What have you seen computer 'newbs' do that made you laugh?

blankscreen

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i guys, a bit of fun to be had here, i've messed with computers since the Sinclair ZX81!, so not claiming to be no expert but experienced.

starting the ball rilling - years back a guy in my circle of friends, while knowing i was into computers off his own bat had ordered a tower system from a well known mail order company, on receipt he undid all the boxes and tried for about 4 hours to assemble it. Phoned me and i arranged we would all go around to look at it in a few days when we were all going to a show together.

On the way by car to Birmingham we were discussing his problems when he vexedly stated 'i have to return it anyway as i ordered a tower, and those fools sent me a desktop - the idiots!'.

We all managed to stifled a giggle and let him rant on for a while, then pointed out the main box could be stood up as a tower, or laid down as a desktop. Then he admits he actually got it connected, turned the key on but nothing happened, in those days you used to have a lock to disable the keyboard, did he look sheepish. i had trouble controlling the car due to the ribbing he got.
 
I used to know someone who worked in a tech call center and basically all the stories you hear about, even the really stupid ones are all true (same with bodily insertions with a senior nurse friend). It drove him spare and eventually cost him his job, when one day he'd just had enough and lost it over the phone to someone.

We really were talking about not plugging things in. Not know how to turn things on. One of my faves was "there's nothing on my screen", "so you can't see your desktop?" "No I'm looking at it right now".......no word of a lie.
 
not really the same buuuutt..
my friend struggled for nearly two months to complete a level in some viet nam fps game he had, the level involved clearing out some cong tunnels and was in pitch black, until i hit the "T" key for him to switch on his torch
 
and their was a guy who i had to deal with as part of my job doing insurance inspections, he had claimed on his home accident cover because on messing around inside his pc he had "accidentally" plugged the psu pci-e connector onto his mainboard cpu power supply point...................
 
Typical support call,user calls in saying that their monitor isn't working. Now you know the type,the one that knows it all, the most dangerous type of user. Now he claims that it is all plugged in and connected but no picture. So go through the usual then decide I will have to go and drop of a replacement. Anyway get there to find that the monitor is connected to the PC but not plugged into the mains!!!!
 
some knowledge is dangerous, and i'll own up to this 'own goal',
when we bought our first washing machine the company offered to instal it for free. so we arranged for the delivery during normal working hours.

i get home to a confused wife saying its taking a very long time on its wash cycle, which had started at 1pm and i'd got home about 6pm.

i can't get any response from it, so annoyed i ring up the help line, guy says this and that and ask's have i checked the fuse? i respond angrilly it was only installed today, and in any case if the fuse has blown there will be a reason oi find the cause - but not by me!

but i go and check the fuse, to discover a 3amp was fitted in the plug, so i ask the wife abouti t, apparently the guy who delivered had no plugs, aided and abeted by my dear wife, he knicked the one off my low wattage Antex soldering iron. This was strong enough for the pump and valves and the engineer said sign here and keft, but obviously a s soon as rhe heater cut in, the fuse went 'pop'.

ended up feeling veryvsheepish but also sabataged lol!
 
Having spent many years as IT support I've heard just about all the silly faults.
I had a guy call me and ask why his PC couldn't connect to our server. I'm sat beside the server so know it is up ok but he can't get connected. So I go through all the basic diagnostics with him until I get to asking him if he can see any lights on the network card to prove it is polling the network, to which he replies that he can't see as it is too dark in the office - he then swears and puts the phone down. A couple of minutes later he calls me back and appologises and tells me there is a local power cut in their area :facepalm:
It is even worse as he was the head of IT for that local office :eek:

Mark.
 
How about a friend of mine who paid I think £30.00 a couple of years ago to download 3GB of memory. He asked me to come round and check why his memory upgrade had failed! :facepalm:
 
Many a daft moment. A lady brings a monitor with keyboard and mouse, plonks it on the counter of the shop and asks me to fix her computer. I reply I will when she brings it. After a few moments of bewilderment and explaining from me she heads home with her monitor to get the computer to repair.

