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Hello all, I've been enjoying your stories for a while and thought I'd share a couple of my own.
I provide Tier 1 tech support to a three-letter government agency (not one of the cool ones, mind you) and basically all I do is write up trouble tickets and reset passwords. Sometimes I get to tell a caller to take the floppy disk out when they get a "Non-system disk or disk error" because apparently I am some sort of genius (actually had a customer call me that). Anyway, I was resetting this woman's password and the random password generator always creates an all-caps password with some numbers and punctuation mixed in.
ME: All right, ma'am, I've got your temporary password here. All of the letters are capitalized.
SC: okay...
ME: We got A like apple...
... I always spell out passwords phonetically since B sounds like C, D, E, G, P, etc. I tried using the Military phonetic alphabet at first, but then people started to wonder why their passwords were 50 characters long. Anyway, skip to the punchline...
SC: Okay, so you said it was all capitalized?
ME: Yes, ma'am.
SC: Is the 5 capitalized?
ME: o_O... Ma'am... you can't capitalize a number...
SC:*click*
This next story comes courtesy of my father-in-law who does Tech support for an ISP.
SC: yeah, when I try to type in my log in name, none of the numbers come up.
Dad: Okay, do you use the number pad to type your numbers?
SC: Yeah.
Dad: Is the num lock on?
SC: $h!* *click*
I provide Tier 1 tech support to a three-letter government agency (not one of the cool ones, mind you) and basically all I do is write up trouble tickets and reset passwords. Sometimes I get to tell a caller to take the floppy disk out when they get a "Non-system disk or disk error" because apparently I am some sort of genius (actually had a customer call me that). Anyway, I was resetting this woman's password and the random password generator always creates an all-caps password with some numbers and punctuation mixed in.
ME: All right, ma'am, I've got your temporary password here. All of the letters are capitalized.
SC: okay...
ME: We got A like apple...
... I always spell out passwords phonetically since B sounds like C, D, E, G, P, etc. I tried using the Military phonetic alphabet at first, but then people started to wonder why their passwords were 50 characters long. Anyway, skip to the punchline...
SC: Okay, so you said it was all capitalized?
ME: Yes, ma'am.
SC: Is the 5 capitalized?
ME: o_O... Ma'am... you can't capitalize a number...
SC:*click*
This next story comes courtesy of my father-in-law who does Tech support for an ISP.
SC: yeah, when I try to type in my log in name, none of the numbers come up.
Dad: Okay, do you use the number pad to type your numbers?
SC: Yeah.
Dad: Is the num lock on?
SC: $h!* *click*
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