Did the user just say that!?

[Possessed Freak]

You know the drill, you are working on solving a user's problem when they say something that completely blows your mind (my cup holder broke, and it is the CD tray). I know we have had this topic in the past, but I had the need to share one that happened to me yesterday.

I work at a university, most of our tech support calls are issues in classrooms during lectures. These range from the mundane loose cable issues, to a blown projector bulb. So I get a call that the speakers are not working. I walk the professor through a quick series of fixes and it is not resolved so I go for a walk. Upon entering this room, I find that there are multiple problems.

1) The user is connected with a laptop but had the document camera to be selected.
2) The volume on the laptop is set to 0.
3) The 3.5mm cable is connected into the microphone jack and not the headphone jack.

Now, 3 I can kind of understand, the professor probably rushed and plugged it into the wrong port by accident. No problem, I point this out. "But I am not using headphones." Now, the professor has been using this room for multiple semesters before, and I know that the laptop was used and videos were played. Suddenly the user completely forgot how to use their machine. I had to explain to think of it as an output and not specifically headphones. "But that doesn't make sense to me." The professor is actually arguing to me about this. I run out of words, I begin to gape like a fish. I had to quickly turn away and continue to work. I get everything hooked right and start the video.

4) The video had no sound. It was recorded in a past semester with a webcam and no microphone.

I left the room shaking my head. But at least now we have some running jokes in the office.

 

[VoteQuimby]

Think of it as job security.

 

[Krazy4Real]

Everybody needs a nice walk every now and then.

 

[SandEagle]

yes yes and i am sure if the professor started talking to you about newtonian mechanics as it relates to thermodynamics and its effects on gravitation.....you'd be like. 'wat, dat make no sense to me'.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

I actually spent some years managing for Capital One's credit Card division. Best one I heard in reviewing some agent interactions was my agent tell a customer to go to www.capitalone.com and the customer's reply was:

How do you capitalize 1?

 

[Possessed Freak]

yes yes and i am sure if the professor started talking to you about newtonian mechanics as it relates to thermodynamics and its effects on gravitation.....you'd be like. 'wat, dat make no sense to me'.

Ah, but if I had previously learned those topics, and used them successfully as recently as a month ago, I believe that if I suddenly forgot everything on that subject, I would flunk the quiz. And I doubt the professor of that class would be forgiving, as I had displayed a working knowledge.

 

[notposting]

yes yes and i am sure if the professor started talking to you about newtonian mechanics as it relates to thermodynamics and its effects on gravitation.....you'd be like. 'wat, dat make no sense to me'.

You are comparing that to "plug the noise making cable into the noise making port"?

If the guy can't figure that sort of thing, he probably shouldn't have a drivers license either.

 

[SandEagle]

You are comparing that to "plug the noise making cable into the noise making port"?

If the guy can't figure that sort of thing, he probably shouldn't have a drivers license either.

it is not his area of expertise. he probably doesn't even use a computer at home. that is all i am saying.

 

[Number1]

I bet you get paid good money to do this work so why don't you just STFU and do it or find another line of work.

 

[lxskllr]

it is not his area of expertise. he probably doesn't even use a computer at home. that is all i am saying.

Who doesn't use a computer at home these days? In any case, it's a tool he needs for his job, and he should know how to use it. That's like a machinist calling tech support to change the bit in his drill press.

 

[mmntech]

I think back to all the stupid questions and idiotic incidents we'd get at the car rental. Such as...

-The lady who demanded to know why the car was going so slow and there was a red exclamation point on the dashboard. She had driven several miles with the parking brake on.
-The guy who told us he "gassed" up our diesel truck
-Guy who complained another truck had broken down and demanded we pay to get it towed. Left it parked on the side of the highway overnight. Truck was fine, had just run out of gas. We had filled it before it left the shop too.
-Lady who wanted me to show her what literally every single button, switch, and dial did as if it was the first car she had ever seen. We were worried about that one.
-Guy who "gassed up" a pickup truck with water. As if we didn't have your name, address, and credit card on file.
-Guy who backed the truck into a light pole in our parking lot and claimed it was like that before. He shut up when we asked why it had fresh concrete dust on it.
-Lady who set her own car on fire (allegedly) smoking weed in it then returned ours while she was high as a kite. Thankfully her sober husband had done the driving.
-Lady that needed to be instructed how to dive an automatic car.
-Various people who couldn't do basic math. Cars didn't always go out full because we didn't have enough staff to refuel them when we were slammed. If the car went out at 3/4 and has a 50L tank, you'd have to bring it back up to 3/4. You won't believe how many people couldn't figure that out.
-Retired police officer who came in with an expired drivers license
-Customers who try to pay with non-kosher tender. Then got mad at us and went across the street to Enterprise, only to be kicked out of there.
-Lady who freaked out we had given her a burnt orange car and demanded we find her a silver one, on a long weekend. She had the last car left in the city. We had just picked her up in the car and she said nothing the whole ride to the shop.
-Guy who misplaced his "Tylenol" in a car and accused us of stealing it. We found it buried in the car the next day. Was a Tylenol bottle filled with weed.
-Guy who punched a hole in the side of a truck and claimed a rock hit it on the highway. Given the direction of the hole, he'd have to have been driving in reverse for that to happen.

