Hi There - I saw that is says "phoned" for the serial number. The number I gave you is my home phone number. You may have an easier time getting ahold of me at: 555-555-1234 Thanks Joe UserThis kind fellow has noticed on his receipt that it says Serial number: phoned and as such assumes we want to contact him and even gives us an extra number to do so! This morning I got a call from a concerned user. He had just finished the purchased process and paid for one of our products "but didn't get a serial number". This was of course cause for alarm as he saw his credit card had been charged. I got a suspicious feeling and asked for his order ID to diagnose the problem. Yeah, you guessed it, his receipt said "Serial number: missing"!! After I explained the situation, he laughed about it and called it classic, entered the info and went on his merry way... ...other times are not so smooth. ;) We attempt to clear our dictionary of any offensive terms and over time we have managed to clean out a lot of abrasion. But early on, we had pretty much whatever you can find in a simple dictionary being sent out as "codes". (no slang luckily) A few times customers have been extremely upset at us for words like "anti-Semitism" and "swastika". The latter person was so upset he/she wanted to sue and report us to some agency or another. Most of the time a simple explanation and a new code and all parties are happy of course. ;) These bumps aside, our registration scheme has hopefully made things easier for most people rather than more difficult. :) On a related note, I want to create a Support Hall of Fame. We've been in the business long enough that we've seen the gamut of support inquiries. All the way from a movie of the problem complete with narration and detailed descriptions to one guy asking us to "make my monitor work with os x". Don't get me wrong, we understand that some people have skills that lie in fields other than computers, and they are probably smarter than us in everything else, but it doesn't keep a bunch of geeks from laughing their butts off on occasion! Anyone have some good stories to share? :) Extra points if you're the star of the tale. ;) (and none of the "guy used his cd-tray as a cup holder" type stories. we've all heard them. :P )
Posted by brian at 03:06 PM
| Comments (9)
| TrackBack (0)
Related:
- Betas, Twitter and WTF - Feb 16, 2010
- Quick Status Update - Feb 12, 2010
- It's Winter, Right? - Jan 26, 2010
- Hiya Kids, it's Theming Time! - Oct 06, 2009
- Mighty Mouse with Some Theme Sauce - Jun 02, 2009
This is a classic, but once a guy where i usually do tech support called me asking why his soundcard didn't work. I went, reinstalled driver (that was on windows), messed up for half an hour until i saw...the red slashed circle over the little yellow speaker. Yes, volume was to 0. I tought neither for a second that as possible problem.
Posted by: brainnolo on July 23, 2004 1:30 AMI'm a software developer for a company that authors and publishes management software for churches and non-profit organizations. Our softwares runs in a networked environment in a typical client/server setup. One of our techs was once working with a user and instructing her to "go to the server", meaning to navigate to the mounted network drive from her client computer. However, nothing seemed to make sense to the user from that point on. After several frustrating attempts to determine what was going on, it became apparent that the user had the client computer and server computer physically next to each other, and when instructed to "go to the server", the user would simply turn her chair around and literally be "at the server", ready to go.
Posted by: Durandal on July 23, 2004 5:52 AMI see a lot of them... while this isn't quite a cupholder, it does fit into the 'step one...is it plugged in' category:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,10844058~mode=flat
Posted by: ACat on July 23, 2004 7:38 AMFrom 1995-1997 I worked for an ISP, starting out in tech support. I heard a lot of great stuff. A long time ago I made this little web page of some of them: http://www.unix.vi/lusers.html .
Btw, maybe Joe User is just lonely and wants someone to talk on the phone with. :)
Posted by: Ken on July 23, 2004 9:53 AMHow about people who reply to the mailer-daemon?
http://www.jedi.com/obiwan/dearmd.html
Posted by: zetawoof on July 24, 2004 1:22 PMJust a little while ago I had some people saying that my application wouldn't run. One of them was a developer, so he helped troubleshoot through it. After various tests the reason became clear: he had deleted his /System/Library/Java/com folder. Thus my cocoa-java application would no longer run. So he got a friend to send over that folder and everything worked fine.
The weirdest thing is that this same problem and solution affected 3 different people! I think they were affected by a problematic java update and got some lousy advice on what to do.
Here's the full forum thread:
http://sillysoft.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=718
My wife, a school psychologist, was at work and noticed one of the other psychologists going back and forth to the copier. She asked what she was doing and the other psychologist replied, I'm trying to make the fonts bigger on this print out. So my wife showed her how to change font size instead of print, set copier to enlarge, copy, and repeat.
Posted by: Mark Neal on July 27, 2004 1:18 PMComments don't seem to be particularly active on this post, given the number of qualifying stories there should be. How about you post some of your funniest support stories while you wait for us to give you ours? :)
Posted by: Kevin on July 28, 2004 12:38 AMThis is probably the funniest i can tell: Yesterday, i went to do support to the same guy of the "soundcard problem" and he told me "please could you sync the numbers in my P800 with the laptop, when you finish installing these programs here?" i said "Sure" and he "Ok thanks, now i need to go i'll be back in a pair of hours, go when you have finished i'll pay you tomorrow", said that, he took the P800 and left.
(For those who doesn't understand the fun: he took the P800 i was supposed to sync).
Posted by: brainnolo on July 28, 2004 2:32 AM