Them: Hello, I need help this morning.
Me: Good morning.
Them: The video went out on the server and I had to put the hard drive into another Win98 machine.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Maybe you should have suggested that they need to rebind lana0 and make sure the netbeui driver is loading properly

--Nathan

Yeowch..... Reminds me a lot of:

Regular (as it were) Prices for Technical Support/System Administration

Calling me with a question: $10
Calling me with a stupid question: $20
Calling me with a stupid question you can't quite articulate: $30
Implying I'm incompetent because I can't interpret your inarticulate problem description: $1000 + punitive damages
Questions received via phone without first trying Help Desk: $10
Questions where answer is in TFM: $10
Questions during Xpilot session: $20
Calling me back with the same problem *after* I fix it once: $100
Insisting that you're not breaking the software, the problem is on my end somehow: $200
Asking me to walk over to your building to fix the problem: $5/step
Asking me to drive to another town to fix your problem: $50/mile + gas
If you interrupt me while I was reading news: $25/hour
If you interrupt me while I was trying to count all the xroaches on my screen: $35/hour
If you interrupt me while I was trying to actually fix somebody else's problem: $45/hour
If you try to hang around and get me to fix it now: $50/hour
If you expect me to tell you how I fixed it: $60/hour
If you've come to ask me why something isn't working that I'm currently working on: $70/hour
If you're asking me to fix something I fixed for you yesterday: $75/hour
If you're asking me to fix something I told you I fixed yesterday, but never did fix: $85/hour
If you're asking me to fix a quick patch that I made that didn't work: $95/hour
If you're bugging me while there's another admin in the room who could have done it for you: $150/hour
Making me treck to your office to fix your problem then leaving immediately after hanging up the phone: $1,500
Calling up with a problem which "everybody" in the office is having and which is "stopping all work." Not being there when I rush over to look at it and nobody else in the office knows anything about it: $1,700
Explaining a problem for half-an-hour over the phone BEFORE mentioning it's your personal machine at home: $500
Self-diagnosing your problem and informing me what to do: $150
Having me bail you out when you perform your own repairs I told you not to do: $300
Not telling all of your co-workers about it: $850
Figuring out you mean floppy drive when you say hard drive: $50 BEFORE I order your replacement hard drive, $250 after
Fixing your "broken" mouse with a mousepad: $25
Fixing your "broken" optical mouse by rotating the mousepad 90 degrees: $35
Fixing a "broken" mouse by cleaning the rollers: $50
Fixing your "broken" printer with an ink/toner cartridge: $35
Fixing your "broken" ANYTHING with the power button: $250
Fixing the "crashed" system by turning the external disk back on: $200
Fixing the "hung" system by plugging the Ethernet transceiver back in: $375
Fixing the crashed nameserver by plugging back in the SCSI cord someone accidentally yanked out on Friday afternoon when the "real" sysadmin has just left for a two-week vacation: $400
Visiting your old university and fixing the broken PC by plugging the monitor lead back in: $50
Explaining that you can't log in to some server because you don't have an account there: $10
Explaining that you don't have an account on the machine you used to have an account on because you used it to try to break into the above server: $500
Forgetting your password after it was tattooed on your index finger: $25
Changing memory partitions without informing me first: $50
Installing programs without informing me/getting permission first: $100
Technical support for the above programs: $150/hour
Spilling Coke on keyboard: $25 plus cost of keyboard
Spilling Coke on monitor: $50 plus cost of monitor
Spilling Coke on CPU: $200 plus cost of motherboard swap plus hourly rate of $150 per hour spent reinstalling the system
Leaving files on desktop: $5 per file, $10 per day the file is left unclaimed
Cleaning the mouse with spit and sleeve: $50 plus cost of sleeve plus cost of therapy
Bringing in your own copy of the original Norton Utilities v1.0 to fix a brand new machine: $200
Chewing on the end of the graphic tablet stylus: $25
Putting feet up next to workstation after ten mile jog thourough NYC streets: $50
Spending 30 minutes trying to figure out what your problem is and another 5 explaining how to verify and fix it, only to hear you say... "So that's what the little box that popped up on my screen was telling me to do!": $40
Listening to your network troubles, suggesting that you check to see if you are plugged into the network jack, hearing yes, trying five other things, asking you to identify your plug type, listening to you drag furniture, and hearing a sheepish, "Oops. Nevermind.": $35 (including discount for polite apology)
Dealing with tech support requests for obviously pirated software: $25
Dealing with "How can I get another copy of [obviously pirated software]? Mine just died." requests: $45
Having to use the "We're really not the best people to talk to about that; why don't you try calling the number on the box in which you bought it?" line: $55
Actually needing to explain copyright law to you after you failed to get the hint in the previous response: $95 (includes instructions for getting freeware replacements from the public file server)
Having to point out anything that's on the wall in a typeface larger than 18 points: $15
If I wrote the sign: $45
If it's in a 144-point font and taped to the side of the monitor facing the door: $75
Reporting slow connection by passenger pigeon packets to MPEG archive in Outer Slobavia as a Mosaic/Netscape/Gopher/FTP client problem: $25
Reporting it more than once: $50
Reporting it more than once and implying slothfullness on tech support's inability to solve problem: $200
Beeper Prices

Beeping me when I'm out with the significant other: $50
Beeping me when I'm out of town and I took pains to ensure that help files were left all over and that diagnostics had been run on all machines before I left: $100
Beeping me more than once to tell me that the printer's offline and the fix is to press the On Line button: $200
Beeping me more than once while I'm asleep: $50 per beep
Beeping me and not identifying yourself within the first 5 seconds: $25
Beeping me and then changing your story/denying you placed the call/hoped I would forget who caused the problem: $500
Special Rates

Dealing with user body odor: $75/hour
Dealing with user not familiar with the primary language spoken at site: $50/hour
Dealing with user who is (self-proclaimed) smarter than you are, but still calls every other day for help: $100/hour
Dealing with computer hobby folks: $125/hour
Questioning the other prices ........... $50

You will probably like these:

http://www.b3ta.com/questions/clientsarestupid/

(warning: allow for several hours of laughing!)

Gareth

Thanks for that link, some of them are truly classic. I like the one about Richard Branson.

Gotta get me on of them data bricks they mentioned.

Here's mine...

ISP troubles all day, things working intermittently at best.

So I ask the user, "did you get to that site after?"
And he replies, "yup, I had to go into network properties and close out really fast and then go to the address. In order for it to work I have to keep moving my mouse around."

I turned around and walked away... not saying a thing.

Hilarious, asided from the fact that I have to get past interpreting that bloody "King's English" from time to time.

And he replies, "yup, I had to go into network properties and close out really fast and then go to the address. In order for it to work I have to keep moving my mouse around."

Believe it or not, he's actually describing a symptom I've seen.

He's got a serial-port mouse which shares an IRQ with the COM port that the modem is on. Either that or his USB/PS2 mouse is sharing an IRQ with the ethernet card. (Depending on whether he's connecting via dialup or LAN.)

Troubleshoot his IRQ's.

But our ISP was having problems. No one could get on the internet reliably. His (and everyone else's) computer was working fine (for months) before our ISP had problems, and is working fine again after our ISP cleaned up their act.

Oh, that's a different story, then.

But I remember back in the day, when we had serial mice and ISA modems which took up COM ports that this sort of thing could happen.