 

[SandEagle]

Who doesn't use a computer at home these days? In any case, it's a tool he needs for his job, and he should know how to use it. That's like a machinist calling tech support to change the bit in his drill press.

lots of people still don't. your norm is not their norm. even so, lots of people make the mistake of plugging a jack in the wrong hole. bfd

 

[lxskllr]

lots of people still don't. your norm is not their norm. even so, lots of people make the mistake of plugging a jack in the wrong hole. bfd

A lot of people do a lot of stupid shit, but that doesn't justify it. For the jack in particular, most are color coded. In general, he was explained how it worked, and then argued the issue. They weren't discussing the finer points of quantum physics. They were discussing the equivalent of put the blue star in the blue star shaped hole game you give to toddlers.

 

[Tweak155]

About 10 years ago when I used to work a register, I had this old guy hand me a credit card and said "beam me up". Was awesome.

 

[dank69]

it is not his area of expertise. he probably doesn't even use a computer at home. that is all i am saying.

I agree. After 4 years of college and 10 years on the job, I am now comfortable calling myself an 'expert' when it comes to plugging stuff into a computer. The most difficult part, by far, was mastering the headphone and microphone jacks. Everything else, and I mean everything, has different shaped holes for different wires, so why not the microphone/headphone jacks? It isn't realistic to expect an Average Joe to just understand this complex stuff without some intense training.

 

[Wyndru]

The unfortunate thing is how quickly people learn on their own without support. Be thankful he is so reliant on you. Once they learn all of the common sense stuff your position becomes irrelevant.

Many of the schools I work for are cutting all of their tech staff with the reasoning that once the installers put the technology in, the teachers can figure out the rest.

I'm currently supporting 2 full school districts on my own (4 out of 5 days I have no coworker) with about 2000 PCs and each room having either a smartboard/brightlink or enoclick, as well as a doc camera. I also oversee the wireless and wired network and all of the fileservers.

It's a lot of support, and it's not fun, but when it saves the school money it's direction they want to go. These days they expect the teachers to be competant enough to not rely on support.

Colleges probably don't care though since they can just raise tuition to survive.

 

[DrPizza]

yes yes and i am sure if the professor started talking to you about newtonian mechanics as it relates to thermodynamics and its effects on gravitation.....you'd be like. 'wat, dat make no sense to me'.

If the professor was talking to him about Newtonian mechanics, then the professor probably wouldn't have called for that level of tech support. I'm guessing the professor would have been able to talk about French Poetry, or maybe "does the computer actually exist though - maybe it's just in my mind."

 

[Baked]

If everybody's as smart as you, your job would be obsolete. You should've thank the professor and buy him some flowers for calling you in. Without him and his colleauge, you'll probably be working the fast food drive through.

 

[Number1]

If the professor was talking to him about Newtonian mechanics, then the professor probably wouldn't have called for that level of tech support. I'm guessing the professor would have been able to talk about French Poetry, or maybe "does the computer actually exist though - maybe it's just in my mind."

OK, that was funny.

 

[angminas]

expertise

mod please move this thread to HT

 

[Atomic Playboy]

"But I am not using headphones."

That actually makes sense though. I mean, obviously this is a tech forum, so we're all solid enough on our understanding of technology to figure out that an audio output port is going to output audio regardless of whether you have headphones or speakers, but to a novice, that shit is unnecessarily confusing. He wasn't using headphones; why should he know that speakers and headphones use the same port? Then again, why would he plug speakers into the mic port? That's just silly.

 

[cronos]

Lady that needed to be instructed how to dive an automatic car.

This is a legitimate issue. The first time was tough for me too, and I'd been driving for ~10 years until I finally get a chance to drive a car with automatic transmission (and yes, it was a rental).

It was actually somewhat scary to me. I thought: how am I going to be able to control the car for turning, etc. if I don't have a clutch and can't shift down when I feel the need to? Just depend on the brake 100%?

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

This is a legitimate issue. The first time was tough for me too, and I'd been driving for ~10 years until I finally get a chance to drive a car with automatic transmission (and yes, it was a rental).

It was actually somewhat scary to me. I thought: how am I going to be able to control the car for turning, etc. if I don't have a clutch and can't shift down when I feel the need to? Just depend on the brake 100%?

Years ago, I was in the car rental business and rented a car to an older couple from Germany. Not only had they never driven an automatic, I'm pretty sure they didn't believe they existed. They destroyed the brakes on two Furies (I said it was years ago ) because they kept trying to use the brake as a clutch. The lady asked me in broken English if Furies were "delicate" cars.