Babies learn quickly, but not always what you're teaching them:

This is why everything of interest is "Cat!" to Lillian.

Happy birthday to Kathy and Raq!

You all Natterers are being funny today. Not that that's unusual.

God help me, may I never perform tech support again.

That having been said, the L1 support guy I last spoke to who condescended to me and told me that refronting my new to me laptop was too effort intensive, and that it was better for the various tech groups to redo each little bit in a lovely roundrobin of me never getting the thing back. Two minutes after the actual people-doing-the-work showed up, they said "Oh, we'll just refront and start from scratch. Much easier."

Hmmph.

Hey, does anyone know--when a cellphone incoming call messes with the stereo, is it messing with the signal at the wires or at the speaker?

Way back when, when I did computer support I had a call about a printer that wouldn't work. I got down to the printer and discovered that it wouldn't power up. I traced the plug back to a power strip. I traced the power strip to a an extension cord. I traced the extension cord back to the same power strip.

That's pretty classic. I've had more "It won't work" and the device isn't plugged in calls than I can count, but I've never had someone actually plug something into itself.

My all time favorite (and I think I've talked about it here before) is the nurses who called me to say their PC kept making a really loud noise and there was a burning smell. I go down to their office. I don't smell or hear anything. They tell me the noise is intermitent. So I crawl under the desk to check the PC and see if the fans are running and maybe I'll catch a whiff of the smell when I get closer to the machine.

As I'm under the desk, I hear this horrific racket right behind my head. The nurses immediately tell me "There it is! Can you hear it?"

I climb out from under the desk, open the desk drawer, extract the pager set on vibrate that was inside and hand it to one of the nurses. "Problem solved."

Of course, my desk-crawling days are behind me at the moment with this stupid re-org.

Two minutes after the actual people-doing-the-work showed up, they said "Oh, we'll just refront and start from scratch. Much easier."

No kidding. SOP around here is unless the new person is going to be doing the exact same job as the previous owner, the machine gets wiped and reinstalled before being transferred. Saves on a lot of headaches.

Man. I have made some really dumb tech support calls in my life. Really dumb.

Saves on a lot of headaches.

I was talking to a guy who insisted on using the old version of my Notes ID on the network, despite it being a notebook which was used disconnected (duh) all the time. He also insisted I had no choice but to run MS Office from the networks.

Sometimes you just want to get off the phone and get to the automated system, or grab one of the techs as they walk past (I sit a couple cubes from their door, and I make a point of being friendly with them. Not people on whose bad side you want to be).

Kalshane--did you find people who put in dud calls (like the nurses) were blasé, defensive, or apologetic?

The place I did tech support at did a lot of stuff I thought was insane. There was no network for the PCs, so we strung tons of printer cable so that people could print. There was a separate set of cables for the mainframe to hook up to terminal emulator cards. There was another separate set of cables for the AS/400 to hook up to another set of emulator cards. It was not unusal to have computers with two terminal emulator cards, two serial ports, two parallel ports, and a modem for true IRQ hell.

tell me something nice or happy. please.

I got two VIP tickets to go see Ellen Degeneres when my mom is in town at the end of April.

(Okay, maybe that's not happy for YOU, but my mom is stoked)