Experiences with non-techies

[CommanderAlex]

3 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

"Oh so you know how to fix computers? Can you fix the light in my room for me?"

That's... not my job... How hard is it to go out and buy a lightbulb? 

Damn...ruthless. 

[da na]

1 minute ago, CommanderAlex said:

Damn...ruthless. 

I just don't get how it's that hard! You take off the shade, look at the model number on the lightbulb, go to Walmart, buy a new one! I don't have a giant box of every lightbulb ever made lying around so the weird fluorescent bulbs in your closet that you turn on maybe 2x a year must wait another day!

[CommanderAlex]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

I just don't get how it's that hard! You take off the shade, look at the model number on the lightbulb, go to Walmart, buy a new one! I don't have a giant box of every lightbulb ever made lying around so the weird fluorescent bulbs in your closet that you turn on maybe 2x a year must wait another day!

Some people are just too ignorant to learn and do things themselves. Some will just call an electrician to replace a light bulb (I'm not talking about seniors here going up a ladder to replace the bulb). 

[da na]

Oh wow, another? 

"My computer won't turn off!" -my roommate

*proceeds to punch it multiple times*

 

Breaking it more won't fix it... I taught him the way of the hard shutdown because one day he's going to destroy his HDD doing that... 

[da na]

Just now, Schnoz said:

Plot twist: It's a smart light with a microcontroller in it and the person who asked @Mel0nMan wants to run DOOM on it.

What an enlightening experience that would be!

[da na]

Just now, Schnoz said:

This reminds me of a certain situation I had with a client a while back. When their laptop acted up, they'd slap it hard enough to restart it (the corner where they slapped it was noticeably bent). Turns out, that corner was where the HDD was.

 

HDDs have one of two forms of head protection. The first is contact start/stop, where the heads land on a laser-textured landing zone on (usually) the inner diameter of the platters. The other is load/unload ramps, a superior method where the heads are located safely off the disk. Thing is, these only work when the hard drive has time to park/unload. A good slap right where the hard drive is is not enough time.

 

What happened was the heads landed on the data area of the platters and got stuck. Since the head and platter are very smooth, they basically got cold-welded to each other. The drive motor couldn't exert enough torque to dislodge the heads, and their data wasn't backed up...

Idea: HDD with a giant capacitor that can run it for like 6 seconds so that when power goes out it can safely be parked...

yes I am aware that most HDDs park automatically when power is lost but stiiiiillllllll

[Freakwise]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

Idea: HDD with a giant capacitor that can run it for like 6 seconds so that when power goes out it can safely be parked...

yes I am aware that most HDDs park automatically when power is lost but stiiiiillllllll

I have better idea

 

battery

[Bitter]

I remember when that concept of HDD head parking and unloading was new! Used to be your heads would just rest on the drive somewhere when you shut it off so don't go jiggling the thing too darn hard or else! Also you were better off keeping the drive spinning to prevent wear from the heads touching the disk each time it spun down.

[Kilrah]

A few years ago my brother did get annoyed at his laptop being slow and give it a smack, right on the HDD - well it definitely wasn't any faster afterwards. Recovered what I could for him and he bought a new laptop. To be fair it WAS utterly slow, was an XP machine from 2003 with a pentium M and only 256MB of RAM in early 2010s...

Bonus is I got to keep the old laptop, put a new drive in, a friend then gave me 2GB of matching RAM he had laying around, and it's now a perfect machine to run old XP-era stuff.

 

[CommanderAlex]

8 hours ago, James Evens said:

I have a idea: regenerative breaking

using the energy of the spinning disk to safely park the head.

Ahh, the thought of Chernobyl popped into my head...

[Bitter]

[Filingo]

How to connect PSU directly to monitor?

(product link: https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-Supernova-Modular-Warranty-220-G6-0750-X1/dp/B08WJJQRGB/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=evga+g6&qid=1632513529&sr=8-3#customerReviews)

 

[LloydLynx]

[ObsoleteTech]

A colleage on another department was to replace his work computer. The boss ordered him a thin client... He runs AutoCAD & LayCAD on a daily basis...

[CommanderAlex]

1 hour ago, Schnoz said:

Engineering team: "Let's make it simple and intuitive to use and durable in all the right places to keep customers from accidentally breaking things!"

 

The customers:

 

~Snipped Photo~

As a teacher in high school always said when other students were not thinking straight..."There is nothing more uncommon than common sense". 

