The article title is Stupid User Tricks, but some of those stories sound like stupid IT tricks.

Our former problem reporting system had room for a short abstract, and then nearly infinite room for the problem description. On more than one occasion, we received problem tickets whose abstract read "it's broke" and the description was empty. Sadly, not only was the user "uninformative", but the two levels of support below us had just passed it on without any action.

Interestingly, our new system has a finite (and rather small) area for problem description, so the customer's comments are often cut off right in the middle of a word.

Here are three experiences I've had over the years with my previous employer:

Though I'm primarily a programmer, DBA and sysadmin, I've occasionally been drafted into doing PC support. Back in the days of 5.25 inch floppy diskettes I was called by a user who needed help recovering "very important" data from a diskette. When I arrived at her desk she presented me with a diskette that looked like it had been around the block a few too many times. It was unreadable on her machine, so I took it back to my desk and tried some data-recovery tools on it, but without success. So I told her it couldn't be salvaged and she'd have to rely on her backup copy -- which, of course didn't exist. She was quite upset because she said she would have to recreate all the documents on it.

When she asked what caused the problem, I told her the diskette probably was defective or damaged from overuse, but that it might be a problem with her diskette drive. I asked her if she had another diskette we could use to test her drive and see whether it was causing any damage. She gave me a diskette which we were able to read on another PC, but after saving a file on it from her machine it became unreadable on either PC. I told her I would order a replacement diskette drive for her. Then she asked me to "fix" the test diskette. Yep, you guessed it: She had given me her only copy of *another* important diskette to test the defective drive.

I arranged to have someone else install her new diskette drive.

On another occasion, a manager called me because he was unable to get his spreadsheet program to print. I went through the usual troubleshooting checklist with him over the phone, and asked him if he had checked his documentation. He insisted repeatedly that he had tried everything in the manual and nothing worked. So I went to his desk and tried it myself. After a few minutes of checking the setups and running tests without locating the trouble, I asked to borrow his copy of the manual so I could look up something. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, but finally opened a drawer and sheepishly handed me his manual. The pages inside the looseleaf binder still were bundled together and shrinkwrapped.

Finally, I received a call once from a manufacturing plant user who was unable to log on to the network. A few minutes' discussion on the phone convinced me there must be something wrong with his terminal, but he claimed it was working fine the day before and he knew nothing about any damage to it. I finally left my office and went to the plant with a new terminal. As I approached his workstation I noticed plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling everywhere. When asked about it he told me that the roof had begun leaking during the previous night's rainstorm. I asked if there was any chance if the terminal had gotten wet, and he said, "Well, it might have gotten a little damp." I looked at it and there was water standing on the keytops. So I picked up the keyboard, turned it over and drained about a half-cup of water into a nearby coffee cup.

A few years back our communication dept contacted someone over my head and demanding a brand new "superfast computer". Well that was approved and I was given the task of upgrading that computer. I went on ahead and ordered all the parts to make them a "superfast computer" the only thing I didn't order them was a new case, just because the old case worked fine even if it did look a bit old and used.
So afer a week or so I got all the parts in and built it for them in the old case and put it in their office. Right now they had the fastest computer on my network and I figured they were satisfied. I was dead wrong, they complained that I was blowing them off and just gave them back their old computer. Ok well I recently purchased a new case for my computer (which happened to be the same as their old computer), so I wiped my hard drive rebuilt the O/S and applications and gave them that computer. They were happy then because it looked new and fast. They never found out that they never had anything faster then their old computer and that I had a "superfast computer", I just love people like that.

As a long-time computer support person and educator, I've always observed that many IT people like to feel intellectually superior to their clients by sharing stories about how stupid they are. Personally, I think that showing disdain for your clients is a totally demeaning activity that only shows how little you respect them, and serves only to foster mistrust and widen the communication gap between them and you. It's also a good way to end up being fired. Share your stories if they teach good lessons, but please drop the attitude of intellectual superiority.

A solo-practitioner lawyer friend of mine in a nearby small town told me that she had narrowly avoided waking me up early one weekend morning. It seems that her new secretary was just not working out, so the unfortunate staffer was let go.
On Saturday morning, my lawyer friend went in to the office to get some work done and her computers would not come up. It turns out the secretary decided that before she left, she had better remove her files, so she deleted all the files with her initials, DLL.

Early last year we experienced problems with a point to point T-1 WAN connection going up and down over the course of 8 days. I checked all equipment and had the T-1 provider check the circuit, but everything looked ok. While doing testing, I discovered that one router was ceasing to function as ping response times steadily increased. Finally, I had everyone shut down their computers and had my assistant start them up one by one. In the course of this, my assistant discovered a group of outside financial auditors in a private office. Our CFO had allowed them to connect a small switch and five laptops to our network. Immediately upon learning of this, I had my assistant unplug them and the ping response dropped to normal. Plug them back in? The problem immediately started again. One of the laptops was generating foreign private IP address traffic which the routers did not know how to handle. They passed the accumulating traffic off to each other until one was overwhelmed and stopped functioning. When the auditors were in our office and connected, the WAN link went down. When they left, all was ok.

