Computer Stupidities

[Legodude77]

At least three people from our company have come to me panicked, almost crying. They all say, "I think I just erased a program!! Help!!" In reality, it turns out they just minimized the window. When I open it again, they gasp, "What did you DO?!?!?"

I think I won.

[Ad Bot]

[Jerkface]

Sales Clerk 1 handed me a cable.

    Me: "This is a 9-pin cable. I need a 25 pin cable."
    Sales Clerk 2: "Most PC's have 9 pins on their serial cards."
    Me: "I am not attaching a PC. I am attaching a VT100. There are 25 pins on it -- it needs to plug into a 25 pin connector."
    Sales Clerk 2: "Then use the small end to plug into your modem."
    Me: "There are 25 pins on the modem as well. Do you have any 25 pin cables? All I need is a cable with 25 pins at each end."
    Sales Clerk 2: "This is a 25 pin cable."

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHH-  THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

Overheard in a nationwide computer retail store:

    Customer: "Now what does this 512MB of RAM mean on this PC?"
    Salesman: "Umm...RAM is what slows down your PC, see it rams into your processing power, causing slowdowns, thus why it's called RAM."
    Customer: "Are you sure?"
    Salesman: "Who's the expert here?"

I couldn't stop laughing.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HH!!!

[Trifax]

These are really entertaining c;

[Momentum]

A few years ago I visited a computer store and saw a computer equipped with this new Microid Research BIOS which was unfamiliar to me. I would like to know something about the performance of this BIOS, so I asked if it was a fast BIOS. "Well yes!" he answered, "Take a look at this!" He rebooted the computer and pointed at the "Press DEL to enter SETUP" message, which was on the screen for five seconds. Then he rebooted the system again, entered the BIOS, and decreased the "Display enter setup message time" from five seconds to one second, left the BIOS, and rebooted the system once more. While it was booting, he pointed again at the "Press DEL to enter SETUP" message which was now on the screen for just one second. "See how fast it is?" he said proudly. "I increased its speed by a factor of five! Is this a fast BIOS or what?"

HNMG

[Pentium]

I've seen these before, and they're absolutetly hilarious. My favorites are probably the ones from "hardware abuse".

I was on a tech support call yesterday, and one of our stores had a crashed server with a bad motherboard. They did not want to transfer the hard drives over to the new server we were going to send them, so I said, ok, mail the hard drives to me, and we would put them in the new server.

So I got the package this morning, and to my surprise I found...the circuit boards from the hard drives. They took the boards off the hard drives and send them to me.

Grinning, I called the store and asked them to send me "the rest" of the hard drives. I have never ever ever heard of this happening. Now how the heck am I going to find out which hard drive goes with which circuit board, and will there be any way to get them working again?

A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) bought a brand new Toshiba laptop computer last year since his "old" one was a model from the year before. He worked in the computer services office on campus here at our university. He decided one night that to impress his co-workers he would make his new laptop more decorative. He bought a can of emerald green Krylon spray paint and sprayed his entire computer (screen, mouse, keyboard, casing, and all) with it. He was shocked to find that his computer wouldn't work afterwards and decided the paint must be at fault. So the next day he bought a can of Goo Gone and a bottle of paint thinner and poured them both on his computer, then rinsed it off in the sink.

Again, he was shocked when his computer wouldn't work. He was even more shocked when Circuit City told him they wouldn't refund his money or exchange his computer for a new one.

I have heard of computers which died from smoking. How about one which died of industrial disease?

A lot of years ago, a steelworks wanted to replace the old clunky PDP-11 which ran some of their production software with a little 8-bit micro. We modified the FORTRAN software (ugh!), installed it on a then-new Cifer machine, demonstrated it at our offices, and let the steelworks people take it away and install it.

Within a week, they complained that it had completely died. When we went to the site to look at it, we found that it had been installed not in the air-conditioned room where the PDP-11 had lived, but in a walled-off area on the foundry floor where one of its terminals had sat. This area had no roof, was between two large electric-arc furnaces, and was ankle-deep in clinker and rust.

The computer was almost too hot to touch. The sponges inside the fan unit were clogged with iron-oxide powder. The machine ran off two 5.25" floppy drives. We extracted the floppy disks with a gritty crunching noise and found them to be covered with the same rust powder and heated to the point where they were distorted at the edges. We didn't dare even try them in another machine to see if we could recover any data.

