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America's Funniest Computer Stories! This is a collection of funny, but true computer stories compiled and edited by Writer/Cartoonist Steve Kramer of "Cartoon Alley" fame. This eBook is a work in progress and humorous computer story submissions are always welcomed. If you have a funny, but true computer story that you would like to share with the rest of the world, e-mail your story to Steve Kramer. Upon acceptance, allow a few days for your story to be reviewed, possibly revised and edited. You will remain anonymous. l will publish your story in this special eBook collection that is bound to cause your head to crash. Introduction Do you get along with your computer? I don't know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with my computer. This eBook is loaded with lots of love/hate relationships with lots of computers. It's overflowing with humorous computer stories that really happened to computer people just like you and me. You won't believe some of these computer stories. I found most of them to be humorous or they wouldn't be here. The sad thing is that you might be able to relate to a few of them. These stories describe the kinds of wild, crazy, funny, stupid things that happen to many of us computer people in spite of advances in technology and user-friendliness. Did I say user-friendly? Some of these stories are from years ago when computers were first introduced and you weren't even born yet. If you don't know what a punched card is don't worry about it. Sorry, there is no technical support provided with this eBook. You are on your own! When you read this eBook you might learn something about computers that you didn't know. Or you might learn something about computer users that you didn't know. This eBook might save your life or your computer's life. Or it might make you cry with laughter. Read it carefully and you will learn what not to do when it comes to computers. If only I had this eBook when I got my first computer. Many of these stories are compliments of computer users just like you and really make you wonder about the people that sent them in. Several of the stories are from my own experiences. Some stories are truly amazing and perhaps awe uninspiring. As you read this eBook you will discover that not all computers are created equal. And that all of us have an equal opportunity of having a very bad time with them. This eBook is definitely high-tech versus low-tech! I have organized the stories into logical chapters. I tried to group the stories into categories that make them easier to find and read. Some of you may only be interested in computer training stories. Those stories have their own chapter. Others may be interested in computer war stories. There are chapters on computer programmers, technical support, and practical jokes too. Twelve chapters in all and each with its own state-of-the-art laughs. I have taken special care to revise and edit the highly technical computer stories to make them easier to read and understand. You don't have to be a computer expert to enjoy this eBook. Plug in your system and let's get started. Shall we boot our minds and get up and reading? Here is a true story to get you started. This really happened to me. My face is still red from embarrassment. As is the case with all of the stories in this eBook, the names were changed or omitted to protect the innocent. Funny, but true computer story! Is this the way computer job interviews are conducted in corporate America? I will never forget the day I was asked to sit in on an important job interview with the hiring manager and the anxious job applicant. The company I worked for was looking to hire a Wang computer repair technician. We worked in a very secure environment (Top Secret?) and were closely monitored and watched at all times by armed guards. Three of us entered a private interview room in Human Resources and closed the door behind us. You won't believe what happened shortly after the interview had begun. The three of us overheard strange noises coming from somewhere outside of our room. The interview suddenly stopped. The three of us sat stone-faced and red-faced, staring at each other, trying to contain our surprise and laughter. Were those the sounds of wild and passionate love-making? What now? There we were, interviewing a Wang technician. Coincidence? In spite of the interruption, we hired the Wang technician. Obviously there was plenty of Wang equipment to go around and we badly needed a repair technician. When that heart-throbbing interview ended I suspect our newly hired Wang technician looked forward to coming to work.
Training? Who Needs It? I hope you enjoy this collection of stupid computer training stories. A computer trainer was teaching a beginner’s course. One student thought the computer would turn itself on if she looked at it long enough. When asked why she didn’t turn it on using the power switch, she said, " I thought computers were supposed to be labor saving devices." When I sold and serviced computers I got a call from a guy who wanted to buy a 486MHz computer. "A what?" I said. The caller admitted that he didn’t know anything about computers, but a friend, some friend, told him to get a 486MHz computer or better. The friend advised him to stay away from a 386MHz computer. It sounds like these buyers are going to need some TRAINING! I encountered a computer user who did not know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. You know the type. Trying to help someone with DOS commands is next to impossible when they don't know the difference. One computer trainer was teaching a Warp Server course recently. One of the students didn’t even know how to put a floppy in the drive. How did they ever make it into the class? One computer alumnus remembers a school where the students had to pay for their own computer punch cards. Some students did the first assignment in columns 4 thru 38 and then punched /* in columns 2 and 3 and 39 and 40. This technique enabled the students to re-use the right-hand 40 columns of the 80 column card for the second assignment. Smart, but cheap students would look through used card decks and find cards with statements they could use again. Recycling, it works for me. In another recycling effort, some students economized on paper tape by running paper tape through their programmable calculators 2, 3 or 4 times. Sometimes it's better to draw straws. Some colleges like one in England had a shortage of computer terminals for students to use. First year students had to use punch cards to work the Univac 1108 while second and fourth year students had terminal access. What about third year students? Did they get a turn? One student in his first information science class back in 1968 had an instructor teaching the class Assembler language for which there was no Assembler. The instructor planned to write the Assembler and then have the students run their programs through it in their second term. The instructor finished the Assembler a couple years later; so much for advanced methods of teaching programming languages. One trainer was working with a woman who had just acquired some new computer-aided drafting (CAD) software. He was to train her for a couple of days to show her the main features of the software. They had worked on a file for several hours when the trainer suggested that she save the file before something happened that might cause the file to be lost. She looked at the trainer with a rather puzzled look and said, "Why?" He explained to her that if the power went out or something like that happened, her drawing file would be gone forever. She quickly interrupted while pointing to an electrical outlet strip on the floor. "Oh, you don’t understand. I have one of those new surge suppressors. I don’t need to save my files." This next story is from a computer technical support specialist. This episode happened outside the computer lab at a college. An assistant in the lab mentioned to the secretary that there seemed to be a problem with the mice in the lab. When