8246. Retail tech misconception: If the customer finally found a power supply of the right wattage and plug in your store, and has pressed Escape to get into the BIOS screen to find out what exactly this computer they bought at Goodwill has so they might buy some more stuff from you such as RAM, it's a good idea to press the Power button to shut the machine off 0.45 seconds after the BIOS screen comes up and say "we're closing now". Especially when said tech leaves the store before any of his coworkers or customers at five minutes until 5pm. [By :Mushroom / 2013-05-12] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Corrupt my BIOS? That's a stabbin' -RiffRaff

8245. How in the name of all that is unholy is it possible for me to enter "network administrator" and "IT" as search criteria for a job website, and receive an e-mail from them with a listing for a "breast surgeon?????????" [By :RiffRaff / 2013-05-06] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Let the puns commence! -RiffRaff I search for "Electronics Technician" and get results like "Senior Council" and "Wireless Tower Climber". -Stryker One Agencies are not good at noticing where you want to work either. I live near Coventry in the UK and dropped 2 agencies when they refused to stop telling me about "wonderful jobs in London". I stopped dealing with any agencies a long time ago. Life is simpler now... -Holdfast I love them giving me jobs in Georgia because my CV has a Florida Address on it while I'm in Iowa. Just a few thousand mile difference. -PolarCoyote Stopped using headhunters when they couldn't understand why, when I said I lived in Portland, OR and was unwilling to relocate, I didn't want to apply for jobs in Portland *MAINE*. Yes, it's our namesake but it's the other side of the country for Pete's sake... -Lusus I stopped reading my daily Monster.com emails. Any job with "technician" in the title, in a 50 mile radius, is a hit. -DukeOfURL Somehow they got "New Tits" out of those phrases... -HappyCrappy Because the job normally entails dealing with a bunch of pathetic tits on a daily basis. -Gromit "New Tits Took A Dim Narrr" is an anagram for "Network Adminstrator". -AmazingKreskin Be glad they didn't come back proctologist or urologist. Of course users can be dicks or asses so I guess it still qualifies. -ecoli

8244. This one was too epic not to share. A co-worker tried to explain to me that flat panel computer screen has a light bulb in it. While most technically do have a backlight, when I corrected her, she pulled out a light bulb from her desk. I remember hearing "Why are you walking away?" before I started laughing. [By :ravensentinel / 2013-04-30] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Technically, there are two very thin fluorescent light tubes in an LCD panel. But bulb shaped, they most definitely are not. -SwedishChef And those fluorescent tubes are very fragile, too. One reason why newer LCDs use LED backlights instead. -DukeOfURL

8243. That entering new lats and longs into a modem doesn't mean you are moving it. Let's see - you moved the dish 20 meters to the other side of the building and took new location readings...what dictionary do you use to define the word move?? [By :frprinterwiz / 2013-04-24] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Maybe he thought you meant taking it to a different (postal) address. -DukeOfURL Thats called a reloacation not a move. (runs for the LART Shelter) -deedadee

8242. An author misconception. Dan Gooken, or Gookin says, aparaphrasaed, in his pc's for dummies. "nerds love helping people." then "if tech support tells you to reinstall windows, they're being lazy. if you press them, they'll tell you the real solution, and how to fix it. there is absolutely no reason, ever to reinstall windows or reformat your drive. don't do it to "refresh the bits" or whatever garbage they dish up." Ok, have fun guys, I'm keeping my mouth shut until I see some comments. :D [By :AdmiralWbury / 2013-04-24] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments he's right - there's no need to re-install windows. You can *always* choose ubunt, or other *nix variant. Apart from that, there are times where you cannot do anything *but* reinstall windows, especially if you have had someone helpfully organize all the dlls into one folder, all the exes into another, and so on. -madonnac This is mostly true. However the real solution would involve more time and energy to fix. Than simply nuking and paving. -deedadee Actually it's amixed bag on this one. Often times it's alot easier and more thorough of a fix to nuke and pave. Take for instance some of the nastier to remove viruses out there. a number of them actually can affect the MBR, Windows executeables, registry settings etc. Time to nuke and pave a few hours, going in and inspecting every bit on the computer ( assuming you can) can take days. Lets take the concept of a failing hard drive. There is no chance of getting away with just fixing the os. Number three failed operating system aka: "It won't boot" or it's on a blue screen death spiral( often caused by item 2. As the saying goes "Ya Kenna change the laws of physics" -McSmiley well....with windows 8 there is that "restore windows" function which essentially restores windows to clean install....but then again do you trust it? -gashach Never mind reimaging. I have that same attitude when trying to get them to reboot! -Holdfast methinks someone met one too many lazy techs and is taking the opposing stance out of ignorance. if the virus is nasty enough i'll say "I could spend 3 to 5 days fixing this mess, but i can tell you it will never work right again, little problems will plague you at odd times that seem to have no reason and it will just be a constant headache. Or I can back up your files and clean them, and completely reinstall windows, and have it back to you purring like a kitten in 48 hours. Your choice, but option A is a lot more expensive." They take B 99% of the time you explain it to them like that. -GargoyleTS Sometimes nuke and pave IS the better option. I've had laptops with viral issues that were so bad, it would take me three times as long to fix the problem, and even then, there would be no guarantees it would ever work right again. And usually, if I have to go to the nuke and pave option, I've already spent almost twice that amount of time trying to fix it. -TechieSidhe He also speaks of nerds in a condescending way, as if we, they, whomever, are another species, like an animal who cna't understand what's said about them. But, you'd have to pick up the book to get the full jist of it. it's, I do believe the fifteenth edition of the book, chapter 31. -AdmiralWbury Then again, this is PC's for DUMMIES. Doesn't it explain it all? Isn't dummy a (l)user synonym? And those dummies, I mean, users, don't need (and can't) to read a book to think (do they?) the way they do. Otherwise they would come out of the dark side and become geeks, nerds or any other kind of enlightened being. -buitre There are, however, an awful lot of dumb techs out there who will nuke & pave because it's easier and helps their AHT. But there are also a lot of techs who have been told that they can't advance an apparent hardware problem to level 2 unless it persists through N&P. Any generalization is wrong... including this one... -chazz

