I recently got an irate piece of e-mail from someone arguing that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed his right to post off-topic messages in newsgroups.
He was posting and mailing from Canada.

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I’m a regular reader of rec.sport.fencing. What I hate is the people who post articles with the subject line, “Fencing.”

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Posted to rec.sport.fencing:

I am wondering how to get on a fencing newsgroup.

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Posted to a newsgroup:

Everyone is talking about these ‘newsreaders.’ Can someone tell me what they are and where I can get one?

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Posted in alt.games.tombraider:

please do not send anymore messages to me. I beleve these were sent to me by mistake.
I have had to delete over 3,000 messages.
thank you

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My list server is one of those that you subscribe to by sending a message to some mail bot with the word “subscribe” in the body.

Occasionally (and I’ve been on other mailing lists that have seen this happen), a user will send a subscribe message, and whenever a message goes to the list, he/she/it will reply to it, saying, “STOP SPAMMING ME!!!! STOP SPAMMING ME!!! I DIDN’T ASK FOR ANY OF YOUR MAIL!!! STOP SENDING ME MAIL!!! I’M GOING TO SUE YOU!!!! YOU BETTER STOP SENDING ME YOUR ****ING WORTHLESS MAIL!!!! WHO ARE ALL YOU ****ING PEOPLE AND WHERE DID YOU GET MY ****ING ADDRESS?!!?!?!?!?!?!!????!!?!?!”

After letting the other subscribers flame him/her/it for a while, I unsubscribe it manually and do some Procmail magic to make sure it never subscribes again.

It’s even funnier to see this happen on Usenet. I saw this one message from a user who apparently thought that a “newsgroup” was some private entity that existed only on his own computer. I don’t remember the exact text, but it included the line, “Quit sending to my newsgroup!”

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Posted to a newsgroup:

When I came to the NG, it showed that there were lots o unread mail. When I opened the group, it showed 4 items. Is it me? OR Is it AOL? Perhaps the entire internet, even. just curious!

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Posted in comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc, under the subject line “ultrasound and PC”:

I am getting the image of ultrasound on the PC through
a TV Tuner card. Is there a soft ware or hardware with
which I can convert the grey scales to coloured ones.

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Customer: “I have a problem with Usenet news.”
Tech Support: “Um, sir, you shouldn’t be calling me in the first place, send mail to support–”
Customer: “But this is very important, and maybe affecting a lot of subscribers! Please listen to me.”
Tech Support: (well, he did say please) “Ok, what’s the problem?”
Customer: “There’s nothing interesting on Usenet. It’s all mindless crap, and as one of the larger Internet providers, you must take liability for this!”

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I work at the computer store on a campus. A few weeks ago, we had a customer call in and ask the following:
Customer: “I’d like to buy the Internet. Do you know how much it is?”

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Customer: “How much does it cost to have the Internet installed?”

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Customer: “I would like the disc with the Internet on it.”

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Also heard in a University store:

Customer: “Can you copy the Internet for me on this diskette?”

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Customer: “I would like an Internet please.”

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Customer: “When I sign up, do I need to be home so you can come out and install the Internet to my house?”

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Customer: “I just got your Internet in the mail today…”

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Customer: “I just downloaded the Internet. How do I use it?”

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Customer: “Excuse me, could you sell me an Internet?”

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Customer: “I don’t have a computer at home. Is the Internet available in book form?”

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Customer: “Will the Internet be open on Memorial Day tomorrow?”

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Customer: “We’re getting an Internet from you. Are you guys having any problems sending out your Internets?”

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Customer: “I can’t get online.”
Tech Support: “Can you be more specific?”
Customer: “It says, ‘Bad username/password’.”
Tech Support: “What is your username?”
Customer: “Are you sure that the Internet isn’t closed for the night?”
I was extremely tempted to tell him how people in Europe and Asia wake up at odd hours just to use the net.

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I just had a call from a customer who wanted to know if she had to bring in her computer to get connected to the Internet or if we could pick it up and deliver.

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Customer: “My boyfriend says that I need a memory card to run the Internet. Is this where I get one?”

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Customer: “The Internet is running too slow. Could you reboot it please?”

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Customer: “We’re going on holiday for three months, can you suspend the Internet for us please?”

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I work for a local ISP. Frequently we receive phone calls that go something like this:

Customer: “Hi. Is this the Internet?”
…or…
Customer: “Do you own the Internet?”
…or…
Customer: “Is this ‘Internet’ the same as ‘www’ and do you own that as well?”
We would love to be able to say, just once, to these callers, “YES! We are the Internet, and we own all.”