A client called Wednesday afternoon. Her computer was dead. All our field techs were booked for the day, so we sent one out first thing Thursday morning. The problem was gone.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

He brought the computer in for service. I ran the computer two days on diagnostics with no problem, and we returned the computer.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

The following Wednesday, we had a tech sit with her all day. At lunchtime, she watered her plants, which, in turned out, she did every Wednesday at lunch. The plant above the computer started leaking.

A friend worked for a company that made IC's. Every few months, their yields would go down to about zero. brown townysis of the failures showed all sorts of organic material was introduced in the process, but they couldn't figure out where. One evening, someone was working late and came into the lab. There he found the maintainence crew cooking pizza in the chip curing ovens!

Recently we were trying to talk one of our customers through an installation of an SBUS card in a Sun SPARCstation 20. About halfway through the install, at a point where we had the top off the machine and had been swapping RAM, moving hard drives, and moving SBUS cards around for a while, one of the people at the remote site commented that "funny things" were happening on her monitor. It was at that point that I realized that she had never turned the computer off.

All these anecdotes make me feel much better -- it's so comforting to know I'm not the only person surrounded by people who seem to lose multiple IQ points when in the presence of a computer. I teach Windows 2000, Novell, and Linux networking at a community college in South Africa, where a large percentage of the students coming through our doors are from rural communities only just receiving electricity, never mind computers and/or Internet access.

Some gems I've come across include one very sweet and well mannered farm girl insisting on ending every console command with "please," as she didn't want the computer to think she was rude, a student who managed to bend a PS2 connector out of shape enough to jam it halfway into a USB port using nothing but his teeth, and, my personal favourite, a guy who brought food to class every day and warmed his lunch by opening his computer's case and putting his tinfoil parcel onto the CPU's heatsink. Amazingly it didn't cause damage until the stew he brought on the next to last day leaked out and shorted not just his machine but the entire floor of the building. What frightens me most is that he was genuinely shocked that we were shouting at him about it.

Once we had a customer bring his system into our service center. He seemed to know a little about computers but thought he was an expert, so as soon as I started to ask a few basic questions about his hard drive problems, he said, "Look, I know that it's the hard drive thats stick because when I do this it works again." As he spoke, he lifted the back of the tower off the bench by about four inches and dropped it.

My jaw dropped by about the same amount, and my supervisor, who was nearby at the time, just stared at the system. I recovered enough to say, "Well, we'll take care of it now, so why don't I just take that over here...."

Apparently he had been using this method to get his system going for the past three months, but lately it was not working as well as it used to. Surprise, surprise!

Once I went to a customer's house to see what was wrong with her computer. It turned out that, since she had a lot of cats, she'd wrapped the entire computer in plastic wrap to keep the cat hair out. It had overheated so badly that the inside had turned black.

I work at an ISP in the United Kingdom. The most shocking call I received came from a student at a local college here. He had received a CD for an ISP from an American friend.
Customer: "Hi there. I got this CD from an American, and he says that his ISP is better than mine because the calls are free. So can I install it?"
Me: "Yes sir, that's your choice completely. But is this an American ISP? Because if so, I don't think it will work with your computer."
Customer: "Listen, I happen to be a computer student. I know exactly what I'm doing, so don't insult my intelligence!" (click)

Ten minutes later, he called back, humbled.
Customer: "My computer exploded."
Me: "What!? How did that happen?"
Customer: "Well, the CD didn't work. I couldn't get through to the ISP. So, I changed the computer to American power."

He'd changed the voltage switch while the computer was on, causing the power supply to explode.

At college we had a lesson in which we set up problems for each other to diagnose and fix. For example, we'd not put the RAM in properly, plug IDE leads the wrong way, etc. Some clever person thought that it would be a good idea to switch the voltage on the PSU. The person "fixing" the PC plugged it in, turned it on, and BANG!

A new technician was sent into the field to install a new video card. About the time they began to wonder if something was wrong, the technician called in. "I have the monitor apart, I just can't figure out where to install the video card."

