Customer: “I need a new iPhone cover for my new Samsung S10.”
Me: “I’m sorry, what?”
Customer: “An iPhone cover for my new Samsung?”
Me: “Okay, I just want to clarify. You want…”
Customer: “An iPhone cover for my new Samsung phone.”
Then, I got to teach her about different phone brands.
She left, with no phone cover and a confused look on her face.
I get a ticket from an employee.
Employee: “My hard drive is almost full. Can you help?”
Me: “Okay. What have you been doing lately on the PC that is taking up so much space? For example, have you been downloading a lot of files lately? When did you last clear your cache?”
And so on.
I remote in, go into the browser, and clear the cache, but [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the free space on their drive. I clear the %temp% folder. [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the remaining free space.
Concerned something might be wrong, I start running a security scan on [Employee]’s PC. For a while, the filenames being shown are all similar. They go like file1.txt, file2.txt, and I think it stops at around file5000.txt. I then check the files, and yup, they take up a lot of space.
Me: “Why do you have 5,000 copies of the same file?”
Employee: “I was trying to back it up.”
Apparently, keeping 5,000 copies of the same file was a good way to do so, and they didn’t get the meaning of “have multiple copies of your data”.
Trying not to laugh over the call, I simply told the employee that they could upload the file to the network drive. [Employee] then uploaded the file to the drive and deleted the 4,999 copies of the same file.
Now, they were comfortable with the free space on their drive. I ended the call and closed the ticket, and hopefully, they won’t make the same mistake again.
The customer I’m talking to points to a Toshiba Satellite series laptop.
Customer: “So, does this come with its own satellite?”
Me: “It comes with Wi-Fi capability if that’s what you mean.”
Customer: “No, does it come with a satellite? Like, in space?”
Back in 2008, I graduated and started a job as an internal analyst with one of the big, global manufacturers — one that had a generally IT-literate employee base. Our team used a couple of niche simulation programmes to do prediction analysis, but our outputs would always be presented to our “clients” in Office apps — Word, Powerpoint, and/or Excel — which everyone had access to and knew how to use. Well, nearly everyone.
On this occasion, we had been asked for a favour by another department, and the guy (apparently some bigwig) was looking for some prediction data for three different scenarios and needed it urgently. We had already been working on something similar for someone else, so I sent over a cut of the bits he wanted pretty quickly — same day instead of a few weeks or months. You’re welcome.
But instead of a thank-you, my boss got an angry email that we had only sent over information for one of the three scenarios. I assured him that I had sent all three; each one was on a separate tab, and if he checked again he should see he had everything he asked for.
But after a couple more emails back and forth, double-checking my outbox, and even resending it just in case the extra tabs somehow went missing in transit, he was adamant that the information wasn’t there. He was acting very huffy, entitled, and condescending. He even implied that we were being willfully obstructive along with one of his re-requests for the information that I had already sent him.
It didn’t take long to escalate to the point that he demanded a phone call to get the key figures from us (despite him being far too busy for such things) before we ruined his important meeting with our incompetence.
We didn’t have screen sharing back then, but it still didn’t take long to ask him:
Me: “Look down… Down… Do you see the words ‘option 1,’ ‘option 2,’ and ‘option 3’ just above the bar at the bottom… over on the left?”
He did. His voice sounded quieter now.
Me: “Click ‘option 2’.”
Bigwig: “Oh.”
Turns out he didn’t know what tabs were and didn’t think to ask. In 2008, he still thought Excel was only ever one page. And I never did get that thank-you.
An old woman walks up holding a piece of virus scanner software.
Customer: “Do I need a computer to be able to use this?”
Me: “It’s a virus scanner for a computer, ma’am.”
Customer: “Oh. I needed one for my DVD player. It’s got some virus on it that makes all my videos Spanish.”
It was a very productive hour teaching her how to select the language on her DVDs!
Related:
Totally Estúpido! Part 24
Totally Estúpido! Part 23
Totally Estúpido! Part 22
Totally Estúpido! Part 21
Totally Estúpido! Part 20
