* 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 just fine.