Brilliant!

Starting that day, all visitors to our offices have to sign in and indicate that they need internet access. The associate they are visiting is required to contact I.T. so we can check the laptop and monitor the network when they connect. Incidentally, the manager of that auditor team later belligerently denied they were the cause of the problem and told us we didn’t know what we were talking about. His reasoning? “We are a big accounting firm.� They were later fired as our auditor.

Danä D, M.C.S.E.
Director of I.T.
B&OI

Back when I started with a new company, there were only about a dozen computers, and about 8 were networked for the sales and accounting department. In the sales department, they were in the habit of putting information on floppy disks and handing them back and forth (instead of using the server...???). Anyway, one person was assigned to erase the floppies, and would open a DOS window (default to c:\Windows), go to the A drive (A:\) and type Del *.* Effective, until I got a call that her computer was dead. She had somewhere mistyped the command to go to the A drive, and deleted all the files in the Windows directory. Not once, but twice! Finally got them to start using the server for file transfer, and the problem went away. Now up to 70 computers and 3 servers, and no more problems. Amazing...

I had so many of these stories, I devoted a Blog to them: http://foolsoft.blogspot.com/

We had several users leave for another country and we gave them data aircard, through our cell phone provider, in case they do not have Internet access in the location that they are in. One user decided they would call home with skype over the aircard thinking that they were saveing money because skype was free. It cost the company $17,000 the first month for just that one individual the rest of the company was $6,000 for cell phones and aircards.

Our telecom coordinator relayed this story to me: a woman in our office brought her telephone with her to a different office within our building. Spying an open phone jack, she plugged in the cable. To make sure the phone was going to work, she checked for dial tone. So far, so good. Going a step further, she got out her cell phone and dialed the number to make sure the phone would ring. Nothing...the phone didn't ring. After a couple more redials and verifying that the ring volume was turned up, she finally tracked down the telecom guy to fix the problem. After a few milliseconds of troubleshooting, the problem was found to be that she was, in fact, dialing HER OFFICE PHONE NUMBER! She thought that her phone number would be the same as it was in her office, since she was using the same telephone! True story.

Many years ago, in the time of 5.25" diskettes, I had to troubleshoot a problem where all of a particular engineer's diskettes in the filing system were not readable. I tested a number of the diskettes and found that the problem was mechanical - most drives just couldn't spin the diskettes in their sleeves. I visited the engineer, and all his diskettes were fine - and then went to the secretary who did the filing. There she was, with a pre-labeled diskette wound into her typewriter, typing out the diskette contents on it...

Years ago when I did tech support in the DC metro area, I had a customer that kept her emergency boot disk attached to the side of a file cabinet with a magnet...I wonder why it never worked? ; )

Back in the late 80's, I was a college intern at a huge insurance company. Gene was a really nice, sharp guy and director of IT, but not the most PC literate man. About 5pm one evening, he stopped me in the hall and said "you're pretty good with these PCs. Can you help me with a problem I'm having?". Sure - no problem.

Back in his office, he has Lotus 1-2-3 (DOS) open and is typing a memo. He says "I keep having trouble getting the words to break to the next line correctly when I insert a word. Should I be adjusting the columns or is it the wrong font?" I immediately realized that 95% of the work he did was budgets and forecasts, and that his secretary normally did all the typing. In my most politically correct tone, I suggested that he try using the other application on his desktop called Wordperfect. I told him it was much better at wrapping the lines than Lotus 1-2-3, and spent 20 minutes showing him the basics. I learned, very quickly, the meaning of the phrase "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", along with the value of good user training. And there sure is value in making a friend of the Director, to boot!

I just read the 9/11/06 post about the user expecting the phone number to follow her phone. Guess what, it's the IT guys turn to be sheepish - we can do that - though we prefer not to.

Regarding the lady who took her phone to a new location and expected it to work - - - she was just ahead of her time, and thought she had a VoIP phone. That IS how they work.

In one field office location, users would download or copy data from their hand-held PC to a desktop PC with a serial cable, daily. One day a user called me saying that he could "hear" the data being downloaded and he didn't before. I couldn't resist asking him to hold the serial cable in his hand to see if he could also "feel" the data. Long story, short...a new hard drive had been installed on the desktop PC and he was hearing the hard drive which made more noise than the older drive.

A user wanted us to update a spreadsheet containing details of some laptops for insurance purposes, so she attached a copy of it.

...as a JPeg snapshot of the spreadsheet page.