Sticky keyboard
I am messaging someone on Instant Messenger and all of sudden, garbled text comes across. I ask the sender to explain. Still more garble. I decide to call them on the phone and see what is going on. They tell me that they were eating cereal at their desk and spilled milk all over the keyboard. I let them off the phone for them to clean up. Ten minutes later I get another call saying their keyboard won’t work. I asked what they did to clean it. They said that since it was a wireless keyboard, they took it to the bathroom and ran it under hot water to get the stickiness out. They then ran the keyboard under the blow dryer to remove the excess water. At this point, I was on the floor in hysterics.
It’s turtles all the way
Support pilot fish is called in to this data centre to fix a problem. “I spent 20 minutes beating it into the skull of the Level 2 support person that the problem was what I said it was, and explaining the intricacies of spelling commands properly,” says fish. “After the problem was resolved, I ended up listening to a short tirade from him about the apparent cluelessness of the Level 1 people and the end users. “I bit my tongue and did my best to not say anything about pots and kettles. “After verifying that everything seemed OK on the mainframe, I went to talk to the end users to make sure that their problems — passed on to me as ‘It’s broken’ — were satisfactorily resolved. “I walked in on the middle of a conversation about clueless customers and a 20-minute discussion about how something that is eight inches and supposed to be eight inches is a normal occurrence and certainly not out of spec. “I left the building wondering just who I had possibly offended with my stupidity.”
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