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  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Piecing It Together

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Systems

1.1 Piecing It Together

More than with any other product on the market today, people are willing to shell out hundreds of pounds to buy something of which they have no real conception - a computer.

I used to work for MacWarehouse as a tech support representative. One day a gentleman called who had never had a computer before. He was trying to set up his new system. I tried and I tried but I just couldn't make him understand where to plug the cables in. Finally I looked up the details on his order. He had ordered top-of-the-line everything - monitor, keyboard, printer, modem, scanner, speakers, CD-ROM drive, external hard drive......except, he had not ordered the actual computer itself. No wonder the cables would not plug in anywhere.

On one occasion, a lady came into the store, apparently interested in buying a home computer. After surveying the models on display, she walked over to one and pointed to the monitor and keyboard saying, "I think I need one of these, and one of those...." She then pointed to the CPU and continued, "...but I don't think I need one of those."

Well, I had one event happen to me, where one lady had just bought an Apple IIc and complained that she was having problems with her monitor, so we told her to bring her monitor in, and we'd check it out. So she brings her monitor in, and we plug it in, and it works without a flaw. We tell her that the monitor isn't the problem, and to bring her CPU in. She stares at us blankly, and asks, "What's the CPU?" Joe explains that it's the piece of equipment that all your devices plug into. So about twenty minutes later, she returns and walks in carrying the surge supressor. When we explained to her the item that we needed her to bring in, she replied, "Oh you mean the keyboard!" (On Apple IIc's, the CPU box and keyboard are part of the same unit.) And to make this all the more interesting, she was a school computer class instructor.

Back in the mid-eighties, the high school I went to had just purchased a handful of 8086s along with some basic hardware -- at that time these things still were horribly expensive. A few weeks later, the computer lab was broken into and some of the hardware stolen. But the computers themselves had been left untouched: only the monitors and keyboards were gone. Apparently, the only computers the thieves had known were C64s or Apple II's, where the computer and keyboard are part of the same unit. Imagine the frustration when these guys tried to get the stolen machines to work!

I was one of a group of students who would help other students and teachers at my high school with computer problems. One day I got a call from a teacher saying that her computer was not working at all. I went to her room to find a perfectly good Mac PowerPC on her desk. With one problem.

A man who owned a small business asked me to program a sales and inventory system for him. He was replacing his old 286 PC and had been running a DOS-based program.

He wanted all the bells and whistles, wanted it browser-driven, with images of all the products in his inventory. But the most important thing to him was that it all run off of floppies -- his 286's hard drive had crashed in the past and he lost all his records, so now he didn't trust hard drives. Not only did he want the whole thing on floppies, he wanted to be able to do a backup onto one floppy every night.

The other thing was that he didn't want to use a mouse or any other sort of pointing device.

I was advising a friend on a used PC she was considering buying from a friend. I asked the friend if it was a Pentium PC, and he laughed, "All computers have Pentium processors!"

I was in our University Bookshop the other day looking at software when I overheard a salesman talking to a lady about an iMac.

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Piecing It Together