Quick laughs, funny things people say when they don't know how computers work.

[SupraMan]

I visited the Apple store in NY, during its Grand opening. a quick overview of the store, its 2 stories, and the stairs are made of glass.

Oh and they have a bunch of Apple computers in the store as well.

ANyway... I was looking at the dual 1 Ghz G4, and I asked an employee if I could see the heatsink inside. Well, it was locked so it was a no-go to the heatsink. So I started to talk to the guy and how Steve Jobs is anal about computer sound. (I.e. Fans)
So, knowing apples never use fans, I was wondering if the dual HDDs were making any whines or otherwise loud noises, I asked the employee if he knew anything about it.

Now this is the funny part... he said, "I don't think you can hear the Hard Drives, but thats because it has 2 processors. 1 for each hard drive."

Man that one blew me away. I was stunned. I didn't know what to say.


Please post some funny stories that you've had, as it is 2 AM where I am and my endorfins are rolling and I laugh at pretty much anything.

[eab]

Wellcome to the Forms! Thats pretty funny... Don't really have my own good story.

This proply belongs in genral computer related descuion... you would get more replies that way...

Wellcome to the forms again!!!!!!!!!

[Lusankya]

Welcome to the Fun house

I don't have any stories either...

Though if some saleman told me that... I'd quirk an eyebrow at him.. give him a funny look and flat out deadpan "You don't know anything about what you're selling do you" as a staement.. since a question would be pointless seeing as he had already answered it

[Zerileous]

lol, i dont have any funny stories, one of these days im gonna get off from school and go to best buy and make my own funny stories (i.e. confuse the sales person) lets see "whats the cas latancy of the ram in the machine? How many deciples does it put out overall? What brand is the motherboard? What type of thermal interface material was used to attatch the HSF to the CPU? that would be funny, see what they had to say. I especially like the cas latency q.

[Lusankya]

No fair doing it at Best Buy.. you know the ppl that work there wont know crap.. You gotta go tot the smaller stores and do them.. if they think they got the IQ to sell parts.. they better have the IQ to know what you are talking about.

Best Buy Sales People + Sheep = Sheeple

[Zerileous]

lol, there are a few places around, theres a place, Z-Computer, little store, overpriced, but then again im spoiled with online pricing

[RoadWarrior]

In general I usually find it best to treat computer sales staff as complete morons until proven otherwise.

I have conversations like this . . . .
RW:I want a socket 370 heatsink/fan cheapest you've got.
Droid:What for?
RW: (patiently) cooling my processor.
Droid: What processor?
RW: (sighs, knowing where this is going) a K6-2.
Droid: That's a ummm socket 5 processor, it won't work.
RW: (sigh) it's a socket 7 and yes it will.
Droid: We have socket 7 heatsinks you know.
RW: Hmmm last month you didn't have any and were trying to sell me a P3 system, how much?
Droid: $25
RW: What!!! how much is your cheapest socket 370 hsf.
Droid: $15 but it won't work.
RW: Ohhhhhkay, can I see them both?
Droid: (rolls eyes) Okay.
(gets down one white box with a typed label saying socket 7 cooler on the end, and one gaudy blue, yellow, green and red, "super 370 cooler make your PC run for happy life" box"
I open the first, and put it on the counter, open the second and put it on the counter, AND THEY"RE THE EXACT SAME!!!)
Droid: Careful you don't get them mixed up!
RW: Right, ahem, I'll take the socket 370 cooler please, maybe I've got a socket 370 chip after all, I thought it was a K6 but now I seem to recall it says intel celeron on it.
Droid: (brow clouds for a count of ten, then clears) (Brightly) yes that's a socket 370 chip, and that would be the right cooler then.
RW: Okay I'LL TAKE IT!

RW finally leaves store after half an hour of BS goes home and fits the socket 370 cooler to his K6-2, shaking his head.

Road Warrior

[Lusankya]

hehe I would have stopped that conversation much sooner with something along the lines of

"I asked for a heatsink.. not your opinion. You can either sell me what I asked for or yap at me for awhile then sell me what I asked for anyways or I can turn around and give my money to someone else... your choice"

Sometimes I have SOOOooo little patience with twits that try to sell me stuff :)

[CaptBill]

Great Tales

[djb23]

My personal favorite is the "Any key" one. The one where people call in to tech support asking which key is the "Any" key because it says to "Hit any key to continue".

