I have been working in my new capacity as an Apple mobile device tech for the last three weeks. In any job, one finds moments and customers that make one question one's faith in humanity as a race, but also how certain individuals manage to operate and live their lives without befalling some hideously-moronic tragedy. Tech support workers, however, are typically considered to have a higher number of these using their service, as theirs is a business of resolving problems that have arisen due to ignorance, idiocy, or a combination thereof. For example, most of the civilized world (by which I mean the non-brain-dead portion) considers the traditional tech support opening question of "Is the computer plugged in and turned on?" to be ridiculous and unnecessary, but tech support employees will swear that it is simply amazing how many times this simple question fixes the problem.
These moments are often referred to as "facepalm" moments - situations in which the sheer magnitude of the ineptitude or stupidity causes an observing participant to cover his/her face in shame of being even in proximity to such idiocy. One of my co-workers, for example, tells a story of how a middle-aged woman asked the following question shortly after the iPhone 4 was released: the woman was contemplating the higher-capacity model (32 gigabytes), and towards the end of the conversation she asked the following question: "As I put more music and stuff on it, will it get heavier?" This was asked with an utterly straight face, as the woman was apparently very concerned with the weight of her GBs and whether or not it had the wifis. I remarked that the tech should have sent the woman to Walgreens (YouTube is your friend).
We have all heard such stories from people in tech support sectors and other places (including an insurance call center rep who had the bad luck to ask me if I had a spare tire with me after I told her that I'd blown the rear tire on my motorcycle - let that one sink in for a minute) Today, however, I finally witnessed a tech support facepalm for myself first-hand.
A customer checked in with a phone that he said was taking blurry pictures, so I immediately looked at the lens. It did look a bit cloudy, but more pressing than the cloudy lens was the small, translucent plastic tab sticking out of the space between the gentleman's phone and its case.
"Oh, surely not," I thought, incredulous. "It can't be."
I probed as I entered his serial number: "Has it done this since you got it?"
"Yes. From day one."
"And how long ago was that?"
"Three or four weeks. I don't remember."
Had he not been right there in front of me, I would have facepalmed hard. Instead, I asked him to remove the case and hand the phone to me. He did, and the tab came with the phone.
I then proceeded to pull the tab away from the phone. The tab pulled a thin piece of plastic from covering the back of the phone, including the camera lens. The poor brain-dead gentleman had left the shipping protection in place, even though it completely covered the camera lens and flipped over the charging connection at the bottom of the phone. How he'd thought it a good idea to leave it all in place was beyond me; "This is a really poorly-designed back protector - I have to bend it back every time I charge my phone."
I turned the camera on, took a picture of the customer, turned the phone around to show off the shot, and proceeded to ask, "Does this look better?"
His response: "Oh."