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Customer: “I have a question about the Internet.”
Tech Support: “Ok, what’s your question?”
Customer: “How do I unsubscribe from a BBS?”
Tech Support: “Uh, well, you should probably contact the people that run it.”
Customer: “Well who owns the Internet?”

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I once got a “priority” tech support phone call. The guy’s first words were: “I’m a vice president at [major ISP company], and we own the Internet.”

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Overheard on a train ride:

“The Internet — isn’t that a microchip?”

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Overheard near the public Internet terminals in the Kiasma Modern Arts Museum in Helsinki, Finland:

“Isn’t Netscape Navigator the Internet?”

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Some people pay for their online services with checks made payable to “The Internet.”

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Had a guy call just recently, asking how to get to the Internet through a word processor.

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Customer: “What do you mean I have to pay for Internet access??”

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From a discussion on IRC:

“I have a problem with my Internet. Anyone know how to get the screens smaller?”

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I got a call from an administrative assistant in our office. She said when she opened Netscape it was smaller than normal, so she could not see the entire Internet.

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Customer: “Do you have to use Netscape to get on the Internet, or do you have to use the program Netscape?”

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Friend: “I’m going to leave AOL. I think I’ll switch to Netscape.”
Me: “Um, Netscape isn’t a way to get on the Internet. It’s what lets you look at the Internet. You need an Internet Service Provider like AOL, CompuServe, or AT&T Worldnet.”
Friend: “Oh. I guess I’ll get Internet Explorer.”

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Tech Support: “If you don’t have a phone line, you can’t connect to the Internet.”
Customer: “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. You guys need to do something about that if you want people to be happy with your service!” (click)

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Customer: “I lost my Internet. I switched it off last night and turned on this morning, and it’s gone. I just paid $19.95 a month, and I have lost it already. Can you send me another one?”

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Customer: “Is the Internet down?”

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Customer: “I broke the Internet! Can you fix it for me?”

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Customer: “The Internet site’s giving me a busy signal!”
(Usually due to the customer dialing his own phone number with his modem.)

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Customer: “So that’ll get me connected to the Internet, right?”
Tech Support: “Yeah.”
Customer: “And that’s the latest version of the Internet, right?”
Tech Support: “Uhh…uh…uh…yeah.”

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Customer: “Every time I call you I get disconnected from the Internet!”

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Some friends of mine and I stopped at a local bagel/bistro place that had three Macintosh computers hooked up so patrons could surf the web while they eat and slurp their coffee. None were being used. I walked over to them, and there, in front, was a prominent sign reading:

“The Internet is down all over the world!”
To this day I wonder if the employees were clueless, or if they made that message up to prevent questioning from angry patrons.

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Bayfield High School announced in their recent yearbook that their introductory technology class had “almost completed rebuilding the Internet.” That’s some introductory class!

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I attend a major Australian university, and the library computers are often the only Internet access that students have. This means that the librarians often have to explain to students how to use the net connection. One day as I was doing some research for an assignment, an older gentleman asked the library assistant how to print from a web site. He was fairly web savvy, so he was just asking about selecting and printing the text he wanted. The assistant complimented him on his prudent use of resources and said, “So many students don’t do that. They just print out the whole Internet.”

Now I knew our printers were fast, but I didn’t realize they were that fast, or that we had that much paper. It was a real effort not to butt in and correct her, or burst out laughing, or both.

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I am a student studying Computer Systems Engineering. In my final year, I moved into a house with a few friends, one of which was a woman studying English. As I was the only person connected to the Internet from our house, they all used my computer to check email and so forth. Well the English major kept asking me if she could have a look on “my Internet.” I said she could, and she logged in and directed the browser to a search engine so she could find the information she wanted. Fifteen minutes later:

Her: “You really should get some English literature on your Internet. All I can find is computer-related stuff. The computers at the University have all sorts of information on their Internet. Maybe you should ask them for a copy?”

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Several months ago, a woman came in and wanted to start an Internet account. She lugged her 17″ monitor in, sat it on the counter, and proudly proclaimed, “I would like you to setup Internet on my computer.” Holding in my laughter as best I could, I politely explained that she needed to bring in the “other” part of her computer.

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Tech Support: “This is technical support returning your call for support. How can I help you?”
Customer: “I want to lodge a complaint.”
Tech Support: “What seems to be the problem?”
Customer: “I specifically asked you not to program my Internet with pornography. I want it removed immediately.”

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Customer: “My youngest son was surfing the web last night and to my shock he was at [a British comedy site].”
Tech Support: “Yes, what is the problem?”
Customer: “The ‘.uk’ at the end — doesn’t that stand for United Kingdom?”
Tech Support: “Yes.”
Customer: “Just great — I knew it! He’s in trouble now! He was there for almost a half hour! How much does AOL charge for long distance?”
Tech Support: “It does not work that way. You can surf anywhere without long distance charges.”
Customer: “No, I am sure AOL charges extra. It doesn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t. England is a long way away, they would lose millions not to.”
After trying to explain how the web worked, the customer refused to take my word and said she was going to call AOL. A while later she called back.

