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From: I78BC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Michael Polymenakos)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <1912I78BC@CUNYVM>
Date: 5 Feb 89 21:57:41 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <4744@sfsup.UUCP> <2887@sybase.sybase.com>
Organization: The City University of New York - New York, NY
Lines: 45
DISCLAIMER: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article


  How about the young computer salesman giving some client a demonstration
of the new electronic word-processor? He loads up a large document, and
says: "watch this!". He hits a couple of keys, and converts every "i" in the
document to an "a", making the text unreadable.

  "And it you can change it all back, just like this" he proclaims,subsequently
converting all "a"s back to "i", including those that had been "a"s originally.

  Ofcource, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine.. :-)

-----

Another one my father told me:

  My dad was an electronics engineer in Greece, for a company that imported
various high-tech lab equipment. One of them (A HP spectrophotometer, I think)
was controlled by a special built-in computer, running optional proprietary
software. Each optional package was copy protected. To enforce that, installing
the package could only be done by a tech-rep; after the installation, the disks
were automatically erased, and the program was kept in battery-backed RAM.
  Anyway, at some point the computer lost all its programs. A call had to
be made to Germany, for new disks to be send as a replacement. My dad could not
find the reason for this, and he was really surprised when the client called
again, with the same problem next week. Call Germany again, install the disks
again, then next week guess what happened: The lab calls again.
  But there was a definite pattern: The lab always found the system down
on a Wednesday morning. Obviously, whatever went wrong happened on Tuesday
nights only....
  After more than a month of downtime, someone realized that the cleaning
lady came to the room every Tuesday night. Someone went to check her and found
out that she carried a nine-year old kid with her. The kid had discovered
the machine's on-off switch, with a few buttons next to it. When the
machine was on, pressing those buttons made cute sounds(aka. audible warnings!)
which are supposed to alert you to the fact that holding the button
down for a few seconds would completely reset the machine. I guess the kid
thought of it as an oversized musical instrument. The mom turned the
machine off before she left, erasing error codes etc. No-one knows
how much this story cost the lab in downtime.....

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|  ||  |   |||||  ||     Michael S. Polymenakos      BC-CUNY
   |||| ||| || | |||||   ----------------------      New York
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