I know end users are the most retarded type of human out there. Gimme some examples of what you guys have dealt with, if you don't mind. I won't be on a help desk, more like traveling to an account and fixing/troubleshooting in person.

Prepare for things like:

Hooking up any sort of hardware to a PC/Mac
Installing any sort of hardware to a PC
Printers, printers everywhere
Network drives
Network printers
Wireless configuration
Modem configuration
Random network issues
Random PC/Mac issues
Microsoft office issues
Outlook issues
Outlook to mobile issues
Lots of stupid questions

hating all humanity forever

so, more of the same

Never, EVER open an iMac.....EVER

"I forgot my password. Do you know what it is?"

That fucking drives me apeshit

A+ summation

I'm still looking forward to it

I once had to explain to a women why she couldn't right click and copy something on one PC, and then unplug the mouse and move it to a new computer and paste it.

In the end I just told her that our computers didn't have that feature because she just couldn't understand why that wasn't possible.

............................................................................

.................................what?

resetting passwords
and you aren't kidding about printers. i don't know why people still use them.

Yeah this was at a school. It was some 80 year old health teacher who will never own a computer at home but was expected to be able to use powerpoint.

wow. that's fucked.

I recently had to explain to a WOMAN that "no, you can't run cardboard through your bypass tray, or through the normal paper tray" why not? "BECAUSE YOU CAN'T!!"

The place I'm going to has bonus incentives and will pay for certifications. So I'm ready and willing to put up with a different class of stupidity for more money and opportunity

Inkjet photo paper through a $2,500 color laser printer. Lots of fun.

THICK 3, MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?!?

LOL - srsly, friend of mine runs a print shop; I've been out of the game over 5 years, but I still have flashbacks going in there. (Sounds like their color tech is a real piece of work, too.)

also be prepared to be called out just to plug a usb cable in then be heralded as the king of technology for doing so.

You can't make a copy of your ass by pressing it up to a computer monitor, but you CAN search for pictures of other people's asses online.

I'd say that's the primary difference between fields.

so far I have:

1.run many spyware/malware scans using combofix,malbytes, and superanti spyware...why do people involved with churches have the worst virus problems?

2.cloned a failing HDD

3.set up a ton of new PC's.

4.still working on printers, they are an HP dealer. working on HP's SUCKS

one ting though, one of the guys in sales bought a PC off someone and replaced the motherboard. It's the correct board but now the CPU fan and the exhaust fan run at high speed all the time, even when in the BIOS setup screen. Updated firmware everywhere and tried different fans....any ideas?

Delete System32 folder.

But seriously.. I've seen this before. There could be multiple causes though. Are you able to see temp reading in the BIOS? If not, boot into the OS and install speedfan or another app that will let you check CPU temp. The temp sensor in the motherboard that is responsible for throttling the fan may be fucked. I've seen this before and replaced the motherboard and it was all set. Maybe your coworker needs to RMA the board and get a new one.

I run some heavy ass stock on the HW4 setting on my Docucolors and they run fine but cardboard? LOL

I even run vinyl through this machine to make ghetto stickers. I just cut the vinyl down to 8.5x11 and run through the bypass tray with the coated 2 setting

I might be getting certified in this shit soon as well. :-/

HP printer drivers are a pain in the ass especially in windows 7...the ones you choose on the HP site are universal and always fuck up on 7.

"Hi. I have a super critical Power Point presentation to make in 10 minutes. My presentation is on my office desktop in Des Moines. I have a flash drive that I bought at Best Buy on my way over here. It doesn't have my presentation on it. Fix it."

that's what you have to look forward to.