8241. If you delete an email then empty the recycle bin in Outlook we'll be able to magically recover your item FOUR months after you did this. Too bad we only archive 2 weeks of email messages...and the deleted items is the one folder we don't archive at all. [By :Starfury / 2013-04-15] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Sounds normal, I had a customer that used his deleted items folder in his email client to save the emails he wanted to keep after reading them. Then he wanted one out of there after having everything transferred to a new pc, he couldn't quiet grasp that the deleted items folder wasn't a good place to put stuff (yes, we tried to edjamacate him where he should put it). -spectreoflife There are reasons that, back when I was in charge of backups/restores, I would tell users that "Delete" meant GONE FOREVER NO MORE DATA BYE BYE. Well, partly for reasons like this, and mainly because the backup system was so flaky it was guaranteed to be incapable of restoring anything anyway. Hated that job. -Lusus

8240. When I don't respond to a ticket of yours within an hour or so, it's completely warranted to stop me while I'm walking with an armload of equipment or a vendor to ask what the hold-up is. The hold up is that I'm busy. Since you've stopped me to hassle me further about your little problem, I think I'll got to lunch before getting to you. [By :murdermachine / 2013-03-23] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments My swiftness at dealing with your issue is proportionate to the amount of time you spend bugging me about it not being fixed yet. -flapjackboy

8239. I care. [By :Icelator / 2013-03-22] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments We DO care. Now the question is, about what do we care? Not them. -Voz

8238. Anybody else think it's weird that in 2013 there are still people who think you absolutely must type "www." before every URL? And they assume it's implied, if you don't say it! Like, I say "Please go to website.com" and they say "okay, www.website.com"...I wonder, do they still pick up their home phones and say "Central? Are you on the line?" [By :Waish / 2013-03-22] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Thinking hard about getting the voice rec on my phone to use "Central, get me..." as the command string. I already have one of the bluetooth handsets that look like old Bell phones... -chazz I ran into the opposite yesterday - I came across a web site that didn't specify the www in their blurbs - but required it anyway. -Captain Trips If it helps, my dad still insists I have to actually tell him 'http://' in front of every address. That and he insists on typing it in... -skippytpodar if only they could apply that assumption to "http://" instead of "www" it might be more helpful. -DukeOfURL What skippy and I were obviously trying to say was the "http" followed by the "://" -DukeOfURL Weeeeeelllll... our client has never set the corresponding virtual servers (they use Windows Server for (deity)'s sake!. So you HAVE to type www. before their domain name. And the (l)users are not aware of this most of the times so we have to repeat the full url to them all the times. -buitre Buitre: You don't need virtual servers. You need CNAME records in DNS. Or you need servers that accept multiple names. The first doesn't touch the servers; the second can be done in IIS almost as easily as it can be done in Apache. -chazz

8237. It is acceptable, just because you know me, to stop me somewhere random (bank, store, grill, soda, church, your holiday party) and ask me to repair some random technological item, and expect me to do it that instant, without charge. I love doing this, it is what I live for. Especially when you start the conversation as 'Hey how are you! So quick question!', because we BOTH know you really don't give a crap how I've been or that you're now consuming the only spare time I've had in months. [By :metaice / 2013-03-15] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments Hey! I'm pretty good. Quick answer ... -Gerund Thankfully, I've only had one client try to do this to me. They learned that, if bored/cornered/challenged, I can extempolize very very long-winded complex (and utterly meaningless) answers to anything. Think "Pip" from Animaniacs. By the time I was making a detailed comparison of hard drive fragmentation to plate tectonics (with variances allowed for subduction, divergent and convergent plate boundaries, and mid-oceanic ridges) they gave up and flat out walked away. Very successful. -Lusus Love it! -Voz

8236. When there's a system wide outage it's specifically directed at YOU and not the other 1499 employees also affected. We deliberately caused the crash because we like having calls holding 10 deep in the queue for over an hour. [By :Starfury / 2013-03-04] [Top] Comment on this Customer Misconception Comments See?!!! I knew it!! </starfish> -ecoli welcome to my world, we use shitrix over a network that is already overloaded and when all the users log in and try email and open their network share(s) it goes to pot. Then you can queue ( literally) the calls to our help desk. -Jax

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