Trouble shooting stories

A buddy of mine shared this story with me the other day from his tech support days:

He was working for some company, Novel i want to say, way back in the day (think the old 5 1/4 inch floppy disk time frame). He was managing a group of phone tech support people, and they noticed they continued to have the same problem with one client. The client would call up, saying the software they recieved wasn't able to be loaded from the disk. The tech person would, of course, after determining the disk was the issue, offer to send out new media, since the old media arrived corrupted.

Well, this went on for several weeks. They would send out the software and the client would call up for help installing the software, and it would turn out the media was bad. Back and forth, back and forth this went.

Finally, my friend decides to get involved during one of the calls from this client. He's walking her through how to install the software and such, being very careful to define everything she should do. Everytime he asks her to place a new disk in the computer, he hears this little hollow"click" in the background. At first he didn't think anything of it, but after a few times he asked her what the click is, thinking maybe there's some sort of problem with the disk drive that is damaging the disks.

"oh, that noise? It's just the sound of my magnets on the side of my file drawer. that's where i keep all these disks you send me. I use a magnet to hold the disks in place."

DOH!!

Mark

heheheh my physics teacher messed up a computer with an arc from his Van deGraff generator once, and from a huge magnet he had sitting near it.

http://www.techcomedy.com -- my fav - especially the phone call audio clips. (There's freebies available but you have to pay for a small membership fee now to hear the really good ones). I used to spend hours lmao at those.

//P.S. -- those phone calls are unedited -- a few of them get fairly "colorful" -- just a heads up.

Another good site is http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

Honestly, I lived through a similar situation!

A long long time ago I helped students as a lab monitor for a local university. A girl complained her 5-1/4" diskette was currupt. Since she had lost large portions of her thesis, I did my best to recover as much data as possible.

A few days later, we went the the same process.

Suspecting bad media, I sent her to the library with instructions to buy new disks and a case.

A few days later, we went the the same process.

At this point I knew something else had to be to blame: likely her care of the disks or maybe her floppy drive at home. Since I couldn't test her drive, I asked her to retrace her steps. Her story ended with "...and then I take them out of the case and stick them to the fridge."

Case closed.