Slashdot Mirror
Computer Stupidities
Stephen R. van den Berg writes "Yet another BOFH [?] -relief site:
stories about Computer
Stupidities compiled by
RinkWorks.
"What do you mean, other tape?
When it said second volume, I just hit
enter again.". "
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
1. Don't ever bitch about nerds mocking ordinary folks -- we're just making up for our formative years.
2. The lion's share of stories on this site are either about people with extremely humorous misunderstandings or people who have very basic problems following directions. In the former's case, I'm fairly certain that all professions have similar lore (picture a a bunch of chemists laughing because someone asked about the valence shells of trichloroethelyne and you'll get my drift).
The latter, the people who can't follow directions, are the really aggrivating ones. People who can't master pressing the "a" key or for whom the concept of clicking on the "Start" button seems horribly complicated. There are a lot of users who call for help and follow directions well; the others deserve to be laughed at -- imagine if you were teaching someone to drive and they couldn't find the steering wheel; you can't help but laugh, can you?
There is a third class as well: people who get themselves so worked up that they call tech support to vent and ignore the help that could so easily fix their problem. The reason they're funny is self-explanitory: if techs didn't laugh, they'd go postal. These calls are probably the most destructive possible influence on a support organization's morale; fortunately the company I used to work phone support for let me hang up on customers who got abusive (which is a good thing, since I would have anyhow).
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Interestingly, one of the largest lists of these stories I ever saw came from Dell's tech help dept. Customer service indeed. The amount of cluelessness involved in releasing that document with Dell's name on it is easily an order of magnitude larger than anything in it.
I think you have more of a problem with badly set up abstractions, not with the concept of abstractions in general.
Take your example of shortcuts. Ideally, a user shouldn't have to know how a shortcut is done low-level, the user should just know it's a shortcut that points to the actual file. OS/2 implements this properly. When you move a file, the shortcut points to the new location automatically. The only reason win95 shortcuts are bad is because they're implemented as simple textfiles that contain the directory/filename of another file. Same problem with UNIX symlinks.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's only in the modern microprocessor era that CPU meant anything smaller than a box the size of a small office, with a heat output comparable to Andromeda.
Personally, I'd cut guys like that some slack. If they made it with their brains intact, back then, and are still in the computer business, there's more between those ears than pea soup.
Then again, there are also plenty of guys who like to sound cool, hip and knowledgable, who wouldn't know what an acronym was if it ran up and bit him. =THOSE= are the guys to hang up on, if they're in tech support. The challange is sorting them out from the first lot. Anyone can, after a while, it's painfully obvious, but it's not so easy, right off, like that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, it had. I'm sure this is a recycled story, as I e-mailed several stories to Rinkworks after finding it mentioned on Slashdot.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(Sector editors, and a buggy version of DOS, are great fun to play with... :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The test is, IMHO, can you laugh at yourself, for all the mistakes YOU made, whilst climbing the learning curve? Not shaming, not belittling, but laughing. If you can't laugh with yourself for your errors, how can you laugh with others?
The stories regarding tech support people and admins are, perhaps, the funniest. Not because these people are "bad" or "stupid", but because they have claimed greater expertise than they have. They may know a lot about a great many things, but like the Emperor's New Clothes, their technical skills reveal something other than what is intended.
Laughter is good, and healthy. This site is packed with good laughs. Shame and blame can take a long walk off a short plank, and the label of "Stupid" deserves a life-long GPF. Boot them out, and enjoy watching people be people.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Before Windows 95 existed, Microsoft was working on an operating system called Chicago. But, it was way to buggy, so they scrapped it and then re-released it as Windows 95." (This one has the most truth in it of all of them)
"After Microsoft introduced Windows 95, they created an operating system called Windows NT. The NT means that it is a network server." (What about NT 3.51?)
"After you get done using the internet, you need to disconnect your phone line from your modem to make sure nobody hacks into your computer and puts a virus on it." (Huh? I doubt many hackers call around looking for folks who have set their software up to answer when somebody calls.)
