Stupid Roommates

During my younger days in boarding school the majority of the student body had to have their teeth corrected some way. There were those who endured the pain of braces, the annoyance of retainers, and so on. However, some lucky students just had super model teeth. One friend of mine had the largest retainer I had ever seen. It looked like he had a tennis ball in his mouth. One evening while walking down the hall a fellow student asked what he had in his mouth. “It’s a retainer,” he replied. “Cool, whose is it?” This is the same student who when his friend was playing golf on the computer his friend yelled out, “Yippie, I got a hole in one!” His reply was, “Cool, in how many shots?”

Stupid Tech Support

When in college, I had to make a fake advertisement for a class. I had a GIF that I downloaded that I wanted to put into it, so I sat down at the only Mac that was connected to the scanner in the school’s computer lab. For some reason, it couldn’t open the file, and the program crashed repeatedly. I got a lab technician to come over, and I explained the problem. She asked what I did to it and got angry with me. So I went to the Mac next to the one I was on and opened the picture in the same program. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was responsible for ruining the computer.

Me: “I scanned these pictures in, then tried to open this GIF I downloaded.”

Her: “What? You can’t do that! That type of a file is for Windows machines only! It isn’t supported on Macs.”

Me: “No, it is a standard graphic file. It can be opened on either machine.”

Her: “No it can’t! You might have to pay to fix this.”

Me: “If it can’t open on a Mac, how did I get it to open on this Mac right here? See?”

Her: “Don’t do that! You’re gonna break that one also.”

To protect her computer from evil me, she leaned over and flipped the power switch off.

Stupid Bosses

An Internet friend of mine swears this is true, as it happened to him, in his office. He is the de facto computer repairman, only because he has seen the inside of one. One day, his boss asked him to do what he could to repair the cup-holder on the front of his personal PC. A cursory inspection revealed a CD-ROM tray warped beyond repair, and an expensive CD-ROM drive, useless.

Stupid Criminals

R.C. Gaitlin, 21, walked up to two patrol officers who were showing their squad car computer equipment to children in a Detroit neighborhood. When he asked how the system worked, the officers asked him for a piece of identification. Gaitlin gave them his driver’s license, they entered it into the computer, and moments later they arrested Gaitlin because information on the screen showed that Gaitlin was wanted for a two-year-old armed robbery in St. Louis, Missouri.