Customer: “Well, AOL said you were correct; no long distance charge for overseas web sites. I do have another question I thought of after I hung up with AOL.”
Tech Support: “Yes?”
Customer: “Do you think they charge extra for long distance email?”
Tech Support: “Trust me — they don’t.”
Customer: “Wonderful! My oldest son works in Sweden. He sends us email, but I was always afraid to reply because I didn’t know how much it would cost, so I just called him on the phone. This will save us lots of money! Still if AOL was smart they would charge for this service.”

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Customer: “I can’t get any information off the Internet.”
Tech Support: “What happens when you hit our icon?”
Customer: “What do you mean?”
Tech Support: “When you double click our icon does the modem dial up?”
Customer: “What do you mean ‘dial’?”
Tech Support: “Ok, when you hit our icon does the modem make a noise?”
Customer: “Which one is your icon?”
Tech Support: (banging head on desk) “The [company name] icon.”
Customer: “I don’t have that.”
Tech Support: “You do have an account with us don’t you?”
Customer: “Yes, of course I do.”
Tech Support: “And our software is installed?”
Customer: “Oh, no. I’ve been on the Internet and downloaded all the information on it, so I took your software off.”

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Customer: “Yes, hello, could please send me again one of those Internet programs of yours?”
Tech Support: “Sure, but didn’t you get one when you subscribed with us?”
Customer: “Yes, well I threw that one away!”
Tech Support: “Why did you do that, if I may ask?”
Customer: “Well, I installed all the programs and connected the first time and downloaded all the Internet, so I saw no use for it any more, so I uninstalled everything and threw the CD away.”
Tech Support: (playing along) “Ok. But if you have downloaded all the Internet, why do you need another disk?”
Customer: “Well, I forgot to download some part of the Internet.”

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Tech Support: “Ok sir, you’re going to need to download those drivers from our web site. Do you have an Internet connection?”
Customer: “WHAT!?!? OF COURSE I HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION!!!!!!! THIS IS THE 90’S!!!! This office has 30 PC’s, each with an ISDN line for our graphic design business!”
Tech Support: “Great. Well, you should have no problems then. You need to go to our web site and download ‘CDROM.EXE’.”
Customer: “And this will fix my problem, right?”
Tech Support: “Yes sir.”
Customer: “Ok, now what number do I dial to get on the Internet?”

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I’m the executive director of a company which produces communication media software, our principle program being a chat client.

Sometime back, in the days when I was still working for this company in technical and product support services, we used to do a lot of real time on-line support service on our chat server.

One day on site, I saw a man come into the room I happened to be working in. As I had the official company insignia of a support tech by my name, everyone else in the rather crowded room kept telling him to ask me. Now, keep in mind, all the chat dialogue in the room was scrolling very quickly. New users often find it difficult to follow a “threaded” conversation, and this guy was no exception.

Him: “LADY? CAN YOU HELP ME OR NOT???!!!”
Me: “What seems to be the problem?”
Him: “HUH???!!! ..WAS THAT TO ME?!!!”
Me: “Yes; what seems to be the problem?”
Him: “WHAT??????!!!!!!! I CAN’T FOLLOW YOU!!!!!!! WHAT DID YOU SAY???!!! ARE YOU GOING TO HELP ME OR NOT???!!!”
Me: “Yes, sir. I’m trying to ascertain the nature of your problem. Let me move us both to a private room where we can speak without all of these other distractions.”
Him: “I TOLD YOU!!! I DON’T HAVE TIME!!!! I NEED HELP NOW!!!!”
Me: “Yes. What is the problem you need help with?”
Him: “I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO GET ON THE INTERNET!!!!!”

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Customer: “I just went out and bought the newest unit they have out and having trouble hooking up to the Internet!”
Tech Support: “What type of machine are you running?”
Customer: “A Nintendo 64!”
Tech Support: “Sorry, but you can’t hook that up to the Internet. You need a computer with a modem first.”
Customer: “Well, can’t I just buy a modem thing and stuff it inside somewhere?”

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Customer: “Am I supposed to hear those people on the IRC?”
I wondered if he was calling because he couldn’t hear them, or because he could.

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I used to do tech support for a company that made computer accessories and video game accessories. We had a pay-for-access web site for one of our products. The site was full of special codes and cheats. One day, a customer called, asking how to access the site.

