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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Other

7.1 Miscellaneous Dumbness

This section contains some stories of silliness that don't fit anywhere else.

Many people in computer labs will assure you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were doing everything correctly, and it still wasn't working, only to make you get up from your nice comfy seat to walk over to the other side of the room and do it yourself. Invariably, after it works the first time for you, the response is, "THAT'S WHAT I TYPED THE FIRST TIME!" Obviously not.

A customer, attempting to show that he's knowledgeable about computers...

We have a customer here who recently bought his own domain. His catch phrase everytime he has a problem is, "Do you think I could add a MIDI file to fix that?"

Uh....

I have a friend who isn't very computer literate. Whenever she saves her work, she does it five times, one right after another, just to "make sure it will actually be saved."

Cut from our email support log:

This morning I tried to sign on and for a purple screen. After several tried with different browsers then I got the message you were down. I tried to exit. It went to a background with huge pixels and stuck. I mean no amount of rebooting would get rid of it. Finally I had to reset my wallpaper.

I was giving instructions to a caller once, but his son was the one physically sitting at the computer, so all my instructions had to be relayed. Here's a snippet of the conversation:

The really scary part was what his son said then:

Do we really want to know what goes on at that house?

Back to the days when I worked in technical support, I had a customer call me with a problem. I took his name and information, then asked him what the problem was. He got angry and started to yell at me, saying, "You should know that by now." When I told him that all I had was his username, password, and phone number, he assumed I had connected to his computer via the Internet and had complete and total access to his computer. When I explained to him that that wasn't possible, he was angered even more and said, "Then what the hell am I paying you for! This is technical support! You're supposed to be able to fix my computer!" He hung up.

I did tech support for the now defunct Zelos Digital Learning. We published and produced CD-ROM educational multimedia titles. One caller asked if he could get a copy of our "3-D Tutor" software on floppy disks. I told him the software would take up roughly 450 floppies' worth of space. "So will you do it?" he asked.

While working in tech support, I received a call from a user who asked me to install some piece of software on her machine. While installing, there was a bit of a wait so I tried to make small talk. I said, "This machine is slow, isn't it?" She replied, "Well, I have a friend who has Quicken on her machine. If I install it on this machine, will it run faster?"

At work, each employee has a home directory on a UNIX file system. The home directories are sorted into subdirectories, one per group within the organization. Recently I moved from one group to another and consequently needed my UNIX account moved to the new area.

Finally I was informed that the move had taken place. I logged in and discovered that instead of copying the contents of my old home directory to my new home directory, the copy started one level up. So inside my new home directory was actually a copy of the whole directory for my old group. Basically I had a copy of all the home directories of all the members of my old group right inside my new home directory. (On top of that, my old home directory was never removed from the old location.) Fortunately, among the many home directory copies I had was a copy of my own. I fixed the problem myself. Good thing I'm a scrupulous person.

A user came into my office this morning. Apparently, her computer had popped up a message that included the words, "See your System Administrator," so she came down to find out what I wanted.

When a colleague of mine first ran across the original PKARC program (this was a while ago) he thought it was the greatest thing. He figured that he could reduce each of his files to a single byte by re-running PKARC on a .ARC file enough times.

I couldn't convince him otherwise because, lacking a detailed knowledge of software compression techniques, I had only my own gut instinct to rely on. That and the fact that, if he were correct, it would mean that the number of possible different files was limited to 256.

A guy I worked for was kind of a penny pincher. One of his disk space saving techniques was to compress compressed compressions. He would use the product that compresses EXE files internally so they automatically expand when executed, then zip a whole bunch of files including those, then store the zip file on a DriveSpace compressed volume. I think his eventual goal was to get all his files down to 1 byte.

I'm an occasional consultant for a group of lawyers who spend all day every day in Word and WordPerfect, completely ignoring the rest of Windows and other applications. One day the secretary called me and told me she was worried they were running out of disk space on the server and wanted to start saving space.

