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These remind me of another story I heard (or probably read on rec.humor. It was told by an instructor who taught programming in BASIC language.
He had given them step-by-step instructions on how to write a short program that would let you enter two numbers and the computer would return the sum of the two numbers.
When each student had all their program steps keyed in, he told the class to type RUN and enter. A lady in the back of the class said, “It didn’t work.” The instructor once again told her to simply type RUN and enter. Still didn’t work. So the instructor walked back to see what the problem was. It was obvious. He had been spelling out “R” “U” “N”…she had typed “are you in”.
A user came up and wanted to know why their 3.5" disk wouldn’t go into the Mac’s floppy drive. I check out the disk, noted that it was okay, and then walked over to the offending machine, suspecting a hardware problem with the disk mechanism.
As I moved to insert the disk into the drive to test things out, the user interrupted me:
“No! Not that drive…this one.”
“This” drive, of course, turned out to be a CD-ROM.
Every now and then, when users work on documents on multiple disks, the Mac’s will tell them to insert their other disk. And sometimes, you get to catch people trying to put two disks in the same drive at the same time.
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I was at the local computer shop and I happened to be in the tech area talking to one of my friends there and I overheard this woman say to another technician the following:
“I am running WinFax to receive my faxes. I want to know if I have to leave the computer running in order to do this.”
It was all I could do to from bursting out loud and rolling on the floor laughing.
At my first real world programming position, we sent out updates on 8" floppy disks. To save time/energy, we put the following on the disk labels:
1) Insert disk in drive <A>
2) Press ^C (control-C)
3) type A:INSTALL <RETURN>
We got a call from one of our users (um, “customers”). She said “I don’t know what to do. I inserted the disk in the drive, but then I forgot what the next step was.”
This was the turning point for me. I finally realized just how foolproof things needed to be. (We sent out paper copies with instructions after that.)
While I was working in a placement office at the University, we helped students write their resumes on the computer. A student came up to me and said he had problems reading the disk. I asked him to show it to me so I could see if I could recover the files, “sure.” he said, an took the disk (5 1/4" floppy) out of his pocket and unfolded it.
Another time, while working at a computer store, somebody who bought his computer from us was having trouble with one of his disks. The man was living in another city, so I asked him to send me a copy of the disk, and I would take a look at it. A few days later, an envelope arrived for me, it contained a “photocopy” of the front and back side of the disk.
I overheard a nice conversation one day in a computer shop:
customer: I’d like a mouse mat please.
assistant: certainly sir,we’ve got a large variety.
customer while looking at said mats then asked:
“But will they be compatible with my computer?”
All i could do to keep a straight face was walk out of the shop.
A friend of mine works at Word Perfect in Orem UT. He had a lady call up and tell him she couldn’t figure out how to install the program.
He told her "Insert Disk1 into the disk drive and type “INSTALL WP”. He then proceeded to have her insert disk 2 through 4 in sequential order. She then stop him to ask if it would be alright to remove the previous four disks because the fifth wouldn’t fit.
The best protection against computer viruses is to keep the cover on the
floppy disk when you insert it into the drive
Don’t laugh. At the store in which I used to work we actually had people come in with disks stuck in their Macs and on the disks the plastic disk cover. One of the downsides of being “easiest to use” is that you do get a lot of bonehead customers. To paraphrase John Dvorak, the only interfaces which are truly intuitive are rocks and mud.
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