Shortly after I begin my day the upstairs monochrome laser printer starts beeping with a group of people around it. My boss walks over and checks it, then looks over at me and asks me to take care of replacing the toner (TK-320). No problem, or so I thought.

Working front-line call center support for a computer vendor has it's ups and downs. There are calls that leave you amazed at how intelligent our youth are and then there are calls that convince you the human race is going to die out sooner than later.

I am submitting my first bait so be gentle please.

A user group in our organization has been straying outside of the security requirements that I authored by using a PC in their area as a central workstation.

A contractor is working to replace our outdated heating and ventilation system. The other day, one of the contractors forgets to turn the boiler back on after they were working on it. Needless to say, the next morning a large portion of the office was cold (about 55 degrees F). We were warm in IT, so we really didn’t think too much about it until the building UPS starts beeping madly.

I got a frantic call this past Sunday from an elderly customer with an "urgent" problem: the user wanted to be able to forward an e-mail anonymously.

So a user calls me to say she is having trouble accessing our network via the VPN on her laptop. Since she usually comes in I walk thru the basic stuff with her then ask her to bring it in to the office since she was coming in anyway.

One of our service techs was called to a law office to diagnose a user's random emails disappearing.

This pilot fish was asked by his boss to reset a user's password. I did so and took the new password to the user. Conversation went like this.

User: "I don't like this password. Can you change it?"
Me: (not sure what they mean by 'can') "I have the ability to change it, but not the authority. [boss's name] asked me to do this."
User: "But I don't like it. Why do I need this new password?"

Sorry to give away the punchline in the Subject line but it's just too priceless. User contacts tech support about USB drive not being recognized. All attempts to get the PC to recognize a new 8gb drive failed. One tech support website has a solution posted on it that many users responded worked for them when all else had failed: simply unplugging the PC.

It's Monday, and the user got a replacement PC last week. She has a dual-monitor setup, which was working perfectly on Friday. This morning, I get the call that "second monitor doesn't work" via both my boss and the ticketing system. OK, good opportunity to grab a cup of coffee, so I head down to the user's desk.