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I work on a support desk and this morning there was a call logged that said:

something wrong with her pc (wasnt able to explain it to me) wants to speak to an engineer

I called the client to see what the problem was... the screen had rotated 90 degrees!

I give in

Have you tried etc etc...

Wait.... did the screen physically rotate 90 degrees, or was the picture 90 degrees from what it should have been??


The first one is hilarious, the second.... well, that would be a good problem

NO, I'm sure the user had rotated her head 90 degrees.

Picture had rotated 90 degrees, which I can understand they may not know how to change. It's the part that it was too difficult to describe which is the scary part

But i cannot stop laughing... I mean, really? To hard to describe?

"The screen it... I don't know how... all of a sudden... I accidentally... 30 million... SEND HELP!"

So would you if the screen image rotated 90 degrees in the Z axis.

Ah, the old "I reached for Ctrl-Alt-Del and when I hit it my screen rotated" problem.

When will people learn to not hit the arrow keys instead of delete?

Was this woman from the 1700s, by chance? Ichabod Crane had a tough time with his computer last night on Sleepy Hollow, so this might have been a similar situation.

P.S. Typing this upside down. WOOOOOOOOO

I want to try this out but I'm afraid I won't be able to change it back.

 DogofWar1 wrote:
Ah, the old "I reached for Ctrl-Alt-Del and when I hit it my screen rotated" problem.

When will people learn to not hit the arrow keys instead of delete?

Was this woman from the 1700s, by chance? Ichabod Crane had a tough time with his computer last night on Sleepy Hollow, so this might have been a similar situation.

P.S. Typing this upside down. WOOOOOOOOO

Loved the episode last night...


However, my screen appears to be broken... it doesnt rotate when I do Ctrl+Alt+arrow.... doing some reading and I'm guessing my hardware doesnt support that function :(

It can be disabled.

This was a fairly common call when I was on the helpdesk; the image being rotated, for the same reason DogOfWar already stated.

Note that some monitors (at my job, anyway) do in fact physically rotate 90 degrees, which is very handy for reading comic books working on spreadsheets. Although it doesn't take an engineer to effect this.

 purplefood wrote:
It can be disabled.

Probably stop people clogging the support hotline with vitriolic complaints about their obviously malfunctioning hardware because there was no way in this life or the next that they could possibly have pressed the buttons that can cause this to occur manually except for the time that they cat jumped onto the keyboard or maybe when their son was messing with it but I doubt that'd happen because what are the odds?

That doesnt beat what my mm did.
"Son, Help me, my screen is black"
Turn out she forgot to turn on her moniter

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Turn out she forgot to turn on her moniter

That too was sadly a fairly common call when I worked on the helpdesk.

I've called IT when my projector doesn't work to have them come in, walk directly to the computer, push a plug in slightly, nod, and leave.

Twice.

 Da Boss wrote:
I've called IT when my projector doesn't work to have them come in, walk directly to the computer, push a plug in slightly, nod, and leave.

Twice.

I've fixed your issue with a similar response, several times.

My favorite was when a professor called us and said that they weren't getting a signal from the computer to the monitor... I walked across campus in the middle of a snowstorm (that cancelled classes the next day). I got in there, took a look at the computer, and then back to the professor and said, "Someone unplugged the computer from the outlet." plugged it in, made the professor sign off on the ticket and trudged back across campus.

In our futures:

Oddly enough, my computer has started trolling me at work.

"Sorry mate, I can't do that right now, the program isn't working."
"Not working? There's some minor errors right now, but nothing that should stop it doing anything. (Have you tried turning it off and on again?)"

"Neop, by broken. I mean so seriously broken, it's hilarious. I have 10 dialogue boxes up, server connection errors all over the place, java exceptions. It's bollocked."

*Walks over*

Server connection restored that moment.

And more...

"Dear Customer,

I'm sorry, I can't verify that for you, we've dataflow problems."

Mail Message Sent

Incoming mail. Dataflow issues have been resolved

"Well, feth."

Seriously, one of those two has happened to me every day for the past 4 days.

I've just started this job, I don't need my coworkers to think I'm a moron before I've had the chance to prove it! That's just unsporting!

 Ouze wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Turn out she forgot to turn on her moniter

That too was sadly a fairly common call when I worked on the helpdesk.

Buddy of mine worked an IT contract for a hospital that changed its computer systems... prior to changeover, the keyboard/mouse plugged into the monitor, which plugged into the wall, and EVERYTHING else ran off of the one giant computer.... Well, he gets called in for all kinds of things, from the "cup holder" won't go in any more, to "it keeps saying to restart, and i do it, but it keeps saying it, and nothing works" (she was turning off the monitor, which on the old system would "turn off" her machine)

I had to short a UPS battery out with a paper clip to prove an electrician that, yes, there is an electrical problem causing all of our UPSs to start beeping, and no, it wasn't every single UPS going out on the floor at once.

