Geeks are Funny Too





Customer: "Your sound card is defective and I want a new one."
Tech Support: "What seems to be the problem?"
Customer: "The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming
out of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the
left. It's defective."
Tech Support: "You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker
to the right side of the machine and vice versa."
Customer: (sputter) (click)
Tech Support: (snicker)

                       ********************
Customer: "I'd like to return this scanner."
Store Clerk: "Excuse me?"
Customer: "This scanner I bought. I paid eighty dollars for this
scanner, and it doesn't work!"
Store Clerk: "Uh . . . sir, that's a trackball."
Customer: "No, it isn't. It says 600 dpi tracking resolution right
here!"
                       ********************

Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having
problems:
the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed
strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. 
I walked her through the basics, then came over and printed out a test 
sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job
to the
printer. As the paper started coming out, she yanked it out and showed 
it to me. 
I told her to WAIT until the paper came out on its own. Problem solved.

                       ********************

I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet
division for about a month when I had a customer call with a
problem I just couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All the
other
colors would print fine, which truly baffled me because the
only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance,
green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine.
Every
color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had
the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and
reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for
help; they offered no new ideas.

After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the
customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she asked
quietly,
"Should I try printing on a piece of white paper instead
of this yellow construction paper?"

                        *******************

A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's
tech support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't
find the printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the
printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find
it!

                         *****************

Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay,
and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the
two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I
picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got
the message, 'No Carrier,' on my screen. What's wrong?"

                         *****************

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows
installation that had gone terribly wrong.
Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on
my home computer."  (Training stresses that we are "not the Soft-
ware Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.)
Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"
Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't
initialized."
Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"
Customer:(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk.
Would you like to initialize it'?"
Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"
Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to
be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read
them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only
set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

                            ******************

For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from
someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few
minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between
our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards.
She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed
look on her face.

She called the teacher over and explained that no matter what she
typed,
nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was
hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced.

I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

They both jumped back, silenced. "What the . . . " the teacher
said.

I typed, "I said leave me alone!"

The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!" It
was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation
between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.

Me: "Don't touch me!"

Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."

Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!" Etc. Finally, I couldn't
contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair laughing.

After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red.
Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.

                           ***************

I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to
load a program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program. My
friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good.
He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time
he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he kept getting
the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to press only
on the very top of the key. When I taught him about the shift key, he
thought I was a genius.

                           *****************
This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied"
message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his
user name and password in capital letters.
Tech Support: "OK, let's try once more, but use lower case
letters."
Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."

                           ****************
Email from a friend:
"CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"

                           ****************

My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He
noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations
with her arms crossed across her chest and staring at the screen. After
about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position
only
now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help
and she replied, "It's about time! I pushed the F1 button over twenty
minutes ago!"



