customer support / technical support / clerk crazyness

[Pythonfriend]

i worked in customer support, for a company for PC and console periphery, gamepads and joysticks and stuff for consoles and so on, and you do get strange requests. Apparently some 4000-dollar-per-piece customized system got replaced by one of our 10 dollar gamepads because the ministicks were good enough, and you could reach the buttons while operating the ministicks. I researched further, and its a team of underwater pilots using underwater cable-connected drones linked to a ship to search and destroy underwater mines from past wars. The underwater robots were really expensive. Our stuff ranged from 10 dollars to 400 dollars retail, and they were using our 10-dollar gamepads to steer underwater drones towards active sea mines containing half a metric ton (500,000 grams) of high explosives. They wanted to reduce the deadzones, i told them for that they need another driver when using it under Windows aaaand.... was petrified to find out that they indeed control really expensive underwater drones in mine-clearing using windows

Later, a different company requested to use our flight SIMULATOR stuff for steering REAL drones with radar equipment in europe, to make the airspace safer and to track civilian aircraft. What to tell them, except that maybe using peripherals running over USB are maybe NOT the way to go in this case?

Obvious answer: Our devices are designed to satisfy gamers. When our devices fail, we expect a virtual character to get into virtual trouble or expect a virtual airplane to virtually crash. We dont expect drones to go down in cities, or underwater drones to trigger a sea mine.

Sometimes we also got requests from the military. They just asked us stuff like: Please send us all data you have regarding USB devices, with all plans and blueprints and such. Totally unqualified, hitting a list of hundreds of products. We just ignored these, or did send them a link to our website (which they had anyway because they emailed us). You dont get answers unless you know how to ask the question, and the company was really just about entertainment.

What are your crazy whacko customer support or technical support or clerking stories you have? Im sure you have equally crazy stuff if you really worked in one of these segments, be it with animals or people or technical stuff.

[Mike41793]

Not quite the same but a nurse at my work came into the kitchen asking for yellow sugar. I told her we had white sugar and brown sugar but had never heard of yellow sugar... She pointed at the packets of splenda and said "ohh them, that yellow sugar!"..... "You mean splen... nevermind... here have some yellow sugar..."