**************************************************************************** * * * The Results of Letting Novices at Computers... * * * **************************************************************************** ------------ You will think I am making this up, but I swear that this is true: I was working for a now closed merchant bank when another guy in our (computer) department came into my office in hysterical laughter. He told me he had just fielded a question from a woman whose department had gotten PCs installed two months previously. (Not by our group, we wrote software.) She told him her problem, and he figured out that a few files were lost from a floppy disk. "Do you make backups?" he asked hopefully. "Oh, yes, we were instructed to copy all of our data disks every day." "Well, put the backup copy in the computer, and I'll show you how to restore the files." "You mean put it in the printer?" "Huh? Put it in the disk dirve." "How am I going to do that?" You see, each night they used a Xerox machine to copy their disks, and neatly stored the pictures of each disk in a filing cabinet. My response was to suggest that we fax them a new copy of their disk. ------------ I took Fractint in to the computer lab at my high school ('286's, VGA, mongo HD's, brain dead supervisor) and this is the conversation I had: "Hi. I have a program I'd like you to install on the network drive. It draws fractals." "I can't put copywritten software on our computers" "Oh, it's public domain." "Can you prove that?" "Sure, the documentation is right here." "Where?" "On this disk." "I told you, I can't put copywritten software on our computers!" "I'm not putting software, I'm just putting a text file. See, I can't show you the program because it's packed..." "Look. If you can download a hard copy of the proof ..." "Download a HARD COPY? HUH?" "Well, print it out!" "Look, there's a printer right here! I can just..." "NO COPYWRITTEN SOFTWARE!" "It's public domain! I got it straight from the authors over a network!" "Just because it's on a network doesn't mean it's public domain!" Rather than try to explain the concept of a moderated binaries group, I went through proper channels and brought in a hard copy (Which, for all she knows, I could have typed myself) of the pertinent docs. I then said, "OK, can I install it now?" "Well, we have to wait for our computer person to install it" It's been a week so far.. ------------ Then there was the student who turned in his program, with the printout neatly stapled to the disk. ------------ At one of the public computer clusters here at Carnegie Mellon, a user tried to put TWO disks into one disk drive on a Macintosh SE. What's worse, it was a two-drive machine! ------------ And....for a little change..... Reportedly, when one of the early Crays started malfunctioning, the machine's purchasers it called in Seymour Cray to diagnose the problem. Cray came to the site, sat down, and stared at the machine for two and a half hours. At that point he stood up, marked a single connection on the machine's blueprints, said, "Replace THIS wire," and left. The techicians did as told, and the machine worked perfectly. ------------ I once saw a couple of kids sat at an Apple II. One of them typed in "We want to play Space Invaders" To which it replied that classic one-liner SYNTAX ERROR ------------ I once had the misfortune of knowing a microcephalic undergraduate female (her skull really was significantly smaller than the average) who was renowned for her stupidity. Once she was seen typing "Please change my tutorial times." in shell. Surprise, surprise, it didn't work! ------------ Then there was a printer I was asked to fix. The problem, as described, was that it would go through all the motions of printing (head moves, sound of needles, etc.) but nothing would appear on the paper. First move was to try to hook it up to a computer and see for myself what happened. I noticed the ink ribbon was out of place, fitted it properly - and thought "It can't be that simple. They can't have been that stupid". It was. They had. ------------ I had a similar problem to deal with a while ago: One office had just installed a new Apple LaserWriter II for their Macs. The first day, they called me up and told me that it was printing the college letterhead on each piece of paper. "Are you sure it's PRINTING the letterhead, or are you using pre printed paper?" I asked. "Oh no, it must be printing it, because they just put in plain white paper." Thinking this was going to be a semi-interesting problem, I headed over there, and, sure enough, there was the college letterhead on each sheet of paper...embossed in three colors from the printing house. When I pointed out the fact that they were, in fact, using pre printed paper, she responded, "But I told the computer I didn't _WANT_ a header. And it still shows up, huh?" ------------ One lady tried to use 5.25" disks on a Mac by, you guessed it, FOLDING them in half... then she wondered why they wouldn't work. ------------ This reminds me