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Working in Tech Support requires an abundance of patience, being able to think quickly on your feet, and a vast knowledge of any myriad of solutions. You never know what type of call you’re going to receive on any given day, not to mention from what sort of customer.

How would you handle a situation where you discovered that the root of your customer’s problem was actually…you? One guy recently shared a goofy example of this from his own life. Here’s what he said.

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem

This one’s on me.

Got a frantic call from a user saying their brand-new, expensive docking station wasn’t working.

No video output, USB dead, the whole thing.

That’s a nightmare scenario to say the least.

I ran them through every standard fix for an hour: driver updates, firmware, different cables, different ports.

Nothing.

Sounds like he’s going to have to pull out the big guns.

I was about to escalate an RMA for a defective unit.

As a last resort, I asked them to read the model number off the bottom.

They said, “It says ‘AC/DC Adapter'”.

Maybe that turned out to be the magic word?

Turns out they had plugged the laptop’s power brick into the USB-C port on the dock, and the actual dock’s power supply was still in the box.

The docking station was just… unpowered.

We’d been troubleshooting a device that was functionally turned off.

Welp, you can’t win them all.

The silence on the phone after they realized it was profound.

I didn’t even say “I told you so.”

Sometimes the solution is so stupid it humbles everyone involved.

At least the customer in question was courteous all things considered.

Let’s see what the Reddit comments had to say about this one.

The comments section could relate all too well.

And most took the time to share their own stories.

One person provided validation.

Another reminded us of the Golden Rules of Tech Support.

And someone else pointed out the universality of the experience.

Even the Tech experts aren’t immune from needing Tech Support.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.