Quote :

"wow, you can rotate a photo? i had no idea you could rotate a photo!"

this was just said seriously.

1/4/2006 3:16:30 PM

I remember finding this out with mac paintshop 1992. I thought it was pretty neat as well.

1/4/2006 3:30:46 PM

had you ever referred to yourself as a graphic designer at the time?

1/4/2006 3:34:15 PM

photos ain't graphics

1/4/2006 3:35:02 PM

true

1/4/2006 3:35:44 PM

True quote:

"Do the socks for the iPod mini's work with the iPod nano's? Are they compatible?"

1/4/2006 8:08:00 PM

me:
"Type www dot unc dot edu"

client:

"Ok, so that was www at unc dot edu"

Me:

"No, thats www dot unc dot edu"

client:
"yeah, www at unc dot edu"

me: slams head into desk asking myself why I have to take helpdesk calls during the holidays...

1/4/2006 8:17:15 PM

Quote :

"had you ever referred to yourself as a graphic designer at the time?"

Photographs are an intergral part of graphic design and a person that considers themselves a graphic designer said that I'm speechless.

1/4/2006 8:20:09 PM

Customer: This new server doesn't do anything when I power it up.
Me: ::verifies it passes POST:: What's the problem?
Customer: It doesn't do anything.
Me: You have to install an operating system.
Customer: WHAT THE HECK IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM?
Me: Dirka dirka dirka.
Customer: WHY WOULD THEY SELL ME THIS SERVER IF IT CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITHOUT HAVING TO DO A BUNCH OF WORK.
Me: Durrrrrrrrrr...This is going to be a long day.



Also, you should have heard the doctor's wife that got a $10k server as her home computer. YES THE GRAPHICS SUCK AND NO IT WON'T RUN WINDOWS 98.

1/5/2006 8:44:22 AM

I had just started at my current job and the network goes down. I mean NOTHING is working. No internet, no access to servers etc, so I run to the server room and I find the Install Manager with half a dozen cables unplugged holding them looking like a deer in headlights when I walked in.

I hung a note on the back of the server rack that said "No *his name* don't touch the wiring". He apparantly saw it since he came to my office and told me how unprofessional the note was... I responded "And what you did wasn't?".

As a note, his reasoning for doing what he did was because it looked cluttered. He had half of the wires plugged back in the wrong spots.

Another incident was back in the day when I worked for Ubisoft Tech Support. Customer calls in anger as hell that the game won't work on his computer. He says it gave him a "problem loading" I go through the dealio of getting him to check directx to make sure he had a sufficient video card, processor blah blah so that I have that information later. The game wasn't one that I was familiar with but sure enough we supported it.

About 10 minutes into the call I ask him to reinstall it and he goes "Oh it installs fine on this computer, I just won't install on my Mac."

This was one of those times where I would have paid good money for a device to reach through the phone and bitchslap the person on the other end.

My all time best story had with a job I had in early college doing tech support at Lucent Tech. I get a ticket from the SouthEast Regional VP that his computer is having disc errors. Nothing more specific. This was in 1998 mind you.

I went up to his office and he shows me his computer and goes into a meeting giving me specific instructions to come get him when it was fixed. I get up there and it's a state of the art computer almost locked entirely up. I restart the computer (at the time I didn't know better) and it starts fine and complains about disc space. I go and look and his 40gb HD was full. I was about to take it downstairs as I didn't want to just go and delete files, when this naked girl pops up in the bottom right hand corner.

You know what I'm talking about .

I run the cursor over it and I shit you not this was the name of the program "Porn Grabber 9000". It had been running for 3 days non stop on a T-1 connection. I find where the porn is stored and he had 35gb's of PICTURES... Of course at this point I'm laughing my ass off and call down stairs and tell my boss what's going on. He laughed for like aminute and then told me to go get the guy.

I did and he wanted to know what was wrong in his meeting and the thought crossed my mind to blurt it out but better judgement and the will to retain my job stopped me. When he came back to his office I put on a stern face and told him that his Porn Grabber 9000 program had reached the limit of our HD space and that I removed the program and deleted the files. And warned him to not leave it on for 3 days at a time next time. He started to say it wasn't his and I just looked at him funny.

I was fired two weeks later quoting "Funds issues". I still laugh about it.

1/5/2006 9:02:14 AM

Quote :

"Porn Grabber 9000"

/thread

1/5/2006 9:37:10 AM

After over a decade of internetting, my dad found out last week that you can send the same e-mail to a bunch of people by putting all their names in the address bar of one e-mail. YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO SEND THE E-MAIL OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!

He is running dual monitors now and all that.

1/5/2006 2:36:56 PM

I wish I could explain all of the dumb-shit stuff software testers do, half of the defects I get are ID-10T errors instead of real functional problems.

1/5/2006 4:32:44 PM

Quote :

"had you ever referred to yourself as a graphic designer at the time?"

damn, just damn

and Raige wins this one

1/5/2006 5:06:19 PM

This just happened this evening as I was helping my in-law's church friends (you can tell that already means trouble) "install" a TiVo (i.e. plug it in and turn it on). I came out of the night with 2 stories -

So after I got the TiVo running on my way out she mentioned her scanner wasn't working. The computer was on one side of the room and the scanner/copier was on the other. She said "when I try to scan it says it has to be hooked up to the computer".....
So I say "well.... yeah, usually that helps. I don't know what you'd be able to do with a scanner that wasn't attached to a computer."
"But I don't want to hook it up to the computer. I thought you could use it on its own."
"oh... well, if you want to scan something then it needs to be connected to the computer so you can store the scanned image"
"but I just want it to print out the scan on some paper"
"AHA - ok, well then you want the 'copy' function. [included in this particular scanner] In which case, I don't suppose you need it hooked up to the computer. Mind you, this is a poor method if you want to make more than 1 or 2 copies of something"

so I thought we were cool then. She could just use the copy button and get what she wanted. But then this gem:

"Yeah, I use the copy button. It works fine" - and she proceeds to show me some print outs of some articles she copied.

me - "ok cool. So if you can use the copy button to do what you want, without hooking it up to the computer, why do you want to use the scan button"

"well, because I want to scan some pictures"
"right.... but then you have to have somewhere to store the scanned pictures. That's where the computer comes into play"
"oh, well I just want to scan them"

it kind of fizzled after that. I guess it came down to she didn't understand the concept of scanning, and I don't think she realized that the main purpose of a scanner is to create digital versions of a scanned paper. I still never understood why the copy function didn't satisfy her, and what extra functionality she thought the scan button would add that didn't require a computer.


Then on the way home my mother-in-law demonstrated some other wonderful rational reasoning. She has an insanely expensive digital camera that she doesn't know how to use and takes way too many pictures, then burns them to CD and prints them at Wal-Mart so she can 'scrapbook' them (using 'scrapbook' as a verb there.....). She's gone through several high-quality photo printers and there's always "something wrong" with them so she just continues to buy more, and never uses them because she can't figure out how to use them. I've set her up with Picasa so she can organize, edit, print and/or burn pictures, and showed her numerous times how to do things like crop and get rid of red-eye, print in sheets, burn CDs, etc.

So she says she saw a printer at Sams Club (of course) that "you can plug any media card right into the printer", then edit the pictures right on a little screen on the printer. I said, "yeah, cool", thinking it might be easier for her to cut out the middle man (Picasa) and just go straight to the printer. But then she drops the bombshell - apparently the printer also has a CD-burner built in; So her plan was to buy the printer so she could plug in the media card, edit the photos on the tiny screen, then burn them to a CD to take to wal-mart to print for her. So I said "oh.... well, wouldn't you rather use your computer and picasa to edit the pictures then burn them to CD?" To which she replied - "it's just so hard to edit the pictures when they're so small. I can barely see what I'm doing".
If you haven't figured it out - she wasn't aware (or more likely forgotten that I've shown her) that if you double-click on a thumbnail it opens the picture full size so you can edit it. She was trying to figure out how to edit each of the thumbnails while viewing them all in the Library window.

1/6/2006 12:14:01 AM

I shouldn't even get started on stories from my Best Buy days . . . . . .


But for a classic, a guy comes in with his laptop he had bought the previous day. Brand new HP, one of the ones with the ridiculous 17" screen and number pad.


Guy: "You sold me a defective laptop! It doens't charge, doens't power up, its a peice of crap! You sell crappy products, it was broken out of the box, I demand a refund, ETC ETC".

Me: "Ok . . . . let me plug it up, and then we can get you a refund or a new laptop, whichever you'd prefer." I start taking it out fo the box.

Guy: "WHAT ARE YOU DOING ALL THIS FOR?! You don't think its broken?! This is ridiculous, I've been in line for 20 minutes and now you're making me go through all this crap! Just give me my money back!!!"

At this point a manager has wandered over and is watching from the shadows, so I give the guy the schpiel about how I just have to verify the problem so we can return the machine to the manufacturer, that its not anything about him, just something we have to do because of policy. Then I pull out the AC adapter and plug it in . . . .

The guy looks at me in the weirdest way

Guy: "Where . . . wait . . . did you plug that into the back?"

Me: "Where were YOU plugging in it?"


And he proceeded to plug the AC adapter into the ethernet port. It was one of those odd HP ones thats oval, so it kind of stayed in there. I then showed him the great big color poster that comes right on the top of the box that has a big picture of where you're supposed to put the cable. The look on his face when he left again with his laptop was priceless.

1/6/2006 1:51:14 AM

Quote :

"What's the difference between a CD and DVD?"

1/6/2006 5:37:41 AM

fregac that is great

1/6/2006 9:21:59 AM

I have had several DVD burners get returned at Sears and I'm pretty sure its 'cause people tried to burn DVDs of their "studio" DVDs and it wouldn't work. Every time I ring one up or discuss them I make sure to make this clear that it won't work (if people know how to get around this then they its a moot point but these are Joe average people)

also DVD players being routed through VCRs.'

and explaining why even on widescreen TVs you might get black bars even on widescreen DVDs


but by far the best is old ppl w/digi cameras I mean I could just flat out lie and say once a memory card is used up you have to replace it (and they would) but damn I don't want to be out of the easy shit loop when I'm old!!

[Edited on January 6, 2006 at 9:28 AM. Reason : lol]

1/6/2006 9:25:55 AM

on the simplistic A/V side, ever have friends and family that just don't understand the concept of audio and video in and audio and video out?

gaaaah

1/6/2006 10:15:36 AM

yup

1/6/2006 10:22:44 AM

Quote :

"but by far the best is old ppl w/digi cameras I mean I could just flat out lie and say once a memory card is used up you have to replace it (and they would) but damn I don't want to be out of the easy shit loop when I'm old!!"

My grandfather's wife's middle-aged daughter (step-daughter then?) thought that. She didn't understand why people liked digital cameras when you have to keep buying more memory. She threw away 4 512MB cards before she said anything to anyone.

This lady's sister is a Creative Memories consultant

1/6/2006 10:43:12 AM

I used to work at Radio Shack (yes yes)... i worked there for 5 years and I was the only person in the store who truly understood that a harddrive...was NOT the whole fucking tower. I can't begin to tell you how many arguements I got into people over that.

My best example was one day I was perusing the web and a customer comes in and says he's having trouble with his harddrive and long story short starts to argue with me about the tower being the same. I tried to let it go but he actually wanted me to say "He was right". So i walked over to a computer and opened it up and took out a harddrive.

"THIS is a harddrive. See where it says harddrive? THIS *points to the tower* is a TOWER. See it says "Compaq somenumber tower". I almost got fired over that one.

The absolute best of all Radio shack stories didn't really involve me. It was between my manager and some jackass. The guy brings in a harddrive, says it's broken and it honestly was. You could hear the grinding of the gear. His warranty is down to just parts so he says he'll put it in himself.

