1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Mincing Words

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Systems

1.2 Mincing Words

Granted, computer terminology is frequently complicated and misleading. But shouldn't people know what they own?

A user called and demanded that his Windows 3.11 environment be changed from "386 Enhanced" to "Pentium Enhanced" since he felt he was "not getting the full potential" of his Pentium.

I was just talking to a user who had been having problems with her machine -- it was losing its settings every time she turned it on.

It took me a while to figure out what she meant.

My grandfather has recently started a course called "Computers for the Terrified." He's nearly eighty and, although used to be an engineer within the British Royal Airforce, is completely stuck when it comes to computers.

He came back from his first evening at this course. When asked how it had gone, he replied, "Yes, it was really good. I really enjoyed it, but I really couldn't get to grips with my mole."

I stopped for a second, completely puzzled, until I realised he was talking about the mouse.

One day I asked if my Mom could shut down my computer. I told her to press "the big gray switch on the computer." After some time, I phoned her and asked if she shut the machine down, but she replied, saying there wasn't any big gray switch on the keyboard.

Once I went on site to set up a computer for a school. I spend several hours setting up the equipment and configuring all the software and checking the Internet connection. When I left, everything was working perfectly.

The next morning, I got a call from the teacher, saying that the computer wouldn't turn on. Perplexed, I paid another visit. I sat down at the desk and looked at each component: the scanner was on, the monitor was on, the speakers were powered up, but the screen was blank. I looked under the desk, and, sure enough, none of the lights on the face of the computer were lit. I reached down, pushed the main power button, and the computer immediately came to life and booted up normally.

She was pointing to the speakers.

As the local computer enthusiast, I sometimes get called on to troubleshoot computer problems. A while back, my boss asked me to help her figure out what was going on with her computer, complaining that her "rat" (mouse) was not responding. She surmised that it was a problem with the "ropes" (cables) behind the computer.

I had a friend who was ready for a memory upgrade on his Mac notebook, and he wanted to know how much "megaram" he needed.

One day I was shopping for RAM with a friend of mine. We checked out a few places. During the trip, my friend blurted out:

The place where a friend of mine works was going through the process of upgrading all of their computers. On one computer in particular, they had determined they needed more memory. One of the senior partners got it into her head that they needed more "Meg." My friend tried to tell her that what they needed was RAM, but she insisted that the machine had plenty of RAM and that they needed more Meg -- specifically, about 16 megabytes of Meg. He got tired of arguing with her and said to go down to the computer store and buy some Meg.

She came back with an envelope with RAM in it -- on the envelope was written "16 megabytes of Meg."

"The salesman tried to tell me the same thing you did," she told my friend, "but then he went and talked to his manager, and he set him straight. Now go install this Meg."

After some inquiry, I finally understood what she perceived the "ROM" part of "CD-ROM" to be: the picture. She said a specific multimedia CD was not displaying the ROM. I corrected her mistaken impression, to which she said, quote, "Huh." I walked her through the problem, and when it was fixed, she exclaimed loudly, "We found the ROM! WE FOUND THE ROM!!!!"

I needed to wipe someone's hard drive and re-install Windows, so I asked her what she had on her system that wasn't backed up.

Seen on a web page:

Here's a silly one. My high school computing teacher routinely called Word for Windows "Windows for Word" through the whole time I went there.

This happened when I was working for Kinko's:

A lot of people seem to think that all computers are made by Microsoft, and that all software is called Windows. This story comes from our school's computer cluster.

I turn the monitor towards him and fire up WordPerfect.

A client just called in reference to our most recent survey, which asks if they have Microsoft Access. The client said, "Of course we have access to Microsoft -- how else do you think we run our programs!?"

It usually takes two or three guesses to determine which Microsoft application he's in.

A few years ago I saw an advertisement that said:

"Required: Office Assistant: Must be familiar with Lotus One, Two, and Three."

Overheard in a computer games store:

When asking questions about setting up a new account online, the caller asked me if she had to put an 'astronaut' (asterisk) in front of the customer name.

