A story shared by Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen offers a glimpse into the wilder side of tech support. The tale involves a retired colleague who once worked the FrontPage support line. The caller was trying to build a Van Halen fan site and had run into trouble with a Java applet that was supposed to play music. It wasn't working, and the caller was not taking it well.
As the call went on, the support agent reportedly heard the sound of ice clinking in a glass. The customer became more intoxicated and increasingly frustrated, eventually shouting that the agent was not a real Van Halen fan. After a warning about swearing, the caller responded with an expletive and demanded to speak to Bill Gates. Chen notes that Microsoft had a special line for such demands, where operators answered as Gates's office and passed complaints back to support.
The story is a reminder of FrontPage's messy legacy. The HTML editor, originally from Vermeer Technologies, relied on proprietary server extensions and lingered in Microsoft's ecosystem for years. Mainstream support ended in 2009, extended support in 2014, and Microsoft only moved to block the FrontPage Remote Procedure Call protocol in 2025. Whether the Java applet ever worked, or whether the caller ever reached Gates, is lost to history.