He gets it back and takes it home and comes back later and the drive he got sounds horrendous. you can hear the scraping. So we reorder one and have it overnighted. This time I open it to check and make sure it's okay and box it back up and give it to the customer. NOT EVEN 4 hours later he comes back and claims it's broken again. It's making a horrible sound and I look at the drive. There is a huge dent on the top obviously from some hard blunt object.

My manager looks at it and goes "Sir, we can't take this back"

The guy "Why the hell not?"

Manager "Because you obviously did this. It wasn't like this when it came in"

The guy "I tried installing it and it wouldn't fit in the slot.

I'm thinking... slot? I whisper to Wayne (manager) that the guy needs to bring in his tower. Turns out he has it in his car! Bring it in... the front panel is RIPPED off, and it looks like someone used a pair of metal cutters to take out the drive.

Basically, he had bought a new harddrive and wanted to replace the old one and on compaq's it's a BITCH to open some of the cases as the front cover came off before the case. He destroyed the first harddrive getting it out... broke two more slamming it in the slot.

But it gets better. He's demanding that we replace it again. Wayne laughs at him and says no. Words are exchanged and Wayne takes the drive and sets it outside the door to the store. The guy goes out and brings it back in. Wayne takes it back outside and then the guy brings it back it.

It was SO ABSOLUTELY hysterical I had tears coming out of my eyes. Then the guy's wife comes in and starts yelling at Wayne about how he can't treat customers like this. In the end cops were called, the guy was given a restraining order and even the cops laughed at the guys tower.

Sigh... I almost miss that job... NAH.

1/6/2006 11:05:54 AM

I hate people that call up demanding an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) for a router or modem or something. It always turns out being the computer at fault or some sort of operator error.

1/6/2006 11:23:59 AM

Quote :

"And he proceeded to plug the AC adapter into the ethernet port."

Yeah, I'm my extended family's tech guy. One particular household was always a bother. I could guarantee that I'd be working out the latest set of self-inflicted PC disaster every time I'd go over. It would always start the same... "it was working fine until so and so go on".

So I try to narrow the problem down before I begin.

Me: "What is wrong?"
Them: "I can't plug the scanner into the hard drive"
Me: <sigh>

Quote :

"I was the only person in the store who truly understood that a harddrive...was NOT the whole ******* tower"

Yes, I hate this too.

Turns out they had plugged the usb printer into the NIC... diagonally... with wiggle room to spare. I'm not sure why they thought that would work.

[Edited on January 6, 2006 at 12:08 PM. Reason : -]

1/6/2006 12:07:15 PM

I just got 3 angry messages (cell phone was dead, at parents house with no charger) about me coming in to work because I didn't "setup this new hire properly". I get there and the guy deleted the shortcut to the program...

1/6/2006 2:52:23 PM

Quote :

"yeah, you have spyware, this rainlender program needs to come off"

-UNC school system tech support

Quote :

"AIM is full of spyware, get google talk "

proceeds to install google talk and add his screen name to the buddy list
-UNW school system tech support

1/6/2006 3:26:05 PM

I always have to read these threads becuse they are pretty freakin funny, but I always come away so dissapointed in humanity.

1/6/2006 3:51:14 PM

one night a couple years ago, my RA comes charging out of his room. pissed as hell b/c he can't get some webpage to work

RA: " How the hell do I enable goodies?"
Suite: "hhahahahahahah"
RA: "DAMNIT HOW THE HELL DO I ENABLE GOODIES? THIS DAMN WEBSITE IS TELLING ME TO ENABLE GOODIES"
Suite: "You mean cookies?"
RA: "................... yeah you're right"

RA was an Electrial Engineer.

1/6/2006 3:54:40 PM

goodies, **chuckle**

1/6/2006 3:56:29 PM

remote employee: this damned VPN thing of yours is always down. i am hardly ever able to get on the network at work. it's broken right now.

me: *tap tap tap* no, it's working fine right now. can you get on the internet?

remote employee: what do you mean?

me: can you get fuckin' google to come up?

remote employee: no and i can't get any other webpages either.

me: fuckin' call time warner.

