Category: computers

Subject: Top 12 things you don’t want to hear from tech support12. ‘Do you have a sledgehammer or brick handy?’11. ‘… that’s right, not even MacGyver could fix it.’10. ‘So — what are you wearing?’ 9. ‘Bummer Duuuuuuuude’ 8. ‘Looks like you’re gonna need some new dilythium crystals, Cap’n.’7. ‘Press 1 for Support, Press 2 if you’re with 60 Minutes, Press 3 if you’re with the FTC’ 6. ‘We can fix this, but you’re gonna need a butter knife, a roll of duct tape, and a car battery.’ 5. ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ 4. ‘In layman’s terms, we call that the Hindenburg Effect.’ 3. ‘ Hold on a second……. Mom! Timmy’s hitting me!’ 2. ‘Okay, turn to page 523 in your copy of Dianetics.’ and the number 1 thing you don’t want to hear from tech support… 1. ‘Please hold for Mr. Gates’ attorney.’

Netscape employees found a gigantic blue stage prop in the shape of an ‘e’ in front of their company’s front door one recent morning. The night before, the same 10-by-12-foot stage prop — which represents the logo for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, or IE, — was spotted at a Microsoft bash in San Francisco. Netscape had the last laugh in the prank, though. Netscape employees placed a 12-foot foam likeness of their mascot ‘Mozilla’ — a green Godzilla-like creature on top of the ‘e’. Mozilla held a placard that read: Netscape — 72 Microsoft – 18 referring to recent market share data.

Australian Thesaurus of Computer Terminology

Log on – Make the barbie hotter
Log off – Don’t add any more wood
Monitor – Keeping an eye on the barbie
Download – Get the wood off the ute
Hard drive – trip home without any cold tinnies
Floppy Disc – What you get lifting too much firewood at once
Backup – How you get the ute out of the shed
Keyboard – where you hang the ute keys
Windows – What you shut when there’s a dust storm
Screen – What you shut when there are blowies or mozzies about
RAM – How you get the fence post in
Byte – What mozzies do
Bit – What mozzies did
Megabyte – What Townsville mozzies do
Chip – Accompanies fish
Microchip – What’s left in the bag after you have eaten the chips
Modem – What you do to the lawns
Cable – The thing wound around the winch on the front of the ute
Dot Matrix – Old Don Matrix’s wife
Laptop – Where the cat sleeps
Hardware – Real stainless steel knives and forks from K Mart
Software – Plastic knives and forks you get at Red Rooster
Mouse – What eats the grain in the shed
Mainframe – What holds the shed up
Web – What spiders make
Web Site – The shed or under the veranda
Cursor – The old bloke who swears a lot
Search Engine – What you do when the ute won’t go
Yahoo – What you say when the ute does go
Upgrade – A steep hill
Server – The person at the pub who brings out the counter lunch
User – The neighbour who keeps borrowing the lawn mower
Network – When you have to repair your fishing net
Internet – Complicated fish net repair method
Netscape – When fish manoeuvres out of reach of net
Online – When you get the washing hung out
Offline – When the pegs don’t hold the washing up

Internet – Where cafeteria workers put their hair.

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The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn’t get her new
Dell computer to turn on. John Dower, a Dell Computer Corp.
technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked
the woman what happened when she pushed the power button. “I’ve
pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens,” the
woman replied. “Foot pedal?” the technician asked. “Yes,” the
woman said, “this little white foot pedal with the on switch.”
The “foot pedal,” it turned out, was the computer’s mouse, a
hand-operated device that helps to control the computer’s
operations.

One woman called Dell’s toll-free line to ask how to install
batteries in her laptop. When told that the directions were on
the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith, Dell director of
technical support, the woman replied angrily, “I just paid
$2,000 for this !@#? thing, and I’m not going to read a book.”

Compaq’s help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated by some
8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related
by technician John Wolf: “A frustrated customer called, who said
her brand new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked
the unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20
minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what
happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked, ‘What
power switch?'”

Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many
people have called to ask where the “any” key is when “Press Any
Key” flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering changing
the command to “Press Return Key.”

Some people can’t figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST
technical support supervisor, says one customer complained 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. Dell technician Wayne Zieschang says one of his customers
held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all the while
clicking madly.

Disk drives are another bugaboo. One customer was having trouble
reading word-processing files from his old diskettes. After
troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the
problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the
diskette. The customer’s response: “I put a label on the
diskette, roll it into the typewriter…”

At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician’s
request that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A
letter from the customer arrived a few days later, along with a
Xerox copy of the floppy.

At Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his troubled
floppy back in the drive and “close the door.” Asking the
technician to “hold on,” the customer put the phone down and was
heard walking over to shut the door to his room.

The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A
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.

Another customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer
worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub with soap
and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and then removing
all the keys and washing them individually.

Top Ten Ways A Computer Nerd Can Impress His Date

10. Flash the big wads of tens and twenties you created with your color laser printer and top-notch graphics program.

9. Spend an evening playing floppy disks backward, listening for the secret messages about Satan.

8. Invite her back to your place to show her the etchings on your Newton MessagePad.

7. Let the lady go first when you reach the virtual reality escalator.

6. Serenade her with your MIDI-compatible drum pads.

5. Have your dinner illuminated by the soft glow of an active-matrix LCD panel.

4. If you’re getting serious, consider a set of “his ‘n’ her” system unit keys.

3. Drive her crazy by murmuring tender love words with the help of a French-speaking voice synthesizer.

2. Never type on your date’s laptop computer without permission, particularly if the system is on her lap.

1. When things get tough, simply ask yourself, “What would Bill Gates do in a situation like this?

Modem – What ya did when the grass and weeds got too tall.

