Her car was speeding along Interstate 80 at well over 80 miles an hour when it passed by a State Trooper’s position…
Obviously, the officer was compelled to pull the young female driver over and he asked to see her license.
After looking it over, he said to her, “It stipulates here on your license that you should be wearing glasses.”
“Well, I have contacts,” the woman replied.
“Look lady, I don’t care who you know,” snapped the officer. “You’re getting a ticket.”
The following exchanges are taken from transcripts of 911 calls.
Sung to the tune of “Let it Be” by the Beatles
When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
“Write in C.”
As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
“Write in C.”
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
LOGO’s dead and buried,
Write in C.
I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
If you’ve just spent nearly 30 hours,
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
BASIC’s not the answer.
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
Pascal won’t quite cut it.
Write in C.
Actual dialog of a WordPerfect Customer Support employee:
“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 not ready to own a computer.”
Know what you call webmeisters who get married? …….Newlywebs.
Let me share some of the newlywebbed bliss with you. Most folks would register at Macy’s or Foley’s or Dilliard’s or some place normal. Not Dick and Jane. They’re registered with PC Warehouse and Mac Connection (URLs available upon request).
The families did require Dick and Jane to provide a more traditional list of wants and needs however. So ultimately, they compiled, er, complied. They included the normal stuff… blender, toaster oven, electric mixer, food processor. But they categorized them all as ‘plug-ins.’
There was a moment or two of roughness. Jane kept arguing that communication was important in a marriage, so Dick finally bought another computer and a second phone line so he and Jane could chat. The topic of their first real spat though…Mac vs. Windows.
At work, Dick has been introducing Jane as his future “service provider.” Turn-about is fair play, of course; and Jane isn’t referring to Dick as her future husband. She says he’s a forthcoming Add-On (currently in Beta release).
Thus far at all showers and pre-ceremony events Dick and Jane have seemed very happy. How happy? It’s sickening. They keep tilting their heads sideways to smile at each other. 🙂
Now, don’t get me wrong. Dick and Jane are very serious about this endeavor. They have put an access counter on the door to the church and the reception hall. The reception will be a little bare compared to most though. They’re serving cookies and java.
The plan for the wedding? Dick and Jane have written the ceremony themselves…in HTML. The ushers will just pass out little slips of paper with URLS. All invitations came with a little slip of paper that said ‘This wedding best viewed with Netscape Navigator.’
Dick and Jane will spend all their days and nights of their honeymoon…. [the remainder of message has been censored by the Coalition for A Clean Internet].
New York — People for Ethical Treatment of Software (PETS) announced today that seven more software companies have been added to the group’s “watch list” of companies that regularly practice software testing.
“There is no need for software to be mistreated in this way so that companies like these can market new products,” said Ken Grandola, spokesperson for PETS. “Alternative methods of testing these products are available.”
According to PETS, these companies force software to undergo lengthy and arduous tests, often without rest, for hours or days at a time. Employees are assigned to “break” the software by any means necessary, and inside sources report that they often joke
about “torturing” the software.
“It’s no joke,” said Grandola. “Innocent programs, from the day they are compiled, are cooped up in tiny rooms and “crashed” for hours on end. They spend their whole lives on dirty, ill-maintained computers, and are unceremoniously deleted when they’re not needed anymore.”
Grandola said the software is kept in unsanitary conditions and is infested with bugs.
“We know that alternatives to this horror exist,” he said, citing industry giant Microsoft Corporation as a company that has become successful without resorting to software testing.
Scon is short for Student Consultant. Scons are people hired to help users learn and work with the university’s machinery. A pod is a UNM term for a place where such machinery is made available.
| El Explicito | “I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it doesn’t, ya know?” |
| Advantages | Provides interesting communication challenges. |
| Disadvantages | So do chimps. |
| Symptoms | Complete inability to use proper nouns |
| Real Case | One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager and said, “I can’t get what I want!” The pod manager leaned back, put his hands on his belt-buckle, and said, “Well, ma’am, you’ve come to the right place.” |
| Mad Bomber | “Well, I hit ALT-F6, SHIFT-F8, CTRL-F10, F4, and F9, and now it looks all weird.” |
| Advantages | Will try to find own solution to problems. |
| Disadvantages | User might have translated document to Navajo without meaning to. |
| Symptoms | More than six stopped jobs in UNIX, a 2:1 code-to-letter ratio in WordPerfect |
| Real Case | One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document was underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found that he’d set and unset underline more than fifty times in his document. |
| Frying Pan/Fire Tactician | “It didn’t work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt’s recipe for key lime pie.” |
| Advantages | Will usually fix error. |
| Disadvantages | “Fix” is defined very loosely here. |
| Symptoms | A tendancy to delete lines that get errors instead of fixing them. |
| Real Case | One user complained that their program executed, but didn’t do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty minutes before realizing that they’d commented out every line. The user said, “Well, that was the only way I could get it to compile.” |
| Shaman | “Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and Formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did compile.” |
| Advantages | Gives insight into primative mythology. |
| Disadvantages | Few scons are anthropology majors. |
| Symptoms | Frequent questions about irrelavent objects. |
| Real Case | One user complained that all information on one of their disks got erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but empty sectors, I suspect nothing had ever been on it). Reasoning that the deleted information went *somewhere*, they wouldn’t shut up until the scon checked four different disks for the missing information. |
| X-user | “Will you look at those…um, that resolution, quite impressive, really.” |
| Advantages | Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology. |
| Disadvantages | Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in graphics technology. |
| Symptoms | Fuzzy hands, blindness |
| Real Case | When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me at DEC station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter while, for twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to act like they were doing exectly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn’t log in. |
| Miracle Worker | “But it read a file from it yesterday!” “Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swallowed and regurgitated. “But I did that a month ago, and it read a file from it yesterday!” |
| Advantages | Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren’t around. |
| Disadvantages | People complain when scons actually use the word “horse-puckey.” |
| Symptoms | Loses all ability to do impossible when you’re around. Must be the kryptonite in your pocket. |
| Real Case | At least three users have claimed that they’ve loaded IBM WordPerfect from Macintosh disks. |
| Taskmaster | “Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it to MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM, convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?” |
| Advantages | Bold new challanges. |
| Disadvantages | Makes one wish to be a garbage collector. |
| Symptoms | An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendancies to make machines do things they don’t want to do. |
| Real Case | One user tried to get a scon to find out what another person’s E-mail address was even though the user didn’t know his target’s home system, account name, or real name. |
| Maestro | “Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this, and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after that I picked my nose, like this. . .” |
| Advantages | Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error. |
| Disadvantages | For as long as five or six hours. |
| Symptoms | Selective deafness to the phrase, “Right, right, okay, but what was the error?”, and a strong fondness for the phrase, “Well, I’m getting to that.” |
| Real Case | I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user’s shoulder while they continuously retrieved a document into itself and denied that they did it (the user was complaining that their document was 87 copies of the same thing). |
| Princess (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males) |
“I need a Mac, and someone’s got the one I like reserved, would you please garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?” |
| Advantages | Flatters you with their high standards for your service. |
| Disadvantages | Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people on this planet. |
| Symptoms | Inability to communicate except by complaining. |
| Real Case | One asked a scon to remove the message of the day because he (the user) didn’t like it. |