You can't make this **** up

ganutenator

Lifetime Supporting Member
ganutenator
Join Date
May 2002
Location
kansas
Posts
1,440
Craziest Support Calls:

I'll start.

Salesman had someone copy our electrical panel but it didn't work.

He called up for support.

"But we copied it exactly"
 
#2) I got this alarm "HP Pump #3 Low level"

me: Did you check the water level in the tank?

customer: ok

customer: in the background "who the **** turned this off"
 
My favorite is: It doesn't work!!

No explanation, no details, no troubleshooting, like I am suppose to magically fix the problem with the excellent details given. :D
 
I makes me wonder how the world continues to spin. If we could screw that up we would be in real trouble.

think of what the Rockwell tech support guys must put up with. I now our tech support gets some real bubbas. some have been put in extremely bad situations by poor mechanical and hydraulic 'designers'.
 
I was on a phone call with a maintenance manager of a big food manufacturer. They had some problems with a exhaust fan on a freezer. In the middle of the conversation he yells, "F''k!", "Seagull" and hung up. It turned out that in the tube that was going from the machine and straight up through the roof and outside haden't been fitted with a cover. So apparently a seagull had went down the tube and were completely shredded from the exhaust fan, pieces and feathers had went all over the production floor.
 
Somewhat related my father god bless him phones me up about a month ago, he has received some pictures on a CD he wants to look at on his computer. His computer has a CD rom and a DVD rom. So I tell him to put it in the CD rom wait for the pop up, go to exporer etc... This goes on for a few minutes to no avail so I try the same thing on the DVD rom, no luck.

After about 15 minutes I was about to give up and tell him there was something wrong with the CD when he says to me "Is the picture on the CD supposed to face up or down?"

My dad has owned a computer since 1982 and is by no means a dumb person. It just sucks getting old...
 
It was my very first telephone technical support call as an AC drives technician, and our most senior field engineer was sitting right next to me, listening in.

We had just verified that the 4-20 mA reference signal was OK, and the electrician on the other end of the phone then mentioned a low DC bus fault code.

Me: "Okay, to troubleshoot the DC bus we're going to have to measure the DC voltage across two terminals on the bottom of the drive. You need to set your meter up to measure in the 1000 V DC range."

Customer Electrician: "Okay, which terminals do I check ?"

Me: "They're marked DC- and DC+, on the left side of the bottom row. But first, you need to be sure your meter is set up to measure 1000 volts DC. You need to move the leads back into the Voltage terminals."

Customer Electrican: "Okay, I set the meter for DC volts, 1000 V range".

Me: "Are you absolutely sure you have the meter leads in the correct place ? Because we're going to be measuring hundreds of volts."

Customer Electrician: BOOM !

Me: "Are you alright ? Hello ? Hello ?"

Customer Electrician: "It blew up !"

Me: "What blew up ?"

Customer Electrician: "Everything ! I gotta find my glasses."
 
I was in the computer center at my university when dial up modems were just coming out and we got to take the user calls when they had trouble dialing in to the mainframe (for you new kids, this is just like cloud computing but at 1200 baud :D ).

Anyway, over half of the calls went like this:
User: I can't get connected
Me: Is the modem turned on?
-Click-
 
How about being called to a customers shop to reprogram some offbrand PLC you never heard of - but they can't understand why you can't reprogram it because you have some PLC programming software on your computer & its a PLC they want changed.
 
I got a call on a PLC in a control panel I built for controlling hydraulic ram pumps used in locking bridge cranes together.

User: "Your control system is not engaging the rams, the pump mfr told me to call you because you programmed that PLC."

Me: "Is the hydraulic pump running?"

User: "Yes, but the rams are not extending. You need to get down here right away."

Me: "There is nothing in the PLC that would prevent the rams from extending if the pump is running. There is no valve control or anything like that, the pump ONLY goes to the ram."

User: "I didn't want an excuse, I want you down here NOW."

Me: "Give me an open PO, I charge $150/hr for field work, portal to portal, you are 3 hours away. If it's my fault, no charge. If it is something else, full charge. Agreed?"

User: "Yes, dammit, just get down here!"

3 hours and 30 seconds later, I look at the sight glass on the hydraulic pump, there is no oil in it. The big red tag ON THE PUMP that says 'WARNING! DO NOT OPERATE WITHOUT FILLING OIL RESERVOIR!" is still in place on the fill cap.
 
Jraef, I ran in to a similar problem about 6 months ago. The cylinder would only move so far. Well duh, the tank wasn't filled enough to fill the cap side of the cylinder with oil. Meanwhile the pump was cavitating making an awful noise and no one checked that out.
Oh well.

Didn't the pumps make an awful noise or were they run with no oil at all?

I was told everything was ready to go before I left. Wasted a day waiting for the hydraulic guys to get their act together but the customer paid for it.
 
Peter Nachtwey said:
... Didn't the pumps make an awful noise or were they run with no oil at all?
Click to expand...
Probably. I didn't run them when I got there, I saw the problem BEFORE I turned the power on!

The user by the way wanted to haggle on the price because "I didn't actually do anything when I got there." Reminded me of that old joke "Price List" that says something like "Banging the side of the machine, 50 cents. Knowing exactly WHERE to bang the side of the machine, $500". He eventually paid me though, I think because he knew that if he ever really DID need me for something, I wasn't going to get burned a second time.
 
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