A few...
One of my colleagues (and he *is* a reader here) left an interesting error message in a site he developed. The message was an in joke around the team, and was "Get back, thickyhead".

The first I heard was when a user came to me asking why one of our website was telling him to get back, and calling him thickyhead.

My colleague had put the message in as a joke and forgotten about it. The code was designed so that a lot of things had to occur before it was displayed. So, it took months for it to appear.

The message as quickly removed when I asked about it

As for my favourite, well, two. They both happened to the same user who was, shall we say, a little eccentric (to say the least).

One morning, he came in, wearing his headphones (big, over the ear "cans") and asked me a question. When I replied, he just shouted "What?". I politely (but loudly) asked him to remove his headphones, to which he shouted "What?". My boss appear behind me and shouted "Take off your damn headphones". At which point the user did, and could hear me..

The other occasion, the user came into the office, and was just about to launch into a tirade about something, when my boss looked at him, and said firmly, but politely, "Before you start your question, do you think you could tell me the best way to London City Airport?". The user was so surprised that he answered and left the office immediately.
(Ok, I'll get me coat, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 16:25, 5 replies)

Helpdesk muppets.
My favourites over the last couple of years working for the NHS:

1) Telling me to try rebooting, no matter what was wrong with my pooter. Including stuff like "the projector won't come on when I hit the power switch".

2) Due to him using the word "mate" as punctuation, having to say to the tech monkey "Look, I'm not your mate, will you stop calling me it?"

3) And this one happens a lot:
Me: Hi, I can't log into SystemX, when I click on the icon, I get an error saying "wibble flibble dibble not found"
IT blokey: Right, first can you log out of SystemX?

4) Since I work in System Support, I can see the calls that I have raised. 90% of the time, what is on the logging system bears no resemblance to what I've said. It's also amazing the amount of times I am assigned an issue, work out a resolution and ring the user, only to be told "that's not the problem I'm having, it doesn't surprise me though, the guy I spoke to wasn't paying attention when I explained it to him. And he called me 'Mate' a lot"

I also had a fantastically fun one:
Some of the users in my last place had my mobile number, so would ring me directly out of hours. I had the best call ever (and by "best" I mean "worst"): one of the theatre staff rang me and said "A patient has just died in recovery, but the nurse has logged them as having gone back to , how do we get them back on the system?". I walked them through it, then hung up and has a little cry... since it was 7am on the 25th of December. That was a very Merry Christmas for some poor mother.
(ScousersPet, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 16:07, 3 replies)

When I first started my career as a developer
I learnt the follys of leaving test messages in your code the hard way. This is because, after releasing a new version of the software I was working on at the time, I almost immediately had a user ring up asking why his computer was telling him it was a cow.

Luckily, he laughed it off. I think.
(Flap Burger hasn't really got a burger made of flaps, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 16:06, Reply)

The Server Room
As I’m sure most of you do, I work in an office. Although recently promoted to an external role (car, laptop, phone, tenkyouveddymuch) I’m still in the office quite frequently, usually trawling through the latest QoTW posts all day when I am. I’m not in IT Support, nor have I ever been, nor do I intend to be. Our IT Support guys are pretty good, although the two guys do remind me of the Matthew Holness (AKA Garth Marenghi) character who briefly appeared in an episode of The Office, repairing Gareth’s PC (they also have a young assistant – a 22-year-old brunette with the perfect figure, lustrous hair, gorgeous deep blue eyes and breasts like street bollard tops, but I’ll save that for Thursday’s QoTW – Good Looking IT Personnel).

Anyroadup, this story goes back a few years (several) to when we were based in our old offices. Now, we as a company realised quite early on that in our line of work, it was simply not worth the hassle of opening between Christmas and New Year. All our customers shut down, and as we don’t deal with the general public, the phone hardly rings and as a consequence it becomes too expensive to open. Anyhoo, this particular year we’d decided to open up, albeit with skeleton staff and reduced working hours (10 till 4). I was manning the ‘sales desk’ on my own as we weren’t envisioning any volume of calls whatsoever. This meant that yours truly was destined to spend 6 hours on t’interweb when I should have been at home watching films and topping up lost alcohol levels, what with it being the season of goodwill and everything.

