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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.5 Floppy Abuse

Floppy disks routinely undergo severe ordeals by owners who do not know how to treat them or even understand what they are. One would think, in a world where audio cassettes and music CDs are mainstream, people would understand that floppy disks are a similar medium.

A customer saw me handling some floppies, and remarked, "How do they get the words small enough to fit on there?"

A company at which I once worked replaced their existing clones and XTs with PS/2s. Users were informed to convert their data to 3 1/2 inch diskettes. One user didn't replace everything. Not to worry, as she just folded the 5 1/4 inch floppy in half and jammed it into the 3 1/2 inch drive.

When one of the computer labs upgraded from Apple IIe computers to Macs, one student came to me because she was having problems with the new computers. She had "reformatted" her 5 1/2" disks by trimming them down with a pair of scissors so that they would fit into the 3 1/2" drives.

That one warms my heart every time I think of it.

When I was in third grade or so, we learned some computer skills on an Apple ][e. One day, the software we were using wouldn't load on the computer (keep in mind this is a classroom full of 9 and 10 year olds), and the teacher said, "Oh, the window must be dirty," and proceeded to rub the window of the 5 1/4" diskette with her thumb and forefinger, smearing it badly. The entire class yelled at her to stop, but not before three or four brisk rubs. Apparently she thought the disk was a little dusty that morning, so she wiped it that way before the class got there, then again when it wouldn't load for the class.

When I was in seventh grade our principal substituted for our computer teacher. One morning we walked into class and to our horror she had all of our disks soaking in a big bin of soapy water. Earlier that morning she had been grading our assignments when she got an error message. She assumed that the disks were dirty, so she decided to clean them. When we explained to her that you can't get a disk wet, she said, "I didn't know that. Next time I'll just use a little Windex."

It's not uncommon for new computer users to try to put disks in the wrong drives -- ZIP disks in the floppy drive, floppies in the CD drive, etc -- but once I saw a student mix up three. He had put a 5 1/4" floppy in the CD drive, then tried to access it via the A: drive, which was the 3 1/2" drive.

Tech Support kept getting calls from this one client because any disk which was sent to the client became unreadable after one day in the field. A live technician was sent out. He asked what happened after the client received the disk. "I keep them right here, on the side of the file cabinet," he said. (Under a magnet!)

The computer was having problems reading the disk. I checked the disk and found that it had a coffee ring on it. I asked who set their coffee cup on it, and one guy raised his hand. I asked why, and he said, "Well, I didn't want to hurt the table."

One user, a gentleman quite unfamiliar with computers and very short on common sense, had a floppy disk that wouldn't stay in the disk drive. He called the help desk because his computer wasn't working as it normally did and wondered if someone could take a look at it.

The problem was his "solution" to his floppy disk problem. To get it to stay in, he used superglue to keep it in the drive.

A customer was having diskette problems. After trouble shooting for a while (magnets, heat, etc), tech asked the customer what else was being done with the diskette.

A customer complied with a tech's request to send in a copy of a defective diskette. A few days later, the tech received a letter from the customer along with a Xerox copy of the floppy.

My professor logged into the computer in our classroom to show us a spreadsheet she had set up on a floppy disk. She double clicked on the A: drive to get a directory listing, and she frowned and said, "These are not the right files."

So she closed the Explorer window, took the disk out, and logged off. Then she logged back in, put the disk back in, and double clicked on the A: drive again. She was astonished that the files still weren't the right ones.

We never did find out what happened to the disk she'd originally put the files on.

A floppy-based computer would not boot. I went to the site and discovered that the 5 1/4" floppy was inserted sideways.

Over the summer a couple years back, I was working for a small chemical company as a process engineer. The secretary in the area where I worked had recently acquired a new Macintosh computer and since I was one of the few who knew how to use it, I got called when ever there was trouble. Well, one time I got called to come over and help her. I got there and found out that she was having problems getting the 3 1/2" disk into the disk drive. It would only go about half way in and no further. I proceeded to check to see if there was already another disk in the drive and also used a paper clip to see if somehow the drive had gotten into the down position. I was stumped...until I looked down at the disk and realized that she had put the disk label entirely on the front of the disk instead of folding it around to the back like you're supposed to. In the process, she had literally taped the metal door shut so it wouldn't open when she tried to put the disk in. Apparently she had labeled a whole pack of disks that way.

One user kept her diskettes in a three ring binder -- but punched the holes in the disk rather than the sleeve.

One student turned in his program with the printout neatly stapled to the disk.

One tech support person told a lady to insert a clean disk into the drive. She washed it first.

