Tales From the Help Desk: Six Crazy Horror Stories

By Darryl K. Taft

An end-user called the IT help desk to say his desktop computer wouldn’t turn on—during a power outage.

When an end-user could not access his virtual private network at home, IT found out that the user was connected to his router, but the Internet service provider shut down the modem because he didn’t pay the bill.

An end-user informed IT that the PC she was using kept “eating” CDs. IT headed down to her office and asked her to demonstrate the process she was using to burn CDs. The user proceeded to take a fresh CD out of its case and shove it in the gap under the CD-ROM tray. After showing her how to properly place a CD in the tray, IT opened up the case and found several CDs that had melted over the CPU. Needless to say, the entire unit needed to be replaced.

An end-user called the help desk stating that her keyboard wasn’t working, only to find out later she had spilled coffee all over it.

An end-user submitted a ticket asking, “How do I reply to an email? Do I copy the whole email and then open up a new email and paste it into it?” Uh, nope, just click on “reply.”

A user submitted a help desk ticket stating that the database was down. Turns out, his password had expired, and, of course, he couldn’t log in using expired credentials.