Sometimes, especially when conversing on the phone, people misunderstand each other. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's frustrating.
An instructor in the BASIC programming language was teaching his class how to write a simple program and execute it. When each student had all their program steps keyed in, he told the class to type R-U-N and enter. A lady in the back of the class said that it didn't work. It turned out, when the instructor had said to type R-U-N, she had typed, "are you in."
The problem happened again.
They ran perfectly on my machine. I had her print her config.sys and autoexec.bat files, etc. No problems. I called her back.
In the background, faintly, I heard these "tickety-tickety" sounds.
It turned out she was typing, "Type A and press Enter." The error message at the bottom of the screen apparently didn't count as "doing anything."
(At this point I had to put the caller on hold to tell the rest of the tech support staff what had happened. I couldn't, however, stop from giggling when I got back to the call.)
I was showing a new user how to change her password. She was typing the new one in slowly and said to me, "I hope you're not reading my password." I replied that I was the system administrator and didn't need her password. She replied, "That's good to know. I wouldn't want you accessing my stuff."
I work in a computer lab for the business school of a large university. While most students have their own login name for our network, some students that rarely use the lab can use a generic student login that does not require a password. One such student came up to me at the help desk.
I used to work in tech support for a company in Sweden. Once a guy called and started talking in English. Well, I speak fairly fluent English, so this wasn't a problem. So I spoke English back, and we started troubleshooting his problem. After a little while I started to suspect something was up with this guy, because he didn't always seem to understand what I was saying, and he often fumbled for words.
Right then, I heard a door open in the background, and a voice said, in Swedish, "Ready to go to lunch, Sten?" He answered in perfect Swedish.
I put the customer on hold and tried not to spit my coffee out from laughing so hard. When he came back on the phone, he spoke in English, and I spoke in Swedish. After about five more minutes of him following my instructions, he said to me in English, "Hang on. I can't understand Swedish. Please speak English." The rest of the conversation was in english.
I work for an ISP. After two calls totaling 45 minutes with one customer, I asked him to bring his computer, in and I would configure it myself. He was a bit skeptical, so I assured him that he did not have to bring in the whole computer, just the CPU -- no monitor, cables, mouse or keyboard, just the CPU. He was not sure which part was the CPU, so I told him, "Just bring in the box -- the part with the CD-ROM drive and floppy drive." I explained this twice. Later he arrived with the cardboard box that his computer came in. I asked him where the computer was, he replied, "I thought you just needed to look at the box to see what model it was."
A lady struck up a conversation with me on an airplane.
I'm working as a tech support person at a Finnish newspaper printing and publication house, and we have several reporters that submit their files via a dial-in modem line directly to our layout system.
Once one of the reporters wanted to call the tech support because the modem wasn't answering his calls, but the call was answered by a computer illiterate.
He proceeded to page the whole company through the central P.A. system.
My co-worker intercepts, trying hard to keep a straight face.
The computer illiterate returns to the phone and tells the reporter that our modem is on vacation till August.
I took a call from a customer who sounded like quite a nice old lady. Querying the customer database through the serial number, I found the customer's name to be "Carol" and her surname to be impossibly long and presumably Eastern European. Fortunately -- or so I thought at first -- she didn't want tech support and was only calling to claim a free software offer that was a part of the packaged bundle. I checked on the issue and the offer had expired a good three months before.
Sure, escalate the call, but she wasn't going to get it. I told her so in the nicest and sweetest of the tones I'm capable of.
Wow, talk about getting emotional. I called my supervisor who would take the escalated call and try to talk some sense into her, but he failed. The call escalated a second time as the area supervisor took the call and once more as the shift supervisor took over.
I couldn't believe it. There we were, all four of us sitting in a row, listening to the call that -- for an encore -- got escalated once more. A customer satisfaction specialist took the call and didn't do any better.
We decided to roll it around once more and patched her through another tech, who finally placed and solved the ACTUAL problem.
Or hanging jaws nearly hit the floor. "Carol" was A GUY -- even though he sounded like a Powerpuff girl -- and we had all been calling him "Ma'am" all along. The whole company laughed at this for almost a week.
This happened to me several years ago. The phone rang and I picked it up. It was my wife, Kitty, on the other end. She informed me that she was having problems printing out a report on the computer. The system was locked up and would not respond to the keyboard or the mouse.
I told her reboot the system. She did. I heard the printer go through the startup cycle. I asked her to describe what the computer was doing.