Experiences with non-techies

[da na]

New favorite thing to do is send bluetooth pair requests from my laptop to nearby computers/phones in class, and watch people freak out because they think they're getting hacked 

[roxsonixx]

Many years ago, roughly 1999-2000, my family got it's first computer. It was an HP PIII @ 1GHZ and a 40GB HDD with 128MB of Ram. It was the "family computer" and we were on dial up.

 

It was running Windows ME. Yuck. Anyways, I was the only person in the house who had any real experience so I created user accounts for everyone. My mother who at this point had never even browsed the internet, decided that we weren't allowed to have our own accounts, she wanted to be there to be only one user account. I was not allowed to make any changes to the wallpaper, or any settings because she was convinced I would void the warranty and break the computer. I went ahead and created folders for my files, with shortcuts on the desktop. Each folder had my name followed by what was in the folder. This caused her to have an out of body experience, where she marched into my room at very early morning hours, and started shouting at me and demanding I come out and fix the computer. I don't remember what time it was but the sun hadn't even come up yet, and she was livid. I sat and looked at the desktop and asked her what was wrong. She said that I was "taking up all the folders' That it wasn't my computer, it was the family's, and that I was using up all the folders and not leaving enough for anyone else. Basically I was being a resource hog by having 3 folders with my name on them. It took me a minute to understand what she was upset about but when I did, I tried to explain to her that there was hardly anything in those folders, and that there was virtually no limit to how many folders I could create. She was not hearing it. She was convinced that I was "trying to take over the computer" and that having my name on 3 folders was somehow impeding her ability to use the computer. I deleted the shortcuts to the folders and tried once again to explain to her how this was not an issue but she would not hear it. She then tried to sign into AOL (Yes, we were on AOL because her sisters told her it was the best) and she kept failing to log in because the password she was using was no good. She then started shouting at me again and demanding I come take a look. She explained to me that this was my fault and that it was somehow because of those folders that she couldn't get online. I took one look at the screen and noticed she was trying to login to AOL on my sisters username, so of course her password was wrong. I selected her username and had her input the password and voila, she was online. I once again explained to her that creating some folders was not the issue, that she needs to make sure she is logging in to the correct account when trying to go online and some folders had nothing to do with that. I was told to stop being a smart ass, and that if she hadn't been distracted by my overwhelming amount of folders than she would have selected the correct username. 

 

This kind of thing went on for a few years and we had some pretty bad yet hilarious fights about things. One time she was convinced that the internet on AOL was different than other ISP's and that you could not access the same websites like Yahoo, MSN, etc without AOL. Another time I was playing Combat Flight Simulator 2 and she said that it looked "pornographic" and demanded I remove it from her computer immediately. 

 

A couple times her fiance who was fairly literate got involved and explained to her that she was wrong, and how things actually worked, but her reply was that she just knew I was "up to no good on that thing". So I stopped using it and refused to troubleshoot any issues she was having with it. I ended up building my own PC a couple years later and she was convinced that I was going to get the FBI at our house  

 

She now uses a computer built by my younger brother without issue or complaint. 

 

 

 

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

My boss decided to revamp how we're doing meeting room reservations, since we've repurposed a few offices recently. We only had one meeting room, for which we had an Outlook calendar. The obvious solution would be to just add two new rooms to Outlook, each of which has a calendar attached. That way, if you create an appointment and select that room as location of the appointment, it gets automatically added to the corresponding room's calendar.

 

Unfortunately, the simple solution is never the one that gets chosen. My boss wanted to have an overview of the reservations of all 3 meeting rooms simultaneously. I told him that he could just open up all the room's calendars simultaneously and overlay them in Outlook, which is fairly trivial. That wasn't good enough for him. He wanted a single calendar he could open and check the reservations of every room at a glance. I told him this wasn't ideal but hey, boss gets what boss wants.

 

Cue me telling our IT department that they need to create additional room calendars for each room as well as one "master" calendar. Every person who wants to make a reservation has to go into this master calendar, create an appointment in there and select the desired room as the location. The room calendars would only accept invitations from this master calendar and reject every other source, so nobody could make reservations directly. 

 

Consequence #1: You can't create an appointment in your own calendar and choose a room in the rooms list directly to make a reservation. The room would automatically decline the invitation.

Consequence #2: People don't read these rejections, so they think they made a reservation when they didn't.

 

 

Now here's where the fun begins. We use Outlook calendars to plan our employee onboarding. Every October, we get new people who get to run through a gauntlet of orientation and schooling. We used to do this manually in a stupid Excel file, but I finally convinced upper management that if we already have calendars in Outlook, we could just use that as well, since everybody can create empty calendars and share them with other people who can also work in them.

