Tech Support Stories

When I first started at ComputerWare in the summer of 1993 I was in the Technical Support department at headquarters, along with Earl Gerfen, Ron Reck, and Ross Gard. We did pre-sales and post-sales support for Corporate Sales, International Sales, Direct Sales, and all ten of the Macintosh-only Retail stores.

One of my favorite stories involved a customer who called to say that his computer would reboot every time he flushed the toilet. Doing over-the-phone support for this one was tricky, and you could actually here the computer chime and reboot as soon as he flushed the toilet. We sent out a hardware tech, who reported back to us the following: it was actually true. The issue turned out to be that there was an electric water pump that turned on and refilled a main water reservoir. Flushing the toilet caused enough water to run out of the reservoir that the pump kicked on and caused an initial voltage drop (brown-out) that was large enough to cut power to the computer. The computer would then get full power a second later, and reboot.

Another classic was the customer who called in to headquarters to complain about one of our retail technicians. She was very upset and wanted to make sure that we were aware that we had a thief working for us. The issue? When her Performa computer was returned to her after repair, all the virtual memory had been removed; stolen if you will...

There are also some funny Help Desk stories from other places besides ComputerWare.