Tales from the Trenches of Tech Support Hell

The summer between my second and third year of university, I worked in the computer department of a big-box office supply store that happened to sell computers. This is a chain named after a tiny piece of metal that binds paper together, and for legal reasons, we’re going to call it “Paperclip”.

Me, seen here in my bright red polyester “Paperclip” uniform.

I was hired on as a full-time computer associate at Paperclip for exactly four reasons:

1. I was still a computer science student at the time, because I had not yet abandoned a lucrative, highly employable field for a field where you get paid mostly in hugs, and it seemed like a logical fit.
2. I had enough knowledge of computers to rattle off the technical specs required for a laptop that could run Diablo III with medium-quality graphics and not catch on fire. This was greatly impressive to the older employees, who were still trying to get their heads around the fact that computer games no longer come loaded on 26 separate floppy discs.
3. The computer section was my only real option, because I was completely emotionally and psychologically unequipped to work in the office supply section during the back-to-school season. The first time an anxious mother went into full-blown hysterics because we didn’t carry the discontinued brand of pencil crayons listed on her child’s school supply list from 1943, I was apt to climb onto the roof and start swatting at planes like King Kong.
4. There were currently no girls working in the computer department, and I was willing to ride gender tokenism all the way to the top.

Picture unrelated.

The city I was living in at the time was a small, upper-middle-class bedroom community with a rapidly aging population, and I figured that my job would mostly involve teaching someone’s Grandma how to use the iPad she got for Christmas, or helping anxious Baby Boomer parents pick out a $4000 laptop so their kid could check Facebook during their college classes. And for the most part, that’s exactly what I did all day.

With a few notable exceptions.

These exceptions.

Hard Drive Harriet

My job at Paperclip wasn’t my first retail gig; by this point in my life, I’d spent enough time manning the tills at a now-defunct Canadian department store to discover that customers weren’t always rational people. The first time I was screamed at and personally blamed for the price of milk, I learned to be wary of the general public’s critical thinking skills. I expected things in the computer department to be worse. After all, milk costs $8 and it’s something that the average person understands. It’s milk. A fancy laptop costs $1000, and is handcrafted by wizards and black magic. Tensions are bound to run high.

But even with all this in mind, I still underestimated Hard Drive Harriet.

Yeah, a gallon of milk costs $8 in Canada. If we could afford more milk, we’d be too powerful to contain.

I was standing at the computer support counter one day, just minding my own business and thinkin’ about HDMI cables, when an irate, red-faced woman came stomping towards me, lugging a computer tower.

She banged the computer down on the counter in front of me.

“It’s broken,” she grunted.

“Broken how?” I asked.

She looked at me like I had personally squatted over her breakfast that morning and pissed directly into her Lucky Charms.

Pictured: tech support.

I tried to politely but firmly explain to Harriet that “broken” could mean anything from “computer is running kind of slow” to “computer is currently melting in the fires of Mt. Saint Helens”, and I needed a bit more clarity if I was going to be able to help her.

“Computer used to work, but now it doesn’t,” she grunted. “It’s broken.”

Even at $11 per hour, this conversation was a waste of my time; I decided to just book Harriet’s tower in for a diagnostic and let the tech guy figure out what was wrong with it. She reluctantly paid the diagnostic fee, making it quite clear all the while that she suspected I had personally broken into her home and sabotaged her computer in the dead of night in order to extract $79 from her. Then she hurried off to ruin someone else’s day, and I promptly forgot all about her.

The things we do to pay off our student loans.

Two days later, I was standing by the computer support counter, minding my own business and thinkin’ about wireless N routers, when the tech support guy poked his head out of the closet we kept him in.

“Janel, did you book in a computer tower recently for an unknown problem?” he asked.

“Yup,” I told him, like the eloquent wordsmith that I am.

“You forgot to write down that it’s missing a piece,” he replied.

“She didn’t tell me anything about a missing piece. What’s it missing?”

“The hard drive.”

For those of you who didn’t spend your teenage years reading graphics card reviews instead of making friends, the hard drive of your computer is one of the most important parts of the whole machine. The hard drive is where your operating system lives; without an operating system, the only thing your computer is good for is hurling at an intruder’s head to buy you time while you escape out the window. No hard drive, no functioning computer. End of story.

This is a Venn diagram of computers that don’t have hard drives, and computers that don’t work. 

