Stupid Users

the worst are some of these so called IT professionals @ the companies I visit. One poor lady was told, " Should jump to Win/XP because 98se was old and its time to upgrade." Which totally messed up her old rig.

I also witnessed two (2) techs having difficulty installing a vid-card when I asked, " Did you set the Display Adapter to super vga, then shut & install the new card?" Really dumbfounded look.

Originally posted by Phantasm66
he waited for around 4 hours

Click to expand...

Wow! That's some lunch hour your take! lol

Uncleel's story reminded me of an event at a previous company. Our group had purchased some RAM for some Pentium machines. The tech support person came to install the RAM, not because we couldn't but rather, we weren't supposed to install it ourselves. The tech support person knew that the RAM needed to be "paired" on Pentiums; however, she didn't know that the pair needed to consist of identical RAM sticks. The system wouldn't boot when she paired a 32MB stick with an 8MB stick...go figure!

StUpIoDz

This user has performed and illegal operation and will be closed down....

I told you all about the power woman, didn't I??

OK this woman at my work (who's left now) once called to say that there was "NO POWER ON HER COMPUTER!"

During our 4 minute conversation she UTTERLY convinced me that the PSU or something had blown. So with screwdriver and new replacement PSU in hand, I made my way over to her office.

Of course, it was that she had ONLY TURNED ON THE MONITOR!!!

.....yes.....!

Oh yes, and then there was mister blue screen.

This dude is ALWAYS telling us that ALL computers are crashing for him. ALWAYS....

"It keeps crashing and crashing", this dude says, not unlike the way you alway think Dracula would speak in a cheezy Hammer horror.

"It KEEPS taking these BLUE screens!" He said.

Of course, he was in the BIOS screen.

He told me he pressed DEL during POST because.... "IT TOLD HIM TO!!"

(i.e. press DEL to enter setup.)

"But it TOLD me to press delete."


....You see what I have to put up with. These are all true stories.

In the early days of our small company, I was the only one w/ any pc experience. Nobody had used Windows. Two administrative people came from other companies using DOS, our then currently customer & billing list was DOS. PC's were 286's, 386's, 486's. The adventure began as we immediately built three Pentium 166's with Win/95, peer -to- peer network.

One girl kept resizing cause the "solitaire cards were too small!" Changing desktop appearances, re-booting & messing up the network. Swapping monitors & printers 'cause, "Hers is pretty, I like it! "Her 'puter has better sounds than mine!" etc. etc.

My sales numbers were way down as I spent countless hours troubleshooting over the phone, & fixing things when I returned to the office. I'd leave the office late @ night w/ everything running correctly to the bosses satisfaction, only to await the next days disaster. :dead:

Part of the problem was \/\/indoze does not like to run 24/7 w/o losing it's brains. But powering up & proper shutdown were beyond the realm of possibility.

*bumping for the enjoyment of our new users *

For more stupidities, take a look here

...stupidities

not really a stupidity, but as the sole person responsible for our network (6PCs p2p), I got a weird request the other day from one our more experienced trainers. You can imagine my astonishment when my colleague came up to my desk to inform me "that the internet was broken" !!......

..... of course I asked "What the whole Internet?" hehe , before she realised what she had said. Needless to say that whenever we have had a proxy issue since, the whole internet has fallen into a massive abyss and dissapeared.....

So that's what happened...

The most common and classic stupid-user-thingy is that with a customer calling the support, telling that his "cup holder" broken when he put a cup of coffee on it. The "cup holder" was the optical drive's tray...

I was visiting a friend an couple of days ago at work and the IBM workstation that they use in the back office was just sitting there with a Blue Screen of Death. I didnt think much of it but about 10 mins after I got there a guy from IBM should up to fix the computer. 10 minutes later the computer was making these awful noises like there were power cables in the CPU fan. My friend said to the IBM guy, "it never made that sound before." The IBM guy just laughed and went on "fixing" the computer. About 10 minutes later the tech left with the screen now showing some color test screen and that was it. He said he was going to come back and test the hard drive. I looked at my friend and said, "Why didnt you just reboot when you saw the BSOD?" He said he didnt know what was up with it and when he called IBM that told him not to touch the system and that they would come out next week to fix it. I dont know who is worse, my friend or the IBM "tech"

This thread reminds me of this site:

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

Enjoy!

P/S: Hope this hasn't been posted

Uncleel, I hope you're not trying to say woman are stupid in general? I know some IT professionals - and by this I mean old school like myself - who happen to be really good at what they do. I work with a female colleague, and she’s damn good at what she does. Not to mention she has to work twice as hard to prove her worth in a male environment.

Users are dumb-asses in general! And by this I mean to say that there are an equal amount of brainless men and woman out there. God knows why no-one does a proper Pc orientation with these *****s before they even start working in the company.
Yes, there are some techies that are *****s themselves, but I still think it's sad how We as IT professionals get treated on a daily basis. The casual disrespectful way we get spoken to, as if we're servants! It crawls right up my Ars*!!! If I got shot, and needed a doctor, I wouldn't shout and curse at him to get help out of him now would I? I wish there was a way to take revenge on these people that make our lives hell.

I believe that if we as professionals can make the effort to get to know PC's, then the everyday person should do the same!
It should be made compulsory like driving a car! That way we'd deal with the real problems, not the Mickey Mouse bulls**t we get on a daily basis. I wish there was a Union of some kind to protect us from being underpaid, over stressed and under appreciated.

