The 4pm duh, Special Holiday Edition

[serinde]

Mon Apr  3 10:06:01 EDT 2000 - vf: 
"And then I hit enter, like this, and then I hit control-apple-foobar,
like this, and then I picked my nose, like this..."

The guy will NOT shut up.  And what he's bibbling about is usually
utterly irrelevant.

Mon Jun  3 10:12:48 EDT 2002 - vf: 
Why do I always win this guy?

This time it was all about this new Mac that he got at a flea market (!)
and how to make it connect, and since he has IE which is a client
program, then there must be servers out there, and if he runs a server
does that mean he doesn't need an ISP at all?

Mon Jun  3 14:03:45 EDT 2002 - ja: 
Me runs bibbling from adduser. No, really...just ask Tori and Eli.

Mon Mar 17 14:33:23 EDT 2003 - ja:
And then babbled on about PPP...he wants to understand "...where he is
in PPP....." whatever that means. I honestly wasn't able to understand
his question, which was in the form of a statement he wanted me to
confirm, or deny.

Thu Jul 7 15:41:32 EDT 2005 - vf:
I talked to him for ten minutes and I am still not quite sure what
EXACTLY he was calling about.  I _think_ it was that he misinterpreted
an earlier note that all users were going to be switched into new-mail
soon, and (though he just got converted anyways) he thought that
Things Were Going To Happen to his mail while he was on vacation.  I
assured him not, upon which he then thought "oh, that only happens if
I start DSL, right?"  Etc. etc.

He also gave me a full itinerary of where he's going on vacation.  I'm
not sure why that was, either.

So, we have a bit of history with this user. Let me state that, a) the conversation below is utterly typical, and b) it's condensed.

Nutty McBibbler: "I was away in Australia with my laptop and I was connecting from the hotel which was fine but I've got this IP address here and I'm not sure about it."
dariodevil, who I am watching silently scream for about three minutes: "... I'm sorry, sir, you said you're in Australia?"
NMcB: "Yes. No! Austin. I was in Austin. And I had an address from the hotel and I don't know if it's one of yours."
DD: "Well, what is it?"
NMcB: "198...um...hold on"
[Time passes, shenanigans ensue]
NMcB: "It's 192.168.1.101. Is that you?"
DD: "Well, no, but... Could you hold for a moment, please?" *puts on hold* *slowly bangs head into keyboard*
Your Humble Correspondent, taking pity on her loyal minion: "You want I should take this?"
DD: "OH GOD YES." *to NMcB*: "I'm going to transfer you to a senior technician, please hold."
YHC: *picks up phone, finding NMcB in mid-sentence talking to the hold music* "Hello sir, can I help you?"
NMcB: "Yes, I am using Mac OS X Jaguar which your people told me I couldn't use but I've been using it fine for some time, it works perfectly well ever since I did some things--"
YHC: "But I understand you had a question about an IP address?"
NMcB: "Oh, okay, we're going to talk about that. Well yes, I was in Austin, Texas, and I was staying in a hotel, and I connected from there fine and they gave me an IP address, and it created a whole location, you know, in the Control Panel? There's a location called Austin with this IP address they gave me and I wanted to make sure it was okay. It says it gets it from the DHCP server. Is that you?"
YHC: *pauses, attempting to parse the madness* "Well, you said it's 192.168.1.101, right? That's part of a reserved network that is meant for internal usage. Most home networks use NAT, which will assign an address in 192.168.something.something. It's very possible the hotel you were at was using the same netblock, certainly."
NMcB: "But this address, I got it from your router?"
YHC: "No. You're getting it from your DSL router."
NMcB: "But I had the same address in from the hotel!"
YHC: "Yes, as I said, that's entirely possible. And if you did, since it's in the netblock that your DSL router is using, your router should be able to work with it. ...Sir, let me just confirm, is there an actual *problem* with your DSL connection?"
NMcB: "No, it's working fine. I was just afraid I was connecting to the Austin internet."

Comments

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

Bwahahaha! Darlin, you really should post these to work_stories_it sometime... :-D

[missionista.livejournal.com]

The Austin internet is icky. I wouldn't want to connect to it, either. :)

[lunchboy.livejournal.com]

He was probably worried if he connected to the Austin internet that someone would upload indie rock to his computer and make his desktop background all tie-dye.

[briony530.livejournal.com]

Your work stories are so FUNNY! Customer service would be such an easy job if it weren't for the customers, wouldn't it?

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

OMFG.

You know, of all the arguments for global addressability and end-to-end transparency and whatnot, made in defense of IPv6 and offense against NAT and so on, I don't know if this one — that it would reduce confused rambling by clue-deficient users to tech support — has yet been proposed.

I mean, clearly that wouldn't fix the underlying problem here; it's just that “I was just afraid I was connecting to the Austin internet” might not have been an entirely unreasonable conclusion to draw, say, 15 years ago.

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

Yer like a living User Friendly strip.