Bewildered, we contacted the woman to let her know that we’d found the problem, and asked her to come back to the store. She arrived later that afternoon, looking just as beet-faced and angry as she had the first time we’d met.

“So? Did you fix it?” she demanded.

“Well, no, we can’t,” the tech guy explained, “because your hard drive is missing. You say that the computer used to work – is there any way someone could have removed the hard drive?”

“What’s a hard drive? That thing with the spinny thingie?”

We nodded, confirming that it was, in fact, that thing with the spinny thingie.

Harriet looked at us as if we’d just told her to fix her computer by filling the CD drive with peanut butter. “Well, yes, I removed the hard drive. It makes a noise when it spins, I don’t like that.”

For the record, this is less likely to render your computer non-functional than what she did.

We stared at her. This was a grown woman who had removed a major mechanical component from her computer, saw that it immediately stopped working, and could not figure out what was wrong. Frankly, it was astonishing that anyone who struggled this hard to grasp cause-and-effect could even survive to adulthood. I would have expected her to drive herself straight into oncoming traffic after failing to learn that turning the steering wheel caused the car to change direction.

I draw cars like a time traveler from the 1400s who has never seen a car before. 

My coworker gently explained that if she brought us the hard drive she’d removed, he would re-install it for her at no additional charge.

“Why would I want you to do that?” she snapped.

“Because… that’s what will make your computer work.”

“I already told you,” she barked, “I don’t like the way that spinning thing sounds. I want you to make my computer work again without it.”

This is technically possible, using something called a solid state hard drive – a hard drive that is basically all thingie, no spinny – but in the summer of 2012, they were only just starting to hit the market, and they tended to be extremely expensive with relatively low storage capacity. The tech support guy started going over the costs of purchasing a solid state hard drive, but Harriet stopped him – she wanted him to just make the computer work, without her buying any additional components. My coworker explained that he was not prepared to singlehandedly push the limits of modern consumer technology for $14 per hour, and Harriet began to gather her computer in a huff.

“Well, if you can’t make my computer work without a hard drive, I’ll just take it to someone who can!”

Pictured: a person who can.

Legend says she’s still out there to this day, going door to door looking for someone to make her computer work without a hard drive. If you listen closely on a calm night, you can hear her ordering a baffled Best Buy employee to get the motherboard out of there too, while he’s at it.

Porno Paul

My younger readers may not know this, but the era of high-speed internet and multi-billion-dollar pornography streaming websites is relatively new; way back in the days of yore, if you wanted to access pornography on your computer, you had to download a file from a sketchy peer-to-peer file sharing site and pray to the Gods of shame and puberty that you actually ended up with the double-penetration dwarf porn you wanted, and not a computer-killing supervirus. Even old-school pornography streaming websites weren’t safe – just visiting the wrong one could catapult your computer into an endless hellscape of constant pop-ups and stolen personal information. Every time you accessed porn, you were basically playing virus roulette. “Grandpa’s computer is always full of viruses” used to be a euphemism for “Grandpa sure does love barely-legal teen Asian lesbians”.

Loves to tutor them with their English, that is, because he too understands what it’s like to be a marginalized immigrant trying to make it in America. You sicko.

By 2012, most people had figured out how to get their interracial three-way fix without barbecuing their computer with viruses, but not everyone had gotten the hang of it. At work, we saw a pretty steady trickle of men coming into the store to book their computers in for “virus cleanups”, and hinting that we shouldn’t look at their internet browsing history. These men were always incredibly sheepish, looking down at their feet as they checked in their machines, and mumbling their shame so quietly that we struggled to hear them.

All of them, that is, except for Paul.

This is Paul.

I was living in Alberta, Canada at the time, which is a place where people feel perfectly comfortable occasionally wearing cowboy hats in public, but Paul strolled into the computer section looking like Matthew McConaughey from a Dallas Buyers Club/Magic Mike crossover. He parked his computer tower on the desk without a word, and I stood there in silence, wondering what sort of computer problems a man shamelessly wearing spurs at 10:30 in the morning could possibly have.

If you guessed that the answer has something to do with “bareback”, you’re not wrong.

“What seems to be the problem with it, sir?” I managed.

He chewed his toothpick. “It’s full of viruses. Needs a cleanup.”

