True tales from Customer Support: A new hard drive for my modem

"Ever since you guys put a new hard drive in my modem I can't see the Swedish Bikini Team"

This is how the conversation started. I knew right away that I was dealing with a novice, but this man had the nerve to admit WHY he wanted his modem to work. Another customer, who was using Netscape 3.0 back when browsers stored your browsing history in the address bar without giving you a way to erase it, had a different problem:

"The kids were doing something on the computer, and now there's smutty websites showing up when I try to type in a web address. How do I get rid of them before the wife sees it?"

In the first case, the problem turned out to be the modem settings. Modems have never been easy to set up because several poor design factors in computers; first the classic modem hardware competed with other devices for scare resources, and then, when hardware started improving, modem manufacturers started cheapening their designs with buggy, unreliable, CPU-hogging software modems. Now things are pretty sane, and lots of people have high-speed Internet anyway. The customer's settings were messed up because we installed a new hard drive in his computer, which had an internal modem; I guess someone told him the box with the phone line is the modem.

For the second user, there was little he could do since he was unable to edit the registry. I told him to browse the web to 10 different sites so that he could replace the history entries. Unfortunately I couldn't walk him through it because he only had one phone line, and needed to dial-up to access the 'net. Now I'd ask him to call me back on his cell phone. Ah cell phones, high-speed Internet.... heck these days some ADSL and cable modems probably do have hard-drives.

True tales from Customer Support: How do you spell "A:"?

I once received a phone call from a customer who needed help getting his computer connected to the Internet. In those days Windows 95 didn't install, by default, the TCP/IP protocol, and thus getting connected was harder then than it is now. The customer in question had been given some floppy disks by his IT department that contained the Windows 95 install files and the ISP's software (Windows didn't ship with a web browser either). This conversation started out poorly and went downhill from there:

Me: Good afternoon, how can I help you?
Customer: I'm trying to get my computer set up on the Internet, can you help me?
Me: Sure, what's the problem?
Customer: The computer is asking me for a disk and I don't know which disk it wants.
Me: What is the message on the screen?
Customer: The computer is asking for Windows 95 Disk 2.
Me: Ok, so insert Windows 95 Disk 2 then.
Customer: The problem is I have two stacks of disks and they each have one labelled "Disk 2".
Me: What do the disks say on their labels?
Customer: Well, one says "Windows 95 Disk 2 of 13", and the other says "Sympatico Install Disk 2 of 4".
Me: ... Ok, well, the computer will usually be specific about which disk it wants, so if it asks for a disk labelled "Windows 95 Disk 2" I'd insert the one from the pile of Windows 95 disks.
Customer: Ok, then what?
Me: Well, you insert the disk and press enter. If for some reason it can't find the disk, it will ask you where it is. Just type "A:" and press enter.
Customer: How do you spell that?
Me: Well.... it's the letter "A", then the colon symbol.
Customer:......
Me: It's next to the 'L'.
Customer: On which side?

I wish I was exaggerating this story.

True Tales from Customer Support: Your computer is set to "slow mode"

Back in the day, Duke Nukem 3D was the game to play (until Quake came out). This game required a fairly fast computer; The average computer was a 486 and Duke would barely run on it. The minimum spec was a 486 with 8 MB ram but this was too little for serious play, never mind high-resolution 640x480 graphics. A friend of mine and I had similar computers: 486 DX2 66 MHz, mine with 12 MB ram, his with 16 MB. Duke Nukem ran acceptably on my computer; low-res mode was fine but 640x480 was a little choppy. My friend called me one day to complain that Duke Nukem ran very slowly on his computer. We talked about RAM, using MS-DOS boot-disks to eliminate TSRs, HiMem.sys, and lots of other esoteric things, knowledge of which was de rigueur when dealing with DOS and memory-hungry games. We concluded that it wasn't the RAM and I suggested he bring the PC to my place. He did, and we disconnected my PC and plugged his into my monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc, and started the game.

It was like watching Duke Nukem, only as a slide-show. The game was truly unplayable and this was surprising considering how well it ran on my computer. I checked his settings and could find nothing wrong with the setup. Then, on a whim, I pressed the seldom-used button on the front of the case.

Back in the day computers weren't fast. The original IBM PC was a blazing 4.77 MHz. Eventually new computers were released with faster processors and RAM. However there was a large number of programs (mainly games) that relied on the timing characteristics of the PC: the games didn't had a timing loop that was tightly coupled to the speed of the processor. Run the game on a faster processor and the whole game goes faster. The aliens attack more quickly, the flight-simulator flies faster, and the ghosts chase Pac-Man more relentlessly. In order to accommodate the older software, many computers had a "Turbo Switch" which allowed you to slow down the computer. However as time went on, developers got better at writing games with proper clocks and users stopped wanting slower computers, so the Turbo feature disappeared.

Pressing this button injected new life into the sluggish Duke Nukem and the game took off, full of pixellated-sprite glory and witty one-liners. I recommended to my friend that he disconnect the Turbo switch to prevent any future accidents.

True tales from Customer Support: The internet is a noose around my neck

Me: Good Afternoon, Innitech Service dept, how can I help you?
Angry Customer: This printer you sold me is crap! I can't get it to work with my ECP Parlell port! Don't try to tell me there's something wrong with my card, I paid good money in the US for this card! It's an expensive VESA-local bus IO card*!
Me: Let's try some diagnostics.
[snip various printer tests that show there is no communication with the printer]
Me: Ok, let's verify the jumper settings on your IO card. Do you have the manual?
Customer: No, I don't know where it is. You guys should have the manual! **
Me: We sell hundreds of different products, there's no way we can have manuals for all of them.
Customer: I blah blah blah and I know all the products I sell inside and out.
Me: There are new products every week; there's no way we could keep up with them all. We're a retail store, not the manufacturer!
Customer: Don't give me that! You should know all the products.
Me: Ok, maybe you can download the manual from the internet.
Customer: What?! The Internet? Don't you go trying to put a noose around my neck! That's nothing but a way for the government to control you! They will track everything you do!
Me: ... Ok, well, what's the model number of this IO card?
Customer: AFP-10x-23
Me: (After searching on Yahoo) Ok, I've found the manual for it on the internet, let's verify those jumpers...
Customer: Really?
Me: Yeah, I'm looking at a graphic showing the card and all the labels.
Customer: Maybe this internet thing IS worthwhile....

The ironic thing was this customer claimed to be an electrical engineer. In the end we didn't get his printer working so I suggested he bring it in, where we'd get it working for him (for free, since he bought it from us). He flew off the handle again, claiming it was too far to drive, and decided to see what he could do by himself. I saw him again a few months later, and asked how his printer was. He claimed that one of the wires was loose in the parallel connection on the printer and after re-soldering it it was fine. Who knows? It's either that or the men in black came to his house and sodomized his cats and he's just too embarrassed to admit it.

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* This story takes place in 1997. VESA local bus was a not bad technology that was popular on 486s but lost out to PCI.
** We didn't even sell him the IO card in question.