Here's what makes it so damned golden though. Compaq finally decided to change the message to "Hit the Enter key to continue" to save the tech support calls. Did their call volume go down? Nope. "It says Hit the Enter key to continue, but it will also continue when i hit the space bar or actually any other key"

*sigh* se la vie.

In truth, I love when people say those things, because I know I will end up with their money eventually...

[h20link]

my best:

I was helping a friend buy a new machine at Best Buy

(now before you jump on me, know that I made him buy a Computer Shopper magazine and I pointed out to him all the great mail-order prebuilts he could get for waaay cheaper but he wanted to go to best buy, I couldn't make him listen to reason)

So we're looking at machines and I say, "I thought you had some machines with RDRAM."

"nope", says the sales guy

I ask him if they have any DDR machines..."nope" he says.
So at this time (maybe 8 months ago) you couldn't even get a DDR or RDRAM machine @ BB. So then the sales guy asks me:

"what's the difference between DDR and RDRAM?"

well at that point I didn't even know what to say... and that's pretty much how every Best Buy experience goes.

[djb23]

I tend to give Best Buy guys a lot of leeway. They tend to be 16 year old kids, so its usually not their fault for not knowing.

Unfortunately, people go get their stuff there and listen to them and think its the gospel. :rolleyes:

[Penguin4x4]

sigh...........Salesmen are Salesmen. If you don't do your homework,(help guides written by sheperads) you (the sheep) have to trust the salesmen(the wolf) because you don't know about technology, or cars, or whatever. Sheperds(us) scare the hella outa wolves. Remember that.

[bob_the_d]

my friend and i were sitting at his house and somehow got around to talking to the classic joke about your typical idiot who calls tech support asking about his broken "cup holder"... and then he reached down to his computer, yanked at the cd-rom drive on the top bay and tells me that this is his old 32x cdrom that broke and he now uses as an actual light cup holder.

weird, eh?

[Fedorenko]

Once had some idiot at school that said he ahd a P5 200000MHZ processor with 6000gig of hard disk space, and 2gig of ram.

I went roudn to his house, which was more like a cardboard box, and on his desk, was on of those plastic icea (or ikea) 'computers' with P5 writen on the fornt with Nikko.

[jazztrumpet216]

ROFL. One of my friends once told me he had an in with a shopkeeper in town who sold computers, and he got an Intel sample of the P5 (this was about a year ago, keep in mind). I didn't wanna go anywhere near his house, so I went to the store instead. Got some misc. computer stuff, some AS2 (at the time AS3 wasn't out) and some CD-R's and stuff, and casually ask the owner who was ringing me up if it was true about the P5. His response was something along the lines of "WTF is a P5? This dude you're talkin to ain't got a clue." I laughed for awhile about that one.

[RoadWarrior]

I've got a P5, no really, it's the code for a 5V socket 4 pentium, 60 or 66 Mhz. :D

I needed a Pentium board (P54/P55C ;-) ) a while back so went to this junk shop that gets lots of old parts, and asked, and the strange mittel european owner tried to sell me a 486 board, with a dx2/66 on it, telling me it was for a pentium because it had "long memory slots" meaning the 72 pin SIMMs, he thought every board he had with 72 pin SIMM slots was for a pentium, even the one out of a PS/2 model 80. LMAO
Stupid suspicious old fart thought I was trying to cheat him when I tried to tell him different.

Road Warrior

[trdsw20]

Fun stories!!!
Best Buy employess look real bad about now!!!

I have a story not much of a conversation piece but here we go:

Theres a cyber cafe (more or less)in the city that you can go and play games or anything else that please you. I believe that I had walked in at 10 pm and when I got there there were 2 kids downloading music at there comp. I didnt pay much attention at that point.

2hours later...
My eyes got pretty sore and I decided to call it a night so as I was leaving these 2 kids were sitting down still catching some mp3s. Then after DLing songs for about 2 hours they decided to call it a night. The method of transporting there at least 2 hours worth of songs on to a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

I was astonished and also laughing. They asked the stors attendant why it wouldnt hold the files and the guy told them that they need at least 3 floppies for a song and about 50 for all the songs that they had

[Carnil]

Originally posted by djb23
My personal favorite is the "Any key" one. The one where people call in to tech support asking which key is the "Any" key because it says to "Hit any key to continue".

My computer has an "Any" key. While I was setting it up and installing Windows, it kept freezing, and eventually I got tired of hitting the "reset" button. So I re-labeled it.

