PEBKAC of the year award (Little Long with language)

[Qaeria]

I had a customer call me today to complain about his Dial Up connection. Basically where the guy is, there is no High Speed, unless he wants to spend lots on satellite. He has a relative right in town that is an ADSL subscriber. Now both operate over the phone line, however most of you know that it is two completely different things. Today is a classic Canadian Winter day, complete with snow, etc, and whenever bad weather hits, you can usually expect an average 10Kbps reduction in speed via dial up. So the customer whines that he is only connected at 30Kbps. He then tells me that this is crap as he can go to his mother in law, and he's connected at 100Mbps (Tells me it is via LAN anyways) and proceeds to curse me out that his speed is so slow. He could not understand why the average download speed at his house was 2.2 KB/s, while at the inlaws, he can DL at 165KB/s.

So I try to explain that they are two entirely different services, describing the basics of each. Of course the asshat would not listen, and then proceeds to ask me about the Add/Remove Progs Ctrl Pnl. He thought that the footprint readout in the control panel took away from his Internet speed, and if he removes some apps, he should then get a screaming fast connection. Afterall, since a program occupies 20 MB of the HDD, that should free up 20 Mbps via dial up.

Hard to contain my laughter, but I eventually was able to explain that that measurement described how much space it takes up on the HDD, and has absolutely nothing to do with Internet.

After this, the paranoia sets in, where the fucktrumpet is convinced that I have this magic switch somewhere that will arbitrarily restrict his speeds. I checked our Modem Pools, and sure enough, it is weather related, and therefore nothing we can do. Once the customer finally got this through his head, he finally allowed me to end the call.

Anyways, that is our nomination for PEBKAC of the year. Anyone else have nominations for 2007?

[borise]

I've come to the conclusion that everything relating to ADSL is just plain unfair, fortunately I get good service at home and tolerable service at work but it can't be fun being stuck on dial-up nowadays.

[Primer]

I've come to the conclusion that everything relating to ADSL is just plain unfair, fortunately I get good service at home and tolerable service at work but it can't be fun being stuck on dial-up nowadays.

Oh, but it's lots of fun! Especially on days when I'm happy to be getting a 24K connection! At the moment, I have 26.4k which is considerably faster than normal.

[Jewels]

Ok, what does PEBKAC stand for? I've been racking my brain, but keep coming up with nada.

[crazylegs]

not sure on the P part but the rest is
Error
Between
Keyboard
And
Chair

I.E. the end user

[crazylegs]

Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

Ooh, thats different...

[Shabo]

Wow. I have said PEBKAC and ID 10 T errors before, but never to a customer's face. That's just asking for someone to fire you.

AOL sucks, but I must say that the ID 10 T error was on the AOL tech's side.

I had a PEBKAC from two years ago. An old retired faculty member called up trying to get stuff off of her floppy disk, which is fine. I talked her through how she could access the files... and then she told me that the floppy drive was making a funny noise, and did the disk go in silver side first or last. I'm sure you can guess which side she put in first. Needless to say, she somehow managed to *not* ruin her drive, and was able to still get the info off of her floppy. I hope she's done using them for good now. Nice lady though.

The winner of last year's award, to make a very long story short, could not find anything when I was trying to direct her to it. For example,

Me: *Kill me now!*
Her: *License to operate computer revoked*

Me: Go to the top left corner of your desktop and click on "File".
Her: I can't find it.
Me: It's in the top left corner.
Her: It's not there.
Me: In the top left corner.
Her: Oh, wait, here it is.

Rinse, repeat, for EVERYTHING. If she wasn't off campus, I would have just gone over to her office and saved myself an agonizing 30+ minutes on the phone. Ow, my head hurts just remembering that.

No winners yet for this year... thank goodness. And the year is almost over.

[Fyzzle]

I had a user that kept saying that Windows XP would not allow her to enter more than 9 letters into her password field starting one day.

XP is good about telling people that they have their caps lock key on.

This one had her numlock key off. Turns out the last 3 characters were numbers.

They WILL find a way.

[Dreamstalker]

Wow. I have said PEBKAC and ID 10 T errors before, but never to a customer's face.

I'm guilty of using the "ID 10 T error" explanation to someone's face, but this was a rather dim girl in college who I wanted to Go Away. I was able to string her along with that one for awhile, and when she finally began bothering IT because I "wouldn't help her" (um, you threw out the cables and instructions, we can't do anything as that's not hardware we support, you're out of here in a week anyway so what's the hurry?) they continued the joke (they were sick of her too). Fun was had by all. We never did find out if she ever called the people she was supposed to.

[TryNotToBeThatOne]

I know someone who claims that he used the Pebcak & 1d10t error to the guy's face, with the guy's boss running down the hall to stifle his laughter.

This genius was a salesman or something & while he was on the phone would 'computer doodle.' He would take all of his .dll files & put them in a DLL folder, ditto for .exe, etc.

My friend was the one who got summoned to straighten out this mess. My friend told him "I think it's a Pebcak error in the Id10t form.' Genius just nodded wisely. Genius's boss left the office hurriedly, but not completely out of earshot, because my friend heard him.

[Bluenomi]

I had a user that kept saying that Windows XP would not allow her to enter more than 9 letters into her password field starting one day.

XP is good about telling people that they have their caps lock key on.

This one had her numlock key off. Turns out the last 3 characters were numbers.

They WILL find a way.

I had this problem once. I wnet on holidays and when I got back I couldn't log into my machine. I was sure the password was right. As it turns out someone else had used my machine while I was away and for some reason now num lock defaults to OFF when I turn my machine on. I did work it out all by myself though

I personally like PICNIC: Problem in chair, not in computer

[Geek King]

I personally like PICNIC: Problem in chair, not in computer

I miss the old days of error messages, when they didn't coddle the user. I still get calls multiple times per day to fix what turns out to be a GIGO error.


GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

[rvdammit]

I miss the old days of error messages, when they didn't coddle the user. I still get calls multiple times per day to fix what turns out to be a GIGO error.


GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Tangentally related: I've seen comments in code like "Don't know what the fcuk this does, but if I take it out nothing works"

[Seshat]

And THAT, boys and girls, is why the original programmer should have put a meaningful comment in there. Code is NOT self-documenting! The code tells you what it does, not what it's supposed to do or why it does it.

(Can you tell that this is one of my big irritations?)

[technical.angel]

Heh. At the college I went to, and did work study at the Helpdesk, we had ID 10 T as a category for work orders. It was used... ALOT.