I am working at an electronics retailer back in the early 2000s. I am assisting a gentleman who looks to be in his fifties with a fax machine.

Me: “Perhaps if you let me know what you’ll be using it for, I can help recommend the best model for you.”

Customer: “Well, my rent checks seem to arrive late to my landlord, so I figure I’ll fax them.”

Me: “I doubt your landlord will accept a faxed check.”

Customer: “Why not?”

After a few further moments of discussion, I realize that he thinks it’s either a teleportation device or something akin to the vacuum tubes at the bank drive-thru. I explain how fax machines work and that it does not actually send the item, but more of a picture of it.

Customer: “You must not be showing me the right thing. My neighbor bought one; I’ll be back after talking to him to see which type of machine he bought.”

I am testing instructions with a focus group on installing and using a new program, back in the day when these things came on a couple of floppy disks.

One user was getting very frustrated with their machine, trying to stick in the second floppy disk.

User: “It’s broken! The machine is broken!”

His second disk was looking extra floppy by now! I checked out the disk drive; the first floppy was still in there. I ejected it.

Me: “You have to remove the first floppy before putting in the second one.”

User: “It doesn’t say that on your instruction sheet. How was I supposed to know?”

Related:
Reasons Why Small Print Is A Million Pages Long, Part 2
Reasons Why Small Print Is A Million Pages Long

I worked at Blackberry tech support. After activating a customer’s phone:

Me: “Okay, now you need to dial a number and hit ‘send’ to see if you can make a call.”

The call failed. We did some troubleshooting but to no avail. After half an hour of him dialing a number and getting “call failed”:

Me: “Hmm… maybe it’s a problem with who you’re calling. What number are you dialing?”

Customer: “Twelve.”

I work intake for computer repair in the warranty department.

Customer: “I need to send this laptop in for repair.”

Me: “I am sorry, sir, but we can only take Apple products.”

Customer: “This is an Apple product!”

Me: “Sir, that’s a Dell laptop with an Apple sticker logo on it.”

Customer: “Doesn’t that make it Apple?”

A company ordered a 3D animation as a commercial for their product.

Client: “Why is it taking so long?”

Me: “The render time calculates every frame, and there is a lot of liquid physics going on, so it will take some time.”

Client: “Listen, I got an idea. I have a couple of PCs at my house. I will sell them to you cheaply. You can scrap the parts and put them in your PC; that would make things faster.”

Me: “That doesn’t work that way.”

Client: “Why?” 

Me: “You can’t take random parts and just put them in another PC to make it faster. And I don’t think those PCs are good enough for 3D rendering.”

Client: “Those are fast PCs! All have I3 processors, and Office opens in like five seconds.”

I just rolled my eyes and pretended I didn’t hear that.