I told her all about archiving, zip, WinZip, etc. At her insistence, I helped her download and install WinZip. I walked her through the process of using the system, creating archives, decompressing them, etc. A week later she called again, in a panic.

A friend of mine had just found a working 386. He said the end of the monitor cable was missing a few pins, but he was going to fix it by gluing new pins into the holes.

How about a time machine?

I work as a lab proctor in a computer lab on campus. One day a gentleman was having trouble editing his document, so I went over to his computer to see what the problem was. He was trying to type his paper in at the DOS prompt.

For some reason, all our classroom's computers' sound cards stopped working. We determined that someone had deleted the sound drivers off all the computers, so we told the teacher.

A while ago I was received a call from a woman who said that Eudora Pro was showing her password. I found this to be strange, because when you type it in your password in Eudora, it displays asterisks. So when I went over to her office and looked at her desktop. She had renamed the Eudora Pro icon with her password.

I provide tech support over the phones for a company. We don't support Windows 98 and usually refer Win 98 calls to the Microsoft tech support line.

Recently, we upgraded all our users from WordPerfect 5.1 to 6.0. One user was so happy that she decided she'd never use WordPerfect 5.1 again. So she went into 5.1 and deleted all her files. A short while later we got a call. "I can't find any of my files!" she complained. "What did you do with them?"

One of my clients called one day saying that a bunch of her folders were missing when she tried to open documents in Microsoft Word. She was smart enough to check trough Windows Explorer to see if the folders were still present, which they were. After several attempts over the phone to find the missing folders my service manager decided to send me over to take care of the problem. When I arrived, I asked the lady to duplicate the problem. She started Word and clicked on 'Open'. She then pointed out that some of her Folders were there but not all of them. As politely as possible, I pointed out that the scroll bar on the bottom of that window was not all the way to the left. When she moved it left, her missing folders appeared as expected. Needless to say she was very embarrassed since she had been using computers for over four years.

I had a call from a user with a problem with his spell checker. I walked him through fixing the problem and later sent a follow up email, asking if the problem was gone.

I got this back:

Thanks for inquiring, the spell chicker works fine.

I once saw a person with a spreadsheet in front of him. The spreadsheet had a few lists of numbers, and he was adding them manually by punching them into a calculator.

During an Excel course:

In our company, we use Lotus Notes as our database. I am an executive assistant and am involved with determining how to handle or solve problems our field personnel have with the database.

One person was telling me that he had lost one of his databases.

Apparently all he had done was rearrange his databases and only needed to scroll down to find it. Needless to say, I had been laughing the entire time.

Before moving into network support, I did PC support for a large multinational utility company. We had bases all over the country and personnel moves were frequent. There was an software model in use consisting of applications delivered to the desktop using Novell Application Launcher. A user's ability to run or even see applications depended on membership of Netware groups.

One user had moved sites and had his account moved to a different container. The next Monday, he logged a call to the help desk, saying that he couldn't see one of his applications any more. Obviously someone had just forgotten to add him to a group in his new location.

My colleague received the following email from a help desk employee:

Simon,
This user has moved from Motherwell to Wrexham and has lost his Landmaster icon. Could it have fallen out of his PC when it was being moved?

A very irate dentist called to complain that the custom office package which I had written was extremely slow.

I was able to calm him down and offered to rewrite any portion of the software that wasn't executing correctly, which he finally agreed to. That afternoon I sat with the receptionist to watch her use the software and see where the slowdown occurred.

She began entering her first appointment:

S............... m............... i............... t.............. h............

I have never seen hunting and pecking go so agonizingly slow. No wonder it took thirty minutes to enter an appointment.

I was helping my friend with her computer once. I asked her to move a window that was partially obscuring another. I watched her as she resized the overlying window by pulling the lower left corner way down, then resizing it again by pulling the upper right corner so that it was the proper size again.

I showed her how to move windows around by the title bar, and she was amazed.

