The Dumbest IT Questions Ever

I know my husband has heard a good number of those. He also has problems that can be solved by turning on the monitor, wiggling the mouse and having the computer plugged in.

I once got a call from a user that their fax machine was jamming. Finally, they got it to work once they STOPPED PUTTING THE ENTIRE LEGAL PAD through the machine!

Another one was a coworker who asked the user "Is your power out?" and the response was "How do I know?"

Their problem is not locating the elusive Any key, but actually connecting their iMac to the power grid.

Trivia! : The first typewriters wern't QWERT, they were alphabetical. However, people were so quick typing on them, the machinery got jammed. So when they redesigned the key arrangement for the new typewriters, it was engineered to be as counterintuitive as possible, so ensure people couldn't type too fast to jam the machines.

Hmm...the wireless mouse one makes a tiny bit of sense in that it needs to be connected to the computer (or in some cases connected with the base which is plugged into the computer) but not physically (sorry, I'm a bit tired right now and can't think of the correct way of explaining it). I have had to have my husband help me figure out why my wireless mouse/keyboard weren't "connecting". Stupid bluetooth POS.

Anyway, one of my favorite IT problems is when my mother-in-law was trying to get hubby (over the phone) to help her get the scanner to work. He asked if it was plugged in, she said yes. After half an hour of trying to make it work he asked her to look and make sure it was plugged in. There was a long, drawn out silence, then a very quiet "oh". And this is a woman who has her masters in computer science and is currently working in the IT field herself.

Anyone who works in IT knows that these are all too real. Here are a few from the "special needs" folder in my ticketing system:

"Amy called and was looking for a file on Robin's H drive but was not sure what file it is."

"The fax machine does something weird every night around midnight. Is this suppose to happen?"

"Hi, I can't open this because my computer does not have a zip drive."
(User had received a spam email from 'UPS' (cough) about a package they could not deliver, with instructions to open the attached zip file.)

"Peggy said that since the carpet has been replaced, her computer has been acting funny. She said that every morning she has to boot up the computer because it is turned off. I had her show me how she logged off and she went to start>shutdown and 'shutdown' was selected. I pointed out to her that this is the reason why she had to boot up everyday..."

My old company sold a specialized computer for older, first time users. It was just for surfing and email. It had a bunch of extra function keys that automatically took people to certain websites for shopping or to order pizza etc.

I had a customer call in for tech support who had found it too easy to spend money thanks to these function keys and had pried a number of them off the keyboard with a butter knife. Unfortunately, he pried off some of the wrong ones and completely bollocksed up his computer and expected me to make it work.

I work a smallish software company. Our current favourite is a complaint that "the bumblebee won't go away."

Some probing discovered that 'the bumblebee' was the hourglass with a special Windows theme.

We explained that reading large text files can take some time, especially on older computers.

I'm always needing to "reset the Internet" (actually, I'm just resetting my connection).

And I don't think "How do I read my e-mail?" is that weird. Especially if you use a Windows-based e-mail program that likes to crash and/or install weird things when it tries to open an e-mail.

Having worked with computers for 30 years and provided tech support in one fashion or another for 20 of them, let me be a strong voice of empathy for such users.

Most of them are very good at some part of their lives, just not at computers. Those of us in the industry need to practice tolerance and patience.

I am working for tech support. There was this angry guy who called and had a problem with a virus in his computer. He told me he got it after clicking on a link about Paris Hilton's sex tape he saw on the website. And he was asking for credit because of this.Patience is really the key to survive in this kind of work, but in this type of situation how do you deal with that? Just asking... :)

My favorite is, "my cupholder is broken, do you know where I can get a new one?" After a few minutes of exploring the subject, it turned out to be the CD-ROM drive.

haha that iMac in the picture isn't even plugged in...

Oh, the days of IT support. How I hated those days. Best moment I had was when someone had put their pizza in the cd-rom drive and was wondering why their pizza wasn't warming up.

"Who is this General Failure, and why is he attempting to read my disk?"

- Old DOS joke...

But I have to agree with Edward on this..
Besides, computers have gotten less accesible over the years.
With the old Home Computers we used to get a comprehensible manual where you could find the ins and outs of your OS..

Now most of the users don't have a clue how to customize their windows or how many handy shortcut keys there are and such.

Is it worth pointing out that the power cable is unplugged from that iMac in the picture? I think that might be the problem there...