Desktop·25,135 discussions

What is your best and great user

Locked

Stories from 2005? I asked the same thing last year and still laugh or just shake my head at some of them.
I will start by telling one of my own user stories. I was a new employee at a small bank and had the pleasure to upgrade all the old servers to Win 2000! There were 11 servers and six were old Unix servers/ pre 98, well they ran all the banking services from them. All the data bases were not uopgradeable to Windows of any type. I told the CIO that we needed to export the data to a file and try to import to Excel and try to import to the new servers.
He only wanted his files saved and some things on the sever saved. I thought he was talking about his own laptop. But he said no I should not worry about the banks information because it is backed up ever night and can be access any time.
Well the back ups were never checked and were blank, I tried to show him this but was told to compleat the project. Well I left the bank the next week before the bank was examaned by the FDIC.

Topic

Key Systems

In reply to What is your best and great user

While doing field service for a previous boss,
we serviced a standalone system that stored
car keys in little plastic boxes with a barcoded
label on the outside. The idea was that a new car dealer could put in all the keys for the demo
cars on the lot, track them and identify who
had what keys. It could hold 750 boxes, but
the turnstile that held the shelves on which the
little boxes sat were plastic and would sag as the number of keys increased, forcing a
recalibration of the servo positioning system
that delivered the boxes. The secretary that
was responsible for adding new keys and getting
rid off the old ones was not taking out the old
keys. Big trouble, as the system would fsil to find the keys as the servos could not repeat
itself to either fetch or return the boxes.
My job was to recalibrate on a weekly basis
until it could hold no more, then purge the
the system, recalibrate with only 100 keys and
continue the process. Got to know the salemen
by first name and avoided the secretary like
the plague. When the top boss got the bill, new secretary did puges daily and I never had to go back

dumb users…..

In reply to Key Systems

User: What do I do now?
Admin: Type your password into the password window
User: It does not work
Admin: What do you mean it does not work?
User: When I type in my password, only small “x’es” appear.
Admin: Hold on for a minute, I am going to go to have a quick heart attack…

Dumb Users part 2

In reply to dumb users…..

User: I can’t access my email over the internet.
Me: Do you have Internet Explorer open?
User: No, my screen is blank and there’s no icons to click on.
Me: Is you system turned on?
User: ohhhhh, I knew I forgot something (and this person is the top sales rep for the company)

DUmb user part III

In reply to Dumb Users part 2

Admin: the login windows should popup
user: Oh, I see it.
Admin: type in the domainname\username
User; whats the domain?
Admin: Enterprise\
User: then my name?
Admin: yes:
User: loss of brain function
Admin: you do know your name?
User: Oh yes, of course I do.

He wanted me to tell him his name.

He Hooked It

In reply to DUmb user part III

A fellow called up describing his computer making noise like something was loose inside his case. He couldn’t describe it, so he held the phone up to his system. Sure enough, it was making noise.

When Cy and I got there it was still sounding strange. We opened it up, and much to our surprise, we found a golf ball in the case.

We looked up at this fellow and asked, “[User]. Um, how do you suppose this got in there?”… holding up the golf ball. He got really pensive for a moment, and then it dawned on him. “Well, I do remember playing PGA Tour on this thing, and I hooked this one shot WAY far to the left.”

As it turned out, he was the butt of an office prank.

Ignorant users

In reply to He Hooked It

We too played a joke similar to that on one of our co-workers. We went to fix his printer and found that it was not a quick fix, so we had to take his printer back to the shop. We unhooked the printer cable and making a big show of holding it up high in the air, told him that he could not lay the cable down or the data would run out of the cable. He sat there holding the cable for a bit looking a bit sheepish and then got the bright idea of hanging the cable on the wall with the connector pointed up, so we let him. I am not sure how long he fell for that.

Dumb Users Part IV

In reply to DUmb user part III

User: my password won’t work.
Me: can’t you remember it?
User: Yes! I can…it’s my daughters name.
Me: Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know what your password is…
User: Oh no…that’s fine…just…can you tell me…how did I spell it?
Me: Your OWN daughter’s name…?
(thud)

My favorite question

In reply to DUmb user part III

“I lost my password, can I borrow yours?”

I’ve gotten this one from the same guy for three different apps.

My favorite question

In reply to My favorite question

“Is sausage bad for printers?”

To this day I wish I had replied “Patties or links?”

The Mouse That Couldn’t

In reply to My favorite question

I get a call from a user saying their mouse isn’t working right. I go to investigate and ask this person what the problem is. The mouse won’t move as far to the left as the user needs. I look and this person is dragging the mouse on a mouse pad and it gets to the end of pad. I first said, for starters, you don’t need a mousepad (we have laser) and you can move the mouse where ever you like. “Oh.” That’s all you get(“Oh”)from anybody when your in the IT profession.

My eyes and ears

In reply to Dumb Users part 2

I dont subscribe too dumb users, just people who struggle with computers. Anyhow before we get into that debate, i had a custemer who was a mature 60 in the late 70’s who ended up doing her husbands books on COMPUTER. Background. he wore a UK demob suit circa 1945 when he came to the demo. I nice guy but a little tightarsed. His wife, a good jewish mama, was roped into been the punch operator. well she tried hard, and i enjoyed going there, she could cook like a demon, so I was quite relaxed about the situation. ANYHOW, she phones one day to tell me the computer is going on by itself. i am not touching anything and it is just “running”. on site I ask her to show what is happening. Mrs K. duly goes thru the scenario showing how she starts the machine loads the program and inserts the paper. When she inserts the paper her rather large bust area, RESTS on the keyboard, starting all types of prorams etc. You explain to a good yiddisher mama, her boobs are resting on the keybaord. I tried, diplomatically, to no avail, suddenly it dawned on her, and so i was told “Oh my tits are on the keyboard, why didnt you say so”. She was a good person, and brilliant mother she shoudnt have operated anyhting outside of her kosher kithen. I liked her.

Next time any of you feel the urge to ridicule an end user, think that most of the people who operate machines these days, did not ask to be there, did not ask for the technology, but took on a job to survive.

i like my operators they are my eyes and ears, and i always lok after them.

john

Mistaken Identity

In reply to My eyes and ears

I’m with you on this topic. Most users and clients are embarassed by their lack of tech savy, and I try not to use my powers for evil.
Having said that I do have one client, who I’ll call Bill, that takes the cake in the tech challanged category.
Bill is a wiz at sales and has contacts that the company brought on board for. His only problem is getting around to follow ups and organizing data etc…
I was asked to go over to his office and check out his system and make some reccomandations for smoothing out his office world.
His desk was the was holding up paper and his workspace was a small pedestel table with keyboard balancing on it. He would place a mouse pad on his lap and run his mouse in this fashion.
Anyways, several organizer trays later we get Bill back to his desk and I had a few wireless mice in the back of my tickle trunk, so I decide to give Bill a thrill and hook him up. That same day he has a new cell phone delivered to replace the one he had lost months ago.
I signed for the phone and placed it on his desk with a note explaining the changes I had made for him.
Next morning Bill is on phone to me, calling to let me know that the this wireless mouse is hooped, and he needs me there asap.
I think most people can see where this is going, and needless to say Bill is there at his desk, racing his cell phone around on his mouse pad, and cursing my mother’s exsistance.

Mouse

In reply to Mistaken Identity

First of all, galbrait, you must be Canadian. Only we know a tickle trunk… LOL.

I once had an aquaintance call me because he coulnd’t get in touch with the guy that set up his computer. He said “my mouse doesn’t work”. I said I would follow him back to his office and watched as he picked up the wireless mouse receiver and moved it back and forth on the table. “See? It doesn’t work.”(The mouse had been knocked off the desk.)

I had another user, the sweetest lady, who was not very computer literate. After she got her new computer, she said “Where are my programs?”. I told her that I had made shortcuts on her desktop to the programs she used. She said “When I click on the icon, that’s not the right program.” When I asked her which program she was referring to, she said “The third icon down.” I asked her which program that was. “Oh, I don’t know the name of it. I just know on my old computer, it was the third icon down program.” This one took a while.

I got ripped off

In reply to Mistaken Identity

Customer calls up and says that he was sold a pc and he paid for Office 2003 Standard to be installed on his computer, but that it wasn’t and he had been ripped off by the sales associate that sold it to him. I got his receipt number and looked up that sale, sure enough he had bought Office, and paid for the install. Since I was the install tech, I looked up his service invoice, sure enough I had installed it and signed off on it, so I was sure that it had been installed…
Me: Sir, I personally installed that software on your machine, you’re sure you don’t have it now?
Caller: Yes, it’s not there
Me: Sir, have you tried to open the application?
Caller: I don’t know how to do that.
Me: Okay, it’s easy, just click on the Start button, then Microsoft, then Office.
Caller: I don’t have a start button
Me: You don’t have a green button in the lower left corner of your monitor that says start?
Caller: No, I can’t see anything on my monitor.
Me: Why not? Is it turned on?
Caller: Of course it’s NOT turned on, it’s still in the box!
Me: Sir, you’re going to have to take the computer out of the box and set it up before you can us Microsoft Office.

Coffee cup holder.

In reply to dumb users…..

User: I need to have my coffee cup holder replaced.
Tech: Coffee cup holder? Sir, we do not support that.
User: But it is attached to the box that you set up for me.
Tech: Okay??? I will have to come to your office and take a look.
[Tech arrives at users office]
User: See…it is broken, I can no longer hold my coffee cup in it.
Tech: Um…sir, that is not a coffee cup holder — that is what we call a CDROM drive.

Coffee cup holder! I can believe it!!!

In reply to Coffee cup holder.

That’s hilarious about the cupholder/CD Rom Drive!!!!

Last week I told a user to hit any key to reboot. Fifteen minutes later, he was still looking for something labeled “ANY KEY!!!!!!!!”

try hitting this…

In reply to Coffee cup holder! I can believe it!!!

anykey, and the user will definately get a reboot

Any Key Deluxe

In reply to Coffee cup holder! I can believe it!!!

Several years ago I work at a job where the
manager was extremely un-tech savy. The was
however another guy who was vey sharp. He got
ahold of the boss’ PC and wrote a small program
that gave a bogus error message on bootup. the
message said to press any key, after the next
keystroke the PC played a .wav file that shouted
from the speaker “not that one you idiot!”

LMAO

In reply to Any Key Deluxe

That’s a good one! (course u gotta make sure the boss has a sense humor b4 u do stuff like that)

I pulled a joke on the Owners email setup.

In reply to LMAO

I worked for a mom and pop company and the owner was a very nice lady who also like to joke around. Well, her computer was the best in the company of course and had the nice speakers and sub woofers for the best sound. I went into her office while she was out for lunch and added my own little wave file to her incoming messages. She returned to her office with a client and then had called me to her office. Just as arrived at the office her email sounded off with the sound file I had added to outlook. The wave file sounded off with, “YOU’VE GOT JUNK MAIL? and I nearly Busted out laughing on the floor with this very guilty look on my face. The next day I came into the office she had changed all my sound bites to play, ?Don?t torment yourself, that?s my job.? Good thing for fun people that have a sense of humor.

This reminds me of a gag I did…

In reply to Any Key Deluxe

This happened back in my programming days, several years ago.

We were using Clarion (a DOS programming utility) to write our code. I was tasked to write an applet that would create a random-character string of varying lengths for various uses.

We had a woman on our help desk who wasn’t too technically savvy – one of those who knew enough to support our product, but not much else. She and I liked to play practical jokes on each other, so my applet gave me an idea…

I edited my code so that it would create a random-character string of infinite length and display it in a fullscreen DOS window. (We were running Win95.) I inserted this program into her Startup folder, and patiently waited for her next reboot.

This was in the days when Hollywood often used this type of display to show something terribly wrong happening to a computer. You can probably see where I’m going…

She bit, hard. I got a panicked call from her the next morning, “My computer is going nuts! I’m losing all my data! What do I do?! Get down here, FAST!”

By the time I recovered (laughter) and strolled into her area, one of her coworkers had used Ctrl-Break to kill my program, and all was well. Her coworker didn’t see the humor as much as she and I did.

Joke error message #2

In reply to Any Key Deluxe

I used to teach at a high school in which we had a school administrator that was a bit… formal. Our resident guru installed a program on his Mac that showed the Mac “bomb” message, with a “Restart” or “OK” button. Problem was, as you approached the button with the cursor, the button jumped to another part of the screen. Hey, WE thought it was hilarious! Hmm… neither of us work there anymore, and he’s a principal. (Actually, he is a great guy who I’ve come to appreciate. But it makes a good story, and I run a computer now instead of teaching: tell the numbers to sit down and shut up and they DO!)

Good One

In reply to dumb users…..

We had a salesperson called us because he thought he got a virus on his computer somehow. When he called he said “I think that it came from the internet.” Ya think! Anyways we helped him with his problem.

We had another one where a salesperson called when he was traveling becasue he said he could not retrieve his email through the web. He explained that the dialog box prompting him for his logon information kept popping up even though he was entering the information. We tried to figure out if it was a password problem not letting him log in, or if there was something wrong with our exchange server that was not letting him log in through the web. After troubleshooting everything on our end and determining that there was not a problem on our end, we decided to ask him if he was connected to the internet, he said “I have to be connected to the internet.” We told him that in order to retrieve his email from the exchange server through the web, he would need to be connected to the web.

I work for a small company, about 150 employees, and I hear all sorts of good stories, I could not imagine how many stories there must be when dealing with a company of thousands.

Chat show

In reply to Good One

What a laugh, eh?

Maybe you should go on a chat show. The folks would be rolling on the floor.

Small Companies

In reply to Good One

I work for a company with about 1000 pc’s but to be honest I haven’t any real funny tales to tell. I think you may find in larger companies the IT department don’t get as many of these stories because the local “power user” sorts out the person before it gets near us.

I often get the “Where is the ANY key?” and (Usually on a mobile) “I can’t download my sales contacts – I get an error” “What does the error say?” “Oh I can’t remember that!” ” Well can you do it again so I can get the error message” “Oh, I’m just driving to my first sales meeting – do I need to be in front of the computer??”

Sorry buddy but you haven’t seen enough

In reply to Good One

Well this story only proves that the help desk dept. isn’t aware of how dumb users could be…
i would ask right from the beginning regarding the internet 🙂

Like the alphabet virus

In reply to Good One

This actually reminds me of a user at the company that I work for, who called me in a severe state of panic one morning. As I answered the phone, I was greeted with “I’ve got an alphabet virus!!”. I calmly asked her what exactly was wrong and she said: “All my emails are suddenly the wrong way around. You know… they always run from A to Z and now they run from Z to A! What should I do??” I gently guided her through the steps of sorting her emails in Outlook… needless to say her virus problem was instantaneously solved. After I explained to her the cause of her problem, we actually had a good laugh about it!

The case of the missing icon

In reply to dumb users…..

I swear this is a true story that happened to me!
Back in the heyday of Windows 95, I recieved a call from one of our remote sites, the user was having trouble with his pc (as usual). Usually the guy fat fingered his password but was able to bypass the network login and get to his desktop (you know, the place where all your icons are…), anyway having done this,none of his network applications were working (mysterious already isnt it). We used Novell servers at the time and I wanted him to open a command window and run “whoami” to verify that this was the problem. “L***, I want you to look on your desktop. There is an icon there that says MSDOS. After a few moments of silence he says nope, I cant find one. L***, I know its there. I put it on on your desktop last time we had this problem. A few more moments of silence, Nope I’ve looked every where and I dont have one. . Fine, I’ll be down there in a little while anyway, I’ll look at it then. and I hung up. When I got there later I found out from a friend at the next desk over that L*** had been franticly sliding papers around on his “DESK TOP”, looking underneath them for the missing DOS icon.

What desktop?

In reply to The case of the missing icon

I am part of the IT team for a very large
national publishing company. One day one of our
VP’s calls me up and wants access to the
Financials web site. Knowing he already had a
login for the site and it was bookmarked in IE
for him, I decided to walk him through creating
a shortcut on his desktop (because that is where
they were before he got his new laptop and now
they are gone).

I started out by telling him to right-click on
his desktop. After a very lengthy pause I asked
him if he had done this. Yeah, he says, “I’m
just about there”. After another very very
lengthy pause I asked again. This time his
response was “I can’t find the button that says
“your desktop” do you know where it is?”

I about died on the spot.

and also

In reply to What desktop?

i was doing phone support for a home user who had just purchased a notebook and wanted to change the screen size. i tell the person to right-click on the desktop and left-click on properties. his response, after several attemps at explaining “right-click and left-click” was, “I am not at my desk.”

and these are the people deciding how much of a raise employees get

In reply to What desktop?

nuff said?

My excel

In reply to dumb users…..

I have this one trouble user, about every week or so she comes to me and this is how the conversation goes.

Her – “Greg I have a huge problem.”
Me – “What seems to be the problem?”
Her – “I was working in Excel (word, access,etc) and I saved a file and now ALL my Excel (word, access) files are gone. Something must’ve happened and they got deleted.”
Me – “Well I’m positive they’re not missing, unless you deleted them.”
Her – “No, they’re gone I can’t find them, they’re usually in this folder (shows me a directory).
Me – “Ok let me take a look (open up search, type in *.xls, run it). Yup here they are, thats the folder they’re in
Her – “How’d they get moved there?”
Me – “According to the file attributes they’ve been in this directory for at least a month, maybe you were mistaken”
Her – “No I’m sure they got moved there.”
Me – “Well no bother, you’ve got them. Now if you’ll excuse me….” and I trail off as I make a break for it.

Now this conversation happens at least every few weeks, it’s getting quite annoying.

My excel II

In reply to My excel

So I have the same person in my office – turns out she was trying to open excel files while in word. duh!

You can do this!

In reply to My excel II

strangely enuf, you CAN open excel files in word, shows as a big excel grid inside word, and I don’t think you can do much editing unless it calls excel with ola, of course not what the user wanted to do

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to You can do this!

but you can’t see the excel files in using the open browse command in word…

Yes you can

In reply to Reply To: What is your best and great user

You just have to change the focus of the type of file by typing *.* or selecting all files!

Opened Excel in Word

In reply to You can do this!

When I first started working at a company and did not know the “personalities” of our frequent callers, I got a call from a woman who was frantic that all her Excel files were CRAZY! “When I open them, they’re all jumbled up.” I could not imagine what she was talking about so I remoted into her desktop to watch what she was doing. “Show me what’s going on…” I let her drive, she went to her taskbar and brought up Word and proceeded to do File/Open (she was set to “All Files (*.*)”), browse to her shared drive and opened several .xls files.
“you see, they’re all crazy!”
“but you’re opening them in Word”
“no I’m not.”
“you’re in Word right now.”
“well, that’s not what I was doing when I had the problem before I called you.”
Then is took control of her mouse and launched Excel. I asked where the files she needed to work in were located and browsed to them and of course, they opened w/ no problem.
She said, “so why are they OK now?”
“because we’re in Excel now.”
“That’s what I was using before!”
I went back to her Word, I clicked on “File” in the tool bar and looked at the list of recently opened files.
“are these the Excel files you’ve been trying to open?”
“yes.”
At that point, I put her on hold to keep from laughing in her ear, but I was still remoted into her computer. I watched as she proceeded to open 5 or 6 .doc files so she could flush out all the .xls files from her Word MRU list.
I brought her back on the line and let her know that she had to open .xls files in Excel for them to display properly.
She said, “OK, but I’m going to call back if this starts happening again.”

Excel 3

In reply to You can do this!

My users like to use Word to browse thier folder for Excel documents and visa versa. Only problem is they dont change the “Show files with the extention…”
So when they are in Word looking for thier Excel docs, they “disappeared”.

Excel…

In reply to Excel 3

We don’t typically have that problem here, most of our users use Excel (and sometimes PowerPoint) as their word processors instead of Word anyway. Then they wonder why they have so much trouble with it…

Excel with Word & Respect for Users

In reply to You can do this!

Our users are not particularly dumb – but MS Office is – it allows a user to open up an Excel document in Word – and save it – but it becomes a word document with a .xls extension. It is very messy to clean up – and I find it hard to console users who can’t understand why the computer would allow them to do something like that. You can call the user dumb for doing it – but I think MS is even dumber for allowing it to happen – at least not the edit and save part..

OK – there’s my MS rant – I have to agree with an earlier post about treating users with respect – I find respect begets respect and I start it. Most users are intelligent competent people – competent with the things that they were hired to do – and I’m hired to help them with the computer – it’s a team effort. If I approach it that way I rarely get the same person with the same problem – because I spend enough time with them that they learn how to solve that and similar problems.

I think our largest problems have been with smart competent people who have so little respect for IT and security measure that they try to do unauthorized things (like setting up WiFi in the office or plugging their personal lap-tops into our LAN, messing with their host file – disabling their antivirus in an attempt to get a game working – something like that) and then when they have screwed it up so bad they don’t know which end is up – they call us in a tiz. In the problem solving phase we might have a wrap-up conversation about the document they sign each year indicating their agreement to comply to the usage policy – they’re usually a bit more willing to contemplate it after a spectactular failure on their behalf to comply…

you need to teach them not just fix the issue

In reply to My excel II

When you have a customer (internal or external) that keeps making the same errors, it’s because you have not taken the time to teach the person to understand the process. Instead of beating a hasty retreat, you should take the time to find out what she is doing, and then train her in the proper usage. User training should be a big part of the help desk, as you’ll get fewer help requests overall.

Yeah, but then…

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

…you take away your job security.

…as well as the source of the headache that is apparently so much enjoyed by the writer. (Brick walls are GOOD for the brain!) 😉

Good Graaaaaavy!!!!!!