+1M

My girlfriend gave me a 6 year old HP printer without any software. I plugged it into my awesome iMac and OS X had downloaded the drivers, installed them and made a donation in my name to UNICEF within 5 minutes. Just saying.

sometimes its that easy, sometimes its a pain depending what model and what model driver its compatible in windows.

it can be a real pain btw in windows 7 if you do not clear the print spool/que before adding a new device cause ALL the old ones that you "remove" will come back ....come back to haunt u

I called HP and the Indian told me to try everything I had already tried again. I told him I tried that already and he transferred me to another department so I hung up. We gonna return it anywho. It's under warranty

Yeah in that case I usually do all the troubleshooting myself, and then when I call them tell them that the machine is not POSTing. haha. QUESTION THAT ONE, SHAMTAJ

Same thing with Dell. If I think the drive on a server is on the way out with intermittent errors and needs to be replaced, I usually call them and lie. Otherwise they'll ask me to do Dell diagnostics and jump through a shitload of hoops when I already know what's wrong.

I just give them the one symptom that they can't verify over the phone and always results in warranty replacement. IE: "drive is making a clicking noise and OS installation doesn't see any available hard drives when installing. plus other drives work fine in this machine" etc

Naturally, the steps they have you go through are usually good, but I like to do my troubleshooting beforehand so I can a) figure shit out on my own. b) not talk to people on the phone.. so their troubleshooting steps are redundant

Shit like this DOES happen. I'm trying to think of some good level one tech support stories but I think I've blocked them all from my brain so I didn't commit suicide.

It always amazes me when people have that "I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS. I HAVE THINGS TO DO AND DON'T NEED THESE STUPID COMPUTERS THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK GIVING ME TROUBLE" attitude. They'll give you grief, yet the issues they are running into are all the result of their company's higher-ups not green-lighting necessary steps to ensure their employees' productivity. When my company does consulting for small offices we usually gauge how critical it is for them to have every PC working all the time. In some offices it's not necessary, other offices need every computer humming 24/7 or else they're completely fucked. Obviously in this case, you'd probably want a backup machine of some sort. Hardware DOES break down. And if they can't be without a computer for 24 hours or so while the broken one is being fixed they should have one waiting in the wings. It's amazing how often you make this suggestion, they ignore it, and then act as if you just kicked thier kids in the mouth by inconveniencing them so terribly.

We have one bigger client right now with 2 40U racks full of servers in the basement of a 300 year old mansion that is constantly flooding and losing power. The servers are ridiculously old and they NEVER want to replace them. They always opt to not see the big picture and end up paying double in the long run to rebuild older machines for shittier performance and hardware that's waiting to fail. The ISP that supplies the MPLS network to link 4 of their other offices is a joke. All thier employees in the other offices do all their work via Citrix full desktop to these servers. When the ISP "accidently" fucks up the routes while doing routine maintenance, or their building loses power, or one of the shitty servers breaks down, their entire business is dead in the water and 100+ employees are twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. We've made countless suggestions for them to let us plan out and puchase new servers for them and host them in a datacenter with reliable power & connection but they never bite. When their network goes down all their employees call over to us all pissed off like we suck. Yet we can't throw their bosses under the bus and let everybody know that they're fucking retarded. Shitty client. My boss is fucking dumb for not telling them to take a walk so we can focus on doing right by other clients rather than wasting time on them.

Also.. just thought of a pretty stupid issue I dealt with once. We all know the vast majority of doctors are assholes. No matter who you are in my company, everyone ends up doing level 1 tech support for doctors when on-site at a hospital or physician's office because they demand attention and hand-holding. One doctor who was dumb as a fucking box of rocks once paged me over the loudspeaker to deal with one of many critical issues. She was all bullshit and giving me attitude because she had patients to see yet her tablet was not working. It just shut off and now won't turn back on. She was giving me attitude as if my company's service to them was lacking since she had "so many issues". Her issues were all retarded though. For that particular tablet issue I ended up plugging it in because the battery was dead. She should go back to her med school and ask for a refund.

LOL! Nice. I just had one where the teacher said whenever she is typing her cursor goes flying all over the place. All I had to do was disable the touchpad while an external mouse was plugged in. She paid my company 90$ for that

Yup people will always request the dumbest shit. Also... you'll be amazed how often people will spend 20 minutes finding your company's number, calling, and putting in a service ticket when all they fucking needed to do was reboot their computer to fix an issue.

