#1 STUNNA

What's your best (worst) story? Or have you done some thing that's screwed everything up?

I got one of each for you today. First up.

I get a call last night from one of my clients that I had replaced a video card and reinstalled XP on his machine before, including IE8, updates, Chrome, Open Office, etc. He's completely clueless when it comes to computers (and seems pretty dumb in general), I mean completely, almost as if he's never seen one before clueless.

Anyways, he calls me and tells me he can't get on the internet anymore and that Windows XP is gone. That doesn't make sense so I ask for him to tell me what happens when he turns his PC on. Does he see the dell logo, etc. He says he sees the dell logo, then the boot from CD thing (when he said that I thought ) and then he gets the start menu and a couple icons.

He says he called Brighthouse (ISP & Cable TV guys) to have them come out and fix it. Of course it's not their problem (they must get this all the time) it's a problem with his PC. So he calls me to have me look at it. So I get to his place today and sit down in front of his PC. I noticed the IE6 icon and all the programs that I installed are gone....... At this point I know it could only be one thing that would cause that but I try to rationalize it out of my mind but I keep finding more clues that lead to the same conclusion. All his documents and pics are gone, his PC has a different name, he has a different user account name, there's unknown devices in device manager, he's only on SP1 and event viewer's first event logged is from two days ago!!!! WTF!

Why? Why, would you do that!?!? How could he do that!? Did someone else do it!?

So I called him up and asked what happened two days ago!?!? He says the computer shut off by itself and then he some how booted from the CD in his drive and went through all the prompts and ended up he had reinstalled XP and deleted everything and didn't know what he was doing at the time......

HOW THE FUCK DO YOU ACCIDENTALLY REINSTALL WINDOWS!?!?!?!?!?

How the fuck do you accidentally click through like 50 prompts and delete and reinstall windows!? I'm speechless........

I asked didn't you see the prompts about erasing a previous installation of windows and loosing all the files? He says he never got warned about that. Uh yes, you do! He reformatted the drive too and I know you have to click "L" to Delete the previous OS partition.

So now I have to try and get his data back....

#1 STUNNA

Now my stupid mistake story. Yesterday I was at a clients office setting up a new Win 7 PC and transferring data from the old PC over the network. I have the two PCs next to each other since one is replacing the other at that desk. So on the Win 7 machine I'm installing SP1 and Office 2010. Now I'm at the part where it shutsdown Windows and does the configuring service pack stage 1 of 3 thing do not unplug or power off PC. Blah blah blah, whatever. Well I'm done transferring data from the old PC and want to get it out of the way so I turn it off and get under the desk to unplug it from the outlet (you know where this is going already) and I was following the cord back to its outlet and I guess I got cords mixed up in th big mess down there and I ended up unplugging the new PC during the SP install!:guninmouthp ulltrigger: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I knew I was fucked. I was just hoping I could get out of it. I turn it back on and........BSOD! Fuck! So I boot into recovery mode, auto repair finds nothing of course so I try system restore. There's two restore points, I try both and the first fails and I give up on the 2nd after waiting for 45mins for it to work. So I had to do a factory restore and do everything all over again today! That's probably the dumbest miskate I've made so far in IT.

I was working with my boss once and we were upgrading the firmware on some of the phone's we sell (Allworx) and he told me to start doing the upgrade on the phone and then halfway through the firmware upgrade he decided to unplug the phone for some reason! that phone! Couldn't recover from that one!

Beelzebub

Too many to mention.

Problem
Exists
Between
Chair
And
Keyboard

Back when I was temping for Bank of New York

I had to dis assemble a machine to get a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive out of the space between the 2 drives. And when I asked them if they had a backup of the data (which was Pension data for one of the big unions) they said what backup.

The bank had actually invested in a floating head disk reader, as shit like this had happened before.

While still at the bank. I get a call that their computer isn't working.
So I go up stairs and start checking everything, cables power....
Then I pushed the power button for the monitor and just walk away.


Now while doing qa
I had to reinstall the product I was testing on a Sequent Unix machine and I checked the directory I was in and pwd command showed I was sitting in the right directory so I issued a rm -rf * and it seemed to be taking too long, then I start seeing messages cannot remove ls.
The machine promptly stopped working after that, and I had to get an admin to com and re install the machine from quarter inch tapes (which took him all day)


and many more

The ones from my tech support days are legends in my company.

svtmike

http://support.geeksquad.com/support/expert/Warren

#1 STUNNA

he's offline.....

svtmike

Sucks to be you.

#1 STUNNA

Majofo

did you call paypal?

Anachostic

Early on in my career, back when I did PC support instead of programming, I was sent out on a service call to a lady's house. Her kids wanted to play this Barbie game or something and the game kept crashing.

I spent hours and hours there. I installed DirectX a dozen times, I updated the CD-Rom and video card drivers, I patched anything and everything. I think I might have done a full reinstall, but I can't remember for sure. Nothing I did fixed it.

In the end, all it turned out to be was a dirty CD-ROM, all mucked up from grubby kid fingers. What could have been literally a one minute service call turned in a full day ordeal because I always handle CD's by the edges and didn't flip the disc over to look for dirt or scratches.

1ogan

I went out to someone's house because their sound wasn't working. Long story short, the speakers weren't plugged in.

Moog-Type-S

AZuser

Messed up Tuesday night. Guy wanted me to take a look at his Gateway laptop because wife complained it was running too slow.

Did the basic tune up stuff first (deleted temp files, defrag HDD, checked registry, updated XP from SP2 to SP3, etc.), upgraded RAM from 512MB to 2GB.... finally ran chkdsk at the end and it found some errors. System tried to recover some orphan files, etc.., but no luck so I ran chkdsk with /F parameter to fix errors.

Laptop rebooted, started checking disk then crashed and BSOD. I tried to reboot laptop again, but BSOD again (A problem has been detected and and Windows has been shut down blah blah blah...)

At this point, I started to get worried since I wasn't sure if there was important data on HDD or not and whether data was backed up or not.

Ran Hirens and it found no master boot record.... FFFUUUUU!!!

Long story short, ended up having to reinstall XP, Office, and other programs. Luckily, no important data was on there.

Cruz_msl

Stunna- welcome to my Brother-in-law. He's the "clickidy-clickidy" guy. Picture giving the keys to a Lambo to a 13 year old. Every few months I will get a call from him saying, "All of my icons are gone again", or "This damn thing is soooo slow..." All he does is surfs for pron. I can't tell you how many times he has contracted malware from clicking the "You have been infected, click here to fix" icon. He also likes to experiment with system configurations and always forgets what he did. It's a fun challenge to try to figure out what he did.

And then there is my sister. Very typical "user". She uses my brother in law's e-mail because she doesn't know how to log into her own account on Comcast and refuses to learn. I have created separate user accounts for both but she still refuses to use it. So literally speaking, when I get an e-mail from them I don't know if it's going to be cute puppy pics or big black nasty titties! Drives me absolutely nuts.

I'm due for another visit soon.

BTW I think you should get the avatar of the year award, every time I see it that god-damn song pops back in my head! Too funny

GIBSON6594

You IT guys are almost as bad as teachers when it comes to complaining about your jobs.

Moog-Type-S

^^

1ogan

fuzzy02CLS

iTrader: (2)

PEBKAC!!!

Didn't know other people used that

phee

iTrader: (5)

:racist: