Once upon a time, two computers were often found to be incompatible. Your PC totally
ignored your neighbours Mac; the incompatibility was so complete that you sometimes caught
yourself wondering "I think the problem is that his computer uses the trinary numbers
instead of binary numbers!".
Nowadays, computers more or less communicate freely, despite differences in hard- and
software. The Net is an example of such. Thus, there's a need to redefine the meaning of
the word incompatibility. I believe in choosing a definition like:
To support that "theory", some friends and I have compiled a collection of "bummers" and "bloopers" caught in our surroundings. The following stories are all true. I let the persons remain anonymous, because we also want to survive! Feel free to submit your own stories to me! I'll add it to this page...
You can also check out my page of silly, weird and
funny screenshots.
Stories in green are new since last update.
"I'm not an invalid!" (Respond to MS-DOS' "Invalid command")
User: "I decided to free some space on my harddrive, so I deleted all the files I
didn't know...
Supporter (joking): "What about the WIN.INI?"
User: "What do you mean by "What about the WIN.INI?"...By the way, could
you help me with my Windows? I think there's a bug somewhere, it doesn't work
anymore!"
User shuts down Windows 95. The "It's now safe..." screen appears. User turns off the monitor, then turns it on again. "Why didn't it reboot?"
Supporter: "You might release some memory, if you close a few windows".
User: "Huh? It isn't that cold in here, is it?"
(It's true... I heard it myself!!!)
Heard at work: "My sister's pregnant, and now she's wondering whether working by the monitor can be dangerous to the unborn child - and whether Windows 95 is more damaging than DOS...".
Supporter: "Then you close the application..."
User shuts down Windows 95. Supporter waits for Windows 95 to start, asks the user to
start the troublesome application again, "do the error again" and then asks the
user to close the application.
User shuts down Windows 95... (keeps going & going!)
A tries to log on a Windows PC on a network, but types her password wrong. B says: "Oh, what a pity! Now you can never, never, never use that PC again! It's never going to accept you again, you must find another PC. It's some error in Windows 95!" (No, it's not... it's a feature, which the administrator can turn on and off... I've been working a place with tons of Win95-machines and users who always forgot their passwords, but they were never excluded after 1 try!)
A: "What program did you use to make your report?"
B: "I wrote it entirely in Windows 95."
"How many times did you reboot the machine?"
"I've taken the CD in and out from the drive 5 or 6 times - is that enough?".
"The hourglass is glued to the screen!"
(Windows was stuck)
On the phone: "Something's wrong! You must help me! The clouds are pale!"
(The PC had decided to show only 16 colours, so the classic Windows background had turned strange).
New user wants to login to the system.
Supporter: "Now type your username and then press TAB to jump to the password
field."
User does so.
Supporter: "Then type your password"
User types password, but complains: "The computer is wrong - my password does not
consist of 6 tiny stars!"
Another one of that kind: Inexperienced user watches experienced user type in username
and password to log on.
Inexperienced user: "What an easy password - 8 stars!"
A: "Which operating system are you using?
B: "Office 98"
A: "Eh… you sure?"
B: "Oh, no, how stupid I am! We're running NT 97!"
A very common mistake: "Oh... We don't use Windows on our system - we write everything in Word!"
Scene: Booth at CeBIT 99. Salesman trying to convince potential buyer that this network
gadget is the best.
Potential buyer: "And which operating systems does it support?".
Salesman: "Oh, it supports Windows NT and TCP/IP!".
A large TV-radio-music-PC store in Copenhagen had this text in *huge* letters on their window:
"iMac
G3 266 MHz GB harddrive
MacOS 8.51 - available in 5 colours!"
I like both the concept of a "MHz GB drive" and the possibility of
multi-coloured operating systems...
"I bought an iMac, but I quickly realised I should've bought a computer instead" (I just LOVE this quote!)
A friend told me that a relative of his had bought an iMac. This comes without any floppydrive, so this relative bought an external floppydrive for the USB-port. He plugs the drive in the iMac only to realise that it requires a driver. Fortunately, this driver is in the box in which he bought the drive: On a floppydisk. Duh!
"This game is stupid and full of bugs!"
"You sure?"
"Yeah, it says it needs 32 MB RAM, and I have at least 500 MB I don't use, and it STILL doesn't work!"
