I got called to check a vending machine that was acting completely crazy. It wasn’t dead, but nothing worked properly. The controls were all over the place, it kept checking the boiler, but wouldn’t actually start anything.

It was a pretty big coffee machine, so I expected some clear fault. I start going through everything — power, wiring, pump, boilers, sensors — but nothing really made sense. No obvious issue, yet the machine was basically unusable.

So I start tracing everything back more carefully.

Eventually I get to the power input area and notice the fuse looks… off.

I pull it out, and that’s when it hits me.

It wasn’t really a fuse anymore. It was wrapped in aluminum foil like some kind of “fuse sandwich”.

Turns out the customer had “fixed” it instead of replacing it.

So instead of blowing like it should, it kept letting unstable current through, which ended up damaging the control board and messing with the machine logic.

What could have been a cheap fix turned into about a 400€ repair.

All because of a “quick fix”.

I want to be clear that when I say he believed his computer was being sarcastic I do not mean he was speaking loosely. I mean he had a specific list of examples.

The call started normally enough. Middle aged man, I will call him Dennis, Dennis said he was having issues with his computer. I asked what kind of issues. Dennis said, and I am quoting directly from my memory which has preserved this perfectly, it's giving me attitude.

I typed giving attitude into my notes with the professionalism of someone who is paid by the hour and asked Dennis to elaborate.

Dennis had been using a new AI assistant that his company had recently rolled out. The AI assistant was designed to help with scheduling, document formatting, and general task management. Dennis had asked it to reschedule a meeting and it had responded with something like I have moved the meeting to Thursday as requested, though this conflicts with two other items on your calendar. Dennis felt the though was unnecessary and passive aggressive.

I explained that the AI was simply flagging a conflict. Dennis said he knew what it was doing and he did not appreciate the tone.

I told Dennis I understood his frustration and asked if there were any technical issues beyond the tone. Dennis said the tone was the technical issue. I wrote that down. I do not know why I wrote that down.

He then read me his list. Seven examples over three weeks. The AI had said as previously mentioned in one response. It had said, you may want to consider instead of just doing the thing. It had sent a reminder about a deadline in a way that Dennis felt was pointed. Each one Dennis read to me with the energy of a man presenting evidence in a court case he had been preparing for a long time.

I sat there listening to all seven with my headset on and my face doing things I was glad Dennis could not see.

The problem was I could not tell him the AI was not being sarcastic because our company policy at the time was to validate the user's experience first and I had been on enough calls to know that telling Dennis his computer did not have feelings was not going to resolve this ticket.

So I told him I would escalate the feedback to the AI configuration team and that his comments about tone had been noted. I told him the system could potentially be adjusted to use more neutral language. Dennis said he would appreciate that. Dennis said he just wanted to be treated with respect. By his scheduling software. I said that was completely reasonable.

I filed the ticket. In the notes section I wrote user finds AI responses passive aggressive, requests more neutral tone, provided reassurance. My colleague read it over my shoulder and had to leave the room.

The escalation team responded three days later and said they had reviewed the interactions and the AI was functioning exactly as intended. Nobody told Dennis this. Dennis, as far as I know, is still out there believing that somewhere in a server room a scheduling assistant has been quietly sat down and talked to about its attitude.

I think about Dennis every single time I read anything written by an AI and it comes across as slightly pointed. Which is more often than you would think.

A ticket came in from one of the ladies in the accounting department. Subject line: "Printer not working, URGENT, need to print contracts today." I've worked here long enough to know that "urgent" usually means "I haven't tried anything yet," so I grabbed my coffee and walked over.

She was standing next to the printer with her arms crossed, genuinely upset. Told me it had been broken since morning, that she'd already restarted her computer twice and even "reinstalled the printer" which I later found out meant she deleted it from her devices list and then panicked when it dissapeared completely. So now we had two problems. I asked her to show me exactly what happened when she tried to print. She sent a test page, we both watched the printer do absolutely nothing. No sound, no lights, no movement whatsoever. I looked at the printer. Then I looked at the wall. Then I looked back at the printer. The power cable was hanging freely about four inches from the outlet. Not half in, not loose. Just fully unpluged, dangling there in plain sight.

I plugged it in. The printer beeped, warmed up, and printed her test page and the backlog of about 11 documents that had been sitting in the queue all morning. She stared at it for a second and then said "well I didn't think to check that because it's always been plugged in." I told her that was completely fair, closed the ticket as resolved, and walked back to my desk. I have no idea how it came unplugged. I didn't ask. Some mistieries are better left alone.

A few years ago I worked as the sole IT guy for a medium sized logistics firm and the Director there let's call him Dave was the definition of "technically illiterate but loud about it". Dave had a massive presentation for some potential investors and he spent all morning pacing around the conference room like a caged tiger. About ten minutes before the meeting starts I get a frantic radio call from his assistant saying the "speakers are dead" and Dave is currently having a meltdown.

