1

Between us all, we’ve heard pretty much every stupid excuse, reason or justification for things over the years.

I thought I had until today.

A user was complaining that they’d run out of disk space on their laptop.
The usual culprits were at play here - Recycle Bin, Temp folders, Downloads folder etc.

The user was observing what I was doing and I was just about to click ‘Empty Recycle Bin’ which resulted in a banshee-like scream - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

After scraping myself off the ceiling, I enquired as to what the problem was.
The user said

“Don’t empty that, that’s where I keep files I want to keep”.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Anyone else any stupid, ridiculous or just plain confusing stories to tell?

40 Spice ups
2

I’ve got a couple from my previous job.

There was a call centre agent who wanted a replacement keyboard because they didn’t like the one they were using, which is fair enough. So, I grabbed a newer keyboard, brought it over to the agent, took away the old one, and as soon as I chucked the USB cable through the hole of the agent’s desk, they then started typing, stopped, and then said to me

“This keyboard isn’t working”.

I then told the agent that I haven’t plugged it in yet, and all I got back was an “Oh”. So, I plugged in the keyboard, made sure that it worked okay, and then walked back to my desk.

Five minutes later, the exact same thing happened. Same agent, same illogical issue, same response. The fact this has happened with multiple agents throughout my first job is simply astounding.

I’ve also had agents tell me that their PCs weren’t working, which were resolved by turning on their monitors. We’ve had fuses tripping because people had heaters plugged into extension leads, despite several warnings both vocally and via email.

Thankfully, I’ve had none of those issues with my current job, and I’d like to it stay that way. :joy:

14 Spice ups
3

I had a few people say to me, the webcam isn’t working.
I did some initial troubleshooting (remotely), and realized without seeing their setup, they had their laptop shut while using an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. It’s an integrated webcam on the laptop. :rofl:

18 Spice ups
4

I’ve seen plenty of this in email clients - elaborate folder structures set up in the Deleted Items folder for long term storage. C-levels start blowing out their mailbox quotas and refusing to delete anything and wondering why. Just give me more space because my trash is much more important than everyone else’s treasure - because the sun does in fact shine out my Output Port.

18 Spice ups
5

I think we work at the same company. This just happened last week. That’s where the user keeps PDF copies of reports.

12 Spice ups
6

This is definitely not the first time I’ve heard of such. When I was more on the consumer side of things I usually asked the customer if there was any reason I shouldn’t empty the recycle bin. You’d be surprised.

8 Spice ups
7

The server is down = anything from the printer needs toner to an issue with a macro in Excel…

16 Spice ups
8

I try really hard not to be snarky, but when someone asks me “Is the system down?” I wonder if they have any clue how unspecific that is, and how unlikely I will have an answer for them.
Which system? Which service? Which server?
Is this ‘system’ in the room with us right now?
Can you just tell me the issue and we can see about solving it together?

18 Spice ups
9

Lol I had a Partner at a Law Firm, complain to me that the power button turns off the laptop…

While in the middle of explaining his problem to me (I was remote Helpdesk) he pushes the power button thus disconnecting the remote session and the call. Few minutes later he is calls in very angry demanding to speak to my Team Lead because I didn’t “Fix” his laptop.

16 Spice ups
10

I don’t really like calling a sincere lack of understanding “stupid”. There’s never really a stupid question and the fact that they’re at least asking for help is already a step in the right direction. I definitely have my fair share of technologically-impaired coworkers that do things I can’t even begin to comprehend.
That said, I’ve got a couple good ones:
Long story short, had a coworker drive all the way to my house just for me to restart his laptop so he could log onto the VPN. Previous coworker didn’t log off and he didn’t restart the laptop like he told me he did.

Coworker complained that their laptop’s battery was going out and requested a new one out of schedule. Had the intern check it out and told me it was dead and not charging. Stopped out there, followed the power cord and found that coworker had unplugged the AC adapter for her new salt lamp. It wasn’t on the building UPS circuit so that was fine, but I def called both her and my intern out on it.