"If you double click on an icon and it tells you that it can't find it, it means the icon isn't there . . ." (How do you double click on something that isn't there?)
(After a blue screen "fatal exception OE"): "That computer must have some kind of virus. I'll have the computer guy (me) check it out after class."
And, my personal favorite:
"One day, you might turn on your computer and discover that someone has put it a logon password and you don't know it. Has anybody ever had this happen? Yeah . . . what you can do is turn off the computer, and take the case off. There are usually screws in the back to do this. Y'all come up here and watch this. (Begins disassembling the case, much to my consternation -- but, I listened, just to see what was going to happen.) Y'all see this shiny thing here? This is the CMOS battery. It keeps that logon password. All of the hard drives have them. All you need to do is remove this battery for about 15 seconds and it will clear out that logon password." (Ummm . . . is it really wise to tell folks who can't figure out how to double click to open up their case and mess around with the internals?)
It really makes me somewhat angry that these folks still let this guy teach even after I've notified folks that he doesn't know what he's talking about sometimes. Usually, I just get "Well, he's taught computer stuff for 4 years, so he must know about some things that you don't." HELLO? TAKING OUT A CMOS BATTERY HAS *NEVER* CLEARED A WINDOWS LOGON PASSWORD, NOR WILL IT EVER (that I can imagine) DO SO!!!
10 CLEAR SCREEN
20 DRAW CAR
30 MAKE CAR RACE
40 BEAT ALL OTHER CARS
Then I would wonder why it wouldn't work. I'm quite thankful that my dad seemed to have no end to the time he would spend showing me how to write real programs in BASIC, even after an agonizing 8 hours at work. I must say, that without it, I probably wouldn't be where I am now. Thanks dad!
OK, I'm done with the emotional part now . . .
I love these sorts of stories myself, but I don't care for the idea of nerds mocking ordinary folks. People who don't spend their lives learning the ins and outs of computers are not stupid; they just don't know. In many cases, they really shouldn't have to understand the intricacies of a system; if the system were better designed, it'd be self-explanatory. The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Perhaps that is why 'Math' may still be a good primer to computing - mathematics is nothing but abstraction.
These "Dumb User" articles aren't funny anymore. I feel my stress level rise just reading them. Some of these stories go beyond "I am new to computers", and into the realm of "I am just plain stupid, but I expect you to make up for that fact anyway."
--
"All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
I've worked on-and-off in tech support for about ten years now, and I've got to say that 'clueless user' stories tend to piss me off. Not that they're false -- I personally had a photocopy of a diskette faxed to me -- but the inherent smugness involved in telling these stories annoys me in a major way.
Guess what? Computers aren't easy to use. If a secretary puts the mouse on the floor and tries using it with her foot, it's because she's used to steno equipment that looks remarkably similar. Once the mouse is expained, there's no more problem.
Yes, there are a lot of morons out there who refuse to learn, and ten explanations later are still typing in their real name to log on to the computer. But the vast majority of problems are due to unfamiliarity, and are the fault of employers.
Sorry about the rant, but I've spent years grumbling on this very subject.
I was in the market for a new printer. Running OS/2 at the time, I wanted to make sure that drivers were available. I called up Hewlett Packard, and asked for technical support (knowing I wouldn't get help from sales).
Me: I trying to find out if there are HP692c drivers available for OS/2 Warp 4.
Tech support: I'm sorry sir, but our inkjet printers won't work on the Mac.
(I eventually found the OS/2 drivers, and Mac drivers along the way)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Well, the removable core idea isn't just for hardware problems its for software configuration problems too. Sure, you could remove just the harddrive and take that with you, but as hardware specific configurations are stored on the harddrive it would probably crash immediently upon being booted in a different persons computer. So you take the desktop with you, only you don't have to deal with a huge box, and all the little connections. I'm NOT avocating this solution btw, just mentioning it, because I love going inside my computer and changing the parts easily. As such a solution would leave a very non easy hardware repair job.
The fault is is offering phone support for something that should've been an on-site repair done in the flesh by a real person, skilled in his craft, to begin with.
