Fuckwittery from me
First time poster, long time lurker, etc.

This one happened recently and is still a source of shame for me...

I work in retail, and am usually the one people go to when the tills go down because I seem to be the only till monkey that knows how to restart a computer. CTRL + ALT + DEL is a mystery to most of the old dears that work with me, so it gives me an inflated sense of self :)

Anyhow, one day I come into work, and am met with wails and gnashing of false teeth that Till Three wont turn on. Woe! So naturally the hero of this tale strides over and pushes the power button.

Nothing happens. Shitfoxes.

I rummage with the cables, I press every conceivable button and I get an unsatisfying bugger all in response. I don't however check to see IF THE FUCKING THING IS PLUGGED INTO THE WALL. In my defence, they aren't ever unplugged because they need to be on overnight/all the time to send the till info. You can see what's coming next... I eventually admit defeat and phone our IT Support.

Me: It won't turn on!
IT: Have you turned it on?
Me: Of course I've bloody turned... oh... OH...
Me: I'm so sorry.

He didn't even bother trying to hide his laughter as he put the phone down on me... :(
And you know why it was unplugged? Phyllis "got cold" and plugged her portable heater in down there.

And since then, I haven't been able to phone IT because I know they'll remember me as the dumb fuck that can't turn a computer on.

Apologies for length, I'm only 5'2" :)
(becky_bubbles, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 19:22, Reply)

Bleh
I hated working in IT. Which is why I now work outdoors.

One shining gem of support years and years ago was the guy who'd gone on deployment, and put his laptop in the baggage hold of the plane. Who then called us and moaned that it was broken, and berated us for giving him a flimsy laptop.

All the usual nonsense as well such as foraging and amassing user porn, reading emails, etc etc. I really don't miss that work.
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:37, Reply)

Not technically IT support
but in the 3rd year lab at Uni, I wrote a very simple C file (2 lines or thereabouts - using malloc I think) that would eat memory at an exponential rate and basically render the targets PC unusable. Re-naming it f1refox or something equally as ubiquitous meant that after running the Linux 'top' command to try and suss out what the problem is, the victim would see f1refox hogging all the resources and try to exit the firefox browser to sort the problem. *queue evil laugh*

SSH-ing into someone else's workstation and running this little binary would result in major hilarity. CompSci students? Yeah, we are geeks.

One guy was particularly dumb - how he ever made it to 3rd year i'll never know - and coupled with the severity and difficulty of the workload, was very easily stressed - especially during project hand-in time when he's finishing off the last of his Java code, writing a dissertation, and trying to finish off his coursework on the day of the hand-in. His terrible time management skills only added to his stress....

Picture this nimrod: sweating, screaming and shouting at his monitor, almost crying with frustration because his code is a mess, hair unkempt, bags under his eyes from spending days on end in front of a monitor, sleeves rolled up, notes all over the workstation.....

Cue god_is_probably_fish and his nifty little C binary. I swear to god, I think I almost sent him over the edge during project-time. He'd be down at the technical support guys, trying to get them to fix his machine, and pleading with other students to help him sort his code.

The best was when he'd move machines thinking that it was a hardware issue - until it happened again. We watched him move through a whole row of machines one afternoon becoming more and more suicidal each time.

Eventually, he caught on to the group of geeks huddled over one machine buckled with laughter every time it happened. He took it pretty well, bless him.

I used to SSH into my machine at home from Uni as well and stream hardcore pr0n to my terminal. That was fun for everyone until I realised that the security camera behind my back had a perfect view of "Squirt in my Gape" during my lunch-break.
(god_is_a_ghoti Carpe Deum., Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:30, 1 reply)

I used to be in IT...
but I'm better now, thanks.






Length? About 27 years...
(Rumbling Bear rumbled on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:17, Reply)

Many many moons ago....
.... I was a teacher, and worked for a progressive County Council who in their foresight had bought and delivered spanking new BBC Model B Micros, monitor screens and tape-players for all the schools in the county. As this was back in 1982, I said whatever the equivalent of YAY was, as this was a new-fangled invention I wanted to know more about!

