IT makes an analogy to auto repair:
No humor here, either. But, unlike that stupid Mordor shit I referred to earlier, this one isn't your fault. I imagine most people in IT would see this as funny, because LOL surely a mechanic does not deal with this.
...actually, yeah. Yeah, we do. It's pretty much exactly the same, in fact.
If you have good service writers, then can OFTEN ask the right questions to get SOME kind of useful information. But sometimes, the person is just so goddamn stupid that you simply cannot comprehend what their complaint is. It's bad enough that a lot of the time, I'll just test drive a car and/or do a brief inspection, then come back to them and say 'okay, I noticed this, this, and this. Is one of these things what you're complaining about?'
Here's a random example that comes to mind: 'it makes a noise when I start the car.'
I swear to god, I talked to the guy for fifteen minutes trying to get a fucking better description. After looking at the car, and another fifteen minutes of trying to decipher his retardese, I understood the problem to be: 'when I turn the key, I hear the starter turning the engine, but sometimes the engine takes a lot time to start.'
The standard terminology for that would be 'intermittent long crank time.' That's it. All that needs to be said. Fully understood. But no, I get thirty minutes of 'it makes a noise.'
It's akin to someone telling you the 'the lights on the front of my computer don't work.' And then you look at the computer, and it's clearly on fire.