I started filling out the form to book the computer in for a virus cleanup, and explained that it would speed the process up if he gave us the password for his computer. We could get into the computer even if he didn’t, but bypassing the password would take time, and possibly push back the date his computer would be ready.

I hadn’t even finished my explanation when the customer interrupted me. “The password is b-i-g-t-i-t-s, all lowercase.”

“Just to confirm, sir, the password is ‘big tits’? That’s ‘big tits’, all in lowercase?” I announced loudly enough for nearby customers to hear, because I am an asshole.

I was not well-liked in my cashier days.

“It sure is. My favourite thing in the world,” the customer responded, not even the littlest bit phased.

I finished booking the computer in and returned to my daily routine of helping upper-middle-class people spend too much money on Monster cables. The interaction with Paul faded quickly from my mind. Or at least it did, until I walked into the tech closet two days later and was greeted by the sight of the biggest goddamn tits I’ve ever seen in my life.

Check out the size of these tits.

The tech support guy was looking at the “loaner monitor” that we used to work on computer towers that had been dropped off without a monitor. On the screen was an image of a young, nude woman, struggling under the weight of her own enormous bosoms and spreading her legs to show us just what a thorough job her aesthetician had done on her latest bikini wax.

I asked my coworker why he was staring up a strange woman’s birth canal in the middle of the work day.

“Hey, it’s not me,” he said, throwing up his hands. “This is the computer you checked in the other day, the one from the Big Tits guy. This is the dude’s desktop.”

We stared at the monitor the way people stare at fireworks, trying to drink in the majesty of a middle-aged man who used a 22-year-old’s hairless vulva as the backdrop for all his daily computing needs.

The tech guy looked at me. “I can’t leave this picture up on a work computer, can I?”

“You absolutely cannot,” I confirmed.

Sighing, he opened up the preferences menu and went to change the desktop to an innocuous picture of mountains, balloons, or the colour blue that had come pre-installed on the machine. Then he stopped himself.

“I’ve got a better idea.”

My “better idea” would have been to flee tech support entirely and devote myself to begging some sort of deity for the destruction of our gross, sticky species, but his idea was fine too.

As I watched, my coworker opened up Microsoft Paint, loaded up the offensive desktop image, and carefully drew a bright green bikini over the woman with his mouse. Then he saved his work, closed the program, and changed the computer’s backdrop to the slightly-less naked woman. From a distance, it almost looked like she was wearing a real bathing suit and not just a collection of green pixels, if you squinted just right.

“I’ll change it back to the regular picture before he picks it up,” the tech support guy told me. He paused. “Actually, you know what? I’m not going to. I’m going to give it back to him like this and see if he says anything.”

He won’t suspect a thing.

Sure enough, Paul was back two weeks later, with his computer in tow once again. I asked him how I could help him, fully expecting to get an earful about how we’d had no right to purge his desktop of visible areolas at the same time we were purging viruses. But Paul surprised me.

“Needs another cleanup,” he said, dropping the computer on the desk and already reaching for his credit card.

We booted up his computer the moment he left, curious to see if the tech guy’s handiwork was still on the desktop. To our surprise, Paul had changed his desktop image to a different – but equally naked – young lady. She was fitted with another Microsoft Paint bathing suit and sent back to Paul several days later, now virus-free.

And so the start of a beautiful relationship began. Every few weeks, Paul would drop off his buggy, virus-riddled computer with a new naked lady on his desktop, and we would send it back, clean and outfitted with increasingly creative swimwear. And then several weeks later, he would be back for another virus cleanup, without a word about what we’d done to his desktop. It was a beautiful cycle of incredibly costly computer repairs that went on the entire time I worked there, and is probably continuing to this day unless Paul has died, installed McAfee, or finally discovered PornHub.

Blow-Dryer Bobby

Going into this job, I knew I would meet a lot of people who had broken expensive electronics in careless ways. I expected to see laptops and tablets that had been dropped, stepped on, or backed over with a Honda Civic after their owner was caught cheating on his girlfriend with a middle-aged Boston Pizza waitress named Darla. What I didn’t expect to see was people using Looney Tunes physics to intentionally mess up their own machines in stunning and creative ways.

Good news: I can’t draw Bugs Bunny well enough to get sued by Warner Bros.

I was minding my own business at the tech support counter one day, thinkin’ about how much I hate integrated graphics chipsets, when a man sauntered up to the desk and set down a closed laptop.

