Jul 05
User: I can’t do anything right now, my laptop’s broken.
Me: Don’t you still have that spare I set up for you?
User: That one’s broken as well.
Me: Maybe I can get it running again. I know it’s old and the IT people won’t fix it, but it’s better than nothing.
User: Well, it’s not really a problem with the software.
Me: I’ve got spare RAM and hard drives.
User: Well, it’s a bit embarrassing really. Don’t tell anyone,† but…I backed my car over it.
Me: Accidentally?
User: Of course accidentally!
Me: But…how?
User: I was in the parking lot, and I put it on the ground while I put some stuff in the trunk. Then I forgot it was there.
† I feel that ethically speaking, an anonymized story like this doesn’t constitute telling anyone.
Jul 05
Customer: I ordered some software from you last week. The package arrived, but there wasn’t any software; just the printed instructions.
Support: No software? Was the disk corrupted?
Customer: Disk?
Support: [Pause] The black square thing with a hole in the middle.
Customer: Oh, that. I thought that was just packing material, I threw that away.
Jul 05
Seeing a thread on Slashdot about anecdotes from technical support reminds me that I haven’t posted mine here. So, time to start. I’ll be limiting myself to stories of things that either happened to me personally, or happened to a colleague I was working with; no “friend of a friend” stuff.
There are stories of more dubious provenance at rinkworks.com. I love their quote from Charles Babbage, which has to be the earliest example of a clueless user story.