However. It soon became apparent that nobody knew how to use the things, what to use them for, and being busy teachers pre-national curriculum, nobody had the time to learn. And the older ones had no inclination either - nor video recorders to tape the overnight lessons from BBC2.

So the progressive council advertised amongst its teaching staff for those who would be prepared to do the BBC/OU course which, of course, the BBC Micro was introduced for. The lucky acceptees were to be subsidised and given video recorders (still a relatively expensive item at that time). I applied and was accepted, YAY again.

Months later on completing the course and learning to amend the few existing educational programs to suit particular classroom environments and writing a few new ones, I and my colleagues proceeded to go round all the schools in the county to set the systems up and teach the teachers what to do. With some considerable degree of success as hardly any of the schools had bothered to take the things out of the box before we got there.

However, one school surprised us all. A rural location, with a lovely little-old-lady headmistress, on the phone she happily told us the computer was the most useful thing the council had ever sent her, and yes we could come to see her use it.

Believe me, the lot of us descended on that tiny school. By this time we were fed up of spending our time dusting off the boxes, getting injured by the packing staples and finding somewhere to dispose of all the polystyrene packaging instead of showing the kids that if they kicked the bricks in a certain order to spell words, their name would come up on the screen in flashing & alternating bright colours. (yes, times were very different then, that was a real incentive, honestly).

We arrived, eager to see this enthusiastic little old dear's set-up. She greeted us at the school entrance and told us that the building was so small and had so few pupils, all the children were taught in one big open plan area in the hall, under different groups according to age.

Then we saw the BBC Micro, in use.

In its box.

Propping her office door open.

She said it was the only thing she had ever found that was heavy or strong enough to stop the hinge on the fire-door to her office from closing shut, and she wanted the door open because with all the empty classrooms and all the pupils in the hall, she felt isolated from them. And this, honestly, was said to us without a hint of irony or sarcasm.
( wuffle, the b3ta bunny 's flea collar isn't working on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:16, Reply)

Bright Sparks
1. "Can you look at my monitor? There are sparks coming out of it". Goes up to look at said monitor, but no sparks. Lady said "It only happens when I water the plants" and demonstratess how she watered her geranium with the pot balanced on top of said monitor.

2. Stood at the console of a large (in its day) buiness system next to the ops manager. I turn to him and say "how do you spell 'power-down-sys immed'?" and watch him go white.

3. Wrote back up program that instructed the operator to load-spool-on-drive-one, reload-spool-on-drive-two, clean-drive-head-and-replace-spool, stand-on-one-leg-and-whistle-dixie while watching him and pising ourselves laughing through the machine room window.

4. Seen a loser-user take a floppy disk and staple it to a report. Genius.

5. In the old days, it was easy to hi-jack peoples screens, so you could capture passwords. It's easy with passwords to work out who in an office is shagging who. Of course, clear type password files are the best!
( Piper Alpha is being a grumpy northerm bastard on:, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:05, Reply)

ERROR
Could not find kitten. Please insert kitten and try again.


(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:05, 2 replies)

I recently joined a forum
for smugly condescending IT workers. It was terrible; they were all telling funny stories appropriate for a general audience.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 18:00, Reply)

Out of personal interest
(Not much interest I'll grant you, but it's there):

What (in the context of firefox) is meant by a "Well formed error"? Is it congratulating me?
( MatJ LOOK, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 17:01, 4 replies)

How to change your password
I used to work at a research lab in Oxfordshire, working on a giant laser. One of the lab technicians was an older chap, with the IQ of a bag of hammers, who was obviously employed as a favour to someone.

I was implementing a new stock database for him and had to assign him a new password for his login. You had to type your new password twice before pressing Enter for the password to register.

Despite me telling him not to press Enter after he had first typed his new password, he did it every time. EVERY TIME, until I was almost shouting in his face to stop doing it. In the end, I had to put my hand over the Enter key to prevent him from hitting it.