In reply to Yeah, but then…

Without cussing I should ask you what your position is? What kind of job security do you need that you can’t show a user how to open an Excel spreadsheet correctly??? If I had to have those kind of pitiful tasks needed to keep my job I would consider serving burgers somewhere. Give your users some knowledge for crying out loud! For one thing it will save you alot of frustration from not having to do this every few days or so, plus it will give the user a feeling of slight power knowing how to do it correctly. Now whether you like to make people feel good about themselves or not is beside the point because now you have a “power user” in terms of that one little task and he/she can take that burden out of your hair by sharing that knowledge as well. Now you can go back to playing solitare or whatever it is YOU use to kill time when you aren’t protecting your “job security”. I will stick to keeping the internet connection alive and our VPN, controlling web use, setting up emails, user accounts and fileshares, making backups and checking recovery, running cables for a new user office, setting up a computer, installing new software, making a backup power solution, setting up wireless access points, ordering a new document station…….maybe you catch my drift, or maybe you never needed help in a task? Get a life and DO YOUR JOB!

Techtacular…

In reply to Yeah, but then…

If you can’t pick up on sarcasm, then you need more help than I can offer.

Nice rant, though. Get over yourself.

In a way, teaching users is job security…

In reply to Yeah, but then…

If you take the time to show them their mistakes and show they what they should be doing to perform whatever task that is they are doing, then it is good. Not only as some have said that it cuts down on calls to the desk, it shows the user that you have some sort of caring towards them as a user. Why do u think users call us so much? Users are like children and when they feel that the support is there for them, they will call and call. Yes, this can cause the turnaround effect of aggravating users who make the same dum-num mistakes. But, if they learn, then they are basically your mouthpiece. They will speak up for you when you get in a rut. Trust me, I know.

Beg to differ…

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

There are some customers who, while good at their areas of expertise, are as dumb as a box of hammers when it comes to computer issues. No amount of training will fix that.

I am the most patient person I know when dealing with customers, and I always take the time to calmly explain how to do things, but sometimes, as I’m talking and watching the user smile and nod their heads, I can almost hear the rushing sound of my words being sucked down the wormhole that resides just inside their ears.

agree w/ Ken

In reply to Beg to differ…

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve gotten off the phone w/ a user and thought, “I wish I could see this person in their element and see how good they are at their job” because they don’t have a clue about what’s going on w/ their computer. And as far as being able to teach frequent callers how to resolve their own issues… I haven’t had any user’s from that planet yet. There’s an endless number of feel, “why should I learn this when I can call YOU?”

dumb as a box of hammers

In reply to Beg to differ…

And these are usually the people with the big salaries, the big offices, the big comission checks.

Agree

In reply to Beg to differ…

I work for a company of about 200 and within this company we have everything from the ones that have never touched a computer up to the ones that think they know more than the IT staff. I have been able to work with almost all of them. But on the other hand we do have a couple of users that no matter what we do (and several of us have spent many hours trying) just won’t pick up on the information.

For example, one is a Planner, goes through designs, drafts, blueplints and such, has been in it for many years. But no matter how many times we show him how to use Word Templates and not to change them, or the difference between Word and Excel and not to save it in Word (I’m with the prior posting, Why did MS even allow it, though OpenOffice is great for fixing it after he has messed it up). The most common comment that he makes is “The computer should just know what I want”. I’m sorry but some users just won’t get it (not that they can’t).

AMEN

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

This should go under the Dumb Tech category. Why would anyone let the same problem occur repeatedly?

Maybe not…

In reply to AMEN

As a tech, we can do just so much with a user who deliberately refuses to learn. There are occasionally the users who think they are making a point by being passive-aggressive. As the tech, we can try our best to train them, to help them, to figure out the underlying problem, but after (no joke) 1 tech devoted to 40 hours to teach 1 person something that 20 other people learned and became experts on in 10 minutes, you have an issue. As the IT person, it’s not my place to reprimand the user, but to let that person’s team leader know, in a kind way, that we’ve spent this many hours teaching 5 clicks of the mouse, and that the user is still struggling. It is now up to that manager.

Unfortunately, I have seen that quite a bit, but, on the flip side, we have some really awesome users here who have gone from barely knowing what a mouse is, to being a super-user and supporting her entire nursing unit.

It’s all in the attitude. Mine, and the user. We’re a team in the learning process. As much as I wish I could engrave it in a baseball bat and beat her until she learns it, I don’t think I would be effective training the next person from my jail cell.

Not always the case

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

My clients are external. These are businesspeople who view computers as a tool to help them get their job done. They are very successful at their jobs and do not believe that they should be computer solver problems. They have no time for user training, although I keep hearing constant request for training followed by “I have no time for it”.
Any suggestions?

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to Not always the case

You have to love the thought process of
“I don’t have time to learn this, I only have time to use it.”

Change their perspective.

In reply to Not always the case

If you explain to them that, with a few minutes of training, you can save them the time of calling the Help Desk (including the possibility of hold time), they might be convinced. Most people understand the idea of an investment – put a little in now for a bigger return later.

Time for Training

In reply to Not always the case

Schedule it as an off-site, in Vegas.

No time for training vs. Money Saved…

In reply to Not always the case

I’d sell the business person on how they can make more money if they learn said computer application. Sell them on how much time they save, and how much more time they will have to make more money. The key is to speak their language…$$$. Also, learning said computer application makes one more efficient. After all, time is money.
(Realize, posted in ’05, but thought someone might find this mildly useful)

Not just techs

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

The users and management bear some responsibility.

If I was running a train line and needed someone to drive a train, I would be darn sure the person either A) already knows how to drive a train OR b) is trained on how to drive a train.

If Management is not going to make a basic computer test as part of the hiring process, then management must train. When training is provided, management must make it mandatory to attend and learn. Those few companies that do train do not make it mandatory to learn and retain the information by testing to complete the course and testing again at a later date to retain the information.

Additionally, these same users would never think of just jumping in a train and start pulling levers to “figure out” how it works. They would either know how to operate the train or ask for training.

With computers end users tend to resist training.

As long as this continues, any amount of training will be useless.

Training is required

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

I appreciate your amazement and astonishment at users ignorance. It is unbelievable that into days world there are users that aren’t up on the basics. My question is why isn’t the organization training these folks? I worked for a large bank in the small business lending production group. The loan officers used a form for capturing the basic financial information. The form was in Lotus 1-2-3 butt didn’t have the formulas for crunching the numbers…they would use their calculators to crunch the numbers and then enter the info into the form. You can imagine how surprised they were when I entered the formulas into the form and the ratios calucated automatically. They’d been doing this for several years. Amazing that the company didn’t make sure their loan officers had basic computer skills.

I disagree

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

Some users simply don’t get it – even after multiple attempts to train or explain. Rather than attempting to learn it themselves, many users simply find it easier to call you to solve their problem.

Complicated machinery

In reply to I disagree

I agree 100%. The only thing some people are ever willing to remember is the phone number of their tech!

Did you ever notice that with any other kind of complicated machinery or equipment, employees are usually required to get some type of formal training at school or otherwise?

I don’t see why it should be any different for computer users.

If I got a new job running a high tech piece of equipment, is the repair person going to come out and teach me how to operate it? I think not…

I teach our users

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

I have detailed instructions with pictures for our users and some of them still can not follow the instructions right.

re: you need ot teach them…

In reply to you need to teach them not just fix the issue

will I agree with you in principal….I have a problem with your post…

…find out what “SHE” is doing…..train “HER” in the proper….

Lonely users

In reply to My excel

Maybe she wants a date. Ever think of that?

Dumb User again

In reply to dumb users…..

Client: I don’t understand why that accounting software cost so much. It’s only been used once.
Consultant: What do you mean, it’s only been used once? You use it every day.
Client: No, I don’t. You used it once when you put the program on my computer and it’s been sitting in the box ever since.
…Time to get my money up front….

Dumb… and predictable

In reply to dumb users…..

I have one user, every six months I get a trouble ticket from him, “My keyboard is broken”
I just reach in the cupboard for a pair of AAs and go replace the batteries in his wireless keyboard. when I get there, he says “That’s right, Dammit, I keep forgetting. It’s been 3 years since he got that keyboard.

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to Dumb… and predictable

Without knowing this user, I’d venture to say he isn’t forgetting…he’s just lazy.

Ha Ha

In reply to dumb users…..

An employee at my girlfriends work once phoned in sick saying that he had been on the internet the night before and that he thought he had contracted a “computer virus”! I swear to god!!

well thats not a dumb user

In reply to Ha Ha

thats not a dumb user thats called simply dumb 🙂

out of IRQs

In reply to dumb users…..

One of the contractors in my office ordered a new computer through his company. Unfortunately, he ordered a NIC with a RJ45 conector and we were on a coax network at the time. This was back in the days of Win95. I informed him of the problem and that I had a spare NIC to give him if he would order the correct NIC to replace the one I provided. He got on the phone with his company and complained about the NIC. This guy thinks he is a computer genius, but really just thinks that bigger, better, and more are always the solution. So he ordered everything he could think of in this computer. Not a single bay was open and most of the slots were filled. Needless to say he had an IRQ problem. His company gave him the number of the computer company and told him to call their sales department. I was happy to see him on the pone because then he wasn’t bothering me while I set up his computer. I overheard him say to the sales department “My land guy says I’m out of IRQs. Can I buy some more of those?”

I can’t get the internet back

In reply to dumb users…..

I went to the home of an elderly couple who jut got a new computer. I was setting up internet service. All was fine, I set up desktops, icons, favorites, and showed them how to sign on. Two days later I had to return to repeat the whole process. The husband ran the recovery cd just to see what it was.

Overheard at my In-laws house

In reply to dumb users…..

Mother-In-Law: You can’t read my e-mail because you need my password to sign in.

Father-In-Law: I know your password. I saw you type it in yesterday.

Mother-In-Law: Oh, yeah, smartypants, what is it, then?

Father-In-Law: It’s five asteroids.

Me (in other room): ***Spits soda up my nose***

Hard drives + magnets do not mix

In reply to Key Systems

Several people at a local gov’t agency put little refrigerator magnets on their CPUs in very close proximity to the hard drive. They were shocked to learn that the cute self-expressions caused hard drives to crash and/or need to be replaced after erasure etc. Monkey see, monkey do! One person would do it and next thing you know, several more followed suit with cute magnets of their own. It was only a matter of time until hard drives died one by one. 😉

i am completely amazed

In reply to Hard drives + magnets do not mix

when clients will spend between $1,000 and $2,000 dollars for a pc an turn it into a scrap book with all their family pictures and magnetized trinkets stuck on the case.

Magnets at a tech company!

In reply to Hard drives + magnets do not mix

At a previous employer (a company that installed computer networks for law firms), our receptionist did the same thing. Funny thing is, I was the third tech to look at her computer, but the first to notice the magnet. That taught me to always look for the simplest solution first.

You got that right on magnets

In reply to Hard drives + magnets do not mix

A friend of mine told me this story. There was a lady in a doctors office that always made a backup copy of the days work on floppies diskettes. The next day she would come in to the office and get the diskettes she made the night before and they never worked. He asked her to show him what she was doing. She made the backups and then took the floppy diskettes to the back room and used a magnet to hold the floppy diskettes to a file cabinet.

If you think that’s bad…

In reply to Hard drives + magnets do not mix

I used to do IT work for a company that managed two professional sports teams. Each year they distributed magnetic calendars. Each year the staff would snag one from each team for their cubicle. Each year IT would run a sweep for the obvious. It was bad enough finding it on the “new” users computer, but we had several repeat offenders.

NO NO NO! Magnets are fine

In reply to Hard drives + magnets do not mix

ok, we all know that HDDs are magnetic devices, but there seems to be a myth regarding HDD failure and magnets.

Scott Mueller (from QUE) says in his popular tome “Upgrading and Repairing PCs” that the magnetic field has to act in a certain way to do anything to the data on the platters. If you’ve ever opened up a HDD then you’d have found a whopping big magnet inside as part of the acutator mechanism. This is perfectly acceptable, because it’s field is not aligned to the platters, and even being right next to them, it’s still out of range. The heads are the most dangerous magnets for a HDD, because they produce powerful (relatively) magnetic fields, in the right alignment, less than a millimetre from the platters.

sticking a fridge magnet to the platters would not harm the data (at least the magnetic integrity of the data anyway) because to change the bits on the platter, the magnetic field has to oscillate. stationary fields are harmless.

The effect of a fridge magnet on the outside of the HDD is already negligable. the fridge magnet on the computer case has even less effect because the case is designed to shield the internal components anyway.

BTW: most cases still have internal speakers, (which produce oscillating magnetic fields, but nowhere at the frequency or strength required to change or corrupt data)

of course, there are magnets to watch out for (and other things you wouldn’t suspect) Degaussing wands are bad (at close range) and maybe surprising to some, Power transformers, such as used for external peripherals can be dangerous. I have an external USB HDD, which i left sitting next to it’s powersupply, over a month, I was unable to retrieve any data from it, just as well I didn’t have any important stuff on it, I was still able to format it and move on.

I just think people should educate themselves before jumping to conclusions.

I have several fridge magnets attached to my computer case, I like fridge magnets (not obsessive)

yes but

In reply to NO NO NO! Magnets are fine

isn’t it frustrating when you go to an office to fix a pc and spend the first 20 minutes removing magnets, pictures of family, and those stupid little stick-on calanders ? can’t they put them somewhere else on the desk besides the pc?

Yes, I know

In reply to yes but

ok, I was gonna say that, it can get annoying when people take it upon themselves to decorate comapny property without concern for damage they could be doing to their cases (hard magnets scratch up the surface)

but they don’t cause any sort of data problems…

system is down!

In reply to Key Systems

user: the system is down! my things are gone!
me: what do you mean? can you be more specific?
user: i can’t open my email……………..

Support Services Director t/s mouse cursor to bad monitor

In reply to system is down!

The Help Desk was swamped so the Support Services Director decided to assist, call came in from user: Monitor blank except for mouse cursor. She calls me to ask my location and if I had a spare monitor with me. I ask her the problem and she say’s it looks like a bad monitor. I ask her to have the user disconnect the vga cable and see if the monitor displays No video signal. Later on I find out the symptom from the user when he asks how can a bad monitor just show the mouse pointer? Reboot solved problem.

system is down, everything has crashed!

In reply to system is down!

This happened to a guy that was trying to cover for me while I was on vaca. He is not a PC tech savvy guy and was merely trying to cover the basic paper pushing and data spreadsheet stuff that I do, but in no means was he prepared for any major troubleshooting. He gets in Monday the first day I was on vaca, and he was bombarded by our boss telling him that the whole network was down everything didn’t work, everyone from managers to sales was over reacting that the whole system was down…..turns out it was just that a customer coultn’t log in to their FTP account because they were spelling their password wrong and everyone over reacted.

Wirless?

In reply to What is your best and great user

Someone from my office called me at home because she said she could not connect to the internet, I usually dont support people at home, but I thought I would be nice. I went through some basic troubleshooting, and then I asked her to check her network cable, she then replied that she uses the wireless. I knew that she did not have a wireless router, but she insisted she did. I asked why she thought she did, and she said becuase she has been using it for 6 months, I thought this sounded wierd, but I finally convinced her to use a cable and her problem was fixed. We finally figured out that she had been connecting to her neighbors wireless connection, and he had moved and left her with no wireless.

Neighbors are great

In reply to Wirless?

Esp when they have an open access point!

Went to visit my Aunt, and it turned out she had the dreaded dial-up service (shudder).

I checked, and the neighbor two houses over had an open access point! Bonus! Connected, but no internet. (drat!)

Luckily they were nice enough to leave everything in the default config, so the access point was kind enough to identify itself so I would know which DEFAULT admin password to use. Got in, fixed the config for them and then had my TR fix taken care of for the rest of the weekend! Never even sent them a bill for my services. What a guy!

———————————

Better yet, JUST last week I installed a DSL connection with an access point in a remote office. (they had been using dialup to connect to the servers). After I got it up and going, I looked and there were 7 access points running, and 5 of them were wide open IN A OFFICE BUILDING in the middle of a busy city.

Unbelievable.

While we are at it ..

In reply to Neighbors are great

I moved to this new place in london … I had been trying to find a good internet connection for my area …

One day, I took my laptop home … and what do you know?? Some idiot has an open access point … WooHoo …

Only trouble is, I have to sit near the window to be able to get a strong connection … but oh well, you win some…you lose some 😀

]:)

Tapping in

In reply to While we are at it ..

The following equipment would pay for its self in no time! Also good for going in on a connection with a neighbor.

http://tinyurl.com/7k4ac
bridge

http://tinyurl.com/c8ae9
omni-directional

http://tinyurl.com/do385
directional

I use this now to bridge a network between two buildings where it isn’t cost effective to run fiber and has a lot of electrical “issues”. (when the machinery fires up, we “brown out” the entire area!)

I will also be carrying an extra set when I go on the road to extend what I can connect to! Should take it home to see if anyone in my area has something open that is beyond the laptop with just a card in it! ]:)

Just One Word …

In reply to Tapping in

BRILLIANT …

Watch out neighbors !!!!

]:)

Word of warning…

In reply to Just One Word …

using someone elses wifi without their knowledge is illegal. I’m not saying don’t do it, just don’t get caught 😉

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/uk_war_driver_fined/

Crazy Brits!

In reply to Word of warning…

I guess it wouldn’t be bad to see what it is in the US. Last I saw, it was pretty fuzzy and involved bad intent. Just the “theft” of bandwidth though? Hmmm.

But it does go back to the same argument of if the neighbor has their radio on too loud and I can hear it in my house, can I listen to it? Some access points allow you to back down the broadcast, and ALL allow you to secure them to at least need a password.

All the time

In reply to While we are at it ..

Forget getting your own connection
You can plead ignornace just like your users do, I didnt connect, a box popped up, and I just hit OK. 😉

I have a Centrino, it says you can have wirless internet anywhere, and thats what I thought it was 🙂

Easy

P.S. Did Greg (read above) ever ask his user out? She has the hots for him for sure 🙂

Ethical issues

In reply to Neighbors are great

I’d feel like I’m taking advantage of a poor schmendrick who’s just trying to get along. Admitted, the neighbor probably wouldn’t notice, and you’re not costing him anything extra (maybe), but it seems kind of like using shareware and not paying for it.

It’s also illegal, but the ethics are more important to me.

Broadband Limits

In reply to Ethical issues

You could also make him reach his download limit quicker and roll onto charged-for data.

Not abusive

In reply to Broadband Limits

We are talking email and getting my TR fix while on the road, not porn mega downloads.

I am a good boy! 😀

Hey, I fixed their setup free of charge! They should thank me!

No, did not scan for other PC’s.

Great restraint.

In reply to Not abusive

Very good!

Even Shareware

In reply to Ethical issues

has a demo period!

The ethics. This was batted around last summer in a discussion. Maybe it is time to give that another round as it is more and more common?

Just last week, I had to set a user up with wireless on his DSL in his remote office space. I found that their were seven other access points in that same office building and five of the seven were wide open. Can you believe it? I would expect this out of a home user.

One of these days, I will go back knocking on doors as a security “expert” (what is that anyways?) and for a fee offer to secure their wifi for them!

schmendrick

In reply to Ethical issues

I can’t resist … do you subscribe to AWAD? That’s today’s word!

Trying to Understand

In reply to Neighbors are great

It must be nice to have no morals, makes life easier. Following your logic, if your neighbor left his door open its OK to move in or if they left their car unlocked it’s OK to take it for a ride. Theft is theft and while I would steal a loaf of bread if I was starving, I pay for everything I use unless something is free given to me!!

What does morals have to do with it?

In reply to Trying to Understand

I guess I don’t understand your analogy. The guy is NOT leaving his doors open. He has built an open hallway from my house to his house. He has NOT left his car unlocked. He is parking it in my garage. My take on this is, if you don’t want me using your wifi then keep it out of my house, office, car, etc. What you are telling me is you can put whatever you want into MY house and I can’t touch it, right?

Sorry folks but if it is in my house uninvited, I will either kill it or use it.

Morals? How about being a good neighbor???

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

Just because you have more knowledge of the situation does not mean that you should take advantage of the situation. Be a good neighbor and inform him/her of the situation and offer your services to secure it for them.

So proximity is the dermining factor??

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

And if the signal is in your house, encrypted, password protected. It’s still a signal you can hack is it still fair game?

Sorry but your argument is nothing but a weak rationalization.

I think I’ll add this question to my interview list. I’ve a hunch there is another rationalization that allows for a different opinion when being interviewed for a job. Sustinence for the kids etc…

That’s why it is a moral/ethical issue.

Ethics

In reply to So proximity is the dermining factor??

The real issue is ethics. Would you want to hire a person you knew wasn’t ethical with their use of the wifi? These ethical issues will spill into other areas of their life and at some point could come back to trouble you, the employer. Sure they are smart, but think of all the companies that have gone under in the last couple of years because of the ethics of a few people that eventually made it to the top.

Pleasantly Suprised

In reply to Ethics

It’s good to see the lack of support for the if it ain’t locked it’s mine view.

Awhile back there was a thread on this issue. I was amazed at the number of people that vigorously defended the practice.

Ethics is not an issue

In reply to Ethics

Unprotected wifi has nothing to do with ethics.
The average home user has no technical knowledge.
The hardware manufacturers are at blame for this problem. The typical home wireless router does very little to inform the user of the vulnerabilities of wireless and does little to help them to secure the connection. Manufacturers need to educate their customers, else we’ll have another governmental nuissance like CAN-SPAM act which does not solve them problem.

oops

In reply to Ethics

sorry double posted

So there it is….

In reply to Ethics

ENRON went under because someone in the company thought it was OK to use an unsecured wireless signal to check their email.:-) i knew it!! but seriously…. Cut the guy some slack. he just wanted his email. he is not misreporting investment reports. and do not give me the “it will lead to more ” speech. by the way are we not off topic, now?

