April 19, 1992 should have been the happiest day of my life but really turned into a disaster for me. I got up that morning, took a shower and asked my good friend if I could borrow his brand new Powerbook 140. Being a nice guy and all, he said sure. I needed his machine because I was finally going to print out my thesis and be done with school forever.

My friend lived in a suburb in Chicago and I had to take my motorcycle downtown to print the thesis out. So I got on my bike, with the Powerbook on my back in a back pack, and headed toward downtown Chicago.

All went well at the university, I printed the thesis in no time at all, and started heading back to my friend's house who lived about 30 minutes away from downtown. I got on the expressway and a feeling of satisfaction and relief came over me. I was finally done with school for ever.

Well, that was my big mistake. Being happy and stuff, I started to speed on the motorcycle. I must have been going 75 MPH when out of nowhere the flap on the back pack opened up and my thesis went flying onto the highway. Not knowing what happened, I pulled over to the curb.

Now here comes the big mistake. I hadn't realized my friend's Powerbook was still on my back. So when I turned my head back to see where my thesis was, the Powerbook just flopped over and came crashing on the hard cement. OH NO! CLUNK! The screen of the Powerbook had shattered in half. OUCH!

Well, anyway, I got my thesis, which was about 50 feet back, and headed back to my friends house to return him his now broken Powerbook. When I later told him what happened, the first thing he said was, “Hey, you just bought yourself a brand new broken Powerbook.” Yup, I ended up paying him for the Powerbook plus another $900 for fixing the screen. Quite an expensive day, wouldn't you say? The funny thing is that my thesis didn't have a scratch on it!

- Eduardo Chavarri Caracas, Venezuela

The Old Switch-a-Roo
I was one of the first lucky few to get my greedy little hands on that input device of supreme toastiness, the Gravis MouseStick II. Well, I though all would be well.

WRONG! The hardware was just peachy, but the MouseStick cdev froze up my mouse whenever it loaded. I tried booting up under System 7, system 6.07, 6.08, with and without any or all of my inits and cdevs loaded, and various combinations thereof. Nothing worked.

A call to Gravis tech support (long-distance to Canada, btw) promised a reply, but none was forthcoming. Again I called. Nothing. Finally, I got fed up at looking at my sleek, expensive, comfort-grip paperweight and called Gravis yet again.

This time, I got connected to somebody who knew right away what the problem was: according to him, Gravis has petitioned Apple for a reserved ADB id, which happens to be 35. Well, Mouse Systems took apart a MouseStick and copied its design to build their Little Mouse ADB (one of which I also have), which resulted in the Little Mouse having an ADB id of 35, too.

As anybody who’s ever diddled with a SCSI chain knows, ID conflicts cause strange and wonderful things to happen. At any rate, all I have to do to use my MouseStick is turn off my computer, unhook my mouse, and reboot off of a floppy with the MouseStick II cdev on it. (I can’t have the cdev on my startup disk, ’cause I leave the joystick connected all the time)

The best fix would be to but another mouse (Gravis said just about any other one would work), but not all of us can afford to drop $75 for an electronic rodent. So, for now, I’ll stick to playing pick-the-plug. It’s not an elegant solution, but it works—kind of.

- Black Mac

I worked as Macintosh Technical Support for a state agency. One day a user called for help complaining that she had moved her Mac to a new desk and now it was not powering up.

The users were really not supposed to move their computers without consulting us first, and I envisioned the many catastrophes which could have taken place in the 20 foot move.

I asked her the standard questions: Is it plugged in? Is the power strip on? Are all the cables connected? She answered yes to all my queries, and I told her I would immediately come over and take a look at it. I was thinking that it might be a bad keyboard or power supply, so I lugged the appropriate equipment to her office.

Sure enough the Mac would not power up from either the keyboard or the power button. I proceeded to double check all the cables. I followed the Mac’s power cord through a jumble of cables to the power bar. The power bar’s switch was in the on position (the bar had no power indicator light), so I followed its wandering power cord through the gnarled mess of cables to see where it led.

Much to my amusement, she had plugged the power bar’s cord into one of its own outlets.

- unknown

One of our clients ordered an Quadra 840AV, but explicitly did not want the internal CD-ROM drive which comes standard in that box. This was not a serious problem, and I removed the CD-ROM drive before I delivered the unit to the customer.

