We have all had many a giggle at the online postings of idiotic support calls/email that tech support staff have had to deal with from people that clearly shouldn't be allowed to own a computer, so I thought I would share a few of my own. Just when you think you have reached the limits of stupidity and no-one could ever ask or say anything more dumb, someone comes along and surprises you.
I recently dealt with a customer who had registered a domain name, signed up for hosting and had the holding page up and running but could not get his site to work because he would not upload it to the correct place (wwwroot). No matter how many times I told him that his site needed to go in the wwwroot he would not listen as he thought he knew better. In the end he decided to take his business elsewhere because we supposedly had no idea what we are doing, he was advised how to transfer his domain, but then decided for some bizarre reason that we were with holding his domain and stopping him using it, even though he had already changed the name servers and pointed it at his new host. He then claimed that his domain name had not even been registered and we had ripped him off, despite the fact that he was able to view the web site with the holding page, he had edited the name servers to point it elsewhere and the WHOIS showed it was in fact registered.
Here are some of the incredible rantings I got from this chap. Now I accept the fact that some people are simply not very I.T literate, and that is understandable and most of those people are aware of their limitations and openly admit them, but this crazy guy actually claimed to be an I.T professional and is a MCITP and a member of ACITP (wooo) , which is why I thought this utter lunacy was actually worth posting as my 5 year old son knows more about the internet than this guy. And no I don't even have a clue what he is talking about most of the time, and his inability to write coherent English or use punctuation doesn't help either:-)
And for all you wanabe IT professionals do make sure you check out 'The Association of Certified IT Professionals' as you will be totally lost without their essential training!
You will be able to learn stuff like (from module 14), how to 'Access a known web site', 'Execute a simple search', 'Save web page to a local drive' ... and my personal favorite ... 'Navigate a web site using hyper-links' (took me years to master that).
So next time you are struggling with tricky stuff like how to 'Navigate the world wide web using a web browser' (no really this is something they teach) you can rest easy knowing that there are dedicated teachers ready to put you through the rigorous disciplines required in our technically challenging world.
Reading through some of that is about as nice as reading binary code..
I can't imagine how I would have handled something like that.
I think you should install a UDF that checks for run-on sentences... that was awful.
Not everyone knows everything, but the ones that prevail are always the first to admit that!
I had pointed a couple of them to the amazon page for the book "Dummies Guide to Webhosting", telling them to read that first, then come back to me with questions.
I once worked on and IT helpdesk (hence why I have no hair left) and had this idiotic women phone me up ranting and raving at me asking where the hell I was. I politely answered that I was sat at my desk listening to her, when only made things worse.
Apparently she had been waiting for 6 hours for me to turn up and fix her computer. First I'd heard about it. I kindly asked if she'd telephoned us to ask for help to which she replied "why would I do that... I was told to press F1 for help" - I proceeded to her desk with a baseball bat and a P45.
My own classic is what I call a 2 pixeler. Several years ago i worked doing training development using ToolBook or Authorware. We were working with this one client who was turning out to be very difficult to say the least. she kept complaining about the positioning of a set of buttons, saying they were too far over in one direction. Well we kept trying to accommodate her, but nothing seemed to work. Finally she came over to our offices to show us the problem. The client brought her laptop with her, an antique of a machine (640 by 480 and only a very small colour set). She set it up, booted up the training app, and then proceeded to show us, with the ruler she brought with her, that the button were too far over in one direction. I had to leave the room at that point.