Tech Support gone bad

A man purchased a laptop from me. He called about a week later and said that it would no longer boot-up. I tried to troubleshoot with him about what went wrong but he said it wouldn't even start. I had him bring it in and I couldn't get it to work either. I was making preparations to remove the hard drive so I could put it into a new laptop for him. When I turned it over, I saw 16 nicely drilled holes in the bottom of the case. I asked him how this had happened and he said that it was getting hot sitting on his lap all the time, so he drilled some air holes in it. "Could that be the problem?" he asked.

"I downloaded Netscape and tried to install it. It said not to install this version if I was running Win95. So I uninstalled 95..."

Compaq is considering changing the command "Press Any Key" to "Press Return Key" because of the flood of calls asking where the "Any" key is.

AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with photocopies of the floppies.

Caller called me up wanting to send something via email. She said that no matter what she did--it wouldn't go through. After much debating over the settings, I finally got around to asking her what she was trying to send...turns out it was a BOX she wanted to email to her daughter for her birthday!

Another Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to Fax anything. After 40 minutes of failed problem solving is was discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.

A confused caller to IBM was having troubles printing documents. He told the technician that the computer had said it "couldn't find printer". The user had also tried turning the computer screen to face the printer - But that his computer still couldn't "see" the printer.

An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

An IBM customer had trouble installing software and rang for support. "I put in the first disk, and that was OK. It said to put in the second disk, and had some problems with the disk. When it said to put in the third disk - I couldn't even fit it in..." The user hadn't realized that "Insert Disk 2" meant to remove Disk 1 first.