Floundering Users

I was able to talk to the user later in the day, still flipping out as the 'lost emails' were from very important people, actors, etc. When I RAS to her system and asked her to show me she did - describing the 'lost mails' as: 'When I start a new message and type 'a' all the email that starts with 'a' show up. Of course NOW I know she was referring to AUTO-FILL and NOT missing Emails.

So I get this new user setup on their company Exchange account, go to the workstation to save their current POP messages for a migrate into the Exchange and notice over 7Gb in the .pst file. A quick exam showed almost all the messages were in the Sent folder. I explained to customer about Archiving and was told that she didn't want/need them.

Yesterday I got a call from a "friendly competitor" took over from me a client that kept making unreasonable demands, such as "baking up cookies", etc. (search my past posts for that story) and ignoring all technical advice that came from me. Did I say, he is family?

I am getting more and more irritated by users who will blame anything that goes wrong up to a week after I have done anything to their computer. While I could cite many examples, here's the latest.

Walked into the main office one day to find an employee screaming at some tech support guy half way around the country because she was unable to get the Pitney Bowes mail metering machine to update itself over the phone line.

I received a forwarded email from a co-worker from a suit upstairs asking why the attached web pages didn't show the pictures that were on the website. Obviously, the attachments were only the HTML files, and the image paths were relative to the server they had been hosted on.

As we all probably do, I sell computers on the side. My normal questioning when someone asks me goes something like: "What do you want to use this PC for?" and "Will anyone be using this for gaming?"

I recently quoted a price for a dual proc quad-core, high-end gaming machine. When they got the quote, they were shocked. "All this so I can play Solitaire?"

I have a user that loves to call people on speaker phone, then gets up and wander around, frequently turning their back on the phone. I try to be polite about it when they call me, but I constantly have to ask "what?

One problem I run across many times is when a user diagnoses a problem under the guise of describing the symptoms, to wit: "my computer is slow - I need more memory". As you may guess, more memory doesn't always solve the problem.

I can't believe I didn't post this before so...