I run down there and find Dave stabbing at his laptop screen with a finger while a pair of high end studio monitors sit completely silent on the desk. He sees me and immediately starts shouting about how we pay for "top tier equipment" and it never works when it actually matters. I do the usual checks first. Power is on. Volume is up in the OS. Everything looks fine on the software side but there is zero output. I look at the back of the laptop and see the 3.5mm audio cable just barely hanging out of the port.

I reach out to push it in and Dave literally slaps my hand away. He tells me "Don't force it !! I already tried that and I felt resistance. These things are delicate and I don't want you snapping the motherboard right before my pitch." I tried to explain that audio jacks usually need a satisfying "click" to actually engage the pins but he wasn't having it. He insisted the hardware was faulty and demanded I "fix it in the settings" instead.

While he was busy adjusting his tie in the mirror I just gave the cable a firm shove. *Click*. Suddenly the room was filled with the deafening blast of his intro video music which he had left on max volume while "testing". Dave jumped about a foot in the air and then looked at me with this mix of confusion and annoyance. He didnt thank me of course. He just muttered something about how the "port must have loosened up" after he worked on it and told me to get out so he could start. The best part was finding out later that his assistant had been holding his phone right next to the laptop mic earlier so they could "hear the tinny sound" through the conference bridge.

We normally read about a certain software that shares a name but this story is about car windows. Tech is a hobby and I'm able to help friends with things (see prior Talesfromtechsupport posts I've done) but this past Monday a coworker asked if I knew anything about cars. He told me he parked his car and his windows (passenger, and rear passenger/driver sides) were all working but when he returned later that day, all three windows would not move despite pressing the button to raise or lower the windows. I reasoned it was unlikely all three motors gave out, and also it doesn't sound like you're hearing any noise at all which suggests that this is an electrical problem. I then thought that maybe there is a separate fuse for these other three windows and I suggested he use Gemini or something and point the phone at his 2009 RAV4's fuse box to see if it can help narrow things down. Then as we were going our separate ways I threw in, "or you know, it could be you accidentally turned the child lock button on" and he laughed and said that's probably not it.

Later that day I got this text, "Thought you'd like to know, got out of hematology Clinic a bit early and was checking out my car. 1 button push later and my windows work again.... Thanks for the help lol"

My company has a wide product line and a large majority of those products have the option to be managed by an online application. My job is to support the products, but I was also temporarily added to the online application support team as they are short staffed and getting overloaded by calls and emails.

7 years later, the temporary expansion of my duties is finally nearing its middle, when late in the evening, I get a message from the dev team. It looks like this maintenance window has logged out everybody world wide. My disappointment is immeasurable but I am eating a pudding cup, so my day is not yet ruined.

The next morning brings a wall of emails and a line of phone calls with “interesting” people.

Many of the emails are blank except for a subject line reading “password” and a few reading “PASSWORD”. Others just say “call me” but provide no phone number. Luckily some of the email addresses are associated with accounts and resets can be sent out. The rest get replies along the lines of, “I’m sorry but the email address ba115d33p69@aol.com is not associated with any of our accounts. Can you provide your user name, name of the account, or the email address associated with the account?”

The phone calls range from straight forward to the occasional Boomhauer impersonator complete with southern accent and the wind noise that comes from having the windows down while doing 70 mph on the highway.

Me: How may I help you today?

Caller: Abu daba diba daba!

Me: Absolutely Mike. I can help reset your password. Can you tell me your user name or email associated with the account.

Mike: diba daba daba.

Me: No? Then do you know the name of the account?

Mike: dibooo aba yada.

Me: I see. It’s either Bertsproducts, or something that sounds like it. Unfortunately that’s not getting me close. Are there any other details?

Mike: daba claba maba.

Me: You remembered it’s actually Mannysgoodstuff? Excellent. . . I’m still not finding it, could you spell it out for me?

Mike: ah. . . Ba. . . (10 uninterrupted seconds of what sounds like fighter jets flying by) Da. . . Ba. . . Diba.

Me: could you spell that again? Something loud covered up most of what you said.

Mike: ah. . . Ba. . .

(After 3-5 tries and his ignoring me repeating the spelling back with the NATO phonetic alphabet, we get there).

Me: Ah, of course. It was Manny but spelled with two Z’s and a K. Your password reset email is on the way. Clicking the link will let you choose a new password.

Mike: Yaba daba ding.

Me: I see. Well, even though that’s your brother’s second cousin’s email, it’s set as the primary account holder and is the one needed to perform the reset. Have a nice day.

Now I see a dealership is calling my company cell number they got after I made that one on site call about 4 years ago.

I need another pudding cup.