 

So my boss's secretary goes and creates this onboarding calendar for our new employees. She puts in all the appointments and invites the appropriate employees who will be heading the lesson units. Only, she "reserves" the meeting rooms by directly using them as the location, completely bypassing the master calendar. And she doesn't understand what a reservation refusal from the rooms means.

 

I as one of the instructors get my appointments, look at the master calendar, see that there's no reservation for my time slot and just enter one myself for the two separate groups I have to deal with.

 

The first appointment goes off without a hitch. But the second one is where another quirk of meeting room reservations rears its ugly little head: Rules for thee, not for me. Meaning that even though I had a reservation for a meeting room scheduled, my boss decided it didn't count, because he had auditors in that day, which he knew about for a while. And since the room was empty when the auditors came and my appointment started an hour or so later, my reservation was effectively null and void. Thankfully, I managed to get by with some improvisation.

 

Anyhow, today the secretary calls me in a panic because she now realized that none of the reservations she thought she made for the next 3 weeks went through. Time to remind my boss why he should listen to me from the start while I also point out to him that maybe we could just ditch the reservation calendars altogether if some people don't bother looking if the rooms are booked or not.

[Bitter]

6 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

My boss decided to revamp how we're doing meeting room reservations, since we've repurposed a few offices recently. We only had one meeting room, for which we had an Outlook calendar. The obvious solution would be to just add two new rooms to Outlook, each of which has a calendar attached. That way, if you create an appointment and select that room as location of the appointment, it gets automatically added to the corresponding room's calendar.

 

Unfortunately, the simple solution is never the one that gets chosen. My boss wanted to have an overview of the reservations of all 3 meeting rooms simultaneously. I told him that he could just open up all the room's calendars simultaneously and overlay them in Outlook, which is fairly trivial. That wasn't good enough for him. He wanted a single calendar he could open and check the reservations of every room at a glance. I told him this wasn't ideal but hey, boss gets what boss wants.

 

Cue me telling our IT department that they need to create additional room calendars for each room as well as one "master" calendar. Every person who wants to make a reservation has to go into this master calendar, create an appointment in there and select the desired room as the location. The room calendars would only accept invitations from this master calendar and reject every other source, so nobody could make reservations directly. 

 

Consequence #1: You can't create an appointment in your own calendar and choose a room in the rooms list directly to make a reservation. The room would automatically decline the invitation.

Consequence #2: People don't read these rejections, so they think they made a reservation when they didn't.

 

 

Now here's where the fun begins. We use Outlook calendars to plan our employee onboarding. Every October, we get new people who get to run through a gauntlet of orientation and schooling. We used to do this manually in a stupid Excel file, but I finally convinced upper management that if we already have calendars in Outlook, we could just use that as well, since everybody can create empty calendars and share them with other people who can also work in them.

 

So my boss's secretary goes and creates this onboarding calendar for our new employees. She puts in all the appointments and invites the appropriate employees who will be heading the lesson units. Only, she "reserves" the meeting rooms by directly using them as the location, completely bypassing the master calendar. And she doesn't understand what a reservation refusal from the rooms means.

 

I as one of the instructors get my appointments, look at the master calendar, see that there's no reservation for my time slot and just enter one myself for the two separate groups I have to deal with.

 

The first appointment goes off without a hitch. But the second one is where another quirk of meeting room reservations rears its ugly little head: Rules for thee, not for me. Meaning that even though I had a reservation for a meeting room scheduled, my boss decided it didn't count, because he had auditors in that day, which he knew about for a while. And since the room was empty when the auditors came and my appointment started an hour or so later, my reservation was effectively null and void. Thankfully, I managed to get by with some improvisation.

 

Anyhow, today the secretary calls me in a panic because she now realized that none of the reservations she thought she made for the next 3 weeks went through. Time to remind my boss why he should listen to me from the start while I also point out to him that maybe we could just ditch the reservation calendars altogether if some people don't bother looking if the rooms are booked or not.

Sounds like it's time to get your boss's instructions in writing because you weren't clear on some part of it then just let everything fall to shit.

[wamred]

On 1/16/2013 at 12:29 PM, Salmiakbal said:

Here's a good one: if the cursor is an arrow, double click

If the cursor is a hand, single click

Maybe try and teach her that

That's actually a good point. I had never thought about that. There are so many people that I deal with that don't understand when to double or single click.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Seems like our IT department now counts as non-techies.

