Ignorant Computer Users...

The Loony Bin ( loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk )
Fri, 3 May 1996 18:56:13 +0100


Hiya Folks...

More silliness for you...

Wishes & Dreams...

- ANDREA
        xx

-- 
************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>************
******************<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>*******************
***                                               ***
***                THE LOONY BIN                  ***
***          loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk         ***
***                                               ***
******************Internet Goddess*******************
*********************ANDROMEDA***********************

  ------- Forwarded message follows -------


BLINDLY IGNORANT COMPUTER USERS

A secretary in our office (years ago :-) was trying to save her data on
a floppy. She kept complaining that the (single sided) 5 & 1/4 was
losing her data. Well, I was asked to investigate. I unwillingly
approached the gallows. I asked her to show me what she did when she
saved her data. She took out a new disk, inserted it into the drive,
formatted it, saved her data, and removed the diskette without a hitch.
She then proceeded to peel off a new label, and carefully applied it to
the disk. No problems so far. She then took the disk, inserted it into
the typwriter, scrolled it through the roller, and neatly typed her
label. I found the problem on the first try.

I was trying to teach this sales person how to enter his letters into
Word Perfect.  I told him to select Word Perfect from his menu and when
he did it gave him the opening screen which said, "Press any key to
continue..."  He looked at the keyboard for awhile then asked me, "Where
is the 'any' key?".

A secretary working in an accounting firm was told to make back up
copies of the discs every night.  So every night she carfully collected
together all the discs and took them away to copy them.   After six
months the hard disc crashed but no-one was worried because they had
backups, until the secretary brought in the huge pile of paper with a
nice photocopied disc on each!

A user called the PC Support line of the university having trouble with
her Mac.  It was handed off to one of the Mac guys...
"What seems to be the problem?"     
"It's not working."
Eyes roll.  "What's not working?"
"My Mac."
<- Five minutes of drawing the problem out of the woman deleted ->
"Okay, to access the files on the disk click the mouse on the picture
 of the disk."
 Pause.  "Nothing happened.  I told you, I've already tried this."
 Support guy makes as if he is strangling the phone.
 "Okay, do it again.  Is the mouse moving?"
 "Yep."
 "On the screen?"
 "Yep."
 "Now click twice on the picture of the disk."
 Pause and the consultant hears the two clicks again.  "Nothing."
 "Maam, double-click once more for me."
 Clink-clink.
 "Maam, are you hitting the screen with your mouse?"

A secretary who had gotten a PC for word processing had periodic
failures. The disks would work for days, but after a couple of weeks
would fail. They would be recovered by IBM (to an extent) but after a
couple of weeks the cycle would repeat. At one point a service tech came
out to the site to repair it, suspecting damage in transit. He recovered
what he could, cleaned and aligned the drive (for the 400th time) and
gave it a clean bill of health at about 5:00...and the secretary in
question put the disk in the envelope, stuck it to her wall with her
magnet, and went home.

A friend of mine fixed his mother's TV by connecting the antenna.  After
explaining the problem, she asked:
"How far away is the TV station?"
"From here?  About 20 miles."
"You mean that picture can travel 20 miles to get to the antenna, but it
can't go another 3 inches to get to the TV?"
How do you explain that (in less than four years)?

This was told by an instructor who taught programming in BASIC. He had
given them step-by-step instructions on how to write a short program
that would let you enter two numbers and the computer would return the
sum of the two numbers. When each student had all their program steps
keyed in, he told the class to type RUN and enter.  A lady in the back
of the class said, "It didn't work."  The instructor once again told her
to simply type RUN and enter.  Still didn't work.  So the instructor
walked back to see what the problem was.  It was obvious.  He had been
spelling out "R" "U" "N"....she had typed "are you in".

A user came up and wanted to know why their 3.5" disk wouldn't go into
the Mac's floppy drive.  I check out the disk, noted that it was okay,
and then walked over to the offending machine, suspecting a hardware
problem with the disk mechanism. As I moved to insert the disk into the
drive to test things out, the user interrupted me:
"No!  Not that drive...*this* one."
"This" drive, of course, turned out to be a CD-ROM.

At my first real world programming position, we sent out updates on 8"
floppy disks.  To save time/energy, we put the following on the disk
labels:

        1) Insert disk in drive <A>
        2) Press ^C     (control-C)
        3) type  A:INSTALL  <RETURN>

We got a call from one of our users (um, "customers").  She said
"I don't know what to do.  I inserted the disk in the drive, but then 
I forgot what the next step was." We sent out paper copies with
instructions after that.

While I was working in a placement office at the University, we helped
students write their resumes on the computer.  A student came up to me
and said he had problems reading the disk.  I asked him to show it to
me so I could see if I could recover the files, "sure." he said, an
took the disk (5 1/4" floppy) out of his pocket and unfolded it.

Another time, while working at a computer store, somebody who bought
his computer from us was having trouble with one of his disks.  The
man was living in another city, so I asked him to send me a copy of
the disk, and I would take a look at it.  A few days later, an
envelope arrived for me, it contained a "photocopy" of the front and
back side of the disk.