Another time. A lady buys a monitor.... a few hours later she is back and a little irate about the monitor I sold her being faulty and not working. She is telling me how she can't get facebook on it, im in the process of trying the monitor as I start asking if she has tried another monitor or display device on her computer to make sure thats working and ok, to this I was greeted with the answer of 'what computer, this is all I need isn't it' pointing at the monitor. There after was some in depth explanation of how to make it possible to access facebook. Oh has that site got so much to answer for.

There is more lol. Ill share later.
 
an elderly client lives in SW London, went to a well known high street chain warehouse and bought a complete setup, gets it plugs it all in

blankscreen said:
an elderly client lives in SW London, went to a well known high street chain warehouse and bought a complete setup, gets it plugs it all in

(ooops! caught the send key lol!)

while typing he gets the $ instead if the £ key, phones up the store who apologise and ask him to bring back the keyboard which he did 3 TIMES. travelling to Lakeside via he toll crossing.

Anyway, he decides to call me to make a service appointment for his CCTv and during the call tells me his problem, so i carefully explain how to change the Country and keyboard map - from USA to UK.
 
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A friend of mine got a call from one of his mates asking if he'd go round and look at his PC as it was crashing a lot. He said he'd fitted some new RAM and things had been going pear shaped since then.

My friend went round there, cracked the side of the PC case open to have a look, and when the guy had fitted the RAM, a cable was running directly across over the RAM slot. Rather than move the cable out of the way so the RAM would slot in, he just pushed the RAM down as hard as he could, bending the cable and forcing it down into the slot along with the RAM stick.

My friend took a photo of it and emailed it to me, and it's that that made me laugh cos I couldn't believe anyone would manage to do something like that, but unfortunately I no longer have it. :(
 
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I remember going into the short lived Best Buy store in Rotherham when it opened last year, with my girlfriend.

She pinched my arm to get my attention as there was a sales guy there trying to flip through the albums in itunes on a 27" imac by swiping along the screen with his finger! :laugh:
 
How many people at night, before going home from work, turn off the monitor thinking they are turning off the computer. No wonder the planet is warming up.
O r photocopying a CD/floppy disk etc and sending a "copy" of the data to you.
 
How many people at night, before going home from work, turn off the monitor thinking they are turning off the computer. No wonder the planet is warming up.
O r photocopying a CD/floppy disk etc and sending a "copy" of the data to you.
I've had both of these happen to me when trying to resolve user issues :suicide:

I've asked somebody on the phone to reboot their PC. They say ok done after only a few seconds and I have to explain that a reboot takes a few minutes. They can get upset when you ask if they did indeed reboot the PC or just turn the monitor off.
I also had a user with a critical document they had received on an old floppy disc that they couldn't read. They said they couldn't send me the original just in case it got lost, so I asked them to send me a copy of the disc. The next day in the internal post I received a photo copy of the disc, but they had ripped the actual disc out of the case to copy it.

I also had my manager email me an Excel document to check it for him. I replied back saying it was ok but didn't send the actual attachment as there was no point in clogging up the email system with it. He then calls me and has a go at me as he says he needs the file sent back to him as he has given me the only copy he had :facepalm:

IT Support would be so much easier if it wasn't for the users :D

Mark.
 
I've seen one guy on another forum a few years back, who had decided to upgrade his memory from ddr to ddr2, and took a file to the memory to cut a groove in the correct place, so it would fit the motherboard.
He couldn't work out why it didn't work.

Years before that, I supported a network for a credit card company 'that would do nicely', we got called because a node in czech republic or similar (can't remember) wasn't working, so could we ring the guy on site to help him diagnose the fault. When we asked him to look at front and see if any lights were on etc..., he said he couldn't because it was in the basement, and it was flooded up to the street level.
 
i'm coming up ti to 63, my memories are old - so tuff lol!

days if the Sinclair ZX81, and White Outs' caused by poor design connections. fellow engineer fed up with said white outs decided to solder his ram-pack to the mother board - using a 50 watt mains soldering iron, wondered why it would not work afterwards!

for those not aware, early electronics especially devices were highly susceptible to static discharge and soldering iron 'leakage', you had to use earth bands and ceramic shaft low wattage irons, he had managed to bring both to hazards to his then much prized computer.
 
