I was trying to teach this sales person (for automated entrance system [they made gates]) how to enter his letters into Word Perfect. I told him to select Word Perfect from his menu and when he did it gave him the opening screen which said, "Press any key to continue..." He looked at the keyboard for awhile then asked me, "Where is the 'any' key?".

There is the classic one (which may be an urban myth) of the secretary working in an accounting firm who is told to make back up copies of the discs every night. So every night she carfully collected together all the discs and took them away to copy them. After six months the hard disc crashed but no-one was worried because they had backups, until the secretary brought in the huge pile of paper with a nice photocopied disc on each!

A user called the PC Support line of the university having trouble with her Mac. It was handed off to one of the Mac guys...

"What seems to be the problem?"

"It's not working."

Eyes roll. "What's not working?"

"My Mac."

<- Five minutes of drawing the problem out of the woman deleted ->

"Okay, to access the files on the disk click the mouse on the picture of the disk."

Pause. "Nothing happened. I told you, I've already tried this." Support guy makes as if he is strangling the phone.

"Okay, do it again. Is the mouse moving?"

"Yep."

"On the screen?"

"Yep."

"Now click twice on the picture of the disk."

Pause and the consultant hears the two clicks again. "Nothing."

"Maam, double-click once more for me."

Clink-clink.

"Maam, are you hitting the screen with your mouse?"

A secretary who had gotten a PC for word processing had periodic failures. The disks would work for days, but after a couple of weeks would fail. They would be recovered by IBM (to an extent) but after a couple of weeks, the cycle would repeat.

At one point a service tech came out to the site to repair it, suspecting damage in transit.

He recovered what he could, cleaned and aligned the drive (for the 400th time) and gave it a clean bill of health at about 5:00...

and the secretary in question put the disk in the envelope, stuck it to her wall with her magnet, and went home.

Of course this sounds stupid to us, but how many secretaries are familiar with mass storage techniques? A friend of mine fixed his mother's TV by connecting the antenna. After explaining the problem, she asked:

"How far away is the TV station?"

"From here? About 20 miles."

"You mean that picture can travel 20 miles to get to the antenna, but it can't go another 3 inches to get to the TV?"

How do you explain that (in less than four years)?

These remind me of another story I heard (or probably read on rec.humor. It was told by an instructor who taught programming in BASIC language.

He had given them step-by-step instructions on how to write a short program that would let you enter two numbers and the computer would return the sum of the two numbers.

When each student had all their program steps keyed in, he told the class to type RUN and enter. A lady in the back of the class said, "It didn't work." The instructor once again told her to simply type RUN and enter. Still didn't work. So the instructor walked back to see what the problem was. It was obvious. He had been spelling out "R" "U" "N"....she had typed "are you in".

While I was working in a placement office at the University, we helped students write their resumes on the computer. A student came up to me and said he had problems reading the disk. I asked him to show it to me so I could see if I could recover the files, "sure." he said, an took the disk (5¼" floppy) out of his pocket and unfolded it.

Another time, while working at a computer store, somebody who bought his computer from us was having trouble with one of his disks. The man was living in another city, so I asked him to send me a copy of the disk, and I would take a look at it. A few days later, an envelope arrived for me, it contained a "photocopy" of the front and back side of the disk.

I overheard a nice conversation one day in a computer shop:

customer: I'd like a mouse mat please.

assistant: certainly sir,we've got a large variety.

The customer, while looking at said mats, then asked, "But will they be compatible with my computer?"

All I could do to keep a straight face was walk out of the shop.

A friend of mine works at Word Perfect in Orem UT. He had a lady call up and tell him she couldn't figure out how to install the program.

He told her "Insert Disk1 into the disk drive and type "INSTALL WP". He then proceeded to have her insert disk 2 through 4 in sequential order. She then stopped him to ask if it would be alright to remove the previous four disks because the fifth wouldn't fit. (!!)

A foreign gentleman came in needing help using a word processor to write a letter. I took him over to a Mac and gave him a brief overview of its capabilities and commands and left him at a point where he could just start typing. He looked at me, puzzled. See, he didn't know how to type. Not just that he didn't know how to type well, but it was like he didn't understand the concept of typing (the 's' key puts an s on the screen). Eventually I ended up typing it for him bacause it was easier than arguing with him.