"So then if my battery is dead, when I drop this paper clip on these leads...."

Thankfully, I was able to brush the paper clip off with a pencil before it caught fire. There was a noted smell of ozone combined with me insisting a little too strongly to my coworkers that I don't know what smell they're talking about.

 daedalus wrote:
I had to short a UPS battery out with a paper clip to prove an electrician that, yes, there is an electrical problem causing all of our UPSs to start beeping, and no, it wasn't every single UPS going out on the floor at once.

"So then if my battery is dead, when I drop this paper clip on these leads...."

Thankfully, I was able to brush the paper clip off with a pencil before it caught fire. There was a noted smell of ozone combined with me insisting a little too strongly to my coworkers that I don't know what smell they're talking about.

Yes, my thanks for this
As it is, when my mum got her first computer-a laptop-8 years ago, she couldn't turn it on. She wouldn't listen when myself and my brother told her how.
So first order of business for her was to go too a college course on how to use it. And the first thing they taught her was how to turn it on

It constantly amazes me how humans can learn to use the same 26 symbols to communicate pretty much anything, and at the same time fail to comprehend the button with the lone, universal symbol for "on/off" staring up at them.

It's found everywhere; on remotes, televisions, radios, and yet so many people cannot for the life of them understand what it means.

It's amazing, the buggers can find away to get a browser loaded to use Facebook, even after you deleted all the obvious links, but ask them them to find the Teamviewer icon on the desktop and you get comments such as "I'm a hairdresser, I don't understand this techie stuff".

 Wolfstan wrote:
It's amazing, the buggers can find away to get a browser loaded to use Facebook, even after you deleted all the obvious links, but ask them them to find the Teamviewer icon on the desktop and you get comments such as "I'm a hairdresser, I don't understand this techie stuff".

The irony

Kind of on topic: I used to work IT support for the Washington State Patrol when I was younger, and naturally because I was the new guy I was on the graveyard shift. As is common in such environments, we often played practical jokes on each other, and the most heated was between my unit (front line tech support for the troopers) and the folks upstairs who handled the servers and in house stuff.

After a couple times of coming in to a tin foiled console or other things I decided to take it upon myself to go upstairs, gather every keyboard from their office I could find, and proceed to re arrange the keys from QWERTY to alphabetical order I got really good at popping the keys off of keyboards. Some people just left it that way, others were a bit upset but I thought it was hilarious...

Do people in IT still look at their keyboard?

IronWarLeg wrote:
Kind of on topic: I used to work IT support for the Washington State Patrol when I was younger, and naturally because I was the new guy I was on the graveyard shift. As is common in such environments, we often played practical jokes on each other, and the most heated was between my unit (front line tech support for the troopers) and the folks upstairs who handled the servers and in house stuff.

After a couple times of coming in to a tin foiled console or other things I decided to take it upon myself to go upstairs, gather every keyboard from their office I could find, and proceed to re arrange the keys from QWERTY to alphabetical order I got really good at popping the keys off of keyboards. Some people just left it that way, others were a bit upset but I thought it was hilarious...

I had a similar thing happen to me when I went away on vacation for a week while in university. I didn't have a password on my computer because at the time I had nothing of importance on my computer, so my roommate, and my best friend (whom worked in our school's IT department with me) came in, logged into my computer and did the following to my computer:
1) Changed the Language from English to Mandarin Chinese
2) Created folders of various types of pron on my desktop, created a screenshot and used that as the background of my computer (so when I tried to delete it, I'd freak out about not being able to get rid of things like, "furry pron"
3) Changed my screen saver to a man lounging on his side, nude
4) Downloaded 2 programs one of women and one of men where they would basically strip for you just above your task bar.

I had everything fixed in like 30 minutes, but when I tried to upgrade form XP to Vista on that system, I apparently hadn't changed everything back from Mandarin... all of my installers for that were still in Chinese, no matter how I tried to get rid of it... Fethers...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 pretre wrote:
Do people in IT still look at their keyboard?

There are still plenty of hunt and peck keyboard typists out there, and some of them work in the IT field... so, yeah :-\

I had everything fixed in like 30 minutes, but when I tried to upgrade form XP to Vista on that system, I apparently hadn't changed everything back from Mandarin... all of my installers for that were still in Chinese, no matter how I tried to get rid of it... Fethers...

That wasn't them, it was your PC trying to stop you from 'upgrading' to Vista.