'True' Tech Illiteracy Stories #9 

Cust: I accidentally turned the machine off while I had a bunch of programs
      running.  Now I'm getting a bunch of CHKDSK errors.  Why?
Me: Because you turned off the machine with a bunch of programs running?


Cust: My modem isn't working!
Me: Ok, are you in Windows right now?
Cust: No, I'm in OS/2.
Me: (confusion hitting) Do you have Win95 on your computer?
Cust: No, I only have OS/2.
Me: I'm sorry, sir, but this is MS Wi95 support. OS/2 is
 done by IBM. I can't help you, but I can give you IBM's number.
Cust: But they told me to call you!
Me: I seriously doubt that, sir.


There's a poor whippersnapper onboard my ship who, despite my
*brilliant* demo of my Mac, bought himself a PC laptop. He told me he
was having trouble so he gave it to one of the techs to fix (he knew
I would laugh at him). The tech decided his hard drive needed to be
reformatted, and did so (he had all of his software on a CD-ROM, after
all). Came time to reinstall the software and, lo and behold, the thing
won't load his CD-ROM because the driver he needs is, yes, you guessed
it, on the CD.


One woman's system was displaying hardware errors. She said it was
related to a call they made a month ago. I researched that call. Both
calls were regarding massive hardware failure, but the error messages
were different and there was nothing else in common. Three hours later,
she called me. There were different errors now, and some of the
supercomputers weren't working at all. I promised to contact a hardware
specialist immediately. I asked, "Why do you think it is related to the
other call?" "Oh," she said happily, "in both cases, the air conditioning
had failed and the computer room was over 150 degrees." That's the only
time I ever let out a scream in public. And she still refused to turn
off the computers!


For a computer class, I sat directly across from someone and our computers
were facing away from each other. A few minutes into class, she left
the room. I reached between our computers and switched the inputs for the
keyboards. She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed
look. She called the teacher over and explained that no matter
what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this
time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced. I started to
type... 'Leave me alone!' They both jumped back, silenced. 'What the..'
The teacher said. I typed, 'I said leave me alone!' The kid got real upset,
'I didn't do anything to it, I swear!' It was all I could do to hold my
water! The conversation between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing
five minutes. 'Don't touch me!' 'I'm sorry, I didn't *mean* to hit your
keys that hard.' 'Who do you think you are anyway?!'... etc... Finally,
I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair and about
peed myself. After they had realized what I had done, they both turned
beet red! Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class...


"I paid $5000 for this computer; I shouldn't have to read the manual!"


When I was at IBM, one lady ran from within her home directory: rm -r .*


A professor was telling his class about his new students (freshmen).
When he asked them to comment all their programs, this is what he got:
"This program is very nice"
"This program is very difficult"
"This program is very interesting"


A friend worked for a company that made IC's. Every few months, their yields
would go down to about zero. Analysis of the failures showed all sorts of
organic material was introduced in the process, but they couldn't figure out
where. One evening, someone was working late and came into the lab. There
he found the maintainence crew cooking pizza in the chip curing ovens!


A huge travel agency in Florida (a major booker of Caribbean cruises for
blue-haired retired ladies) bought an IBM 3090 to run the reservation
database. When the deal was consummated, the proud new owner asked IBM to
install it in a big glass room so all the customers could see the flashing
lights and spinning tape reels as they walked in, a testimony to the
modernity of the agency. Good idea, except there are no blinking lights
on a 3090. So the service manager offered to build some. They
hired a theatrical designer to come up with a suitably futuristic "set", got
curved glass walls to minimize reflections, and installed the mainframe behind
the "real-looking" facade. The customer declared that it was exactly what he
had in mind, regardless of what the actual computer looks like.


The Met office is now using fax machines to give local authorities early
warning of severe weather. The Hampshire emergency planning office said:
"Rather than having to rely on telephones, for instance, where lines are
at risk in bad weather, we are encouraging the wider use of fax machines."