Another gentleman came to us frantic. The day before he had saved a very important document on the hard drive of one of our Macs and he could not find it. He was yelling at me that our lab employees must have deleted it and we need to have more respect for users, etc. (We have a policy of allowing documents to remain in the hard drives for 7 days before being erased by the staff.) I helped him look for his paper, but when I couldn't find it, I explained our policy and the fact that we can't control what other users might do with a document left on a computer. He was not happy. Then in a sudden flash of genius I asked him, "You were using this particular Mac, weren't you?" to which he responded, "No, I was using one in the other room."

We once had an elderly female end user (the type that technology passed by) who would get very angry with the machine, generally when it would do EXACTLY what she had instructed it to do. Her usual response was to bang the mouse down on the desk. Obviously, it didn't take long for the mouse to break. We analysts knew what she was doing, but she always denied it when the tech came to replace the mouse. Finally, one of the techs, took a mouse apart on her desk as part of the replacement process. Says he, "You hit this mouse pretty hard." The reply, "Oh, no. I never did anything. It just broke." To which the tech said, "Well Ma'am, as you can see by the value on the impact capacitor here, this mouse has been subjected to a very bad force. Probably caused when someone picked up the mouse and dropped it or banged it on the desk."

In another case, I had gone to a customer site with one of the hardware guys to install a machine. The new sysop, a true novice, asked a number of questions about the care and feeding of the machine. At one point, being funny, I told her that for best performance she should dust and wax the boards occasionally to keep them clean. She looked at me a bit askance, as we knew each other previously and she knew of my penchant for practical jokes. At that point the hardware tech looks up and says, "Be sure to get a good polish like Pledge or something. And don't get anything with lemon scent. It messes up the contacts." She believed.

We later called her boss to gently suggest that her leg might have been pulled.

There was an big, athletic-looking guy fooling with one of our brother (IBM) printers. He was opening it up, shaking it a little, and trying to jam a paper into the manual paper feed. When I asked him what the problem was, he said, "Your copier isn't working."

Meet the man who asked which was the laser printer. I asked him which machine he was printing on; we have different laser printers. He gives me this nice sarcastic response, "This is a Mac lab, right?"

So I pointed him to the Mac laser printer.

The trouble is, (1) Maclab is the old name; and (2) he was on an IBM PC.

Of course, this didn't occur to him for the (I swear to Bill) 35 minutes he stood at the wrong printer waiting for his printout, until he asked me how long the print queue was (it was empty, had been for most of the 35 minutes.)

Very patient man, if nothing else...

I mean, come on, even I know that an empty queue doesn't take 35 minutes to print, except when my assignment is due.

- Hey, can you help me? my program doesn't work...

- What is the problem, are you using Turbo Pascal?

- Yes, the program just blocks the machine...

- Well, does it compile?

- I don't know, it just doesn't run...

I went to his computer and he told me:

- You see? there's the .EXE file, if you run it it blocks the machine...

- And where is your source, the .PAS file???

- I wrote it and renamed it to .EXE so it could run...

"Remove the sleeve, and insert the floppy disk into the drive."

[hours of technical support later]

"You know -- these vinyl covers they put on disks are really hard to get off..."

[45 minutues of trying to fix a terminal -- including a process kill and a full shutdown (UNIX)] "Oh -- wait a second..... Oops, the intensity was just down. I have a login prompt now."

A bank clerk friend told me this the other day:

An elderly customer came into the bank complaining the ATM wasn't working. She had been waiting for half an hour after "requesting a new cheque book" and it still hadn't come out yet!

A customer (wife of an obnoxious history professor, none the less) comes into the store with a Macintosh which I had just replaced a bad drive in a few days previously. She complained that it wasn't working again, implying that I didn't fix it right the first time. So, I get out the diagnotic tools, but can't find a thing wrong with it. I then checked some of the diskettes she brought in with it, and find that they are loaded with viruses. After cleaning up the diskettes, I explained to her that her computer probably got the virus by trading diskettes with someone whose computer was also infected. She then got a very sullen expression on her face and asked me, "Can a person catch this virus from their computer?"

On another occasion, a lady came into the store, apparently interested in buying a home computer. After surveying the models on display, she walks over to one and points the the monitor and keyboard saying, "I think I need one of these, and one of those, ..." She then points to the CPU and continues, "... but I don't think I need one of those.

This one just happened.

User walks into the office. "This disk doesn't work."

Computer literate non-staff: "You have covered the disk slot with the label."