And you call users “dumb”

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

That is, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s buttheads like you that are giving the rest of us a bad rap.

butthead????

In reply to And you call users “dumb”

YEAH, It couldn’t be stuff like using “butthead” that gives us a bad rap.

You said it!

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

Why is everyone freaking out over this issue?

There are ways for securing your wi-fi from random users. If you don’t know how to set it up then get some help from someone who knows how to secure the connection. If you don’t know how wireless works then understand it before you implement it.

This is not a morality or ethics issue. It’s a matter of the user not understanding the cons as well as pros of wi-fi services.

Call me what you will but if I encounter an open wi-fi connection, it’s free internet.

And for all you hypocrites out there, why not lend your services to the unknowing and inform them of the danger to themselves of their wi-fi service?

Oh, I know…if you did that, you may not be able to browse the ‘net anymore.

I did

In reply to You said it!

I determined that a user was open, I talked to them and helped them lock down their access point. Users that leave their AP’s open do so because of ignorance, almost without exception they would be horrified and angry that someone was stealing their service. If they leave it open, they are NOT giving permission, they are ignorant. The reason for encryption and locks on doors is becuase of people like you. Honest people would never (except by accident or ignorance) steal a car, rob a house, or steal other peoples internet access. People have to pay for the service and no one has the right to be a freeloader!!!! Personally, I would never run an AP using WAP, it is insecure. New wireless encryption protocols are coming out that are turned on by default and are MUCH more secure and I will continue running CAT5 to every room until the new AP’s are out.

so…

In reply to I did

a home user has a linksys router in default config. neighbor has the same router in same config. user puts router in basement where signal is less than neighbors and unknowingly uses neighbors signal. is this a crime as well. or does the end users level of expertise dictate the degree of the offense.

I agree!

In reply to You said it!

ttosun, I agree with you, especially when you make the hypocrite referral.

I’ve ‘borrowed’ another’s open WAP once before, and to be honest, I felt a little guilty about it at the time. However, I didn’t try to access his computers, and I didn’t use anything that cost him any money. (Internet service in the States is unlimited – no maximum data – except in very rare cases. I don’t even know of an ISP that has data limits.)

Because of the fact that this didn’t cost the ‘victim’, I don’t agree with the analogies regarding keys in the car, or front door open. To drive another’s car includes gasoline usage, not to mention the risk of property damage. Taking from another’s home is obvious – you’re denying their use of the item.

If you use an open WAP, especially one in a home, you’re not denying usage or using resources. Granted, your usage disallows some of their bandwidth, but how many homes include enough computers to truly use all bandwidth available?

Personally, I get nervous when I use an open WAP, but only because there’s the possibility that someone else is accessing it for malicious reasons, and I wouldn’t want to be caught up in that fracas.

Regarding legalities, there are currently NO US federal laws (and few, if any state/local laws) regarding using another’s open WAP for the purpose of accessing the public Internet. It’s a different story when the WAP is secure, or if it’s used to access computer resources or personal data, but that’s not the issue raised in this discussion.

As to the hypocrite referral, I’m sure some of the people deriding this topic would be more than happy to take good money from the hapless WAP users for shoring up their security. Explain to me how THAT isn’t a denial of resources! (Yeah, I know, you’re giving them a service, but seriously, this is something most people could do for themselves, if they cared to do so. It ain’t all that hard.)

All in all, I don’t condone the use of open WAPs without permission (…yeah, I know, I’ve done it before…), but the other side of the fence is also true – if you broadcast a radio signal without security, it’s publicly available. That’s the basis behind radio and TV stations, and why HBO started scrambling their satellite signals oh so long ago.

By the way…

In reply to I agree!

I don’t even have a laptop! We don’t use wifi at work. I don’t use it at home.

Look, I can’t speak for the ones who have malicious intent. But the avarage schmo’s just trolling the ‘net on your air. I think it’s because of this reason there are no strict/er laws.

What are they stealing…air?

Using WAP without permission *COULD* be considered illegal

In reply to I agree!

Using a person’s Wireless Access Point without permission *COULD* be considered illegal depending on how the District Attourney wanted to prosecute it.

Think of this: You are on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor’s house, and you can see the football game on his GIGANTITRON TV. Viewing from the street is fine as you are on “premises open to the public”. However, you can’t simply go walking into his house (uninvited)to watch that same TV because it is now the crime of TRESPASSING! Same if you take a few steps into his (unfenced) yard. It is still trespassing even though you are not costing him any additional costs to view the game on his TV.

The same principle could be applied to the WAP as the signal from YOUR wireless card has to enter HIS home to get to the wireless router or AP! A weak arguement yes, but possible.

A better, and more likely arguement would fall under the FEDERAL WIRETAPPING LAWS! WIth VoIP, your neighbor’s broadband connection is now a communications service. You can’t freely tap into his phone service and use it can you? Also, remeber the problem with scanners and the cordless phones? I believe the FCC forced scanner makers to stop letting scanners pickup the frequencies that cordless phones (and cell phones) use. So they could make a strech and try using the Federal Wiretapping laws to charge you for using the neighbor’s WAP.

The general term law enforcement uses is “reasonable expectation to privacy”. Your neighbor has a reasonable expectation to privacy from someone using his WAP without permission. Doesn’t really make any difference if he/she is too ‘challenged’ to know how to secure it.

And I just remembered another one they could try to use. Don’t know how many states would have this particular law, but some states have a “Theft of services” law. Unauthorized use of someone else’s Wireless network could be argued under that.

So even though you can access his internet service from your house doesn’t make it legal. The interception of the commercial TV or radio signals doesn’t equate because that is what they are there for. And HBO, Sirius, XM radio, etc don’t count because they are designed as “PAY” services even though they are delivered over “radio” waves. Can you argue for free cell phone use if you have a compatible handset? Their signals are just floating around too.

Rethink your argument.

larrybell…

In reply to I agree!

Larry, you have some valid points, and some not-so-valid points. It’s the latter I’ll address here.

You’re right, using another’s WAP *COULD* be considered illegal, but so far, to my knowledge, no case has been successfully prosecuted in the US – at least not for someone who used a signal emanating from a WAP with no security enabled for the sole purpose of accessing the Internet.

To respond to your analogy of watching a neighbor’s TV while standing in their yard – The issue here isn’t attempting to use their wireless signal from their property. The issue is using their wireless signal from YOUR OWN PROPERTY – similar to your statement that viewing the neighbor’s TV “from the street is fine as you are on ‘premises open to the public’.” (Technically, if the neighbor’s TV is inside their house, you could be arrested for being a peeping tom, but that’s another discussion.)

If you want to pursue the argument that the radio signal from my wireless NIC is trespassing on their property, then I stand to make millions by sueing the originators of the myriad radio signals that pass through my property (not to mention my own body) every day.

As to the federal wiretapping laws, you are correct in your statement that you can’t legally tap into their phone signal. However, again, that’s not the issue raised here. This discussion, so far, has ONLY touched on the idea of using their WAP to access the public Internet. This pointedly DOES NOT include his phone signal, nor any other devices on his network.

“The general term law enforcement uses is ‘reasonable expectation to privacy’. Your neighbor has a reasonable expectation to privacy from someone using his WAP without permission.” You’re correct here, too, regarding reasonable expectation to privacy. But again, the discussion doesn’t include invading anyone’s privacy. NOBODY mentioned accessing computers connectd to the WAP. Yes, that’s entirely possible to do, but the only use mentioned in this discussion was to access the public Internet. Explain to me how accessing the public Internet invades anyone’s privacy, and I’ll accept this argument.

I’ve stated earlier that I don’t condone using another’s open WAP (whether or not it’s an intentionally open WAP), and I stand by that statement. In fact, I often advise others to avoid doing it – for various reasons, including their own security.

For all this, my point is that at this time, I know of no laws governing the issue of using an open WAP for the sole purpose of accessing the Internet. The federal government is working on writing legislation, but until such legislation is passed by Congress and signed by the sitting president, my point remains valid.

Moral? Maybe, maybe not. People have different levels of morality, and each tends to look at those with other levels of morality (whether ‘higher’ or ‘lower’) with disdain. In other words, this argument will rage forever.

Legal? Right here, right now, yes.

I have an open access point

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

It’s in the DMZ, throttled to 56K and 100MB monthly limit, http traffic only, and every byte that goes through it is logged. I’ve noticed neighbours/passers by/random people using it from time to time.

Anyone who wants to take advantage of my free internet is more than welcome to do so, as long as they have no expectation of privacy whatsoever.

Again, what does morals have to do with it?

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

If you don’t read anything else, please read the last couple of paragraphs.

Here in the US, most times DSL is unlimited service not based on useage. Therefore, my remarks are as follows.

I believe that their a trememdous amount of bandwidth that is paid for but never used. Why not share it and use it?

Someone mentioned I was stealing service. NOT. What has been stolen? Is their less service?

Have you ever used someone’s phone? Is that stealing?

Have you driven down someone’s driveway or used it to turn around when you passed the house you were looking for? You didn’t pay for it. Aren’t you stealing his driveway or the service thereof?

What does it hurt?????

It sounds to me like a bunch of children who don’t want to share their toys.

If you don’t want people to use your service then lock it down. If folks are ignorant to the ramifications of not securing their wifi then by all means educate them BUT don’t start calling me a theif or unethical.

Now let’s take this another step. I am an ignorant computer user (this is NOT a derogatory term, it means I don’t know about computers). I setup my brand new DSL connection after calling tech support and having them walk me thru it. I add wifi utilizing the default settings by reading minimum amount in the quick start guide. I am uptown now. I then fire up my brand new notebook with wifi built-in and connect to what I think is my network and in reality it is the person’s next door. Am I a theif? Am I unethical? Or am I just ignorant? According to some folks, I am a thief. I am stealing service from the folk’s next door. Right?

I believe, the police will tell you, “ignorance is no excuse for the law”.

If you want to be a NICE neighbor and share your wifi leave it open. Of course, protect your individual PCs but be neighborly and share.

Now that I have said all that and have some of you folks in a lather. I will tell you that I pay for my own DSL connection which I have put wifi on. I have put up some antennas and told my neighbors they are welcome to use to their hearts content. I even helped the elderly lady next door setup her computer to use my wifi. Her husband recently died after being a vegetable for the past 5 years, and she took care of him in her home for those 5 years. She uses it for email and to keep in touch with her children and grandchildren.

I love watching the old “You’re stealing my radio and TV signal” boys get their panties in a wad.

My work here is done! Have a great day! I will.

Unbelievable

In reply to Again, what does morals have to do with it?

You stated:

“Someone mentioned I was stealing service. NOT. What has been stolen? Is their less service?

Have you ever used someone’s phone? Is that stealing?

Have you driven down someone’s driveway or used it to turn around when you passed the house you were looking for? You didn’t pay for it. Aren’t you stealing his driveway or the service thereof?

What does it hurt?????”

In using someone’s phone, I suspect out of courtesy would ASK first to use the phone. As for driving down/using the driveway, it is unlikely anyone would bother to press charges due to the all the trouble it would take. But yeah, technically, I think they could.

As for: “I then fire up my brand new notebook with wifi built-in and connect to what I think is my network and in reality it is the person’s next door.” , You would likely get off unless they could prove you intentionally accessed the neighbor’s network instead of your own. But then, YOU KNOW that it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you are on your own network.

It is nice of you to openly share your network with your neighbors. I’m glad you can afford to be so generous. But because you are so generous to share YOUR network doesn’t mean that everyone else needs to be so generous. Why should I work hard to afford my $45/month cable internet service just so one or more neighbors can freeload off of me? If I want to invite them to, that’s one thing. If I choose not to invite them to use it, I have the right not to. And they don’t have the right to use it anyway just because they can.

If neighbors want to “share” others internet access, they should also share the cost.

(Trying to rince the ‘lather’ off)

You’re right, Larry…

In reply to Unbelievable

“If I choose not to invite them to use it, I have the right not to.”

You’re exactly right – that’s why there are security settings available in all wireless routers. It’s up to the WAP user to enable these.

Granted, the manufacturers SHOULD be shipping the things with security enabled, but they don’t.

GM, Ford, Chrysler, and all other automobile manufacturers ship their automobiles with locks on the doors. When the car is delivered to the customer, the driver door is unlocked to make it easier for the new owner to open it. (When is the last time you had a dealer show you how to operate the locks? It’s a reasonable expectation that if someone is buying the equipment, they have basic knowledge of how it operates and how to secure it.)

Because the door is unlocked at delivery, and there is no training involved in how to operate the locks, does that mean the dealer/mfr is at fault if someone enters the car without permission to take it or items within?

I know the next argument you’ll try to use – “Does this mean you have the right to drive the car?” No, it doesn’t, but I’ve already addressed this angle in an earlier post.

Responsibility??

In reply to Unbelievable

Quote
“But then, YOU KNOW that it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you are on your own network.”

Then it’s the owner of the AP to lock it down if they don’t want anyone using it…

This thread is very amusing but very off topic.

Think of it this way…

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

Here is something that may help with the ethical question of using somebody’s unsecured wireless network without permission:

Imagine that you knew that you were going to be put in this situation, but you didn’t know which side you would be on (the tech savy person using the connection, or the unknowlegeable person supplying the connection). Would you care which position you would be put into? Especially since the unknowlegeable person probably leaves several other security holes open because of not knowing about them, let alone how to close them.

It is easy to sit in our ivory towers and laugh at the ignorance of the “clueless” (i.e. uneducated) users out there. But are you an expert at everything? How good are you at fixing a car, cooking gourmet meals, designing a bridge or an airplane, or any number of other areas of specialized knowledge? We sound *JUST AS STUPID* to the experts in those areas! (That being said, I DO get a kick out of some of the things that people come up with.)

Freeloading Leaches

In reply to What does morals have to do with it?

I cannot believe how many freeloading leaches are actually posting on this site.

If you didn’t pay for it, your stealing it… period! (Unless you have permission.)

Let me guess, on garbage pick up day all you freeloaders probably add your garbage to your neighbor’s so you don’t have to pay for that service either right?

If you didn’t pay for it…your stealing…quit stealing air, please

In reply to Freeloading Leaches

If you didn’t pay for it…your stealing…quit stealing air, please

Justifiable by reason of ignorance

In reply to If you didn’t pay for it…your stealing…quit stealing air, please

Just like a true thief, trying to justify your crime through your own ignorance.

thanks

In reply to Freeloading Leaches

that’s a good idea !!!

My father…and Minnesota

In reply to Freeloading Leaches

My father believes that in Minnesota (he is not a lawyer so could be wet behind his ears) that it is legal to access someone elses Open internet connection that is Not password encrypted, as long as you are not accessing files on the computer and is only using the internet, and it is wi-fi and not dial-up, and no hacking was required for access. He also doesn’t care if someone drives up our road and uses our wi-fi for free. Doesn’t think it is very likely that anyone will hack into the network being that we live way out in the boonies. He is a little over confident as we live in suburbs, a little out from the cities, but suburbs, nevertheless. I will use wi-fi internet that I find for free, but only if I need to access something in an emergency that I forgot to do before leaving home, or if I am trying to fix a problem friend is having with her dial-up connection and need on-line help. Last time I used free internet was when I had to go down to Fairmont, MN for holiday and copy and paste an entire forum site before it got hacked again by someone who has hacked 957 sites. (google searched key words left behind by hacker). The forum was going down Aug. 1 anyhow, and webmaster didn’t want to give me access to the files directly. Just gave me permission to copy and paste it the nutty long way. I feverishly worked very long hours. I succeeded. On Saturday, the 8th, they were hacked again. This time the hacker was successful. Hacker wasn’t successful the first time. It’s a security problem with Invision Power Board forums. Site was hacked after I had laid down for a nap. I was able to email the webmaster and nail the time down to a 3 hr 45 minute window frame, as I was at the site before and after that time.

Nothing to understand IMO

In reply to Trying to Understand

If my neighbor is playing his XM sat radio at high volume so that the music can be heard inside my house, am I stealing the service from XM?

If my neighbor is reasonably intelligent, debatable, he should *know* that his music is loud enough to be heard by the other people living around him.

If my neighbor turns on his hose and lets it run through his backyard unrestricted and the water flows through my fence is it illegal for me to capture the water and use it for my own benefit? I didn’t turn it on and leave it running endlessly, he did.

If my neighbor is reasaonably intelligent, he should understand that he’s wasting water that he, in the end, will have to pay for.

Likewise, in 2005, anyone that buys a wireless access point and sets it up unrestricted has had access to all of the enclosed reading materials that specifically address the security aspect of their radio device. The signal doesn’t stop at my fence line but intrudes into my home whether I want to allow it inside or not.

The biggest reason I don’t see a problem with using someone’s access point is that the wireless antenna on my computer doesn’t really care where the signal comes from. It latches on to the strongest signal and enjoys the ride.

What Did Yo’ Mama Say?!?

In reply to Trying to Understand

Mama used to say, “if you’re not sure whether it’s right or wrong, imagine telling someone else you did it – would you be proud or ashamed?”

If your neighbor found out you were using her connection would you feel proud of that?

If your neighbor knew the public had access to her connection would she want it changed to something more private?

Anyway, if you have access but only want to use it for innocuous surfing and email, someone else may have access and have identity theft in mind. Shouldn’t you tell her?

For the record, I have borrowed open connections from nearby hotels, etc. when traveling. Guess we all have our line — mine stops at using personal connections that I feel pretty sure people would want secured if they knew better.

Reid

my mother told me

In reply to What Did Yo’ Mama Say?!?

my mother told me if i am not watching the TV to turn it off. why does this not apply to internet? if i am not using the net (browsing, downloading, email, TR so on and so forth) i turn it off. first i dont need my connection on when i am not using it (some of you need to think about this one) and secondly its a security measure no one else can use internet if i turn off when its not in use. well thats my 2 cents.

now as for the wireless issue, consider this analogy. if your car was stolen you would claim it on isurance. would your insurance provider pay up if you left your car unlocked and the keys in the ignition?

Cheers
Mike

PS the makers of broadband routers may want to bring back Dial on Demand Routing so you only connect when you need it (assuming there are no connection costs, should be none on broadband)

Theft? … ok, show me what’s missing? Better yet, feed the planet

In reply to Trying to Understand

Did I actually take all of his bandwidth?
Did I make him get charged more money by his ISP?

OK, based on all the wasted time and money discussing this. All the money it’s gonna cost in the court systems, etc. How about all wireless equiptment manufacturers add a page to their user instructions about being charitable and providing free internet for your neighbors. Also, they should change the default router name from something like “linksys” to “FreeWAP”.

NOW is EVERYbody happy?

Whats missing is ethics

In reply to Theft? … ok, show me what’s missing? Better yet, feed the planet

You took part of his bandwidth. is it not stealing if you only lift half the money out of a persons wallet? you are using equipment your neighbor paid for, resources he paid to have available for him, and electricity that he paid for. you paid for none of it.
However, your idea of freeWAP isn’t a bad one. I may setup a vlan with limited bandwidth exactly that way just to provide that service to my neighbors and friends. but if you leave your AP wide open you are asking for trouble. not just a wardriver surfing the web but someone who is interested in your home accounting SW and your account numbers passwords etc. believe me, My AP is tied down tight as I can get it.

Did you cost ??

In reply to Theft? … ok, show me what’s missing? Better yet, feed the planet

How do you know if you cost him anything to use his internet connection? Did YOU get the bill?

You don’t know what type of service he actually has. You just see ‘free internet’.

Several years (only about 3) ago, I had an ISP through DSL that DID limit data download to something like 1 gig per month. How do you know what type of service he has? How much has been downloaded over his connection? Maybe he reached his service limit, and he is now incurring extra charges.

Your argument doesn’t cut it.

Well … how about introducing yourself to your neighbor

In reply to Trying to Understand

Offer to fix the problem for them, maybe they’ll even offer to share their internet with you.

Now you have explicit permission.

NOW is everybody happy?

And for the Yeah But’ers here. Get a laptop and walk around and you should be able to figure out WHICH neighbor is the one that has it on. Otherwise, you might have to knock on more than 1 door but still … it’s gotta be somewhere close right?

that is the right way to do it.

In reply to Well … how about introducing yourself to your neighbor

taking without asking is stealing,
accepting an offer of use, or asking and receiving permission is not.

But it may not be theirs to give . . .

In reply to that is the right way to do it.

Many ISPs specify you cannot “share” with your neighbors, run servers etc. Although it would be hard to enforce, it’s often in the fine print.

To chime in, I like “free” stuff as much as the next guy, but it looks like ethics today is truely out the window.

WOW

In reply to Trying to Understand

That is a bit of a stretch isn’t it?

I don’t pirate software, even though I have a bud that will always have a cracked copy of this or that available.

I don’t go into someone elses yard and take anything.

I asked in a different post if anyone knows of a law in the US that specifies if connecting to an open access point for internet access is illegal or not. If their is a law spelling this out, then and only then is it theft.

I would never take advantage of this by doing downloads, chewing up bandwidth.

For how EASY it is to turn WEP on, it is reasonable that an open access point is because they don’t CARE, or they would have followed the simple instructions that come with the access points.

This is not the same as taking something out of an unlocked car or house, because it will still be there when they come back. They have lost nothing and are injured in no way, shape or form.

I concider myself a VERY moral person. Funny how that works, huh? I disagree on this one thing and I am jack the ripper.

here we go again

In reply to Trying to Understand

how long till this topic goes of on the “ethics of hacking” tangent?

Illegal access?

In reply to Neighbors are great

Pissing around with other peoples config?

What a guy!

What a tosser!

Not pissing

In reply to Illegal access?

