CALLER: “The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty
period. How do I go about getting that fixed?”
TECH REP: “I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?”
CALLER: “Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer.”
TECH REP: “Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped. Did you receive this as part of
a promotion at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it
have any logos or trademarks on it?”
CALLER: “It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotion. It
just has '4X' logo on it.”
At this point, the Tech Rep put the caller on hold and burst into laughter. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and had snapped it off.
 
CUSTOMER: “I just purchased a Power Macintosh 8500/120 and an external
gigabyte drive. Can I put all my files, programs and folders on the
external drive?”
SALES REP: “Certainly. You can keep anything you want on the external drive.”
CUSTOMER: “Good, because I don't want to keep anything on the internal drive.”
SALES REP: “Why not?”
CUSTOMER: “I don't really know, it just looks better that way.”
SALES REP: “Don't you feel like you're wasting a gigabyte drive by doing that?”
CUSTOMER: “Hmmm. You have a point there. I never thought of that.”
 
“It works fine, until I take the CD out of the machine. Then I can't get it to run at all. Does the CD have to be in the machine?"
 
Just before 9:00 am, I received a call from a man who had purchased a Hewlett Packard 310 inkjet printer from us, to complement his new PowerBook 5300. At the beginning of the conversation, all I could ascertain is that he had a PowerBook of some sort and the HP 310.
The gentleman had called because he was concerned with the warnings he had read about installation of the printer, and wanted to know if I could talk him through it.
The first thing I asked him to do was to restart his Mac and hold down the shift key, until he saw the message “Welcome to Macintosh...Extensions off”. After the second time the startup message failed to say "Extensions off,” I asked “Sir, are you holding down the key that says shift on it?” (I had mentioned shift several dozen times by now.)
“No,” he began, incredulously. “I'm holding down the long one in the middle... the space bar, I think.”
After two more attempts, we finally booted with the extensions off. I then asked him what disks had shipped with his printer. I determined which he needed to use, and asked him to insert it in his disk drive.
“Where would I find that?”he inquired.
“Well, sir, what kind of PowerBook do you have?”
“It’s a 310.”
“Sir, that's your printer. What kind of PowerBook do you have?”
“It’s a 530.” (At this point I gave up this questioning simply assuming he had one of the 500 series PowerBooks.)
“OK, then... the drive would be on the right hand side.”
“There's no place on the 310 that this disk seems to fit”
“Sir,” I sighed, “You need to insert the disk into your Macintosh.”
“Oh, OK. Which way does it go?”
“The label faces upward and the metal shutter goes in first.” (It took several minutes to get the disk inserted into the drive, but I'll spare you the details.)
While it was installing, I figured I'd try again to find out what kind of Mac he had. As it turned out, he had a 5300, not a “530.”
“Sir, when you bought the printer, did they tell you that you would need to get a software update from Hewlett Packard before this printer would work with your computer?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
It was downhill from there.
Tech Support Tales compiled by
 
Eric Hausmann is a Macintosh Technician and Co-Sysop for two Florida BBSes. He welcomes commentary and submissions at Junkspill@aol.com.
