I’m the idiot in this story, but let me preface this with the fact that I’m not usually an idiot and I know as much about computers as the average person.
I once called our help desk with a question and they would “proxy on” my computer to help me out. While explaining my problem to them–I POINTED TO THE SCREEN!!
Duh.
Yes, Yes! This is what I mean. These aren’t ULs, but rather they look like ULs because the same (or very similar stories) keep coming up. But the real reason is that some of these things have happened over and over again.
Not quite the same a DVous Means’ story, but we had a customer who had a honkin’ great magnet on his desk (out of a speaker or something) that he used as a paper-weight… and that did wonders for floppy disks, and another who took the back-up disks homes and stuck them to her fridge with a magnet.
I can add one story.
I always thought that the stories in the OP were apocraphyl. I didn’t really beleive they could happen. That is, until the following happened to me.
I used to work in Customer Service for a major electronics and computer retailer. As I was the most computer literate person on the staff at the time, I ended up getting the vast majority of the computer calls.
Anyway, we had one woman who ordered over $10,000 work of equipment from us. She bought a laptop and every possible accessory you can imagine. Trouble was, she didn’t have the faintest idea what she was doing. It was almost as if someone had given her a list and said “You need this, this, this and this.” Of course, she couldn’t figure out how any of it went together. I good-naturedly helped her out the first few times over the phone, but eventually, after it seemed I’d spend hours on the phone with her (hours I didn’t have), I eventually told her to hire herself a consultant to help her with her stuff.
One day, however, I got a hysterical call from her. She was yelling and screaming at me. She said that she thought everything we sold her was legal and above board. I informed her that everything was legal and that we were authorized dealers for everything we sell. Still she insisted that she had to call the police about her laptop. Finally I got it out of her that she was using Windows and had seen (I guess for the first time in her life) the ever-popular “This computer has performed an illegal operation…” message. It took me half an hour to convince her that it was a technical term, not a legal one.
After that happened to me, I learned to believe all these other stories, or at least accept that they could have happened.
Zev Steinhardt
The technical director, myself and the other senior programmer of my company were working late one Saturday. We finished our work and were trying to lock up. Three highly paid engineers, standing there trying to figure out how to lock a door. After fifteen very loooong minutes, we realized that we didn’t have the proper tool to actually lock it.
At another company I was chatting with the receptionist and kept hearing the microwave go beep beep beep beep pause, beep beep beep beep pause, about a half dozen times. I looked to find the other senior programmer trying to heat up his lunch. He would enter the time, press “Start” and nothing would happen. He was getting pretty frustrated. I reached past him, opened and closed the door to re-engage the safety lock, and got him going.
Hehe well heres my personal stories and as far as the cd coffee holder goes I’d believe it. My boss upon having her first new computer set up said " Ohhh i never knew they have coffee cup holders" My coworker(having given his two week notice the week before) spend the next holf hour trying to convince her it was actually a bagel warmer.
One of our end-losers wasn’t getting her job done cause she kept sending the cd burner back for repair. Once we went and checked it out and it was fine, but the next day she sent it in again. When we asked her why she said that she had been cooking for years and there was no way it was getting hot enough to burn anything.
The same loser also kept sending in requsition requests to have her yellow networking cables replaced by green ones cause they were so much faster(nobody ever figured out where she got that idea).
By far the most common codes used in the problem resolution field of our trouble tickets were “PIBCAK” and “ID ten T” errors.
I know this thread has gone a little cold, but…I just remembered another tech UL I read somewhere.
A secretary of an office rang the helpdesk of a major software company about her word processor. Almost every time she typed a document, spurious letters would appear randomly amidst the text, which she would have to go back and delete. Apart from this slight annoyance, the rest of the program worked OK.
She was given the usual advice about enuring that other programs where not running in the background, reinstallation of the word processor etc. When the problem was still occuring a week later, she was then advised to reinstall the OS, as this could be the culprit. Not surprisingly, this also failed to cure the problem. So she was sent a brand new copy of the software, which had been installed and checked for reliability before sending. Yep, still no joy.
So, reluctantly and after much insistence, a rep from the company visited her office to see for himself. It turns out that the lady in question had very large breasts, and was short sighted, and therefore needed to lean forward from time to time to read the text on the screen…You can guess the rest.
Shortly after my sister got her computer a couple of years ago, my mom, who’d never previously used anything beyond an Apple ][e, used the word processor to type up a paper for a class she was taking-- we’re talking a LONG paper here, 40 pages or so. Well, she knew how to scroll to the next/previous page, but didn’t know that you could position the cursor just by clicking, so she had to use the down arrow to scroll through the whole paper any time that she opened it and wanted to work on anything near the end.
Then again, Mom also says that computers work because of a Japanese leprechaun who sits inside of it and does all the work, and that all the technician really does is slip him some sushi and soda bread. 