So, it transpired that, after 2 hours of doing c*ck-all, and managing to visit all the sites that I could think of and have an interest in, old Captain One-Eye began to commandeer my thought processes and suggested that I might wish to perhaps visit some *ahem* gentleman-friendly sites. So, a cursory glance around the office (I think there were six people including myself in) confirmed that three people were at their desks, engrossed in whatever it was they were doing, and a fourth, an Accounts woman, was filing. So, I began to gingerly finger an entry into the search engine and enjoy the transformation of my screen from a dour grey and blue to a plethoric explosion of cream and pink.

Unfortunately, half an hour of this was leading to some kind of explosion below the Equator so to speak, and thoughts began to race in my head as to what I could do about this. I was getting turned on as fuck and really needed to crack one off to put it mildly. There was no-one in the office who could see my screen, or notice my surreptitious excitement. So I made a democratic decision to take a trip to the conveniences and shake hands with the President.

The toilet was located downstairs (only one – it was a small office), but to my horror, it was engaged. Undeterred, and with my caber on the verge of being tossed, I espied the door to the server room ajar. I rushed inside and pulled the door ‘to’. I unleashed my, by now, quivering and pulsing gutstick and began polishing the Pope’s cap with rapidity, knowing that this would be a swift military operation. I managed maintain an air of quiet as I approached the Billy Mill roundabout, for fear of being caught, and at the point of no return, managed to extract a tissue from my pocket and caught my filthy yogurt. My heart beating in my ears and mouth, I swallowed each breath and managed to scrunch up the "remains of the day" and popped my, by now, fading glory back into its home, and began to make my way out when I heard a familiar voice say ‘Alright Sonora?’. Fuckshitfuckshitfuckshitfuckshit; the one IT guy who had to be in today had been in the server room doing whatever IT guys do in the server room and caught me at it! I mumbled, ‘Er yeah, alright mate!’ in a passable impersonation of Emo Phillips crossed with Bobcat Goldthwaite and legged it out of there.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I managed to bump into our then Financial Director; this woman, who said ‘You OK, Sonora?’, on account of my flustered, crimson-cheeked appearance. I managed to blurt out, ‘YeahOKjustfinejustthoughtI’drunupthestairsandblowawaysomeofthoseChristmascobwebsahahahahaha!’ and ran back to my desk as I realised that I was still holding the evidence and that also I’d managed to drop some of my goo on my shoe thanks to my carelessness in ‘catching the impossible’ with the tissue.

I still work with the IT guy, and to this day he’s never mentioned anything to my face, although he smiles at me when he’s in the (new) server room in the new offices and I walk past. I’m sure he was probably at the same thing when I was and it’s only the ‘guy code’ that keeps him from revealing it. I think...
(SonoraAeroClub "OH SWEET HELEN OF BALLS!", Wed 30 Sep 2009, 15:59, 2 replies)

This just in...
I've just had a look at our helpdesk program to see what calls the nohelpdesk have put through to the training department today...

Latest is "Please could you convert these documents to Word format so that we can read them?"

And attached to the job? Two Word documents! :)
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 15:41, 6 replies)

The comms room
Part of a former job entailed going into the comms room and rebooting the server if someone at another site said certain things weren't working. The Comms room had become a dumping ground for the IT department and when there was not a clear route to the server a colleague refused to go in there. The "on call" IT person would be phoned and if they answered at all nothing happened so a system failure on Friday after four would usually not get touched till Monday morning despite the company operating 24/7. This situation continued till the weekend the head of IT couldn't off load his on call stint to someone else. He got the call on a Saturday morning about the server needing rebooting and why we weren't doing it and exploded. By 1100 Monday the Comms room was empty.
(jvz, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 15:40, Reply)

Our Current IT manager..
...just answered his phone with, "Hello, erm, sorry, i'm going to have to call you back. I've got a crisp in my eye."
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 14:28, 2 replies)

I worked in PC repair for about 10 years.
And yes, we had a fair few amount of stupid people, but the vast majority were normal people that needed genuine IT assistance. Faulty hard drives/motherboards/memory etc... data backups, OS reinstallations and so on.

However, this is something I will always say about my time in IT:

I don't have any problem with people that don't know what they're doing; it's the people that *think* they know what they're doing that are the worst.
( Mike Fishcake teamfishcake.co.uk - better than your mum's face, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 14:16, 2 replies)

Error Messages
Working as an IT tech in a school I got a support call from the woodwork teacher teaching a group of 6th formers how to use Pro Desktop. The call was rather interesting.

Teach: Hello, some of the students are getting an error message.
Me: What does the message say?
Teach: Bananas
Me: ...sorry?
Teach: Bananas
Me: I got it the first time. What?
Teach: All the machines say bananas

So I walked over to see that indeed a class of 30 students were staring and an error box saying "Bananas". This seemed to be a quirk of this software, someone had forgotten to write in all the error messages in properly.

Others included:
"please write error statement here"
"Hello World"
"Coconuts"
" "
"Please ignore this error"
"Rubber Ducks"

It was always a joy to try and fix them as no one at their support line had a clue about what I was talking about and several time I got called a nutter and had the phone put down on me.

Oh you crazy developers.

Length? Bigger than a bunch of bananas!
( Aenesis, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 14:04, 4 replies)

I don't recall the version
It may have been pcAnywhere 10 that gave the rather superb error message:

"Error loading error message"

Good work Symantec, your work is done here.
(zebby wasting irony here on, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:44, 5 replies)

IT? Yes. Support? Not so much.
It's my 6th year at school. Advanced Higher Computing class. The people who have gotten here have gone through computing, systems and programming to get to this point. Should have some measurable amount of brains, at least.

So one lad (who shall remain brainless) attempts to retrieve a CD from one of the computers, but the tray won't come out. Bloody iMacs. For most of us in this class, the solution is obvious; get a paperclip, push it into the mysterious tiny hole and the tray pops open. So the teacher furnishes this lad with a paperclip for just this purpose. (and possibly clipping paper, I never asked)

Which the lad then uses to try and pry the tray open.

It was worrying on two distinct levels.

One; an Advanced Higher Computing student (roughly equivalent to GCSE for those unfamiliar) didn't know the paperclip method for extracting CDs from greedy disc drives.

Two; he tried to prise something - ANYTHING - open with a paperclip. There's a reason a paperclip is not part of a fireman's standard kit - you couldn't use it to prise open Katona's lady-cave let alone a plastic and metal disc tray.

He passed the class, mind you. Guess it wasn't that important.
( Iki I think my camel is dead., Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:42, 2 replies)

Omar the Destroyer
A few years back the company I worked for had a particularly incompetent IT bod. He'd got bored working in a pizza shop, done a 2 week computer course and got made head of IT by his cousin who ran the company I worked for.

The first time I ever installed Microsoft office on a computer, I was really nervous because I had seen Omar do it and it had taken him nearly 5 hours and he ran into endless problems. I was pretty amazed when it took about half an hour and worked fine when I tried it. He couldn't walk past an unguarded pc without tinkering with (breaking) it.

I used to Omar-proof my computer if I thought I would be away from my desk for any amount of time. Omar-Proofing consisted of taking a screenshot of the desktop and setting that as the wallpaper then moving the taskbar to the top of the screen and setting it to autohide and hiding all the icons.

In this fashion, Omar could be guaranteed to just sit there, endlessly and fruitlessly trying to click on what was essentially just a picture of a computer until you got back.
( Afinkawan Yes I can hear you Clem Fandango, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:39, 4 replies)

Where I once worked as a contractor
IT support took care of creating reports for the bosses via an Oracle Forms & Reports type application which they had written. I was given the task of creating a dozen or so reports which returned results from the system that I had been working on as support didn't know anything about the data contained therein. One requirement all of these reports had in common was the ability to specify a date range i.e. "show me how many thingies were thingied between 15th Jan to 23rd March 2009".

They showed me how to use their gizmo and off I went to create the first report. All pretty straightforward only I couldn't get the date part of the query to work. I tried putting it in single or double quotes, tried formatting it different ways, nothing I tried worked. So, I asked one of the support guys to show me how to query by date. He sent me an example.

Bleeding Flip! Every date comparison in his example involved breaking down the date in the database to e.g. first 4 characters for year, characters 6 and 7 for month, etc and doing the same to the dates specified in the query. He had then written some massive Decode (Oracle If, Then, Else, function) along the lines of If year1 greater than year2 and month1 greater than month2 and day1 greater than day2 and year2 less than year3, etc, etc which took up the whole screen and then used that repeatedly in every place where there was a date comparison.

Our database contained tens of millions of records, if I tried to run a query like that it would never come back.

Did I mention that they wrote this application? Yet no one ever thought to fix the "dates don't work" bug. Instead they wrote queries that killed the database. Insane.

This is way too geeky but I've typed it now...

In case you're wondering, I found a workaround which involved substituting the dates specified into a string and sending that to the database bypassing their bollocks tool.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:49, 1 reply)

One thing that regularly fucks me off
being a computery type person who is sometimes entasked with managing networks, is the following error message:

"Please contact your system administrator."