One of our lusers called me about a problem she was having with her PC, she was using a vt220 emulator to connect to one of our UNIX-boxes, and "half of her prompts were missing". Two days earlier I had set up the emulation software for her, and had checked that everything was ok, so I tried to get her to be a bit more specific (fat chance!). Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turned out that the screen on this particular PC was one of those fancy things where you can adjust the height, width vertical and horisontal placement of the screen image......she had accidentally shifted the whole image to the left, so the first half of her prompts were off-screen. :-)

A tech support guy once told me that he got a call from someone saying that the computer screen just went black and the computer wouldn't respond at all. The tech guy (starting with the obvious) asked the guy if the computer was still plugged in that maybe his foot had knocked the plug out of the socket. The guy on the other end of the phone said to hold on that he would be back in a minute with a flashlight because the electricity had just gone out in his building and he couldn't see under the desk without the lights....

On my previous job a user needed a program but didn't have a modem, so I told him I'd overnight him a diskette. He then asked me if i could fax the diskette to him! If I didn't need my job I would have told him I would, but dominos was faxing me a pizza and he'd have to wait a bit. :)

Customer: Where can I get a BIOS upgrade for by 286 computer?

Tech: The unit should have been shipped with the latest bios.

Customer: Well I upgraded the processor myself, and my computer doesn't seem to work.

Tech: What did you upgrade the processor to?

Customer: I upgraded it to a 486DX-50.

Tech: Sir... The 286 chip is soldered on the motherboard!

Customer: I know, I took out my handy soldering iron and took it out and put the 486 on myself.

Tech: Sir, the 486 is bigger than the 286.

Customer: I know, I had to use quite a bit of solder to solder the extra pins together.

Tech: Sir, I have to put you on hold for a second.

The tech laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.

In my first real job, I was not only responsible for programming but I also did customer support and training. Our company used to sell time on our computers so very small companies that couldn't afford computers at the time could do their bookkeeping, etc. One day, a new woman came in to use the trash-... i mean TRS-80 (boy I'm really dating myself ;-) ). She fumbled about for about 10 minutes, but I paid no attention to her. Finally she came out & grumbled something about how the computer wouldn't turn on. I grilled her with the usual obvious questions: Did you turn the switch on? Did you plug it in? Did you turn on the switch on the power strip? She was sure she had done everything right. I was sure she neglected to plug one of the power cords into the power strip.

So, I went to investigate and she was right, she had plugged everything in to the power strip... including the power strip's own power cord. Talk about a ground loop!

A woman called the shop where she had bought a PC and complained that it didn't work properly: Every time she switched it on the screen was filled with characters.

Two technicians were sent out and were met by a woman with tits about twice the size of Dolly Parton's and glasses about two centimeters thick. They asked her to switch on the computer. This she did, and then leaned over the keyboard to read what was on the screen...

The problem was quickly solved.

Or, there was the customer who couldn't get her disk to go into the drive once she had formatted it. After a long conversation, the tech finally went onsite, only to discover that, like a well organized person, she was putting a label on each formatted diskette - completely over the shutter as well.

We had a customer call us once, saying that they were having problems getting their new disks to work in the machine. It turned out that the customer thought they had to TRIM THE 5.25" DISKS DOWN to fit in their 3.5" drive... Fortunately the 3.5 drive wasn't damaged...

And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the diretion oposite the movement of the mouse (when she moved her mouse left, the cursor went right, etc.) She also complained about how hard it was to hit the buttons. She was quite embarased when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed AWAY from her...

I remember when my new Amiga arrived (way back in 86!). I had a class to go to, but my roommate was kind enough to set it all up for me. When I got back from class, he was having a great time playing with it. His only problem was using the mouse. Turns out he was holding it in his hand and rolling the ball with his fingers! I don't even remember how he was coping with the mouse buttons.

I was working for a computer retailer in Denver when my supervisor received a phone call from a very irate customer. According to this man, he had purchased his computer two days before, had read the instructions, and had performed a backup of the hard drive exactly as instructed. The problems started the moment he reformatted his hard drive to test his backup.

First revision of user manual includes:

     Insert disk A
     Press ENTER
     Wait for reply LOADING EXECUTED
     Insert disk B
     .
     .

Following a complaint by a user, the second revision reads:

     Insert disk A
     Press ENTER
     Wait for reply LOADING EXECUTED
     Remove disk A
     Insert disk B
     .
     .

When I worked for Reuters, I saw some truly idiot proof user manuals along these lines. Reuters has a lot of rack-mounted PCs all over the world in places where the local tech-level is zilch. The field service guides for these things explain how there are 7 wrong ways but only one right way to insert a 5¼" disk into the right slot (let's not talk about the wrong slots!).

They also explained techno-babble such as 'disk-drive door' so that people wouldn't interpret instructions such as 'Insert disk A into drive and close door' as an instruction to close the door of the room they were in.