this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I did had one support call, a long time ago, where I told the guy to use the mouse and click on the start button. Then I heard the sound of something tapping on glass.
"Sir, please keep the mouse on the table and then move it. You'll notice the arrow moving too. Move the arrow to ..."
Yeah, that was still when everybody had CRT screens. That should give you an indication how long ago it was.
I did a support call in the 90's where "clicking the left mouse button" was stumping her. After trying a few variations of instructions, I decided to take a step back and better assess the situation.
Me - Ma'am, are you left or right handed?
Her: right
Me: Lift your right hand, and look at the mouse. It should be a palm sized white plastic device with two buttons, one on the left and one on the right where your fingers rest. There should also be a small cable that extends from the far side and plugs into your computer. The underside of it has a little grey ball in the middle. Do you see it?
Her: You mean the doohickey on the floor?
Me: Pardon me?!? Well, it should be on your desk, not the floor. Why would it be down there?
Her: You mean the foot pedal?
Me: *light bulb clicks on. Are you really familiar with sewing machines?
Her: yes, but this doesn't work anything like that.
Me: ok. We have found the problem! This is great. First step is to take the foot pedal off the floor and place it on the desk, under your right hand when you are sitting comfortably.
From there everything went smooth as silk.
To be fair, some mouse designs back then really did look like a foot pedal, albeit rather small for a foot.
Props on figuring it out and being able to help her.
Dear god…
This is gold!
Ah, reminds me of this good old collection of stories http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
I once had a support call where I told the customer to click the Start button and they didn't know what it was. I clarified by saying that it was the button in the corner of the screen. They did it and then said that their entire screen turned black.
Apparently they'd pushed the power button on their monitor.
To the guy a few weeks ago that said I wasn't being fair to users not reading error messages and comparing it to a doctor reading your charts. Read this fucking thread.
A ton of power users who never worked in service desk don't understand how incompetent the average user is. It is quite something.
I'm laughing my ass off reading this threat because I can imagine every single one happening.
Yeah, my last job I was part IT. It was amazing how bad some shit was. We had an old old computer running a machine and it was on windows 2000 (there was no upgrade path for this thing). One day it broke, HDD failure. User sends in a ticket saying its not working and that the software seems to be out of date...
At some point the place I was working at was acquired, and the new parent company bought one of our competitors across town. These people were a fucking tier 1 issue factory. "My teams doesn't work" they weren't connected to the internet. "My old email doesn't work" that was discontinued 3 months ago. "My old email still doesn't work" sir this is the 8th time you've mentioned this, it was discontinued 5 months ago.
When I was young, older people thought the monitor was the computer and had no idea there was a chassi under the desk connected to it. :)
Enter the imac.
Have you ever seen the original Mac?
Yes, but was never a mac dude.
When I was young people thought the keyboard was the computer. And they were right.
Vic20?
Or commodore 64. Amiga 500. Schneider 6128. ZX spectrum. Just to name a few from my time.
Actually yeah, I didnt think of that but commodore 64 was my first computer. Its actually incredible the things it could do without any cooling or fan, and tiny graphics chip...
Reminds me of that story where a company secretary thought the towers are just junk and asked the whole lot thrown out the entire office