An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer." (Training stresses that we are "not the Soft-ware Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.)

Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"

Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't initialized."

Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"

Customer:(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it'?"

Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"

Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division for about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine.

Every color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for help; they offered no new ideas.

After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly,

"Should I try printing on a piece of white paper instead of this "yellow" construction paper?"

One of Microsoft Network's finest support techs was drafted into the Army and sent to boot camp.

At the rifle range, he was given some instructions, handed a rifle, and a couple rounds of ammo. He loaded the rifle and fired several shots at the target which was fifty yards away.

The report came from the target area that all of his attempts had completely missed the target.

The tech looked at his rifle, and then at the target. He looked at the rifle again, and then once more at the target. He placed his finger over the end of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger with his other hand.

The end of his finger was blown off -- whereupon he yelled toward the target area...

"It's leaving here just fine; the trouble must be at your end!"