My favorite stories involve people who THINK they know what they’re doing, but really don’t…
My younger brother, for example, managed to acquire hardware for his own computer last August (mostly by conning our mother out of it), and set about putting it together. Well, he only had minimal experience (from taking apart old 386’s and 486’s), and building a P-III with big HD and RAM and video card etc. etc. was a bit too much for him. After a few weeks, he went on vacation, and while he was gone, I took his computer over to a friend who actually DID know what he was doing.
Turns out, my genius of a brother had just plugged cables and such into random slots… wherever it seemed to fit. After a bit of tinkering, my friend had the computer up and running.
Sidenote: Since getting his computer to run last August, my brother’s own tinkering has led him to format the thing and reinstall everything at least five times so far. And he STILL thinks he’s hot shit 'cuz of his computer.
Spoofe: And did he notice that the computer magically healed itself?
Auntie P: Remember the thermal copiers that used the pink overlay sheet? Sloooooooow! One copy per minute, and it came out hot. And mechanical calculators that had a separate column of number keys for each column of numbers? Ten digits required a hundred keys. Had a comptroller at one company who insisted on using one almost as old as her. But she made it fly. And what about Teletypes? Ever send one?
VV: I’ve had temps whose agencies swore up and down were Autocad wizards and they couldn’t open a file.
Gee, what a coincidence, I seem to have had a similar experience with Spoofe’s younger brother, except in my case, I plugged all the cables into the correct slots, exactly how the manuals showed, and tried to install Win95 with a Win98 boot disk, which does not work. My friend had explained to me why that didn’t work, and since I only had Win95, I was kinda in a pickle. I was set to get my computer up and running, but I was going on vacation. So my older brother took my computer to a friend’s house and got Win98 installed for me while I was on vacation, and if there happened to be any misplaced cables, it’s because either A) The manual was wrong (Which has happened to me on a few occasions) or B) There was just a more efficient way to wire things up.
Never having conned my mom into paying for the hardware, doing the agreed upon housework between me and my mom to pay off what I didn’t put up front in cash, I don’t know what Spoofe is referring to.
Spoofe, why don’t you try telling the truth once in a while?
About a year ago I was installing a modem for my friend and his technologicaly incompetant mom was watching to see what I was doing. As I was finishing up the procedure I accidently dropped one of the screws into the tower and it lodged in a place my clumsy fingers could not easily reach. My friend and I went off to get some tweezers and when we returned we found his mom picking up the entire computer tower. Upon our inquiring what she was planning to do she informed us that it would be much easier if “we just turn it upside down and shake it.” Luckily I managed to convince her otherwise before she sent the still-not-completely-attached modem and screw careening throughout their computer.
To this day the woman still doesn’t grasp the differnece in meaning between “computer” and “internet.” She’ll come in and say “I’m going to turn on the internet” if she needs to use Word, or “Are you signed on to the computer?” when we’re playing a game. She also hasn’t picked up on the internet-phone line connection yet, or the fact that the N64 and Playstation aren’t the computer or the internet. Ahh, the wonders of stupidity.
Auntie, I was the night clerk at a hotel in downtown Austin that became the Western Union office after 9:00 P.M. and on Sundays (when the real WU office was closed). I had to learn to use the teletype - big old thing, just like in the movies (this hotel also had a crank operated cage elevator). Part of the training my boss gave me included giving it a running kick that knocked it over on its back when it wouldn’t transmit.
I also learned that a telegram was a lousy way to ask a gal out (telegrams having been almost universally associated with bad news).
The first version of Win 95 won’t install with a 32 bit FAT.
I’ve run into the problem formatting with a newer Win95 boot disk and then using an older Win95 CD.
Someone smarter than I can probably recite the version numbers.
Thanks, carnivorousplant (Do you have a shorter nickname?). That is exactly the problem I had. When you format with a Win98 bootdisk, it partitions the hard drive with FAT32. My old Win95 cd only supported FAT16, so it wouldn’t install, always giving me some stupid error message.
When I got the computer back, I had checked it out: There was no real re-wiring of what I did, just rearranging it to make it less cluttered inside.
And the reason I had to format and reinstall Win98 5 times since I’ve had the computer was because I was learning about computers, teaching myself as I went along. Yes, I did screw up a few times, but as I learned more, the time range between formats grew much longer. I haven’t had to reformat my computer in a long while now, and now I know what I can safely tinker with without messing something up, and I know how to fix stuff without making it worse.
I taught myself how to do this because I don’t like bothering tech support for likely trivial things. Now I have a bad image because my brother is an ignorant liar.
Now I’ll stop before this becomes a lengthy flame.
Yup…My brother in law is a “techie”.One of the smartest guys I’ve EVER met.He can do nearly anything with software.
BUT…The guy can’t walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.He called me over because his new washing machine had aq “Leaky hose”.Turns out,he hooked up the hose connection sans the rubber washer which was twist tied right to the connection. He replied…“Oh,is that what that’s for?” Sheesh
I had a techie tell me this story of computer incompetence
Back in the days of the 5 and quarter floppy disk, my friend had completed training people in an office on the latest word processing program, and he thought they had sufficient knowledge of the program. But the day after he had completed the training and left the program with them he got called back to the company. They told him the program wasn’t working. He went back and sure enough the floppy disk would not run the program. So he left them with another copy of the floppy disk. Several days later he got called back. Same problem. Again the program would not run.
So he left another disk with the word processing program. And again the next day he got called back. It wouldn’t run.
So when he went back he asked them to show him what they did when using the program. They went through everything right and everything should have worked. Then he asked them how they stored it when they were done. And they showed him. They hung up the floppy on the side of a file cabinent with a large magnet.