02-23-2003, 05:48 PM
Hi,
Dave, a friend of mine started his digital career on the help desk of a CAD company. One day he got a call from an architect who freely admitted he was ignorant of all things computer. He'd bought a computer specifically to take advantage of CAD. It seemed that he could not get the program to install. Now, this was in the DOS 3.x and floppy disk days. Well, Dave tried to walk the guy through an installation, but nothing was working. "dir a:" gave "file not found". More conversation followed, and finally it was established that the architect had reformatted all the distribution floppies. Seems that this conscientious individual had indeed RTFM, and in the DOS 3.x manual it specifically said that floppies needed to be formatted before they could be used. The guy got screwed because he followed instructions. Dave FedExed him a new distribution with new instructions: "Call me before you open the package."
The other happened to me. When I went to work for Boeing (late '85), they were just getting PCs for the engineers. Since I had a lot more experience with personal computers, many of the engineers used me as tech support even for their home machine. One day I was at home with my wife and daughter (both of whom are pretty darn computer savvy) when I got a call from an especially clueless (but nice) acquaintance. Seems that he had just bought a mouse but couldn't get it to work with his machine. Everything seemed to be OK, but when he went into Windows, the cursor just sat there in the middle of the screen. There followed a long conversation, during which he read me his autoexec.bat, his config.sys, and his win.ini. All seemed to be OK, but we tried some variations just to check things out. Played a bunch of other games, still no joy. After about a half hour of this, he interrupted me and said, "Wait a second while I get this out of the box. It's getting in the way." Then, about ten seconds later he said, "Hey, it's working now!" Seems he had been moving the mouse around, all right, but the mouse was still in the box and he was moving box and all. He thanked me for my help and we said good-by. After I hung up, all three of us laughed so hard we cried. :)
--Pete
Dave, a friend of mine started his digital career on the help desk of a CAD company. One day he got a call from an architect who freely admitted he was ignorant of all things computer. He'd bought a computer specifically to take advantage of CAD. It seemed that he could not get the program to install. Now, this was in the DOS 3.x and floppy disk days. Well, Dave tried to walk the guy through an installation, but nothing was working. "dir a:" gave "file not found". More conversation followed, and finally it was established that the architect had reformatted all the distribution floppies. Seems that this conscientious individual had indeed RTFM, and in the DOS 3.x manual it specifically said that floppies needed to be formatted before they could be used. The guy got screwed because he followed instructions. Dave FedExed him a new distribution with new instructions: "Call me before you open the package."
The other happened to me. When I went to work for Boeing (late '85), they were just getting PCs for the engineers. Since I had a lot more experience with personal computers, many of the engineers used me as tech support even for their home machine. One day I was at home with my wife and daughter (both of whom are pretty darn computer savvy) when I got a call from an especially clueless (but nice) acquaintance. Seems that he had just bought a mouse but couldn't get it to work with his machine. Everything seemed to be OK, but when he went into Windows, the cursor just sat there in the middle of the screen. There followed a long conversation, during which he read me his autoexec.bat, his config.sys, and his win.ini. All seemed to be OK, but we tried some variations just to check things out. Played a bunch of other games, still no joy. After about a half hour of this, he interrupted me and said, "Wait a second while I get this out of the box. It's getting in the way." Then, about ten seconds later he said, "Hey, it's working now!" Seems he had been moving the mouse around, all right, but the mouse was still in the box and he was moving box and all. He thanked me for my help and we said good-by. After I hung up, all three of us laughed so hard we cried. :)
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?