nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

It's okay to have funny names among yourselves for users who seem really dumb, but I hope you guys never said this to the user. I had a real jerk of a tech-support colleague in a school district who did and I cringed whenever I witnessed it. I never knew whether any complaints got filed about him. I could only hope so.

BBurns Loc: South Bay, California

Many times the acronym 'PEBKAC' explains much the trouble.

Problem
Exists
Between
Keyboard
And
Chair

pendennis

Our customers NEVER saw or heard any of our remarks. Our LAN room, where our techs resided, was secure, and the action reports were always clean, because IT upper management saw them on a random basis.

When our techs got to the customer, they were always polite and fixed the problem. PERIOD.

We did keep close touch with supervisors and managers for those customers who had chronic problems, and those chronic problems did make their way into performance reviews. Sometimes there were problems that were escalated to Level 2, or above, especially when we determined there were application, or hardware problems (Microsoft does have their share in the software side, as do the hardware makers). The techs did keep a s**t list among themselves, though. It was guarded like Fort Knox.

The worst problems, though, were with folks who thought they knew everything there was to know about PC's, LAN's, routers, etc. There was more than one instance in which customers opened up the CPU and screwed up memory slots, drive connections, etc. We had one customer, now deceased, who thought he shouldn't be connected to the LAN because his data was so confidential. That case went to management, and the user was told any further transgressions would be highlighted on his PR. Case closed after that.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

The issue of pull-down menus is a major problem. You usually find it in three different cases.
1. The techie you are following has used a different (often earlier) version of the application which does have a Tools entry. He assumes that the later version does too. There is frequently an alternative or equivalent to the Tools but the techie just assumes you are an expert so doesn't bother mentioning it.
2. The techie does not bother to add any dates to his entry so it is hard to work out just when the item was published so that you can decide the possible relevance to your problem.
3. A lot of applications allow you to change things in the menu system. The techie has no concept that this can be done and hence his reply refers to something you may no longer have. A classic here is the changes that occur with the control panel when you are looking at either the Ctrl Panel as originally installed or after you have changed it to small icons.

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

It is stated as "eye - dee - 10 - t" and sometimes they can't figure it out even when they see it in writing...

hassighedgehog Loc: Corona, CA

Look at the bottom of the panel that has your accounts on it. There is an icon that looks like a gear. Click on that icon and the tools panel will come up.

cochese

My vote goes to Thunderbird. It's free and a very mature open source program created by the fols at Mozilla.