A: "I can't open my PowerPoint file from these PC's!" B thinks it's because it's a PowerPoint 97 file, and the PC's are running an older version of Office. A & B go to another room which has PC's with Office 97 to convert the file. B saves the file as "PowerPoint 95 file". A: "My file was already in that format!". B: "Are you sure?". A: "Yeah! I did it with Windows 95, so it must be a PowerPoint 95 file, right?". B: "Ehm... not exactly". A: "But PowerPoint 95 comes with Windows 95, right?". B runs away, screaming. (hey - when will Office NT be released? :-)
"Office 2000? Isn't that the successor to Windows 99?"
Office 2000 - The Phantom Menace!
"Can it be true that my scanner makes Paint and after I installed a secret copy of office 2000 my Paint is gone, but it's behind and I can start it and then it's not there anyway and then my motorcycle-pictures becomes PhotoDraw and PictureIt and what's that and I think it's that Office and because it was secret and I can get it to show and then I can't...".
He continues for 5 minutes about lost programs still there, the secret Office 2000 and motorcycle-pictures.
What really had happened was that during his installation of Office 2000, he'd allowed it to be the default viewer of .bmp-files, so PhotoDraw starts up when double-clicking a bitmap-file.
I spent some time explaining why PhotoDraw is better than Paint (not that it requires much to be better than Paint), but still then, he wanted Paint back in business and that was how he got it.
A gets a Word document from B and wonders why some text is black, some red, some blue, some green... B: "Oh, that's because it's from the *blue* file!". Ehhhh...
Scene: Company that uses mainframes for data processing and MS Office for... well, Office-stuff.
User U asks supporter S, if S has time to help her with formatting her letter in Word, making it look professional.
S. "Sure, have you written it?"
U: "No, not yet"
S: "OK, then write it as you usually would, then we can take a look at the finer details afterwards, when we have the actual letter to work with"
S is quite sure that this person U, who's been an office worker for several years is going to write the letter just like she would on a typewriter, so the formatting will be a question of changing words to bold or italic and formatting margens...
Half an hour later, U tells S that she has written the letter as she usually would. And yes, U has written her letter as she usually would - but not like she usually would on a typewriter but like she usually would on the mainframe: All uppercase with caps lock on. No linebreaks. No usual formatting AT ALL.
(Format | Change Case was God's (or Microsoft's) gift to S that day).
A helps B installing a typical Microsoft program. The help is given via the phone.
A: And what can you choose now?
B: Exit...(silence)...setup.
A (is a bit confused, because A expects Setup to be mentioned before Exit): Well, choose
Setup then.
B: (clicke-ti-click) Now it asks me whether I want to exit the installation?
A: Then you must have clicked the wrong button. Answer No, and click Setup again.
B: (silence). Same question again! And I did click Setup! Is it Microsoft's fault?
A: Now, try again...
B: The same... hey, there's another button here saying "Setup" only?
A: Yeah... You pressed a button saying Exit Setup, right?
B: Ehm. Yeah, but I only clicked the "Setup" word...
A & B are both working with Visio (an advanced piece of software which creates
business diagrams).
B needs a file which A has made, and gets the file, imports and tries to move a dashed
line that A has made.
To B's surprise, only parts of the line moves.
B fears the worst, but has to ask: "A, how did you make that dashed line?".
A: "I made a tiny line, and then I used copy'n'paste a lot of times to form a dashed
line!".
(B tries not to laugh, and then explains A how to draw a dashed line by drawing a plain
line and picking dashed as the property from the toolbar).
A group of students are creating a user interface for their database (a form). They've been told about userfriendliness and such, and are discussing which colour to use as the main colour (background colour) for their forms. They decide to ask an older student, who replies: "I suggest bright yellow, because then you can see we're using a colour monitor!" (this happened in 1998...)
User: "There's something wrong with this floppy!"
Supporter: "How?"
User: "The computer says it's write protected!"
Supporter explains about write protection...
User: "When I get such floppies, I throw them away, they don't work!"
User: "I only have my document on a floppy... I know it disappears from the harddisk when I shut the computer down!"
User: "I'm afraid there might be virus on the floppy..."
Supporter: "Has it been write protected?"
User: "Write protected? How can I see that?"
