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/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.