MIDI file to fix that?"

My family got our first computer when I was 14, back in 1995. It was a then state-of-the-art Packard Bell 486 running Win 3.11. One of their friends set it up for them, and this guy was the type that thought he knew everything about everything but really didn't. He had us all gather round as he showed us how to turn it on and off. He told us to never, under any circumstances, turn on the monitor or the printer until we heard the "little beep."

The beep would sound once the computer checked its memory and everything checked out okay. My parents followed this routine religiously for years, honestly believing the computer would sustain damage if they didn't do everything in the proper order. I still laugh about this.

I work at the help desk of a university.

• Student: "Um, yes, I'm using Powerpoint to prepare some slides for class tomorrow, and I wanted to know if there is a way to copy and paste a background from slide to slide."
• Me: "Yes. In order to change the background image to a color or picture, all you need to do is right-click, select Background, and then select a color, image, or background effect to use. It'll let you select if you want the background to fill this slide or multiple ones as well."
• Student: (dead silence) "That's too many clicks. I don't have time to click six times to get a background. All I want to do is copy and paste."
• Me: "Unfortunately, Powerpoint doesn't do it that way, sir."
• Student: "Yeah, well, I want to copy and paste, so it should. Could I fill a slide with enough text to turn it black? Then I could copy and paste it instead. I only want two slides black anyway. I just don't have the time for this many clicks."
• Me: "As far as I know you can't do that, sorry. Maybe one day Microsoft will employ that particular feature but not yet. You could always email them a formal suggestion for it, though."
• Student: "I just might do that."

I once received an email that included the line:

By the way, what does BTW stand for?

A friend of mine was recently typing up his resume and listing his experience with different operating systems. When the Word spelling/grammar checker came across "Windows ME and Linux," it was quick to suggest that "Windows, Linux, and I" would be more appropriate.

• Tech Support: "Tech support. May I help you?"
• Customer: "Yes, my microwave isn't communicating with my computer correctly anymore. I'd like to bring in my microwave and my computer."

• Customer: "I want to get the new Netscape from you people."
• Tech Support: "I'll need to charge your account $30."
• Customer: "What do you mean? I pay for this service."
• Tech Support: "We're providing the registered version of Netscape. Netscape charges us, so we have to charge you."
• Customer: "Well, my son is a socialist and I spent a year in Spain. What do you have to say to that?"

Uh....

• Customer: "I thought so." [click]

• Tech Support: "Hi, this is tech support. I was returning your support call."
• Customer: "Sorry, we don't sell lobsters to the public."

I work for a large company. One day one of our servers had a serious crash, and the tech working on it needed assistance with the recovery process. He went to the CIO and asked him what he should do.

The CIO replied, "If a server has a hard drive and some ROM, and when you push the 'on' button on the monitor the screen at least flickers, then there's no possible way there could be any error on the machine whatsoever!"

I have a friend who isn't very computer literate. Whenever she saves her work, she does it five times, one right after another, just to "make sure it will actually be saved."

Once I had a guy bring in two polaroid pictures of screen shots of his computer. He claimed they were "before" and "after" shots and wanted us to diagnose his computer problems by looking at the pictures. They looked the same to us -- but we kept them and posted them in the back area with a $1000 dollar reward to anyone who could diagnose the problem that way.

Cut from our email support log:

This morning I tried to sign on and for a purple screen. After several tried with different browsers then I got the message you were down. I tried to exit. It went to a background with huge pixels and stuck. I mean no amount of rebooting would get rid of it. Finally I had to reset my wallpaper.

I had a guy in my office who decided he didn't like his wall paper. He was a Windows 95 user with a policy editor, and he couldn't figure out how every time the machine restarted, the same wall paper came back. His first step was to blame the person that worked on the opposite shift from him, and the second was to remove the offending file.

Being a not so experienced user of four years, he decided to restart the machine in DOS, change to the Windows directory, and type in "del *.*".

• Customer: "How do I print my voicemail?"

Our store had a few demo computers running so customers could try them out. I kept an eye on one guy who went to the DOS prompt and started viewing EXE files with the "TYPE" command. I watched him doing it for over ten minutes, after which my curiosity was too much to resist. I went over and asked him what he was doing.

• Customer: "I was studying how the programs worked."

When I was in college, I worked four hours a week as a tutor for an introductory computer class. Once I was helping a student out who was having trouble using Microsoft Excel. He couldn't figure out how to print out cell formulas (a common problem). After I showed him what to do, he hit the print button, then sat there and stared blankly at the screen. After a few seconds, he turned to me and asked, "Do I have to go get it from the printer now?"

I work for an ad agency. A customer of ours sells peripheral hardware for computers. They asked me to post all the latest drivers on the web site we made for them.

Before I could say another word, my genius co-worker arranged for a professional photographer and two days of studio time for photographing the drivers.

• Student: "Would it be possible to install Arabic language support on those computers?"
• Computer Teacher: "In order to use Arabic language in Windows, you must install an Arabic graphic card. So I don't think we could do that."

I was working at a help desk, and, thankfully, my co-worker took this particular call. A man nervously called saying that he couldn't print his proposal due out that day, because WordPerfect was reporting an error that his fonts were missing. My co-worker told the gentleman that we'd send somebody right up. Apparently there was quite a back log, though, and no one could get there fast enough for him. He had continually called throughout the day asking for his call to be expedited. Finally, at the end of the day, his secretary called and asked, urgently, "Could you PLEASE send somebody up as quickly as possible? He opened the computer with a screwdriver and is looking for his missing fonts."

I received a call from a friend who was fairly new to computing. He had bought a new game and was trying to install it on his PC, but the installation failed for some reason. So I asked what instructions he had, and he seemed to have some written installation notes, so I decided to talk him through the installation.

Step one, copy all files to c:\windows\fonts.

• Me: "Ok. Next step?"
• My Friend: "That is it."
• Me: "Huh? It doesn't say anything else?"
• My Friend: "No."
• Me: "... What is this game called?"
• My Friend: "Fonts."
• Me: "Fonts?"
• My Friend: "Yeah, and every file is all the letters of the alphabet."
• Me: "'Fonts' is not a game."
• My Friend: "What is it, then?"

After I explained what fonts were, he was less than happy at having spent $20 on something that was not a game. He didn't even have a word processor package on his computer at that time.