I remember going into the short lived Best Buy store in Rotherham when it opened last year, with my girlfriend.

She pinched my arm to get my attention as there was a sales guy there trying to flip through the albums in itunes on a 27" imac by swiping along the screen with his finger! :laugh:

My 2 year old son does this when I mirror the display on my iPad to the TV via AppleTV. It's quite amusing to see him "tap" the screen expecting it to do something.

Si
 
simonfr said:
My 2 year old son does this when I mirror the display on my iPad to the TV via AppleTV. It's quite amusing to see him "tap" the screen expecting it to do something.

Si

as a small child if about 4 years old, my older by 6 years brother had a clockwork train set, as you do i'd play with this while he was at school.

he had sussed this, so hid one of the curves, i spent frustrating hours trying to get the rails to stay together. how smug was he? what he did not know was i'd got fed up so dismantled the engine to find out what was inside it - and put it back together again ;).

being older he got into electric motors, we had a fairly big mecano set. based on what i had watched him do, i made rails then a train using the mecano clockwork motor, attached wires oi a battery but obviously could not make the motor run.

he came in from school, when i moaned he laughed at me so i aimed the motor at his head, he ducked and lets say it hit my dad in a very sensitive spot - for which my brother got grounded a week for annoying me :).
 
Not a computer story but funny all the same.
I was selling some bits at a carboot sale and had a old style phone to get rid of, this guy and his wife roll up and he picks up the receiver and hits a few buttons the wife then asks him what he thinks about it and he replys "its broken there's no dial tone" :eek: I forgot to mention we were standing in the middle of a field about 500 yards away from the nearest building never mind a telephone exchange.:laugh:
 
How many people at night, before going home from work, turn off the monitor thinking they are turning off the computer. No wonder the planet is warming up.

It's what they do in the movies and TV, so it must be right! :laugh:
 
in my earlier work days i worked in security systems as a service e engineer, had one client has alarm bars on every window you could remove. as a well paid barrister her habit was ti work six months then travel six months.

on returning home she would always manage to set the alarm off, this called the Police using an auto dialer, Police were getting very fed up.

i instructed her any time the bell rings go straight to and lift up the phone to engage the line and stop the dialer going out (pulse disconnect days), you ave about 30 seconds.

next time she returns, as usual i get a call to attend, on arrival she says 'the Police still attended'. Bemused i thought perhaps a neighbour called them, but i asked her to show me what happened.

She go's all through the actions with me watching, the bells go off she dives into the alarm cupboard and lifts the receiver - then pushes down the handsets rest buttons!!!
 
Not quite along the same lines, but working in an IT support dept many many years ago, I came back to my PC to resume work on a spreadsheet to find my PC unresponsive. The mouse would work, but I couldn't click on anything or use my spreadsheet.... a minute or two later I found the root of the problem. My colleagues had taken a screenshot, made it my wallpaper and hidden away everything else...
 
i used to go to a fairly large computer club, these clubs always attract those who try to prove heir machine is the bees' knee's.

i'd bought (yes bought) a game called 'battle chess', this was in about 12 floppies, very amusing fights would be enacted when exchanging pieces, teking would drop his pants showing his butt when in check mate.

took a lot if horse power, one of the wanna be newb's has paid out for a fully built machine, he could hardly wait to show off and test it out, assembled it, cranked up the volume and set about loading disks.

In a very quiet moment boomed out a comment a very camp voice "oooooh! this heap of a computer is very very slow!".

the lads embarrassment was oh so very painful - but very sweetly enjoyable, bit like blokes all laugh when a cricketer takes one in the wedding tackle :).
 
rampant said:
always tell the noobs

`the problem is between the chair and the keyboard`

never fails to make them aware that they are the problem :)

i like that one, i often say 'your really a nice person, but i won't tell anyone in case i spoil your image'.

try it, usually takes several seconds to sink in ;).
 

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