X-News: utulsa rec.humor:34351
From: lemberg@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Daniel Lemberg)
Date: 4 Sep 1993 22:04:10 -0400

I've had some funny ones over here, some of my favorites:

	Guy buys a pack of 3 1/2 inch disks, opens up the box. Reads
directions of back of box: "Remove disk from jacket and insert in drive". So
he pulls out a knife and saws off the casing on the disk, inserting the metal
disk that is left into the drive. Then he comes to me complaining that he is
having trouble saving his document.

	Saw some lady in the back of the room repeatedly rebooting one of
our PC's. Asked her what was wrong, she said she the machine wouldn't give
her disk back.

	A guy comes up to me and loudly complains that our disk drives are
broken, he saves stuff onto his disk and next time he uses them his file is
gone. I ask him to show me what he is doing. Well, on the back of his disk
box it said "format before use", so guess what he did?

	A UNIX user calls and says he can't get elm (an e-mail program) to run
properly. His account hasn't been set up yet, so he doesn't have a .profile
which properly sets his terminal type. We have a default .profile in the
directory /usr/skel. So I tell him to type "cp /usr/skel/profile .profile"
For some reason he keeps typing in the command wrong, and finally ends up
with "cp /usr/skel/profile profile", so I say just type "mv profile .profile"
to which he reponds "Well, thats MUCH easier, why didn't you just say so
in the first place?"

	I get a phone call from a PC user who has some memory resident junk
which is screwing up his program. So after having him list out his autexec
and config.sys, I tell him to just boot his machine again. He says Well, ok,
and I hear a crashing, tinkling noise.

	Word for the Mac will disk-swap if a file is to big to fit in
memory, in other words it will place information that would normally be in
the machines memory into files upon the hard drive. Well, this lady was
editing a 750k doc on a Mac with 1 meg of memory, off of her floppy drive.
Unsurprisingly, it soon told her that her disk was full. So she trashed all
the files on her disk.

	Same lady calls me from home. Her Mac wont boot, she says. The last
thing she did was trash all the system files. I say, "Didn't I tell you that
a good guideline to follow is to never delete anything unless you know what
it is?" Sure, she says, but she had read her manual and knew what these were.

	A new PC user reads an article on graphics co-processers. So he buys
a 486 66 chip and solders it onto his graphics card, and wonders why his
machine refuses to boot.

And much, much more...

Remember, you're not a computer consultant unless you've had to talk down
PC homiciders!