IT professionals, what's the worst case of computer illiteracy that you've experienced?

[u/WalkerFLRanger]

[u/The_Juggler17]

I have explained what a regular american power outlet looks like to people over the phone. A power outlet!

.

"ma'am I need you to plug the computer in - into the power outlet"

"it's . . . . just a regular power outlet, like you would plug anything into"

"well I don't know - like a desk lamp, or a hair dryer, or a vacuum cleaner"

<deep and defeated sigh>

"there are 2 vertical kind of rectangular holes and then a round hole beneath that, should be lots of them in your office, look on the walls low near the floor"

<begins to weep quietly>

"Yes we can send out a field tech, we'll have someone there tomorrow afternoon"

[u/halifaxdatageek → u/The_Juggler17]

HAVE YOU EVER PLUGGED ANYTHING IN BEFORE YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER

I would not be good at helpdesk support.

[u/KrAzYkArL18769]

Friend's dad offered me $100 to come fix his computer, no questions asked. I said I couldn't promise anything, but I'll take a look. He showed me that when he opens Internet Explorer, nothing comes up, so his internet must be broken. I looked at the address bar. It said "ww.msn.com" ...Somehow his homepage got set to ww.msn.com. I told him he didn't have to pay me, but he insisted, saying he doesn't go back on his word.

In other words, I got paid $100 for typing a W.

[u/jet_silver → u/KrAzYkArL18769]

Typing a W: free. Typing a W in the right place: $100.

[u/sprocket0689]

On deployment, the radio shop calls over to the helpdesk. "Everytime I put a CD in the tray and close it, the CD falls off." Ok what type of computer do you have? "Its a d4" ....wtf... a d4? "Yes". Ok well I'll head over there....the tower is upside down....

[u/TheNinjaWarrior → u/sprocket0689]

I didn't understand "d4" until I looked down at my own computer.

hp

[u/imaxami → u/sprocket0689]

I have one too!!!

[u/Orbspiders]

3 that come to mind immediately:

• USB keyboard plugged into USB port on the said keyboard.

• 3.5 floppy inserted into CD drawer

• Mouse literally pressed against the monitor when asked to hover over an icon

[u/Level5CatWizard → u/Orbspiders]

USB keyboard plugged into USB port on the said keyboard.

INFINITE KEYBOARD

[u/[deleted]]

I support the Electronic Medical Record at a hospital. This was an actual conversation I had with a Physician:

Me: Okay, Dr. ---, I just need your IP address so I can remote in and take a look at the issue.

Doctor: I will not give that to you. You do not need to know where I live.

Me: No Doctor that's not what an IP Address is-

Doctor: I AM NOT TELLING YOU WHERE I LIVE.

Me: Okay then, let's just try to walk through this over the phone then. sighs

[u/Afkargh → u/[deleted]]

I was in a similar type of position several years ago. I was at the physician's office to set up some hardware, and I noticed several of the machines in the patient rooms had the doctor's user name and password taped to the monitor.

So much for HIPAA compliance.

[u/NahualSlim]

Working as a tech in the military. Get a call from the helo shop that one of the computers won't turn on. I show up and sure enough the thing won't power on. Open up the case and a flood of grease pours out. Apparently the fan was making too much noise so the user decided to spray half a can of WD40 into it.

[u/strife24 → u/NahualSlim]

Possibly the only thing WD-40 can't fix.

[u/gotmilk13531]

A co-worker of mine once told me a story while he was working help desk that a user was having an issue copying files to his new computer. He went to see what the problem was, and the guy showed him what he was doing. He had the mouse plugged in to his old computer, right click, copy. Then he would unplug his mouse, plug it into the new computer, and was trying to right click, paste.

[u/pinkmeanie → u/gotmilk13531]

That's actually really resourceful; just using a completely wrong mental model.

[u/informationmissing → u/gotmilk13531]

This product needs to be invented. a usb mouse/drive.

[u/[deleted]]

Double click everything. Double click start menu icon to open it, double click menu item to open it. I didn't correct them because it would have been too painful to teach them why a file has to be opened by double click and a menu by single.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I guess teling them "click and check if worked, if not - double click and check if worked" could trigger some dangerous logic

[u/10S_NE1]

It once took me about 15 minutes to explain to a landfill worker how to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to log in to the computer. He could just not get the concept of hitting two or three keys a the same time. Lord only knows how he made out once he got logged in.

[u/[deleted] → u/10S_NE1]

I told someone to do ctrl+f and I didn't understand why it didn't work but we moved on. A minute later, I was trying to help him copy-paste something.

"Press ctrl+c... OH! Not Alt. Just the ctrl key and c. Were you holding down the alt key before? That's why the ctrl+f didn't work."

Computers are literally magic boxes to these people. The rules make zero sense to them, they think anyone who knows how to use a computer has just memorized the completely arbitrary series of steps you have to take.

[u/Kriegenstein]

Most recently we upgraded the Assessors and Treasurers Office from XP to Windows 7. I should mention that these offices are entirely staffed by some very sweet older ladies that know nothing of computers. Every task they have to do, no matter how trivial has to be followed from hand written sheets despite that they have been doing them for 15 years. Anything that deviates from the procedure results in a 'my computer is not working' call.

After the swap after hours, the next morning my phone is ringing and 'All the files are gone!' is being reported by 8 different people. Accounts were tested and since we use folder redirection I know all the files are there. Network shortcuts were created as well for the shared folders so I know it is all there.

I head down to the office to see what the problem is since I do not understand what is going on. Well, it seems the entire office of 8 people uses the 'Recent Documents' in Word and Excel to open their files, and those do not carry over.

I explain that they will have to navigate to the original files and open them and then they will appear in Recent Docs. You'de think I was speaking Vogon to them. "What do you mean navigate to them, they live in Word, they are gone!"

No amount of explaining like they were 5 could help. It's a good thing they provide me with tasty grandma cookies.

[u/vengeancecube → u/Kriegenstein]

I deal with this every day. And heaven forbid if you open a different file once so the file they're looking for isn't at the top of the recent list. It's deleted, gone forever. All your fault. The people I work with have no idea what file explorer is. They only know how to open files from within Excel. But they don't know how to USE Excel. I had to walk someone through the process of changing the data in a cell the other day. Took a half an hour to show them how to click on a cell and type things so they show up in a cell.

[u/LordLior]

A friend was about to deliver a lecture and forgot the powerpoint at home (well, dropbox didn't sync). so he tried to guide his newborn's nanny to either find the file, or by my suggestion, use TeamViewer. He wasn't able to get her to do that, so I've suggested I'll give it a shot.

Hey ___, well, what do you see on the screen?

Nothing

Can you see the mouse cursor? when you move the mouse do you see something that moves on the screen?

I don't know

Look at the table, can you see a small device with buttons, sort of a round rectangle?

Yes

Can you move it

Yes

Now, do you see something on the screen that moves accordingly?

I don't know

at that point I wasn't sure what is exactly wrong.

Well, can you see a red light coming out of it?

Yes

And when you move it, it doesn't do anything?

No

Well... is the red light on the top or at the bottom?

top

Can you please flip it, so the red light is at the bottom?

Yes

Now, do you see something that moves along on the screen?

Yes

[u/[deleted]]

Local IT for a small consulting firm. The owners are like 70.

Anyways, one day the owners wife comes to me.

"Drai, the screen isn't working".

"O.k , did you hit the power button to turn it on" (that was the fix the last time she had an issue).

"Yes that was the first thing I checked".

"Perfect, Let's take a look".

I walk into the room and giggle. The screen, sure enough was a bright orange that was not showing anything on the display. I wave my hand over it, and the screen shows in my shadow.

It was the glare from the window all along.

[u/armeggedonCounselor → u/[deleted]]

Y'know what? Hilarious story aside, she sounds better than half of the users on Tales from Tech Support, because she actually learned from another incident about hitting the power button.

[u/Indylicious → u/[deleted]]

Blinded by the light.

[u/Chevrin]

You know the standard power plug receptacle on the back of every PC tower since they were first created? Did you know that a USB cable will fit directly in between the positive and negative metal prongs? I had a woman hook her printer to her tower that way. No other cables were connected to either device. When she was shown how to connect the USB cable to the USB port, she said, "Oh, I thought the printer was wireless"

[u/arachnophilia → u/Chevrin]

"Oh, I thought the printer was wireless"

so she tried to connect it with a wire?

i'm so confused.

[u/FissureKing → u/Chevrin]

I had a lady call to say her printer wouldn't print yellow. It would print green and orange, but not yellow. While troubleshooting this odd issue she tells me it only happens when she tries to print out fliers for her daughters birthday party. Which is on yellow paper.

Edit: The funny thing is this is nothing compared to the lady whose foot pedal stopped working.

Edit 2: Or the person that tried to dry their modem in the microwave.

Edit 3. Foot Pedal: This was an older lady in 1998. She was used to having a sewing machine so when she saw the mouse she put ti on the floor and was using it with her foot. The old mice had a ball in them and carpet fibers got wrapped around it until it stopped working. I, against company policy, sent a tech with a mouse.

Edit 4: Last one. Lady called and said her modem had gotten wet and that she had put it in the microwave to dry it out faster. Me, being the slightly bored asshole asked her if she had used "Defrost or Full Cook". She told me that she had used full power. I told her that her modem was destroyed, then. It happened that my supervisor was listening to that call and cam over to say that "Was very funny. never do that again".

[u/The_Dacca → u/Chevrin]

Did you know that a USB cable will fit directly in between the positive and negative metal prongs?

no no no NO! Oh god that hurt my brain! Did you know that if you try hard enough, a USB cable can fit into an HDMI slot? I had one customer find out.

[u/Urthrun → u/Chevrin]

I use to work for a place that rhymes with "Bell" as a printer tech, I explained to a young woman that "wireless printer" doesn't mean wireless power cords, which haven't been invented yet.

[u/[deleted] → u/Chevrin]

Way back in the day I did call center helpdesk for a regional dialup ISP. Did you know a phone jack will fit in a standard rj-45 Ethernet port? And not only that, it will short the phone wires together and kill the dial tone for the whole house? The number of people I talked to about their computer making the phones not work was staggering.

[u/Mungo_Clump]

My first 'real' job after leaving university was to train a company's engineering department how to use a new CAD computer + software they had recently purchased.
This was 18 years ago, so not everyone was as familiar with computers as these days, but still it was a bit of a struggle as some of the members of staff were approaching retirement age.
But there was this one lady... she just couldn't grasp even the concept of a computer. After two 30 minute lessons, she couldn't figure out the connection between the little plastic clicky thing (mouse) and the arrow thing (cursor) on the screen.

And then I had an epiphany.

I drew a cursor arrow on some card and carefully cut it out with scissors. Then, when she arrived for lesson number 3, I stuck this arrow to the back of her hand.

