Topic: Stupid computer stories

[Nemesis]

I thought that we might use a lighter side by posting some of the stupid computer stories you have come across.  Preferrably stories you either have first or at least 2nd hand knowledge of.

FIrst Story

[/color]

An IT person I know was once called over to fix a friends computer.  The Windows install was totally hosed and she hadn't seen anything quite like it.  After intense questioning of the husband who had been using the computer when things "went wrong" she finally found out what he had done.  He had heard that you should delete all the "garbage files" periodically and did so, according to his informant all the garbage files had the extension .dll. 

She did get a nice bottle of wine out of doing the reinstall.

[Don Karnage]

 

her something funny from dilbert

Hard Reboot

You'll need to do a hard reboot. listen carefully. Rent a van and fill it with stolen dynamite. park it near the power company main's relay station. now aim the bazooka at the van.

[knightstorm]

I've known people who couldn't get the computer to work because they didn't know they had to push the button on the tower as well as the on the monitor.

[Vipre]

Got a call when I worked Help Desk for an ISP asking me to walk them through the internet connection configuration. The PC was still sitting in the retail box on the living room floor.

[toasty0]

True story...

While still working at the Sahara as a bartender I started to get a rep as a computer wiz (isn't that something you do in the bathroom?) and was starting to get calls from staff who would have problems with their computers. One day one of our cocktail waitresses called my house hoping for me to help her with her new computer. After going through some preliminaries I asked her to open the window. There was a pause then in a skeptical voice she asked, "Jerry, how is opening the window going to help me with my computer?"

[Centurus]

I think Vipre's is the funniest one so far.

[Nemesis]

A Chinese restaurant had their sign translated by computer and then printed up.

[Pestalence_XC]

I do PC repair and custom builds.. I had a customer call me to set up an appointment and told me that their new computer wouldn't start.

I told them to box the entire thing up and bring it over and I would look at it..

2 hours later, they arrived and they pulled out a wide but thin box..

they had bought only a Dell monitor.. not a computer.

[Roychipoqua_Mace]

These are funny! LOL at Nemesis's one.

[Nemesis]

For reasons that were never made clear to me another facilty of the company I worked for had a "gentleman" working alone consistently late at night.  He eventually became bored and had an idea of something interesting to do on the phone but it was not allowable and if caught he would get in trouble.  He knew that phone numbers callerd were monitored on all the phone lines, except one he thought.  So the one "un monitored" line would be disconnected from the computer it was dedicated to and he would attach a phone and make his entertaining calls. 

He was of course wrong about the monitoring and was eventually called into the office during the day.  He was given two choices:

A/ Quit and pay the several thousand dollars for the 976 calls he had made

OR

B/ Be taken to court and fired.

He chose A/ and apparently had a great deal of difficulty explaining to his wife why he quit and why he owed the company so much money.

Only barely computer related but worth a chuckle anyhow.

[Czar Mohab]

Coworker story #1:

Weekly we have to input in our company's database "adjustments" to what the database says we have for inventories. The process is simple. We do a quick inventory, compare it to what the db says we have, and tell it what the difference is. This, in turn, crunches those numbers and gives us neat little things like how much we've sold, used, or whatever else. It also projects what we should have next week, and tells the big wigs how our plant is doing overall.

It all gets fed into a very basic Excel spreadsheet. We have X tons of product, db says we should have Y tons, the difference is Z. if X>Y then Z is positive, X<Y Z is negative. Negative numbers are red. They also have a fancy "-" in front of them. Ex: -32.22. Positive numbers are not red, and do not have the fancy "-". Pretty simple stuff.

One item we receive is, in part, ordered and shipped based on data in the db. We get low, they ship a rail car full of the goods to us. We have room to hold 3 rail cars.

One lonely night, the magical red number was misread as a non-red number. No, he isn't colorblind. No, he didn't forget to put "-" in front of the number. "I thought it was positive," he said. Thankfully, it was caught and we didn't run out.

Part 2:

Another lonely night, same person, same number, just not red this time. But, never fear, as our friend "-" made its showing, and before anyone else could see it or save the day, we had 6 railcars shipped to us. Remember, we have room for 3. The Railroad placed the other three in an out of the way area, costing us lots of $$$, per day, until we had room for them.

His response: "You sure that's not negative?"

Story #2:

Same worker.

Given an Excel spreadsheet to fill in with various safety related items. Pretty simple. Has to email it back to someone in HR. That someone couldn't open the file. Why? because he was sent "Shortcut to FILENAME.xls".

Story #3:

Same guy (I got a lot of these, some not so funny).

"I can't get this to print," he says to me. Pretty simple fix, was sent to a printer that DOESN'T EXIST anymore. But that's not the kicker. "I don't want this printed on the Laserjet," he says after the first sheet comes out in blazing fast speed. "I want to use the color pinter." For the black and white document.

#4:

Yup. Same guy.

"I used to have a computer back in the '80's" he says. "All I have left is the monitor and the printer, so when I go out to buy a new one, I willn't (sic) need to buy a new monitor."

Yes, he not only writes "Willn't", but uses it in normal speech.

#5

Still him.

Well, lets just say that this worked on him:

"Internet is Full"

But with different cords. No foolin'.

Czar "My 2 cp" Mohab

[Nemesis]

I was passing through our company lab one day and found a Chemist trying to change a toner cartridge.  It didn't fit so he was attempting to modify with a hacksaw.

[Commander Maxillius]

Sounds like a workplace "accident" waiting to happen.

"Sorry officer, I didn't know he was standing there."

"You ran over him six times."

"There just happened to be a bump in the floor there a few years back and I was just thinking about stuff, you know, like you do when you get bored, then all of a sudden I hear this noise and I get off the forklift and there he was.  Whoops, I seem to have dropped a $100 bill, could you get that for me, the accident did something to my back."

"Hmm, there are skid marks that appear to be consistent with acceleration, but this is a forklift so those are probably old.  This will likely be ruled an accident."

[Nemesis]

Sounds like a workplace "accident" waiting to happen.

"Sorry officer, I didn't know he was standing there."

"You ran over him six times."

From the look on her face when I told her I think our IT person was considering some physical mayhem.  She was relieved to find I had handled the situation for her (WITHOUT mayhem).