Unfortunately, I did not have the blank bezel (or faceplate) with which to cover the drive bay’s opening, so I left the CD-ROM slotted bezel in place. I set the system up for them, gave them a quick lesson on it's ins and outs, and told them I would be back in a couple of days to replace the bezel.

I returned two days later and opened up the case of the 840 to install the new blank bezel. Inside the 840AV where the CD-ROM originally resided, I found about two dozen post-it note slips.

Puzzled, I asked the operator why there were slips of paper in his Macintosh. I was told by the startled user that he had put them in there because he thought that the original CD bezel, with its long slim opening, looked like the trash recepticles that are in automated teller machines.

- unknown

While speaking with a gentleman who was having problems with his Mac Plus, we were going through the usual questions.

At one point I asked him, “Has your computer crashed lately?”

“Well, no,” he replied. “It’s been sitting here on the desk the whole time.”

- unknown Mac tech supporter

About a year ago, I was called out to do field service. When I got to the lady's house and was let in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder. The second, the double barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying on the couch. Third, the big gaping hole in the side of her compact Mac.

I looked at her. She was a little grey haired woman, around 60 or so. Had she? Not possible. Still, I had to ask.

Me: "Did you shoot...?"
Customer: "Yes, I got a little mad at it. They told me I couldn't hurt it, but I think they were wrong. Can you salvage anything?"

I mumbled something about not being a Mac tech and told her I would send one out as soon as I could. Then I burned rubber out of there.

About a month later, my boss called me in; he had the woman on hold. She had apparently complained that I was not competent and that I had lied when I said I would send out a competent Mac tech -- or perhaps I just hadn't been able to find anyone competent working for us. I filled him in. He paused for a second, picked up the phone, and said, "Ma'am? Did you put a shotshell into your computer? ... Uh huh...I'm sorry, ma'am, we really can't...well, no.... I'll try to send one out.... Nice doing business with you...." He hung up, looked at me, and said, "You think any of our Mac techs will go?" I shook my head. "Me neither."

We heard from her again last week, when my boss told me that the woman had called up to cuss me out, saying not only was I a "young whippersnapper" but also a liar, since one of our competitors had fixed her computer just fine, even fixing the little scratches and stuff on the monitor glass. That sounded fishy, so I went over and talked with the techs. After a case of canned drinks and a few bags of junk food, I wormed the whole story out of them. Apparently, about the only salvageable part was the hard drive (which the buckshot had missed), so they took it out, went out and bought a whole new compact Mac, slapped the hard drive in, and presented it to the lady as her repaired computer -- of course charging her an arm and a leg.

Back in 199x when one of the computer labs upgraded from Apple IIe computers to Macs, one student came to me because she was having problems with the new computers. She had "reformatted" her 5 1/2" disks by trimming them down with a pair of scissors so that they would fit into the 3 1/2" drives.

Working as a service technician for a large telecommunications equipment manufacturer, I was forwarded a call from the helpdesk concerning a woman whose Macintosh IIfx had what appeared to be a bad power supply. I went out and replaced it.

Several hours later, I was again forwarded a call from the same woman asking for me by name. She stated that the power supply had not fixed the problem and that her machine kept shutting itself off. It figured, while improbable, the new power supply might have been bad, so I grabbed another one and went to check the system out.

When I got there, she was typing away, saying it had come back on just after we had hung up. I told her that I had brought a new power supply with me and, to play it safe, it might be wise if I replaced it anyway.

So I replaced the power supply and fired the machine up. While it was booting, she fidgeted with the lampshade on a small desk lamp. Making idle conversation, she explained that she had just bought the lamp for extra light but that it usually caused bad glare on her screen.

Me: "You might try moving it somewhere else than right next to your computer."

Her: "Well, I like it where it is, and I just shut it off when I'm having trouble seeing the screen."

She demonstrated by reaching down and turning off the little red switch on her power strip.

Her: "See, see...there it goes again!"

There is nothing worse than the customer who will only believe his or her own self-diagnosis. A woman and her daughter were lingering around by the Macintosh display in our store. She told me a story that I never really grasped, but the general problem was that her daughter saved a report to a floppy using the Mac they had at home.

Later, when they tried to read the file, they couldn't find it. They had put one disk in after another, but every directory looked just like the first disk. She KNEW what the problem was and would be damned if I would tell her different. SHE knew that the disks were all kept in a stack on the desk, and that the disks all had the same data as the first one because the topmost disk "leaked" onto the others.

I told her the correct way to look for the lost file on a Mac, but she wasn't willing to accept my answer. She wandered off, and I went to help another customer.

