Sitting at my desk in the ISP help desk cube farm, I didn’t have a lot of time to reflect on my day. We had 6.5 minutes per call to resolve the issue as a level 1, and we had called in queue from when my shift started at 4PM until 11.  During this shift I was taking between 10 to 15 calls an hour. every hour….for 7 to 8 hours a day.

With that amount of volume you are going to hear some strange things, things you didn’t believe people actually said. With that in mind, I took a call from a gentleman who couldn’t get on the Internet. It wasn’t a big deal, as configuring Dial Up Networking was my bread and butter…I was walking him through his configuration when the machine gave us a BSOD. He was running Windows 95 and I assured him not to worry, these things sometimes happened; it would come back up and we would finish configuring his machine.

It was at this point when we hit a roadblock.  As the machine was coming back up, Windows 95 instructed him to press “any key” to continue. I advised him he should.  After a long (30 second) pause, he then  replied “can I press the ‘L’ key?”

I told him that was perfectly fine, and he did so, and the machine booted.

I didn’t think that “any key man” existed and thought the story was apocryphal – I talked to him myself. From what I understand, the confusion about where the “any key” is has led Microsoft to change all their documentation and language to “press the Enter Key.”

Wasn’t the “any key” actually two keys? “N’+”E???”  I promise this will be the only “any key” post 😉 – Rob

[Picture Source: MrVJTod (CC)]