 

We're in the process of rolling out new devices for our department. It's a total replacement, so everybody also gets new 1440p screens. Since I'm responsible for coordinating the whole process, I got early access to the new laptops and monitors. When I went over to IT yesterday to get them, their guy in charge showed me his identical setup and casually mentioned that they're still in the process of figuring out how to hook up 3 monitors, because they have people there who'd also love to have more screen real estate and theyr'e capped out at 2 at the moment. The screens are Lenovo Thinkvision monitors with built in docks, so you only hook up a Thunderbolt cable (he was mistakenly thinking that it's just USB, because hey, the plug is USB-C and that means it can only be USB ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) between the laptop and one monitor and daisy chain the rest with built in outgoing DisplayPorts. 

 

For some reason, this guy also though that only the monitor with the attached webcam served as the only dock, but as far as I can tell, both are identical in that area. I'm led to believe that because I just hooked up the primary monitor (the one with the webcam), daisy chained the second one with a DisplayPort cable and daisy chained my old third Monitor with another DisplayPort cable between the second and third monitor. Worked immediately.

 

Since the laptops also have two Thunderbolt ports, I also hooked up the second monitor that way and basically left the first one isolated with no daisy chaining. Also worked immediately. Apparently, spending 5 minutes to just test things is too much to ask for IT these days.

[E-waste]

On 1/16/2013 at 4:30 AM, Tr3vor said:

my aunt who is constantly complaining about her slow Pentium 4 computer

Maybe Ubuntu with lxqt or xfce desktop would perform better.  A large majority of windows software is usable on Linux with Wine, including Windows games.

 

Even steam, yes that steam, is available on Linux and has been since 2013.  The steamdeck runs Arch Linux!

[da na]

Received a couple vacuous blank stares when I swapped a laptop battery at a cafe today. 

[soldier_ph]

These Comments are pure Gold: https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/s/Ln7e4GMlAY

 

A recent one from myself:

 

Due to my unemployment status I had to do a 9 day course for freshly unemployed people who had just done an apprenticeship. One of the guys who was in the same course as me one day asked me if I could get his Money Back because his MS Office annual license thing automatically renewed itself and thus charged his Credit Card. He got upset when I told him he should update his payment Method on his MS account and contact his Credit Card Company and or Bank about the unwanted charge. Guy really thought I could just magically get his Money back.

[Avocado Diaboli]

A coworker just called me because he had problems with his phone. This particular office is staffed 24/7 and for reasons™ they still have physical phones on their desks, unlike everybody else who uses their PCs for calls. They still have headsets connected to these phones and they can answer calls through an app on their PCs. And the phones have corresponding buttons for when you want to route audio to the headset or the speaker. His issue was that whenever he accepted a call, the audio wouldn't switch to the headset automatically, which it usually does, so he had to manually push the headset button every time he accepted or initiated a call. The phone remembers the last audio device you used and defaults to that.

 

I couldn't figure out what the issue was and decided rebooting the phone probably wouldn't hurt. As I picked up the phone to pull out the powered Ethernet cable, I noticed the receiver sliding into place slightly. Since they almost never touch the receiver, I hadn't bothered checking it until that point. To illustrate the problem, I purposely reset the receiver incorrectly, tried accepting a call and got the expected result of the audio automatically going to the receiver instead of the headset, because taking off the receiver from the phone overrides everything else.

 

Then I silently looked at my coworker, lightly pushed on the receiver until it clicked into place and told him that was the issue.

[da na]

I was the idiot today: I killed two PoE injectors because of a faulty switch.

I picked up a D-Link 5-port PoE switch from ewaste recently, wasn't receiving power on the PoE injector I had. I picked up two new ones and tried with those. One of the PoE injectors tried to deliver power, failed, then stopped working altogether - the other, well, shot sparks when connected to the switch. That one is also now dead. 

Maybe the burned LAN port on the switch should've been a clue that something was off?

[da na]

Today I was reminded of my favorite iPhone repair story.

This happened when the 13 was the newest model, just a few months old.

 

Guy comes to me with a top-end iPhone 13. Says it won't turn on.

Well, that seemed like more of a symptom than the problem itself, as the phone had a large, jagged hole in the glass back and evidence of water inside. I asked him what the hell happened... says he dropped it (No case, of course), a piece of the glass came out, and he WASHED IT IN THE SINK to get the bits of glass out of the phone. 
Thought the guy was joking. He kept insisting that the phone was waterpoof and that, in fact, neither the massive hole nor the rinse was why the phone didn't work.

[Godlygamer23]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Today I was reminded of my favorite iPhone repair story.

This happened when the 13 was the newest model, just a few months old.

 

Guy comes to me with a top-end iPhone 13. Says it won't turn on.

Well, that seemed like more of a symptom than the problem itself, as the phone had a large, jagged hole in the glass back and evidence of water inside. I asked him what the hell happened... says he dropped it (No case, of course), a piece of the glass came out, and he WASHED IT IN THE SINK to get the bits of glass out of the phone. 
Thought the guy was joking. He kept insisting that the phone was waterpoof and that, in fact, neither the massive hole nor the rinse was why the phone didn't work.

