Discussion on:

Clueless users: 10 more tales of the absurd

My favorite incident happened at a high school where a wise student got the idea to unplug all the mouses from the computers in the computer lab. Everyone was so clueless and they spent all day trying to figure out why the mouses weren't working.

Then the next day a kid decided to take and swap the mouses by hooking them into the computer next to them.

At Uni, we used sticky tape the first time, then disconnected the mice, then we rotated the optical mouse pad 90 degrees. Note that the early optical mice needed an optical mouse pad that had to be oriented correctly to work.

Here is a story from a former college of mine. It was at the time when small companies started to replace MS DOS PCs, mostly used for accounting, with Windows 95 machines. An accountant, who was not at work when the new PC had been installed (it was the first Windows machine there), called us and said that the mouse of her new PC was not working. "The arrow on the screen is not moving", she said. Our support guy checked with her the mouse connection, she rebooted the PC several times but to no avail.

So, he had to go to that place (about 200 miles away) supposing the mouse had malfunctioned. When he arrived he realized that the mouse was working just fine. She asked the lady to use the mouse. She took it in her hand, lifted it a few inches above the desk and started moving it left and right: "You see, I am moving the mouse but the arrow is not moving."

Back in the days of OS/2, the retailer I worked for had a market research program that used OS/2 "servers" at store sites to gather consumer responses. These sites were run by store sales personnel who got paid a little extra to administer these surveys.

One site was having issues so I was trying to get the lady to reboot the system. For OS/2 one needed to right-mouse click the desktop to bring up the menu, then Shutdown was about half-way down the list. This poor lady kept telling me she didn't have Shutdown on the menu. After much checking to make sure she was really pressing the right mouse button, I finally figured out she had the mouse backward, with the cord toward her instead of away. Therefore a right-click was really a left-click. Mind you, she had been doing this job for several months and had never had the issue before.

Similar situation. User calls and say her mouse needs to be replaced, every time she moves the mouse down, the arrow goes up. If she moves the mouse up, the cursor goes down, mouse to the left, cursor to the right and vice versa. Tech went out and turned the mouse around so the cord was as the top.

Back in 2003, I was working for a jewelry company. User had a drive crash, and sent the laptop in. Drive was toast. Management said that the drive had "critical business information" on it.

We suggested that the drive be sent out to a data recovery company, since the user had never done a backup ever. The Director of IT didn't like that answer, because it would cost money.

That night, the Director of IT, and the Hardware Manager (who was just going along for the laughs) bought a new hard drive, took it apart, took the old drive apart, and switched platters. Yes, the predicable happened.

We had the platters nailed to the wall in our office as a reminder of how stupid our management was.

The company finally died about 5 years ago.

Of course, when you deal with people working in high tech you expect them to have some modicum of basic computer use knowledge.... A secretary of the CEO, no less, phoned me with a problem that she couldn't manage to send an email. I asked her the usual questions..."Did you type in the correct address"? "Are you in on-line mode"? etc when I got to "How big is the mail, perhaps it's to big for the incumbents mail box"? She replied "...its about the same size as my screen"!!!!

in 1990, we had a PC in the corner of our classroom. It was running MS-DOS I believe. I recall my teacher telling the class to press the "D" key to delete text. Of course there was confusion as line after line of D's appeared.

I must admit that the bad power strip happened to me.

After getting a call from a customer for whom we had just purchased a new PC, we asked him to insert a CD we had sent him into the CD Drive. After 20 minutes on the phone explaining what he had to do, he told us emphatically there was No CD drive on the computer. The only thing in the position we told him to look was the automatic cup holder that came out when he pushed the button !!!

Archimedes told this one to Pythagorus

I've seen it with my own eyeballs - coffee cup on the CD tray. At a software company, no less.

(On a computer used by an elderly CFO who struggled with the concept of "caps-lock"; circa 1995)

The common denominator is that CD drives started appearing on high-end computers (often given to the most computer illiterate of upper management just for the prestige factor) about the same time car companies started installing retractable cup holders in high end luxury cars. Both items were used by the same type of consumer: older folk who were entering middle age when electric typewriters were vogue.

comes out like a Drawer and hold a lot of different size Cups

Most "users" who do this are fortunate to not have a CD unit that has a time out function to automatically close it

out of the hundreds of units I handled
I've only ever seen 2 that do this
one 1995 CD-ROM
and a 2008 DVD-ROM
both have a 5 minute time out and then they close

most just remain open though

And when it was a styrofoam cup that fit into the hole up to the rim...an amazing mess ensued...never ceased to amaze me.

This happened way back in 2k4. I was a supervisor for help desk support for HP pavilion desktops. One of our customers called in saying that HP had committed a fraud by selling him a new system with a DVD drive which threw out the DVDs and that he was gonna sue us! He had the latest model that we had released just a few weeks back.
Now this seemed to be a serious case and the supervisor was needed which was me. I calmed the guy down and asked him to describe what exactly was happening. He elaborated that after placing the disc on the tray when he presses the button, the tray goes in but the disc falls out. Now this was weird. He had tried different discs but still the problem persisted. As I pulled out the product page, I asked him which one of the drives was giving him the problem, the one at the top of the system or the one below that. To this he retorted none of the drives are at the top. Now I was confused. I asked him where the drives were. He promptly said, at the bottom of the tower. Then it hit me, the guy had kept the tower inverted! Needless to say he wasn't happy with his own stupidity once I provided him the solution.