Tech Support: “Well, just go to [URL].”
Customer: “How do I do that?”
Tech Support: “Type it in in your web browser.”
Customer: “Huh?”
Tech Support: “Ok…sir…do you have Internet access?”
Customer: “Huh? No. No Internet. I don’t even have a computer.”
Tech Support: “Ok, sir, you need a computer and an Internet account to access web sites.”
Customer: “Oh. Well, it didn’t say that when I mailed in the membership card. I want my money back.”

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This conversation took place through email.

Customer: “I need something off the web, and I don’t have any way to use a browser!”
Tech Support: “There’s a browser called ‘lynx’ that you can use from a shell.” (gives a brief description of how to use it)
Customer: “What’s lynx? I need a browser!”
Tech Support: (again mentions lynx and says how to use it)
Customer: “I need a browser. If you can’t help me, get someone else to answer my emails.”

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Student: “I’m not on a web site. I’m on www.ask.com.”

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I was browsing the Internet when my friend came over and said he made a website. He told me to go a particular URL. When I went there, though, the browser said it was invalid. So I went to Google to search for it, and when I got to Google, he said, “Oh yeah, that’s my web site.”

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I used to work at the IT Support Desk for a university. A librarian at one of our libraries was surfing the web one day and came across a site that said it was best viewed using the Internet Explorer browser. So she called me and said she needed a “browser” to view this site, and could we install a browser onto her system?

I told her that if she was viewing the site already, she was already using a browser, but, unsatisfied with that answer, she went over my head to the Directory of Libraries and said that we were being uncooperative about providing her with a browser.

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While working at the university computer lab one evening, a student came over to ask me why her computer was running so slowly. She said that she was just surfing the Internet. I went over and examined her screen and noticed that she had approximately 230 separate browser windows open in Internet Explorer.

She thought that she could only use each one once.

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On a recent commercial airing on U.S. televisions, 10-10-220 advertises a low-cost, long-distance choice without commitment. This one features Emmitt Smith and Elmarie Wendel in the first class section of an airplane.

At the end, ways to find more information on 10-10-220 includes their website, which they promote as simply: www.10-10-220.

I wonder how many people try to reach this and find it’s not accessible?

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Customer: “What do you mean I have to dial into the Internet every time I want to go to your web site? I thought I only had to do that the first time I used this software!”

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A customer, to his ISP:

Customer: “I found this [web] page on [another service] but the name you need to get there is too long. Shorten it.”

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Customer: “I am getting a ‘Page Cannot Be Displayed’ message.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try our home page.”
Customer: “That worked.”
Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try another page like www.cnn.com.”
Customer: “That worked too.”
Tech Support: “I don’t see any problems then.”
Customer: “Well I tried that page I was trying, and it did it again.”
Tech Support: “What’s the site’s address?”
Customer: “(address).com.”
Tech Support: “Hmmm. It looks like the site is down.”
Customer: “Yeah, I know it is. Can you fix it now, please?”
Tech Support: “It’s not one of our sites, so we can’t fix it.”
Customer: “What do you mean you can’t fix it? You are my Internet provider. You should be able to fix it.”
Tech Support: “No, we cannot. We do not own that site.”
Customer: “Let me speak to your supervisor. You’re just stupid and trying to brush me off.”

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We have a minor help site for the easiest to answer questions, and we’re always telling customers to go look at that first before phoning us. Anyway, my colleague was on the phone, and I overheard this conversation:

Tech Support: “Yeah, just go to our website it’s at www.[our company].com…yeah, three w’s, then a dot, then [our company], then a dot then ‘com’…yeah, that’s right. . . . What do you mean, how do you spell ‘dot’?”

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Customer: “Whenever I try to go to your sports site, I end up at this other page. I even typed the correct address in the bar to make sure that I got there.”
Tech Support: “What browser are you using? We need to check to see if your browser is new enough to view our sites.”
Customer: “Well…I must be using the newest browser. I’m using Yahoo. I think they’d update their browser! Hold on. Let me check Alta Vista really quick.”

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This happened to me when I was in high school. I was in the computer lab, and I overheard the lab moniter telling someone that if you bookmarked a page before it had finished loading you’d only get the partially loaded page every time you visited it from your bookmarks.

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On day my English teacher was trying to teach the class how to do research on the Internet.

Teacher: “What browser do you use to get on the Internet?”
Student: “Internet Explorer.”
Teacher: “No, no…the browser that you use to get around the Internet. Which do you use?”
Student: “Microsoft Internet Explorer.”
Teacher: “You connect with Internet Explorer, but what is your browser? You know, Yahoo, Webcrawler…?”
And for the rest of the semester he insisted that a search engine was the same thing as a browser. And every time he said it, I dug my fingers in the desk to keep from screaming at him.

