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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.13 Other Hardware

These days, you can get all kinds of add-on devices for your computer that perform all manner of different tasks. With such a diversity of equipment, it's all the harder for new users to keep up.

One night I was watching QVC, and the current item being displayed was a computer. Someone who had just bought one called in and was put on the air.

I was at an ad agency a while back and there was a big project deadline looming. The folks who were printing this particular ad were about 150 miles away and had to get all of the files that the agency had put together in a hurry. We found out the hard way, after trial and error, that the print house didn't have any Internet access at all, so we couldn't email the data. So I suggested that we meet half way, and I'd give them the files on a zip disk. I asked the woman on the phone if she had a zip. She replied with a five digit number.

A customer was trying to open a .zip file in PowerPoint. She was getting the error message, "This is not a PowerPoint presentation.

The graphics card was still in the box.

I recently purchased a Sony Mavica still camera, which, for those unfamiliar, is a digital camera that stores snapshots on a floppy disk. Twice so far I have had someone ask me if it is safe to take the disk out in a lighted room.

A client called in with computer problems. Part of the conversation went like this:

I was at a classmate's house once, explaining some things to her about Internet communications and about ICQ and Netmeeting and so forth. She asked me if she could download Netmeeting from the Internet, and I said she could but that she would need a microphone for the talking part. She stared at me with the most naive look and asked if she could download the microphone, too.

A customer called in. After pulling up his case, I realized that this was his fifth call to us over the last two days, all regarding the same product. He was trying to add a 3D accelerator card to his system and could not get it to work. He had spoken to us four times and to his computer manufacturer twice. It was still not functional.

I walked him through the install process, and everything was fine. This was his seventh call to some form of support, and the card never even made it into the computer. Sigh.

A customer called up the company that made her hand-held scanner, complaining that it wasn't scanning correctly. After several minutes of hardware and software questions, the tech asked what exactly the person did to scan. "Well," she said, "I simply put it on the side of my head and drag it down." (And she wonders why the "brain scanner" can't find anything!)

I looked at the program he was using. It was a very primitive one that doesn't let you preview the image before scanning. So I showed him how to cut the black borders once he scanned in the picture.

I was working for a computer education company, setting up the classes. One week we were training for Cisco routers. To do this, another training company sent us six routers in two cargo boxes locked with combination locks. The sheet of paper with the combinations was shipped securely inside.

I work with someone who has very, very little real computer experience. He was one of the first people in the office to get a PC (most of us had UNIX machines before), and the first thing he did was delete everything he didn't want -- things like the networking software he needs to connect to our network.

Some time ago, his Jaz drive broke. I told him it was broken and that he should use his office charge card to buy a new one and then I'd install it for him. He bought a new one. He spent the better part of two weeks trying to install it himself. It took him that long to figure out he didn't have the right SCSI adapter in his computer. (I had scavenged the Jaz card from his system after the old one broke, and I had told him that he'd need a new Jaz card, too -- but he didn't believe me.)

After finally realizing he needed a new card, he bought one, installed it, and tried again. It still didn't work. He wracked his brain. He emailed me:

"My jazz drive still isn't quite right and I wanted to ask you a question about it. In the beginning of pentium time, we purchased this machine before we had Nt, correct? So, was this jazz drive installed initially with win95 software? And then when we went to NT, did you have to run the NT software for Jazz on my machine or am i still running win95 alone (i doubt that)(doesn't make sense to me)? Please help me get with the program here..."

His machine is running Windows 95. It has always been running Windows 95. The NT machines he refers to were all purchased later. He still, to this day, and no matter what I say otherwise, thinks that somehow the act of networking his computer turned it into something else. He talks about the difference between "stand alone" and "networked" computers all the time, as if there was some mystical difference between the two, something other than the fact that one has networking software installed and the other doesn't.

As far as I know, he's still trying to get that Jaz drive to work.

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