The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Sat, 4 May 1996 13:15:29 +0100
Hiya Loonies... This would appear to be a trend... 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 ------- MORE BLINDLY IGNORANT COMPUTER USERS I overheard a nice conversation one day in a computer shop: customer: I'd like a mouse mat please. assistant: certainly sir,we've got a large variety. customer while looking at said mats then asked: "But will they be compatible with my computer?" A friend of mine works at Word Perfect in Orem UT. He had a lady call up and tell him she couldn't figure out how to install the program. He told her "Insert Disk1 into the disk drive and type "INSTALL WP". He then proceeded to have her insert disk 2 through 4 in sequential order. She then stop him to ask if it would be alright to remove the previous four disks because the fifth wouldn't fit. Man comes in, in a panic. He had typed a document the day before, and now it was all gone. "Have you saved it properly?" was of course my first question. Yes, he said, it was saved properly. But all the text had mysteriously disappeared. On his disk, I found a completely empty document. Indeed it was saved, apparently, and indeed it did not contain text. Of course, he had saved the document right BEFORE he started typing. When it was finished, he took out his disk and shut down the computer. And now all that text was gone, even though he had SAVED!!! ....... To top it all off, he got mad at ME when I told him the only thing he could do was retype the whole thing. Was I nuts or something??? Someone comes in and asks me how to print a document. I explain about the Page Setup (making sure the user selected "A4 Letter" as his document size, the one for our LaserWriter) and then selecting the Print command in the File menu. Happy, the user walks away. Comes back in two minutes. Still no document with his name on our spooler. "Make sure you have selected the Info-Groep Laser Spooler, I said. He had checked. It WAS selected. "Have you issued the Print command yet?" Of course, what did I think he was, a fucking dummy? So I went over to have a look. The "Print" dialog box was still on his screen. I clicked on the "Print" button.... "Oooooooh, you have to click on Print!!!" Another incident I remember froma a few years ago when I worked at the computer center of the University: a student came in a complained that she saved a file (Mac) earlier that day, but now she can't find it. Computer assistant: And which Mac did you use earlier when you saved it? Student: Oh, this same one. Computer assistant: Perhaps it's on the harddrive... Student: No, some other assistant saved it on my disk for me. Computer assistant: (Looks for disk icon, looks in drive, can't find the disk) Where's the disk? Student: In my bag... I was in the computer lab sitting next to a blonde who was typing a paper, and by the way she was doing it, it was clear that this was just about her first time. Well, a friend of hers sat at the computer across from hers, and they started chatting... and yup, the screensaver kicked in. The scream was heard, I was told, around two corners in the hallway. Her friend just told her to move the mouse to get back to what she was doing, that she didn't lose anything, in fact. She didn't count on the fact that when her friend jumped up in hysteria she'd bumped the keyboard/mouse connector out of the socket... Tech support to a lady having troubles getting her computer to turn on. He asked her, "What happens when you turn the computer on?". She replied, "The screen just stays black". He then asked, "Is the computer plugged in?". She replied, "I took it to a repair shop last week and they apparently fixed it so it doesn't need a power cord anymore." He asked, "Is the computer a laptop computer?". She replied, "No, but they never gave me back the power cord so they must have fixed it so it didn't need it." He said, "Go back to the repair store and get back your power cord. They just forgot to give it to you." A foreign gentleman came in needing help using a word processor to write a letter. I took him over to a Mac and gave him a brief overview of its capabilities and commands and left him at a point where he could just start typing. He looked at me, puzzled. See, he didn't know how to type. Not just that he didn't know how to type well, but it was like he didn't understand the concept of typing (the 's' key puts an s on the screen). Eventually I ended up typing it for him bacause it was easier than arguing with him. Another gentleman came to us frantic. The day before he had saved a very important document on the hard drive of one of our Macs and he could not find it. He was yelling at me that our lab employees must have deleted it and we need to have more respect for users, etc. (We have a policy of allowing documents to remain in the hard drives for 7 days before being erased by the staff.) I helped him look for his paper, but when I couldn't find it, I explained our policy and the fact that we can't control what other users might do with a document left on a computer. He was *not* happy. Then in a sudden flash of genius I asked him, "You were using *this* particular Mac, weren't you?" to which he responded, "No, I was using one in the other room." There was an big, athletic-looking guy fooling with one of our brother (IBM) printers. He was opening it up, shaking it a little, and trying to jam a paper into the manual paper feed. When I asked him what the problem was, he said, "Your copier isn't working." - Hey, can you help me? my program doesn't work... - What is the problem, are you using Turbo Pascal?? - Yes, the program just blocks the machine... - Well, does it compile? - I don't know, it just doesn't run... I went to his computer and he told me: - You see? there's the .EXE file, if you run it it blocks the machine... - And where is your source, the .PAS file??? - I wrote it and renamed it to .EXE so it could run... "Remove the sleve, and insert the floppy disk into the drive." [hours of technical support later] "You know -- these vinyl covers they put on disks are really hard to get off..." [45 minutues of trying to fix a terminal -- including a process kill and a full shutdown (UNIX)] "Oh -- wait a second..... Oops, the intensity was just down. I have a login prompt now." A bank clerk friend told me this the other day: An elderly customer came into the bank complaining the ATM wasn't working. She had been waiting for half an hour after "requesting a new cheque book" and it still hadn't come out yet! A customer (wife of an obnoxious history professor, none the less) comes into the store with a Macintosh which I had just replaced a bad drive in a few days previously. She complained that it wasn't working again, implying that I didn't fix it right the first time. So, I get out the diagnotic tools, but can't find a thing wrong with it. I then checked some of the diskettes she brought in with it, and find that they are loaded with viruses. After cleaning up the diskettes, I explained to her that her computer probably got the virus by trading diskettes with someone whose computer was also infected. She then got a very sullen expression on her face and asked me, "Can a person catch this virus from their computer?"