New Microsoft motto: Never assume you know more than the audience I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week. One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it... Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth referred to as "MPM"), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix-style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated. An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH. The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts. The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec. The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well. This assertion and counter-assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact, David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. Of course, David Korn is the author of the Korn shell. Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink-cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone else's?
What's in a name? The residents of Silicon Valley are more confused than usual after a billboard campaign by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of America used this line in an ad slogan: "MS: It's not a software company" exploiting the fame of a certain company to draw attention to an altogether worthier cause. Requests to comment on the campaign have been met by a surly silence by Microsoft, which doesn't relish the association of ideas, but is painfully aware that it can't afford to appear insensitive over such an issue. Seasoned information technology professionals will have no trouble telling the two MS's apart: One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. The other is a disease.
The Evolution of a Programmer High School/Jr.High =================== 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 END First year in College ===================== program Hello(input, output) begin writeln('Hello World'); end. Senior year in College ====================== (defun hello (print (cons 'Hello (list 'World)))) New professional ================ #include void main(void) { char *message[] = {"Hello ", "World"}; int i; for(i = 0; i < 2; ++i) printf("%s", message[i]); printf("\n"); } Seasoned professional ===================== #include #include class string { private: int size; char *ptr; public: string() : size(0), ptr(new char('\0')) {} string(const string &s) : size(s.size) { ptr = new char[size + 1]; strcpy(ptr, s.ptr); } ~string() { delete [] ptr; } friend ostream &operator <<(ostream &, const string &); string &operator=(const char *); }; ostream &operator<<(ostream &stream, const string &s) { return(stream << s.ptr); } string &string::operator=(const char *chrs) { if (this != &chrs) { delete [] ptr; size = strlen(chrs); ptr = new char[size + 1]; strcpy(ptr, chrs); } return(*this); } int main() { string str; str = "Hello World"; cout << str << endl; return(0); } Master Programmer ================= [ uuid(2573F8F4-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820) ] library LHello { // bring in the master library importlib("actimp.tlb"); importlib("actexp.tlb"); // bring in my interfaces #include "pshlo.idl" [ uuid(2573F8F5-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820) ] cotype THello { interface IHello; interface IPersistFile; }; }; [ exe, uuid(2573F890-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820) ] module CHelloLib { // some code related header files importheader( #include #include #include #include #include "pshlo.h" #include "shlo.hxx" #include "clsid.h" int _cdecl main( int argc, char * argv[] ) { HRESULT hRslt; IHello *pHello; ULONG ulCnt; IMoniker * pmk; WCHAR wcsT[_MAX_PATH]; WCHAR wcsPath[2 * _MAX_PATH]; // get object path wcsPath[0] = '\0'; wcsT[0] = '\0'; if( argc 1) { mbstowcs(wcsPath, argv[1], strlen(argv[1]) + 1); wcsupr(wcsPath); } else { fprintf(stderr, "Object path must be specified\n"); return(1); } // get print string if(argc 2) mbstowcs(wcsT, argv[2], strlen(argv[2]) + 1); else wcscpy(wcsT, L"Hello World"); printf("Linking to object %ws\n", wcsPath); printf("Text String %ws\n", wcsT); // Initialize the OLE libraries hRslt = CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_MULTITHREADED); if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt)) { hRslt = CreateFileMoniker(wcsPath, &pmk); if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt)) hRslt = BindMoniker(pmk, 0, IID_IHello, (void **)&pHello); if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt)) { // print a string out pHello-PrintSz(wcsT); Sleep(2000); ulCnt = pHello-Release(); } else printf("Failure to connect, status: %lx", hRslt); // Tell OLE we are going away. CoUninitialize(); } return(0); } Apprentice Hacker =================== #!/usr/local/bin/perl $msg="Hello, world.\n"; if ($#ARGV = 0) { while(defined($arg=shift(@ARGV))) { $outfilename = $arg; open(FILE, "" . $outfilename) || die "Can't write $arg: $!\n"; print (FILE $msg); close(FILE) || die "Can't close $arg: $!\n"; } }else { print ($msg); } 1; Experienced Hacker =================== #include "Think of the Internet as a highway." There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor. Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net. . . A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant- vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone. AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120. No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning. NO OFFRAMPS. None. Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
I was musing on similarities between Santa Claus and system administrators. Consider: 1. Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny. 2. When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal. 3. Santa seldom answers your mail. 4. When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he's got, he says, "Elves make it for me." 5. Santa doesn't care about your deadlines. 6. Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves. 7. Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions. 8. Santa laughs entirely too much. 9. Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME. 10. Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence.
COMPREHENDING ENGINEERS ñ TAKE ONE What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers? Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets. COMPREHENDING ENGINEERS ñ TAKE TWO The graduate with a Science degree asks "Why does it work?" The graduate with an Engineering degree asks "How does it work?" The graduate with an Accounting degree asks "How much will it cost?" The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks "Do you want fries with that?" COMPREHENDING ENGINEERS ñ TAKE THREE Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last said "Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?" COMPREHENDING ENGINEERS ñ TAKE FOUR "Normal peopleÖbelieve that if it ainít broke, donít fix it. Engineers believe that if it ainít broke, it doesnít have enough features yet." COMPREHENDING ENGINEERS ñ TAKE FIVE An architect, an artist, and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to spend time with the wife or a mistress. The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid foundation for an enduring relationship. The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress because of the passion and mystery he found there. The engineer said "I like both." "Both?" Engineer: "Yeah, if you have a wife and a mistriss, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman and you can go to the lab and get some work done."
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

fsgreen@gwis.com