[NEkram]

Once a customer asked me if there could be virus attached to a printed file that would infect his computer if he scanned it back in.

lol

[Momentum]

All these anecdotes make me feel much better -- it's so comforting to know I'm not the only person surrounded by people who seem to lose multiple IQ points when in the presence of a computer. I teach Windows 2000, Novell, and Linux networking at a community college in South Africa, where a large percentage of the students coming through our doors are from rural communities only just receiving electricity, never mind computers and/or Internet access.

Some gems I've come across include one very sweet and well mannered farm girl insisting on ending every console command with "please," as she didn't want the computer to think she was rude, a student who managed to bend a PS2 connector out of shape enough to jam it halfway into a USB port using nothing but his teeth, and, my personal favourite, a guy who brought food to class every day and warmed his lunch by opening his computer's case and putting his tinfoil parcel onto the CPU's heatsink. Amazingly it didn't cause damage until the stew he brought on the next to last day leaked out and shorted not just his machine but the entire floor of the building. What frightens me most is that he was genuinely shocked that we were shouting at him about it.

oh god

[Lando The Climber]

Customer: "I need you to tell me what browser I am using. Is it Netscape 2.0? The reason I need to know is that I have read that Netscape 2.0 distributes a virus called Java."

[Blocky943]

Customer: "How do I get online with your service? Do I need disks?"
Tech Support: "Well, I'll give you a call back in about 15 minutes once I'm done setting up your account on our end, and then I'll explain over the phone to you how to get online."
Customer: "Wow! How do you do that!? I mean, you didn't send me anything, and I don't have to do anything? Don't I have to, like, plug in the Internet or something?"

What the forget is this shiz

A man called, and he was EXTREMELY upset. He was yelling and carrying on, very angry with his last ISP. He wanted to know our prices and services, so as always I told him what we offer and what we could do for him.

Customer: "Well, good, I'll go with you. I was using that *^@#$%ing AOL, and I hated them &^$@#%*s!"
Tech Support: "What was the problem?"
Customer: "Well, EVERY single time I signed off AOL, this smart-@$$ guy kept telling me 'goodbye' in this smart-@$$ tone, so I canceled them!"

It was really painful to repress my laughter.

HAHAHAHAHAH

[Otis Da HousKat]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-  THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HH!!!

I actually submitted the second story you quoted there.

[Mr.jacksaunt]

Customer: "I think I've broken my computer! There's a message across the screen that says: 'It is now safe to turn off your PC.' WHAT SHOULD I DO?!?!"

[Electrk]

My brother-in-law was going to buy my sister a new computer for her birthday. He told me he was even going to buy her a copy of Google for it. She's so lucky.

[Legodude77]

Back in my "less mature" days, I loved nothing better than going to electrical shops (not specialist PC dealers, but the type of place where you can by toasters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc) and winding up the less experienced salesmen.

So I hung out in the shop one Saturday and poked around the PCs until a salesman approached me.

Salesman: "Can I help you, sir?"
Me: "Could you tell me about this PC?"
Salesman: "Well sir, this PC comes with..." (reads the specs off the display card)
Me: "Ok, but what is the clock speed of the CPU?"
Salesman: "Oh, you'll have no worries there. It's 24 hour."
Me: (trying to keep a straight face) "But that's no good to me. I'm really bad with 24 hour times."
Salesman: "That's not a problem. This PC comes pre-loaded with Windows 97, which can convert the PC back to a 12 hour clock if you prefer that."
Me: "Ok, I'll think about it."
I had to leave the shop and sit on a bench until my sides stopped hurting.

Ahaha

[SpreadsPlague]

    Tech Support: "I need you to boot the computer."
    Customer: (THUMP! Pause.) "No, that didn't help."

can we all just stop and appreciate this for a second

[Superbot]

Back in 2001 our public library had a bunch of Internet terminals running Windows 98 with Internet Explorer. I sat down at one and logged on to check my email. Behind me, I heard a computer reboot. A few minutes I heard it reboot again. So I turned around and watched the man at the terminal behind me. Here was his routine:

Login to his library account.
Open Internet Explorer.
Go to a web site.
Click on a link, which took him to another page.
Read the page.
Reboot.
Wait.
Login to his library account.
Open Internet Explorer.
Go to the same web site he was just on.
Click on a different link on that page.
I told him about the 'back' button.

holy loving stuff.