1/6/2006 3:57:39 PM

dad: how do i find the lyrics to this song?

me: type in the song title and the word lyrics into google.

dad: ohh, i got it! i'm a hacker now!

1/6/2006 4:19:03 PM

haha, yea, I don't believe the older generation will ever understand how to sucessfully use a search engine

1/6/2006 4:27:33 PM

I love threads like this

1/6/2006 4:31:29 PM

Quote :

"hey son, punch this up on the internet for me"

1/6/2006 5:47:40 PM

This thread is awesome. Humanity is doomed.

1/6/2006 6:19:25 PM

Quote :

"rudeboy: dad: ohh, i got it! i'm a hacker now!"

haha teh wins

my boss is kind of like this, absolutely great guy to work for but not the most tech-savvy around he always bitches about how he got this brand new computer from Dell but it's always so damn slow. now part of it is that the machine has only 256MB of RAM and all kinds of Dell-ware shit loaded onto it, so that slows it down quite a bit.

but one day last week he needed my help trying to find a particular email or something like that, and the guy's got 58+ Outlook windows open at the same time. so I tell him this won't help his speed issues, and to click the red 'X' in the top right corner when his done with a message.

and he goes "oh, you mean that doesn't delete them?"

1/6/2006 8:08:20 PM

My math teacher in high school once asked me if she could download more memory for her TI-83.

1/6/2006 9:49:23 PM

My band teacher in middle school got a 3.5" floppy stuck in her cd-rom tray.

1/6/2006 10:58:21 PM

1/7/2006 12:01:46 PM

http://www.brentroad.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=377179

great thread

Quote :

"By the way, putting the damn thing together like a dork doesn't bring down the price"

[Edited on January 7, 2006 at 12:37 PM. Reason : .]

1/7/2006 12:36:14 PM

essential reading: http://rinkworks.com/stupid/



I seem to remember a good one, but the memory is really fuzzy ... bear with me on this one.

My brother (agentlion - maybe he can clarify this story) and I go into the Preiss Co offices to sign our lease a few years back. The dude helping us is a normal Preiss Co guy - big time fratty, too much bong resin clouding his brain. We get up to his office, he says, "Sorry I don't have your lease ready, I've been having computer trouble for the last week. Let me run over to a co-worker's office and I'll get the lease ready."
Joe (brother) says, "Well, we know a little about computers. What's your problem?"
Preiss Co guy: "It won't start up. I push the power button and a few seconds later it gives me some error about it can't find the Windows disk or something."
Us: "Hmm, turn it on."
He turns it on, we see the error message (which, in all truth, is pretty damn cryptic if you've never seen it before).
Us: "Oh, here's your problem." -- Eject floppy disc.
Him: "damn."

[Edited on January 7, 2006 at 1:59 PM. Reason : ]

1/7/2006 1:58:25 PM

i didn't know you and agentlion are brothers

1/7/2006 2:18:27 PM

^^do that to most engineers and they will run into the same problem

1/7/2006 2:27:42 PM

who cares

1/7/2006 2:49:26 PM

^^

I dont know a single engineer who even owns a floppy disk drive , outside of a laptop

1/8/2006 8:03:54 PM

Quote :

"I dont know a single engineer who even owns a floppy disk drive , outside of a laptop"

gross exageration - they are coming more and more rare everyday but you know people with them

1/8/2006 8:06:08 PM

I can name 5 who dont before 1 who does sir

1/8/2006 8:07:02 PM

techno-nerd friends

1/8/2006 8:17:15 PM

Quote :

"remote employee: this damned VPN thing of yours is always down. i am hardly ever able to get on the network at work. it's broken right now. me: *tap tap tap* no, it's working fine right now. can you get on the internet? remote employee: what do you mean? me: can you get fuckin' google to come up? remote employee: no and i can't get any other webpages either. me: fuckin' call time warner. "

happened to me last week..fuckin morons

1/8/2006 8:35:23 PM