The Help Ticket of Shame

Ever have the help ticket that will not go away? Can you imagine it coming back to haunt you 10 years later?

Microsoft can probably tell you all about it because in a story that will probably be coming back to haunt them for at least another 10 years, a blogger reported Jan. 13 that Microsoft had called him Jan. 8 about an open help ticket–a help ticket that had been filed on Jan. 8, 1998.

The blogger, BIC, who goes by his initials, theorized that the tech support person who called his parents’ house (where he had livedin 1998) must have used the numbers across the top of a keyboard, but instead of typing 1/08/08 mistyped 1/08/98.

Though some believed it must be a hoax (one far-fetched hoax theory is that BIC blogs on the Blogger platform, owned by Microsoft’s archenemy, Google), most pundits immediately had a field day with the story, laughing at what they consider an appalling service track record on Microsoft’s part.

But the parties involved were less irked.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that they would look into what caused the delayed outreach, and BIC himself (or herself) considered Microsoft placing the service call “a testimony to their superior technical support.”