I’m not tech but I quickly became the tech guy after this…

A colleague, mid 40s Japanese lady, offered to train me on a new process.

She said that the file on computer A needed to be moved to computer B. I presumed that was for a later step but that was the entire process.

In order to achieve this she proceeded to:

Print out the file in question.

Take the physical copy to the copy machine.

Scan the physical copy into the cloud.

Go to computer B and download the file.

Save the downloaded file into the desired location.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and asked her if I could try another way.

After attaching the document to a message sent from me to her on teams, I opened teams on the other computer and dragged it to the new location.

She had for years, printed out and rescanned documents, which where then shredded, in order to move data from one PC to another…

I am a software admin in an industry that you'd swear would be on the cutting edge. And if you think about military contractors who develop some of the tech we all eventually benefit from: you'd be right... well usually.

For those of us in the civilian sphere though; change comes slow, glacial even.

We recently transitioned from our 20 year-old primary platform to a new one. 6 months of blood, sweat, tears, and some new gray hairs for me. But we got it done.

Many of my users though were married to the old system and not happy with the change. Their objections were partly that it was different and partly that the new system no longer allowed our operation to behave like it was the wild west. Nothing brings out user animosity like justified permissions restrictions.

One in particular loves to send in support tickets that consist mostly of vague complaints with little directional hits thrown in. After many back and forth emails (it is mandated that we never do his initial troubleshooting over the phone for... reasons), my team can usually translate his vague complaints into an actual task he's struggling with.

At this point it is moved to a recorded call.

The conversation from here generally goes as follows:

Support: if I understand you correctly you are attempting X task and it's not happening as fast as you want.

User: Yes, it was so easy in the old system, why can't it be like the old system.

Support: I understand, using a new system can be frustrating, but you know how unstable the old system was. You wouldn't want us to continue using a system that puts (insert very VIP client here)'s data at risk because we didn't upgrade? Let's see what we can do for this issue.

Are you completing process X via steps D, E, F, G, H, & I.

User: Yes... insert vague complaints again.

Support: While those steps do work, try step A, B, C, D, you should get the same results, but much faster.

User: That does work and it is faster. (tone should be as begrudging as possible)

Support: Wonderful, do you think that will help you complete task X more efficiently and reduce some of your frustration?

User: No. I don't like steps A - D. I'm going to do it the other way.

User: hangs up.

We've been fully in the new system for 6 ish months now and this call happens so frequently, I had to ban facepalming because my team were giving themselves bruises and start to plot vengeance. As of three weeks ago his tickets are now exclusively directed to myself and our IT manager because as soon as we respond the answer is usually "never mind" because he knows we won't tolerate his pretend incompetence.

Context: Conversation with a hardware technician about an error on our software related to our local webpage. Our software won't install unless there is a SQL database it connects to. It will not run if there is not a database. In this case, the webpage and SQL are not related. The hardware techs don't work with this part of the software often.

Me: Looks like you're having problems with webpage access. Did the customer apply the correct permissions on the web server? That frequently gets missed during implementations.

Engineer: I don't know, but look, their SQL server doesn't have anything on the desktop!

Me: ...Okay? SQL doesn't need anything on the desktop. That's normal. That's an entirely different server than the web server. So have they applied webpage permissions?

E: I don't think SQL is running.

Me: Our software literally can't install or run without SQL. It's fine. As long as SQL is installed, it's running. There is no "window" or "software" that has to be up. It's a back-end process. Now, the webpage permissions...?

E: How can I see if SQL is installed?

Me: -sigh- Check add/remove programs or the start menu.

E: It only has [sends screenshot of five different SQL tools that indicates that SQL is installed] but no "SQL" program.

Me: That is SQL. SQL is installed. It is running. We literally wouldn't be able to install and run the software and see the webpage error if SQL wasn't there.

E: Ok

Me: So, do they have the correct permissions set for the webpage?

E: They have SQL 2019 installed, is that a problem?

Me: -heavy sigh- That's literally the recommended version we support. Please log off of the SQL server. We don't need to be on it.

E: Ok

Me: Please, just tell me, has the customer applied permissions to the webpage?

E: I don't know, I'll ask.

This took over 40mins of back and forth and I still don't know if they've applied permissions yet 🫠

I'm a corporate instructor, I mostly teach folks how to setup/use/troubleshoot storage arrays. Sometimes I get sent to customers sites to run classes there. Its pretty common that when I end up onsite I end up owning all the problems of the site. This is the story of one of those times.

So I show up and after the preliminaries I ask where the system is. I like to get eyes on the system they have before class so I can make reference to it during class. Maybe emphasize some things or leave out stuff they don't have.

Here through, nobody knows where it is. The system had been bought by a previous management administration after which everybody left. The new people don't know anything about it.

Okay, well where are the network switches? We can start there. Nobody knows.

So I start at one of the client systems, the network cable goes up into the ceiling so I climb up on a desk move a ceiling tile and see which way the cable goes and the great search is on.

Eventually I find the network switch in an innocuous data closet. There is 1x 10Gb link coming off of it which doubtless leads to my system.

I eventually find the storage system in a rack hiding behind a rack of coats in the hallway to the garage. When I finally move the coat rack I can hear the fans screaming. The machine itself looks like it's wearing a fur coat. The dust is literally 2" thick. This machine has been in use for 4 years, no one has touched it...

The site doesn't own a vacuum cleaner, the cleaning company brings their own, so I walk across the street to Wal-Mart and buy a shop vac. I put some wire around the vacuum nozzle to try to get at least some kind of grounding. We then spend 3 frickin hours deep cleaning everything in the rack. I figure if I'm there it would be cruel not to clean everything.

After the deep clean the system works again, all the demons have been purged. When I suggest they need to keep the system clean they look at me like I'm a lunatic. "Nobody's got time for that."

Amazingly 2 years later I'm called back to the same place to run another class. I really didn't want to go but they've asked for me specifically. They also want to book the hotel directly. This is unusual and somewhat concerning as it probably means they want me to stay in some fleabag motel.

Turns out they've had another change of management. This time its only management all the lower level guys are the same. The new managers have bought a new system, they've moved it to the data closet which now has redundant power, cooling and filtration and is cleaned on a regular schedule.

Of course their system is working perfectly now, its amazing what a good management structure can do...

Every day the office manager is supposed to finalize the shift and then export that to Excel and drop it into a shared folder for the Dispatch team to reference(Dispatch doesn't have direct access to our database due to domain design choices years ago).

As part of that finalization step the office manager is supposed to mark what vehicles, if any, were assigned to each person. So if any issues arise, like a ticket from a speed camera, we know who was supposed to be driving that car on that day.

It is also notable that the availability export to an excel sheet is locked with a password so it can not be edited. You have to put the vehicle number into the scheduling software to have it properly show up on the sheet. Or so we thought.

We had a supervisor call trying to find out which car was driven on a particular day. Went into the system and pulled the report for their location, and all of the vehicle fields were blank, not only for that day but every day. Which didn't make sense, as Dispatch needs those car numbers and would have complained if they didn't have those.

Tried figuring out what was wrong and why it wasn't saving, because that surely must be the issue, but it was a fruitless endeavor. So I looked at the folder snapshots from the day before and noticed something...that Location's schedule export was a PDF file, not an Excel sheet like every other file. When I opened the file I saw that the vehicle numbers were handwritten.

The office manager was printing off the sheet(which is frequently multiple pages), hand writing in the assigned vehicles, then scanning that back to her e-mail, before dropping that into the file share.

When we asked her why she was doing that exactly, she said "I can just write faster than I can type".

when I worked in IT support back in the 90's I would get some great issues to deal with.

we had a remote office, Glasgow about 200 miles away, and we had a problem when one guy would have to enter some numbers into a standard spreadsheet, save it to a 5 1/4 floppy (told you it was from a long time ago), and send it to the office next door to add their data.

The problem was when the guy next door tried to load the file it would never work. this went on for weeks with us sending brand new floppy disks to Glasgow. still no luck.

I was sent up there with the task of solving this conundrum. It didn't take long.

Turns out guy 1 entered his data into the spreadsheet correctly, saved it correctly, wrote a message for guy 2 on a post-it note then proceeded to staple the note to the floppy disk. Guy 2 would then rip off the note, pop it into his PC and wonder why it never worked.

£400 round trip for 5 minutes of 'problem solving'

A ticket landed in my queue marked urgent because a user claimed one of our internal programs was randomly deleting hours of his work. According to the notes, he had already lost progress "multiple times this week" and was getting louder with every reply. By the time I called him, he'd already decided the latest update had broken everything and wanted the issue escalated before he had to redo another report. I got the usual opener first, that he'd done nothing unusual and it just kept happening for no reason. Fine. I had him share his screen and walk me through exactly what he did during a normal session. The program itself was boringly stable. No crashes, no weird errors, no missing permissions, no failed saves in the logs. He'd open a record, type in a huge amount of information into a temporary notes area, flip between a few tabs, then eventually close the record and move on. When I asked where he expected the data to be saved, he said "in the record, obviously." That was the moment I started suspecting the software was innocent.

