“Larry, this computer doesn’t work at all! I can’t access my files!”
“Seems okay to me, what are you trying to do?”
START --> PROGRAM FILES --> MICROSOFT ACCESS
FILE --> OPEN --> MY DOCUMENTS --> LETTER.DOC
“You can’t open a Word document with Access.”
“But I want to Access my files!”
Also, when we replaced all of our remaining CRTs with LCD monitors, I had one user who insisted that this change “messed up” her computer. For weeks… Not saying that things displayed differently, mind - every day, some new user-related idiocy, “because of this monitor!”
My first real job, I was told to load several hundred boxes of paper files onto a set of steel shelves in a storage room. The shelves were completely full of stored boxes of paper already. So I asked my boss what I should do with the material already on the shelves – throw it out? Ship it somewhere? She insisted that nothing be done with it – it was to remain right where it was – and the new boxes were also to go into the same space. Uh, I said, trying to be diplomatic, there’s no free space at all – they can’t fit. Her reply was the classic “Why are you giving me trouble about this? Just do it!” Apparently that pesky law of physics, two objects not being able to occupy the same space at the same time, is MY fault – now you know who to blame. Ulitmately, I did exactly nothing at all, and the issue was forgotten.
That same company used to regularly ship a fifty-pound box of completed paperwork every week to a long-term storage facility, where it would sit for seven years in case an audit happened. That’s all that it was saved for – to sit in a dusty warehouse for seven years. Every week they shipped the box out on Friday – by FedEx overnight express, paying extra for Saturday delivery. This was back when FedEx was newer and not as routine; the company didn’t have a discounted account, and as a result paid something exorbitant like $70-90 for this shipment. The box would then sit at the warehouse until someone came in Monday morning to file it. This became one of my assignments, so I asked if I could slow-boat it using UPS and save a ton of cash. The request was denied – the box had to be there immediately, so that it could commence sitting undisturbed for seven years.
That one doesn’t sound so stupid. Depending on the type of info you were storing, there migh tbe increasing liability concerns the longer it was in the hands of a third-party courrier.
Your first example is pretty dumb, though.
Yes, I’ve seen that too. But the best in this line was the call where I had to remove about four 5.25" floppies all stuffed into a drive. True, the installations instructions didn’t explicitly say to remove floppy 1 before inserting floppy 2, but really …
It’s a long story, but my coworker left an unattended tealight that started a small fire inside a glass candle holder. In a daycare. When I saw it, I told another coworker to keep the kids away, then ran to the nearest sink, soaked a hand towel that was hanging there, wrung it out, and threw it over the candle. The fire went right out, to the chorus of OOOooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOooooooOOO! from the kids. The coworker responsible for the candle came in again just as the situation was resolved, and I told her what happened, rather curtly. She answered, in a calm voice, that, yes, of course, tealights could cause fires, “but only small fires, not big ones.”
I felt much better about the children’s safety when she decided to part company with our daycare program. :smack:
Joy, I have a fresh “IT-stupid story”. (Not an actual stupid co-worker, actually a generally bright guy.) Anyway:Buddy comes to me with a USB dongle-ish thingy.
“Larry, I can’t get this thumb drive to work. Whenever I take it out and put it in, it says ‘USB Device found,’ but the drive doesn’t show up anywhere.”
I look at the device, and say “This isn’t a thumb drive, it’s the transceiver for your wireless mouse.”
“Oh, okay. Anyway, while I’m here, can you come and look at my computer? My mouse keeps freezing up, for some reason.”
“While you’re trying to get your ‘thumb drive’ to work?”
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t a thumb drive, it’s the transceiver for your wireless mouse.”
(Thing is, all of our desktops are corded - if he has a wireless mouse, it’s because he brought it in himself.)
80% of my coworkers do this, except they don’t go so far as to try opening it in Excel. When they can’t find a file, they insist, “I saved it in Word.” Folders and subfolders are absolutely confounding, as is the concept that files don’t actually “live” in Word.
When I was in college ten zillion years ago, WordPerfect rather than Word was the dominant word processing program. If I recall aright, its default was to save all documents in a sub-directory of WordPerfect. I can imagine someone getting used to that in the early 90s and being a little surprised that Word was not the same.
This is my sister’s story, but it always cracks me up:
She was a lowly admin assistant, tasked to walk the company CEO through using some new software. So she’s standing over his desk, they’ve got the program open, and she tells him to “right-click.”
So he pulls out a pen and grabs a sticky-note and *writes *“click.”
In 15 years, they haven’t been able to figure it out???