# People + technology = FAIL **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 25, 2012, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737 "2012-03-25T03:58:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![PlainJain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@PlainJain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlainJain)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/41 "2012-03-28T04:54:32Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > This has been a standard joke-list since the days of Daedalus and Icarus. According to one version, these were from the maintenance logs at Qantas Airlines. I’m not getting the funny. Is it that pilots don’t know anything about mechanics? Or is it just the off-beat solutions? ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/42 "2012-03-28T09:40:11Z")
> [@PlainJain](#): > > I’m not getting the funny. Is it that pilots don’t know anything about mechanics? Or is it just the off-beat solutions? The primary funny in most of those airplane maintenance logs lies in how vague and meaningless the stated problems are. The silly solutions, in turn, are mocking the silly complaints. ISDTM (It seems doubtful to me) that any of those complaints/solutions, as stated, are for real. This was just an airplane mechanic’s version of an Internet Joke Sheet. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/43 "2012-03-28T14:02:20Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > About 5 generations of computer storage later, but that ‘knowledge’ persists. Wow, very interesting. Memes can survive under the oddest circumstances! ---
**Author:** ![PlainJain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@PlainJain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlainJain)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/44 "2012-03-28T14:45:28Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > The primary funny in most of those airplane maintenance logs lies in how vague and meaningless the stated problems are. The silly solutions, in turn, are mocking the silly complaints. ISDTM (It seems doubtful to me) that any of those complaints/solutions, as stated, are for real. This was just an airplane mechanic’s version of an Internet Joke Sheet. Ah, OK. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![blondebear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blondebear/32/1022_2.png) [@blondebear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blondebear)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/45 "2012-03-28T14:53:09Z")
We had a workstation where the PC was put in a cabinet under the tabletop. It used to overheat so the solution was to leave the cabinet door open. Fine, a workable solution, no problem! Later on the PC was moved out of the cabinet onto the tabletop. An even better solution to the overheating problem! But for almost a year, some techs would insist on leaving that cabinet door open. ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/46 "2012-03-28T15:47:39Z")
One of the pieces of software that I used on a daily basis while working as an analytical chemist has a rather weird but not complicated method of viewing the processed results and report to ensure that all the data has been entered correctly and that the results are acceptable (basically a weird Print Preview). At both companies I worked at, no one knew about this feature…no one had looked for it… and no one believed it even existed (this, in 2002 and more recently, so not exactly in the early days of computing). What everyone would do would be to run the process, have the system print a hard copy report, review the report, find any mistakes, then go back and run the process again, print a hard copy report, review the report… These reports were often 20-80 pages long, so the final file on any given test (about one a day per chemist) would end up with 3-5 of these things, all stamped CANCELLED or VOID or whatever until a final acceptable report was obtained and submitted officially. It took me all of 5 minutes to find out how to get the print preview to work, and I started using it on a daily basis. This confused the in-house auditors (“how are you getting it right on the first try every time?!”) and greatly impressed my coworkers. I explained to people how to do it. I made up a very simple walkthrough instruction sheet and emailed it to everyone. I explained again and again and again, year after year. The only people who took to using the preview feature were new employees that I trained myself. No one else was willing to believe that it really worked, or it was just too complicated for them or, worse, they actually believed that the only possible way to get the right report was to print out a half dozen ones that needed corrections. It was ridiculous. ---
**Author:** ![Morgyn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morgyn/32/3041_2.png) [@Morgyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgyn)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/47 "2012-03-28T16:28:14Z")
> [@Max\_Torque](#): > > 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. I’m astonished that the file hasn’t become irreparably corrupted. And if it was long enough ago, I’m even more astonished that she was able to open it and work in it without Word being massively slow or crashing because the file was too big for it to handle. ---
