"Understanding Tech Support"
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#1
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     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?"
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#2
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     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 ste 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."
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#3  (and my personal favorite)
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     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.
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#4
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     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?"
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#5 (this last one supposedley isn't just a story from Tech Support.  The
    guy who wrote the article says he listened in on this one on the
    supervisor's monitoring line)
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     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 complimented 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?"
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(a rim-shot rings out from somewhere in the background)