I live in an impoverished area, and so to try to help out a little, I run a service on Saturday afternoons at the local library that does basic fixes for computers for free. 

I had an old lady come in with a Toshiba laptop.

Lady: “It’s really slow. Can you make it faster?”

I run a hard drive cleaner software, a malware scanner and remover, and a few other programs to check for viruses, manage files, and clear caches. We got the computer’s boot time from ten minutes down to two.

Lady: “That’s still really slow.”

Me: “How old is this laptop?”

Lady: “Ten years.”

Me: “Based on the age, and that it only has 2GB of RAM, this is as fast as I can get it without reinstalling the operating system.”

Lady: “Then, just, I don’t know, do something.”

Me: “Ma’am, your computer is old. It cannot support newer material.”

Lady: “Well, then. Just do something.”

Me: “Your computer cannot be fixed for free. I recommend buying a new laptop.”

Lady: “Okay. How much will this cost?”

Me: “Nothing, ma’am. This is a free service.”

Lady: “Okay. Do you have a website?”

Me: “No, ma’am, I just advertise my services through the library.”

Lady: “Okay, so the library is where I leave the one-star review about how useless you’ve been?”

The one-star review was up on Google and other sites by the next day, likely written on her freshly cleaned-up laptop.

I worked for a point-of-sale company. One weekend, when I was on call and drinking at the bar across the street, I got a call from a manager from a chain full of not bright people, and to compound that, most of them weren’t even remotely nice, insulting us tech guys every call like they forgot they were twice my age managing a Denny’s knock-off.

So, the guy called and said:

Caller: “A screen on one of my POS terminals isn’t very responsive.”

Me: “Is it dirty?”

Caller: “No.”

Me: “Okay, let’s calibrate it.”

These people were using Windows XP in 2017; that should tell you the condition of the equipment. I walk him through how to calibrate it. Nope, still barely responsive.

Caller: “I’m pressing it, but there’s stuff caked all over the screen.”

Contrary to it not being dirty earlier. POS screens are nasty, considering the environment they’re in.

Me: “Wipe it down with a damp towel.”

Caller: “Won’t it damage it?”

Me: “Nah, Posiflex terminals have water-resistant screens. At the trade shows, they’ll sometimes have water dripping on the screen to demonstrate that. Screen cleaner would be best, but a damp towel will work.”

Caller: “Okay.”

He hangs up. Twenty minutes later, I get another call, him yelling and swearing about how it’s not working at all, not turning on.

I head over to my apartment and hop on TeamViewer. I can’t see it on the network, and I start the whole tracing the power cable routine.

Caller: “I put it through the dishwasher, and it just stopped working!”

I said verbatim:

Me: “You ran a computer through a f****** dishwasher?”

When I relayed this to my boss the next Monday, he didn’t even care because it was so stupid. Swearing at customers isn’t professional or okay, but this one was kind of explainable.

Caller: “You said it was water resistant!”

Me: “I said wipe the screen down! Water resistant is NOT the same as waterproof, dude. I mean…”

Caller: “Well, I need a new terminal now, so send someone. We are packed and can’t go without it.”

A quick check of his sales report and table seating chart determined that it was a lie; they were dead and had been all day.

I told him even if I left right then, going to the office, imaging a new terminal and driving the two hours to get to the site would put me there well after they close, and the other three terminals they had should work just fine, especially when the time clock showed just two servers on.

Caller: “Well, it’s under warranty, right?”

Me: “No, if it has Windows XP its well out of warranty at this point, plus your corporate office has to okay all equipment purchases.”

I told him this, rather than cause further chaos by telling him that doing something that freaking stupid voids warranties. After a few moments of awkward silence…

Caller: “You better stay out of xyzville!” *A smaller town that I would never ever go to on my own free will anyway.*

He hung up, and I went back to the bar and kept drinking.

Some fairly important backups were stuck on a way-too-old server in our server room. The guy in charge is a coworker at some faraway location and is more of a software kind of guy, less the operating system guy, yet I thought he was sort of tech literate.

The operating system on that machine failed and refused all efforts to boot (recovery, rescue, whatever). I was able to recover most of the data, but most of the drives were almost toast.

I got the guy access and told him to urgently get his backups off this machine, as most disks in there are almost done for.

Two months later, I get a phone call.

Me: “So is that server ready to be scrapped?”

Him: “Oh, not yet, the server just needs to hold up until the end of next year, just in case I need those backups, then it can be scrapped. Just wait until then.”

