Dumb user

[Moira]

I've read about and come across some very dumb users over the years, but nothing much beats my cousin just recently. She emailed me to say she had some kind of memory stick but it didn't appear to be a USB type as it "wouldn't fit". To be helpful, she told me its brand - Invirase 500.

I'd never heard of Invirase as a maker of memory sticks, but looked it up on Google. All I could find was reference to a drug treating AIDS. Anyway, I couldn't help much so she took this stick into her local computer shop.

The reason it wouldn't fit her USB ports? She hadn't realised you had to take the protective cover off the end! And the manufacturer? Nothing to do with Invirase 500 - clearly it had been a freebie given away by the drug company!

I don't know whether people like this are fit to let loose with memory sticks. I bet it brightened up the day of the people in the local computer shop anyway!

[gore]

Pffft, I so have you beat.... Let me see here, I was once given a prize by Jupiter Media for being a runner up in a contest we held a while back where the thing was basically to talk about what makes you not want to be in IT.

All I had to talk about was my Aunt. I didn't bring up MY cousin Matt who got into an arguement with me when I said ... Actually here is the onversation for th most part:

Me: "Umm dude, you know going online and all these porn sites is a bad idea right? I mean the spyware and virus problem from the P2P and that isn't good."

Him: "Oh you dumb ass I have Norton anti virus remember?"

Me: "You don't pay for it, it doesn't update!"

Him now all "I'll show you" attitude: "Dumb ASS, we got it free when we bought the computer and it updates itself every day idiot!"

Me, now in BOFH mode: "@#%#$%#$%#%$%#%(Swearing) You idiot! Your Mom and Dad bought this computer 7 YEARS AGO! NORTON ONLY GIVES YOU THE FIRST 6 MONTHS FOR FREE AFTER THAT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT TO KEEP UPDATING!"

Him now more or less a beaten man: "I'm hungry"... (I'm not even kidding about this either)...

----------OK, so my cousin thought he was protected after 7 years and that anti virus from Norton was free forever.... OK but it doesn't stop there, I did a spyware scan after downloading Ad-Aware....

The horror I saw.... The reason I was downloading it was from his Dad telling me he can type a sentence on the computer and come back 10 minutes later to watch it finally appear on the screen....

I scan, and the Ad-Aware finds more than a THOUSAND problems, and not to mention 7, count them 7 TROJANS! and of course, 500 and something viruses.....*Sigh*.

And if you think this is bad imagine my Aunt who won me a free AntiOnline coffee cup....


--------

Now on to my Aunt:

My Cousin Ray who doesn't show up here much anymore, is a good person usually, in that we get along good and I get along great with his Dad. My Aunt though, we CAN get along but she has a special power of being able to drive ANYONE completely bat **** insane.

One day I was reading and she decided to tell me how she was a "hacker" and that she took computer classes.... OK so someone who thought the "Desktop" on Windows XP was just a picture and that the icons were part of it and you had to search in explorer for every application.... Sure...

She said she was a programmer in college and when I asked which language, she didn't remember, so I name off a BUNCH of them. I also make sure to check that these were something a college would have at the time.

None of them were what she used... OK fine, I go back to reading my Linux book. She looks at the cover and says "I programmed in Linux in college".

I tell her Linux wasn't even around until the early 90s and sure as hell wasn't in the 70s.

She tells me I'm wrong and she's right. I show her the BOOK where it SAYS this....Guess what she said? SHE SAID THE BOOK WAS LYING!

OK at this point I'm thinking of strangulation...

My Uncle comes back and saves me from a life sentence and says "What the hell are you talking about woman you were in DATA PROCESSING IN COLLEGE, NOT programming!"....

Oh yea, 4 hours of when Linux was invented for someone who read off a page and typed it exactly what it said....

It gets better:

My Uncle owns a business so my Aunt you just read about of course helps out... Well sort of... More like "Allen how dare you put a password on this computer we have our baking info on it and our accounts and all the info for the business is on there!"... I'm not even kidding.

And when a customer came in to pay a bill we used a computer that would then send the bills out in bulk at the end of the day. She told a customer once while I was working in there that she would do the bill because "My Nephew Allen isn't good with technology"....

Then, before I could laugh myself into convulsions at who had sdaid that she screwed up and had to start over the whole process 4 times.

Nevermind the fact that when she would miscount how much cahs was in the register she'd say I stole it even when my cousin, her son, would say "Allen didn't do that" or my Uncle "Quit blaming him for your screw ups" she'd still do it just when we were alone.

