AND YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD COMPUTER PROBLEMS…

Check out these excerpts from a Wall street Journal article by Jim Carlton.

1) Compaq is considering changing the command “Press any key”to “Press Return key” because of the floods of calls asking where the any key is.

2) AST Technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

3) Another Compaq technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn’t read word processing files from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the costumer labeled the disks then rolled them into a typewriter to type the labels.

4) Another AST customer was asked to send in a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived with xeroxed copies of the floppies.

5) A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. The customer asked the tech to hold on, and was heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door of his room.

6) Another Dell customer called to say he couldn’t get his computer to fax anything . After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the Send key.

7) Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so a Dell tech suggested he to go to the local Egghead. ” Yeah, I got me a couple of friends,” the customer replied. When told that Egghead was a software store, the man said, ” Oh, I thought you meant for me to find a couple of geeks.”

8) Yet another Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it by filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys
and washing them individually.

9) A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was ” bad and an invalid “. The tech explained that the computer’s “bad command” and “invalid” responses shouldn’t be taken personally.

10) An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn’t get her new Dell computer to turn on. After ensuring that the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, ” I pushed and pushed on the foot pedal and nothing happens.” The “foot pedal” turned out to be the computer’s mouse.

11) Another customer called Compaq tech support to say that her brand-new computer wouldn’t work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it in, and sat for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked. “What power switch?”

One of (Insert your favorite telco)’s finest techs was drafted and sent to boot camp. At the rifle range, he was given some instruction, a rifle and bullets. He fired several shots at the target. The report came from the target area that all attempts had completely missed the target. The tech looked at his rifle, and then at the target. He looked at the rifle again, and then at the target again. He put his finger over the end of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger with his other hand. The end of his finger was blown off, whereupon he yelled toward the target area: “It’s leaving here just fine, the trouble must be at your end!”

From the corporate and Silicon Valley jungles.

“batmobiling”
putting up emotional shields from the retracting armor that covers the batmobile as in “she started talking marriage and
he started batmobiling”

“betamaxed”
when a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better marketed competition as in “Microsoft betamaxed Apple
right out of the market”

“blowing your buffer”
losing your train of thought

“cobweb”
a WWW site that never changes

“elvis year”
the peak year of popularity as in “1993 was Barney the dinosaur’s elvis year”

“generica”
fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions as in “we were so lost in generica that I couldn’t remember what city
it was”

“going postal”
totally stressed out and losing it like postal employees who went on shooting rampages

“high dome”
egghead, scientist, PhD

“irritainment”
annoying but you can’t stop watching i.e; the O.J. trial

“meatspace”
the physical world (as opposed to the virtual) also “carbon community” “facetime” “F2F” “RL”

“percussive maintenance”
the fine art of whacking a device to get it working

“prairie dogging”
in companies where everyone has a cubicle something happens and everyone pops up to look

“salmon day”
swimming upstream all day to get screwed in the end

“siliwood”
the coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and computers also “hollywired”

“square headed girlfriend” (boyfriend)
computer

“treeware”
manuals and documentation

“umfriend”
sexual relationship “this is Dale, my…um…friend”

“world wide wait”
WWW

“yuppie food coupons”
twenty dollar bills from an ATM

If you receive an e-mail with a subject line of “Badtimes,” delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous Email virus yet. It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play. It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there’s company coming over. It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic. Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card. Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.

These are just a few signs. Be very, very afraid.