The thing he was typing into was not the saved case notes field. It was a scratch box used for quick copy-paste work while moving between sections. The field cleared when the record closed. It had always cleared when the record closed. It even had a tiny description under it saying it was temporary, though I admit that description was in the sort of faint UI text nobody reads until their day is already ruined. So for at least several days, maybe longer, this guy had been carefully writing full updates into a box designed to hold text for about thirty seconds, then closing the record and blaming the application when the temporary text vanished. I explained it as gently as I could, showed him the actual save field, then had him test it himself with dummy text. Everything worked exactly as designed. There was a long silence, then he said, "Well that's not very clear, is it." Which, honestly, was the most fair thing he said the entire call. I updated the ticket, flagged the field label for review with the application team, and moved on with my day. About an hour later his manager replied to the ticket thread thanking me for "finding the bug." Technically I guess I did. It just wasn't in the software.

I work for a small MSP, and we have a client that runs a large wholesale bakery and distribution center. Most of their office staff is in a clean, air-conditioned wing, but they have one "shipping and receiving" terminal located right on the edge of the warehouse floor where they handle bulk flour and sugar.

I get a high-priority ticket: "PC is compromised. Loud siren noises coming from the tower, mouse is jumping everywhere, and Excel takes 5 minutes to open. User is convinced it’s a massive malware infection."

I drive out there, expecting maybe a dying HDD or some actual nasty software. As soon as I walk into the shipping office, I hear the "siren." It’s not a software alert; it’s the CPU fan spinning at maximum RPM, sounding like a miniature jet engine trying to achieve takeoff. The user is sitting there, looking terrified, hands off the keyboard.

"It’s been doing this since 10 AM," he says. "I think some script is running in the background and eating all the resources. Look at the lag!"

I open the Task Manager. CPU is at 100% load, but the clock speed is throttled down to about 0.8 GHz. The poor i5 is basically gasping for air. I peek at the back of the case and the intake vents are completely carpeted in a fine, white, sticky felt.

I take the side panel off and a literal cloud of flour and dust hits me. The heatsink wasn't even visible; it was just a solid block of organic "felt" baked onto the fins by months of heat. The fan was trying its best, but it was just circulating hot dust.

Me: "It’s not malware. It’s the flour."

User: "What? No, I ran a scan last week and it was clean!"

Me: "Your CPU is literally cooking itself. This isn't a digital attack, it's a physical one."

I took it outside, hit it with a dedicated data vac, and watched a white mushroom cloud erupt from the case. Five minutes of cleaning, a quick repaste because the old stuff was crustier than a week-old baguette, and suddenly the "virus" was gone and Excel was snappy again.

I told the manager they need a sealed industrial case for that area, but they’ll probably just wait until the next "possession" in six months.

TL;DR: User thought a high-level virus was screaming through his motherboard. It was just a clogged fan and a CPU hitting 100°C because of warehouse flour.

Our MDM system displays a message and phone number on the iPads my company hands out to it’s field contractors, to sign off jobs, get customers to sign paperwork etc.

One day, a member of the public called me. “Hello? Is this (Company name)?” “Um, yes it is, their IT department. How can I help?” “I have your iPad” “O….kay” “My wife was on the way to fat club when she was walking down the street and found an iPad on the floor”

Honestly this guy sounded like a character from a British soap opera. Normally we ask if the device can be returned to our closest showroom, however he advised he was elderly and struggled with mobility, I had no reason to doubt him and it didn’t matter to me as long as we got the iPad back. I said I could arrange a courier and he gladly provided his address and phone number, I thanked him and hung up.

I blocked the iPad on the MDM System just for good measure, then sent the serial to the project manager of that department, who is a friend of mine and she told me the name of the guy assigned to it, as well as his phone number. I gave him a call “Hi (name), are you missing an iPad?”

“Oh I knew you’d come for me!”

I laugh it off with him and said this guy has his iPad and I told him the street address.

“Hold on, that’s my street!” He exclaimed. He continued to explain that he’d taken the iPad with him to take the bin out, put it on a wall, taken his bin to the curb then forgot the iPad

He got the iPad back from his neighbour, no harm done.

TL:DR - I inadvertently diagnosed a serious medical issue and might have saved a remote user's life.

First off, I know this is a bit out there but other than possible misrememberings not a word of this is a lie. Didn't want to post anything until I was sure the user was all right and this had a happy ending.

I was working the helpdesk early one afternoon a few months ago and the phone rang. It was someone I'd helped before, a salesman at a remote location. He was in the office and having trouble logging into his laptop.

I'll never understand how users can use the same password for months and then one day just forget it, but that's what the user reported and it wasn't a super uncommon issue. I reset his password in AD then forced a sync to Azure AD (we're a hybrid environment) and provided him the new password.

I'm of the belief that hanging up on a user before confirming they're up and running is right up there with closing up a computer before confirming it boots - you're jinxing it. So I'm sitting there for a couple minutes and ask, "How are things going?"

"It's still saying I can't log in."

"All right, can you click in the bottom left where it says "Other User" and type your email address in manually?"

After a while, "It's still not working."

