Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!hc!lanl!beta!bms
From: bms@beta.lanl.gov (Barbara M Sandoval)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: computer follies
Message-ID: <21505@beta.lanl.gov>
Date: 15 Sep 88 19:51:31 GMT
References: <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <57438@ti-csl.CSNET> <741@etive.ed.ac.uk> <1037@bucket.UUCP> <927@crcmar.uucp>
Reply-To: bms@beta.UUCP (Barbara M Sandoval)
Organization: Los Alamos Natl. Labs, Los Alamos, NM
Lines: 24
Distribution:usa


 After working as a consultant in the terminal room of the college I went to,
I took a job here at the Lab in the PC-Help section.  There are anywhere from
3 - 7 of us at any given time (student help); there are over 6,000 IBMs and
clones here, and we support all of them, running any kind of DOS applications.
Needless to say, things get pretty weird here.  Anyway, after doing consulting 
at college, I thought I knew just how stupid some people can be, but I was 
amazed at how wrong I was.  We've had several people call asking which was the
`any' key - one guy that got that question said "Just a minute, I'll look it   
up", then grabbed a manual and flipped through the pages of it right over the 
reciever.  Then he picked the reciever up and said "Gee, I can't find it in  
here!  Why don't you try hitting return and see if that works?"  The woman
thanked him profusely, and insisted that he was the only one who could help her
after that.

 Of course, knowing something about micros doesn't guarantee against mistakes.
My father put a diskette into his MAC II backwards, with the metal slide on the
outside of the drive.  They will go in that way quite easily, but it took a  
pair of flat forceps to get it back out.  Or the time a woman called, quite
upset, because "My VTerm quit working, and I don't know why", and it turned out
her gandalf was turned off.  Then my boneheaded stunt was spending almost an
hour re-writing batch files for someone to switch from one kind of printer to
the other, with no success, then checking and finding out they were connected
to the same port! (She needed a T-switch, not batch files)