the secretary asked what they were going to do about it, the assistant said that they had tried taking the balls out, cleaning them, and replacing them, but that didn’t seem to help very much. The look of horror and disgust on the secretary’s face made him realize that she had not understood what he was talking about. A computer science professor at a university was having some trouble with a particular file on disk. The computer help desk asked the professor to send them a copy of his disk. Sure enough, the next day the help desk received a photocopy of his disk in the mail. A techie was setting up a new user and showing her how to do backups. The techie formatted the first 3.5" floppy disk, labeled it and left the new user with instructions on how to do the rest. The user was somewhat experienced, but not with the 3.5" size disks. Minutes later the techie got a call from the new user saying that her disk wouldn’t go all the way into the drive and that this was a brand new computer. She was right, the disk was jammed and sticking half-way out. The techie had removed the cover of the computer when he realized what she had done. She had put the whole label on the front of the disk, instead of folding it over the top, thus, locking the metal shutter firmly shut. There was computer trainer showing a secretary how to back up her WordPerfect files to a floppy. He gave her a formatted 5.25" floppy disk in its protective sleeve which she proceeded to put into the drive. She put both the floppy disk and the protective sleeve into the floppy drive. The trainer thought that maybe it was just absentmindedness, but it didn’t really fit and he watched her turn it around a couple of times trying to get it to fit. Finally, trying desperately not to laugh out loud, he showed her how to do it. We used to fool people in school by entering DOS commands into their PCs such as $p$gInvalid Command or $p$gType Mismatch. This trick would display an error message after executing any command. No one ever realized what happened, but every time it ended in rebooting of the PC. One computer technician was called in to fix a mess caused by the old DOS command "Recover." The user had a laptop. It was clear the hard disk had a problem. It would groan and grind trying to find the files. While it was doing that, the guy walked over and said, "Oh, when it does that, you just do this!" and he reached over the technician's shoulder and struck the laptop with his fist. The user thought it was like a stuck record and would skip a track and be okay. I took a deep breath and explained that he should never, ever do that again. As far as we know, he hasn’t. In the days of 5.25" diskettes, a student brought a disk into class and said she was having trouble with a file on it. During the break, we put the disk into the drive and, amazingly, it was blank. I mentioned this to her and she said that that was impossible. "It was there last night," she said. I suggested that, perhaps, she had picked up the wrong disk. "No, this is the right one! I know it is because after I copied the file on it, I put it on my refrigerator so I’d be sure to remember to bring it with me today." I’m sure you can guess how she stuck it to the refrigerator. Back in the old days, Lotus 1-2-3 was copy protected and you received a System Disk and a Back-up System Disk. I was running a training center in a computer store at the time, so I managed to get all the support questions. The caller said, "Hello, the program _ _ _ _ _ _ recommended is a piece of trash!" I replied, "Lotus 1-2-3 is something of an industry standard, maybe I can help you get started with it?" "Yeah, I can’t get it to turn. I put the System Disk in, but the computer just gave me error messages, so I used the Back-up System Disk and it won’t work either. None of the programs I bought will work worth a d_ _ n!" I tried everything I could think of and decided to make a house call. I noticed the user had read some of the instructions. Then I noticed a slit in the black diskette casing. I saw the user had removed the little round disk and crammed it into the disk drive slot. When our computer technician opened up the disk drive, there were 12, count’em 12, little mylar magnetic circles stuffed together. One computer user was described as someone whose philosophy was, "Never use a screwdriver when a sledge hammer will do!" One day that user called to tell me his mouse wouldn’t work. After a bit of telephone diagnosis, I found that he had decided that the mouse ball was no longer round because the mouse pointer was jumping across the screen, not moving smoothly. Instead of blowing the dust out of the mouse, he took the mouse ball into his workshop to make the ball round again. By the time he called me for help, the ball was small enough to fall though the mouse hole. Then there’s the friend who teaches a computer class at the local users group. He’s always griping about students who don’t take the prerequisite course that is listed. It seems as though he spent half of his class explaining things that the students were supposed to already know. A computer trainer taught a course for IBM’s Open Class Libraries. A prerequisite for the course was a working knowledge of the C++ language. Of his 5 students, only 2 had a C++ background. The third had taken a C++ class three months ago, but hadn’t touched it since and had forgotten most of it. A graphic design student who does freelance tech support helping other students was distressed that the cup holder in her new computer was already broken. Then, they discovered the cup holder was really the CD-ROM drive. What about the secretary who had to be sent for remedial PC training. After training she had to be redeployed to a non-PC position. She insisted on banging her mouse against the computer screen in an effort to move the cursor to a new location. Warm Boot, Cold Boot, No Boot Don't you feel like celebrating? We all just graduated from Computer State University with a B.S. in Computer Science. It’s time to turn on the computer, or turn off the computer? A sales rep for a division of Control Data sold turn-key mini-computers to radio and TV stations (this was around 1979 or 1980). Our division was self-contained. We OEM’d Datapoint hardware, wrote the software, did the installation, and provided customer service both by phone and on-site. One morning I happened to be in the customer service telephone room when one of our customer service reps motioned that one of my customers was on the phone. I listened in. "That’s right, I said my disk drive is bleeding." Disk drives in those days were about 18" in diameter. A 5 Meg removable disk pack was placed in a drawer—analogous to a CD-ROM drawer—and then the data could be read off the drive. The platters were metal, covered with recordable oxide, but they were not sealed, like today’s drives. The customer service rep did not know what was going on. "When you say ‘bleeding’, do you mean, you’re losing data, or ... ?" "NO! BLEEDING. There’s blood running out of it. It’s red and it’s sticky. I know that it's blood!" We found it to be hilarious and since we were in Connecticut and the customer was in Virginia, we couldn’t get someone there that day. We did promise to send in Datapoint service. "Yeah, we’ve got a customer and their disk drive is bleeding ... yes, that’s what they said, bleeding." The Datapoint guys didn't believe us any more than we believed the customer, but they promised to do a service call. About a half hour later the Datapoint service rep called us. "Well, it’s bleeding all right. Probably a cup, maybe two cups of blood running down the side of the drive." We think that because it was a cold, chilly day a small family of mice had decided to sleep in the nice warm disk drive. When the customer turned on the computer, the spinning metal disk sliced a couple of the mice in half, resulting in lots of blood. The disk drive was truly bleeding. Another funny part of the story is that Datapoint decided that since mice are not part of the approved environment, it was not covered under the repair