FIXING. Took something that didn’t work because it wasn’t configured correctly and configured it correctly.

Tosser? Probably. 😀

Open Access Point

In reply to Wirless?

I had just sold a customer a Firewall upgrade and they had a wireless access point and I wanted to increase the security. Every time I changed the settings of the device I would loss the Internet connection. I finally figured out that they had been using their neighbor?s access point, which had a stronger signal. I move the Access point to a more central location (Theirs was in the wiring closet) setup security.
I keep wondering what the neighboring business thought when wireless Internet access kept going down.

wireless at hospital

In reply to Wirless?

I did a site survey at a hospital to determine
why their network was slow.
Wireless access points bridged 3 buildings, and
were left in default configurations. I expected
to find 3 AP associations. I counted almost
200 associations. Cardiac telemetry accounted
for only about 6 of those. The rest were
neighbors in the residential area around the
hospital.
Any guesses why the network was slow?

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to Wirless?

I had someone do the same thing. A user called in and just said that he couldn’t connect to the network from home. I asked if he had been able to connect from home before. He said he had been doing it for the last 6 mos. I asked if he could get on the internet. He said he couldn’t. I asked who was his ISP. He said he didn’t have one. It turned out that he had been getting on his neighbor’s wireless network and it knew it. The neighbor finally secured his network and this guy was calling in and had the nerve to ask if there was a way to break into the neighbor’s network again.

even more fun ???

In reply to Wirless?

i worked for a cable internet company and had had a customer complain that his speed had dropped. after several visits to the site by the installers we finally figured out that she had been connecting to the old neighbors linksys router and the new one also had a linksys router but a different internet service which was about half as fast. to top it all off, she wanted to be given a refund for the service even though her son who “knows everything about computers” set it up for her. it amazes me how many people never change their SSID’s.

What suprises me about this

In reply to even more fun ???

Where I am at, the internet providers won’t even talk to you while you have anything plugged in between their “modem” and your computer.

This never would have happened in Michigan.

SSID’s? We don’t need no stink’en SSID’s! 😀

we live to serve…. for a fee

In reply to What suprises me about this

we supported our users routers if they were willing to pay an extra monthly fee.

Another Newbie

In reply to Wirless?

I was working at the public library, installing computers for the clients to be able to search for books in the database. An elderly lady stopped to inquire what we were doing. I explained how the system worked and then showed her how to navigate through a search. I then suggested she try it. When she got stuck, I explained she had to move her mouse cursor over the search button and click it. She physically picked up the mouse and tapped the monitor on the search button….lol.

Enough Please

In reply to Wirless?

This off topic rambling has (for me) been ruining an otherwise fun thread about dumb users.

Do any of you pontificators think that you are going to change anybody’s mind about wifi use by calling names and shame?

Please stop and lets stick with the topic okay?

What did i Start?

In reply to Wirless?

Wow, I didn’t know I was going to get something started! But who among us has not “borrowed” a AP while on vacation.

Wireless 2?

In reply to Wirless?

A friend of mine was visiting a relative and their neighbor was a friend of my friend. The neighbor told my friend that he couldn’t get connected to the internet. So my friend went to his house and asked him were his cable modem was. He said I don’t have a cable modem. I turned my laptop on a year ago and I have always been getting onto the internet. The neighbors across the street had a daughter that had a wireless modem. She left for college and took everything with her.

Here in Australia

In reply to Wirless?

Here in Australia theres a few factors to consider.

Because we are not required to obtain licenses to operate our wireless equipment, the frequencies zoned are for public use. This does not mean it’s a free for all, there sre regulations pertaining to the use of this spectrum.

One could draw a comparison with free-to-air television, which is beamed into anyone’s house, and you are free to tune your television to watch these transmissions, even record these signals for later use.

So following from that, one would assume that signals in the air, as long as you have the right to own the relevant equipment, are free to be viewed and/or recorded. there is also the matter of the use of these signals. Everyone is allowed to listen to police radio, but it is an offence to use this information to commit a crime, or assist in the commission of a crime.

It is also illegal here to circumvent security measures, be they on a DVD, on a radio signal or in a chip in a decoder box.

One would assume then that by simply having a password secured system, you have legally protected your network. for more sensitive information, there are encryption schemes available.

The other factor here, is that if you are providing an ISP service without appropriate licenses, then you are liable for fines and imprisonment under ACA regulations. If people can access the internet through your network, then you can get into trouble. again, simply putting password protection on, would be enough to cover your ass legally.

If you access someone’s internet through a wireless network, you are essentially stealing bandwidth, and are probably in violation of the victim’s ISP’s terms and conditions, which can mean big legal trouble. This is a grey area, and one in which i have little knowledge, but I do know that ISPs T&C are prickly.

anyway, that’s my bit, I don’t care if you do or you don’t just don’t tell me, and we’ll get along fine

what about the best

In reply to What is your best and great user

i work for an architect. i have a temp worker (who has been here 3 or 4 years, ha) that is my autocad hero. this guy knows everything about any version of cad and all the quirks that come with it.

this isn’t really a story, cause whenever I have an autocad problem thats outta my league, i go ask him and he lets me know what’s up. This guy bats 1.000 and I’m never to proud to ask for help. after all, knowledge shared is knowledge learned.

Never be too proud to ask

In reply to what about the best

I was a contractor at a large hospital for two years and the most help I ever got was from a nurse. She had been there for five years and knew more about the hospital then the IT directors did. When my contracty was out I gave her a big box of candy.
If I dont know something I ask it is better then making a mistake.

computer expert hired

In reply to Never be too proud to ask

I’m the only IT person at a small company. They hired another sales person that was supposed to be a computer ‘expert’. Everyone was worried that I would feel at risk with this ‘expert’ around. Didn’t take long to see that he wasn’t much of an ‘expert’. After a week on the job, his computer was so messed up that I had to log onto his computer as administrator to fix it. When he came in and tried to log in, he couldn’t. He came to ask if I had changed his password. When I went to his office, he hit alt-ctrl-delete and typed in his password. ‘See it won’t take my password! You must have changed it’, he said. I pointed out that the username was still ‘administrator’ and that he had to type in his username with his password in order to access the network. He argued that he was typing in his password correctly and that the username didn’t matter as long as the password was correct! Gotta love what some people see as experts!

Don’t bother me

In reply to computer expert hired

with details! Usernames, who need them? He already knew who he was, right?

We also recently had the utter joy of having someone like this hired at a remote location. Knows MUCH less than I was originally told he did. (funny how people that know NOTHING about computers are such bad judges of who is good and who isn’t!)

He is rude and abusive to my female co-worker, and TRIED to be with me. I stopped him in his tracks on that one and put him in his place. I then offered if my co-worker doesn’t feel like dealing with him to either put him on hold and lose the call or I would attend to him. My “monitor” post will be about this individual.

Re: computer expert hired

In reply to computer expert hired

I wish I was half as good as the “experts” I have worked with think they are! I support a website for a small NFP, one evening I got a call from the operations VP just to “discuss” the website. After a few minutes he told me about the new “expert” who just joined the group and that since this person was “without a doubt” the end all with everything technical and web related he would be calling the shots on the site from now on. Since I had previously worked with this “expert” I suggested that he should take over the site and they could call me when they wanted it fixed.

Needless to say, the “expert” declined my offer.

username didn’t matter

In reply to computer expert hired

A few years back, one of the techs that worked for me went out to work on a workstation. When the user returned, he called me complaining that all his files were gone off the network. I figured that the user had not logged on and did not have any network drives. I had him reboot and log on again. Same thing. So I went to see what was going on. I noticed the logon prompt had my tech’s username so if figured the user would get a bad password error. NOPE. The tech and the user had the same password. So when the user typed in his password, he saw my tech’s network files not his own.

I made them both change their passwords and had the tech tell me what it had been. Amazingly, it was not a weak guessable password!

Printer keeps powering off

In reply to username didn’t matter

I’m certain a lot of you out there have come across a similar situation. Here it goes:

My boss and I were on the road to a remote site, when his phone rings. It was an employee at a different remote site and she was having printer issues. She said that the printer kept powering off. My boss asked her a few questions, like have you checked all the cables to make sure they’re all plugged in? She said ‘Yes’. We concluded that it must be a bad power cord. So I head out there after our first stop and guess what? The power cord was not plugged in all the way. Been the typical sarcastic IT guy that I am, I gave her hard time about it. So, I gave her a replacement power cord and said: “Here, I’ll leave this with you, but you can only use it after you’ve made sure everything’s plugged in!”. Burn! She’s got an excellent sense of humor, too. LOL She told I won’t be getting anything in my stocking this year. Burn! LOL

What are the odds?

In reply to username didn’t matter

That’s amazing. What are the odds of that ever happening?

I’m sure many people share the same passwords, but for a tech and one of his customers to have the same password, that’s got to be very rare.

I’ve met so many computer “Gurus” in my career…

In reply to computer expert hired

Usually, they know a bit more than the average person out there, so they are annointed with the title. Often they know their limitations, but sometimes they don’t realize just how much they don’t know.

Once I was doing phone support with one of these “Gurus”. He was young, and very sure of himself. Rather dismissive of both the customer’s operating system, equiptment, and how everything should be updated. This wasn’t an option.

Briefly, we were setting up a peer-to peer Network in Win 95. we had to do a ‘substitute’ command at a Dos Prompt. (OK, yeah, it was a few years ago, but still…) We could get to a command prompt with no problems.

When I told him that he needed to substitute the letter “C” drive with the letter “N”, there was a long silence at the other end of the phone. The “Guru” then said , “Ok, I know how *I* would do it, but how would you do it?” Our Guru had never learned DOS commands.

After hanging up, I said in too loud of a voice, “If he’s a Guru, I must be the freaking Dali Lama!”

My boss still laughs at that.

not everyone knows it all

In reply to what about the best

I do have to admit I do go to other. some non-IT people from time to time. Those who know a specific software I trust, other who are “wanna bes” I would love to get them on a deserted island and see if they can do what the Professor (from Gilligan’s Island) did with coconuts!!!!!

Don’t be afraid of users….

In reply to not everyone knows it all

Some of the best support people are users. Yep, I know we don’t want to believe it, but since they work with some software day in and day out, they know what’s going on after all the patches, etc. are going on.

Usually, you can get a good idea of who knows what after a short time. I don’t have time to learn their job and mine or every single, solitary quirk of the software. Luckily, two heads can be better than one and everyone can benefit.

Secretaries are usually the ones in this type category. They always know where “the bodies are buried”. Never mess over secretaries or HR people. Bad things can happen if you do!

True Gurus

In reply to not everyone knows it all

True Gurus (of ANY topic) know the limits of their own knowledge, and work within those confines. They also understand that a lack of knowledge in a specific area of their realm isn’t a weakness, and it can be easily corrected by asking questions that will expand their knowledge.

Self-appointed Gurus don’t have the intelligence (maturity?) to admit they don’t have the answer to everything.

I’ll be stepping off my soap box now.

Special treatment

In reply to What is your best and great user

OK, here’s mine. We currently have a great policy for keeping email to a minimum. It’s only kept 90 days then it’s deleted, so if you want to save it past the retention period, you have to put it into a file somehow.
This has been in effect for several years, but amazingly we had a couple of executives in the legal dept who built up 40,000 messages in their inboxes each, without having any deleted. I finally got the connection when the new “retention policy” was published. The company lawyers who wrote it had a line in the document that excluded themselves from the policy and made sure they could keep everything forever!

Lexmark Lies

In reply to What is your best and great user

My Lexmark X2250 failed a month short of its 12 month waranty period. Finally I threatened Lexmark with legal action under Australian consumer laws, and finally received a reply from someone who claimed who would handle the matter personally within the next 2-3 days. After two weeks of waiting, I looked at his e-mail addy again and realised it was derived from the classic “Worm Ourobos”. Basically, I was being told I was too dumb to understand I was just chasing my tail in trying to get Lexmark to live up to its warranty. The kicker is, of course, is that Lexmark has screwed itself, that my problem with Lexmark is no longer a civil matter, but a criminal matter here: we take conspiracy to defraud very seriously. I just hope the person who sent me the “get stuffed” e-mail likes seven years behind bars 🙂

It worked!

In reply to Lexmark Lies

On the day that I threatened to start criminal and civil legal action against this company, a refurbished printer arrived, by express delivery. Roughly 8 weeks for a warranty replacement guaranteed in 2 days. I don’t know if the replacement works, but I do know Lexmark could have saved a lot of money by simply sending me the next model without a warranty. I mean, who the hell tries to repair a $150 printer?

Who repairs?

In reply to It worked!

I worked for a anl-retentive boss who made a religion out of repairing Okidata 9-pin printers.

Ship out a loaner, ship back the bad one, repair it, ship it back, TRY to get the loaner shipped back. All for a printer that should have been pitched totally when it failed.

System administration is a thankless job

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was chatting with my boss the other day, when one of my users came by. He said, “Do you remember last week when you restored my 80 GBytes of corporate critical data for me?”

“Yes, I remember”

“You remember how happy I was?”

“Yes, I remember”

“Well, I’d like to thank you, but system administration is a thankless job” and with that, he wandered off.

So I turned to my boss and said “This is a good time to ask you for a raise”.

To which I replied, “I would give you a raise, but system administation is a thankless job” and then **he** wandered off.

Nightmare?

In reply to System administration is a thankless job

Was this a real event of a nigtmare you had last night? I’m inclined to believe the later…

I mean…jeez!

Technicians all have thankless jobs

In reply to System administration is a thankless job

I’ve worked in IT for 7 years and before that I worked in electronics for the Navy for 20 years and it’s almost always a thankless job for the technicians. When your equipment works, well that is what you are supposed to do so why so should anyone thank you.
When something breaks the technician gets the blame and responsibility for fixing it quickly.
It hasn’t changed in the 27 years I’ve been fixing things and I don’t expect it will. I just take the paycheck and be happy I have a job!

Maybe nobody likes you.

In reply to Technicians all have thankless jobs

Maybe they don’t thank you because they don’t like you.

I get thanked for everything I do, even if the problem fixes itself without my intervention.

I know a lot of techs that are very knowledgeable and good at what they do, but they are so arrogant and self-centered that nobody ever wants to deal with them.

I’m not ripping on you by any means because I don’t know you. It’s just a thought.

Another thought is that maybe you only deal with arrogant self-centered customers who don’t appreciate the help of others.

Thankless Jobs?

In reply to Technicians all have thankless jobs

I get thanked by everyone that I help. Even when I didn’t have to fix a problem. They were just doing something wrong.

Bosses who know nothing but earn more …

In reply to What is your best and great user

One of our marketing managers complained that he couldn’t make any sense of a telephone management spreadsheet I’d sent him because he couldn’t see when the calls were made. I explained that each worksheet in the spreadsheet had a name and the name indicated the applicable month. Two minutes lates he arrived at my desk saying that he still couldn’t make any sense of the spreadsheet because there were no dates in the worksheets. I opened my copy and showed him that the dates and times were in column A. He then tried to tell me that I had sent him the wrong file because his column A just had “stars” in it! Oh boy – was his face red when I showed him how to expand the column! Makes you think, huh?!

I don’t have a degree but my boss does!

In reply to Bosses who know nothing but earn more …

amen, I have always been passionate about IT, but am not really academic, I learn stuff by doing it, making mistakes and troubleshooting mistakes (mine and others)

I love the challenge. But even though I’ve tried to study, there’s not really any course that caters just for me. sure, if I had a degree, i could probably get twice what I get now, but i don’t want to go through that again, I’m just happy that someone gave me a chance to do what I love. maybe one day I’ll be ready to get that degree, but now I’m just happy mixing with the people, they appreciate my work.

but it still bugs me that my boss earns more than me because she has a degree, but knows little about computers…

Well you are not alone

In reply to I don’t have a degree but my boss does!

I am in india and i learnt most of the subjects my self by following your method from the childhood including computer and i am not ashamed to admit i dont know.Keep it up what ever youare doing and internet is grate place to learn i promise you will beat your boss in some other field,figer it out ,A degree is not the end of the world belive in yourself world is under your thumb this is my personal experience.
wishing every one at techrepublic a grate Christmass and Warm new year
muralidhar.c.r
india

Beyond merely “dumb”

In reply to What is your best and great user

A thief scumbag breaks into his neighbor’s wireless network and then crows about it on a public TR forum. Now that’s uber-dumb.

hear hear…

In reply to Beyond merely “dumb”

no different from physically breaking and entering – ha

you’re right

In reply to hear hear…

is way different.
they’ve sent their signal over to your place

as long as you don’t decrypt the signal you are NOT breaking (IMO, laws vary).

(see the story of secretary who’s pc connected to neighbor wifi even tho she knew nothing about PCs)

it’s definitely not ‘cracking’ or ‘breaking’
if you don’t decrypt it, and not ‘entering’ as signal is broadcast to your place.

laws should be modified to reflect this and avoid penalties for inadvertant users of un-secured wireless where user does not trespass to pickup up signal.

you’re right

In reply to you’re right

Unless the neighbor is connected to a free service then any person who connects to their WAP is committing theft of services from the ISP or Network that is serving the neighbor. You use bandwidth (don’t care how little) . . . you pay for bandwidth. It’s simply a matter of ease and anonymity.

Agreed!

In reply to Beyond merely “dumb”

Bottom feeders annoy me.

Checking up on users…

In reply to What is your best and great user

I am finally rolling out a Windows XP and Office 2003 to users. I’ve got a pilot group of users who have been selected due to their use of various systems and varied knowledge of IT.

Most users are good at giving feedback on the image – notifying me of bugs and niggly issues that crop up. However, one user remained pretty quiet so I dropped her an email:

“Karen,

I’ve not had much feedback from you on your installation of Windows and Office. Is this because it’s working fine and without any problems?”

Fair enough, I thought.

She replied, “I don’t know how to use it.”

“Hmmm”, I thought, “there’s some scope for training here”. However, she’s got the Windows 2000 interface and I know for a fact that can handle email, Word, etc. So I popped back a reply.

“Can you elaborate?”

The next day I received her reply.

“I don’t know where it is on my computer”

At that point I gave up.

Blurred Vision

In reply to What is your best and great user

Once in being young and ignorant I decided to replace a monitor for one of our users while she was on leave. The monitor was very blurred and no-one could read it clearly. The new monitor worked as monitors should and images and words were now clear and crisp. However on returning from leave this lady was very upset as she could no longer read her screen. I almost suggested she see an optemetrit but it was easier to give her back the blurred monitor which we had not yet disposed of.

Loaction anyone?

In reply to Blurred Vision

When i used to do user support at a heavy machinery company, i had this user who was not so tech savvy. Perhaps his age had something to di with it, but anyway, i once go to set up a custom app for him to use. Being the anal retentive i am, first thing i did was to “auto-arrange” his desktop, then proceed with the install, test it and scuttle back to mission control. 5 minutes later, i have the same user on the phone moaning about me screwing up his comp. Back at the user’s station, he points at his desktop (after mumbling some jihadist rhetoric against tech support) and goes, ” ‘My documents’ used to be here”, pointing at a location in the middle of the screen….

I would be upset too

In reply to Loaction anyone?

I definitly know my way around a computer, but if you were to come install some software on my computer and Auto Arrange my desktop I won’t let you touch my computer again.
When someone comes to give you a file at your desk, do they start rearranging your desk – put your notebook at the corner and your pen in a drawer where you won’t find it?
A desktop is organised (by some users) so you know where exactly where anything is and you don’t have to look for it.
AutoArrange completely ignores human memory, which is based on pictures. You know where that document is, because you can see in your mind where you?ve put it. AutoArrange moves it and now you have to look for it.

Desktops are personal

In reply to I would be upset too

whether physical or computer, the desktop is very personal. I have my desktop arranged “just so” at work based on which apps I use the most and what’s most aesthetically pleasing to me. I would get very miffed if someone messed with my icons! At home I have it mostly arranged to make things easy for my hubby, the parts he doesn’t touch, I arrange for myself. =-)

oh dear

In reply to I would be upset too

I’m just glad at my work, Everyone has the same desktop thanks to a mandatory roaming profile…

Lucky

In reply to oh dear

.

Lucky

In reply to oh dear

That does make things easier for larger offices. Here each computer is different in some way or another. Therefore each desktop is going to differ. As well each personality differs too leading to unique desktops. Our order desk girl likes to have a toolbar with her office app shortcuts visible on her desktop. I have mine (as well as my taskbar) on auto-hide. She hates this! lol. but we’re a tiny office so I don’t mind all the differences as far as a technical stand point cuz it doesn’t make it any more difficult for me since I’m usually the one who has to make their desktops appear the way they want it anyway!

Don’

In reply to Loaction anyone?

Sorry – bad post

Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke…

In reply to Loaction anyone?

I’ve gotta agree with the others who responded to your post.

You were there to do an application setup. Rearranging his desktop so that it looked right to you wasn’t part of the job.

There are many, many things that my users do that don’t make sense to me (and even, IMHO, make their work harder) but that’s their process, and it works for them. If they (or their supervisor) don’t like the process and ask me how to make it better, I’ll offer my suggestions, and make changes only when they agree to them.

I leave desktops alone, no matter how jumbled they look to me. One person’s madness is another’s working method.

The only exception to my rule is if there are far too many icons on their desktop – I’ll broach the subject with them.

I recently had a user like this. With his permission, I created a new folder in his My Documents folder called ‘Old Desktop’. Then, I selected all items on his desktop that weren’t part of our standard build and moved them into the new folder. Auto-arrange was already on, and I was surprised to find a whole new batch of files. I had to select desktop files two more times and move them to the new folder.

It turned out that he regularly saved everything to his desktop, and for some time, he hadn’t known why he was unable to locate things he’d saved there, but didn’t think it important enough to contact the Help Desk.

