{"id":112740,"date":"2026-09-29T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=112740"},"modified":"2026-09-29T21:15:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T04:15:18","slug":"20260929-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20260929-00\/?p=112740\/","title":{"rendered":"As a general rule, calling product support while drunk is not recommended"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a reminiscence about product support stories, a now-retired colleague related a story of a call that they took when working the product support phone lines for Microsoft FrontPage, a Web site authoring tool from the late 1990&#8217;s and early 2000&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>The call came from a person who was creating a fan site for the rock band <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Van_Halen\">Van Halen<\/a>. They had a java applet on the web site that played music, this being back in the days when java applets on Web pages was a thing, and the applet wasn&#8217;t working.<\/p>\n<p>This was not a FrontPage issue, but my colleague figured they could try to help out anyway. &#8220;But man, was this person lit.&#8221; The sound of ice clinking in a glass was readily apparent, and as the call went on, the customer got more and more drunk.<\/p>\n<p>The customer shouted in frustration, &#8220;You&#8217;re not even a real f\u2014ing fan of Van Halen!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>My colleague advised the customer that if the swearing continued, they would have to end the call.<\/p>\n<p>This was apparently not the response the customer was hoping for.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;F\u2014 you! I wanna talk to Gates!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what happened next. I wonder if the customer was <a title=\"When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20251223-00\/?p=111896\"> transferred to the special operators who pretend to be Bill Gates&#8217; secretary<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Swearing is also poor form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-112740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Swearing is also poor form.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112741,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112740\/revisions\/112741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}