I recieved this from TechWeb a site devoted to IT professionals. I thought this was pretty funny.
Ummm… welcome back Techie.
This actually happened to me, so it’s not an urban legend.
“If I buy a new monitor, how long will it take to set up all my icons again?”
I’m sure I can think of more later…
Thanks!
OMG, I just crack up at the questions I get sometimes. It’s not even so much the questions because I work for a client, in house.
“I don’t have any sound”
I proceeded to turn up the volumn on the machine, presto we have sound Einstien! This from a guy that builds huge commercial buildings.
As for the icons? Boy, I wonder about people sometimes.
Sometimes the tech folks aren’t to swift either…
I couldn’t establish connection with my server, couldn’t print (driver on server), no e-mail, no web browsing.
I couldn’t fix it. Tech guy comes up and stats pinging this and pinging that. He re-addresses me to a different server. He pings here, he pings there. No luck.
Calls up his supervisor. He pings here, he pings there. Changes me back to my original server.
Then I notice the loose phone cord on the back of my 'puter.
Boy, did they feel dumb.
First off, welcome back techchick!
Now, are those questions you listed real? Did people actually ask that? If so, I think I’ll gonna sell all my stock in the human race.
Apparently they are real. I wouldn’t doubt it though, I have run into some stupid stuff in my role as a network consultant.
Here’s the link to find more stupid tech questions.
http://167.216.253.160/techweb/questions/index.html
If they are real, get a green card for Mars, we might find more intelligent life up there. Oh wait, they haven’t established life exists there but it may still be more intelligent rocks.
That should read:
“it may have rocks that more intelligent than people”
sheesh – been graphicing (working on the SD people pictures too much – some of you made me hot and bothered, hehe)
so I can’t even get a sentence out…must be time for bed!
Night Night all.
It’s hard to think of individual stupid questions, but hooo boy, have I seen some dumb computer-related stuff when I was a tech…
One doctor’s secretary had (I swear I am not making this up) one MS Word document. That’s all. Everything she typed was just added to the end. All of the doctor’s correspondence was in there; the secretary would type each new letter into the already-massive file and just print the last page. And she wondered why her computer was slow…“Um, perhaps because you work entirely out of a multi-thousand page document?”
Once a floppy drive in a Mac Color Classic stopped working. They told me that they hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary with it and, sure enough, it didn’t work. I didn’t take the drive out to inspect it closely, because those drives are a reeeeel bitch to get out (although the logic board slides out really easily, the Color Classic case is very stingy about letting the rest of of its parts out). Auto-inject drives used to (and still do) cost quite a bit more than the PC kind; I gave 'em the bad news that getting a replacement drive would cost close to $100. They ponied up the cash, the drive came in, and I did the replacement. I took the broken drive downstairs to inspect it more closely, and spotted the problem; I reached in with tweezers and pulled out the yellow Post-It note that had fallen off someone’s inserted floppy disk and blocked the drive’s heads. Hm, they should have told me the last disk they ejected was missing a Post-It. Oh well, free spare drive!
The worst person to do repairs for was one totally computer-illiterate doctor who would NOT let you have a moment’s peace when you worked on his machine. First, he always locked his office, so you couldn’t slip in and fix things when he wasn’t around. In addition, he insisted that you page him before you came up so that he would be able to sit down with you and have you explain every little step of your repair as you went along. And he never understood a freakin’ word. Talk about an exercise in frustration…apparently he didn’t realize that quiet thinking is often helpful in fixing computer problems.
Another computer-illiterate doctor with money to burn purchased himself a top-of-the-line system that included a 31-inch monitor. You heard me right, thirty-one inches. Here’s the kicker: he’d managed to trash his video driver and got stuck with some generic VGA driver, meaning that he was stuck with a 640x480 resolution. I shit you not. His icons were just about the size of my hand on this enormous monitor. The really funny bit is that he wasn’t interested in fixing that, so we all just left it as it was and laughed our asses off when we got back downstairs.
People who don’t know how to change their passwords: ugh. We hand out the instructions with the accounts, people ignore the warning emails, and since they kept getting their email after the password expired, they’d just forget about it. Well, one fine day, when I was on the help-desk phone, our Systems people decided that everyone with an expired password would HAVE to change it, so they disabled all the accounts with expired passwords. Oh, the calls that came in…can any of you tech-folk beat my record of 94 password changes in the course of one eight-hour day?
A proud fix of mine: when I was first hired as a tech in 1993, one section of the building that used Macs was on an AppleTalk chain, connected in a utility closet to a Shiva FastPath that allowed the AppleTalkers to access the rest of the building’s ethernet network. It had gone down just before I arrived there, and the guy who was supposed to be my supervisor hemmed and hawed and frowned at the problem for about a week. Finally, I got tired of spending so much time in one area and just brute-force traced the damn thing, following the physical wires from room to room. In the room farthest from the utility closet (and thus the last place we figured to check), which was a recently-empty office, I found the problem. A doctor who had gone on sabbatical shortly before my first day had unplugged everything in his office, including the connection that fed the FastPath, and his was the last link in the chain. Plug plug, whir whir, all was well.
Ergh. Tired. I’m sure I’ll come up with more in the morning…
I think you’ll like this techie:
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_online.shtml
Lotsa funny stuff there.
Glad you’re back.
My friend who is quite computer illiterate had gotten a new computer, but couldn’t get it to work. He called me over to see if I can fix it. I went over, and noticed the problem right away: The power cord was not plugged in.
I thought I had a perfectly reasonable tech support question a while ago. I had gotten Quake 3, but could not get it to run properly on my computer. I e-mailed them, and basically what they told me was “Your graphics card is a piece of crap. Go cough up money for a new one”. Gee, thanks for the help. I never did get Quake 3 working, but my computer runs everything else fine.
