"Welch Hall computer assistant; may I help you?"
"Yes, well, I'm having trouble with WordPerfect."
[Instant voice-recognition: I know it's a particularly ditzy blonde French
professor with whom I have had prior dealings.]
"What sort of trouble, Dr. B?"
"Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went
away."
"Went away?"
"They disappeared."
"Hmm. So what does your screen look like now?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"It's blank; it won't accept anything when I type."
"Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?"
"How do I tell?"
[Uh-oh. Well, let's give it a try anyway.]
"Can you see the C:\> prompt on the screen?"
"What's a sea-prompt?"
[Uh-huh, thought so. Let's try a different tack.]
"Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?"
"There isn't any cursor: I told you, it won't accept anything I type."
[Ah--at least she knows what a cursor is. Sounds like a hardware problem.
I wonder if she's kicked out her monitor's power plug.]
"Does your monitor have a power indicator?"
"What's a monitor?"
"It's the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it
have a little light that tells you when it's on?"
"I don't know."
"Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power
cord goes into it. Can you see that?"
[sound of rustling and jostling]
[muffled] "Yes, I think so."
"Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it's plugged into
the wall."
[pause] "Yes, it is."
[Hmm. Well, that's interesting. I doubt she would have accidentally turned
it off, and I don't want to send her hunting for the power switch because
I don't know what kind of monitor she has and it's bound to have more than
one switch on it. Maybe the video cable is loose or something.]
"When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were
two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?"
"No."
"Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the
other cable."
[rustle rustle] [muffled] "Okay, here it is."
"Follow it for me, and tell me if it's plugged securely into the back
of your computer."
[still muffled] "I can't reach."
"Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?"
[clear again] "No."
"Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?"
"Oh, it's not because I don't have the right angle--it's because it's
dark."
"Dark?"
"Yes--the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming
in from the window."
"Well, turn on the office light then."
"I can't."
"No? Why not?"
"Because there's a power outage."
"A p--!" [ARGH!]
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 drive." "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.
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.
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.
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...
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 hardware 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.
"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.
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:
Remove diskette from envelope (he used an exacto-knife to open the black plastic envelope) Carefully insert disk in drive (he inserted just the inner plastic disk) Close drive door (driving the hub through the disk about 1/2 inch off centre) 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. (sigh)
Caller: "I'm having some trouble with one of your cards in my PC."
Tech support rep: "What's wrong?"
Caller: "It's on fire."
An office technician got a call from a user. The user told the 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 to "Unplug the power cord and bring it up here and I will fix it." About fifteen minutes later she shows up at his door with the power cord in her hand. "TRUE STORY"
Once I was sitting at my desk, and a clerical worker came back and told me that here terminal was putting all sorts of garbage on the screen. I walked back to her desk/office and looked around-- there was a rather large wet spot on the floor, and an empty glass on the desk. I lifted the keyboard off of the desk by the cord, and water literally _poured_ out of it. I grinned. She said, "Oh! Could that be the problem?"
Our computer (a Unisys thing) has periodic maintanence done on it once a month. This particular morning the Unisys techies 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 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?
had one of my VAX users come to me and ask "Why did the printer print out my memo in all capital letters?". So I checked the port configuration on the VAX to make sure it was set to "Lowercase"; I checked the dip switches on the printer to see if maybe there was an "Uppercase" switch (there wasn't). Finally I did what I should have done in the first place : I loaded the file into the editor and sure enough - it had been typed in with all capitals! !?!
We taught first-years how to cope with using a computer (well, a MacIntosh; the next-best thing). We had one chap who spent ages with the mouse upside down, using it as a trackball, before he came and asked us if there was a better way.
The bewildered new PC user calls support and...
DU (Dumb User): "I put the disk in the slot, but it doesn't work,
the computer just says something about 'Abort, Retry, Ignore'."
Long-suffering support person: "Did you insert the disk correctly?"
DU: "I think so, but first I had to take it out of that funny black
envelope..."
From the "People Who Just Don't Get It" file:
I've worked closely with the sysops of a local BBS, who are always amazed at the users that download a file from the system, decide that it's not what they expected, and return it by re-uploading it.
"My disk ran out of space when trying to save my Word document, so I changed it all from double spaced to single spaced and it STILL wouldn't fit!"
A woman called the shop where she had bought a PC and complained that it didn't work properly: Every time she switched it on the screen was filled with characters. Two technicians were sent out and were met by a woman with tits about twice the size of Dolly Parton's and glasses about two centimeters thick. They asked her to switch on the computer. This she did, and then leaned over the keyboard to read what was on the screen... The problem was quickly solved.
When I ordered a disk drive from Insight Direct, one of the largest US mail-order vendors, it came with a small brochure filled with advice for "common problems". In the section on mice, it reported that a customer had once rung up to say that his new system seemed to be working well, but that it was very difficult to control the "mouse pedal". Sure enough, he had put it on the floor, like the foot pedal for a sewing machine.