Tales From Tech Support - There's no place to type!

hey everyone welcome to r tales from tech support where we get to have a little chuckle at the technologically disadvantaged like me i'm uncle reddit and have i got a story for you can receive email but cannot send i was working the help desk for an isp back in 2004 most of my day consisted of me bouncing modems or setting up email clients when the customer got a new computer or router one day i got a call from a customer claiming that she can receive email but cannot send it took about 25 minutes to walk her through finding the settings and read them to me everything she read told me that the client was configured correctly this speaks my interest now so i spent 20 minutes walking her through connecting to our support page to download the remote client after connecting i decided to first send myself an email while i poke around the system while i'm double checking the settings for the email client i see a new email on my inbox i tell her that i got the test email she didn't believe me so i replied from my workstation how did you do that she exclaimed i told her that i just clicked on compose message filled out the fields clicked send she asked me to stay on and watch her she clicked on compose message she filled out the email address she wants to send to keyed in the message then hit send a pop-up appeared and she clicked on no the pop-up came on so fast that i couldn't read it but i knew what it was i told her to click send again and just wait the pop-up read do you want to send this message with no subject i asked her why she immediately clicked no she told me that she was informed by her brother who works in tech to always click no when presented with options i told her that this is a warning message stating that the email had no subject she could either click on yes to send it with no subject but that could lead to a message being blocked as spam or she can click on no and enter a subject she then asks what she should fill in for the subject line face palm i think what the brother was probably talking about was anytime you get weird pop-ups while you're uh surfing the web do you want to install this software do you want to buy this program whatever i guess he was afraid of her getting some kind of funky stuff on our computer but yeah sometimes you actually have to read the messages oh you have proof now i thought this was fitting for here i finished an integration project that went live a few months ago and i still do a bit of support for it since it's so new this new system replaces an old system that had very poor logging among other shortcomings so it went live and i had the following very satisfying conversation a few times me hi what seems to be the problem customer the registration process has put the wrong name on 80 different files i selected john's name but but they are assigned to jim me okay let me take a look customer this is a disaster it's going to take me all day to manually assign jim to all these mistakes by your system me okay i can see you selected john's name at 3 45 pm the process ran at 3 50 pm and then you changed it to gym at 4 25 pm it was now 4 30. customer that's not what happened are you calling me a liar me no not at all i'm just telling you what i see in the logs let me send you the screenshot from the ui audit log i send her the screenshot via teams customer well this isn't correct i'll be speaking to my manager about this and i never hear from them again so either that person did choose the wrong thing by mistake and once you to take on the blame to cover their butt or they inadvertently did it and just can't fathom that they made a mistake i cannot get the ink off my screen we have an electronic check-in process and have for many years part of this process requires our guests to sign their documents electronically for their rentals it's not uncommon for them to call for assistance when signing me how can i help you caller i sign my documents but i can't get it to submit me sure let me help you with that i walk them through it caller i can't get the ink off my screen how do i get it off my monitor me i'm sorry color i signed it on my screen with my pen but can't get the ink off my monitor this is not right sometimes there are no words to describe the things we endure while remaining professional towards the humans we serve so wait they actually signed their monitor with a pen have they ever used the computer before did you remember to pay your bill this is a quick story but i face palmed at the end and thought it might fit here my parents called me up the other day commenting that their wi-fi wasn't working they told me it was out all day and that they'd talked to their neighbors on the same isp and none of them were having issues i started going through the basic troubleshooting steps reboot the modem and router connect to the modem config page and confirm all the settings wire your laptop directly into the modem and see if that works confirm what lights are showing up after a good 45 minutes to an hour on the phone with them i tell them that they're gonna have to contact their isp because there's nothing i'm able to do over the phone for them and it's pretty clear at this point that the issue is to do with the isb five minutes later i get a call back apparently when i updated my credit card i forgot to update it in the isp so it was suspended for non-payment it's working now oh dear lord i guess that could happen i've had that happen with some things occasionally where i have a card that's getting ready to expire and i forget to go in and update but usually things like isps and phone companies and things like that tend to send you reminders and say hey listen your card's gonna expire and you got a bill coming soon like they'll either send it to you in the mail email something uh so i'm not sure how that happens that often oh never mind i'm just stupid during my latest gig as a t1 t2 technician a call came in with the description chrome our systems had the user say a short description of the issue and to the best of its effort translated it to text for us me equals me cx equals customer tech support how can i help today customer hi i'm having issues with chrome not opening when i click the icon it jumps up and down as normal but then nothing happens while customer is explaining the issue i see in the previous tickets that he's on mac this is on a mac correct customer yep i'm not familiar with mac os and sadly our mac specialists are all on a call but i'd be happy to give it a shot if you don't mind customer yeah no worries worst case i'll bring out my laptop okay so it sounds like the process is stuck let's try to close it and see if that helps do you know how to bring up the mac os task manager customer no i do not cue me quickly googling to bring it up and