[nfl2k2]

gotta love the classic Sneakernet connection :D

[drunkmonkey]

My next set of mods wil include a new "Any Key" on the comp.
I usually go into best buy, comp usa, etc. when i know exactly what i want and want it quick. I usually don't even like asking them where stuff is, i hate dealing w/ the sales ppl.

Oh yeah! forgot bout this one:
I put linux on a comp
(this is back in my pre-oc-forums.com era) my dad got me from a local comp shop, well i ran into some big trouble and couldn't get rid of lilo.So finally i called them up, the convinced me they needed to work on it. The solution was format /mbr but they had to charge me $60 to fix it. Later they tell me that windws starts in the background and then linux loads and the only way to get it to work is to buy another hd from them, lol. I never called them back. Later on when i knew moe bout comps i was dragged in to that store with my dad so he could but some speakers ND i FOUND OUT THEY NO NOTHING ABOUT LINUX nd my prob, THEY COULDN'T SPELL IT!! what punks. I wish i had the knowledge way back then(many years ago) to know they were ripping me off.

[AltecXP]

when i 1st got my e-machines i put a 20gb drive in it and installed ME (i was stupid) well after 2 days it crashed so i called the comp store and they tried to tell m that it was because i had sdram and my comp used ddr, i read them the book for the comp and they said "ohh bring it in" and when i got it back it had 95 on it and 1/2 my ram was gone i was like wtf! so i went back and told them my problem and they said that my comp couldnt handle 2 sticks of sdram that 128mb was WAY tomuch and "i though Me was just another name for 95"

[Gerst240]

my favorite thing is to "play" with the best buy machines when they are in there little presentation mode you can hit alt ctrl and + and it will exit it then have whatever fun your in the mood for that day usally if i am at best buy i am in the not happy mood so i do something like set a group policy that doesnt let them do anyhting and set the color to 256 then the resolution to 640x480 im sure that no one would buy a computer that looked like crap so i think of it as saving people from buying over priced junk :)

[Captain Slug]

Originally posted by Gerst240
my favorite thing is to "play" with the best buy machines when they are in there little presentation mode you can hit alt ctrl and + and it will exit it then have whatever fun your in the mood for that day usally if i am at best buy i am in the not happy mood so i do something like set a group policy that doesnt let them do anyhting and set the color to 256 then the resolution to 640x480 im sure that no one would buy a computer that looked like crap so i think of it as saving people from buying over priced junk :)

I LOVE DOING THAT!
That or changing all the screen savers to marquee with a password. "Best Buy sux!"........"Best Buy sux!"

:)

[RoadWarrior]

Heh just saw a job ad for a new computer center in an office store. Said something like "Motivated sales professional wanted for computer sales and customer assistance, must have proven sales track record, and customer service skills" etc etc and stuck at the bottom as almost a "by the way" is "Computer experience an advantage but not essential"

So, you get the guy who could sell two Pontiac Aztechs a week, that typed up his resume with one finger on the family heirloom 1942 Crown Imperial .
Road Warrior

[FunkDaMonkMan]

be4 i knew anything... and i mean anything about comps.... we had a best buy guy convince us that we needed win ME on a comp to network it. IDIOT! eeesh!

[drunkmonkey]

Originally posted by funkdamonkman
be4 i knew anything... and i mean anything about comps.... we had a best buy guy convince us that we needed win ME on a comp to network it. IDIOT! eeesh!

lol, windows ME is the only Windows OS I haven't been able to network with correctly, lol.

[o770]

oh boy! i would love so much to translate an entire section of a brazilian computing website about funny things that happen when you call the technical support.
there are things such as the technician throwing a memory stick on the desk for discharging statics, and someone who said the computer glass-holder was not working anymore, which by the way was the cd-rom.

[djb23]

Windows ME --> Many Errors

[drunkmonkey]

Originally posted by djb23
Windows ME --> Many Errors

Amount of time to install a scanner:

Win98: 3-4 mins
WinXP: <1 minute
WinME: >5 hours:D

Boy do i hate that os

[Audioaficionado]

That CD tray cup holder is pretty funny.

How about when someone puts out an alarming ALL CAPS alarm that there is an undetectible virus that will destroy their computer if they don't use windows explorer to find and delete. Of course they wipe out an importaint OS file and screw themselves up bad.

I once changed the suffix of the IO.SYS file and changed a bootscreen.bmp to IO.SYS thinking that's how you changed bootscreens. Pretty funny huh? I didn't think so at the time however. The OS knew the difference and refused to boot. I couldn't find that original IO file in DOS no matter what I did and ended up formatting and reinstalling.