He also wanted to include a number of punctuation marks in his password to ensure it was secure, but almost every time forgot what he had originally entered when he came to confirm it a second time.

I'm glad I moved on. And now I'm in the heady world of the DBA. Jesus.
(mobileabuser I liked... clive, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:47, 2 replies)

I'm fairly certain the guy fucked them over...
But some assistance would be appreciated.

About 5 years back my Dad invested some serious money into getting a bloody good PC built for us, about £1000 (Serious for him). Thing ran like a dream for the first 9 months, no worries at all.

One day, it died, with a slight burning smell. Upon investigation, it turned out the graphics card had died, and taken the PSU with it. No biggie, replace both, carry on.

About a month later, we start to have severe problems with Viruses and Spyware. The PC would last about 5 minutes, and then the graphics would go insane. It needed a format and reinstall, no biggie.

I went away for a few days, and my Stepmum couldn't work out how to install windows, so looked up a number for a computer consultant in the paper. He comes out, tells them that 'the virus on here has corrupted the RAM and graphics card, they'll never work again', charges them £80 to take the PC off them (with a genuine copy of XP SP2 in the drive) and then sells them a 'much better PC' (read: Piece of shite ACER).

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but surely Software can't corrupt hardware? I know drivers can go mental, but damage beyond repair? I'm sure that's bollucks.

Ah well, a few months later the guy proved he was an idiot by cancelling a disk format while it was still running, crippling the disk. We ended up having to buy DiskWarrior just to get the cunt working again.

I know this is a boring, rambling, shitty post, but I just wanted to get it off my chest.
( Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:46, 7 replies)

I still giggle about this one....
There are lots of kids in my family. But my mother loves and adores only one child in the family. She keeps rubbing my face in the many ways of how glorious and smart my little brother is. One day I got interrupted when this beloved brother of mine complained that the keyboard was no longer typing even if he changed the batteries. He demanded that I wipe the drive to fix the keyboard. I explained to him that the keyboard needs to be replaced and not wipe the drive. He said I was being stupid. Lovely mum stepped in and demanded that I hurry up and fix it. I replaced the keyboard whilst laughing for the demand to wipe the drive to fix a keyboard. I still giggle to this day. I especially make sure to laugh in front of my brother......and behind his back.
(ButacuP As yoooo wish!!, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:41, 1 reply)

I love my IT department. They are wonderful people doing a difficult job.
It's the way they take remote control of your computer no matter what you are trying to do without the courtesy of a phonecall. If I'm reaaly pissed off each thing they open I'll shut down till I've finished what I am doing. My manager got a phone call about that.

As in most companies various websites are blocked. Working for a large public transport organisation I thought the "Traveline" website would be useful so I could check whether the information was accurate (that was the reason I gave anyway.) It got to senior manager level before a decision was made and now I can plan my journeys around the country.
(jvz, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:37, Reply)

notice we are only ever referred to as 'users'
autistic cunts
( spimf ™ is whoever you want him to be, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:21, 7 replies)

Two from a long list of many....
I have been in IT support for twenty years and have met more than my share of "special" users. Here are but two:

The secretary who rang me to complain that her PC screen was fuzzy. I went in at lunchtime to swap her monitor for a new one. She walked in holding a coffee and sandwich which she duly dropped and screamed as I was pulling out the old monitor: "WAIT!!! All my documents are on there!!!"

Or the user who insisted that she had a haunted PC that would randomly type fragments of her conversations while she chatted to colleagues....A qick visit revealed that she had inadvertantly switched on XP's voice recognition...

(The first call I EVER had as a support technician was a director whos terminal would not power up. I noticed that the plug wasnt in the socket properly on the skirting trunking. So I examined the screen and ummed and arrred... then mysteeriously wiggled my fingers at the screen whilst discretely back-heeling the plug into place... My boss got a call 10 minutes later to say that the new boy was truly "magic" :) )
(goatboy2k, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:11, Reply)

The Downfall of Adam, Self Proclaimed King of IT
In most of my jobs the IT bods have been pretty decent people, but at one place I worked there was this nasty little gobshite named Adam in charge of IT support who looked like a younger, skinnier version of Lurch.