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In my job on the helpdesk of an ISP I get a lot of callers who are ignorant and proud of it. I think they have decided that since they weren’t born with computer knowledge, it’s too late to learn anything now.

Yesterday’s customer was having problems with his email. I have given up asking, “What is your email client?” because I just get questioning grunts.

Tech Support: “What icon do you click on when you want to read your email?”
Customer: “No. I just use inbox.”
Through a leap of sheer intuition, I decided he was using the mail program on his browser. Now I needed to know which browser.

Tech Support: “What do you see on the page?”
Customer: “Well, your company’s web page is on here.”
Tech Support: “What’s in the top right hand corner of your screen?”
Customer: “An X.”
Tech Support: “What’s under the X?”
Customer: “An N.”
Tech Support: “Ok, so you’re using Netscape mail.”
Customer: “No, Alta Vista. I go to your home page, then I click on the links page, and then I click on Alta Vista. Then I go down to the inbox. It’s right next to the wheel thingy on the bottom.”
I searched the site. I can’t find any wheel thingy. I got him to describe exactly where this wheel is. Yes, it was on the bar on the bottom border of Netscape. He was using Netscape mail. I did tell him he didn’t have to go to Alta Vista to use Netscape mail. The frightening thing was that he had been using the Internet for years.

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I’m a librarian/network administrator for a large community college. We have 36 workstations in our library, ostensibly for research purposes, and we use Internet filtering software, due to some students viewing pornography in the library. Part of my job is to check Internet histories for attempted accesses to sites of this kind. One recent night I was doing this and discovered that a student had typed in — THIRTEEN TIMES — “www i want to buy a cd dot com.”

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I work for a small ISP. One day I received a phone call from a very angry customer who switched to us from another provider. He had problems installing our software. It took a long time to walk him through fixing the problems, because he had no computer skills (even though he was a programmer for the last 30 years) and rarely did what I asked him to.

I thought I actually made him happy until he asked me to change his Yahoo username and password. He assumed that since we provide access to the web page that we must control it as well. To this day I still hear that he calls in from time to time to yell at other techs because they won’t change his Yahoo username and password.

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Customer: “I can’t get to the page. The address is: http://[site]/~user/~home.htm.

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Sent to our tech support email address:

PLEASE GIVE ME HELP ON HOW TO DELETE HTTP://MULTIMEDIA.COM

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There was an URL floating around a while ago that pointed to a site that had a card trick on it. I sent the URL to my mom.

The web page asked you to choose a card out of a set of cards and then to click on a link. That link took you to a page with a new set of cards. The page stated that the card you picked was now missing from the set, because the site had read your mind and knew which card to remove. The way the trick worked was that none of the cards in the first set were in the second set — the second set contained similar cards to the first set, but none of the same ones. Many people first think that the web page somehow determined what card they had chosen even though they had done nothing on the computer to indicate any particular card.

A while after sending the link to my mom, I sent her an explanation for how the trick worked. She sent back email saying that she and her husband were rolling on the floor with laughter because they had spent the last half hour trying to fool the computer using various methods. One of them was this: her husband would go into another room in the house. Then my mom would call him on his cell phone using hers and tell him all the cards. Then he’d tell her that he’d chosen one — but not tell her which one — and then she would click on the link. They were frustrated and befuddled that the computer still “knew” which card to remove even though they had gone to great lengths to separate the person that chose the card from the computer.

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Emailed to the owner of a web page:

I got here by some nefarious route. I was trying to get to [an email address] or other similar sites. I distinctly dislike being hijacked in cyberspace to see something I did not ask to see. If this happens again I will make a formal complaint to my local federal district attorney. Thank you. Do not do this again.

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A customer emailed the following to his ISP:

hello, I have just published my first web page. What is my address? Never mind, found it, thank you.”

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A standard format for web sites containing images is to have a front page full of thumbnail images, and you click on the thumbnail image to get to the corresponding full-sized image. The reason you do this, of course, is to reduce the loading time and required bandwidth for the front page. Some people don’t understand this. I’ve seen a few thumbnail pages where the thumbnail images have the same file sizes as the large versions — they just appear smaller on the page.

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Two students, who had spent the better part of their class hour bragging about their computer skills, were becoming increasingly frustrated while browsing the Internet. They were trying to access a site that didn’t exist, but they were absolutely convinced the trouble was something else.

Student #1: “The damn keyboard locked up again!!!”
Actually, a page was loading.

