Some people are soooo stupid.

[celticfan11]

Ok here is the mp3 file that i took off our vocie mails at my internship. Quite amusing how she breaks down.


http://www.realityslap.com/~noobkilla/cryinglady.mp3

 

[Son Goku]

:laugh: Tech support horror stories

I used to know some people who worked at a comp shop. Carol (who owned the business) told me of two:

- Someone bought an Alpha NT system from them. Mind you, this was back in the days of winNT 4.0 when there were seperate compiled versions of the OS for the PC, Alpha, Power PC, and MIPPs systems...

Anyhow, the person decided to upgrade some hardware one day. After getting it properly plugged into their computer (this part they did OK), they then went online and downloaded the x86 drivers for the device. They installed these and their computer wouldn't boot.

So they brought it back down to the shop and complained. After they explained it, Carol tried to explain to him that one can't use x86 drivers on their Alpha NT system, that they need drivers compiled for the Alpha platform.

The guy was like "It's the same difference isn't it? It's Windows..."

"No, it's Alpha NT. PC drivers won't work on the Alpha..."

Guy

- Another person was apperently messing around in Disk Manager. They don't know what the guy did, as they only saw the aftermath. Lets just say that she had the painful experience of low level formatting the person's 9.1 GB Baracuda, that even being a 7200 rpm SCSI drive, was still quite painful... There was no other way to recover his drive, or get it bootable again.

tbh, I have no clue what he could have done in Disk Manager to cause this myself... Then again, I have no idea how when I took a PC into a shop after I put winNT 4 on it...the guy managed to get pagefile.sys into the recycle bin when it was on the NTFS partition. Somehow he did, and within a month after he touched that install, it had slowly gone to the crapper... There was no second install of winNT to give him access to the NTFS partition either. This was around 1996 time frame

 

[X-Istence]

try pluggin in and unplugging in your drives and see how many of them work after hehe.
And still he isnt allowed to touch things.

Done. Considering the fact how many times i hot swap drives in our X server at school, they should all be dead by your experience.

I daily hotswap HD's at least 10 - 15 times depending on what software i need on the network for network push to client. It is easier to remove the drive, install the new version of the software and shove it back in rather than trying to install it over the network.

As for my horror story. A box full of spyware, ad-aware found 16,000 items. I bet you can all guess how the rest of the story goes.

 

[Son Goku]

Yeah, but some drives are designed to be hot swappable. I've also heard of hot swappable, redundent power supplies before. I think it's a good bet this dudes drives weren't hot swappable

Oh, and someone told me they had a bit of a problem with a person who kept changing their desktop preferences to show black text on a black background. After this, they kept calling down to the help desk (was on their work comp). Soemone would come to fix it, and then the person would do it again.

Finally, this person said they took a print screen of the person's desktop and saved it to a .bmp file. They set that as the dude's wallpaper, and then hid their task bar and icons. The caller spent the rest of the time clicking about wondering why nothing seemed to work :laugh:

 

[vern]

Lots of us "smart" people seem to forget that the majority of people aren't "smart". I doubt we'd be called stupid if we didn't know how to do an operation that would be routine to a doctor. Kind of like that commercial where a doctor was explaining to a patient over the phone how to cut open his stomach to do an operation. Before I started working with in a bigger organization, I thought they were stupid, later I knew I was just full of myself.

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

Good post Vern just because we think we are smart does not mean we are, makes me laugh, its as if knowing something about a computer makes you special ... love to see some of these people in a garage ripping down an engine, or trying to build a house from scratch, or as said doing what a doctor does.. oh well I am off to play golf later all you super smart peeps lolol

 

[RickyC]

Sounds more like bad tech support. If you have students using a system from different time zones, tech support should make it perfectly clear what time and what time zone a call has to be made. You can't presume anything!

 

[mlakrid]

Good post Vern just because we think we are smart does not mean we are, makes me laugh, its as if knowing something about a computer makes you special ... love to see some of these people in a garage ripping down an engine, or trying to build a house from scratch, or as said doing what a doctor does.. oh well I am off to play golf later all you super smart peeps lolol

Ahhh Yes, I COULD agree... except for one small factor you are forgetting...