A friend of mine has a daughter who had started attending a university and had decided to buy a computer on which to complete assignments. Her father suggested she call me for some advice on what to buy, since he knew I worked with computers. I answered the questions based on her needs and thought she had a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals of what we had discussed about RAM, applications, windows, etc. Until she asked, "Oh, and Mike, which is better, hardware or software?"

I was working for a major college in our area and we had a real neophyte end user that was constantly having problems with her PS/2. I went over to find out what was wrong. I wanted to find out what program she was running, so I asked, "What software are you using?" She replied, "Software? Oh, we don't use software." Needless to say I was totally amazed, I guess her computer is telepathic.

Talking to a Mac user:

A friend had to go over to a bank and set everyone's software up. Since all the Internet software his company supports runs under MS Windows, he asked the manager "Do you have Windows?" The manager stared at him blankly and said, "No, we've got air conditioning."

A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. The tech asked her if she was "running it under Windows." The woman then responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his is working fine."

My mother works in a bank. She told me that every once in a while the printer would go crazy and spit out dozens of blank pages for no reason. I told her that sometimes happens when somebody prints a binary file that contains unprintable characters.

The next day, she proudly announced to everyone in the office that the reason the printer goes crazy is because it's printing "unmentionable" characters.

I'm an employee of a major computer retail store. Recently I saw a woman wandering around, looking confused. I asked her if I could help.

She looked at me disdainfully, as if I was the world's dumbest idiot for having to ask.

While selling off some salvaged computers, we had a couple of 286 CPU cases stacked together with a monitor on top; another monitor happened to be sitting nearby. A woman asked me (pointing to the first monitor), "How come this one comes with two risers and the other none?"

My company publishes clip art products for the computer, so many of the tech support calls involve people trying to use our products with their own illustration software -- Aldus FreeHand was one of the most popular. One day I overheard the tech guy in the next office say to a customer, "No, I think you mean Aldus. Adidas is the shoe."

A job ad that I saw in a storefront in London in March 1998 was for someone with "Windows 97" experience.

The other night I was talking to my girlfriend's father about computers. He was complaining about the difference with his computer at home and the one he has at work. The one at home was a Pentium II with Windows 95. The one at work was an old machine running "Windows 91."

A guy I work with came back from the dentist, puzzled. The two had been commiserating about Windows and its instability, and the dentist had observed, "Yeah, last night I was fooling around with the system, and I blew out all my interrupts."

I was doing some training for an initial release of our software. One of the students found a bug that caused the software to crash. The student was new to computers, so I explained that the program had crashed.

The student proceeded to look behind the laptop he was working on, look below it, and then look at me, confused, and asked, "What did it hit?"

I had a lady that called up complaining that she couldn't access the Internet. Now keep in mind she had an IBM system with a "Mwave" modem. She said that every time she tried to connect to the Internet, it told her that there was no dial tone. She looked up the error message in her help documentation, and it told her to make sure her phone line was connected.

Through the course of our conversation, I discovered she was calling the monitor the computer and the computer the disk drive. So I clarified.

I helped her get the system working, but she returned it anyway. She said, quote, "I couldn't get no hard drives programmed into the CPU." The return was accepted without hesitation.

I work as a tech for my local school district. One day we got in a Mac LC with a problem tag stating the following:

"Need to install CD chip into hard disk drive to expand memory to accept CD programs."

I work at a computer store in the upgrades department. One day, a customer came up to me and asked for a "card game."

The customer looked at me like I was a complete idiot.

I was trying to figure out how a card game was going to help them out. Instead of getting a racing game, at least a card game would work. But it wouldn't be very easy to play a card game with a steering wheel.

Then I figured it out.

I spoke with a woman who appeared to be knowledgeable about computers and wanted to inquire as to which modem to purchase. She asked which ISPs were supporting 56K modems, how noisy the phones lines were, the pros and cons about voice modems, and so forth. After determining which modem would best meet her requirements, she asked, "How much more hard drive space will this give me?" Then, before I could recover enough to answer, she asked, "Or would a trackball be better to speed up my computer?"

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Mincing Words