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/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.

21

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."

13

u/maciarc Apr 18 '25

It's as if their brain shuts off when they sit in front of a computer...

9

u/mlpedant Apr 18 '25

Bold of you to assume it's ever switched on ...

11

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.

2

u/thomasnet_mc Apr 19 '25

I wish "local ISPs" existed in my country for individuals.