A very common misconception is that the plastic case of a 5 1/4" disk needs to be removed (with an x-acto knife or something) before the disk can be used.

A consultant showed a new user how to copy a disk to do backups and told her to buy a box of disks. She did, and when she got the new box, she unwrapped the disks and did the backup. The consultant returned a week later, and the client proudly showed him her backup disks. To his amazement, she had 'peeled' off the wrapping on all ten disks, including the metal shutter. Her explanation: "I thought you had to expose the disk."

One new user, diligently following instructions that you had to format new floppy disks before using them, promptly went home and formatted all of his program disks. They were new, after all, and he wanted to use them.

"How do I open this new-fangled floppy drive?" a user asked. He was on an IBM PC-XT, pointing to the hard drive.

A student reported that he was trying to copy his assignment to floppy disk, but the machine he was using wasn't formatting the floppy correctly. I asked him to try formatting it again so I could watch.

He correctly inserted the floppy, started the format correctly, but when it got 34% finished, he ejected it.

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.

I work as a computer consultant at a school. One day a very irritated -- and irritating -- student walked in with a floppy disk.

She handed me the disk. It was a really cheap brand -- I forget which -- and the case was slightly cracked and missing the protective metal cover. The disk media itself had fingerprints on it and a sizable bend at one point. I tried the disk out, and sure enough, no files were found. I tried to explain to her that this was a lost cause, but to no avail.

The sad thing is, since then, I've seen several other students with disks in similar condition, and they all contained their only copies of their senior theses.

I said that she could, but I wanted to say, "Yes, we are an equal opportunity computer lab."

A friend of mine purchased "colored" floppy disks so she could save email attachments to disks. The attachments were color GIF files, and all she had around the house were black floppies.

I was demonstrating MS Powerpoint to some students. I imported some color clip art into the program. After I asked for questions, one girl asked if I saved the file to color or black and white floppies.

A few years ago, a woman called to complain that she bought a computer, and after only a couple months, Windows didn't run anymore. She further explained that her son had installed a game on the computer and that that was the only thing the computer would run.

I went to her home and found that the son had created a boot diskette for the game and never popped it out of the drive.

Someone came up to me in such a big distress because we don't have WordPerfect on our machines anymore. So I told this guy to use Microsoft Word because it's the same sort of thing. Well, the guy told me that he needed to save the resume he'll be typing, and since his disk had been used previously with WordPerfect it therefore couldn't be used for Microsoft Word. He formatted the disk for Wordperfect, he kept insisting, so it wouldn't work for Microsoft Word. Obviously I couldn't slap him on the face, but I wanted to.

I received a call from a secretary asking for a document to be converted from WordPerfect 5.1 to WordPerfect 6.1. So I did as she asked and emailed the converted file back. Later she called and asked, "If I copy this to a disk, will it stay in 6.1 or will it go back to 5.1?"

One user had a word processor that took 3 1/2" disks and stored files on them using an MSDOS file system format. He wanted to convert the files that were on his word processor disks to his new MAC machine. Unable simply to insert the word processor disks into the MAC's disk drive and have them be readable, he enlisted the aid of an acquaintance who had a PC with MSDOS.

He didn't grasp that a second disk, also formatted for PC use, wouldn't work in his MAC any better than his originals.

Later on, he got an idea when he was reading the documentation for a Disk Doctor program he had on his MAC. The utility, he discovered, could restore files that had been erased from a disk by accidental deletion or reformatting. So he took one of his MSDOS-formatted word processor disks, reformatted it in his MAC, then tried to get the Disk Doctor to recover the lost MSDOS files. Didn't work, surprise, surprise.

I was on duty one night at my university's computing centre. A woman came in with a disk that she wanted to retrieve some files from. The disk was in really bad shape; the metal door was missing, a boot print was on it, and the label had been treated with white-out several times. I suggested she go buy another disk at the vending machine down the hall while I tried to read the data off her disk.

When she returned, I told her that I was able to get most of the information off the old disk. I asked for the new disk so I could save the information.

"Ok," she said, and started to hand the disk to me. Then she paused and said, "Oh, wait. I forgot to format it."

With that, she took the disk in both hands and ripped the metal door off.

"There," she said, pleased with herself.

It took all the self-control I could possibly muster to retain my composure and suggest she buy another disk.

Well, some of these typewriters can write MSDOS format disks, so it's possible. She hands me her disk. Unfortunately, it's not a writeable disk. In fact, it's not a disk at all. It's a yellow plastic insert, most definitely a piece of shipping packaging. Now, here's where years of living with teachers comes in handy. Can you imagine trying to keep a straight face?
  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Floppy Abuse