This little crib sheet is provided by Disgruntled Goat as an aid for the technically challenged. We suggest you print it out and place it next to your phone so that before you call Tech Support you can see if your purile, irritating and generally nonsensical question is present.
Avoiding the following questions will ensure that you do not irritate the one and only person who has any hope of fixing what inevitably will turn out to be a stupid mistake you have made.
| Customer Remark |
Interpreted by Tech Support as |
Likely response from Tech Support |
Notes |
| Err - I think your server's down. |
Hello. I want to waste your time. |
Which one? |
If you don't know, it isn't. |
| I don't know much about this computer shit... |
I have just referred to your chosen profession as excrement |
Indeed. |
The support engineer now cares about your problem as much as you obviously care about his career choice. |
| My son knows all about these computers |
My son has installed BitTorrent and my PC is now riddled with virii. |
Snorts into coffee Good. |
The support engineer will, at this point, have switched you to speakerphone and waved all of his colleagues over. |
| Since I've had your service installed my scanner doesn't work. What are you going to do about it? |
I've never tried to use my scanner until now. |
RTFM. |
|
| My e-mail (stupidusername69@not_this_isp.com) doesn't work... |
I'm not using all the services that I pay for each month. |
If you don't know how e-mail works you shouldn't have an address, should you? |
Read your ISP welcome pack for the first time and follow the instructions on e-mail setup |
| The internet's down! |
I haven't the slightest clue what I'm on about |
Sigh... What, all of it? |
You may want to see if your modem is plugged in and switched on. |
| I'm only getting 64 kilobytes download but I'm paying for half a megabit! |
I'm very pleased with the service as it maxes out all the time! |
We're pleased that you're pleased, sir... |
8 is a nice, round number |
| The internet's going slow! |
My unwitting participation in a botnet has used my monthly bandwidth allowance |
You're throttled due to excessive usage. Would you like to upgrade? |
|
| My ping time on really.shitty.gameserver.net is really high |
I have eight wireless hops before traffic even leaves the building |
On-line gaming is bad for you and can cause RSI. Get a life. |
|
| I am a technically-minded person |
I used to be able to write a Hello, world! program in BBC BASIC and only had to refer to the manual twice |
It's probably the ROM BIOS stuck in a programmed-IO mode that's causing the kernel to spinlock on a hardware interrupt. |
|
