complete crap = explanation

[anivair.livejournal.com]

Do you ever just make up complete crap to shut people up?

for example, one of our salespeople has a usb floppy drive. I just got a call from him.

"My floppy drive won't read my dusks. the light's not on. Do you think it's dead?"

Well . . . no. No I do not. So I say:

"Unplug it and plug it back in"

"Oh, that worked just fine. Hey, why do you think that is?"

"umm . . . sometimes USB pointers decay and you need to reset them."

To which he replies, "Oh. yeah, that makes sense."

What? What the hell did I just say? USB pointers? I could have told him that the problem was with the main deflector dish. I suppose it's easier than the truth.

Comments

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to but never had the balls.

I kept swearing to people that on my last day of work at my tech support gig, I'd tell everyone that their problem was a bad router, and that they needed to contact the router OEM for support.

Didn't do it, alas.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

...Though i did start putting "in accordance with prophecy" in the resolution notes one particularly annoying Friday....

[dudeitsawesome.livejournal.com]

Oh.
I am so doing that.
I'm having a perfectly awful week, so I think today is a good time to start.

[jecook]

Hell, I put the phrase "per procedure" in most of the new user tickets I process. I like yours better, except I can't pull it off here, because the entire company can read the work notes. :)

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Technically our tickets are open to viewing through a web link, but Remedial has separate "work log" and "tech notes" areas. ;-)

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Half the problems I see have no easily discerned or remotely rational explanation. Your explanations are every bit as probable as anything else.

[foobarintel.livejournal.com]

All the time. The best is when they don't believe the REAL REASONS you give them.

We have a slice of software that likes to more or less time-out (it's network related) but not tell our control sever that it's gone. So you try to re-connect and it thinks there are 2 of you and throws an error.

Basically you haven't ping'ed out yet.

So when I tell them all this (in terms they can understand) and they rebutal with "No, I don't believe that, my machine costs $6,000 and it can't be my computer or connection." (yes, that's right $6,000....tards..) I start to explain things like, oh, the OSI model or how TCP/IP works...they usually shut up then.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

One of our tweaks to get people connected to VPN involved adjusting MTU. I always mentally sighed whenever anyone asked, "What's MTU?"

Seriously, you reps do -not- want to listen to me explain what maximum transmissino unit is, even in my usual layman-friendly watered down terms. You don't really care. You, like the last twenty people, will just get impatient and cut me off when you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I may as well be explaining v.34 control codes or relational databases or the differences between Windows domain authentication and the server authentication model. On a particularly frustrating day, perhaps the functional differences between telnet and ssh.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

MTU = Maximum Tube Use.

Basically, too high of an MTU means your data won't fit through the smaller tubes.

[foobarintel.livejournal.com]

hahah yeah. I've totally used the "magic" term one time too many.

The problem is - we tend to get a lot of "southern" customers. So you say magic...and they think "THE DEVIL". So then you have to be all "Haha, uh, yeah...we just have caller ID"

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

In one of my previous jobs, I had a magic wand hanging in my cubicle.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

I say that all the time. I tell people I have technician magic, and that they should be careful, because as soon as they get back to their office, their stuff will probably not work anymore. It's the vibes in my workshop, you know. Everything works right there.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

Constantly. In a recent department wide email I said I was bringing down a managed system "to apply critical maintenance to the hypervisor"

[jecook]

USB is one of the deeper magic's I've not learned just yet, so it really is magic when I unplug it and plug it back in.

I explain this away by telling the user that sometimes windows forgets about the device, so unplugging it and plugging it back in will prompt the system to find it again.

[gremlingirl.livejournal.com]

I usually go with "the drivers get stale and need to be refreshed," like the user needs to keep them in a ziploc bag or something.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

anthromorphisize it... yep . people can recognize the absentminded professor stereotype. :-)

(ok, so I munged up the scientifiky term a bit....)

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it actually does. Especially when resuming from standby.

[prozacnation.livejournal.com]

I've actually hear phone reps say: "Well your flux capacitor needs to be replaced inside your computer. That is why you cannot connect to the internet. Yes. You will need to call eMachines regarding that. Anything else I can assist you with today?"

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

I was told that my Dell laptop battery had suddenly died because all the iron inside had oxidized. ...Yeah. You do not try to pull that shit with a chem major. The poor rep promptly got a lecture about what exactly "lithium ion" means and why I did NOT believe the problem was that my battery had *rusted* overnight, and furthermore I wanted to speak to a supervisor NOW.

But I'm still trying the "main deflector dish" thing :)

[prozacnation.livejournal.com]

That would be awesome! :D

[codecattx.livejournal.com]

I have one that only works if you and the customer have a long history together.

One of my customers has had me as more or less their assigned slave for the last three or so years. Reason being is that there is a lot of legacy servers (10+ year old IBM Netfinity) and equally old networking gear (10+ year old Foundry ServerIrons) and therefore most of our new engineers shy away from it like it was a great big open beaker of carbon disulfide.

Well one day, while working with the customer to resolve a Windows 2000/Solaris interaction issue, I had completely run out of snappy patter to mutter to myself as I was finishing fixing the problem, so I found myself uttering the following as I restarted the webservice"

"OK, now let me reverse the polarity to the Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator.....aaaaand try it now."

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone for about ten or so seconds, then my customer started laughing so hard he almost fell out of the chair. (It also didn't hurt that the problem was fixed).

I don't know if anyone else could have gotten away with that, but it was a great moment for me and for the customer.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Only a handful of my users are savvy enough with their Star Wars knowledge to catch me if I indicate that one of the motivators has gone bad and needs replacement. I'm still wondering what a motivator can be if it can be found on both a starship and a droid.

[twistedsyx.livejournal.com]

My favorite answer is when the customer comes up with the idea on their own that maybe, just maybe it's a problem with their crappy operating system *cough winders cough* I always advise to reroute the encryption and perhaps flashing the bios might do the trick. But check with Microsoft first.

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

Sometimes you need to reverse the polarity! ;)

[doitalone.livejournal.com]

But never cross the streams. That would be bad.

[snarl817.livejournal.com]

I do that ALL the time. If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

I've had problems that defy explanation, too. In cases like that, I've actually told the customer, "Ok, we're going to need a young priest, an old priest, and some holy water." They usually laugh at that.

[kestrelct.livejournal.com]

Your icon makes me die.

[megpie71.livejournal.com]

I maintain a strong belief in the existence of what I call the TPC (Technician Proximity Circuit). It's a little circuit in all electronic machinery which detects the presence of a sufficiently knowledgeable person within earshot. I use it as an explanation for all those calls where you pick up the phone to hear the merry words "oh, it's working now". What's happened is that by picking up the phone, you've tripped the TPC, and the problem has gone away. It's nice and simple, and it explains so many things.

Then again, I tend to anthropomorphise computers. My favourite explanation for a known issue with Acer 5200 PCs (the network cards would occasionally just stop working, which meant you needed to do a hard reboot to reset things) was that the PC needed "a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down". Oddly enough, explaining to the caller that making them wait 30s while the capacitors inside the machine discharged enough for the reset to work was the computational equivalent of said "cup of tea" etc seemed to help the callers understand it.

Sometimes a good metaphor saves about five hours of explanation.