Help desk pilot fish gets a call from a user whose support calls are way too familiar to everyone there.

“I knew this was going to be a frustrating call,” says fish. “But first, I needed some information about the computer by having him type in ‘ipconfig /all’.

“I said, OK, I need you to open up a command prompt by clicking the Start button and typing ‘cmd’ on the search line.

“He said, ‘What?’

“I took it step by step. Slowly. I phonetically spelled out ‘cmd’ — Charlie, Mike, Delta. He said he got it. I told him to press Enter. ‘A black screen came up,’ he said.

“Good, I said, now type ‘ipconfig /all’. Again, I phonetically spelled out everything. And since 95 percent of our users don’t know the difference between a forward slash and a backslash, I told him to use the slash that is with the question mark key and not the slash above the Enter key. I made it very clear that he was to type the slash and not the question mark.

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