It's only waterproof if all the seals are intact, and all other items are also kept intact. In order for the device to be waterproof, the innards must be kept dry lol.

 

Some people are not very smart, and do not understand electronics.

 

Was this a younger or older person?

 

Also just for clarification: Nothing is truly "waterproof". It's only ever water-resistant, since it can only take so much pressure before water is able to penetrate the device and get where it's not supposed to go, whatever it is.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Godlygamer23

[da na]

42 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

It's only waterproof if all the seals are intact, and all other items are also kept intact. In order for the device to be waterproof, the innards must be kept dry lol.

 

Some people are not very smart, and do not understand electronics.

 

Was this a younger or older person?

 

Also just for clarification: Nothing is truly "waterproof". It's only ever water-resistant, since it can only take so much pressure before water is able to penetrate the device and get where it's not supposed to go, whatever it is.

About my age, actually. Late teens.

 

About that, a couple months back I bought a "waterproof" camera that immediately filled with water the first time I dipped it underwater.

[Godlygamer23]

31 minutes ago, da na said:

About my age, actually. Late teens.

 

About that, a couple months back I bought a "waterproof" camera that immediately filled with water the first time I dipped it underwater.

I'm surprised by that a little bit. I would think that the individual would understand that once something breaks or chips away majorly like that, the device is no longer what the manufacturer sold it as, or intended to sell it as. Therefore any claims of it being waterproof are completely thrown out of the window, since any liquid is now given a pathway to enter into the device - Apple likely never considered a user dunking their phone with obvious physical damage when designing the device. Most of the time, electricity mixing with water**, particularly in ways they were never meant to, results in things being damaged, or outright breaking. Water** can be used as a conduit I suppose, but only in scenarios where the system was designed for it, if any systems have been designed like that.

 

Was the camera advertised to be at any particular IP level?

 

**Impure water that is. Pure water does not conduct electricity.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Godlygamer23
Clarification on terms.

[da na]

11 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Was the camera advertised to be at any particular IP level?

Yeah, I forget what IP but it was "safe to 30m submersion"

[Godlygamer23]

3 minutes ago, da na said:

Yeah, I forget what IP but it was "safe to 30m submersion"

Probably a defect then - a major defect. Do you remember who manufactured it?

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Probably a defect then - a major defect. Do you remember who manufactured it?

Vivitar I think? Low tier company anyway. Was worth it for the laugh

[Godlygamer23]

4 minutes ago, da na said:

Vivitar I think? Low tier company anyway. Was worth it for the laugh

Was it this one? Tempted to buy one to try it out lol.

https://www.amazon.com/Vivitar-Action-Camera-Waterproof-Streaming/dp/B0CHH16BD8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=ZAQLWZZ9K0W1&keywords=vivitar+camera&qid=1700875863&sprefix=vivitar+camera%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-2&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.304cacc1-b508-45fb-a37f-a2c47c48c32f

 

[da na]

9 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Was it this one? Tempted to buy one to try it out lol.

https://www.amazon.com/Vivitar-Action-Camera-Waterproof-Streaming/dp/B0CHH16BD8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=ZAQLWZZ9K0W1&keywords=vivitar+camera&qid=1700875863&sprefix=vivitar+camera%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-2&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.304cacc1-b508-45fb-a37f-a2c47c48c32f

 

Hah, knockoff GoPro! Very similar, I doubt they even sell this model anymore - 720p.

[IkeaGnome]

30 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Was it this one? Tempted to buy one to try it out lol.

https://www.amazon.com/Vivitar-Action-Camera-Waterproof-Streaming/dp/B0CHH16BD8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=ZAQLWZZ9K0W1&keywords=vivitar+camera&qid=1700875863&sprefix=vivitar+camera%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-2&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.304cacc1-b508-45fb-a37f-a2c47c48c32f

 

Sad day. It comes with a battery

[da na]

2 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

Sad day. It comes with a battery

how the hell are you supposed to get like, any consumer electronics?

...how do you buy replacement batteries, in fact? 

[IkeaGnome]

14 minutes ago, da na said:

how the hell are you supposed to get like, any consumer electronics?

...how do you buy replacement batteries, in fact? 

Batteries, stores. 
A lot of companies get confused. There’s rules on what batteries can and can’t be shipped by air so most will just say no. 
 

When you fly it’s the same reason you are allowed batteries in your carry on, but not checked bag. 

[WhitetailAni]

Got told that any site without https is always wrong and that .org sites are always right today. 

[soldier_ph]

Non Techies + the H Word => Confusion 100