What technology fails have you witnessed lately? Could be you, someone close to you or a stranger.
Mine happened this week. We had a customer come in every day this week complaining that her car alarm was going off inside her car while she was driving.
We checked for fault codes. None.
We check for alarm causes stored. None.
We went for test drives. Nothing.
We went for test drives with the customer. Nothing.
We checked this car 4 days in a row. Nothing. It was perfect.
We have a couple of hours invested into this sucker and have found NOTHING.
Friday morning she is back complaining it has happened yet again.
The following took place while she was standing in the service office talking to the service adviser, here is the actual conversation.
Her: Listen, there it is, it is making the noise right now!
Service adviser: ??
(Note the car is parked outside, and is not locked, and not running)
Her: There it is, can’t you hear it?
Service adviser: whaaa?
Her: Are you tone deaf, can’t you hear that?
Service adviser: :dubious: Uh, Mrs. _____ that sound is coming from your purse, not the car.
Her: oh. That is my work cell phone I never answer that.
Service adviser: Let’s go out to your car
Service adviser returns alone laughing his ass off. Customer had paired her work cell to the car, but always used a headset with her personal cell. All of a sudden this week, people from her work started calling her during the time she was in the car. Her work cell has a rather obnoxious ring that sounded like a car alarm, and she never answered it. So every time she got a call she thought the alarm in the car was going off. :smack:
She of course didn’t notice the incoming call message on the radio, and the radio muting so the ringtone could play though the speakers.
:rolleyes:
And people wonder why my labor rates high. I have to invest time into shit like this for a zero return.
So what technology fails have you seen lately?
[Jeff Foxworthy] Here’s your sign[/JF]
Prof: I can’t login to the computer in the conference room.
Me: Huh - You know the login info for that computer is printed on a label that’s on the frame of the monitor?
Prof: But I’ve always used my personal login and it’s always worked!
Me: Well, let’s go see …
Me: :: points to label on monitor :: See this username and password? Try that. (And Shazam, it works)
Prof: I could swear my personal login has worked before.
Me: Well, probably what’s been happening is that someone else had already logged in to the computer that day using the login info on the monitor and didn’t log out. So you didn’t really need to log in to the computer - just to any other of your own accounts you wanted to use that day.
Once upon a time I was an IT consultant for a scientific software firm. I once gave a software training class to 6 PhD’s that were sent to us as designated “super users.” hand picked by an unnamed large pharma firm.
Halfway through the 2nd day of class one of them raised their hand and asked.
“How do I right click?”
After that the flood gates opened, and the rest of the PhD’s started asking equally basic questions that indicated complete computer ineptitude.
These people all had PhD’s and were hand picked as software super-users by their company. They were meant to take the software training back and pass it onto others at their company.
I work for a company that sells software development tools. So, our users are (necessarily) software developers. They write code and (at least theoretically) are pretty familiar with computers.
At one point, one of my friends at work was trying to help a customer debug something, and asked him to send a config file so we could check that some part of our tools was configured correctly. The config file in question is just a text file with the configuration in a simple human-readable form.
The customer responded with a Microsoft Word document. Inside the Word document were a series of images. Each image was a screenshot of a text editor showing a portion of the config file. He had to take multiple screenshots because the config file was too long to be displayed all at once.
The Word document has been printed and adorns my friend’s office wall.
About 5 years ago I was on another forum that had disabled hot linking. Someone asked why the posted URLs in a certain message were so long. “Every time I try typing one into my browser I get an error because I wade a mistake somewhere, and then I have to try to figure out where.”
I do software development (and support) for in-house users. So I get my share of emails from employees with screen shots of error messages. Some folks know the Alt+PrintScreen trick to get just the active window copied, and they paste the error message into the email. Others paste a shot of the entire screen. However, this one guy that worked there a couple of years ago would get a screen shot of the error message, paste it into MS Paint, take a screen shot of THAT, then paste it into a Word document and send me the Word document. I could never figure that one out.
Because he got that to work once. Now, how he stumbled on that sequence will be forever a mystery - but at a guess, he’d probably tried something easier once and messed it up, and someone helped him troubleshoot it over the phone, and he took good notes:
Zero return? Many of the car repair places I have dealt with (in the past) would have just de-linked the cell phone from the car, told her they had fixed it, and given her a bill for a couple hundred dollars.
My grandfather is pretty adept with computers for his age, but occasionally I really have to bite my tongue.
He had gotten an email from his ISP regarding a password reset or some such, and didn’t know what to do on his own. There was a 20-some digit verification string that you had to paste into some web page. He calls me and asks me to help, so I tell him to send me the email he got from the ISP.
So what he did was print out the email, scan it back in, and then emailed the scanned picture to me. :smack:
I’m still a bit shocked that he did all that successfully but didn’t know about the “forward” button…
My friend, back at her house several miles away: “What the hell? Did you change your WiFi password already after I left b/c you didn’t want me to keep using it?!”
Me:
There’s also my parents’ gated golf course retirement community. “My neighbor says we’re using their wire fire.”
Me: “Well let’s make sure you’re attached to yours as the default…”
Woman I met on an island in the south Pacific: “This place is so primitive - my wifi doesn’t work.”
Me: “I didn’t think your hotel had wifi?”
Her: “No, the wifi on my computer.”
Me: “The wifi that you use back home in Newfoundland?”
Her: “Yes. It’s ridiculous. How do these people live?!”
::: sigh:::
It’s a 2011 car under warranty. No estimate given to customer due to it being a warranty issue ( we thought)
Turns out it is not a defect in material or workmanship so not a matter for warranty. I can’t bill the factory Since I had not given an estimate for $ when the repair order was written it would be against Calif. law to charge the customer at that point.
Bottom I get screwed by a not so bright customer.
Still I would rather have that than some of the outright dishonest assholes.
At the place I used to work as a troubleshooter, there was one secretary who had an interesting way of using Word: every letter, every memo, every THING she’d ever typed was in one file on her desktop. When she had to type a new letter, she’d open this massive, multi-meg file, carriage-return off the bottom to a new page, type the letter, save the huge file again, and just print the last page. She’d been doing this for years. I offered to teach her how to create different documents and organize them into folders, but she felt that her system worked just fine.