explain to customer how to close chrome from here customer okay i think i did it and nope still the same issue me okay then i'm not sure cool if i remote in and have a quick look customer please go ahead when i connect i quickly see that the customer has two monitors with chrome open on the secondary screen as i was about to ask about this i hear oh i just figured it out i feel so stupid right now i forgot to turn my second monitor on i am so sorry have a good day click probably the best call i ever had yeah hey listen they made a mistake they called in for you to help them and they realized that they made a mistake by not turning their other monitor on uh it took you to help jog your memory but that's all right nobody got angry worked up sounds like the customer was pretty laid back sounds like you were pretty laid back everything turned out all right the calendar is wrong this is one of my favorite tech support calls from 2000 i was a software developer for an insurance company we had to code and do post-production support for everything we did free enron no separation of duties we had a branch of montreal who seemed to only employ people allergic to technology there was no remote desktop at the time we had to walk everyone through their questions and problems to give you an idea of how frustrating they were i got a call to add a shortcut on their desktop i told them to click with the right side of the mouse to bring up the menu the user said the program opened i told them that was their left told them to close the program and try again this went on five more times on the same call on to the story the insurance system effective and expiration dates are one year and a day apart if you have a policy effective on june 1st then it expires june 1st the next year i get a call from the montreal branch saying there's a bug in the system they're claiming the expiration date is coming up with an extra day i coded the policy date function so i know there shouldn't be a problem i asked them what's wrong the policy is effective on february 29 2000. the expiration date that comes up is march 1 2001. they're claiming that the expiration date should be february 29th 2001. i tell them that this is not a bug it's leap year in sleepier this year and there is no february 29th in 2001. they told me that i'm wrong and that the calendar is wrong my manager and my teammates who are within earshot are laughing while i'm keeping a straight face the person on the line tells me to hold the person calls over three people and they have an impromptu conference they're discussing the calendar and why there is no february 29th in 2001. after five minutes they come to the realization that the calendar is actually correct they finally tell me that there is no issue after hanging up the phone i was finally able to join my co-workers and laughing so like i guess they never thought to go check an actual calendar when they came up with that date just to make sure it being friday is no excuse today i had a ticket where obviously the body was empty besides the user's email signature and the title read please shadow me i cannot open emails descriptive now this ticket was raised a couple days before and had a couple different engineers and a couple different engineers had tried reaching her throughout these two days that it's been open no notes and ticket besides try calling can't reach user so armed with my mountain of knowledge on this issue i called the user at 505 pm ish and to my surprise i got through hi my name is op calling from company regat user i don't want to speak with you right now click so that was rude as f after she hung up i tutted loudly as a british tradition i guess it's and closer ticket as it was on its third no response strike with no kind regards at the end that'll show her feel free to follow the instructions welcome to the gnomes workshop here's a little story of trying to get a customer to listen to an instruction i had an elderly gentleman ring with a battery issue nice enough chat knowing i would most likely have to order a new battery for him i asked him if he knew the model number i know i know but sometimes you get lucky next i asked him to click on the start button and verify that he had clicked on it by asking what he saw confirmed that he had clicked on the start button me start typing words system information him uh there's nowhere to type me i know just start typing him but there's nowhere to type me i realize this but if you just start typing you'll see a new window open with system information near or at the top him i can't see system information anywhere me yes you have to start typing system information in first him there's nowhere for me to type me i know just start typing and it'll appear him nothing's appeared i've got nowhere to type me bring it in and i'll get it sorted for you sure enough needed a new battery and took an extra day because he wouldn't just start typing that instruction didn't sound all that complicated to me just close your eyes forget what you see on the screen just start typing the words on the keyboard regardless not complicated sure all work weekends for you english is not my first language and i'm on mobile apologies in advance a few years back i worked for a small msp my primary responsibility was general tech support but i also handled deployment and planning of solutions we would sell to our customers one of these customers was the type that wanted the problem solved before he called and was never appreciative of help he got now when i started at this company he had been a long time customer and was not happy about having to deal with a new primary contact with us and preferred sending an email instead of calling no matter how urgent the issue was and subsequently complaining about us taking too long to get back to him with time he warmed up to me and started calling for the urgent cases eventually calling no matter what after dealing with an upgrade from office 2003 to 365 which could be a tales from tech support on its own he stopped caring about our office hours o 800 to 1600 before eventually calling any time of the day any time of the week when he started calling on weekends i told him to contact us during office hours unless it was actually an emergency he of course did not listen so i brought the work laptop home and started helping him off hours i got overtime pay for this so didn't mind usually and ended up vlogging around 50 outside office hours the next two months assisting him here's the kicker we build hourly for support to our customers outside office hours during the weekdays was 100 addition to our usual rate 150 on the weekends he stopped calling on the evenings and during the weekends after that well that's one way to get customers to understand when you start hitting them in the wallet like that then they