warranty. I think the repair bill was about $20,000. This one is for MAC users only. A user called tech support complaining that they had a problem. The engineer asked, "Do you have a MAC II or MAC SE?" The user replied, "I don’t know. How can I tell?" The engineer asked, "If you push the computer off the desk, will one piece or two pieces hit the floor?" The user paused for a second and then said, "One." The engineer replied, "You have an SE." One day a computer consultant was working with a new apprentice in operations. The consultant got a call in the middle of the night asking about how to perform a certain function on one of the 9 track tape drives. When the apprentice entered the last command, the consultant heard the dreaded, "Uh-Oh!" and then, "Was the last command rewind or rewind-and-burn?" After the yelling stopped, the apprentice replied, "It must have been rewind and burn because there’s smoke pouring out of the back of the tape drive." There was a brand new VP of tech support for a leading supplier of fingerprint processing equipment. The new VP was a close personal friend of the President. The VP called in one of his engineers to complain that his DEC VT-220 terminal was broken. It seemed that if left unused, the screen would black out after about five minutes. It sounds like a screen saver to me. In The Toilet This chapter gets its name from a favorite expression a good friend of mine used whenever his computer went down. "I’m in the toilet," he would proclaim. I drove for more than 100 miles to process data which could not be processed at the home office because the computer was down. When I got to the back-up computer site, the large removable disk drives were in the reverse order of the drives at the home office. You can guess what happened next. Before I started processing, I wanted to make a duplicate copy of the disk that I brought with me, just in case. Much to my dismay, since the drives were reversed I proceeded to copy a blank disk onto a full disk and lost everything. There was an IBM Customer Engineer that reported a client with IBM disk problems. The IBM disk was a removable hard drive consisting of a 14" aluminum platter holding about 2.5MB. An ordinary refrigerator magnet wouldn’t bother it much, because there is about 1" of free space above and below the platter. IBM was a bit skeptical, until the caller told them that she had discovered that someone was placing a telephone set (500 style) on top of the disk from time to time. You would never believe the magnetic field those old ringers can generate. An unlucky computer user was working at the data center of a bank on Long Island. Every Wednesday evening at 6pm the computer crashed. I remember discussing it with the chief operator one evening. They had tried everything they could think of, including calling IBM. He finally decided that he had to find out. What was different about Wednesday night? He eventually did find out. At 6pm every Wednesday the hardware company across the street tested its radar. The first call an IBM Customer Engineer got after coming back from IBM school was from a customer that had a card reader problem. This particular card reader ejected the cards lengthwise from a slot into a bin. The card came up, hit a rubber bumper, and dropped back into the bin. His job was to install a new rubber bumper. The engineer showed up in a brand new suit with a brand new tool bag and headed into the computer room. He was talking to the computer operator while looking for the reader. He had been trained on a different reader and had never seen this particular model before. Then he made the mistake of asking the operator what was wrong with the card reader. The operator went over, grabbed a big deck of blank cards, loaded them into the reader and pressed start. The operator then tried to keep a straight face as the IBMer watched. One after another, the cards came flying out, making a graceful arch across the computer room and landing in a pile about 8 feet away. His next call was to a customer where he had to work on a printer. He disconnected the printer and was working on it when the operator asked, "What did you do to our system?" Sure enough, the CPU had a red light. He didn’t know how smart the CPU was about its own diagnostics, but he didn’t think that he caused that light to light. After some digging and no answers, he called for help. Unfortunately, the tape drive controller across the room had chosen the same time to die. It took two specialists 12 hours to get things up and running again. I don’t think they ever completely convinced the customer that he had nothing to do with it. Service Without A Smile The computer is down! The computer is down again? Been there, done that. These computer stories make horror stories look like fairy tales. I once worked in a hospital data center. The center was located in the basement of the hospital. There was a flood one night while I was on duty. The floor was one of those raised ones and the cables were hidden beneath it. I carefully turned off all the equipment, afraid I would be electrocuted in the process. The water got to be 2" to 4" deep and some of the cables were swimming. The next morning when the day shift arrived, the leak had stopped and the clean-up had begun. The floor panels were removed in parts of the room to allow access for the clean-up crew. The supervisors did not want the computer manufacturer to know because the water might invalidate the maintenance contract on the computer hardware. As luck would have it, the mother of someone from the computer manufacturing maintenance team was admitted to the hospital. Of course, the computer manufacturer's maintenance person had to come downstairs and say hello. This is par for the computer technician's course. I'll never forget the day I drove all the way across the county to troubleshoot a PC problem. A guy called and said his computer was not working and he could not do anything. I wasn't able to help him over the telephone. When I got there, I found that the keyboard was unplugged. I knew a guy who pushed the reset button on the front panel of his computer so hard that the button went inside the computer case. The computer had to be opened, the button retrieved and remounted. I’ll never forget the time that IBM came to fix the mainframe computer. The computer had been acting flaky for a long time. How about using some of those expensive hi-tech tools in your tool bag to troubleshoot the problem? Not! The IBM Customer Engineer was blowing on the electronic circuits using a straw from McDonald's. He figured one of the parts was overheating and if he blew on the hot part that would cool it off and he could find the problem. How about the guy who stuck a 5.25" floppy disk into his computer, but missed the floppy drive. Instead, it went between the floppy drive and the drive below it and disappeared. Someone must have forgotten it was in there. One day while repairing his computer, a flat square black thing fell out onto the table. Check the fine print on your diskettes. If your floppy drive cannot read the diskettes, maybe it's because they say Macintosh. Duh. And then there was this service call to a computer technician. "My CD is stuck in my drive." When the technician arrived he noticed that someone had indeed stuck a CD in the 5.25" floppy drive. Technical Supporters This chapter is dedicated to those of us who are in the business of providing technical support to those "Dummies." End-users who don’t know which end is up. It's much easier to call technical support instead of reading the book, right? I went to help a well-educated computer user with a problem. It turned out to be a simple little problem. Even a beginner could have figured it out. I could not believe that the user had a P.H.D. hanging on the wall of his office. How did he ever earn that P.H.D.? The accounting office came to the computer services department and asked for assistance in finding a $1,000,000 discrepancy in a figure. We spent several hours looking at the little holes in thousands of punched cards before