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025 - Tech Support Stories [Part 2] Customer: "Your
sound card is defective and I want a new one." Customer: "I'd
like to return this scanner." Got a call from
a woman said that her laser printer was having problems: the bottom half of
her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange that the printer
was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the basics, then came
over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a
sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As the paper started coming out,
she yanked it out and showed it to me. I told her to wait until the paper
came out on its own. Problem solved. I had been doing
Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division for about a month when
I had a customer call with a problem that I just couldn't solve. She could
not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine, which truly baffled
me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance,
green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine. Every color
of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had the customer change ink
cartridges. I had the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked.
I asked my co-workers for help; they offered no new ideas. After over two
hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send the printer
in to us for repair when she asked quietly, "Should I try printing on piece
of white paper instead of this yellow construction paper? Sometimes the user
can teach us a thing or two about tech support. 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. Customer: "Hello?
I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and it dialed fine.
I could hear that. Then I could hear the two computers connecting. But then
the sound all stopped, so I picked up the phone to see if they were still
connected, and I got the message, 'No Carrier,' on my screen. What's wrong?" An unfailingly
polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone
terribly wrong. For a computer
programming class, I sat directly across from someone, and our computers were
facing away from each other. A few minutes into the class, she got up to leave
the room. I reached between our computers and switched the inputs for the
keyboards. She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed
look on her face. She called the teacher over and explained that no matter
what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this
time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced. I started to type,
"Leave me alone!" They both jumped back silenced. "What the..." the Teacher said.
I typed, "I said leave me alone!" The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything
to it, I swear!" It was all I could
do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation between them and HAL 2000
went on for an amazing five minutes. Me: "Don't touch me!" Her: "I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard." Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!"
Etc. Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my hair
laughing. After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red.
Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class. I have a friend
who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a program by typing
"A:" and then the name of the program. My friend told me it would not work
because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot
thingie" and that every time he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he
kept getting the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to
press only on the very top of the key. When I taught him about the shift key,
he thought I was a genius. 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 user name 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." Email from a friend:
"CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?" 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
and 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 pushed the
F1 button over twenty minutes ago!" Add your review Back |