This one isn’t necessarily “stupid” but thought I’d share anyways. Just implemented MFA, coworker was having issues with his laptop shutting off the display every time forcing him to log back in and punch in the code. Sure enough, the screen would shut off/on intermittently and I couldn’t replicate it on a test account. Randomly glanced at his wrist and it dawned on me that his watch wristband has magnet. Problem solved. I also found out he’s a lefty like me!

10 Spice ups
11

For me, it’s not so much what they say, but what they do. I’ve definitely had the “I store important emails in the Deleted folder.” That one really confused me.

When I was doing a lot of desktop support, the thing that really got me is the “I don’t understand, it always works when you’re standing here.” We’ve all seen it. It couldn’t be because you’re actually paying attention to what you’re doing while I’m watching you, could it? I don’t say that part out loud of course, but…

12 Spice ups
12

I used to believe that until someone did ask a really stupid question, wish I could remember what it was but that was years ago.

I was at a public library and a desk called down to the IT room. A coworker picked it up and put it on speaker (like he did most calls). A patron was having trouble connecting to the WiFi, so he asked what operating system they have. The patron responded that he had Microsoft Office. The coworker ended up going to assist as he couldn’t get past Microsoft Office.

7 Spice ups
13

That is far more common than you can imagine.

13 Spice ups
14

I’ve had a few funny support calls. There was a lady that did not realize the black cable under her desk was a power cable for the computer, she thought it was the cord for the lights in her cube.

And then the usual “what’s a power button”, “what green light?”, “there are no power buttons on this computer”, there was, lol! Calls can be funny.

#IAmIntel

5 Spice ups
15

Many years ago, I worked at a law firm, and one paralegal often complained about strange issues that we could never reproduce. One day an attorney angrily said that this paralegal couldn’t work and asked why we weren’t helping her. We didn’t know that the paralegal “couldn’t work,” because she didn’t open a ticket, call us, or walk around the corner to tell us that she needed support.

I went to the paralegal’s desk, and her computer was powered on and logged in. She claimed that none of the applications would work, but Outlook, document management system, browsers, and other apps opened normally. When she couldn’t demonstrate any issue that prevented her from working, she said, “It must have been the Windows ghost.”

6 Spice ups
16

I had this scenario a couple of months ago. The president of the organization said his Outlook wasn’t working. His mailbox had reached its quota, and Outlook was giving him a notice that he couldn’t send messages until the mailbox was under the quota.

The president refused to let us empty the deleted items, so we suggested archiving old messages. He insisted that he needs ALL of his email available offline when he travels, and he didn’t want to look in a different folder for an archive. We tried to explain that the offline cache has a much smaller size limit, so he cannot have all email available offline anyway, but he continued to repeat his demand.

5 Spice ups
17

User complains that they can’t get to their email. The culprit was that the computer was not plugged in… Guess they were technically right…

5 Spice ups
18

I had a user who kept all of her important emails in trash in Outlook. She refused to move them to actual folders. No one in the company would do anything about it.

3 Spice ups
19

I once had a person complain about how ridiculous it was that We didn’t support win 10 and 11 in patching as when they hovered over the list of supported software it the two mentioned options didn’t show up - little did they know that the list was explicitly showcasing the legacy models we do support - they genuinely thought we only supported windows vista when i pointed this out I was ignored lol

5 Spice ups
20

These are all good ones! I’ve not seen anyone use the Recycle Bin or Outlook’s delete box, but I’ll keep an eye out. It’ll be worth the chuckle to see in the wild.
I have two users who put in urgent tickets that they can’t print, and when I go to their desk, they’re trying to print Adobe Sign forms. Nope. It won’t print, and if it did, they’d get 22,000 pages of code rather than a two page document. So I have them save it to their system and print that copy, which works every time… until they forget and try to print the Adobe form again. Bless them. :slight_smile:

2 Spice ups