Supporter: "You know, that hole in the corner"
User: "I don't remember if it had that hole in the corner, but I haven't changed
anything since I bought it; I guess it was write protected"
Supporter: "But have you used that floppy?"
User: "Yeah, I saved my document on that floppy - so what?".
This line is dedicated to everybody who has ever tried inserting a diskette the wrong way.
A: "Anybody's got a floppy?"
B: "No, can't you use a diskette instead?".
"I don't want a DVD-drive in my PC! Then I can't read my CD-ROMs!"
A guy couldn't understand why his laser printer wrote all pages totally black after he
had cleaned it...
Solution: If I tell you that he had cleaned the vital parts with ANTISTATIC cleansing
fluid, can you work out why it happened?
Hint: How does a laser printer work?
"Of course I have a backup of my document - I printed 2 copies of it!"
A friend in China wrote this about a computer magazine in his country: "...a computer journal has an article on it saying that all Cyrix and AMD processors are fake because the author tested them with Norton Utility and got the information that they are just 80486 chips...... The editor just added a few lines commenting that customers should be cautious about fake products..."
User has her mouse on a mousepad in front of her PC.
Supporter is going to change something on user's PC, so he moves the mouse to the right of the PC.
User (in panic): "Don't move it, I'll never find it again!"
I was on the phone, helping a (much younger) friend installing a game. Her knowledge of the English language wasn't the best, and I had her read aloud the messages on the screen so at least I had an idea of what was going on. At one point during the installation, she read the following: "Now the program says: "Miss... Mouse... not... found"". Needless to say, it was looking for a MS Mouse, not Minnie Mouse.
Another inexperienced user hasn't noticed that the PC she's using is lacking a mouse pad. The mouse doesn't work too well, so she lifts the mouse to examine it better. She then notices bottom of the mouse and says: "Eek! My mouse has feet!"
User with old PC: "You mean, I can just upgrade by setting a new motherboard in my harddisk?".
"My computer says it's out of memory. Can I borrow a harddisk from you to put in my motherboard to fix it?"
"Do you have a spare harddisk with more Megahertz that I can borrow?"
A guy who's a bit too clever and want to impress the listeners about what he has tried: "...and our cool (sorry, kewl) Compaq mainframe..." (Yeah right... it was an Alpha-based server...)
Had to make an appointment with a user. This user is obviously VERY new and has never tried Outlook before – and even less than never in a multi-user/Exchange-environment.
Needless to say, there's no public access to her calendar (which company policies requires). I give up booking an appointment the usual way, as Outlook/Exchange keep complaining that her calendar is not accessible (which is 100% correct).
Next step is to send her a mail. And needless to say, the Out-of-Office assistant is not on (which company policies requires), so if she's out, I'm not informed instantly about this, as I should be.
Finally, I used the old-fashioned telephone. No answer, but it IS late, so she might have left the office, and all I can do is to hope that she'll see my mail the next morning.
As a side-comment in my mail, I'd mentioned to her that giving others access to her calendar would be a very nice thing to do.
A week later I get a reply from her, which runs something like this: "I've been away at a seminar for 4 days. I haven't made my calendar available, because I never have any appointments".
Sigh...
"...And all those people on the Exchange Server, they have an IP-address you can write to from Outlook!"
The Killer Sig: Working place (office) gets new PC's with Windows95 and Microsoft Exchange Server, which is used for internal e-mails. One user, who prefers Windows NT to Windows95, is tired of Windows95 constantly hanging, and includes the following line in the signature file attached to all e-mail sent from the user's account: "Your computer is dead, it was so alive - you shouldn't have installed Win NinetyFive". The day after, the whole system breaks down, and the poor user is accused (by the sys admin!) to have caused that "by including a virus in the signature"!
A: "What's your email address?"
B: "I don't know!"
A: "But it's your username here plus @domain.com! What's your username?"
B: "I don't know, I just log in"
A: "How do I tell Eudora where to send the mail?"
B: "Type the e-mail address in the To: field"
A: "Ooh!"
A: "How do I tell Eudora to send the mail?"
B: "Click the Send button"
A:"Ooh!"
A sends an SMS-message to B's cell phone. The message is sent as an email and not as a cell phone to cell phone message, so both the name of the mail server and the name of the sender are displayed on B's phone. The mail server is called olfert.somewhere.dk. B phones A to comment on the message, and B's first question is: "Who the h*** is Olfert, and why did he send me a message?".
