Resourceful Computer Users

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Computers will never be completely “Idiot Proof” because Idiots continue to be so resourceful.

The following is an excerpt taken from a Wall Street journal article:

  • Compaq is considering changing the command “Press Any Key” to “Return Key” because of the flood of calls asking where the “Any” key is.
  • AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.
  • Another Compaq technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn’t read word processing files from his old (5.1/4″) diskettes. After trouble shooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the customer had labelled the diskettes, then rolled them into the typewriter to type the labels.
  • Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with photocopies of the floppies.
  • A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. Th customer asked the tech “hold on”, and was heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his room.
  • Another Dell customer called to say he couldn’t get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the “send” key.
  • Yet another Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it by filling up his tub with soap and water soaked the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys and washing them individually.
  • A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was “bad and an invalid”. The tech explained that the computer’s “bad command” and “invalid” responses shouldn’t be taken personally.
  • A confused caller to IBM was having troubles printing documents. He told the technician that the computer had said it “couldn’t find printer”. The user had even tried turning the computer screen to face the printer – but his computer still couldn’t “see” the printer.
  • An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn’t get her new Dell computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, “I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happened”. The “foot pedal” turned out to be the computer’s mouse.
  • Another customer called Compaq tech support to say her brand-new computer wouldn’t work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it in and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked “What power switch?”
  • True story from a Novell Netwire SysOp:

    Caller : “Hello, is this Tech Support?”
    Tech: “Yes, it is. How may I help you?”
    Caller: “The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?”
    Tech: “I’m sorry, but did you say a cup holder?”
    Caller: “Yes, it’s attached to the front of my computer.”
    Tech : “Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, it’s because I am. Did you receive this as a part of a promotion, at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?”
    Caller : “It came with my computer, I don’t know anything about a promotion. It just has “4X” on it.”

    At this point the Tech Rep had to mute the caller, because he couldn’t stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off in the drive.

  • Another IBM customer had trouble installing software and rang for support. “I put in the first disk, and that was OK. It said to put in the second disk, and I had some problems with the disk. When it said to put in the third disk – I couldn’t even fit it in …” The user hadn’t realised that “Insert Disk 2” meant to remove Disk 1 first.
  • In a similar incident, a customer had followed the instructions for installing software. The instructions said to remove the disk from its cover and insert it into the drive. The user had physically removed the casing of the disk and wondered why there were problems. Say no more…

The Computerized Toaster

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Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What
do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller,
I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen
waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign
the toaster in just a few years.”

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs,
hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”

“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some
derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent
processing is required, too.”

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v. 12.3’ appears on the screen. (UNIX 12.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 16MB of memory, a 160MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

Rules for Computer Technical Support

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A peek into the thoughts of computer techs worldwide …an end user’s guide to technical services.