Student #2: “Here, you have to pull the wires out.” (yanks network wires out of the back) “When that happens, just pull those wires out and shove ’em back in. Does it work now?”
Student #1: “No, it says, ‘Reading File…Done.'”
Student #2: “Oh, ok…that means your keyboard server is down. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

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I taught web design one summer to a group of underprivileged teenagers. At the end of the informal course, the “course assessor” (a senior academic who was formally in charge of the course but knew nothing about computers) came to see the students’ webpages. Upon looking at the first student’s monitor screen, she exclaimed, “Oh, that’s beautiful!”

The student looked perplexed. I walked around to look at the student’s screen, and saw…the Windows 95 desktop. The student hadn’t yet displayed her webpage. The academic was praising the beauty of the desktop.

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I’m a high school senior. One day, we were partnered with another class to do an Internet project. Web site design is a hobby of mine, so I happily displayed one of my pages to my partner in Internet Explorer. My partner, in a vain attempt to scare me or tease me or something, highlighted all the text on the web page and threatened to delete it.

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Being one of the people that interviews many prospective candidates for our computer consulting company, I came across many individuals who shouldn’t have made it past the first screening process. One was a college student for an entry-level position in web development, and I was simply trying to ease him into demonstrating his technical knowledge.

Me: “So tell me one of the ways in which you would try to get images to load faster in web pages?”
Him: “I’d do it in Java.”

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Student: “I can’t find the place to type in the URT.”
Teacher: “The what?”
Student: “You know the URT — the thing that starts with ‘www’?”
Teacher: “Oh, URL.”
Student: “Whatever. Where do I type it?”
Teacher: “On the blank line at the top.”
Student: “Where?”
Teacher: “At the top!”
Student: “I see no line.”
Teacher: “Is Netscape open?”
Student: “Does it have to be?”

——————————————————————————–

Our school requires all students to take a computer class. My class has to have some of the stupidest people I’ve ever met.

Teacher: “Does anyone know what HTML means?”
Student: “That means something?!”
Me: “Hypertext Markup Language.”
Teacher: “Correct, have any of you ever used HTML?”
I’m the only one who raises a hand.

Teacher: “Great! We’ll be doing some simple HTML by the end of the year.”
Me: (bangs head on desk)
Student: “How do you use HTML? Is it like typing?”

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I work as the graphic/computer designer at a printshop. A while back, I got a phone call from someone who works for a major ISP who asked to have an image scanned. He said he wanted me to scan in the image to a one meg JPEG file so he could email it to people and use it on web pages. He didn’t give me any dimensions, just the file size. I explained that this was rather large for use online and that even if he had a fast modem or a direct line, others might not.

Customer: “Oh, well I want it this way because, even though the Internet won’t allow you to send files that large, the ISP I work for can.”

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From a post to a mailing list:

I am trying to learn HTML, so for every web site I visit I try to view the WYSIWYG.

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I recently visited the site of a company which shall remain unnamed and was frustrated by the extremely slow screen refresh as I scrolled through the page. I investigated and discovered that instead of declaring a plain green background color for the page, they had created a one pixel GIF image which was ’tiled’ as a background.

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I run a web hosting service. This was sent via email from one of our customers:

um,u said that if i delete some stuff from my page i’ll get more space what do u mean by delete?do u mean by deleting the file or just taking a picture out of my page?i took saome pictures out of my page but it still said that i already used all my space

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A friend of mine just bought a new computer and asked me to show him how to download programs off the web. The poor guy is completely clueless with anything computer related. I showed him a couple of the more popular sites and started a download. While waiting, I made the comment about how slow telephone access can be. He sat there staring at the paper sheet icon move between the world and folder icons for a few moments, and then said: “Well if you move the folder closer to the Earth, then the program won’t have so far to travel, and it’ll download faster.” I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

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One evening around midnight, I decided to book a flight for the weekend using NorthWest Airlines Cybersaver deals. On their site, they provide a link to National Car Rental. The URL was http://www.nationalcar.com/cgi-bin/cyber1_res.pl. Upon completing the form for a car reservation, I received a message saying, “Your request has been sent.” I never received a confirmation. After trying three more times, I called tech support.

Me: “I tried reserving a car on your web site, but I do not get a response.”
Tech Support: “Let me get your reservation number, and I can look it up.”
Me: “I didn’t get one.”
Tech Support: “Well, let’s go to the web site and check it out. Go to www.nationalcar.com.”
Me: “Actually, I’m on a promotional part of your web site for NorthWest Airlines.”
Tech Support: “That’s not our web site. Our web site is at www.nationalcar.com.”
Me: “That’s where I am at.”
Tech Support: “No, it is not.”
Me: “Yes, I am at www.nationalcar.com/cgi-bi–”
Tech Support: “Sir, anything after the slash is not our web site. You are on someone else’s web site.”
Me: “Uh…no, that is your URL. The link points to your servers. The system is on your server.”
Tech Support: “No sir, it is not. You are on someone else’s server.”
I hung up. Upon arriving at the airport, I found I had three cars in my name. Apparently the system simply sends an email to the regional office, then they manually reserve a car. Some system, eh?

