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When you work in tech support, you quickly learn that the callers who seem the most confident are usually the ones who are the most wrong.

That was the case in this story where a user called to report that her new computer was broken. When the technician arrived on site, he quickly realized that the software she used was just not installed.

When he offered to install it, however, the user got upset and claimed that he was just trying to sell them something (even though they already owned the licenses). She escalated the issue to the CEO who told him to install the software.

I hate when people are like this, and worst of all, they never apologize. Read through the details of the story below and see what you think of how he handled it.

Bad command or filename

Back in the mid-90s I was working as the head tech monkey for a computer store. It was a small operation, but we had a fairly good reputation (our PCs won awards in some local magazines), so we had some fairly sizable customers.

Let’s see what happened here.

One client was a company that manufactured personal medical monitoring equipment. Their previous support vendor went belly-up, so we took over.

Most of my call outs were for minor things like installing a network printer or replacing stolen terminators from the coaxial network. They were generally a good bunch to work with, but I recall one of their senior managers was a difficult customer. Let’s call her Mary.

Users are often like this.

One day I get a call from Mary that one of the brand-new PCs that we supplied “doesn’t work”. After a bit of back-and-forth, I was able to deduce that she was trying to run some software that wouldn’t behave.

Alas, Mary was more interested in telling me how much of an inconvenience this was to her rather than give me an accurate description of the problem itself.

Just tell him the problem, Mary.

Mary also had a habit of escalating things to the CEO of their company, and wanting to stay in their good graces, I jump in the car and head over to sort things out. Thankfully, they were located just down the highway.

I meet up with Mary, who reiterates how the computer “doesn’t work” but I see that it booted up just fine and connected to their network. I ask her to demonstrate the problem. She types something at the DOS prompt.

Well, the user is faulty.

Bad command or filename

“See?” she says. “The computer is faulty!”

Computers don’t come with every bit of software on them.

I could see that she was trying to run WordPerfect, but after a quick poke around, I could also see that WordPerfect wasn’t installed (their network didn’t serve software, it was all local installations).

I ask her if she has her WordPerfect disks handy and I could set it up for her, but she blows up at me, saying things like “After selling us a computer, you expect us to supply more stuff for it?” and “You’re just trying to upsell me more stuff we don’t need!”.

I sure hope the CEO doesn’t buy her silly story.

I try telling her that they already have licensed software, it just needs to be installed, but she instead decides to escalate to the CEO and end up dragging me into his office.

She explains to the CEO that the computer is faulty because of “bad command or filename” and that rather than fix the computer, I am trying to upsell some more things that she doesn’t need.

What is he going to say?

I explain that the issue is that WordPerfect isn’t installed on the new system and that I could fix that if I had access to the disks.

The CEO looks at me for a length of time that makes me feel uncomfortable. I can see a frown cross his forehead.

Unbelievable.

He then opens a cupboard and hands me a box of disks. Yep, WordPerfect disks. I thank him and install WP on Mary’s computer, while she lectures me about how much of an inconvenience this is to her and how I am wasting her time. 😒

How do people like this keep their job. The CEO should see that she is just causing trouble and wasting time.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

This is just too funny.

It just doesn’t make sense, though.

Honestly, I can see why there would be confusion.

The company was paying him regardless.

She really thought she knew what she was talking about, but he fixed her problem anyway. If she would have just let him do his job, the issue would have been fixed much sooner.

Unfortunately, some people just can’t be reasoned with. It is such a waste of time, but at least he was getting paid.