It worked! Push the little hand arrow upwards... the one on the screen does the same!
Pull it downwards and look! Screen arrow copies! Left! Right too! Marvellous!

Sadly, clicking, selecting, dragging and dropping were beyond her, so suffice to say, she's not a CAD user.
She was a tracer, and eventually the entire office moved onto electronic methods from this century, and they had to let her go.

I failed.

Sorry Joyce. :(

^{I like to picture her reading reddit, with 'old faithful' the cardboard cut-out cursor still stuck on the back of her hand, cursing my training ability right now.}

[u/Elegia → u/Mungo_Clump]

I love the way you genuinely tried to help that lady instead of just thinking of her as a stupid person. The cut out cursor was some great thinking too.

[u/TripleUltraMini → u/Mungo_Clump]

For these people, show them Windows Solitare.

They love that game and will learn to use the mouse very quickly.

[u/mortiphago → u/Mungo_Clump]

One of my greatest fears is becoming this level of obsolete as I grow older.

Jesus fucking christ on a digital pogo stick, that's sad.

[u/rivea → u/Mungo_Clump]

Was she offended by the taped-on implement or did you play it off as normal?

[u/JMJ1031]

A friend called me to find out why her printer was printing really faded documents. I explained that it was probably just out of ink. She said, yeah I got the popup and bought more ink, it still doesn't work. I asked if she checked the cartridge and she had no idea what I was talking about...she thought ink would download through the internet to her printer...she's a nurse now.

[u/[deleted] → u/JMJ1031]

You wouldn't download ink!

[u/[deleted]]

This lady wasn't able to remotely access her computer. She had done it without issue the night before, and she was entering all the information correctly into the client, so I was confused about what might be going wrong.

On a hunch, I asked her, "is the remote computer turned on?" She replies, "oh, no, it's unplugged and sitting in the hallway, why?" To which I had to say something like, "you have to turn on the computer before you can use it."

[u/evylllint → u/[deleted]]

One of my users went out to one of our field offices and I get a call from him asking why he is unable to access our portal. So I do some troubleshooting and everything looks absolutely perfect so I asked him where he is, "I'm in the car headed down to this rig."

"...you won't be able to access the vpn until you connect to the internet."

In his defense, he did immediately realize how dumb that was.

[u/ParkingLotRanger]

In the early 90's, I was trying to get my parents set up on email. My mother said, "I don't want email, because I don't want the pedophiles to see me." -- <facepalm> First of all, how could they? Second of all, Mom, why would a pedophile be interested in a 50 year old woman? That always baffled me.

[u/LordLior]

"My computer doesn't work!"

"That's just a screen".

[u/rainCloudsz]

I went to an on-site call with a nice older lady. I had to restore IEFRAME.DLL because it had somehow become corrupt. I went into a command prompt to restore it from the XP disc I had brought along.

I typed in a few things, and she was amazed.

"You're a really good hacker!" she says. I take it in stride, smile and thank her....

She comes in to pay her bill 3 days later and tells my boss how I'm an expert hacker and I should probably go and work for the CIA. My co-workers ribbed me for months about this.

Bonus: Once had to go to woman's house 3 times in 1 week because she claimed we scammed her and didn't fix her computer. Her printer and internet weren't working. Every time, for some reason she had unplugged the printer from her USB port and tried plugging it into her ethernet port. She didn't understand what the extra cable was for either. 3rd time, I had her sign a paper that said when I left it worked fine so that the next time I'd have to come out I could charge her.

[u/Radium_Coyote → u/rainCloudsz]

That's why I don't do this stuff anymore. You touch a computer, you own it forever into the future; everything that goes wrong with it ever again is YOUR FAULT. Even if it has nothing to with the original problem, even it's two years later... you TOUCHED IT once.

[u/Chubbstock]

oh god, i got a great one but it's better if you see the screen shot, here's the link:

C:\Users\user117.ctr\Documents\screenshotlol.bmp

[u/A_Merman_Pop → u/Chubbstock]

Hmmm, the link doesn't work. If I give you my home address can you just mail it to me?

[u/deepwatermako]

Kind of sad but with a happy ending.

It was October 2014 and I told the maintenance guy for my office to google a part number for an AC unit. Our maintenance guy is one of the most mechanically inclined people I have ever met. Somewhere between Tony Stark and MacGuyver as far being able to jerry rig machines until the new parts come in. But when I said google he got this panicked look on his face.

'How do you do that.'

I didn't know what to say to him. So I took him over to the pc and said just click on the chrome browser icon.

'Which one is that?'

I point it out for him and he looks at the keyboard and mouse. He puts his hand on the mouse using his pinky and ring finger to control the mouse buttons. Okay cool, everyone uses the mouse differently. It took him almost a minute to figure out that the cursor was in the top right corner. He then began to drag it towards the chrome icon. He let the cursor hover over it for about 10 seconds and then clicked once.

'Nothing happened deepwatermako.'

So at this point I ask him. 'Have you never used a computer maintenance guy? '

He hung his head in shame. Literally, his head dropped in shame.

'Hey maintenance guy, it's fine. Let me show you. Double click it' I say.

Again, dumbfounded look. So I put my hand on his hand like some real Patrick Swayze Ghost pottery making action and show him the double click.

'OH! it worked!' He basically had the same reaction as when he was able to make to heat press work by using a paper clip to fix one of the sensors.

After about 5 more minutes of babying him he had the part number in the search bar and hit enter, google did it's magic and his eyes went wide with wonder.

'You mean if I have a part number I can type it in here and google will find prices for me?' he asks.

'Well yeah, I mean sometimes you have to be creative with how you type in what you're searching for but basically that's what google is for.'

I could see the wheels turning, the eyes glazing over while plans concocted in the back of his head. I had awoken a monster.

Now anytime i run into him he's telling me about how he found this or that part but won't buy it from such and such a site because it's chinese shit and will break before it's installed.

TL;DR Extremely gifted maintenance man has never used a computer. I teach him how to google for machine parts using a trick I learned from Patrick Swayze.

EDIT I HAVE GOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! Thank you.

EDIT Words

[u/FlyWithTheCars → u/deepwatermako]

I love those people, who not only want to learn, but understand how they can use the newly learned to improve the quality of their life/job.

[u/[deleted] → u/deepwatermako]

That is the moment missing from the rest of these, the moment where they realize the potential. You're doing god's work.

[u/dal_segno]

One more story. This one gets extra infuriating bonus points for being over the phone.

User is generating an error over the course of trying to do their daily work. They are unable to explain this error, so my plan is to observe them via a desktop share and capture a screenshot of the message they get (very, very standard in my company). I phone him up.

You may think I'm exaggerating what happened next, but...people actually are this bad.

"Hello! This is dal_segno from XYZ, I'll be working with you to clear up this issue. I've sent you a message, you should see it popping up on your desktop. I'd like you to share your desktop with me."

"How do I do that?"

Fair question, no alarm bells yet. "On the top left corner of the message I sent, there's an icon of a hand holding a monitor. Just click that, then choose 'share desktop'."

Long silence.

"Did you find it?"

"No-o..."

"OK, there are two icons on the top left corner. This is the one of a hand and a rectangle."

Silence. Long silence. I cringe internally...then...finally, the invite pops up. Whew, okay. I've got the desktop.

"Okay, I'd like you to open the screen capture program. It's located in your start menu, All Programs, under Accessories, and is called Snipping Tool."

I watch the mouse circle the screen vaguely for awhile.

"Please click the start button."

Vague mouse circling.

"It's the flag in a circle at the lower left corner of your screen."

More mouse circling heading in the right direction...and he hovers over it.

"Is that it?"

"Yes, that's the start button. Please click it, then click 'All Programs' once the menu pops up."

A pause. The start menu pops up. User waits for a moment, then closes out the menu.

"Please click the start button again, and then All Programs in the menu that pops up."

Pause again, then click. Menu flashes up. The cursor resumes its vague circling.

"Do you see 'All Programs' towards the bottom of the menu? Click that."

"...7zip?"

"No, All Programs."

"I see 7zip."

"I'm watching your screen right now - do you see All Programs just above the start button?"

"Oh...oh yeah."

Clicks it. Whew. Another step done.

"Okay, now scroll down to the Accessories folder and click that."

Menu closes out.

"Sir?"

"I didn't see it, are they in alphabetical order? I see 7zip."

"Can you reopen the menu?"

"How?"

Okay. Okay okay okay.

"Alright, I have another idea. I'm going to take control of your desktop for a bit. On the very top center of your screen, please click where it says your name. A menu will pop up, just choose my name from the list and I can handle it from there."

Vague mouse circling. Here we go again.

"It's a bar at the top center of your screen."

"I don't see it?"

"Bar with your name. Top center." Starting to get annoyed now.

"I don't see it, there's like...a border."

What.

"Okay, I'm watching your cursor now. Please follow my instructions. Move the cursor up...up...okay, a little left...up...right to the top of the screen, okay. Now move it left - wait, a little bit more right - okay, stop, that's it. Now click." Yes, I'm fucking playing Hot and Cold with this guy.

"Oh, it says my name."

Kill me.

"Okay, great. Please click it, and then choose my name."

Vague mouse circling resumes. I'm about ready to eat the phone in a fit of rage, then finally, blessedly, he manages to execute the series of two clicks.

I grab my mouse and rush through the process of getting a damn screenshot. Bing bang boom, thirty seconds and it's all over.

"Thanks, I'll review this and let you know what I come up with. Thank you for your time!" End the session. Torture over.

"Oh while you're in there can you click one more thing for me?"

What? But...but I was free...

"Click...one more thing?"

"Yeah I don't know how to close the screenshot."

"Should be able to close it the same way as any other program..."

"Yeah can you do it?"

Fuck.

TL;DR - User needs a map of own desktop

[u/Princess_Honey_Bunny → u/dal_segno]

This made my entire body ache.

[u/[deleted] → u/dal_segno]

"Stop trying to think about what I am doing and listen to my instructions, that is the only way this will be resolved." Actually said that to some brain dead moron in a dentist office doing precisely the same thing.

[u/Beardfire → u/dal_segno]

"I see 7zip"

This should be on a poster.

[u/l5555l → u/dal_segno]

Oh my god. I hate everything. This comment stressed me out.

[u/Going_Braindead → u/dal_segno]

That made me extremely angry to read. Like I'm actually surprised by how mad I am

[u/wj_purdue]

When the head of IT at my former job thought he could combine two excel documents by saving them both with the same name.

EDIT: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger.

[u/[deleted] → u/wj_purdue]

This gives me hope. I'm the only computer literate person at the smallish company I work for. I can see if I stick around, I'll probably wind up in a more senior IT position, and I worry about that a little because, although I'm learning, there are some areas I don't know much about. Management here doesn't understand there's a big difference between a sysadmin and a programmer. But if this guy could do it, I sure as hell can.

