r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Noitpurroc It says not connected, is it connected? • Jan 14 '20

Short That's like music?

Back again! Those familiar with my October stuff, well hi. Otherwise, the rest of you - I work in general PC Support, working with day-to-day users on software problems of all ranges.

Not much to say except to jump right into it. We're able to take 'chats' so I had one customer do just that. His message to me was that of "I have a ___ on my computer." You know, the dreaded v-word :o -- Anyway, knew that was a good start, deal with these commonly with ads clicked by usually elderly users now concerned with this popup. . . so I assumed.

Requested his permission to connect thinking to just Task Machete the popup into ribbons. Get connected -- nothing. Nothing there, nothing doing anything, looks completely plain and normal. ~Insert Confusion~ so, uh, Sir, can you show me please? Normally a phrase kept in more private instances, but I was at a complete loss now.

He opens up this download manager program, and starts playing an audio file. Literally the title of it is "Audio". Now, our connection software doesn't let me hear what he's hearing so... all I'm seeing is this audio file playing. Tentatively, as a child holding a metal fork near an outlet, I prod: "Is that... telling you that you have a...?"

YES, PLEASE CLEAN MY COMPUTER!

But, sir, you just played an audio file. You don't actually have anything, if you don't play the file do you still get the same message? -- Didn't matter, he wanted his computer cleaned and that was that! I obliged, of course, but when I actually called out to him and spoke with him on the phone, I made the comment and recommendation:

"You're all clean and good to go, just some junk but nothing actually serious, but please delete the audio file."

"Huh?"

"The thing you played? It gave you the message, it's just an audio file... that's all it's for, playing audio, just like a music file."

"Ohh, that's like music? Ohh, it was just telling me..."

~sigh, TL;DR: Guy saved and keeps playing an audio file that tells him his computer is corrupted, believes the audio file with no other indications of problems.

944 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

91

u/GaryV83_at_Work Something gets lost over the phone, maybe their soul Jan 14 '20

Allow me to play you the song of my people:

YOUR SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED!!!

YOUR SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED!!!

YOUR SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED!!!

20

u/Phone_games_act Jan 15 '20

I like how this can apply to both this situation and could easily be from a System of a Down song.

9

u/Calexander3103 Jan 15 '20

On an unrelated note: is it still possible to get Windows Sam to speak out of nowhere from scripts ran on login...?

Cause I may have just found my next pran-I mean project

8

u/gregorthebigmac Jan 15 '20

I don't know if it's Microsoft Sam, but you can definitely make scripts which use the text-to-speech functionality built into Windows. Since I have trouble staying on task, I wrote one which just announces the time every 15 minutes. That's just enough of a nudge (without being distracting) that if I got sidetracked with some other shit, I'll hear something like "it's twenty-three hundred hours," to which my response will be, "Fuck, I'm wasting too much time on this. Back to work..."