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I worked one summer at a Radio Shack that also owned its own ISP. My job dealt with the ISP billing, but since my bosses and coworkers knew I was proficient with computers, I would also be referred to tech support calls. One gentleman called in because he was clicking and nothing was happening. He was trying to set up Microsoft Outlook to check his email account that he received as an ISP customer, and he was, with good intent, following the instructions we provided on our web site. I asked him what his screen looked like, and it seemed he was in the right place, but I still walked him through the steps again, all the time hearing him say, “I’ve done that. I’m clicking, and nothing’s happening.” As a last resort, I decided to ask the customer if he had actually run the program. He responded by saying, “Well, I just thought this thing ran it for me.” I realized, to my great amusement, that he had been looking at our instructional web page the whole time and mistaking our screenshot of an Outlook screen for the actual program. I explained what was wrong, and all he had to say was, “You need to rewrite these instructions. They’re very misleading.”

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At work, an email was sent to me once requesting that I fill out an evaluation form on the web. However, if I were unable to access the site — well, take a look:

For those evaluators who are unable to access [the site] while completing evaluations, a CD ROM or disk-based version of the application may be requested through an order form on [the site].

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At the end of the year, last year, all the eighth graders at my school had to go to the computer lab to do two things: fill out an anonymous survey detailing all the things we could do with computers (to tell the school how much they had taught us) and to register for high school online. Both were done through a web browser.

Well, I got finished pretty early, but the kid sitting next to me was going a little bit slower. I was watching him, and soon he got to the screen which said that all of his information had been sent and he was done. The teachers had told us that once we finished we should exit out of the browser window and get off the Internet and then shut down the computer, but the kid went to another web site instead.

The head computer teacher had been watching, and she freaked out. She started yelling about how all of the information he submitted would be erased, that he could have broken something, and that he was in deep trouble. The assistant computer teacher came over, as did my social studies teacher, and they were all of the mind that because the kid surfed to some other web site, all the information he submitted would be sent back or something.

I would have told them it was all fine, but I was laughing too hard. I don’t think I could have gotten the words out.

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Wanting to use the bash UNIX shell on a computer that’s being set up, I did a Google search and came to a site that had several compressed tarball files (roughly the UNIX equivalent of a ZIP archive for PCs) archived there. The site had a message unlike anything I’ve ever seen before:

Selecting any .tar.gz file will send you a listing of that file. From the listing, you can selectively download individual files from within that archive.
Thinking a message that moronic had to be a mistake, I clicked on bash-2.04.tar.gz and saw that I was wrong. The index listed a whopping nineteen screenfuls of individual files, one per line — with hundreds of individual downloads necessary to download the complete archive. You had to go to the first file, click the filename, pull down the file menu, select “Save frame as…,” click OK, and hit the browser’s back button. For a couple hundred separate files. The entire archive would have taken me about 25 unattended seconds to download. Downloading each file individually, well, I downloaded six of the couple hundred files in three minutes and gave up.

I looked around for the webmaster, saw an education/work history that suggested a competent computer person, and wrote a careful note saying, “You have a massive bug on your site,” and then explained (but not in detail) why hundreds of individual downloads are a user’s nightmare. I used analogies; I pointed out that he wouldn’t like to have to check out hundreds of pages separately if he wanted to borrow a novel from the library.

To no avail. He said:

It’s intentional. My link can’t handle those kinds of downloads, but my site is the only one where you can look inside the tarballs without spending hours downloading them. It’s a special service.

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A former co-worker was called to solve a problem. The problem was that a customer called saying that his 23-inch workstation monitor screen was cracked. The customer was a mining company in the Andes mountains. (We live in Chile, South America.)
Upon checking the manuals, they found the monitor’s maximum operating altitude above sea level was lower than where the mine was.

My friend’s superviser was worried that the monitor might blow up in someone’s face and create a major incident. They sent him right away with a replacement.

When he arrived, they took him to where the workstation was. He took a long look at it, then licked his fingers and wiped the screen. The monitor hadn’t been cracked. It was just dirty.

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We do a lot of business in Central and South America, which generally requires that we have a translator on the phone. Usually, it’s our sales rep, who should know better, but that’s beside the point. One particular day I was at my wit’s end. The simple function of creating a user account for these people had already taken an hour and a half, and they just weren’t getting it. They’d speak in rapid-fire Spanish for a while, the sales rep would translate for me, I’d make a response, and it would begin all over again. Occasionally, I’d hear the client make comments in English, so I know he could at least halfway understand me. I’d also explained time and again that this was explained in the manuals, which an outside company had translated into Spanish specifically for this client. I was told that they’d much rather be on the phone with us while they tried this.

