Good grief...

[ffutures]

I always thought it was an urban myth... even when I was doing phone support for a second-hand computer shop it never happened... but I just solved a relative's laptop problem over the phone by asking if it was plugged in. The answer, of course, was that it wasn't, and the battery was flat.

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

I've done tech support for more than twenty years, and this is the most common problem. Generally speaking, computer issues boil down to:

1) Is it plugged in (to power, to the computer)?
2) If it is plugged in, is it turned on?
3) Is the Caps Lock key off?
4) Have you tried rebooting (for Windows machines, anyway)?

I'd say that covers the bulk of my help requests, historically speaking.

I've worked in a variety of environments (artists, MIT PhDs, computer programmers) and those hold true whatever the client base.

Occassionally, people do things that make me thing they're from the future -- they're ahead of the wireless curve, or they want to reformat an AOL CD so that they can reuse it -- but most of the time they assume it is something more complicated (usually a virus).