I work for an online banking service as a sales and service support representative. Part of our marketing included having our number on customer's bank statements. Needless to say, we received many calls unrelated to our service as customers would dial the first toll-free number they saw on their statement. Most of the people who had called in error quickly understood and were content to let us transfer them to their local branch or just let us give them the correct number. One elderly lady took some extra convincing, and after five minutes of explaining that she had called the wrong area, reluctantly accepted my offer of giving her the correct number.

I hear four telephone keypad tones come through my headset.

After dialing-in remotely to a field user's computer, I activated PCAnywhere's chat window to communicate with the user since she didn't have a dedicated phone line. I typed, "Barbara, if you're there, just type back." After about ten seconds, my chat window started displaying, "BACK" . . . "BACK" . . . "BACK" . . . "BACK"

We sell an add-on for a popular flight simulation game. A customer called and was very concerned about the message telling her that she needed a license in order to fly any of the planes in the game. After a moment's confusion I realized that she was referring to the license agreement that comes with just about all commercial software. I explained that no, we just needed her to agree not to resell the product without a license.

What amazed me the most about the call was not that she had misunderstood the license agreement, but that she'd actually read it in the first place. I mean, who reads those things?

Understandably, I was shocked.

I put him on hold. For about three minutes. I hate to be screamed at.

I work in the internal tech support department for our bank's computers. Computers, mind you. Tech support for the computers.

Several years ago, we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and said to a secretary, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?"

"Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, he took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.

I once got an especially helpful reply to a question I asked on Microsoft's on-line tech support service. I wrote back to thank them for a complete and concise reply and said how much I appreciated it.

The next day I had a response: We are looking in to the problem and will contact you with a solution as soon as possible.

One man complained that a message that appeared when installing Microsoft Excel said that the installation would take thirty minutes...and it only took ten. This is the first time anyone has ever complained that the wait was too short.

Turned out, the user was playing Lunar Lander and crashed his spaceship.

Someone needed help installing a game from a diskette.

I once saw a student type, "Please change my tutorial times," into a computer. Surprise, surprise, it didn't work!

A guy said whenever he typed the letter 'O', his Mac acted as though he typed Command-O. I told him I didn't think our INIT could do that and suggested that maybe the Command key was stuck down. He replied, "****, this call is costing me money!" He had a point, so I asked how he found out our product was causing the problem. He said he did an automatic conflict resolution test with his startup manager, which restarted his Mac five times in a row and identified our INIT as the culprit. Fair enough. Did he attempt to duplicate the problem after each startup? No? So how did the startup manager know what it was looking for? He said he told the startup manager what the problem was by typing the words CORRUPT KEYBOARD in the Notes field. I tried to find a polite was to say that startup managers don't read English yet, but it wasn't polite enough to prevent a rebuttal composed entirely of cuss words. Maybe if he'd typed that into his startup manager....

Since I teach nights at a local community college, I get a lot of professional programmers in my classes upgrading their education. One student, who was one such person, attended every lecture and smiled and nodded and took notes. But he only turned in his first assignment. The results of his first test were horrid. Out of curiosity, I asked my wife, who barely knew how to turn a computer on much less program one, to take the test (which was mostly true/false and multiple choice questions). My wife scored higher than this guy.

The semester's end came, and he flubbed his final, too. A few weeks later, I got a call from him complaining about his 'F'. I pointed out he hadn't turned in any of his assignments, and those counted 75% of the grade.

"Did you hear me say something besides what the other students heard?" I asked.

"Well, I thought my test grades would carry me," he replied.

It had turned out his company had paid for him to take the course. Since he failed, it suddenly came to the attention of his employer that he didn't know how to program, and now his job was in jeopardy. As I hung up the phone, I mused that his company shouldn't fire him. It was a perfect match: a programmer who couldn't program and a company that couldn't figure out sooner that he couldn't.

