Lookin for idiots.

People sometimes say to me what are you doing and i simply reply my job. If I have time to sit and play or do other things on my computer then My job has been done correctly. Why>? you might say. I am a network administrator, and when the network is up and running and purring like a kitten then I have done my job just fine.

I hate when users call too. Dont they realize that I am sitting here reading all these posts on TR.

~Argg time to go play some UT~

Rad

When Win 95 first came out, my sister (a well-educated high school bio teacher), decided she needed more room on her disk and systematically deleted all the .dll files.
I asked her why would she go into the Windows directory and do something like that?
Answer: SHE wasn't using them. "Besides my dear brother could always fix it for me."

I bought her a zip drive for Xmas and taught her to save her data there. And told her to NEVER go into the windows directory again.
The up side is she didn't speak to me for a while.

After several nightmarish run-ins with the her and other 'friends', I now advise them to buy their next PC from a retailer and take out a service contract.
I also bought myself a t-shirt that simply says:
"No, I will not fix your computer."

I don't know if this was funny, but it sure was cathartic.

People sometimes say to me what are you doing and i simply reply my job. If I have time to sit and play or do other things on my computer then My job has been done correctly. Why>? you might say. I am a network administrator, and when the network is up and running and purring like a kitten then I have done my job just fine.

I hate when users call too. Dont they realize that I am sitting here reading all these posts on TR.

~Argg time to go play some UT~

Rad

An young technician was being interviewed by an engineer in a manufacturing plant I worked at several years ago for an entry level position trouble-shooting discrete circuit boards.

The interview included a little hands-on at the bench reading basic test equipment, including an oscilloscope. The engineer asked the candidate to place the probe on ground for a test, at which point he leans over the chair and literally puts the probe on the floor.

He is probably the CTO at a major corporation now, reading this and making a mental note to never hire me.
See, good things do come to those who wait!

My best user and customer foibles do not come from being in IT, but from when I was a salesmaker for Radio Shack.

At one point, I had a customer come into the store where I worked. She had her two-year-old son with her, and a Pentium 166 MHz IBM CPU. The computer would not read CD-ROM's correctly, and the tray would not open.

So, I set up the machine on the counter (just plugged in power, nothing else), and forced the tray open as gently as possible (didn't damage the tray any more than it had already been damaged when it came in the store). When the tray opened, there were traces of pancake and maple syrup was dripping onto the counter.

Her son loves pancakes, and he had filled the CD-ROM drive with pancakes coated in maple syrup. Needless to say, the machine was sent out for repair, and the boy was not very happy for some time after that (punishment, of course, from his mother).

I just went into the store room after they left and had a good laugh about it, since it was rather funny that the boy had managed so much without her even noticing :)

Most of my users don't give me anything nearly as interesting, although they are inherently more frustrating. My job basically is the IT department for the bank where I am employed, and my dept. is not expanding. Hence, I am the system administrator, the Help Desk, the repair tech, the part-time trainer, etc. which tends to make life interesting, but I could not outmatch any of the stories that you have already heard inthis discussion, except with the above because it was more unique than your average "cup-holder" problem with CD-ROM drives :)

Charles

Half of PC techs are idiots...

They want to become Sysadmins!

Shall we now descend to a series of traded insults or simply agree that there are idiots everywhere and unfortunately we have to work with, for, or around them?

...please let me know!

Just getting this post spelled properly took three edits and a proofread!

Tom,

That was the point, that they sent it after the fact and it was an unscheduled outage. I found out later that the email was sent by one of the help-desk folks trying to be "helpful"...of course, it sat in their out-box for several days until the server was back on-line.

One thing a company must be careful of is what they ship with their software. This goes back to when the FedEx shipping software was fairly new.

For those of you unfamiliar with this program... The FedEx software was designed so that a company could print out labels to ship packages via FedEx, rather than write them out by hand. One of the requirements was a laser printer, so the label could be printed on plain paper.

Of course, all of us know that the label must be attached to the package. To make this easier, FedEx decided to ship some plastic label pouches with their software. The instructions were very clearly written, and available in more than one place, that the labels were to be printed on plain paper.

My job was telephone support, which provided many hours of entertaining stories. My favorite story involved the plastic label pouches. On two separate occasions, I had a user (different guy each time) call in to report that our program had ruined his expensive laser printer. He had tried to print directly to the plastic pouch, which resulted in plastic melting inside his printer. I can say I'm very glad I wasn't the one who had to fix the printer.