How could he NOT figure that out himself, by just ooking at the box it came in or the manual???? Funny!

My most absurd incident involved a customer who was located in an older historic building. They setup a computer so customers could access after hours and download info and pdf's. This computer was located in a supply closet. They were having a problem with the computer shutting down every night. After having our local electric company put a monitor on their circuit and finding no problems, I paid them a visit one day. I couldn't find a problem with the system and was ready to replace the whole box when one of the office staff turned off the light in the closet and the computer shut down. It seemed that the wall outlet they plugged the computer into was controlled by the light switch and the last employee to leave was instructed to turn out the light in the supply cabinet every day. Needless to say I moved the system to a better location.

We tell the user to close windows on the phone and we hear the windows in the room sliding down and closing or they tell us that the windows are already closed. We tell the user to turn off the computer and they turn off only the monitor. Its sooooo much fun to see how the new guys handle those situations in our support team with those users. It spooks the hell out of the new guys as they try to figure out why nothing changes at the customer side.

This problem happened about 15 years ago: You always have a tremor of fear when the Finance Director rings with a computer problem. So when I got the call from him to tell me the network was down, I sprang into action. I immediately tried pinging his machine, to which I got a normal network level response. Somewhat puzzled I queried him on his diagnosis. He began to get annoyed that I wasn't taking this seriously enough, so I figured, let's do the professional thing and go and view matters from his end. I went to his office, where he proceeded to show me that printing his Excel spreadsheet on his local dot matrix printer produced loads of blank paper, which was why, he told me, "the network has gone down." Stifling all possible inappropriate responses I bit my tongue and said in a polite but firm tone, "When you see this situation, it means that the ribbon in your printer needs replacing."

You could see the light dawning behind those eyes, and a large smile crept over his face. "Ah, I see", he said. "I understand now." Figuring that to be the end of the matter I went to leave the office, but his parting message made me realise why I am an IT professional, and he was not. "So", he said "What you're telling me is, that every time the network goes down, I need to replace the ribbon in my printer..."

(sigh!)

LOL! God love'em

A friend of mine wanted to setup his machine to print via the home network to the printer attached to his dad's work computer. Upon downloading the required drivers and finished the required configuration, he decided to send a test page to the printer to ensure all was correct. He typed the following into a Word document and pressed print: "Your computer is infected with a virus and all data is being deleted!". 2 seconds later a scream from accross the house was heard - his dad, having read the test page pulled the plug out of the wall socket, loosing about 2 hours of work (which wasn't saved). He was convinced that the virus was informing him of its presence via the printer! He wasn't impressed with his son for a while once he heard the true story!

In the early 1980s I was a data communications technician for a utility company and one of our branch offices called in to say the cluster controller (remember them?) needed rebooting every morning. Not a trivial matter since back then they were booted from a cassette tape and that needed a manual rewind first. The hardware looked OK but we swapped the controller for a spare and put it on a soak test in our lab - it stayed up a week while the new one went down every night. We got the electricians to check the controller was on a clean supply separate from the main office, which it was, and just to make sure we got them to put a smoothing transformer on the feed as well. Still dropped out every night. We thought of human intervention, talked to the cleaning and security staff who said they never went near the "computer area" and stuck tape over the plugs. Nothing for it but to go in and sit there and wait for it to drop out.

So there I was, reading magazines on overtime when at around 7pm I heard a vacuum cleaner start up at the other end of the office. I turned round and saw the red LED's on the controller flashing like train crossing lights. On investigation I found the cleaner had innocently plugged into a socket on the open floor. Further investigation found that this socket, alone of the hundreds in the office was connected to the clean supply reserved for the computer equipment. Still further investigation elucidated that until some six months before one of the computer users in the office (an elite band in those days) had had his desk there and the electricians had gone to the trouble of laying in a special power feed for his VDU (even though not strictly necessary) connected to the same ring as the rest of the computing equipment. How long had the controller been dropping out - err about six months.

Just goes to show, no-one did anything wrong or stupid, but if you don't clean up ALL loose ends .....

For most of you who don't know, thin-net was the standard before 10 Base-T. The standard was a coax cable based system that had a 50 ohm termination on each end of a single run of cable. Each PC was tied in with a tee connector.

Back in the thin-net days I was network Manager in a company that had one server, one network hub and four thin-net branches running from the hub. I got a urgent page (yah, we had pagers back then too) - I called and the network was down hard. I immediately looked at the hub and noticed a error light on one branch & started chasing. I found the issue right away - Randy, one of our Test Engineers unplugged the tee connector from the back of his PC, added a 4' extension then plugged the extension into his PC so that he could re-arrange his office. I explained why "you can't do that with thin-net", removed the cable and he put his PC back where it was. Everything ran fine until Randy did the exact same thing again 4 months later. And he brought the network down 3 more times between the second time and when we finally installed a 10 base-T network.

