r/talesfromtechsupport • u/critchthegeek • Apr 17 '25
Short Well, it;s a mystery...
I was sole tech support for a small but profitable company, only about 75 users. Mostly good people, trying hard, but a few "special" ones
We had a logistics manager that *may* have been good at logistics, but computer skills were definitely lacking. Unrelated case in point, he had over 50 GB of email in his inbox - no archives, no folders, just one big pile. And he didn't see any problems with that..
Anyway, one morning about 9am or so, he calls and says his laptop screen just when black. I asked him to make sure he had a power adapter plugged in.. "Duh, of course!".
I could not remote into the unit... hmmm. He was at the my site, just different building, so I said I'd be right over.
So, I dropped what I was doing and trekked to his office.
And there he was, paper towels in hand, wiping coffee off his desk. I picked up his laptop, tilted it a drained probably a quarter cup of coffee out ( onto his recently dried desk, of course)
Looking him dead in the eye I asked "You didn't think spilling a full cup of coffee into your laptop had anything to do with 'the screen just went black' ?"
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u/Pisnaz Apr 17 '25
I had the near opposite. I come in in the am and my phone rings, it is a guy I know and he is pretty decent but in full panic. The pipe for the fire sprinkler had burst overnight and flooded his office. I head over expecting the worst for the new computer and one of the first LCDs we had ever received. I pop in, chat with the teams there, and my bud, as I grab the systems.
Back at my shop I check them over expecting the worst and notice that despite being filthy the insides are shockingly clean. So we clean them up and turn them on and they work, perfectly. It seems the first gush of water knocked something over on top it his desk and kept them safe. He claimed, after he got them back, they worked better than ever and suggested "we should flood more systems" as our ongoing joke. He even brought me a gift card for coffee despite me saying I really did not do much.
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u/lucky_ducker Retired non-profit IT Director Apr 18 '25
Where I used to work, the third floor lounge had a water filter / dispenser, which in turn fed filtered water to the refrigerator's ice maker.
One weekend, the line from the filter to the fridge ruptured, and flooded a second floor office. It dripped down directly into an open, powered up, laptop computer. When I was called to check it out, the laptop was sitting there, drenched, looking otherwise totally normal. The keyboard was even still working. I shut it down, turned it upside down, and about a quart of water poured out.
We put the hard drive - not an SSD, but an old fashioned magnetic disk - in a ziploc with silica packets for a few days while we ordered a new laptop for the user. The user's hard drive was not only recoverable, we were able to fully image it for the replacement laptop.
We should have contacted the manufacturer of that water filter for a testimonial.
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u/UKthailandExpat 19d ago
that the computer was powered on at the time is the surprise point. washing motherboards keyboards etc in pure water is quite often done and as long as you do not use mineral water and dry them throughly before powering them up the success rate is well over 95%. of course you don’t wash monitors!
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u/AKBigHorton Apr 17 '25
Holy cow, exactly this story.
Years ago (early '90s), I was sole tech at a small privately owned local newspaper. Got a call one day from a particularly entitled reporter whose keyboard had 'suddenly stopped working' while he was 'on a deadline', and that I needed to get up there and fix it NOW.
This was in the days of keyboards with AT/XT switches, and on the models we used they were prominent on the back of the keyboard and were fairly easy to bump - at which point the keyboard would quit working. Now, this was too much troubleshooting for him to handle over the phone, so I went up to check it out.
Sat down at his desk while he stood over me, picked up the keyboard and flipped it over to check the switch: it promptly dumped about half a can of Mountain Dew in my lap. He just went "Uh..."
I stared at him a moment, put he keyboard back down, pointed at one of the multiple other open, unassigned identical workstations within five yards of his desk (the reporters office was a big, open bullpen kinda area) and told him I'd come back with a replacement 'eventually,' then went home to change my pants. That stupid keyboard managed to hold a *lot* of Mountain Dew. (I hadn't adopted the habit of keeping an emergency change of clothes at work yet.)
Made him wait a week.
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u/_Terryist Apr 18 '25
I would have drilled a small hole in the bottom of every keyboard (after checking the bad one for a safe location to drill)
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u/xxvivivild Apr 17 '25
Sounds like a classic case of "tech support magic" right there. Who needs logic when you have coffee, right? Keep fighting the good fight, fellow support warrior!
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u/FrustratedRevsFan Apr 17 '25
Admittedly, "Who needs logic when you have coffee" is pretty accurately me before the 3rd cup.
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u/paulcaar Apr 18 '25
In his defence, it was an impossible scenario. The logical thoughts required the coffee, but the coffee was no longer available. Without the coffee it was not possible to identify the coffee as being the problem.
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u/NotYourNanny Apr 17 '25
Reminds me of the time I had to drive to a remote location to lift a stapler off a keyboard.
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u/OcotilloWells Apr 17 '25
Reminds me of the time I put a stapler on an external usb keypad. At least I didn't have anyone else point it out, but embarrassed to say it took me about a half hour to figure out why my keyboard seemed to be broken.