I created a desktop shortcut to his ‘Old Desktop’ folder, and told him to save everything there, instead. He was thrilled.

Location?

In reply to Loaction anyone?

Some users just don’t like their icons organized. They like them in different areas of their screens. I have one user that has her icons so big they are hard to see.

Opposite scenario

In reply to Blurred Vision

I had a user submit a trouble ticket for a bad monitor. When I went to see him he told me that he honestly thought his vision had gone bad and that he had gone to see an eye doctor.

Only after the doctor told him his eyesight was fine did he start to suspect a bad monitor.

Monitor Upgrade

In reply to Blurred Vision

when monitors would come back to IT after a user would be termed or someone else would get an upgrade, we would roll those out to users that were further down the equipment “needs” chain. When one of the “executive” user was out of their office, when swapped an old (old) 15″ CRT with very nice 17″ one (but the case was yellowed a bit from UV). We promptly got a call complaining that we had taken away her nice clean monitor and had left her with an old dirty one. We swapped her back… no problem.

The MAC User

In reply to What is your best and great user

I had just converted a large number of MAC users over to the windows 2K desktop. A manager left me a voicemail that she could not turn on her laptop and insisted I come to her office immediately. When I arrived she was trying to turn on the docking station and asked if the “large heavy piece” was needed. Miss the days of desktop support!!

C:\TEMP for Temporary workers

In reply to What is your best and great user

Many years ago in the days of Windows NT, my company used the C:\TEMP directory for windows temporary files (probably not a great idea, but it’s they way they liked it). The directory was cleared every day as part of the login script (again, probably not a great idea).

A Temporary worker was hired to catch up on a lot of documentation and correspondence; with no guidance on where she should be saving her work, it was all saved to C:\TEMP.

After a few days of work, she discovered that the previous days work had disappeared. She typed it again, and saved it to the C:\TEMP directory. A few more days went by before she sought some assistance – they job came my way, and she explained there was a convenient directory there to save her work in, but it kept disappearing.

Next time a temporary worker was hired, a short induction was performed. And soon after the C:\TEMP directory was (thankfully) retired.

What is so hard about remembering your name?

In reply to C:\TEMP for Temporary workers

We use fistname.lastname log on convention on our domain.

On Monday of a couple of weeks ago. One of my users tells me her password in not working. I re-set it and told her what is was. She was good to go. She then comes back and said the new password does not work either. I go to her desk to see what the problem was. She is typing the password in the user name area. I point out the problem to her. Then she asks, what is my user name? I replied that it is her firstname.lastname (but I actually said her firstname dot her lastname). She was able to log in and all was well.

Tuesday of the same week the same user asked me what her login name is again. Again I reply with her firstname dot her lastname. She was able to log in and all was well.

Wednesday of the same week the same user asked me what her login name is again. Again I reply with her firstname dot her lastname. She was able to log in and all was well.

Thursday the same week the same user asked me what her login name is again. This time I may have been a bit snippy when I replied the same as it has always been. Your firstname dot your lastname. She replied with I am just going to have to write that down!

The kicker is she is my boss.

C:\TEMP for Temporary workers

In reply to What is your best and great user

Many years ago in the days of Windows NT, my company used the C:\TEMP directory for windows temporary files (probably not a great idea, but it’s they way they liked it). The directory was cleared every day as part of the login script (again, probably not a great idea).

A Temporary worker was hired to catch up on a lot of documentation and correspondence; with no guidance on where she should be saving her work, it was all saved to C:\TEMP.

After a few days of work, she discovered that the previous days work had disappeared. She typed it again, and saved it to the C:\TEMP directory. A few more days went by before she sought some assistance – they job came my way, and she explained there was a convenient directory there to save her work in, but it kept disappearing.

Next time a temporary worker was hired, a short induction was performed. And soon after the C:\TEMP directory was (thankfully) retired.

Long old days of the floppy

In reply to What is your best and great user

If you can remember this far 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 3rd party support firm.

2 such calls always brign 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, 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 that he had not removed the first disk and had actually managed to get both disks into the floppy drive AT THE SAME TIME. oopps

Caller #2
Me: hello Tech support
Caller: Hello yes, I received this update from you for my new pc but it can not read any of the floppy disks you sent me.
Me: hmm, Can you please explain whats 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 1st disk into the drive after removing the protective cover
Me: Protective cover?, do you mean the little white slieve that the disk cmes in.
Caller: No the big black voer 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 hanaged to take out the actually disk from inside the disk casing, he had actually managed to get it logdged into the drive and then broke the heads of the drive when he tried to get it out.

Oh users can be so much fun, enjoy

Dumb and Dumber

In reply to Long old days of the floppy

From the “Never Assume Anything Dept.”:

Several years ago, our organization 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 http://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!

Similar Situation

In reply to Dumb and Dumber

I’m a contractor for the FAA. We had just got our T1 line and internet access and there were no filter settings as of yet. As you may or may not know the Federal Government is awash in acronyms. Our acronym is AVN. One of our Office Administrators was one of the first test users for internet access. She was so excited to try out the internet and so as we are all standing around her desk she innocently types in http://www.avn.com nad what pops up nothing but the “Adult Video Network”. Poor girl she was so embarressed. She could’nt turn here PC off fast encough. She to will never live that one down!

The new age of CDs . . .

In reply to Long old days of the floppy

Not quite so damaging but . . .

I had a user earlier this year that called me and said “I’ve put my CD in, but the computer will not read it and now I can’t remove it, it’s stuck”.
When I got there I found that she had managed to push the CD through the gap between the CD drive and the next drive.
Whilst taking the PC apart to retrieve the CD I asked why she hadn’t used the CD tray (like everyone else) and she replied “I thought it was like the CD player in my new car”, odd thing is she’d been using the PC for about a year or so before getting the new car.

Favors for the Boss

In reply to What is your best and great user

It is the bane of a small consulting company that dealing with the client’s extended family is part of the package. “Customer Service” and “Goodwill” I keep telling myself.

Call while driving to a real PAYING job:

Client – My computer keeps starting in Safe Mode

Me – Let’s restart it and keep tapping the F8 key as it starts (hoping for the boot menu)

C – Nope

M – Let’s try again – it is a little tricky getting just the right moment

C – Nope

M – Again

C – Nope

M – Anything on the screen like white text on a black background?

C – Oh Yes! It says Keyboard Failure (after I had been read the BIOS maker, builder and initial POST details in great detail…..)

M – Oh! Go plug the keyboard in firmly – follow the cable to the back.

C – Oh I KNOW it is plugged in firmly – I just finished emptying the water out of it from the vase of flowers the cat knocked over into it.

M – ………………….

It is any wonder ??

In reply to What is your best and great user

I could add my own story about the lady who thought her “mouse holder” had been stolen from her desk because she couldn’t get her mouse to track properly by using her thumb (turn the mouse over and glide it on the pad) but that would just be adding antoher to the long list of ID-10-T and S.U.E. situations… so let me just say that is it any wonder that “user” rhymes with “luser”??

Have a great holiday.

Stories from 2005?

In reply to What is your best and great user

I worked for Hotel Capitol Hill as a System Administrator. I worked on IDS Software,)A Complete Hotel version) the Database of which used to get overwritten in case of backup day. I informed this to my General Manager that this process is wrong and would create trouble in future. He found nothing wrong with it. One day the inevitable happened the database got corrupted due to overwriting bad data. There was nothing left to retrieve after many efforts I was able to retried the data after 10 days that was manually taken backup by me on different HDD.

Noor
System Admin
Capitol Hill
Ranchi, India

More floppy woes

In reply to What is your best and great user

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 report with her so I asked her “How it the drive suppose to spin the disk if it is folded?” the lights came on, cheaks 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.

Floppy Story

In reply to More floppy woes

I got a call from a user that their floppy drive wasn’t working. She was trying to download a file from the Internet and save to the floppy, but when she viewed the disk the file wasn’t there. I had her show me. She started the download, when it asked where to save the file, she took the default (which happed to be c:\temporary internet files) and couldn’t understand why when she had the disk inserted in the floppy drive, it didn’t automatically save there.

Computer Silliness

In reply to What is your best and great user

This site has one of the best collections of user horror stories I’ve seen. The posters claim that they’re all true, but you gotta wonder about some of them.

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

They also have a collection of some of the worst jokes and puns in the world. Great fun!

well, she was trying to be good….

In reply to Computer Silliness

during one of the less fortunate parts of my technical life, I did some contract work for a copier/fax company. Got a call from this gal in a lawyers office; their fax was absolutely not working; everything they sent was coming out blank.
New temp person in the office, and one of the first machines I had fixed under this contract – so my new boss is steaming, and I get over there slightly quicker than “right now”.
Checked the standard things, did the standard tests, even called a friend and sent him a fax – perfect. Now I’m clueless. Decide the best thing to do, is let her send some faxes, and then call the folks she’s sending them to; maybe get some clues.
She quickly types a document, gets it signed, then carries it over to the fax – folds it in half, print side in – and presses the “send” button…
When I asked her “why are you folding it?”, she replied, “it’s confidential” – with a straight face…
oh my LOL

Here’s a few good ones from some of my users…

In reply to What is your best and great user

At a previous company I worked for, we always had weird calls come into the Help Desk. Here’s a few good ones:

1) A user submits a ticket because he’s having issues accessing his e-mail. We call him to make sure everything is okay, and he asks us why we were messing with his Outlook, when he could not access his YAHOO e-mail account.

2) We send out memos periodically to remind users they should never open an e-mail from someone they do not know. So, one of our employees phones into the help desk, saying he got an e-mail from someone he didn’t know (and he opened it), and there was an attachment (he naturally didn’t recognize, and opened it), and now his computer was acting “funny”. Turned out, he infected his machine with a virus, and it was making attempts to send e-mails via its own SMTP engine.

3) We were slowly in the process of upgrading users from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 at a remote site. Once one of the users at the remote site were upgraded to Windows 2000, every other employee there kept trying to come up with reasons why we would have to rebuild their machine (thus upgrading them to Windows 2000).

Contractor from Hell

In reply to What is your best and great user

The company I work for rolled out its first Linux servers last year, and I jumped at the chance to expand my knowledge out of the Windows world. We hired a contractor for 3 months who claimed to have extensive Linux knowledge, including strong scripting skills. We soon learned this was not the case.

We were having problems with an incoming file one day — the target app was picking the file up before the transfer was complete, and we were trying to come up with solutions. One idea tossed out was to transfer the data to a different location, then send a trigger file when the transfer was complete. We asked the contractor if he could write a script to look for the trigger file and move the data to the target location. I literally spent 45 minutes trying to get him to understand this concept, pulling my hair out the entire time. When I think he finally understands, he wanders off, makes a phone call, comes back and says, “Just set the network connection to full duplex and you’ll be fine.”

We didn’t renew his contract.

You have to read email?

In reply to What is your best and great user

Recently received a call from a (l)user regarding loss of mapped drives. I connected to the machine via remote shell mapped the drives and even create a VB Script that would allow the user to remap the drives if they went missing again. I replied via email telling that it was fixed and included instructions on how to run the script which I had placed on his desktop. The next day I get a call, “Those drives are missing again and if you can’t fix it then give me someone who can.” I asked if he had read the email. His response, “why should I read my email, and there’s no reason for you to talk down to me just because I not a techie like you.” The conversation just deteriorated after that, but if you think you have to be a techie to read email, then I guess explaining the ID10T error he keeps generating would just be too much.

CD drive inversion…

In reply to What is your best and great user

We had a user who called in a complaint about a CD drive not working. A tech was dispatched, and came back reporting everything was fine. The user called back, angry because the tech had been there and hadn’t fixed it, so another was dispatched, and so on and so on.

Fast forward a couple of days. Now there’s a user who is flaming hot because every tech in the shop is, “obviously inept and can’t fix the simplest problem.” Tech supervisor goes over to do a one-on-one to try to calm the user and also do a base-level analysis to find and finally diagnose and fix the issue.

Supervisor returns half an hour later, caught in the strange world that lies between being so amused you wet yourself and so angry you spit nails. It turns out that the user was – ready for this – putting the CD in UPSIDE DOWN! Just about every CD drive or player you see has the CD label-side up, including those in cars, yet this one was putting it in label side down! The kicker – all that wasted time and effort because they wanted to listen to their favorite music at work.

I nominate that user for the “I’d rather use an Etch-a-Sketch” award!

YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE IT…

In reply to What is your best and great user

A manager at one of our many retail locations received a new workstation and much to my surprise, it was her first time in front of a PC. She seemed flustered and very intimidated so I made sure I put on my kid gloves so as to not embarrass her. Well, we started the lesson with basic navigation techniques, i.e. using the mouse, so I showed her the left button, right button and had her move the cursor around on the desktop. I then asked her to double-left click the ?Blue E? for practice. Did I say I had kid gloves on? Ha! No one could have been prepared for what happened next…
she sat up in her chair, stretched her arms out (as if preparing to lift a heavy object), reached her left arm across her body, grabbed the mouse in her left hand, positioned the cursor over the Explorer icon, lifted the mouse off of the desk and tapped it on the mouse pad two times.

Indignantly, she says, ?It didn?t work!?
(As she turned around to see me wide-eyed, hand over mouth, red-faced and LMAO.)

Someone please tell me a story of someone more stupid or I will quit my job on the grounds that this company hired someone soooooooooo dumb.

I can only remember this one guy

In reply to What is your best and great user

After a long time of guiding him through some troubleshooting steps, he said, ‘Hold on, I am going to have to use both fingers.’ Evidently, he was not a touch typist. I was happy he began to use BOTH index fingers, thus doubling his rate of inputting data.

My favorite user story

In reply to What is your best and great user

This happened several years ago when floppies were pretty much the only portable media to transfer data from computer to computer. I was supervising the techies as a contractor on a government site and we had a user who kept complaining that her machine was ruining floppy disks. I was free, so I decided to step in and take a look. I had her bring a floppy to me that was supposed to contain data and, sure enough, it was blank. So I made her a new one, checked it was ok, she took it back, read it. No problem. Next day she called again, now she couldn’t use the floppy I had given her. I went to her workstation to see what was going on and told her to put the floppy in. She reached over and got it from, get this, the metal side of her desk. She had pinned it there with a refrigerator magnet to make sure she didn’t lose it. Needless to say I explained to her that there were better ways to store floppies, but I don’t think she ever got why.

They both just don’t get it

In reply to What is your best and great user

I do a lot of work in the medical industry and doctors today must comply with federal HIPAA compliance laws. One of the laws is that doctors offices must provide some sort of security if they do electronic billing. I provide hardware and operating system support, however I do not provide medical billing support, this is provided by the software vendor. In the process of setting up a brand new doctor (still wet behind the ears) I had him setup up for LAN & Internet services along with a firewall for protection. Shortly after having everything running great I got a call stating that the software folks couldn?t get into the system to do maintenance, I told him that?s because the firewall was doing it?s job, so he called the software folks back and told them about the firewall. Their reply was to have their IT guy bring the firewall down so they could have unrestricted access to the system at any time. Upon getting this information I told the doctor that doing that would violate federal laws and I wouldn?t do it. He insisted that I do it and I asked him to think about what he was asking me to do. Again the software folks (whom makes nothing but medical software) said to take the firewall down. I fired both of them!

And Darkness Covered Their Eyes

In reply to What is your best and great user

While a field engineer for what was then Burroughs Corp, I received a call about dead workstations. There were 5 of them and three had quit. I asked the caller to see if they were all plugged in, and he asked me to ‘wait a minute’. After 20 minutes, he got back to the phone and said all were plugged in, the three dead ones in wall sockets, and the 2 active in an extension cord leading around a corner. Casually asking him if he’d had trouble getting under the desks for 20 minutes, he said, “No, I had to go get a flashlight…the power is off in this office.”
The extension cord led out the room and down the hall to a live outlet.

Dial up problems solved!

In reply to What is your best and great user

I had a user who simply was unable to use dial up once she had left the office. I had conducted numerous training sessions with her, making sure she showed me the procedure she was using before she wen t on the road. In addition, I created a help document with pictures to make sure she had steps to follow when I wasn’t there. Needless to say, she could always use dial-up when she was in the office.

Inevitably, she would go on the road and call, frantic that she couldn’t dial in and get to her e-mail. The last time, she insisted there was ‘something wrong with the modem’. I dispatched our hardware service provider (she was in a hotel in Florida, our office was in California) only to find out that she had disconnected the phone cable from the wall and connected that to the modem in her computer! She thought that, since she was ‘connected to the telephone’ she should be able to dial-out! The HW tech and I had a pretty good laugh on that one..

Fortunately, she went into business for herself and lets her husband do all that nasty computer stuff now!

Mouse Design

In reply to What is your best and great user

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. After this the mouse worked perfectly. He was quite happy and I left satisfied that this “problem” had been solved to everyone’s satisfaction. However, the next morning, I again received a call from Dr. X to say that his mouse was broken. This time when I arrived he moved the mouse from one side of the pad to the other while the cursor did not move at all. When I turned the mouse over, I found that our engineer had decided that the mouse was poorly designed to allow all of the dust and debris to enter it. To correct this poor design, he had applied scotch tape over the entire underside of the mouse! I have to admit, he would probably have never had a dirty mouse problem again!

Engineers…??

In reply to Mouse Design

While working for a computer equipment manufacturer as the head of quality/repair of the monitor department I regularlly received monitors for customers. Their problems rnaged from bad data cables to faulty componets or bad video cards.

The best return I ever got was from some engineers at US Robotics. They said that the monitor would not display any images. The power light would glow and they could hear it fire up.
When I put their video card in my test machine and hooked up their monitor, sure enough the power light came on & I heard it crackle to life. After observing the blank screen I reached around back and turned the brightness knob and there displayed the perfect picture.
The kicker is…IF they read the first page of the manual they would have seen the control to adjust the brightness.

But hey, these guys are engineers, the already knew how to make it work, what do they need a manual for.

If it don’t work after trying everything you know…read the manual!

Imagine my dismay

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was working as a help desk supervisor supporting the stores for a retail chain. One day I walked in and found a neat marketing item in my mailbox from HR. It was shaped like a CDROM. It was a magnet.

I quickly called HR and begged them to please tell me they didn’t send it to the stores. I was thankful that only the corporate offices got them (another division supported them.) After I explained to them why this was a BAD idea, an email was quickly sent out telling people not to put the magnet into their computer.

I never did find out how many computers ended up with problems because of this brilliant marketing campaign.

My Favorite

In reply to Imagine my dismay

I’d been dealing with a helpdesk for a particular application for years. Needless to say it was a frustrating experience because it was usually for a simple problem – I just needed access to do the fix. So a typical phone call would be hours of ‘verifying’ the problem. Trying to give these busy folks the benefit of the doubt, and knowing they have procedures that have to be followed I’d always been able to hold my tongue when I wanted to scream ‘Have you ever seen a computer before?’

The software app is getting upgraded and it’s time for training. So I’m in a class with bunches of admins and this one person from the help desk. The help desk person is a little behind all of the others, but that can be written off to not being an active administrator. Until the instructor was passing around a quick patch on a mini-CD and the help desk ‘expert’ put it in the floppy drive.

I think I need therapy… This still upsets me.

How to get your own back

In reply to What is your best and great user

Admin for a small manufacturing company, installed a new PC to the whing’engineering department .. boy you should hear them, there getting rusks as a xmas present this year. digressing… this pc has large storage capacity for all their junk .. oh and their CAD files. whilst setting it up, I checked to see if the various devices needed drivers updating.. low and behold the graphics card did .. its an nVidia. updated the drivers, as was going through the settings when I dicovered a setting that allows you to turn the screen upside down, yeeha … so whrn the last whing’engineer left for the night it got flipped right round… next morning

Two of the whingers are in an hour before me, one was complaining of a sore neck because he had to tilt his head to the side to read the screen? the other just turned the monitor upside down, so thats bronze and silver taken care of, now for the gold…..

the whing’engineer manager, asked me what was wrong, “I’ll have a look” .. corrected the “problem” and let him know that it was fixed…
“what was wrong with it”
“I installed the Austrailian drivers by mistake, thats the english drivers on it now”
“awe thats great bill.. cheers”

they don’t make’em like that anymore

Bill ( moac )

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to How to get your own back

what does “whing’engineering” mean? And what are “rusks”?

Whinging & Rusks

In reply to Reply To: What is your best and great user

Whinging = moaning, cry babies

Rusks = baby food as in farleys rusks .. mind you its been 40 odd years since I had them

two countries

In reply to Whinging & Rusks

separated by a common language. I still have no clue what a rusk is.

They talk kinda funny over there

In reply to two countries

Us American folk don’t use words like “whilst” and “rusks.”

Please cut us some slack (give us a break, take it easy on us, etc.)if we don’t find your post amusing. We just don’t understand some of your local lingo.

They talk what!!!

In reply to They talk kinda funny over there

yeah .. bit difficult for this end too…

Spell funny, too

In reply to They talk what!!!

Do you really spell, “whine” as “whing”? How do you pronounce it?

To rhyme with “ring”, or to rhyme with “brine”, assuming all accent-driven pronunciations in your favor? 🙂

Sendbux

In reply to They talk what!!!

“Whing” or “Winge” or “Whinge” depending on which part of the UK you are from is a distinct word sperate from “whine” yet akin in meaning. “Whinge” sounds like “cringe” as in what most of us do when we read some of these less fortunate user stories.

Bizarre out of the blue question, but why is US English diverging into a seperate language so quickly whereas Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and, to an extent, Canada have not changed the basic language that much?
I stand to be corrected by people from those countries, but from my experience so far, that is the impression I have gained.

Linguistic diversity

In reply to They talk what!!!