I think the best one I ever had was whilst working in a 'reputable' PC Superstore in the UK.
A customer came in and wanted a laptop, he knew exactly what he wanted, specs and all, money was no problem, so we had no trouble selling him a top of the range toshiba.
2 days later he returned with it in hand, walked to the customer care desk and asked for a replacement as his one wasn't working. Our policy was always to check what the customer was saying, so I promptly got out the laptop, power cable and plugged in the power cable. At this point he stopped me and asked what I was doing. Bemused, I replied "Plugging it in sir, why?" to which he replied "No one told me you had to do that."
Obviously, confusion has now set in, and the look on my face nust have said it all because he told me he bought it because it was battery operated, but the battery was flat. I startd to explain that the battery was charged from the mains, to which he replied "Oh, I live on a farm and I only have a small generator to power my house." In the end we had to refund him the computer, but it is now a major point with the sales advisors that it must be made absolutley clear that the batteries require mains power to recharge.
:-)

I work for a school system, and this week my job is to design a new curriculum that will require the students to earn an Internet Driver's License before they can use the system.
As for I-D-10-T Error stories, my brother-in-law called this Christmas about his new PC and cable modem. He needs a converter to switch the TV cable to a Phone cable so he can plug it into his 56K modem....

I know there's more. I've worked enough tech support to know all the pitfalls and missed points in 'Computers for Dummies'. There's better stories than this but this is the only one I can recall at the moment.

I was working for a University, and had gotten a report from a professor who was having trouble using their machine. I went to check it out and it turned out the quantum fireball harddrive had actually managed to scratch its disks. So needless to say the HD was gone. The professorasked me what was wrong with his machine and I told him that "the hard drive, the C drive is ruined. I will have to install a new drive and rebuild your machine." He then said that he didn't care what happened to the hard drive, just don't touch the desktop, I kept all my files on there.

We have Act 2000. Mainly used by our sales team, with 2 people who really do know how to use it and 1 who kinda does and the rest are completely and utterly clueless beyond human comprehension.

I feel your pain most definitely....

(One user thinks its for printing calendars...nuff said)

We have Act 2000. Mainly used by our sales team, with 2 people who really do know how to use it and 1 who kinda does and the rest are completely and utterly clueless beyond human comprehension.

I feel your pain most definitely....

(One user thinks its for printing calendars...nuff said)

I work for a small software company doing help desk/support with some onsites setups. Another tech went to do an onsite one day for one of our customers and when he came back told me the funniest thing I have ever heard.

He asked this lady to right click on the desktop and lol :) she wrote "click" on top of the desk.

I still can't stop laughing.

Everything in the digital computer is one's and zero’s. So there's one's and zeros written on the hard disk, and the floppy. But you cant see them, because there isn't magnetic light.

If you have a microscope, you can see the 1's and 0's on a CD, in Courier New (developed for the CD ;-). ) because a fixed pitch data stream was required for first generation CD's.

Can't put x2 or x8 CD-ROM, into higher spec CD-ROM drives. The data starts to slide to the edge.

If you write all 1's to one side of a floppy, and 0's on the other, it's a flat magnet. You can stack them for more magnetic power.

Some are smart enough to know it's fulse, and other are good entertainment.

About ten years ago, I was working for a major corporation when the call came in from a lady about how her computer kept eating her floppy disks (the old 5.25"). This was so intriguing a call that I went personally to check it out.

Obviously, wecouldn't find anything wrong, but mysteriously, we also couldn't find her floppies. So we showed her how to transfer files via the network, and figured that was it.

Well, about six months later, her floppy drives died. She still used floppies, even though her computer sometimes "ate" them.

When we went to replace the floppy drives, what did we find? Sure enough, we found about a dozen floppies that she had forced into the little space between the floppy drives. I guess that she was "feeding floppies to the computer gods" :)

i had a guy come into my store last week, well it goes like this.

me: what can i do for you sir?

him: i want to buy an internet

sorry ppl,cant stop laughing here.................

It would have been better to advise them to call AOL to check with them, so the tech's at AOL could have a laugh too.....

Stuart

You could try itemising a few of the things you do in a typical day (and explain what will happen if it's not done....) - you should be able to list a couple of hundred essential tasks ;-)

if that doesn't convince them, offer to go on holiday fora week/fortnight/month and see how many times they call you.... or what goes wrong. *SIGH* wishful thinking perhaps, but nice to dream about.

[rewind to reality] - AAARRGGH

Stuart

A true story.
In '91 I was doing development work on a telemarketing project. The telemarketing trainer was (I thought) fairly PC savvy. One day I hear that she needs help so I go over to offer my assistance. I see her with a screwdriver at fiddling with the diskette drive. Whats up? Well, I just got a new version of dbase (Addison-Tate I think) and the diskette is stuck. So I catch the caught diskette way back in the drive. It feels strange. And I managed to pull it out. Its a 5 1/4 thats been cut. I aks what the heck it is and I was told that the software came on the big disketts and she only had a small diskette drive in her PC. So she cut the diskette to make it fit. I almost fell over laughing. I think the software was around $600.00back then and money was tight. I called Addison-Tate and got a tech support guy. There was no way I was getting a replacement copy. But after telling him the and hearing the laughter as he told everyone that was around him, he gladly sent me anothercopy. His words were "You just couldn't have made that up".