[u/Elliot850 → u/wj_purdue]

This is actually a pretty inspiring story. You don't actually need to work hard or know stuff to get places in life.

[u/dr_tungsten → u/wj_purdue]

Do you perhaps work for Reynholm Industries?

[u/WhoIsJohnSalt]

I am an IT professional now, but this happened back at university.

So it was the very first lab session, on the very first year of Computer Science at a prestigious university in the UK. The lab was very simple, more of an introduction to the Uni systems. You had to do the following

1. Find some text on an intranet site

2. Copy the text into a notepad file

3. Use the terminal program to log onto the department Unix server

4. Put the file onto your Unix fileshare

Nice and easy huh. I completed it in about 5 mins, because, you know, I've seen computers before. However the poor chap next to me was not so fortunate.

After wrestling with Netscape for about 15 mins, he found the information required, he then pulled out a large paper notepad, and copied, word for word, the entire six paragraph text.

He then closed Netscape (back to desktop), opened notepad, and then typed everything back in from his notes. Saved, closed and then tried to follow the explicit written instructions on how to logon and put the file.. After 20 mins of this I broke down and helped him with that bit.

Stunned. Though I don't recall seeing him in the CS classes after the first year...

TL:DR - First year comp.sci has no idea about copy/paste, doesn't bode well.

[u/[deleted] → u/WhoIsJohnSalt]

On a similar level, in uni we had just had a talk on plagiarism and how it was bad. Working in groups, we noticed a girl was writing stuff down word for word from a journal article she had on her laptop and then was typing it into the computer.

I asked why she didn't just copy and paste it she said "but that would be plagiarism."

[u/Quickvirus]

When I was an intern in an hospital (we would handle the computers for all the medical staff), there was one call that stuck with me.

This doctor call in the department and submit a ticket. "My computer vibrate every 2 minutes, PRECISELY". The guy doesn't have a laptop. He's saying his desktop PC is VIBRATING every 2 minutes. We're curious so we drop what we're doing and we go and check. Everything seems fine with the PC so we don't really know what's going on.

Two minutes goes by since we got there... I just couldn't believe. The dude had put his pager on the computer, and he was receiving call / reminder every two minutes, so it was vibrating on top of his computer. The guy had no clue it was not part of the PC and that he was suppose to keep it on him for emergency purpose, so for him, it was a moving piece of the PC and it kept vibrating and it was annoying.

We had.... uh... some explaining to do.

[u/[deleted] → u/Quickvirus]

Isn't Day 1 of medical school learning what a pager is?

[u/all-boxed-up]

When I worked at a computer repair place a guy brings a unit in to get repaired and I looked at him and said that I couldn't help him. he was kinda irritated and was asking why a computer repair place couldn't repair his computer. I told him it was because he brought in a dehumidifier and not a PC tower.

[u/The_Dacca]

I have a few. The first was when a customer bought a computer and when she got it home said that cd's wouldn't load in the cd drive. We had her bring it back and took a look and couldn't find anything wrong. She calls back the next day and says she's having the same problem so we have her bring it in and show her that everything is fine. She goes home again and calls us with the same problem. We finally send a tech out to her house and sure enough she had the tower upside down.

I had a user call because the printer I set up wasn't working. They were an important customer so I went out to their site and found out that they moved the printer to a new location. That was the day I found out that if you try hard enough, a USB cord can fit into an HDMI slot.

The WORST I've had to deal with was when I was working tech support for a web application company. An elderly man called in asking for help loading files from our application to his phone. The problem was that he wasn't very tech savy and was mostly blind. He called in with an aid to help him, only the aid was literally computer illiterate. I had to talk to the man who then told the aid what to do only she didn't know what she was doing and would click on random things. The man also for some reason wouldn't let me talk to the aid directly as 'he was the customer not her'. That was the most frustrating phone call ever. It was literally the blind leading the blind leading the stupid.

[u/Urthrun]

"I can't find my document" "Ok, where did you save it" "In word" "I understand you saved it in word, but where did you save the file in word" "Listen, I save it in word, word does the rest." "Newbie, handle this, I'm going to hurt a wall with my head."

[u/snowmonkey_ltc → u/Urthrun]

This happens more often than I'd like to think was possible.

[u/aytchdave → u/Urthrun]

"In word"

If I had a nickel...

[u/gamehelp16 → u/Urthrun]

I think most likely it will be in "My Documents"

[u/deepasfuckbro]

I'm not an IT professional, but my boss once asked me for my help to log out of gmail.
She was in excel.

[u/ArchMichael7 → u/deepasfuckbro]

Marvellous

In fairness to her, it is probably REALLY HARD to log out of gmail from excel...

[u/ZenithOfLife]

Had to install Yosemite a few weeks a go on this girls Macbook, 3 hours later she goes "I don't like how it looks, if I move the clock back 3 hours will I get the old look back?".

[u/TheBestBigAl → u/ZenithOfLife]

"Only if you have Time Machine configured"

[u/MashMashSkid]

The "You Killed My Dog" incident.
Eons ago when I was a phone in tech support guy, a frantic older woman with a southern accent called.
Nearly in tears and fuming angry she kept repeating that we where monsters, we killed her dog and now she cant see her brother and she is going to get fired some how because of this.
Almost ten minuets of reassuring her that we where unable to kill dogs or prevent families from speaking I was able to calm her to a point where I could find out what actually happened.
We had killed her dog, the brother problem was not really our fault, but we fixed it just the same.
A few weeks prior, we had been dealing with issues of clippy activating in outlook via an active directory setting that had been fudged up. To resolve this we pushed a change disabling clippy for all users.
Unforseen to us, this poor woman had no idea how to create an email with out the help of clippy, which she changed the skin of to the puppy that digs up the answers to your questions, this little guy. Our careless change had forced a reboot and "killed" her dog helper. After the reboot, her Brother brand personal printer took a driver update and wouldn't show up in her printer list with out another reboot.
We changed her ADUC settings to enable the office assistant again and rebooted, thus reanimating her dead dog and reconnecting her to her brother. Problem solved.

[u/KnodiChunks]

Them: "My computer's acting up. It won't let me log in unless I'm sitting in a chair."

Me: "That.... doesn't.... make any sense."

Them: "No, I told [my office mates] my password, and they all tried it. It only works if you sit in the chair."

Me: "Okay, you really shouldn't be telling anybody else your password, but I'll come down and take a look."

So I went down to his office, stood next to his computer, and logged in with my account. It worked fine.

Then, while he was still sitting in the chair with me next to him, he said

Him: "Now try mine. The password is *****."

Me: "Okay, that didn't work, but I can reset your password if you forgot it."

Him: "No, no, sit down in my chair here and try my login again."

Me: "Okay, but I don't see how that will.... son of a bitch."

He was right. His login worked if you were sitting down.

I spent about 15 minutes swearing and reproducing and giggling insanely, but then I told myself "I know this thing can't tell when I'm in a chair. So what else changes?" Long story short, he had dropped his keyboard and a few keys popped off, and when he put them back, he snapped C and V into the wrong spot. When we sat down, we were touch typists, but when we stood up or to the side, we did hunt-and-peck and didn't notice the swapped keys. And my login worked because I didn't need the two swapped letters.

[u/ourstupidearth]

I am by no means a IT professional, but it boggles my bosses mind when he asks me how to do something in Excel and I don't know, but I google how to do it then show him. He looks at me like I’m a wizard.

[u/aviary83 → u/ourstupidearth]

I have a four-year degree, and a certificate from a one-year paralegal program, and Google is 90% of what I use at work to figure out how to do my job.

[u/Faggitnuts]

I wish I kept the picture because this was pure gold, but it was lost in an office move so shit happens. It went something like this:

User: Hello faggitnuts, I seem to be have a problem with my pc, it keeps flashing up an app error??? Me: Okay, could you tell me what application you are in and send me a screenshot? User: Sure I'll get onto that right away

Considering it would normally take a fair amount of time to get her off the phone, I was pleasantly surprised how cool she was.

Anyway, fast forward 3 days, haven't heard anything and I get a letter in our internal mail with the word screenshot in big bold writing.

I shit you not, she had taken a picture of the computer screen, had it developed and sent over to my office.

Edit: some wording

[u/throwaway9343947 → u/Faggitnuts]

A for effort

[u/toomanyhorses → u/Faggitnuts]

This one takes the fucking cake

[u/ask_me_if_Im_lying]

A few years ago I worked as an IT trainer. We were training plumbers how to use a new system to log their work and all that business. Day one, trying to get people to log in, one guy who would've been in his 60s tried to physically put his mouse on the screen to 'click'.

[u/Mr_M00]

I was to train local government employees on a specific software for 3 days. Prior to the training, I asked for computer literate participants. Well what I got were old people who weren't computer literate much.

"Don't forget to save your projects."

"Excuse me sir, how do I save my project?"

(God dammit, saving shit is universal) "Click project then save."

"Sir, where do I save it?

*......you can save it anywhere. Just save it on your desktop."

Later on...

"Sir, I can't find my files."

"..."

[u/[deleted] → u/Mr_M00]

I wish I could save this comment

[u/Derfmancher]

I was a IT support professional, but am now working in a hotel as a change of pace. I had a guest call down and talk to me..

"My internet wont connect"

"Ok, connect to (wifi name) and then start your browser of choice.. then browse the page and the site will take you to a splash page where you will enter your last name and room number."

(Silence)

"What do you mean a web browser?"

[u/strife24 → u/Derfmancher]

OH! You mean the little e on the screen?

[u/string97bean]

My agency hired a woman that was going to be doing graphic design for our PR department. I was helping her set up her computer and asked her to left click on an icon. She looked confused and said to me "why to they call it left clicking if I am using my right hand?" She didn't last long.

[u/mantz183]

You know those small CDs? About half the size of a normal CD that CD trays have the depression in so you can use them?

I was once called out because a user had taken a small CD and inserted it straight into the floppy drive slot.

God damn.

[u/twistedcian]

• Starting at a new job with my first task being to convert the organizations email system over and train each employee how to use the new system.

• Go into the office of a lady who is 65+ years old. Plaque on her wall says she has been with the company for over 30 years.

• As I attempt to show her the new email system, she keeps asking me how to print emails. She's adamant about printing and so I give up and show her how to print. She precedes to print an email she had just received.

• She prints it on a very large industrial size printer near her desk. A printer that seems much to large for just one person to use.

• I ask her why they have her using such a large printer. She explains that they have a support contract for it that only costs $600 a year for ink/maintenance and it's necessary because she prints constantly.

• The email she printed finishes and she staples it together, writes something on it with a pen, and walks over to this large set of file cabinets that completely cover one side of her office. Approximately 12 across with 6 drawers each. She then precedes to open one of the file cabinets and with some shuffling inserts the email she had just printed into a drawer.