Because we got shot of the Yanks before we really got the Empire bit up to speed, they don’t have any of the words and phrases that we got from The Raj and other places. All of the American linguistic differences from “our” English have been internally influenced.

We also started from a different place as the Pilgrim Fathers were eighteenth century Lincolnshire yokels and I shudder to think what they spoke like! We English had general London English at the same time as all our myriad dialects and modern English English evolved from all of them.

We spell things differently because of the French influence. Most of the “-or/-our”words come from the Latin, which was always spelt ‘or’. The ‘our’ corruption has no phonetic value whatsoever. Increasingly use of the internet has spread the more phonetic American spelling.

For lots of the things invented and named in the nineteenth and twentieth century, we have different names – e.g. the parts of a car. That’ll probably stop now we have the huge US Internet, communications and entertainment monopolies telling us what everything is.

You can see that in the way we all have adopted such appalling phrases as “human resources” for “personnel”, “downsizing” for “sacking much of the workforce” and “outsourcing” for “sacking much of the workforce and exploiting workers overseas”.

Just my tuppence worth.

Neil

Reply To: What is your best and great user

In reply to two countries

Rusks are very hard to find in American grocery stores. When my 10 yr old daughter was a baby I happened upon them and used them as a cheap substitute for teething toasts. But then later I couldn’t find them for my other 2 kids.

Rusks (at least the ones I found) are thick pieces of hard toasts.

Rusks

In reply to Reply To: What is your best and great user

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2964052.stm

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/kids-equipment/farleys-rusks/439402/

I try not to encourage my baby to have too many sweet things but I’m afraid that I had to give in when it comes to Farleys, they’re a great tradition!!!
I have found them very easy to mush up with some warm milk as an early food and my baby loved them. I use the reduced sugar variety and was impressed to see the range which is now available, including gluten free.
Also make a fab finger food which doesn’t make as much mess as some others and make baby smell all nice and rusky!
They are also pretty good value, especially if you buy the larger boxes

Ruks

In reply to two countries

Baby Food ( UK )

One Country

In reply to two countries

All I have to do is drive 5 miles from the suburb to “da hood” and I realize I am in a different country.

Point ‘n’ Click

In reply to What is your best and great user

A laugh from a friend of mine who was running a little training session for some new computers installed into a secretary’s office.

While running through some simple exercises of powering on the machine, typeing simple words and moving the mouse arround and clicking on things.

He gets a call from one of the Girls at the back of the room saying she is having a bit of trouble.
So he walks over and asks her nicely to show him what was wrong.

She say’s she can not get the mouse to move the pointer to where she need’s it to go.

So he says, “well show me then”.
.
.
She then picks up the mouse, places it on the screen and clicks…..

Praises to the guy he was calm and colected and showed her hoe to move the mouse on the mouse pad.

correction fluid

In reply to Point ‘n’ Click

Was this the same Essex (UK) girl covered her screen with tippex when using the word processor?

Wiring expert

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was working on some equipment in our conference center when I was introduced to the new A-V Tech. He was reportedly great with computers and networking. He ran his own contract business wiring networks (or so I was told). I spoke with him for a few minutes as we were looking to have some wiring done. A few days later I receive a call from this guy saying the network connections in our conference rooms weren’t working, so I went to check out the problem. Well this A-V wiring expert was trying to use a phone cord as a network cable…he also didn’t get the rewiring contract.

If I had a dime…

In reply to Wiring expert

If I had a dime for every “expert” I’ve ever come across, I’d be a rich man.

How to use this disk

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was a computer lab assistant in college and had a student come up to me with a 3.5″ floppy in hand and asked me how she was supposed to put this into the PC. Observing how she was holding it in her hand, I politely told her that she should put it into the PC exactly how she was holding it. Her reply was, “No stupid, do I put it in this way or that!” (She was holding it correctly and then turned it over so that it was upside down.) I told her that she would be better off asking someone else as I was obviously not capable of continuing a civil conversation with someone of such high intellect.

the best of 05

In reply to What is your best and great user

Ok,

So here it is ….I work on the service desk for a major corporation at the Canadian Head office. Our company has a number of “remote” home based users. About 2 weeks ago, one of these users called and was having a problem with his mouse not working when he turned on his laptop, which is plugged into a docking station.

The user had indicated that a number of “brown-outs” had occurred the night before. At this point I had asked the user to power cycle the docking station by removing the powercord from the back of the unit. He could not see or find the power cord. I then asked that he unplug the docking station from the wall and then plug it back in again….he still could not find the power cord. There was a silence for a few seconds and then his phone line went dead. About 10 minutes later he called back and I asked what happened. He stated since he could not locate the powercord I was referring to, he then went down to the basement of his house…shut down the main electric panel…and the mouse is now working again.

So the joke became that this user actually rebooted his entire house so he could get the mouse on his laptop working…he actually said this with a straight face…even though I was killing myself laughing….

Peter W. Fritsch

Retail Clean Up

In reply to What is your best and great user

A now defunct retailer used to have a yearly clean up and fix up contest between stores and districts. The object of the game was to get stores to perform fix, paint and/or clean up their stores without paying for outside help.

Two of the technicians from our company came to me requesting funds for plane tickets and hotel reservations. Apparently, a department manager found the lan line cords rather messy in appearance and not really understanding what she was cutting cut them from both the floor and at the top of the counter.

This presented two problems. The store is off line and can’t ring in sales. And the cords that were run through tubing under the floor were cut in such a way as they had the damnest time running the lan line the 150 or so feet from the register area to the computer room.

The department manager wasn ‘t a department manager too much longer…… she was promoted.

Don’t teach me

In reply to What is your best and great user

A few years ago I worked on a help desk at a location that used PCs and mainframes.

One day I got a call from an individual who needed to copy a file from the mainframe to his PC. I walked him through the process, and everything was fine until we got to the point of providing a name for the file on the PC. He asked me what to name it; I replied that it could be anything that he wanted, so he should give it a name that he could remember. His reply: “Don’t try to teach me how to do this, just tell me what to type. I only do this about once a month.”

My ‘dot’ doesn’t work

In reply to What is your best and great user

A Director of my current employers called me today complaining his dot wasn’t working. This guy normally provides at least one entertaining help desk call per week, so I just had to go and see.

Upon arriving at his desk (spare keyboard under arm), I saw that he was attempting to add a new contact to outlook express by typing in the search box (which is limited to 31 characters). The address he was trying to add was a Finnish gentleman who’s email address was 42 characters long…..

After regaining my composure (which took some doing), I patiently explained to him that this was a search box and showed him the correct way. B.T.W. this guy lists computing as one of his key hobbies..

Rollout

In reply to What is your best and great user

I remember around 1996/97 when IT was crazy we did a rollout of Windows 95 & OS2 Lan Manager all over Europe.
We had to upgrade 1000 existing Windows 3.11 workstations of all makes and models with various token ring cards installed(PCI & ISA & MCA).
Every weekend for around three months we would head of to a different city and work like crazy for 48 hours upgrading the PC’s to 95. It was the biggest f*** up I have ever been part of.

One weekend one of the contractors brought his sister so that she would get his cocaine into Germany! Guess where she put it!
A fight broke out in Milan between the project manager and a contractor(high on coke). Busted lips and the European IT manager had to be called to sack the contractor. In Paris we went without testing the build properly with SNA/PCI/PC3270. Eventually at 5am on Monday morning with half the office not working we got to bed. In Dusselldorf we went to a night club on Friday night and got so wasted none of us were able to work on Saturday.
In Rome we brought a so called Windows 95 expert(30 per hour). At 9am I asked him to rebuild a PC. At 17:00 I found him at the same PC having installed the Token Ringer driver 15 times in an attempt to get it working!
The project manager decided that we were spending too much money on the rollout so he decided to drive a truck to each office with all the parts required. He got to Dusselldorf (from London) but while on his way to Paris ended up in Warsaw!
When we got to Amsterdam we decided to walk down to the city center. Just as we arrived in the square “The weather girls” (remember them) started singing “Its raining men” and 50,000 men erupted!! We had walked into the middle of the world gay games!
One of the guys was called to Brussels on an emergency, He arrived in Brussels on Monday and did not stop working until Thursday. He arrived back our HQ on Friday wearing the same clothes. He smelt a bit! Contractors were given company credit cards who would then proceed to put them behind the bar of whatever nightclub they were in and would spend the evening drinking champagne!

The whole project cost around 2 million dollars and was a complete disaster. It took another year to sort ot all out! I miss those days!

Can’t identify the computer

In reply to What is your best and great user

Another story from my help desk days. Same place – PCs (IBM and MAC) and mainframes (VAX and IBM).

Many users had PCs on their desk and used terminal emulation software to access the mainframes; others used dumb terminals to access the mainframes. It was often a challenge to figure out what system the user was having trouble with, especially when using a terminal emulator on a PC. Of course we needed to know what kind of PC was being used in order to know what emulation software was being used.

I got a call from a user having trouble with his mainframe session. I asked him what was on his desk – terminal or PC, and type of PC. He couldn’t find anything to identify what he had. The only marking he could find was a colorful circle with a bit missing on one side – kind of like an apple!

Computer?

In reply to Can’t identify the computer

My favorite secretary back in the late 80’s, early
90’s had this problem.

She would call up and say, “My WP is broken”.
By “WP” she meant “Word Processor”. This applied
equally if
– her printer was in the offline mode
– her monitor was malfunctioning
– her terminal emulation program wouldn’t start
– Microsoft Word wouldn’t start
– The keyboard was unplugged.
– She had accidentally typed control-S in the terminal emulation program
– the short haul modem was down
– the mainframe was unresponsive

However, it was always comforting to hear from
her: all complexity was stripped away, and I knew
what “Really” was wrong – her “WP” was broken.

Rebooting entire network

In reply to What is your best and great user

I work at a architectural company that when ever they had problems with the printer they would turn off the entire network (printers, all the workstations, server, broadband router, hub) to fix it.

Lan is down

In reply to Rebooting entire network

I heard this from co-workers. I worked on a help desk (phone support only from us; another group went to the client’s desk) at a large complex. We got a call that the network was down. The help desk operator started the usual troubleshooting questions, but was told “I’m a manager, I know when the network is down. Just send somebody over to fix it.” So a trouble ticket was entered and a tech sent over.

Turns out that the reason the network was down was that the manager couldn’t print. And why couldn’t he print? Because the printer was out of paper!

The usual, pc unplugged, the naked user

In reply to What is your best and great user

The usual stuff, PC unplugged, num lock key not on. And someone changing clothes in my work room for the Christmas party without telling me beforehand. Don’t tell my wife.

Don’t tell my wife.

In reply to The usual, pc unplugged, the naked user

We won’t tell as long as you promise you didn’t probe any ports. 😉

el ginec?logo

In reply to Don’t tell my wife.

The new story around here is I’m the company gynecologist / network admin.

Oh that reminds me

In reply to The usual, pc unplugged, the naked user

Of a non for profit hospital I worked at! I was to train the P.T. girls ( physical therapist ) how to use a digital camera and print with it. Well I was one of four males in the hospital and you know how nurses act any way. Well I let them use the camera all morning and got it back at noon. Well most the pictures they took were sneak picture’s of each other. I have seen more of them then I ever thought I would. And a couple asked I looked at all the pictures because they wanted them deleted. I am still smiling. 😉

Can anyone see my ‘Privates’

In reply to What is your best and great user

That’s how a discussion started between me and my Managing Director.

We run a Novell server for users file storage and there are two mapped drives for each user (a ‘public’ for documents to be shared and a ‘private’ for confidential documents which is only accessible by the user or admin).

It took 40 minutes of severe self restraint to explain the concept of the naming convention (Public vs Private), without even thinking about the opening line….

no email

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was working at a University and our helpdesk office got a call from a lecturer.
Lecturer: when are you going to come and fix my problem I emailed you a week ago and you still haven’t come to find out what is wrong? Don’t you ever do any work?
My Boss:Sorry but we always respond to requests for assistance when we get them.
Lecturer:Well you haven’t done very well this time have you? A week to respond to an email.
My Boss:Well tell the problem now and we’ll try and fix it now.
Lecturer:My email doesn’t work.
My Boss:!!**##? Why did you send us an email instead of telephoning then?
Lecturer:I thought it might get through.

Another story from the university

In reply to What is your best and great user

Academics intelligence 1000% common sense nil

User arrives in the IT office.

User:My PC isn’t working.
Support:How did you get here?
User:I came down three flights of stairs.
Support:Why?
User:The lifts aren’t working.
Support:Does it seem dark in here?
User: Yes. Why don’t you turn on the lights?
Support:That would be the power cut (that’s power outage in the US).

the mouse

In reply to What is your best and great user

my company recently let an employee go when I went to her computer to wipe it clean and check it I noticed the mouse was missing I thought that was strange so I asked her cubemate if she knew where it went she told me M**** had taken it because that was the “brains of the computer you cant do anything with out it” she got us I had to laugh at that.

I wonder why they let her go…

In reply to the mouse

Why would a company ever let a smart one like that get away?

Punctuation

In reply to the mouse

You seem to have an irrational fear of punctuation. It makes your post difficult to read.

Gray desktop

In reply to What is your best and great user

User called in, saying that when he opened an Excel spreadsheet, then minimized it, he got nothing but a gray background – desktop icons were MIA.

I didn’t have the luxury of remote desktop, and he was in a remote office, so I asked him to duplicate the issue, explaining everything to me. He did so in perfect detail – “I double-click on My Computer, navigate to the folder, double-click on the file, and it opens. I click on the little minus sign in the upper right, and I can see it minimized in the lower left, but my desktop isn’t there – all I see is gray.”

I asked him if there was any detail at all, short of the minimized app. He told me there were a few items, but nothing as to what he expected.

Given the fact that he’d just given me a fully detailed explaination of what he was doing when he opened the file, I knew he’d be thorough when I asked him to explain, in detail, what he was seeing at that time.

He went on to describe an Excel menu and toolbar.

I explained to him that he’d minimized the spreadsheet, but the Excel application was still maximized. His loud response: “I didn’t open any d***ed application! I opened an Excel spreadsheet!” (He’d been fully cooperative and easygoing, to this point.)

I didn’t bother to respond to this statement. I brought his attention to the remaining minus sign in the upper right corner, then heard him express his amazement (“Well, I’ll be darned!”) when he clicked on it.

Problem with CD-ROM

In reply to What is your best and great user

In a past job, I was responsible for supporting a multimedia application providing by one of the world’s leading encyclodepia distributors. In one instance I had a lady ring in that her copy of the application did not work. One of the appropriate questions to ask was whether the CD was placed into the drive the correct way. Her response to that was one of disgust in that I asked that of her when she had a university education with Ph.d and Masters degrees. Anyway, to cut a long story short the CD was in fact put into the drive tray upset down. Why? because the floppy drive had been installed upside down and needed the disk inserted label down, so the same thing was needed for the CD. needless to say I did not receive an apology for her treatment of me when I suggested that.

couple of good ones

In reply to Problem with CD-ROM

I work in a small shop, and do a little of everything, upgrades, repairs, tech support, etc.

Once had a guy add a dvd to 2 month old pc. He disconnected all of the power connectors, installed the drive. When he reconnected the power connectors he had one left over and was’nt sure where it came from. So he pulled the jumper from the hdd, and connected the fdd power connector. He just could not understand why the computer wouldn’t boot to windows.

But the best was an elderly woman, who in describing her bsod error message, told me, “now this next part is in Corinthians.”
I was barely able to hold my composure as I was thinking, “if you’ve got an error message from the bible on your pc, we’ve got big problems.”

so what happened

In reply to What is your best and great user

so what happened to that bank? You ever watch to see?

HW guru upgrades his RAM!

In reply to What is your best and great user

Some years ago I was working as a consuktant for a ww petrol company and in the office where I was assigned there was this “ICT Manager” who once called me.
MGR: “Hello Ale, I’d like to use the old PC’s RAM for my new system” (we’re talking about the ol’ sdram banks! for a P3)
ME: “Well, simply you cannot, they are completely different, indeed if you look at the contacts side you should see that they have two cuts instead of one as it’s on the new systems”
MGR: “Oh I see, so I cannot, ain’t it?”
ME: “Sure you cann’t, that’s impossible”
MGR: “Ok thank you”

Some time passes and after about 45 minutes he calls me again

MGR: “Hey Ale, my system doesn’t boot anymore and beeps! What’s wrong with it?”
ME: “It beeps? Something wrong on it, did you change something perhaps?”
MGR: “Nope…oh well, I just upgraded its RAM as I told you before”
ME: “??!?!!?!?! What? Sorry, how did you do that?”
MGR: “Oh well, I adapted it”
ME: “Adapted? What do you meen with ‘adapting’ sorry?”
MGR: “Well, you know that the old ram didn’t fit into the new system because the cut being in the wrong place? Well I just made a new cut onto the old memory bank in the right place and fit it to the new system”
ME: “” I just hang up the call…I couldn’t believe what he did!!!!

Passwordingly So..

In reply to HW guru upgrades his RAM!

I had a user that thought he knew it all.. he called me one day to come over and fix the password problem they were ALL having. 2 weeks of the same problem, couldn’t something be done? I was clueless, nobody has mentioned it to me. So I drive over and find all of the cases open and running. He said it was to make it easier to reset the passwords. It took a few minutes, because I just couldn’t fathom what he was doing. Then it dawned on me, after a couple of explanations. We had began pushing down a group policy that enforced password protected screen savers. None of the 11 people knew what to do when they returned from lunch and found themselves “locked out”. So they asked him to help. He was so excited to be the person that fixed something – he never called me. He simply shut down each computer by unplugging it, then removed the CMOS battery – waited 10 minutes, then put the battery back in and rebooted, all 11 machines after lunch – every day – and sometimes they would just randomely lock the users out, like whent they went on break, or to the bathroom. HAHHAHAHAA

Supposedly a true story (not from 2005, though!)

In reply to What is your best and great user

“Ridge Hall computer assistant; may I help you?”
“Yes, well, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“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?”
“Can you see the C:\ prompt on the screen?”
“What’s a sea-prompt?”
“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.”
“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?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.”
“Yes, it is.”
“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.”
“Okay, here it is.”
“Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.”
“I can’t reach.”
“Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?”
“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 power … A power outage? Aha! Okay, we’ve got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?”
“Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.”
“Good! Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from.”
“Really? Is it that bad?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
“Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?”
“Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”

All time classic

In reply to Supposedly a true story (not from 2005, though!)

I was wondering when someone would get around to posting that one.

Shouldn’t this thread deal with stories that heppened to you though?

That’s an old one but,

In reply to Supposedly a true story (not from 2005, though!)

it’s still one of the greats.

Hard Drive?

In reply to What is your best and great user

A training session on how to write in Lotus Notes WIP DB:
Trainer: Initialize DB on Server; then replicate DB to local —right click on DB icon and then on replicate>new replica.(on the local). Local being local hard drive
User: i have to create the replica where?
Trainer: on your comps Hard Drive
User: No! Where? Which Hard Drive
Trainer: DUH?
User: i mean Comp Hard drive or Lotus Notes Hard Drive
Trainer had to be excused: mixed attack of apolexy and gigglitis…

Dumb IT stories

In reply to What is your best and great user

I think it’s only fair that we put up a few stories of how dumb IT guys can be. I consider myself a high-end user (yeah, the IT department’s worst nightmare!), but I’ve never “officially” been an IT guy. I just….help.

1) Back in the day…in 1989 (what was that? DOS? Windows 2.1?), I had to borrow a PC from work, at work, to get my work done. After about 9 months using it, IT wanted it back. Of course, back then, IT was one guy that had built an Altair in his basement, and still had solder-burn scars on his fingers. But even so, he wanted me to take all my software off of the machine so that he could start from scratch.

I had DELTREE, or XTREE, or some such app that let me review the directory structure and see the hidden and system files. He watched as I deleted all my stuff (no registry back then to worry about…oh, the good ol’ days!), and he got confused when we got to the root. “What are those files, IO.SYS, and MSDOS.SYS? I’ve never seen those before! Delete them!”

But…but…”Delete them!”

I didn’t have the heart. But I really should have.

An Interesting Thread in this Thread

In reply to What is your best and great user

BTW, the first story so far is the most LOL one. As huge and serious as the problem the president created was, it was funny.

There’s something being illustrated here that was not intended. Some of the reporters are quite bad at telling a funny story. Others tend toward the unnecessarily recondite.

Which gives me to wonder, whether there would be fewer dumb users if their IT guys/girls were more adept at communicating?

Communicating

In reply to An Interesting Thread in this Thread

Yes, like using words like “recondite” that users would have to look up in a dictionary to understand. 🙂

You got that?

In reply to Communicating

Congratulations. What I like to call “self-referential humor.”

And it was included to make a point: the fact that one can say a thing doesn’t mean it will be understood.

This from my daughter…

In reply to What is your best and great user

A few months ago, my daughter forwarded me an email that made me break out with a good laugh. Unfortunately, I’ve deleted the original, but here’s an outline:

Late one Friday afternoon, her IT department shotgunned an email to notify everyone that they would be rebooting some servers, and some network resources may not be available for a 15 minute span.

Shortly afterwards, one of the supervisors used the ‘reply to all’ option to send a rather terse email, stating roughly the following:

The supervisor thought it was ridiculous that IT expected everyone to stop what they were doing so that IT could reboot some servers. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and people were trying to get things done before they went home for the weekend. This supervisor made it quite clear that, in her opinion, this type of work should wait for a couple of hours, after everyone else had gone home.

My daughter is a self-admitted computer moron, but even she understood that a quick reboot of servers would have very little, if any, effect on most of her work activities.