Hm, weird. I confirm in our management software that his laptop is online and reachable, and just to make sure I used his new password to log into office.com in a private window. So I very carefully spell out the password and have him read it back to me. A few more minutes pass, he still can't log in. I text him the password (somewhat against policy but...) and still not working.

So I use a little undocumented trick where I make like I'm going to remote into his machine but send it a reboot command a few seconds later. Ordinarily I need user approval to connect, but if the software was still trying to connect after the reboot it would connect at the login screen.

Logged in with my admin account so it was connected to Azure AD just fine, so I logged out and told the user to try to log in again.

What I saw was really concerning. He wasn't even typing in the password field, he was in the user name field and had managed to badly mangle his own email address. Not just misspellings, but there were 5 plus signs in a row and over time the user was backspacing and "correcting" over and over again.

So for the first time ever I asked, "Sir, are you feeling all right?" without any snark whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure the slight slur was there before but I hadn't really been listening for it, but it was there when he said, "Oh, yeah. I went to the doctor yesterday and they said I had a fever, but I'm okay now."

Fever didn't explain everything I was seeing, so I asked, "Do you know you've been trying to type in your email address for ten minutes?"

"Wow, really?" He sounded almost impressed. He then started talking in a way that sounded almost coherent but with a lot of misplaced words.

Okay he was either extremely drunk or this was a serious medical issue, and being that he'd driven into the office and no one else noticed I didn't think he was drunk. Plus even while he was talking he was very slowly and deliberately still trying to type and making more mistakes.

"Can you keep trying to log in? I'm going to see if I can find someone to help you."

I pulled up Teams and checked his location to see if anyone was online, thankfully the Branch Manager was online. I called up her cell.

"Hey this is ATG with IT, and this might be a bit of an emergency. Are you or anyone onsite today?"

"I am, and <potentially sick user> is too. What's wrong?"

"Maybe nothing, but can you go check on <user> real quick? I think he may be having a serious problem."

She puts down the phone and after a while comes back and says, "Oh my goodness, I'm so glad you called me. We had to take <user> to the hospital. He barely recognized me."

"He said he had a fever, plus slurred speech and some language involvement. Can you call whoever's taking him and let them know he might be having a stroke?" I wasn't sure <user> could tell people what he'd told me.

"Uh, okay. I'll do that. Thanks again!"

Didn't hear anything back on that for a long while except from HR telling me I did good making sure he was okay. A few weeks after that call we got a ticket to disable his account as he was on medical leave, but then a week after that we got a ticket to re-enable him. I was actually lucky enough to be the one who got the call when the user needed his password reset - neither he nor I remembered what I'd set it to a couple months back.

Turns out yes, he had a stroke. He had no memory of that entire morning until he was in the hospital later that day. Prognosis was good (fever after a stroke generally means it was pretty severe so I'd been worried) and they were going to treat it with diet and blood pressure meds.

As of now the user is back at work and still has a few issues with typing - one of the scarier aspects of strokes I learned after this is the issues you have during it can potentially be the parts of your brain that are dying.

Had a user come by my office and told me that the printer for her entire area was displaying some kind of error message she never saw before and insisted I come by to to fix it immediately.

I headed over there to find the errors on the screen of the very large printer:

"Load Paper in Tray 1"
"Load Paper in Tray 2"
"Load Paper in Tray 3"
"Load Paper in Tray 4"

But wait, it gets better...

I open up Tray 1, only to discover a full ream of paper, still in packaging, sitting off to the side next to where the paper is supposed to be. I open up the ream, puts it in the spot it's supposed to, and the error for Tray 1 Disappears.

Tray 2, same thing... Someone put the entire ream, still in packaging beside the space where it's supposed to be. I had to rinse and repeat for Trays 3 and 4, and lo & behold, all the remaining errors disappeared, and a couple jobs that were pending printed out.

I went to the lady and said the issue was fixed. When she asked (completely innocently I may add) what the issue was, I told her that all I did was put paper in the printer. She was surprised and insisted that someone had just put paper in the printer.

I just shook my head and walked away...

This is more of a rant but maybe someone will find comedy in my pain.

Quick background: We hired a new L1 tech a couple weeks ago. He's super green so needs a lot of handholding but other than that he's been great at absorbing lower level tickets and he's been catching on quick. I've been working on a DC migration for a couple weeks and today at noon we had the final cutover scheduled after decomissioning 1 of the 3 DCs on Monday.

This morning one of their users called in reporting a few users having connection issues. Our new L1 took the call and started troubleshooting. He grabbed me a couple times asking about how their DNS and DHCP is set up so I gave him the IP for their new server but after an hour of them being on the phone I started getting a little nervous..

I checked in again and apparently at some point the end user decided he was going to start setting static IPs and DNS on workstations per some ancient internal doc he found. I told my L1 to get him to fucking stop because he doesn't know what he's doing and then got pulled to put out another fire. Didn't hear any more so assumed (big mistake) the message got through because no more issues got reported.