  • When a tech says he’s coming right over, log out and go for coffee. It’s no problem for us to remember 2700 network passwords.
  • When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and Popsicle art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
  • When tech support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re probably just testing out the public groups.
  • When a tech is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts out and expect him to respond immediately. We exist only to serve and are always ready to think about fixing computers.
  • When a tech is at the water cooler or outside having a smoke, ask him a computer question. The only reason why we drink water or smoke at all is to ferret out all those users who don’t have eMail or a telephone line.
  • Send urgent eMail ALL IN UPPERCASE. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
  • When you call a tech’s direct line, press 5 to skip the bilingual greeting that says he’s out of town for a week, record your message, and wait exactly 24 hours before you send an eMail straight to the director because no one ever returned your call. You’re entitled to common courtesy.
  • When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it, right?
  • When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can even fix telephone problems from here.
  • When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on a tech’s chair with no name, no phone number, and no description of the problem. We love a good mystery.
  • When you have a tech on the phone walking you through changing a setting; read the paper. We don’t actually mean for you to DO anyhing; we just love to hear ourselves talk.
  • When we offer training on the upcoming OS upgrade, don’t bother. We’ll be there to hold your hand after it is done.
  • When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently just disappear into the cosmos for no reason.
  • When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the office. One of them is bound to work.
  • Don’t use online help. Online help is for wimps.
  • If you’re taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go around and update the network drivers for you and all your coworkers. We’re grateful for the overtime when we have to stay until 2:30am fixing them.
  • When you have a tech fixing your computer at a quarter past one, eat your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly dizzy.
  • Don’t ever thank us. We love this AND we get paid for it!
  • When a tech asks you whether you’ve installed any new software on this computer, lie. It’s nobody’s business what you’ve got on your computer.
  • If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.
  • If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards work much better with half a pound of muffin crumbs, nail clippings, and big sticky drops of Coke under the keys.
  • When you get the message saying “Are you sure?”, click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?
  • Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that computer crap”. It never bothers us to hear our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.
  • When you need to change the toner cartridge, call tech support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a Master’s degree in nuclear physics.
  • When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn’t know anything about the problem.
  • When you receive a 30-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a high-priority mail attachment. We’ve got plenty of disk space and processor capacity on that mail server.
  • Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. God forbid somebody else might get a chance to squeeze into the queue.
  • When you bump into a tech in the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We work 24/7, even while at the grocery store on weekends.
  • If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on the weekends and do his projects on your office computer. We’ll be there for you when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access database flip out.
  • When you bring us your own no-brand home PC to repair for free at the office, tell us how urgently we need to fix it so your son can get back to playing DOOM. We’ll get right on it because we have so much free time at the office. Everybody knows all we do is surf the Internet all day anyway.

I Am In Desperate Need of…

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Somebody who can invent a stove that connects to your computer. It must have flags that pop up and say things like:

  • Add More Water To Your Pan – Your Pan Is Ready To Boil Over. Do you want this? Click on Yes or No
  • Your Pork Chops Are Burning. Do you want this? Click on Yes or No
  • Do You Intend To Turn The Burner On Or Just Let Water Sit On It? Click on Yes or No
  • It Is Now Time To Add The (seasoning, mix, etc) To The (Whatever you’re cooking) – Do you want this? Click on Yes or No
  • Please Stir The Pudding – Do you want this? Click on Yes or No
  • Caution! Caution! Your Kitchen Curtains Are On Fire! Do You Want This? Please Click On Yes Or No, etc.

My computer and my stove don’t seem to interact for some reason. I think to myself, “Surely the Rice-A-Roni won’t burn until I finish just this one email” and guess what. By the time I finish emailing and get out to the stove, it’s already turned brown and is sticking to the non-stick
skillet.

If you’re an inventor, please help me!

Computer T-Shirt Slogans

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  • Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
  • As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
  • COFFEE.EXE missing – Insert Cup and Press Any Key.
  • Southern DOS: Y’all reckon? (Yep/Nope)
  • Buy a Pentium 586/90 so you can reboot faster.
  • Backups! We don’ NEED no steenking backups.
  • 4 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
  • E Pluribus Modem
  • Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
  • File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
  • Ethernet (n): Something used to catch the Etherbunny
  • Computers are not intelligent; they only think they are
  • A main-frame: The biggest PC peripheral available.
  • My software never has bugs. lt just develops undocumented features.
  • An error? Impossible! My modem is error-correcting
  • C:WINDOWS C:WINDOWSGO C:PCCRAWL
  • CONGRESS.SYS Corrupted: Re-boot Washington D.C. (Y/N)?
  • C:DOS C:DOSRUN RUNDOSRUN
  • <-------- The information went data way
  • Does fuzzy logic tickle?
  • Best file compression around- "DEL *.*" = 100% compression
  • A computer’s attention span is as long as its power cord.
  • The Definition of an Upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in.
  • 11th commandment: Covet not thy neighbor’s Pentium
  • BREAKFAST.COM Halted .. Cereal Port Not Responding
  • 24 hours in a day … 24 beers in a case…Coincidence???
  • The name is Baud, James Baud.
  • Disinformation is not as good as datinformation.
  • BUFFERS FILES 2nd down, 4th quarter, 5 yards to go
  • Windows: Just another pane in the glass.
  • SENILE.COM found… Out Of Memory…
  • Access denied! Nah nah na na nah nah!
  • Who’s General Failure & why is he reading my disk??
  • C:Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner!
  • Ultimate office automation: Net-worked coffee.
  • Bad command. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay!
  • RAM disk is NOT an installation procedure.
  • Why doesn’t DOS ever say ‘EXCELLENT’
  • Shell to DOS, Come in DOS, do you COPY?
  • All computers wait at the same speed.
  • Computer: A device designed to speed and automate errors.
  • Go ahead, make my data!
  • Smash forehead on keyboard to continue…
  • Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue…
  • ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!
  • E-mail returned to sender: Insufficient voltage.
  • Help! I’m modeming… and I can’t hang up!!!
  • All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?
  • Error! Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue.
  • DOS Tip #1701: Add DEVICE=FNGRCROS.SYS to CONFIG.SYS
  • Hidden DOS secret: Add BUGS=OFF to your CONFIG.SYS
  • Press any key to continue or any other key to quit…
  • Press any key… no, No, NO!! Not THAT one!
  • Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue …

