Tales from the helpdesk....

I thought it would be interesting to share some stories from your helpdesk/hardware troubleshooting experiences. I have only been in this situation about 2 months but I already feel like I have "seen it all" lol.

I just had a ticket request for "a new keyboard, as this one has had a liquid spilled in it". Device location: Medical Lab. Liquid? Urine.

"Yeah you can just throw that one in the garbage, I will be down shortly with a new keyboard...."

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Dieg0M

That's hilarious.

tstrip007

Couple of years ago a request came into to helpdesk to put more toilet paper in the bathroom. That request was screen shotted and immediately inducted into the hall of fame.

zxbane

A funny experience at the help desk was when I asked a user for their computer name and they told me Dell. I transferred them to a friend of mine lol..

rsutton

I once had a user give me their laptop to repair and I asked them if they needed a loaner; they said no. An hour later I got a call from the frustrated user who told me their "loaner" was not working. Upon investigation it turned out they were pressing the power button on their empty docking station and were confused because nothing was happening. The user was a highly educated attorney & I felt bad cause they looked really silly after I explained what had happened.

GLaDOS11

I routinely have conversations that go like this:

Customer: "My printer is broken!"
Me: What makes you say that?
Customer: I can't print any emails at all
Me: Ok I'll be down in a minute.

When I get over to their computer, I'll try to open up their email program and find that it crashes immediately. Absolutely nothing wrong with the printer, it's with their email program. Why anyone would describe that as a printer issue is beyond me!

Trifidw

"User has accidentally killed *********, please can you revive them?"

--chris--

Keep in mind we are the second tier of support here, by the time the ticket gets to us its been seen by at least one technical minded person and run through the "have your rebooted the device?" type questions.

We get the "__________ is unable to login, potential network issue in unit...send to field services for eyes-on please"

One of us gets down there and its a thin client...and the power cord has come out of it. So the symptom was the inability to login to Windows. The problem was it had no power.

--chris--

rsutton wrote: »

I once had a user give me their laptop to repair and I asked them if they needed a loaner; they said no. An hour later I got a call from the frustrated user who told me their "loaner" was not working. Upon investigation it turned out they were pressing the power button on their empty docking station and were confused because nothing was happening. The user was a highly educated attorney & I felt bad cause they looked really silly after I explained what had happened.

Oh yeah, docking stations cause all sorts of confusion here. I know those feels.

lsud00d

Use your time in the trenches wisely...this is how you learn how to ask questions and provide sight to the blind, both of which will be instrumental throughout your career.

Cerebro

A person reported that the computer was broken and making lots of beeping sounds.....

Someone had obviously spilled something sticky onto the keyboard, as one of the keys was stuck!!....*smashes keyboard*

--chris--

Cerebro wrote: »

A person reported that the computer was broken and making lots of beeping sounds.....

Someone had obviously spilled something sticky onto the keyboard, as one of the keys was stuck!!....*smashes keyboard*

We have a serial space bar person around here. We occasionally get a ticket for a new keyboard because the space bar is missing, all over the hospital in different units. I swear its a buildings and ground person just screwing with people randomly...there is no pattern.

@Lsud00d, I have already learned so many things about interacting with end users and I thought I did this well before!

We joke that all end users lie, but the truth is every single one has a different perception of what is wrong (IE you could line up a dozen users and have them all use the same PC with the same problem, then ask them individually whats wrong with it and get 36 different responses). Knowing this makes you approach every single incident in a manner that essentially ignores what they just told you. You start from the bottom up looking at all the simple stuff first that they tell you is working just fine until the problem is resolved.

devils_haircut

Our maintenance guys use the same ticketing program we do, and we just filter tickets by department. But sometimes I read theirs to see what's going on around the building. My favorite one recently just said this and nothing else:

"The wasps are back."

SweenMachine

7 years at a help desk with 90,000 employees.. I have taken practically every call you can imagine...two things come to mind:

The first, was the email ticket request I got from... Dong Dong Wang (yes. this did really happen)...