Erm. Yeah. I am the system administrator. Now what the fuck do I do?
(Flap Burger hasn't really got a burger made of flaps, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:31, 4 replies)

Bored?
Eject the CD drive, insert vegetables / fruits / various other items of increasing strengths and sizes into the space in the tray, then press the button to close and see if the CD-Rom is strong enought to snap it. Repeat until you find something that won't break.

The IT support of a previous employer hated that game.
( Muns, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:20, Reply)

One day in the office....
...there were rumours amock of a visitor to our IT department, hanging about by our break-out area in the centre of the building. Was it a top-knob boss?

Nope. It was a freakishly big mutant house spider.

It was on the wall looking down at all the people who were gawping like fuck at it. And they had reason to gawp. For this spider resembled a large house spider with a perfectly spherical white body, literally matching the size of a golf ball. I've never seen a spider like that in my life, and I'm ever so slightly arachnaphobic (as in I can look at 'em but I won't go near the cunts).

Of course, working with a bunch of nerds we wouldn't go near the freaky 8 legged cunt, we just all stood there and pointed while making nerd sounds before eventually getting bored and going back to our desks to fix computers over the phone.

About an hour after I'd seen this abomination I was back at my desk and continuing my teching. One habit I tend to do to help me relax when I'm doing me job is to take my shoes off and dangle me feet under the desk...mid-call and suddenly there was a bump off my foot.

"Wtf????" I glance under the desk.

Nout by me feet, so what the fuck was it? I look right, and the golf ball spider is doing 10 to the dozen under the desk away from me.

I screamed like a fucking baby. Unfortunately the customer I was speaking to on the phone thought I was being attacked by Hannibal Lector or something and was shouting "Christ man, are you ok??????" to me. Bless, it was fun trying to explain what just bounced off me foot to someone who'd just hear the last of my manhood dribble out of my life.

What made this worse was that a 4 foot tall girl who used to work here ran straight over to my desk with a plastic cup and caught the fucker, before taking it outside the building to be released into the wilds. She come back in and re-assured me that "it was more scared of me than me of it", which didn't exactly fill me with comfort. I was more worried about having to cross the carpark to get to my car at the end of the shift knowing that this golf-ball cunt was still out there, watching....and waiting.

Apols for length, I was almost an "innie" when I saw it...
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:02, 13 replies)

How I got Mauled by a Squirrel
One of my student summer jobs was in an office, just across the road from which was a park; I'd go to that park to have my lunch.

There was a number of sqirrels that lived there - unsurprisingly - and one in particular I recognised by his slightly injured-looking tail. He seemed to be around my preferred bench every day. I would, on occasion, throw him a bit of crust or a crisp or something.

Now, squirrels lose some of their timidity during the summer, because last year's food has pretty much gone, and this year's isn't ripe yet. So, over the course of a week or two, I was able to get this squirrel to come quite close. He wasn't quite friendly, but he wasn't running away.

"Wouldn't it be nice," I thought, "if I could feed him from my hand..." And so, one day, I held out a bit of crust for him but didn't let go. He edged closer... closer... tentatively... closer... and eventually plucked up the courage to bite...

Except what he bit was not a piece of sandwich. It was my finger.

And that is how I got mauled by a squirrel.

At this point, you may be wondering why this is related to the QotW. Well, there's two reasons. First, the job that I was doing at the time was on a helpdesk. Second, "squirrel" and "SQL" are a bit similar.

Click "I like this" if you're wondering why noone ends a post with "Click 'I like this' if..." any more.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 11:30, 3 replies)

Mental
I've just seen my boss try to put a DVD-ROM in his cup holder! Lol! Then he Ctrl Alt Deleted and reset his motherboard drives! Whilst surfing for pr0n!!!!!

What a maroon!
(The Boy Monders I have ginger bits in my beard., Wed 30 Sep 2009, 11:19, Reply)

Anyone for coffee?
Its probably in here already and once a common occurance.

I needed to setup some software remotely for someone but I needed her to install pcAnywhere first. It was her first experience of a cd and I asked her to put it in the cd-drawer. After several seconds she came back to me and said she could find it. I talked her through finding the cd eject button. Down the phone I heard the drawer slide open followed by the comment "Oh, you mean the cup holder!".
(specsteve, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 10:39, 12 replies)

An IT expert friend of mine did a bit of moonlighting working on a sex advice line
He only lasted one shift. Apparently his sage advice: “have you tried turning her on and off again?” didn’t go down too well with the punters...
( SpankyHanky, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 10:08, 5 replies)

Don't knock the 'computer expert' friend who knackers your machine with his tinkering.
If it wasn't for one of those, I wouldn't have met the current Mr Quar!

A mate had a pooter that her 'knowledgeable' friend had 'reprogrammed', ie broken.

I offered to find a real expert to fix it for her, with him and her coming to some 'oral' agreement over payment. Yes, that's the type of girl she was.

Had a tootle around on AOL for local-ish single blokes who worked in IT, got talking to several, thought he was funny and clever, got to know him a bit and...

Yes, he sorted her PC, but by then I'd sorted HIM!

That was eleven years ago. We're married now.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 8:56, 7 replies)

Sat-a-WTF?
This is without a word of a lie, a true story.

At a clients, I evict a guy from his desk so I can do some work on his PC

Him: That’s OK, I’ll use my laptop

Shortly thereafter I can see he’s having some kind of difficulty so I offer to help him out

Him: I can’t get on the Internet

Me: You need to plug in the network cable (points to little blue lead)

Him: I don’t need it, I’ve got satellite

Me: Eh?

He then points to the front of his laptop where indeed there is the legend, Toshiba Satellite
(RichardInSydney would like to know why teh date & time is, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 8:34, Reply)

Back in the day....
Me - based in Sheffield, call from a college admin in Salisbury - can't reboot the computer (an ancient multi-user system from Comart). All checks alreeady having been done including have they turned the reset lock off? I set off for Salisbury. Gets to college office, turns reset lock key, presses reset button, turn key back to Lock, drive off home. Users!

Report from a place in Hull - screen is wobbling. Set off with monitor. Arrive on site, turns off anglepoise lamp next to monitor, wobble stops. Another genius user.

Apologies for length & bitterness.
(Mister_E_Meat was caught sniffing bike saddles at, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 7:30, 4 replies)

IT Over Fifty ?
Ok this is my first post so be kind :)
I am here for the over fifty club, I am the only IT person at my office,I am also the oldest person in the company,so please dont give the oldies a hard time. I know more about IT than all the young bloods in the office some whom struggle to find the on off button. I am the Helpdesk for software, hardware and anything that has a button and socket. When I left school there where no computers in the classroom and I crafted my trade through ZX80's onwards. Now the young bloods all had ITC at school but it seems they where all asleep during these classes, but as most share one brain cell and that is damaged they have tuff IT days!.
So be kind to us oldies we know more than you think :)
(stumpey, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 7:17, 11 replies)

PowerPointless
We have an awesome IT department where I work, but if there's one thing that has them reduced to a gibbering wreck in no time flat, it's when one of us need help with Powerpoint for Mac. Truly, the most infernal piece of crap you ever encountered, and it causes us more problems than you can imagine. And we only use it because our clients use it.

On top of this our clients just got acquired by a larger European company. Our clients use Macs, the Europeans use PCs, nobody wants to compromise, and everything is communicated in PPT.

If only it was a simple as charging them twice for everything - a PC version and a Mac version.
(Thomas_The_Spankengine, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 4:10, 3 replies)

Anyone else remember DOS?
While I was in college this past time (circa 2002) I worked in a QC lab as an assistant engineer. I did my best to ignore the fact that most of the people I was working under were either my age or younger- probably helps a bit that I don't look like I'm as old as I am, but it was still a bit shocking at times.

One of the pieces of testing equipment ran on an old 8088 with DOS 5 for an operating system. As it had been in use for about twenty years at that point, it was full of dust and generally getting pretty ragged. But none of the IT guys wanted to touch it and no one else knew anything about that computer, so it just kept wheezing along.

Then came the day it died. Much panic ensued, as no one had any idea where the installation disks were- hell, they would have been 5.25" floppies anyway. What to do, what to do?

I powered it down, then lifted the case a couple of inches off the desk and let it drop. I turned on the power and it came back to life. There was much rejoicing.

"Got any blank floppies?" I asked.

"Yes. Why?"

"Because I can find the program files and copy them and make a disk for you."

Blank looks from a row of engineers. "Can you do that?"

I looked at them for a second. "Yes, this is DOS, not windows. Find me a floppy and a new computer to hook it to and I'll get it running again."

Two hours later I had the program installed onto a Windows 2000 machine, running under a DOS shell. (It only took that long because they had to come up with disks and a computer.) They all thought I was some sort of computer guru after that. I thought they were a poor excuse for engineers- they used the same machines I did, at the same time I did.

