The silly things people do

Had a customer complaining that their laser printer was leaving a repeating funny mark on every page, insisted on getting it replaced under warranty - opened it up and there was a very flat cooked frog embedded into the fuser roller. They still refused to pay for the repair and insisted the printer be replaced under warranty - ended up going to small claims court where the magistrate pretty much laughed them out.

Then there was a few years ago when we had a mouse plague in the area. Customer had an old Amstrad PC that they couldn't replace with something better because it ran some very specific software that was locked to the machine and the software vendor was no longer in business. The machine stopped working - I found a mouse had been inside and piddled and crapped all over the mainboard. A thorough clean, and a few bridges made with fine wire got it running again. Customer got it back, and decided that in order to prevent it happening again, they put gaffa tape over all holes on the back of the machine big enough for a mouse to climb through, such as the gap around the keyboard connector, and some of the vent holes. A week or so later it stopped working again and they called me out. Well the tape turned out to be an impenetrable barrier to the mice, only trouble was more than a dozen were already inside the machine before they taped it up. Most of these mice had died inside the machine, and their decomposing juices had again caused corrosion/shorts etc on the mainboard. A thorough clean, a few more bridges soldered on, and a VERY large service bill, and the machine was again working.

Had one last week.Repaired a phone for a customer that had been liquid damaged. They picked it up and paid for the repair only to return the next day and abuse me for not repairing it properly. Went on about how we have paid good money to have it fixed etc,etc. On inspection it was found that when they had put their sim card in they had managed to put the battery in the wrong way around. And of course no apology was forthcoming.

Best one I've heard about was a young female who took a flatbed scanner in for repair. When asked how it happened, she admitted she sat on it to send a photo of her nether regions over the Internet.

You gotta wonder.

-mark

"Mark jb"

........ Phil ;-)

There should be a newsgroup for this kind of thing :-)

Ask any copier tech about how many glass platens they replace after the Christmas-New Year period, my favourite was the drunken flying instructor who tried to photocopy his arse only to forget it was a copier with a moving platen: he overbalanced and tipped the copier off the table to smash on the ground!.

And we all know why Phil. It would be the closest you'd ever get to the real thing.

How's that Madonna song go again? " Like a virgin.........." Isn't it your theme song?

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:18:40 +0930, Kissing Lettuce put finger to keyboard and composed:

I had a customer call to complain that she couldn't get her new CB radio to display any channel other than 88. While she was describing the problem she realised her own mistake - she had not removed the display's protective sticker.

A friend asked me to find out why her new printer was not printing. It turned out that she hadn't realised it required a data cable. Her husband had his car towed to a garage after he heard noises coming from the rear. The mechanic diagnosed a flat tyre.

I once had to replace a computer CDROM drive after the owner had inserted the D-shaped power cable the wrong way. It takes a lot of force to do that.

- Franc Zabkar

Yeah, Unidens. I've had that several times.

-Mike

Urban legends are great, arn't they ? I know most of these stories are probably true but still good enough to write a book about !

Recommended Reading - Too Good To Be True ( The Colossal Book of Urban Legends ) by Jan Harold Brunvand

I had a Double adapter/power cable for a CD Rom/5 1/4" drive which swapped the 12V rail with the 5V rail - Fried 2 CD roms before I took a closer look ....

i used to do vcr repair year's ago.

one came in the owner that had a miss hap with a glass of bear that fal into the vcr and tried to dry it out in a microwave oven. another came in, thay sed thay used wd40 in it to free it up.

Many years ago I came across a TV that was a little too far from the wall socket, so hubby had fixed it. He replaced the plug on the TV power cord with a socket, and made up an extension cord with a plug at each end.

In that instance it was a bit silly not to have just used an extension cord on the original plug/cord from the TV but your story reminded me of a similar use for doing same... When I was a kid I was part of a larger family and our only form of heating at the time was a 3 bar electric heater.

Mum was paranoid about one of the kids toppling over the heater one day and setting the house alight while an adult wasn't around or still asleep. Of course we often rose with the sun to watch the cartoons or such on TV while our parents were still asleep and often plugged the heater on ourselves despite not being aloud to. This went on and on until she nagged DAD into coming up with a solution bar throwing out the heater altogether.

The solution of course was to remove the plug from the heater and fit a female socket to prevent being able to plug the heater in to a power point directly without a short lead that had a male plug on both ends. The adaptor lead was always locked away while an adult wasn't present or with my parents while they slept. My mother is still obsessed about electricity and heaters etc and always turns off and unplugs every electrical appliance (bar the fridge) before leaving home to shop etc and she seldom ever uses a heater anyway preferring to wear more clothes or sit under a blanket with a hot water bottle. Bit weird is my mum ;-)

anxiety disorder. I have one of those but different to your mum's.

Hi all

My story

My wife had been complaining for a few weeks that the 3 1/2 " floppy wasn't working on her PC. The disk wouldn't go in all the way. I eventually got around to looking at it on Sunday & sure enough the floppy wouldn't go in. I got another floppy drive & I tried that. The disk didn't go into that either. I then tried one of my own disks. It went in both drives. I then took a real look at the floppy disk in question. My dearest darling had put a label on it it & instead of folding part of it around & over the top, she had stuck it all on the front, covering part of the sliding cover locking it thus preventing full insertion. I was a bit mad at myself for not picking this up earlier.

Back in the 80's i worked for a company in abbotsford They had service contracts on all sorts of muck including those old word proccesor/typewriters with a floppy drive, we had multiple callouts from one customers site for data loss. the units would never fail in the workshop thou, eventually we found out they were sticking the disks to the fridge with a bleeping magnet

Darren