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Someone complained he couldn’t get his disk out. I said, “Type Command-E (Eject) when you’re in the Finder.” He came back. It didn’t work. I said, “Type Command-Shift-1.” He came back. It didn’t work. I then said, “Reboot the Mac while holding the mouse button pressed until the disk ejects.” He came back. It didn’t work. So I decided I’d have a look at it myself. He had succeeded in cramming 2 disks in the same disk drive. Any guess what… they were stuck!!! … computers!!!
Man comes in, in a panic. He had typed a document the day before, and now it was all gone. “Have you saved it properly?” was of course my first question. Yes, he said, it was saved properly. But all the text had mysteriously disappeared. On his disk, I found a completely empty document. Indeed it was saved, apparently, and indeed it did not contain text. Of course, he had saved the document right BEFORE he started typing. When it was finished, he took out his disk and shut down the computer. And now all that text was gone, even though he had SAVED!!! … To top it all off, he got mad at ME when I told him the only thing he could do was retype the whole thing. Was I ****ing nuts or something???
Someone comes in and asks me how to print a document. I explain about the Page Setup (making sure the user selected “A4 Letter” as his document size, the one for our LaserWriter) and then selecting the Print command in the File menu. Happy, the user walks away. Comes back in two minutes. Still no document with his name on our spooler. "Make sure you have selected the Info-Groep Laser Spooler, I said. He had checked. It WAS selected. “Have you issued the Print command yet?” Of course, what did I think he was, a ****ing dummy? So I went over to have a look. The “Print” dialog box was still on his screen. I clicked on the “Print” button… “Oooooooh, you have to click on Print!!!”
Our computer center has both PCs and Macs, and the most frequent stupid error is people who create a file on a Mac, and try to edit it later on a PC. When I tell them that they have to use a Mac to edit their Mac files, they look at me and say, “But all the Macs are being used.” Most of them eventually accept that they have to stick with one type of computer, but I have gotten into some extended arguments with a couple of stubborn users.
Of course, there are people that try to retrieve a file from the A: drive, when their disk is in the B: drive. The first time I can see, but after the little light comes on in the wrong drive, you’d think they’d figure it out…
Here where I work (research clinic) one of the secretaries recently complained to me that she just saved a file on a disk but now it wouldn’t read it. Apparently, she had put the 5.25" floppy sideways (with the slot on one side) into the drive.
Another incident I remember froma a few years ago when I worked at the computer center of the University: a student came in a complained that she saved a file (Mac) earlier that day, but now she can’t find it.
Computer assistant: And which Mac did you use earlier when you saved it?
Student: Oh, this same one.
Computer assistant: Perhaps it’s on the harddrive…
Student: No, some other assistant saved it on my disk for me.
Computer assistant: (Looks for disk icon, looks in drive, can’t find the disk) Where’s the disk?
Student: In my bag…
I personally love the reaction of some people to the screen savers on the Macintoshes in our computer lab. I was sitting next to a blonde (at that point I didn’t place any significance on this fact) who was typing a paper, and by the way she was doing it, it was clear that this was just about her first time. Well, a friend of hers sat at the computer across from hers, and they started chatting… and yup, the screensaver kicked in.
The scream was heard, I was told, around two corners in the hallway.
But there’s more… after she’d nearly passed out, her friend just told her to move the mouse to get back to what she was doing, that she didn’t lose anything, in fact.
She didn’t count on the fact that when her friend jumped up in hysteria she’d bumped the keyboard/mouse connector out of the socket…
I also heard a story of a guy doing tech support for a small company. A lady called in telling him the company’s software wouldn’t work. He went through a bunch of questions about how the software was acting, and came to discover that the lady was having troubles getting her computer to turn on.
He asked her, “What happens when you turn the computer on?”.
She replied, “The screen just stays black”.
He then asked, “Is the computer plugged in?”.
She replied, “I took it to a repair shop last week and they apparently fixed it so it doesn’t need a power cord anymore.”
He asked, “Is the computer a laptop computer?”.
She replied, “No, but they never gave me back the power cord so they must have fixed it so it didn’t need it.”
He said, “Go back to the repair store and get back your power cord. They just forgot to give it to you.”
cartoon seen in an old computer magazine:
little boy sitting in a pile of diskettes, he’s holding a horseshoe magnet. Father is in the adjoining room doing some take-home work.
“Dad, you’ve been jipped. None of these are magnetic”
A salesperson hoping to demonstrate to a skeptical corp. how easy it is to use windows.
Just point and click" he says. “Just point to the application you want and click on the mouse button.”
So the exec take the mouse, lifts it, hefts it like a tv.remote points at the screen and clicks the button.
A foreign gentleman came in needing help using a word processor to write a letter. I took him over to a Mac and gave him a brief overview of its capabilities and commands and left him at a point where he could just start typing. He looked at me, puzzled. See, he didn’t know how to type. Not just that he didn’t know how to type well, but it was like he didn’t understand the concept of typing (the ‘s’ key puts an s on the screen). Eventually I ended up typing it for him bacause it was easier than arguing with him.
Another gentleman came to us frantic. The day before he had saved a very important document on the hard drive of one of our Macs and he could not find it. He was yelling at me that our lab employees must have deleted it and we need to have more respect for users, etc. (We have a policy of allowing documents to remain in the hard drives for 7 days before being erased by the staff.) I helped him look for his paper, but when I couldn’t find it, I explained our policy and the fact that we can’t control what other users might do with a document left on a computer. He was not happy. Then in a sudden flash of genius I asked him, “You were using this particular Mac, weren’t you?” to which he responded, “No, I was using one in the other room.”
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