I do the same thing for my company but our clients are primarily medical practices, so always dealing with asshole doctors that demand everything. We once had a brain surgeon that insisted on bringing his MAC's into the building and so we wouldn't touch them, he used them to host torrents on his computer to upload and download games. The practice wasn't happy when they got a letter from the ISP telling them to cease and desist since they have traffic recorded of games like Half Life being shared illegally.

There's a lady at one place that must weigh 400 pounds and has bingo arms (the flabby fat fat arms), she's always forwarding funny emails to everyone in the practice, on facebook at work, listening to online radios to kill their bandwidth, just an overall shitty user whom i've had to fix viruses on the PC a million times. She just emails me last week all angry because of the amount of spam emails she's been getting for the last 2 years is now too much to handle, and that I need to fix it because she can't work like this. YOUR COMPANY HAS A SPAM FILTER AND ITS SET REALLY HIGH, NOBODY ELSE GETS SPAM BUT YOU!! so I emailed her bosses and explained the situation by and large, suggesting we give her a new email and demand she use her computer like she's at work.

Yup. I've dealt with that before. No amount of spam filters can block everything if they're constantly giving the world their email address. Sometimes the only thing to do is change their email address and tell them not to fuck it up in the future... in the nicest most professional way possible, of course.

when I worked for the Revere school system, the spam situation was so bad that we were blacklisted by the big e-mail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.)...my boss had to get in touch with each of them to get us off the blacklist

We would tell the teachers all the time, if they get e-mails they don't recognize/did not expect, to just delete them, but sure enough, teachers would get e-mails for Disney porn and click the link to unsubscribe thinking it would stop them

what certs do you guys have?

I don't have any actually

i had to

Anyone I've ever met who did university or corporate IT had at least one instance where a client called them and tore them a new asshole for how much spam they were getting... on their yahoo email.

like

xvnxvn

Nice. I've graduated to configuring Cisco ASA's, I troubleshot a PIX firewall the other day and some Windows Server 2K8 back up weirdness.

Oh, and I went to this 80 year old womans house because "her email won't work"
She wasn't double clicking on the mail icon, she thought she could single click. Ah, dementia
D'OH

Did you atleast get ribbon candy?

No, I got barked at by her football sized sausage dog

^ sublime excellence

did you tap that?

so just for the record, IT guys must be rolling in the pussy at work, amirite?

We just had intern start working mornings in the service department. She looks like Winnie from Wonder Years. Nice change of pace from hairy men

That is pretty much equivalent to a raise.

Does an acoustic guitar play every time she walks into the room?

bennyhillifier

2 hours on the phone with HP support after installing a 710 wireless controller that worked fine in the lab we set up with the exact config to match the customers set up. 2 hours later he says to set the Internet port to a static address. This after the guy who hung up/hit the wrong button/disconnected from us said you NEVER do that. I fucking hate HP support.
/rant

if you seen the viruses i've seen, you wouldn't be able to sleep at night, nigga.

IT DELETED EVERYTHING

IT circa 2002:

Customer: THE INTERNET DOESN'T WORK! HELP!
IT Guy: So you can't get to Web sites? Type Yahoo.com in, does it come up?
Customer: Yes, it does.
IT Guy: So, your Internet is working....
Customer: NO, IT'S NOT!!
IT Guy: What's wrong?
Customer: AIM DOESN'T WORK! I CAN'T DO ANYTHING!
IT Guy: *facepalm*

IT circa now:

Customer: THE INTERNET DOESN'T WORK! HELP!
IT Guy: So you can't get to Web sites? Type Google.com in, does it come up?
Customer: Yes, it does.
IT Guy: So, your Internet is working....
Customer: NO, IT'S NOT!!
IT Guy: What's wrong?
Customer: FACEBOOK DOESN'T WORK! I CAN'T DO ANYTHING!
IT Guy: *facepalm*

That SUCKS dude. That is fail from the start, and I bet they don't need all that hardware...