- Old DOS joke…

But I have to agree with Edward on this..
Besides, computers have gotten less accesible over the years.
With the old Home Computers we used to get a comprehensible manual where you could find the ins and outs of your OS..

Now most of the users don’t have a clue how to customize their windows or how many handy shortcut keys there are and such.

Most of them are very good at some part of their lives, just not at computers. Those of us in the industry need to practice tolerance and patience.

And I don’t think “How do I read my e-mail?” is that weird. Especially if you use a Windows-based e-mail program that likes to crash and/or install weird things when it tries to open an e-mail.

Some probing discovered that ‘the bumblebee’ was the hourglass with a special Windows theme.

We explained that reading large text files can take some time, especially on older computers.

I had a customer call in for tech support who had found it too easy to spend money thanks to these function keys and had pried a number of them off the keyboard with a butter knife. Unfortunately, he pried off some of the wrong ones and completely bollocksed up his computer and expected me to make it work.

for great computer stupidities

“Amy called and was looking for a file on Robin’s H drive but was not sure what file it is.”

“The fax machine does something weird every night around midnight. Is this suppose to happen?”

“Hi, I can’t open this because my computer does not have a zip drive.”
(User had received a spam email from ‘UPS’ (cough) about a package they could not deliver, with instructions to open the attached zip file.)

“Peggy said that since the carpet has been replaced, her computer has been acting funny. She said that every morning she has to boot up the computer because it is turned off. I had her show me how she logged off and she went to start>shutdown and ‘shutdown’ was selected. I pointed out to her that this is the reason why she had to boot up everyday…”

Anyway, one of my favorite IT problems is when my mother-in-law was trying to get hubby (over the phone) to help her get the scanner to work. He asked if it was plugged in, she said yes. After half an hour of trying to make it work he asked her to look and make sure it was plugged in. There was a long, drawn out silence, then a very quiet “oh”. And this is a woman who has her masters in computer science and is currently working in the IT field herself.

Another one was a coworker who asked the user “Is your power out?” and the response was “How do I know?”