People calling the wrong number is a fairly common occurrence, and when it happens most people are pretty friendly about the mistake.

What would you do if someone kept trying to call a PC support number, but when they got you instead, they were rude when you tried to correct them?

That is what happened to the guy in this story, so finally he got sick of it and offered him some bad advice.

Sorry, I’m not PC Manufacturer support, please stop calling!

About 15 years ago a relatively large PC Manufacturer who I will not name for the sake of protecting identities offered Windows OS support in addition to hardware support for their PCs.

Well, in the State of Utah at the time, the predominant Area Code for phone numbers started 801.

About 2-3 times a month, someone would somehow transpose the “1-800” portion of the support line and punch in “1-801” instead.

That would get annoying.

This friend’s phone # was identical to theirs, the difference being the toll free area code vs the local area code.

99% of the time he’d tell them “yeah you need to dial the 800 #, you dialed 801” they’d understand, apologize and hang up.

Well one older guy who hated himself, humanity, the neighbor’s dog, Wednesdays, etc. called him and rather than accepting his error, just pressed “redial” on his phone.

He was pretty rude too.

Each time he called he would become more agitated and escalated with insults, general annoyingness and demanding help with his Operating System.

Finally after a few calls the friend had enough, recognized the # calling through and answered:
-“Hi, [PC Manufacturer] Support, how may I assist you?”

LOL, yeah right. Get him fired.

-“YEAH, FIRST OF ALL SOME JERK KEPT HANGING UP ON ME AND WOULDN’T FIX MY COMPUTER, I WANT HIM FIRED!”

-“Oh certainly, I’ll personally make sure he does not work for [PC Manufacturer] as soon as this call is completed! What can I assist you with today?”

-“OldManScreamingAtClouds.mp3”

• Side note: it’s worth mentioning, this friend of a friend was a PC hobbyist and knew his way around PCs quite well, he just didn’t want to do customer service for the company for free but in this moment he just snapped. The “troubleshooting” steps I’m about to list below SHOULD NEVER BE PERFORMED BY ANYONE.

This is bad advice.

“Okay, so I know what this issue is and there is a really easy way to resolve this. First things first, I need you to navigate to “My Computer”

Okay now you should see something in there that says “Local Disk” and in parenthesis a capitalized “C”.

Please click on that.

Users should not be messing around with this folder.

Once that loads up you’ll want to locate a folder labeled “Windows” and inside that folder open another one labeled “System32.”

Excellent, now this is a known issue that happens sometimes, do you see anything labeled “Kernel” in there?

You do!?

Okay, so if you have too many of those it will slow down your computer, just select all of those and delete them.

It may prompt you for an administrator password, that’s just your normal password to log into your computer.

He will never be able to recover this on his own.

Okay, those are all gone? Perfect, now please restart your PC….*click*”.

He immediately turned off his cell phone and left it of for about 6 hours.

When he turned it back on he had about 15 minutes of voicemails to listen to and I’ve been told they were quite humorous, a bit graphic and a couple got racist.

That guy is going to have to reinstall the operating system and start from scratch, not that he doesn’t deserve it.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit think about this situation.

Yeah, it was quite mean.

Exactly right.

She is calling the wrong place.

Some people just don’t get it.

It would be so tempting.

If the guy would have been polite, this could have been avoided.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.