During 12th grade, I read up a book called "Stupid Mac Tricks." One of the tricks in it was how to replace the Mac's startup screen. As a joke, I made a graphic of a black-bordered white box with a gray background. The text in the box read, "This computer will self-destruct in ten seconds. Thank you, Apple Computer Co." I made this the startup screen for a computer in my high school's computer lab.

The next day an "out of order" sign was taped to the monitor. The lab attendants usually wrote the reason on the bottom edge of the paper, so I leaned in to read what had been written there. It said, "Will self-destruct."

A call came in and the customer said that his computer was acting funny. The customer said that he shouldn't be having these problems, because the computer was reading that it was "Ok." The tech pondered a moment, and came to the realization that the display actually was "zero K" -- the customer's disk was full.

Back in the 1980s, my university had sponsered a "computer show" for various vendors including IBM and Radio Shack. IBM had just announced the IBM PC, complete with dual low density floppy disks and standard 64K RAM, expandable to 640K. A very pretty blonde woman was operating the booth and was eager to answer my every question.

She showed me a line in a manual: "After booting, BASIC will print '64k free'."

I helped a customer with a UNIX command that wasn't working once. He was entering the full path to an executable on the command line but typed an extra slash in the middle. I told him to retype the command without the extra slash.

A tech once calmed a man who was enraged because his computer "had told him he was bad and an invalid." The tech patiently explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.

A customer needed help setting up an application. The tech referred him to the local Egghead.

When told that Egghead was a software store, the man replied, "Oh! I thought you meant for me to find a couple of geeks."

I am a tech for HP Calc support and I got a call last week from a lady who wanted to send in her husband's calculator to be "overhauled." When I asked her what was wrong with it she replied, "Oh, nothing, it works fine; he just wanted to get it looked at and have some upkeep maintenance done on it." I guess she wanted the 10,000 calculation tune-up.

About six years ago I was starting to get into 4th Dimension (on the Macintosh) and was setting up a multi-user database for a client. I got everything setup as a single user system for the customer because they didn't want to allocate resources to the database until debugging was through, etc. So, all was fine and dandy as a single user system. The customer called me back three days later and was very frustrated trying to get multi-user working. Everything seemed ok in his setup, but he couldn't use both "machines" at once because the other user kept "messing up the screen." Turns out that he just plugged two keyboards into the same Macintosh and thought that meant multi-user.

There was a fellow who set his type color to black, just after setting the background color to black. Took him a couple days of blind typing to get things back again.

I just had a call from a woman who read to me everything in the "About Box" for Microsoft Works for the Macintosh. Her frustration was that every time she tried to click on the user's name in the about box it disappeared! "How do I get rid of this woman's name," she asked? "Well," I explained, "that's the name of the author of the program; you can't get rid of it." "What?! You mean every time I startup Works I'm gonna have to look at my husband's ex-wife's name?"

I heard this old story from someone who worked for a French company. They had a problem with a program on punched cards written for them by a US subsidiary. The programs never worked when loaded in France but the US systems house swore blind that they did at their end. Eventually, in exasperation, someone followed the working set of cards from the US to France. At French customs, he observed a customs official remove a few cards at random from the deck. Apparently, the French customs are entitled to remove a sample from any bulk item (such as grain), so a few cards from a large consignment shouldn't matter, should it?

A customer called a desktop publishing outfit and wanted a poster made from a color slide. It was a picture of the caller's recently deceased father with a couple of his fishing buddies in a boat. The caller mentioned there was a slight problem -- in the picture her father was facing away from the camera. She wanted the photo expert to flip the negative so you could see his face. When it was explained that this would only provide a mirror image of the back of his head she became irate and screamed into the phone, "If you can take the pimples off those glamour girls why can't you put a face on my father!"