That is a very good point, we as techs need to come up with a solution. The idea of remote administration has been around for a long time, but is riddled with security problems. Even if the system is secure people are not comfortable with allowing someone whom they've never meet to peer around in their personal computers. So enters the idea of computer shops where you take your computer to get fixed. The only problem with this is that most people (even me) find it annoying to unconnect and move their computer somewhere to have it fixed for a minor problem. The only 2 solutions I see to this problem would be,
1. A removable core, where the computer acts more like a laptop (without the screen) in a docking station. So that the central components can be as easily removed as say a toner cartidge (weird analogy but it works, and yes there are some people who can't change their toner cartidges), and the core can be taken in for repair. This has the major drawback of not being nearly as user servicable.
2. Self diagnostic, user correcting, polymorphic, self evolving programs, that fix any problems themselves. HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.. sorry good laugh. Its a good idea, but still ahead of our time.
That didn't make me laugh. It made me mad. Of course, I'm also mad because I've been on hold with Sun for the last 3 hours, and someone tried to run me over on the way to work, but that's not the point.
:( Computers for people with at least half a brain. And if they have half a brain but just don't know anything about computers, they should read a book or twelve before bothering me.
Users who can't read piss me off. "It says it is NOT safe to turn off my computer" (Windows 95). "No, it says it is NOW safe to turn off your computer."
Users who have no idea what they're talking about also piss me off. Yes, I'm high and mighty, but it doesn't take that long to figure out that there's both RAM and a HDD in your computer, and that referring to both as `memory' doesn't help the rest of us.
I used to do tech support, so I can identify with a lot of the stuff on that site. I didn't think it was funny then, and I don't think it's funny now. It was, and is, frustrating. Computers for the masses? Please no!
I don't recall seeing "handholding a bunch of idiots" in my job description, or in any of your job descriptions, either.
I'm rather simpathetic to the newbie user who doesn't know much about computers. Heck i remember zooming in on the page of my step fathers performa thinking that would make the text bigger when i printed. The people who really piss me off are those who act like they know all about computers but then fail drastically. Like a columist in my local newspaper who answers tech support type questions. He told a user once that there was no way to get sound off of her CD rom and that in order to save sound files on her computer she needed a CD-R. That guy should be fired, but drastically he's still out there giving other advice to poor folks.
And my school computer techer who doesn't even know to access differnet computers across the LAN, i had to show her. It seems like just anyone can become a computer authority now because they know how to type.
My computer has 20 Gigs of memory. Why is that funny? ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I spent a frustrating two years or so trying to help a company I won't name into being an Internet Service Provider, with explicit permission and encouragement to do so. Unfortunately, the president of the company decided that he was going to be the sole and only salesman for the services; he knew little or nothing about the Internet and displayed no willingness or ability to learn about it, preferring to operate on the assumption that whatever he wished to be true about the business would magically become the case, and blaming any failure of reality to mold itself that way on his subordinates.
The result was the predictable disaster. He was told that because not all customers would be using the proposed 250 dialin connections at once, statistically the 250 connections could support perhaps as many as 2000 users. This caused him to jump to the conclusion that all 2000 could dial in at the same time, 8 customers using each a modem and ordinary phone line simultaenously, and therefore only 32 modems would be needed to support 2000 customers by the statistical rule. Then I was presented with 4 analog dialin lines and modems, and a statement that they should be able to support 250 users, which we would start the business off with.
Upon reality being presented, along with the original provisioning documents, the idea of selling dialin lines was suddenly dropped, and reselling T1 service from our connection was declared to be our new Internet business; also it was proposed that we would be selling web sites, though already web farms with much higher bandwidth were coming into use.
Then everything seemed to - oscillate. One week, it would be declared that we were going to put websites up, a couple of weeks later we were going to go full bore selling bandwidth. No details were ever available of the "plans".
