Tech Fails

Shentar said:
I work in IT, so I have seen a few good ones. My favorite however is this:

One Friday, I moved a girl's computer from one desk to other. I waited till Friday after she was gone for the weekend. She knew I was moving the computer. After I had come in on Monday, she came to me complaining that the computer wasn't working. I walked over to her desk and, sure enough, nothing was on the screen. I moved the mouse and nothing happened. I looked at the computer and I put my hand behind the power supply fan. No air was moving. I reached around to the front of the computer and pushed the power button. Instantly the system came on and I saw the screen light up. I said "There you go", walked out of the cube, and facepalmed all the way back to my desk.

I always thought this kind of crap was a joke. It isn't. It is similar to:
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Long ago I used to work phone support for an ISP, and before that I worked phone support for a major tech retail chain.

That sort of thing? Far too common. It really does happen more than you'd think.
 
brydie76 said:
LP said:
One of our admins just asked our tech guy at work this week if the printer needed the USB connection in order to print something from her laptop. >__________________________>
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Hey! Some of us have only just recently gotten wireless printers, i even now still have to go out to the printer and physically connect via usb if I want to print! :lol:

Mind you, dad finally bought a wireless printer yesterday. And a computer. But he bought the wrong one. I think that counts as tech fail, right???
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Wireless printers are utilities of Satan. Please, just give me a plug-n-play USB printer that needs zero configuration. I don't need all the useless crap features, resource-whore-ware (I'm looking at you, HP) and proprietary Rube Goldberg drivers, written by the lowest dumbest foreign bidder, that constantly fail for no reason.

I JUST WANT A DANG PRINTER. It just needs to print, not have some stupid digital menu for a thousand useless, over-engineered features that should be done in third-party software on your computer anyway.
 
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I work at one of the top game companies in the world. Yet somehow our employees have trouble figuring out simple things like a water dispenser. See, on many of our water dispensers, there is one blue button to push for cold water, and two red buttons to push for hot water. For some reason, it is exceedingly difficult for the vast majority of workers to figure out that you need to push both red buttons together to get hot water. Most of the time they resort to kicking the machine and saying that it's broken. Well, we left them a (fairly) courteous note telling them exactly how to operate the water dispensers, and telling them to please not kick the machines, because then they would really be broken. What did they do? They made a bigger sign next to ours saying "YOU ARE WRONG. GET US A NEW MACHINE." At this point I'm tempted to just take the machine away and say we're repairing it.

Jesus Christ the stupidity of some people baffles me.
 
TerranCmdr said:
I work at one of the top game companies in the world. Yet somehow our employees have trouble figuring out simple things like a water dispenser. See, on many of our water dispensers, there is one blue button to push for cold water, and two red buttons to push for hot water. For some reason, it is exceedingly difficult for the vast majority of workers to figure out that you need to push both red buttons together to get hot water. Most of the time they resort to kicking the machine and saying that it's broken. Well, we left them a (fairly) courteous note telling them exactly how to operate the water dispensers, and telling them to please not kick the machines, because then they would really be broken. What did they do? They made a bigger sign next to ours saying "YOU ARE WRONG. GET US A NEW MACHINE." At this point I'm tempted to just take the machine away and say we're repairing it.

Jesus Christ the stupidity of some people baffles me.
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More baffling is why anyone should need to have a safety system for the hot water from that dispenser to keep from injuring themselves.
 
TerranCmdr said:
I work at one of the top game companies in the world. Yet somehow our employees have trouble figuring out simple things like a water dispenser. See, on many of our water dispensers, there is one blue button to push for cold water, and two red buttons to push for hot water. For some reason, it is exceedingly difficult for the vast majority of workers to figure out that you need to push both red buttons together to get hot water. Most of the time they resort to kicking the machine and saying that it's broken. Well, we left them a (fairly) courteous note telling them exactly how to operate the water dispensers, and telling them to please not kick the machines, because then they would really be broken. What did they do? They made a bigger sign next to ours saying "YOU ARE WRONG. GET US A NEW MACHINE." At this point I'm tempted to just take the machine away and say we're repairing it.

Jesus Christ the stupidity of some people baffles me.
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Make a bigger sign, tell them they have failed at life, the universe and everything, then swap the hot for the cold and whittle them down some.
 
Sigh, large report I'm working on just disappeared. Have auto save on, and I religiously save after a major change. Word crashed, told me it was auto recovering, bought up the version from 11am this morning and proceeded to tell me that was the current version.