He was basically a bit of an arsehole – being the most unhelpful, rudest, pompous fucker on the planet Earth. He’d been known to reduce members of staff to tears with his smarmy, ballistic tirades. Bit weird, really, when this fella earned his wage because he knew how to fix all this shit and no one else did. He’d fuck about for ages trying to look importantant, spouting off all this shit about how he possessed the greatest IT mind in the universe, keeping whichever poor fucker it was waiting while he fixed the power converters, sorted the warp drive, fiddled with the flux capacitor – whatever the fuck it was he was doing. He needed an audience. Everyone else just wanted to get on with their job without the computer-thingy breaking down or doing odd bollocks. And Adam had this special way of winding up this audience, what with him having the charm and people skills of roadkill splattered with dogturds. Basically, whenever Adam came into a room you knew you’d have to use all your zen-like powers not to punch the fucker out.

And, to make matters worse, he’d always had it in for me after the time I delivered one of the company laptops back to him in a carrier bag... well... two carrier bags... after an incident involving a reversing Vauxhall Astra and me putting my laptop case down at the wrong moment after being distracted taking a phonecall. Adam never forgave me for that. The phrase “stupid,” used in conjunction with the word “cunt,” was banded about for a while. He went crying to management about that, suggesting I pay for a new one (just not the done thing). But Adam was always going to management about something or other – telling tales on people who’d been violating company internet policy, people who’d changed their desktop to a photo of their wife and kids, an endless list of petty bollocks that most normal IT people would let slide.

But Adam was a jobsworth cunt.

So, one Christmas Eve my mate Dave and I came up with a plan. The plan to knock Adam off his shiny fucking pedestal of Microsoft-inspired cuntdom. Fueled by the stongest coffee known to humankind (this stuff was basically black sludge you could stand a pencil up in), we systematically went round the office and did a spot of petty sabotage. Being on the early shift it was only the two of us in; we had an hour and had to work fast.

Roll on nine AM. All the others start turning up, wanting desperately to get home. And when they went to switch their terminals on they realised something wonderful – they wouldn’t work. None of them. Neither would the photocopier, the fax machine – even the kettle and microwave in the kitchen were absolutely fucked.

The MD was going into apeshit mode and Adam was called forth from his grotty little store cupboard. He ponced about like a superhero about to do a great deed, then he went over to the first PC – nothing. Then the second – nothing. And so on. By the time he got round to the seventh terminal he was starting to panic a bit.

“Must be an electrical storm,” he mumbled. The MD pointed out that the lights were working and so were the phones. Eventually the rest of us IT-illiterate tosspots were allowed to go home and start Christmas a littler earlier than normal – we couldn’t do any work. Leaving Adam to pull what little was left of his hair out. The self proclaimed King of IT was stumped. It was a real Kodak moment.

Once we got outside, my mate Dave and I stopped off at the rubbish bin and dumped the pocketfuls of fuses we’d removed from all the plugs, then we went to the pub for a double baileys (just to get into the Christmas spirit). And the best part was we knew, we just fucking KNEW that when Adam finally realised what'd happened, he'd be too fucking proud and embarrased to tell anyone in management.
( SpankyHanky, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:07, 4 replies)

Zealot
In my first ever management job I had the misfortune to manage an IT support team. Most of them were fine but one was a fat, sweaty, French Linux zealot.

And I mean zealot. He hated being asked to install windows machines for new users. It took me a little while to discover that if forced to do so he would remove all the MS-Licensed programs and replace them with Open-source variants like swapping MS-Office for OpenOffice. It took me a while to understand why it was that people in the office were having such file compatibility problems.

We all had to work with him in a small office. And he stank. Even in the winter he stank. It was clear he rarely washed and to make things worse he'd wear a sweater religious, even in the height of summer. People wouldn't have him out on support calls because they didn't want him near them. When I challenged him about this would shrug and say "I'm a big guy. I sweat". And that was all.