The second was when I was working the overnight, and a DEER smashed through the door and ran amuck down the halls of the office building. Thankfully I was in a secured help desk room, but me and my worker definitely ventured out to check out the carnage... it jumped out the same hole it came in, leaving fur, blood and destruction behind..

I called security "hey this is scott at the help desk, a deer broke into the building"
security: hahahahahahahaha
Me: no. seriously, there is blood all over the halls.
security: oh. uhm, stay there....

hahahaha

Bokeh

Remember two from when I was in the military. First one - computer does not work in the OFF position (from the lab at the hospital). Just smacked the forehead on this one.

Second - User was backing up to floppy (yes way back then) and did so every Fri. Come Monday morning when we went to use the floppy again, the data was gone. It HAD to be a virus, just had to be he exclaimed. I go over to supply, scan the computer, its clean. Told him call us if it happens again. Yep, same thing next week. So boss and I both go down on Fri, to watch his process. Put the floppy in, back up spreadsheets. Take disc out, put it back in, yep they are there. He chuckles and said I guess it was a fluke then. As we go to leave, he pulls the floppy out, puts it in its sleeve, and uses a magnet to hold it up against his partition "For safe keeping till Monday." When he inform him its his magnet, he looked all stupid like, then asks "Well where else can I put it where I will find it?" Had to bite my lip and not tell him where it should go! We suggest his desk drawer, and he agreed on that.

Danielm7

I've had a few people swear up and down someone must be hacking them, their computer is going crazy, etc. You walk over and there is a book laying in the edge of their keyboard holding down the esc key... move book, tada, crisis averted.

eansdad

Ticket comes across that a user can't find her c:....The user....Supervisor of Technology....

Had another one from a building principal about PC not working....It was turned off. Would happen every time his secretary was out.

Not a ticket but was a funny comment by an assistant superintendent. I say "Our infrastructure is not set up to handle the hundreds of iPads that you want to bring in. This school only has 12 access points over 3 floors and could never handle the bandwidth not to mention the switches are only 100mb and stressed out already." He says "Wireless can't run out of bandwidth, it's everywhere." - So what happens - He orders 1100 iPads, 50 MacBook Pros and 100 Apple TVs (that have to be on wireless because our ancient core doesn't have bonjour management). Yeah....you can imagine the fun we are having.....

In my exp I have found that the more "educated" some one is the less common sense they have.

IndyLoveless

I once got a ticket from a person looking for help for her "vaginal area". Wanted to talk about it and for me to give a call back...it was, interesting to say the least.

srabiee

I once had one of our new employees call me and inform me that her mouse cursor was moving in the opposite direction than normal. (Moving the mouse upward caused the cursor to move downward on the screen). I went to her station to investigate and found that she had her mouse flipped around so that her palm was resting on the mouse wheel and buttons. When I informed her that she had the mouse backwards, she was oblivious. And she was in her mid 20's and was a recent college graduate with a bachelors degree. I discovered that she was terminated a few weeks later for incompetency.

When I worked as tech support for a major ISP, I once had an old woman call in stating that she had just purchased her first computer and needed help getting online. She didn't know what a "mouse" was. I described what the mouse looked like to her repeatedly because she couldn't physically locate it. She finally said "Oh, you mean the foot pedal!"

As ISP tech support, I would frequently get the same dumbass call that goes like this: Customer calls in complaining that they cannot access the Internet. I would ask them what the lights on the modem are doing, and they would say "nothing, they are off." When I would ask them to plug in and turn on the modem, they would say they can't because the power is currently out in their neighborhood...

W...T...F....

chopsticks

ha ha ha... then I bet you guys would love this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhPejfTQfEA

--chris--

eansdad wrote: »

In my exp I have found that the more "educated" some one is the less common sense they have.