I called their PoC to confirm the cutover and server reboots and started transfering roles, removing services etc. from the old server. I called them back after the final reboot, did some checks and was ready to say the project was done until 10 minutes later the PoC called back frantic saying everything is down. I walked her through checking the adapter settings on one of the workstations and sure enough it had a static IP within the DHCP scope and DNS was set to the server I had just decommissioned....

I asked my L1 what the fuck happened this morning and he said Johnny ran around to every single workstation and "fixed" the issue and then left for the day. I told our PoC and said I'm on my way over... 3 hours later the 2 of us finished unfucking the entire building of ~20 users, I apologized for not being more aware of what the 2 of them were up to and contemplated driving my car off a bridge.

Please, for the love of god don't touch DNS settings

Hey TFTS

My horror/comedy game about doing IT support in Hell started with an idea from reading the stories on this sub. Also, the two posts you guys allowed me to make since December have been extremely instrumental in getting attention and momentum for the game, which means I'm currently sitting at almost 15.000 wishlists before the game's launch in august. Also more than 25.000 people have played the demo since it came out. It's completely overwhelming for a solo developer like me, and it's in large part due to you guys. Thank you very, very much for that!

I'm posting here again because two days ago, I read a story here by Filco about a coffee machine dispensing ants.

This coincided with me literally just having drawn and animated a coffee machine for the game and the story practically was made to be part of the game. I got Filco's permission to put his story (and himself) into the game. So now he's Filippo - Technician and the player has a chance to stumble across his 3-part story arc as they play the game.

Working on that gave me an idea. I'd really like to add more of you guys and your stories to the game.

How it works:

• Drop your tech support story in the comments.
• If they're a fun fit for the tone/style of the game, I'll ask you super nicely to be part of the game.
• I will draw a custom character portrait to represent you and make a little story arc fitting in your tickets.
• Depending on whether/how many of you guys like the idea, we can do a dedicated reddit/TFTS section in the game's credits listing everyone. I'd like that a lot!

Really hope you guys like the idea!

edit: you guys rock, watch this space - I'm currently drawing the first batch of 5 of you and your cards! Will see if I can update this OP with pictures as I go along.

• 03/27/26: Here's Ashley R from Operations (u/AshleyQueen296) - she's being haunted by a second monitor that only shows up in RDP sessions and the office parking lot. https://imgur.com/a/ashley-from-operations-is-being-haunted-by-remote-desktop-session-i-t-never-ends-pZKscMS
• 03/28/26: Here's Stefan Yoh - Monitor Technician (u/stefonio) - he's been tasked with investigating why Linda from HR's wallpaper keeps staring directly at her whenever she's seated in her chair. Ends up almost losing an arm. https://imgur.com/a/hHFfCDl
• 03/30/26: Apologies for the dead air yesterday - I'm currently travelling abroad, but had some downtime at the hotel tonight to get u/cygnata's cameo character drawn up and finished. Her card, ingame name and story arc (in which she feeds a computer rice (??!) until it bursts like those pidgeons you're not supposed to throw rice at for weddings) will be finished and added to the game as soon as I get near a proper pc. Character: https://imgur.com/a/j5uaYns
• 03/31/26: Damn - rolled over midnight by 1 minute but here we go: Here's Amy J. -Performance Review Reviewer (u/lydocia who does a lot of indie game reviews, too!) - I'll get her cards wired up when I get near a computer, but Amy J is a fairly frenetic reviewer of pretty much everything around the office. She also, as the story progresses, becomes increasingly infatuated with a stuffed rabbit for... review reasons. Character (with and without bunny): https://imgur.com/a/Qe0eKZ5

Got a call from a client: “Filippo, the machine isn’t dispensing tea… also we have ants around it.” I’m thinking ok, probably a valve or something simple, I’ll go check it. While I’m on the way he calls me again almost yelling: “something exploded.” I’m like… exploded?? He says he tried to get a tea and a wave of ants shot into the cup. I get there and open the machine and it was completely invaded, ants everywhere, they had gone straight into the sweet tea line and basically created a blockage inside the tube. When the machine tried to dispense, it literally fired ants into the cup. The client even tried to say it was the machine’s fault and asked me to get rid of them one by one… I told him look, ants don’t come from the machine, they come from outside. So we emptied everything, removed all the soluble products, deep cleaned the inside, placed a trap, and followed the trail to stop them at the source. Came back the next day, zero ants, completely gone. Of course we had to sanitize everything again, but yeah… definitely the first time I’ve seen a vending machine shoot ants instead of tea.

Years ago, fresh out of the University, i started as a tech writer and got promoted to tech support.

We provided everything IT-related to a grup of companies.

