Tech Fails

I used to work as a tech support agent in a call center for stores that owned Kodak digital Kiosks... big stores like Wal-mart, CVS, K-mart, etc etc.
The people using the machines were supposedly trained on how to, but there were sooo many tech fail stories from calls we got, way more than I can remember anyway.

As someone who DID work as a photo tech at walgreens I assure you they aren't trained at all. They give you a long video to watch about sexual harassment and stealing but that is about it. No one knows how to service the machines unless they bother to look it up themselves. Even if they do they don't do it anyway. There were 4 techs working there at one point with me, I was the only one who actually did the end of day maintenance. I had lots of idiot customers stick the wrong thing in the wrong slots and had to unscrew half of the damn computer to pull out their memory cards because they couldn't read. I like to imagine the machines fell apart after I left.

Oh on a similar note, one day an old lady came in and yelled at me because the phone she purchased (landline kind, with curly wire that hangs on the wall) did not come with phone service.
 
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I have a fail, the Playstation Network! its killing me!
 
Oh on a similar note, one day an old lady came in and yelled at me because the phone she purchased (landline kind, with curly wire that hangs on the wall) did not come with phone service.

Oh wow that's just going too far. I would've gone completely ballistic.
 
I don't understand how they could think that. I could understand if they bought a CELL PHONE and couldn't figure it out being old, but a wall phone? What have you been using your entire life?
 
I did work experience back in the early 90's. Had a mother come in and complain that the Public Domain game disk wouldn't work. We usually didn't provide hardware support for a $5 3 1/4 inch game disk but told her to bring in her machine and we'd see why...

Next day she walked in carrying.......

.....her VCR.

She then went off her tree as to the need to buy 3000 dollars worth of PC to play a $5 disk.

I have millions of these stories...
 
I did tech support for Verizon DSL...for the public..

*shudders*

I have earned a place in Heaven, no matter what I do in life from now on.
 
My fail: I?m my whole familys tech-support when it comes to computers. So it was nothing unusual when my brother in law called me over, saying he couldn?t get his new Notebook connected to the internet via wifi (that I set up about 2 years ago) ... long story short: I spend a whole afternoon trying to figure it out. Problem was, I had changed the passwort for the network some time down the line and forgot about changing it, still trying the old password. So I tried to connect to a WiFi with the wrong password for half a day, trying every tool I know, every setting, every trick, blaming everything and everyone ... just because I forgot that I changed the password (and didn?t write it down like the old one) and it didn?t occur to me for hours ...
 
I have a kind of fail.

I can't persuade my Grandmother to stop using the old Appleworks. She has Office 2004 and she has to start using it now in order to send documents for her things she volunteers for (although I think she personally needs to quit these and move away out of the country for a real retirement, but that's another story). So what she does is she types it out in AW and then copies it to Word. I tried showing her that Word had a lot more options for customization and that it was set up in the same type of way only with different wording for the menus. She still thinks "it's way too different and I just can't ever learn it". She said that about the internet and she uses that quite a lot.
 
I can't persuade my Grandmother to stop using the old Appleworks. She has Office 2004 and she has to start using it now in order to send documents for her things she volunteers for (although I think she personally needs to quit these and move away out of the country for a real retirement, but that's another story). So what she does is she types it out in AW and then copies it to Word. I tried showing her that Word had a lot more options for customization and that it was set up in the same type of way only with different wording for the menus. She still thinks "it's way too different and I just can't ever learn it". She said that about the internet and she uses that quite a lot.
I had to go through quite some trouble getting office 2000 (!) to run under Ubuntu because my mother kept insisting that after trying it for 2 months that Openoffice was WAY too different and way too comlicated for her to work with it. Ubuntu from 2010 is now running a 10 year old MS office ... and I hate her for having me frankenstein that combination together.
 
I used to work as a tech support agent in a call center for stores that owned Kodak digital Kiosks... big stores like Wal-mart, CVS, K-mart, etc etc.
If you don't mind me asking, was that call center in this country?

Anyway, the only thing that comes to my mind atm is a time period in which my dad would use a spread sheet program as a word processor. This was years and years ago, before Microsoft Office took over the market. Symphony, could that have been the program's name? I don't quite remember it.
 
As someone who DID work as a photo tech at walgreens I assure you they aren't trained at all. They give you a long video to watch about sexual harassment and stealing but that is about it. No one knows how to service the machines unless they bother to look it up themselves. Even if they do they don't do it anyway. There were 4 techs working there at one point with me, I was the only one who actually did the end of day maintenance. I had lots of idiot customers stick the wrong thing in the wrong slots and had to unscrew half of the damn computer to pull out their memory cards because they couldn't read. I like to imagine the machines fell apart after I left.