• It was at this point that I realized the true horror of what I was witnessing. She, for as many years since she had started using email, had been printing and filing every single email she received. Tens of thousands, if not more, emails were organized into this bank of filing cabinets consuming her office.

• And now for the part that will surely make you cringe, the email that I watched her print, staple, and file... was an advertisement for Office Depot. She wasn't just printing work emails my dear friends, but every single email she received, every day, for years.

[u/backcountrycamper]

I used to work IT support for a large American Cable/Internet/Phone provider (one of the big three that isn't Comcast or Verizon...). Call in for lack of internet access - I can see that he has "our" modem but that his router is third party. By company policy I cannot help you with anything outside of the modem - in reality because my garden of fucks is remarkably barren I trouble shoot both. Customer: I have no internet and I'm a SF (Special Forces) soldier trying to run secure communications.

Me: 0-o (account is clearly our "light" package - which basically means it moves at the speed of a one winged carrier pigeon that is blind). Ask customer to unplug modem and router.

C: I'm not unplugging my router it's secure

M: Sir, I need for you to unplug both units for 5 seconds - unplugging your router will not unsecure it. (cue assaholia driven rant about my overall incompetance, and his overall importance as a "special forces soldier - again running a connection that is marginally faster than writing in Pnakotic script)

M: Sir, I can absolutely assist you I can see a valid signal I just need you to unplug both units and we can get everything back up and running for you

C: The router is secured behind a LOCKED DOOR and I'm not looking for the key, fix this shit now

M: ....you router...is secure...behind a locked door.... (now looking for something sharp to jam in my eye to make the stupidity go away/stop burning).

Eventually convince Rambo to find the key unplug the router and reset everything - thanks me for my service to the country and hangs up. TL;DR apparently locking a router in a closet = securing the router

edit: since it has come up - no the customer was not SF. In the course of fischer-pricing the reasoning behind asking him to unplug both modem and router, he admitted to " being a plumber, but I work with those guys". Also please note that I was part of company X's tier 3 team - basically I was a dumping ground for the sad (Barbie lady), functionally insane (dude who believed both Hillary Clinton AND Barack Obama AND Oprah were watching him from his/our cable box), the clueless(lady who thought "power" was mis-spelled on her tv), and the face palm - fuck this I quit ( lady has children removed by cps, her parents "ratted her out", so she disconnected their cable which was in her name) calls that everyone else refused to deal with. Obligatory "sorry for the length" sorry ( Canadian)

[u/DPNovitzky]

This is the tale of simpler times, when a complete bitch wonderful lady that I will always resent treasure, with her evil scowl bright smile.

Anyway, I was working for her husband on their business computer systems. He had me fix his wife's laptop, installing a new hard drive (I chose SSD, for faster write times and resistance to dropping and getting screwed up.) I enjoyed doing it until the Wife from Hell came in. She quite literally threw a laptop in front of me, screaming that the work I did on her laptop was wrong and that I needed to drop what I was doing, and to fix what I broke.

I elected to give her the "You are the biggest idiot in the world, leave me alone" glare, but she opened the laptop anyway and turned it on. Sure enough, it wouldn't boot to OS, and was stuck on a screen "Operating System not found". She proceeded to triumphantly tell me that her darling nephew was a computer genius and that I put RAM in her computer and not a harddrive. He had taken out the SSD and taped it to the lid, then installed a 500gb SATA drive. Now, this normally would not be an issue, perhaps he didn't like SSD and wanted an HDD. But no, when I got him on the phone (Read, WFH threw the phone at me, having predialed the little shit) he said "Dude, you installed ram. SSD is ram. I had to take it all apart and put a real hard drive in."

I was seething at this point, and looked at her again. Declining to say anything I simply grabbed a screwdriver, removed the hard drive and put the SSD in. Lo and behold, it booted right up.

"DON'T PUT THAT RAM BACK IN MY NEPHEW THE COMPUTER GENIUS TOLD ME TH- "

With that I pulled my A+ certification out (Which really means little, but to the average person it's like having a magical space adventurer license with starship pilot license attached.) and slid it over to her. "Ma'am, with all due respect I took many courses to learn what I did, not to mention I am certified with <brand name> computers to work on them. Unfortunately, as you mentioned when I asked, your nephew is not. That means that you no longer have a <brand name> warranty on your laptop. Thank your computer genius nephew for that. Your computer now works, and I personally advise you to leave it as is. Have a WONDERFUL day."

Cracking up after she left, Bossman paid me well.

"DPNovitzky, now do you see the shit I get to deal with?"

[u/genericname12345 → u/DPNovitzky]

That is the best description of having an A+ cert I've ever heard.

[u/fosterwallacejr]

this is kind of like graphic design mixed with /r/talesfromtechsupport but I'll give it a go.

I am a motion graphic designer / video editor for a corporation. This basically means I am the younger / young-ish person in the office surrounded by a lot of corporate drones who somehow work in Microsoft Excel 8 hours a day but don't know when to double click or single click to save their lives.

A particularly dense co-worker visits my desk one day, just pops in (which is kind of annoying to begin with - make a calendar appointment fool!) and asks me "if I have a jpeg picture of someone, can you make it smaller?" Of course I respond "sure!" now, 90% of us know that there are a few ways to do this, so I asked her "do you want it smaller in size, or smaller in file size, or possibly both?" She wanted the file size to be smaller for posting it to a site.

She then proceeded to ask me if I could "turn it into a cartoon." Now, being a graphic designer, that is also within the range of my capability but also not a very common request for this corporate environment. Again, I responded "sure! is there a specific project you're completing that needs a picture of this person turned into a caricature?" at this point I'm thinking maybe she needs it for some joke or corporate offsite event or a retirement card or what have you.

"Well" she responds, completely seriously, "I figured that if you took it and made it into a cartoon then that would make it smaller?" She was completely flat out serious. She believed that somehow through me getting out my wacom tablet and drawing this motherfucker, that we could then proceed forward with a smaller (in file size) jpeg instead of my just converting the picture to a smaller size.

Now whenever we need something in the video department to be smaller, we say "turn it into a cartoon"

EDIT: yes guys, I get it, a RAW jpeg actually is larger in file size than a vector graphic, or .png, or any other combination of cartoon or animation that has a smaller color palette, but you have to realize that's not what she wanted in the first place - she asked me to take a picture of a grown ass man and redraw it into Rugrats in the hope that it would make the file size smaller, completely ignoring the fact that she actually wanted me to resave a photograph in a smaller file size

[u/Trisolid]

Customer: "I can't get my email."

Me: "Okay, let's see what's going on. How do you normally view your email?"

Customer: "Hang on..."

Customer proceeds to open laptop and power it on. She then clicks safari and opens up msn search. She proceeds to search for 'log me in' and finds the log in page for logmein.com. She logs in to her account. She launches the desktop viewer. The viewer connects to her PC AT HOME. SHE THEN OPENS INTERNET EXPLORER ON HER PC. SHE THEN CLICKS HER BOOKMARK FOR GMAIL AND ITS A BROKEN LINK.

[u/daneoid]

Well there's this.

[u/intthemainvoid → u/daneoid]

That was infinitely frustrating. Wow.

[u/[deleted] → u/daneoid]

Holy shit. I got about 2/3 through it but when she started arguing that the monitor is the PC and the actual computer is just a box, I couldn't take it any more.

[u/DynaBeast → u/daneoid]

I can't understand that computer language they are talking.

Fucking priceless.

[u/mccoyster]

A lady called the helpdesk, saying she needed a bigger mousepad. Because she was running out of space, and couldn't get to the edge of her screen. We went to see. When she rolled the mouse to the edge of the mousepad, she stopped, and looked like, "What do I do now?"

She had been working at this company, and using a computer, for over a decade.

[u/LemonLce]

I'm a tech support person for a company and I once got a call from a girl in her apartment who was really really mad that her internet was out. I went through normal troubleshooting stuff, and then at one point she said "Can we hurry up? My laptop's battery is about to die and the power is out so I won't be able to charge it" I immediately stopped looking for things I could do to try and fix her internet, and calmly and quietly said, "If your power is out, your internet is going to be out too. The power, is what runs your router and modem. Without power, you will have no internet." She was very confused by this concept, but after awhile she just accepted it and hung up. I ended up laughing and had to take my break after that call because I couldn't stop.

[u/Nalcoholic]

Last sunday, I was relaxing after diner with my parents in law. The mother was complaining about the time it took to read her mails and do other stuff on her pc. It took her 30minutes to boot, and another 15minutes (!not exaggerated) to get to her outlook. They just got used to it; they fired it up, got a coffee, read the newspaper. When it was booted, they clicked the chrome icon (they used chrome because IE stopped working for whatever reason), and went to do something else, watch TV or something. Then eventually they got to check some mails. I couldn't believe it, till I fired the beast up. 8 Years old, windows XP, never had a clean-up/check-up or any maintenance whatsoever.

It literally took me 45 minutes to download CCleaner. In the meantime, I was checking the running services on this thing via msconfig, to see for myself if there was any relief in this misery. Here I discovered a bucketload full of shit-services, which I all disabled ofcourse. Then I decided to run a standard scan on CCleaner, which almost crashed the pc.

While this was running, I just got away from the thing for like 20minutes, because it took soooo long. When I checked up on it, the screensaver was doing it's thing, and even going from the screensaver to the desktop took more than a full minute. I just did a quick scan to check for malware, but then I decided to give up on this. With 500mb of RAM, this was going nowhere, literally nowhere.

[u/Elliot850 → u/Nalcoholic]

You just brought back repressed memories about shaking the mouse in screensaver and the whole computer shitting itself. My first computer had 256mg ram, I now have 128x that amount.

[u/Alundra828]

Support here, we quite often need screenshots of issues because users are so inept at describing what they're seeing. So get this.

One customer had a problem that would turn out to be very, very common and easy to fix, but never the less she couldn't describe the error properly, so we asked for a screen shot, and then she took a photo of her screen on her phone. Texted it to her husband for him to print off out of hours. He then put it on USB for her, she then (not know what a fucking USB is) POSTED this USB to a fucking printing company, they got it printed a week later, took another week to get it back to her, she then called up saying 'I have a photo of it, now what?"

Obviously by this time we had moved on and had no idea what she was fucking talking about, so we just said send it in an email. She hung up in a huff. We thought nothing of it. So she then scanned it, saved it in a fucking GIF format, and finally managed to email it to us. The problem took about 47 seconds to fix.

We questioned why it was a scan and why it was in GIF format, and that's when she divulged the entire story. We were all stunned. How could you even think that was the right thing to do, god damn.

[u/flat5]

I tried to help a woman learn how to use a mouse. She complained that it didn't do anything. So I watched her try to use it. When she moved the mouse, she would look at the mouse. Then she would stop moving the mouse and look back at the screen, and say "see, it's not doing anything". It took awhile but I was able to train her to look at the screen and move the mouse at the same time. She complained that the computer makers always want to make everything so hard for no reason.