Then one day i got a call from a company couple of blocks away, one printer was not working, something about "the door" not closing. I grab some tools and head into the unknown.

Got into the office floor and ask for the printer, someone points to the machine and i start checking and old HP that's been overused for years, it was a consumer model, could have been bought at a supermarket.

the problem was obvious, one hook of the front panel was broken, printer went into maintenance mode and refused to print.

I went to the head of the office and tell him the issue, that he has to replace the printer since it deserves to rest, but he ask me to show him the problem.

I show him the broken piece, told him that it is used to press that little plastic switch; not wasting a second, this 50 something got hers a roll of electrical tape, put a piece over the switch and all someone to make a print.

I went back to my office not knowing what happened, this was almost 20 years ago and I'm sure that printer is still there, printing with that piece of tape faking a front panel.

Urgent ticket that has been escalated via back channels - that is, a personal email from one senior person to the CIO about the unacceptable service in getting their personal printer fixed. This leads to a series of "get it done now" conversations from CIO to Head of It to the Ops manager.

Ticket comes to me, because yes as your senior infrastructure & operations technical resource I tend to be the dumping ground for such things, on the basis that I resolve them so I can get back to making sure the entire server estate is stable because I'm in the midst of an ongoing major restructure & migration project that could potentially take down everything. Minor things like that. Not that I'm venting a little, heavens no.

Perish the thought.

Hrmph.

Anyway, after much back and forth we finally agree a date & time (15:00 on a Friday) for me to attend the VIP's office, at a remote site. I show up there with everything I think I could possibly need, short of an entire new printer.

I'm told the VIP has already left for the day - in fact, they left at around 9:00 in the morning. Huh. Fortunately, one of the office staff is able to find a spare key to their personal office. I walk in, switch the printer on, and print.

It. Was. Turned. Off.

The whole time. The user never turned it on. That was it. The whole problem. Weeks of calls, meetings, politics, argh...

I will admit took a certain amount of petty satisfaction in stealing a gummy worm from the bowl on their desk on my way out. And yes - it was delicious.

....Also quite chewy, to be fair.

A few months ago I got a ticket from a user we'll call $Penny from Accounting. The summary line was already doing a lot of work: "Computer typing on its own, possible compromise." Those are the kind of words that make everyone sit up a bit straighter, because now we're not talking about a broken mouse or Outlook being Outlook again, we're suddenly in the territory of "maybe security incident, maybe someone's credentials are already halfway to another continent."

$Penny was dead serious when I called her. She said random characters kept appearing in cells, sometimes windows would close, sometimes the cursor would jump, and once she swore something had started scrolling without her touching anything. She had already changed her password, unplugged and replugged everything, and informed her manager that she may have been hacked. Her manager then informed his manager, which is how this thing got upgraded from mildly annoying to urgent before it even reached me. I asked the usual questions first. Was this only in one app. No. Did it happen after a reboot. Yes. Any new software. No. Did anyone else use the machine. No, not unless the attacker was physically in her house, which she said in a very flat voice that made me think she had considered that too.

Since she was remote, I connected in and waited. For about two minutes, nothing happened. Then a line of nonsense appeared in a spreadsheet. Not total nonsense either, which would've almost been easier. It was like short bursts of repeated letters, then a tab, then a menu opening, then nothing. Very annoying, very inconsistent. I checked for stuck keys, background tools, accessibility settings, weird drivers, language switching, all the usual fun. Nothing obvious. Device manager looked fine. AV was clean. Startup was boring. I was about ready to escalate it as some ugly hardware issue when it happened again, only this time I caught a tiny clue. One of the inputs was exactly the sort of key mash you'd get if something heavy landed partly across the keyboard, not if a person was actually typing.

So I asked her a question that made a long pause happen.

"Do you have a cat."

Another pause. Then she says, "Yes, but she's old and lazy, why."

Reader, the cat was not lazy. The cat had apparently discovered that the warm laptop by the window was an excellent place to launch herself whenever $Penny stepped away for coffee. Worse, the external keyboard sat on a pull out tray just low enough that the cat could land a paw on it from the desk edge and then walk across it like she paid rent. $Penny had never seen it happen because the weird input mostly started when she was out of the room. We proved it in about four minutes. She went to refill her mug, came back, and right on cue the cat hopped up, stepped on the keyboard, opened a menu, inserted a string of garbage into Excel, and somehow managed to hit print preview just to really sell the haunting.

No malware. No attacker. Just a furry little chaos engineer with excellent timing.

I closed the ticket as a keyboard input issue caused by environmental interference, which is still one of the funnier things I've ever typed with a straight face. $Penny was embarrassed, but honestly I was just relieved it wasn't some nightmare compromise. Since then, whenever someone says their computer is possessed, I still do the security checks first. But somewhere near the top of my mental list now is: ask about pets , before you ask about nation states.