Stupid encounters

[Borzoi]

Share your experiences that you've had with "experts" who have made you want to facepalm from their stupidity and users which have less than minimal knowledge. For example, people that wonder why their computer doesn't turn on during a power cut.

My most recent one that I can recall is when I was doing a temp job a few years ago. One of the people there had moved desk and the network cable no longer reached his computer so what he decided to do was place the tower at a point close enough so the network cable would reach and then after logging in, he unplugged it and moved the tower back to his desk. He then kept complaining that the internet wasn't working and he couldn't access any network folders. I tried explaining to him that the network cables needs to stay plugged in to access the network but he was adamant that it only needed to be plugged in to log in. He seemed to be the type of guy that thinks "I'm older so I must know more."

[JavaDad]

I did a reformat and OS reinstall on an older gentleman's computer last week. He dropped it off, then brought it back home and hooked everything back up again. He called me the next day and asked what I did to his computer that was causing it to tie up his phone lines. He was kind of upset because nobody could get a hold of him for a day before he realized he had a problem. When I went to see what the problem was, I found that he had plugged the phone cord into the ethernet network jack. We all had a good laugh.

[Ancient Dragon]

A couple years ago I walked into a doctors office and the receiptionist told me that she had to do evething manually because her computer was broke and a repairman had not yet arrived to fix it. I asked her what happened to her computer and she told me she tried to print something and the computer just hung up -- she could not use it at all after that. I looked over at the printer and did not see any lights on it so I asked her to press the On button. She did, and guess what -- the printer warmed up and printed whatever it was that she tried to print early that morning. All that time wasted because she failed to turn on the printer when she turned on her computer that morning :)

In another case, some 15 years ago now, I was working nearby St Louis and a client in Seattle had a problem with a program I had written -- it just wouldn't work. So my boss asked me to fly up there (a 4-hour flight one way) and find out what was going on. I did, walked into his work place, pressed the computer's On button, and everything worked just fine after that. The client, of course, paid for my time as well as tavel pay (air fare both directions). Cost him maybe $1,000.00 or more for me to fly up there and turn his computer on.

[Borzoi]

Someone in my department called IT about two hours ago because they couldn't access some files on the network drive due to the filepath being too long. The IT guy came up and did... something. I'm not sure what he did but it took him at least an hour to come to the conclusion that "I can't fix it from here. I'm going to have to change the folder name on the network drive." I then went up to him, plugged in my memory stick and ran a batch file I wrote two weeks ago. Problem fixed instantly.

All the batch file did was map the folder to a network drive.

[pritaeas]

Yesterday at work I got a call from a (technical) manager who had just removed the last server from our previous location. While in the car he realized he had just removed the server which was still being used by a legacy application to send confirmation e-mails to customers.

[kes166]

I had to get a guy connected to his dial up on his laptop. I asked him to locate a phone line and plug it into his laptop. He did, and said he had no dial tone. I had try again, still no dial tone. I directed him to unplug the line from his wall and find a new RJ-11 (I think I said wall plug or something) jack to plug the phone line into, and he said it's not plugged into the wall.

He unplugged the wire from the wall and hard wired his laptop to his phone.

[The Mad Hatter]

Um, there's been so many. Note that these were 'self proclaimed experts'.

1) Woman who thought her modem was dead - it wasn't plugged into the telephone jack.

2) Woman who thought her mouse was dead - wireless, batteries needed replacement.

3) Guy who swore his motherboard was dead - Windows have committed sepuku.

4) Guy who swore his monitor was dead - it wasn't plugged in.

As I said, self proclaimed experts. Too few people are willing to sit down and logically work through issues when something isn't working.

[The Mad Hatter]

Someone in my department called IT about two hours ago because they couldn't access some files on the network drive due to the filepath being too long. The IT guy came up and did... something. I'm not sure what he did but it took him at least an hour to come to the conclusion that "I can't fix it from here. I'm going to have to change the folder name on the network drive." I then went up to him, plugged in my memory stick and ran a batch file I wrote two weeks ago. Problem fixed instantly.

All the batch file did was map the folder to a network drive.

Oh, that's hilarious.

[kes166]

This happened to the guy next to me.

He was troubleshooting someone who was unable to create a shortcut on the desktop. He told him to right click on the desk top, from the menu, select new, then select short cut. The customer said "It's not working!"

"OK, so tell me what you see"

"Well, I'm 'writing click' and nothing is happening"

True Story

[MooGeek]

the most stupid thing is that when my parents bought a 57,000Philippine peso($1,266.40) and they've paid the store to install Vista and the softwares for 700Php($ 15.83 USD). and when I saw the laptop, I was shocked when I saw that the guy who installed the softwares installed TWO FREAKING ANTI-VIRUS just because he thought that "two is better than one".

and the hardest thing is, the AVs are AVG and Norton

they paid $16, what a service

[Kraai]

A client of mine, who have his domain hosted by me, and uses email addresses on his domain, also have an email address at another ISP.

One day, he sends an email from his domain account to his isp account, and the email bounced with a 550 error, no such user.

He was furious as to why email send from his domain hosted by me bounces.

After carefull study of the bounced email header, I found that he misspelled his own email address at the ISP.

[Sudo Bash]

These are true but I have not witnessed them:

A lady had just bought a new computer back in the day of the 8 inch floppies. She had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and some software on a 8 inch floppy. Well it didn't fit so with wonderful ingenuity ... she trimmed it down to size!

In the early days of the CD-ROM a man dialed up custamer support for his new computer and complained that his coffee cup holder kept disappearing!

A lady just bought a computer and floppy drive in addition to her typewriter. She had just written to a of floppies and was wanting to label them, which she did ... with her impact typewriter! Customer support then had to deal with a very mad lady with a bunch of ruined floppies.

;)

[The Mad Hatter]

A lady just bought a computer and floppy drive in addition to her typewriter. She had just written to a of floppies and was wanting to label them, which she did ... with her impact typewriter! Customer support then had to deal with a very mad lady with a bunch of ruined floppies.

I actually witnessed someone do that. This was back in the days of 256K Ram and 10 megabyte hard drives. I was using Fastback Plus to backup the company data onto 5.25" floppy discs. They were really upset when I screamed at them because they were messing up my backup discs...

Things got real interesting. The owner came in, and we had a real noise fest. I finally got everyone convinced that they needed to put the label in the typewriter before putting it on the discs.

Man, that brings back memories. We'd switched from CP/M to DOS 1.0 (which was a downgrade - DOS 1.0 was garbage), and then upgraded to DOS 2.0, which caught up to the prior version of CP/M, typical Microsoft, always playing catchup.

Everyone told us we were crazy to buy a machine with 256K Ram and a 10 Meg hard drive, all we needed was 64K and dual 360K floppies. A year and a half later they told us that we were crazy not to buy a new machine, with 640K Ram and a 30 Meg hard drive.

Ah, the bad old days. Before we knew what a total crook Billy Goat was.