Tech Support: "Hello, tech support, can I help you?"

Customer: (slowly) "Oohh." (pause) "I think I did a bad thing."

Tech Support: "Ok, so tell me what's up."

Customer: "Well, my computer was running great. Everything was working fine, I
had no problems whatsoever."

Tech Support: "Ok..."

Customer: "So I decided to open it up and have a look inside. I saw all these
wires dangling all over the place. There were grey flat ones, and small red,
black, and yellow ones, and it seemed like they weren't connected to anything.
So I decided to plug them all in."

Tech Support: "Um, you mean you plugged them all in? What did you plug them
into?"

Customer: "Well, whatever I could get them to connect to. I saw pins sticking
off of some of the boards that didn't have anything on them, so I plugged all
the loose wires in to make it run better."

Tech Support: "And then you..."

Customer: "And so I plugged them all in, and I hit the power button, and there
was this loud bang and a flash and a puff of smoke. Now it doesn't work at
all."

Tech Support: (suppressing all emotion and turning deep crimson) "Can you hold
for a minute, please?"



Kaboom! "Explosive" doesn't adequately describe the laughter. I related the
story to some co-workers between gasps for breath. Several of the techs and I
had quite the laugh fest while he was on hold. After about five minutes of
eye-popping, sweat-beading laughter, I wiped away the tears, took a sip of
water, and came back on the line. I knew it'd be futile to even attempt to
troubleshoot it.



Tech Support: "Ok, well why don't we just have you wrap it up in the original
packing material and send it back to us, we'll take care of the whole thing."



And so another computer newbie learned that the extra power supply cables and
unused IDE ribbon cables don't have to be plugged in for the computer to work

---
:wq!
++B¹


---
:wq!
++B¹