'True' Tech Illiteracy Stories #6 


This guy's system came up okay, but he kept saying he was getting a
black screen. I couldn't tell whether he meant a BLANK screen, which at
least meant the hardware was working, or a black screen, like the
monitor wasn't coming on. I finally asked him to make sure the
monitor was plugged in. He said it was plugged into the CPU. "And the
power cable?" I asked. "What power cable?" he said. "You mean I have to
plug it into the wall, too?"


Bob: Hi, I'm Bob from AT&T, and I'm calling to let you know
 about the Internet services we offer.
Me: I'm busy right now, but if you email me the info, I'll call you
 back if I'm interested.
Bob: Could I have your fax number? We're behind a firewall, so our email
 doesn't always get through.


Some of our older systems have two different card cages in them: one for the
proprietary system bus, and a Multibus cage. The cards that go into the
system card cage are much larger than Multibus cards. We had one customer
where the sysadmin was prone to do his own hardware debug. He managed to
fit a system disk controller into the Multibus one time, and the board
stuck out a good four inches!


A lady bought a computer from us, and a month later, she came in and
asked us to install a soundcard which can support CD-ROM drives. So we
installed a SB PRO for her. About a week later, she brings it in, and
starts ragging us out because her CD-ROM isn't working, and "won't eject
the disk" I look at the computer... "But you don't have a CD-ROM drive!"
she points at the 5 1/4" disk drive and says, "What kind of computer
salesman are you? Can't even recognize a CD-ROM drive when you see one?"
Seems she had decided her 5 1/4" floppy drive was in fact a CD-ROM,
and since the CD fit in quite nicely, it HAD to be a CD-ROM. She figured we
messed up her sales order, so she wanted us to install the soundcard so she
could use her "CD-ROM". The drive was destroyed, the CD was destroyed,
and all the techs were laughing for a few hours.


I install software for a health care company. On one install, shortly
after going live with the product, I needed to copy a new file to the live
environment, and needed to have all the users off the system. Rather than
just shutting it down, I sent a message to all the terminals that read
"Please sign off by 17.15. If you do not sign off voluntarily, your job
will be terminated. Thanks." About five minutes later, I received a call
from the most irate ICU nurse. She demanded to know who I was and who I
worked for. I explained to her that I was employed by the hospital to
install their new system. She ranted and raved and told me that my
message was the most rude message she had ever read. She then hung up on
me. I asked my colleagues to read the message and they both thought I was
quite polite. I had the system down for about an hour and then brought
it up. I called the emergency room to make sure that the fix I had put
in was working. The nurse informed me that it had, but asked me if she
was going to be fired. "Excuse me?", I said. "Am I going to be fired?" I
told her I didn't know what she was talking about and then she said that
she wasn't the only one worried. She had been on the system when it was
taken down and she thought that meant losing her job! I couldn't believe it!
I explained to her that the term 'job' was a computer term meaning the
program you were currently in. It suddenly dawned on me why the ICU nurse
had been so rude and why, the nursing supervisor and the head of IS had
been beeped! I sent out a message over the system apologizing. The next
morning, I ran into the CEO and CFO of the hospital who thought the whole
thing was hilarious and took to calling me the Terminator. They told me
that anyone that stupid deserved to be fired.


A customer called in at MicroSystems Warehouse and said he needed to speak
to a tech immediately. He said, "Are the SIMM slots located in the back of the
computer?" I asked him if he needed help installing the chips. He said, "No.
I installed them and the computer just isn't recognizing them." I said,
"Where did you install the chips?" He said, "I removed my sound card
and put them in there."


The computer tech where I work told me he got a call from a secretary
complaining that the floppy drive in her computer wouldn't work. He
went down to check it out and found that she was putting the disks in WITH
the plastic dust sleeves still on them. He asked her why on earth she was
doing that and she said, "I didn't want my computer to get a virus."


