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Horror Stories | by Dark_Jedi | 2001-11-16 07:39:46 |
| From Both Ends |
by rwrannells |
2001-11-16 15:12:25 |
While in the Peace Corps living in the Mosquito Rain Forest, got a call about a computer no longer worked. I had previous experience with the owner, he kept telling me that Computers did not need to be in cool dry places. That PC's could handle life in a Rain Forest with no problem. I tried to boot the system and nothing happened. I opened the box to check so see why and found a the entire inside of the box was green. The mother board, drives, everything was covered with mold. There was one small black spot on one corner of the CPU, where the mold had caught fire and burned part of the CPU.
When pulling help desk duty at a major steel producer in Gary Indiana got a call from a user claiming her foot pedal didn't work anymore. After 10 minutes of question and answer, I had it figured out. A former mainframe user who had just gotten a brand new 386 with mouse had been using the mouse as if it was a sewing machine foot pedal.
A neighbor asked me to help her with computer, she claimed windows had crashed and she couldn't get it to work. She offered my $20 to fix it. I took one look at her system and typed autoexec at the command prompt and everything was up and running. She claimed to have been on talking to tech support for over an hour.
My first 286 had a freak accident so I took it in to get it repaired. The tech called me "Bold Faced Liar", that there was no way a mouse could get in my computer and cause a short circuit. I bet him the repair/replacement cost of the computer. We opened the box and there it was, a dead mouse with its left rear leg missing (my cat had bitten it off) and blood all over the mother board.
When my first 486 arrived it was supposed to have a 14.4 modem included. When I went to log in to my local ISP, I discovered that the modem was bad. I called the company and got tech support. I told the person on the phone that the computer they had sent me had a bad modem. The tech assured me that the modem was perfectly fine and that all systems are fully tested before leaving the factory. We proceded to step though all the diagnostics to check out my computer. After almost an hour, he asked me to find out what my current IP address was and explained how to find it. He was shocked to find that there was no IP address set and that he could not contact my computer over the internet to run the system diagnotics. I once again told him that the modem was bad and that if they could send me a new one, I'd be happy to install it myself. He continued to insist that there could be nothing wrong with the modem. After about another half hour the Tech gave up and transferred my to level two. Once again I was told that there was no problem with my modem and we went though 45 more minutes of diagnostics. I was then told that a system engineer would call me within 24 hours to help diagnose the problem. I never got the call. I called the sales departmen three days later and asked them to send me a new modem, that the on I had recieved was bad. The sales person promised me that the new modem would be Fed Exed and that if I didn't have it within 48 hours to call him back personally. When I got home from work the next day my modem was waiting for me. I exchanged it with the bad one and low and behold everything worked (as well as can be expected on a win 95 machine).
The last happened with AT&T. when I switched from worldnet to @home I wanted to keep my old email address. They told me this was impossible. That there was no way that email sent to my old address could be delivered to my new address. I then told the Tech support person how to find and open the .forward file, how to edit it with both vi and emacs and what the put in the file. I was told this wouldn't work. After going through several more tech support people, managers and engineers over a two month period. I was finally told that it was an AT&T policy not to forward email from canceled accounts. They then had to balls to try and bill me for the two months of Internet service that they had wasted trying to solve the problem. This is currently in the hands of my Lawyer. I've paid her over $200 in legal fees to get rid of the $40 dollar charge. It's the principle of the matter at this point.
Ross |
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