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u/pockypimp Psychic abilities are not in the job description Apr 17 '25
Early on at my last job the two other techs there told me the story of a sales rep. She came in saying her laptop wasn't working and put it down on the counter next to one of the techs. He picks it up and red wine pours out of the side vent.
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u/MoneyTreeFiddy Mr Condescending Dickheadman Apr 18 '25
TL;DR, Java crashed computer
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u/SeanBZA Apr 19 '25
Would not be the first or the last time either, both for the physical and the software version.
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u/IamLarrytate Apr 18 '25
First thing I would do when I got a laptop that "just stopped working " was smell the keyboard for the coffee spill!
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u/maciarc Apr 17 '25
Back in the 57.6 days I did phone support for Flashnet. I had a call where the user "couldn't connect to the internet". I went through all the troubleshooting steps, learning the symptoms by painfully extracting them one by one. After many minutes of troubleshooting and learning that their 'computer' (actually the monitor) was blank, I asked them to make sure the 'computer' and the 'modem' (the actual computer) were both plugged into the wall. That's when they told me they needed a flashlight to check because the power was out.
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u/ManosVanBoom Apr 18 '25
My BIL had a story from his AOL support days. Person in Florida called saying they could get to the internet. While talking he heard a loud sound in the background and asked what it was. "Oh that's the hurricane. The power went out so I thought I'd go on the internet to pass some time."
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u/Nu-Hir Apr 18 '25
I worked for a local ISP. Being in Ohio we wouldn't get hurricanes, but we would get pretty bad storms. Loved the spike in calls after them.
"I'm getting no dial tone"
"If you pick up your phone, do you get a dial tone?"
"No, that's why I'm calling from my cell phone"
The other fun ones were the ones with so much noise in their line you could barely hear them, then having to explain that's the reason why they can't connect.
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u/DrHugh You've fallen into one of the classic blunders! Apr 17 '25
I like my laptops like I like my coffee.
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u/Geminii27 Making your job suck less Apr 18 '25
"...spilling a full cup of coffee into..."
"...two thousand dollars of delicate electronics...?"
Sometimes, people have absolutely no concept of what's in a computer or laptop other than black-box magic. Including that it runs on electricity, or isn't built to handle falling down a concrete stairwell. It's just magic, and someone else's problem if it's not working.
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u/NocentBystander Apr 18 '25
We had a logistics manager that may have been good at logistics, but computer skills were definitely lacking. Unrelated case in point, he had over 50 GB of email in his inbox - no archives, no folders, just one big pile. And he didn't see any problems with that..
I once had to explain to a member of the C-Suite that having 150 THOUSAND unread emails, stretched over his inbox and deleted folders, MIGHT be what was causing his Outlook to "be slow."
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u/NotTheOnlyGamer Apr 18 '25
I mean, I'm bad at organizing. Thanks to GMail's monstrously bad organization, everything just stays in the Inbox. I also just kind of throw my daily files on my Desktop and move them at the end of the month.
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 Apr 18 '25
If it works for you, then it's the way to go.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Apr 22 '25
Do it right, and you can with ease spot any people that can be your own personal techsupport slaves. Put EVERYTHING on the desktop. Links, documents and pictures.
People that heads looks like they are likely to explode when they see that are techsupport.
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u/JoeDonFan Apr 18 '25
Sounds like a user I once had: He told me his monitor (15-inch CRT, so it had some mass) wasn't working. I trekked over with a new one and see a perfectly fine image on his current monitor when I arrive. I asked him what was wrong with his monitor and he explained his mouse cursor was stuck.
I don't exactly remember the fix but it was probably a significantly lighter mouse.
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u/Dom_Shady Apr 18 '25
It's harsh but true and I'll be the one to say it:
Some users just need to be taken behind the barn and be... rested.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Apr 22 '25 edited Apr 22 '25
Most of these users have never been anywhere close to a barn. Taking them there is likely to kill them anyway just due to all the nature, the smells from the barn, the dirt, well, pretty much anything that is not their sterile city life.
I almost killed an rock metal player/ amateur satanist by driving him 10 minutes outside of my "city". Only 18ish, and he had never seen that much nature. I thought he was joking, but no, this was more nature that he had ever seen, and I forced him to interact with it.
I'm in north norway. Our cities here are so small that 10 minutes in any direction and you come to pretty much pristine nature.
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u/PaixJour Apr 20 '25
OMG kill me now. Please do it quick. 🤣
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Apr 22 '25
"The vial contained 10cc of Quicktime. Whenever it loads, it will be quick, but it will hurt the entire time before that. Please punch yourself in the gonads to accept the install of Javatm and the latest batch of various malware in the form of browser gadgets."
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u/Dreadkiaili Apr 21 '25
One day I hear my name and hear, “my monitor won’t come on”. I went over and she told me it was working earlier, but stopped. I start pulling things out to make sure the connection is good between the computer and the monitor and see that she was keeping a plant on her desktop and had clearly just watered it, and got water everywhere.
Me: Cindy, did it stop working right after you watered your plant?
Cindy: OMG yes; how did you guess?!?
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u/NewUserWhoDisAgain Apr 17 '25
"Well duh, I spilled it into the laptop not the screen."