Eventually this climaxed in an angry, out-of-the-blue mobile phone call demanding "Yes or no - do we have a clear T1 channel to the Internet?" and escalating fury as I tried to explain that that was a trick question; we had a T1 to a backbone ISP, but no guarantee there was 1.544mbps to each and every server on the net, et cetra. Upon being told I would be fired if I did not simply answer the question with a "Yes" or "No", I said "Yes", true in the sense we had a "clear channel" DS1 line and not a Frame Relay connection. Nothing more happened for a while, then I was called into the president's office and was told he had sold some T1 connections - and that he decided, and had told the companies involved, that they did not have to actually purchase a point-to-point connection to us, or any CSU/DSU or router; because we already had the T1 & et cetra, we would just sell them "part of ours". Magically wishing the bits from our networks into the customers'. The response he was given, which as it had to be was that the president/salesman had been given specific lists of the required equipment down to part numbers and itimized costs, was not well accepted - I was told, in effect, that he was too important a person to be required to read such trivia as what subordinates put into his "In" box.
Probably I should have known things were not going to work out well when the principal involved proposed early on that we could save much money by buying an AOL account or two to resell to our high-bandwidth customers. Sigh. At least they finally learned to use email, but it was rather a relief to leave that place.
However, after spending a good afternoon reading these stories, I note that many of them involve a user who assumes that he knows more than the tech support person or a tech support person who won't consider the obvious.
When a user calls up, claims to be an "Apple Tech," and then proceeds to ask how to do something simple the techie tells him to do, he rightfully should be mocked. When the user refuses to take the advice of a knowledgeable tech and then threatens some sort of recourse because "the tech doesn't know anything," they rightfully should be mocked.
The problem with many computer users is that they get proficient with using MS Word, figure out how to drag and drop, and install a program or two while surfing the web using AOL and they decide that they're an instant A+ certified MSCE know-it-all. I've got friends like this. One of my (least) favorites thinks he knows all about designing web pages. He's decent at Photoshop and knows a bit about WordPerfect. One day, he applied for a job where I work, and told the folks that he had a "vast knowledge of computers." The next day he called me wanting to know how to put in a CD-ROM drive.
I'm often reminded of the "General Motors Tech Support" joke that was circulating about two years ago, where a user calls up tech support because his car won't start. When the support guy tries to get the user to check things out, he is met with replies like: "What's a steering wheel? What's a dashboard? Fuel Gauge? What's That?" Finally, the exasperated user exclaims "I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places with my car!"
Although it seems ludicrous that we would allow someone with such limited knowledge to pilot an automobile, we do the same thing with computers every day. I'm not saying that people who don't know computers shouldn't be allowed to use them -- I'm saying that most people realize that a certain amount of knowledge is necessary to drive a car on our highways. Computers users need to realize that despite the fact that they might want to do something useful with their new toy, they are going to have to take some time to master some concepts.
Incidentally, I'll go the other way in terms of blaming why computers are so hard to use - it's the level abstraction set up between the user and whats really going on.
/wants/ to look at it and know whats going on, s/he can. And yet, people who don't know anything about engines just don't touch theirs, and refer to experts when it comes time to fix it. But at least they can see it, and chose to learn about it and fiddle with it if they want to. If a proper interface was set up bewteen the low-level and the high-level in an OS, the user should recognize properly what not to touch, or conversly, what to touch when they want to fiddle and learn. Barring this low level from the user (such as in most Windows 9X componants' interfaces) makes them live on another plane of reality from whats really going on, and leaves them clueless when its time to fix things of describe whats going on to tech support.
For example, I'll propose that the newbie Windows 95 user hasn't a clue what a "Shortcut" is with respect to the idea that its an actual file on the disk with a special file type. They're just told it's a "Shortcut" and how to work it. These types of abstractions only serve to convuse new users as when it comes to problems, they havn't the faintest idea what they're actually supposed to be fixing, nevermind how to. How are they supposed to know when a problem is because of the shortcut, or the actual file it points to? Similar abstractions (wizards, "dumbed down explainations") may serve to help the uninitiated get off the ground faster, but makes it all the more difficult for the user to make an emergency landing when it comes time.
Cars are complex things. Why do auto makers not lock the engine from the driver? Because if the driver
"Old man yells at systemd"