I work in a computer repair shop. We’ve had plenty of odd customers, as all such shops do. But we also have the occasional customer like this man.

Me: “Hello, sir, how can I help you today?”

Customer: “I have a laptop that needs to be fixed. And you’re going to want to wear gloves for it.”

Me: “Okay. What happened to it?”

Customer: “I bought a new puppy a few weeks ago. We’re still house-training him, and you can probably fill in the blanks from there.”

Me: “Oh… So, the puppy…”

Customer: “Yeah. My toddler son was playing on the computer on the floor and forgot to put it back on the table when he was done. The puppy peed on the computer. Are you still willing to work on it with gloves, or does that put you off?”

Me: “I’ll tell you what. I’ll pull the hard drive and put it into a reader to see if we can recover anything from it. If there’s enough data to recover, I’ll swap it onto a refurbished computer and sell you that for a discount as thanks for telling me up front instead of making me find out the hard way.”

Customer: “That works for me. Thank you!”

In the end, that’s exactly what I did: I copied all the data from his old laptop onto a refurbished laptop I had recently rebuilt, wearing surgical gloves any time I touched the pieces of his old laptop. I also started wearing surgical gloves as standard procedure any time I work on water-damaged devices; most customers are not as honest as this man.

About twenty years ago, I was employed as the sole IT staff member for a small organization in the agricultural field. I worked from an office in the city where I lived, but we had several farm facilities in the region.

One morning, I received a call from the bookkeeper at one of the remote sites. She was one of several staff working in a small office attached to the barn. She reported that her desktop was starting to crash and freeze at apparently random moments, and the problem was getting worse.

After some basic troubleshooting over the phone, I agreed to come out in the afternoon to investigate. This site only had two moderately ancient IBM-AT class machines that were in need of replacement, but management had not yet approved my upgrade proposal.

Upon arrival, I decided to start by opening the case and giving the insides a quick check and cleaning. As I slid back the cover, I was shocked to see almost the entire interior of the PC filled with straw, shavings, and mouse turds galore. As I stood speechless, staring at the mess, it suddenly began to move. As I jumped back in surprise, a mouse appeared from the middle of the wad and lunged for an opening in the back of the case. Someone prior to me had installed and then removed an add-in card for this machine. But when they removed the card, they had neglected to reinstall a cover plate for the slot. I imagine the warm toasty interior of the PC was quite an inviting habitat for the little critter.

I spent the next hour or so carefully removing the debris inside the case and cleaning up as much of the mouse turds and urine as I dared without further damaging the motherboard. After this treatment, the PC booted up normally and appeared to work just fine for the rest of my time on-site. I opened the other PC in an adjacent office and found more or less the same situation, but there was no active inhabitant, fortunately.

I located several slot covers among the old computer debris on the site, so they were installed on the open slots of both machines before I buttoned them back up.

Shortly after reporting this to management, the proposal to replace these two mouse houses was approved. Fortunately, the staff had no further problems with the old machines until they were replaced.

A user submits a ticket because the Wi-Fi signal near their desk appears weak when they look at their laptop. The actual performance is fine, but they want to get ahead of the issue. Their desk is directly below a router and should have full bars.

I grab my laptop and my cell phone and head over to the user’s desk. I imagine it’s not going to be long before other users in the area start complaining, and I’d better be prepared to open a war room if needed.

Me: “So, can you show me what’s going on?”

User: *Pointing* “Look, the Wi-Fi is weak!”

They point to the Wi-Fi icon on their screen. Except it’s not the Wi-Fi icon. They’re not looking at one signal bar as they claimed; the Wi-Fi is working fine.

Me: “Sir, that’s the volume icon. It’s set at 10%.”

They were very quiet after that — ironically.

At my high school, we use this assignment tracking website to, well, keep track of our assignments, and using it is a part of your grade in some classes.

One day, a substitute teacher in first period tells us to pull out our laptops, open Chrome, and go to the assignment tracker. Most students use school-provided computers, but I brought my own laptop to school, running Windows. I don’t have Chrome installed, and I don’t have admin permissions on that laptop, so I can’t install it, so I open up Firefox and log in to the tracker.

The teacher begins walking around the room, making sure we’re all doing what we’re supposed to. She stops at my desk.

Teacher: “You’re not using the right software.”

Me: “Oh, did I go to the wrong website?”

Teacher: “You have to use Chrome; Firefox will not work.”

Right as she says this, the tracker loads up fine.

I turn my laptop to face her to prove that it is working fine, but she keeps standing there, continuing to insist that I use Chrome, ignoring the other person that needs help. She goes over there to help that person, but only after telling me to open Chrome and open the tracker there.

Instead of installing Chrome, I instead download its icon from the Internet and change the Firefox icon on my taskbar to the Chrome logo.

The teacher comes back over to my desk.

Teacher: “You have to use Chrome. If not, I’ll have to write you up for not following directions.”

I pointed to the Chrome icon on the taskbar. She just scowled and went back up to the front of the room.

I didn’t get written up that day.

I’m not actually tech support at work but de facto support because I can plug a USB in on the first try (okay, I’m lying; no one can do that) and because I know enough to get myself into trouble and some fancy Google search terms to get myself out of trouble.

I don’t actually have a budget for IT equipment, but I can pretty much buy what I need (and occasionally want) if I have reasonable justification for it. I just need the owner of the company to sign off on it, and to be fair, he rarely says no because he knows I do things at as small a cost as possible.

Every day, I need to print just over a hundred pages on a printer at the other end of the office (only a handful of meters away), but as the printer has a maximum of a hundred-fifty pages, I need to check that it’s got paper each time. The young lady who works right next to the printer tells me to just ask her to check the paper level.

Asking her to check the paper level each day gets boring, so I rename the printer “Kraken”. Now, instead of asking her to check the paper level, I can ask her to “ready the Kraken”. (We’re weird and it makes us smile.)

The owner overhears one day as I yell, “Ready the Kraken!” He has a good sense of humour and sends me an email.

Owner: “I don’t remember signing off on a Kraken. Please can you send me the initial outlay, running costs, and justification for a Kraken? Please also remember to submit the VAT receipt for a Kraken.”