I work as Macintosh Technical Support for a state agency. One day a user called for help complaining that she had moved her Mac to a new desk and now it was not powering up. The users are really not supposed to move their computers without consulting us first, and I envisioned the many catastrophes which could have taken place in the 20 foot move. I asked her the standard questions: Is it plugged in? Is the power strip on? Are all the cables connected? She answered yes to all my queries, and I told her I would immediately come over and take a look at it. I was thinking that it might be a bad keyboard or power supply, so I lugged the appropriate equipment to her office. 

Sure enough—the Mac would not power up from either the keyboard or the power button. I procceded to double check all the cables. I followed the Mac’s power cord through a jumble of cables to the power bar. The power bar’s switch was in the on position (the bar had no power indicator light), so I followed its wandering power cord through the gnarled mess of cables to see where it led. 

Much to my amusement, she had plugged the power bar’s cord into one of its own outlets.

 

One of our clients ordered an Quadra 840AV, but explicitly 
did not want the internal CD-ROM drive which comes standard 
in that box. This was not a serious problem, and I removed the 
CD-ROM drive before I delivered the unit to the customer. Un-
fortunately, I did not have the blank bezel (or faceplate) with 
which to cover the drive bay’s opening, so I left the CD-ROM slotted bezel in place. I set the system up for them, gave them a quick lesson on it's ins and outs, and told them I would be back in a couple of days to replace the bezel.

I returned two days later and opened up the case of the 840 to install the new blank bezel. Inside the 840AV where the CD-ROM originally resided, I found about two dozen post-it note slips.  Puzzled, I asked the operator why there were slips of paper in his Macintosh. I was told by the startled user that he had put them in there because he thought that the original CD bezel, with its long slim opening, looked like the trash recepticles that are in automated teller machines.

                                                                                       Tech Support Tales compiled by 

Eric Hausmann joins the MacSense Staff this month, bringing his popular and humorous Tech Support Tales to MacSense readers. Mr. Hausmann is a Macintosh Technician and Co-Sysop for two Florida BBSes. He welcomes commentary and submissions at Junkspill@aol.com.