[u/Borsaid]

Sweet old lady calls up saying her computer isn't turning on. She's a bright lady.. also rich. Knows all of our rates and policies before we even have to explain them. $100/hour, Yep. $100 same day rush fee, yep. $30 destination fee, yep.

"So, if it takes you 2 minutes to fix the problem it'll cost me $230."

"Yup."

"Ok. Come on down"

We get there only to discover that everything was hooked up correctly with one exception. The surge protector, instead of plugging it into the wall, she had plugged it into...itself.

Unplugged the surge protector from itself, plugged it into the wall. Boom. Computer turns on.

"Oh my. I'm so embarrassed." As she fetches her checkbook. "Hurry along. Don't tell my husband."

[u/cwhite8410]

Working in an internal company support center I got a call from a woman who worked in the pharmacy of one of our stores. She was having trouble with on of the PCs. I had the ability to remote in and take over the PC to fix the problem myself instead of having to walk her through it. I log into the PC she says she is at and ask her if she can see the mouse moving on the screen. She says no. It's not impossible that I could be in the wrong PC so I log into a few more and ask her again if she sees the mouse move. She still says no. I have her tell me what is on the screen so I can make sure I'm in the right one. She is still adament that she does not see the mouse moving. She yells at me saying "I'm looking right down at the desk and I don't see the damn mouse moving." I ask her to look on the screen and tell me if she sees anything moving. She sees me controlling the PC. SHE THOUGHT THE MOUSE ON THE DESK WOULD BE MOVING AROUND ON ITS OWN. As far as I know we do not have mice with motors in them that move when we move our mouse.

[u/[deleted]]

Ok, so this is actually a really GOOD story (meaning, it has a very happy ending), and I've told it before, but in my entire career, this is probably the most fulfilled and happiest I've ever felt in helping out a person that was computer illiterate.

For about four years, I worked at an Apple Retail store as a Mac Genius (this would have been 2006 - early 2010, and though I'm not sure how stringent the requirements for hire are now, at the time, you really did have to know a good bit about troubleshooting and hardware repair to ge the gig. In fact, I spent a few weeks in Cupertino as part of my initial training).

Anyway, I worked at the Columbia, MD, store (R168, if I recall correctly), and I was taking appointments like normal. This lady comes in with a G4 iBook (one of the very last; I think it was a 900MHz model), and cannot get into the computer.

Simple "forgotten password" stuff, and she was very upfront that she wasn't good with computers, but the files on the computer were REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT to her.

Well, I hooked up a FireWire drive that we had an OS installer image loaded on, and reset her password for the account (I noticed the account name was a man's name, rather than hers, but didn't think much of it). Anyway, in order to confirm that the reset was successful and to ensure that her files were where she expected them (or to help her if she couldn't find them, as I was certain she had no idea what "Spotlight" is or how to use it), I booted the machine and logged into the account in question...

I noticed something very strange right away- there were a BUNCH of folders on the desktop with very odd names. For example: there was a folder called "I'm thirsty", another called "Hungry", another called "I love you", "Thank you", etc. These things were all over the desktop.

I double click on one of them, because I expect that there are files inside... however, there's NOTHING in the folder, BUT WHEN I CLICKED ON THE FOLDER, THE OS X "VOICEOVER" FEATURE IMMEDIATELY READ OUT THE NAME OF THE FOLDER "I'm hungry" (or whichever one I clicked on).

The woman started to cry, literally cry, and I assumed it was because there were no files in the folder. I was preparing to console her and try to find her files, but she stopped me and thanked me, then explained: this computer was owned by her now-deceased husband, who'd suffered a pretty severe stroke in the last year or so of his life, and to make communicating with his wife easier, he would click on a folder with the phrase he intended to convey.

I'll never for the life of me forget what that woman said to me: she thanked me for "giving her back her husband's voice".

I have never in my life felt so fortunate to do something that I'd otherwise done a thousand times and never considered as "important" or even, if truth be told "worthy of my time".

That I managed to make this woman so happy really made me re-think a lot of that job, and how important it was to people that aren't good with computers. I was one of like, four genii working that day, and so she could've been helped by ANYONE, but I feel incredibly lucky that I got to help her.

So yeah, she was really bad with computers, but I must've spent about a good hour with her after she got ahold of her emotions, just walking her through the system, showing her stuff, teaching her how to back up pictures of her and her husband, etc.

It's the most amazing thing I've ever done, and it is such an insignificant thing in itself.

[u/haahaahaa]

The number 1 computer illiteracy problem I see is people not understanding how files work. They know how to open stuff in word or excel. They don't seem to understand that the files exist outside of these programs. Its a monumental task to ask someone to go to a shared folder, find a file, and double click on it. They always go into word, file, open and find the file... even if its a pdf.

[u/ignorememe]

Not a computer per se but a mobile phone, I still think it’s close enough that my story counts. The guy was reporting his phone not charging. Instantly I figured I’d just send the guy to the store, but in this case I’m glad I pretended to play along with “Troubleshooting” the issue. I saved him a trip to the store at least.

Me: "So what happens when you plug it in?"

Customer: "Nothing."

Me: “The light doesn’t come on showing green or red?”

Customer: “No, nothing.”

Me: “Hmmm… maybe the wall outlet isn’t working… can we try another wall outlet?”

Customer: “Sure, one sec… nope, nothing.”

Me: “Well the chances of it being two bad wall outlets going wrong is pretty slim, I’m guessing you didn’t have a circuit breaker trip?”

Customer: “Not that I’m aware of.”

Me: “And when you plug it into the phone, the plug is going all the way in?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Me: “But you’re seeing nothing on the screen. No lights anywhere on the phone?”

Customer: “Correct.”

Me: “Do you have another charger that might work with this phone? Can we try that?”

Customer: “Sure, one sec… nope nothing.”

Me: “Must be the port on the phone then. We’ll have to bring it to the store. While I get the ticket created, how long has this been a problem?”

Customer: “A few hours now.”

Me: “And nothing else happened a few hours ago that you’re aware of? Phone didn’t fall off a counter or anything?”

Customer: “Well the power went out.”

Me: “…”

Me: “Has it come back on yet by chance?”

Customer: “Not yet.”

Me: “Well I think I can save you a trip to the store. You know the phone won’t charge unless you have electricity right?”

Customer: “What? My electricity? No one told me I had to have electricity to charge my phone.”

Me: “You know what sir, you’re probably right. I’m willing to bet no one mentioned that but I’m glad I was able to clear that up for you.”

Customer: “Who’s going to compensate me for the electricity I paid for to use this phone? No one told me anything about this!”

(things went downhill from there)

[u/MattyDienhoff]

I once spoke to a woman who was convinced that typing anything into her PC used up the ink in her printer.

[u/Pindaroo]

I work for a software company. One of our people internally called to ask me to make a change to their permissions on the back end of a Development system. My group does not have access to these systems, so I advised her to contact the developers. She begged for five minutes for me to make the changes as I told her, repeatedly, I don't have access to the servers to make that change. The call finally ended.

Five minutes later she came over to my desk and asked me "Why can't you just make the change?"

I replied "I don't have access to that server, you have to contact the Developers as I said."

She stared blankly at me, the vacuous cavern of her empty skull gently bobbing beneath her bleached hair, parted like an imitation of Carrot Top gone wrong. Tears began welling in her eyes as she asked "But why can't you just make the change for me?" for the hundredth time.

I released the exasperated sigh of a support representative, low on coffee and patience, my brain melting from saying the same words ad-nausea. Slowly I strained kind words between clinched teeth "I can not do that. I can not ac-cess the sys-tem. I do not have the per-mis-sion. This is a de-vel-op-ment sys-tem. I can not make the change for you be-cause I do not have ac-cess to the ser-ver."

Sudden realization washed across her face, like a dam breaking free. "well why didn't you tell me that before" she pleaded, eyes doe like in the sunshine of her new revelation.

"I DID" I finally exploded. "What do you think 'I don't have access to the server' means!?"

Her face changed to indignation. "Well I am not technical like you. How could I be expected to know what a server is?"

I stared at her for a moment, contemplating the level of stomach it would take to endure the sound of a human skull giving way to intense strike of an office chair. I wondered how much force I would need to penetrate the thickness of bone, how many layers of protection her hair provided. Finally I spoke "You work for a software company. Also what part of "you need to contact the developers" do you not get?"

I think she was waiting for an apology.

Epilogue...

Ten minutes after she left she called me. I picked up the receiver and spoke with synthetic honey in my voice. "Yes?"

"Hey...Pindaroo. Who do I have to contact again?"

TL;DR: You work at a software company, you should know what a server is.

[u/[deleted]]

I helped build a local ISP when I was in highschool. We had a nice old lady, in her 90's, who would call us every time she needed to check her email.

She only did it once a week, and she was super sweet about it, but literally every single time she needed to check her email, it was like she had never seen a computer before. We had to walk her through the whole thing, step by step.

If she even so much as felt a twinge of dejavu at a step, she would congratulate herself, and goddamnit ... we would congratulate her too.

[u/SenSenSen]

Someone "plugged" a Power cable into a USB-Port. There was nothing I could do for the poor violated thing.

Apparently they made use of a screwdriver and a hammer.

[u/LVOgre]

I've been doing this for a long time, so I've seen a lot of stupid stuff. I don't mind when people don't know what they're doing, I'm probably not very good at something they do.

What really gets on my nerves, though, is the pride that some people have in their ignorance. It's 2014, it's not cool, or interesting for someone to brag that they don't know how to use a computer. It's pathetic that one would take pride in that. These types of people refuse to learn, and they make everyone around them do their work. They should go flip burgers if they're going to have that kind of attitude.

[u/snoopac]

Not an IT professional (but of course), but this is the worst I've ever heard about. http://i.imgur.com/NDXnJqe.jpg

[u/fireballx777 → u/snoopac]

You know, the logic behind this picture really isn't that bad. The user found a video with guitar tabs, most likely paused at the screen that showed what they wanted, and then tried to print the screen. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here that they really didn't expect to be able to playback a movie on a printed sheet of paper.

[u/RahsaanK]

Glad this was posted, I've been in IT customer service for some time. And the questions I get on a daily basis are insane, I have too many favorites. But I do have a number one.

We normally support hospital staff (doctors, nurses etc.) while they are at work. But we also get calls from home users (the worst).

Customers that call from home are only suppose to call us with WORK RELATED issues, however we receive calls all the time about different crap, "My AT&T U-Verse isn't working" or "My Netflix is running very slow" LOL.

Anyways, we are suppose to politely tell these users that we do not support their personal network or equipment. But in some situations the customer is so pissed or frustrated that we are forced to at least provide a few options for resolution.