I subscribed to PC Magazine and read up on all the jargon. Took me almost a year before I knew all what they were talking about. By the time I'd read those rags for two years, I knew enough to not get suckered by those fast talking sales guys. I loved going in there just to make them squirm.

Now it's no big deal. I just go in and get my stuff. I only ask 'em what shelf they moved the goodie I came in for. They've got to earn a living in a tough arena. Circuit City sales people have to earn $2k per month or they're history. CC is thinking of bumping that up to $3k. That's earnings not gross sales. Now you know why those guys always give you the hussle and always offer to ring you up right there as soon as you pick something up.

[o770]

there are many ones like that about the cup holder but i think most is too hard to beleive its real.. like one the guy on the other end from the technical support asked the person what was the last thing saying on the screen (you say screen but we say just monitor in portuguese): "samsung", the person answered. hehe.

[Lusankya]

I was working as tech support for a large chicago ISP.. had just started about a month or 2 beforehand and was still learning actually having to tell ppl what to do.. I got some lady on the phone saying she couldn't dial in or soemthing.. basicly it got to the point that I had her crawling around the floor tracing cables to make sure everything was hooked up. She kept telling me her phone cord had 3 prongs on it.

I of course, still being a newbie to communicationg with a customer was suddenly in a panic.. a 3 pronged phone cord?? WTF is this something I never heard about..?

So I am having her trace wires back and forth for at least 10 minutes before she traces this "phone cord" back to a fax machine.. Oh and it wasn't a phone cord of course.. it was the damn power cable.

I was still new enough to assume that no one could be stupid enough to mistake a phone cord for a power plug.. She proved me wrong

This is just 1 of many tales... As another example.. we had 1 guy.. some much older (like 65+) jewish/hebrew cultural teacher that called us at least 4 or 5 times a week for problems.. he was our nightmare... you could hardly understand him, it sounded like he had gravel in his mouth.. he was using a mac laptop that was pretty well hacked up to let him type hebrew in the right to left direction... We kept files on each call and most people on average had maybe a page or 2-3 for the more troublesome systems... on average with the scroll rate of VI these ppl would scroll to the end in about 3 seconds...
We would sit our new hires in front of this guys file and let them watch it scroll for over 5 minutes before it got to the end.

Anyone who's ever used *NIX and seen VI scrolling like mad.. knows just how long 5 minutes really is...

[djb23]

Old people are the worst. I don't fault young people for not knowing something, because they may not have hear dof something or they may not have the know-how as to how to GET the info they need to learn. Old people, however, have absolutely no excuse.

[CraxySerge]

I was on some website and they had the funniest tech support calls which you could listen to. One guy with a Mac called and and tried to figure out why his Mac didn't work, so the rep started asking the guy questions and it turnes out that he tried to add more RAM by sawing off the back portion of the computer case, and sauldering on more RAM. Some people I tell ya.

[Lusankya]

We can't forget the woman callign in saying satan was showing up on her computer.

Or the guy calling to scream and blame the poor tech for not ebing able to get him online. I hear it helps to actually own a modem

[WyrmMaster]

I used to work for MSN doing dialup tech support, today was my last day after 8 months. yah, iv got some stories. My best though was this lady who had some problem, i dont remember what, that i had to have her call her OEM for. The conversation:


ME: Who is your computer manufacture?
HER: I dont know.
ME: What does it say on the computer?
HER: Samsung.
ME: I think thats your monitor, what does it say on the front of the tower?
HER: The what?
ME: The big box that everything plugs into.
HER: (sounding very proud of herself) OOO, YOU mean the HARDDRIVE!!

[cruc1fy]

I was listening to a radio show about computers one day, and the guy was talking about stupid people getting tech support. The one thing I remember was some lady calling up and saying her computer didn't work. It would boot to windows fine (i'm sure she didn't actually use the word "boot," though), but afterwards she couldn't do anything. The tech support guy said, "will you please double click on my computer?" She tries, and, natually, nothing happens.
This goes on for a little while. He has her follow the cables to see if the mouse is plugged in. After a few minutes, she tries again, and the tech support guy hears a little "clink clink" noise.
Turns out she was taking the mouse and hitting the icons with it.

... people are dumb.


With Win95 you used to be able to turn off the Start Menu (by right clicking it and selecting close). Afterwards, you couldn't bring it back up without restarting the computer. I used to do that at computer stores.