Working in a hospital I can say this *appears* to hold true. I'm certain it isn't, these people are brilliant...but sometimes I wonder.

edit: Too many funny stories to respond to them all, but I chuckle daily when I check this...

cpartin

Couple weeks ago we had a guy ask where in the building is the "XPS Document Printer". I completely lost it.

pamccabe

I once got a call from one of our head finance guys who said his computer will not play any CDs that customers send him. He was very close to retirement at the time and his family actually started the business. I had good conversations with him. Anyway, I go up to his office and he was headed out to a meeting. I took his computer out from under his desk and examined it closer and realized he didn't have a CD or DVD drive. It was a small form factor computer without a drive. Odd. It even had the cover of the bay on so it didn't even look like it ever had a drive installed. I looked around and it was the only computer. No laptop around, nothing. Since I was there, I opened up the cover and there I saw three CDs inside the case! He must've been forcing them in the opening between the drive bay cover and the plastic cover of the computer thinking it was a CD drive. We were doing computer upgrades at the time so I upgraded him from XP. I didn't have the heart to tell him what was the issue. His upgrade had a DVD drive so I just told him the other one failed.

tprice5

pamccabe wrote: »

I didn't have the heart to tell him what was the issue. His upgrade had a DVD drive so I just told him the other one failed.

Good on you. No sense in humiliating the guy and propogating the "IT guy" stereotype.

Anonymouse

tstrip007 wrote: »

Couple of years ago a request came into to helpdesk to put more toilet paper in the bathroom. That request was screen shotted and immediately inducted into the hall of fame.

I received a similar request when I first started my job. A user asked us to replenish stock in the candy machine.

lsud00d wrote: »

Use your time in the trenches wisely...this is how you learn how to ask questions and provide sight to the blind, both of which will be instrumental throughout your career.

This a million times. I've worked with too many desktop support techs who didn't know where to start with basic troubleshooting before hitting up google or what questions to ask the user to figure out the real problem.

Akaricloud

In my previous position while covering our Desktop Support Tech's day off I had a user come to me asking to have a virus removed from his computer. He then felt the need to tell me he was searching the internet "To see if urine was good for the skin" when a bunch of malicious windows popped up.

Also we had a woman walk into the IT area, start curiously looking around and then finally ask where we kept the help desk tickets for people to fill out. She thought help desk tickets were actual paper tickets... This inspired me to make actual joke paper tickets to fax to other techs.

--chris--

Had another one that made us chuckle today.

EU opened a ticket through the helpdesk (technical questions were asked by helpdesk tech) that stated, "User stated hard drive in computer is making consistent clicking noises." I put the asset tag into our ticketing software....and its a zero client. I go and check it out only to find the user was hearing a clicking coming from a patients room (not sure what it was in there, but I know its out of our realm lol).

Its one of those where you just tell the end user its all fixed up (leaving the part out about it not having a hard drive) and put the details in your worknotes.

Cleverclogs

In my last job (The one that drove me insane, and that I spent 25 months trying to get out from) I had to deal with a myriad of clueless users. One that stands out was the time I was on the email inbox and an email arrived to us that had been bounced around all over the place. The first person had emailed their manager saying "Jerry, have you seen all these ants all over the desks?". Jerry had forwarded it on to his manager, who'd forwarded it on to someone else, then to their supervisor and eventually to this high-ranking female employee (Who wouldn't know **** from apple butter). She had then forwarded on the email chain about the ants wordlessly to IT. I think I actually did the forehead slap when I read this one. I do remember printing it out and putting it up on the wall next to my desk, along with a picture of the Ant Eater and the Ant (From the Pink Panther cartoons).

no!all!

I don't recall any recent weird tickets, however I think my co worker got one about a microwave in one of our break rooms not working...

--chris--

Here is a good one. Ticket read "EU unable to print; see screen shot"....

ScrawnyRonnie

User calls and says each day a different key on her keyboard wouldn't work. One day it's P and the next C. I went to look at it in person and I discovered a tiny bead that was rolling around under the keys.

I also love when I have to drive 40 minutes to another location to push a power button for someone.