Funny Stories From The Land Of IT Support

IT support teams often get inundated with requests from end-users to fix inane issues. These end-users often provide unhelpful or nonsensical information about the problems. Sometimes they get angry. At least these folks that do IT support can see the funny side. Here are a few stories from the Sysadmin subreddit that gave us a laugh this week.

Redditor umkhunto started a discussion about IT support tickets users have received. Here is the best one by far:

crimsonlyger:

Best ticket I EVER got. She was a great user, but did dumb things:

“I was just working on a document when a phantom poltergeist took over my computer and deleted all the text without me even having my hands on the keyboard. No hands! Just ghosts! In a bit of (admittedly rash but potentially justified) panic, I removed (forced) the backspace key from my keyboard. I have never liked scary things. Then, regretting my action, disgusted with my poor judgment, and fearful of your disappointment, I attempted to glue the key back on using just a bit of glue and a bit of guidance from the internet. I have done this in the past to my personal computer and experience success. Needless to say, I was not successful this time. The key remains dismembered. I have computer functionality because I have my desktop keyboard, but Jordan told me that I had to tell you because it is unsightly and I am an embarrassment.

“I am sorry for this series of events and I hope that this is a potentially inexpensive and unburdensome fix. Thank you in advance for your compassion and limited admonishment.”

That last line killed me.

ITShadowNinja had a paranormal encounter:

Customers site was down and they threaten if we didn’t fix their issue they would send their dark wizard army to put death curses on us.

Site in question was money exchange site to turn your USD to spirit money.

Since a threat was made it had to go to the security team to check out the threat. Security team added to the ticket: “We want nothing to do with dark wizards.”

This one sounds like a very common ticket. From deathjam:

Best one:

“Email not working”

-via email

Sometimes, the reason why “email not working” is kind of depressing: From sugardeath:

We had a client do that to us too! They thought their email was broken because they hadn’t received anything all day. Health reports are solid, test emails were flowing through without issue.. Message trace showed… no incoming messages. They just aren’t as popular as they thought they were. They were kind of sad when we told them everything was working.

Redditor SJHillman had a few good tickets to share. We’ve picked the top two:

“Neanderthal Blackberry mean no email access, Need email access. Need new smart device. When can get new smart device? Soon? Hope? If no, me be sad :(” Device: Blackberry, not smart enough, phone”

“Blue”

Yes, just “Blue”. Nothing else. SJHillman explained what happened with perplexing ticket and how he magically fixed it the problem based on one word:

That one was escalated to me because the Helpdesk was puzzled (for obvious reasons) and the user wasn’t returning their calls. Techs thought I was crazy when I told them to just go and tighten the user’s monitor cable, then thought I was magic because I had correctly diagnosed both the problem and solution based on a single word. I’m not magic, I just speak user.

You can find more IT support stories over on this Reddit thread.

Got your own IT support story? Tell us all about it in the comments!


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