He wouldn't do what he was asked, and sulked terribly. There's no great denouement to this tale but eventually he left. And when he told me I actually did a little dance for joy, right there in front of him.
(MattDP (Squiggle), Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:03, 2 replies)

I've had some really bad luck with computers. it all started with this new machine.
1st off it went to the wrong address, twice! By the time it reached my apartment I had gone out clubbing. My flatmate tried to take the delivery but that didn't work out so they tried delivering to me at the club. At least they have good service hours. The even sent out a tech support to help me with the problem but he dressed like a bum and kept rambling on about some computer conspiracy. When I did see him I thought he was some psycho stalker or something until he got a chance to properly introduce himself by working on the machine (which had arrived around the same time as he did)

The machine was an absolute nightmare, completly user unfriendly and I was forced to chase around, running myself ragged trying to get it sorted out. I even tried to report it to the police but they didn't turn out to be much help at all.

It ended badly too. The machine ended up in a junk pile and the tech guy managed to worm his way into my pants before leaving me to raise our son on my own while teaching him his fathers beliefs.

Well at least it isn't the end of the world. Yet.....
( Crap Little Monkey Deathstar, so good they built it twice, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:02, 4 replies)

I'm
in IT, but not really support. I do get the occassional phone call for support, and if there's no-one else around, then I don't mind doing it.

However......I was working for one firm once as a salaried employee. They had several offices in the world, most in the UK. One in London.

One of my jobs was to design and write a credit control system for them from the ground up...and so I did.

A lot of the time, this involved working in the London office. The London office didn't have clocking-in cards, as their employees were trusted to some degree. In our office we DID have a clocking in card system - thankfully electronic and for some odd reason it had a MS Access v.2 database behind it - but I'll come back to that later.

Upon arriving back at my main office after a few days in the smoke, I was told that my 'flexi-hours' (read: flexitime where you can start any time before nine and leave any time after five) were not up to the minimum for the month. Obviously, this didn't sound right and I queried it.

"Ahh, I see. You haven't counted the days I have been working in our London office."

"Prove you were there."

"What?"

"Prove you were there, you could have been skiving off for all I know"

"I.Was.Sat.Right.Next.To.You.When.I.Was.There!"

"That's not proof."

etc.... this was not the first or the last time that this particular "IT Manager" had issues like this. There were many things, like I had a serious bout of proper flu three years before this. This manager had come in from nowhere, gone through attendence records from the year dot and started pulling people up about it. When it was my time to be pulled up, I explained that I had flu three years ago and that's why in that year I had 8 days off. Eight days. None the year before and none in the preceding years. Hardly a serial skiver, I'm sure you'd agree.

This was really the tip of the iceburg. This bloke was a useless IT manager, and even if you could get past the "what's this mousey thingy then?" type questions, you might be able to forgive if he was a good people manager....but as you can see....he wasn't that either.

...back to the credit control system.

One of the requirements was that it had to accept emails sent in from clients and send an automated response back. It also had to send *chasing* emails for overdue accounts etc...

Around the same time, the aforementioned IT manager wanted a 'corperate screensaver'...I knocked one up in a day, and rolled it out to the entire company (thankfully all automated due to an earlier distribution prog. I had written).

What this nobhead didn't realise was, that he had pissed me (and pretty much nearly everyone else, off - 18 of the 40 programmers left in his first year, some after 20 odd years of working there.

The screensaver, when started would also turn it's host machine into a telnet server. When a signal was received it would start pinging the mainframe downstairs...a lot.

Of course, if an email with a certain subject was sent into the credit-control system, it would broadcast continually to any telnet servers on the network. They, in turn would start their distributed denial of service attack. It wasn't called that in those days - in fact, I don't think it had been done before.

Of course, you could see on the network where the traffic was coming from, and paradoxically, the traffic would increase over lunch when people's machines became idle. Once someone went to one of the machines where the traffic was originating, the screensaver would terminate and the traffic would stop.

Sadly, after I left, my anger subsided, and I realised that this would only put my ex-colleagues jobs in jeapardy, and so I never sent the email that would trigger it off.

