Shortest solved problem for me ever
Back in the early days of my career paying my dues and having my prior sins purged from me through the pain and suffering of doing phone support, the best call I ever received that to this day still cracks me up.
I was doing remote support for a school that offered home schooling via computer based on a custom system built on top of Lotus Notes (of all things). The list of problems we had to solve over and over again was long given that the computers being used in the homes of our users ranged from Windows 95 to Windows 2000, or they would rent an IBM machine from us with Windows 98 SE on it.
Typical problems involved having sync issues in Lotus Notes and we would routinely have to walk them through the same custom data integrity check procedure over and over on the phone. Many of our users only had dial-up so call turnaround time was fast because we would get them to the point where they could initiate a script that would run to resolve most problems, and then we would hang up so they could connect to the internet and do their thing. It was dull, tedious work.
One day, I was training a new guy who had just started and he was shadowing me on these phone calls. The best call of that day came in mid-morning as I was sipping on my coffee. It literally went like this:
"Hello, this is Stephajn. How can I help you?"
"HEY! I'm really confused about this computer you guys lent me. I think it's missing some parts!"
"Oh? What parts is it missing?"
"Well you only gave me half a keyboard! Where are the lowercase keys?"
My shadow and I looked at each other, both feeling rather confused. Then I turned back and looked at my keyboard, and started laughing so hard, I barely managed to mute the phone in time before the guy would have heard me laughing my ass off at him. My shadow looked at me confused, and I held up the keyboard where, of course, all of the labels on the keys are in capital letters.
He had to walk out of the room and laugh so hard in the hallway. It took everything I had to compose myself and explain the concept of a caps lock key to the guy on the phone.
"OH! So just like my typewriter then!"
"Yes....just like your typewriter....." and again I had to mute the phone because I was laughing so hard.
But that day didn't stop rewarding me because the next call came from a woman who was in absolute tears. Completely distraught.
I asked her what the problem was and she said her computer did something illegal and she didn't mean for it to happen. She was so afraid that the police were going to show up.
"Why do you think your computer did something illegal?"
"It just told me onscreen! It says, 'This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.'"
The 19 year old in me both wanted to laugh, but also to give this poor woman a big hug. Oh memories of the Windows 9x error message days....
It took me a few minutes to reassure her that the police were not coming to her house and that it was just bad wording from Microsoft to indicate that a program had just crashed.
About a week later I got to meet this poor woman when she came into the school to pick up a replacement monitor. I got to give her that hug as she was so grateful.