Client: “I have attached the pictures I would like on my website. I am looking for a dark and mysterious look and feel.”

Me: “I just opened your pictures and noticed that they are all of My Little Pony.”

Client: “Oh, gosh, I am so sorry. Those are meant for my daughter’s birthday cake. Attached are the actual images I would like. Sorry.”

Me: “Sorry to bother you again, but these pictures are all from Woodstock.”

Client: “Yes, that’s correct.”

The client was looking for a professional website for their detective business.

Today was Thanksgiving, and our store was one of the few places in our area that was open. The main grocery store and the convenience stores were closed, so it was just us and some pharmacies. Because of this, we were extremely busy with people who had forgotten stuff they needed.

At one point, we had a group of three teenagers and one older guy, maybe an uncle, come in and start awkwardly standing around the front registers. Teenagers almost always cause problems here, so rather than approaching, I made eye contact with one of them. She immediately turned away and started whispering to her friend. I assumed they didn’t need help and went back to working in my aisle.

A few minutes later, my manager was having a conversation with me, and the girl I’d made eye contact with came up to me.

Girl: *Yelling* “Excuse me! I need help getting my pictures off this!”

She held up a disposable camera.

Me: “Okay. I just need to find an envelope that you can fill out to send it for processing.”

I started digging around behind the counter, and I heard her telling her friends that she didn’t think I was right.

That’s when the guy she came in with told me they thought I was wrong.

Guy: “She says if you help her, she can connect the camera to her phone with Bluetooth and download the pictures onto her phone.”

Me: “There is no way to do such a thing. We usually mail disposable cameras out of state for film processing, and then the pictures are digitally sent back to us to print.”

Guy: “How long does that take?”

Me: “Usually a few weeks.”

Behind him, the girl started throwing a fit that it wouldn’t be done today and stomped off.

The funniest part of all this to me is the fact that they actually thought disposable cameras had Bluetooth.

This story is from before I really was in IT since I was still in high school, around 2002 to 2004 if I recall correctly. I was the go-to tech support for my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had just bought a new pretty early digital camera and was having fun with it, trying to figure out how the machine worked using the manual.

He got pretty far with it but kept running into an error, so he phoned me. It sounded pretty strange to me. Every time he snapped a picture, his camera would tell him there was an error. But the picture was there and it was good. So, on my bicycle I hopped to pay them a visit.

Once I had the camera in my hands, I was able to take pictures and didn’t notice anything wrong with it. I didn’t even see the error message my grandfather had been having issues with. I handed it back to him, and the first picture he took displayed the error message again, according to him. So, we repeated the steps, now both looking at the display to find out what would go wrong. He snapped a picture.

Grandfather: *Immediately* “There it is!”

Camera Display: “Storing.”

It clicked for me. The camera had been set up to use the Dutch language, not the English language, though somehow this message was still in English. I didn’t register the discrepancy, but there it was.

“Storing” in Dutch means malfunction or failure, not to write a file to memory and store it there.

It was one of my first lessons in rule one: “Users lie” — even though this user really thought he was getting error messages.

I’m on the phone with a client.

Me: “If you could send me some digital photographs of the property, that would be great.”

Client: “Okay, I’ll send them tomorrow first class!”

Me: “First class?”

Client: “Yeah, I’ll put them on a memory stick tonight and put it in the post first thing tomorrow.”

A woman had me use her photo as part of her new ad. She paid for some touch-ups with Photoshop, so I sent her the new picture.

Client: “I look great! Is there any way you can make my breasts a little larger, though?”

I thought it an odd request but proceeded anyway. However, she still wasn’t satisfied with the second, or even the third copy. However, once I sent the fourth, I got an angry email.

Client: “Why did you make my breasts so big?! I look like a bimbo!”

I then showed her the numerous requests she had sent me. I got another email shortly after.

Client: “Sorry for the confusion. The first draft is fine. My husband decided to answer my emails for me.”