'True' Tech Illiteracy Stories #11 

A guy comes into the shop with an Atari 520 ST that we had got in
especially for his wife as we did not normally sell them.
"My wife says the computer does not work."
"OK, I'll take it out back and check it," I say, taking the machine from
him. I plug it in, play some games for 10 minutes, seems to be working fine.
"I can't find anything wrong with it sir, what did she say was wrong?"
"The screen just went black after a program has loaded."
"Nope, I loaded several. Give me a call if you have any more
problems". And off he goes.
A while later, a call: "It still doesn't work, she says."
"If you could bring it in again I'll check it out in the
shop."
About 40 minutes later, he arrives. I show him how I plug it in and I turn
it on a load up a desktop publisher, show him that it works, do a little
flyer, print it, he's happy.
"Well she must be doing something wrong", he says and leaves. Guess what,
he calls back later.
"It's NOT working and I am getting very angry, put me through to your
boss."
"I am in charge of the showroom sir, I'm sure-"
I try to offer more assistance but he insists that I
put him through to the managing director. Five minutes
later, the MD comes in saying that the guy is on his way and that he [the
MD] will watch over me. So, a bit later he comes in: computer,
wife and all. So I ask her to set it up to eliminate any differences
between home and the shop. The director is leaning over my shoulder
watching every move. She plugs it all in fine, turns the monitor and
printer on, turns the computer on, and watches it boot up. All fine. She
then clicks on the DTP package and that loads up and displays its welcome
screen. She clicks OK, then reaches round and turns the computer off.
"SEE!?" she says.
"You've just switched it off!" I say.
"Isn't it in there now?" she asks, while pointing at the monitor.


This one computer near me wasn't working, so I turned the monitor
off. You wouldn't believe how many computer science majors try
to use it, and give up, not even trying to turn the monitor on. :)


I had a small computer shop in town a few years ago... I sold two
computers to a dentist office and networked them. The main computer had
a FAX modem installed. The install went fine. Weeks later, they called,
stating that the main computer wasn't working correctly and that they
had never been able to fax. I made an office call to see what was up.
I asked them to show me how they were sending documents.
"Well," the dental assistant said, " It was pretty difficult at first,
but once we found the slot on the bottom of the computer we would just
slide the paper in like this... and hit the fax button!" "Of course we
thought most fax machine's would give you the document back..."
Opening the case I found about 35 sheets of paper that they had tried to
"fax" - needless to say the computer was overheating.


A woman called to see if she could add three or four more floppy disk
drives to her new PC, because she was running out of storage space.
I told her there were technical problems with that, and space problems, too:
There just wasn't enough room inside that chassis for more than two
half-heights, plus the full-height hard drive my screen showed we'd
installed in her machine when we shipped it.
"Well, I've got to do something," she said. "Every night before I go home, I
copy all the files from my hard drive onto floppy disks, and I've got more
files now than I can get onto one floppy."
I complemented her on her attention to back-up procedures, but I suggested
she really didn't need to be quite that careful: hard drives are pretty
reliable these days.
"But what's going to happen to those files when I turn the PC off?" she
said. "Don't those files I copy onto the hard drive every morning go away
when I turn the power off?"


There was a company locally that had 'Panic Buttons' for sale. I
bought some and would slip them onto people's keyboards when I would
tutor them. Anytime they'd run into problems, I'd have them hit the
'Panic Button' (I would put it on F1) and they'd get the Help screen.
They would thank me profusely and it would take A LOT of explaining to
get them to realize that I hadn't REPROGRAMMED their computer just for
them.. (Ah, the old days)..


her: My frigging computer is not working again!
me: Ok, what's it doing?
her: Nothing. It won't come on or do anything.
me: Well, is it on?
her: Of course! I tried turning it off and on and nothing happens.
me: Are the lights on the computer or screen on?
her: No.
me: Are you sure it's plugged in?
her: I don't know.
me: Could you LOOK?
her: Well, I'll have to get a flashlight.
me: Why? Is it dark behind your desk?
her: No, it's dark in my office, the power is off right now...