Warning!

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This machine is subject to breakdowns during periods of critical need.

A special circuit in the machine called a ‘critical detector’ senses the operator’s emotional state in terms of how desperate he or she is to use the machine. The ‘critical detector’ then creates a malfunction proportional to the desperation of the operator. Threatening the machine with violence only aggravates the situation. Likewise, attempts to use another machine may cause it to also malfunction. They belong to the same union. Keep cool and say nice things to the machine. Nothing else seems to work.

Real Computer Scientists Don’t Write Code

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Real computer scientists don’t write code. They occasionally tinker with ‘programming systems’, but those are so high level that they hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications.)

Real computer scientists don’t comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can’t afford the disk space.

Real computer scientists don’t write the user interfaces, they merely argue over what they should look like.

Real computer scientists don’t eat quiche. They shun Szchezuan food since the hackers discovered it. Many real computer scientists consider eating an implementation detail. (Others break down and eat with the hackers, but only if they can have ice cream for desert.)

If it doesn’t have a programming environment complete with interactive debugger, structure editor and extensive cross module type checking, real computer scientists won’t be seen tinkering with it. They may have to use it to balance their checkbooks, as their own systems can’t.

Real computer scientists don’t program in assembler. They don’t write in anything less portable than a number two pencil.

Real computer scientists don’t debug programs, they dynamically modify them. This is safer, since no one has invented a way to do anything dynamic to FORTRAN, COBOL or BASIC.

Real computer scientists like C’s structured constructs, but they are suspicious of it because its compiled. (Only Batch freaks and efficiency weirdos bother with compilers, they’re soooo un-dynamic.)

Real computer scientists play go. They have nothing against the concept of mountain climbing, but the actual climbing is an implementation detail best left to programmers.

Real computer scientists admire ADA for its overwhelming aesthetic value, but they find it difficult to actually program in, as it is much too large to implement. Most Computer scientists don’t notice this because they are still arguing over what else to add to ADA.

Real computer scientists work from 5 pm to 9 am because that’s the only time they can get the 8 gigabytes of main memory they need to edit specs. (Real work starts around 2 am when enough MIPS are free for their dynamic systems.) Real computer scientists find it hard to share 3081s when they are doing ‘REAL’ work.

Real computer scientists only write specs for languages that might run on future hardware. Nobody trusts them to write specs for anything homo sapiens will ever be able to fit on a single planet.

Real computer scientists like planning their own environments to use bit mapped graphics. Bit mapped graphics is great because no one can afford it, so their systems can be experimental.

Real computer scientists regret the existence of PL/I, PASCAL and LISP. ADA is getting there, but it is still allows people to make mistakes.

Real computer scientists love the concept of users. Users are always real impressed by the stuff computer scientists are talking about; it sure sounds better than the stuff they are being forced to use now.

Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn’t. It’s a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.

Real computer scientists love conventions. No one is expected to lug a 3081 attached to a bit map screen to a convention, so no one will ever know how slow their systems run.