Fifteen minutes later, I noticed that she had a second salesman cornered and was making "leaking" gestures as she presumably told him the same story. He talked for a while and demonstrated how to read disk directories. She gave him the same blank stare that she gave me and wandered off again.

Not good enough! Fifteen minutes later she had a THIRD salesman cornered and started going through her while story again. The salesman looked like he was ready to pop, so I stepped back in.

Knowing she'd never leave until we told her what she wanted to hear, I told her that after some further thought, I realized she was right. There was nothing that could be done to save her daughter's file, but in the future she should always keep each floppy in a ZipLoc bag to be sure they don't leak on each other in the future. She was instantly happy and went on her way. I'll make a bet she still keeps her disks in sealed plastic bags.

I got a call from a user installing a program on her Mac. Our software used a copy protection scheme that required the floppy to be write enabled.

The user put in the disk, hit the "double-click to install" icon and started the install. Then suddenly the disk popped out, and a message came up on screen saying, "At this point of the installation, you need to write-enable your disk. Please write-enable your disk and reinsert."

She looked at the disk. Shoved it back in. It popped back out. Same message on the screen. She tried again. Same result. So she took out the disk and looked at it. Then she picked up a pencil. She wrote "enable" on the disk. Then called tech support because it didn't work.

Over the summer a couple years back, I was working for a small chemical company as a process engineer. The secretary in the area where I worked had recently acquired a new Macintosh computer and since I was one of the few who knew how to use it, I got called when ever there was trouble. Well, one time I got called to come over and help her.

I got there and found out that she was having problems getting the 3 1/2" disk into the disk drive. It would only go about half way in and no further. I proceeded to check to see if there was already another disk in the drive and also used a paper clip to see if somehow the drive had gotten into the down position.

I was stumped... until I looked down at the disk and realized that she had put the disk label entirely on the front of the disk instead of folding it around to the back like you're supposed to.

In the process, she had literally taped the metal door shut so it wouldn't open when she tried to put the disk in. Apparently she had labeled a whole pack of disks that way.

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer."

Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.

Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't initialized."

Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
Customer: (proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it?'"

Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

Tech Support: "Sir, open up your System Folder and find the Launcher Items folder."
Customer: "I don't have a Systems Folder."

My patience with such customers was wearing thin. After a short pause:

Tech Support: "It's in your hard disk, sir. You must have one, or else your computer wouldn't start properly."
Customer: "Hard disk, hard disk...hmmm -- is that little rectangle in the top right?"
Tech Support: "Yes."
Customer: "Ok, but mine doesn't say 'Hard Disk.' It's just labeled with a period. How did that happen?"
Tech Support: "Well, you can name it anything you want, perhaps yours was named accidentally."
Customer: "Oh. What now?"
Tech Support: "Open your System Folder."
Customer: "I don't have a systems folder. Oh, oh, here it is! Ok, ok, I'm opening the Systems Envelope now."

And after an excruciating 30 minutes of how to make an alias and reminding him that he truly did have a System Folder (or, as he called it, an "Envelope") and where it was, we got his new software on the Launcher.

Ten minutes later he called me back and told me how he had written down my directions to the "Systems Envelope" so he could put more programs on his Launcher. One of the programs didn't work, however, and after another 45 minutes of sheer hell, I told him we needed to send him some new floppies.

Customer: "Hey, can you send me a dozen apples too? My wife would like to make a pie. Ha ha! Apples. Get it? Macintoshes? Ha ha. Don't you get it?"

If I had a button on my phone to administer electro-shock to this man, I would have.

Tech Support: "Yes sir, I do."

Last night, I had a woman on the phone who was trying to get her Mac's DOS card to see more memory. Not only did she change her story ten times, but she kept restarting the Mac, over and over.

Tech Support: "Let's change this option in PC Setup now, ok?"

BONG!

Tech Support: "Ma'am, why did you restart your Mac?"
Customer: "I wanted the changes to take effect."
Tech Support: "Please don't restart until I ask you to, ok?"
Customer: "Ok."

Anyway, we'd go back into the PC Setup, change something, and then, inevitably, BONG! I got so upset, I finally said to her, "Ma'am, you shouldn't restart so much, you're going to burn out your restarting coil, and that's not covered under Apple's warranty."

She got so scared, she didn't even want to restart her Mac ever again. She even told me, "Thank you so much for telling me that, I don't want to burn out my coil."