When the end of the world arrives how will the media report it?

USA Today:
WE’RE DEAD

The Wall Street Journal:
DOW JONES PLUMMETS AS WORLD ENDS

National Enquirer:
O.J. AND NICOLE, TOGETHER AGAIN

Playboy:
GIRLS OF THE APOCALYPSE

Microsoft Systems Journal:
APPLE LOSES MARKET SHARE

Victoria’s Secret Catalog:
OUR FINAL SALE

Sports Illustrated:
GAME OVER

Wired:
THE LAST NEW THING

Rolling Stone:
THE GRATEFUL DEAD REUNION TOUR

Readers Digest:
‘BYE

Discover Magazine:
HOW WILL THE EXTINCTION OF ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT AFFECT THE WAY WE VIEW THE COSMOS?

TV Guide:
DEATH AND DAMNATION: NIELSON RATINGS SOAR!

Lady’s Home Journal:
LOSE 10 LBS BY JUDGEMENT DAY WITH OUR NEW “ARMAGEDDON” DIET!

America Online:
SYSTEM TEMPORARILY DOWN. TRY CALLING BACK IN 15 MINUTES.

Inc. magazine:
TEN WAYS YOU CAN PROFIT FROM THE APOCALYPSE

Microsoft’s Web Site:
IF YOU DIDN’T EXPERIENCE THE RAPTURE,DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE PATCH RAPT777.EXE

I humbly suggest that you may wish to share this with all of the E-Mail lists in which you participate. You may also wish to keep a copy send to correspondents who forget these suggestions.E-Mail Facts Of Life1. Big companies don’t do business via chain letter. Bill Gates is not giving you $1000, and Disney is not giving you a free vacation. There is no baby food company issuing class-action checks. You can relax; there is no need to pass it on ‘just in case it’s true’. Furthermore, just because someone said in the message, four generations back, that ‘we checked it out and it’s legit’, does not actually make it true.2. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. If you are hell-bent on believing the kidney-theft ring stories, please see: http://urbanlegends.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa062997.htm And I quote: ‘The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have.’ That’s ‘none’ as in ‘zero’. Not even your friend’s cousin. 3. Neiman Marcus doesn’t really sell a $200 cookie recipe. And even if they do, we all have it. And even if you don’t, you can get a copy at: http://www.bl.net/forwards/cookie.html Then, if you make the recipe, decide the cookies are that awesome, feel free to pass the recipe on.4. We all know all 500 ways to drive your roommates crazy, irritate co-workers gross out bathroom stall neighbors and creep out people on an elevator. We also know exactly how many engineers, college students, Usenet posters and people from each and every world ethnicity it takes to change a lightbulb. 5. Even if the latest NASA rocket disaster(s) DID contain plutonium that went to particulate over the eastern seaboard, do you REALLY think this information would reach the public via an AOL chain-letter? 6. There is no ‘Good Times’ virus. In fact, you should never, ever, ever forward any E-Mail containing any virus warning unless you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that actually deals with virii. Try: http://www.norton.com/ or http://www.symantec.com. 7. If your CC: list is regularly longer than the actual content of your message, you’re probably going to Hell. 8. If you’re using Outlook, IE, or Netscape to write E-Mail, turn off the ‘HTML encoding.’ [hear, hear!] Those of us on Unix shells can’t read it, and don’t care enough to save the attachment and then view it with a web browser, since you’re probably forwarding us a copy of the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe anyway.9. If you still absolutely MUST forward that 10th-generation message from a friend, at least have the decency to trim the eight miles of headers showing everyone else who’s received it over the last 6 months. It sure wouldn’t hurt to get rid of all the ‘>’ that begin each line [I do that!]. Besides, if it has gone around that many times – we’ve probably already seen it. 10.Craig Shergold in England is not dying of cancer or anything else at this time and would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards. He apparently is also no longer a ‘little boy’ either. Nor can you get into the Guinness Book of World Records this way anymore (the rules were rewritten specifically to prevent this.)

Bill Gates is hanging out with the chairman of General Motors. ‘If automotive technology had kept pace with computer technology over the past few decades,’ boasts Gates, ‘you would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8, and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour,’ says Gates.

‘Or, you could have an economy car that weighs 30 pounds and gets a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case, the sticker price of a new car would be less than $50,’ he continues.

In response to all this goading, the GM chairman replies, ‘Yes, but would you really want to drive a car that crashes four times a day?’

Translated from latin scroll dated 2BCDear Cassius:Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven’t much time left. I don’t know how people will cope with working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it to us to sort it all out at this last minute.I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius hadn’t done something about it when he was sorting out the calendar. He said he could see why Brutus turned nasty. We called in Consultus, but he simply said that continuing downwards using minus BC won’t work and as usual charged a fortune for doing nothing useful.Surely we will not have to throw out all our hardware and start again? Macrohard will make yet another fortune out of this I suppose.The money lenders are paranoid of course! They have been told that all usury rates will invert and they will have to pay their clients to take out loans. Its an ill wind ……As for myself, I just can’t see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards.We have heard that there are three wise men in the East who have been working on the problem, but unfortunately they won’t arrive until it’s all over.I have heard that there are plans to stable all horses at midnight at the turn of the year as there are fears that they will stop and try to run backwards, causing immense damage to chariots and possible loss of life.Some say the world will cease to exist at the moment of transition. Anyway, we are still continuing to work on this blasted Y zero K problem.I will send a parchment to you if anything further develops. If you have any ideas please let me know,Plutonius