The year - 1990 or 1991. My experience with computers - very little then. My situation - living in Florida and my computer got hit with a power surge (lightning induced). Fried all ports (serial and parallel) on my motherboard. Since I was a DOS user, I didn't notice this for a couple weeks when I attempted to print something and it wouldn't work.

After years in application tech support and a couple years in operations support, I have to come clean with my own "stupid user" story.

Was working the helpdesk. I have a deep, melodious voice. Cust called in and received standard greeting. Cust then asks "Are you a human?" Feeling silly I said "No, I'm the most fiendishly complex voice recognition software ever developed." Cust cursed and hung up!

I was at one of our remote sites recently, replacing a monitor. The other gentleman in the room called me over, and said "the time card program on this computer is broken."

He had the time card program open, and the window open to enter his employee ID. Now, if the program is open, it's working, and connected to the server. It was clearly working.

We deployed a "new" computer (refurbished hand me down from another office) to a customer. She called the next morning complaining that her mouse did not work. After some prodding, she finally explained that she left the mouse soaking in a glass of water overnight to clean it.

When I read the ticket, I thought it was a joke.

A user got a message that their drive was getting full. Help Desk told them to "Clean their Drive" (I'm guessing they were referring to Disk Cleaner). What did the user do?

You guessed it! They RAN IT THROUGH THEIR DISHWASHER!! I've heard of this through I.T. urban legend, but this was my first experience with it.

Why is it that when you give users new equipment they must run out and immediately find a way to break it!

6 weeks ago we replace all of our old 3G air cards with brand new HSDPA cards. We replaced 33 cards and since replacing the cards our users have managed to destroy 5 of them!.

So I get a call from a user asking if the Network is down. "Nope, whats your issue?"
User: "The computer in the camera room wont connect to the internet."
Me: "Did anything change recently, were you able to connect earlier today?"
User: "I haven't been able to get on for a few days."

So, I work as a helpdesk/desktop/printer support technician for state government. Me and 4 other people support about 3500 laptops/desktops/printers throughout our state.

I am currently subcontracting some IT work for a national chain. Or is it sub-sub-contracting ...?