I was working at a company that manufactured inter-networking hardware for
minicomputers, providing in-house support for other employees of the
company. One day, a user buzzed me on the intercom and asked, "Is the
computer down?" Since I was reading and did not actually know the answer to
her question, I sat up quickly and began typing on my terminal to see if the
computer had crashed when I wasn't looking. It hadn't. I replied, "No, it's
up." "Well, I can't log on," was the reply. When I got to the user's office,
I checked the obvious things; the terminal was plugged in and turned on, the
keyboard was plugged in and the lights showed "online". I reset the terminal
- no effect. I checked the terminal settings (baud rate, parity, etc.), all
correct. Finally, in desperation, I craned my neck around the back side of
the terminal and noticed that there was one and only one cable running into
the rear of the box - the power cable. I asked the user where the other
cable was (the serial connection to the mini) and was told, "Oh, it's over
here. I moved my terminal this morning. Is this thing important?"


Knowing something about computers made me the department computer geek.
That meant that I had to help install nearly all the Mac software for
a large radiology department. It was fun to go to everyone's desk and get
them up and running. One secretary really like to chew wintergreen Lifesavers.
I told her the old story about seeing phosphorescence when the candy is crushed
by her teeth. She had heard about that and had even tried it out in front of a
mirror in a darkened room. I smiled and said, "Chewing Lifesavers in front of
your monitor will get the screen to jiggle." She looked up with wide eyes
and while grabbing her purse she said, "We'll just see." She popped a Life-
saver in her mouth and lo and behold, the screen jiggled (for her).
She was amazed and I grew several levels of esteem after that incident until
she caught me in the hall later and wanted to know why no one else could see
the screen jiggle when she chewed her candy.


Me: Hewlett Packard Customer Service, can I help you?
Cust: Yes, I have a deskjet that I need to have repaired.
Me: We make several deskjets - do you know what model yours is?
Cust: It's a Hewlett Packard!
Me: (suppressing a sigh) Yes, I know...could you tell me if your deskjet
 is color or black and white?
Cust: (pause) Well, it's beige!


At 3:37 a.m. on a Sunday, I had just looked at the clock to determine my
annoyance level, I received a frantic phone call from a new user of a
Mac Plus. She had gotten her entire family out of the house and was
calling from the neighbor's. She had just received her first system error
and interpreted the picture of the bomb on the screen as a warning that the
computer was going to blow up.


We received an angry phone call from an woman who had bought a Mac.
Apparently, she had set her whole system up without incident
until she came across the mouse pad we included at no extra charge. "Which
side," she demanded, "of the mouse pad faces upwards?" Despite the brightly
colored red company logo emblazoned on one side of the pad, the woman
scolded us for not including appropriate instructions.


A kid called our Service Dept for an LC he had in for repair. The hard drive
had gone south, and he needed quotes on replacements. He wanted to know if
he could get a hard drive with a CD-ROM drive built into it...


Them: Hi. I'm tryin' ta print somethin' and it's crashin' da fu**in' rip.
Us: Which rip?
Them: da fu**in' rip man, dis progreeam fu**in' sucks.
Us: No, no, no. What kind of rip is it sir?
Them: Well, it din't reeeally a rip. It's just a fu**in' printa.
Us: What kind of printer might that be?
Them: Some HP color printa somethin c.
Us: OK. And what kind of a file are you trying to print on it?
Them: I got dis drawin' here, it's got some pitchas I imported into it, and I
 arranged 'em all pretty like by pastin' inside a buncha rectangles. An' I
 wanna print 'em on the printa 'cuz I gawt it fer real cheap, like two hunnerd
 dollas, fer buyin my computer and I wanna see if it woiks. I got deez pitchas
 a my family, and I put 'em inta some rectangles. I scanned da fu**in' pitchas
 on my new scanna.
Us: How many pichas, er, pictures did you scan, sir?
Them: Ten.
Us: And how big are they?
Them: Oh about an inch or two square each.
Us: In terms of memory, how big are they?
Them: Oh 'bout 2 or three memgabytes each. Some are smawlla.
Us: Lemme get this straight. Your sending a 20 MB file with almost a
 dozen overlapping high resolution files pasted inside scanned images to
 a cheapie color printer you got for $200, and you expect it to print?
Them: Sure. Why not?


Me: Hi, this is Me at Megalith. Can I have your name and phone number?
Customer: (Resentfully) Now where would I find *that*?!


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