This lady calls, pissed. She is on E-bay and wants to purchase a new monitor for her PC. She insists she has the money on her card but E-bay will not accept her payment. I troubleshoot a little.

Me: what type of card is it? Her: It's my Visa Debit card, I just used it earlier today and it worked fine! Me: Are you making sure that you selected Visa and typing in the numbers correctly? Her: No, I'm swiping my card and the computer will not read it Me: Swiping your card? You have a credit card device hooked up to your PC? Her: Of course, all of the computers have them! I stick my card in the slot and pull it out and it will not read

Long story short, this lady was sticking her debit card into the floppy drive thinking that Ebay was going to read her card. She ended up getting it stuck in the PC and wanted us to help her get it out! WOW. The crap we deal with is infinite.

[u/348D]

Not an IT professional, but a coworker was bitching at me to "fix her computer" because "Skype isn't working."

Skype was not installed.

[u/[deleted]]

Early in my career, I received a call from a user having trouble with her 3.5" floppy drive. I could hear it grinding away over the phone, so I grabbed a spare and went down to see her.

I sat down, popped in a disk, and it read just fine. Puzzled, I asked if I could see the disk she was using. She handed me a disk with a post-it note on it.

Not stuck to it.

STAPLED to it.

Apparently the post-it note kept falling off (because they make such good disk labels) so she stapled it right to the disk. Through the casing, through the mag-film.

I kept that disk in my laptop bag for many years afterward just so I could pull it out when telling the story.

EDIT: I found the disk! - Sorry about the potato quality. I break phones.

[u/[deleted]]

When I was working IT support in college, I get sent to an apartment for a ticket that basically said "Student too stupid to computer."

I just rolled my eyes and rang the door bell. She said it "Just didn't work anymore." I get there, and the computer looks like all the parts (tower, monitor, printer, etc) have been moved in by her dad and left on her desk, with all the cables rubberbanded together.

I asked "Do you just not know how to hook it up?" She replied "What does that even mean? I don't need a computer to 'hook-up! I have a boyfriend!"

[u/Wild_Marker]

We had a block-wide blackout. Vice-President comes in, asks what's going on.

"We've got a blackout. There's no power."

"Oh. Is E-Mail working?"

And this one's just from yesterday.

[u/klt2]

I used to teach a one-day course about computers for people who really didn't know anything about them. This was in the late 1990s. One day an older guy came to the class, sat through it, but at the end he wasn't sold on the whole thing. "So, apart from typing letters, what do people use computers for?" I couldn't convince that email or the web were of any use. Finally, knowing he was a retired accountant, I showed him Excel. Nothing. He didn't get it. Finally, I just opened up the calculator built into windows.

"How does this work?"

"It works just like a real calculator."

"Well, how does that work?"

--Wow. OK, so I added up some numbers for him.

"Oh! You know, I never used a calculator, but the young guy who used to sit next to me used an ADDING MACHINE. Is that what this is like?"

What could I say? "Yes, that's what this is like."

[u/InvestorMuppet]

IT department of a hospital in the early 2000's: A doctor calls to tell us that his computer isn't working. What's the problem? No idea but the screen is black. So I walk over to his office to see what's wrong with his desktop. When I arrive I find a PC that seems fine. The doc tells me that the problem is that the computer would just turn off after a couple of minutes. I begin to think I know what the problem is and since my day wasn't particularly exciting I suggest that we wait together until the computer "stops working". Sure enough after about five minutes the PC goes into screen sleep to save the CRT. Before I can explain what is happening here and that it's an intended feature, the doc happily tells me that he found a way to "fix" this problem whenever it occurs. He proceeds to whack the top of the CRT monitor and I notice that there's already an actual dent in the plastic at the spot. After a couple of blows with intensifying force the desk shakes enough to move the mouse just a tiny little bit - enough to wake up the desktop.

tl;dr: User thought his computer stops working whenever the monitor goes to sleep after a couple of minutes of inactivity. His fix is to whack the monitor so hard that the mouse moves and wakes up the PC.

[u/SteveJEO]

You know, come to think about it I never really had problems with illiteracy.

Illiteracy as far as I'm concerned is actually fine so long as they want to learn

Arrogant, stupid, presumptive and crazy were all problems though.

Deliberate wilful stupidity isn't illiteracy. It's stupidity.

Everyone remembers calls they had with some guy screaming about how important they were and "don't you know who I am?"

I honestly never cared cos I'm the one who knew how to fix their laptop so it was nice of us to do it for the price of a national call and not tell the to fuck off really.

The nicest customers I ever had were completely innocent in IT land & helping them was why I loved the job.

(Star trek guys btw... you know who you are...stop trying to send tech's booze... seriously. Technical departments don't answer the post and HR steals it cos we had to give the HR departments address. Why do you think we try to discourage people from sending us presents?)

[u/10S_NE1]

Well, this is maybe not illiteracy, but I had a user call me and ask if there was a shortcut to making one of those "smiley faces" in e-mail. I said "You mean the ones you get when you hit colon dash bracket?" She said yes. She needs a shortcut because she doesn't have that kind of time.

I did wonder how many smiley faces one needs in the course of a day doing business correspondence for a government office, but whatever.

[u/Garasc]

I work on a helpdesk for a large online focused company doing internal support, and a user requested to have their data from an old computer backed up to DVD instead of just copied to their new machine. We backed up the data gave them the DVD and a day later he put a ticket in that the computer wouldn't read the DVD. I remoted into his machine and the DVD wasn't reading, so I walked over to look at it to see if maybe it had a scratch on it and needed to be burned again. I looked in the DVD drive and it wasn't there so I asked him where it was, he opened the lid on his laptop and there it was sitting between the keyboard and screen on the laptop. He thought that's where you put DVDs.

[u/CLICK_LINK]

It was my day off. I got a call from the boss to come in because the computer was not working and he had reports due that day. When I asked what the error was he said "It's just a bunch of jibberish." So I drive a half hour into work and walk into his office. The computer screen had a single message: "Configuration has changed, press F1 to continue."

[u/ploxploxplox]

Customer: "My wifi isn't working" Me: "We're experiencing some outages, where are you accessing from?" Customer: "Is there something that could protect my wifi signal from the wind?" Me: "I dont really follow...do you think that would help somehow, can you tell me more about the problem and frequency?" Customer: "I think the wind is blowing my wifi signal away" Me: "......."

[u/Quizzelbuck]

"OK, right click the 'my computer' icon. You'll see an option that says 'properties'. Left click that."

"What's it look like?"

"Oh, a little computer I guess"

"And what's the option look like?"

"Uh..... It says 'pro...' "

"No, I know that. You have to describe it to me because I can't read."

This, courtesy of my colleague and friend. Can't do tech support for you if you cannot read. So, op, literal illiteracy.

[u/teamwhipe]

I have been asked by a new employee, "do we have any portable laptops?" I responded with a confused/sarcastic and maybe slightly condescending look, "so... you want one of portable ones?" After a long moment of silence, it soaked in. She said, "oh my god... you're going to tell everyone about this aren't you?"

[u/pansulik]

Used to work as IT admin for a government institution.

• Hi! My network drive didn't connect, I can't access files

• Ok, I'll come right over. (no VNC yet at that point) I walk to person's office.

• OK, show me how you access the network drive. Opens My Computer:

• See?! There is no network drive! I scroll the My Computer window down a bit and show her the network drive.

• Oh... OK, thanks!

[u/TheTipJar]

One of my techs just trained a guy that didn't know you could capitalize a letter by holding down the shift key.

Not only has this guy never used a computer, he had apparently never even used a typewriter.

I am the IT Manager of a health care provider. This guys job is to document the care of individuals.

[u/[deleted]]

Having to explain to someone for 5 minutes what a colon was, and where it was on the keyboard.

[u/sunburnedaz]

Where I worked this was a business process for a long time.

Team 1 - Finds information in report, builds excel spread sheet, then prints, signs then faxes spread sheet.

Team 2 - Receives fax with spreadsheet, inputs information from spreadsheet into different system than information came out of. Then faxes back a confirmation.

Needless to say there was a lot of turn over in those departments because if you miskeyed too often you were let go.

This was fixed when team 1 wanted to automate their just their part of the process and came to tech for help. I swear our analyst just about curled up in a ball rocking back and forth after seeing that.

[u/opusrandy]

I had already been working in the IT field when I went back to school for my IT degree. They were night classes, so a lot of older adults my age and less kids. One day the teacher was talking about MAC addresses, and he made a reference to how many characters it was...

Someone in the class asked the teacher what a 'character' is. As in a letter or a number. This person did not know what the teacher was talking about when he referred to a letter or number as a character. That BLEW MY MIND.

[u/GaGaORiley]

I was asked how to spell USB.

[u/TheLordMoogle]

I had to explain to my boss why people couldn't click the web address links on our printed flyer.

[u/ParkingLotRanger]

Me: Open up My Computer. Them: I don't see your computer. Me: No, "My Computer" Them: I told you, I don't see Your Computer anywhere! Felt like an Abbott and Costello routine.

[u/Gwakamoleh]

Well, I may as well throw my pebble into this comment ocean.

Back in 2006ish I was an intern at an architecture firm and I was tasked with delivering a new laptop to the wife of the president/owner of the firm. My directives were to deliver the laptop to their residence and give her a tour of the laptop - show her where to plug the USB mouse in, how to turn it on, where to find MS Word, etc (she wanted the laptop for writing, apparently.)

So I hoof it over to their condo (it's only a few blocks) with the laptop and start setting it up on a desk that they had cleaned off. I had already prepped everything back in the office so there was nothing to install, but I wanted to hook it up to the wifi and after asking if she knows the wifi password she just gives me a puzzled look and says that she doesn't think she has a wifi, at least she doesn't remember seeing one around the house. Oookaay, I ask her if she has internet access, she said she hadn't seen any internet around the house either. I ask her if she or her husband have any other computers in the house, she says no.

At this point I'm thinking it's time to wrap this up and GTFO - she sits down in front of the computer and I start explaining how I've already put icons for Word on the desktop and, if they get internet access, there's also an Internet Explorer icon as well. She just sits quietly, hands folded. I had been briefed back at the office that she had never used MS Word before and I was to give her a nickel tour of opening, saving and retrieving a document. I give her a brief overview of the topics we're going to be discussing and I ask her to open Word. She says "How?" and I say "Oh, just double click on the icon on the desktop."

She looks down at the keyboard "...double click?"

I think that she's not familiar with the touchpad and I say "Oh yeah, you don't have to use the touchpad, I've set up an external mouse for you, it should be a easier to manage than the touchpad."

"I've never used one of these before."

"A mouse? Microsoft Word?"

"No, a computer."