discovering the one card that had a "1" punched in the wrong column. Where's my reward money? Look at the bright side. Tape drives have a sensor to detect the end of a magnetic computer tape. The mag tape has a metallic strip near the end of the tape. When the tape drive senses the strip, the tape drive rewinds and closes the file. For some reason, there was one tape drive that stopped and rewound before reaching the end. There was no explanation for it. Then one day, it was discovered that sunlight reflecting off of the car windows as they drove would flash against the tape drive. A tech support specialist had a customer call and tell him that ever since the last update, her program was running backwards. The support specialist insisted that, while many things could go wrong, a program could not run backwards. She insisted that her program was running backwards. He asked her to describe what she was seeing on the screen, and it sounded like everything was working perfectly. It turns out that her terminal wasn’t handling certain control characters properly resulting in her screen appearing in reverse video. She assumed that meant her program was running backwards. What ever happened to the end-user who couldn’t find the "Any" key, as in "Press any key to continue." Get help for the user who insisted on putting the computer mouse on the floor. She tried controlling it with her foot. We don’t know if she was blonde. There were several people on a PC network at a large bank. Several weeks ago, the manager overheard one of the techs having a hard time on the phone with a user. The tech kept saying "cup holder" and trying to get more information from the user. The manager went over and told the tech to send someone to resolve the problem since it was going nowhere. Later on, when the tech came back he had a real dumb look on his face. He said one of the users had placed a real hot cup of coffee onto the CD tray and that after it closed, they tried to reopen it, even tred to reach in with pliers to bring it out. The CD tray had warped under the temperature and weight of the coffee and had jammed shut. Tech support told one user to "Put the disk in the drive and shut the door." The techie heard the user get up from his chair and walk over to the door and close it. Do you know the difference between a forward slash and a backward slash? Some users say "Use the southwest/northeast slash" or the "Northwest/southeast slash." Others say "The forward slash leans forward, the backward slash leans backward." Still others say "The forward slash is the one under the question mark." Whatever. Watch out for those CD-ROM drives that use that little CD holder. Don't you know that you have to put the CD into the little holder before you put the CD into the drive, or else. The CD fits fine without the carrier, but you will never be able to read the CD and you may never get it out. There was a tech support person from WordPerfect who told me the story of a lady who was continually losing WordPerfect documents. She would save them on diskette and go to retrieve them later and the disk would not work. The computer company decided to send a technician out to see what was wrong. The technician watched her for an entire day as she typed documents and saved them without a hitch. Then, at the end of the day she took the diskette out of the drive, put it into a sleeve, and stuck it to her filing cabinet with a magnet. I don't get it. What's the attraction? This one comes from a friend who provides technical support over the telephone. He told the customer to put a clean disk in the drive. She said "Just a minute," and the line went dead for several minutes. Then she came back and stated that the computer still didn’t recognize the disk. "Are you sure that you’re using a clean disk?" the techie asked. "Oh yes, I just washed it!" she said. The company's help desk had a user who was constantly getting himself into trouble. He would buy and bring software to work and install it without regard to the company's computer policies or standards. They pointed out that he was running out of space on his hard drive and that he should stop bringing software to work. Silly them. They thought that would stop him. They got a call from the user and he was in a state of panic. He had gone out shopping over the weekend and found some more software that he just had to have. There just wasn't have enough disk space. The user then admitted that he used File Manager to search for files to delete in order to gain hard drive space. He thought he had deleted a bunch of game files. They asked him to be more specific. You know, "Game files! Like old baseball game files that have .BAT in their filename." The idiot had erased all the .BAT files including the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. An end-user called for support and said that the "Foot Pedal" wasn’t working. He was referring to his mouse. Give me a gun. The help desk supervisor got a call two or three weeks ago. One of the tech's got a voice mail message that a PC had a broken cup holder. When she tried to call the person back she got his voice-mail. She decided to go over to the person’s desk since it was one of the top level managers (VP level). As happens quite often, someone put a hot cup of coffee into the CD tray. Either the weight or the temperature of the cup caused the CD tray to come off of its track. Once the CD tray disappeard into the PC it was jammed. Since several managers had no doubt seen the cup sitting on the CD tray, I had to immediately send out an e-mail informing all users what that little tray was for. Where's Dilbert when you need him? When All Else Fails When your computer dies, do you feel like tossing it out the window? If so, this chapter is for you. I was once asked to appear in a Honeywell film, not Hollywood film, as a computer operator while working for a hospital. In order for me to fit into the picture I had to remove a tile from the computer room's raised floor and stand inside the hole. That way the camera got me and the computer in the picture without cutting off my head. Autographs anyone? Someone had a flaky hard drive on her Sun workstation. The workers periodically removed the drive from the computer and shook it and reinstalled it; then the drive would start working again. This had been going on for over two years. The users turned into experienced movers and shakers. They worked for a State agency and that might explain why there was no money to replace the flaky drive. Of course, to them this was only a short-term solution. One worker recalls the day when the computer department boss was on the offensive. He was getting ready to implement a new computer application for the company. "Nonsense," the boss exclaimed, "The other managers aren’t as stupid as I made them out to be." Then the phone rang and it was another manager. "Are you getting an error message?" I asked. "Yes, I’ve got a message, ‘Disk Full.’ What does that mean?" About 5 years ago a computer helper had just returned from installing Windows when the manager called the help desk and asked, "What do you do when you run out of room for your mouse?" The help desk tried to get the manager to be more specific, but frustration levels were high and the caller ended the conversation with, "Just bring me a new mouse. This one has a broken cord!" A new mouse was delivered and installed. The manager started to use it and everything was fine. Then, as the technician started to leave, the executive cried out, " See! What am I supposed to do now?" Upon turning around, the helper observed the manager struggling with his mouse cord. It was stretched to the far corner of the desk, across the pad, papers and whatever else was there. When he had moved it as far as the cord would allow, he had literally come to the end of his rope! Then the helper told him, "When you reach the end of the rope, you’re supposed to roll it up your arm and down the other so it goes back to your desk." It must have worked. He never called back You Can’t Do That This chapter talks about strange things that people did to and with computers. Some computers deserved what they got, while some computer users deserved what they got.. I had a boss with a terrible temper. I remember the time he kicked the metal door on the IBM 1130 as hard as he could. I thought something was going to break, either the computer or his toe. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any dents. IBM must have used some pretty heavy metal in those days. You could always plan on a kicking frenzy to always follow a computer crash. Oooooo. My poor achin' computer. One computer consultant was working with a company that had a long row of the older disk drives (the top loaders with the disk packs). The company had a regular problem with the disk pack in the last drive. It was always found to be with errors. There errors always seemed to occur on the last weekend of each month. After studying the problem at great length, someone discovered that the janitor was buffing the floor at the end of the month. The row of drives had sufficient space for the floor buffing machine to fit, except for the last one. Some customer that a technician would visit had a small kitchen in a room with a microwave oven. The oven was on the same circuit as one of the computer UPS’s. Every time the microwave started, the UPS sounded off. A tech support specialist reports that his programming days started at Control Data in Houston back in 1982, one day the air conditioner went out in the computer room. In Houston the humidity can be outrageous at times. Within 6 hours all of the tape drives had mushrooms growing on their circuit boards. Believe or not? A computer operator told a story about a cake that was hidden inside one of those big, old, removeable disk pack, disk drives. Somehow the drive turned on and the access arms activated and you can guess what happened next. Presto, a multi-layered cake, and a disk drive that was scrap metal. When I was a computer operator, I printed paychecks. I started to remove the checks and noticed that the last check was made out to a phoney person. I became suspicious and called the boss in to point out my amazing discovery. The accounting department told me that they printed a phoney persons name on the check on purpose to correct an accounting error that had been made. Gee, and I thought I was going to be a hero. I remember the day a company called and asked for my fax number to send me over some exciting new product information. Within a few minutes I began to receive their pages. I looked on in disbelief as page after page came out of the fax with a small white picture at the top and a solid black background soaking the rest of the page. Thanks for the fax, whoever you are. This is a story about a man who goes down to the local computer superstore. He buys a 32.1 PCMCIA modem for his laptop computer. He gets home and discovers a cable is missing. He goes back to the store and gets one from another box. He returns home and discovers the cable doesn’t fit. He takes the modem out of the box and notices that the manufacturer's name on the modem doesn't match the manufacturer’s name on the box. The modem was supposed to be an Eigercom, not a Kensington. It was supposed to be a 32.1, not a 14.4. This modem was out of a shrink-wrapped, sealed box. Needless to say, he returned the merchandise and settled for a 28.8 because the 32.1's were sold out. How about the computer user who got the message, "Insert disk three in the drive." But, disk three won’t fit because disk one and two are still in the drive. One guy worked for a company that had a satellite dish on a drilling rig in the northern part of Alaska. There were helicopters coming in at all hours. We had to make sure the helicopters did not pass in front of or hover in front of the satellite disk. Remember, in those parts of the world, the satellite is pointing basically horizontal. Some computer data links are riskier than others. A help desk reported that a local fiche company picked up a tape every night from the night operator. One night, an inept operator called the fiche company to report that the tape had been made and was ready for pickup. The company’s phone number was 291-1xxx. The operator dialed 9 for an outside line, but before he connected, he immediately dialed the whole number. The momentary pause for the connection occurred while he was punching the 2, so the 2 didn’t register. Only the next 3 digits, 9-1-1, did. When 911 answered he told them their tape was ready! My sister came over one day to borrow my computer. She had never used a mouse before. When I came into the room she was waving the mouse in the air trying to get it to move. Someone’s mother was forced to learn to use a PC at work. Her mother practiced using her mouse everyday by playing one game of Solitaire. Too bad, she has yet to finish a game. Her mother gets so dizzy from staring at the screen that she has to lay down to recover. There was a trouble call from a lawyer. "John ... I’ve spilled coffee in my system ... what do I do?" John told him to invert the computer and put it on some towels or a newspaper. He would be right over. John goes over there and finds the computer still running upside-down on the newspaper. The computer was fried because the lawyer liked lots of sugar in his coffee. John asked how he managed to spill coffee all over inside the computer. The lawyer showed him the secretary’s machine. It seems that something caused the "cup holder" to go back inside and crushed the styrofoam cup. Eeeek! Wild Computer Kingdom "My computer is bleeding." "My computer is under water." "My computer is smoking." These are the actual words spoken by computer owners in distress. I knew a guy who was so computerized that when a repairman would come to his house, he would transcribe everything that was said between he and the repairman directly into his computer. I wonder if he was married? I worked in a hospital computer center. Third shift is often referred to as the graveyard shift. The computer center was located in the basement of the hospital adjacent to the morgue. Whenever the computer died, I knew right where to take it. I had a customer whose office was invaded by flood waters. It was salt water and one of the computers was underwater for a period of hours before being rescued. I let the computer dry out for about a week. When I plugged it in, the computer mostly worked. I swapped a few rusty parts and everything was back to normal. Could I get a wetsuit for my computer? As a computer operator I had to print payroll checks on the printer. I watched the checks go by to make sure they did not jam. I noticed a black spot on one of the checks. After the checks were printed, I thumbed through the pile of checks looking for the black spot. It turned out to be a large bug that became part of the paper at the paper factory. Unfortunately, the accounting department did not issue that person’s check. How come when a printer starts printing one line per page, you are never in the room? Tension and frustration are common side-effects of working with computers. One company had a unique way of coping. The company does ambulance service billing. Everyone in the office has a refrigerator magnet message stuck to the wall of their cubicle. The magnetic clips are various kinds of barnyard animals that make sounds. When tension and frustration levels reach the breaking point, everyone pushes their clip to make it sound off. A visitor walked in one day after the billing system crashed and it sounded like a barnyard as everyone hit their clips at the same time. Did you hear the story about the data link on a national network that would go down for several days every year about the same time of the year? An instructor, fed up with the annual data link problems, decided to pay the site a visit. He went to the location of the problem and found a couple of microwave towers spanning a lake. He discovered that the outage was caused by migrating birds. Once a year the birds would fly between the two towers on their way north in such numbers that they would break the signal.
