Stupid Family Members

April 5, 2006

One night my son was playing a computer game while I was watching TV. I asked him to turn the sound down, and he did. After a short while he came over to watch TV with me. Every so often I would hear the engine noise of his game. I asked him to turn off the game. He did. I was still hearing the noise and told at him to turn it off. He said he had switched off the power to the PC, but I was still hearing the engine noise about once a minute. We went over to look. Sure enough, the computer was off, but the sound was still there. We unplugged the speakers. Didn’t help. We pulled out the batteries. Didn’t help. Then I realized it was my pager that had been sitting on one of the speakers.

Stupid Family Members
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Stupid Tech Support

April 4, 2006

We sell Texas Instuments graphing calculators, the kind you can synch with your computer to put simple programs onto them. A customer called up with a problem his kid was having. They had tried to download a couple programs to the calculator, but neither worked. After a bit more conferring, it transpired that they had tried to put Quake III and WinAmp on the thing.

I wonder how that kid thought he was going to listen to music on his calculator?

Stupid Tech Support
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Stupid CoWorkers

March 31, 2006

As a computer monitor at a university, students typically have fairly stupid questions, but rarely do the monitors though. Just this morning a monitor was unable to print to the color printer, which is not unusual considering the state our computer lab is in. However, the head monitor was asked to look into it. He was unable to determine the cause of the malfunctioning printer and waited on a full-time support person to come to the rescue. This person arrived and immediately lifted up the printer to discover the cable had been disconnected. Just goes to show you how even people who provide help need help.

Stupid CoWorkers
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Stupid Tech Support

March 27, 2006

We have a service contract at a local college. I got a call one day from someone who said that their Mac IIsi was having a problem. Upon questioning him, he said that whenever he typed on the keyboard, the image on the monitor was shaking. All sorts of monitor problems ran through my mind. I asked him if it was only when he typed and he replied yes. Well, since it was a contract, I figured we’d better go see what was happening. My tech called me about ten minutes after arriving and reported that the problem was not the computer, but his desk. The desk vibrated every time he typed on his keyboard. I am still shaking my head on this one. The sad thing is that this guy has “Dr.” in front of his name and is a professor at a major college.

Stupid Tech Support
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