MOST people... and I say MOST because obviously it isnt always the case...
most people pretend like they know what they are doing. NOW, if they tell me right upfront they don't know alot about computers... I try and show them things.
However... when its the engineer types that want to tell me how they have a in IT/IS double major. and they are getting their doctorate, and want to be all high and mighty, well then like many of you have mentioned its screen capture, remove icons and customize desktop TIME!

LOL

 

[Son Goku]

Many such cases which can make people laugh, come more down to a total lack of common sense, then "smarts" per se. It's like the person who kept setting their display settings so everything would appear black on their screen. Two major problems with that, which shouldn't require one to know the difference between a PCI and an ISA slot:

- If one sets the text and the background to the same color, how can one distinguish the text?

- If something doesn't work say 10 or 20 times, and one has to call someone to come down and fix it, what makes one think it will work the 11th or 21st time?

It's a reasonable proposition, if someone keeps trying something, and the same (undesired) effect is produced each time, to not expect that the next time will magically be different then it has always been in the past...

In the case of a doctor, if someone needed instructions on how to apply a band aid to a cut (especially after they've been told many times in the past), or needed the doctor's assistance in tying to figure out what symptoms the patient has (when the doctor can't feel what another person is feeling in their body); it might get a chuckle, or perhaps the doc being ready to pull his hair out...

Knowledge can be one thing, common sense and the ability to reason something through (without having to specifically know) can be another however...

And yes I've known some people, like this one person in summer camp. He was a straight A student, and had encyclopedic knowledge about a wide range of subjects. However he had to ask people if he had to go to the bathroom or should get a glass of water. I was to discover the truth of it one time when I saw him interacting with his over-protective parents who wouldn't allow him to make any decisions on his own (lest he make a mistake). He was 17 at the time, I was 14...

 

[mlakrid]

And yes I've known some people, like this one person in summer camp. He was a straight A student, and had encyclopedic knowledge about a wide range of subjects. However he had to ask people if he had to go to the bathroom or should get a glass of water. I was to discover the truth of it one time when I saw him interacting with his over-protective parents who wouldn't allow him to make any decisions on his own (lest he make a mistake). He was 17 at the time, I was 14...

Oh my... sounds like he was so isolated he never realized he was his own person... ACK... sad really...

those are the people who don't work well in society...

 

[celticfan11]

Sounds more like bad tech support. If you have students using a system from different time zones, tech support should make it perfectly clear what time and what time zone a call has to be made. You can't presume anything!

i didnt take this call, however 99.9% of the callers are from CT or the area, so forgetting to say eastern time is not "bad tech support". it was a ****ty internship tho . I will never do phone tech support ever again. Id rather flip burgers.

 

[ShepsCrook]

Yeah, that's one thing. Time zones are easy to forget. She should have thought about the time zone difference, as well as the tech support should have made it clear that it would be 4:45 eastern, probably meaning he only planned on a maximum of 15 minutes for a call before he could easily bail out for the day.

Some of us may feel that we are the supreme knowledge database for computers, whereas others may feel that we lack sufficient knowledge of them. But noone knows everything about computers.

We all have our forte's in life.

A doctor knows about the human body and ways of fixing it.
An IT person should know about computers and ways of fixing them.
A construction worker knows about building structures.
A poolshark knows angles, power, and accuracy to win games.
A Vet knows about animals.
Heck, even a janitor might know something you may not. Like the best way to clean gum off of a floor.
Or even that lady on the phone might know something about applied physics in a weightless environment. Who knows.

Like I said before, we all have our own knack in life.

 

[Beginning]

Hehehe.. The .mp3 was kinda hilarious...

 

[kcnychief]

No need to bump threads this old, especially in this section

 

[Beginning]

Sorry.. It won't happen again.. I didn't realize it was that old..

 

[Grandmaster]

Just slap chief.

 

[kcnychief]

:hurt:

 

[Admiral Michael]

This was an amusing thread. I like funny tech stories, it's time to revive this topic!

Any one got some good tech stories?