A number of years ago on an island off the Norwegian coast, a few colleagues were called in to look at a problem with the telephone exchange. About the same time each day the exchange would reboot. Sometimes it would happen twice a day. The computer repair folks went to investigate and looked at the code, ran it through debuggers, checked the hardware, put analyzers on it and everything. When they knew the approximate time this would happen they’d all be inside, all hands to the pumps, checking, debugging, and analyzing everything and still the exchange would go down for no apparent reason. Then, one fine day, one of the workers was taking a break outside the exchange building admiring the view over the fjord, when he heard trouble from inside the building. The exchange went down again. He looked up and saw that the daily island ferry has just passed. It just so happened that the ferry's mast was high enough to break the line of sight of the microwave tower. Give me a break. The self-appointed SysOp (a bored secretary) insisted on keeping her hard drive clean. The problem was that she couldn’t tell the difference between a *.BAK file and a *.BAT file. If she didn’t know what the file was, she would delete it and then call the help desk to report that her system wasn't working again. There was a computer novice who was very diligent about making a backup disk of his critical data. To ensure he never misplaced the backup, he would attach it to a filing cabinet with a magnet. This went unnoticed until it took two disks to do a backup and the magnet wasn’t strong enough to hold both disks. A bank was having problems because their account totals kept failing to match. The discrepancies were never large, but they were persistent, and the computer department was going nuts trying to figure out what was causing them. One night somebody was working late and saw the cleaning lady come through, grab a few punched cards from one of the trays and use them as a makeshift dustpan, and then dump them into the trash! A woman called the help desk to report that her I/O device was not working. When the techie asked the lady to explain the problem, she replied, "It’s my I/O device. I know what an I/O device is!" He then humbly asked if it might be the keyboard, screen, mouse, or printer. She replied in anger, "It’s the red device at the side of the computer marked I/O. It’s not working in the ‘O’ position." That's the power switch, dummy! Probably the same lady called the help desk to report that her PC’s foot-pedal was not working. The technician asked, "What foot pedal?" The lady had never seen a mouse before. Techie: "Just copy your document file from the floppy to the fixed disk." Manager: "Oh, I didn't realize it was broken. When was it repaired?" Impractical Jokes These stories will give you some ideas to liven up your workplace and brighten up your day. Even computer revenge might be the ticket for some of us. The night shift always kept their can of coffee under the raised computer room floor to keep it fresh. That’s where the air conditioning feeds to the computers. When someone wanted coffee, they pulled out the floor tile, grabbed the can and made some coffee. When done, they replaced the can and the tile. One of the computer operators got a wild idea one night. He crawled beneath the computer room floor (about 8" of clearance), hid and waited for the other operator with the coffee to return. When the operator came back, he stepped down into the raised floor and bent down to place the coffee can. The one hiding under the floor saw the foot and couldn’t resist. He grabbed an ankle. The operator with the coffee can let out a scream and jumped out of the floor. He was laughing so hard that you could see the floor tiles, two tiles away, bouncing up and down. I played a joke on a PC novice. Don’t try this at home. I made a simple change to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file so it printed a friendly, but informative message. "Warning: This computer is going to self-destruct in 30 seconds. Please turn off the power, before it does!" Whoever I did this too, please forgive me. It won’t happen again. I was working as a computer operator in a small trailer which was a temporary data processing center. One day as the keypuncher sat at her keypunch machine I casually walked over and put my finger on the hopper button (the button which makes the keypunch machine stop when too many punched cards are collected. The button stopped the machine. The keypuncher thought the machine was stuck or jammed. I walked around and sat down and punched a few cards. She said, "Wow, how did you do that?" I walked back around and put my finger back on the same button. Again, she could not work. This routine went on for several minutes before she realized what I was doing. Did you know that some companies have pot-luck meals in their offices? In preparation for a pot-luck lunch, the mechanical engineers in the trailer nearest ours put their loaf of French bread up on the roof of their trailer to warm it in the sun. The bread was still wrapped in a bag. I was working in the temporary computer center in an adjacent trailer. I operated the computers and the vacuum to clean the computers. I had an idea. I removed the screen from my trailer window and stick the vacuum out the windows and used it to grab their loaf of bread without anyone noticing. When the guys got ready to eat, we watched as they stuck their hands out the window and reached up for the bread. No bread. They thought the birds stole it. Before lunch we confessed and returned their bread. Back in 1980, the computer operator for an IBM S/34 took a vacation with his wife. Before they left, he decided to leave his able-bodied assistant a message that would appear when she turned on the computer. The message read "Good morning Jane - we’re in Dallas, TX at the Hilton and looking forward to another couple hundred good miles today ..." Jane got a thrill because e-mail was virtually unheard of. When the couple got back from vacation, Jane asked, "How did you do that?" I rigged the computer to spit out the message at power up, before I left on vacation. An ex-Navy man told me a funny story. The Navy used 3-part paper for some print jobs. The 3-part paper was on a big, long roll. The 3-parts were all different colors. For a joke, the supervisor would tear off the first part of the first sheet of the roll. Then it looked like the paper manufacturer goofed. The supervisor then made the employees unroll the entire roll of paper and recollate it. All that the employees really needed to do was tear off the second and third parts of the first sheet of paper. Unrolling and recollating was not necessary. I was told that this practical joke happened often. I got this story from a customer support person. They received a call from a customer about his ADM3 terminal. There was a shiney spot on the back of the terminal and every time he touched it he got a shock. They had him enter several commands on the terminal and had him touch the spot after each command. He got shocked each time. When the support people were just about to burst with repressed laughter, they told the customer that the plastic cover had come off of the fuse holder. Don't try this at home! Programmer Nerds? Are all programmers nerds or am I stereotyping? Okay, I confess, I did wear one of those pocket protectors a few times, but then I quit wearing shirts with pockets. If this chapter gets too technical for you, you may want to advance to the next one. It gets pretty geeky! I used to know a programmer whose boss said of him, "That guy reads computer manuals like they’re Playboys. He eats them up and can’t get enough of them." What planet was he from? You probably heard about the gay programmer who got fired for adding "studs" to a computer game that featured plenty of female "bimbo" characters. The programmer added a few male hunks in swimsuits to the game without telling his boss. Some 50,000 copies of the game were shipped before the company discovered the additions. The programmer was fired the day after the discovery. Gee, can’t a programmer have a little fun once in a while? I worked on a computer program that was about 20,000 lines long. Whenever I made a minor change to the program I had to print out a new program listing. The new program listing used an entire box of computer paper and took all night to print. Where was recycling when you needed it? What do bored programmers do in their spare time? We were three bored programmers in a room. There was not much work to do because we were all waiting to get government clearance before we could work on any significant programming projects. Between twiddling our thumbs, we practiced rocket science. Computer punch cards made nice rockets when held together with rubber bands. We successfully launched punch card rockets from one desk to another. With pin-point accuracy you could land a rocket right in the middle of another guy’s coffee cup. Hey NASA, need a helper? There was a programmer who worked for a company that declared the use of vague variables was a crime. The programmer used "Dracula" as a loop variable and was immediately questioned by the "code inspectors." What a perfect name for a Count(er). One programmer on a major simulator project was looking through the list of variables and found a comment beside one of the instructions. "Paul’s little secret." There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it. A very strange comment, indeed. Do you have a favorite error message that you carry around in your wallet? On faded, greenbar paper was printed the following error message: "EC604 FORTRAN error occurred during abnormal termination processing. Main storage is probably destroyed." Another error message that would get your attention is "Something is wrong with this program and something is wrong with the universe." Programs written in the wee hours of the morning tend to be a bit disjointed. An error message was found in an application a number of years ago that read "Illegal function ... Try that again and I’ll call the Sheriff." Did a programmer prankster do it or is it part of Word 6? A user was working in Word 6. Imagine what the user thought when the tip of the day read: "It is risky to jump into murky water." Some actual error messages reported by New Scientist: A programmer used to write IBM 370/Assembler and they would send the source out so it could be changed on-site. One of his comments around an area of code that he was forced to write against his own will was something like, "You would have to be a complete idiot to use this option." Some programmer played a joke on a novice PC one day. They made a simple change to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file so that it printed a message like, "Warning: This computer is going to self-destruct in 30 seconds. Please turn off the power, before it does!" Can you imagine waiting 24 hours to get the results of your computer program? That was the standard back in the '60s and most programmers never got to touch a computer. Just hand the punch cards in at night and pick up a computer program printout in the morning. I'll never forget the day I found a whole stack of printouts on the desk, each one carefully labeled "Latest Printout." I sure was happy when they got around to putting dates on printouts. One budding computer programming student left Bell Northern as a co-op student. We had a network of UNIX PC’s and they all had a screen saver that would kick in after two minutes of inactivity. I had source code for the screen saver, and so I rewrote it to display a whirling propeller and exploding stars (all in text) with the message "Good bye!" in the middle of the screen. It was set to go off after 10:00am on the Monday after I left the company. The moment you pressed a key to clear the graphics, the program restored the old version and deleted itself. A student programmer wrote a program that relied on DOS.COM before the .EXE program load algorithm. It was designed to recognize the day of the week and the time, and if they coincided with one of the university CS advisor’s shifts, prevent her from running any of her favorite programs with a message like "Sorry, Alice. I can’t let you do that." Other users at other times had no problem. When I was in school taking my first Assembler class, I had an assembly error in one of my jobs that baffled everyone for about a week: "Illegal character near column 29." Except that there wasn’t anything in column 29. It didn't matter what I did to edit the line, I still got the error. The only solution was to delete the line and re-type it. That worked. Later on, someone figured out that I had edited the line and used the backspace key on column 29 and the Assembler was picking up the unprintable character. Then there was the night a programmer was called out of bed because his program had hung up in production. He had to get dressed and drive 30 miles to the site. When he walked in, the operator said, "Oh, we found the problem. There was a pin hole in the tape." Shortly after installing a new warehouse management system, the programmer got a phone call from the plant engineer (and aspiring programmer) responsible for front-line support. He complained that all the bills of lading were garbled; nothing would print properly. The support person was at a trade show at the time and therefore unable to do anything sensible like have him fax one of the bills. The support person told him that he would be there, an hour’s drive away, at 6:30am the next morning to check it out and hopefully fix it before shipping started at 7:00am. When the support person arrived, he immediately recognized the output as a hexdecimal dump of data that his program was sending. He told the support person that there were two options: they could teach the shippers to read hex, or they could turn the printer off and back on. He left at 6:35am. The Golden Years What’s a punch card? I don’t remember putting on the gloves and punching a card. I do remember times when I would have liked to put on the gloves and duke it out with the computer. The computer would probably win! "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their
home." Card jams on the old unit record equipment were spectacular. Do you think they should have provided a hacksaw with the machines? Did you know that the military in the '60s had a machine that would reassemble shredded paper? In the '60s there was a machine called the MFCM or multi-function card machine. Otherwise known as the "Mother Fletchers Card Mulcher." The machine could collate, reproduce, sort and perform assorted other duties with punch cards. What some people would do with punched cards: A big, old IBM printer used to have a cover that automatically opened when the printer ran out of paper. Some computer operator left a box of punch cards on top of the printer. The operator got to demonstrate how fast he could move. If he was real fast, he could catch the box of cards before the cards dumped on the floor. They sometimes used long needles for searching through the standard 80-column punched cards. With skill and a little luck, the needles could search a drawer of cards about as fast as a PC can search a database today. The needle could go through hundreds of cards per second. One company’s computer operator had a couple of Philips DS714 computers. They had a built-in speaker and selector switch so the operator could listen to the operation of the various computer components. With a little experience, the computer operator would be able to recognize a problem by the change in the sounds. The 1403 printer by IBM was a big, bad, smelly and noisy printer from IBM. They were a multi-hammer chain printer that could print up to 2k lines per minute. They had a lid that weighed over 100 pounds and had a motorized drive to lift it. When the lid failed, you got a hernia trying to lift the lid. If you did lift it, the noise would deafen you. The printer would eat a box of paper in no time. One computer operator worked in a shop that had several "hot-rodded" versions from IBM that took a paper pallet so you only had to load paper in them every six hours instead of every 20 minutes. One had a hardware malfunction and couldn’t find the top of the page. It went through four boxes of paper before the operator got it shut down. Actually he didn’t notice it until the paper jammed and broke out the front glass. Oh, and what about the time in high school when someone came up with a program which played "She’ll Be Com’in Round the Mountain" on the IBM 1403 printer. The program was timed so that the hammers hitting the paper made the different tones. Did you know a "Nancy 1" is a pet name for the old IBM 1403N1 printer? If you hit the right amount of hammers at the same time, the IBM 1403 would produce just about any pitch you wanted in about three octaves. One programmer got bored one night and wrote a program to play a Brahms waltz. That was back in the days when programmers were required to work third shift. About 10 years ago, one computer operator remembers putting a transistor radio next to the wall of the machine room and listening for when the UNIVAC computer was about to crash. Someone even made music on DEC PDP 8s and PDP 10s around 1968. Remember those clever picture printouts on computer paper? There were pictures of Snoopy, Einstein and Santa. They spanned several pages of computer paper. I operated an IBM 1130 computer in the old days. I saw a guy put a transistor radio on the computer and play music through the radio from a program he loaded into the computer. The office was impressed. Then there was the local bakery supply company who had a room full of unit-record equipment clearly marked, "Computer Room." Some guy ran an IBM 1403 printer for a local bank on third shift. He was also attending college in the daytime. He could sleep on the job and automatically wake up if any of the noises changed. Here's one for the record book. One computer person remembers seeing someone drop an IBM 1403 printer seven stories to the street below as it was being hoisted into the 7th floor computer room. The only way to get the printer into the building was through the 7th floor window. It was not a pretty sight, but a smashing idea! Computer Daffynitions This chapter will help you to win computer friends and influence computer people. Here we will take a closer look at computer buzz words. Don’t you just love those computer acronyms? Here are some
examples: An amusing computer limmerick: What's does PnP stand for?. It's means "Plug and Pray." Kidney - A shared resource in an office which an employee must often wait to use. For example, a fax machine. "I can’t fax this right now, Jack has the kidney." Some funny computer definitions that were e-mailed to me: Chip Jewelry - A euphemism for old computers to be scraped or turned into decorative ornaments. "I paid three grand for that Mac SE and now it’s nothing but chip jewelry." Crapplet - A badly written or profoundly useless Java applet. "I just wasted 30 minutes downloading this stinkin’ crapplet!" Plug-and-Play - A new hire who doesn’t need training. "The new guy, John, is great. He’s totally plug-and-play." World Wide Wait - The real meaning of WWW. CGI Joe - A hard-core CGI script programmer with all the social skills and charisma of a plastic action figure. Dorito Syndrome - Feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction triggered by addictive substances that lack nutritional content. "I just spent six hours surfing the Web, and now I’ve got a bad case of Dorito syndrome." Under Mouse Arrest - Getting busted for violating an online service’s rules of conduct. "Sorry I couldn’t get back to you. AOL put me under mouse arrest." Glazing - Corporate-speak for sleeping with your eyes open. 404 - Someone who‘s clueless. From the World Wide Web message, "404, URL Not Found," meaning that the document you’ve tried to access can’be located. "Don’t bother asking him ... he’s 404, man." Dead Tree Edition - The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms, as in: "The Dead Tree Edition of the San Francisco Chronicle." Ego-surfing - Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name. Graybar Land - The place you go while you’re staring at a computer that’s processing something very slowly (while you watch the graybar creep across the screen). "I was in GrayBar Land for what seemed like hours, thanks to that CAD rendering." Open-Collar Workers - People who work at home or telecommute. Squirt The Bird - To transmit a signal up to a satellite. "Crew and talent are ready ... what time do we squirt the bird?" Brain Fart - A by-product of a bloated mind, producing information effortlessly. A burst of useful information. "I know you’re busy on the Microsoft story, but can you give us a brain fart on the Mitnik bust?" A variation of an old hacker slang that had more negative connotation. Cobweb Site - A World Wide Web Site that hasn’t been updated for a long time. A dead Web page. It’s a Feature - From the adage "It’s not a bug, it’s a feature." Used sarcastically to describe an unpleasant experience that you wish to gloss over. Keyboard Plaque - The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. "Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of keyboard plaque." Career-Limiting Move (CLM) - Used among microserfs to describe an ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within an earshot is a serious CLM. Elvis Year - The peak year of something’s popularity. "Barney the Dinosaur’s Elvis Year was 1993." Alpha Geek - The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he’s the alpha geek around here." Adminisphere - The rarified organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. Tourists - People who are taking training classes just to get a vacation from their jobs. "We had about three serious students in the class. The rest were tourists." Blowing Your Buffer - Losing one’s train of thought. Occurs when the person you are speaking with won’t let you get a word in edgewise or has just said something so astonishing that your train gets derailed. "Damn, I just blew my buffer!" Gray Matter - Older, experienced business people hired by young entrepreneurial firms looking to appear more reputable and established. Bookmark - To take note of a person for future reference (a metaphor borrowed from web browsers). "I bookmarked him after seeing his cool demo at Siggraph." Nyetscape - Nickname for AOL’s less-than-full-featured Web browser. Beepilepsy - The brief seizure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions, and stopping speech in mid-sentence. Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed in the end. Instead of WORM (Write Once Read Many), how about WORM (Write Once Read Never). THE END |
Mount Laughmore
by Kramer
©2006
Copyright 2006. Kramer & Kramer Design. All rights reserved.