A few months ago a lady started to call our tech support department over and over again. She couldn't get a DXF file to import into our 3D program. After exhausting the tech support pool, I was asked to see if I could help this lady. I promptly asked her to send me the file that she wanted to bring into our 3D program. After receiving the file I look at it and found that it was a 2D DXF file. I called this woman to inform her that she could not import a 2D file. She responded by screaming that she wanted her money back if our program couldn't automatically make a 3D object out of her 2D CAD drawings.

We received a fax from a customer last year. It was a tech support question about our accounting software package:

I had what sounded like a 90 year old lady call me once:

This customer was calling from a medical center.

One customer kept reporting a problem with her system beeping at her. This would happen (at times) without a user at the computer and at no specific times. The random timing, of course, made the troubleshooting difficult. Our decision was to create a problem report and have her call in when it was occurring or had occurred.

One month later, she called back. It turned out that a pager had been dropped under the desk where the computer was situated.

I used to service bank teller workstations. One day we received a call that a workstation was beeping. I took a look and couldn't find anything wrong. I cleaned the keyboard, just in case it was a stuck key.

The next day, she called back and complained that the computer was beeping again. This time I replaced the keyboard. But the problem didn't go away -- she called back the next day.

I noticed that she called at the same time of day each day, so I asked if there was something she did every day that might made the computer beep. She said there wasn't and that the computer would beep for about 15 seconds and then stop.

The next day I happened to be in the bank for an unrelated issue. At 3pm, the beepin started, and I went over to track it down. It seemed to be coming from the keyboard until I looked a little further in the desk drawer. There was a digital alarm clock in there.

My apartment-mate (we'll call him "Mike") sheepishly entered my room, asking me if I could take a "look" at his computer. He rarely relies on my Mac expertise to solve a problem; he usually takes it on as a "challenge" to solve it himself. So I knew this must be a stumper.

He turned on his Performa, and shortly after the extension parade, his Mac started beeping. Incessantly.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

We still had control of the Mac, and could open files, pull down menus, etc. But the incessant beeping was maddening. We checked every control panel for settings. All seemed ok. We changed the error beep in the "Sounds" control panel, and lo and behold, the incessant beeping became incessant quacking.

Quack! Quack! Quack!

Annoying, so we changed it back. We lowered the volume in the control panel, and now instead of beeping, the menu bar began blinking (which is what normally happens when you mute the beep sound).

Blink! Blink! Blink!

Obviously, first thing I tried was restarting with all extensions off.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

So, what was going wrong with his Mac? To what error was the Mac trying to alert us? And more importantly, was this a software or a hardware problem?

Mike's first guess was to replace the system software (perhaps it got corrupted?). As he pulled out the old floppies, I figured I'd test if this would solve the problem. I started up from the System Software CD-ROM that came with the computer. Guess what?

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Just to be safe, I then started up from the Disk Tools. Even though it was a minimal system, with no control panels, we STILL heard:

Beep! Beep! Beep!

No matter how we'd alter or re-install the software, this beeping would not go away. Perhaps a loose speaker connection? Mike finally admitted that he'd been pulling his hair for hours on this one, and I was his last hope. Apparently this incessant beeping was plaguing him for three days now, and he could no longer concentrate on getting his law studies done. I could see the psychosis building in his eyes. This was a desperate man.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

I'd ascertained it was a hardware problem, which meant it was out of my hands. Before giving in completely, Mike seemed let down that he'd actually have to bring his trusty, die-hard Mac in for service. Blasted Performas, I thought. Apple probably cut some corners to make the models less expensive. Weird new features, bundled software, ease-of-installation...I mean, how difficult is it to install and configure a real Mac?

I began to exit the room. Mike got on the phone. Defeat.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Then it hit me. I turned around, headed back for the Performa. At the base of the CPU were two volume buttons to "ease" adjustment...and the "up" button was jammed in. With a quick jiggle, it was released, and...

Silence. Beautiful silence.

Mike asks me for Mac help all the time now.

One day I downloaded a game that my sister really liked to see. Unfortunately, due to the economic crisis here in Indonesia, bandwidth to outside the country is not much, and the download times are large. My sister was growing more and more impatient by the minute.

