No more hiding in the server room

Any Funny stories?

Anyone here have funny stories to share? I bet there are hundreds out there. Like the one about the user who calls the help desk to say their coffee cup holder is broken, when they are actually referring to their CD drawer.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rick on March 5, 2009 at 6:25pm

I've got a fresh one! Earlier this week I shipped a new APC brand UPS to a branch to replace their recently broken one. I get a call yesterday from an excited employee at the branch asking me what they need to do in order to get the new UPS machine up and running. I was confused because they seemed so excited about a battery and also kept saying they've never had one of these at the branch before. I then realized the employee who opened the box thought the APC UPS was a new PC dedicated to running shipments/labels for our outgoing UPS packages AND had unplugged the PC we currently use at the branch for shipping UPS and replaced it with the battery. I broke the news gently.

In all fairness I could see how it might be possible to confuse the black half tower looking UPS with a PC, and the console port on the back with a vga port.. but I'm a bit unnerved that employees at that branch would open IT equipment and assume its purpose and start putting it to "use" without calling IT first to ask questions.

This of course is the same employee that before argued with me that they've never used the file/print server sitting in the network room and that it's been turned off for years. I almost snapped on that call, but was able to calmly explain to the employee that they were mistaken and that all of the branches .pst and user shares lived on that server. They never admitted they were wrong :V

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Rob Atkinson on March 5, 2009 at 7:21pm

Ahhh the 'helpfull' L-user!
I'm sure every office has one of these, armed with a little information suddenly they become the expert.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on March 11, 2009 at 1:42am

I really like how Joel describes things like this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000060.html

If it affords clicking, ppeople will click it.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on March 11, 2009 at 1:50am

I had a good one today.

One of my users got a message that her password was expiring in 14 days, which was causing her some level of discomfort (you'd have to get to know her to really understand). I started to walk her through changing her password and when we got to the "Enter your new password" part, she stopped.

Me: Alright, come up with a new password. Remember to give it at least one capital letter and a number

Her: Can't I enter the same password as before?

Me: um...no

Her: Why not?

Me: Well, then it wouldn't be changing your password...

Her: grumble