I can't think of any single awesome story, so here are some of the better ones:
1. First month on the job, along with another new guy. He is working on a fairly big customer's system. Somehow/somewhere along the way he just dumps it on me cause he isn't making any progress on it. Needless to say it was an early Pentium 4, full tower chassis, with a SCSI setup, and tape backup. XP was hosed, his main drive was borked, and he wanted the system recovered from a tape backup... Sounds easy enough. Drive installed and configured, easy. He brings me a box that contains a CD he made that is supposed to be used with the tape drive in case the OS drive is damaged. I read through some documentation on it and it seems straight forward. Boot from the CD, but it can't see the SCSI card or the drives...? Now we have had the system over a week and the customer is calling at least everyday now. I read a little more and decide that I should be able to get it to work by installing XP on the system, the tape software and doing it that way. Get it all up and working, pop the tape in, and it sees the backups. I think I'm home free. Select the backup and start the restore. Meanwhile the customer is now calling three or more times a day. Restore failed. WTF. Try something different, several hours later failed again. End up calling Seagate support (maker of the tape unit) and get pointed in the right direction...try again fail again. Call back, another piece of information, try again....fail again. Customer getting UPSET. Call back the third time, and find the critical piece of information - that the backup index has to be loaded and linked to the correct backup volume. I just ask the Seagate tech if they made it intentionally vague so average people wouldn't screw with it and he pretty much answered with a "Yeah, pretty much.". Three hours later, fixed and done. Customer was happy that he didn't have to reload his software so that was good.
2. Had a teenager drop of a system he was building because it couldn't load windows. Brand new AMD64 FX chip with OEM heatpipe setup, drool. Boot it up and first thing I notice is overclock fail warning. Oh REALLY?. Pop into the bios and default it all. Reboot and run memtest, passes. Load up specific settings for the ram, rerun memtest and passes. Install windows no problem. Call the customer and tell them nothing is wrong with it. Now the fun comes when mom comes with him to pick it up. She begins to question me why we didn't find anything wrong with it. She pulls out her, "I'm A+ certified" card and I almost blow a gasket. I just look her dead in the eye and say, "I've been doing this for years and that system will work perfectly fine if your son isn't trying to overclock the living day light out of it." She just kind of looks at her son, looks back at me with that "my bad" kind of face and becomes all nice... She pays and as we hear them leaving she begins to berate the son on the way out the door...
3. I didn't personally do this, but I was the manager of the store at this point so I ended up with all the heat. Had a tech doing a simply memory upgrade on a Dell laptop. Might have been a 1505 or 1050, something like that. Anyway it died. Like DOA, no power, nothing. And it wasn't really anything that he did. You could google this model laptop and they all died randomly, even Dell had knowledge of the fact. Needless to say there was a lot of yelling, it made it to the local news/shady business segment... I'm not sure what the owners did about all that.
4. Again as a manager. A new system we built for a customer would not load windows for him (we do load windows to verify that it will before it leaves.) He is not happy, but he didn't not pay for an OS, or for us to install his OS, so I wasn't just going to do it for free. But I would test it out just in case we miss something. We go through it with a fine tooth comb and install windows straight from a cd. It all works great. He comes picks it up and calls back 30 minutes later yelling at me that it does work. After ten minutes or so I get him calmed enough to have him bring in the system and what he is installing on it. We figure it out after about 20 minutes that he has a pre SP1 XP disc...which doesn't really work on any later hardware. Needless to say I make him a new slipstreamed disc and do a preload of XP for him at no charge. I explained what the problem was and what I did to fix it. He was going to return it if it didn't work again. He called back the next day to say it was working great.
5. A nice college girl and her mom came in when her laptop wouldn't charge. Looked like the power cord was chewed on by rats for a decade... That's the problem right there, hell didn't even need to check anything to tell her that. We didn't have a replacement unit in that would work... So I offered to try and fix it for her. It wasn't pretty at all, but man she was happy. I totally wouldn't have even offered if it wasn't for the fact we were dead slow and she was pretty hot.
-tripped a breaker once while installing an AT power switch wrong.
-removed a PSU that had a bug infestation.
-had a customer rip me a new one for not building his PC with a graphics card that could do S-video out. He said his cable wouldn't fit into the port on the graphics card or the adapter that came with it. I asked if he was using the right end of the adapter.... He apologized and thanked me for putting up with him.
-had a customer that would call once a week and ask about those "Pen-ten-ium 4's"...
-did home pickup/delivery for a blind lady that smoked like 4 packs of Marlboro reds a day. She was rude and berated you any chance she got.
-had a customer that ran an adult video store just down the road. Did a drop off there one day. I swear the cleanest, well lit, nicely organized place I'd ever seen. Even had one of those porn star replica torso/hip things on display in a glass case.
-had a customer who's desktop background was a male porn star spread eagle... Guy had vasts amounts of porn - mostly gay. Needless to say his background pic got changed cause customers could see the station his computer was at.
-had a repeat spyware customer - after the 4th trip in we kindly told him to stop surfing for porn in not so many words. He was older and kind of new to the internet.
I'm sure there might be more, but that's what I can remember. Most people were not happy paying for service, but were generally nice about it. We did do work for a very sweet older lady who baked up all kinds of cookies and brownies. We did so much free work for her it wasn't even funny. She had no idea we were suckers for hot brownies.
. After about 30 minutes of fittling with the hardware inside the computer, I bang on the power supply and it magically turns on. It was a maracle, and at that point i was getting really worried that I toasted his computer. As of now his computer can turn on but says his cpu fan is unplugged and need a new mobo.
I told him that he bought the router not the internet connection and he said that "aren't they the same thing? ". I couldn't hold the anger of the ignorance so I told him "Sir, Behind the router there is a grey Ethernet cable , please check where that cable is from and contact him" then we hung up.