Then there was Doug, the Quality Engineer who called because his monitor screen was distorted with the top right corner mostly red and the top left corner mostly blue. I grabbed the magnetic toy he had placed on top of the monitor, which immediately took care of the problem. I handed the toy to him and said "don't do that". He placed that toy back on the monitor & called because his monitor was distorted three more times over the next three months until I picked up his toy and threw it in the trash. Then he reported me to management & when the dust settled his feelings were hurt and magnetic toys were banned from all Engineers offices.

Did you try to explain why these things were happening?

I always try, even if they get the glazed over "uh oh, this is like science" look. I figure if it doesn't help them, it'll maybe help them motivate their kids to at least try to study physics.

When their eyes glaze over, you've not only lost them, but you can pretty much bet that they will actually try to push their offspring away from science branches because it's too arcane for them.

You just have to explain it in their terms.

Ask if they would add anything to one of their structures without expecting the stresses to change.

Had the same issue with some of my early networks. People decide to move their computers and don't get the coax and terminating resistor back on then call because the network is down! Y'know, there really aren't any good old days for computers. There were just way too many ways for things to go bad.

Engineers are nothing if not consistent!!!

And this goober, Doug, was an engineer? Or is "quality engineer" in the same category as "sanitiation engineer" (janitor) or "food service engineer" (cafeteria worker)?

I protest your making sport of a medically-trained person for mistaking an idiotic cartoon paperclip for a cartoon stethoscope. Having worked in the cartoon animation industry for 17+ years, I have many times encountered poorly-designed characters which at a glance could be mistaken for any number of things. The person in question, being biased toward her nursing profession, obviously saw in the form and design of that character what she was more accustomed to working with. Certain icons and cartoon characters are easily identifiable to those who work around them regularly, but for others who encounter them for the first time-- and who have more important things to do than to scrutinize trivial icons-- it may take time to see what is obvious to others. But there is no shame in that. It's easy to be smug about such things, and I fail to see the humor in your story.

First time I saw Clippy, I couldn't tell it was a paper clip. I just got rid of it. I'd do that for everyone.

Then, some time later, I learned that a lot of users actually liked Clippy and learned from it. This knowledge was quite humbling, because it revealed my shortsightedness and my unreasonably high expectations of users.

I loaded a third party joke addition, that made it possible to "kill" clippy with a machine gun burst! Man that got a LOT of aggression out of the staff! I wasted a lot of time on breaks and lunch just shooting the H E double LL out of that nauseating cartoon!! HA!

Hello. It looks like you're about to kill that patient. Would you like to save your patient first?
(PS. I agree with the comment about bad icons.)

Some 25 years ago we were trying to help a customer on the phone with a problem with her new version of word processing software. We couldn't fathom what was going on so we asked her to send us a copy of the floppy disk containing the new software.

The next day an envelope duly arrived. Inside it was . . . a photocopy of the floppy disk.

It not always users who can't think straight when it comes to IT, even IT staff have their moments.

I was with a group of colleagues visiting our US HQ. This was pre-WiFi days, so the only way to connect to the network was using cables. We arrived at HQ reception and were redirected to some hotel desks, which had no network cables (or phones). I called IT from my mobile, expained we had just arrived in town, and needed some network cables. The guy asked us to log an IT request - online! I just replied with "think about it", and after a bit of a pause, came the reply "I'll bring them down"

I'm sure I've heard that one (8) about the server going down at the same time every day before, but the punchline was that a cleaner was using the outlet for the vacuum cleaner... you say these incidents happened to you? Funny coincidence.

I've heard it on every single IT forum out there. Apparently it seems to have happened in every data centre on the planet (except those that I have personally worked in)

Have you heard the one about all the main frames in the machine room and their peripherals being on UPS with generator back up, but the pumps for the water cooling of the IBM machines of the time were not?

A super computer was added to a large UK university. The Facilities department was asked to sort out the server room for the aforementioned supercomputer. The server room had two power phases. One was connected to the buildings fire alarm system and the other was not. When a fire alarm went off in the night the one phase turned off taking all the cooling down. The system was only saved when the alarm in the corridor outside was tripped when the door was opened to the server room.

A pair of ear phones was melted to the wall where they had been left!

A friend of mine was studying a drama related course, as a part of this they had to film on site. While doing so they had arranged to work in an office for a scene and had to plug in some lights. You can guess the rest - needless to say the second nights filming did not go ahead.

I worked as a teller in a bank in 1981. The corporation had installed servers and teller terminals in its branches. At the beginning of the month, and especially at the beginning of the quarter, the interest applied to accounts would be transmitted from San Francisco to the branches. Our branch never got the data on time. It usually was two to three days late, and we'd have to post the interest by hand from the microfilm info.

Crocker (the bank where Scott Adams worked) sent down a technician to see what the problem was. Our manager was able to help. He told the tech that he always turned off the server before he left at the end of the day. The tech asked whether he had received the notice not to turn the server off overnight because that was when the updates were pushed out. Yes, he knew that, but, as he said, "We saved $25 on the electric bill last month!"