One night my son was playing a computer game while I was watching TV. I asked him to turn the sound down, and he did. After a short while he came over to watch TV with me. Every so often I would hear the engine noise of his game. I asked him to turn off the game. He did. I was still hearing the noise and told at him to turn it off. He said he had switched off the power to the PC, but I was still hearing the engine noise about once a minute. We went over to look. Sure enough, the computer was off, but the sound was still there. We unplugged the speakers. Didn't help. We pulled out the batteries. Didn't help. Then I realized it was my pager that had been sitting on one of the speakers.

I am a software installer for a large healthcare information systems company that produces products for the AS/400. On a recent install, shortly after going live with the product, I needed to copy a new file to the live environment. In order to do this I needed to have all the users off the system. Rather than just shutting it down, I sent a message to all the terminals that read, "Please sign off by 17.15. If you do not sign off voluntarily, your job will be terminated. Thanks." I sent the message and about five minutes later, I received a call from the most irate ICU nurse I have ever talked to. She demanded to know who I was and who I worked for. I explained to her that I was employed by the hospital to install their new system. She basically ranted and raved for a couple of minutes and told me that my message was the most obnoxious and rude message she had ever read. She then hung up on me. I asked two of my colleagues to read the message and both of them thought I was quite polite. After all, I did say "please" and "thank you." I had the system down for about an hour and then brought it back up. I called the emergency room to make sure that the fix I had put in was working. The nurse informed me that it had but then asked me if she were going to be fired. "Excuse me", I said. She asked again, "Am I going to be fired?" I told her I didn't know what she was talking about and then she told me that she wasn't the only one worried. She then explained she had been on the system when it was taken down and she thought that meant losing her job! I couldn't believe it. I explained to her that the term "job" was a computer term meaning the program you were currently in. It suddenly dawned on me why the ICU nurse had been so rude and why, I found out later, the nursing supervisor and the head of Information Systems had been beeped! I send out a message over the system apologizing. The next morning, I ran into the CEO and CFO of the hospital who thought the whole thing was hilarious and took to calling me the Terminator. They told me that anyone that stupid deserved to be fired.

I took Fractint in to the computer lab at my high school ('286's, VGA, mongo HD's, brain dead supervisor), and this is the conversation I had:

Rather than try to explain the concept of a moderated binaries group, I went through proper channels and brought in a hard copy (which, for all she knows, I typed myself) of the pertinent docs. It's been a week so far.

I once read a short story where the villain sent email to the goodguys, in which he gloats about his escape. He tells all about his evil plan and says that money must be deposited in his bank account by clicking on a "deposit-only" icon (which consisted of three ASCII symbols embedded in the email message). He then went on to say that the email message itself couldn't be used as evidence, because it was self-destructed by an "auto delete" feature "triggered simply by accessing these last two paragraphs."

Obviously, this novice writer hadn't done his homework.

Once I helped a user whose folders were all named "New Folder." There was a "New Folder" and a "New Folder (2)" and so on up to "New Folder (35)." He opened up one of them, and there were more "New Folders." And inside those were more. He had a series of handwritten sheets that indexed each of his files for him. He'd look up a file he wanted to find, and it would say, for example, "New Folder (22) - New Folder (5) - New Folder (8)."

I mentioned that he could rename the folders to reflect what data they contained. The user thanked me but assured me that the system he was currently using worked quite well.

I live in Italy. I'm sort of knowledgeable with computers, so friends and relations often come to me when they have a problem. One day, my brother-in-law told me his brother's laptop wouldn't work anymore and asked if I can help.

He drove over one day and came into my office with the laptop. He told me the machine hadn't been able to boot for the last three days, though it worked perfectly before then. I switched it on, and it started going. Then it froze. I told him there's probably some corrupted driver, and the first thing to do is back up his documents. I booted from a floppy and checked his folders. When I looked into the Windows directory, I noticed a bunch of files named "A," "B," "C," "1," "2," and so on -- and a few Italian translations of original file names, like FINESTRE.EXE instead of WINDOWS.EXE.