I never heard whether anything came down from above regarding the supervisor’s behavior.

all the cities in all the world

In reply to What is your best and great user

I had a call from an AA who was filling out an online expense report for her boss. She had to enter a hotel bill for Madrid, Spain and she couldn’t find the country/state/city code that corresponded with the entry in the database.

I asked her to user *Spain* as a wildcard search for anything “Spain,” but nothing came back. She thought she was vindicated because “Spain would HAVE to be there… See, the system is broke…”

I had her search for *Madr* and it returned about less than dozen hits and one of them was Madrid, Spain, but the country code was “ES.” This didn’t surprise me, but she said she would never have found that. All I could tell her
was (as you know) there are tips and tricks to searching that you have to learn.

She said, “that would be too difficult. Is there some place I could get a print out of all this?”

I said, “you want a print out of all the cities and countries in the world? That would be thousands of pages.”

She said, “yes, but it would be easier to search…”

(yeah, right…)

Company boss ID-10-T Error

In reply to What is your best and great user

A few years back, I was working for a small IT company in Melbourne. We had a problem client who owned a rather large company and expected all his IT to work with out a problem every minute of every day.

Two memorable moments stand out.

Memorable Moment One: we get an email from him claiming his email isn’t working.

Memorable Moment Two: He is receiving phone calls, e-mails and written letters stating his mail server setup is allowing for spammers to use it for relaying. He has a go at us, we point out documents in his possesion from us that state this problem needs to be fixed and we’ve been pointing this out ever since we took over his IT servicing. He says fix it or I won’t pay you. We say you haven’t paid us so we can’t fix it. He says, Well it will have to wait. I’ve left the small IT company now but at the time I left, he still wouldn’t pay for the time needed to fix the issue.

Memory is a bit hazy on the finer details so it was a more general overview of what happened. 🙂

We used to do it on paper…

In reply to What is your best and great user

I work in ICT Support in a UK Secondary School (High School to the US) We regularly get support calls saying that a user cannot get access to the SIMS (Student Information Management System) software that is used to hold all student data, and also to take electronic registration, its the end of the world when staff are unable to get into SIMS, and I think up until very recently they always took paper registers, and yet they seem unable to cope without the pc’s for 5 minutes now, get helpdesk e-mails marked as High Importance for problems such as “My mailbox is full” and “My Interactive Whiteboard is not working”, all staff have the ability to write a note and place it in someone elses pigeon hole, and to use an old fashioned standard whiteboard, which are still provided in every room!

CD Confusion – YAIUS (Yet Another Idiot User Story)

In reply to What is your best and great user

CDs seem to provide us professionals with more than their fair share of “idiot stories”. But I’m afraid I have one more. This is what I call a “Believe It or Not” story.

Tech support receive a call to say that a user has a CD stuck in the drive of their laptop – can someone make a call to remove it.

On que, a technician arrives to take care of the matter. Sure enough there was a CD stuck in the drive … hmmm a mini CD stuck in the floppy drive.

A kind of understandable mistake given the similar sizes, but that’s not the kicker. The mini CD was still in its plastic case!! What’s more, it was well stuck in that drive so quite a large amount of force had been used to get it there.

Believe it or not!!

Coffee mug holder

In reply to CD Confusion – YAIUS (Yet Another Idiot User Story)

I did receive a technical support call several years ago about the “coffee mug holder” breaking off.
Then a few months later, Canon ran a long advertising campaign about its image processing systems, and the TV advert actually showed a CD drive being used as a coffee mug holder.

short one

In reply to What is your best and great user

one of the best stories comes from the it director at my previous workplace (a quite large company).
during a meeting with an isp about a vpn solution for mobile users, in the middle of intense discussions filled with tech terms, the it director asked innocently: “what is a proxy?”.
ever wonder why that is my previous workplace?

Pre-computers

In reply to What is your best and great user

Coming in on a national holiday to check some new compliancy issues with our servers, I ran into the girl from switchboard who had forgotten her lunch, so I agreed to cover the phones for ten minutes while she nipped out to buy something – national holiday, what could possibly happen?

After about five minutes, got a call from a customer who, according to logs, had not been heard from for a considerable time. She was positively irate and demanded to know why we had not telephoned her immediately to tell her that we had not received the fax that she had sent three days ago. The urge to say “because our staff are not telepathic” was nearly overpowering because of the outright anger and indignation that she was directing at me. Trying hard not to laugh at the surreality of the demand, I was really stuck for words, so just appologised straight out. Whereupon, she demanded to know how we would improve our ordering system to stop this problem from happening again as apparently other companies do not have this problem. This phased me completely – if anybody out there can, please tell me how to do this!

Somewhat tongue in cheek, I assured her that we would do our best to anticipate orders in the future and telephone accordingly which miraculously appeared to satisfy her. After that, took and posted her order by phone and everybody seems happy. Just to make sure that I wasn’t going crazy, I ran a complete check on the fax machine which was working fine and quizzed the girl from switchboard who assured me that there had been neither a fax from that customer, nor any nameless unintelligible faxes in the last week. Nevertheless, it perked up what was going to be a rather humdrum task and I got to wear a rather bemused smile for the rest of the day.

Not quite an IT Pro story, but still funny

In reply to What is your best and great user

At this stage of my life, I am not ‘working’ per se in the IT industry. I’m a 16 year old high school student. I do, however assist people in computer-related classes I take, and spend some time helping out on support IRC channels. I apologize in advance for all the set-up to this one, but I think the punch line is worth it.

My Office Applications (MOS Certification) class is held in a 24-station computer lab. The workstations are very cramped, and most of us have little or no desktop room, because all of that is taken up by the PC boxes (small Gateway E-Series machines) and gargantuan 17″ CRT displays. There’s also a keyboard/mouse ‘shelf’ a bit lower than the computers themselves, but there’s no room on that to set your stuff. We do have small filing racks to set finished papers in, but there’s nowhere to have your textbook open where you can still read the letters, so most people set the textbooks in their lap.

One person in the class asked me for help with a Microsoft Word document. I asked what was wrong, and she said “I don’t know what happened, all these spaces keep coming up on my screen. As fast as I can delete them, more come up.” I looked down at her machine for a minute, and saw the problem. She had tried to prop her textbook up against the keyboard tray. I looked back up at her with my ‘are you for real’ look and said “Your book is on the space bar.”

Interesting users

In reply to What is your best and great user

She called in a state of panic. Her system would not boot. Once on site, I booted it with a floppy. (Dos days) Started looking for boot files. None to be found. Asked her if she had deleted anything lately. She says “Yes, I found some files that I didn’t need. Command.com Config.sys Autoexec.bat. Since I didn’t use them, I got rid of them.” Easy restoration.

Thats great

In reply to Interesting users

I had a woman who thought she was a power user! She read a book once on computers, her system was slow (windows 98SE). She did a few good things, Defrag, Scandisk ect. But still was not fast enought so she deleted the windows system 32 directory and rebooted. hilarity ensued when I tried to tell her that any thing under the windows directory was a nono. I love power users who read a book;)

Interesting User 2

In reply to What is your best and great user

Why, the managing partner asks, are we spending all this money for backup tapes when we have a server with mirrored drives? If one drive fails, we don’t lose anything.

Interesting User 3

In reply to What is your best and great user

My printer won’t print! The bitch dog from hell secretary whose desj was withing earshot of my office yells. I dropped what I was doing, walked over to her station, and to my amusment, flipped on the power switch.

Interestig User 4

In reply to What is your best and great user

Attorney: Where’s the “Any” key.
Me: What?
Attorney: The “Any” Key. It says “Press any key to continue” I don’t see an “Any” key.
Me: Not wanting to make him feel any dumber than I have to, “Well, there is no “Any” key what they are talking about is any key on the keyboard.”
Attorney: You gotta be kidding me!
We had a good laugh.

Interesting user 5

In reply to What is your best and great user

I followed behind a local guy “Steve” for about two years cleaning up his messes before I actually met him. One memorable one was the lady who was the bookkeeper in a glass shop. She was backing her Peachtree data to floppys nightly, One day, she couldn’t access her system, and since she didn’t like Steve, (He had told her she needed to call him if there was ever a problem because he was the only person who would be able to fix it) she called me. It seems “Steve” partitioned her 40Mg hard drive into 8, 5Mg partitions and used the Dos Subst command to make them all look like a C: drive. This made the accounting program dependent on those eight partitions. The real problem was she had been backing up on the same set of floppys for three years, they were worthless. Luckily, I took the old drive and replaced the circuit board and brought it back to life. Then discovered the partitions. Took a lot of work but managed to straighten everything out.

My three cents

In reply to What is your best and great user

1) While working phone support at a Help Desk.
Caller (starting the call out right): What did YOU do to my computer!
Me: What is it doing?
Caller: My monitor went completely blank.
We went through checking for lights and found that both the monitor and the pc had power, but she was very resistant to checking cables for me.
Me: Can you tell me what you were doing right before it went blank?
Caller: I just turned it to show the girl in the cube next to me something on my screen.
Me: I really need you to check the cables before I can page someone out to you desk.
Caller: Fine, but there is nothing wrong with the cables, everything was working fine just a little while ago? Oh, its working now, bye.

2) Phone call from a friend of mine.
Her: Hey, my printer stopped working.
Me: Does it give you an error or just nothing prints?
Her: It gave me some error, but I clicked past it.
Me: Let?s try again and see if the error pops up.
Her: Ok, (pause as she asks for a print). Okay, here is the error.
Me: What does it say?
Her: Out of paper, Oh! I guess it helps if you know how to read.
We both still get a kick out of that one.

And finally, not to be outdone? 3) Me this morning while reading the first part of this string?
I was using Barts PE and Ghost with an image file stored on a different machine to re-image a newly repaired laptop. I tried to map a drive to the image store location. It comes back with an error. I try again, still erring out. I check all the spelling and verify the password. No go. I reboot the machine, still the same error. I try and reach the machine with my laptop, it goes through. I am thinking evil thoughts about the manufacturer who repaired the laptop (still under warranty). So, I finally put all my attention on the laptop and it dawns on me? no network cable! Just goes to show you that the ?expert? can be in too big of a hurry to follow all the steps too!

Emily
If I don?t laugh at myself, who will?

Too many cooks

In reply to What is your best and great user

My brother, a farmer no less, was extremely proud of his new purchase: a PC. Well, there was a family gathering that weekend and he had two brothers, myself and 2 nephews showing him all these tricks on this wonderful new system of his. After the weekend was over, all of us experts returned to the big city. Sunday night, I got a call from my brother saying that he could not get anything to work on the PC. Suspecting that one of my nephews loaded something that has caused problems, I spent over an hour on the phone with him troubleshooting possible problems. He still could not get any programs to open.

Finally it dawned on me. NOT ONE OF US HAD SHOWED HIM HOW TO DOUBLE CLICK HIS MOUSE ON AN ICON.

Blind guiding another Dumb blind

In reply to What is your best and great user

Well i myself is a computer idiot and i have friend of mine who is a proud owner of two IBM Thank pads and a stand alone PC who requested help to save a word file over Telephone i told him to copy paste the document to his desk top reply was its not possible because he is working on his laptop.
iceing on the cake was he assumed that OS XP Pro has crashed after downloading all avilable anti spyware,anty virous softwares free on the websites along with Nortan antivirous 2005Editions and lodaded his old windows 95 Recovery CD and ran the same and called me at 0300 in the morning to help him recover his system as an urgent mail was to be sent through Out look express Only.well is there some body to guide this Idiot! weighting for some help

Regards
Muralidhar.C.R

Beat this one….

In reply to What is your best and great user

I agreee with the above, these people didnt ask to be infront of a computer but are forced to be. But as you would guess this one can silence anyone and this is just a regular day in my job.

Tech: Hey Admin. I heard you need a laptop set up for a presentaion?

Admin: Thats right, it has to connect to the network so i can get a document off of the shared drive.

Tech: Here you go, this one has been tested and is working fine.

Admin: Ok (no thanks or anything)

After about 20 mins i get this call.

Tech: Hello?

Admin: Were do i plug the network cable in?

Yes, this is our Network Admin. This guy is friends with my manager and director…… that should answer a lot.

Any one out there hiring any network techs in NJ?

“Broken” Monitor

In reply to What is your best and great user

I have so many, but these two stand out:

A guy called up telling me that his monitor was broken – all he got was a blank screen. He’d restarted “a bunch of times”, but still nothing. I could hear Windows starting up in the background. I asked him if there was a green or orange light on the monitor – and he said “green”. I said, “It just sounds like it isn’t on. Are you sure it’s turned on? Is there a green light on it?” He assured me he had and the green light was there and on.

I ended up having to go to his office because none of this was making sense. Sure enough, the monitor was OFF!! The “green light” he’d saw and equipment he’d insisted he’d turned on was his COMPUTER!

My second is the best-dumb-user I’ve EVER had (and that’s saying something).

First off, “Dr. Watson” is a software utility that’s included with Windows that helps detect, decode & log errors with Windows programs. Sometimes you’ll see it come up when an error occurs.

I received an email from an employee who was trying to do something on his pc but kept getting errors. It read as follows:

I keep trying to open the program, but keep getting kicked out and then I get a message from this Dr. Watson, who is not my primary care physician. I don’t know who this “quack” is, but I would like to be able to get into the program.

Classic.

More Monitors

In reply to “Broken” Monitor

We currently outsource hardware repairs to another council division, we have recently had a batch of monitors (all about 4.5yrs old) starting to fail on us, as each has failed we swap it out for the user and send the fauly one off, it detifully returns on the transfer van after 1-2 weeks with a fault report attached saying:
“Dry joint soldered, no fault found” – Last time I checked a dry joint was a fault, thou believe it or not we have now had 12 of these come back with exactly the same fault report, and they all worked after return!

Oops…no power!!!

In reply to What is your best and great user

I had user call me and tell me that her computer kept shutting off on her and she didn’t know what was going on. After inspecting the system and found that nothing was physically wrong with it I asked her to show me what she was doing when it left shutdown. To my amusement, I watched her as she pulled herself closer to the desk to start working and boom the system went down. I asked where she was putting her feet and I saw she was putting them right near the outlet the surge protector was plugged into. Oops, it shut off again!!!

I can’t think of anything

In reply to What is your best and great user

I’m sorry everyone. But everything I can think of won’t be consider “best and great” by the standards set in here UGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

We’d still like to read them…

In reply to I can’t think of anything

Ghost, post yours anyway. We’re not looking for you to post a better story than anybody else’s – we just want to read new, original ones.

I’ll try to…

In reply to We’d still like to read them…

Come up with an original story. I’m sure I can think of soemthing *ROFL*.

Is it espoused to do that?

In reply to What is your best and great user

Used to do phone tech support a long time ago. So I’m on the phone and it takes about 20 minutes to get to tech support first off.

Me: Can I have your ID number so I can look up your info
User: O sure honey its ######
Me: Great what can I help you with
User: Well let me explain it to you.
Me: Ok?
User: I was in the front of my store helping a customer and he turned to me and asked If I smelled anything burning. So we walked back to the back of the store and sure enough my computer was on fire. He turned to me and asked is it espoused to do that? I didn’t know so that’s why I’m calling you.

You think its over NO this is where is gets good.

Me: Hold one….put her on hold……BA HAHA HAHA (rolling on the floor laughing it had been a long day)…I compose myself.
Me: Mrs….. what is your customer doing?
User: O he’s a volunteer fireman he make sure it didn’t catch the rest of the store on fire.

ITS BEEN BURING THIS ENTIRE TIME!!!!!

Me: Mrs….. I think you should turn off your PC and unplug it
User: But won’t I lose all my memory?
Me: Mrs…. do you see that black smoke coming from the top of you PC?
User: YES! (Very excited to get a term correct and know what it is)
Me: That?s your memory
User: O…is there anything I can do to save my memory?

Feeling bad and recently reading BOFH….

Me: Yea, if you get a jar and capture that black smoke you can save your memory.

That came and byte me in the ass when the hardware tech guy in the shipping department called and asked if I knew anything about a glass jar marked “Memory” in a burnt PC.

Westpac Bank Support or Dumb ASS Support.

In reply to What is your best and great user

Speeking to a lvl2 support person regarding Deskbank Modem Conection problems..

I told her the ppp conection failed..
that no gatway was assigned on the dialup

she insisted there was a firewall issue.

I disabled wiin FW

she took me through the steps of starting a dos sesion and pinging deskbank.westpac.com.au this did not resolve an ip…

also i could not ping the IP it was suposed to be..

THE DUMBASS still insisted it was firewall related and offer one more sugestion:

lets try telneting to deskbank.westpac.com.au 5030

i said hello you cant resolve the ip how do you expect to telnet to it..

eventualy we found out there was a router change and the DHCP gatway and dns setings were not set correctly.

it took 2 days of talking to idots at a bank teling us it was on our end.

A funny way of typing F8

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was called in to help on an internet access installation. The tech support person at the ISP company had been unable to instruct the user over the phone to get in safe mode by typing F8 while the operating system was loading and wanted to know what was wrong. No wonder it would not work! The user was keying “F” followed by “8”…

Oh no, not her again, please!

In reply to What is your best and great user

2 of my favorites from back in my helpdesk days, both from the same woman

The first was when I was trying to get her to right-click on the desktop and she was adamant no menu popped up. After a few tries I realised I could hear distinct keyboard noises? when I asked her to describe what she was doing her indignant response was ?? exactly what you told me to? I?m writing click on the desktop?? from that moment on I began to use the phrase ?click with the right mouse button?

The second was the morning I found a floppy on my desk with a little post-it note attached informing me that it was write protected and please could I fix it immediately. She had been using floppies for years

She also had a habit of ringing up and insisting the file she was just using had been lost. After ages spent asking her to scroll down I?d toddle off to her desk and scroll down for her, lo and behold the file would be there, just where I said it would be. Her response? ?Well it wasn?t there a moment ago?

Fortunately for the rest of the team she wore very bright colours so they could see her coming and hide, thus leaving me to cope with her!

Her again!!!

In reply to Oh no, not her again, please!

We had one like that. Friend of the owner’s wife.

Never, ever submitted a trouble ticket with the ticketing system; always just stomped down the hallway, and anounced in a shrill, New York voice “It’s not working!!!!”, turn on her heels and stomp back.

What wasn’t working was a early electronic documents program, certified that it wouldn’t work with Windows XP. As bosses wife’s friend, of course she had one of the 3 or so Win XP boxes in the place.

Boss and wife are back in IT one day, wanting to know why we get so far behind on our projects when we have all this technology, the ticketing system, etc. Five minutes into the meeting, down the hall comes friend of wife, stomp, stomp, stomp. Open flies the door to the IT department, and in a shrill, New York voice “It’s not working!!!!”, turn on her heels and stomp back.

Meeting ended, topic never revisted.

Stupid Owner

In reply to What is your best and great user

Small company, runs the business off a HP with a P-iii, it is adequate.

We built a zippy fast tower for his daughters, and the older one (17 or so?) thinks she is Miss Thong on Yahoo Chat. She’ll download anything, open anything, upload anything. Naturally the PC quits working after a while.

Dad, instead of telling her to wait, lets he loose with admin privilidges onthe office PC, until that too won’t work. Then we go out to TRY to recover business data, programs, and so forth.

Regular business, but SHEESH!

Password security

In reply to What is your best and great user

After months of security training and policy development, my users seemed well versed in the areas of password and desktop security practices. One department in particular was very diligent in making sure passwords were complex, users kept passwords secret and backup tapes were kept in a secure location at all times.

During a visit to the department, I was impressed to see that my trainings had paid off until I walked over to the server. There, hanging on the wall next to the server, in bold print were the Administrator username and password along with the keys to the secure area where the backup tapes were held.

When I asked the department manager why the Administrator username and password were displayed for all to see she replied, “Oh, the Administrator account is a user too?” Apparently, she thought only real people could be users.

My Mantras

In reply to What is your best and great user

my bad!

My Mantras

In reply to What is your best and great user

ok, these are the two things i work by

1. Save often, save now!

2. 90% of PC problems can be solved simply by turning the monitor on.

Boring 2005

In reply to What is your best and great user

2005 has been a boring year for me in the category of Technically-challenged Users. I don’t think I’ve had anything this year that I would consider off the wall. The only thing that would even come close is one user who kept snapping off CD trays (his tower is on the floor – CD is knee-level). I think I put about 10 roms in his system during the year. This guy wasn’t dumb though – just hopped up like a mongoose on speed with a caffine addiction.

Hope 2006 is a better year for grins …. I actually enjoy it. These people are my bread and butter, so I’d rather have fun with it than ridicule them by any means.

Just had this one yesterday…

In reply to Boring 2005

I’m walking by the help desk area, and there is a student (future user) talking to a tech about their laptop. I wish I was joking about this, but the question I actually heard asked was, “So what makes this wireless? Is it that cord that goes from the laptop to the wall?” Hats off to the tech for the stifled laughter and kind answer…

Wireless

In reply to Just had this one yesterday…

That is funny. A few years ago I stumbled upon a guy who built a custom desk for his computer. When attempting to access his tower I had to crawl under his desk and up in behind it. When I asked him why he designed his desk like that he said he wanted to get his tower as close as he could to his keyboard tray so there would be no ‘wire’ issues …. with his wireless keyboard and mouse. After he thought about it for a minute we both had a chuckle about it.
His desk is very neat and organized though – much better than the paper, CD and book mountain I have in front of me.

