Five Tech Support Horror Stories

The early years of my career were in tech support. As with any other job, there were good days and there were bad days. After the third year at the job, the bad days started to outnumber the good. It all seems hilarious in hindsight now, but there were some days where things in this list caused me to question my career choices.

Until one day it all came to a head and I decided I'd had enough, and started over in web development.

Sometimes I get together with some friends who are still in tech support, and we trade horror stories of the users we have to help. These are some of the stories that get 'em, every time.

1. Plugging in

This is actually a fairly common one, but let's start small. You get called to a user's desk because the desktop computer refused to turn on no matter how many times they pressed the On/Off button. And they even checked if the main switch was on. And judging from the light, it was.

Not plugged in.

However, upon closer examination, it turned out that the cord wasn't plugged in. Yes, you read that right - the power was on but the plug was just halfway into the socket and needed to penetrate another two inches before the computer could actually benefit from that power source.

Sound stupid? Welcome to my life at that time, buddy.

2. Opening Excel

Another alarmingly commonplace occurence was getting called into the office of some hotshot executive who was encountering an issue opening a MS PowerPoint file in his (or sometimes, her) MS Excel application.

Now, if you're still scratching your head and wondering why that's a problem, reread the preceding sentence. MS PowerPoint file. MS Excel application.

Just a bad fit.

I dunno, that was the early 2000s, and attempting stuff like that smacked of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It was amusing the first couple times, and then it got old real fast.

3. Infinite scroll

This was was so cartoonish it was almost amusing. I got a panicked call to a user's desk because her MS Excel spreadsheet was scrolling endlessly downwards on her screen and she couldn't understand why. It conjured up images of getting hacked, a malfunctioning monitor and whatnot.

The truth was even funnier.

Held down the ENTER key.

I got there, and the first thing I did was remove the heavy binder from her keyboard, which had been pressing down on the ENTER key and causing MS Excel to react as though some user was holding down that key.

4. Email Signature

This particular incident did not happen during my years of Desktop Support, but rather during my fledgling years as a web developer. However, the incident in question made me more determined than ever to never get back to Desktop Support.

A user had asked me to help set up her email signature because she had no clue how to use MS Outlook. I obliged, because I know sometimes Microsoft software functionality can be hidden in the darnedest places. But then after I got into the interface, input the standard company email signature template, I asked her to type in her name into the box and click the SAVE button.

Yay! We're now
qualified to type
our own names!

Guess what she told me?

"You should do it. You have an IT Degree."

That level of entitlement was staggering. What was she implying now, that she needed an IT Degree to type in her own goddamn name? What foolishness was this? This wasn't a competence issue. This was an attitude issue. And the less of this I see in the workplace, the better. There's no place for this nonsense in any work environment. Hopefully this woman has since retired. At the very least, she's someone else's problem.

5. Emails

This is also a fairly common complaint among grunts, not just tech grunts - people feeling like they're entitled to your time outside of office hours.

I remember having a dinner appointment with someone, and Human Resources asking me to stay back because they needed me to, wait for it, retrieve some emails from the email server backups between three of the staff. Staff they were planning to terminate, thus they needed evidence of wrongdoing as leverage.

A whole bunch of
DVD backups.

Basically, nothing was on fire. They just needed me to help cover their asses. Hours later, as I was retrieving yet another batch (back then, it was the era where stuff like that was stored on DVDs), when HR asked me: "I'm sorry, did you have something on tonight?"

Seriously, lady, if the answer was "yes" would it have made a difference? If not, how about just shutting the fuck up? You know what's worse than people who don't care? People who don't care and try to act (badly) like they do.

Phew!

I wouldn't say any one incident turned me off of Desktop Support. Even on its own, it can be a repetitive grind that wears on the soul. But these were the war stories that I shared with the guys. And their reactions suggested that these occurrences weren't at all unheard of. Some of their stories were even more unbelievable than mine.

No, you don't need an IT Degree to read this,
T___T