Microsoft Word To The Wise: Run!

I work in tech support for my university. A “regular” comes in one day and explains that a Word document from her email won’t open on her Mac. She is elderly and a regular at tech support, so I know it is about to get interesting.

Me: “Okay, let’s start by getting into your university email.”

Customer: *Starts logging in* “What’s my password?”

Me: “I have absolutely no idea what your password is.”

Customer: “But you guys gave that to me!”

Me: “That wasn’t me. You’ll have to go back to [office] where they reset university account passwords.”

She grumbles and heads to the office, and they handle her and send her back. She next shows me the email in question. I download it and test it on our Mac, and it works fine. I resave it in a different file format just in case.

We go to her email account, and I attach the document and email it to her. She says she’ll try it and leaves.

Ten minutes later, she’s back and walks right over to my desk, balls her fists up, raises them over her head, and yells:

Customer: “Why won’t you help me?!“

The receptionist comes over and tells her she needs to stop yelling. She says a bunch of things about how much money is at stake, that no one is helping her, and that she needs help desperately.

Again, I look at the file and show her that it opens just fine on our computer. I’m not really allowed or supposed to go with anyone anywhere, so I give her the phone number and tell her to call when she is at the machine in question.

Nope.

She comes back ten minutes later again, and this time she is VERY angry.

Customer: “You’re not helping me! You’re doing a terrible job! They shouldn’t be paying you; in fact, you should get fired!”

My boss then came out and shuffled her away immediately. My boss actually went with her to the machine she was trying to work on. It turned out that it wasn’t a Mac but a Dell. The Dell did not have Microsoft Word on it, so the file would not open.

She returned three more times that day, one time just to talk, one time to ask for a paper clip, and one time to ask to use the phone.