Similar experience with being a projectionist at a movie theater. They teach you how to use the machinery, that is, how to thread and start the movies, and very routine maintenance (mostly cleaning dust out the film path). If even the slightest thing goes wrong, a "full trained" projectionist won't know how to fix it, unless they've figured out how to do it on their own. One day, according to one of them, "the platter stopped working". They called in the technician, who charges $75 an hour, and after some simple tests that anyone could do (check outlet that platter system was plugged into, check all platters, etc.) the problem was determined - a simple blown fuse. Lost an entire day's worth of shows in that auditorium and had to pay a technician $75 to change a fuse.
 
I had to go through quite some trouble getting office 2000 (!) to run under Ubuntu because my mother kept insisting that after trying it for 2 months that Openoffice was WAY too different and way too comlicated for her to work with it. Ubuntu from 2010 is now running a 10 year old MS office ... and I hate her for having me frankenstein that combination together.
Yeah, this sounds pretty similar.

I don't understand why she thinks that she can't do it, because she had to learn how to use Claris/Appleworks before right? And she was like I'LL NEVER GET THE INTERNET AND HOW TO USE IT, and now she Googles things (kinda Googling people since some of the stuff she's involved with make her have to contact people who are hard to contact) like a champ. Which is why I am trying to show her the light to MSOffice, for one thing because she bought it, and for another because it has so many more options! (Though, me teaching her how to do it can get confusing for me because I have 2010 on my laptop and my school uses 2007 so I get a little backwards in the menus. @_@)
 
My mum calling/texting me when I was in class during HS because she couldn't figure out how to check her email/how to use the printer/get on the internet/how to turn on the computer, etc. I got so fed up I wrote down everything on paper and taped them on the wall behind the computer. That was years ago but it still makes me rage sometimes.

Lately, it was my sister griping that the computer burnt an audio cd wrong because it wouldn't play in any of the cd players. What she did was burn the playlist files. *head desks*
 
Another projectionist tech fail, that I meant to post about but forgot to do so until today:

Wednesday morning, we run a little mini-event in one of the auditoriums, for which the details are unimportant, but require showing a short video from a DVD player. Our digital slide player and our DVD player (a BD player, actually) both use the digital projector's HDMI input, so to swap between the two I just unplug the slide player and connect the BD player. Since my shift ended in the middle of the film that was playing in the auditorium, I never bothered to re-connect the digital slide player. When I arrived for my next projection shift Friday morning, I was informed by the opening manager that "the slides weren't working" in that auditorium.

I kind of shrugged off the comment, walked straight upstairs, and found the BD player still plugged into the HDMI port. I sighed and reconnected the slide player, and everything worked fine. So, the Wednesday night projectionist, the projectionist who worked all day Thursday, the managers who worked those shifts, and the Friday morning manager, ALL failed to notice that the reason the slides weren't coming on screen was because the slide player wasn't connected.
 
I had lots of idiot customers stick the wrong thing in the wrong slots and had to unscrew half of the damn computer to pull out their memory cards because they couldn't read. I like to imagine the machines fell apart after I left.

Hehe then you probably saved me a couple of calls. We even might have talked :p

If you don't mind me asking, was that call center in this country?

No, I was living somewhere else at the time.
 
My very own tech fail...

Last Wednesday decided to work from home, and had to reboot my Ubuntu machine in Windows 7 to connect to the VPN.

Spent 3h trying to install Windows 7 final I had bought a year ago, but never bothered to install over the Windows 7 Beta. Finally got it to work.

Fail happened when I tried to go back to Ubuntu. I knew the Win7 install would screw up GRUB, but no worries, just need to boot using a live-cd and fix Grub, right? Well, I don't know what I did wrong, but now I can't boot Linux nor Windows.

I guess I'll download Ubuntu 11.04 on Thursday when it goes out of beta, and try to install that over the 10.10 I have right now, and see if the full install fixes my screw-ups.
 
I've worked tech support in the dorms at UChicago for the last four years. This is the best one among many that I can think of. One morning at 7 I get a call from a desk clerk that claims her ABC (streaming) won't work. I drag my ass out of bed, having only fallen asleep two hours before, and go find that the reason why her video won't stream is that she kicked the ethernet cable out. I go back to sleep. The same thing happens two hours later. And the next morning. And the next. And the next. I eventually used duct tape to tape the cable into place, because she just wouldn't listen when I told her to plug everything in before she called.
 
My very own tech fail...

Last Wednesday decided to work from home, and had to reboot my Ubuntu machine in Windows 7 to connect to the VPN.

Spent 3h trying to install Windows 7 final I had bought a year ago, but never bothered to install over the Windows 7 Beta. Finally got it to work.

Fail happened when I tried to go back to Ubuntu. I knew the Win7 install would screw up GRUB, but no worries, just need to boot using a live-cd and fix Grub, right? Well, I don't know what I did wrong, but now I can't boot Linux nor Windows.

I guess I'll download Ubuntu 11.04 on Thursday when it goes out of beta, and try to install that over the 10.10 I have right now, and see if the full install fixes my screw-ups.

You can always boot with a Windows cd, go to the repair console and use fixmbr (or at least it was called like that)... that'll let you boot into windows at the very least.

Might be useful link: http://www.ehow.com/how_4836283_repair-mbr-windows.html
 
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