I work at a small private institute for teaching English in a country where English is not our native language. The secretary there is quite sweet with everyone, and she is the one who suffers the most the pressure from our boss. I can’t tell who of the two has less knowledge about technology.

I get to work as usual, and I see the secretary typing as fast as she can. I ask her what she is doing because, obviously, she has a lot of other tasks to do — receive phone calls, talk with parents, fill in forms, etc. — and I can tell she was making her biggest effort.

Secretary: “[Boss] asked me to copy this whole text — more than ten pages! — from a PDF file to a doc for her daughter’s schoolwork.”

Me: “But why don’t you do this?”

I approach her desk, and I copy the text from the PDF and paste it onto the doc file. She looks at me as all the words from the PDF file appear immediately and magically in the doc file.

I think she is still thanking me to this day.

This was back in the 1980s when offices weren’t designed with network cabling in mind and you could still smoke in the office.

I had a user in the office portion of our warehouse whose network connection started cutting out between 9:00 and 9:10 am, every morning, starting in November. Sometimes it would come back; sometimes it wouldn’t. It was really weird. I swapped the NIC with a known good one (mine); my unit stayed connected while the user’s continued to cut out. I swapped out the CPU; I rebuilt her hard drive and loaded and reloaded drivers downloaded at a million dollars a minute… and no go.

One morning, I was at her desk, waiting for the network connection to die, when I watched a coworker walk in (he started later than everyone else, at nine) and hang his coat on the coat rack next to the door. A few moments later, the connection dropped.

I looked at the coat rack and then at the floor, and I noticed a network cable under one of the legs of the coat rack. I managed to lift the rack just enough to slide the cable out from under the rack, and the connection came back up. It seems the sixth coat on the rack was just enough to pull the cable out of the nearby rack and drop her connection.

Just to be safe, I replaced her cable and anchored it to the baseboard with antenna clips. We never had a problem again.

I’m working the helpline for a huge Internet company. Usually, when customers come to me, they are transferred from a coworker of a lower level and need some special technical help, like deleting cache, cookies, or other stuff, and are stuck in some security alert so they can’t log in to their account.

This conversation comes up to me at least two times a day, sometimes more often.

Me: “Okay, I have your account up now and changed something. Would you mind telling me which device you are using right now?”

Customer: *Irritated* “Um, my home phone… I have no smartphone!”

Me: “Let me be a bit more precise: which device are you using to log in?”

Customer: *Slightly angry* “Oh… a PC. What else should I use? I have no smartphone!”

Me: *Dry as a good wine* “There still is the possibility that you could use a tablet. And don’t forget about smart fridges.”

Customer: *Laughing* “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that.”

Most of the time, they add something like, “You know I’m old.” Then, the real struggle begins, but that’s another story.

I work as a level-two help desk tech at a major university under contract with a government agency to provide computer support. We aren’t bound by any agreement that we can’t point out someone’s stupidity to them when deserved.

This was in the day when everyone was getting laptops but not everyone knew how they worked (so it really could have been yesterday).

Me: “[Agency Help Desk], this is [My Name].”

Client: “I can’t get my laptop to turn off.”

Me: “Okay, did you try holding the power button for five seconds?”

Client: “Yes, but it wouldn’t turn off.”

Me: “Try unplugging it from the power outlet.”

Client: “I did, but it still won’t turn off.”

Me: “So, let’s remove the battery and see what happens.”

Client: “It’s still powered on.”

Me: “So, send it to me, and I will split the money with you.”

Client: “Money? What are you talking about?”

Me: “Well, we’ve found the only laptop in the world that doesn’t require any source of power, and we are going to be rich.”

Client: “Umm, I’ll call back later.”

Me: “Okay, but I was hoping to buy a yacht.”

Client: *Click!*

I have just had a caller transferred to me from one of our Order Processing phone representatives. The caller is not able to log in to our website.

Me: “Hello, [Caller], this is [My Name]. I understand from [Phone Representative] that you are not able to log in?”

Caller: “Yes. This happens every time that I try to log in; I have to reset the password. So, I reset it again today, and then I couldn’t log in with the new password.”

On our website, after you reset the password, it logs you in, so she would have had to log out and then log back in, so she was clearly testing to make sure the password would work.

Me: “I apologize that the website is not letting you log in. I show that your username is [Caller’s Full Name] with no spaces. Is that the username you are trying to log in with?”

Caller: “No, my username is [email address].”

Me: “I apologize for any confusion. That is the email address we have on record for you, but your username is [Caller’s Full Name]. Can you check and see if you can log in with that username and your password?”

Caller: “No. It doesn’t work.”

Me: “Okay, I’m going to resend the password reset email to you and have to try to reset it with me. Let me know when you receive it.”

Caller: “I have it.”

Me: “Now, click the ‘reset password’ link in the email just like you did before, and then type in the new password and click ‘continue’.”

Caller: “Okay, I reset it and I’m in. I’m going to log out and back in again to make sure it works.”

Me: “Okay. Let me know if it works.”

Caller: *Sounding a bit disappointed* “It worked this time. I’m back.”

Me: “I’m glad we were able to get this straightened out for you. Just remember for next time that the username is [Caller’s Full Name].”

The perplexing part of this incident is that in the password reset email, right above the previously mentioned “reset password” link, is a line that says, “Username,” and lists the person’s username.

Related:
The Username Blame Game