[nillas12]

I've been getting a lot more since starting as a consultant. Jesus, people are IT illiterate 

It's insane to me that this thing is still going

[Rauten]

2 hours ago, nillas12 said:

I've been getting a lot more since starting as a consultant. Jesus, people are IT illiterate 

It's insane to me that this thing is still going

I've been working helpdesk for years, and I can say first hand - it keeps getting worse.
Users are constantly finding new ways to demonstrate their absolute and utter inability with tech. And the higher up the chain the user is, or they higher up the chain the think they are, the worse. Specially the latter ones.

Most users here don't yet understand/know what a browser is, even though most of them use 3 each day - MS Edge, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

[Avocado Diaboli]

2 hours ago, nillas12 said:

Jesus, people are IT illiterate 

I don't think it's just that people are IT illiterate. It's more to do with them being regular illiterate.

 

Case in point: I sometimes cover shifts in another department that requires me to launch a bunch of programs and especially websites that I need for that task. Instead of doing all that manually every time I start a shift, I just wrote a simple batch file to do all of that for me. This is doubly helpful because when my shift starts and the previous one ends we always have to keep one person fully logged in until one from the next shift is ready, so a certain amount of speed is beneficial. One of my coworkers saw how quickly I was set up and asked if I could share that batch file. So I zipped the batch file to not trigger any anti-virus nonsense and emailed the zip file to all my coworkers in that department with the instruction to first save the zip file somewhere, unzip the batch file and execute said batch file by double clicking it. Easy, right? Over half the people I sent the file to either called me or came to me personally asking what they should do. 

 

Similarly, I recently sent out order forms to all my coworkers in case they wanted to order the new iPhone 13 models. I specifically wrote that they should fill out the forms and return them to me via email. Not even 20 minutes after I sent that email, 3 people came to me, printout in hand, asking me how I wanted the form returned. 

[Stahlmann]

Just a few days ago at my workplace: I got called over because they set up a 2nd monitor for one of our new colleagues and couldn't get it to work. For whatever reason they decided to use the DVI-port on the monitor, to a DVI to DP adapter into the DP cable, back into a DP to DVI adapter and into the DVI port on the back of the PC. I took one look, saw that both the monitor and the PC had a DP port. So i removed all the adapter stuff and just used the DP cable. Somehow magically everything worked the second i plugged in the plain DP cable. I have no idea how someone can fuck up plugging in a monitor, but they did it in the best way i could ask for.

[Kadzo]

My coworker that uses excel basically every day, said " i don`t use functions i to sum numbers, or other functions because i don`t trust a PC to give me the right answer so i calculate it by hand"

I think you could hear a loud thump when my jaw hit the table.

[Ankh Tech]

1 hour ago, Kadzo said:

My coworker that uses excel basically every day, said " i don`t use functions i to sum numbers, or other functions because i don`t trust a PC to give me the right answer so i calculate it by hand"

I think you could hear a loud thump when my jaw hit the table.

mine would've dug to the other side of the earth

[da na]

5 hours ago, nillas12 said:

I've been getting a lot more since starting as a consultant. Jesus, people are IT illiterate 

It's insane to me that this thing is still going

[da na]

2 hours ago, Kadzo said:

My coworker that uses excel basically every day, said " i don`t use functions i to sum numbers, or other functions because i don`t trust a PC to give me the right answer so i calculate it by hand"

I think you could hear a loud thump when my jaw hit the table.

Instead of literally everyone else on the planet who doesn't trust themselves to calculate it by hand so uses functions... 

[Kadzo]

14 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Instead of literally everyone else on the planet who doesn't trust themselves to calculate it by hand so uses functions... 

Oh she`s a old school engineer and she knows better, trust me she KNOWS.

Never mind that i had to blow her mind be showing he that she can actually bookmark web pages so she doesn't have type it every time. 

[Kadzo]

Couple of weeks ago i got a call for a coworker that sits in the office right below mine. He called me and asked me can i come to his office he has a problem with excel and needs help.

I got to his office, got on to his PC and asked whats the problem?

-I need to copy a row this table (call it table A) to this table (call it table B)

-Ok and then what?

-Noting that`s it.

-That was the big problem you had?

-Yea, i was trying for the past hour or so.

And that wasn't the thing that got me, what really finished me was, while i was leaving his office next to his door was a "certificate" for advanced excel hanging in a frame.