It was a usual busy Tuesday in the IT helpdesk office when a support ticket arrived that instantly stood out from the dozens of password resets and printer jams. The ticket read: “My pencil sharpener is broken. Please fix urgently.”
At first, the tech assigned shrugged it off as a prank. But the request came through the official support portal, complete with the user’s name, department, and even a severity level marked as “High.” Curiosity got the better of the technician, and they replied politely: “Can you please confirm if this pencil sharpener is connected to your workstation or if this is a hardware issue unrelated to our services?”
The user responded promptly: “Yes, it’s the small electric sharpener on my desk. It’s stopped working and is causing me to fall behind on my notes. Please advise.”
The IT team exchanged bewildered glances. Fixing a mechanical pencil sharpener was not in the job description, yet the request was real and the urgency was taken seriously by the user. Deciding to maintain service quality, an engineer swung by the user’s desk with his trusty toolkit—only to find a tiny hunk of plastic and metal sitting silently, no lights, no sounds.
Diagnosis was quick: the internal blade was jammed, likely due to an overenthusiastic attempt to sharpen a colored pencil that was too thick. Since this was an electrical device unrelated to the network or software, the tech advised politely that physical hardware repairs of office supplies weren’t in scope and recommended replacing the pencil sharpener instead.
The user appreciated the visit but requested if IT could just “push a fix remotely next time.” The ticket was closed with a friendly reminder that some things, like pencils and their sharpeners, are best handled by human hands.
The whole helpdesk team had a good laugh. Somewhere between the staples, servers, and software licenses, they’d just been asked to troubleshoot a pencil sharpener. Not exactly IT support, but definitely one of the strangest tickets ever logged—and a great reminder that sometimes helpdesk heroes get called for the oddest reasons.