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A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer’s tech Support number, complaining about the error message: “Can’t find the printer.” On the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn’t find it.

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And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away from her.

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An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Customer: “I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer.”

Training stresses that we are “not the Software Police,” so I let the little act of piracy slide.

Tech Support: “Umm-hmm. What happened?”
Customer: “As I put each disk in it turns out they weren’t initialized.”
Tech Support: “Do you remember the message exactly, ma’am?”
Customer: (proudly) “I wrote it down. ‘This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it?’”
Tech Support: “Er, what happened next?”
Customer: “After they were initialized, all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can’t read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?”

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This guy calls in to complain that he gets an “Access Denied” message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his username and password in capital letters.

Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try once more, but use lower case letters.”
Customer: “Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard.”

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Email from a friend: “CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?”

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My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her arms crossed across her chest, staring at the screen. After about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position, only now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she replied “It’s about time! I pressed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!”

1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

2. Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

3. When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 300 screen saver passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.

6. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.

7. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

8. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

9. When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.

10. When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

11. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We’re collectors.

12. When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

13. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

14. When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice : “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?”. That motivates us.

15. When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

16. When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

17. Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.

18. Don’t use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

19. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 20kg of computer sitting on top of them.

20. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.

21. When you get a message saying “Are you sure?” click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you ?

22. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don’t have any money to speak of anyway.

23. Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that computer crap”. We don’t mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

24. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call I.T. support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master’s degree in nuclear physics.

25. When you can’t find someone in the government directory, call I.T. Support.

26. When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call I.T. Support. We love to hack.

27. When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn’t know anything about the problem.

28. When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We’ve got lots of disk space on that mail server.

29. Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.

30. When an I.T. person gets on the elevator pushing $100,000 worth of computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: “Good grief, you take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?” That’s another one that cracks us up no end.

31. When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company. People out in Birmingham like to keep abreast of what’s going on.

32. When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

33. Don’t bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

34. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We’ll find all the settings and drivers somewhere.

35. In no way do we believe that end-users are ungrateful. It hurts our feelings that one could even think such a thing on the basis of the above statements. In truth we wish to express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of wonderful end-users portrayed herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.