Post your funny stories from non-techies

[Aether176]

No doubt most of us here are the go-to tech guys for our families and friends. Or maybe you work at a job that deals with computers or other tech. So I'm sure we all have those moments: we say something that we think is super simple but utterly baffles the non-techies around us and it either cracks us up or makes us do a great big facepalm. I'm sure we can all get a good laugh out of other people's troubles, so share your stories here. I'll start.

Just last night, my mother asked me to find a movie for her. She's barely able to use email (and even asks me how to turn on and off the computer sometimes), let alone do anything else online. So instead of forcing her to navigate through Netflix (and God knows she'd never be able to), I just found the movie on Netflix for her and created a shortcut to its page on her desktop. When she asked where the movie was, I said "It's on your desktop." She turned off the monitor, moved it to the side, and started shuffling the papers on her computer desk around. She did this for a good minute and a half before turning to me and saying "Where? I don't see any tape on the desk. You mean on your desk?" I couldn't stop laughing.

So what funny stories do you all have? I'd love to hear them!

[Beausiph]

I work at a local Staples, and had a customer come in looking to plug their printer into their computer. I then point out the USB cables to her, where she tells me it isn't what she needs - because she has a new a "TOP END DELL" (her words exaclty) and it doesn't use these old connections. She then explains the cable as a regular USB end for the printer, and a headphone jack like end for the PC...... WHAT?

[Night]

So...I work at a Telco. Frontline sales staff and that sort of stuff. I 100% guarantee you every day, I get at least one person who I know isnt trolling...but I sometimes suspect they are.

Example: Today I had a lady come in who wanted to buy a new phone because she didnt know how to use her current one. Her current phone:

The one she wanted to buy:

Now I know im in sales and I should jump at the chance to sell anything. Wrong....oh how naive you are. Instead I urged her to practice with her current model and come back if she needed help, I would so rather fix a problem today than send it away to come back another day. Anyway her problem was that she just couldnt outright use the phone. All she wanted to do was text, on the R6, the red one... you basically push the center button about 6 times to get into the text message screen, also note it has the word for the action the button is about to press directly above the button on screen.

So...I just told her how to text, which her daughter had also written down on a bit of paper she had brought in.

Funny, only when in my mind I start to think "this person is a troll, they must be a troll....nooo...noo they cant be this stupid....troll?!...shit." Then after that its all very tiresome.

[Night]

I work at a local Staples, and had a customer come in looking to plug their printer into their computer. I then point out the USB cables to her, where she tells me it isn't what she needs - because she has a new a "TOP END DELL" (her words exaclty) and it doesn't use these old connections. She then explains the cable as a regular USB end for the printer, and a headphone jack like end for the PC...... WHAT?

I so very much hope there isnt a secret club that every one is in except us and they are even smarter than us, but they keep it secret so they can all troll us. Conspiracy :O !!!!!!!!!!

[jukki]

My parents are not tech guys, and I usualy end up fixing their problems.

One time i was waken up and called sownstairs. They play tv series and movies from their laptop to their tv. They where claiming that the sound did not come through the tv. So unoluged the cable and immediatly noticed that the plug was broken, so i told them to use the laptops sound and went back to sleep. I had just closed my eyeswhen thy called me againg. Now they claim that the siund quality is horrible, so Inreturned back to my room and spend good 5 minutes to get my hdmi cable of my xbox. I throwesd them the cableand went back to bed. Almost fell asledp when i was called againg. This time they could not figure out why the ilage qualitu was shot. So i went to intel graphics control panel and set all the settigs. After that i went back to bed. Took my parent 2 more minutes to call m againg. This time because sound did not come through againg. Cursing my parents and lost sleeping time. So in went back. Set the sound setting to use the hdmi and went to sleeping. AGAING five minutes later the compuer froze (her computer does it all the time) i told her to reboot it, but she didnt want because the videos she had predownloaded would disapear (flasplayer). Did everything i could and fixed it (took good 10 minutes). So i told them that wake me up one more time and i will hang them with that hdmi cable.

Later i bought them blu ray player so i would not have to deal with this anymore.

Hate typing with iphone...

[Night]

My parents are not tech guys, and I usualy end up fixing their problems.

One time i was waken up and called sownstairs. They play tv series and movies from their laptop to their tv. They where claiming that the sound did not come through the tv. So unoluged the cable and immediatly noticed that the plug was broken, so i told them to use the laptops sound and went back to sleep. I had just closed my eyeswhen thy called me againg. Now they claim that the siund quality is horrible, so Inreturned back to my room and spend good 5 minutes to get my hdmi cable of my xbox. I throwesd them the cableand went back to bed. Almost fell asledp when i was called againg. This time they could not figure out why the ilage qualitu was shot. So i went to intel graphics control panel and set all the settigs. After that i went back to bed. Took my parent 2 more minutes to call m againg. This time because sound did not come through againg. Cursing my parents and lost sleeping time. So in went back. Set the sound setting to use the hdmi and went to sleeping. AGAING five minutes later the compuer froze (her computer does it all the time) i told her to reboot it, but she didnt want because the videos she had predownloaded would disapear (flasplayer). Did everything i could and fixed it (took good 10 minutes). So i told them that wake me up one more time and i will hang them with that hdmi cable.