Twits.

A few years later I'm working for a company that designed ethanol facilities to take advantage of the new green energy craze. One day my boss tells me to take all of the files from one project on the server, copy them to a new folder, then go through and rename each one from "100MGD" to "50MGD", as we were basically going to use the one project as the basis for the other. "There, that should keep you busy for at least an hour," he laughed.

"Really? Got a sec? Let me show you something." I brought up a DOS shell, typed in the path to the newly copied files and typed in ren 100MGD*.* 50MGD*.* and hit return. A wall of text flashed up the screen for a moment, then I got my command prompt back. I exited the shell, then opened the folder in Windows Explorer and showed him the result- all of the files renamed as requested.. "Okay, what next?"

His jaw dropped. "How the fuck did you do that?!?"

I grinned at him. "Dude, be thankful that I didn't go to the root directory and type in del *.xls /s. That would have wiped out every spreadsheet on that network drive."

He looked pale at the thought. "Okay, don't ever show that to anyone else here, understand? You have any idea what they would say if they knew you could do that?"

I snorted. "I just can't believe that they don't already know. We only stopped using DOS ten years ago. What happened to all the people who knew how to run it?" I laughed and started singing, "Damn it feels good to be a DOS geek..."

He shook his head and left.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 30 Sep 2009, 3:02, 7 replies)

Building computers for family members is never a good idea...
I once built a computer as a surprise present for my then father in law. I assembled it, partitioned it, clean install of windows 2000, all the patches, all the anti virus, anti malware, the works. Took me two days to do it as I had to get all the patches etc over a dialup connection. But once it was done I was a proud person - it was absolutely bomb proofed, and outside of his doing something really, really stupid would remain pretty safe.

Fast forward 5 months... He wanted to put some more software on it and as I'd set it up so that he ran in a limited user mode (hey, he was doing work that involved peoples contacts etc the law stated it *had* to be locked down as best as could be done or I'd be in the crapper) he wanted the admin password, which I gave to him. No worries thought I...

Two days later I visit to find out that he'd got his other son in law "the professional computer operator" to slap on an unpatched version of XP that was set to auto login to an admin account. I held my tongue on the waste of effort I'd put in, but I was irritated, especially when I examined the result.

Him: Yeah he didn't want to have to sign in every time.
Me: You are aware that he does business on that machine, right?
Him: Yeah, and? So what?
Me: The DPA requires that all reasonable measures have to be taken to secure a machine otherwise the person doing the install can be held liable.
Him: ...
Me: I had that system locked down for a damn good reason, partly so that it couldn't be exploded by random things being installed and partly to cover my own arse.
Him: It doesn't matter, it'll be fine.
Me: It's a £5000 fine for each breach if it isn't. If he's got 20 names and addresses on that system and it gets breached and those details are used fraudulently...
Him: I'll just go and have a word with him...

Cheeky fucker even tried to imply to the father in law that it was somehow my fault as I heard later on.

Computer professional my left nut. Never ever again.

Apologies for length etc
(the_leander, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 2:43, 2 replies)

The Wonders of Technology
Is it just me or are any of you bricking it at the thought of getting old and not having a clue how technology works?

I ask because it seems that most people who are over say 50.... have absolutly no idea how to operate current technology.

My dear old mother for instance is always asking me how to program her VCR (i know i did say current technology), retune her freeview box and she still has no idea how to send a txt message.

My boss (a woman in her late 50's) still cannot fathem how to add an attachment to an email (ffs) despite being shown several times a week for as long as i can remember.

In 30 years or so am I going to be like that? bothering the young 'uns to show me how to work things?

Dear God I hope not!
( MoeLester Don't judge a book by its movie, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 0:52, 6 replies)

I've run into a ridiculous problem on my own computer
I can't install the stand-alone FEAR expansion, Perseus Mandate, because the characters in the CD key are physically too large to be entered. How the hell is that even possible?
(Badgers wear Corpsepaint it's true, I've seen them..., Wed 30 Sep 2009, 0:08, 7 replies)

Monitor Problems
I once rang our IT "help" desk as my monitor was blank and no matter what I did, it stayed blank.

After trying all the usual "turn it off, turn it on again" our IT monkey suggests "unplugging the cable at the back"
"er, theres two, which one" says i.

can you guess whats coming....

"oooh, good question........try both"

brilliant.
(Singo69, Tue 29 Sep 2009, 23:56, Reply)