Funny reasons why people have opened a ticket with IT

As an IT professional, you’re probably not new to the idea of IT tickets, and have probably seen it all, from requests to reset passwords to fixing the internet speed, and everything in between.

But every now and then, you probably get a memorable ticket with an aberrant request.

We asked IT managers what are some of the funniest tickets they’ve received, and here are some of their hilarious answers:

Too many cat photos

“When I was working as a system administrator, we had one of those IT tickets that would just keep coming back. It was a user who was complaining that her computer was slow and she couldn’t figure out why. She had tried everything, and nothing worked.

Finally, we asked her for permission to look at her computer remotely — she agreed — and when used our RMM software, she had a bunch of pictures of cats on the desktop. We asked her why she had all these pictures on her desktop and she said it was because she liked looking at them.

That’s when we realized that every time she opened up her computer and saw those pictures, it took longer than if there were no pictures on the desktop at all! So we told her that if she wanted to speed up her computer’s performance, she should get rid of those pictures ASAP.” – Michael Miller, CEO and Security Evangelist, VPNOnline.com.

“Curious” to see a phishing scam in practice

With a lot of phishing scams going around, our IT team was asked to prepare a special workshop for all employees on how to recognize a scam, to not click on any suspicious links, and to even just send a screenshot to IT to verify everything for each user, if there are any doubts. After what I felt was a well-run workshop, the same day I received two emails from two separate users on what to do “if they clicked on some weird link”.

I assumed that after that long workshop, they realized that they had done something like this previously and wanted me to check whether our system or their accounts were compromised in any way. Unfortunately, I was wrong. They clicked on suspicious links in emails, 1 hour and 33 minutes and 1 hour and 42 minutes after I explicitly informed them not to click on suspicious links in emails and did that while being aware that yes, these links do look quite suspicious. Apparently, they were both “curious” to see a phishing scam in practice.

Thankfully, after a full check of server logs for just an abundance of caution, we found that there was no sign of any intrusion. The emails about the phishing scam weren’t really funny on their own but to me are indeed a funny tale about human curiosity.” – Ivan Novak, Senior IT Support Officer at Energy Casino.

Put in batteries the wrong way

“One of the most surprising aspects has been how frequently individuals contact our team for IT-issues that are not related to their domain. For example, I have seen a call come to support regarding a computer mouse not working. It turns out they had installed the batteries incorrectly. Our help team does its best to assist customers even in these situations, if possible. – Chandler Rogers, Relay.

Installed software on the wrong device

“IT tickets can be pretty hilarious, depending on the situation. I once got an IT ticket from a customer saying that they were unable to find the installed software on their device. We investigated via our patch management software the issue and found that he actually installed the software on an external drive.” – Alaa Negeda, CTO at Alxtel.

Have any funny IT tickets you’d love to share? Let us know!