Computers and Electronics as Depicted in the Movies

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  • You never have to use the space-bar when typing long sentences.
  • All monitors display inch-high letters.
  • High-tech computers, such as those used by NASA, the CIA, or some such governmental institution, will have easy to understand graphical interfaces. Those that don’t, have incredibly powerful text-bases command shells that can correctly understand and execute commands typed in plain English.
  • Corollary: you can gain access to any information you want by simply typing “ACCESS ALL OF THE SECRET FILES” on any keyboard.
  • Likewise, you can infect a computer with a destructive virus by simply typing “UPLOAD VIRUS” (see “Fortress”).
  • All computers are connected. You can access the information on the villain’s desktop computer, even if it’s turned off.
  • Powerful computers beep whenever you press a key or whenever the screen changes. Some computers also slow down the output on the screen so that it doesn’t go faster than you can read. The *really* advanced ones also emulate the sound of a dot-matrix printer.
  • All computer panels have thousands of volts and flash pots just underneath the surface. Malfunctions are indicated by a bright flash, a puff of smoke, a shower of sparks, and an explosion that forces you backwards.
  • People typing away on a computer will turn it off without saving the data.
  • A hacker can get into the most sensitive computer in the world before intermission and guess the secret password in two tries.
  • Any PERMISSION DENIED has an OVERRIDE function (see “Demolition Man” and countless others).
  • Complex calculations and loading of huge amounts of data will be accomplished in under three seconds. Movie modems usually appear to transmit data at the speed of two gigabytes per second.
  • When the power plant/missile site/whatever overheats, all the control panels will explode, as will the entire building.
  • If a disk has got encrypted files, you are automatically asked for a password when you try to access it.
  • No matter what kind of computer disk it is, it’ll be readable by any system you put it into. All application software is usable by all computer platforms The more high-tech the equipment, the more buttons it has (Aliens). However, everyone must have been highly trained, because the buttons aren’t labeled.
  • Most computers, no matter how small, have reality-defying three-dimensional, active animation, photo-realistic graphics capability.
  • Laptops, for some strange reason, always seem to have amazing real-time video phone capabilities and the performance of a CRAY Supercomputer.
  • Whenever a character looks at a VDU, the image is so bright that it projects itself onto his/her face (see “Alien”, “2001”).

Are Computers Male or Female?

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Five reasons to believe computers are female:

  • No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
  • The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
  • The message “Bad command or file name” is about as informative as, “If you don’t know why I’m mad at you, then I’m certainly not going to tell you”.
  • Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
  • As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

However, another group of computer scientists (all female) think that computers should be referred to as if they were male. Their reasons follow:

  • They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
  • They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
  • As soon as you commit to one you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.
  • In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
  • Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.

Both sides present compelling arguments. Only you can decide whether your computer is male or female.

The Computer Hillbillies

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Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed,
A poor college kid, barely kept his family fed,
But one day he was talking to a recruiter,
Who said, “they pay big bucks if ya work on a computer…”

UNIX, that is… CRTs… Workstations…

Well, the first thing ya know ol’ Jed’s an Engineer.
The kinfolk said “Jed, move away from here”.
They said “Arizona is the place ya oughta be”,
So he bought a box of donuts and he moved to Ahwatukee…

Intel, that is… dry heat… no amusement parks…

On his first day at work, they stuck him in a cube.
Fed him mo’ donuts and sat him at a tube.
Said “yo project’s outta budget, but we know just what to do.
Instead of 40 hours, we’ll work you 52!”

OT, that is… unpaid… mandatory…

The weeks rolled by and things were looking bad.
Schedules were slipping and the boss was getting mad.
They called another meeting and decided on a fix.
The answer was simple… “We’ll work him sixty-six!”

Tired, that is… stressed out… no social life…

Months turned to years and his hair was turning grey.
Jed worked hard while his life just slipped away.
Waiting to retire when he turned to 64,
Instead he got a call and escorted out the door.

Laid off, that is… lead hand shake… unemployed…

Now the moral of the story is listen to what you’re told,
Companies will use you and discard you when you’re old.
So gather up your friends and start your own firm,
Beat the competition, watch the bosses squirm.

Millionaires, that is… Bill Gates… Steve Jobs…

Y’all come back now… ya hear’