of a conversation with a coworker here, as he was installing a 3.5" drive underneath his 5.25" drive... Me: "Gosh, wouldn't it be funny if you accidentally stuck a 3.5" floppy in the 5.25" drive?" Him: "No. It isn't funny. [The Boss] did it, and it got stuck. It had to be pried out. And have you ever noticed the foam between the drives?" Me: "Yeah..." Him: "Well, that's because [the boss] stuck a disk in there between the drives once, and lost it inside the computer. It was found a couple of months later, when the computer had to be taken apart." ------------ I worked at a computer store for a couple of years... get some real weird ones at times... One time, someone complained of losing data from his disks... he'd use them a couple of days and then they'd just die... After checking the disk drive out quit thouroughly, we found out he'd been storing the disks on his refrigerator with magnets. We also got a call about the "any" key once... Most people who have computer problems aren't stupid... just "computer illterate." Work in a computer store to get calls from the stupid ones! ------------ Ok, time to pass on a few of my experiences as lab manager: Did you ever have someone absolutely ASSURE you that they were doing everything correctly and it still wasn't working, only to make you get up from your nice comfy seat (along with a box of Fiddle Faddle and a KoolAid drink box) to walk over to the other side of the room and watch them type it in and have it work perfectly, only to have them look at you and say "THATS WHAT I TYPED THE FIRST TIME!" Obviously, not. Most errors were so obvious that we didn't even bother getting out of our seat. "I typed login but nothing happened" "Press Return" "oh. Ok" "I typed login return but nothing happened" "You typed r-e-t-u-r-n, didnt you? Schmuck." "The printer isn't printing." "Is it online?" "What?" "Are the little green lights on?" "Oh. No, they're not. Thanx." "You're welcome" "My program doesn't..." "You forgot the semi-colon." "How did you..." "Line 15. Check." "But..." "Trust me." ------------ Being a student and getting called on by faculty who didnt know what they were doing was a particular speciality of mine: "We asked the hardware specialist, and he said its a software problem. So we called you." "Not only is it NOT a software problem, the problem is a bad host cable coming out of your file server. Get the hardward guy back and tell him THAT." I *love* doing both jobs at once. "Why is the B key missing from this keyboard?" "A girl accidentally knocked the keyboard off of the table on your day off yesterday. We tried to get them all, but we couldn't find that one." "It's under the space bar." (It really was, too) "Where is the F10 key?" "One of my students tried to eat it." "Oh. Silly me." I have a million of these, but I have to go to work so I'll end on this one: "Ah, Duane? We have a little problem in the back lab." "Gee, what could it be? Printer out of paper again?" "No, it's with one of the computers." "Someone turn the screen contrast down again?" "No, it's smoking." I *never* moved so fast in my life. If it's one thing that software people know, it's that smoke is a hardware problem. ------------ 1. (Mac SE) "How do I start MacWrite??" "See that arrow on the screen. Use the mouse to position the arrow over the network icon [I point to network icon], and press the mouse button twice" User picks up mouse, places it on monitor, and drags mouse across the screen. 2. (Mac SE) "Excuse me, there is an Empty-folder virus on my disk" 3. (Mac SE) "There must be something wrong with this boot disk--the computer won't come up" Walk over and turn on machine. (Note: The computer only had one switch; monitor was internal) 4. (PS/2 50z with harddisk) A user just finished printing out a paper. He did not have his own disk, but instead used a 16k vdisk (d:) that is created by the autoexec.bat. When it finished printing, he shut the machine off. "O there's big mastake--good thing I saved it on the d disk!" ------------ - Uh, is this support? - Yes, can I help you? - Um, I'm usin' my PC, you know, and like I put this disk with my assignment in the computer, you know, and it don't work... - Did you put the disk in the right way? - Uh, yeah... - Did you get a message of some sort on the screen? - Hang on.... yep- it says "Not ready error reading drive A." - Is the door closed? - Oh... just a second. < door slam in the background > ------------ When I worked for the government here, we had a user mail us a distribution diskette that he said he couldn't read. He followed all of the instructions to the letter: 1. Remove diskette from envelope (he used an exacto-knife to open the black plastic envelope) 2. Carefully insert disk in drive (he inserted just the inner plastic disk) 3. Close drive door (driving the hub through the disk about 1/2 inch off centre) 4. Type install (grind grind chew chew...disk error) Not only that, but he folded the inner disk in half and neatly creased it to put it in the envelope to send to us STAPLED to his letter.