6. Back when floppy disks were the only portable medium (good old 5 1/4 and 3.5 inch disks hold not much more than a mere 360K), I was working as a field engineer for a third-party support firm. Remembering two calls always brings a smile to my face.
Caller #1: A guy rings up and says that he has just received his new update on four 3.5 inch floppy disks and he followed the instructions supplied with the update to the letter. He had a problem with the machine reading the second disk, just would not accept it. After a few probing questions, a site visit was required, so I attended the next day and was amazed by what I saw. Yes, the guy obviously had a problem reading the second disk after following the installation instructions. Installation Instructions:
1. Insert disk 1.
2. Run setup, click Ok when asked.
3. When asked, insert disk 2.
What I found was that he had not removed the first disk and had actually managed to get both disks into the floppy drive AT THE SAME TIME. Ooops.
Caller #2:
Me: Hello, Tech Support.
Caller: Hello yes, I received this update from you for my new PC, but it cannot read any of the floppy disks you sent
me.
Me: Hmm. Can you please explain what's happening?
Caller: OK, I opened the box and read the instructions telling me to put in disk 1 and run setup.
Me: Good; next?
Caller: So I got the disks out the box and put the first disk into the drive after removing the protective cover.
Me: Protective cover? Do you mean the little white sleeve that the disk comes in?
Caller: No the big black cover that the disk comes in. Is it supposed to be that hard to get the disk out?
At this point I fell off my chair, only just managing to put the caller on hold before breaking out in a laughter fit.
When I attended his home, he had not only managed to take out the disk from inside the disk casing, he had
actually managed to get it lodged into the drive and then broke the heads of the drive when he tried to get it out.
â€"darkside@
7. Several years ago, our organisation finally got a T1 connection, so everyone suddenly had access to the Internet. The firewall with content filtering software was installed, but we were still playing around with the filtering settings.
Lots of our workers were complete newbies, so I had to teach a class on using browsers and e-mail clients. I had a mixed class of men and women, most of them completely new to computers. One of the guys was a very religious man, and everyone there was well aware of that.
At one point, I asked everyone in the class to enter www.yahoo.com in the URL box. After a moment, I heard a
gasp, followed by everyone in the room busting out in laughter. Seems my religious friend didn't know how to spell
"Yahoo" and had instead entered "Yuho." To his shock, and in front of a room full of witnesses, he was immediately
transported to a raunchy porn site! The poor guy will never live it down!
â€"Quiet_Type
8. Back in the early '90s, I was the PC support person for a tire manufacturing plant. Most of the computers had dual floppy drives (5 1/4 & 3.5), but there were some old clunkers (IBM PCs) with only 5 1/4, as well as some state-of-the-art 286 Compaqs with only a 3.5" drive. It is latter that this story is about.
I got a call from a summer engineering student that her disk had gotten stuck in the drive. When I got to the
computer I found that she had her work on a 5 1/4" floppy. She was trying to load this work on one of these new
Compaqs. The disk was too big, so she decided that, since the material that the floppy is made from is the same, if
she were to fold her large floppy in quarters to make it fit the drive then the drive would still read it. Thing is, this
person was otherwise a very smart, logical person. I also had a fairly good rapport with her, so I asked her, "How is
the drive suppose to spin the disk if it is folded?" The lights came on, cheeks reddened, and she made me promise
not to tell ANYONE what just happened. I didn't in that job, but we both had a good laugh.
â€"support@
9. I work for an engineering company. I had an engineer (with an engineering Ph.D., no less) call me about a broken mouse. When I arrived at his office, he showed me the problem by moving the mouse smoothly from one side of the mouse pad to the other while pointing out that the cursor moved in jerks. I showed him how to open the mouse, remove the ball and how to clean the crud from the rollers.
â€"ESchlangen
10. User: "Is sausage bad for printers?"
To this day I wish I had replied, "Patties or links?"
â€"Mchappell@
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I remember the launch of my old company's new website. The CEO actally managed to misspell the name of his own company and was treated on an avalanche of porn popups in front of a large audience.