A user told a tech that her computer was not working. She described the
problem and the tech concluded that the computer needed to be brought in
and serviced. He told her, "Unplug the power cord and bring it up here."
She showed up at his door with the power cord.


Our computer (a Unisys thing) has periodic maintanence done on it once
a month. This particular morning the Unisys techs were stumped. The
computer was on, but nothing happened on the console (Keep in mind that
this computer has 150 terminals on it). After three hours, at $96/hour,
one of the techs turned up the brightness on the monitor.


A CI (Computer Illiterate) reads in the manual that when you save something,
it creates a file. The person saves what he/she is doing, then gets up, walks
over to the file cabinet, and flips through the files, trying to find the new
one.

A CI who follows baseball reads that his computer has 640K memory. The CI
then spends five or so hours trying to figure out how the computer can pitch
a strike-out.

A CI refuses to use a laser printer because he/she fears it will burn a hole
through the paper.

A CI buys a home computer with a hard disk. He/she unpacks the computer,
sets it up, then calls the place he/she bought it from, complaining that there
were no disks in the box at all, hard or floppy.


A person has just gotten a new printer. She plugs in the printer, walks
across the room, tries to print something with no connection to the printer,
and then wonders why it doesn't print.


Person turns on the computer without a keyboard plugged in. When she turns
on the computer, the computer finds out that there is no keyboard attached and
it gives a "Keyboard Error" message. She then asks, "Why did it give me a
keyboard error? There isn't even a keyboard attached!"


While trying to diagnose a problem over the phone, I told the user to
type the autoexec.bat file. It said, "File not found". I told him to
do a dir. I asked him if he saw 'autoexec.bat' listed. He said, "It says
autoexec, then there's some spaces, but no dot, and then it says bat." I
said type, "type autoexec.bat". Again, he got "File not found".
I asked him to tell me exactly what he typed. He said, "I typed just what
you told me: 'type autoexecdotbat'."


A major corporation bought a Cray to use in R&D. On a tour of the
department, an executive remarked that it was a lot of money for such a
small machine. The engineer countered that it did calculations 100 times
faster than their old machine, allowing them to do things they only used to
dream of before. Impressed, the executive remarked it could probably
calculate a huge spreadsheet of his in under a second. Sadly, the
engineer informed his boss that Lotus didn't make a version of 1-2-3 for
the Cray. At this, the executive remarked, "What do you mean, it's not
PC-compatible?"


A lady on the airplane strikes up a conversation with the fellow sitting in
the next seat, "Where are you going?" "I'm going to San Francisco to
a Unix convention," he replies. "Eunuchs convention? I didn't know there
were that many of you."


Federal regulators alleged in a lawsuit that 16 former executives of
MiniScribe Corporation altered company books and disguised bricks as
computer disk drives to inflate the company's profits.


A French company, had a problem with a program on punched cards written
for them by a US subsidiary. The programs never worked when loaded in
France but the US systems house swore blind that they did at their end.
Eventually, in exasperation, someone followed the working set of cards
from US to France. At French customs, they observed a customs official
remove a few cards at random from the deck. Apparently, the French
customs are entitled to remove a sample from any bulk item (such as
grain), so a few cards from a large consignment shouldn't matter, should it?


A former supervisor put a floppy in his Mac. Didn't mount. Put another
floppy in. Same problem. Tried three or four times before asking for help.
You guessed it. No floppy drive. All the floppies were just falling into
the Mac, where they had to be retrieved later. They taped up the hole.


I was working in the computer shop. One day, an old man asked, "I don't
know about computers but I'd really like to learn. How do they work?"
The vendor didn't know where to begin and said, "The computer is a machine
and you speak to it to make it do things, like graphics, games.." The
man bent over the keyboard of the nearest computer, examined it and said,
"Well? Well?!" and after a minute, says, "I'm talking to it and it's
not responding!"


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