From a user

In reply to What is your best and great user

I am a user and am somewhat tech savvy. A few years ago I had a computer that would give me the blue screen of death approximately every 35-40 days. It always happened during the busy part of my month, and nobody could ever figure out what was wrong. The hardware support people sais it was a software problem, the software people said it was a hardware problem and they would sit in my cubicle and argue about who should fix it for days. Then somehow it would start working again. Nobody could ever explain that either. They would just come back the next month when it happened again and start the whole argument over again. So by the 3rd month I was frustrated and I wrote a batch file as a joke and was going to give it to the hardware guys when they showed up. It was called boatanchor.bat and with the exception of the ECHO OFF command, nothing in the file was a real command. The documentation however said that the file would cause the computer to shut down every 35 days and that for the next three days the only useful purpose for the computer would be as a boat anchor. I left it on my desk and the guys showed up and were looking all over in the machine for the other files/programs that were being called by this batch file. They thought it was a real program and did not seem at all amused when I told them it was supposed to be a joke. I eventually got a new PC and all was well. I am not sure if they used the old machine as a boat anchor or not.

Thats mean!

In reply to From a user

And I love it! Can I use this? This would be great on some of the other Techs I work with. They act like gods and treat others like they know it. I like users and am not laughing at them most of the time I show them what they did wrong. And some time’s we both get a laugh out of it. Other times I just let them learn and go on.

Jeb

In reply to What is your best and great user

For those of you working in Technical Support, not lucky enough to have seen this yet, it is well worth a watch for a laugh, had our support department bringing up references for weeks!

http://www.weakendproductions.co.uk/movs/jebsjobs.html

okay, here ya go…

In reply to What is your best and great user

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11183-0.html?forumID=9&threadID=186476&messageID=1908416

Here is another one

In reply to What is your best and great user

I work on alot of computers some Mac, Apple, thin clients and of course Windows, Intel stuff. Again at the non-for profit hospital I was called to the doctors area because one of the do ctors could not fet his Mac to work. I never talk down to any one but after a few minutes it became clear that this Harvard grad did not know the basics of his computer. I asked when the last time he zapped his pram and cleaned his desktop. He told me to leave and complaned about me to the director. After a long talk with the board I was cleared but I was never to talk directly to the doctors, I get the problem and send the correction to the board. They will help the doctors! And people wonder why I try to fix my problems and not go to a doctor. Not all doctors are like this but I dont want to find out if the one I go to is one!
Is it time for your check up?

Here is another one

In reply to What is your best and great user

I work on alot of computers some Mac, Apple, thin clients and of course Windows, Intel stuff. Again at the non-for profit hospital I was called to the doctors area because one of the do ctors could not fet his Mac to work. I never talk down to any one but after a few minutes it became clear that this Harvard grad did not know the basics of his computer. I asked when the last time he zapped his pram and cleaned his desktop. He told me to leave and complaned about me to the director. After a long talk with the board I was cleared but I was never to talk directly to the doctors, I get the problem and send the correction to the board. They will help the doctors! And people wonder why I try to fix my problems and not go to a doctor. Not all doctors are like this but I dont want to find out if the one I go to is one!
Is it time for your check up?

FAT32 swap

In reply to What is your best and great user

I’m only work on PCs as a side business… building, repairing etc. A guy where I work came to me several times over a two week period wanting free advice with a problem on his PC.
He would always approach me while my coworkers were present.
I could not pin down his exact problem because he kept changing his story. He varied from the HDD to the OS to some software and so on.
I finally told him to bring the unit to me and for a fee I would repair whatever was wrong. He refused and replied he would “fix” it himself.
Then he proudly announced in front of four of us that he had already swapped out his FAT32. I asked him what he meant by swapped? He said “I just popped it out and popped in the new one”.
I asked him exactly what he “popped out”.
He looked at my coworkers like it was stupid question and said “The FAT32 of course” and walked away with a smirk.
Since then I have heard he has told others around the company that I don’t have a clue about computers and he had to fix his by himself.

What a dumb_ass!

In reply to FAT32 swap

If he ever describes another computer problem he’s having, tell him he is suffering from an ID 10 T Error.

OMG

In reply to FAT32 swap

I?ve had a few dumb users like this but the worst one I?ve heard of was a IT person (with degrees behind their name) who asked what to do when the memory module wouldn?t press into place was told to use a hammer (jokingly) asked in all seriousness “do you have a hammer I can use?”
Most of the “dumb users” stories I have can be traced to ignorance and ignorance is curable but stupidity is forever. But the biggest dumb users I?ve found are the guys and gals who have the IT degrees and think they know it all and their feces have no odor.
Don?t get me started on the Info Systems department at the collage I use to work for that blacklisted me from tech jobs because I had the temerity to tell them they didn?t know everything (and was right) (sorry for my little rant fortunately I haven?t seen any of those kind around here)

I just had too….

In reply to What is your best and great user

I have known this guy for long time, he’s always yaking about how much he knows about computers, and all the upgrades and “sh*t” he can do.
Well about a month or so ago he did this complete overhaul of his “old” system, while creating a new one, as you can guess he had issues form one end to the other.
He brought me both machines and asked (more like demanded) that they be fixed after going through all the files, programs and so forth, I came to the conclution this mess is all becuse of user errors, and straightened this all out.
So just to be the smat-ass that I am, I replaced the default windows error “noise” with a small wav file that would play whenever he made an error. He was here for hours playing with both machines and was happy, so he took them home.
About a week goes by.. He calls SCREAMING at me that his machine keeps calling him a “stupid S.O.B.”, I told him stop making errors and it will stop. The next time he was here I had to show how to “FIX” the problem.

Power Failure

In reply to What is your best and great user

I was working on a first line helpdesk for a large financial department of a well known oilcompany.
One day, I’ll never forget it was around 10am, the electricity went out. Some dude hit a powercabine with his car so the whole neighbourhood went down. I said to my co-worker ‘it won’t take more than 5 minutes and someone will call with a stupid request’ and so it happened, phone rings, I pick up the phone and yes it was L., one of our finest ladies but a tiny bit on the slow side.
‘Hi, I’ve got a problem with my screen’
‘Hi L., no problem with your screen, the power went down.’
‘Oh really? that’s not good.’
‘Well nothing really much we can do, just wait untill the power gets back’
‘ok, but in the meantime, if you’re doing nothing, you ca ncome over now and install a new monitor for me??’
Not a single hair on my head tought about explaining her that a screen needs electricity so I went ‘euh,well,euh okay L., I’ll send someone over’
Off course I didn’t send nobody…
10 minutes later
‘Hi, no need for a new screen, it started working again.’
‘Well, the power came back’
‘Yeah, strange isn’t it?’

she still remains one of my favourites 🙂

Dumb user and Micro$oft

In reply to What is your best and great user

Once was a tech support guy for the expatriates in the South of France. Got a call from a lady who
couldn’t find her data…. Went over and, lo and
behold, this lady had backed up all her data onto floppy, before deleting the files on the hard drive… Oh dear, she had just dragged the files to the floppy and Microsoft Windows kindly put shortcuts to the data on the hard drive onto the floppy. Once deleted from the hard drive they were gone!
Still got a bottle of whisky for my efforts…

dumest user

In reply to Dumb user and Micro$oft

i use to do support service to a person as a freelancer while studying. one fine day this guy calls me up and says he’s havin trouble using his computer. so i went to see wht the problem was.
when i normally diagnosed the computer everything seemed fine to me , so i asked him where he’s having trouble, so he gives a demonstration of wht he was doing.
he comes to the computer hold on to the mouse in his hand(in the air) and point it to the monitor and moves the mouse left,right, up & down and says see can’t u see the problem here the mouse is not moving at all no matter where ever i move, can u not fix this?
for a moment i couldn’t realise wht i was seeing, i couldn’t laugh aloud infront of him (thought that might not be a polite),and i might loose the extra bit of money i make due to his silly problems.so i simply explained him the use of the mouse pad & the table and went out and have a balst of a laugh at wht i just saw.then i thought pple like this also exist in this world.

Some real Gems…

In reply to What is your best and great user

I must work for the most IT illiterate outfit in northern Canada. Here’s a few REAL (ie: not kidding) goodies:

– When re-assigning IP’s to printers, I sent out a note saying there were some printer changes. Not five minutes later, a lady runs into my office in a panic giving me sh$& because she had to get new business cards with the new “silly fax number”…

– When I told one left-handed fellow to “right-click” he promptly moved the mouse to his right hand…

– A whole *department* that uses MS Word as their file manager, and then complains to me that they can’t find their spreadsheets and presentations, or they get clever and look for “all files” and they won’t open when they double-click on them…

– One senior Manager who had some 600 documents in his “Deleted Items” folder, because he found he could automatically file his important documents just by pushing the “Delete” key and they’d all be nice and handy in one place…

There’s lots more, but I’m getting a headache…

No, the grey cable…

In reply to What is your best and great user

User- My invoice printer won’t print
Me- Ok, do you know if it is a networked printer or attached to your computer
User-I don’t know
Me-Ok no problem. there are two cables coming from the printer, what color are they
User- one is black and one is grey
Me-ok great, the black one plugs into the power socket correct?
User-yes
Me-ok, where does the grey cable plug into?
User-it goes under the desk
Me-Right, and plugs into your computer? Or another smaller box with lights on it?
User- it plugs into the wall
Me- no, that is the black power cable. we want to find out where the grey cable goes
User- the phone cable is grey
Me- is that cable plugged into the printer?
User- no, it plugs into the phone plug on the wall
Me- right. So the grey plug coming from the printer, follow it and tell me what it plugs into
User- I don’t know. The black one plugs into the wall
Me- ok, but where does the grey one go
User- Well there is a box with a bunch of wires on it… my computer is a netgear
Me- no, it won’t plug into that… that netgear box is something seperate, ignore it. What else is down there
User- I see a box that says belkin
Me- ok, so the grey cable plugs into the belkin? (we don’t use belkin print servers only hp)
User- no it plugs into the wall
Me- ok, got it, but now look at the grey cable
User- I don’t know
Me- ok forget all that, did you assign the printer in your billing terminal
User- what?
Me- you have to assign your printer so the billing system knows where to send the invoice
User- I don’t know how to do that
Me- you have been billing at this company for a few years…. ??
User- Yes. How do I assign the printer?
Me- I’m not sure, I never bill anything, only hook them up. It is something you are supposed to know
User- well, I don’t.
Me- and you don’t know where the grey cable plugs into?
User- the black cable plugs into the wall
Me- right…. well, do this. Unplug everything, and replug it all in and call me if it still doesn’t work.
User- ok I will call you back

To fellow staff – I’m off to lunch guys! I’ll be back in an hour

Two of my favorite trouble calls

In reply to What is your best and great user

In the old DOS days, computer keyboards could be physically locked with a key. A somewhat cocky co-worker approaches me, indicating she has a strange message on her monitor, and could I take a look at it. I did, and the message read:
“Your keyboard is locked. Please unlock it to continue.”
I grabbed a Post-It, and stuck it on her monitor. The Post-It read: “Your keyboard is locked. Please unlock it to continue.”

Another co-worker at the same job called me, extremely frustrated, and said her computer would not start, that she’s done everything, and that she needs to get to work because she has so much to do. I stop over and notice that she had indeed powered-on her monitor, but her PC was still turned off. Without saying anything I powered the PC on and walked away. I went back to my desk and located a graphic of her IBM PC on the web. The graphic showed arrows, describing all the features of the PC. I edited a copy of the picture, and sent it to the girl in mention. From the power button I had added an arrow, with the description “Thingy that makes it do stuff”.

Older PCs are more secure?

In reply to What is your best and great user

I work at a company where the CEO is extremely tight with the company funds… so tight in fact that it’s to the point where this person makes decisions that could jeopardize the network security of the entire company all to save a buck.

Since I came here a couple years I have been trying my best to get staff PCs replaced and/or upgraded (they were still using mostly Win98 boxes, and in fact we still have a number in use today) to Windows XP Pro. Except where PCs have finally died and needed replacing, or the staff member was using software that required a Win XP box with certain specs, I have struggled to get approval for replacement and upgrades. The CEO’s justification? According to them, “newer PCs aren’t really that much faster than the older ones we have, and all the hackers out there in the world are focusing all their attention on breaching the security in newer machines and are leaving the older ones alone so we should be safer staying with what we’ve got.” Huh?!

We all love the computer

In reply to What is your best and great user

Novices and dread the call from them, but we know that most of the problems are an easy fix.

30 seconds or less

In reply to What is your best and great user

Once upon time when windows 98 was still in it’s infancy, I worked technical support for a major computer company based out of Texas.
A gentleman waited about 40 minutes queue with some sort of Modem problem.
Me: Thank you for calling >>>>techsupport may I have your ID information.
Caller: it is *****
Me: Thank You Mr.******* how may I help you?
Caller: My modem doesn’t work!
Me: O.K. Sir I’m sorry to hear that.
Let’s open up your control panel so
we can get to the device manager.
Caller: You know what? You’re an F@*&$ing
idiot. (click; then dial tone)
Me:(typing note into customers file)
Cust called in with Modem issue; unable to TS; tried to instruct cust to open CP win98;cust then called me an f*&$ing idiot then disco’d the call.

Call took less than 30 seconds. The guy monitoring my calls at the time laughed so hard I heard him several rows over. Needless to say the audio made it’s way around for a while.

Even Suppliers are Noobs

In reply to What is your best and great user

About a two years back I called into a regular supplier. I found to my dismay that my other regular supplier had poached six of the sales staff and now needed to talk to a new guy. I already knew that this would mean a whole bunch of explaining about how I preferred to be quoted to save time for both me and the sales person.

However, my slight irritation turned to total dismay with the following conversation:

Me: “Hi, are you stocking the new SATA drives?”

Salesperson: “I am sorry Sir but we are currently only stocking Samsung.”

My coffe cup holder doesn’t work!

In reply to What is your best and great user

Years ago, I was a field engineer in the New England region for a small Hospital Information System company . The company was relative small but we had a good number of clients sprinkled throughout the country. As a result I was home based, on essentially 7/24/365 on-call and carrying pager.(does that tell you how long ago it was?). To give you more perspective, around this time in the evolution of computers, the CD-ROM drive was being shipped with new desktop computers.

One night about 3 AM, my pager went off. I had a call from one of my sites stating that there was a major problem with the night operator’s computer. Our system at the time relied on a single computer to interface with the “Mainframe” to process the nightly backups. Generally any software issues where handled at our comapany headquarters but hardware problems were the resposibility of the field. After shaking off some of my slumber and collecting my thoughts, I called the client. There was no answer at the extension I was given. I left a message with my home phone number (cell phones were still in the semi-brick stage)asking the operator to call me back. I put on a pot of coffee in anticipation of a drive or at least an extended call.

After about 15 minutes I tried the night operator again. She answer stating that since her computer was down she decided to go out for a smoke.

I asked the famous IT question, “So, what is the problem?”

She answered, “Well, I got this new computer last week. It is right here under my desk on the right-hand side.

I replied, “Yes I installed it last week. What is the problem?”

She replied, “Well ever since I got here tonight, the coffee cup holder doen’t work.”

Ok, we are coming up on 3:30 in the morning, I said, “WHAT????”

She said, “You know the coffee cup holder…that pops out when I push the little button on my new computer…”

Computer Oil

In reply to What is your best and great user

In the late eighties I was called by an employee in one of our remote offices. She asked me if I had any “computer oil” in stock, or if she should order some. After some questions I was able to determine she was asking about the small tubes of oil that I sometimes used on the old DecWriters we had in the warehouse– to keep the print heads moving smoothly. So I asked her what she needed “computer oil” for and she said her keyboard was squeaking– all the keys were making “squeaking” sounds when she pressed them. I told here that, under no circumstances would it be correct to put oil inside the keyboard, then I asked her to hold the phone down close to the keyboard so I could hear the squeaking. Turns out the “keyclick” setting had become activated on her dumb terminal so each time a key was pressed there was a small beep. When I was done laughing I told her how to turn the keyclick feature off again.

Doesn’t Double Click

In reply to What is your best and great user

Before I started working in IT at an ISP I
was a consultant for Staples Business Depot.
I had a lady come in and tell me that her
mouse that she just bought wasn’t double
clicking properly. When she tried to double
click it would do strange things and little
windows would pop up. I was a tad confused by
this behavior. During her description of this
problem she was motioning as if she was
clicking both buttons at the same time. I
confirmed with her that she was in fact doing
this and it took every ounce of strength not
to laugh right in front of her. I proceeded
to explain how to use a mouse properly.

I’m out of passwords

In reply to What is your best and great user

A while back, I got a call from a user who was having problems. They had been asked to do a regularly scheduled password change due to it expiring. They typed in a new password, and the system told them they could not reuse a previous password. They tried a different password, and the system told them it didn’t meet the password requirements. Getting frustrated, they tried again and again they were told they couldn’t use a previous password.
“That’s it”, they told me. “You’re going to have to fix this. I’m out of passwords.”
“Fix it how?” I asked.
“You need to give me a different password. I tried all of them that I know.”
I boxed up their computer and returned it to the warehouse.
Not really, just wishful thinking.

My three best

In reply to What is your best and great user

#3. Had a user put in a request that she couldn’t get to email because there was an error message on her screen. I was busy that afternoon, so when I checked it out in the morning, the error message was ‘No Signal’, which the monitor was displaying because her computer was turned off. Apparently she had so many cords behind her desk, that one of them had been pulled a bit and had flipped the ‘hard switch’ on the back of the power supply. It’s a wonder her email wasn’t working though!

#2. User called me up in a panic saying that her excel files were gone. When I got to her machine, I discovered why. Apparently, while in Word, she had opened the Open File dialog box, which Word automatically applies a *.doc filter too. She wanted to delete all the Word documents in a folder, so she figured that since she could only see Word docs in that dialog, that if she deleted that folder, from within that dialog, that it would just delete the Word docs (and leave her excel files in that same folder untouched). Interesting leap of logic, but obviously a gross conceptual error!

#1. My personal all time favorite. Along with network and pc support, I am also a developer. One of my first web based systems was an employee survey system. With the paper version, the HR department would ‘censor’ the essay responses for curse words and real names. So I had to design the system to allow them to ‘censor’ the responses, while maintaining the uncensored version. So I was building a screen to allow them to ‘censor’ the responses, and when I asked if they wanted the original text to be automatically put in the ‘censored’ side, so they could go in and ‘XXX’ out the stuff they wanted to censor, the HR director asked if the users would be able to see the original text behind the XXX’s. I immediately knew where she was getting that concept. In the paper version, they would use a marker to cover the words they wanted to censor, and then they would photo copy that, because if you held the original up to a light you could still see the word that was being censored. So without missing a beat, I responded ‘only if you want to give me the time to create a new font!’.

Expansion Bay is Broken

In reply to What is your best and great user

I got a customer who came by the store to return a pc because the ‘expansion bay’ was broken, she said that when the button was pressed nothing happened, but that the other button worked just fine. I looked at the tower, it was an hp/compaq where the front cover has the spring loaded doors infront of the cd/dvd drives, and it has a button that is also spring loaded and presses the actual button on the cd/dvd drive. I flipped down the door on the top drive and saw the cd/dvd rom was there, I flipped down the door on the expansion bay and there was just the aluminum plate. I explained that of course the expansion bay wouldn’t work, it was an expansion bay, and nothing had been installed there yet!

Save? – What’s That?

In reply to What is your best and great user

Many years ago I ran a computer lab at college. Our high-end PC’s were DEC Rainbows with no hard drive. We had about 12 machines with an additional 2 machines attached to printers. Our DOS-based word processing program was WORDSTAR.

A non-science major had spent the entire day and half the night typing his paper. He really worked hard! I think at around 10PM he decided to print it. Well, the computer he was using was not attached to the printer and subsequently Wordstar sent his document to the “Black Hole” and immediately locked-up the machine. After several minutes he finally asked us what was happening.

Dialog:

Student: “I’m trying to print my paper and nothing’s happening”

Geeks: “You can’t print from that machine. You have to take your floppy over to that computer and print from there.”

Student: “Well I can’t do anything with this machine”

Geeks: “It’s locked up – you gotta shut it down”

Student: “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PAPER!!!!”

Geeks: “It’s gone, man… did you save it?”

Student: “Save? What’s that?”

I really felt sorry for the guy. –Ed

Clever users

In reply to Save? – What’s That?

I work in 2nd/3rd level Unix support, so generally, I do my very best to have no involvement with users where possible. Working for a large company that makes network devices with it’s own R&D, we have some pretty savvy users that spend a lot of time cutting code.

This one particular user was a little bit too clever for his own good. We had a server that would just start grinding to a halt, and eventually lock up to the point it needed a hard reset. The operators had already reset it 3 times, hence why it finally came to me to see what was up.
After spending time trolling through system logs, and checking for hardware errors, I started seeing who was logged in, and what they were doing.
Lo and behold, there was one user that had over 3000 sessions open, and that number kept growing exponentially. To those not super familiar with UNIX/Linux, all users have a file in their home directories called a .profile, which you can customize to change your shell, set your path, define aliases etc.
This guy had inserted a line at the end of his profile that read;
alias sc `/home/username/.profile`

The above line basically means, run my .profile, .profile runs, gets to the last line that says…you guessed it, run my .profile, and on and on and on and on……..in short, a never ending loop opening session after session after session……
That user received a very terse e-mail from me to be more careful with what they do.

some of the smartest people….

In reply to What is your best and great user

We have a policy that all computers need to be shut down at the end of the work day – for various reasons – unless there is a specific reason to keep it running such as need for remote access.

We had a temp helping with our marketing and graphics projects. Our Marketing Director thought she was phenomenal and was considering hiring her. I noticed that this temp was not shutting her computer off. I went to her and reminded her that we shut our computers off daily. She said, “How do I do that?” 🙂 I said, You click Start, Shut Down.

I went to the Marketing Director and said, please do not hire this person. She did. And it’s been a fun ride – one thing after another. She is a loony toons. She does brilliant graphics work though so I guess the good outweighs the bad??? Not for me. I have to deal with her gross lack of common sense.

[Author]

Replies