Later i bought them blu ray player so i would not have to deal with this anymore.

Hate typing with iphone...

Lol...this is why you make sure non-tech peoples problems are solved for good the first time, Or at least far enough for them to try figure it out themselves without being scared of breaking something.

[Kevin Beam]

One time I fixed a PC for someone and they told me that there computer wasn't turning on so I asked if the power supply was plugged there brat kid swore that it was. I get to the house and while PSU was indeed plugged in the surge suppressor wasn't. People are funny.

[cafe]

One time I fixed a PC for someone and they told me that there computer wasn't turning on so I asked if the power supply was plugged there brat kid swore that it was. I get to the house and while PSU was indeed plugged in the surge suppressor wasn't. People are funny.

lol I love when I try and help someone and they have an 8 year old who got a little too much internet access and thinks he knows more about computers then me and then ends up making himself look like an idiot to his parents... or his friends :P

[Kevin Beam]

One time I fixed a PC for someone and they told me that there computer wasn't turning on so I asked if the power supply was plugged there brat kid swore that it was. I get to the house and while PSU was indeed plugged in the surge suppressor wasn't. People are funny.

lol I love when I try and help someone and they have an 8 year old who got a little too much internet access and thinks he knows more about computers then me and then ends up making himself look like an idiot to his parents... or his friends :P

Whenever I fix a computer I give people a list that I made that most of the time will 50% of the time will fix the problem I also give parents an outlet tester to give them a reason to check if things are plugged in.

[Salmiakbal]

So...I work at a Telco. Frontline sales staff and that sort of stuff. I 100% guarantee you every day' date=' I get at least one person who I know isnt trolling...but I sometimes suspect they are. Example: Today I had a lady come in who wanted to buy a new phone because she didnt know how to use her current one. Her current phone: [img']http://store.telecom.co.nz/content-images/phones/TNZ-R6-RED/details-images-main01.jpg The one she wanted to buy: Now I know im in sales and I should jump at the chance to sell anything. Wrong....oh how naive you are. Instead I urged her to practice with her current model and come back if she needed help, I would so rather fix a problem today than send it away to come back another day. Anyway her problem was that she just couldnt outright use the phone. All she wanted to do was text, on the R6, the red one... you basically push the center button about 6 times to get into the text message screen, also note it has the word for the action the button is about to press directly above the button on screen. So...I just told her how to text, which her daughter had also written down on a bit of paper she had brought in. Funny, only when in my mind I start to think "this person is a troll, they must be a troll....nooo...noo they cant be this stupid....troll?!...shit." Then after that its all very tiresome.

I never understand this. How can people be SO thick that they can't even figure out that they need to use a button in order to get somewhere? I mean what the hell man.

It's like people don't even want to try something out in order to see how it works, like trial and error. They just sit there and expect it to resolve on its own.

My dads laptop is pretty slow. One afternoon I decided that I should have a look and uninstall some bloat and unnecessary software. So I went ahead and disabled a ton of programs for startup, about 5 antiviruses and a lot of other bullcrap. I looked through the specs and saw it had a 150gb 5400rpm hdd, core 2 duo 2GHz, 2GB ram etc.. Not too bad and it could still be pretty fast, although the hdd could use an upgrade, but okay. The biggest problem is that the thing is running Vista that hasn't been cleaned up in 4 or 5 years.

There's only so much I can do in an afternoon without just installing Windows 7. So I shut it down and called it a day. Not surprisingly performance still wasn't very good.

A few days later I told my dad he should look into buying Windows 7 (or pirating it). He was semi interested but in the end he didn't give a lot about it.

My mom then said to my dad ''Maybe you should let [Me] have a look at it again, he's pretty good at that stuff''

Dad: ''Nah, he doesn't know how to fix it''

Later still he went to a computer repair shop (I know right? It's not like they can do more than me, or him) and they advised him windows 7 which costs him €100 and €40 for installing.

Now it's still slow and he doesn't know how to use Windows 7.

For the same money I could've pirated Windows 7, put in an V4 128GB SSD and even jumped the ram to 4gb. But no the ''computer geeks'' as he calls them had to do it.

My mom isn't tech savvy as well but at least she uses my advice and uses Firefox (while my dad still uses IE, disregarding my advice)

[Anoyster]

I can't think of any longer stories but three things I can remember in the last 6 months or so that told of inability to use electronic devices.

Whenever my mom wants to send a text message or change the clock on her phone she asks me to do it. I usually let her do it but I stand next to her and tell her what buttons to press and I have no idea how often I've done this but she still needs to have me there telling her what to do every step of the way. She will never learn that 0 is the spacebar of the phone, I have to tell it to her after each word she types in her text messages. She can't change the time on anything electronic so if it's the TV or phone or whatever I have to change the time for her.

