My boyfriend and I were sitting in my dorm room, when there was a power surge, causing my computer to reboot. Unfortunately, it never got very far and popped up an error message about a missing file. Panicking, I reboot again, and the same thing happened. Foolishly, I decided to call my computer’s tech support line, and after struggling with their automated system, I finally got through to someone.
Tech Support: “Thank you for calling tech support. How may I help you?”
Me: “Yeah, um, I just had a power surge in my dorm room, and my computer won’t reboot. It’s giving me the error message: [error message]”
Tech Support: “Have you tried rebooting?”
Me: “Yeah. Want me to try again?”
Tech Support: “Yes, go ahead. Tell me when Windows comes up.”
Me: “Ok…it’s giving me the same error message. It’s not even getting into Windows.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try rebooting again, but this time, hold the button down for longer.”
Me: “Er…how much longer?”
Tech Support: “About five seconds.”
Me: “All right. Holding it down now…ok, it’s rebooting.”
Tech Support: “Good. Tell me when Windows comes up.”
Me: “Same error.”
Tech Support: “Ok. Let’s try a hard reboot. Turn your computer all the way off, then unplug the power cable.”
Me: (??) “All right, it’s out.”
Tech Support: “Ok, now hold down your power button and plug it back in. But don’t let go of the power button yet.”
Me: “Er. Ok. Tell me when to let go.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let go. Tell me when Windows comes up.”
Me: “Same error message. Windows isn’t coming up.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try looking at your BIOS.”
Me: “All right.”
Tech Support: “Reboot your computer, and when it’s coming up, hit F1 as many times as you can.”
Me: “Can’t I just hit it once?”
Tech Support: “No, your computer should start beeping. I want to make sure it beeps.”
Me: “All right, it beeped. BIOS came up a while ago.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s walk through some things….”
He proceeded to do nothing more than confirm there was nothing wrong with my BIOS. He had me reboot again, and, of course, I got the same error message.
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try bios one more time.”
Me: “All right.”
Tech Support: “Now, when it’s rebooting, I want you to hit the F1 key as many times as you can. It has to beep for this to work.”
Me: “I really don’t think my computer ‘beeping’ has anything to do with the problem.”
Tech Support: “I think I know a little more about computers than you do, ma’am.”
Me: “All right, fine, I’m hitting it. My computer is beeping.”
Tech Support: “I don’t believe you.”
Me: “…Excuse me?”
Tech Support: “I think you’re lying. I need you to hit it as many times as you can. This is very important.”
Finally, I gave up on the guy and made my boyfriend finish the call. About half a minute into the call, my boyfriend gets a really funny look on his face and ejects the floppy disk that was in the drive. He rebooted it, and it worked fine.
I suppose this doubles as a stupid user story too, but you’d think a tech support person would have checked for that early on, instead all the other dumb things he had me do.