**Author:** ![FlyByNight512](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/82dd89/32.png) [@FlyByNight512](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyByNight512)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/48 "2012-03-28T18:25:54Z")
Just yesterday I helped a lady who complained that ‘Adobe wasn’t installed’ on her computer. I knew that Adobe Reader was installed and working fine, so I asked her to demonstrate. She nodded, opened Excel, went to file -\> open and attempted to open a .pdf. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/49 "2012-03-28T20:04:54Z")
> [@mnemosyne](#): > > I explained to people how to do it. I made up a very simple walkthrough instruction sheet and emailed it to everyone. I explained again and again and again, year after year. The only people who took to using the preview feature were new employees that I trained myself. No one else was willing to believe that it really worked, or it was just too complicated for them or, worse, they actually believed that the only possible way to get the right report was to print out a half dozen ones that needed corrections. It was ridiculous. At one of my old employers our terminal interface program had the keypad “-” key mapped to some odd rarely used function. I wrote a set of instructions to remap that key as a - so when entering ISBN’s for books we could 10 key the numbers very easily. I sent an email to a couple of the corporate IT guys who managed all the interface stuff. Turns out the config file for the software could be modified so that when the software installed, it would enable the - by default instead of a function that even they confirmed nobody was using. It took 3 years for the change to be implemented, I even sent them a modified config file that would do the job. When it came through, the config file was exactly what I sent them. My whole region (about 150 computers) already had it installed on every computer for 2.5 years and it was working perfectly. :smack: I also wrote a nifty MSaccess DB that would spit out proper tags for reboxing old product with all of the item descriptions, item numbers, barcodes, quantity, various relevant categories within our inventory. After 2 years of begging, I got “read only” direct access to the master title database on the network (which is all I wanted/needed). I modified the system to pull direct from the master list, worked perfectly. Now as soon as a title was added by corporate purchasing, it was live in my system. 14 warehouses were using it. Then they made a few changes to security on the system and my access was locked out disabling the programs updates. I went back to maually updating it for our area. I quit a few months later. About 30 days after I quit I recieved a phone call at home from a supply chain manager in another area of the country who loved my program, even if it was manually updated. I told him I would be more than happy to do so for a fee ($400 or so for 8 warehouses in his area that were using it) Never heard another word about it. I did teach a couple of my coworkers how to update under the condition that it not be shared. As far as I know, those two are still the only place capable of generating those tags everyone loves. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/50 "2012-03-28T20:23:43Z")
**drachillix** , that reminds me of a job I had once. I was developing an app in VB that was an update of an old DOS app that they had. They wanted it to look and function just like the DOS app. And they wanted all of the read-only fields to be in disabled textboxes. And the default background color of the textboxes was grey. So they had grey text on a grey background. Their workaround to this was to have everyone change their Windows color scheme so that disabled text was black. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2012, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/51 "2012-04-04T04:35:58Z")
[Cracked.com](http://Cracked.com) is right on top of this kind of thing. [18 Instructional Charts for People Who Suck at Technology](http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_344_18-instructional-charts-people-who-suck-at-technology_p18/) ---
**Author:** ![kferr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/71e660/32.png) [@kferr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kferr)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2012, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/52 "2012-04-04T12:13:08Z")
> [@mnemosyne](#): > > My mom used to send me an email then call me immediately to see if it “went through or not?” Sometimes, if there were large files attached, she might actually call me before the email showed up in my inbox, and then she’d get mad at the stupid computer and ISP and whatever else she thought caused the problem. > > She has learned, though - now she only calls a few hours later or sends a text to tell me that she sent me an email. Sometimes she calls a few hours after the text too, just to be sure. My parents (in the US) once sent me (in the UK) an e-card for my birthday. They sent it about a week before my birthday so it would “get there in time”. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2012, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737/53 "2012-04-04T14:11:46Z")
> [@kferr](#): > > My parents (in the US) once sent me (in the UK) an e-card for my birthday. They sent it about a week before my birthday so it would “get there in time”. When I went on a round-the-world trip 10 years ago or so, I lent my computer to my parents, who didn’t have one, so they could email me on my Yahoo account. My mum is fairly techno savvy and had no problem, but I gave up trying to explain to my dad that the he didn’t need to know where in the world I was in order for the email to “find me”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-technology-fail/616737.md?page=2)