It’s easy to assume that customers have failed to do the obvious and that’s why they are having computer trouble.

But this I.T. worker had to work a bit harder to solve this problem.

The oddest ticket I’ve ever worked.

I was a tier I remote support tech. This was one of my first official IT jobs, and I was a young, fresh-faced, wide-eyed kid with a working knowledge of some kind of code and the ability to install Java with over a 50% success rate.

Ring, ring went the phone. I perked up. Another customer desperately in need, on the brink of disaster, had called upon me to single-handedly resolve their problem and leave them 110% satisfied.

That was a tall order for this ticket.

This was a problem I alone had the keys to fix, so long as it was within the exceptionally narrow purview of the types of problems I was trained to handle.

“Thanks for calling Tech Support Megacorp! My name is Clickity, can I have your name and client number, please?”

There was a long pause and then the person slowly gave me their info. I plugged it into my system and BAM. I looked at the client’s info: they were based out in Washington State. A very remote office, easily three or four hours’ drive from their nearest deskside support analyst.

If I couldn’t fix their issue, they might not be up and running for days. I was their last hope.

But none of his troubleshooting panned out.

“So our computer’s been running really slow,” the guy starts out and I jump on it.

“I see! Let me see if you have any hanging processes going on? Do you know what version of java you’re running? Have you recently uninstalled or reinstalled any programs?”

No to all of these. our remote session was lagging for sure. But I couldn’t find out what was the cause.

“See it started after this storm…” the guy went onto a ramble about the weather and how they’ve been dealing with landslides and other unrelated things. Meanwhile, I keps scrounging for data in the system. The processor was just running so slow.

“…and it’s been hot and the computer smells pretty funny.”

It got even more bizarre, but started to make sense.

I stopped. “Smells funny? have you…um..have you cleaned it recently to get dust out of it?” I felt like a Genie-oos. Once he vacuumed that up he’d be all good to go.

There was a long pause while the guy presumably took the case off the PC. then– “Agh! Oh god! aaaaaahgh!” Slam. Slam. “Over there!” Strings of profanity. Then quiet.

“Sir?” I asked after a moment. “Are you still there? Is everything ok?”

“No!” he shouts. “There’s a hole in the wall, and it looks like they got in after the storm. God, they’ve built a hive.”

Finishing the ticket was also surreal.

“What?”

He repeated himself. “Can you get someone out here with a new PC or something? I know it’s hard to get someone out here and all…”

Undeterred, I assured them I’d have someone out as soon as I could. I typed up the ticket and sent it on its way, and I never heard how it got resolved. But I will never forget that ticket as I sent it on its way:

“Computer completely filled with bees. Sending to deskside support.”

Here is what people are saying.

I think he needs more than spray.

NO, really?

Not a gag anymore.

Maybe keep a beekeepers on staff.

Bees rock.

Thank goodness he wasn’t allergic. I hope.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.