These days, you can get all kinds of add-on devices for your computer that perform all manner of different tasks. With a such diversity of equipment, it's all the harder for new users to keep things straight.
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.
A conversation from an Internet chat room:
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.
I got a call from a woman who spoke very little English. She was extremely irate that her PCS phone would not turn on. I tried every troubleshooting step I could think of, only to hear, "You no listen, you dummy. It not working!" no matter what I did. Finally I asked her to turn the phone off and on.
The silence was long.
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.
Posted to rec.photo.digital:
I put my 8Mb smartmedia card in my FlashPath adapter and used Windows
95 and DriveSpace on it. Now windows says that I have 20MB available
on it! It just saved me a bunch of money, right? Wrong. My camera
can't see any of the extra space. In fact, it sees less space.What gives? Am I still going to have to send my camera in for an
update to use the extra space? What a rip off. I should have kept my
Mavica.
A client called in with computer problems. Part of the conversation went like this:
Back in the days when "multimedia computer" was the latest buzzword, a student in my class overheard a conversation I had with my friend about sound cards. Later he came up to me asking me to copy my soundblaster for him. I told him it was a piece of hardware, and you cannot copy it. The next day he gave me a disk and proudly announced it had a program on it to make hard copies.
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 as a trainee in a program development company. Once I took a phone call from a young man, trying to have an encyclopedia cdrom installed and running. Not being a regular tech support man, I had a long discussion while I tried to understand why the software wouldn't work properly. I finally had to go on site and find out by myself.
When I got there, I discovered by reading the readme.txt that the cdrom was shipped with a hardware key (a dongle) that was supposed to be plugged in the back of the computer to prevent piracy. I asked the customer where he'd put the thing, and then he confessed he "borrowed" the CD from an uncle. I took some time to explain the young guy what a dongle was and why he would never succeed in installing and running the thing if he couldn't plug one in.
I left and came back to work. Fifteen minutes later, a colleague came in and told me he saw and heard the young guy in the locale locksmith's boutique and trying to buy a hardware key.
Some ten years ago, I worked for a company who produced mainframe terminal emulation software. A local authority in the UK was running this software over a local area network. In fact it was practically the only thing they ran over the network. You could sometimes see local government officials walking along the corridors holding floppy disks -- "sharing" a file with other users.
They were happy with our software until they moved into a spanking new office block. Suddenly, the network started performing very slowly. Active sessions on the host were constantly timing out and being disconnected. I went to the site and found that sure enough, there were vast numbers of bad network packets being generated and discarded, even at low network usage rates.
Rather desperately looking at the back of a PC for inspiration, I noticed ordinary flat pair cable (i.e., telephone cord) connecting its net adapter card to a jack in a wall socket. All the PCs in the building were the same. On a shelf above the network administrator's desk were the manuals for that particular net adapter card, all of them still wrapped in cellophane. I opened the first and read out loud the sentence which stated that the card required twisted pair or co-axial cable. Ta-daah!
However, replacing all the PC-to-connector cables in the building with co-ax failed to produce much improvement. Eventually, one of the authority's IT "experts" admitted that their entire local network ran on flat pair cabling, over three quarters of a mile of it, all of which was completely buried behind the plaster! (The building had been expensively converted and decorated to their very strict specifications.)
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.