An executive secretary, who was a beginning computer user learning on a PC clone, got lazy about naming her files. Instead of using descriptive file names to name her files, she started her own system. She numbered the files (1, 2, 3, etc) and kept a notebook listing the file number and file description. This system worked well enough for her, getting her up to over file #5000. And it would have continued to work for her had disaster not struck -- she lost the notebook. Each and every file had to be opened and renamed. Luckily for her, she was an executive's secretary who had been there forever, so her job was safe.

A user once wrote in to demand that we (an ISP) switch servers from a SparcStation costing as much as a small house to a "superior" $5000 Win 95 machine, or he and all his friends would quit. His letter closed with the line, "Don't fight me on this. I never lose." He lost.

I work at a University's computer cluster.

The next day the student came in with the JPEG file, renamed to have a .BMP extension.

I once had a computer science professor who couldn't understand how overhead projectors worked, despite her many years of teaching experience. One day she discovered that the focus knob made the viewing area on the screen bigger or smaller. Then she put a transparency on the thing, and I could scarcely contain myself when I witnessed her trying to adjust it.

She'd look back at the screen and use the focus knob to focus it properly. Then, when it was, she'd turn back to the projector and crank the same knob in order to make the viewing area bigger -- naturally throwing it all out of focus. Then she'd turn back to the board, realize it was out of focus, then adjust the focus with the focus knob (aided by the students, who had started to offer verbal advice -- "a little more," "too far," "right there," and so on). Then, the focus fine-tuned, she'd turn back again and crank the focus knob a bunch of times to make the image bigger. She did this probably three times before she realized that making the image bigger also meant throwing it out of focus. I don't know why it didn't register that what she was doing didn't make an ounce of sense.

A co-worker once thought he was being electrocuted when his new beeper was set to vibrate, and he was fixing his reading lamp when it went off. This same person accidentally shot himself in the foot while he was being strangled by his rental car's automatic seatbelt. It was on his honeymoon -- he was returning the vehicle to the drop-off and was unloading his pistol en route. (A story in itself.) He was too far away from the ticket machine and couldn't back up because he had already driven over the spikes. He had his pistol in one hand, still loaded, and opened the door to get his ticket. The automatic seatbelt did it's thing. It pushed him to the floor and somehow wrapped itself around his neck when he closed the door. It began to strangle him, and while he was trying to reach the emergency release, the gun went off, putting a hole in his shoe, his foot, and the floor board.

I write HTML. My supervisor asked me to modify an imagemap so that a formerly inactive link could become active. Studying the positions of the links above and below it in the image, I added a rectangle area to the imagemap. She was greatly impressed and asked how I knew which numbers to enter.

Twenty minutes later, I was still explaining the basics of Cartesian geometry.

Once I worked as an operator on an old IBM 370/Model 138 mainframe at a local college. My position had been reclassified to fall into a new area outside of the I/S staff. One day, my new supervisor entered the room and stared at the air conditioning unit directly behind me. He studied the two flashing lights for a few moments and asked what job it was currently processing. I killed my career by replying, "Actually, sir, it's cooling the room. The computer is over here."

Submitted from a completely different reader is this reversal of the above anecdote:

A Sun server in a tall rack-mount cabinet was installed in an early 19th-century building in the only available place: the corner of a conference room. A distinguished faculty member was ushered into the conference room one day, where he would grade some tests, read some applications, or something of that sort. After a while the server crashed. When the techies went into the conference room, Professor X explained, "It got cold in here, so I turned off the air conditioner."

I got a call from an angry customer who complained that we had sold him a dead computer because his computer wouldn't start up. Come to find out, he had been trying to start it with the keyboard lock keys...like a car.

From one of my smarter clients:

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  4. Miscellaneous Dumbness