I’m on the phone with a financial officer talking about money.

Me: *Shouting to the background* “No barking while I’m on the phone!“

Loan Officer: “Oh, I know how it is. My cat’s the same way.“

Me: “I don’t even have any pets. That’s my kid.“

A couple of women approach me at the customer service desk.

Customer #1: “We’d like to look at the gifts from a wedding registry? Name is [Bride and Groom].”

Me: “Of course, let me bring that up for you.”

Customer #1: “What’s the return policy?”

Me: “It’s thirty days with a receipt.”

Customer #2: “Oh, good. We don’t think it will last that long.”

Crazily, twenty-nine days later, they were back asking for a refund!

This happens in my first few months as an IT guy for my current job with a health care provider. I am pretty new and really only know the basics of IT. I only got the gig because they were desperate; the whole team had turned over save for the boss and one tech.

For the most part, this place uses 95% full-sized Dell Optiplexes. They have a handful of micro FormFactors, but they are few and far between and are generally reserved for administration. I get a call for help from a team room where all of our nurses work, and when I get there, one nurse is absolutely frantic.

Nurse #1: “Someone stole our PC!”

I take this proclamation with a grain of salt and take a look at the workstation. The monitor is powered on but the screen is black. I look beneath the desk and see… there’s no desktop. All eleven other workstations in this room have those large Optiplexes underneath the desk and this one has nada. Oh, shoot. Someone did steal their PC!

I call up the boss.

Me: “Hey, what do we do? There’s no PC here; I think it may have been stolen!”

Boss: “Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

My boss gets down to the room within ten minutes and does the same examination I do. He comes to the same conclusion: this PC was jacked right from under our noses! He starts talking to the other nurses about who has been in the room recently, starts making calls to security to get logs, and writes an email up to finance to purchase a replacement.

Then, another nurse walks up to us.

Nurse #2: “Did you check behind the monitor?”

Sure enough, mounted right behind the monitor was a tiny little micro Optiplex that was powered off. I hit the power button and let the original nurse get back to work.

Needless to say, both “IT professionals” involved felt a little embarrassed.

I’ve just bought a new gaming PC. My brother’s best friend builds custom PCs and built the PC for me. He’s helping me (someone completely hopeless at IT) install the thing.

My brother has just made a mistake in the assembly process. He bolted on one of the monitor arms backward, necessitating a disassembly.

Brother: “G**d*** it. Why am I so stupid?”

And with perfect timing, my partially-built but still functional PC chimes up.

Cortana: “To answer that question, I need access to the Internet. Please connect me to Wi-Fi and ask again.”

Brother: “F*** you!”

[Best Friend] and I bend over in laughter.

Brother: *Sighs* “What has my life come to that even computers are sassing me now?”

When I did theater in high school, the tech crew would put a speaker in the hallway that was our backstage so that we could hear what was going on onstage, including lines said through microphones and sound effects.

One day, after the cast had been rehearsing for a while but while the tech crew was just getting started, I was talking to some of my friends backstage, very close to both the speaker and the men’s room.

One of them excused himself to use the bathroom, and I turned to do something else. A second later, music that the crew was planning to use for a set change started playing over the speaker, but since they hadn’t used the speaker before, they played it at an unbelievably loud volume. I jumped a mile because this was in no way expected, but they soon turned it down to bearable levels.

I turned around to see that my friend was even more surprised than me and was now lying sprawled out in the entrance to the bathroom.

Friend: “Well, I had to use the bathroom. Had to. It’s a past-tense need now.”