"My friend's just got a homepage and I've got an email account on it!" (No, the friend hadn't got his own domain or anything...)
A wants to send an email to B, C and D. His mail program has three lines in top: A To:-field, a Cc:-Field and a Subject:-field. A writes B's email-address in the To:-field, C's email-address in the Cc:-field and finally... D's address in the Subject:-field... I wonder, how he's going to send an email to 4 persons?
User 1: "How much space does an installation of IE 5.5 take up on the disk?"
User 2: (looks in Help | About Internet Explorer) "Ehm… My version is approximately 5.5 MB!"
(He found the version information, not the size…)
(Person A wants a file from person B). Person B "Sure, A, I'll ftp it to your homepage!"
A guy tried writing "http://www.something.somewhere" from a DOS-prompt on a 386 with no Net-access and couldn't understand why it didn't work...
Two people in the computer lab, both using Netscape.
#1: "What's the address of that funny site?"
#2: "It's www.something.com!"
(#1 types) "It doesn't work!"
#2:"You're sure you typed www.something.com?"
#1: "100%!".
#2 looks over the shoulder of #1 and reads that #1 wrote wwwdotsomethingdotcom...
Some people have heard about the existence of a site called "www.nerdbird.dk". Some of these people have no idea of how to get to this site, so they go to Yahoo or Infoseek or another search engine and search for www.nerdbird.dk... then they read the results and - voila! - the search engine found http://www.nerdbird.dk for them and they go there. I'm pretty surprised that this has happened more than once - in fact, it happens about once a week.
"We just upgraded our Internet! It's version 4 now, and it's all in Danish, so it's so lovely!" (She forgot that little important word Explorer).
"I like your site. Could you please send me the URL of it, so that I can link to it?"
"I signed your guestbook!"
"No, you didn't!"
"Then something's wrong with your guestbook!"
[looking through logfiles]
"I can see you've been at the guestbook page..."
"Yes, and I DID fill it out!"
"And then you went to a completely different page, I can see..."
"Yeah, there was an exciting link at the bottom of the guestbook page"
"Those buttons on the guestbookpage, you didn't click at the Submit button, did you?"
"No, I had already filled out the page! What does Submit mean?"
Seen in a teen magazine: "The newsgroup starts with "alt." meaning that it's open for everybody and not protected with any kind of lock". (so, is a "rec." newsgroup closed? Or what about a "comp."?).
In huge letters on the front page of a very "trendy" magazine: "The Year 2000 Virus" ("Warning: This virus will infect all calendar systems. Please do not forward any dates, months or years, or you may infect your friends' calendars" or what?)
This line is dedicated to everybody out there who still puts in a Carriage Return when the line reaches the right margin in Word, WordPerfect etc. You have no idea of how popular you are with other computer users who get your files and try to use them in DTP and whatever...
(See above). Just with a slight change: Dedicated to you, who use TABS and expect other computers with other margin settings and other printers to write your document exactly the same way as it looked on your monitor!
"I can't get my OECD connection to work!"
Post in one of the Microsoft Certification Newsgroups: "As we all know, Bill gates got his MCP as 12 years old"
User calls about some piece of software: "I'm calling you directly, it's much easier than reading the instructions you sent!"
A: "I tried calling you on your mobile, but got your answering machine..."
B: "Yeah, my mobile is always shut off"
A: "Eh?"
B: "Yeah, it's expensive to have it turned on, it costs money to roam between the networks, when one moves!"
"Is it possible to use object-oriented programming on both RISC and CISC processors?"
A explains the binary numbers.
B: "Does it also work on a PC with object-oriented
programming?".
An article in a Danish newspaper about the September 9, 1999 problem: "This is only relevant for old computers running the Cobolt language". I'm sure they think of COBOL, but what if it was "Kobolt" (=Cobalt; rather radioactive element) or even better "Kobold" (a kind of nasty goblin living in mines) (The Kobold version could explain quite a few things, though).
If you read Danish, I recommend you to pay www.guld.dk a visit! It's a huge collection of support stories (most of them much worse than these) from supporters from all over Denmark!
If you came directly to this page from an extern link/search engine, click here to go the NerdBird's Nest.