Go figure.
Green card? Is that so I can deal with the little green men?
My fav is Compaq having to change its manual because it said: “Hit any key” & people called & said they couldn’t find an ‘any key’
Glad to hear from you again, welcome back. kiffa
Did you ever notice that the more technically illiterate a person is the more unlikely they are going to do what a tech suggests?
Tech: Click on the Start button and then click on…
Moron: No.
Tech: Okay, click on My Computer and then…
Moron: No.
Tech: If you aren’t going to do what I suggest, why did you call?
Moron: So you can fix this for me.
Tech: Hang on I’ll beam right over.
OTOH, I’ve told many people where I work that 90% of tech support in an NT environment involves re-booting the computer whenever there is a problem.
Welcome back, Tech. Hope your return means that things are smoothing out for you.
Then there’s ego. Part of my job involves sw training for sales reps. Just because they’re capable of selling high tech IT equipment doesn’t mean that they can work a PC. I start by trying to understand their level of computer literacy. Of course they’re all VERY competent power users. That is until I give a direction such as “now minimize this application”, or “click on the hyperlink”. Anybody know where I can get an ego filter for the classroom door?
I don’t have any technical horror stories – I don’t understand that stuff myself. But I fondly remember the change from typewriting to word processing many years ago.
Pressing the space bar trying to get to the cursor, and then chasing the cursor all over the screen and laughing hysterically.
The woman who couldn’t grasp the concept of a word wrap – she insisted on using the Enter/Return key at the right margins, and hyphenating manually. Okay to do, as long as you’re never going to make a change in the document. She was never comfortable with it and would go back to her trusty IBM Selectric whenever she could.
And me, I was just as bad. I remember the first time my document started disappearing off the top of the screen. “Hey! My stuff’s gone! Where’d it go? This thing’s broken!!”
We were skeptical for the longest time that anything we’d saved could be retrieved. Lots of times it couldn’t. Figuring out file storage and how to name documents was the hardest concept to grasp, especially for us old folks who grew up with paper.
[hijack]Ask someone over 50 about early business machines and procedures.
We love to talk about the old days with spirit masters, mimeographs, dictating machines that recorded on plastic sleeves, early photocopiers that needed special paper (the flimsy see-through stuff), big clunky bank calculators that you had to use standing up. Manual typewriters. Carbon paper.
No faxes, no phone mail – you used an outside service to take your calls when the office was closed, real live receptionists who took messages and wrote them down. You’d call the next morning and get your messages, or they’d call you at home with emergencies.
We felt quite competent, making all this stuff work efficiently. Probably much like techies feel today when they help us old farts with our PCs.
[end hijack]
Real live receptionists? Yeah right. Pull my other leg 
I’ll never forget when my grandparents got a computer and wanted me to help set them up online. Show them how to get on, get them an email, how to operate the search engines. Real basic stuff.
I would say, “In order to get online, double click on this lil icon here, and when the window pops up, hit ‘Connect’.”
Then I would do it…“SLOW DOWN!” They would yell after I hit connect and the modem was starting to work.
Me: “What?”
THem: “How did you get online”
Me: Diconnecting from the internet. “Ok let me walk you through this one more time.”
20 minutes later we had Netscape on the screen.
Me: “Now I set up a Yahoo! account for you, so you can get email. Let me show you how it works.”
Them: Ok, but you go to fast. Slow down.
Me: “Fine. Now, click on this link…”
Them: “What a link!?”
Me: “It’s basically a shortcut to where you need to go, so you don’t have to type in the address.”
Them: “What’s an address.”
Me: “All will be explained later, just bare with me.”
Them: “OK”
Me: “So you click on this link to Yahoo. Once this window comes up, click on the “mail” link up here on the top.”
Them: “SLOW DOWN!”
Me: “Uh…all I did was click on this link. See? Like this.”
Them: “Ok, got it.”
Me: “Now this is your email account name Type it in herel ike this. This is the space for your password, type it in here.”
Them: “Do we have to type in a password?”
Me: “Yes.”
Them: “What if someone hacks into my computer and steals it?”
Me: "Grandpa, A) You don’t even know what “hacks” means, and B)nobody is going to steal your password.
Them: Ok, what did you do there?
Me: I typed your name and password in. That’s all. Now, hit “submit” and it’ll take you to your email Got it?
Them: Yeah
Me: Ok Exits all window, logs off of internet Now you try.
THem: We can’t, you went to fast when you showed us!
All this would be ok, if it only happened once. But I kid you not, we repeated the above scenerio at LEAST a dozen times. After the 12th time, I gave up and told them to get someone else to help them.
My husband just got a guy shuffled into his department during a reorganization who had apparently never used a PC before, but didn’t bother to tell anyone. Hubby would leave him in the office with something to do and then go do his own thing. He came back one day and asked how something was coming along and the guy went “Well, um, er, um…I’m still trying to open this document.” He’d spent all morning single clicking on an icon, never getting lucky enough to accidently click twice in rapid succession. :rolleyes: Later in the day my husband was working in the same office at another computer and heard the guy say “Wow, this computer is really slow.” He replied “Yeah, that’s my old computer…” then looked over to see something scrolling in super-slo motion. Puzzled (“Hmmm…it’s not THAT slow!”) he went over to find that instead of CLOSING any windows, the guy was just MOVING THEM OFF HIS SCREEN. He had about 300 windows open and when he moved the cursor down to the hidden taskbar it popped up about 3 inches high, lol! Oh by the way…this is a NASA project they’re working on. !!!