techrecovery | (no subject) (Reply)

You know those calls that make you laugh hysterically and weep at the same time?

Yeah, I just had one of those.

Me: "Thank you for calling xxxx, this is

demented_pants. How may I help you?
User: "I don't know if you can help me with this, but I'm using Linux, and I think I may have broken both of my web browsers. My connection is fine but I can't get online with either of them."
Me: "Okay, I can try and help you figure that out. What distro are you using?" (Note: I am a PC consultant. I dabble in Mac support when I need to, but I get approximately one linux call every two months. Of the THREE that I've taken, two of them were people who hadn't followed the instructions carefully and wanted a registration code for the version of Red Hat they'd downloaded from the university servers, which they shouldn't have needed.)
User: "Distro?"
Me (thinking it was just a language issue thing, as that happens frequently): "Yeah, the version of Linux you're using."
User: "Oh, I'm not really sure."
Me (boggling): "Oh." (Trying to jog his memory) "Is it maybe Debian? Ubuntu? Gentoo? Slackware?"
User: "Oh, I think it was Gentoo."
Me: "Red Hat, maybe?" (Thinking, No, there's no way you're using Gentoo. If you were using Gentoo, you'd damn well KNOW WHAT DISTRO YOU'RE USING.)
User: "I'm not really sure. I had the computer custom-built."
Me: "Okay, without more specific distro information, the best I can suggest is to uninstall and reinstall using Terminal. But if you can figure out what distro you're using, we have a mac/unix support line between nine and five."
User: "Okay."

Now, in retrospect, he was probably using Ubuntu, but still.

How can you NOT know?