I had a guy at one of the hotels I supported a few years back call me at
two in the morning frantic, (his computer runs the Point of sale system in
the restaurant which is open 24hrs),
He said, 'I don't know if it's a problem, but there's a red light on the
front of the compute flashing like crazy, and if you listen close you can
hear it going "grrrr. grrrr. grrrr."'
I almost drove there and shot him...


Salesperson: My computer don't work.
Me: What's it doing?
Salesgeek: Well, it just up and quit workin' a couple of minutes ago.
Me: Which computer? [we have PC's and dumb terminals]
Salesgeek: The one on my desk.
Me, sighing: Is the text green or white on the screen?
Salesgeek: White.
Me: Okay, that's your PC. Exactly what did it do? Did it give you
 any kind of error message?
Salesgeek: Well, no. There was this sizzling noise, and now there's
 this funny smell...
Me, frantically: Turn it off! Turn it off NOW!
I found out later that smoke was literally coming out of the top of the
monitor when this person called me. Frightening. You'd think they would
have mentioned that?


Overheard in the office supply megastore: a man asks a store clerk,
"Where can I buy some JPEG?" The store clerk directed the customer
to the Service Department.


My neighbor works in the operations department in the central office
of a large bank. Employees in the field call him when they have problems
with their computers. One night, he got a call from a woman in one of the
branch banks who had this question: "I've got smoke coming from the back
of my terminal. Do you guys have a fire downtown?"


We were already months behind on shipping dates for the new release
of our product. Our credibility with a major customer seemed as
low as it could get. This customer was giving a major demo to some
internal brass and their clients, for which we put together a rush
shipment of new, fully equipped workstations. The workstations were
prepped, tested, packed and put on a truck, which took them directly
to our salvage facility, where they were destroyed.
 
 
My company flew a database administrator across the country to support
an installation. When he got there, he decided he could support the
release just as well from his hotel room so he did not bother going
into the office.


My former boss had gone from a successful career designing menus
for low-rent restaurants to convincing several wealthy friends to
pony up money for a web design firm. I was hired to run the network.
First day there, he calls me into his office and shows me a site.
"I like this design," he tells me. "Can we do something like this?" I
look at it for a long moment. "Sure," I tell him. He was looking at the
filesystem under an ftp directory....


A friend of mine had an exceptionally bad day at the copy shop he
worked at. One of the salespeople had just bought a new computer and
brought it to work. On her lunch break, she sailed around the office with
two of her friends, carrying a phone cord with her, looking to "surf the
Internet." After a few minutes, she announced triumphantly, "I found one!
Okay, I plugged it in. Try that America Online thing." A moment later, all
the POS terminals filled with garbage....


I used to work in a computer store and one day we had a gentleman call 
in with a smoking power supply. The service representative was having 
a bit of trouble convincing this guy that he had a hardware problem. 
Service Rep: Sir, something has burned within your power supply.
Customer: I bet that there is some command that I can put into the 
 AUTOEXEC.BAT file that will take care of this.
Service Rep: There is nothing that software can do to help you with 
 this problem.
Customer: I know that there is something I can put in... some 
 command... maybe it should go into the CONFIG.SYS.
[After a few minutes of going round and round]
Service Rep: Okay, I am not supposed to tell anyone this but there is 
 a hidden command in some versions of DOS that you can use. I want you 
 to edit your AUTOEXEC.BAT and add the last line as C:\DOS\NOSMOKE and 
 reboot your computer.
[Customer does this]
Customer: It is still smoking.
Service Rep: I guess you'll need to call Microsoft and ask them for a 
 patch for the NOSMOKE.EXE.
[The customer then hung up. We thought that we had heard the last of 
 this guy. But NO; he calls back four hours later!]
Service Rep: Hello, Sir, how is your computer?
Customer: I called Microsoft and they said that my power supply is 
 incompatible with their NOSMOKE.EXE and that I need to get a new one. 
 I was wondering when I can have that done and how much it will 
 cost.... 

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