'True' Tech Illiteracy Stories #10 


A user in our company called the help line to get someone
to empty her hard drive. When the helpdesk asked her to explain,
the user reported she was getting a "hard drive full" message.


Cust: I'm having problems getting this printer to work in Windows.
Me: Okay, go to an Os/2 prompt so we can edit the config.sys...
Cust: Os/2? I don't have OS/2 installed.
Me: Are you having problems in native Windows or Win/Os2?
Cust: Windows 3.1.
Me: And you have no OS/2 installed at all?
Cust: No.
Me: I'm afraid you would need to contact Microsoft support for that.
Cust: Microsoft? Why would I need to call them?
Me: Because Windows is a Microsoft product.
Cust: Huh? Windows is an IBM product. It came on this IBM computer!
At this point, I had to actually have him restart the system so he could
see the word 'Microsoft' on the Windows logo before he would believe me.


A top executive called a tech support line and complained "It
says 'press F10 to continue'. I pressed the F, the 1, and the 0 at
least a dozen times and it still would not work!"


I once wrote an instruction that read:
"Press any key to continue, any other key to quit."
Of the hundreds of people who ran the routine, only one got it.


Someone was writing for hours and decided to save. He pressed enter
and got 'wrong command or file name'. He has been typing at the DOS prompt!

Another guy was working, and - like us all - decided to save when
he was DONE with it. He wrote for hours, eventually finished, got to the
'save' menu.  Reclining back in his chair in satisfaction, he tumbled
over and his foot yanked the power cord out.

Another guy was about to save a long file when a truck smashed
into a electric pole across his house, killing the power.


Tech: You should clean your heads regularly.
Cust: What shampoo do you suggest we use?


Every time I go home, some sort of computer problem seems to come up at
my dad's office that they need me to fix. Once I visited, and for three
days straight I drove to his office to fix stuff. When everything seemed
to be working (he was using PC Anywhere), I left for what I thought was
the last time. He gives me a call the next day complaining that PC
Anywhere isn't working anymore. I go step by step on how to use the
program with his secretary for quite some and finally I give up and
decide to drive in yet again. I drove the 45 mins to his office. Get out
of the car, walk in the door, look at the computer, turn the modem on
and drive 45 mins back home!


One tech asked the operator of the machine in question to queue up the
system status report to the printer so he would have it by the time he
was ready to leave. The silence, nothing printing, was quite noticeable.
Seeing that the printer was off line, he asked again if she would run the
report. "Oh, yes," came the response, "it'll be printing in a moment.
I'm just waiting for the phone to ring." "I beg your pardon?" "I'm
waiting for the phone to ring so the report will print." Mildly curious,
he inquired what influence the telephone had over the system printer, and
the story emerged. When she was a new hire, she was asked to print a report.
She was told to keep the printer off line so that the guy could phone her
when he was ready, and she could press the online button (he wanted her to
print it at a certain time). This she had done, and from that day forward,
whenever anyone had called asking for a report, she had taken the printer
off line, queued up the report, and waited for the phone to ring. No-one
at the customer site realized what she was doing, because whenever anyone
would call the machine room to ask where a requested report was, she would
say, truthfully, "It's printing right now."


An engineer was called out to one school that had just gotten a disk drive.
They arrived to find a tape cassette jammed in the drive and an eight-year
-old standing there saying, "I told her not to do it" (of the teacher).


Common mouse problem: User doesn't pick up mouse and put it back in
the middle of pad, ends up running mouse along walls of partition...


Recently I received mail from a student who said, "I have a 'ps -ef'
running and can't kill it. The process ID keeps changing. Please help."
(this must be a Heisenberg uncertainty 'ps', where the act of observing
the system changes its behavior).



The Nine Types Of Users

El Explicito:
  "I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it
 doesn't, ya know?"
  Advantages:  Provides interesting communication challenges.
  Disadvantages: So do chimps.
  Symptoms:   Complete inability to use proper nouns.

Mad Bomber:
  "Well, I hit Alt-F6, Shift-F8, Ctrl-F10, F4, and F9, and now it
 looks all weird."
  Advantages:  Will try to find own solution to problems.
  Disadvantages: User may have inadvertently translated document to Navajo.
  Symptoms:   More than six stopped jobs in Unix.
  Real Case:   One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document
   was underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found that he'd set
   and unset underline more than fifty times in his document.

Frying Pan/Fire Tactician:
  "It didn't work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt's recipe
 for key lime pie."
  Advantages:  Will usually fix error.
  Disadvantages: 'Fix' is defined VERY loosely here.
  Symptoms:   A tendency to delete lines that get errors instead of
   fixing them.
  Real Case:   One user complained that their program executed, but didn't
   do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty minutes before realizing
   that they'd commented out EVERY LINE. The user said, "Well, that was
   the only way I could get it to compile."

Shaman:
  "Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and formahaut
 was above the horizon, I typed F77, and lo, it did compile."
  Advantages:  Gives insight into primitive mythology.
  Disadvantages: Few scons are anthropology majors.
  Symptoms:   Frequent questions about irrelevant objects.
  Real Case:   One user complained that all information on one of their
disks got erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but empty sectors, I
suspect nothing had ever been on it). Reasoning that the deleted
information went *somewhere*, they wouldn't shut up until the scon checked
four different disks for the missing info.

X-user:
  "Will you look at those...um, that resolution, quite impressive, really."
  Advantages:  Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology.
  Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in
   graphics technology.
  Symptoms:   Fuzzy hands, blindness.
  Real Case: When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me at DEC
station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter
while, for twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to act like they
were doing exactly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn't log in.

Miracle Worker:
  "But it read a file from it yesterday!" 'Sir, at a guess, this disk 
has been swallowed and regurgitated.' "But I did that a month ago, and
it read a file from it yesterday!"
  Advantages:  Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't around.
  Disadvantages: People complain when scons actually use the word
   "horse-puckey".
  Symptoms:   Loses all ability to do impossible when you're around.
   Must be the kryptonite in your pocket.
  Real Case:   At least three users have claimed that they've loaded IBM
   WordPerfect from Macintosh disks.

Taskmaster:
  "Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it to
MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM,
convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?"
  Advantages:  Bold new challenges.
  Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector.
  Symptoms:   An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendencies to make
   machines do things they don't want to do.
  Real Case: One user tried to get a scon to find out what another person's
email address was even though the user didn't know his target's home system,
account name, or real name.

Maestro:
  "Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this, and after
that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like
this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after that I
picked my nose, like this..."
  Advantages:  Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error.
  Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours.
  Symptoms:   Selective deafness to the phrases, "Right, right, okay, but
   what was the ERROR?", and a strong fondness for the phrase, "Well, I'm
   getting to that."
  Real Case: I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user's shoulder
while they continuously retrieved a document into itself and denied that they
did it (the user was complaining that their document was 87 copies of the same
thing).

Princess (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males):
  "I need a Mac, and someone's got the one I like reserved, would you please
garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?"
  Advantages:  Flatters you with their high standards for your service.
  Disadvantages: Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people on
   this planet.
  Symptoms:   Inability to communicate except by complaining.
  Real Case:   One guy asked a scon to remove the message of the day
   because he didn't like it.


 ___  __  __  ___    __    _  _  _  _  ____
/ __)(  )(  )(_  )  /__\  ( \( )( \( )( ___) Suzanne Cook
\__ \ )(__)(  / /  /(__)\  )  (  )  (  )__)  
(___/(______)(___)(__)(__)(_)\_)(_)\_)(____) http://www.cs.utah.edu/~scook/