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Another XKCD FTW

I can understand wanting to skip past the obvious stuff. I usually had the person describe the problem to me at the start and would try to judge from their own words just whether it was something the script would help or not. Since I had to keep to the script I would rush through it if I was pretty sure it was not going to resolve it so I could then get to the part where my intuition could take over (IIRC there were about 7-8 things I had to do as part of the script) and try to figure it out from there.
 
gnome said:
Open questions is the answer... don't ask them a question they can just say "yes" to.

"Press the 'info' button on your TV. What station does it say you're on?"
"What have you done since you discovered the problem?"
"Tell me which lights are on the router."
"Type your password into 'notepad'. Does it appear correctly?" (nobody wants to consider if they left their caps or num lock on)
Click to expand...

That technique will also help you spot keyboard problems. I remember one time I was repeatedly getting password errors. When I finally got on, I tried typing the whole login sequence in notepad and discovered that the "tab" key, which I used to move from user ID to password, was intermittently producing "<tab>\". Time for a new keyboard.
 
CORed said:
That technique will also help you spot keyboard problems. I remember one time I was repeatedly getting password errors. When I finally got on, I tried typing the whole login sequence in notepad and discovered that the "tab" key, which I used to move from user ID to password, was intermittently producing "<tab>\". Time for a new keyboard.
Click to expand...

That's a keyboard and not a software problem?
 
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