Me: “You do know that you rely on a way-too-old machine with broken hard drives as your backup storage solution running a rescue operating system, right? And that I told you two months ago to urgently get those backups off that server like years before?”

Him: “Getting that much storage somewhere else sounded like a lot of effort, so I just left it like that.”

Me: *Eyes twitching.* “How much data are we even talking about?”

Him: “About one TB.”

I don’t even…

In the end, I just plugged a USB drive into it to transfer the backups into our regular backup system.

Years ago, I was working the tech support evening shift on phones, with a team of about six people.

I was essentially acting as a second pair of eyes for people calling in (“there’s no option to send!” “Did you try clicking the big green send button?” “No one told me that!”). You get the deal.

As a tech support technician, I helped with… tech. One thing I did NOT handle was accounts, billing, contracts, etc. Even if I wanted to, it’s not something I had any level of access to see, much less perform. Users had to email or call their account managers, who worked 9-5.

Everyone who used our service had annual contracts, paid either yearly or (more commonly) month to month. We had a pretty idiot proof method of ensuring accounts didn’t go delinquent. Daily emails, voicemails from the account manager, and a huge banner across the tool that cannot be dismissed, stating exactly how many days they had until their account was suspended due to nonpayment.

Enter this caller.

He calls in at 19:00 EST, or just exactly past midnight in London, where he was based, screaming the site was down (it wasn’t). I look up his account, and see it’s suspended due to six months (?!) of nonpayment. I inform him of this, and he’ll need to backpay, plus late fees, in order to restore service. I inform him he’ll need to call in tomorrow during business hours to settle this with his account manager.

In a word? Explosion. 

Ten minutes of him screaming that no one told him, our system is terrible; he deserves free months for his ordeal, the usual. I pulled up his history and can see email read receipts showing he clicked on the delinquency emails, as well as login history, showing he was logged into the system and had seen the banners. I didn’t even bother bringing this up.

He doesn’t accept the answer that no one is in the building except me and six others, and demands I reset the system, which I cannot do. Then he demands I call the account manager’s personal phone number (which I do not have, I don’t know them!) to wake them up to process it. 

He hung up and called back, but I grabbed him out of the queue so no one else had to deal with him.

At this point, he states that he will not get off the call until this is resolved. Admittedly, he had me a bit here, since we are “under no circumstances” allowed to hang up calls unless they threaten violence or legal action, which he has not done.

It was also 20:00 at that point, and I needed to make the last train home, so I did the only thing I could think of and transferred him to my cell (hiding the number).

I packed up, walked out of the building, and walked across to the train. When he heard the noise, he asked what was happening, so I just replied:

Me: “I know you’ve said you’re not ending the call, and I know I’ve told you the solution, which is to call your account manager when the business opens. I need to start heading home, so I figured we can multitask and go over these options as many more times as you need to understand, while I head home. Now, which part would you like to go over again? How long until an account is suspended?”

I think I broke him. I got a solid thirty seconds of silence, followed by screaming that he understood it but didn’t accept it. Blah blah blah.

So, I started my hour-long commute home with this guy. The train was super loud, so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself (and sometimes I did it for fun).

Me: “Sorry, the train is super loud, can you repeat? Are you asking me why I don’t know a stranger’s cell number again? Well, your account manager is not someone I know; I’m not friends with them. You have their email to contact them yourself!”

I sound super peppy the whole time, talking to them like I was explaining shapes to a toddler.

He finally lost it halfway through, said he was suing me personally, and I finally got to hang up.

The account expired three months later, and all the data was deleted. Last I heard, it had gone to a UK collections agency.

Years ago, when I was doing network operations, we got an alarm for a data center that had a problem with the sprinklers. These days, data center sprinkler systems are loaded with inert gases like argon or nitrogen, but back then, it was water. We called someone to head into the office to work on the issue.

After that, we had to reach out to the facilities manager. As I am in Richmond, Virginia, and the data center was in California, I was calling them at about 5 AM. When the guy picked up (VP level), he read me the riot act and hung up. 

I called him back and stopped him when he began to rant:

Me: “I just need to give you the message, and then you can hang up. Your data center is flooding, and water is pouring on the server racks.”

VP: “Holy s***!”

Me: “I have facilities on their way to the site, and we are pulling the appliance list to notify the application owners.”

VP: “I’m in a car with a bunch of friends on the way to a football game.”

It’s 5 am their time, but California’s traffic is legendary.

Me: “Would you like me to call the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer, his boss)?”

VP: “…Yeah.”

Me: “Will do. Enjoy the game.”

He later contacted our department to apologize to me and talked me up to my boss.