I believe it's still running now. If I ever run into that bloke again and he pisses me off.......
(dchurch bah, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:51, Reply)

The current Mr Quar is an IT manager and often spends hours painstakingly explaining why certain of Finance's money-saving ideas won't work.
This last year, Finance unilaterally decided to stop wasting money on air-conditioning the server room. Well, nobody sits in there, do they? And it doesn't even get that hot in the city of ***** ** *****.

Chaos.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:47, 4 replies)

A pearoast in QOTW?
Call at approx 16:30 on a Thursday Office closes at 17:30

Customer : We need some help setting up (our system xxxx) on a pc

(for the record, it normally runs on a server with client pcs accessing the databases/programs,etc)


Me: Ok, do yo know where your main system runs from, then we can get the installation files over the network and have you up and running in few minutes

C: We only have one machine for xxxx, this is a new pc to replace it.

M: Ok....do yo still have access to the old pc so we can get the system from there?

C: No, it's gone "poot", thats why we had to get a new one

M: So, the old xxxx machine is completely dead?

C: Yes. Everytime we tried to do anything on it, it just locked up so we got rid of it.

M: Right....did you take a backup of the xxxx system before you got rid of it?

C: A what?

M: A backup...a copy of all the customer information and jobs, etc you had already entered, just in case something terrible happened to the pc.

C: I think we did once....we have a xxxx installation disk. Does that help?

M: Erm...no..thats just to install the database engine so you can access your data.

*insert chat with my manager covering the above events*

M: Ok..the most important thing is to get your jobs onto the web system so the rest of the network knows how to handle the jobs. Do you have internet access on a pc there?

C: No, it was only this pc that was set up to do all that.

M: Ok...we would stongly recommend you try to get that sorted...evenif it means you have to take the info home and enter it on a pc there...its important this information gets entered or the network might fine you, etc for not entering information for jobs yo want them to handle.

C: Hang on, we do have a back up.

M: Brilliant! Do you know how old it is?

C: Not sure, we just found it in the back of the cupboard

M: Well we cant use that...it wont have half of the information and wont have the latest software releases and will more than likely do more harm than good.

C: Cant we get the information of the old pc?

M: I thoght it had gone "poot"

C: Well its still here...its jsut really slow...

M: *blink* Weeeeell....if yo can get it to run at all, we might be able to get them to network -

C: Oh no..i do know we only have 1 network card and thats now in the new pc...

M: -or if it has a cd-writer or similar we can do that....

C: It does, but everytime we use it, the pc freezes up

M: *Puts customer on hold for a minute to bang head on desk in frustration to general amusement of co-workers and has chat with manager*

M: Ok, as we said earlier, the most important thing is to get the info onto the web system...we can try and sort the rest in the morning (its now 17:15 and will take a lot longer than the 15 mins left)

C: Oh while you were away mr C2 has got the old pc up and running again with the network card in it....

M: Really? Fantatic, you can use that to enter and uplaod you jobs as normal.

C: Oh we cant...our router has gone down and we dont get a new one till monday. Cant you just get us a blank system to enter stuff into and we can sort it out afterwards?

M: without internet access and the short time left....no...not really...

*At this point the call was passed onto my manager and then his boss who suffered with this for the next 2 days. I went and wept in the corner...*


Yes it's lengthy, but some people like it that way.
( mooglemania Please disregard this sig., Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:39, Reply)

In the land of the blind
A few years ago I was working in a small company as the only IT support person. This lady said she had a problem with her PC so I walked over to her desk to find out what was wrong. The problem was a straightforward one to fix, so I started off by saying 'Go to My Computer...' At that point she stood up and walked over to my desk and patiently waited for her next instruction.