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

I agree entirely with what you say.

However, just one small point.

This thread is over four years old lol.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

Point taken. Maybe it's time to revive this thread...

We were in the server cupboard (that's what we get at the school cupboards with aircon), the boss says to me,
"Dave hit the test button on the UPS would you?"
so I hit the power button. Every server in the cupboard was running off of that UPS.

Today a collegue of mine (moments ago in fact) was asked to restore a lost file, so he has a look in the folder the end-user said it used to be in. He finds it one level deeper.

At the primary school I used to be subcontracted to the staff consistently reffer to a tower or desktop as a 'hard drive' and when I corrected my liason - amiably mind - they complained to my boss. They still call them hard drives.

I was just called to the other end of school to explain that there wasn't a data projector. Conversation follows,
Teacher points to empty security box,
Me: "It's broken. We're fixing it upstairs"
Teacher: "It can't be. It was working before."
Me: "Sorry, but it is."
Teacher: "Since this morning."
Me: "The bulb's gone."
Teacher: "But I'm teaching."
Me: "Sorry. It's broken. We'll be putting it back soon though."
Teacher: "I can't belive it's broken."
There was more of the same I do not kid.

howard_hopkinso said:

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

I agree entirely with what you say.

However, just one small point.

This thread is over four years old lol.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

Click to expand...

And there was me temporarily thinking the entire userbase from back in t'day had returned....

Phantasm66, um, how much do you get paid? LOL.

I always like how when you answer the phone, you know like "bobs pc shop", a customer instantly spews all their problems and wants you to fix it over the phone. You try to be polite and say something like "have you checked device manager?" And then of course you get "how do I do that?". So you try to be vague to get them off the phone, "you can get to it in the control panel". "Where is that?". And suddenly you are stuck on the phone for 30 minutes, teaching them how to right-click and read words with their eyes.

I like how they bring a system in and are told, "well, there's about 10 systems ahead of you....", "ok, so can I maybe get it in the morning?" HAHA.

I especially like the people who cannot for the life of their children, explain WHAT their problem actually IS. All you can ever get out of them are "well it just doesn't act right". And "it isn't like it used to be". And so on.

And lets not forget the dumb ones who INSIST they are right. Insist they are right as they give YOU their computer to fix. I had one lady who wanted to take to her grave, that her power supply blew because her son listens to music. And that uses to much power!

Oh ya, and one of my personal favorites, the know-it-all customer who hangs around the store loligagging like a bum, and interrupting me as he forcefully answers my customer's questions which are directed at me. And not only bugging people, but answering WRONG to begin with. ARG.
And then he talks to you in that ****y tone about some stupid "cool" thing he knows and expects me to be impressed with him somehow. Like "oh, you know how to go into 'Manage' on a PC. WOW, I'm impressed!".

And lastly, for you older folk, it is NEVER cool to talk to us younger guys about how you paid $5000 for a 5meg hard drive. And I don't want to here about your first job programming on tape. Because we really DON'T CARE! lol

Ah people, you meet all kinds of people. Soon I will not be doing this anymore for a living....

IF you look at the titles of Bobes and Uncleel, what is a runner?

Anyways, I have delt with many teachers and students that need help with their PC. The number one thing I have noticed is, they have no idea what the PC parts are called.

Im not asking for them to say 7200 RPM SATA 80 GB with NCQ, just Hard Drive.

One thing that sticks in my mind,

Drama teacher puts a call on the help desk, I go down to see what is wrong. She says

My Black Modem is too slow.
Excuse me?
I have to use the white modem
Ma'am you dont have a modem in your PC.
Of Course I have a Modem!

She ment that the white modem (an old Gateway witha Pentium 3) was faster then her new Black Modem (Dell Pentium 4.)

I took the "Slow Black Modem" back to my classroom, wasted about 30 minutes of diagnostics found not a thing wrong with it. Gave it back. We have to do follow ups to close the call, so I say, hows the Dell? She says, Great! What did you do to it! Its faster!

Thats why, Im not going to do this for a living.

AtK SpAdE said:

IF you look at the titles of Bobes and Uncleel, what is a runner?

Click to expand...

No idea, but they were both moderators waaay back in the day, and neithers been seen in an age..

I kinda feel embarrased about this - but one day, I turned of my monitor. Next day I forgot about it and tried all sorts of things to get it back up. Took 10minutes to figure it out. Needless to say - I have never done that again.

Korrupt

Well I may have never done something super stupid on my own PC, but us techs still do stupid things in other areas. One time I was going with a group of people and I parked my car on the street. And, yes I did, left the car running the whole four hours! WITH my keys locked in!!!
And I never even thought about it the whole time until we were done and I couldn't find my keys until I went outside and noticed the sound of my engine running!

One time late at night I was just messing around and my cursor kept doing weird things, moving around on it's own, clicking things. I thought for sure I got a virus or something, I restarted. Came back up and it was fine but about a minute later it started up again. Was driving me mad until I realized that my friend had logged in to my VNC and was screwing around with me! Lol, I never guessed, cause it runs as a service and I totally forgot, he guessed my password.

One time I got off from work and was about to drive off until someone yelled at me that my laptop was on my roof! Ouch.

Yes, techs have their moments too