It usually took 5 minutes for me to recount and show her that not only didn't I steal it but that she should probably learn to count past 12.

I'd tell her to do a spyware scan, but nope, she was busy ANSWERING SPAM AND SCAN MAIL.... I'm shocked she doesn't have 12 credit cards in her name I really am. I've watched her click on every link in a spam email and reply to them asking for where to pay for something...

I'll stop there because even thinking about it just pisses me off. Needless to say there is a lot more stories with her in them.

[Moira]

It must be amusing living with your family sadly I only get gems like my cousin and her memory stick coming round once in a very long while.

I love dumb user stories. I recently came across a good one:

"Someone from my office called me at home because she said she could not connect to the internet, I usually dont support people at home, but I thought I would be nice. I went through some basic troubleshooting, and then I asked her to check her network cable, she then replied that she uses the wireless. I knew that she did not have a wireless router, but she insisted she did. I asked why she thought she did, and she said becuase she has been using it for 6 months, I thought this sounded wierd, but I finally convinced her to use a cable and her problem was fixed. We finally figured out that she had been connecting to her neighbors wireless connection, and he had moved and left her with no wireless."

[gore]

Oh that one was amazing!

And yea I guess it can be entertaining.

[nihil]

Hmmm, this one goes back about 20 years. I was head of development and #2 in the department. Our sysop was having problems with this user whose "computer kept going wrong".................like he had replaced 4 terminals that morning.

This was an IBM midrange with some make of 5250 dumb terminals attached to it

Tom (the sysop) came to me and asked me to take a look.............I guess that he thought it was a dumb user.

I think that it was 1986............ a very hot summer over here, and the office did not have airconditioning.

I reached over and switched off her desk fan.............. magically the display came back to normal

The fan's motor was on the way out and giving out some weird EMPs

[Moira]

Haha

There are a couple more from the same source as the wireless one, but I can't find the original stories. One involved a user complaining that his program wouldn't let him enter a date. When asked what date he was trying to enter, he replied "31st September 2005". He was then informed that there were only 30 days in September ......

The other was posted by a website hosting company who had a client with a website entitled "hacks and cracks" or some such stuff. This guy complained constantly he couldn't get the site to load, so eventually the company asked him to send them his index page, at which point it turned out the client had thought "html" was just an abbreviation for hotmail and kept deleting it! Hacks and cracks indeed .....

[nihil]

I have another one Moira,

It was back in the days of the great Year 2000 rip-off, and the Finance Director had asked me to check out this sales order processing module they were wanting to implement. The little toads had just gone out and bought it, without consulting IT (of course ).

So, I set it up on a labrat and enter some sample data. I try 1999 and 2000 then tell it to do a December 31st 2000 month and year end............... no problems.

Right, the next test has to be 29th February, as millenium years are leap years. I run it up to 29th February 2000, then tell it I want to run a 29th February month end. Aaaaaarrrrrgh! it says "invalid date"......................so, having been an accountant in a previous life, I give it 1st March (a Saturday as I recall)................ I got the message: "That is not a month end, would you like to use 29th. February"................. I said "yes" and it did it!!!!!

Apalling program logic, but the damn thing actually worked

[gore]

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

[Moira]

That's a great story nihil, how inventive you were to think of getting round the problem like that!

Aaah .... I've seen that link to computer stupidities before but lost it. Thanks gore, it's a great way to find an hour or so has suddenly passed without getting anything useful done!

I was showing a new user how to change her password. She was typing the new one in slowly and said to me, "I hope you're not reading my password." I replied that I was the system administrator and didn't need her password. She replied, "That's good to know. I wouldn't want you accessing my stuff."

[tin.roof.rabbit]

When I first started working for this company I held the lowly position of newbie technician/helpdesk bean bag and one of the regional hospitals. One day we had a very violent storm, so violent that it cut the power to the hospital. If you have ever worked at a hospital or been in one when they loose power you know that the generators will only power essential health care devices (of which computers are not counted, normally).

I had a user call me and tell me that her monitor turn on (I think we all know where this is going), to which I asked her if she had power. Normally it should be a hint that the power was out, you have been told to follow down time procedures, meaning you have been told to switch to pen and paper patient care (This has changed but it was true at the time). But she still argued that it couldn't be the power because her office had lights on, to which I asked if they were her normal over head lights or the emergency light system.

The excused herself and hung up the phone.