It took me a few seconds to twig what she was doing, then I had to explain to her that I meant for her to CLICK on My Computer. Special.
(Stoopid_Faaka, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:28, Reply)

Don't talk about computers like they're human.
They hate it.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:12, Reply)

DOS ...
years of writing and supporting a Clipper DB app so it would run on Win3.x meant that I had fixing config.sys & autoexec.bat down to a fine art:

3in7: Ok now read me the first line
Maureen*: Blah...blah...blah
3in7: Uh hum, and the next
Maureen: Blah...blah...blah
3in7: Yep, and the next
Maureen: That is it.
3in7: OK, first we are going to delete all that and then type what I say. OK?
Maureen: Yes fine.
3in7: Ok the screen should be clear now. On the first line type this Dee Ee Vee Eye See Equals See Colon Backslash Dee Oh Es Backslash Aitch Eye Em Eee Em dot Es Why Es ... etc etc for about 5 minutes
Maureen: OK all done
3in7: OK go to file on the menu and click on save ... done? ... OK now reboot PC ...

Maureen: Umm it says "The file is missing or corrupted.Error in your CONFIG.SYS file on line 1"

3in7: Ah right so type this edit c:\config.sys and read back to me what it says ...

Maureen: Nothing happens
3in7: Did you hit enter?
Maureen: Oh - he he!! .. right is says - Okthescreenshouldbeclearnowonthefirstlinetypethisdevicequalscolonbackslashdosbackslashhimemdotsys


* or any other middle aged woman in the Black Country
(Biff..., Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:05, 1 reply)

A puzzler.
I was working as an IT support person at uni when a student came up saying that whenever she typed anything in Word random windows would open. Went over to have a look and couldn't figure out what was wrong. It was only when tried ctrl+alt+del to restart that I realised...............one of the books she had been reading had rested on the ctrl key. who would've thunk it!!
(Studentken is looking for motivation on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 14:56, Reply)

Too Hot
One very hot summer in Newbury, the building that a large mobile telecoms company housed all of it's main servers started to get rather hot. The air con wasn't working and all of the windows were bricked up to provide added security. They firstly removed the bricks to get some air flowing through the building, they then hung fans in the windows to get more air flowing through. They then put containers of icy water in the roons to try to cool it that way.

They eventually started hosing down the roof to try to cool it that way.

The hot spell luckily ended before they had do think of anything else.
(peter_griffin, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 14:15, 2 replies)

Chair
My father rang the helpdesk for his new computer. Every time he switched it on it worked for a while then switched itself off. The support guys went through every test and check they could think of with no result. He was just about to take it back to the shop when I went to visit.

I asked him to show me what was wrong. He switched the computer on, all was well. He turned in his chair to get something out of a draw, the arm of the chair pressed the 'off' button on the tower unit under his desk. When he turned back to the computer it was off. Problem solved.
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 13:56, Reply)

Caps Lock
Place i used to work dealt with security printers, the type that print cash and the like. We sent these printers all over the world with pretty serious servicing contracts with them so nice trips abroad were regular.

One time we recieved an irate call from Bangkok, Thailand shouting that they could not access there system and demanding an enginer visit and sort it ASAP. We explained that if a visit was the result of them either breaking or misusing the system they would be liable for all costs, this they agreed.

Thus my buisnes class flights from UK to Bangkok, nice hotel then visiting the printing plant, being ushered through security to the idle printer with all the management looking on. On walking up to the PC that ran all the software to run the machine i proceeded to turn off the CAPS key, input the password and he printer came back to life..... The look on their faces was priceless.

Thus a few days in Bangkok having a lot of fun ensued with a stopover in Dubai on the way home all on them.
(mabazaritchie ...Its not rape if she cums first..., Fri 25 Sep 2009, 13:55, Reply)

Nice
I once drove from Dorset in England, to Holland, because a server was down.

When I arrived I assessed the situation. Raised a finger to the patient, pressed the button marked "power", and marvelled at my technical prowress as the office came back to life.

Promptly got back in the car and drove home.

2 miles from home I was pulled for speeding :(

Biggest waste of 48 hours in my life.
(Corbo, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 13:46, 1 reply)

1010010101
0010101110100101010010010000100100111010010011101110101001010010010000101001001101101010100101001011110101!

Foolish humans.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 13:20, 9 replies)