Have run Recuva over the drive and it found the auto save and the last manual save at 2.30pm. But of course it's been written over by 37(1) different apps, some of which weren't even running at the time of the fail.

(1) - May be an exaggeration.
 
Search for any file on your HDD that has roughly the correct size that was modified in the last 24 hours.
There may be a temp file out there that contains your doc.
I've had luck in the past with that method.
Also, maybe this is helpful: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099
 
ESPNSTI said:
Search for any file on your HDD that has roughly the correct size that was modified in the last 24 hours.
There may be a temp file out there that contains your doc.
I've had luck in the past with that method.
Also, maybe this is helpful: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099
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Yeah done and done, Recuva does that, I found the file but it had already been written over so not recoverable.
 
My mother... my poor mother.

She's not great with technology. Never has been. One day, her computer at work wouldn't boot. Tech support is always tired of her, so she tries to avoid calling them, but she just didn't know what to do. So she calls, and they come to help. The person who came plugged the machine in and it booted. Apparently the cleaning had knocked the cable loose. Mom, not wanting to need to call tech support for the same thing again, asked how it was fixed. The person told her it wasn't plugged in, and here's how to plug it in, etc. Mom took notes (she's very good about that).

A week or two or whatever later, Mom's work computer wouldn't boot (again). She checks the cables, and they're all plugged in. She calls up tech support and they come out. She tells tech support she checked the cables and they're all plugged in! The person from tech support unplugged and replugged the cable. The system booted.

Mom was sooooo embarrassed.
 
'Can you lend me 100 bucks, the bank isen't open till morning'
'Euhrmm, I quess....lost your ATM card?'
'No, I don't no how to use that'
'An ATM?'
'Yeah, it used to be realy simple but now they have this screen with buttons like a computer'
'..........'

This was a 35 year old normal intellingence male.

HOW THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE ALIVE?
 
Spectre said:
More baffling is why anyone should need to have a safety system for the hot water from that dispenser to keep from injuring themselves.
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All the ones at my company have that too. And people have still been burnt. To the point that several of them have the hot water tap disabled.

And we make the drugs that keep people alive! Think about it. Orr...maybe don't. ;)


Cowboy said:
'Can you lend me 100 bucks, the bank isen't open till morning'
'Euhrmm, I quess....lost your ATM card?'
'No, I don't no how to use that'
'An ATM?'
'Yeah, it used to be realy simple but now they have this screen with buttons like a computer'
'..........'

This was a 35 year old normal intellingence male.

HOW THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE ALIVE?
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Are you new here? *shakes his hand*

Welcome to Planet Earth!
 
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A tech fail I told should be posted here:

I went shopping at a Fry's Electronics looking to buy a power supply unit for my PC. A salesman asked me if he could help me, so I told him what I needed (A PSU with at least 24 amperes on the +12V rail).

He had no idea what I was talking about.
 
They think in watts...
Victoria said:
A tech fail I told should be posted here:

I went shopping at a Fry's Electronics looking to buy a power supply unit for my PC. A salesman asked me if he could help me, so I told him what I needed (A PSU with at least 24 amperes on the +12V rail).

He had no idea what I was talking about.
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We were talking to the fam back in India, and they were talking to my dad's bro and his 16 year old son.

There was some conversation about computers and I remember when we went back and we got him this netbook. He kept right clicking the desktop and hitting refresh over and over and over again. I was like "why are you doing that", "because it wakes the computer up and refreshes it, like when you put cold water to your face".

He was dead serious. I stood there confused and he goes "what is this, you don't know? I thought you knew everything about computers".
 
Oh, I have one on my dad, too. It's shorter than the one on my mom?

My dad is an old-school mainframe guy. His job was to maintain the mainframe for the Texas Department of Health before he retired. Now, his home computer runs Windows 98SE. "It's just old enough to be great!"
 
Technofobe mate tells me he needed a printer (Lord knows why), so he ask me to go along to the electronics store to pick out 'a good one', so we pick one up, (standard HP affair) and he heads home with it.

Hour later I get a call, 'could you come over, it won't work'....turns out their only was a powercord in the package and not a USB cable....so he plugged in the power cord, followed the 'setup' instructions to the letter, powered up the computer, shoved in the driver CD, and was then baffled why the computer had no idea there was now a printer on the desk.
 
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