Computer Stupidities…
Once again, I normally don’t link to outside websites in order to avoid the inevitable 404 error messages when their site goes down or moves, but I discovered a fun site called Computer Stupidities. A few gems:
- “My computer’s telling me I performed an illegal abortion.”
- I spotted a garage sale with some computer equipment on a table, so I went over to investigate. There was an old dot matrix printer, an amber screen monitor, and what appeared to be an IBM XT. The lady who was running the garage sale noticed me looking at her equipment and came over. “Hey, are you interested in buying that? It’s a full computer, still works. It’s got a color modem and everything.”
- “I don’t use DOS. What would happen if I deleted that directory?”
- My coworker was having trouble downloading a self-extracting archive off the net. In an attempt to make it easier to open the file with WinZIP, he associated *.EXE with WinZIP. Nothing worked after that. Every program he tried to run would load WinZIP first. He couldn’t even run REGEDIT to delete the association. He ultimately had to reinstall Windows 95 and all his programs. [Note: It is possible to edit the registry outside of Windows even though Microsoft itself says it's impossible. Allocate about six hours, and make sure you have bottles of both aspirin and antacids on hand.]
- Once, in school, I was bringing some document on a diskette to our principal. She was on the phone. While waiting I began playing with the sliding metal shutter on the diskette. She looked at me sternly and told me to stop it or viruses would get in.
- I went into a store to purchase an external modem for one of my customers. He had an older system and the fastest modem that he could use was a 33.6K. The salesman insisted that the slowest external modem ever manufactured was 56K. There was not and had never been a 33.6 modem. I pointed out a label on the shelf that said, “33.6K External Modem,” and he insisted that it was a misprint. There were boxes on the back shelf that were clearly what I wanted. He refused to sell me one. Losing a sale was apparently preferable to admitting an error. [How can I ever forget those old 300 baud modems?! That's equivalent, using today's measurements and assuming one bit per baud, to 0.3K...]
People make stupid mistakes out of ignorance all the time. What’s really stupid and truly, breathtakingly moronic is when computer-savvy people don’t recognize this fact.