finally get it client elects to pay thousands in overages to have us do their work for them and still end up spending just as much time on their own our client is paying big money for an advanced content management system the main benefit of which is that the client has the power to create and edit content themselves of course the downside to that is that it requires the client to not be a complete idiot one of the things we have in the cms is a ton of redirect items which have a field for the old path and the new path and are used to redirect the old path to the new path if the old path would return to 404 now obviously these are super easy to create but it can be very time consuming if you need to make thousands of them as they did fortunately i long ago created a super user-friendly tool for creating or editing content in the cms in bulk using a csv it's super easy has all the instructions within the tool but also extensive documentation on my blog and the whole idea behind its creation was for it to be usable by people with no technical knowledge and only the most minimal understanding of the cms like what a field or an item path is so does the client elect to do everything manually or try to figure out how to use my tool neither they like to blow through their entire monthly budget and then agree to pay overages to have us do the work for them as an aside our pm tried so hard to empower the client to do this himself he showed him my tool and explained how to use it the client wouldn't use the tool he wanted pm to do it for him worse the client refused to even make the most basic effort to at least format the csvs he sent pm correctly so the pm could just run them through the import so pm spent hours reformatting the csvs to make them usable now pm did this all himself during the project and i wasn't involved until the very end the day before launch client sends me a csv to import for him and i reply these are not formatted correctly for import please add the following columns and send it back to me client is upset this is how they've always sent the csvs and pm never had a problem importing it after talking to the pm he explains that the client had never formatted the csvs correctly pm had explained months ago how to properly format it and use the import tool but he just gave up on trying to get client to do it right because somehow it was too much for them and pm was spending more time trying to get client to do it correctly than just making the fixes himself client claims this is the first they've ever heard of it and they had no idea they were formatting things wrong pm dies a little inside so now the site has launched and there's still about 60 incorrect redirects client goes into the cms takes screenshots and checks the editing history of all these incorrect items and sends us an email with a list of all the items that have wrong paths that's right he takes the time to check every single incorrect item but doesn't actually fix them while he's in there so pm runs the import again to update them client says the pasts are still wrong and he provided the correct pass to me no he didn't he just provided a list of the past that were wrong but no info on what the correct paths were with 60 items if it took one minute to manually edit each item he could have fixed everything in just an hour and been done hours ago instead client has definitely spent at least an hour checking and testing all the items in the cms and emailing back and forth with us they owe us for several hours of work and it's still not done sounds like there's something wrong with this guy he either doesn't realize he's paying extra for all this work and thinks it's just something you should be doing or i don't know what's wrong with him client returned to discontinued system after three years four years ago i was using a third party portal system for my clients to securely send me their documents this is required in my industry because we handle financial and medical data not either of those industries but related also industry isn't relevant to the story let us call this third party portal old portal for the sake of anonymity all portal allows for branding so the url was compnamed.oldportal.com however clients could go directly to oldportal.com and log in from there for a variety of reasons not the least an ability to access on mobile devices i moved to a new portal which we can call new portal for transition clients were migrated to the new portal data was moved etc and the old branded url was changed to comp name do not use.oldportal.com so to break any bookmarks that the clients may have stored first year confusion but transition worked okay last year no problems as everyone was working on the new portal two days ago 9 30 pm email from client can i just email you my financial and social security information i've been trying to get my password reset on oldportal.com but it isn't working this is a client who swapped over to the new portal with gusto as they could take pictures on their phone and upload them immediately i haven't used oldportal.com for three years now you can always get to the client portal by going to my website at mywebsite.net there's a link at the top of every page saying client portal that you can click on it always provides the correct link do not bookmark the actual portal as it can change don't know what happened that caused the brain burp but i'm wondering what will happen next time for them too long didn't read flying tried resetting their password on a discontinued system that hasn't been used for three years didn't receive a response and couldn't figure out why so i guess they didn't have a need for it for those whole three years like how did they not know that and i'm quite sure when you were switching over you emailed all your clients telling them what was going on and it sounded like in the story that they actually switched over so just odd hey guys thanks for hanging out with me today if you've enjoyed this content do me a favor would you consider giving us a thumbs up subscribing to the channel and maybe click that little bell icon so you don't miss the fact out with the beard telling you stories see it you

Channel: Story Time with Uncle Reddit

Views: 8,108

Rating: 4.9386191 out of 5

Keywords: uncle reddit, reddit, reddit stories, funny reddit stories, r/idontworkherelady, r/prorevenge, r/entitledparents, funny reddit stories 2020, rslash, best of reddit, reddit top posts, top posts, top posts of all times, comedy, funny reddit posts, funny reddit, fails, cringe, entitledparents, entitledparents fails, entitled parents fail, malicious compliance reddit, malicious compliance, tech support, tales from tech support reddit, funny reddit posts clean, tales from tech support

Id: w25LNhfT-as

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021