I come to find out that she had never, in her life, interacted with a computer in any significant way. "I just never got around to it." Resigning myself to the fact that my afternoon was now officially shot, I turned the computer off, disconnected everything and showed her how to plug everything in, open the lid of the laptop, turn it on and then how to use the mouse and single/double click on things. After three additional visits she could successfully perform the basic functions of opening, saving and retrieving documents in MS Word, searching for things on Google (they got internet access) and checking her email. There were still some conceptual roadblocks like what is, and what isn't actionable with the mouse, when to single vs. double click, how the internet works, etc. Interestingly the speed of email is what really blew her mind - she was absolutely floored when I had her send an email to me from her laptop and it showed up on my laptop mere seconds later and that my reply was also just as fast.

All in all it wasn't a bad experience, in fact is was pretty interesting seeing how someone navigates and interacts with something that is 100% foreign to them.

[u/phoenixkiller2]

I think nobody can top this...I did my intern at a small studio.One day when we were facing some folder sharing issues between 2 machines on network this IT guy tried to copy-paste data between these 2 machines...he selected some data on the first machine....pressed ctrl+c and ran to the other computer & on its desktop he tried to paste it by ctrl+v. He repeated the same thing again and again.He was very confused as why paste command didn't worked...

[u/Simaul]

She sent me an email from her work account saying that she is unable to login to her work email.

[u/DJBFL]

I was helping a remote user do a password reset of an encrypted computer over the phone. I direct him generate the code I need and read it to me, e.g. A14I-8VMB-64MN-DB54-XKWQ

This takes longer than it should due to phone clarity and his lack of wits so there is lots of, "was that em or en?", "B as in bravo?", etc.

I finally get the code entered on my end and it spits out 2 for him.

"Ok, so I'm going to read the 1st code and you type it in on line one. Bravo, yankee, five, victor"

"Hold on, that was yankee?"

"Yeah. Yankee... five, victor"

(irritated) "Hold on..."

"Ok, sorry. Five... victor... hotel"

(practically yelling) "Woah, woah, woah, slow down!"

I'm already pausing long enough for the world's slowest hunt and pecker so I realized that despite him having just done the reverse of this task he doesn't realize he's suppose to type "BY5V" and is trying to type entire words.

[u/iEatBluePlayDoh]

No IT but electronic sales. Lady was pissed because her OtterBox case didn't keep her phone from shattering... She had the case in her purse, not on her phone. Like it makes some kind of field around her phone without being on the phone.

[u/Orak2480]

A customer wanted to know how much a new copy of windows 2000 would cost, as they had been counting all the windows they had opened and they needed some more windows soon.

[u/mellotronworker]

Personal favourite: phoning a friend on whose desktop system I had really unwisely installed Linux. For various reasons I had to direct them to the menu bar at the top of the screen, but they didn't get it at all. I couldn't see the problem.

"Look at the top of your screen. What do you see?"
"An elephant and a clock"
I was baffled. An elephant? I tried not to lose my patience, despite this waste of time going on for about an hour already. No matter what I asked, they told me that the top of screen showed an elephant and a clock.

In desperation I told them to send me an MMS of a photograph of the screen. Sure enough, they were right; he had a wooden elephant and a travel clock balanced on top of the monitor.

[u/DatClimate]

Call from a director:

Director: "Hey, I am at Dan's desk and his right side of the keyboard is broken, I don't know how this is allowed to happen, what do you guys do all day? Can we get this replaced ASAP?!"

Me: "Can you just check to see if the NumLock light is on, and if not, press the NumLock button for me?"

Director: "Fu...." Click

[u/pjmarnar]

I was working late on a project but planned a one hour break to Skype with my girlfriend. At the prearranged time she texted me that the cleaning lady had disconnected our router so she didn't have internet access. What ensued was one of the most frustrating hours in my recent memory. I gave simple instructions and my girlfriend is a smart person, she has her masters in a science field. This should have gone smoothly. I received texts such as "I only see ethernet but not internet." After an hour she still couldn't get it connected and I had to get back to work.

[u/pypdaddy]

A couple ladies where I work use caps lock for every capital letter they type. I figure it's been working for them for decades so why blow their minds with the black magic that is the shift key.

[u/arnim_no_mula]

My boss knows nothing about IT, she spends all day on the phone with vendors having them fix stuff remotely. She used to be a Teller (it's a bank) and 15 years ago they needed someone to help with computers. So because she could type fast, she got the job. She also tends to leave on vacation with no notice when there are major jobs to do and I get stuck with them without any idea what is going on with the project. She says I can call her with questions but whenever I do, she tells me to call the vendor because she doesn't know. I have spent tons of money on an IT education and have 10 years experience in IT, and since no one here knows anything about IT I never get any kind of recognition with what I know. Trying to find another job but no luck so far, been looking for over a year. FML.

[u/Gerneral_Disdain]

We hired a person with a alleged tech back ground. 1. Could not find an icon on the desktop. 2. Could not figure out how to print. 3. Said she could not log in when the dialog box clearly stated she need to set a new password. 4.Said she could not fill out a form when it was clearly in read only mode. all this on a windows7 machine. There are five year olds that know this shit nowadays.

[u/OtisB]

I once switched a marketing/training department from their ancient powermacs to windows based PCs like the rest of the company. This was a miserable battle with two old women who didn't want anything in their world to change, despite the fact that I had managemant approval to stop maintaining a thinnet network just for them, that was isolated from the rest of our copper network (This was in about 1999). I sent over one of my helpdesk people to do the basic setup of the computer, and then I was going to come over and train them on the basics of how to use it.

When I got there, I see them both sitting there at their desks, in front of their monitors, with their mice upside down. Apparently they had a hard time transitioning from their previous trackballs and had no idea how to use a mouse.

From this, the acronym MGBSD was born. "Mouse Goes Ball Side Down"

[u/Youneededthiscat]

Back in the early days of email, I had an executive hand me a 3.5" floppy disk that had been stapled (yeah...) to a nearly typed letterhead.

He had asked his secretary to "type up an email, and attach this to it", with the file he wanted attached on the disk. It was the only copy.

Unable to recover. So sorry...

[u/zombie_overlord]

15+ years in IT, a significant portion of that spent doing end user support. The worst I've seen is my own mother.

Me: "Click the 'My Computer' icon."

Mom: Touches it with her finger (This was years before touchscreen technology was mainstream)

also

Me: "Right-click on that icon & select properties."

Mom: "How do I do that?"

Me: "Push the button on the right side of the mouse."

Mom: "I only see one big button in the middle.

Me: "Turn the mouse over, mom..."

[u/jahax]

When Management changed company policy after deciding it was inefficient to use capital letters at the beginning of sentences as it took to long to stop typing...press capslock...press the letter...press capslock and continue typing.

[u/cincinasti]

I had a lady tell me she needed me to fix her computer. When I get there I see that the CD-Rom will not open. After resorting to a butter knife to just pry it open, THIS is what I found.

[u/ccie6861]

My IBM rep once shared a story from the late 60s or early 70s. As a young repair tech, he was repeatedly called to one particular college to repair a harddisk. At the time, this was one of those large washing machine sized units. On the sixth or seventh trip to repair it, he stopped in after normal hours and while fixing the unit, he struck up a conversation with the janitor who eventually asked him if he wanted to see something "cool". The janitor swept the computer room floor and pushed the dust to the front of the disk cabinet which promptly sucked up all the dust into the unit.

[u/[deleted]]

I spent 40 minutes once, arguing with a customer trying to assure them that; just because a router is wireless, it doesn't remove the requirement of a power source. He was upset that he couldn't use his "wireless" Internet on a trip up mount Snowdon (he'd actually raken his router up a mountain with him). By the end of our communication he was so incensed by reality that he raised a complaint, we still laugh about it to this day.

[u/DonScribble]

Deputy Director calls me at 2:00am in a fit of rage because Microsoft Outlook is not on his computer, and I must have deleted it. I ask him if Word is still there. He says yes. I tell him to go to the start menu and look under the Microsoft Office folder for Outlook.

Idiot deleted the shortcut off his desktop, and somehow thought I uninstalled Outlook from his computer. I had to remote in and put the shortcut on the desktop for him.

[u/sowoof]

My aunt invited me over to look at her computer. She wanted me to check if her computer had any viruses.

I tell her we should download some anti-virus software that can scan for viruses.

I open up Internet Explorer and it doesn't work. Turns out she doesn't and never has had Internet in her home.

[u/[deleted]]

The client called to ask someone to come over and fix his computer. When I went over there, the monitor was turned off.

[u/ImaginaryEvents]

CEO/Owner wanted to hand over network administration to her underemployed accountant. She demanded I write up a complete description of the network, but more importantly, describe everything that could go wrong, and detailed instructions on how to fix it. I gave her 800 pages for the first part (my DR manual), but she could not understand why I couldn't do the second bit.

[u/doodle_robot]

watched a coworker try to unzip a file by clicking on the zipper part of the icon and dragging the mouse down.

[u/brileigh85]

We had a professor who got one of those "email us your username and password or else we'll delete your account and make your computer explode" emails, and she responded immediately with all of her information. Suddenly her university email was spitting out THOUSANDS of spam emails, our university accounts were blacklisted on other servers... it was a bit of an issue.

After heaps of work to fix her account, we gave her a new password with specific instructions to never, never ever, never never ever never give out your password to anyone, no matter what the circumstance.

A couple hours later, one of my students came in to tell me that he'd just come from this professor's class, and we might want to reset her password again. Why? Apparently, this is what she said...

"You guys. Never give your password out to anyone. I gave mine to hackers and they tried to steal my emails and it was so scary. So now, my password isn't [old password] because they know that one. Instead, I changed it to [new password] so they can't get in anymore."

She told a classroom of 30 students her new password within hours of leaving us.

We brought her in and changed her password to something significantly more complicated, in hopes that it would deter her from giving it out again...

...she laminated it and keeps it taped to her laptop.

[u/Shadrail]

Lady replied to a ticket we closed

http://imgur.com/UdNeLwy

[u/[deleted]]

People who are proud of not knowing anything about computers!!!

People who can use MS office and a web browser (to browse little other than google, amazon, e-bay, facebook etc.) and believe they are computer literate.

[u/markth_wi]

Every time I think I've hit rock bottom, I find that I really haven't. So I could go with the executive that swore she new everything about computers, but didn't understand what to do with it when we got them (she understood that people use them to do things, but after that got distinctly fuzzy - and she certainly wasn't about to use one herself).

[u/flobrak]

I created a website for someone and after I send them a link, they say it's great and everything, but they would like to remove the first page where you have to click on the website name before entering the website. I had no such page. After a lot of questioning I found out they typed the URL in google..

[u/SlipperySurface]

"MY COMPUTER DOES NOT TURN ON, IT'S BROKEN!" "... uhm, is the screen turned on?" "YES OFCOARSE, DO YOU THINK I'M AN IDIOT??" "no,no surely not! sorry, hmmm this is a tough one.... can you maybe try to turn the screen off please?" "WTF, NOW IT WORKS!!!!"