Another time my brother got one of those 3G sticks for his laptop (I don't know what they are called in English) so he could use the internet where ever he took his laptop. He couldn't figure out how to install it (which was just plugging it in to the USB port and clicking "Next" 5 times) and he had been fucking around with it so I just decided to start fresh and boot up his laptop and do it from the start as it was acting weird and the installer program had crashed etc. He has about a year old laptop that took 10 minutes to boot after which it slowly starts giving pop-ups of a million different programs, warnings of firewalls and anti-virus programs going old, another program has to start in sandbox mode, just a giant clusterfuck. Regular users, I doubt they ever do any clean up or upkeep of their computers.

The last thing that comes to mind is when I was lining up to a help desk at a local electronics store, I can't remember what it was for but that's beside the point. In front of me there was this woman, probably around 30y old. She had her smartphone looked at, I didn't get all of it as I wasn't actively eavesdropping but one issue was that the phone was running out of battery really fast. I couldn't tell what phone it was, an android with pretty robust selection of input holes anyway. The clerk asked a ton of questions from her and she just eventually said that all she uses it for is for making phone calls and sending text messages and she has never touched any other features and she has no use for them. Then the clerk asked if she had downloaded any firmware updates and she didn't know what they are. Then it turned out her mobile contract didn't provide any internet connection in the form of 3G or 4G or anything, it was just a regular old GSM contract. Then the clerk started explaining to her how expensive and tedious it would be do a firmware update through the GSM signal or something, it was the point when I got to the other clerk to do my business so I never got to see how it all played out. It just got me thinking how smartphones are marketed to mainstream existance when in reality I bet there is a big portion of people who are like this woman and have no use for a smartphone.

[Salmiakbal]

I can't think of any longer stories but three things I can remember in the last 6 months or so that told of inability to use electronic devices. Whenever my mom wants to send a text message or change the clock on her phone she asks me to do it. I usually let her do it but I stand next to her and tell her what buttons to press and I have no idea how often I've done this but she still needs to have me there telling her what to do every step of the way. She will never learn that 0 is the spacebar of the phone' date=' I have to tell it to her after each word she types in her text messages. She can't change the time on anything electronic so if it's the TV or phone or whatever I have to change the time for her. Another time my brother got one of those 3G sticks for his laptop (I don't know what they are called in English) so he could use the internet where ever he took his laptop. He couldn't figure out how to install it (which was just plugging it in to the USB port and clicking "Next" 5 times) and he had been fucking around with it so I just decided to start fresh and boot up his laptop and do it from the start as it was acting weird and the installer program had crashed etc. He has about a year old laptop that took 10 minutes to boot after which it slowly starts giving pop-ups of a million different programs, warnings of firewalls and anti-virus programs going old, another program has to start in sandbox mode, just a giant clusterfuck. Regular users, I doubt they ever do any clean up or upkeep of their computers. The last thing that comes to mind is when I was lining up to a help desk at a local electronics store, I can't remember what it was for but that's beside the point. In front of me there was this woman, probably around 30y old. She had her smartphone looked at, I didn't get all of it as I wasn't actively eavesdropping but one issue was that the phone was running out of battery really fast. I couldn't tell what phone it was, an android with pretty robust selection of input holes anyway. The clerk asked a ton of questions from her and she just eventually said that all she uses it for is for making phone calls and sending text messages and she has never touched any other features and she has no use for them. Then the clerk asked if she had downloaded any firmware updates and she didn't know what they are. Then it turned out her mobile contract didn't provide any internet connection in the form of 3G or 4G or anything, it was just a regular old GSM contract. Then the clerk started explaining to her how expensive and tedious it would be do a firmware update through the GSM signal or something, it was the point when I got to the other clerk to do my business so I never got to see how it all played out. It just got me thinking how smartphones are marketed to mainstream existance when in reality I bet there is a big portion of people who are like this woman and have no use for a smartphone.[/quote']

Your mom is exactly like my mom. It's like they refuse to learn or remember how to use it. She's really sweet though so I shouldn't be bitching about her :p

She once told to me ''Maaaybe I should get a smartphone..'' She's had a dumbphone since forever. I just told her not to. The last time she wanted to see my phone she was scared because the screen moved when she accidentally touched it.

[crispy345]

Some of my friends usually think reinstalling their computer's make everything faster, and for 25% of them, that is true. Some of them call me, and wants me to come to their house, to reinstall their computers. But they have made a funny word for it. "Hey, can you help with formatting my computer?" I usually tell them the story, but most of them don't believe me. Formatting their drives will lead to a unusable computer, and that they have to reinstall it to make it "like new". Some of them I also tell to just download a virus/registry cleaner, mostly because they have only had their install of Windows on there for 1 month.

[Destroyer34]

my mum claiming her pc wouldn't turn on, she was switching the monitor on and off and though the tower was a printer. it usually stays on 24/7.