Finally, it got to the point where even the non-technical sales rep was tearing out her hair. I was just about to go get my manager, seeing as how I’d now been on the phone for nearly an hour and a half, when the customer suddenly piped up, in English, “Huh, you know — I think that we will try reading the manuals, and then call you back if we have any problems!”

Thank goodness for the mute button on the phone.

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The Computer Museum in Boston is a very cool place and should not be judged by this anecdote. In 1995, I was there with my father. In a place with the first virtual reality machine ever built, Danny Hillis’ Tinkertoy computer, and other lovely objects, their star attraction is a giant plywood model of a computer that you can walk around in. In fact, you can go on a tour of it, led by a young gentleman who explains how computers work as you went.

The tour guide failed to make a stellar impression early in the tour (Did YOU know they’re called microchips because they’re really, really small?), but we hung on bravely. That is, until he got to explaining what a floppy is. He pulled a 3 1/2″ disk out of his pocket and said:

Tour Guide: “A lot of people don’t know why they call it a floppy because, you see here–” (shakes disk) “–it’s not floppy. But you see that’s just the outside.” (pries case apart, removes interior, shakes it) “Inside, you see, it’s floppy. That’s why they call it that. You need floppies because sometimes the computer can have what’s called a fall-down. I dunno why they call it a fall-down, but that’s why you need the floppies or else you lose the stuff in the computer.”
It was at this point that my father leaned over to me and said, “I really don’t think I can take any more of this tour.” I agreed, and we snuck off to explore on our own, but in retrospect I almost wish we’d stayed. I mean, suppose he finished by showing us the giant plywood cup holder!

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This story was told by people from Motorola and is supposedly included in every microcontroller training course Motorola gives.

Test flights of F-16’s were being conducted in Israel. The F-16’s were doing low height rounds. On approach to the Dead Sea, the whole navigation system suddenly reset itself. The daring pilot landed the bird. HQ called up Motorola and ordered a team on the spot ASAP. The ground tests went perfectly, but every time the bird went airborn, it rebooted.

The pilots were getting restless. Flying on the border of hostile territory without navcom, with the Arabs pointing their earth-to-air missiles at anything that moves, wasn’t that pleasant. Neither was debugging the whole navcom in-flight. Then someone figured it out.

The height of the Dead Sea relative to world sea level is -400 meters. As soon as the F-16 reached sea level, the navcom did a divide by zero, crashed, and rebooted.

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What follows is an urban legend. It is not true. It contains several historical and cultural inaccuracies. It does, however, make a compelling case for its moral.

SuperMac records a certain number of technical support calls at random, to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. By wild “luck,” they managed to catch the following conversation on tape.

Some poor SuperMac TechSport got a call from some middle level official…from the legitimate government of Trinidad. The fellow spoke very good English and fairly calmly described the problem.

It seemed there was a coup attempt in progress at that moment. However, the national armoury for that city was kept in the same building as the Legislature, and it seems that there was a combination lock on the door to the armoury. Of the people in the capitol city that day, only the Chief of the Capitol Guard and the Chief Armourer knew the combination to the lock, and they had already been killed.

So, this officer of the government of Trinidad continued, the problem is this. The combination to the lock is stored in a file on the Macintosh, but the file has been encrypted with the SuperMac product called Sentinel. Was there any chance, he asked, that there was a “back door” to the application, so they could get the combination, open the armoury door, and defend the Capitol Building and the legitimately elected government of Trinidad against the insurgents?

All the while he is asking this in a very calm voice, there is the sound of gunfire in the background. The Technical Support guy put the person on hold. A phone call to the phone company verified that the origin of the call was in fact Trinidad. Meanwhile, there was this mad scramble to see if anybody knew of any “back doors” in the Sentinel program.

As it turned out, Sentinel uses DES to encrypt the files, and there was no known back door. The Tech Support fellow told the customer that aside from trying to guess the password, there was no way through Sentinel, and that they’d be better off trying to physically destroy the lock.

The official was very polite, thanked him for the effort, and hung up. That night, the legitimate government of Trinidad fell. One of the BBC reporters mentioned that the casualties seemed heaviest in the capitol, where for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire from the government forces.

Ok, so they shouldn’t have kept the combination in so precarious a fashion. But it does place “I can’t see my Microsoft Mail server” complaints in a different sort of perspective, does it not?

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under Jokes (Collections). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.