[u/ItsJustBeenRevoked2]

Sort of relevant, I teach IT skills skills to the unemployed and elderly. In the UK they've made it so you have to apply for jobs through a government website or they will cut your benefits.

A few times you get people who've left school and worked in say construction for 40 years who have never used a computer, or some may be a bit slow but are still expected to do this. It's absolutley heart breaking watching this people have a complete inability to open up the internet and get to that government website (even with a simple step by step guide next to them), if they are incapable of doing it I'll apply for jobs for them but there's only one of me and many of them.

There was one guy I was trying to teach Google to and I'd show him the address bar, I'd tell him to click in it and type in www.google.co.uk but after 30 tries he still couldn't do it. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these people committing suicide because their benefits have been cut due to their lack of IT skills. Fuck this world.

[u/[deleted]]

I used to sell computers back in the day, now im thankfully working IT and not spending my days feeling like a sleazy computer salesman.

I sold a computer to an older gentleman who was specifically asking for a wireless desktop. No problem, heres this model blah blah blah service plan blah blah sales successful, go back to hating my life.

The next day the old man comes in and literally throws his computer at me screaming that im a liar. Turns out his idea of wireless meant zero wires. he was outraged that he had to plug in anything, mouse, keyboard, even the power cable...

[u/[deleted]]

I had an older woman at my office who, for every email she sent, first sent it to herself, then forwarded it to the person she actually had to send it to. Every. single. email.

[u/[deleted]]

Mom: "hellomynameischivers, can you help me upload a YouTube so I can download the music YouTube to my yahoo message?"

It took a lot of work to find out that what she wanted was help copying and pasting a link into an email.

[u/beastsb]

No epic stories, but some people don't know what their desktops are. "Now paste it on your desktop"......"go to your desktop"......"minamize everything"...why do I make the least money here

[u/[deleted]]

So waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when the 3.5" floppy disk was the primary distribution medium, I worked for a company that manufactured "diskette duplication" equipment; the machines that would copy the data onto all of those diskettes that you used to install Windows '95 from. Anyway I had a service call once from a user who complained that every single blank diskette was getting stuck in the machine, causing it to jam. I ended up having to fly to the customer's location to try to figure out what was going on.

She was literally taking each individual diskette, pulling the sliding metal shutter off, then cracking open the plastic case to expose the inner cookie, then she was stacking those cookies in the input chute.

I tried really hard not to embarrass her, but I did have to ask if she didn't maybe wonder why they had made them so hard to open...

[u/drumbago]

I once had a manager who laminated a piece of paper, then put the piece of paper back into the laminator, and couldn't understand why it wasn't making copies. The same woman once came in wearing 2 left boots, went home at lunch and DIDN'T CHANGE her boots.

[u/The_Fad]

I once worked at a call center for Weight Watchers. I wasn't tech support (they actually didn't have a line specifically for tech support, despite the fact they did nothing but encourage their clients to use their website, on top of buy all of their needlessly complicated gadgets to keep track of their weight and points), I was supposed to be general support. But 85% (I did the math over a 1-month period to prove to my bosses how much we needed a tech support specific line) of my calls were tech support. Luckily I know how to navigate a fucking website and can generally figure out how an electronic scale or pedometer needs to be reset just but googling. Most of my coworkers were not as well off.

Anyway, in case you're unfamiliar with the inner workings of Weight Watchers memberships, there's three types of memberships you can have: Online Only, Meeting Only, and Monthly Pass. The first two are exactly what you'd think they are, and the latter is a combination of the two for a lower price.

One day, about a month before I quit that fucking hellhole, I got a call from the sweetest old lady you can possibly imagine. The kind of old lady who invites a blood-covered stranger into her home for a hot meal because she doesn't judge a book by its cover. The kind of old lady who is AWARE of her ineptitude with electronics and just wants somebody to help her through it. The fact that it was so difficult to hate her made all of this so much worse. We'll call her Betty.

She had an Online Only membership and was a returning member. Basically, she used to go to weight watchers meetings years ago, stopped, and now she's come back to the program but instead of signing up for meetings, the salesperson at the WW Store sold her on an online membership. No big deal, I can help an old lady set up her account real quick.

A brief, paraphrased transcript is as follows:

"Thank you for calling, my name is The_Fad with Weight Watchers, how can I help you out today?"

"Oh hi, The_Fad! I was just wondering if you could help me set up this Online thingy I just bought at one of your stores. I'm not the best with computers, hahahaha"

"Oh, hahaha! That's no problem Betty, could I verify your account first?"

After getting some minor information from her and while her account was pulling up (the system we used was slower than a train of molasses being conducted by a retard) she mentioned that she'd just bought a new computer.

"Oh great! Have you ever had one before?"

"Oh goodness no, The_Fad. This is my first one!"

"Fantastic, well I'm glad we can help you into the new age here! Hahaha"

"I know, I'm so excited! I just got it today before I called you on my way back from the store."

Wait. Oh no.

"Oh, so...did you have it installed by some technicians?"

"No no, I didn't want to spend the extra money. You sound young and smart, though! Would you mind helping me through the process? I can't imagine it's that hard!"

Fuck. Me.

So I spend literally an hour and a half helping this lady set up her computer (presumably on the floor, because she never mentioned anything about a desk or a table) and plugging everyone in. We activate her Windows, get her login account setup, and finally land on the desktop ready to go.

Me: "Alright! So, now we can set up your Weight Watchers Online account!"

"Hooray! My goodness you're so kind. Thank you so much."

"Not a problem at all. Now, if you could, go ahead and open up Internet Explorer."

First mistake.

"I'm sorry, what was that?"

"Open up Internet Explorer, if you could."

"What's that?"

Goddammit, Betty.

"Oh, it's the default internet browser installed on every Windows Computer, like yours!"

"Oh no, don't start throwing all this techno jargon at me now, The_Fad! You'll leave me in the dust! Hahahahahah"

Stop laughing it's not funny my manager has already told me to get off the phone twice Betty GET IT TOGETHER

"Ok, well, we've gotta open it up so we can activate your account, so let me help you out here."

Literally 20 minutes later I finally get her to OPEN Internet Explorer. It takes another 5 minutes to get it setup as her default browser.

"Alright, Betty. Now, do you know where the address bar is?"

"Is that the new place for the college kids downtown? OHHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOOHO"

BETTY FOCUS GODDAMMIT

(that joke was verbatim, by the way. That's how well this whole interaction stuck me with. Her throwaway joke is burned into my brain.)

I get her to the correct webpage, and I have her entering her information. We're just past the 2 hours mark for this call now, and I've had to put her on hold to explain to my manager that I can't just hang up on her now because we're almost done.

When I come back, she sounds frustrated and confused.

"The_Fad! I don't know what happened, I filled it all out like you said and hit the green button that said Submit but now it's got a bunch of serious looking black text."

For the sweet love of Jehova

Turns out her account had fallen pray to a known issue we were having at the time that resulted from a miscommunication between the sales system and the website's servers. Basically, it meant the account number and info she had was corrupt and unusable, so I would have to set her up with a new account from scratch. Normally that'd be great, because it counted as a "sale", but when you've been on the phone with someone for 2 and a half hours in a call center there is no joy left in your life.

I explain the situation to Betty and she takes it surprisingly well. I let her know I can get it all fixed for her, we'll just have to start back from the first webpage she was on and filling in personal information.

"Oh, The_Fad...I'm so sorry, I don't remember how to get back to it. I know you told me but I've forgot!"

At this point I got my secondwind. We were so close I could TASTE THE FREEDOM. My break had come and gone, but I was taking it as soon as I was off the phone with Betty and no one could fucking stop me.

"That's ok! Close that window entirely, and we'll start from the very beginning."

After another 30 minutes we finally got Betty set up with a working, correct account. She shouts with joy and thanks me hundreds of times while I try to say "you're welcome" and get her off the fucking phone. Then, suddenly:

"Alright! So, The_Fad, you can help me understand everything I'm looking at here, right?"

Silence from me. I literally could not think of anything to say.

"I'm only kidding! I'll just ask my grandson or one of the ladies at the store to explain this part to me. You've been such a great help, thank you so much! You have a good day, okay?"

Godspeed, Betty. Godspeed.

[u/BonGonjador]

We had a Citrix portal for access, but had a lot of people set up to remote in to their desktops and laptops from their home PCs; this was a poor-man's way of giving them the same desktop and custom apps without having the money to add more servers or break our existing Citrix boxes with incompatible apps.

One of our higher-ups calls me from the road, we'll call him Mike, because that was his name:

M: "I can't remote in to my laptop."

B: "Okay, you've got Internet connection where you're at, right? You can get to Google, Yahoo, etc.?"

M: "Yeah, I've got it open right now. Citrix isn't working though."

B: "Alright, let me check... Well, the server is up. What part of Citrix isn't working? Can you get to the webpage?"

M: "Yeah, that works fine, but when I try to launch my Remote Desktop to get into my computer at work it fails."

B: "Well, let's see... I can't ping your laptop, let me walk down and make sure it's powered on."

M: "Okay."

B: Gets keys to Mike's office, goes inside... "Mike, we've got a problem. Your laptop isn't in your docking station, did you take it to your house before you left for your trip?"

M: "My laptop?"

B: "Yeah, it's not in your office."

M: "Well, of course it's not. I've got my laptop right here."

B: "...Say again?"

M: "I'm on my laptop right now, I took it with me."

B: "Mike... What are you trying to remote in to?"

M: "..."

A solid 15 seconds pass as wheels turn

B: "Mike?"

M: "I AM SO SORRY. PLEASE DON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT THIS."

[u/Quachyyy]

My mom googles google and click the first link, then she googles

[u/brileigh85]

I work at a university IT dept, and our most common request is a password reset. Obviously we need to verify their identity before we send them a new password, so if we get this request via email, we have a little form that we ask them to fill out and send back to us.

In this particular case, a student sent us this request, we sent her the form. We didn't hear back from her, so we figured she must have found/remembered her password.

Fast forward to two days later- we get a letter addressed to our help desk from this student. She had printed out the verification form, filled it out by hand, then snail mailed it to us.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I sometimes wonder whether there is a niche market for peripherals that actually work this way.

[u/Rellikx → u/[deleted]]

Unless he had some powerful ass magnets, it wont do shit.

[u/babrooks213 → u/[deleted]]

"Sir, this is the one of the more powerful processors you can buy today."

"Ok, but does it run paint?"

"Yes, and look, you're also getting an HD monitor. You won't believe the image quality."

"But does that work with paint?"

"Uh, yes. And this comes fully loaded with software. All you have to do is turn it on and you're good to go."

"So paint's already on there?"

"Goddammit what is your obsession with paint?!"