Human stupidity displayed

Nothing much, just a few (marginally) humorous situations from work.

(In case you've just tuned in, I work as tech support for an ISP)

A kindly, but not overly computer-minded middle-aged woman who called in; she had just upgraded to IExplore 7, and with that, a few things had changed.
Largely, the page our customers need to sign in via gets overwritten by IExplore itself, and hijacked to http://go.microsoft.com ...and naturally, remembering a sign-on page is pretty difficult. So far, so good, got her online.
Next problem, her homebanking had changed a bit, because apparantly a padlock icon was no longer there, so she was uncertain as to whether it was still as safe as before. I assured her it was.
Best part? IExplore 7 comes with a phishing filter. How it works, I honestly don't know, and considering IExplore itself is arguably the biggest security liability you can find onboard a Windows machine. Naturally, the customer was asking about this 'phishing filter'...except, the conversation went a bit for the worse, as she wasn't overly good with english.
I don't know about you people, but I had to bite my lip and turn off my microphone for a moment when she asked me whether or not it was a good idea to have a pissing filter on.
A few moments later, I was able to reply that I considered it a generally very sensible notion to have a pissing filter on, since you never know when you might need it.

Now you know, people. Always wear a pissing filter, in case someone tries to take advantage of you not having it. What exactly it does, I still have no idea on, but at least now I have one more theory.

Other situation; Customer insists that "your internet isn't working". Ever noticed how it's always someone else's stuff that doesn't work?

Of course, there was no problem on the line itself, modem was responding just fine...

Except for one thing;

Customer had connected, to his cable modem, first a switch (that apparantly acted as an extension cord), an IP-router, and hooked up to that was another router, which was turned off.

For some odd reason he couldn't get online; which might even have been attributed to the fact that his wireless netcard wasn't installed, his CAT-5 cable wasn't plugged in, and even as I was about to do humanity a favor and ask him to electrocute himself, discovered that he had also set his ZoneAlarm firewall to "block all traffic".
And of course, had a hijacked IExplore set to go to russian pornsites. Go fucking figure.

Best part? He demanded that this should work immediately, as it was a home office computer he had gotten from his company, and 'it had been set up by professionals'. I was tempted to ask what exactly their profession was, but since the man was so irate anyway, it seemed a moot point.

In itself, it's funny. Being confronted with it is less so, but it's worth a mention none the less;

Housewife calls in, can't get online. Line is registered to what I assume to be her husband.

Shuffling through her computer (asking her what various sections of the IExplore window reads), we come upon the fact that it attempts to hijack the starting page to something dubious. This is going to be good, I think to myself.
I ask her to check the page history.
"Uh..."
...Yes?
"There's a lot of pages here that have a lot of X'es in them..."
...Aha. Please read a few of them up, I need to check if it's the likely cause of the hijacking.
"Leatherfetish.com, Bondagesluts.com...What ARE these pages?!"
Uh, ma'am, it would appear to be pornographic material...
"Well, I haven't visited these pages!"
Well, someone has...
"..."
"...Oh."
"...Ooh..."
*click*

And then she hung up.

I figure the man of the house was in for a warm welcome when he got home.

Final note;

I also handle copyright cases for the ISP. This more or less means that we get forwarded pre-generated mails from various agencies and lawfirms representing record companies, film companies, the works really. The mails are of a nature that roughly say "we know that this IP address tried to download/upload [some material whose publishers we represent], but since we can't do a case on it, see to it that it doens't happen again."

99% of the time, it's uninteresting stuff, you get fairly jaded quickly, and just see blonde, brunette, redhead...Uh, music, apps, movies actually, but the other sounds cooler. The last 1% is the fun part. Apparantly, porn's less copyright protected, and while I can imagine how it might be a bit more awkward to try and claim the intellectual rights for "Interracial Ass Blasters, vol 4 - Return of Dick Black" as the pinnacle of creativity, it's still surprising how few cases we get on it.

Well, as it goes, procedure is that we send it out to the customer's primary mail address at us, and while this isn't always neither active, nor has an alias bound to it, it's procedure.

So, imagine my surprise when I found a case for "Chocolate Vanilla Cum Eaters" among the cases of various just-released box-office hits.
Now, as I mentioned, usually, the customers that do the massive downloading don't even bother with an assigned email. I don't blame them, really.
This customer, however, had 3 different mailboxes, and upon inspection, all were active.
One was a guy's first name, second was (presumably) his significant other, the third one was, if the alias was to be trusted, their entire family's mail.
Being the kind person I am, I sent the mail containing the copyright infringement (with the infringed work's name in it) to all three.

See, the thing is, I don't have anything against people downloading stuff illegally. It honestly does not bother me. I just feel no obligation to help the person doing so hiding it from his wife and children. Also, who the fuck downloads interracial cumplay videos anyway?
...Family fathers, apparantly.