“So I spilled a whole thing of Coke on this,” he began.

The kind that ruins your teeth, not the kind that ruins your fucking life.

We were already off to a bad start.

If you want to fuck up your laptop in an expensive and very probably unfixable way, spilling a sugary beverage on it should be right near the top of your list. Since the “guts” of your laptop are located right underneath the keyboard, spilling any kind of beverage onto the keys means that you’re in immediate danger of liquid getting into the motherboard and shorting it out, which typically means that the whole laptop just became an incredibly expensive paperweight. It is actually possible to save a laptop that’s been spilled on, but you have to act quickly and follow the proper steps. For those of you who are planning to have a juice fight next to your open MacBook in the near future, those steps are as follows:

1. Force shut-down your laptop by holding down the power button, unplug the cord, and if possible, remove the battery. Power it down faster than a teenager whose mom just caught him watching mother-stepson incest porn.
2. Open your laptop as wide as it will go, and turn it upside-down so that the keyboard is facing down. This will help the benevolent forces of gravity keep the liquid out of your motherboard.
3. Set the laptop down on a towel, and let it dry for a whole-ass 24 hours.
4. Take it to a repair shop, especially if you spilled something other than water. Your computer probably has sugar and minerals deep inside of components that are not meant to contain sugar and minerals, and they will corrode your laptop. The repair shop will have to take the machine apart to clean it, while judging you the entire time.

Optional step: enjoy delicious, warm laptop Coke.

I looked at Bobby, a gleam of youthful naivety in my eye, and asked if he had taken the necessary steps to protect his machine. Bobby looked down at his feet. No, he admitted. No, he had done something much, much worse.

I opened the lid of the laptop to get a look at what we were dealing with, and saw the worst thing I ever encountered in my time doing tech support.

Worse than this.

Instead of a keyboard, the laptop had a mangled sheet of melted plastic, with chunks of what had once been keys.

“See, what happened was,” Bobby started, seeing the look of undisguised horror on my face, “I knew that I had to dry the laptop before it got ruined. So I got out my wife’s hair dryer.”

His wife drying her hair, probably.

As I contemplated laying down underneath a car in the parking lot, he explained that he had wanted to dry out the laptop quickly, and so he decided that the “cool” and “low heat” settings on the blow dryer were not powerful enough for his purposes. He cranked the blow dryer to the highest setting, positioned it only an inch or two above the keyboard, and just held it there for as long as he could. By this point in the conversation, his story had attracted the attention of everyone on the computer team, and we gathered around the laptop like we were in the procession line at a wake.

Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

“So why is all of it melted?” asked my coworker, gesturing to the mangled landscape of plastic. “You didn’t notice the keys were melting?”

“Oh, I did. But once the first key started melting, I figured it was too late to stop, so I just went ahead and did the whole thing.”

Pictured: a hot bowl of keyboard soup

Char-broiling your entire keyboard because one of the keys started to warp is like calling in sick for work one day, and deciding that you might as well abandon your career, fake your own death, smuggle yourself out of the country in a shipping container and start a new life as a Bolivian alpaca farmer under an assumed identity. There were plenty of opportunities to realize that you were making a mistake, and stop what you were doing before you reached the point of no return.

This was avoidable.

Bobby tapped the edge of the laptop. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can fix this?”

We assured him that unless one of us was blessed by a wizard or bitten by a radioactive Geek Squad member, we did not possess the supernatural powers required to fix his computer. He sighed, nodded, and gathered the ruined machine in his arms.

“Should have used low heat,” we heard him mumble as he headed into the laptop aisle to look for a replacement.

And probably a proper thermometer, for maximum safety.

My time at Paperclip taught me a lot of things – I learned all about customer service, common computer issues, and the barriers that many of our elderly face in an increasingly tech-centric world. I learned how to fish gum out of places where there should be no gum, and I learned how many people bring computers in for repairs without first double-checking that they’re not just unplugged. I learned that a shocking number of people still used adding machines and electric typewriters in the year 2012.

But most of all, I learned that the world of tech support is not for me. When I went back to school that fall, it was as a psychology major.

If you’ve enjoyed reading about short-sighted decisions I made in my late teens, check out my two-part saga about the time I nearly froze myself to death on a mountaintop. 

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